Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Alice Munro's Save the Reaper



Alice Munro, Save the Reaper
From Munro’s short story collection, For the Love of a Good Woman
Story is a riff on Flannery O’Connor’s short story A Good Man is Hard to Find.  The title of Save the Reaper is a reworking of Tennsyon’s poem "The Lady of Shalott." (See poem below,)

What is this story about?
-       Grandmother takes her grandchildren on a dangerous journey
-       Lifetime of bad decisions and their consequences. Also note grandmother's preoccupation with corn 
o   Fraught mother daughter relationships
§  Can you trust your mother?
§  Mistakes of one mother’s past come back to haunt the present and perhaps/probably the future
§  Family leaves town and gets mixed up with strangers (opposite of a stranger comes to town)
§  Plans gone astray.

 Story starts in the middle of a car ride/family going on a journey, meet up with strangers. Similar to O’Connor’s story A Good Man is Hard to find in that family is going on a summer time journey, trying to find home from grandmother’s childhood.

Story asks the question and ultimately answers it: Is this grandmother, Eve, a reliable babysitter to young children?

Page 1: Story starts mise in scene, grandmother taking her grandchildren and going on a journey. It turns out to be a dangerous journey.

·      Story starts in the middle of a car ride and a game. We are told the rules of the game.
·      Story proceeds like a nightmare, stakes raised in car ride and then again when family goes to drug den

Questions raised about the protagonist, the grandmother Eve. Is she a bad grandmother and a bad mother? (She is tempted like original Eve.)
·      Is grandmother addled by dementia or just fault decision making ability (impetuousness and impulsivity)?
·      Grandmother hadn’t been invited to daughter’s wedding,
·      Daughter Sophie leaves suddenly---son tells Grandma that she has actually asked her husband to come pick her up. Story is about betrayal, secrets carried by children
            
-       Page 1: Stakes are raised at beginning of story when we realize that Grandma Eve has turned the power of the game over to the 7-year old Philip. She lets him make key decisions---always a bad idea.

o   What Eve had originally planned was to have the headquarters turn out to be in the village store that sold ice cream. But Philip had taken charge so thoroughly that now it was hard to manage the outcome. The pickup truck was turning off the paved country road onto a graveled side road. It was a decrepit truck with no topper, its body eaten by rust---it would not be going far. Home to some farm, most likely. They might not meet another vehicle to switch to before the destination was reached.”

-       Page 1: Eve has tried to do right by her daughter, rented a house, house is full of foreboding:
Twelve days, Eve thought. Twelve days had passed of the three weeks. She had to take the house for a mouth. It was a cramped little house, fixed up on the cheap for summer rental. Eve’s idea had been to get a lakeside cottage for the holiday---Sophie and Phillip’s first visit with her in nearly five years and Daisy’s first ever. She had settle don this stretch of Lake Huron shore because her parents used to bring her here with her brother, when they were children. Things had changed---the cottages were all like suburban houses, and the rents were out of sight. This house, half a mile inland from the rocky, unfavored north end of the usable beach, had been the best she could manage. It stood in the middle of a cornfield. She had told the children what her father had once told her---that at night you could her the corn growing. When she too the sheets off the line she had to shake out the corn bugs.

Page 2 Grandmother troubled by daughter's behavior/recent turn of events: “And the burning question was: Who did the phoning?”

Page 2: Secret revealed and tension raised, Eve questions Philip in car:
Wasn’t it a big surprise when your dad phoned from California?
He didn’t phone. My mom phoned him.
Did she? Oh, I didn’t know. What did she say.
She said, “I can’t stand it here, I’m sick of it, let’s figure out some plan to get me away.” “

Pages 2-3: Mother-child/Eve-Sophie relationship detailed subtly with hidden potholes:
And from then until now it had not been feasible for Eve to get to California. Invitations to visit had not been all that urgent, or even specific. Sophie had walked out of Eve’s household a girl student with a toddling son---a winter-pale gale, harassed but high spirited---and come back a self contained full boddied married woman with two children, a creamed-coffee skin and lilac cescents of a permanent mild fatigue beneath her eyes.Also with a certain aversion to memories of the life she’d shared with Eve, of her blithe childhood (as Eve called it), or her adventurous days as a young mother. During this visit they ahd maintained a pleasant puttering routine of morning chores, beach afternoons, wine and movies

