Alice Munro's "Gravel": New Yorker, June 27, 2011

I have completed my fifth reading of Alice Munro’s new short story, “Gravel,” in the June 27, 2011 edition of The New Yorker. I liked it on the first reading, although I was a little unsure about the central event of the sister’s drowning. I liked it even better on the second reading, when I could separate the “actual” from the “imaginary” in the experience of the narrator. I liked it still more on the third reading, when I understood more about the nature of the narrator’s involvement in the central event. But now that I have read it a fourth time—with highlighter in hand, followed up with a fifth reading making penciled annotations—I like it inordinately for its seemingly simple, but actually complex, literary pattern and thematic significance.

Although you can probably read the story at the following site, http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2011/06/27/110627fi_fiction_munro?currentPage=all
I will provide a brief summary:

The first part of the story recounts the narrator’s memory of her mother’s starting to dress like an actress and then telling her husband that the child with which she is pregnant belongs to Neal, an actor she has met. The mother’s motivation for leaving her insurance-salesman husband seems related to her desire to have a “freer,” more Bohemian, life than she has had in her conventional home.

The central incident occurs after heavy rains have filled up the gravel pit and Caro tells the narrator to run back to the trailer to tell Neal and her mother that Blitzee has fallen in the water and she has jumped in to save the dog. The narrator runs to the trailer, but sits down outside before going in. When she does go in and the mother tries to get Neal to go to the gravel pit, he fails to do so. In the third part of the story, Neal does not attend Caro’s funeral. The mother gives birth to a child named she names Brent.

In the final section of the story, the narrator learns that Neal is living near where she teaches, and her partner, Ruthann, convinces her she should go see him to help “rout her demons.” She discovers that Neal lives in a semi-respectable dump and buys his clothes from the Salvation Army—all of which he says suits his principles. He tells her how it happened—that he was stoned at the time and is not a swimmer and thus would have drowned also if he had tried to save Caro. She asks him what he thinks Caro had in mind on that day, as she has asked two others before. Her counselor has told her that perhaps Caro wanted attention to how bad she was feeling; Ruthann has said it was to make her mother go back to the father; Neal says it doesn’t matter, that maybe she thought she could paddle better or that she did not know how heavy winter clothes could be, or that there was no one close by to help her.

The story ends with Neal advising the narrator not to waste her time, not to try to get in on the guilt for not hurrying up and telling that day. He then says:

“The thing is to be happy. No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and the tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.” He then says goodbye.

In the last paragraph, the narrator says:

“I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself in, as if in triumph and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.”

In the following discussion, I have isolated what I think are the most important motifs of the story, which, taken together, suggest its universal, underlying themes:

One of the first things I look for when reading a story is the motivation for its telling, especially if the story is told first person by a character in the story. Why does the teller feel the need to tell the story? At the very beginning, the narrator tells us, “I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture.” The problem is that we usually remember the past in isolated moments—events that happen, but we have difficulty remembering what causally connects them, what relationship one event has to another. As Neal tells the narrator at the end, “I think you might want to know how it happened.” We may remember what happened, but not how it happened, what caused it. One tells a story in order to try to understand the links, the motivation, the causes.

This need to know, to be sure of the connection of events in the misty, disconnected past, is related to the theme repeated throughout the story of solidity and security versus instability and uncertainty.

The gravel pit embodies this split between what is solid and what is uncertain: “The pit was shallow enough to lead you to think that there might have been some other intention for it—foundations for a house, maybe, that never made it any further.”

After the mother leaves her husband, she was “so happy to have shed everything connected with the house, the street—the husband—with the life she’d had before” exchanging the solidly established house for the transient trailer. The father is an insurance salesman, who sells people security against the future; Neal, on the other hand, with his concern about the atomic bomb, thinks there may be no future. “His philosophy, as he put it later, was to welcome whatever happened. Everything is a gift. We give and we take.” Neal accepts uncertainty, while Caro desires stability. When Neal asks Caro, what if we all disappear and Blitzee has to fend for herself, Caro says, “I’m not going to,” Caro said. “I’m not going to disappear, and I’m always going to look after her.” The narrator and the mother build a snowman and call it Neal; snowmen do not last long and soon disappear.

The narrator feel caught between stability and instability, between things that exist solidly in the world and things that are so instable they just disappear. “Sometimes I wondered about our other house. I didn’t exactly miss it or want to live there again—I just wondered where it had gone.” Indeed, after Caro drowns, Neal does in fact disappear.

