Farewell, Alice Munro

What follows is a chapter about Alice Munro from my book, Lost in Canada: An Immigrant’s Second Thoughts (Sutherland Books, 2022). I wrote this when I thought I was very close to reconnecting with my original country and culture. (It was not to be.) Finding Montenegrin content in Alice Munro felt like being stitched where you are divided. A lot of us are divided inside - nothing new. Some along obviously linguistic and cultural lines, others more obscurely. Only connect!… Live in fragments no longer. Thank you for the stitch, A.M. And for the epigraph that brought together my entire book of quite disparate essays:

“Wouldn’t we rather have a destiny to submit to, then, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?”

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Photo: Marion Ettlinger

You could argue that Alice Munro’s fiction is parochial. It wouldn’t necessarily be a value judgment. A lot of the best literature is fiercely local while at the same time transcending its time and place and reaching readers in other eras and locales. But before reading her closely, I was sure Munro’s stories were parochial in that other sense: insular, uninterested in wide varieties of human experience, reiterative. After she won the Nobel Prize, amidst of a wave of excitement and praise, two dissenting voices stood out: novelist Lydia Millet and critic Christian Lorentzen both criticized what they saw as Munro’s narrowness, bourgeois mindset, and exclusive attention to love and sex intrigues among the middle classes of small town Ontario. Why would we care about these people? A small-town Ontario woman having an affair, then leaving both her husband and lover to move across the country to small-town BC to open a bookstore. How is this interesting? Mavis Gallant, another Canadian short story writer beloved by The New Yorker, now she was worldly, with a well-travelled imagination, I thought. She lived in Paris, for heavens sake. (Snobbery will find each of us if we’re not careful, and what is more parochial than it?)

As the second decade of my life in Canada drew to a close, I found myself feeling less like I belong than when my passport was first stamped at the Montreal PET Airport in 1999. Reasons are multiple. I have entered the middle age, and like the narrator of Aleksandar Hemon’s most recent book, My Parents/This Does Not Belong To You, I began to track the line of decisions that led here, and wonder if they were correct. By my twentieth year in Canada, I have met my walls and can guess where the locked doors are, while ten or fifteen years ago, early in my citizenship, I presumed that all was open, the possibilities endless. I also did not want a hyphen to my citizenship, and Montenegrin-Canadian sounds a drag to say, let alone imagine. I had no children in local school. No institutional affiliation. Was I really Canadian?

Against this background, I came across the two stories by Alice Munro touching on Montenegro. The country where I spent my first eighteen years, where almost all of my remaining family lives, is the least known and the smallest of the post-Yugoslav countries of the Western Balkans. People usually have some notion of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia, but not of Montenegro. And yet, here it is, in Alice Munro, who can have her pick of small and unusual countries for fictional purposes. I’ve had the Penguin anthology of her Selected Stories on a shelf somewhere for a long time, but I’ve only recently read the “Albanian Virgin.” The other story of interest, “Tricks,” appeared in the collection Runaway.

“Tricks” opens as Robin, a young woman in a small Ontario town, is getting ready to travel to Stratford for a theatre matinee. Her sister and neighbour are playing cards and are wondering what the fuss is about: her green dress will surely arrive from the dry cleaner on time. Robin is a nurse and her sister has health problems and we presume lives with her because she requires care. The reader gradually finds out that this is a repeat trip to Stratford for Robin. When she attended a matinee of Antony and Cleopatra last year, Robin lost her purse with documents, money, and train ticket back, and was stopped on the street by a stranger wondering if she was in distress. The stranger, whose name is Danilo Adžić, turns out to be from Montenegro, then still part of the larger Yugoslavia, but it’s Montenegro that the author is interested in as Danilo’s place of origin. He lives alone in Stratford and owns a clock repair shop. The young woman trusts him immediately and agrees to follow him home so he can lend her some money and make dinner for both. Robin has never had a boyfriend, but she’s something of a fantasist and Danilo strikes her as a pleasant stranger. She ponders the rescued-by-a-handsome-stranger narrative as if she were a character in a story and doesn’t entirely discard it. We trust Danilo alongside her, he is reliable somehow.

