Profiles in Canadian Literature: Volume 8 (v. 8)

Profiles in Canadian Literature 8

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Profiles in

Canadian Literature 8 Edited by Jeffrey M. Heath Department of English University of Toronto

Dundurn Press Toronto and Oxford 1991

Copyright © Dundurn Press Limited, 1991. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press Limited. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Reprography Collective. Editing: Judith Turnbull Cover design: JAQ Text design and production: Green Graphics Printing and Binding: Gagn6 Printing Ltd., Louiseville, Quebec, Canada

The preparation of this manuscript and the publication of this book were made possible by support from several sources. The publisher wishes to acknowledge the generous assistance and ongoing support of The Canada Council, The Book Publishing Industry Development Programme of the Department of Communications, and The Ontario Arts Council. Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in the text (including the illustrations). Credit for each quotation is given at the end of the selection. The author and publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any reference or credit in subsequent editions. /. Kirk Howard, Publisher

Dundurn Press Limited 2181 Queen Street East, Suite 301 Toronto, Canada M4E1E5

Dundurn Distribution 73 Lime Walk Headington, Oxford England OX37AD

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Profiles in Canadian Literature Includes bibliographies. ISBN 1-55002-146-1 (v. 8) 1. Canadian literature (English) - History and criticism.* 2. Canadian literature (English) - Bio-bibliography.* 3. Authors, Canadian (English) - Biography.* I. Heath, Jeffrey M., 1943PS8071.P76 1980

C810'.9

C81-094164-3

rev. PR9184.6.P76 1980

Table of Contents Foreword

107 Audrey Thomas Lorraine M. York 108 JohnMetcalf Louis K. MacKendrick 109 Michael Ondaatje Barbara Leckie 110 Gilbert La Rocque Kenneth W. Meadwell 111 KenGass Reid Gilbert 112 Dennis Lee Peter Hinchcliffe 113 RickSalutin James Noonan 114 Marie-Jose Theriault Kenneth W. Meadwell 115 Yves Beauchemin Jacques Cotnam and Nicole Jobin-Johnson 116 David Adams Richards Linda-Ann Sturgeon 117 Margaret Gibson Susan J. Warwick 118 JackHodgins Peter Buitenhuis 119 W.RKinsella Don Murray

7

9 17 27 35 43 53 61 69 75 83 91 99 107

120 Margaret Hollingsworth Cynthia Zimmerman 121 Janette Turner Hospital Elspeth Cameron 122 Sandra Birdsell Linda Lamont-Stewart 123 Guy Vanderhaeghe Nicholas von Maltzahn 124 Paul Quarrington James C. MacDonald

147

Series Index

155

115 123 131 139

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Foreword The studies which appear in Profiles in Canadian Literature Series 7 and 8 speak clearly for themselves; nevertheless it may be useful, especially for new readers, if I provide some background. Profiles began life in 1980 with two pilot volumes, and appeared at intervals throughout the eighties on a schedule determined largely by the availability of suitable contributors, the perseverance of the editor, and the sometimes comic setbacks native to the publishing process. The project sprang from the desire to make lively introductions to representative Canadian writers available to an audience that would not necessarily be a scholarly one. Series 3 and 4 appeared in 1982, Series 5 and 6 in 1986. Even before the latter two volumes appeared, bringing the total to nearly ninety studies, I knew that my "representative" selection was still too thin, and so in the 1986 foreword I named other authors I thought needed inclusion. Now it is five years later and somewhat to my surprise, I find that despite the misadventures that have foiled several match-ups between contributors and authors, and despite other amusing editorial adversities, I have realized most of the aims I expressed in the 1986 foreword. With the publication of Series 7 and 8, Profiles in Canadian Literature now includes well over ten dozen studies. I have continued the practice of starting out with an examination of the literature of exploration: this time with a highly readable account of the life and journals of George Back. Students of drama will find studies of Ken Gass, Rick Salutin, Margaret Hollingsworth, and (a special prize) Charles Heavysege, who is significant also for his poetry. Other important poets previously absent now aren't: Ralph Gustafson, Robert Finch, P.K. Page, Anne Wilkinson, Irving Layton, John Metcalf, and Dennis Lee, along with two very fine additional catches Frank Prewett, almost unknown until recently, and Robert Service, often considered too popular for the academy. A study of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts examines both his poetry and his prose - in particular that distinctively Canadian genre, the animal story. The fiction department is further strengthened by articles on Lucy Maud Montgomery, Thomas Raddall, Joyce Marshall, Josef Skvorecky, Clark Blaise, Jane Rule, Audrey Thomas, David Adams Richards, Margaret Gibson, Jack Hodgins, W.P. Kinsella, Janette Turner Hospital, Sandra Birdsell, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Paul Quarrington. Also present are studies of George Bowering and Michael Ondaatje, whose works often elude definition by genre. I have increased the number of francophone writers represented to fifteen overall, with studies of Gilbert La Rocque, Marie-Jos6 Th6riault, and Yves Beauchemin. Finally, readers who take their Canadian writing spiked with controversy will want to turn to the entertaining accounts of Farley Mowat and Pierre Berton. These volumes contain studies of a very broad range of authors. They come from a variety of regions and periods, and what links them together is simply that they are all, in some sense, Canadian. As in the preceding volumes, I have made no attempt to select authors on the basis of any overriding thematic, generic, or ideological considerations, and it should go without saying, I hope, that the opinions and preoccupations expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher or the editor. By the same token, readers of these pages will find a wide variety of critical approaches and vocabularies. I have tried not to tamper with these, and