When the narrator and her mother make the snowman, Neal gets out of the car mad and yells that he could have run over her. Using a significant verb, the narrator thinks: “That was one of the few times that I saw him act like a father.” After Caro’s death, Neal writes a letter saying, “that since he did not intend to act as a father it would be better for him to bow out at the start.”

During the central drowning event, when the narrator goes to the trailer and just sits down rather than knocking on the door, she says, ”I know this because it’s a fact. I don’t know, however, what my plan was or what I was thinking. I was waiting, maybe, for the next act in Caro’s drama. Or in the dog’s.” Munro creates this ambiguous insecurity about the nature of reality so deftly I need to quote the entire passage:

I don’t know how much time we spent just wandering around the water’s edge, knowing that we couldn’t be seen from the trailer. After a while, I realized that I was being given instructions.

I was to go back to the trailer and tell Neal and our mother something.
That the dog had fallen into the water.

The dog had fallen into the water and Caro was afraid she’d be drowned.

Blitzee. Drownded.

Drowned.

But Blitzee wasn’t in the water.

She could be. And Caro could jump in to save her.

I believe I still put up some argument, along the lines of she hasn’t, you haven’t, it could happen but it hasn’t. I also remembered that Neal had said dogs didn’t drown.

Caro instructed me to do as I was told.

Why?

I may have said that, or I may have just stood there not obeying and trying to work up another argument.

In my mind I can see her picking up Blitzee and tossing her, though Blitzee was trying to hang on to her coat. Then backing up, Caro backing up to take a run at the water. Running, jumping, all of a sudden hurling herself at the water. But I can’t recall the sound of the splashes as they, one after the other, hit the water. Not a little splash or a big one. Perhaps I had turned toward the trailer by then—I must have done so.

When I dream of this, I am always running. And in my dreams I am running not toward the trailer but back toward the gravel pit. I can see Blitzee floundering around and Caro swimming toward her, swimming strongly, on the way to rescue her. I see her light-brown checked coat and her plaid scarf and her proud successful face and reddish hair darkened at the end of its curls by the water. All I have to do is watch and be happy—nothing required of me, after all.

What I really did was make my way up the little incline toward the trailer. And when I got there I sat down. Just as if there had been a porch or a bench, though in fact the trailer had neither of these things. I sat down and waited for the next thing to happen.

Next thing, I am inside. My mother is yelling at Neal and trying to make him understand something. He is getting to his feet and standing there speaking to her, touching her, with such mildness and gentleness and consolation. But that is not what my mother wants at all and she tears herself away from him and runs out the door. He shakes his head and looks down at his bare feet. His big helpless-looking toes."

When the narrator is an adult, she goes to see a therapist to help her determine the links or causal connections between the events. All possible explanations from the three people she asks: therapist, companion, Neal—are hypotheses only, phrased as “must have,” “might have,” “maybe.”

When the narrator goes to meet Neal, he is still the voice of one who accepts life as it comes and refuses to feel responsibility about the past. His view about why Caro did what she did is that it does not matter: “Maybe she thought she could paddle better than she could. Maybe she didn’t know how heavy winter clothes can get. Or that there wasn’t anybody in a position to help her.”

Then Neal gives the narrator advice from his perspective: “Don’t waste your time. You’re not thinking what if you had hurried up and told, are you? Not trying to get in on the guilt?”

“The thing is to be happy,” he said. “No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.”

The story ends with her understanding Neal’s advice, but not her ability to follow it:

“I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself, as if in triumph, and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.”

Alice Munro's "Gravel": New Yorker, June 27, 2011

I have completed my fifth reading of Alice Munro’s new short story, “Gravel,” in the June 27, 2011 edition of The New Yorker. I liked it on the first reading, although I was a little unsure about the central event of the sister’s drowning. I liked it even better on the second reading, when I could separate the “actual” from the “imaginary” in the experience of the narrator. I liked it still more on the third reading, when I understood more about the nature of the narrator’s involvement in the central event. But now that I have read it a fourth time—with highlighter in hand, followed up with a fifth reading making penciled annotations—I like it inordinately for its seemingly simple, but actually complex, literary pattern and thematic significance.

Although you can read the story at the following site, http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2011/06/27/110627fi_fiction_munro?currentPage=all
I will provide a brief summary:

The first part of the story recounts the narrator’s memory of her mother’s starting to dress like an actress and then telling her husband that the child with which she is pregnant belongs to Neal, an actor she has met. The mother’s motivation for leaving her insurance-salesman husband seems related to her desire to have a “freer,” more Bohemian, life than she has had in her conventional home.

