On reading the short story Axis, by Alice Munro
Imagine your mother walking in on you having sex for the first time.
Before I read Axis, the story of two college girls called Avie and Grace and their boyfriends, and their lives, I listened to it being read by Lauren Groff on The New Yorker Fiction podcast. I happened to be on holiday, out walking alone in a place called Heather Hill on the Danish coast at the time and let me tell you, it is dangerous trying to listen to an Alice Munro story while walking on country lanes where there are no clear pavements and vehicles might come close to you at any time.
Because listening to Alice Munro being read out loud is different to reading her on the page. If her stories demand a certain degree of concentration when you’re reading them (which they undoubtedly do), then you must triple that focus when listening to one of her stories in an audio download. It’s nothing to do with the reading - Lauren Groff’s voice is melodic and clear and she reads the story beautifully - but it is hard to keep up with the twists and turns of plot and the movement through time. And in Axis, time is constantly moving, as the title would imply.
Put it this way, my walk took me twice as long that morning as I frowned over something that didn’t immediately make sense, as I stopped, paused, replayed and briefly lost my way. Suffice to say, I listened to the story twice, and then when I was back in our summer house, instantly went online to read it. Interestingly, though it was written in 2011, Axis never made it into Alice Munro’s final story collection Dear Life, which was published in 2012. I have wondered why - it is a stunning, shocking story.
I’ve since read Axis several times. I am, in a way, a little haunted by it. Every time I have read it, I am floored by what happens to Grace, mortified for her, and yet I am comforted by the way Avie’s life turns out, that even though she too knows great sadness, she is okay. Though I know what is going to happen in the story, I still feel my emotions building as the story paces forward. I still feel the dread of the disaster to come.
How’s about we start with a little mini synopsis of what Axis is about? I don’t want to spell the entire story out but I have set out the main plot points here for the beginning of the story at least. Hopefully you’ll be intrigued enough to go and read it in full. You can read it here for free but please do come back to read the rest of my notes and share your thoughts with me.
Axis begins ‘Fifty years ago’ with college friends Grace and Avie waiting for a bus to take them to their family homes. They are shivering at the bus stop; it is freezing, it is winter. They are history students, but though they are ‘serious students’ really the main thing on their mind is marriage. They both have boyfriends; Avie is sleeping with hers, Hugo. He’s a nice guy, but she’s not madly, deeply in love with him and she wonders about this, secretly wishing she had a boyfriend like Grace’s instead. Grace is in love with Royce, a veteran of the Second World War. She’s still a virgin but it’s clear that he’s getting impatient. But Grace hopes that she can ‘keep’ him.
Come summer, Royce goes to visit Grace at her family farm. On the bus journey there, Royce by chance notices Avie from the bus and he is struck by how lovely and happy she looks, the implication being how unlike Grace she seems. He momentarily considers getting off the bus, not going to Grace’s, spending this time with Avie instead. But Avie disappears, the bus moves on. It is awkward, around Grace’s family, and Royce is getting annoyed again but Grace proposes a plan: she will sneak into his room while her family is out, and they will sleep together for the first time. Only, disastrously, her mother walks in part way through the execution of her plan, while Grace is naked with Royce in bed. We don’t meet Grace again and here is where her story (mostly) ends.
Fifty years later, Avie is on a train going to visit one of her daughters. It turns out she did fall in love with Hugo. She married him and they had a happy life. Only he is dead now, and she is a widow. On the train, she is quietly reading when someone calls her name. It’s Royce. All these years, half a century, later.
I’m not going to tell you what happens next because I don’t want to give it all away. It is probably, however, not what you think. The next part of the story, the bit I have purposely missed out, is where the beginning and the present cross (cross the axis?) and where the start of the story, all those years ago, meets the end. I notice this a lot with Alice Munro stories, these moments in so many of her stories, when the past and the present cross briefly, like when two trains run side by side, and then suddenly split into different directions.
Speaking of trains, so much of this story features journeys, people coming and going. Taking buses, trains. I love this too, that it says something of the fleetingness of life, of fluidity, of transience. People say goodbye, sometimes they don’t; college friends lose touch. This is desperately bleak, but the way Alice Munro writes it is never heavy handed, it doesn’t feel melancholic. Instead, it’s matter of fact. It’s simply what happens. It’s just how life is.
Grace is the only one who isn’t moving back and forth. All we know about her after what happens with Royce is that she drops out of college. She is the only one who doesn’t move forward with her life the way Royce does with his, or the way Avie does with hers. There’s something deeply unfair and sad about this. Her life is the one that stops, that doesn’t keep spinning on its axis. Or at least as far as we know.
Grace’s story moves me the most, though it’s not even told from her perspective. I gasped as her plan to sleep with Royce failed. It’s funny, you know, here’s this story, set fifty years ago, seemingly so unrelated to my experiences and my life; and yet I can completely imagine this happening. I can believe that it could happen to a girl whose parents are, like Grace’s, religious and don’t want her to be alone with a boy. I can believe the scandal, how awful life would be for her after.
