Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls tells us that she had intended to write about her mother’s childhood growing up on a cattle ranch in Arizona, but the more she talked to her mom about those years the more her mother insisted that it was not she but her own mother, Lily, who had lived the truly interesting life and the one that deserved to be described. Jeannette resisted at first, since she had been only eight when her grandmother died, but she had been hearing stories about her grandmother all of her life, over and over. Finally, Jeannette gave in and decided to write what she calls a true-life novel about her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith.

In many ways this book is even more captivating than Walls now famous memoir, The Glass Castle, and I think it also provides a perspective on her own mother, Rose Mary Smith  Walls, that is in some ways lacking in the memoir. Lily Casey Smith was born in 1901 in west Texas, and spent most of her life in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. Her father was an intelligent man who understood horses even better than he understood people. He had been kicked in the head by a horse at the age of three, and from that incidence had a life-long speech impediment and a gimpy leg. The speech impediment and the limp led to his being not only misunderstood by others, but often being seen as mentally impaired. He would return from town enraged by his inability to make himself understood by men much less mentally agile than he. Since Lily was around him from birth, she could understand everything he said, and very quickly she became his right-hand ‘man,’ both in helping him to train sets of carriage horses and in speaking for him to the outside world. When she turned five, she began to help him train the carriage horses, and soon she was in charge of breaking the horses.

I was in charge of breaking the horses. It wasn’t like breaking wild mustangs, because our horses had been around us since they were foals. Most times I simply climbed on bareback—if the horse was too skinny, its spine sometimes rubbed a raw spot on my behind—grabbed a handful of mane, gave them nudge with my heels, and off we went, at first in awkward fits and starts, with a little crow hopping and swerving while the horse wondered what in tarnation a girl was doing on his back, but pretty soon the horse usually accepted his fate and we’d move along right nicely. After that, it was a matter of saddling him up and finding the best bit. Then you could set about training him.

It was during those years that she learned from her father, “Most important thing in life is learning how to fall.” She learned her lessons well. Her father also told her that what she had to figure out first was what her purpose was, and then set about fulfilling it. Always an avid reader, Lily became passionate about education, although the bit of formal education she got at thirteen at Sisters of Loretto Academy of Our Lady of the Light in Santa Fe was interrupted when her father failed to pay her tuition. When she asked if her younger brother, Buster, was also taken out of school, her father replied simply that a boy needs a diploma, “And anyway, we need you on the ranch.”

Still, Lily was convinced that her calling, her purpose, was to be a teacher. When she was fifteen, without even having an eighth grade education, she passed a government test that had been set up to find teachers due to a severe shortage caused by World War I. She traveled five hundred miles alone, on horseback, in order to get to Red Lake Arizona where she taught fifteen students of all ages and abilities. Since there was no teacherage attached to the one-room school (as there would be in other schools she taught in), she slept on the floor of the school in her bedroll. “Still, I loved my job. Superintendent MacIntosh hardly ever came around, and I got to teach exactly what I wanted to teach, in the way I wanted.”

The end of the war meant the return of young men both to fill teaching posts and to return to the factories where women had been holding down jobs that paid higher than teachers’ salaries. This combination meant that there were more qualified teachers available (at least in terms of education), and Lily was fired. Still, she had discovered her purpose, and from then on she taught at a number of tiny schools in isolated towns of Arizona and New Mexico. When she could scrape together the funds, she would attend university for awhile, loving every minute of it and finding it to be like a vacation compared to the hard life of helping her father run a ranch. She also traveled alone to Chicago, conned into a marriage there to an already married man, escaping from him and the big city after a year and returning to the southwest. As soon as she could, she learned to drive a car, and not long after that, how to fly a plane. Unlike her father, she realized that the future prospects of carriages, and carriage horses, was dim. “What Dad didn’t understand was that no matter how much he hated or feared the future, it was coming, and there was only one way to deal with it: by climbing aboard.”

And Lily climbed aboard. She taught in a tiny Mormon community until she was fired for teaching the girls that there was more to life than arranged marriages at thirteen. “You were free to choose enslavement, but the choice was a free one only if you knew what your alternatives were. I began to think of it as my job to make sure the girls I was teaching learned that it was a big world out there and there were other things they could do besides being broodmares dressed in feed sacks.” And although she married a lapsed Mormon, a so-called Jack-Mormon, the closest she ever came to Mormonism was her married name, Smith. She and her considerably older husband ran auto repair shops, managed large ranches, and she taught here and there, off and on, both to help support the family and to fulfill her purpose.

The charm of this book rests in the way Walls captures the spirit and voice of her grandmother. The prose is sparse and unpretentious. It describes the landscape and the hardships of life in language that is at once brittle and beautiful. As one of the commentators on the book says, Lily Casey Smith “is one astonishing woman…a half-broke horse herself who’s clearly passed on her best traits to her granddaughter.”

