In Rough Country (27 page)

For all that
In the Cut
is clearly a lesser literary achievement by a fine writer, it is also powerful, shameless (or fearless) in its depiction of female passivity in the face of ubiquitous male aggression. Here is a repudiation in a sense not merely of mature womanhood but of personhood itself, with its obligations of personal responsibility and integrity. To allow others, of the category “male,” to identify one in terms of one's genitalia, is to invite death. X, no surprise to the reader, is X'd out. It seems to have been her deepest, not quite secret wish, like that of the enthralled heroine of
Story of O
, whose final request is for extinction and whose final happiness is her lover's fulfillment of that request.

T
hese ardent words of Emily Dickinson, written in a letter to an editor and “romantic friend” Thomas Higginson, might have been coined to describe Sharon Olds's poetry. There are many poems in our literature that inspire admiration, even awe for their technical virtuosity; but there are not so many poems that make us feel anything so immediate, visceral and overwhelming. In her astonishing books—the aptly titled
Satan Says
(1990),
The Dead and the Living
(1983),
The Gold Cell
(1987),
The Father
(1992),
The Wellspring
(1996),
Blood, Tin, Straw
(1999),
The Unswept Room
(2002),
Strike Sparks: Selected Poems
(2004)—Sharon Olds has cultivated an inimitable voice that is both fearless and heartrending, wise—and wounded—with experience yet childlike with yearning. Her original and startling images of domestic life—the “erot
ics of family love and pain” as Alicia Ostriker has noted—her willingness to speak from the heart, at times of subjects so extreme (the excruciating details of her alcoholic father's death from cancer, for instance, as well as the trauma of having been abused by her mother, as a child “tied to a chair,” the vicissitudes of sexual love)—have made her a lightning rod of a kind, a beacon of admirable audacity in the eyes of some—Billy Collins has called her a “poet of sex and psyche…infamous for her subject matter alone”—Michael Ondaatje has called her poetry “pure fire in the hands”—and a threatening and disturbing breaker of taboos in the eyes of others—like Helen Vendler who has called her poetry “pornographic”—(probably the best endorsement the prissy Harvard critic has ever given).

Like William Blake, as well as Dickinson, Sharon Olds has consciously cultivated a perspective of radical innocence. Her characteristic tone is seemingly simply, artless—the voice so ostensibly neutral, we are pulled into it, as in a recollection of childhood nightmare mis-recalled as something very different that might be called “family fun”—

There is something subversive, even mutinous in the poet's unflinching child-eye; we sense a kinship with the unflinchingness of Emily Dickinson as with Sharon Olds's older contemporaries Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath—the quintessential Confessional poets of mid-century American poetry. Like these numinous sister-poets, Sharon Olds is a natural mythographer—all that falls within her scrutiny, all that she sees with her finely wrought poet-eye is myth, fairy tale, legend even as, for Olds, it is utterly domestic, ordinary. Unlike her tormented predecessors, particularly Sylvia Plath who cultivated an air of grievance and discontent with the very fabric of the universe, Sharon Olds is fundamentally a celebrant of what
is
.

“It became the deep spring of my life, this love for men,/I don't know if it is a sickness or a gift”—these are the opening lines of “The Wellspring,” a poem of intense openness and intimacy that begins as a lyric rhapsody to erotic love—“it is all I want,
to meet men/fully, as a twin, unborn, half-gelled,/frontal in the dark, nothing between us but our/bodies, naked, and when those melt/nothing between us—as if I want to die with them.” Suddenly the poem shifts and takes on another tone, acquires another subject, the poignancy of raw unspeakable need. The conclusion:

One Secret Thing
completes the cycle of scrupulously wrought family poems she has been writing through much of her career. The book focuses upon conflict—the outward, political conflict of war endured from numerous—anonymous—perspectives and the inward, scarring conflict of strife within a family. The book begins with an elegy—“Most of us are never conceived./ Many of us are never born…And some who are born live only for minutes,/others for two, or for three, summers,/ or four, and when they go, everything/ goes—the earth, the firmament…” [“Everything”] By degrees a double portrait emerges of the poet—the entranced child's eye—and the poet's mysteriously driven, essentially unfathomable mother: “When I think of people who kill and eat people/ I think of how lonely my mother was./ She would come to me for comfort, in the night,/ she'd lie down on me and pray. And I could say/ she fattened me, until it was time/ to cook me, but she did not know,/
she'd been robbed of a moral sense that way.” [“Freezer”] In “The Dead” a calm thought intrudes—“For a moment I see that it might not be entirely bad if my mother died.”

