On Turgenev’s Virgin Soil

Virgin Soil is one of Turgenev’s lesser-known works. Not hard to see why. It is, as Tom of Wuthering Expectations has put it, formless.  

But if you’re interested in 19th century Russian society and politics, like I am, especially now that I have just read Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty, it is an interesting novel. It is probably Turgenev’s most political novel, or the novel where his stance is most clear: the revolutionaries are not psychopaths but naïve idealists who want to “serve the people” but know nothing about “the people”; the ideal is someone like Solomin, who introduces gradual changes and makes actual positive impact on people’s lives. If only the likes of Solomin had triumphed instead of the Bolsheviks! 

There are also some good bits in Virgin Soil. My favourite part is the chapter about the old couple, Fomushka and Fimushka—it does nothing to advance the plot, it even feels incongruous, but it’s striking and full of life. 

The characterisation of Nezhdanov and the depiction of his doubt and struggle are good. He is the most, or perhaps the only, fully developed character in the novel. Like Tolstoy always writes about the Man Who Searches for Meaning, Chekhov always writes about the Man Who Wastes His Life, Dostoyevsky always writes about the Spiteful Man, Turgenev always writes about the Superfluous Man.

Tom wrote: 

“The generation of Nihilists replaces the Superfluous Men, only to discover that they themselves were superfluous, and now the more violent, conspiratorial, anarchistic Populists elbow out the nihilists, finding, to their despair, that they are entirely superfluous.” 

Nezhdanov is another Superfluous Man. But it doesn’t feel boring—the doubt, the struggle, the gulf he feels between himself and the peasants, the feeling that “it’s difficult for an aesthete to engage with real life”, the despair and self-loathing—all that is well depicted.

There are some good moments, some good scenes throughout the book. The confrontation between Valentina Sipyagina and Marianna, for example. 

“Marianna left hastily, while Valentina Mikhailovna jumped up from her armchair, on the point of shouting and bursting into tears. But she did not know what to shout and the tears did not come. 

[…] She recognized a certain portion of truth in what she had heard. But how could she be judged so harshly? “Can I be so evil?” she thought, looking at herself in the mirror which was placed between the two windows directly in front of her. This mirror reflected a delightful, somewhat distorted face, with prominent red patches, which was nevertheless charming, and remarkable, soft, velvet eyes. “Me. Am I evil,” she thought again, “with eyes like that?”…” (Ch.26) 

(translated by Michael Pursglove) 

I like that. 

The scene where Sipyagin tricks Paklin into revealing the whereabouts of Nezhdanov and Marianna is also good, especially the moment Paklin realises what he has done and tries to justify himself, in vain. 

Some other good bits in Virgin Soil are when the characters leave things unsaid. 

“Marianna wanted to ask for an explanation of these words, but did not, and anyway, at that moment Solomin came into the room.” (Ch.36)

That scene between Nezhdanov and Marianna is very good. I don’t particularly like the romance in the novel, but that particular scene is excellent. 

“Solomin went out and caught Marianna up on the stairs. He had intended to say something to her about Nezhdanov, but remained silent. And, for her part, Marianna realized that Solomin had intended to say something to her, about Nezhdanov in particular, and that he had remained silent. And she too remained silent.” (ibid.)

I like it when a writer depicts those moments when people leave things unsaid; when they don’t say, or can’t say, something. Chekhov and Henry James are the masters of those silences, Turgenev also does it.  

Turgenev depicts another silence in the final chapter of the book: 

“Mashurina merely nodded. She wanted him to continue speaking of Nezhdanov, but could not pluck up the courage to ask him.” (Ch.38) 

The entire chapter is poignant. I like that Turgenev ends the novel not on Marianna and Solomin, but on Paklin and Mashurina: we’re in a way moved further away from Nezhdanov, but we can see the impact of his death on somebody.

There are indeed some very good bits in the book. 

Virgin Soil: Fomushka and Fimushka

Virgin Soil seems like the right book to read after Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty. 

Perhaps at some point I will write about Turgenev’s revolutionaries, but right now I’m interested in the old couple: the Subochevs, Foma Lavrentyevich (Fomushka) and Yevfimiya Pavlovna (Fimushka). 

