The author would like to thank J. R. “Tim” Struthers for his help with research for this article and mention the fact that it was written before recent revelations that will be explored at a later date.

On Reading Alice Munro

1I have been reading Alice Munro for over four decades and researching her for thirty of those years. When I began my doctoral studies in 1994, few ordinary readers had heard of her. Even now, despite the Nobel laureateship awarded in 2013, she may not be as famous as we short-story scholars like to imagine. I was not very surprised when the Canadian tourists I met in Glastonbury in summer 2023—“ABC . . . Another Bloody Church!”—looked at me with blank faces at the mention of their much-feted compatriot. Nevertheless, despite the retirement that followed her last volume, Dear Life (2012), she remains the best-regarded short-story writer in the world; and there is a much larger international body of criticism than ever seemed possible when I was completing my thesis.

2My first encounters with the stories came when I was a young mother and feminist, just beginning to share my own writing in a local workshop. I have written elsewhere (see Cox) about how closely I identified with her protagonist Rose, in the linked collection, The Beggar Maid (1980), and how the little I knew about the author’s life felt inspirational to someone combining motherhood with fiction writing. Its Canadian title Who Do You Think You Are? (1978) encapsulates the feelings about class, gender and social identity that I responded to so eagerly. Munro is only two years younger than my mother, yet her protagonist, Rose, seemed to speak for a sense of dislocation felt by those in my own generation who have more access to education and the arts than the rest of their family. My own parents were very different from Munro’s. Her mother was a former schoolteacher, while her father was a fur-farmer, who later worked in a foundry and raised turkeys, turning his hand to writing in his old age. My mother left school at fourteen, becoming first a clerical worker and then a shop assistant. My dad worked in a bakery. He read nothing except the newspaper, and I never saw him write anything down, not as much as a signature in a Christmas card. Yet Munro’s experience of being “brought up to believe that the worst thing you could do was ‘call attention to yourself,’ or ‘think you were smart’” (Treisman) is something I recognise from my own background.

3The question Who Do You Think You Are? haunts Rose as she navigates her changing identity throughout the linked stories of this Bildungsroman. Her subsequent career as an actress draws attention to the extent to which subjective identity is a type of masquerade in the course of which multiple selves are exchanged or overlap. But the question in the title might also invite the reader to reflect on her own identity. The peculiar intimacy, even complicity, between the reader and the implied author within a Munro text has often been remarked upon. Elizabeth Hay comments that Munro’s stories about her mother “spoke directly to me, offering a deeper and more personal truth than I was used to finding in fiction” (178). In her autobiographical essay, “On Sitting down to Read ‘Lichen’ once again,” Magdalene Redekop describes how Munro’s stories have stayed with her throughout her life, her reading of them shaped by her own passage through time. Each re-reading confers “something provisional—fallible but my own—something that I make of the story after it has changed me and that I may then pass on to you—a kind of gift” (302).

4Redekop explains that the “gift” is intangible, disconnected from the purely social. Hay’s “deeper and more personal truth” (178) also implies something beyond the external parallels between the figure of the mother in Munro and Hay’s own mother, also from the Ottawa Valley. As Charles E. May has observed, characters in short fiction typically appear realistic, but are in fact stylised, the apparent realism conditioned by the active participation short stories demand from the reader. He concludes that “like all great short stories, Alice Munro’s are complex and powerful not so much because of what seems to actually happen in them, but because of what happens in the mysterious literary imagination” (59). I would add that, in Munro’s case and perhaps in others, this inchoate literary space is constructed and reconstructed in the ongoing dialogue between the reader and the imagined figure of the author.

6The inexhaustibly of Munro’s texts is the reason I return to them with so much pleasure. With closer scrutiny than I had spent on this collection for some years, I noticed details in Friend of My Youth that had never struck me before. Munro is not a linguistic show-off; stylistically she uses little ornamentation, such as metaphor or simile, and any symbolic correspondences, such as those between the much-discussed purple grape juice, menstruation and creativity in “Meneseteung,” are tentative suggestions rather than a key to decoding the text in its entirety. If Munro’s style is simple, the analeptic narrative structure is complex, the seamless mingling of voices and viewpoints even more so. Her stories are dense with intertextual references, some of them revealed through quotation, such as the references to the Scottish ballad “Tam Lin” in “Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass,” or to Walter Savage Landor in “Oh, What Avails.” Other intertextual echoes are less overt, more open to conjecture, concealed perhaps in character names. Subtle allusions to masturbation and to an unwanted pregnancy that escaped me previously now seem obvious. Discoveries such as these are largely intuitive, impossible to prove definitively through textual citation. They also emerge randomly, regardless of the topic. Every time I write about Munro, I find myself distracted by another tiny detail, wandering away from the line of argument I am intending to follow, pursuing extra connotations, straying from path. There are never enough words in a chapter or an article to cover everything I might have said, and never a time when a reading is complete.