With the candor and delicately nuanced emotional ambivalence with which Sharon Olds wrote about her dying father, in earlier poems, now in the concluding poems of
One Secret Thing
she speaks of the terrible blood-kinship of mother-daughter—“I do not want her/ to die. This feels like a new not-want,/ a shalt-not-want not-want…Now if she goes/ when she goes/ to me it is like the departure of a/ whole small species of singing bird from the earth.” [“Little End Ode”]

 

It has been charged against Sharon Olds—as it was, in an earlier era, charged against poets as diverse as W. D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman as well as Sexton and Plath—that she has exploited her personal life in her poetry; that she writes of “sensational” subjects. But poetry has always been fueled upon the obsessions of poets, and what subject of lasting significance isn't, in some way, “sensational”? Though Sharon Olds writes with intensity and passion of the personal life it should be clarified that she perceives her work as
written
—undergoing many revisions and transformations until it emerges as a text. For the poet, as for most artists, personal life is but the raw material that requires shaping into an artwork, in this case a highly stylized text. In an interview the poet says:

Born in San Francisco and raised as a “hellfire Calvinist”—as the evidence of her poems suggests—Sharon Olds has a B.A. from Stanford and a Ph.D. from Columbia in American literature. For many years she has been an immensely popular and influential presence in the contemporary poetry scene: she has taught in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at NYU since 1983; in 1984 she founded and continues to run a poetry workshop at Goldwater Hospital for the severely disabled. Though she didn't publish her first book until the age of thirty-seven—“That sure seemed old then, and it sure seems young to me now”—
Satan Says
attracted much admiring attention and was awarded the San Francisco Poetry Prize. Her second book
The Dead and the Living
won the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award. She has received numerous awards including the Lamont Poetry Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize and her books are poetry best sellers. In 2005, one of very few poets invited by Laura Bush to participate in the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., Sharon Olds wrote a letter to the President's wife that was subsequently published in
The Nation
. The letter is a model of tact and integrity:

In her early twenties when she was a graduate student at Columbia, Sharon Olds “made a vow to Satan to write her own poetry”—on the steps of Low Library: “Give me my own poems and I'll give up everything that I've learned. It doesn't have to be any good, just as long as it's mine.”

O
f writers who have made the short story their
métier
, and whose accumulated work constitutes entire fictional worlds—William Trevor, Edna O'Brien, Peter Taylor, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor come most notably to mind—Alice Munro is the most consistent in style, manner, content, vision. From the first, in such aptly titled collections as
Dance of the Happy Shades
(1968) and
Lives of Girls and Women
(1971), Munro exhibited a remarkable gift for transforming the seemingly artless—“anecdotal”—into art; like the short-story writers named above, Munro concentrated upon provincial, even back-country lives, in tales of domestic tragicomedy that seemed to open up, as if by magic, into wider, deeper, vaster dimensions—

Though Munro has set stories elsewhere—Toronto, Vancouver, Edinburgh and the Ettrick Valley of Scotland, even, in this new volume, Russia and Scandinavia—her favored setting is rural/small-town southwestern Ontario. This region of Canada, settled by Scotch Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Methodists from the north of England, is characterized by frugality, rigidly “moral” principles, and Christian piety of the most severe, judgmental sort; a dour sort of Protestantism that has inspired what has been called Southern Ontario Gothic—a heterogeneous category of writers that includes Robertson Davies, Marian Engel, Jane Urquhart, Margaret Atwood, and Barbara Gowdy, in addition to Alice Munro. Like the American rural south; where Protestantism has flourished out of very different roots, the strait-laced xenophobic Anglo-Canadian culture nonetheless throws up all sorts of “queer streaks” and “fits”—lesions in the carapace of uniformity that provide the writer with the most extraordinary material: Munro's “A Queer Streak” charts the consequences of a fourteen-year-old's bizarre threatening letters written to her own family; “Fits” charts the consequences of a murder-suicide within the family of the wife and mother who discovered the corpses. How to explain such a domestic tragedy, in the house next door?