This is how Paklin describes them: 

““No politics, no literature, nothing modern gets a look in there. […] The smell there is antique; the people are antique, the air is antique. Take anything you like and it’s antique. Catherine II, powder, hooped skirts, the eighteenth century! […] They’re awfully like one another, only she wears a mobcap and he a nightcap—with the same ruches as the mobcap, but minus the ribbon. If it wasn’t for this ribbon, you wouldn’t know who was who…”” 

(translated by Michael Pursglove) 

Personally I think not much of interest has happened before this point. Nezhdanov, an illegitimate son of an aristocrat, and a Red, is employed as a tutor by the privy councillor Sipyagin; there he meets a few progressive people who want to “do something”—Marianna (Sipyagin’s niece), Markelov (Sipyagin’s brother-in-law), Solomin (a factory owner), etc. Paklin, one of the revolutionaries Nezhdanov has known from before, visits him, gets introduced to the others, and then takes them to the Subochevs, who gave shelter to his sister. 

“The Subochevs’ coachman, too, was an extremely ancient man, redolent of train oil and pitch; his beard began near his eyes and his eyebrows fell to his beard in a little cascade. He was so slow in all his movements that he used up a whole five minutes to take a pinch of snuff, two minutes to stick his whip into his belt and over two hours to harness Moveless alone.” 

Doesn’t that sound more like something out of Gogol? 

“When together, they were never bored, so they were never apart and did not wish for any other company. Neither Fomushka nor Fimushka had ever been seriously ill, and if one of them had some slight indisposition, they both drank an infusion of lime blossom, had warm oil rubbed onto the smalls of their backs or hot fat dropped onto the soles of their feet, and it soon passed.” 

The episode with the Subochevs is unlike anything that came before. It is—I wouldn’t say out-of-place—incongruous. 

I like it though. The old couple. The house. The servants in the house. The whole scene. It is lively, and unexpected. 

15 films I hate

Curious, aren’t you? I generally avoid blogging about things I hate, but today let’s stir shit up.

Note that I will only name films which are highly acclaimed, or which are with a huge fanbase and considered iconic—the sacred cows, so to speak—it’s no fun mentioning something popular but slammed by critics and relatively recent (such as Twilight or superhero rubbish). 

Here’s the list: 

Lolita (dir. Stanley Kubrick) 

The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick) 

The Tree of Life (dir. Terrence Malick) 

The Shape of Water (dir. Guillermo del Toro) 

Mank (dir. David Fincher) 

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (dir. Martin McDonagh) 

Back to the Future (dir. Robert Zemeckis) 

Jojo Rabbit (dir. Taika Waititi) 

Roma (dir. Alfonso Cuaron) 

Anything I have seen by Jean-Luc Godard, except Vivre sa vie 

Oldboy (dir. Park Chan-wook) 

Rope (dir. Alfred Hitchcock) 

Emma (dir. Douglas McGrath) 

Emma (dir. Autumn de Wilde)

Jane Eyre (dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga) 

The list has just got updated on 20/8. 

My 10 favourite films (2023 list)

One film per director. 

Persona (dir. Ingmar Bergman)  

Sunset Boulevard (dir. Billy Wilder) 

Ran (dir. Akira Kurosawa) 

Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtis) 

A Star Is Born (dir. George Cukor) 

The Conversation (dir. Francis Ford Coppola) 

The Phantom of Liberty (dir. Luis Bunuel) 

The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (dir. Yasujiro Ozu) 

Raise the Red Lantern (dir. Zhang Yimou) 

F for Fake (dir. Orson Welles) 

Chekhov’s “The Letter” and “A Nightmare”

Not enough is said about the great value of Constance Garnett’s 13 volumes of Chekhov. I like her prose, I also like the way she organises the stories—for example, Volume 7 has “The Bishop”, “The Letter”, “Easter Eve”, “A Nightmare”, “The Murder”, “Uprooted”, and “The Steppe”—she groups together several stories which have a religious theme or setting and which can be read together, and adds some different stories so it’s never boring. 