Page 3: Flashback on to Eve’s childhood/very specific memories and gorgeous, unnerving writing about childhood memories and fraught mother-daughter relationships :
“When Eve was quite small and wore a great hair bow on her head, she was fond of these country expeditions. She ate tiny jam tarts and cakes whose frosting was stiff on top and soft underneath, topped with a bleeding maraschino cherry. She was not allowed to touch the dishes or the lace-and-satin pinch-cushions or the sallow looking old dolls and the women’s conversations passed over hear head with a temporary and mildly depressing effect, like the inevitable clouds. But she enjoyed riding in the back seat, imagining  herself on horseback or in a royal coach. Later on she refused to go. She began to hate trailing along with her mother and being identified as her mother’s daughter. My daughter Eva. How richly condescending, and mistakenly possessive, that voice sounded in her ears. (She herself would use it, or some version of it, for years as a staple in in some of her broadest, least accomplished acting.) She also detested her mother’s habit of wearing large hats and gloves in the country, and sheer dresses on which were raised flowers, like scabs. The oxford shoes, on the other hand---worn to favor her mother’s corns---appeared embarassingly stout and shabby. “What did you hate most about your mother?” was a game that Even would play with her friends in her first years free of home. “Corsets,” one girl would say, and another said, “Wet aprons.” Hairnets. Fat arms. Bible quotations. The way she sang “Danny Boy,” Eve always said. Her corns.

Page 4 Gateposts become elevated objects, lodged in Eve’s memory:
“Eve drove on all the same but as she passed the lane she noticed the gateposts. They were unusal, being shaped something like crude minarets and decorated with whitewashed pebbles and bits of colored glass. Neither of them was straight, and they were half hidden by goldenrod and wild carrot, so that they had lost all reality as gateposts and looked, instead like abandoned stage props from some gaudy operetta. The minute Eve saw them she remembered something else---a whitewashed outdoor wall in which pictures were set. The pictures were stiff, fantastic childish scenes. Churches with spires, castles with towers, square houses with square lopsided yellow windows. Triangular Christmas trees and tropical colored birds half as big as the trees, a fat horse with dinky legs and burning red eyes, curly blue rivers of unvarying width, like lengths of ribbon, a moon and drunken stars and fat sunflowers nodding over the roofs of houses. All this made of pieces of colored glass set into cement, or plaster. She had seen it, and it wasn’t in any public place. It was out I the country, and she was with her mother. The shape of her mother loomed in front of the wall---she was talking to an old farmer. HE might only have been her mother’s age, of course, and just looked old to Eve.

Page 4 great description of trees/nature
“They went to look at odd things on those trips; they didn’t just look at antiques. They had gone to see a shrug cut to resemble a bear, and an orchard of dwarf apple trees.
            She didn’t remember the gateposts at all, but it seemed to her that they could not have belonged to any other place. She backed the car up and around into the narrow track beneath the trees. The trees were heavy old Scotch pines, probably dangerous---you could see dangling daed and half dead branches, and branches that had already blown or fallen down were lying in the grass and weeds on either side of the track. The car rocked back and forth in the ruts, and it seemed that Daisy approved of the motion.

Page 5: End of Act 1, scary house beckons. Great, slowly revealed, haunting image concluding with, “She was in the wrong place”:
“There wasn’t any sign of a house ahead, but through a gap in the trees the skeleton of a barn rose up, walls gone, beams intact, roof whole but flopping to one side like a funny hat. There seemed to be pieces of machinery, old cars ,or trucks scattered around it, in the sea of flowering weeds. Eve didn’t have much leisure to look---she was busy controlling the car on this rough track. The green truck had disappeared ahead of her---how far could it have gone? Then she saw the lane curved. It curved and they lef the shade of the pines and were out in the sunlight. The same sea foam of wild carrot, the same impression of rusting junk strewn about, a high wild hedge to one side, and there was the house, finally, behind it. A big house, two stories of yellowish-gray brick, another story of wood, its dormer windows stuffed with dirty foam rubber. One of the lower windows shown with the tinfoiled that covered it on the inside.
  She had come to the wrong place.

