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.

Winner of 2011 “Puzzle the Prof” Contest & Some Thoughts About Short Story Month

I am happy to announce that Ray Embry is the winner of the First Annual “Puzzle the Prof” Contest for Short Story Month 2011.

Ray was taking a course at Southern Oregon University’s version of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute that studies the annual Best American Short Story collection. In the 2010 edition, edited by Richard Russo, the story “The Cousins” by Charles Baxter provided a puzzle for the class with Baxter’s introduction of an apple at the end of the story. Ray points out that the narrator steals the apple and then informs us that he could have paid for it, “but shoplifting apparently was called for. It was an emotional necessity.” Then Ray notes that the narrator has it with him when he gets home. “There it is, deliberately and repeatedly,” says Ray, adding emphatically, “What the hell is it doing there?”

Ray’s query provided me with the most challenging and most interesting puzzle, for responding to it forced me to develop a full-length “reading” of the story that tried to account not only for the apple, but all the other details as well. After I posted my response, I did a search for others who might have discussed the story (which was chosen for the 2010 Best American Short Stories and the 2011 Pushcart Prize, and also appeared for the first time in book form in Baxter’s 2011 Gryphon: New and Selected Stories). I discovered that it had been puzzling to several other readers as well. The story thus seemed to me to be a good example of a work that was recognized immediately as a very fine story, but that no one seemed able to explain why it was so brilliant.

My own interpretation of the complexity of the story has no claim to validity, for, in my opinion, the truth value of an interpretation can only be measured by the extent to which the interpretation accounts for the details of the story and the extent to which it is satisfying to readers of both the story and the interpretation. My own reading of “The Cousins” derives from my experience with thousands of stories and lots of theoretical thought about the short story as a form during the forty years of my career as a reader/teacher/critic. I doubt that anyone else would have developed such a reading of the story, for obviously no one else has precisely the same experience with short stories as I do.

As a teacher, the problem the story and my reading of the story poses for me is that whereas I can develop such a reading and offer it to my readers for their consideration, I am not all that confident that I can “teach” others to read stories in the same way. For, in my opinion, my job has always been not merely to teach readers how to interpret a single story, but rather how to help readers know how to read the next story they might happen to read. I have no way of determining the extent of my success in that task. It’s a humbling experience to admit that doubt.

Now that I have retired from the classroom, I continue my study of the short story and my efforts to provide some suggestions about reading short stories on this blog. I thank all those who take the time to visit the thoughts of a guy whose only claim to expertise is that he has “read and written about a lot of short stories.”

I am sending Ray a copy of Antonya Nelson's very fine collection of stories Nothing Right and my own modest study of the short story entitled The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice. I thank Ray and the others who participated in "Puzzle the Prof" for 2011.

A few words about Short Story Month, 2011:

As far as I can determine, this is the third year that various devoted bloggers have promoted the idea of Short Story Month. It does seem that the number of bloggers enthusiastic about the idea of Short Story Month has grown in those three years. However, as far as I can determine, the idea has not mushroomed beyond blogs. That is, I know of no mention of Short Story Month in newspapers, print magazines, television, radio, etc. (Although I did see a mention on National Public Radio’s blog, I have not heard anything on the air about the month). There has been no nation-wide campaign among writers, publishers, libraries, and teachers to promote the reading and appreciation of the short story.

On the other hand, National Poetry Month, which has been celebrated during the month of April since 1996, is a success primarily because it is supported by the Academy of American Poets, a nonprofit organization that has been around since 1934. The Academy’s website, Poets.org, receives over a million visits a month. National Poetry Month is supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts; by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts; by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; and by the National Council of Teachers of English and the American Booksellers Association. The Academy of American Poets sends out thousands of posters to libraries, teachers, and booksellers, media kits to newspapers across the country, and sponsors a number of events. As a result, National Poetry Month gets quite a bit of publicity. There was even an article in Oprah Magazine (and we know what influence she has), about National Poetry Month, recommending a number of poetry collections.

The question is: Will Short Story Month, informally supported by several bloggers (including myself) over the past three years, ever get the kind of energy, money, and gravitas to become National Short Story Month? As far as I know, there is no short story equivalent of the Academy of American Poets to originate and support such a nationally recognized celebration. And lacking that, I do not know who, or what organization, has the “star power” or the financial wherewithal to make it happen on the same scale as National Poetry Month.

I am open to any suggestions and am happy to join in any effort to get the short story the kind of recognition and readership I obviously think it deserves.