7Using that metaphor about straying from the path, I cannot help but recall Munro’s famous words about how she reads a story and, by extension, writes one: “I don’t take up a story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere, with views and neat diversions along the way. I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It’s more like a house” (“What is Real” 224). Writing about a Munro text, I find myself caught up in this labyrinthine house of fiction, circling back and forth, as she describes, loitering in passageways and rummaging in cupboards. Magdalene Redekop also invokes the house analogy, in the later iteration employed in Munro’s introduction to her Selected Stories (1998). There Munro imagines the reader re-acquainting herself with a place she remembers fondly, noticing something different on her return. Redekop playfully extends Munro’s visual analogy to incorporate sound: “You hear voices talking and singing and you are not always sure whether they are coming from inside or outside the house” (290). This analogy, even more than Munro’s original use of the house metaphor, suggests that reading the text is experienced as a kind of haunting, the fiction infiltrating memory and experience, and real life leaching into the words on the page.

8Coral Ann Howells has analysed Munro’s “projects of textual mapping,” in which the faithful depiction of external reality is overlaid by more subjective or elusive truths (5). She goes on to say that “these stories make readers see that there is always something else which is out there unmapped, still ‘floating around loose’ or partially figured in myths and fantasies and the wheeling composition of the stars” (5). The writer, in a different sense, is always looking for that something else that is still to be mapped. As Munro says in “What is Real?” “I may not have got it right . . . Every final draft, every published story, is still only an attempt, an approach, to the story” (225). Her tendency to keep on revising texts after their first publication confirms that inherent dissatisfaction, “Meneseteung” being the best-known example from Friend of My Youth. Her biographer, Robert Thacker, describes how Munro restored, in revised form, the closing lines that had been excised for that story’s first appearance in The New Yorker for republication in the collection (434-35). The revised ending of “Menesteung” adds an additional note of uncertainty to the story.

9The significance of the edits made towards the end of “Wigtime” between the Canadian first edition and the 1991 Vintage paperback that I consult is not so obvious. The first edition reads: “From up here on the deck the two long arms of the breakwater look like floating matchsticks. The towers and pyramids and conveyor-belts of the salt-mine look like large solid toys” (273). Only the most attentive reader will spot the difference in my British paperback: “From up here the two long arms of the breakwater look like floating matchsticks. The towers and pyramids and conveyor-belt of the salt-mine look like large floating toys” (273). These tiny changes clearly mattered a great deal to the author, in particular the repetition of “floating” which would strike some editors as infelicitous. The compilation of a definitive edition of Munro’s works will, some day, be a painstaking labour of love, requiring the dedication she ascribes to the amateur historians in “Meneseteung,” “driven to find things out, even trivial things” (73).

“Goodness and Mercy”

10“Goodness and Mercy” is most probably the least-discussed story in Friend of My Youth. Mary Condé’s observation that the story has been “surprisingly neglected” still remains true (59). Yet the story includes many themes and motifs that occur elsewhere in the collection, and indeed across Munro’s entire oeuvre, including mother-daughter relationships, terminal illness, masquerade, private jokes and nicknames, and the porous border between fantasy and reality, fiction and the truth. This comparative neglect may be because, unlike the other stories, it is set neither on her home turf, Southwestern Ontario, nor in the familiar territory of British Columbia, but on a transatlantic crossing. Re-reading for the first time in years, I wondered why I had paid it so little attention.

11Averill and her mother Bugs are sailing from Canada to England on a trip whose exact motivation remains unspecified. A similar journey must have been undertaken by the protagonist in a preceding story, “Hold Me Fast, Don’t Let Me Pass,” where one of the locals at a Scottish hotel assumes she must be “looking for [her] roots” (79). The Friend of My Youth collection as a whole touches frequently on family origins, historical antecedents and the Scottish heritage, and, in “Five Points,” “Oranges and Apples” and “Wigtime,” more recent migrant experiences. Still, in “Goodness and Mercy” such themes are occluded. Towards the end of the story, when the ship has docked, Averill and her mother catch a train to Edinburgh. Bugs will die in hospital there, quite possibly, it may be inferred, returning to her pre-colonial origins.