(insofar as possible) have not discouraged contributors from speaking with their own voices, being of the firm opinion that distinctive prose is a precious commodity these days. For the information of readers who may find the bibliographical format of Profiles unfamiliar in certain respects, the style manual used here is Scholarly Reporting in the Humanities, by Roy McKeen Wiles. It has been used from the typescript and the early copy-editing stages onwards, with some few modifications. As in earlier volumes, I have arranged the authors discussed here according to the dates when their work first gained significant public attention. Frank Prewett is an exception. His work was rediscovered only a few years ago, so I have treated him as if history had been kinder to him, and have placed him early in Series 7. In order to help readers find their way around in what has become a fair-sized compilation, I have provided a general index at the back of each new volume. I am sure there are readers who, far from wondering why certain authors have been omitted, will now wonder when and where this project will stop. They are right; it should stop. But writers being what they are, they insist on writing: new suns keep on rising, and even existing stars of the first magnitude have managed to go uncharted in these pages. As before, hitherto unincluded names come to my mind: Mavis Gallant, Raymond Knister, bill bissett, Carol Bolt, Hugh Garner, Constance Beresford-Howe, John Newlove, Leon Rooke, Aritha Van Herk, David Helwig, Susan Kerslake, Judith Thomson, Joy Kogawa, Martha Ostenso, bp Nichol, David Fennario, Allan Stratton, Thomson Highway, Phyllis Webb: these and many others deserve inclusion. But of making many books there is no end . . . My aim in this project remains the same as it was at the beginning: to develop a broad base of studies of Canadian writers and their work by making the expertise of more advanced scholars available and accessible to an informed general readership. As in the six preceding volumes, the studies in Series 7 and 8 are intended as points of departure - as resources for further study, not as substitutes for it. With the aid of the bibliographies, interested students (and perhaps even scholars) will be able to follow out the leads provided by the essays, and can then go on to amplify the information provided in the "comments" and "chronologies". The contributors to Profiles in Canadian Literature, Series 7 and 8, have a common interest in the literature of Canada. They are instructors, researchers, and specialists who have painstakingly adapted extensive knowlege to a demanding format. I thank them for their scrupulous care in doing this. And, since once again the preparation of these two volumes has taken longer than expected, I thank them, and everyone else who has worked on this project, for their cooperation and their patience. J.M.H. The editor, Jeffrey M. Heath, teaches English at Victoria College, University of Toronto, where his interests include twentieth-century Canadian, American, and British literature. He is currently working on the fiction of E.M. Forster, and is the author of The Picturesque Prison: Evelyn Waugh and His Writing (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1982; London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982).

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Audrey Thomas

107

by Lorraine M. York Audrey Thomas once wrote an open letter to the Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay, in which she pointed out, "I do not write confessional novels nor, I think, novels that are at their heart, self-obsessed. I'm very interested in contemporary women because I happen to be one . . . .'n Livesay had commented, in an interview, that writers like Thomas, who were exploring women's issues, especially that of women's powerlessness in society, were somehow singing a one-note song, and that they should really be writing about all human beings. This notion is a familiar one, popping up in readers' responses to writers like Thomas, Margaret Atwood, and Marian Engel; in the minds of some readers, at least, to write about women is to write about the marginal, the frivolous or self-indulgent. And when the writer uses the details of her life as ingredients in her fiction, as Thomas does, this objection is compounded: how dare the writer use the novel or short story to thrash out her own problems? But, as a close survey of her fiction will reveal, Audrey Thomas is right; her novels are not mere repositories for confession, nor are they self-obsessed. Rather, they are glimpses into the obsessions and power struggles of contemporary lives and relationships - a topic which could hardly be termed frivolous. As Thomas reminded Livesay, the territory explored in her fiction is the world of the last five decades. Born in 1935, Thomas has given her readers penetrating insights about women growing up in the 1940s, marrying and starting to raise children in the late '50s and '60s, and coming to terms with marriage breakdown and life as a maturing woman in the '70s and '80s. For Thomas, that journey began, as it does for her character Isobel in Songs My Mother Taught Me, in southern New York State, the area surrounding Binghamton, the medium-sized city in which she was born. She has described her childhood as one of acute suffering, occasioned by the violent arguments of her parents. Time and again, Thomas and her sister would be asked to choose between mother and father, only to have the emotional scene cancelled and allbut-forgotten the next day. Now, as a writer and as a mature woman, she would probably recognize that some of her own fascination with the power struggles between men and women and, especially, with how those conflicts affect the children involved, is linked, in some way, with her own experience

of childhood stress and marital warfare. Education was one way out of such an untenable situation and, as it turned out, one step on the road to Thomas's development as an artist. As a student, first at a New Hampshire boarding school at age fifteen, then at Smith College, Thomas embarked on the academic study of literature. But, as she has pointed out, most of the literature which she read at these institutions, especially at Smith, was written by men; her discovery of the works of Virginia Woolf was, for this reason, a revelation. Even so, when she decided to pursue graduate study in English literature at the University of British Columbia, she chose topics from the main-

stream tradition, completing an M.A. thesis on Henry James, and undertaking but not completing a Ph.D. on Beowulf. This intellectual split in Thomas, between the mainstream tradition, authored mostly by men, and her own growing interest in women writers like Woolf and Doris Lessing, is a conflict which her own novels and stories dramatize. At the end of Mrs. Blood, for example, we find, in the last anguished moments of the narrator's miscarriage, a veritable rag-bag of quotations from the "great tradition" of literature: Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hamlet, John Webster's Duchess of Malfi, T.S. Eliot's poetry. And though some readers have criticized this portion of the ending, labelling it unnecessarily academic, the point is that the narrator has, from the beginning, been characterized as a woman who has had to bear the weight of traditional assumptions about what women should do and be. The deluge of quotations from the literary "tradition", therefore, reproduces this sense of woman buried under layers of age-old norms and expectations. Besides, a more recent protagonist in Thomas's works, Alice from Intertidal Life, thinks, near the end of her journey through a painful marriage breakup, of a female literary ancestor, Thomas's beloved Virginia Woolf, and identifies with Woolf s mental suffering. She even thinks of the lighthouse, that central symbol of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, as a symbol of stability amidst the storms of contemporary life, a stability which women are now, increasingly, claiming as their own: "For who knows when the bridegroom cometh, and who, these days, wants always to be inside, tending the lamps, waiting for his soft knock upon the door?"2 The traditional biblical text of the wise and foolish virgins (Matthew 25:1-13) is here replaced by the improved lighthouse, beacon of women's new sense of stability. "Modern lighthouses can function practically unmanned" (IL p. 271), Alice thinks, in a tongue-in-cheek punning reminder that the strongholds of literary and social tradition have also been "unmanned" and reclaimed by and for women. Part of this work of reclamation and transformation of tradition is accomplished, of course, through women taking up the pen, something which Thomas did from an early age. She did not publish any of her work, however, until 1965, when a short story of hers appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, this was the story which would appear as the opening work in her first collection of stories, Ten Green Bottles. Even though Thomas has remarked on a couple of occasions that this story, "If One Green Bottle . . . ", is not one of her favourites and that she feels it is flawed, it provides a remarkable starting-point for a survey of her career. This story and the collection it opens introduce many of the thematic and technical concerns which fascinate her as an artist for the next few decades. Though critics have written that Ten Green Bottles tends to favour the conventionally shaped, rounded-out short story with a twisty ending, "If One Green Bottle . . . " gives evidence of a young writer's adept willingness to experiment. The story follows the meanderings of a woman's mind while she is undergoing a painful miscarriage. Past and present mingle, and in the ellipses which break into the text on every line, we sense at once the waves of her pain, and the waves of memory: 10