Page 6 Philip yells at her not to get out of the car. (Where is other grandchild Daisy in all this?) Child sounds the alarm and the adult doesn’t heed it.
Eve unbuckled her seat belt.
Don’t get out, Philip said in a shrill voice. Stay int eh car. Turn around. Drive way.
I can’t, said Eve. It’s all right. That dog’s just a yapper---he won’t hurt me.
Don’t get out.
She should never have let the game get so far out of control. Philip was too excitable. This isn’t part of the game, she said. He’s just a man.
I know, said Philip. But don’t get out.
Stop that, Eve said, and got ouf and shut the door.

Page 7 they enter into a hellish place, den of inequity/crack house? two small grandchildren in tow
Daisy squealed with fright and pleasure---she was the one who more of an animal lover---and somehow they were all en route to the house, Even carrying Daisy and Philip and Trixie scrambling around her up some earthen bumps that had once been porch steps. The man came close behind them, smell of the beer that he must have been drinking in the truck…
“Massive disorder was what they had to make their way through---the kind that takes years to accumulate. The bottom layer of it made up of chairs and tables and couches and perhaps a stove or two, with old bedclothes and newspapers and window shades and dead potted plants and ends of lumber and empty bottles and broken lighting fixtures and curtain rods piled on top of that, up to the ceiling in some places, blocking nearly all the light from outside. To make up for that, a light was burning by the inside door.

Page 8 Great, unnerving description of haunted house, full of chaos and smells and disturbing sights. This is no place for children but grandmother goes in anyway:
“The man shifted the beer and got the door open and shouted for Harold. It was hard to tell what sort of room they were in now---there were kitchen cupboards with the doors open, some cans on the shelves, but there were also a couple of cots with bare mattresses and rumpled blankets. The windows were so successfully covered up with furniture or hanging quilts that you couldn’t tell where they were, and the smell was that of a jun store, a plugged sink, or maybe a plugged toilet, of cooking and grease and cigarettes and human sweat and dog mess and unremoved garbage.

Page 8 Tension rises, someone curses and kicks the dog:
“Fuck. Get that dog out of here.
“Lady here wants to see some pictures,” the little man said. Trixie whined in pain---somebody had kicked her. Eve had no choice but to go in the room.
The little man hauled Trixie out from under the table and threw her into the outer room, then closed the door behind Eve and the children.

Page 9 Tension continues to rise---one man naked, dining room hot, the men drinking whiskey, one man asks Philip if he can play the piano:
Sitting with his back to the door was a young man with sharp shoulders and a delicate neck. At least Eve assumed he was young, because he wore his hair in dyed golden spikes and had gold rings in his ears. He didn’t turn around. The man across from him was as old as Eve herself, and had a shaved head, a tidy gray beard, and bloodshot blue eyes, He looked at Eve without any friendliness, but with some intelligence or comprehension, and in this he was unlike the tatttooed man, who had looked at her with as if she were some kind of hallucination that he had decided to ignore.
At the end of the table, in the host’s or the father’s chair, sat the man who had given the order to close the door, but who hadn’t looked up or otherwise paid any attention to the interruption. He was large boned, fat, pale man with sweaty brown curls, and as far as Eve cold tell, he was entirely naked. The tattooed man and the blond man were wearing jeans, and the gray bearded man was wearing jeans and a checked shirt buttoned up to the neck and a string tie. There were glasses and bottles on the table. The man in the host’s chair---he must be Harold---and the gray bearded man were drinking whiskey. The other two were drinking beer.
 “The tattooed man whistled. “Hey you,” he said to Philip. “Hey you. Can you play the piano?
Page 9: Gross, horrifying thought and smell, especially in view of fact that children are in the room:
“She thought, There is a smell of semen in this room.”

