Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Source of book: I own this.

 

I have previously read and reviewed two short story collections by Alice Munro, The Moons of Jupiter, and Runaway. As readers know, I love the short story form, and make sure to read in it regularly. 

 

Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage is a collection of nine stories. If I were to guess at a theme that connects them, it is about live changes and the passage of time. Change from childhood to adulthood, change from marriage to widowhood, change from well to ill, and so on. 

 

As I have started doing with some of the collections that don’t have too many stories, I will mention each one in order, and add a quote or two if there was one I particularly liked. 

 

“Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship Marriage”

 

I love the title of the collection - it is a reference to a children’s game of comparing letters in one’s name to the name of another and finding out which of the above fates will apply. Kind of like the petals and daisies. 

 

The story itself is about an unattractive woman and a practical joke that teen girls play on her that unexpectedly leads to an unforeseen consequence. Johanna is an immigrant from Ireland who is, simply put, unattractive. She works for years as a maid and governess for a family, until the mom dies and the granddaughter goes off to college. 

 

Before that, though, the granddaughter and her rather mean-spirited friend decide to trick Johanna by forging a letter supposedly written by, Ken, the granddaughter’s ne’er-do-well father. It’s…a long story. 

 

In any case, Johanna is fooled into thinking Ken, who she has met only a few times, is in love with her and wants to marry her. So, she spends her life’s savings to go be with him, leaving her employer stunned. 

 

When she gets there, she finds him gravely ill, and as everyone else knows, incompetent. But, she nurses him back to health, they marry, and manage to build a life together, much to the surprise of everyone. 

 

It is a surprisingly heartwarming ending, and definitely not the only way the story could have gone. 

 

“Floating Bridge”

 

This is a story of a woman who unexpectedly learns that her breast cancer treatment is working, and, at least for the time being, her prognosis is much better than thought. 

 

She is discharged from the hospital, but rather weak. Her husband has hired a troubled teen girl to help out, and ends up driving to her house because she forgot her shoes. This turns into an extended visit - because you have to - and she stays in the car because she can’t handle another stress. 

 

However, the teen son meets her, and ends up driving her home via a floating bridge - hence the title. He also kisses her, although they both know they won’t repeat it. 

 

There is a line that stood out to me in this story. 

 

But the life she was carrying herself into might not give her anybody to be angry at, or anybody who owed her anything, anybody who could possibly be rewarded or punished or truly affected by what she might do. Her feelings might become of no importance to anybody but herself, and yet they would be bulging up inside her, squeezing her heart and breath. 

 

“Family Furnishings”

 

This story is about an unusual relative who doesn’t fit in, and who hides a secret that only comes to light at the end of the story. 

 

Alfrida, aka Freddy, is the narrator’s father’s cousin, and is the odd person in the family. Whereas the rest are superficial and rural, with so much of their lives carefully patterned on social niceties, Freddy moved to the city, speaks her mind, and refuses to adhere to beauty standards. She is unmarried (although she has had a series of live-in boyfriends), and supports herself by writing.

 

While she and the narrator start out close, they drift apart when the narrator grows up, and the reunion later in life mostly reveals how little they still have in common. But the narrator realizes too late that the distance was unnecessary, and caused by the same snobbishness and insecurity she condemned in the rest of the family. 

 

There is a line in this story that I really loved, because it is a perfect illustration of how my mother is. 

 

Ordinarily, my mother would say that she did not like to see a woman smoke. She did not say that it was indecent, or unladylike - just that she did not like it. And when she said in a certain tone that she did not like something it seemed that she was not making a confession of irrationality but drawing on a private source of wisdom, which was unassailable and almost sacred. It was when she reached for this tone, with its accompanying expression of listening to inner voices, that I particularly hated her. 

 

This unwillingness to admit that preferences are, for the most part, arbitrary and personal - one could say irrational - is something that has always frustrated me. And I would substitute in my case “private source of wisdom” for “sure that God agrees with her.” 

 

“Comfort”

 

This story is haunting for multiple reasons. First, it starts with a woman coming home to find her husband has committed suicide. It isn’t unexpected - he had in fact indicated that when his ALS got bad enough, he would do it rather than linger in suffering. 