The central incident occurs after heavy rains have filled up the gravel pit and Caro tells the narrator to run back to the trailer to tell Neal and her mother that Blitzee has fallen in the water and she has jumped in to save the dog. The narrator runs to the trailer, but sits down outside before going in. When she does go in and the mother tries to get Neal to go to the gravel pit, he fails to do so. In the third part of the story, Neal does not attend Caro’s funeral. The mother gives birth to a child named she names Brent.

In the final section of the story, the narrator learns that Neal is living near where she teaches, and her partner, Ruthann, convinces her she should go see him to help “rout her demons.” She discovers that Neal lives in a semi-respectable dump and buys his clothes from the Salvation Army—all of which he says suits his principles. He tells her how it happened—that he was stoned at the time and is not a swimmer and thus would have drowned also if he had tried to save Caro. She asks him what he thinks Caro had in mind on that day, as she has asked two others before. Her counselor has told her that perhaps Caro wanted attention to how bad she was feeling; Ruthann has said it was to make her mother go back to the father; Neal says it doesn’t matter, that maybe she thought she could paddle better or that she did not know how heavy winter clothes could be, or that there was no one close by to help her.

The story ends with Neal advising the narrator not to waste her time, not to try to get in on the guilt for not hurrying up and telling that day. He then says:

“The thing is to be happy. No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and the tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.” He then says goodbye.

In the last paragraph, the narrator says:

“I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself in, as if in triumph and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.”

In the following discussion, I have isolated what I think are the most important motifs of the story, which, taken together, suggest its universal, underlying themes:

One of the first things I look for when reading a story is the motivation for its telling, especially if the story is told first person by a character in the story. Why does the teller feel the need to tell the story? At the very beginning, the narrator tells us, “I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture.” The problem is that we usually remember the past in isolated moments—events that happen, but we have difficulty remembering what causally connects them, what relationship one event has to another. As Neal tells the narrator at the end, “I think you might want to know how it happened.” We may remember what happened, but not how it happened, what caused it. One tells a story in order to try to understand the links, the motivation, the causes.

This need to know, to be sure of the connection of events in the misty, disconnected past, is related to the theme repeated throughout the story of solidity and security versus instability and uncertainty.

During the central drowning event, when the narrator goes to the trailer and just sits down rather than knocking on the door, she says, ”I know this because it’s a fact. I don’t know, however, what my plan was or what I was thinking. I was waiting, maybe, for the next act in Caro’s drama. Or in the dog’s.” And indeed her helplessness, her failure to act quickly has to do with not knowing what her “role” is in a drama that is not of her making. Indeed, the central event—from the time the narrator is told to go to the trailer and tell Neal and her mother something, the narrator has no secure sense that the events are happening, about to happen, might have happened, or imagined happening. Munro creates this ambiguous insecurity about the nature of reality so deftly I need to quote the entire passage:

I don’t know how much time we spent just wandering around the water’s edge, knowing that we couldn’t be seen from the trailer. After a while, I realized that I was being given instructions.

I was to go back to the trailer and tell Neal and our mother something.
That the dog had fallen into the water.

The dog had fallen into the water and Caro was afraid she’d be drowned.
Blitzee. Drownded.

Drowned.

But Blitzee wasn’t in the water.

She could be. And Caro could jump in to save her.

I believe I still put up some argument, along the lines of she hasn’t, you haven’t, it could happen but it hasn’t. I also remembered that Neal had said dogs didn’t drown.

Caro instructed me to do as I was told.

Why?

I may have said that, or I may have just stood there not obeying and trying to work up another argument.

In my mind I can see her picking up Blitzee and tossing her, though Blitzee was trying to hang on to her coat. Then backing up, Caro backing up to take a run at the water. Running, jumping, all of a sudden hurling herself at the water. But I can’t recall the sound of the splashes as they, one after the other, hit the water. Not a little splash or a big one. Perhaps I had turned toward the trailer by then—I must have done so.

When I dream of this, I am always running. And in my dreams I am running not toward the trailer but back toward the gravel pit. I can see Blitzee floundering around and Caro swimming toward her, swimming strongly, on the way to rescue her. I see her light-brown checked coat and her plaid scarf and her proud successful face and reddish hair darkened at the end of its curls by the water. All I have to do is watch and be happy—nothing required of me, after all.

What I really did was make my way up the little incline toward the trailer. And when I got there I sat down. Just as if there had been a porch or a bench, though in fact the trailer had neither of these things. I sat down and waited for the next thing to happen.