Possibly not, Munro suggests. Possibly not a “freak” occurrence at all.

In her new, thirteenth collection of short fiction,
Too Much Happiness
—a title both cuttingly ironic and passionately sincere, as the reader will discover—Munro explores themes, settings, and situations that have come to seem familiar in her work, seen now from a startling perspective of time. Her use of language has scarcely changed over the decades, as her concept of the short story remains unchanged; Munro is a descendent of the lyric realism of Chekhov and Joyce for whom the taut stark dialogue-driven fiction of Hemingway holds little interest and the ostentatious writerly hauteur of Nabokov is altogether foreign, like “experimentation” of any sort. (One is inclined to suspect that Munro would agree with Flannery O'Connor's dismissal of experimental literature—“If it looks funny on the page, I don't read it.”) Munro's voice can seem deceptively direct, even unadorned, but it is in fact an elliptical and poetic sort of vernacular realism in which the ceaselessly ruminative, analytic, and assessing voice comes to seem utterly natural, as if it were the reader's own voice:

The Beggar Maid
has the intimate, confiding tone of memoirist fiction, leading the reader to assume that Rose's voice is not distinct from Alice Munro's voice; in “Child's Play,” from
Too Much Happiness
, this voice recurs scarcely altered though the narrator is much older than Rose, and her recollection of the past isn't tempered by the sort of ironic-wistful yearning for what she has lost that has brought Rose—a “career” woman now living in a large city—back to her grim little hometown of Hanratty, Ontario. In “Child's Play” the narrator Charlene undertakes an entirely different sort of self-exploration, or self-incrimination:

The fear of—the revulsion for—what is “awesome” in a retarded neighborhood girl whom the narrator knew when they were children, is the subject of the ironically titled “Child's Play” at the outset of the story the reader is primed to expect a nostalgic look back at the protagonist's United Church of Canada background in and near Guelph, Ontario, and her intensely close friendship with a girl named Charlene, but this expectation is revealed as naive:

In this case “ourselves” is the very expression of the girls' cultural heritage—a deep suspicion of people who seem to deviate from the norm, who threaten the protocol of narrow domesticity. The “wicked” girls grow into—not “wicked” adults—but, simply, their elders. One will seek—belatedly—absolution; the other, the self-condemning yet self-sparing narrator, one of Munro's intelligent witnesses, quite decisively eludes it:

Like Flannery O'Connor, whose fiction, for all its surface dissimilarity, has been a powerful influence on Munro's, Munro tracks her characters in their search for “forgiveness”—or grace. Where O'Connor's vision is otherworldly, and “grace” is a gift of God, Munro's vision is steadfastly secular; her characters lack any impulse toward transcendence, however desperate their situations; their lives are not susceptible to sharp, defined moments of redemption but to more mundane acts of human love, magnanimity, charity. In “Wood,” for instance, in this new collection, a somewhat eccentric, crankily independent furniture refinisher is drawn to the forest to cut wood, an interest, or obsession “which is private but not secret.” Suffering a fall in the woods, Roy can barely drag himself back to his truck—“He can't believe the pain. He can't believe that it would continue so, could continue to defeat him”—his
plight is so extreme, he's being tracked by a buzzard—when, unexpectedly, his wife, who has been near-paralyzed with chronic depression, comes to his rescue: “She came in the car, she says—she speaks as if she'd never given up driving at all—she came in the car but she left it back at the road.” In a moment, Roy's terrible predicament is eased; he has not been lost in a “deserted forest,” as he'd believed, but has been saved—redeemed—by his wife; as his wife, too, in being obliged to rescue her husband, has been awakened from her spell of depression: “To his knowledge, she has never driven the truck before. It's remarkable the way she manages it.” “Wood” comes to a plausibly happy ending, where the reader has been primed to expect something very different, as in one of Jack London's gleefully grim little allegories of men succumbing to the wild.