Volume 7 begins with “The Bishop”, one of his finest stories, and possibly Vasily Grossman’s favourite, as he mentions it in both Life and Fate and Everything Flows. The story is Chekhov’s answer to The Death of Ivan Ilyich: oppressed by illness and overwhelmed with work, the bishop has no time to think about death or God, and when he thinks about his life, he doesn’t ask himself if he has lived a good and worthwhile life, but thinks about his mother and his childhood. 

Bishops and priests in Chekhov’s world are perfectly human—there are no saints—that’s what I love about Chekhov. 

“The Bishop” is followed with “The Letter”. 

“Not everyone knows when to be silent and when to go. It not infrequently happens that even diplomatic persons of good worldly breeding fail to observe that their presence is arousing a feeling akin to hatred in their exhausted or busy host, and that this feeling is being concealed with an effort and disguised with a lie. But Father Anastasy perceived it clearly, and realized that his presence was burdensome and inappropriate, that his Reverence, who had taken an early morning service in the night and a long mass at midday, was exhausted and longing for repose; every minute he was meaning to get up and go, but he did not get up, he sat on as though he were waiting for something.”

In the story, Chekhov moves between different perspectives, depicting both the “feeling akin to hatred” in the exhausted host, and the mind of the unwelcome guest who knows he has to leave but somehow doesn’t go. 

“His Reverence believed in people’s reforming, but now when a feeling of pity had been kindled in him it seemed to him that this disgraced, worn-out old man, entangled in a network of sins and weaknesses, was hopelessly wrecked, that there was no power on earth that could straighten out his spine, give brightness to his eyes and restrain the unpleasant timid laugh which he laughed on purpose to smoothe over to some slight extent the repulsive impression he made on people.

The old man seemed now to Father Fyodor not guilty and not vicious, but humiliated, insulted, unfortunate; his Reverence thought of his wife, his nine children, the dirty beggarly shelter at Zyavkin’s; he thought for some reason of the people who are glad to see priests drunk and persons in authority detected in crimes; and thought that the very best thing Father Anastasy could do now would be to die as soon as possible and to depart from this world for ever.”

Who else but Chekhov would write a passage like that about a priest? It is so good. In “The Letter”, he writes about two priests and a deacon, and depicts them with such keen insight, such compassion and humanity. His characters are all human. 

In “A Nightmare”, there’s a priest named Father Yakov, and he’s seen through the eyes of Kunin, a member of the Rural Board. 

“With his short figure, his narrow chest, his red and perspiring face, he made from the first moment a most unpleasant impression on Kunin. The latter could never have imagined that there were such undignified and pitiful-looking priests in Russia; and in Father Yakov’s attitude, in the way he held his hands on his knees and sat on the very edge of his chair, he saw a lack of dignity and even a shade of servility.”

Writing from the perspective of Kunin, Chekhov doesn’t hold back: 

“Father Yakov was so absorbed in drinking tea that he did not answer this question at once. He lifted his grey-blue eyes to Kunin, thought a moment, and as though recalling his question, he shook his head in the negative. An expression of pleasure and of the most ordinary prosaic appetite overspread his face from ear to ear. He drank and smacked his lips over every gulp. When he had drunk it to the very last drop, he put his glass on the table, then took his glass back again, looked at the bottom of it, then put it back again. The expression of pleasure faded from his face. . . .”

As it is Chekhov, there would be a turn in the story, but I won’t go into detail—all I’ll say is that I love the way he writes about the indignity of poverty, and the pride of a poor person who desperately tries to hide his poverty—it is so moving. 

__________________________________________

I have finished reading Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty. If you’re interested in Russian literature and history, ideology, and big questions, this is the book for you. 

I love that Morson ends the book with Chekhov. He too is my hero. 

Musings on Jane Austen—a personal blog post

1/ It’s strange how these things work. There are writers with whom it was love at first sight (Tolstoy, Melville). There are writers I came to like over time (Jane Austen). There are writers I had to rediscover (Shakespeare, Chekhov). And sometimes a writer comes to mean a lot more to me at a particular stage of my life, like Chekhov at the moment, whilst I’m having a difficult time. As I move closer to Chekhov, it so happens that I move further away from Jane Austen. It’s not because I think less highly of her, but the themes of balance, misperception, and appearance vs reality now mean less to me; whereas the subjects that now occupy me didn’t seem to interest Austen: death, grief, loneliness, longing, sex, sexual desire, unhappiness, fleetingness of love, search for meaning, and so on. 