Charles Baxter's "The Cousins": Puzzle the Prof Contest--Short Story Month 20011

The third head-scratcher for my Short Story Month 2011 “Puzzle the Prof” contest comes from Ray, who at Southern Oregon University’s version of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute is taking a course that studies the annual Best American Short Story collection. In the 2010 edition, edited by Richard Russo, the story “The Cousins” by Charles Baxter provided a puzzle for the class with Baxter’s introduction of an apple at the end of the story. Ray points out that the narrator steals the apple on page 59 and then informs us on page 60 that he could have paid for it, “but shoplifting apparently was called for. It was an emotional necessity.” Then Ray notes that the narrator has it with him when he gets home on page 61. “There it is, deliberately and repeatedly,” says Ray, adding emphatically, “What the hell is it doing there?”

Apples are notorious for causing problems in literature, especially the short story, where the thematic demands and the mythic sources of the form often seem to require that certain objects have symbolic, often mythic, significance. And, of course, the most famous apple in all of myth and literature is the apple in the Garden of Eden that Eve purloined against the warnings of Jehovah and gave to Adam.

Many years ago, I was in a graduate school course on literary criticism conducted by a professor I admired, Dr. Eric Thompson; we had read the short story by Eudora Welty entitled “A Visit of Charity,” in which a young girl hides an apple before visiting a home for the elderly and then retrieves it and takes a big bite out of it at the end of the story. I posted a blog on March 5, 2009 in which I discussed how the class debate about the story centered on the Edenic implications of that apple and how my dissatisfaction with that debate lead me a few years later to write and publish my first academic article.

Of course, in no translation of the Bible I am familiar with is the forbidden fruit identified as an apple. It is simply referred to as a “fruit.” Some scholars think it probably was a fig rather than an apple. However, since the apple seems so irresistible with its solid shiny roundness, it has trumped the fig in the popular imagination. When Milton referred to the fruit as an apple, he seems to have settled the forbidden fruit issue for artists and cartoonists for all time.

Of course, there is no compelling reason to associate every apple in every short story with that archetypal apple that Eve bit and shared with her husband, thus introducing the knowledge of good and evil into the world. Sometimes, an apple is just an apple. Just as Freud supposedly said, (although I cannot find the exact citation of his saying this), sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

So, we will hold the apple in abeyance and start by looking at Charles Baxter’s story to see if there are other elements in the story that might thematically compel us to read his fictional apple as the apple in the Garden of Eden.

“The Cousins” originally appeared in Tin House in 2009 and was later collected in Baxter’s most recent book, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, 2011. As Ray has already mentioned, it was also chosen by Richard Russo for the 2010 Best American Short Stories. In the Contributor’s Notes to BASS, Baxter says, “I have always liked stories with dubious narrators given to rationalizations, and ‘The Cousins’ has one such narrator, someone who should give what used to be called ‘moral support’ but doesn’t do so until it is too late.” Baxter further says the story is built from several bits and pieces: an anecdote told to him by a friend, another anecdote told to him more recently, a dream, his memories of New York City in the 1970s, a stanza from one of his own poems, and a monologue he heard from an Ethiopian-American cab driver. Baxter must have seen some thematic connection between the various bits that urged him to “build” the story.

By “dubious narrator,” Baxter may be referring to the concept that Wayne Booth introduced in his classic 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction—the “unreliable narrator.” Booth says, "I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work ... unreliable when he does not.” When the reader feels that a narrator (usually a first-person narrator) is what Booth calls, "morally and intellectually deficient,” the reader may judge that narrator unreliable and thus his judgments and observations questionable or suspicious, or as Baxter has it, “dubious.” Often we classify narrators as unreliable when their value system clashes with the prevailing value system of the society, the story, or our own notion of what constitutes basic human decency and moral behavior.

The narrator of “The Cousins” is named Benjamin, but called by his childhood nickname “Bunny” by his cousin Brantford, named for the grandfather, who made a fortune from a device used in aircraft navigation. Brantford has spent his entire college fund frivolously, while, it is assumed, Benjamin has used his to get a degree in law. Benjamin says that although he is twenty years older than Brantford, they are “oddly similar, more like brothers than cousins.” This theme of “brother” occurs later in the story at Brantford’s funeral when Benjamin meets Camille, the woman Brantford had been living with and the mother of his child. She tells Benjamin that his face is like Brantford’s, that they both have the same cheerful scowl. She also says Brantford talked about Benjamin “as his long-lost brother, the one who never came to see him.”

