Alice Munro’s Lucky Jew
TSR's Michael Greenstein examines "Simon's Luck" a short story by the late author
The only Canadian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Alice Munro is widely acclaimed for her short stories set in rural Ontario. An amalgam of Jane Austen’s social satire, Dickensian detail, and Hemingwayesque precision informs her house of fiction, which is further enriched by cubist contours and gothic threats. “Simon’s Luck” (1978) uncharacteristically features the eponymous Jewish character, a rare exception in the lives of small-town Ontarians. Munro’s narrator presents Simon through the lens of her protagonist, Rose, an actress and drama teacher who falls in love with him over the course of a weekend.
From the very beginning, the narrative focuses on the female protagonist: “Rose gets lonely in new places; she wishes she had invitations.” Semi-colons in the opening paragraph splice her life of loneliness and longing, old and new places. In turn, this first sentence is balanced by the paragraph’s final sentence: “Rose is an actress; she can fit in anywhere.” She fits within the confines of a short story that extends well beyond the genre’s brevity. In advance of her eventful weekend, the second sentence opens up a bit more with its rhythmic and’s in space and weekends in time: “She goes out and walks the streets and looks in the lighted windows at all the Saturday-night parties, the Sunday-night family dinners.” Routine and unexpected breaking of routine lie at the heart of “Simon’s Luck.”
The paragraph’s middle sentence opens up even further – poised in punctuation of semi-colons and colon: “She could go to parties in rooms hung with posters, lit by lamps with Coca-Cola shades, everything crumbly and askew; or else in warm professional rooms with lots of books and brass rubbings, and maybe a skull or two; even in the recreation rooms she can just see the tops of, through the basement windows: rows of beer steins, hunting horns, drinking horns, guns.” Ever the dramatic decorator, Munro itemizes these interiors, from Andy Warhol’s Pop posters to Edward Hopper’s gothic canvases. Through her cut-and-thrust narrative technique, much is askew in a cubist design of detail and sudden transitions to skull or two and guns. The interaction between Rose’s state of mind and interior decoration finds its stylistic counterpart in the rhyme of askew and skull or two.
A flaneuse of small-town streets, Rose fits into various degrees of class consciousness, from “a costly cabinet de diplomate, … and a dim picture of horses feeding, cows feeding, sheep feeding, on badly painted purple grass.” These animals and their feeding habits reappear at key moments in the story. She scales the sublime only to land on the picturesque: “Or she could do as well with batter pudding in the eating nook of a kitchen in a little stucco house by the bus stop.” All of this discursive décor by way of introduction to Rose and her encounter with Simon at a party in Kingston, Ontario.
At the party, an inebriated former student accosts Rose who is saved by Simon: “A short, strong man with black curly hair took hold of the boy’s arm just above the shoulder.” Simon’s physiognomy contrasts with the boy’s “white and brittle-looking appearance.” The titular Jewish stranger has an accent: “He spoke with a muddled European accent, mostly French, Rose thought, though she was not good about accents.” This, in response to Simon’s words to the boy, “Move it along,” addressed “almost maternally.” If the strong maternal man echoes James Joyce’s portrait of Leopold Bloom, then Rose’s vulnerability, which surfaces in her inability to discern accents, distinguishes her from Molly Bloom. Munro attends to nuances in foreign accents: “She did tend to think, in spite of knowing better, that such accents spring from a richer and more complicated masculinity than the masculinity to be found in North America and in places like Hanratty, where she had grown up.”
Avoiding the pitfalls of stereotyping, Munro probes Simon’s maternal masculinity in an accent never heard in her Ontario village of Hanratty. This intrusion of the Old World into the New World, and the theatrics of cosmopolitanism and regionalism, is examined through a gendered lens. This paragraph of exploration ends with “Such an accent promised masculinity tinged with suffering, tenderness, and guile.” That final word lands firmly on the story’s reality: Rose is exposed to Simon’s guile, his hidden quality that appears near the end of the story along with his suffering and tenderness.
At the party there is some discussion of Diane Arbus, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton, but the first section ends with the focus returned to Simon: “The man with the black curly hair stood in the kitchen doorway giving her an impudent and ironic look.” Rose learns that Simon teaches in the classics department at the university, and as he returns her smile, she feels “familiar twinges, tidal promises.” The stranger becomes familiar in the sexual allure of Simon’s ironic smile, which brings the curtain down on scene 1.