2/ I’ve never got out of my head Nabokov’s remark in his lecture about Mansfield Park: 

“Nobody in Mansfield Park dies in the arms of the author and reader, as people do in Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy. The deaths in Mansfield Park happen somewhere behind the scenes and excite little emotion. These dull deaths have, however, a curiously strong influence on the development of plot.”

This is true for all of Jane Austen’s novels: deaths happen off-stage, and they’re often, if not always, functional (in Nabokov’s words: “affect the development of the novel and are introduced for structural purposes, purposes of development”). 

3/ I reread Pride and Prejudice several months ago. I have always had a complicated relationship with it: I like it a lot, but it’s too light, bright, and sparkling, too much like a woman’s fantasy. Mr Darcy might exist, but you’re not going to meet him. 

(I myself prefer Mr Knightley). 

4/ It probably says something about me that my favourite Austen novel is Mansfield Park, her darkest, most sombre novel.

Like her other novels, it has a happy ending, but she gives us a vision, a glimpse of something else that might have happened: Fanny Price back in Portsmouth, poor, alienated, unhappy, forever unable to get out; or married to Henry Crawford, betrayed, humiliated, and miserable.

These visions are gloomier than what her other heroines might have experienced if they hadn’t got a happy ending.

Musings on Flannery O’Connor and vision

There is often something violent in the works of Flannery O’Connor. In A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, the weakest stories are those in which nothing happens—like “A Stroke of Good Fortune” or “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”—stories of nothing happening, the domain of Chekhov, are not her thing. In her best stories, there’s usually something shocking, something violent or brutal or destructive. And she doesn’t hold back. 

Flannery O’Connor is a strange, fascinating writer. Strange, because she has a weird way of seeing and depicting things, and I often find her elusive. Fascinating, as she has an imposing personality and an uncompromising, pitiless quality. 

Above all, it is strange that I don’t know what draws me to her short stories. Not long ago, I tweeted that I didn’t find the great works of Russian literature depressing even though they depicted war, disease, death, cruelty, humiliation, suffering… whereas the works of Tanizaki (specifically Naomi), Joyce Carol Oates, or Elfriede Jelinek filled me with disgust and left a bad taste in my mouth. The difference, I’ve concluded, is in vision: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky…, in spite of everything, still demonstrate a love of life and humanity, and a belief in freedom and human dignity; Vasily Grossman, even when he writes about the worst horrors of the 20th century, believes in dignity and kindness and offers a glimpse of hope; whereas the works of Tanizaki, Elfriede Jelinek, or Joyce Carol Oates are devoid of light, depicting human beings as just base and depraved. 

I don’t share such a vision of life. Even my current job, in which I regularly speak to refugees, victims of religious persecution, and victims of human trafficking, doesn’t make me cynical, for I still see people stand up for the truth and for justice, I still see people try to help others, I still see people try to make changes. 

Why then do I like Flannery O’Connor? She has a dark, dark view of humanity. In one story, a group of fugitives kills an entire family. In two stories, some men deceive and take advantage of disabled women. In another story, a group of adolescents causes havoc for no reason but their own meanness, and sets the woods on fire. And there’s a story in which a grandfather, the moment he’s needed the most, rejects his own grandson and debases himself out of fear and cowardice. It is a cold, brutal world she depicts and there is no glimpse of hope, no glimpse of human kindness. 

And yet, her stories don’t leave a bad taste in my mouth. Why? What does she have that Elfriede Jelinek, Joyce Carol Oates, and Tanizaki lack? 