12In a close reading of “The View from Castle Rock” (2006), Corinne Bigot briefly mentions “Goodness and Mercy” as a reversal of the ancestral voyage from Scotland to Canada. Quoting Michel Foucault, she sees the ship as a “heterotopia,” an enclosed space that exists beyond the characters’ usual reality, and is subject to its own systems. The “passenger-carrying freighter” (157) on which Bugs and Averill are travelling may additionally be seen as a carnival space, liberating those on board from conventional restraints. Jeanine, an American radio host claims that “the whole point about coming on this trip . . . was to . . . find out who she really was when not blatting away into a microphone. And to find out who she was outside of her marriage” (163). She tells everyone how she and her husband holiday separately in order to “‘test the boundaries of the relationship’” (163).

13“Glamour Puss” (160) Jeanine is just one of a colorful cast of characters, including an artist, a professor and Bugs herself, a former opera singer, who would not be out of place in an Agatha Christie novel. The self-enclosed heterotopia of the ship provides the perfect setting for a who-dunnit. Although murder mysteries abound in Munro’s fiction, they are rarely if ever solved as they would be in a detective novel. Munro deploys the tropes of genre fiction only to deflect them; and in “Goodness and Mercy,” three such modes are subtly parodied. The most obvious in these is romantic fiction, with various abortive flirtations underway. The miscellaneous group of passengers crossing international waters might also be at home in a wartime spy film such as Powell and Pressburger’s Contraband. Registered in Norway, with a Scottish captain, the ship embodies some of the statelessness and notional identities of spy fiction. The captain, whom Jeanine hopes to seduce at a party she holds in her cabin, is reading a novel by John le Carré. Averill herself is something of a spy, as I shall explain later.

14This nameless captain is not only an object of romantic desire, but, as it turns out, a Charon-like figure, ferrying passengers on their way to death. Jeanine herself draws attention to this role, flirtatiously repeating the widespread belief that a shortage of ice on board is a sign that a passenger has died. She pressures him to reveal whether he has ever conducted a burial at sea. This morbid conversation might seem rather tactless, since Bugs, no longer able to join the other passengers at meal times, is terminally ill. However, the details of her illness are withheld from the other characters and, to some extent, from the reader; Bugs’s reference to being a non-smoker and her coughing indicate lung cancer. The official version, agreed between Bugs and her daughter, Averill, is that Bugs is recovering from a bout of pneumonia. Although her condition is deteriorating, Bugs appears to be managing her illness well, disguising her weight loss with caftans and maintaining her sardonic sense of humor.

15“‘Your mother is a gallant woman and very charming,’” says Jeanine, “‘But charming people can be very manipulative’” (162). As a former opera singer, Bugs cultivates a larger-than-life personality, outshining the introverted Averill. Neither her outward appearance nor her behavior seem, initially at least, to be fundamentally altered by illness. Jeanine, however, underestimates Averill, failing to see that she is acting undercover, gathering the latest gossip to take back to Bugs, while keeping an unwanted admirer at bay, and carefully withholding private information. Her friendship with Jeanine is itself a “strategy” (162). “Bugs” seems an unlikely nickname for a glamorous singer. Her real name, the one she also uses professionally is “June Rodgers” (157), but it is as “Bugs” that she is known throughout the text. I always feel a little thrown by this epithet, which in my mind immediately summons up a cartoon image of Bugs Bunny’s long ears and buck teeth. The name probably derives from to the short-lived June bug, a reference that is more obvious to readers in North America, and is symbolically associated with the transience of human existence. Another reminder of mortality, the word “ill,” is smuggled inside her daughter’s name, “Averill.” The daughter’s name is ripe with connotations, including the watery associations of “rill,” the avian connection, or even the Latin greeting Ave.

17Perhaps the most significant connotations of the word “bug” in this story is the association with microphones and surveillance. Like Jeanine, Bugs has been the host of a radio show (the echo of “June” within “Jeanine” is another example of Munro’s prolific wordplay). Eavesdropping on shipboard conversations, Averill herself acts like a radio transmitter, tuning in to the voices of her fellow-passengers: “Recipes were offered, for fruitcake and compost heaps. Also ways of dealing with daughters-in-law and investments. Tales of illness, betrayal, real estate. I said. I did. I always believe. Well, I don’t know about you, but I” (161). Bugged conversations also occur in spy thrillers, such as the one the captain is reading. Such conversations might concern more stereotypically masculine topics than the domestic gossip that Averill overhears, but nonetheless she acts like a spy, reporting back to her controller, Bugs, and covertly watching the captain as he patrols the deck at night.