 

From there, though, we get the back story. He had been a well-respected high school science teacher, beloved by generations of students. Until the Canadian equivalent of the theofascist group “Moms for Liberty” started a crusade in his town. 

 

In this case, the battle was over Young Earth Creationism, which the agitators demand be taught as equally valid to evolutionary science. I wrote a bit about this a decade ago. After years of conflict - and indeed hate crimes and harassment - and a lack of support from administration - he walked away. 

 

It is his wife’s choice as to what to say at the memorial the school insists on having for him that occupies the heart of the story. 

 

And this one has a number of great lines. 

 

Lewis understands that this debate is not about presenting alternatives - it is about theofascists cramming their doctrine down everyone else’s throats. You can see this in the way the Moms For Liberty sorts are driving book bans. Bans on books by and about people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ people. Lewis puts it this way:

 

“That’s nonsense,” Lewis said. “They don’t believe in equal time - they don’t believe in options. Absolutists are what they are. Fascists.” 

 

The scenes with the principal are frustrating as hell. Bowing to public pressure from a vocal and obnoxious minority, he wants Lewis to take time from his science teaching to explain a particular religious myth. Lewis is abrasive, and responds with a bit of a taunt. 

 

“March in Adam and Eve. With or without the fig leaves.” 

 

The thing is, I am a Christian, and I find this whole YEC thing highly offensive. It is literally a modern affectation, a pseudoscientific way of understanding the beautiful creation myth in Genesis. None other than Augustine warned against a literalist reading of Genesis, and historically, it has been understood as having a primarily theological meaning, not an account of literal history 4000 years ago. 

 

So this isn’t a matter of teaching “Christianity” even, but of teaching a particularly toxic and ludicrous Fundamentalist interpretation. (Very much, I will note, like banning teaching about racism in America, or teaching about the existence of LGBTQ people. It is the same old serpent.) 

 

“Nettles”

 

This is one of those “meeting again after many years” stories. A girl spends a few weeks playing with the son of the man who drills their well. The boy moves away, and she doesn’t see him again until they are adults. They are caught in a rainstorm while golfing, and get into a patch of nettles trying to find shelter. 

 

The story is split between the idyllic (although earthy) childhood memories, and the way those memories are remembered or forgotten later. And also, the tragedy and trauma that both children have endured since. 

 

There is also a scene involving the narrator (the girl) and her friend, and their college days. And also the way they, for years, talked about serious subjects. It is a humorous moment. 

 

We read Jung at the same time and tried to keep track of our dreams. During that time of life that is supposed to be a reproductive haze, with the woman’s mind all swamped by maternal juices, we were still compelled to discuss Simone de Beauvoir and Arthur Koestler and The Cocktail Party.

Our husband were not in this frame of mind at all. When we tried to talk about such things with them they would say “Oh, that’s just literature” or “You sound like Philosophy 101.”

 

That does make me appreciate that I have a spouse who likes to talk literature and philosophy with me. 

 

“Post and Beam”

 

I will confess that I probably didn’t understand this story. I went back and looked online for some takes on it, and, while the plot was consistent, what people thought it meant varied widely. 

 

Lorna is the main protagonist. She has married an older math professor, Brendan, and has fallen into a basic Stepford Wife existence. Two people come back into her life. First is Lionel, a former brilliant student of Brendan’s, but he has undergone a nervous breakdown that affected his memory. The other is Polly, Lorna’s cousin who never left home and never married. 

 

Most of the story takes place in Lorna’s head. She is clearly unhappy, but unwilling to make any changes. Polly, in contrast, has found a way of living, even though it seems boring, that works for her. Lionel lives in the moment because that is all he can do. Brendan is content to have his little wife and little kids and little fantasy life at home. 

 

What struck me most about this one was the description of what Brendan wanted in a wife. 

 

His answering attraction to her seemed to be in the nature of a miracle. She learned later that he had been on the lookout for a wife; he was old enough, it was time. He wanted a young girl. Not a colleague, or a student, perhaps not even the sort of girl whose parents could send her to college. Unspoiled. Intelligent, but unspoiled. A wildflower, he said in the heat of those early days, and sometimes even now.