100 latest films and plays I've watched

From January 2023 to July 2023

In bold: films and plays I think are good 

1/ 海街 diary (Our Little Sister - Japan - 2015) 

2/ 女が階段を上る時 (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs - Japan - 1960) 

3/ Jeffrey Dahmer: Mind Of A Monster (2020) 

4/ Tár (2022) 

4/ The Green River Killer: Mind Of A Monster (2020) 

5/ A Murder in the Family: Cheryl Hooper (2023) 

6/ The Whale (2022) 

7/ Mary Kay Letourneau: Notes On A Scandal (2022) 

8/ CODA (2021) 

9/ The Butcher Baker: Mind of a Monster (2020) 

10/ The Fabelmans (2022) 

11/ Clarkson's Farm - Season 2 (2023) - 8 episodes 

12/ My Insta Scammer Friend (2022) 

13/ Dirty Dancing (1987) 

14/ Old Boys (2018) 

15/ The Breakfast Club (1985) 

16/ Emily Atack: Asking for It (2023) 

17/ 東方三俠 (The Heroic Trio - Hong Kong - 1993) 

18/ 警察故事３超級警察 (Police Story 3: Supercop - Hong Kong - 1992) 

19/ 警察故事 (Police Story - Hong Kong - 1985) 

20/ Война и мир: Андрей Болконский (War and Peace, Part 1: Andrei Bolkonsky - Soviet Union - 1966) 

21/ Война и мир: Наташа Ростова (War and Peace, Part 2: Natasha Rostova - Soviet Union - 1966)

22/ Война и мир: 1812 год (War and Peace, Part 3: The Year 1812 - Soviet Union - 1967) 

23/ Война и мир: Пьер Безухов (War and Peace, Part 4: Pierre Bezukhov - Soviet Union - 1967) 

24/ Ma nuit chez Maud (My Night at Maud's - France - 1969) 

25/ King Lear (1983, ft. Laurence Olivier) 

26/ Buying a British Dad (2023) 

27/ Much Ado About Nothing (1984 BBC) 

28/ The Lost Weekend (1945) 

29/ Le Genou de Claire (Claire's Knee - France - 1970) 

30/ Hamlet (1990 New York Shakespeare Festival, ft. Kevin Kline) 

31/ Catching a Pervert: Sexual Assault for Sale (2023) 

32/ A Midsummer Night's Dream (1968) 

33/ Hamlet (2018, ft. Andrew Scott) 

34/ The Monkey Haters (2023) 

35/ Panorama: Is China Watching You? (2023)

36/ The Mentalist: Bloodshot (2009) 

37/ The Mentalist: Carnelian Inc. (2009) 

38/ The Mentalist: Russet Potatoes (2009) 

39/ The Mentalist: A Dozen Red Roses (2009) 

40/ The Mentalist: Red Sauce (2009)  

41/ The Mentalist: Miss Red (2009) 

42/ The Mentalist: Blood Brothers (2009) 

43/ The Mentalist: Red John's Footsteps (2009) 

44/ The Mentalist: Redemption (2009) 

45/ The Mentalist: The Scarlet Letter (2009) 

46/ The Mentalist: Red Badge (2009) 

47/ The Mentalist: Red Menace (2009) 

48/ The Mentalist: Red Scare (2009) 

49/ The Mentalist: Pilot (2008)

50/ The Mentalist: Red Hair and Silver Tape (2008)

51/ The Mentalist: Red Scare (2009)

52/ The Mentalist: Black Gold and Red Blood (2009) 

53/ The Mentalist: Red Bulls (2009) 

54/ The Mentalist: His Red Right Hand (2009) 

55/ The Mentalist: A Price Above Rubies (2009) 

56/ The Mentalist: Throwing Fire (2009)

57/ The Mentalist: Rose-Colored Glasses (2010) 

58/ The Mentalist: Red Tide (2008) 

59/ The Mentalist: Ladies in Red (2008) 

60/ The Mentalist: Red Wood (2008) 

61/ The Mentalist: Red Handed (2008) 

62/ Oppenheimer (2023)

63/ The Mentalist: Bleeding Heart (2010) 

64/ The Mentalist: Redline (2010) 

65/ The Mentalist: Blood In, Blood Out (2010) 

66/ The Mentalist: Red Herring (2010) 

67/ The Mentalist: Seeing Red (2008) 

