Suppose an online dating site were called The Love of Your Life! Just thinking about what’s at stake could give you cold feet. So much to lose! Rather than risk flubbing it, you might just pass.
Now compare that to a site called Just Coffee. The name reassures you: the date is only coffee. No big deal. If all goes well, maybe there’s a second cup; if not, the hour spent is easily forgotten.
The practice of lowering expectations to avoid disappointment is hardly novel. In Jesus Christ Superstar, for instance, Mary Magdalene sings of Jesus: “He’s a man. He’s just a man … / He’s just one more.” Tammy Wynette offers the same tempered hope in “Stand by Your Man”: “’Cause after all he’s just a man.” Even biographies signal modest expectations with subtitles like A Life. Books on Napoleon, Churchill, Cleopatra, Mozart, and Penelope Fitzgerald all use it. No heroics promised—just a person. That should be enough.
Do we really need reminding that the one we’re hoping to meet on a date—or the one we already love—is just a person, or that the subject of a biography is only human? We do. Because so often, people dream of something extraordinary. We want miracles. Even in biographies, where the subject is noteworthy, readers often expect the entire life to be grand and meaningful, rather than a day-to-day existence containing a single pearl of distinction. As Kathryn Hughes notes in The Guardian, readers often want biographies without “loose ends, false trails, and periods where nothing much happens,” preferring a tidy, orderly narrative—a “stately march through the decades.” If a life isn’t like this, it’s often seen as poorly lived, hardly counting at all. Anyone with dull or aimless days—or any mother, just doing the endless work of fussing and fretting over a child—might be told, “Oh, get a life!” Zadie Smith, as a teenager, thought her own mother ridiculous for living such a life, calling it a pitiful existence. If you’ve ever heard this—and I have, both in English and the Spanish equivalent, Búscate una vida!—you might wonder whether you really ought to improve yours.
And whether you can.
Small details, after all, often are the substance of life—the business of it, in fact. Details so small they may be lost to the observer. Such a life, it seems, belonged to the American painter Winslow Homer. His biographers struggled not with a shortage of titillating detail but with a dearth of all detail. The first biography after his death in 1910 lacked substance; a later one, in 1944, was considered “hard reading” for the same reason. Homer left behind no romances, no marriage, no diaries, few letters—nothing but the work. Clement Greenberg said he had “practically no life aside from his art,” as though a life devoted to art weren’t a real life at all—hardly even worth taking an interest in. But for Homer, that life was rich enough, just not something the public cared to hear about. “The most interesting part of my life is of no interest to the public,” he said. Near the end of his life, he excused himself from dinner, telling his brother he had no time for the meal—he was painting.
Those details absent from Homer’s record—where he went and when, to whom he spoke and who he loved—are in abundant supply for the narrator of Alice Munro’s two-part story “Chaddeleys and Flemings.” First she tells of her mother’s colorful cousins, the Chaddeleys—maiden ladies, they were called—who came to visit one summer when she was a child, filling the house with laughter, stories, and song. They were always putting on a show, and Cousin Iris was the most animated of the group. “Audience and performers, the cousins were for each other,” the narrator says. Years later she still remembers the voices floating up to her bedroom from the veranda where the cousins sang rounds of a nursery song in the hot summer evening.
In addition to fun and festivities, the cousins provided a connection to the wider world—especially to England and its layered history. They told tales of lost inheritances, reversals of fortune, personal setbacks. This contrasted with her father’s Irish family, the Flemings, who arrived in Canada during the potato famine with nothing but the rags on their backs.
The Flemings farmed in their new country just as they had in the old. The narrator’s father grew up and left the farm, but his sisters—the narrator’s maiden aunts—all stayed, and there they were when the narrator’s family visited: a line of women so shy, sheltered, and inexperienced in the world that they had no conversation, but only blushed and giggled when their brother teased them, pretending to believe they had been out gallivanting. This was utter fiction: these women lived extremely retiring lives of hard work and little else. They did not chafe at their circumstances, though; they believed work was life.
On these visits, the narrator’s mother, who co-owned a faltering antiques business, tried to get the sisters to change—to modernize and open up their lives. She advised clearing out their old house and selling their antiques.
But the sisters didn’t want change. They didn’t crave possessions or excitement. It was work that gave their lives meaning. “Get a life” would seem absurd; life was given, not made. Unlike the Chaddeleys, who put thought into their lives the way they put it into their hair or outfits, the Fleming sisters were their work—without it, they’d be nothing, like Winslow Homer without a subject.
In contrast, the Chaddeleys enacted a policy of noise, hilarity, movement, and change. Fun. Not a bad policy, the narrator decides, recounting the occasion when Cousin Iris came to dinner, many years later.
The meal is a test: to see if Richard, the narrator’s prosperous husband, can elevate her in Iris’s eyes from the ranks of poor relation, and to see if the worldly Iris can redeem the narrator’s backward family in Richard’s eyes. For Richard, poverty was akin to bad breath or running sores, and if you suffered from it—as the narrator’s parents did—it was partly your own fault. It was not only poverty, but also the striving and the pride, that Richard objected to. The narrator too. She has her own vanity, but it is not displayed in name-dropping or endless stories about herself. (Though isn’t she relating a very complicated one to her reader?)
The dinner is a failure on both counts. By the end of the visit, the narrator’s golden memory of that long-ago summer is seriously tarnished. Everyone suffers in the fallout, including her for her own uncharitable judgment of Iris. The pretensions of her mother’s family, the humility of her father’s, Richard’s pompous attitude, and her own snobbery—no one is spared. At the story’s conclusion, the only people who have no judgment passed on them are her mother’s business partner, a man with both a lisp and a stutter who tried, bravely or foolishly, to make a life for himself among people who made no room for him, and the one-legged hermit who once lived in a shack on the old Fleming farm. Many years later—long after she and Richard are divorced, and after her father and his sisters had all died, and the land was sold—the narrator returns to the farm to look for the hermit’s grave. He was said to be buried under a large stone. She searches but cannot find it, and finally gives up. You’d have to think twice, she muses, about regretting the life buried there.
Thinking of the other side of her family, her mother’s side, she has a different sort of reckoning. She recalls as she often has the cousins singing on a hot summer’s night, at first robustly but with the voices dropping out until just two remain, then only one.
The voice continues gamely but waveringly, until the end.
It wasn’t extraordinary, it wasn’t heroic. Just a person singing just a song in just a life.
“Life is … but a … dream.”