The conversation proceeds in skipped-over impasses. “What are you famous for, then” asks Robin after Danilo says that Montenegro is not famous for its food. He asks in turn, “And you?” upon which she regrets putting her question in those terms. We learn that Danilo is to return to Montenegro to deal with some family matter and that he probably won’t be back before June next year. At the train station they kiss (you can almost hear violins as the melodrama heightens for Robin), and she promises that she’ll follow his request and knock on his door in the same green dress on the same day next year, after her matinee of choice.

The intervening year Robin spends learning about Montenegro, to place Danilo in a context and give him a past. When the story returns to the present, Robin’s green dress is still not ready and she ends up buying a similar one, with a more ‘modern’ cut. The play she’s seeing in Stratford is As You Like It, in which Rosalind, disguised as a man, seeks her stray fiancé in the magic forest of Arden. When Robin finally knocks on Danilo’s door after the play, he interrupts his work, opens the door in irritation, waves his hand at her and slams the door.

The first heartbreak is a rite of passage, the first locked door on a personal geography. Seasons moves from summer to winter, and we find Robin forty years later, a capable chief nurse of a psychiatric ward in her home town, living alone (her sister has died), a string of affairs but no long relationship behind her. A lot of Munro characters are women outside the marital formula: the never-married, those who regret getting married, the leavers, the abandoned, the widows. What kind of a Munro story would a happy couple make, and would they come across as obnoxious as Tom and Jerry do in Mike Leigh’s Another Year, Munro, age 90, is of a generation in which the unmarried women read as somewhat eccentric (as they still do in most of the world). But they are ‘centric’ for Munro, the centre of the story. When a group of patients on their way to another hospital are temporarily placed on Robin’s ward, she spots a man, weak, unable to speak. But surely, she thinks, Danilo? “Aleksandar Adžić”, says the chart, born in Montenegro, Yugoslavia, emigrated May 29, 1962, care of brother Danilo Adžić (this way we learn that Robin and Danilo met in 1961), lived with his brother until the latter’s death in 1995. Deaf-mute from birth… apathy, mood swings, no training in sign language.

“This is ridiculous. This I do not accept.” Twins! Danilo must have stepped out for an errand before she knocked on his door, she thinks.

It’s one of those events that are too absurd for fiction, but not for real life. Writes Munro: “Shakespeare should have prepared her. Twins are often the reason for mix-ups and disasters in Shakespeare. A means to an end, those tricks are supposed to be. And in the end the mysteries are solved, the pranks are forgiven, true love or something like it is rekindled.” This is followed by a darker wave of musing. Their relationship, had they connected, would have been hard to maintain. How could they have lived together, each with a dependent in tow? Perhaps it is better like this, Robin tentatively thinks: better a brutal cut than a protracted cooling off. “Robin has had patients who think that combs and toothbrushes must lie in the right order, shoes must face in the right direction, steps must be counted, or some sort of punishment will follow.” Perhaps, if she follows that worldview, her choosing the wrong kind of green dress put things in motion in the wrong way.