68/ The Mentalist: The Thin Red Line (2008) 

69/ The Mentalist: Flame Red (2008) 

70/ The Mentalist: Red Brick and Ivy (2008) 

71/ The Mentalist: Red John's Friends (2009) 

72/ The Mentalist: Red Rum (2009) 

73/ The Mentalist: Paint It Red (2009) 

74/ The Mentalist: Crimson Casanova (2009) 

75/ The Mentalist: Red Letter (2010) 

76/ The Mentalist: Red Sky in the Morning (2010) 

77/ The Mentalist: Red Sky at Night (2010) 

78/ The Mentalist: Code Red (2010) 

79/ The Mentalist: Red Box (2010) 

80/ The Mentalist: Aingavite Baa (2010) 

81/ The Mentalist: Cackle-Bladder Blood (2010) 

82/ The Mentalist: The Blood on His Hands (2010) 

83/ The Mentalist: Red Carpet Treatment (2010)  

84/ The Mentalist: The Red Ponies (2010)

85/ The Mentalist: Pink Chanel Suit (2010) 

86/ The Mentalist: Red Hot (2010) 

87/ The Mentalist: Ball of Fire (2010) 

88/ The Mentalist: Red Moon (2010) 

89/ The Mentalist: Jolly Red Elf (2010) 

90/ The Mentalist: Bloodsport (2010) 

91/ The Mentalist: Bloodhounds (2010) 

92/ The Mentalist: Red Alert (2010) 

93/ The Mentalist: Blood for Blood (2010) 

94/ The Mentalist: Red Gold (2010) 

95/ The Mentalist: Red Queen (2010) 

96/ The Mentalist: Bloodstream (2010) 

97/ The Mentalist: The Red Mile (2011) 

98/ The Mentalist: Every Rose Has Its Thorn (2011) 

99/ The Mentalist: Redacted (2011) 

100/ The Mentalist: Like a Redheaded Stepchild (2011) 

A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Flannery O’Connor’s similes

Let other pens dwell on plot, I’d like to focus on the writing—for now. 

Flannery O’Connor is very different from Alice Munro. Intense. Bang. In-your-face. There’s something cold and pitiless, perhaps even cruel, in Flannery O’Connor.

But if Alice Munro’s prose doesn’t draw attention to itself, Flannery O’Connor’s does, and it is interesting. 

For example, look at this image from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: 

“Bailey didn’t look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children’s mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green headkerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit’s ears.”

Her similes are odd: 

“Bailey was looking straight ahead. His jaw was as rigid as a horseshoe.”

Very odd. 

“Behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth.” 

I don’t know what I expected, reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, but it went in a direction I didn’t anticipate: the author follows a family going on a little trip and builds it up and lets us get to know the characters, and bang, gives us a shocking, brutal ending. It is even more shocking because of the way she depicts it. 

““You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?” the grandmother said and removed a clean handkerchief from her cuff and began to slap at her eyes with it.” 

This is what I mean when I say Flannery O’Connor is cold and pitiless.

“There were two more pistol reports and the grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for water and called, “Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!” as if her heart would break.” 

Who else would describe an old woman—a grandmother—in such a situation as “a parched old turkey hen”? 

“The River” is another story that goes in a direction I didn’t expect. 

“She lay her head back and as he watched, gradually her eyes closed and her mouth fell open to show a few long scattered teeth, some gold and some darker than her face; she began to whistle and blow like a musical skeleton.” 

“She” is Mrs Connin, a babysitter. She takes a little boy of 4 or 5, who is named Harry Ashfield but who lies to her that he’s called Bevel, to spend the day at her house and then at the river, to see a preacher and healer called Bevel Summers. 

“There were two round photographs of an old man and woman with collapsed mouths and another picture of a man whose eyebrows dashed out of two bushes of hair and clashed in a heap on the bridge of his nose; the rest of his face stuck out like a bare cliff to fall from.” 

Flannery O’Connor has a strange way of looking at things. Writers such as Flaubert or Proust or Mishima also come up with unusual metaphors, but there’s something freakish, something grotesque in the way she looks at people.  

“The air was so quiet he could hear the broken pieces of the sun knocking in the water.”

