Alice Munro: Walker Brothers Cowboy Walker Brothers Cowboy is the first story in Alice Munros first short

story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades. For an overview with links to reviews of the other stories in this collection, please click here. Walker Brothers Cowboy begins by describing a setting well come to again and again as we read Alice Munro: rural Ontario, close to the Great Lakes (here we are in the fictional Tuppertown, a port town on Lake Huron), the late 1930s. In fact, as Munro opens this story its almost as if Munro is setting the stage for her universe, which will be vast, even as it remains tightly focused on these seemingly simple people over the course of nearly sixty years steady work. Toward the beginning of the story, our narrator Del Jordan (not named here, but well see her again in Lives of Girls and Women) is with her father, Ben Jordan, looking at Lake Huron, and he tells her how the Great Lakes came to be: And then the ice went back, shrank back towards the North Pole where it came from, and left its fingers of ice in the deep places it had gourged, and ice turned to lakes and there they were today. They were new, as time went. I try to see that plain before me, dinosaurs walking on it, but I am not able to even imagine the shore of the Lake when the Indians were there, before Tuppertown. The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquility. Even my father, who sometimes seems to me to have been at home in the world as long as it has lasted, has really lived on this earth only a little longer than I have, in terms of all the time there has been to live in. He has not known a time, any more than I, when automobiles and electric lights did not at least exist. He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive old, old when it ends. I do not like to think of it. I wish the Lake to be always just a lake, with the safe-swimming floats marking it, and the breakwater and the lights of Tuppertown. The paragraph nicely encapsulates Munros ability to place focused stories in the larger context of the expansive past and our unfathomable future. The Jordan family is a young family. Del is pre-adolescent and has a younger brother. Ben Jordan is the tranquil father, but he has experienced failure his daughter is just beginning to sense (his son doesnt seem aware of anything much yet). Ben attempted to run his own business raising silver foxes and mink for their furs, but that business continued to dry up until there was simply no way to continue. Now he works as a salesman for Walker Brothers. We first see the mother as she sews a dress out of scraps for the narrator. She embarrasses her daughter by trying to show off, to act above her economic position; the familys decline has been hard on her. One day, at his wifes suggestion, Ben decides to take his daughter and son on his sales route. After some discouragement he covers with a light heart, he takes them beyond his sales boundary to the home of someone he once knew quite well, Nora Cronin, but he hasnt seen Nora for years, not since well before our narrator was born. Our narrator has no idea who this woman is. Its a friendly visit, and the narrator watches as her father interacts with Nora and Noras blind mother, who seems to drift in and out. They are all pleased to see each other after such a long time, and Nora seems genuinely glad to see Ben with his lovely children, though at one time she might have hoped Bens children would be her own (we never learn the exact nature of their friendship). Nothing happens that could be called particularly dramatic. Nora gets Ben a bit of whisky which he drinks, and Nora turns on some music so she and the young children can dance a bit. Its a brief moment of happiness snatched from otherwise hard times hard times for Nora here with her aging mother and hard times for Ben at home with his failures and his wife. For the briefest moment, the present is overshadowed by the past. Despite the relative simplicity of the reunion, the narrator, as young as she is, still recognizes something different that opens up the mystery of who her father is or, rather, was: One of the things my mother has told me in our talks together is that my father never drinks whisky. But I see he does. He drinks whisky and he talks of people whose names I have never heard before.

Its remarkable, and Munro cleverly leaves us in wonder as well at this man we will never know. So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my fathers life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine. The young son lives completely in the present, practically forgetting the trip as soon as its over, his mind focused on rabbits who might be near the road. Grandma Cronin, on the other hand, is blind to the present; indeed, she seems to drift in from the past and then back to the past again. Then there is our young narrator, just beginning to get a sense of the past. The past of the Lakes is tremendous and incomprehensible, but she finds, to her surprise, that so is the relatively limited past of her father. And thus we embark with Alice Munro into these things we will never know. 2 comments to Alice Munro: Walker Brothers Cowboy