THROW like A GIRL by Jean Thompson

Until the last few years I had what was very nearly an aversion to short stories. As one reader friend of mine says, they are tempting, but just as you get sucked in, the story is over. So if the stories are good, they leave you wanting more, and if they are not so good, seem simply a waste of time. Passing time instead of really reading.

Had it not been for incredible writers like Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout, and Carol Shields, I may still have shunned short fiction, and thereby missed out on reading Jean Thomson. Like the above writers, Thompson writes about us, ordinary people neither rich nor famous. But unlike Munro and Strout, Thompson’s characters are mostly city folk very much caught up in the now of frenzied city-life, economic insecurity, bleak predictions, abandoned hopes.

Almost all the stories are in a very intimate first person, inside the mind and body of the narrator immediately. I could easily review the book simply by giving first lines of stories. Each announcing a character and set of circumstances all of us readers recognize, sometimes with a sigh or in-taking of breath, sometimes with the nod of the head. “Jack Pardee signed his enlistment papers in May, right after graduation. The Army recruiter had been working on him for most of a year.” Her story “Lost” begins:

I was twenty years old and about as pretty as I was ever going to be, although I didn’t know that yet. I had long long hair, all the girls did. Mine was nearly down to my waist. It swung across my back like a bell. I had nice legs. There was always some boy I was crazy for, always trouble with some boy. There was never any useful purpose to it. I could never figure out what to do with them, besides wanting them to distraction.

Always her characters are ordinary folk, but her skill at description is anything but ordinary, her never heavy-handed political asides always on the mark. Thompson understands at a deep level the despair that grips more and more people and at younger and younger ages. In her story “Pie of the Month,” one of only a few where there is an author behind the scene commenting on the characters, Mrs. Colley is a woman who has been widowed for many years, and has grown into her solitary life. As the title of the story suggests, she bakes pies, tries to understand the world that keeps changing around her, avoids listening to news: “It was all so worrisome, and all so completely beyond your control.” Mostly the news was about wars, and about things blowing up “in a place you’d never been, or sometimes never even heard of, you first thought what a terrible thing it was, followed by relief that it had nothing to do with you, really, followed by a vague guilt at feeling relieved.” The final lines of the story sum up the views of Mrs. Colley:

You wanted so badly to believe that life was basically good, that people were basically good. And Mrs. Colley did believe it. She might not go around announcing that she was wonderful and blessed, but she reminded herself often that there were many terrible places she could have been born into but had not. Nothing abnormally bad had ever happened to her personally or was likely to happen except for, eventually, dying, oh well. But nowadays there was so little you could trust to stay good, as if there was a pinhole at the bottom of the world and all the best things were leaking out of it.

While this set of stories makes it obvious that we are a global village, and that corporations are bigger than countries, “…it isn’t really countries that fight Wars now. It’s corporations,” Thompson is at her very best when she is describing the inner lives of women relating to other women, and trying, trying, trying to understand their relationships with men.  In the title story, “Throw like a Girl,” the narrator, Gail, has just heard about the cancer death of her girlfriend from youth—her first love in all the most important senses of that word. “Janey was the wild child, the one who couldn’t wait to do too much of absolutely everything. It wasn’t appetite or depravity, just the fear that she might be missing out on something.”

At one point in the story Janey, who has been newly initiated to sex, asks Gail if sex is supposed to hurt. And after a few stumbling attempts to get at what is behind the question, Janey blurts out, “I think he was trying to make it hurt.”

That made me queasy, I guess it shocked me. We didn’t like thinking of ourselves as vulnerable, breakable, controllable objects, even if that was exactly the way some people saw us. I said that it wasn’t right, what he’d done, and she said, Yeah, she knew. But she was still mulling it over, keeping something back. “What?” I said. 

“I let him think  I kind of liked it.” 

I didn’t want to hear that either. Because I understood why girls did such things, even a bold, harum-scarum girl like Janey, understood why we went along with so much, were anxious to please, laughed when nothing was funny, kept silent when we should have spoken, bent ourselves into obliging shapes, did the things that shamed us, even as Janey was ashamed. There was some desperate and unlovable creature that lived inside us, and we had to keep it fed.

Thompsen understands relationships, understands the inebriation of new loves, understands the peculiar flatness that often infects old ones. Her story “The Woman Taken in Adultry,” begins,

I had two daughters and a husband who didn’t notice things. I was lonesome. Sex isn’t always about sex.

My husband was no trouble. Never had been. I’d grown used to stepping over and around him the way you might a large dog sound asleep in the doorway. You start out being married together and you end up being married apart. I’m convinced that’s the truth for most people, if they were honest about it.