The story for the most part feels like an innocent story about a little boy spending a day away from home—what did I think was going to happen?—then at the end, it grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. And when it’s over, I needed a little break. 

The third story in the collection is “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”—it is less shocking, but also dark.

“The tramp stood looking at her and didn’t answer. He turned his back and faced the sunset. He swung both his whole and his short arm up slowly so that they indicated an expanse of sky and his figure formed a crooked cross. The old woman watched him with her arms folded across her chest as if she were the owner of the sun, and the daughter watched, her head thrust forward and her fat helpless hands hanging at the wrists. She had long pink-gold hair and eyes as blue as a peacock’s neck.” 

Her writing is good. 

“A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with the chickens.” 

“The Life You Save May Be Your Own” is not shocking because the author has prepared us.  

“The ugly words settled in Mr. Shiftlet’s head like a group of buzzards in the top of a tree.”

Ominous. 

“In the darkness, Mr. Shiftlet’s smile stretched like a weary snake waking up by a fire.”

“A Stroke of Good Fortune” is, I think most people would agree, not a very strong or memorable story. But there are some striking similes in it: 

“She was too tired to take her arms from around it or to straighten up and she hung there collapsed from the hips, her head balanced like a big florid vegetable at the top of the sack.”

That is the main character, Ruby. 

“Standing up straight, she was a short woman, shaped nearly like a funeral urn. She had mulberry-colored hair stacked in sausage rolls around her head but some of these had come loose with the heat and the long walk from the grocery store and pointed frantically in various directions.”

I can’t help thinking that Flannery O’Connor doesn’t like people very much.

“Madam Zoleeda […] had sat back grinning, a stout woman with green eyes that moved in their sockets as if they had been oiled.” 

Freakish. 

“She remembered her mother at thirty-four—she had looked like a puckered-up old yellow apple, sour, she had always looked sour, she had always looked like she wasn’t satisfied with anything.”

The apple imagery later reappears:

“She felt her face drawn puckered: two born dead one died the first year and one run under like a dried yellow apple…” 

Fascinating writer. 

Alice Munro’s “Walker Brothers Cowboy” and “Dance of the Happy Shades”

As a short story writer, Alice Munro is in the line of Chekhov. I like that she has great control and writes enough, suggesting much more underneath the surface. I like that she writes stories in which nothing happens, and yet at the end, something seems to happen to us. 

“Walker Brothers Cowboy” (in Selected Stories) is the first Alice Munro story I’ve ever read, and I like it a lot. It’s narrated by a young girl. Her father once had a fox farm but lost everything and now works for the Walker Brothers. 

“He sells cough medicine, iron tonic, corn plasters, laxatives, pills for female disorders, mouthwash, shampoo, liniment, salves, lemon and orange and raspberry concentrate for making refreshing drinks, vanilla, food coloring, black and green tea, ginger, cloves, and other spices, rat poison.”

The story flows slowly, naturally—the narrator introduces her father, then the location, then her father’s job, then her mother, then the story of the family—everything flows naturally—then the girl and her younger brother, to give the mother a rest, join the father on his trip to sell things at people’s houses, and we follow them—where is the story going? we wonder—then having done his job, he continues driving beyond his territory and meets a woman he hasn’t seen for a long time. That’s when “Walker Brothers Cowboy” takes a little turn, the way Chekhov’s stories always do. A little turn that gets you to see everything differently.

There are quite a few subtle things I like. For example, we’re not told till that moment in Nora’s house, when it’s necessary, that the father is called Ben Jordan. We’re never told about the relationship between him and Nora. We’re never told about the incompatibility between him and his wife. Everything gradually unfolds, and Alice Munro adds nothing superfluous. 

But the thing I particularly like is that she gets us to see the father differently: 

“She and my father drink and I know what it is. Whisky. One of the things my mother has told me in our talks together is that my father never drinks whisky. But I see he does. He drinks whisky and he talks of people whose names I have never heard before.” 