18Bugs is, indeed, controlling, despite her apparently easy-going attitude to parenthood. Sickness accentuates hidden tensions between mother and daughter, adding a real necessity to the demands of an operatic diva, and highlighting the extent to which Averill has always been cast in the maternal, caring role. Bugs’s affirmation that “Averill is not particularly musical, thank God” (168) is a sign of longterm rivalry. Averill is extremely self-conscious in the elaborate dress lent to her by Bugs after she pulls out of Jeanine’s party. Why does Bugs go so far as to put the dress on and finish her make-up before deciding not to go? Whatever her motivation, the silk dress completes a disempowering role-reversal—glamorous mother, dowdy daughter—and emphasises the tyranny of the sick bed.

19When he is teased by Jeanine about burials at sea, the captain goes on to relate a long story about a previous voyage on this very same ship. This second-level narrative concerns two women, who, in many ways, mirror Bugs and Averill. These unnamed characters are not mother and daughter; they are sisters. Yet, the sickly character seems much older than the other, who, in another reversal of the Bugs/Averill dyad is, the captain says, “‘[t]he most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life’” (174). Her beauty, however, seems, destined to be wasted, since she is entirely devoted to nursing her ailing sister. When the sister dies in the night, the captain is persuaded to bury her quickly at sea. Once the corpse is overboard, he remembers to ask the surviving sister for the cause of death: “Oh, she said, I killed her” (176).

20If the captain’s yarn finished at the point, it would be the perfect crime story, the twist-in-the-tale providing a satisfactory punchline. His narrative, with the details of the sea-burial, all largely recounted in reported speech, builds up suspense in a suitably dramatic manner. Jeanine is thrilled: “‘I knew it!’” she exclaims (176) and is disappointed when the tale fails to live up to generic expectations. Here the narrative shifts to a third level, with the younger sister’s moment-by-moment recollection of how she let her sibling die, rather than answering her call for a life-saving injection. The captain re-assures her that she has done nothing wrong, and then follows her to the ship’s rail where she sings a hymn under her breath. At this point, Averill disrupts the captain’s performance with a rendition of the line “‘Goodness and Mercy all my Life,’” which happens to be the very same song (177). Now Averill has taken center-stage, her choice of line perhaps alluding to the concept of mercy killing. Both the captain and Jeanine are taken aback; the reticent and supposedly unmusical Averill has suddenly found her voice.

22In his essay, “Living in the Story,” Charles May refers to secrecy as a generic attribute of short fiction, claiming that “the hidden story of emotion and secret life, communicated by atmosphere, tone, and mood, so common to the short story, is always about something more unspeakable and more mysterious than the events engaged in by as-if-real characters in a time-bound world” (47). Averill’s private fantasy, her “perfectly secret story,” operating on another level to external events, in the story, provides an entirely different type of revelation to those offered by the kinds of genre fiction that Munro parodies. Averill’s surveillance activities suggest obvious parallels with the figure of the writer as secret observer. Still, the entire text of “Goodness and Mercy” consists of secrets—misapprehensions or truths concealed behind a lie, ellipses and incomplete knowledge. Averill cannot identify “the hymn that starts out, ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’” (169), and only recollects fragments of the text, which she considers “full of strenuous egotism, and straightforward triumph, and, particularly in one verse, a childish sort of gloating” (169) a misreading, in my view, of Psalm 23. The lines quoted in the text omit some of its best-known references to “death’s dark vale,” and to “the quiet waters,” an image that might in turn suggest the watery connotations of Averill’s name and the proverb “still waters run deep.”

23I have more to say about Averill’s “perfectly secret story,” but first I shall consider the figure of the captain himself. Bugs characterises him as a “canny Scot” (164), refraining from bestowing on him the kind of nickname she freely allocates to every other character on board. Married to a Norwegian, with a stable home life and a well-ordered cabin, he appears completely unremarkable. Juxtaposed with the stereotypical photograph of the Norwegian wife, “a large, pleasant-looking woman wearing a thick sweater,” even the Le Carré book signifies predictability, as an example of a best-selling novel (164). It is not revealed whether Averill’s absent father, the “cautious old bugger” who only “slipped up the once” when Averill was conceived (164, 165), shared the captain’s Scottish heritage. Yet, the two married men are aligned with one another, and the figure of the father is, I would argue, concealed within Averill’s “secret story.”

24The different levels of narration and the mingling of direct with indirect speech create ambiguities of focalisation in the telling of the captain’s yarn until after it has been interrupted by Averill’s singing. Her subjective viewpoint takes over unambiguously as she rehearses different versions of the story’s ending. These private fantasies alternate between the decorously romantic and the feverishly erotic, but in all of them it is the captain who takes the initiative. Averill’s fantasies recall romantic fiction, yet the intertextual references to Psalm 23, highlighted by the story’s title, simultaneously cast him as a paternal figure. Listening earlier to the captain’s account of how he reassured the younger sister in his yarn telling her to “calm down . . . Now you know it will be all right” (176), she notes that “he pronounced ‘calm’ in the Scottish way, to rhyme with ‘lamb’” (176). I hardly need point out the echo of pastoral motifs in Psalm 23, which casts the patriarchal deity as the shepherd, tenderly guiding his flock through the valley of death.

25Towards the end of the story, the imagery switches from darkness and constriction to brightness, openness and freedom. Leaving the hospital behind after Bugs’s death, Averill is pleasantly surprised by “so much light in the sky” and by the crowds of international visitors to the Edinburgh Festival (178). This short section is the first of three final coda that provide a fragmentary conclusion to the story. The second of these fragments summarises Averill’s life after her bereavement. In a perverse way, Bugs still exerts posthumous control over her daughter; Averill’s first marriage ends when she realises she may have only chosen her husband because her mother would have disapproved. When she becomes pregnant in a subsequent relationship “[b]oth of them hoped for a daughter” (179). Whether the couple’s hopes were fulfilled is not revealed, and neither is Averill’s motive in seeking to perpetuate the mother-daughter dyad. The second husband seems to be an extrovert, who “either charmed people or aroused their considerable dislike” (179). The implication is that they would not have married, were it not for the pregnancy, but any further details are suppressed. Averill’s life story, as it would usually be understood, is kept from the reader, in this most secretive of stories, while her inner self is displayed and celebrated in the epiphanic closing lines, the briefest coda of them all:

    Averill accepts the captain’s offering. She is absolved and fortunate. She glides like a spangled fish, inside her dark silk dress.
    She and the captain bid each other good night. They touch hands ceremoniously. The skin of their hands is flickering in the touch. (179)

26The “offering” is of course “her perfectly secret story, delivered back to her” (178). The image of the fish also recalls an earlier reaction to the captain’s “offering”: “[b]elieving that such a thing could happen made her feel weightless and distinct and glowing, like a fish lit up in the water” (178). The language is sensuous, yet also sacramental—“offering,” “absolved,” “ceremoniously.” After all, it was the captain who performed the funeral rites for his unfortunate passenger, as is the custom for any burial at sea. The paternal, the priestly, the romantic and the divine are combined in this man who has become an enduring figure in the imagination. The fish happens to be a Christian symbol, but it is not necessary to read it as such to appreciate the spiritual overtones of this closing passage.

27In “Goodness and Mercy,” storytelling, song, voice and breath are interconnected. Up on deck, Averill is able to listen to Bugs’s fractured breathing, an almost musical recitation of “[l]ittle flurries and halts, . . . some snags, snores, and achieved straight runs” (166). When Averill hears her mother singing an aria in her normal manner it is, paradoxically, a cause for alarm. Averill’s own internal song builds “a barrier set between the world in her head and the world outside, between her body and the onslaught of the stars, the black mirror of the North Atlantic” (169). Beyond the surface of the “black mirror,” the sea is boundless and unfathomable, the space where corpses are consigned. The boundary Averill’s internal song constructs against the shapeless eternity of dark sea and sky is the border she needs to establish between her own self and the all-encompassing maternal body. Yet this primeval ambience is also the site of the imagination, the darkness that brings forth the light, as the fish swims in water.

28The problematic relationship between mother and daughter, traced across almost every story in Friend of My Youth, lies at the heart of this story too, the name of the mother encompassing multiple concepts including surveillance, illness and the breath that powers the voice. But also encrypted between the lines lies the figure of the father, the priest, the lover, the shepherd and the captain, the man whose name is never given. And there will be more to add. I just have not figured it out.