What is inevitable and what contingent, what is imposed on us and what we’ve chosen for ourselves: Alice Munro’s fiction keeps returning to these questions. Hers are often characters—women—who fear freedom, or rush too carelessly into the first opportunity that gives the illusion of freedom. Some manage to be free at great expense. In “Albanian Virgin”, Munro creates an Edwardian lady traveller similar to Edith Durham who comes from Canada, then still the British Empire, to explore the Balkans. Her parents are dead, and she’s had a falling-out with her brother, so nobody back home misses her much. The steamer from Trieste makes an overnight stop in Bar, Montenegro, where she would like to stay longer, but Mr. and Mrs. Cozzens, whom she met in Italy, and an English gentleman they’ve introduced her to will “make a fuss” if she’s not back on the boat in the morning. She gets up early, asks for a guide at the hotel reception, and goes on what she believes will be a short hike. They don’t make it far before her guide is killed, in a blood feud, she learns later. She herself is wounded and taken as unexpected bounty to a tribe in northern Albania. The only way to escape the marriage that the tribe arranges for her, she’s told by the Italian-speaking Franciscan who roams the local villages, is to become a sworn virgin, taking a vow of chastity and wearing male clothing. So she does: she cuts her hair, dons men’s clothes, and moves further up the mountain to live a solitary life. She leads her herd of sheep out to pasture and collects the milk that is taken back to the tribe. With winter on the horizon, the Franciscan hears renewed rumours of an arranged marriage for the foreign woman and urges her to escape by following him to Skodra, the closest town. They eventually get there on foot, and find the bishop’s house and the British consulate. Before she sets off on a boat to Italy, she will have to relearn to express her thoughts in English, sit on a chair, and eat with fork and knife.

However, the narration is not that straightforward: the story of the Canadian sworn virgin is actually told to the narrator, a bookshop owner in Victoria who has just moved from small-town Ontario (of course) after a marriage-ending affair, leaving both her husband and lover behind. Her eccentric, this time married acquaintance, Charlotte, is actually telling the story from her hospital bed, as an “idea for a film.” Parallel to the Montenegrin-Albanian goings-on, the narrator is revealing her inner life and recent past. Charlotte survives the hospital stay, but the two women lose touch in the course of the next couple of years. What would the marriage with her lover have been like, the narrator wonders, had she stayed with him? “We become distant, close—distant, close—over and over again,” but they “get over all this.”

It’s never entirely clear how we’re to connect the three protagonists of the story, the Ontarian bookshop owner in Victoria, the ailing then disappearing Charlotte, and Lottar, the Edith Durham figure. I’m not sure if we should try. Both the heroic and the deadly dangerous aspect of women’s lives in wealthy democratic societies have diminished so much today that we seek fulfilment by taking on lovers and opening shops—is that what Munro means? Looking at the changing city of Victoria, the narrator wonders, “Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn’t we rather have a destiny to submit to, then, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?”

This could have been uttered in Toronto of 2021, from my fifteenth-floor rental kula in Upper Jarvis. Sworn virgins still exist in remotest Albania, the last generation of them captured in photographs and documentaries, and Montenegro used to have them (when the last one passed away not long ago, Montenegrin national broadcaster marked the occasion). It occurred to me, while in the company of Alice Munro, that my life now isn’t that different from theirs back then: they herded sheep; I herd words, and jobs that let me herd words the rest of the time. They’ve forsaken the marital heterosexual formula and children so they can be freer, and so have I. Perhaps my ancestors have caught up with me, however far I’ve tried to escape?

To Montenegro, Munro attributes a kind of mystery. It’s an incomprehensible yet oddly inviting place, somewhere to yearn for. A place of perennial yearning. As the global pandemic has made travel difficult, it’s been almost two years since my last visit and I have no idea when I will be able to return. For the first time, I have an inkling of what it’s like to miss Montenegro as an entity. For Lottar, the Canadian travelling the Balkans, Montenegro is a place that she desires but is prevented from experiencing. “She would never take the road over the mountains to Cetinje, Montenegro’s capital city—they had been told that it was not wise. She would never see the bell tower where the heads of Turks used to hang, or the plane tree under which the Poet-Prince held audience with the people. She could not get back to sleep, so she decided… to go a little way up the road behind the town, just to see the ruins that she knew were there, among the olive trees, and the Austrian fortress on its rock and the dark face of Mount Lovćen.”

The question of whether I belong in Canada remains to be settled. What is clear, however, is that a place exists for me in Alice Munro’s stories.