Betsy

Beautiful post, Trevor, about a beautifully told story. A great introduction to Munro. As for me, first, the title, Walker Brothers Cowboy. It describes her depression dad, of course, gamely using good humor, good will and energy to eke out a living as a door-to-door salesman. But in a way, it also describes this girl so like other satisfyingly androgynous girl-narrators in Munro. Before her mothers requirements, shes itchy and ungrateful, feeling these requirements as all I do not want to be. Her mother has head-aches thus the nutshell of why she cannot be her mothers creation. But there is more: the girl, like a boy (unapologetic), is wary of being trapped into sympathy or any unwanted emotion. The girl is a stranger to the idea she must dress up or wear curls and bows. Instead, what the sturdy girl enjoys is being like the other kids, who *occupy+ themselves in such solitary ways as I do all day. When she meets her fathers friend Nora, she wants to stay. And she dances with Nora, and says of herself dancing, me proud, intent. And she notes that Nora is laughing not felled by a head-ache. One of the girls solitary ways is to think, think about what she sees, and in particular, to think about words and the way they define what she has seen. On the evening ride home, Munro describes the girl as thinking over the visit with Nora in this way: She digs with the wrong foot, I think and the words seem sad to me as never before, dark, perverse. So much in that. (And I use the fragment construction here with confidence, having noticed Munros easy use of it.) So much in that the way the girl thinks over how Nora is Catholic, how she knows she is Catholic, and how someone had used a saying to set Catholics apart. For one thing, in the word foot there is the echo of the dancing, which the girl loved. For another, there is the thinking of about the division implied by the saying and the being aware she might never see Nora again, or that it would be a long time before she saw the likes of her again the brightness of her, the dancing, the welcome, the absence of head-ache that Nora represents. The girl rejects the received truth of this saying as it applies to Nora that Nora cannot be a part of their life because she is Catholic and should be separate. And more important, the girl is troubled by the fact that Nora this dancing woman in a bright flowered dress could never have been her mother because she digs with the wrong foot. The girl now thinks of the saying in a new light after Nora, it is now dark, perverse. There is in this narrator a stubbornness of self an unwillingness to have received opinion thrust upon her, or to have unwanted emotion thrust upon her.

What she wants is to be able to think. (Im reading Michael Gorra on Henry James right now, and Walker Brothers Cowboy is Henry James country these girls of Munro who want to think and choose and not have definition thrust upon them. They remind me of Isabel, Jamess heroine from Portrait of a Lady. Am I stretching things to think that Isabel is a name, a heroine, with resonance for Munro? Theres an Isabel in this story, the sister of Noras that marries. And there is a gorgeous Isabel in Leaving Maverly.) What Munro makes her narrators do is think about what they have observed. But I think its also that Munro does not want to thrust unwanted emotion on us, her readers. She is so cautious: she wants us to see. (The way, really, that James is always having his characters and his readers see the way, after enough time, a nights thinking, maybe realization emerges.) One other thing about this girl narrator interests me: here and there in the story the adult who is doing the telling slips in an observation that is primarily the adult self thinking it all over as in when she says, The tiny share of time we have appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquility. This is beyond what an eight year old might think in these exact words but she might intuit it as a child, and put words to it as an adult. How Munro gets away with this doubleness of consciousness is one of the things that makes this story so effective. (What this sentence says about the characterizations is a whole other riff, and not my object this time.) The way the girl loves to observe and think, and the way, if she wants to, she *doesnt+ even turn *her+ head this is Munros voice, fully formed in this early writing. The story takes place in the 30s but it serves the 60s, when it was written the time when women thought they just might have before them an escape from a life of sick-headache. Betty Friedan has just published, in 1963, The Feminine Mystique, a book that upended, stem to stern, the way American women saw themselves. Activism was in-your-face, and Gloria Steinem was just around the corner. But Munro takes an apposite course, an almost Jamesian course, the exploration of what it would be to indulge those solitary ways that thinking requires, that seeing requires. So shes been a kind of Walker Brothers Cowboy herself. Walker Brothers Cowboy AMP (Alice Munro Project) #1 Having read Alice Munro over the last ten years, beginning with Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, ,Loveship, Marriage, dipping back into her books of the mid-90s, but then moving forward from there, I read the first story in her first book, Dance of the Happy Shades, with excitement and just a dash of trepidation. What if the story wasnt any good, what if it was painful to read or even worse what if the story was absolutely brilliant, thus confirming that any hope I have of improving my own writing is pointless, because you either have it, or you dont. Of course, the result of reading Walker Brothers Cowboy, was neither of these extremes. It is a great, interesting and well-written story, neither transcendent with brilliance, nor horrible. It is the story written by a writer who has obviously been working at her craft, who has been reading and writing for years, and it also hints at the greatness that is to come. It is more polished than some authors early writing more polished than some of Steinbecks early short stories (although Steinbecks forte is the novel, not the story), and better than early Richard Russo (another writer whom Ive read throughout his career, tracing his arc from good, to brilliant, and then back down to just being good). So, down to specifics, specifically what I admire in this short story. I admire Munros selective execution of diction through the careful use of just the right verb or noun. The story begins with: After supper my father says, Want to go down and see if the Lakes still there? We leave my mother sewing under the dining-room light, making clothes for me against the opening of school. She has ripped up for this purpose an old suit and old plaid wool dress of hers, and she has to cut and match very cleverly and also make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool, ungrateful.