 

My father-in-law, ironically, used to call his daughters wildflowers as well, although neither of them are what Brendan meant at all. (My wife is a manager at a local hospital; her sister a professor of mathematics. So…wicked smart and assertive. And he is proud of them.) 

 

“What is Remembered”

 

This is another one that feels very 1950s in its view of marriage. (Munro often writes about her parents’ generation.) In this case, there is another marriage that has gone rather stale. The wife has a chance encounter at a funeral that leads to a one night stand - an affair that lasts a mere evening, and the guy is essentially meaningless to her. But the affair sustains her in some way - it adds some meaning to her life that allows her to be happier in her marriage. 

 

I’m not at all sure I feel the same way, and I doubt very much that women with an actual life outside of the home need that kind of escapism. (Perhaps one reason why Ashley Madison ended up being mostly guys and bots…) 

 

That said, there is another badass description that I thought was fantastic.

 

Young husbands were stern, in those days. Just a short time before, they had been suitors, almost figures of fun, knock-kneed and desperate in their sexual agonies. Now, bedded down, they turned resolute and disapproving. Off to work every morning, clean-shaven, youthful necks in knotted ties, days spent in unknown labors, home again at suppertime to take a critical glance at the evening meal and to shake out the newspaper, hold it up between themselves and the muddle of the kitchen, the ailments and emotions, the babies. What a lot they had to learn, so quickly. How to kowtow to bosses and how to manages wives. How to be authoritative about mortgages, retaining walls, lawn grass, drains, politics, as well as about the jobs that had to maintain their families for the next quarter of a century. It was the women, then, who could slip back — during the daytime hours, and always allowing for the stunning responsibility that had been landed on them, in the matter of children — into a kind of second adolescence.

 

I’ll also mention the description of the sermon - one that I swear I have heard a gazillion times. And it still seems as unsatisfying as ever, a pablum account of a promised afterlife. Which, as Rabelais said, is “the great perhaps.” Or, as Hamlet says, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” But at a time of grief, it seems to me to ring hollow. As it clearly does in this story. 

 

After the affair, she has an interesting thought.

 

So she stayed looking at the froth stirred up in the wake of the boat, and the thought occurred to her that in a certain kind of story - not the kind that anybody wrote anymore - the thing for her to do would be to throw herself into the water. Just as she was, packed full of happiness, rewarded as she would surely never be again, every cell in her body plumped up with a sweet self-esteem. A romantic act that could be seen - from a forbidden angle - as supremely rational. 

 

“Queenie”

 

This is a story of a woman in an abusive relationship, which started with a terrible choice. Queenie runs off with a much older neighbor after his wife dies. The marriage is unhappy, he is abusive, and as he ages, poorer than he was. 

 

The story contains some class A gaslighting, and later the kind of ambiguous “escape” that may not really be anything of the sort. 

 

“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”

 

The collection ends with a fascinating tale. Fiona and Grant meet cute in college, marry, and have a life together. Sure, he cheats pretty constantly, and in a way he later cannot - by sleeping with his college students. (This whole progression, from that sort of thing being an expected badge of honor, to a shameful abuse of power, is fascinating, and Munro writes it well.) 

 

The core of the story occurs many many years later. Fiona has dementia, and finally needs to go to a care facility. There, with her memory mostly gone, she strikes up a romantic relationship with another man, Aubrey, who also has no memory that he is married. 

 

This is a dynamic that is somewhat familiar to me from my legal practice, so I was intrigued to see what Munro would do with it. 

 

As often happens in Munro stories, things are complicated. Grant wants Fiona happy, but that happiness may consist in him enabling her new flirtation. And Aubrey’s wife is determined to bring him home again, rather than tolerate his straying. (And also she needs to save the money. They don’t have a lot. This too is something I am all too familiar with.) 

 

So, there are the nine stories. As usual, I enjoyed Munro’s nuance and craft. In the end, the title itself is the theme: relationships, be they Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, or combinations of those ideas.