Waves of pain now ... positive whitecaps .. . breakers ... Useless to try to remember ... to look behind ... to think. Swim for shore. Ignore the ringing in the ears... the eyes half blind with water... the waves breaking over the head. Just keep swimming... keep moving forward... rely on instinct ... your sense of direction... don't look back or forward... (TGB.p. 11)

For Thomas, already, memory is a painful act, one which the human swimmer tries to avoid in order to make progress; still, it is as inevitable an "instinct" and source of "direction" for Thomas's characters as the acts of breathing and walking. It is fitting, then, that Thomas herself should navigate as a writer by coming to terms again and again with memory; as she has revealed, "If One Green Bottle . . . " was written out of the intensely painful personal memory of the miscarriage she suffered in Ghana. It was a memory to which she would return in her novels Mrs. Blood and Blown Figures. As well as setting up her theory of memory as creative pain, this early short story shows us a writer who is intensely self-conscious about her writing, and who enjoys bringing that self-consciousness into the foreground of her fictions. Part-way through the story, the narrator addresses a parenthetical comment to her reader: "You are not amused by my abstract speculations? Listen . . . I have more" (TGB, p. 9). Just at the point where the typical reader, experiencing some disorientation in this sea of ellipses and memories, seems ready to panic and drown, the narrator acknowledges this probable response, and forces that reader to question his or her own desire to "keep moving forward" in the manner of the traditional short-story plot. For Thomas, swimming backwards, forwards, and sideways through memory is just as viable an act of creativity. In the novels and stories to come, Thomas continues to question the conventions which surround the novel and short story, conventions which assume that a writer must express his or her material using certain forms or rules. In the work of a writer so deeply interested in the forms and rules which often govern women's lives in a patriarchal society, formal experimentation works in tandem with this political concern to great effect. Audrey Thomas's work of the 1970s was dominated by a project which her readers came to recognize as a trilogy: the novels Mrs. Blood (1970), Songs My Mother Taught Me (1973), and Blown Figures (1974). Here, the features of her fiction which were already apparent in the early stories women's lives and bodies, memory, and the breaking of formal rules - returned on a larger scale. In fact, the three novels, taken together, show the progressive disintegration of the traditional novel form. Songs My Mother Taught Me, which was written before but published after Mrs. Blood, and tells of Isobel Carpenter's childhood and adolescence, is written as a fairly conventional novel in two parts. Mrs. Blood, which details the narrator's experience of miscarriage in a hospital in Ghana, gives us a fragmented first-person speaker who is, in the miscarriage scene at the very end of the novel, completely overtaken by the fragmentary. In Blown Figures, it is as though we picked up where we left off, with the fragments of thoughts, memories, and literary references which close Mrs. Blood. Now, the narrator is returning,

psychologically and, perhaps, physically, to Africa to revisit the scene of her loss. The text is now entirely composed of fragments, as is the psyche of the emotionally scarred woman; the reader is made much more aware of this connection between text and psyche when some of these short snippets are placed, alone, on a single page. The traditional novel form, Thomas seems to suggest, is not able to contain this tale of a woman's disintegration, for it suggests the finely crafted progression through introduction, complication, climax, and denouement to resolution. Her women, instead, often journey from apparent resolutions to radical questioning and loss of certainty; the form must therefore do the same. Even in the first novel in the trilogy, Songs My Mother Taught Me, there are hints of Thomas's frustration with the traditional narrative thread. In this tale of a young girl caught up in a domestic situation which features an ineffectual father and a mother subject to sudden rages. Thomas gives us a twentieth-century rendition of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, that nineteenth-century primer of childhood woe. (She has expressed her admiration for Dickens's novel in interviews.) Still, fragmentation creeps into this text just as surely as it invades Isobel's home life; suddenly, at the end of chapter 6, for example, we turn the page to find, not chapter 7, but a short passage on a separate page: "Isobel, do you remember when she smashed the bathroom mirror with a cold-cream jar?" "No." "Of course you do. The frame hung there for days and one night, brushing your teeth, you chanced to look up and saw only a blank piece of cardboard and not your face. Your face had disappeared." "I remember. I thought it was an omen at the time." (Songs, p. 94)

Here is fragmentation indeed; one part of Isobel, the questioning, past-seeking side, interrogates the reluctant side which desires only to forget the mother's act. And the image of the smashed mirror reflecting only a partial, splintered vision of Isobel is the physical embodiment of the shattered psyche this internal dialogue is seeking to heal. Finally, though, the two sides manage a momentary reconciliation through the agent of memory - "I remember." Even though this agent brings pain, it brings psychic healing as well. How appropriate that we are given this parable of disintegration and reintegration through memory in a fragmentary passage which we, as readers, must strive to integrate in our reading of the novel we have in our hands. Thomas may not yet be placing single sentences or groups of words on separate pages as she does in Blown Figures, but she is moving ever closer to that practice, and ever further away from the classically constructed plot. Mrs. Blood continues this emphasis on psychic fragmentation by having the narrator split herself into "Mrs. Blood" and "Mrs. Thing", two personae that roughly approximate the two Isobels in the passage above from Songs My Mother Taught Me. Mrs. Blood is the medium of memory and Mrs. Thing her nervously resisting partner who lives, uneasily, in the present. Past and present meet in the last

scene of the novel, where we are simultaneously shown the present miscarriage and the memory of the events leading up to an earlier abortion. Thomas manages this simultaneous telling through the layering of the telephone call which Mrs. Blood made to the father of her aborted child years ago, and her present grief over the miscarriage she is now undergoing: Only silence. "Richard!" Oh, Jason, I'm so sorry. "Get rid of it," he said. (MB, p. 220)

Two stories overlap, and the novel form, with its traditional emphasis on consecutive narration, strains to accommodate them. This strain snaps in Blown Figures', one of the "figures" which is "blown" in this work is the novel itself. Besides marking Thomas's increasing frustration with traditional forms of narrative, the trilogy resurrects another feature of her early stories: her fascination with Africa. In stories such as "Xanadu" and "Omo" from Ten Green Bottles, Thomas explores the problematic relationship between characters from abroad and a challenging new environment which they have trouble piecing together. Africa becomes yet another confusing splintered mirror in Thomas's work; it is a symbolic land whose symbols resist the act of deciphering. This is no doubt why Thomas refers to the African continent, in an interview, as "the other side of ourselves . . . the dream world, [where] things seem to be the same, but they're not."3 Looked at in this way, the three novels show us a woman moving from west to east, further and further into her psyche, further and further into a land which, like the world of dreams, is difficult to interpret. In order to navigate this strange land, the traveller must reach back into the past, just as psychoanalytic therapy aims to convince the stubborn side of the psyche (that other half of Isobel we saw in Songs My Mother Taught Me) that the past must be relived and retrieved. Even so, Thomas doesn't offer us the diagnosis and resolution which therapists like Freud and her own favourite, Jung, tended to do. Once one uncovers the past, that doesn't necessarily mean that the psychic split will heal itself. In Blown Figures, the main character is not able to abolish her fears and anguish with the magic incantation of "I remember." This is part of Thomas's experimentation of the 1970s; she resists giving her character's severely divided psyche a final unity, just as she resists the traditional pull of the novel form towards final unity, the desirable "happy ending". The other element of Thomas's experimental fiction which makes itself felt in the early stories, her self-consciousness about the act of writing, does not lose itself in her work of the 1970s. In 1971 she published two interlocking novels, Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island, which show her continuing fascination with the process of making fiction. Munchmeyer shows us a graduate student with dreams of writing a novel undergoing various nightmarish experiences; Prospero on the Island gives us the outer framework of this tale, the female writer Miranda who is writing a text called Munchmeyer. This boxes-within-boxes form of fic11

tion gives us Thomas at her most explicitly self-conscious, meditating in both texts on the implications of mixing autobiographical event and fiction, and on the creativity of male and female writers. As Thomas moved into the later 1970s, this playfulness filled her shorter fictions as well. In the short story "Initram", from the 1977 collection Ladies & Escorts, the narrator begins by commenting explicitly on the story preceding it in the collection: Writers are terrible liars. There are nicer names for it, of course, but liars will do. They take a small incident and blow it up, like a balloon -puff puff - and the out-of-work man who comes to ask if he can cut the grass ends up in their story as an out-of-control grey-faced, desperate creature who hurls himself through the garden gate and by his sheer presence wrecks a carefully arranged afternoon between a married woman and her intended lover. (LE, p. 88)

After thus providing her reader with a synopsis of the preceding story, the narrator begins a series of paragraphs (four in all), each of which begins with the phrase, "The truth is ... ". Each of these statements, however, conflicts with the others (the truth is, she imagined the man; the truth is he was only a man mowing a neighbour's lawn; the truth is that the man really was just as sinister as he is in the story which she has written). How can all these be true? Thomas's point is, precisely, that they cannot, and that one cannot apply the conventional notions of truth and falsehood we tend to use in our own everyday lives to the worlds of fiction, where things are not merely "true" or "false" but are, rather, fabricated, true insofar as the fiction itself is concerned. In this respect, Thomas's view of art closely resembles that of two other well-known short-story writers in Canada, John Metcalf and Alice Munro, writers who themselves comment self-consciously, at times, about the "truth of fiction" as distinct from everyday notions of truth and falsehood. As Munro once wrote in an essay entitled, "What Is Real?", The answer seems to be as confusing as ever. Lots of true answers are. Yes and no. Yes, I use bits of what is real, in the sense of being really there and really happening, in the world, as most people see it, and I transform it into something that is really there and really happening, in my story.4

Like Audrey Thomas, Munro often has to defend her fiction against those readers who object to her use of autobiographical material; this essay is her way of arguing that her fiction is more than an attempt to reflect everyday experience. So, although Thomas doesn't particularly belong to a school or movement of writers, her work, especially that of the 1970s, shows her experimenting, like Alice Munro, Clark Blaise, and John Metcalf, with art's power to transform - not reproduce - felt experience. This she does by exploring, like those three other writers, the shadowy, exciting areas where autobiography and fiction meet, a natural sort of borderline area for an author to delve into if he or she is fascinated by the possibility that we fictionalize much of our experience in telling it. 12

A feature of Thomas's work which makes its appearance in the late '70s is her interest in the previous decade, the 1960s and, more particularly, the idealistic hopes of the so-called hippie or flower children generation. In stories like "Rapunzel" and "A Monday Dream at Alameda Park", from Ladies & Escorts, Thomas gives us her first studies of this generation, its search for new experiences, open relationships, and heightened sensitivity through new stimuli (travel, meditation, drugs). Increasingly, in her fiction, though, Thomas presents these seekers in a pathetic or negative light; their searches are often naive at best, or downright futile at worst. The wandering innocent Rapunzel, in the story of that name, for example, comes up against a tough fact which she cannot ignore: rape. Her "soft voice", a trademark of Thomas's '60s-ish characters, struggles in "bringing out this hard word rape" (LE, p. 78). Other naive searchers in Thomas's fiction include the figure of the older man who is drawn to the dreams of the '60s, and the love-child way of life. The professor in "A Monday Dream at Alameda Park" is one such middle-aged seeker, as is the husband Peter in Intertidal Life. Both works include the same snippet of dialogue: the former wife declaring that it was "dope" rather than the younger woman that has "turned" him "on" (LE, p. 118; IL, pp. 22-23). But by the time we get to the 1984 novel, Intertidal Life, Thomas's view of the post-'60s "flower children" who are trying to recapture that old dream has hardened considerably. There remains, unquestionably, a great deal of sympathy for the continuing human impulse to search, to question the accepted values of society which these '60s figures represent. But that sympathy has now become leavened with some fairly stringent criticism. There are numerous references, for example, in Intertidal Life, to the soft voices adopted by "the yoga-and-yogurt crowd" (IL, p. 94), and the references have turned much more pointedly critical than in "Rapunzel": "And all those soft voices!", Alice thinks at one point, "Almost like the soft voices of psychopaths, inflectionless, menacing" (IL, p. 44). Beginning in the 1970s, and continuing into the present decade, Thomas has become a determined observer of the years which greatly influenced her and her entire generation. She has not, however, been an uncritically nostalgic traveller in the land of her own past. In the fiction of the late '70s and early '80s, this childlike desire of some characters to return to the supposed simplicity of the love-beads generation is related, for Thomas, to a particular form of breakdown in male-female relationships. In the work written in this last decade, Thomas has been especially fascinated by the figure of the forty- or fiftyyear-old male who wishes to return both to the '60s and to his youth. For Thomas, this obsession is part of what popular psychologists have termed the "Peter Pan" syndrome - a childlike regression whereby the male wishes to have all the benefits of relationships with little in the way of responsibility. Multiple relationships and no-commitment arrangements become means of satisfying male vanity. In Latakia, a novel Thomas published in 1979, as well as in the story "Crossing the Rubicon" from the 1981 collection/tea/ Mothers, characters contemplate a menage d trois shared by one man and two women (never the other way around); typically, in