With her cut-and-thrust transitions, Munro shifts abruptly in the second section to Simon’s European background: “When Simon was fourteen, he and his older sister and another boy, a friend of theirs, were hidden in a freight car, travelling from occupied to unoccupied France.” This hiddenness is a motif in “Simon’s Luck,” where narrative technique conceals as much as it reveals. In contrast to more innocent Canadian train rides, the European journey is fraught: “They were on their way to Lyon, where they would be looked after, redirected to safe places, by members of an organization that was trying to save Jewish children.” Simon and his sister had already been sent out of Poland at the beginning of the war, to stay with French relatives. Now they had to be sent away again.
Their freight car stops for inspection by French and German guards, but the children avoid detection. The narration transitions from these past incidents. “Simon said that when he realized that they were safe he suddenly felt that they would get through, that nothing could happen to them now that they were particularly blessed and lucky. He took what happened to them for a lucky sign.” (Underneath lucky signs in Munro’s world lurk hidden significations.) This history is fortuitous for Rose as well, as the focus shifts abruptly to the present: “Simon laughed. They were in bed, in Rose’s bed in an old house, on the outskirts of a crossroads village.” This crossroads village in Canada contrasts with Simon’s crisscrossing trajectory through Europe.
Since Simon never saw his sister and their friend after the war, he is the only lucky one. A survivor of sorts, Simon offers to insulate Rose’s cold, old house: “he held forth on various kinds of insulation. Styrofoam, Micafil, fiberglass,” but Rose needs emotional insulation as much as any domestic protection. When she underlines “venomousness” in reference to her student’s demeanor, Simon repeats “memento mori” in his wandering accent; where she assumes different roles in her acting career, her Jewish classicist plays different characters while trying to repair her furnace: “This was The Humble Workman. Some others were The Old Philosopher” and “The Mad Satyr, nuzzling and leaping, making triumphant smacking noises against her navel.” By assigning polyphonic voices, Munro undoes traditional stereotypes. From ironic mountebank to multidimensional persona, her Jew eludes classification to emerge as a rounded figure, at once realistic and beyond realism in the web of Munro’s prose.
From navel gazing and grazing the narrator turns abruptly to Rose’s shopping for food for the two of them. At the crossroads store she purchases real coffee instead of instant, real cream, bacon, and other provisions. “She was in that state of happiness which seems perfectly natural and unthreatened.” But the note of threat lies just beneath the surface of her euphoria, like the insulation behind the wallpaper. To the woman behind the counter at the store she admits that she wasn’t expecting company. This woman who tells fortunes through cards and teacups, responds that she would also like some company. Simon enters Munro’s domain of female desire.
The story alternates between Simon’s past and Rose’s brief love affair in Ontario. “Simon said that he had been sent from Lyon to work on a farm in the mountains of Lyon,” where farmers’ lives remain almost unchanged since the Middle Ages. When Simon accidentally rams a pitchfork into his foot, a veterinarian from the neighboring village saves him with “a great horse needle.” From medieval France to modern Ontario, “Simon’s Luck” covers considerable terrain in a few pages. As the relationship between lovers develops, the reader’s understanding expands. “They were at the stage of spreading things out for each other: pleasures, stories, jokes, confessions.” But Simon withholds the most important confession.
In addition to making Rose’s house more comfortable, Simon offers to cultivate a garden for her. He advises her not to be thin-skinned, as he provides her with emotional insulation. After the weekend when Rose returns to work, she imagines him digging in the garden and looking down the cellar, naked. “A short, thick man, hairy, warm, with a crumpled comedian’s face.” As he yanks his forelock, she cries out, “Oh, Simon, you idiot, you’re the man for my life!” Amidst this idiot joy and tragicomedian’s mask, the narrator immediately considers her exclamation: “Such was the privilege, the widespread sunlight of the moment, that she did not reflect that saying this might be unwise.” The writing is on the wallpaper, the moment wide-spreads to greater significance, and the sun sets.