So too, the first story in the volume, “Dimensions,” charts the progress of a woman who has remained married, unwisely, to a mentally unstable, abusive husband: “…it was no use contradicting [Lloyd]. Perhaps men just have to have enemies, the way they have to have their jokes.” Even after their children are murdered by Lloyd, and Lloyd has been declared criminally insane and hospitalized, Doree can't quite bring herself to separate from him; like Lloyd, she wants to think that the children are in some sort of “heaven”—“It was the idea that the children were in what [Lloyd] called their Dimension that came sneaking up on her…and for the first time brought a light feeling to her, not pain.” In another unexpected conclusion, Doree is abruptly freed of her morbid dependence upon her ex-husband by way of a spontaneous act of her own when
she saves the life of an accident victim by giving him artificial respiration:

In the similarly poignant “Deep-Holes,” in the new volume, a woman must acknowledge the painful fact that her adult son is lost to her, for all her effort to reclaim him; he has vanished from her life only to resurface as a guru of sorts to homeless and disfigured individuals in a Toronto slum, for whom “normal” relations with his family are repugnant. Bluntly he tells her:

For Sally's son there is no spiritual dimension—“There isn't any inside stuff…There is only outside, what you do, every moment of your life. Since I realized this I've been happy.” Rebuffed, dismissed, the guru's mother comes finally to feel a kin
ship with others like herself. Her victories will be small ones, but attainable:

The story in
Too Much Happiness
most clearly derived from Flannery O'Connor is the oddly titled “Free Radicals” in which a boy with a “long and rubbery” face—“a jokey look”—inveigles his way into the home of an elderly widow who lives alone, under the pretense of being from the electric company; then, he claims to be a diabetic, who needs quick nourishment; at last, in a TV-psychotic monologue he reveals that he's a murderer—he has killed his family—“I take out my nice little gun and bin-bang-bam I shoot the works of them.” The terrified woman whose house he has entered in the hope of stealing her car—herself in remission from cancer—contrives to save her life by humoring the boy, and by telling him a story of how years before she'd poisoned a girl to whom her husband was attracted; the story isn't true, and doesn't seem to make much difference to the psychotic boy, but seems to be revelatory of Nita's own guilt for having stolen another woman's husband when she was young. After the boy has fled with her car, Nita comes to the belated realization that she hasn't really grieved
for her husband until now: “Rich. Rich. Now she knows what it is to really miss him. Like the air sucked out of the sky.” It's a curious story, an ungainly amalgam of O'Connor and Munro, intriguing rather than satisfying, ending with Nita being informed by a police officer that the murderous boy died crashing her car: “Killed. Instantly. Serves him right.” It's often said that Munro's short stories, richly detailed and dense with psychological observation, read like compact novels, but “Free Radicals,” like one or two others in this collection, rather more suggest the thinness of anecdote.

The jewel of
Too Much Happiness
is the title story, an ambitiously imagined and exquisitely structured novella-length work in the mode of Munro's longer, intricately structured stories “The Love of a Good Woman,” “Carried Away” and “The Albanian Virgin,” as well as the linked stories of
The View from Castle Rock
(2006). In the Russian mathematician/ novelist Sophia Kovalevsky (1850–1891)—the first woman to be appointed to a university teaching position in North Europe—Munro has discovered one of her most compelling and sympathetic young-woman protagonists, in temperament closely akin to such earlier Munro heroines as Rose of
The Beggar Maid
of whom it's said “[her] nature was growing like a prickly pineapple, but slowly, and secretly, hard pride and skepticism overlapping, to make something surprising even to herself.” As Sophia Kovalevsky is eventually doomed by her very independence, physically exhausted and made ill by having to undertake an arduous winter train-journey alone, so Rose is made to feel miserably out of place in her provincial Ontario town of Hanratty; though Rose is never in any physi
cal danger, the threat to her sense of her self-worth is ceaseless through childhood and adolescence, a continual questioning by her elders of the integrity of her very nature. The final story of
The Beggar Maid
is titled “Who Do You Think You Are?”—this terrible, taunting, and corrosive question put to independent-minded young women, often by older women who should be their mentors and supporters, like Rose's high school English teacher, who maddeningly persists in demanding that Rose follow every insipid rule of her classroom. With the authority of the repressive Protestant community behind her Miss Hattie persecutes Rose as if Rose were a young disobedient child instead of an intellectually gifted high school girl: “You can't go thinking you are better than other people just because you can learn poems. Who do you think you are?” Though inwardly raging Rose reacts in the way that, the reader guesses, Alice Munro herself reacted, as a bright high school girl in the small Ontario town of Wingham, in the 1940s: