The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Saturday, April 5, 2025

Storytime: Even in our so-finite lives we have our own personal loops of eternity. We get carried away. Or “Carried Away,” as Alice Munro titles it. Our endless dark matter is that space between fear and imagination where the what-might-have-beens hurtle in a unseen, unheard, indifferent void like so many celestial imaginings in the Oort Cloud. Munro published “Carried Away” in The New Yorker in 1991 and collected it in Open Secrets in 1994, the collection–we now know–demarcating Munro’s life before and after she knew of her 9-year-old daughter getting molested by Munro’s second husband. But her daughter revealed the abuse in 1992. So the the theme of what-might-have-been is premonitory rather than retrospective. The story covers half a century. We don’t know how much of Louisa’s story is real, how much is imagined. (Of course it’s all imagined: it’s a story. But if as Francois Mauriac said, only fiction doesn’t lie, only stories are real and everything else, our “real lives” included, is window dressing. I agree, though window dressing is putting it kindly, implying both “windows”–or vistas–and dressing, implying the furtive pleasures of olive oil, which can be as unreal as olive branches. Our lives are never that interesting, compared to what we can read. It’s mathematically, psychologically impossible, and thank heavens for that: we’d be dead in 60 seconds if they were.) So: Louise. A one-time door-to-door saleswoman, and survivor of tuberculosis after she spent four years in a “sanitarium,” where she had an affair with a married doctor who, to her disillusion, ended it when she was cured. The story begins with a correspondence Jack, a soldier fighting in the Ardennes of 1917, writes her at the library where she works, in a Canadian town called Carstairs, Ontario. He’d glimpsed her there before shipping out but never spoken to her. He falls in love in the course of their correspondence. He comes home after the war. He never tells her. He had been engaged to Grace all those years. He marries Grace. Has children. Louisa is reservedly crushed, being too strong to be sentimentally crushed. She expects he’ll show up one day. He does not. He shows up in the paper after he is decapitated by his carelessness with a machine at the piano factory where he worked, or rather by the lack of measures protective of workers in the factory founded by Arthur Doud’s father and carried on by Arthur, the Douds who endowed the library years before but didn’t care to spend the money on protective measures. Arthur Doud pays his respects to Grace who hands him a stack of library books to return that Jack had taken out. She did not want to incur fines. Louisa discovers that the books had never been checked out. Rather than present them to her to be stamped, Jack would temporarily steal them. Arthur begins hanging out at the library. He is taken and briefly repelled by Louisa, who wants to know what Jack looked like. She still doesn’t know. She will never know. Filling in that blank intensifies her imaginings about what might, what should have happened. Arthur and Louisa marry. He had a daughter from a wife who died in the 1919 influenza. He and Louisa have a son. The story jumps to decades later when Arthur is dead and Louisa goes to London, Ontario, for a heart check-up, where she happens by a commemoration of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, that group of six English men from Toldpuddle, a town on the southern coast of England, who’d been found guilty of swearing a secret oath to a farmers’ union. They were sentenced to penal servitude in Australia then returned to England and pardoned after Lord Russell, Bertrand’s grandpa, led to their pardon in a preview of Zola’s “J’Accuse.” “Martyrs is laying it on somewhat, thought Louisa. They were not executed, after all.” She doesn’t stay for the whole commemoration. She goes off to catch the bus to return to Carstairs, and in the waiting room, in comes Jack, now a union organizer (the martyrs are said to have been at the origins of the movement) telling her, “You must have been mad at me. Are you still?” He fills her in on Grace, on the children, as if he’d never been killed. He tells her, tritely, “Love never dies.” She, or Munro, is not impressed. “She felt impatient to the point of taking offense. This is what all the speechmaking turns you into, she thought, a person who can say things like that. Love dies all the time, or at any rate it becomes distracted, overlaid it might as well be dead.” Of course it’s all in Louisa’s head, so she’s just as complicit in speaking the line. The story draws its power from these interstices of awareness and unawareness, the willed and the wished, the history and the un-happened. “Oh, what kind of a trick was being played on her, or what kind of trick was she playing on herself!” Or on the reader. “She would not have or it. She pulled herself up tightly, she saw all those black clothes melt into a puddle. She was dizzy and humiliated. She would not have it.”

—P.T.

 

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It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust. She had to be forgiven, didn’t she, she had to be forgiven for thinking, after such letters, that the one thing that could never happen was that he wouldn’t approach her, wouldn’t get in touch with her at all? Never cross her threshold, after such avowals? Funerals passed by her window and she gave no thought to them, as long as they were not his. Even when she was sick in the hospital her only thought was that she must get back, she must get out of bed, the door must not stay locked against him. She staggered to her feet and back to work. On a hot afternoon she was arranging fresh newspapers on the racks and his name jumped out at her like something in her feverish dreams. She read a short notice of his marriage to a Miss Grace Horne. Not a girl she knew. Not a Library user.

–From Alice Munro’s “Carried Away” (1991).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.