It’s so “soft” that it doesn’t feel like an epiphany. Shortly after, Nora puts music on and turns towards the girl: 

““A big girl like you and so good-looking and can’t dance!” says Nora. “It’s high time you learned. I bet you’d make a lovely dancer. Here, I’m going to put on a piece I used to dance to and even your daddy did, in his dancing days. You didn’t know your daddy was a dancer, did you? Well, he is a talented man, your daddy!”” 

These little moments make us see the father in a different light, and get us to care about him—about the man he once was, the man he might have been. At the same time, Alice Munro has the young daughter narrate the story and therefore adds the perspective, the relatable feeling when one discovers something new, something unexpected about one’s parents, about who they used to be and what they were like before getting married and becoming parents.  

“So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.” 

The ending enlarges the story. 

“Dance of the Happy Shades” is a story in which there’s even less happening: it’s about one of the boring “parties”— more like recitals—of an old piano teacher named Miss Marsalles, who “was unable to criticize except in the most delicate and apologetic way and her praises were unforgivably dishonest; it took an unusually conscientious pupil to come through with anything like a creditable performance”. 

I could summarise the plot and write about the story but I’m more interested in the writing. 

“Even the shadow behind her of another Miss Marsalles, slightly older, larger, grimmer, whose existence was always forgotten from one June to the next, was not discomfiting—though it was surely an arresting fact that there should be not one but two faces like that in the world, both long, gravel-colored, kindly, and grotesque, with enormous noses and tiny, red, sweet-tempered and shortsighted eyes. It must finally have come to seem like a piece of luck to them to be so ugly, a protection against life to be marked in so many ways, impossible, for they were gay as invulnerable and childish people are; they appeared sexless, wild, and gentle creatures, bizarre yet domestic, living in their house in Rosedale outside the complications of time.” 

Like Chekhov, Alice Munro doesn’t have an ornate style, a style that draws attention to itself. But the style, or perhaps the voice, of “Dance of the Happy Shades” is more interesting than in “Walker Brothers Cowboy”—probably because it’s narrated by a pupil who doesn’t love Miss Marsalles? 

Like the narrator, most of Miss Marsalles’s pupils now are the children of her old pupils: 

“Here they found themselves year after year—a group of busy, youngish women who had eased their cars impatiently through the archaic streets of Rosedale, who had complained for a week previously about the time lost, the fuss over the children’s dresses, and, above all, the boredom, but who were drawn together by a rather implausible allegiance—not so much to Miss Marsalles as to the ceremonies of their childhood, to a more exacting pattern of life which had been breaking apart even then but which survived, and unaccountably still survived, in Miss Marsalles’ living room. The little girls in dresses with skirts as stiff as bells moved with a natural awareness of ceremony against the dark walls of books, and their mothers’ faces wore the dull, not unpleasant look of acquiescence, the touch of absurd and slightly artificial nostalgia which would carry them through any lengthy family ritual.” 

Not ornate, but not bland. 

“The plates of sandwiches are set out, as they must have been for several hours now; you can see how the ones on top are beginning to curl very slightly at the edges. Flies buzz over the table, settle on the sandwiches, and crawl comfortably across the plates of little iced cakes brought from the bakery. The cut-glass bowl, sitting as usual in the center of the table, is full of purple punch, without ice apparently and going flat.

[…] My mother seems unable, although she makes a great effort, to take her eyes off the dining-room table and the complacent journeys of the marauding flies. Finally she achieves a dreamy, distant look, with her eyes focussed somewhere above the punch bowl, which makes it possible for her to keep her head turned in that direction and yet does not in any positive sense give her away. Miss Marsalles as well has trouble keeping her eyes on the performers; she keeps looking towards the door. Does she expect that even now some of the unexplained absentees may turn up?” 

I shall not write about the little turn in the later part of the story, nor the ending. But I’d note that throughout the story, the narrator, clearly influenced by her genteel mother, sees and depicts Miss Marsalles as a pathetic, rather absurd old woman, a mediocre piano teacher who foolishly thinks she can see into children’s hearts; Alice Munro builds it up till that little turn near the end of the story, and then gets us to see Miss Marsalles and all the characters in a different light. And she presents her characters as they are, without moralising, in a style that doesn’t draw attention to itself.

It is very good.