It’s confession time. I Spencer Lynch am a serial murderer. And I started young. I started with one of the twelve angry men.
I was fourteen, and falling in love with culture I was supposed to be too young for. Passion number one was music. Old music from way back in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. With film, I went even further back. To a cinephile, it’s entry-level stuff: Casablanca, Hitchcock, Leone’s Dollars trilogy, The Maltese Falcon, etc. But it was an unusual interest among my peer group. I was pretty smug about it.
Anyway, so there I am, fourteen years old, watching Twelve Angry Men with my mother. The film absorbed me so it must have been afterwards that I took to googling how many of the angry men were still alive.
“One” I told Mam, “some guy named Jack Klugman.”
“I know him” she said, “He was in The Odd Couple.”
“I wonder if he’s lonely.”
From my memory (footnote?) it was later that night, when a knock came on my bedroom door. Mam.
“Spencer?”
“Yeah.”
“You remember that guy we were talking about? The last remaining angry man?”
“Yeah?”
“He just died.” Her tone was slightly accusatory, I thought.
Since then, this gift/curse has followed me around. I have my suspicions about Prince, Pope Ratzinger, Betty White and Oliver Sacks. Of all the people I may have accidentally killed, none grieves me more than Alice Munro, also known as the GOAT.
I was up in Dublin visiting my grandmother. I had decided in advance that I was going to find a bookshop and buy an Alice Munro book. I felt like it for some reason. Into Hodges and Figgis, where a whole shelf was dedicated to the GOAT. I selected at random Open Secrets, a collection from 1994. I believe this was on the tenth of May. Munro died on the thirteenth. I’m sorry, guys.
(Jack Klugman: I’m pretty sure I killed this guy)
Trademarks
Munro’s brilliance is elusive. Virginia Woolf’s line about Jane Austen being impossible to catch in the act of greatness applies to Munro too. So generally speaking, what do we talk about when we talk about an Alice Munro story? The most obvious thing is that Munro wrote mainly about women. Her first and only novel was called “Lives of Girls and Women”: a mission statement of sorts. A feminist writer, perhaps, but a pre-counter-cultural feminism, where the sanctity of marriage was respected, an affair was a big deal. Dramatic things may happen in her stories, as we’ll see shortly, but Munro’s women usually don’t do anything drastic. The furthest they go is an extra-marital fling or to simply contemplate how their lives could have gone differently.
Though her style is as unflashy as it gets, a consistent voice nevertheless emerges: mournful, but not hysterical, somebody watching a door close forever, feels some regret, but gets on with things.
But the most exciting thing about an Alice Munro story is the artful time-jumps, of which there is plenty in “Carried Away”.
Formative
It is 1917. Yes, WWI and all that. We meet our hero, 25-year-old Louisa, having a meal in the Continental Hotel. After some scene-setting descriptions of the tablecloth and tomato sauce bottles, the plot gets rolling with a back and forth correspondence between Louisa and Jack Agnew, a soldier stuck in a sick ward. This first segment is largely epistolary: Munro even titles it “Letters”.
An unconventional romance develops. No, the possibility of romance. That’s all. For Louisa, still a virgin, it is exciting. He has vague memories of her pottering around the library. She can’t remember him at all. She sends him a picture of herself that she is not happy with. Basically, the WWI equivalent of a dick pic.
Disappointment
Then, we have a minor time jump, two years forwards to 1919. The war of course is over, but a new crisis has emerged in the Spanish Flu. At the same hotel, we see Louisa speaking to a man, IRL. She and Jim Frarey discuss the growing emergency in a manner that will remind the 2020’s reader of the spread of COVID 19. After a few drinks, Louisa fills Jim in on her flirtation with the enigmatic solider. There is something elegant about Munro’s pacing here. Though we’ve heard most of the information before, Louisa carries the plot a little further. The letters stopped after the war. Louisa knows Jack must be back home but can’t find him anywhere. She sinks into a depression, abandoning the precious practice of reading. The cold shoulder is broken when Louisa discovers in her workspace an apologetic note from Jack explaining that he was engaged before he went abroad. So in our first segment, we get our set-up. In this second segment, we get an early pay-off. This is all dealt with extremely efficiently, with two different methods of communication. It doesn’t feel like we are reading a story somebody sat down and wrote. It feels like we are watching real things happen.