Next thing, I am inside. My mother is yelling at Neal and trying to make him understand something. He is getting to his feet and standing there speaking to her, touching her, with such mildness and gentleness and consolation. But that is not what my mother wants at all and she tears herself away from him and runs out the door. He shakes his head and looks down at his bare feet. His big helpless-looking toes."

When the narrator is an adult, she goes to see a therapist to help her determine the links or causal connections between the events. All possible explanations from the three people she asks: therapist, companion, Neal—are hypotheses only, phrased as “must have,” “might have,” “maybe.”

Neal gives the narrator advice from his perspective: “Don’t waste your time. You’re not thinking what if you had hurried up and told, are you? Not trying to get in on the guilt?”

“The thing is to be happy,” he said. “No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.”
The story ends with her understanding Neal’s advice, but not her ability to follow it:

“I see what he meant. It really is the right thing to do. But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself, as if in triumph, and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash.”

Text, Context, and the Author's Intention: The Example of Ron Carlson Writes a Story

In his book on Robert Browning, G. K. Chesterton tells an old anecdote, which he admits is probably apocryphal, recounting how an admirer wrote to Browning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, and received the following reply: “When that poem was written, two people knew what it meant–God and Robert Browning. And now God only knows what it means.”

I often cited that anecdote to my students in response to their frequent question about whether one of my interpretations of a story was what the author intended. I tried to convince them that whereas they might find interesting insights in the comments of authors about their own work, ”going to ask the author” his or her intention was not necessarily helpful, much less authoritative. Of course the word “intention” raises many more complex issues about the relationship between the author, the work, and the reader than I can deal with in this post. I, therefore, refer the reader to W.K. Wimsatt’s discussion of the famous “intentional fallacy” in his book The Verbal Icon and to E. D. Hirsch’s discussion of this issue in his book Validity in Interpretation.

My intention in this blog post is to explore the issue of intention by focusing on Ron Carlson’s little book Ron Carlson Writes a Story, in which he attempts to describe the process by which he wrote the story “The Governor’s Ball.” I should note right away that Carlson, who has taught creative writing for many years and now runs the graduate program in fiction at U. C., Irvine in Southern California, has directed this book to writers, not readers. The fact that there is a difference between a book about “how to write” and a book about “how to read” may further confirm my argument that going to ask the writer for suggestions about how to “read” his or her story is not always helpful. Why might this be so?

Carlson provides part of the answer at the very opening of his book by reminding us that writing a story is a ”substance-changing process” that differs from writing a research paper or a letter, noting that if you write a research paper on Romeo and Juliet and change the advice the Friar gives to the young couple, you may be in trouble, but if you “let the process of writing a story inform and change the advice an uncle gives his niece, you’re probably moving closer to the truth.”

The question this raises is, “Why is the truth of a story not dependent on the truth of actuality?” And if the truth of a story is different than the truth of actuality, then what value is it to the reader to know the biographical details on which the story is based—except to be critically aware of the differences between the so-called “real” event and the transformed fictional event? Carlson says the common question people ask writers—“Is your story based on personal experience?”—is a good question when its aim is to gauge the distance between so-called “real life” and fiction. Carlson tells his students, “I write from personal experience, whether I’ve had them or not.”

What Carlson describes about writing “The Governor’s Ball” is a process of discovery, not a fulfillment of “intention.” He says the primary advantage the experienced writer has over the beginner is his “tolerance for not knowing.” And it is this process of discovery--by which Carlson says, “If you get what you expect, it isn’t good enough”—that partially accounts for why it is fallacious to think that if you can discover a writer’s intention you can discover the meaning of a story. When Robert Browning wrote the poem, he may have had some quasi-conscious sense of what he intended or what he was discovering in the process of writing, but that when the work was completed, he disqualified himself from having any authority as the ideal reader of that poem with privileged knowledge of its “intention” or meaning.

In her Introduction to The Moons of Jupiter, Alice Munro wrote that she finds it hard to talk about her stories after they are published because of a “queasiness” about “examining.” Furthermore, she notes about the so-called “biographical” connection that might privilege her knowledge of the story, “Some of these stories are closer to my own life than others are, but not one of them is as close as people seem to think.” And the reason for that, of course, is the complex literary/language process that occurs when the writer actually writes and thus transforms so-called “real life” into the language construct known as a story.

Ron Carlson is, I think, right to focus throughout his little “How I Did It” book on the process of discovery. Throughout, he emphasizes how he was, in the process of writing, glad to let the story “migrate from ‘real life,’” making changes from the mere events for the sake of the significance of the story. By recounting where he made such changes and why he made such tactical choices as characters’ names, settings, situations, etc, Carlson provides some valuable advice to aspiring writers to allow themselves to be open to self discovery in the process of writing. But he did not necessarily provide any valuable suggestions for reading the story.