these fictions, it is the male who desires the relationship, a younger woman who goes along with it, and the older woman who initially agrees, but then discovers its exploitive nature and leaves it. In Thomas's fiction of the '80s, that act of leaving becomes an important motif. The 1986 collection of stories, Goodbye Harold, Good Luck, is named for a woman's scrawled message on a motel bathroom mirror, left for her lover to find in the morning. Another woman, leaving her obsessively perfectionist husband, finds the message in that same motel room. The Audrey Thomas heroines who find it so difficult to let go of the past and its commitments and dreams have decided to move on. This act of leaving can take several forms. One is the act of forming new sexual relationships, difficult though that may be after an experience of loss. In stories like "Breaking the Ice" from Goodbye Harold, Good Luck, and "Harry and Violet" and the title story from Real Mothers, women take on that challenge, facing as they do so not only their reservations about the probability of success in the everlasting power struggles between male and female, but also the implications of new ties for children of the former relationship. These new relationships are not simply dream-versions of the old flawed ones; the story "Real Mothers" contains a new relationship which promises to be even more nightmarish than the preceding one. Thomas's heroines of the '80s find other ways of taking leave of the old attachment of male and female in conventional marriage. One is the tie between mother and daughter, a major feature of the story "Crossing the Rubicon" from Real Mothers and particularly in the close, sustaining relationships between Alice and her daughters in Intertidal Life. The other comforting "children" which these recent Thomas heroines find are their relationships with language, the texts they write. In "Out in the Midday Sun" from Real Mothers, the woman who has hated her writer husband's tendency to use her in his fiction wonders, at the end of the story, whether she, too, will take in all the details of their breakup "and then, when she got free of him, write about that too?" (RM, p. 100). Ironically, the letter she has which will likely bring about the end of their marriage is not a letter from a lover, as one might be led to believe, but rather a letter promising to publish her work. For Thomas, this is one of the most powerful means women have of "leaving" the power relationships between men and women: to "take in all the details . . . and write about" them too. 1 Audrey Thomas, "Open Letter to Dorothy Livesay", Room of One's Own, V, 3 (1980), 71. 2 Audrey Thomas, Intertidal Life (Toronto: Stoddart, 1984), p. 271. Subsequent references to this novel will appear parenthetically in the text as IL Other abbreviations for Thomas's works in the text are TGB for Ten Green Bottles; Songs for Songs My Mother Taught Me; IE for Ladies & Escorts; RM for Real Mothers; and MB for Mrs. Blood. 3 Elizabeth Komisar, "Audrey Thomas: a review / interview**, Open Letter, 3rd Series, No. 3 (Fall 1975), p. 63. 4 Alice Munro, "What Is Real?**, in John Metcalf, ed., Making It New: Contemporary^Canadian Stories (Toronto: Methuen, 1982), p. 226.

Chronology 1935

Born in Binghamton, New York, the younger of two girls. 1950 Leaves home to attend boarding schools in New Hampshire. 1953 Graduates from high school, and enrols at Smith College. 1955 Spends a junior college year abroad, at St. Andrew's University in Scotland, the setting for a couple of her short stories. After graduation she finds a job teaching in Birmingham. 1957 Marries and settles in England. 1959 Emigrates to Canada, settling in Surrey, B.C. 1963 Earns M.A. degree from the University of British Columbia, while raising two of her three daughters. 1964-66 In Kumasi, Ghana, where she experiences a difficult pregnancy and a miscarriage at six months. 1967 First collection of stories, Ten Green Bottles, appears. Back in British Columbia, Thomas completes all requirements for a Ph.D. degree, but her thesis, a novel about Beowulf, is rejected. "If you want to get an inferiority complex ... you went to graduate school in the early sixties, late fifties. As a mother, as a wife and mother, I was simply not taken seriously" (interview with Wachtel, p. 41). 1969 Moves to Galiano Island, setting for recent fiction such as Intertidal Life, with her three daughters. 1970 Mrs. Blood, her first and most widely known novel, published. 1971 Munchmeyer and Prospero on the Island published. 1972 Separates from her husband. 1973 Songs My Mother Taught Me, her second novel, published. 1974 Blown Figures, her most experimental work to date, appears. This is Thomas's first major work to be published by a Canadian press, Talonbooks. The first two works were published by BobbsMerrill in Indianapolis, with whom Thomas had a contract. 1977 A second collection of stories, Ladies & Escorts, published. Thomas sees these stories as particularly concerned with male-female relationships. 1979 Latakia, a novel about a troubled marriage set in Greece and Syria, is published. 1981 Thomas collects a third volume of short stories, Real Mothers, concerned not only with the malefemale relationship, but also with the bond between mother and children, a theme Thomas feels is ignored in literature. 1984 Intertidal Life published, to admiring reviews. 1986 A fourth collection of stories, Goodbye Harold, Good Luck, appears.