As I went back over these stories tagging pages with lines or paragraphs I wanted to share, I soon had dozens of book-marks inserted. I even thought of simply naming the book and author and then stringing together quotes, quite sure that would be a sufficient lure for serious readers. In any case, talking about her as a writer will never be anything like as scintillating as reading her. I leave you with the opening lines of “The Brat.”

She hated her mother and she hated her father to, at least when he was around to be hated. She hated school and all the snotty girls who put their heads together giggling and talking big and showing off their nail polish and their new shoes and new cell phones and whatever else they bought bought bought.

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

I have said before that I think Alice Munro is the best living writer anywhere. She continues to worry her many devoted readers by telling us that she is through writing, but up to now, she has continued to write and to publish. Somehow, I can’t imagine her living and not writing. Her latest collection of short fiction is entitled Too Much Happiness, and it was published in hardback in late 2009. I would be willing to bet that not many of her fans could hold off for the paperback copy; she is just too good.

From the beginning of her career, many of her stories have been quirky, describing circumstances that one would not usually dream up, let alone witness. In this latest collection, some of the stories are so odd that I, at least, found myself disturbed by them, wondering why she chose to write them. Perhaps an article in the newspaper caught her attention, and she felt the need to flesh out the short article, give it a context. At any rate, each story, even the oddest ones, has the ring of truth to it. Despite the title, there is not much happiness in most of these stories, but they grab and hold the reader.

As usual, she writes about what would be called ordinary people and usually of small towns. And although each of the stories is quite short, each gives the impression of being a sketch of what could have been a much longer piece, could have been a novel. Although Munro often begins with a single incidence, she then has an almost uncanny ability to describe or spin out threads reaching back to the past and hurtling towards a future. One story, “Child’s Play,” begins with a summons to a quite old woman, Marlene, from a friend of the same age, Charlene, who is gravely ill. But why is she reaching out now after so many years without any contact? Only gradually do we learn why Marlene feels obliged to respond to the summons despite the long hiatus in their friendship, why she still feels an odd intimacy with her. “This intimacy I’m talking about—with women—is not erotic, or pre-erotic. I’ve experienced that as well, before puberty. Then too there would be confidences, probably lies, maybe leading to games. A certain hot temporary excitement, with or without genital teasing. Followed by ill feeling, denial, disgust.”  But this is an intimacy of a different sort, one that requires a response.

I found myself both interested in and troubled by the stories long after I put the book down, driven to return to some of them in order to look for early clues to the bizarre track the story would take, and often enough finding that clue in the first pages, sometimes the first lines, of the story.

I absolutely refuse to give away any of the twists and turns of these marvelously written stories, but I do want to comment on the last of the stories and the one for which the whole collection is named, “Too Much Happiness.” Munro, herself, must have become intrigued by what she had discovered about a real-life woman, a late 19th century Russian mathematician by the name of Sophia Kovalevsky. There is no doubt that she was a marvelous mathematician, famous even in her own day and at a time when few women were encouraged or even allowed to study and teach high-level mathematics. The story begins with a quote by Kovalevsky: “Many persons who have not studied mathematics confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science. Actually, however, this science requires great fantasy.”

Kovalevsky is so talented, so ingenious, that she wins a prestigious award, The Bordin Prize. All papers for the award had to be submitted anonymously, and had this not been the case, it is more than highly unlikely that she would have won it, unlikely that any woman would even have been considered for such an award in a science dominated by men.

The compliments quite dizzying, the marveling and the hand kissing spread thick on top of certain inconvenient but immutable facts. The fact that they would never grant her a job worthy of her gift, that she would be lucky indeed to find herself teaching in a provincial girls’ high school.

What becomes obvious in this story is not only Munro’s fascination with this woman mathematician, but her fascination with mathematics itself, and the ways in which it resembles, or can resemble, great works of art. "Rigorous, meticulous, one must be, but so must the great poet.” And how remarkable that Kovalevsky was ever able to study and do the scholarly work that she did, having to lie and cheat even in order to get out of Russia and to the teachers and universities that would facilitate her discoveries “because no Russian woman who was unmarried could leave the country without her parents’ consent."

No doubt Munro did loads of historical research preparing to write this rather long short story, but no amount of research could account for the details in her story, the descriptions of the interior life of Kovalevsky. Instead, it is Munro’s splendid imagination, her ability to spin out lovely quilts from mere threads of historical information that accounts for the richness and completeness of the story. As one of Kovalevsky’s friends remarks to her in an attempt to comfort her regarding a relationship with a man, “Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind….When a woman goes out she carries everything that happened in the room along with her.” Just so, and Munro carries with her not only the sparse details that can be gathered from newspaper articles or historical accounts but all the rich life that her imagination furnishes to flesh her stories out. She is simply unparalleled as a writer of fiction.