Walker Brothers Cowboy (Criticism)

Criticism

Rena Korb

Korb has a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following

essay, she compares the three adult characters in Munro’s story and examines their relationship to the past.

In the decades since her first collection of stories was published, Alice Munro has established herself as one of the preeminent contemporary writers of the short story form. Her work has been compared to that of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor — primarily for her skilled storytelling and her evocation of a specific region — and even the short fiction of the great Russian writer, Anton Chekhov. When Dance of the Happy Shades was published in 1968, it immediately garnered critical praise for its author, and she won Canada’s highest literary award, the Governor General’s Award. Since this auspicious beginning, Munro has produced a solid body of work that focuses on numerous themes, but she often returns to those that she raised with her earliest stories, particularly problems of identity and isolation.

“Walker Brothers Cowboy,” the opening story of Dance of the Happy Shades, is, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates writing for the New York Times Book Review, “a beautiful early story.” It features a young narrator, Del Jordan (though she remains unnamed in the story itself), who shows remarkable insight and sensitivity in viewing the world around her and the people who populate it. Del appears in a number of other stories by Munro, both in this and other collections, and these stories allow Munro to explore some of her most important concerns through the dynamics of the Jordan family.

“Walker Brothers Cowboy” takes place shortly after the Jordan family has lost their fox farm. They have relocated to the outskirts of Tuppertown — they are not of the town itself nor of the countryside anymore — and are attempting to forge a new life. While Ben Jordan has found a job — which is difficult in the depression years — selling patent medicines, spices, and food flavorings to the farmers who inhabit the backcountry, his wife refuses to accept their new station in life. She endures in a state of active resentment, which manifests itself quite clearly to her daughter. The story focuses primarily on one afternoon when Ben Jordan takes his daughter and son with him on his salesman’s route. They visit a former sweetheart of Ben’s, Nora Cronin, who now lives with her blind mother. The visit between Ben and Nora is tinged with feelings of pleasure, bitterness, and melancholy. By the time they begin the drive back home, the narrator has undergone a formative experience, one that will inevitably contribute to her maturation into womanhood.

The narrator demonstrates remarkable sensitivity for her age. The details she includes present a clear picture of the life she and her family share, as well as her parents’ different ways of dealing with their economic decline. From the beginning of the story, the narrator shows Mrs. Jordan’s assumed superiority over their poor neighbors. She only deigns to speak to one neighbor, another woman who has come down in the world, “being a schoolteacher who married the janitor.” Mrs. Jordan even makes excuses to keep her children from playing with the neighbors’ children. The only direct comment the narrator makes about how she is affected by her mother’s actions is when she admits that she is embarrassed to be seen with her mother in the town: “I loathe even my name when she says it in public, in a voice so high, proud, and ringing, deliberately different from the voice of any other mother on the street.”

The narrator further subtly castigates her mother when she brings up Mrs. Jordan’s “health problems.” “My mother has headaches,” writes the narrator. “She often has to lie down.” Yet the narrator understands, and relates to the reader, that Mrs. Jordan is not actually trying to get better. Instead, Mrs. Jordan looks at the tree outside the porch so she can imagine she is “at home.” Her longing for the farm, however, resides solely in her desire to return to a more genteel lifestyle. She turns down her husband’s suggestion that she get fresh air by accompanying him on his route because “[fjhat is not [her] .. . idea of a drive in the country.” On the day the story takes place, Mr. Jordan takes the children with him to give his wife a rest. The narrator acutely but tactfully observes, “What is there about us that people need to be given a rest from? Never mind.” Her dismissal of her own question shows an astute understanding that her mother’s malaise stems from her insistence on lamenting the past.

Ben Jordan shows a marked contrast to his wife. He has rebounded from the loss of his fox farm to the best of his ability and found a job at a time when hundreds of thousands of people were out of work. As he tells Nora,’“It keeps the wolf from the door, keeps him as far away as the back fence.’” Unlike Mrs. Jordan, Nora appreciates the importance of even a less-than-desirable job: ‘“Well, I guess you count yourself lucky to have the work.”’ Ben also puts forth deliberate effort to make his job an amusing caper, to bolster both his own spirits and those of his family. For instance, he makes up songs about his travels, which he shares with his family; but Mrs. Jordan responds with, “[n]ot a very funny song.” (Though, when her husband exaggerates stories about his day’s visits, she “would laugh finally, unwillingly.”) The song Ben makes up about himself, which he calls “The Walker Brothers Cowboy,” demonstrates the new image he must now create of himself: like a cowboy, Ben is a wanderer in the sparsely inhabited backcountry, a balladeer off on an adventure.