This part is excruciating to read, because as a reader, you already sense Grace’s plan is not going to work. There’s something too about her naivety that is frustrating. There’s a helplessness as a reader; you both want to look away but also can’t. I have wondered about this, about Grace’s plan, for a long time. Why take such a big risk, sleep with Royce in her family home when her mother could arguably be back any time?
In the New Yorker Fiction podcast discussion, it was suggested that maybe Grace did it on purpose. Maybe Grace wanted her mother to catch her, so that Grace had a reason to be thrown out the house with Royce. It would have meant Royce had no choice but to marry her. But I don’t sense that manipulation in Grace. And besides, things don’t exactly go that way. Grace drops out of college, and that’s all we know about her after. I guess somethings are unknowable and are meant to be.
When we move forward fifty years again, to the train journey with Avie and Royce, Royce goes off on what I thought at first was a tangent. It turns out he became a geologist, and he starts telling Avie all about it. But of course it’s not a tangent (as if Alice Munro would mention this without it having some significance!). We learn that when Royce left Grace’s farm all those years ago, he hitchhiked his way out of the town and stumbled upon the Niagara Escarpment. He was instantly overwhelmed by it, fascinated by the ancient rock - and that set him off on a whole new journey of discovery.
And there it is again, that feeling of a train peeling off in a different direction, the idea that if Royce hadn’t have left Grace the way he did, he might never have found his passion for geology. There it is, the idea that everything, even chance, has a consequence. Later in the train journey, Royce points out the Frontenac Axis, an exposed strip of rock visible through the window. That is quite literally the axis, but the moment is brief and Avie is largely unmoved, and so I’m not sure if it really is the axis of the title. I wonder if maybe Alice is saying something about how small our lives are in the face of something greater. I don’t know.
By the end of the story, Avie is an older woman. She has becomes the one who conforms; a housewife, a mother; she is arguably everything Grace had hoped to be for herself.
I don’t know that this conformity is supposed to be a criticism. Do you? I don’t think it is, I think it’s just simply saying: well this is who she is. It’s normal not to be the same as we were when we were young. I think it’s simply saying: people change. Because they do.
There are things I still don’t know about in this story; Avie’s strange dream, her final conversation with Royce. I don’t care too much for Royce. He treats Grace horribly. I have sat with the last line of the story - ‘A woman’ - and thought and thought about the significance. I can only draw a line back to Avie, Avie who was never tempted to join in with the ‘great switch’ of feminism. And I don’t really know what that means.
But I do know something of that feeling of Grace’s younger desperation, I can imagine it. And I know something of the older Avie’s life, I can imagine that too. And that’s what I feel, that’s what makes this story real to me. Perhaps this is what the story captures so beautifully; the way we grow older, the way we might look back and wonder what happened to people we once knew, why things happened the way they did, when the answer was clear all along. There was no other way it could have gone.
Axis by Alice Munro was published in The New Yorker in 2011.
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Wow, Huma - I loved this. So often I read short stories and wish that I could have an in depth discussion about them, so this was just gorgeous. I hadn't read the story before, but spent some time with it before returning your notes (and I already feel as though I'd like to read it again now I've taken in your thoughts).
I'm drawn to the dream. Is there a parallel with what happens to Grace do you think? Isn't she, in terms of what we end up being told about her (i.e. almost nothing) effectively shut in the basement? Discarded certainly fits - to Royce she is disposable.
That last line: 'A woman'. That after all this time, Royce remembered seeing Avie in the road - and in fact, barely recalled that he had been going to visit Grace - she lingered in his head, but in the end she was just like all the rest: emotional, preoccupied with feelings, maybe even nosy - was it a disappointment to him to realise she was merely human, rather than the idea he had of her when he saw her from the bus of being carefree, vivid, prettier than he'd ever seen her. Isn't that so often the case with men like this, they prefer the idea of a woman rather than the reality of her?
I'm rambling now, and always worry of course that I've completely misunderstood the whole thing, but my goodness I love the concept of this Substack!
So thrilled you are doing this Huma. I’ve loved Alice Munro for years and read lots of her stories. Whenever I’m stuck for something to read I always return to her. Axis is such a wonderful story and I really enjoyed reading your perceptive and thought provoking comments as well as those from your other contributors. The part of the story which stays with me is where Royce sees the escarpment and decides his future is in geology and it is that which he remembers in the future rather than the drama with Gracie.(then again I think - how could he forget such an excruciating incident - has he just blocked it out of his memory - and isn’t Royce such an unpleasant character?). I think the story suggests how our knowledge of other people’s lives is so partial. How lives overlap in different ways and with different significance. I think maybe an Axis is where Royce sees Avie from the bus and is tempted to go to her - if he had done so, all their lives would have been different. Also I wonder about Gracie - she could have gone on to have a rich exciting life, the incident with Royce could have forced her to leave home....we just don’t know. And how like life that is!
Also I love how Alice Munroe’s stories often leap forward into the future often making a past event which she has covered in detail seem so insignificant.
Am so excited to read the next one with you!