Tragedy
The story could have ended with Louisa losing her virginity to Jim Frarey. That would have been a good story. Actually, we haven’t even got to the main event yet.
In one of the most gruesome passages in Munro’s oeuvre, Jack Agnew is decapitated in an accident in the local piano factory. We find out after the fact. We watch the town finding out. First, the factory owner Arthur Doud. His housekeeper. The Minister. Neighboring kids. Jack’s wife. His daughter. A confusing swirl of people. Jack’s father, who blames his own son. The one person whose reaction we never see? Louisa.
The newspaper reports mirror the epistolary structure of the opening segment. Both are italicized. Though the letters are crucial to setting up the story’s premise, the paper extracts merely fill in some extra detail. As if that weren’t enough, the picture is completed through Arthur’s private recollections, the unprintable stuff. If you were ever curious as to what to do in the event of an accidental decapitation, Munro has got you covered.
Now, here is some beautiful structure. Louisa ends up marrying Arthur Doud. Their relationship is formed when Arthur finds some of Jack’s unreturned library books, all of which have some intellectual pretensions. 1Arthur is no great reader, but begins to visit the library regularly, enjoying Louisa’s company, and the peace of the building. Their relationship is tense. Arthur makes some jokes about Jack and she does not like it. We never know if she is grieving or not. She moves on with her life. The one thing she wants to know is what Jack looked like. Arthur replies vaguely that he was “on the tall side.” We get the sense that he can’t remember either.
Getting On
As the story moves on, Munro is less specific with regards to time. Initially, we are given not only an exact year, but the exact date on which Jack and Louisa began their correspondence: January 4th, 1917. It is not made clear when Jack’s accident takes place. Since there is no mention of the Spanish Flu, it could be around ’21 or ’22, or several years later than that. I’ve read this story three times and still don’t know everything.
The murkiness continues in the final segment: “Tolpuddle Martyrs”. We are told only that it is the mid-fifties. That would put Louisa in her mid-sixties, elderly for then. She is on a bus to visit a heart specialist. Her husband is gone. As we see, she may be losing her marbles too.
We get one weird ending. I’m still not sure about it. Stopping for a coke at a commemoration for the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Louisa is visited by the ghost of Jack Agnew. I think that’s what happens anyway. She fills him in on how her life has gone. Jack pisses her off by declaring that “Love never dies”. Louisa thinks:
Love dies all the time, or at any rate, it becomes distracted, overlaid—it might as well be dead.
You may read this sentence and think Louisa is merely in denial about her love for Jack. I take this message at face value. This is a story about the clinical nature of marriage. The fairytale passed Louisa by, so she married a guy she didn’t like that much, and made that work. Sad stoicism. The Munro touch.
I appreciated this segment a little more on the second reading when I realized that we had been given the heads up. During the flu, when Louisa is anxiously waiting to bump into Jack, her mind takes a superstitious turn:
When she entered the Town Hall she always felt he might be there before her, leaning up against the wall awaiting her arrival. Sometimes she felt it so strongly she saw a shadow that she mistook for a man. She understood now how people believed they had seen ghosts.
From the closing pages, there is one line that bothers me. Looking out at the marchers blending into the summer haze, we are told that Louisa “saw all those black clothes melt into a puddle.” Every time I read that, I think the ghost is disappearing into a puff of smoke like something out of Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
The Well is Deep
I haven’t got to the bottom of this story. I have questions about many things. Did Jack have his child before he went to the war? Why did Louisa pick Arthur over Jim? Whatever happened to Jack’s wife? In the final paragraph, when we flash back to Louisa as a young woman taking on the librarian gig, what’s all that about? Has she died? Was it all a dream?
These question marks are exciting rather then frustrating. Even if I don’t understand everything, Munro awakes in me an instinctive peace at life’s ebbs and flows. We have lost one of our great artists. I can’t help but feel morally culpable. Let’s just be grateful that Clint Eastwood is still alive.
Sir John Franklin and the Romance of the Northwest Passage, by G.B. Smith, What’s Wrong with the World by GK Chesterton, The Taking of Quebec by Archibald Henry, Bolshevism: Practice and Theory by Lord Bertrand Russell