Page 11 (page 13) Person jumps into her car/stranger comes to tow:n
She was driving so slowly that it was possible---easy for a figure to rise up out of the tall weeds on the passenger side of the car and open the door, which Eve had not though to lock, and jump in.

Page 15 Prostitute/girl makes a move on Eve
Eve had never believed herself to be attracted to women in a sexual way…

Of course, Eve said brightly, and the hand trailed away, its whore’s courtesy finished. But it had not failed altogether. Blatant and halfhearted as it was, it had been enough to set some old wires twitching. And the fact that it could be effective in any way filled Eve with misgiving, flung a shadow from this moment over, all the rowdy and impulsive, as well as all the hopeful and serious, the more or less repented of, couplings of her life. Not a real flareup of shame, a sense of sin---just a shadow. What a joke on her, if she started to hanker now, after a purer past and  cleaner slate.
No. It was possible that she just hankered after love.

Page 15 Flashback/story of Sophie’s father/Eve’s affair on the train with a married man from India, sort of lovely oasis in the middle of tension filled story, but also shows Eve’s extravagance and impulsiveness:

Page 16 Tension rises, girl in the car asks for money
How stupid to think about sex when the reality, the danger, was elsewhere.”

Page 16: Then Eve does the stupidest thing possible: She gives the girl a $20 bill and tells her where she lives. Tension continues to rise:
“It’s all by itself in the middle of a field. It’s got one ordinary window on one side of the front door and a funny looking little window on the other. That’s where they put in the bathroom.”
Philip notes she smells like vomit."

Page 17 Last page, stress inducing paragraph:
There are people who carry decency and optimism around them, who seem to cleanse every atmosphere they settle in, and you can’t tell such people things, it is too disruptive. Ian struck Eve as being one of those people, in spite of his present graciousness, and Sophie as being someone who thanked her lucky stars that she had found him. Eve could say that the house had smelled vile, and that the owner and his friends looked boozy and disreputable, but not that Harold was naked and never that she had been afraid. And never what she had been afraid of."

Page 17 Last paragraph is full of stress and foreboding
Not tonight but tomorrow night Eve would like down in this hollowed out house, its broad walls like a paper shell around her. She would will herself to grow light, free of consequence, and hope to go to sleep with nothing in her head but the deep, live rustle of the corn.







The Lady of Shalott (1842)
Part I 
On either side the river lie 
Long fields of barley and of rye, 
That clothe the wold and meet the sky; 
And thro' the field the road runs by 
       To many-tower'd Camelot; 
And up and down the people go, 
Gazing where the lilies blow 
Round an island there below, 
       The island of Shalott. 

Willows whiten, aspens quiver, 
Little breezes dusk and shiver 
Thro' the wave that runs for ever 
By the island in the river 
       Flowing down to Camelot. 
Four gray walls, and four gray towers, 
Overlook a space of flowers, 
And the silent isle imbowers 
       The Lady of Shalott. 

By the margin, willow veil'd, 
Slide the heavy barges trail'd 
By slow horses; and unhail'd 
The shallop flitteth silken-sail'd 
       Skimming down to Camelot: 
But who hath seen her wave her hand? 
Or at the casement seen her stand? 
Or is she known in all the land, 
       The Lady of Shalott? 

Only reapers, reaping early 
In among the bearded barley, 
Hear a song that echoes cheerly 
From the river winding clearly, 
       Down to tower'd Camelot: 
And by the moon the reaper weary, 
Piling sheaves in uplands airy, 
Listening, whispers " 'Tis the fairy 
       Lady of Shalott." 

Part II 
There she weaves by night and day 
A magic web with colours gay. 
She has heard a whisper say, 
A curse is on her if she stay 
       To look down to Camelot. 
She knows not what the curse may be, 
And so she weaveth steadily, 
And little other care hath she, 
       The Lady of Shalott. 

And moving thro' a mirror clear 
That hangs before her all the year, 
Shadows of the world appear. 
There she sees the highway near 
       Winding down to Camelot: 
There the river eddy whirls, 
And there the surly village-churls, 
And the red cloaks of market girls, 
       Pass onward from Shalott. 