In case you have not read “The Governor’s Ball,” here is a brief summary. Broken pipes have flooded a guy’s house and he must get the sodden carpet and other ruined stuff to the dump in time to get ready for attending the governor’s ball with his wife. The last thing he piles on his pickup truck is a soaked mattress; on the way, the mattress flies off the back and disappears somewhere along the freeway. After taking the rest of the stuff to the dump, he stops at a bar to call his wife to say he will be late, has a drink, has a small encounter with a dancer, goes looking for the mattress, meets a homeless man and woman who help him find it, taking them for a ride on the mattress in the process. The story ends with the homeless woman, with tears in her eyes, saying, “It’s so beautiful. It’s so chilly and so beautiful.”

Carlson admits at the end of the book, “It is not my job to explain the story or understand the story…. Every story is a kind of puzzle…. We write to present questions, sometimes complicated questions, not to offer easy or not-so-easy answers.” Carlson says he made up the narrator’s meeting with the two homeless people completely when he came to that point in writing the story. However, he notes he is not sure that writers spontaneously create anything, but rather that writers “find elements of stories suggested suddenly by the context” that they have created.

I think Carlson is being quite honest in admitting that he does not know what the story means, although he certainly begins to get some idea of what meaning he is creating (or discovering) as the continues to write and allows the context of the story to compel him to create characters, events, and dialogue that begin to “come together” in some meaning. At the very beginning of the story, when the wife reminds him of their commitment to a friend to go to the Governor’s Ball, the narrator tells her he has to get to the dump, saying “I’ve got to go,” a line, Carlson says, that somehow suggests the narrator has a “strange sense of duty and is using it to avoid his responsibilities to the relationship.” Carlson says without knowing it, he has rigged the narrator to operate from this “bad faith position.”

“But this is key,” says Carlson, “he doesn’t know it. And I, sitting; there typing in the first hour of the day, don’t know it. I don’t need to know it. It will teach me.” Carlson notes again later that the narrator is not capable of declaring, although this would be convenient for the reader, what is bothering him. “Literature is one place where we honestly acknowledge and sometimes celebrate how imprecise an instrument the human being is when it comes to registering and measuring the true ramifications on earth.” He concludes the book by saying that the “literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.”

This is, in my opinion, good advice for the aspiring writer, and Carlson’s memory of the process of writing the story—where he used events that actually happened, how he changed those events, why he created the characters and dialogue in the story, where he invented material and why--may or may not be helpful to someone trying to write. However, it is what Carlson left out – justification and explanation of the particular tone/voice that he created, the specific language that he used, the juxtaposition of the three separate but related actions (the narrator’s trip to the dump, the wife he imagines at the Ball with another man, the homeless couple), the realization of the narrator when challenged by the dancer at the roadhouse, the trickster glee of the homeless couple, the homeless woman’s rapturous joy on the mattress in the back of the truck—all this is up to the reader to reorganize in a meaningful way to understand the “complicated human heart” and the “ambiguity in which we live.”

The following specific details of the text are what must be recognized and reorganized along the lines of analysis/interpretation, not along the lines of chronological plot action:

“I had wrestled the carpet out of our basement, with all my strength and half my anger.” (What is the reason for the other half of his anger?)

When his wife says they are due at the Ball in two hours, he thinks “I wanted to fight, but I couldn’t come up with anything great.” (Is it just the wet carpet that makes him want to fight, or is there something else? Is it that we sometimes want to fight, but not really sure of why we want to fight—either that we cannot articulate it or that to articulate would be shameful or risky or both?)

Why does he note that the soaked mattress, heretofore hidden behind the front door, is his and his wife’ wedding mattress? When he says to Cody, “I’ve got to go,” her car window is up by the time he finishes the sentence. Why is she so abrupt curt?)

What is the narrator feeling when he thinks about his wife at the Ball with their friend Dirk—all dressed up and elegant while he is stinking with dirt and water? Why does he remember that at such functions Dirk always manages to seat himself by Cody?

After the mattress flies off, the narrator says he did not want to go back and retrieve it, noting that it was nine years old and had been in the basement three. Given the fact that mattress is their wedding mattress, this simple line seems significant. “But I had lost it. I had to call Cody.” (What has he lost?) It also seems significant that when he does call his wife to tell her he is going to be late and to go on to the Ball with Dirk, he ends the conversation with this one word, “Behave.”

He constantly imagines what is going on at the Ball, with Dirk introducing his wife Cody with the line, “You remember Cody Westerman. Her husband is at the dump.”

Although Carlson says he just invented the encounter with the homeless couple at this particular point in the writing process to meet some demand of the story, the narrator says, significantly, “They looked at me frankly, easily, as if this meeting had been arranged.” And indeed, as we begin to see, it has been arranged, at least fictionally, to serve the thematic purpose of the story, as Carlson begins to discover that theme in the process of writing the story. And that theme comes together as the narrator drives around with the homeless couple on the mattress in the back, looking up at the stars, “their arms folded tightly over their chests like corpses, the woman’s face absolutely closed up in laughter. They were laughing their heads off.”

Admittedly, this is not a particularly complex story, but it is a funny, endearing, insightful story about a couple who have been married nine years, who have the mixed feelings about each other of love and irritation that all couples have, who often find themselves in completely different places with little sympathy for each other, who have different wishes and different demands. Carlson finds a clever way to embody this inevitable ambiguity of relationships by juxtaposing the fancy Ball against the stinking garbage.

The narrator is first challenged by the dancer in the roadhouse, who sees him staring at her and says, “Don’t even try to buy me a drink…. I’ve seen your kind before. Why don’t you go out and do some good?” Although he is not trying to hit on the girl, he recognizes in her retort that he falls within that category of men who stare at her.

He comes to a further recognition when he contrasts the seeming uncomplicated relationship between the homeless couple and his relationship with his wife. As the couple lies on his ruined wedding mattress in the back of the truck, having a delightful time laughing at looking up at the stars, he cannot but be somehow aware of what he has lost. At the end of the story, when the homeless woman cries and the narrator asks the man what she said, it is appropriate that her response is so intimate that the narrator can only hear it second hand from her companion, “It’s so beautiful. It’s so chilly and so beautiful.”

By the time he completed the story, Carlson had some idea of its thematic significance, but only by looking back on it, as a reader, not a writer with some “intention.” All the reader needs in order to understand and respond to that thematic significance and how it is integrally embodied in the details of the story is the completed “text,” not the external “context.”

Ferreting out the context—biographical, historical, social, cultural, political, etc. etc. etc.—is, in my opinion, merely an academic ploy for avoiding the much more difficult encounter with a literary story, which, as Carlson says, “deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.”

Biographies and The Author's Real Life: J.D. Salinger, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro

I don’t often read author biographies unless I have a special reason for doing so. Last year when I was working on a book on Flannery O’Connor, I read Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. And recently when I broke down and bought an e-reader, I read Kenneth Slawenski’s J. D. Salinger: A Life, just to see how I liked reading a book that way. I just finished reading Carol Sklenicka’s Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life because I have always been a great fan of Carver’s short stories. I am now about half way through Robert Thacker’s Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, for I am currently working on a book on her stories.

Having been educated in the era of the New Criticism, I have been taught that a writer’s personal life is not a particularly relevant context for his or her art. I found nothing in these four biographies to change that view, although I must admit that I enjoyed sinking into the details of the lives of Salinger, O’Connor, Carver, and Munro. I found Salinger’s never-ending battle to keep his life private compelling, Carver’s battle with alcoholism, lack of money, and finally cancer heart-breaking, and O’Connor’s battle with lupus tragic. I have not read enough of the Munro to make a judgment yet. I will come back to it later.

Of the four, Carver and Munro’s stories are the most closely tied to their personal experiences? Indeed, Carver drew so closely on events in his life that his first wife MaryAnn has said that some stories are little more than transcriptions of something that actually happened. However, other than finding it interesting that a story is based on a life event, I do not think that that knowledge helps me appreciate the story, since in my opinion a story is an artifice made up of language and thus can only be understood by understanding how the language works to create an experience. The raw experience on which the story might be based means nothing until the artist makes it mean something. And when it means something, it does so by virtue of the language, not by virtue of the event.

I remember when my kids were small and I used to tell them stories, they would often ask, “Daddy, did that really happen?” And one of the most common questions from the audience at author readings is, “Was that story based on an actual experience?” This common concern with the relationship between the fiction and the fact, wherein the reader’s first interest is whether the event “really happened,” reflects a misunderstanding about the basic relationship between language and events in the world.

Stories are not made up of events in the world; they are made up of language carefully constructed by the author. It is not the similarity between the fictional events and the factual events that the reader should be interested in, but rather the difference between the two kinds of events. This is an old formalist notion that makes a great deal of sense to me. When you attend to the differences between real events and fictional events, you attend to the conventions and literary devices that constitute the work’s “literariness,” to quote a much maligned formalist notion, and it is the work’s literariness that constitutes its “meaning.”

One conviction that Salinger, O’Connor, Carver, and Munro share--often repeated in all four of these biographies--is that their “real life” lies in their writing. When they are not writing, they are chaffing to get back to writing. All four were consumed with writing from early childhood and remained obsessed with writing throughout their lives. Alice Munro, who will turn eighty next month, is still working on stories. At least we hope so.

Thus, it seems ironic to me that author biographies, which necessarily focus on events in the real world, are never really about the real lives of the authors—only their external experiences: O’Connor’s life on the farm, Salinger’s experiences in the War, Carver’s drunken binges, Munro’s divorce and remarriage. If you are a fan of an author’s work, reading about their lives in the real world may be interesting, but when their real lives begin—that is, during the process of writing—the biographer can only say, “She published this or that,” or “He worked on this or that.”

Occasionally, the biographer will note that a certain event—Carver and MaryAnn’s attempt to patch up their marriage, for example—was the basis for a certain story. But the process of writing the story—what the author would call his or her “real life”—plays little or no part in the biography itself.

You can’t really blame the biographer for this. He or she has no way to access the mystery of the writing process, except from author interviews and essays. And even then, there is no guarantee that the author understands the mystery of the creative process and thus can give the reader a glimpse of his or her “real life.” One of the best efforts to do this is, in my opinion, Henry James's Notebooks and Prefaces.

I am currently reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast—mainly because when I was in Paris for a few days recently, my hotel was on the left bank, not far from where Hemingway and his wife Hadley rented an apartment. It was a pleasure to read about Hemingway’s walks in that area, discovering the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, having a drink with James Joyce at a café where I also sat and sipped a café creme. Hemingway worked on his writing at the cafes during this time and resented any time his "real life" was interrupted. But all we know about that real life is the phrase, “I worked."

I just ordered Ron Carlson’s little book Ron Carlson Writes a Story: From the First Glimmer of an Idea to the Final Sentence, in which he, according to a blub, “invites the reader to look over his shoulder as he creates the short story ‘The Governor’s Ball’.” I will post some remarks on A Moveable Feast and Carlson’s book in my next blog entry.

Importance of Tone in Doctorow's "Jolene: A Life" Compared to Dan Ireland's Film Jolene

Just after the turn of the century, the American critic H. S. Canby called attention to the fact that the art of modern short fiction was as much that of tone as incident, noting that the work of the author in the story is "harmonized into one tone, as if narrative were a painting.” Many years later, well-known modern critic Irving Howe argued:

If the short-story writer is to create the illusion of reality, he must sing mostly aria and very little recitative. As a result, he uses a series of technical devices, often quite simple inflections of style, the end effect of which we call the story tone. A novel written in one dominant tone becomes intolerable; a story too often deviating from it risks chaos.

The relationship between E. L. Doctorow’s story “Jolene: A Life” and Dan Ireland’s film Jolene provides an illustrative example of the importance of tone to the short story, indicating that even in a highly plotted, episodic story, tone is more important than plot.

The Film Jolene, (2008) directed by Dan Ireland, from a screenplay by Dennis Yares, is based on the story "Jolene: A Life" by E.L. Doctorow from his collection, Sweet Land Stories. Ireland is perhaps best known for having directed the film The Whole Wide World, which introduced Renee Zellweger.

The film introduces Jessica Chastain as Jolene, and features the following well-known supporting actors: Frances Fisher (Cindy), Rupert Friend (Coco Lerger), Dermot Mulroney (Uncle Phil), Zeb Bewnab (Mickey), Theresa Russell (Aunt Kay), Denise Richards (Marin Lerger), Michael Vartan (Brad Benton) and Chazz Palminteri (Sal Fontaine).

The film runs two hours, but the screenwriter and director do not really have to invent a back-story filled with new characters or episodes, for the story itself is so episodic that it actually takes two film hours to tell the story of Jolene, who begins as a teenager in a foster home and ends up in her mid-twenties in Hollywood, but with her dreams intact.

As a brief aside: I just finished reading Kenneth Slawenski’s recent biography of J. D. Salinger, in which we are reminded that once upon a time Salinger sold the film rights for this great story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut.” The result—a typical Hollywood romantic tear-jerker remembered for only two things: the title theme song, “My Foolish Heart,” and the fact that it convinced Salinger never, never, never to sell the film rights to another of his works, no matter how much Hollywood begged for the rights to Catcher in the Rye. Basing a film on a short story often requires the invention of an elaborate plotted back-story for the story’s single scene, something Salinger perhaps did not anticipate. A more successful example, in which the back-story actually works, is the film version of Hemingway’s “The Killers,” which starred Burt Lancaster as the doomed boxer.