Comments by Audrey Thomas But I am a part of the political and economic events of my time, just as Virginia Woolf was (Mrs. Dalloway) or Jane Austen or Mrs. Humphrey Ward or Susanah [sic] Moodie or whoever. They are reflected in my work of necessity. . . . I do not march in marches or wave banners but I have

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raised / am raising three daughters and I have taught and in both instances I have tried to express openly, verbally, and by example, how I feel about the world we live in. One thing that has always intrigued me is how poets can say "I" "I" "I" all the time and it's called the Lyric Impulse but when prose writers do that it's considered "confessional" or "too autobiographical" or bad form. I believe the statistics show that at least one out of every ten pregnancies ends in a miscarriage. I had one - a long, drawn-out painful affair where I finally lost the child at over six months. And so I wrote, first a story, then a book, about it: Mrs. Blood. No one, to my knowledge, had written a book about something that has happened to millions of women over the years. "Open Letter to Dorothy Livesay", Room of One's Own, V, 3 (1980), 72,72-73,73. So many men have presumed to write from a woman's point of view, from Flaubert to Brian Moore, & in some cases have done it very badly. But I've taken that on [i.e., writing from a man's point of view] as a kind of challenge. Now, with Munchmeyer, his daydreams & things are not so far off anyone's daydreams, who wants to write or whatever. . . . But male idiom is different, male syntax is different. . . . Their dreams might be the same, but they would express themselves differently. But one way of bleeding without bleeding is to be a poet or a writer.... One way of dealing with the past is to write about it. Interview with George Bowering, Open Letter, 4th series, No. 3 (Spring 1979), pp. 11,22. I do think writing has a moral purpose but you can't add it like vanilla. What I'm saying is women have a voice and they ought to be heard. I'm also saying, you can write your book any damn way you want to as long as it works and don't let men tell you that it has to have the larger scene. I'm so fed up with hearing that. You know, you've got to write War and Peace, you've got to write this great diorama of history, The Naked and the Dead. You've got to set it in the context of the great social upheavals of your time. Well, yes or maybe not. I think that women get very scared by that because they think this is not very good writing because it doesn't And I'd like to demonstrate through my literature that you can do whatever you like. If you want to have seventeen points of view, have them, if you want to chop your thing in the middle, do it. Virginia Woolf was doing that sort of thing all the time, she didn't care. If you want to make a letter form, fine, that's an old way, that's the way the novel started. Yes, I think everybody writes autobiography. I think everybody writes one story, has one thing that really interests them, and I suppose what really interests me is the relationship between men and women and how we lie to one another. I think one of the hardest things for women right now, because we've gotten so strong (and we really are strong) is that we're very intolerant of the weakness of men. Interview with Eleanor Wachtel, Room of One's Own, X, 3,4 (1986), 43,45-46,58.

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Comments on Audrey Thomas What it [Blown Figures] is, in fact, is a fascinating, manyfaceted, beautifully sustained novel, which involves us with its central character to such an extent that we really care about her. Isobel is not yet out of the forest, literally and symbolically, when we part with her at the novel's ending. Dealing as it does with the attempt to assimilate into a woman's mind the virtually unbearable fact of her child's death-in-birth, a fact which has shattered her in ways she cannot communicate because even her husband has no real comprehension of her pain, this novel conveys to me, finally, both a sense of hiatus and a sense of being stubbornly alive. Margaret Laurence, "Blown Figures: A Review", Gazette (Montreal), April 1975 [repr. in Room of One's Ow/i,X,3,4(1986), 101-2]. As we might expect, Thomas's women dissent from the traditional roles and domestic plots in which they find themselves implicated as mothers, wives, and lovers, and yet their resistance is always a double game where denials provoke unexpected yearnings for what they are losing/have already lost. Coral Ann Howells, "No Sense of an Ending: Real Mothers", Room of One's Own, X, 3,4 (1986), 113. If anything may be said to be Audrey Thomas's consistent theme, it is private fear. George Bowering, "Snow Red: The Short Stories of Audrey Thomas", Open Letter, 3rd Series, No. 5 (Summer 1976), p. 29. Throughout Thomas's fictions is the constant fact of suffering, and an acute awareness of the psychological results of suffering - its power to distort our perceptions and our memories. A recurrent situation takes us to the appalling borderland between sanity and madness; on that knife edge of mental anguish appears the terror that haunts all Thomas's fiction. Yet the essential quality of her work does not lie in the nightmare that shadows her psychologically complex characters and loosens their grasp of experience; but rather in the precarious equilibrium - which they achieve so intermittently - between the fear and the joy of existence. George Woodcock, "Audrey Thomas", in Robert Lecker and Jack David, eds., The New Canadian Anthology, (Scarborough: Nelson, 1988), p. 410.

Selected Bibliography Works by Audrey Thomas Short Stories Goodbye Harold, Good Luck. Toronto: Viking, 1986. Ladies & Escorts. Ottawa: Oberon, 1977. Real Mothers. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1981. Ten Green Bottles. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967; repr., Ottawa: Oberon, 1977. Novels Blown Figures. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1974. Intertidal Life. Toronto: Stoddart, 1984.

Latakia. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1979. Mrs. Blood. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970; repr. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1975. Munchmeyer andProspero on the Island. Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1971. Songs My Mother Taught Me. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1973. Essays "African Journal Entries", Capilano Review, VII (1975), 5562. "Basmati Rice: "An Essay About Words", Canadian Literature, No. 100 (1984), pp. 312-17. "'My Craft and Sullen Art': The Writers Speak. Is There a Feminine Voice in Literature?", Atlantis, IV, 1 (1978), 152-54. "Through a Glass Darkly: Canadian Art Criticism", Canadian Literature, No. 46 (1970), pp. 62-72. Reviews "A Broken Wand?" [review of The Diviners by Margaret Laurence], Canadian Literature, No. 62 (1974), pp. 8991. "Closing Doors" [review of The Book of Eve by Constance Beresford-Howe and Monodromos by Marian Engel], Canadian Literature, No. 61 (1975), pp. 79-81. "Extraordinary Girls and Women" [review of Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro], Canadian Literature, No. 67 (1976), pp. 85-87. Interviews Bowering, George. "Songs and Wisdom: An Interview with Audrey Thomas", Open Letter, 4th Series, No. 3 (Spring 1979), pp. 5-31. Komisar, Elizabeth. "Audrey Thomas: A Review/Interview", Open Letter, 3rd Series, No. 3 (Fall 1975), pp. 59-64. Wachtel, Eleanor. "An Interview with Audrey Thomas", Room of One's Own, X, 3, 4 (1986), 7-61. Selected Criticism Archer, Anne. "Real Mummies", Studies in Canadian Literature, IX (1984), 214-23. Amussen, Robert. "Finding a Writer", Room of One's Own, X, 3, 4 (1986), 63-67. Bellette, A.F. "Some Observations on the Novels of Audrey Thomas", Open Letter, 3rd Series, No. 3 (1975), pp. 6569. Bossanne, Brigitte G. "Audrey Thomas and Lewis Carroll: Two Sides of the Looking Glass", Northern Dakota Quarterly, LII, 3 (1984), 215-33. Bowering, George. "Snow Red: The Short Stories of Audrey Thomas", Open Letter, 3rd Series, No. 5 (Summer 1976), pp. 28-39.

. "Munchmeyer and the Marys", Room of One's Own, X, 3, 4 (1986), 86-98. Bulling, Pauline. "Thomas and her Rag-Bag", Canadian Literature, No. 102 (1984), pp. 195-99. . "The Cretan Paradox or Where the Truth Lies in Latakia", Room of One's Own, X, 3, 4 (1986), 105-10. Coldwell, Joan. "Memory Organized: The Novels of Audrey Thomas", Canadian Literature, No. 92 (Spring 1982), pp. 46-56. . "Natural Herstory and Intertidal Life", Room of One's Own, X, 3, 4 (1986), 140-49. Diotte, Robert. "The Romance of Penelope: Audrey Thomas's Isobel Carpenter Trilogy", Canadian Literature, No. 86 (Autumn 1980), pp. 60-68. Gottlieb, Lois C., and Wendy Keitner. "Narrative Technique and the Central Female Character in the Novels of Audrey Thomas", World Literature Written in English, XXI, (1982), 364-73. Howells, Coral Ann. "Margaret Laurence: The Diviners and Audrey Thomas: Latakia", Canadian Woman Studies, VI, 1 (1984), 98-100. . "No Sense of an Ending: Real Mothers", Room of One's Own, X, 3, 4 (1986), 111-23. Keitner, Wendy. "Real Mothers Don't Write Books: A Study of the Penelope-Calypso Motif in the Fiction of Audrey Thomas and Marian Engel", in John Moss, ed., Present Tense: A Critical Anthology. Toronto: NC Press, 1985, pp. 185-204. MacKendrick, Louis K. "A Peopled Labyrinth of Walls: Audrey Thomas' Blown Figures", in John Moss, ed., Present Tense: A Critical Anthology. Toronto: NC Press, 1985, pp. 168-84. Renaudi Gaston. "Translating Audrey Thomas into French", in Marilyn Gaddis Rose, ed., Translation Perspectives: Selected Papers 1982-1983. Binghamton: SUNY, 1984, pp. 125-30. Room of One's Own (The Audrey Thomas Issue), X, 3, 4 (1986). Sherrin, Robert G. "In Esse", Room of One's Own, X, 3, 4 (1986), 68-74. Stape, John. "Dr. Jung at the Site of Blood: A Note on Blown Figures", Studies in Canadian Literature, II (1977), 124-26. Wachtel, Eleanor. "The Guts of Mrs. Blood", Books in Canada, November 8, 1979, pp. 3-6. . "The Image of Africa in the Fiction of Audrey Thomas", Room of One's Own, II, 4 (1976), 21-28. A Note on the Contributor Lorraine M. York teaches Canadian literature at McMaster University. She is the author of The Other Side of Dailiness: Photography in the Works of Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Laurence (ECW Press, 1988).

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John Metcalf

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by Louis K. MacKendrick John Metcalf is a critic, editor, anthologist, essayist, and writer of novels, novellas, and, most notably, short stories. He can be an unsparing and authoritative critic, never committed to half-measures. The impressions one gets from much of his non-fictional writing may be variously those of attack, excoriation, polemic, a refusal of euphemism, chauvinism, vendetta, and certainly indignation. He is often vigorously opinionated: such is the manner of his honesty and his concern for literature. For him, writing is not a casual or inspired activity. His critical work is above all undeluded: Metcalf does not gladly suffer foolishness, inflation (in style or reputation), or a less than total involvement in craft. Irony, one of the strongest properties of his criticism, carries over into his fiction. In all his work, and in his critical appraisals of other writers, Metcalf is an exacting stylist who is vitally concerned with the adequacy and aptness of expression. His dedication to discipline and commitment is combined with a clear and mordant vision. Metcalf's first-person narrators may often seem to share many of the author's own opinions: the confusion of his characters' attitudes with those he has developed in his non-fictional prose is not unusual. Nevertheless, Metcalf's best readers realize that his fiction is completely objective: his tale's the thing. Metcalf has admitted some dissatisfaction with his practice in the novel. Both Going Down Slow (1972) and General Ludd (1980) seem collections of set pieces or selfcontained tableaux which often suggest that he is more in command of shorter fiction. In these novels Metcalf's natural satiric impulses have surfaced powerfully. His targets have been, respectively, a repressive and self-serving Montreal secondary school system and a Montreal university which, in the process of surrendering to dehumanizing technology, has innocently encouraged foolishness and self-interest. The novel has given Metcalf less opportunity to practise his particular style of association; his protagonists' lives have more of explication than implication about them. They deliver many witty lines, but the impression remains of sophisticated and allusive comedies which do not work towards the writer's achievement of credible, three-dimensional char-

acters. Their emotional relationships are awkward, and their entanglements occasionally become almost slapstick. Bitingly comic portraits and obvious gestures of parody in both novels, as well as passages of genuine pathos, contribute to some inconsistencies of tone and texture. Though Metcalf is always a skilled writer, and though these novels have many moments of unalloyed delight, he is not completely comfortable in this extended form, and certain mannerisms limit his achievements. 17