On the afternoon of the story, Ben does take his children on an adventure when he brings them to Nora’s farmhouse. The narrator compares Nora to the women she knows, particularly her mother. When the narrator first sees Nora, she is dressed in a dirty smock and running shoes, resembling nothing less than the townswomen Mrs. Jordan looks down upon. When Nora comes downstairs after changing her clothes, the narrator thinks that Nora’s dress “is flowered more lavishly than anything my mother owns.” The other physical descriptions the narrator applies to Nora are far from attractive. She notes her heavy arms, skin that is “covered with little dark freckles like measles,” and coarse, black hair.

Certainly, as the narrator indicates, both Nora and Mrs. Jordan feel bitterness about the turn their lives have taken — Mrs. Jordan because she has joined the ranks of the town poor, and Nora because she is unmarried and lives a life of relative isolation. But the key difference between the two women is what they choose to make of the moments in life that can offer them pleasure. When Ben tells his stories and sings his songs, Nora laughs as hard as the children do. She even laughs so much that Ben “has to stop and wait for her to get over laughing so he can go on, because she makes him laugh too.” Unlike Mrs. Jordan, who is so caught up in her own needs that she does not see those of her family, Nora offers others the chance to experience joy. She plays a gramophone record for the narrator’s brother. She teaches the narrator to dance, whirling her around until the girl feels “proud.” At this point, Nora’s unrefined physical characteristics no longer bother the narrator. She is close enough to notice the “black hairs at the corners of [Nora’s] mouth,” but she describes them as soft, not coarse. She sees that Nora is sweating under her arms and above her upper lip, but she is not disgusted by this. Instead, dancing with Nora, the narrator feels enveloped in the woman’s “strange gaiety” — unlike her mother, Nora can make the girl feel protected and alive.

Despite the disparity between the three adult characters, they do all have a certain regard for the past. In Mrs. Jordan’s case, the past is all-consuming and her longing for it prevents her from deriving any pleasure in the present. It also threatens the harmony of her family. Ben, too, is drawn to the past, as evidenced by his visit to Nora’s home. He also enjoys the freedom that comes with being in her company, the whisky drinking, the unsuppressed enjoyment in his sales stories. However, he recognizes that he cannot mix his past with his present; thus, he refuses Nora’s suggestion to dance and says they must return home. He still hopes to maintain an enduring connection to Nora, inviting her to drop in on the Jordan household. Nora, however, will not take him up on this invitation. As the narrator reports, although Ben tells Nora how to find the house, “Nora does not repeat these directions.”

Throughout the afternoon, Nora has shown both anger and enjoyment in seeing Ben again, but ultimately has no choice but to recognize that it is just an afternoon’s diversion, however sincere, and that Ben will take his children and she will be alone again. As she tells Ben, “T can drink alone but I can’t dance alone.’”

The narrator takes in these different perceptions of the past, and absorbs them into her own sense of the world around her. On the ride home, she realizes without her father saying anything, “that there are things not to be mentioned” to her mother. The course of the afternoon has added to a young girl’s developing maturity. At once, she shares an understanding with her father but also recognizes that he — and the other adults — are essentially unknowable. “I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon,” are the words the narrator closes with,

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.

As E. D. Blodgett writes in Alice Munro, the narrator “becomes gradually aware that the past is a psychological domain that makes of those who appear so intimately ours something other and mysterious.” By the end of the story, the narrator stands on the threshold of the adult world.

Source: Rena Korb, Critical Essay on “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2001.

What Do I Read Next?

• Eudora Welty’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Optimist’s Daughter (1972) explores the bonds between a mother and daughter as reflected upon by the daughter after the mother’s death.
• Flannery O’Connor’s collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) presents vivid characters who occupy the mid-1950s American South. Several of these stories are considered masterpieces of the short story form.
• Alice Munro’s story “Boys and Girls” in the collection Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) also features the Jordan family. It takes place on the fox farm and centers around the narrator’s (Del Jordan’s) realization of gender differences and the boundaries they impose.
• John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is set in the United States during the Great Depression. It traces the migration of the Joad family as they move from their farm in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California. A Pulitzer Prize winner, this novel did much to publicize the injustices of migrant labor in the West.
• Anna Quindlen’s novel Object Lessons (1992) is a coming-of-age story told from the point of view of a teenage girl living in a northeastern suburb of New York City.
• Carson McCullers’ novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) explores the inner lives of five lonely people living in a Georgia mill town in the 1930s. The main characters are all outcast by their society because of race, politics, disability, or sensibility. It is considered the author’s finest work.
• Margaret Atwood’s historical novel Alias Grace (1996) centers on the murder of a farm family in nineteenth-century Canada. The novel is set in the same Scotch-Irish setting in which Munro grew up and in which so many of her stories take place.