Sometimes a troop of damsels glad, 
An abbot on an ambling pad, 
Sometimes a curly shepherd-lad, 
Or long-hair'd page in crimson clad, 
       Goes by to tower'd Camelot; 
And sometimes thro' the mirror blue 
The knights come riding two and two: 
She hath no loyal knight and true, 
       The Lady of Shalott. 

But in her web she still delights 
To weave the mirror's magic sights, 
For often thro' the silent nights 
A funeral, with plumes and lights 
       And music, went to Camelot: 
Or when the moon was overhead, 
Came two young lovers lately wed: 
"I am half sick of shadows," said 
       The Lady of Shalott. 

Part III 
A bow-shot from her bower-eaves, 
He rode between the barley-sheaves, 
The sun came dazzling thro' the leaves, 
And flamed upon the brazen greaves 
       Of bold Sir Lancelot. 
A red-cross knight for ever kneel'd 
To a lady in his shield, 
That sparkled on the yellow field, 
       Beside remote Shalott. 

The gemmy bridle glitter'd free, 
Like to some branch of stars we see 
Hung in the golden Galaxy. 
The bridle bells rang merrily 
       As he rode down to Camelot: 
And from his blazon'd baldric slung 
A mighty silver bugle hung, 
And as he rode his armour rung, 
       Beside remote Shalott. 

All in the blue unclouded weather 
Thick-jewell'd shone the saddle-leather, 
The helmet and the helmet-feather 
Burn'd like one burning flame together, 
       As he rode down to Camelot. 
As often thro' the purple night, 
Below the starry clusters bright, 
Some bearded meteor, trailing light, 
       Moves over still Shalott. 

His broad clear brow in sunlight glow'd; 
On burnish'd hooves his war-horse trode; 
From underneath his helmet flow'd 
His coal-black curls as on he rode, 
       As he rode down to Camelot. 
From the bank and from the river 
He flash'd into the crystal mirror, 
"Tirra lirra," by the river 
       Sang Sir Lancelot. 

She left the web, she left the loom, 
She made three paces thro' the room, 
She saw the water-lily bloom, 
She saw the helmet and the plume, 
       She look'd down to Camelot. 
Out flew the web and floated wide; 
The mirror crack'd from side to side; 
"The curse is come upon me," cried 
       The Lady of Shalott. 

Part IV 
In the stormy east-wind straining, 
The pale yellow woods were waning, 
The broad stream in his banks complaining, 
Heavily the low sky raining 
       Over tower'd Camelot; 
Down she came and found a boat 
Beneath a willow left afloat, 
And round about the prow she wrote 
       The Lady of Shalott. 

And down the river's dim expanse 
Like some bold seër in a trance, 
Seeing all his own mischance— 
With a glassy countenance 
       Did she look to Camelot. 
And at the closing of the day 
She loosed the chain, and down she lay; 
The broad stream bore her far away, 
       The Lady of Shalott. 

Lying, robed in snowy white 
That loosely flew to left and right— 
The leaves upon her falling light— 
Thro' the noises of the night 
       She floated down to Camelot: 
And as the boat-head wound along 
The willowy hills and fields among, 
They heard her singing her last song, 
       The Lady of Shalott. 

Heard a carol, mournful, holy, 
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly, 
Till her blood was frozen slowly, 
And her eyes were darken'd wholly, 
       Turn'd to tower'd Camelot. 
For ere she reach'd upon the tide 
The first house by the water-side, 
Singing in her song she died, 
       The Lady of Shalott. 

Under tower and balcony, 
By garden-wall and gallery, 
A gleaming shape she floated by, 
Dead-pale between the houses high, 
       Silent into Camelot. 
Out upon the wharfs they came, 
Knight and burgher, lord and dame, 
And round the prow they read her name, 
       The Lady of Shalott. 

Who is this? and what is here? 
And in the lighted palace near 
Died the sound of royal cheer; 
And they cross'd themselves for fear, 
       All the knights at Camelot: 
But Lancelot mused a little space; 
He said, "She has a lovely face; 
God in his mercy lend her grace, 
       The Lady of Shalott." 



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