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| Alice Munro |
To consider “Home,” I return to Munro’s “Foreword.”
I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could.
Although this story is about her father, it is also, or really, about a daughter’s acceptance of a new reality regarding her father and regarding herself.
The daughter is living in the east now, about a hundred miles from her father. Unlike the past, when years could pass before she returned home, she now visits every few months or so. She takes a series of busses. The time it takes to get “home” is emblematic of reality. Things have changed so much that it takes real time to catch up to all the changes that make up her father’s home now. So, the beginning of the story sets us up for that – for the time it takes for a person to reach a destination, especially if the person is looking for the truth or looking to go “home.”
The scenes that begin and end the story both address the issue of time. But it is the story’s the ending that tells us we have finally arrived at the story’s original destination.
The last scene is a memory, one that she says is her first memory. She’s three or four and she’s out in the barn with her father, who is milking a cow. It’s dark. It’s cold. The milk hitting the pail sounds like “tiny hailstones.” This is the cow that will die of pneumonia the following year.
Outside the small area lit by the lantern are the mangers filled with shaggy hay, the water tank where a kitten of mine will drown some years into the future; the cob-webbed windows, the large brutal tools — scythes and axes and rakes — hanging out of my reach. Outside of that, the dark of the country nights when few cars came down our rod and there were no outdoor lights.
What matters is what she realizes about her father’s life during her childhood: that there was a darkness to it, and a bitter cold, and a lonely, certain brutality. Munro closes the story this way:
And the cold which even then must have been gathering, building into the cold of that extraordinary winter which killed all the chestnut trees, and many orchards.
From all the other stories that touch on her own experience we already know about her father’s financial failures with the foxes, her mother’s unwieldy ambitions, and her mother’s terrible and unacceptable illness. But this, Munro’s first memory, represents a mystery. What was this cold that had filled the barn with foreboding? This cold is a mystery that demanded inquiry. To learn from it. To solve it. Munro is referring obliquely to her years of writing about her mother, her years of returning, again and again, to the same vast subject of her mother.
In this story, though, what happens is this: Munro notices that home has changed. Her father has remarried. Irlma has shaped things up, put the books away, gotten rid of the old wooden kitchen set. She takes a drink. She tells dirty jokes. Outside, white siding will cover up the brick.
She has installed old Buster as the dog of the house and talks about the dog’s bowel movements in the most alarming and familiar way.
The puzzle is that Munro’s father has told her: “She restored my faith in women.”
What it is, Munro must admit, is that Irlma makes her father feel loved. Irlma is “hot stuff.” There is “light everywhere.” There is affection. There is sex. There is relaxation. There is time to write. Irlma’s husband, Munro’s father, is no longer in out in the dark and out in the cold.
When Munro takes a jealous jab at her, Irlma’s eyes fill up with tears.
But my father came downstairs and she forgot her own grievance — at least temporarily she forgot it — in her anxiety to care for him, to provide him with something he could eat. In her anxiety? I could say, in her love. Her face utterly softened, pink, tender, suffused with love.
All is changed. Even their neighbor who drinks too much and sometimes beats his wife. They’ve joined the Tabernacle and stopped drinking.
Munro has spent her writing life inquiring into the mysteries that were her mother. But her father has moved on. There is some confusion over the word wonder. Had her father said this word?
“Irlma’s got the jump on you and me.” His voice sounds fond to me, yet rueful. Then he faintly smiles. The word I think he says is . . . wonder.”
And then the real change occurs. Munro herself imagines telling a friend that Irlma actually is a wonder. Because her father is happy. Irlma, so different than Munro’s mother, has brought her father out of the cold and out of the dark and she has made him happy. The tactless thing that Irlma said? “She tells me what my father has said to her. He has said that he wished that she’d always been his wife, and not my mother.”
That’s a long journey. To accept that. As the truth.
Note ~ Shit as symbol: Irlma’s paean to Buster’s suffering involves a terrible assault on the reader, a detailed description of how Buster’s bowels get knotted up when he eats the old turkey leavings in the barn, the stuff from the old turkey business — the feathers, the quills, the bones.
Buster’s awful compulsion to root around in the barn’s very old turkey leavings and the inevitable bowel stoppage could be compared to Munro’s own compulsion to root around in her own past. Munro, does not, to my knowledge, talk about the suffering that such “investigations” could cause. And yet this story, with Munro’s multiple trips to her father’s home, and with Buster’s travail, suggests terrible suffering. But she doesn’t dress it up or through the symbol of Buster and his bowels make the writer a romantic hero. She suggests, to me for the first time, that the pain of using the past as one’s writing field produces pain at the level of agony.
And, of course, what Buster produces is shit. Thus suggesting the possibility the writer has to live with: that what the writer produces is shit. More agony.
Munro, in “Labor Day Dinner,” describes how life can intervene and reduce the working artist to blocked artist. But here, Munro represents the blocked artist as a dog with an obstructed bowel, in agony, and in reality, near death. I think she means herself, both in reality and with irony. Which shows how reluctant she has been, lifelong, to play the victim.
Note – Munro’s valediction and changing focus: Munro said in her Foreword that these stories had been written over time. There is a kind of valediction in “home.” It feels somewhat as if subjects beyond the past of her immediate family have become possible. “Home” has changed. There is a clarity that has been achieved: the “home” of her past was in fact colored with isolation, darkness, and mystery and was in fact tempered by the brutal cold of financial ruin and profoundly untreatable and profoundly misunderstood illness. Munro devoted years, untold energy and time to the investigation of her past. What this story suggests is that the investigation revealed a certain truth. Her parents had an enigmatic strength in the face of personal tragedy. But the darkness of that personal tragedy was real.
I think one could trace Munro’s gradual turn to the wider world. There are the stories after her re-marriage that make use of the physical world, “Dulse” and “Lichen” and “Moraine” and “Gravel Pit.” These feel like conversation with her second husband rather than conversation completely with the past. One might assume there was a moment for her like the writer’s moment in “Home,” who sees that although her original home was marked with tragedy and darkness, her father has moved on. It’s time for her to move on as well.
Note – the failed bluestocking as the one who didn’t or couldn’t leave:
I see myself not like Harry or Irlma, who have to some extent flourished in this life [the life of the provincial part-time farmer], or like my father, who has trimmed himself to it, but more like one of those misfits, captives – nearly useless, celibate, rusting – who should have left but didn’t, couldn’t, and now are unfit for any place. . . . I can see myself as a middle-aged daughter who did her duty, stayed at home, thinking that someday her chance would come, until she woke up and knew it wouldn’t. Now she reads all night and doesn’t answer her door, and comes up in a surly trance to spread hay for the sheep.
See also “Meneseteung” and “The Ticket”.
Note – Indigenous peoples: Indigenous peoples figure very little in Munro’s writing*, but a part Indian woman who drinks appears in this story as Joe Thoms’ wife. The word is that he beats her. A neighbor says: “Her being part Indian might have something to do with it.”
Munro and Irlma have a set-to about what is true about Indians:
I feel obliged to say, “Oh, that’s just the way people talk about Indians,” and Irlma — immediately sniffing out some high mindedness or superiority — says that what people say about Indians has a lot of truth to it, never mind.
Of course, Munro has accurately portrayed the liberal and the conservative views that obtain today.
One other thing about Joe Thoms’ wife. She’s a captive. She’s captive to Joe. She is captive to drink. She is captive to her imposed identity, much as all women in Munro are captive to imposed identity. She is apparently captive to breast cancer, given her hideously swollen arm. She could be captive to all of this and be white. I’m not sure it works that she’s an Indian.
I don’t understand the offhand inclusion of a part-Native American wife. The irony is that in this story Munro has solved the mystery of her father’s life. Perhaps the point is that solving the mystery of Canada’s indigenous peoples might require another lifetime.
*See “Eskimo” and “Hired Girl.”
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