Perhaps the most famous brothers in the Bible are the original brothers, Cain and Able. This story of the “first” brothers seem related to Baxter’s story. When Benjamin and Brantford meet for lunch at the beginning of the story, Brantford tells his cousin, “Sometimes at night I have the feeling that I’ve murdered somebody…Someone’s dead. Only I don’t know who or what or when I did it. I must’ve killed somebody. I’m sure of it.” At the end of the lunch, Brantford says, “Would you please explain to me why it feels as if I’ve committed a murder?”

Brantford’s confession of his feeling that he has committed a murder is important, for it is mentioned later in the story after Benjamin tells of his past life as an actor when he knocks a man down in the subway for urinating in his drink glass and then runs away as the man crawls toward the tracks. When he can find no newspaper account of the man’s death, he thinks he may have dreamed the whole thing, or that someone else dreamed it and then put him as a lead actor in the dream—“a cautionary tale whose moral was that I had no gift for the life I’d been leading.” He then dreams that someone points to his body on the floor, saying, “It’s dead.” He says what frightened him was not his death, but that he had become an “It.” He says that he would not have eve thought of his days as an actor had not Brantford told him twenty years later over lunch that he felt he had killed somebody and if he and Brantford had not had a “kind of solidarity.”

This theme of Brantford’s thinking he has killed someone combines with Benjamin’s concern that he may have been responsible for the man’s death in the subway, evoking that archetypal first murder in the Bible, when Cain rises up and kills his brother Abel because God chose Abel’s sacrificial gift over his own.

The Cain and Abel story always puzzled me as a child. I could not understand why God chose Abel’s gift over Cain’s. It was not that Cain gave the Lord rotten or unripe vegetables from his garden, while Abel gave the firstlings of his flock, nor could I accept the theological justification that in Genesis we are dealing with a vengeful God. I published an article several years ago about how the Cain and Abel story is related to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I quote a passage from that article below.

Cain’s murder of his brother is the first sin of man against man in the Old Testament. But it is a sin that is only possible because of the previous Original Sin of Man against God. As a result of eating the apple, Man is cast out of the Garden—separated from the God and nature with which he was formerly at one. However, perhaps the most important result of the Fall is the separation of man from man. As Erich Fromm suggests in The Art of Loving, when Adam and Eve see their nakedness and seek to cover themselves, they do so not because of bodily shame and prudery, but because they have become aware of themselves and the separateness. The realization that they are no longer one causes their shame, guilt, and anxiety.

The story of Cain and Abel is the inevitable result of this separation; it is a series of cumulative symbolic objectifications of the implicit reality. Both Cain and Abel bring offerings to the Lord, each according to his own ability and resources. Abel brings the “firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof” and Cain brings the “fruit of the ground.” However, “The Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering: But unto Cain and his offering he had not respect.” No real explanation is given for God’s making this distinction between the two brothers. Cain has given his best just as Abel has. It is certainly not, as many casual readers think, that Cain offered rotten fruit. Moreover, it trivializes the symbolic significance of a powerful story to simply attribute the distinction to the historical notion that the Old Testament God was partial to blood sacrifices.

God’s distinction may be better understood as an explicit objectification of what is implicit in the Fall: men, even brothers, are ultimately separate. By this act, God says, “You are isolated from one another. It is therefore possible to make a distinction between you.” Cain reacts to this realization by testing it in the extreme—by rising up against Abel and slaying him. Cain kills Abel simply because he can, because he is separate from him, because he is free to do so. God’s response is, of course, to make Cain the original symbol of isolated man. He cuts him off from other men completely: “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.” Thus begins the nightmare reality of man’s isolation from his fellow man—a reality that makes him horrifyingly free to slay his brother because he is separate from him.

I hypothesize that “The Cousins” has something to do with our human responsibility to our “brother,” that is, all other men and women, but that we often have difficulty fulfilling that responsibility because of our inherent separation from the other. As Baxter says in his Contributor’s Notes to Best American Short Stories, the story has something to do with a man, Benjamin, who fails to give moral support to his “brother” until it is too late and then tries to rationalize his moral failure as he begins to realize his “sin.”

In some ways, the relationship between Brantford and Benjamin is like another famous pair of brothers in the Bible in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Brantford spends all his money on an expensive lifestyle, while Benjamin saves his money and gets an education. Although Benjamin says he wanted to help Brantford, he says he did not know how to express compassion with him or how to express the pity he felt. “I think my example sometimes goaded him into despair.”

By the way, I never liked the parable of the Prodigal Son any more than I did the story of Cain and Abel. It just didn’t seem fair to me that the father would welcome back with a big party the son who has foolishly spent all his inheritance, while the son who stayed home and saved his money would get no party at all.

So, let’s say that “The Cousins” derives from, or is a variation of, the two “brother” stories in the Bible (or any other “brother” stories from other mythologies or cultures, and there are many of them, for a “brother” story is most always about making distinctions between the two in which one triumphs and one feels envy). Which of the two cousins is Cain and which is Abel? From Baxter’s point of view, it’s not that simple. Both are Cain, and both are Abel. Both are the same, even as they re different. As Camille tells Benjamin, “You look alike, but that doesn’t mean you were alike. You could have been his identical twin and you wouldn’t have been any closer to him than you are now.”

Camille knows that when Benjamin attends Brantford’s funeral he is there to “exercise” his “compassion.” She tells him that he is in his element, that he is enjoying this attempt at a cheap moral payback for his neglect of his “brother,” his moral superiority. She tells him to send her a regular check, for he is one of “those guys who loves to exercise his pity, his empathy. You’re one of those rare, sensitive men with a big bank account.”

Then, in one of the most important lines in the story, Benjamin tells her: “It seems that you want to keep me in a posture of perpetual contrition,” adding, “I was suddenly proud of that phrase. It summed everything up.”

If our hypothesis about this story is right, it does sum everything up. Given the horrible way we treat our brothers, we should all always be in a “posture of perpetual contrition.”

The encounter with the taxicab driver is a coda of this theme of brothers. When the cabbie tells Benjamin that he is Ethiopian, Benjamin says he thought he was Somali. The cabdriver crossly responds, “Extremely not. I am Ethiopian…very different. We do not look the same either.” He further explains what Ethiopians think a Somali has nine hearts and will never reveal his true heart, only his false one, doing this over and over. Thus, you will never get to the ninth heart, which is the true one, the “door to the soul. The Somali keeps that heart to himself.” This coda seems to emphasize the brotherhood theme of the story—that even though we may seem the same, we are different; or even though we seem different we are the same. We are doomed to always be separate, never to be able to know the true heart of the other, always unable to know the difference between the thing that is and the thing that is not. Benjamin’s encounter with the poet at the party who called him the “scum of the earth,” which in turn caused him to treat the man in the subway as if he too were the scum of the earth, only reminds us that we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves, regardless of how repulsive the neighbor might be. If we treat others in the horrible way others treat us, we have no chance of finding a sense of union in the midst of the separation and loneliness brought into being by the original eating of the Edenic apple.

“The Cousins” ends with Benjamin arriving at his home with his stolen apple and the new bunch of flowers he has bought. He thinks he will ring the bell as a stranger might, “a someone who hopes to be welcomed.” The bell does not work, so he goes to the side door. He thinks if he had been Brantford, the yard animal would have approached him (we recall Brantford’s love of animals). He sees his wife home-tutoring a little Somali girl. He feels the presence of his cousin. He raps on the door, but when his wife looks at him, he cannot see her eyes through her dark glasses (we recall his wife’s sensitivity to light), so he does not know if she intends to ever let him in the house again. The last line of the story is: “I have loved this life so much. I was prepared to wait out there forever.”

So, why does Benjamin steal an apple to bring home to his wife? And why does he feel he has to steal it? If the apple is the Edenic apple, the original theft of which brought separation into life, then it is only right that Benjamin (Adam) gives it back to Giulietta (Eve). It could not have been purchased, for it is beyond price; it must be retrieved in the same way it was originally purloined. We recall that when Benjamin met Giulietta, he recognized her “insubstantial quality. When you looked away from her, you couldn’t be sure that she’d still be there when you looked back again.” Giulietta is a different kind of angel than the “fiery angel” Brantford has seen in the sky and thought might descend on him. When Benjamin looks in and sees his sons and his wife in the house, he cannot be sure that he will be allowed in.

And indeed, how can we ever be sure? One tries to look into the eyes of the loved one and see their true heart, but one never knows. It is the “fear and trembling” of not knowing that requires the “leap of faith” to love the other as the self even if we never know that what we perceive is “what is” or “what is not.” But even if we do not know, we must be prepared, as Benjamin is, to wait to be allowed in. “knock and the door will be opened to you.”

I know this has been a long and complex interpretative journey to get to that apple. But in a good short story, to understand the significance of even one small element requires that we understand the role that the one element plays in the whole story. How do I know if this is the correct interpretation of the apple? I don’t. But it is an interpretation that justifies most all the details in the story, an interpretation that seems unified and gives me meaningful pleasure. I think that is what Charles Baxter wants—a reader who cares enough to give his story the kind of attention that he gave in making it.

I thank Ray for compelling me to spend some quality time with Charles Baxter’s story, and I thank Charles Baxter for writing it with such wisdom and grace. My experience with this story reminds me of why I love the short story and so enjoy sharing that love with readers of this blog.