When Simon fails to show up again, Rose goes to the crossroads store to have her fortune told. The teller looks into her cup and informs Rose that she has met the man who will change her life. Rose’s longing is all-encompassing: “Nothing would do anymore but to be under Simon, nothing would do but to give way to pangs and convulsions.” During her vigil Rose scours the village whose atmosphere reflects her inner turmoil: “The church no longer served the discreet and respectful Protestant sect that had built it, but proclaimed itself a Temple of Nazareth, also a Holiness Center, whatever that might be. Things were more askew here than Rose had noticed before.” A leopard has entered Rose’s temple and shared her fate, for Munro’s cubist, gothic perspectives are repeatedly askew.
Her gothic Ontarians “lived a mysterious life on the borders of criminality or a life of orderly craziness in the shade of the Holiness Center.” In her dance of the happy shades she choreographs orderly craziness and memento mori. “She had turned Simon into the peg on which her hopes were hung and she could never manage to turn him back into himself.” Turning points, transitions, and transformations are all part of the animal’s ritual in the temple: “the weekend would have been only a casual trial run, a haphazard introduction to the serious, commonplace, miserable ritual.” Rose’s misery and Simon’s misery remain apart.
Rose leaves Ontario for the west coast, driving across Canada’s vastness, with “the Camembert still weeping on the kitchen counter.” Munro then covers her tracks with parentheses: “(Why did she bring her boots and her winter coat, if this was the case?)” She writes a letter to the college to explain her sudden departure due to the terminal illness of a dear friend – a tragic irony in light of Simon’s pancreatic cancer. “(Perhaps she didn’t lie so beautifully after all; perhaps she overdid it.)” The author captures the beautiful lies of girls and women.
Driving in her car on Monday morning, she tries to clear her head: “who would guess what mortifications, memories of mortification, predictions, were beating in her head? The most mortifying thing of all was simply life.” Life’s mortifications – hope gives way to memento mori in her tragicomic vision of Simon and in the gothic cubism of narration: “Simon might be turning in her driveway at this very moment, might be standing at her door with his hands together, praying, mocking, apologizing. Memento mori.” A man for all moods, Simon turns in different directions, and his prayers are for naught. Throughout her long drive, lucky signs are ominous, and a magnetic force at the back of her car makes her want to turn around.
In a café in a prairie town, her mind clears as she focuses on the ordinary – “the thick glass dishes they put ice cream or Jell-O in. It was those dishes that told her of her changed state.” Munro thickens her prose to find magic in the mundane, the aura of the ordinary, working through Simon’s thickness and Rose’s thin-skinned search for security. She feels the solidity of these dishes, “with a convalescent gratitude whose weight settled comfortably into her brains and feet.” Through these dishes darkly, the paragraph traverses Rose’s emotions and epiphany, a private balance spring, a little kernel of probity. Until the sudden drop at the end: “So she thought.” Irony destabilizes any sense of security.
By the time she gets to Vancouver, “Luck was with her” because she finds a job with a television series where she plays the role of the woman, a pseudo-mother, who owns an old house. In British Columbia, she steps in and out of roles, as Munro indulges in a linguistic aside that returns to earlier concerns about dermatology and fragility: “A word everybody at the coast was using was fragile. They spoke of being fragile today, of being in a fragile state. Not me, Rose said, I am getting a distinct feeling of being made of old horsehide. The wind and sun on the prairies had browned and roughened her skin. She slapped her creased brown neck, to emphasize her horsehide. She was already beginning to adopt some of the turns of phrase, the mannerisms, of the character she was to play.” Indeed, Munro’s phrases turn back to the agriculture of animal manure and Simon’s pitchfork wound.
A year later on a BC ferry, Rose encounters a woman from the party in Kingston who informs her of Simon’s death from pancreatic cancer. “People watching trusted that they would be protected from predictable disasters, also from the shifts of emphasis that throw the storyline open to question, the disarrangements which demand new judgments and solutions, and throw the windows open on inappropriate unforgettable scenery.” In her trusted technique, Munro shifts emphasis and disarranges the windows of her cubist house of fiction. “Simon’s dying struck Rose as that kind of disarrangement.” “Simon’s Luck” disarranges the reader’s expectations, as Munro fleshes out her Jewish character in three dimensions, a precise portrayal of his European past, his extended weekend relationship with Rose, and tragicomic fate. Above all, it was Simon’s good fortune to have made his way into Munro’s fiction.
Alice Munro was a Nobel Prize-winning short story author whose acclaimed work focused on womanhood and rural living. She passed away at the age of 92 on May 13, 2024.
Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.