A notorious recent example is the new Will Farrell movie, “Everything Must Go,” which the credits list as being based on a story by Raymond Carver. No such thing! If you have never read Carver’s wonderful little story “Why Don’t You Dance?” and if you are a diehard Farrell fan, you may like this movie. But I suspect that only reason it is credited to Carver is because the producers thought it might “sell” the film. It’s too damned bad.

E. L. Doctorow, author of Ragtime (1975), Loon Lake (1980), and Billy Bathgate (1989), is much better known as a novelist than a short-story writer. Acknowledging that the novel has always been his typical rhythm, Doctorow, in an interview after the publication of this collection of stories, said that while editing Best American Stories: 2000, he discovered that many authors were not writing the tight epiphanic Chekhovian story, but rather were going back to the more leisurely plot-based story typical of the nineteenth century. The result of this realization are these five long stories, most of which originally appeared in The New Yorker.

The stories in Sweet Land Stories are primarily plot-based, recounted in a seemingly artless, casual tone--three told in first-person by deluded male narrators and two narrated in third person by ironic storytellers. What is arguably “sweet” about these stories is the naiveté and innocence, thus ultimately the self-delusion, of the central characters as they seek to achieve the American dream, find transcendence in a savior, or uphold their ideals in the face of political chicanery.

The heroine of “Jolene: A Life” has her dreams, even though she starts out with several strikes against her. She marries Mickey Holler when she is fifteen to get out of a foster home where the father molests her and the mother beats her. But it is a move from the frying pan into the fire, for Mickey and Jolene have to live with his Uncle Phil and Aunt Kay, and Uncle Phil has an eye for Jolene. In comic fashion typical of these stories, Uncle Phil finally has his way with Jolene by coming up behind her one day while she is scrubbing the floor, picking her up with the scrub brush still in her hand, and carrying her into his bed. When Mickey finds out, he beats up Uncle Phil in a slapstick battle and then jumps off a bridge and kills himself.

Jolene is put into a juvenile loony bin, but in a silly bit of good fortune, a woman in the place smashes a mirror and cuts her wrists with a sliver. When all the mirrors are removed and nobody can see herself, Jolene begins a business of drawing portraits of the girls so they would know what they look like. She then makes friends with an admiring female attendants, but when the woman gets Jolene out, Jolene promptly leaves her and hits the road, finally ending up, at age seventeen, in Phoenix, Arizona.

Like other protagonists of the American Dream stories in Sweet Land Stories, Jolene appreciates the fact that in the West nobody cares much what you do. She meets a tattoo artist named Coco Leger, moves in with him, and starts working at his Institute of Body Art, that is, until one day, Coco’s first wife shows up with a baby on her hip. Jolene finds Coco’s cocaine, calls the cops and tells them about it, and then takes off after getting fifteen dollars for her wedding band.

Arriving in Las Vegas, Jolene, still young and shapely, gets a job dancing topless, and meets Sal, a distinguished gray-haired man, who puts a diamond choker on her neck and asks her to move in with him. When Sal is killed by mobsters, Jolene takes off again, this time to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she meets and marries Brad G. Benton and becomes a young matron of the upper class. After she has a baby and Brad starts to beat her, she gets a divorce, but Brad and his family get custody of the child. Finally, Jolene takes off for Hollywood, the land of dreams and opportunity. The story ends in Doctorow’s usual comic pathos, with Jolene thinking that maybe she will act in movies, so that one day she can go back to Tulsa in a Rolls-Royce and her son will answer the door to meet his movie-star mother.

The stories in Sweet Land Stories are entertaining and diverting tales told by a master storyteller. However, in their simplistic, self-indulgent shots at innocence, ignorance, and naiveté, they fail to provide any important insights into either the nature of individual human hopes or the national mythos about the American Dream.

What interests me most about the story/film relationship of “Jolene” is how much the story depends on tone and how much the film depends on character. Because of its wry tone, the story is actually quite comic, in spite of the many tragic travails of the heroine. However, the film, because it is deprived of the storyteller’s tone, is sweetly sad, although the character of Jolene, played irresistibly by new actress Jessica Chastain, manages to endear herself to the viewer in spite of her many mistakes about men. Not a great story. Not a great film. But interesting, nonetheless, for what they suggest about the importance of tone to the short story as a form.