There are so many interesting things going on here. The use of the phrase against the opening of school, is so well turned it sets up the confrontational relationship that the mother has with their new poverty, in combating that poverty it is her against the world and it also characterizes a slightly more country way of speaking, a down homeness that makes Munro such a believable writer of this world, as do all of the details of the creation and fitting of these wool clothes. Moving farther down the first page, Munro also absolutely delights the imagination with this simile description: The street is shaded, in some places, by maple trees whose roots have cracked and heaved the sidewalk and spread out like crocodiles into the bare yards. This is a new, non-clich way to describe the roots in a yard, one of which ignites my imagination, so that not only does she make the setting of the story come alive, I now see tree roots differently. Other things I admire are how she works in some metaphysical thoughts and wonderings into the story without weighing down the story too much. For instance, in scenic summary, she shows how the narrators father described the creation of the Great Lakes in the Ice Age, and that leads to the narrator reflecting, The tiny share we have of time appalls me, though my father seems to regard it with tranquility. The above line works because it does several things at once namely, it advances character, plot, and theme. In characterization, we learn both about the narrator and the father through this analysis that the young narrator is introspective, and worries about the purpose and impact of her life, and that her father (at least through her eyes) has reached some sort of acceptance not denial of mortality, but rather a peaceful acknowledgement of mortality. It also gently keeps the plot moving forward to an ultimate confrontation with the passage of time, and its effects on people and relationships, with is both the literal and thematic focus of the story. Ultimately, this is a quiet little story. In order to give the mother a break, the kids go with the father on one of his sales routes, and through her fathers visit with an old flame, the narrator sees that she doesnt know her father as well as she thought. She says that: One of the things my mother has told me in our talks together is that my father never drinks whisky. But I see he does. He drinks whisky and talks of people whose names I have never heard before. She is losing her total naivete and innocent belief in her father as being only the heroic father, and shifting into understanding him as a mortal man, a man that might have regrets or at least wonderings of how his life may have been otherwise, other than being the husband and father that he is. What makes this especially powerful is that he isnt visiting someone who is better off than him, he is not seeing what an easier life he might have, at least not easier financially, but rather, just a different life. And in this, the reflection of time comes up again and again, finally expressed by Nora, the old flame, as Time, says Nora bitterly. Will you come by ever again? And as she bids them goodbye, She stands close to the car in her soft, brilliant dress. She touches the fender, making an unintelligible mark in the dust there. In this strong, clear image, we are given a moment that works both literally in the plot, in showing us how she has been affected by this brief visit, and how the narrator has been affected (in noticing this small detail), and it also serves the theme/meaning of the story, in pressing upon the image of the passage of time, and the lack of imprint that each of us makes on the world. This is so well done, that this could be the end of the story, but Munro takes it a bit farther, and instead leaves us with this moment that reminds me of the ending of James Joyces The Dead. Munro writes: So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my fathers life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it

kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine. When we get closer to Tuppertown the sky becomes gently overcast, as always, nearly always, on summer evenings by the Lake. I am torn about this ending. I love the poetry of it the pure imagery but I also think that the Alice Munro of later stories would have restrained herself a bit more, leaving us with a strong image like the unintelligible mark in the dust, but then again, she does leave us with the concrete image of the overcast sky, an image that works both in setting and metaphor. And we also gain the few paragraphs in between, with the daughter reflecting on the drive home, and the things they do not do i.e. the things they usually do to fill the time and make life endurable and good, the buying or ice cream and the sort and instead they are left only with themselves, and the reflection of themselves in the world.