When Hazel Curtis travels to Scotland, she tells people that it was a trip that she and Jack had always planned to take together.
1990; Penguin, 1991
And now that she’s a widow, Jack cannot contradict Hazel, speak out to say that he never wanted to take that trip.
For now that she’s a widow, Hazel has her own reasons for taking the trip. (She is piecing things together à la “Meneseteung”, but with a lifetime of memories instead of a single text to interpret.)
Hazel (nee Joudry) Curtis, is a widow in her 50s, a high school biology teacher in Walley Ontario.
“She was a person you would not be surprised to find sitting by herself in a corner of the world where she didn’t belong, writing things in a notebook to prevent the rise of panic.”
That corner of the world is the Royal Hotel, which her husband Jack used to visit, when he was a navy man. He had a middle-aged cousin named Margaret Dobie who lived nearby, and Jack would go to the hotel for a drink.
To hear Jack tell it, there was a romance with the daughter of the man who owned the hotel – Antoinette – as well. (Though Hazel finds that story is told differently, when viewed from another perspective.)
When she travels there herself, Hazel does meet Antoinette, who seems to be the opposite of Hazel in many ways. She is also, surprisingly, the opposite of what Hazel expected her to be. (And no, those opposites do not cancel each other out: Antoinette is a complex character.)
Of course, years have passed. Years since Jack was spending time at the Royal Hotel. Years since he was not spending time there, when he was married to Hazel and working at the appliance store.
“She was shy and prudish and intelligent. Jack triumphed easily over the shyness and the prudery, and he was not as irritated as most men were, then, by the intelligence. He took it as a kind of joke.”
Jack is described in some detail, but he also quietly stands in contrast with the solicitor that Hazel meets in the hotel, Dudley Brown.
At first, Hazel believes Dudley is part of the hotel staff, but she immediately realizes that he is not a fit for Antoinette’s establishment. (She later must revise her evaluation somewhat, but that is related to plot points best left unspoiled.)
When Hazel first meets him and figures that Dudley is either a bachelor or a widower, she weighs on the side of bachelor because of his twinkly-ness. “That twinkly, edgy air of satisfaction didn’t usually survive married life.” (Readers can’t help but summon up the un-twinkly, un-edgy Jack, selling microwave ovens in Walley, Ontario.)
Everything in Scotland is fascinating and Hazel is intent upon deciphering what she finds there. “She must have thought that she was invisible, the way she slowed down and peered.”
Even casual references contain glimpse into history with which she is unfamiliar. In her travel diary, a notation for ‘Philiphaugh’ is fleshed out with further knowledge later. (The violence surrounding this detail echoes the unexpected discovery of the history of the Cameronians, which rounds out the first story in this collection, “Friend of My Youth”.)
Often the site of violence appears unremarkable later, whether a public square or a pub mentioned in an old ballad. “But the pub now seemed ordinary….”
What is recorded, what is remembered, is not necessarily reflected in the present-day scene. And yet, sometimes what is recorded (like an old ballad recited by the now-much-aged Maggie Dobie) can reveal unexpected truths about the present-day.
“A ton of words Miss Dobie had, to bury anything.” But Hazel can burrow beneath the surface of those words and find something meaningful underneath.
Sometimes lines can be drawn, connections made between people who appeared distanced, alliances where connections appeared to be severed, intertwined states that exist somewhere between connectedness and disconnectedness: Hazel can decipher some of this, even when others might prefer it remain unrecognized.
But one question remains: “The whole worrying, striving, complicated bundle of Hazel – was that something that could just be picked up and made happy?”
This is true for other heroines in Munro’s stories too (like “Circle of Prayer” in The Progress of Love): “She stood outside her own happiness in a tide of sadness. And the opposite thing happened the morning [he] left. Then she stood outside her own unhappiness in a tide of what seemed unreasonably like love.”
Whether in Walley or Scotland, Hazel is standing outside of her own happiness, examining its relationship to the love she has known in her life.
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Alice Munro’s stories, as I read through her work-to-date. She is one of my MRE authors and I plan to read the stories in Friend of My Youth throughout this month; this is the fourth story in the collection. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story; I would love the company.
Thanks for posting those quotes from the interview: they really do seem to offer a peculiar insight to Helen’s character in this story. It feels to me, too, that she is looking for something quite different.
I also feel as though she WAS looking for something quite different as well. Both in terms of how she had imagined (or, as you suggest “created” for the idea of what she had with him) Jack. As well as having expected something different from their relationship too (which puts her in the company of many other story heroines, it seems).
What are your thoughts about the title? As with “Oh, What Avails”, I felt the connection between title and content was looser than with some stories, perhaps more of a general comment on the transitory nature of relationships and commitments?
I also felt that the connection between the “supplementary” characters illuminated another side of Helen, which would have been hard to pin down were she directly commenting on her own relationship, but her observing another couple’s entanglements brought out some interesting observations. Quite a complicated tale, really.
Hi, I am soo enjoying your blog ever since I discovered it only days ago! Love your reading list by the way. Alice Munro is my MOST FAVOURITE writer, of all time. Just wanted to point out an error in the comment section–I think you meant “Hazel,” not “Helen.”
Two particular sentences that appear very early in this story, actually right after the one you quoted above about a person sitting in a corner writing in a notebook, struck me as defining very clearly where Helen was at in her life and, in a general sense, where this story was going to go.
“She had found that she was usually optimistic in the morning but that panic was a problem at dusk.”
and this, “It had to do with a falling-off of purpose, and the question why am I here?”
This story also reminded me of the statement in the previous story when Almeda “has noticed about married women…how many of them have to go about creating their husbands.” Helen is not creating Jack so much as following up some of what she knew about him and connecting with a world he knew and a time he valued. Mostly though, I believe, she is looking for something quite different.
And what about the title? Which characters do the words represent?
With regard to the woman sitting in a corner with her notebook, there is a quote in Robert Thacker’s biography of Alice Munro from a journalist doing an interview for Maclean’s at the time of Friend of My Youth: “I sit in a corner of the chesterfield and stare at the wall, and I keep getting it, and getting it, and when I’ve got it enough in my mind, I start to write. And then, of course, I don’t really have it at all.” Thacker also gives another quote from the same time period: “I write about where I am in life.” This might be why Helen Curtis feels like someone the reader knows rather well.