Metcalf s novellas - "The Lady Who Sold Furniture", "Private Parts: A Memoir", "Girl in Gingham", "Polly Ongle", and "Travelling Northward" - have proven considerably more successful. They deal with the conflict between opportunities for the fully realized life and unrealistic fantasies or feelings of inadequacy, or between the uncompromising demands of immediate life and ultimately futile evasions of it. These novellas contain varying degrees of effectively realized pathos. The characters' emotional developments are given convincing range, and Metcalf demonstrates a superb command of social comedy and irony. In this form his characters achieve greater dimension than in his novels through their more particularized experiences. Even his minor characters, however near to caricature they come, enjoy a memorable and credible definition. Metcalf is able to achieve a fine balance of comprehensible story line, completely justified and internally coherent major characters, and a satisfactory relaxing of his typically pointed and allusive style. However, it is in his short stories that Metcalf proves masterly. He has received generous praise for his control of the form and for the quality and craft of this body of work. Few of his stories are less than excellent, and many are outstanding. Most contain a rigorously ordered metaphorical subtext, a level of connotation and association which amplifies plot through an appropriate sequence of correspondences, parallels, images, and incidents. The density of motifs and patterns can be remarkable in his most highly worked fictions. "Gentle as Flowers Make the Stones" (from The Teeth of My Father) and "Single Gents Only" (from Adult Entertainment) are examples both of narrative economy and figurative elaboration. Many of MetcalFs connotative devices are metaphorical formulations which also may contribute to the often blatant ironies which play throughout all his work. In his short stories, language, word order, punctuation, and even length of paragraphs work to create effects which, as he has often insisted, are in the first instance emotional. His interest in the rhetoric of story is strong; fiction, he has attested, is a "performance" close to that of poetry, and he often employs poetry's techniques and devices. Metcalf*s careful use of literary devices in his stories complements his painstaking attention to structure: such elements as balance, contrast, counterpoint, and repetition operate intentionally in his fiction - and may also be given figurative as well as narrative realization. His stories are tight weaves of motifs and theme (not to be confused with prescription or "message", a quality which he abhors). They are "literary" in the best sense; nothing is accidental. For all his attention to the craft which underlines and supports the short story itself, Metcalf is attentive to the truths of human experience. The direction of his stories emerges from the nature of his protagonists and the situations in which they find themselves; events are not imposed on them to produce a lecture or parable. His characters' conditions are natural results of their particular context and psychology. This is not to deny the very precise situations to which Metcalf's characters are exposed, but to insist that these are the writer's intentional choices to test the authen18

ticity, and even self-assurance, of these individuals. They are often engaged in a search for understanding or must experience a reversal of their form of understanding by an indifferent or even hostile environment. The story "Beryl" is characteristic in this way: an inexperienced and romantic young man is offered a sexual opportunity by a girl he has idealized, but he is confused by her coarse readiness while television shows in the background offer a vulgar and implicit commentary on his innocence and loss of nerve. One of Metcalf's better-known stories is "Keys and Watercress". Its patterns and implications show some ways in which he characteristically takes his fictions beyond the merely denotative level of plot. The title itself implies the two sides of the narrative: unused keys which open no doors, a rusty private treasure, and the green and innocent life of the outdoors - specifically the colour of the meadow from which David (the name of the protagonist in many of Metcalf s stories) lets himself be led away. (One might compare this story with "The Children Green and Golden" - the title is derived from Dylan Thomas's poem "Fern Hill" - where again an adult world attempts to impose its values on unprepared, unspoiled, and ultimately resistant children; or with "Early Morning Rabbits", where a boy's ambition to hunt like a grown-up is terribly answered by his actual shooting of the quarry and its unanticipated agonies.) It is ironic that the old man lives in a house surrounded by a garden: he has no practical contact with living things whatsoever, and an association with the temptation in the Garden of Eden is not out of place here. This religious suggestion does, in fact, have some support later in the story. David's freed scab leaves a pit which is sickeningly echoed by the pit in the old man's leg - but there "the flesh sank deep, seamed, and puckered, shiny, livid white and purple."1 This description repeats, almost invisibly, "the forbidding white sign" (p. 119) on the downriver bridge in the area where David is not allowed. The "pit" is a conventional synonym for hell, not an extravagant notion given Metcalf's careful attention to David's mounting terror and repulsion, and to an implication of perverse religious dedication. Because David is trespassing, he initially wonders if the old man is a representative authority figure, and indeed he turns out to be dictatorial, arbitrary, and often abusive - an unpleasant exaggeration of the authorities of whom David is wary. When he painfully sits by David and "laboriously stretched out each leg like a dying insect in a jam jar" (p. 119), the simile suggests his somewhat repellent nature, his enclosed physical and emotional life, and that his closeted existence is surrounded by mementoes and intimations of death. The slimy eels David has caught find their human equivalent. One final touch: the old man appreciates that eels can be "extremely slippery fellows" (p. 119), and the observation conceivably may describe the gaps in the logic of his dialogue - really a self-centred monologue - with David. The old man attempts to instruct David in correct names, the accumulation of facts, the uneducated love of sweetness, rudeness, taste, texture (the subject of a scribbled note whose content is, perhaps significantly, not shown), vision, and appreciation. All of these may be understood beyond

the story's context as aspects of the artist's performance. (Metcalf has addressed the nature of art more exactly in "Travelling Northward", "The Practice of the Craft", "The Eastmill Reception Centre", and most particularly in "The Teeth of My Father".) The word "taste" is double-edged in the story: David understands it to apply to sandwiches, but the old man means its aesthetic dimension, even wondering (to the reader's amusement) if his stuffed lion is in "good taste" (p. 123). But the old man's belching and his oblivion to all but his own fixations seem to contradict the manners about which he is most insistent to David. That his watch is a "Hunter" may be considered appropriate for this character who "hunts" in a broad sense - a bright toy to attract the innocent, not unlike David's "turning, twisting" lure for eels (p. 120). The old man's logic is entirely self-serving - "You like my watch, don't you? . . . Well, there you are then. What more proof do you need?" (p. 121) - and sometimes seems arrested in other circumstances: "Raspberry canes everywhere, just as I told you" (p. 122). His inexplicable interpolations and his behaviour are grotesque and unsettling. His sitting room is an emblem of his personality: it is dark, stuffy, and smelly. It contains a "vast mirror" (p. 122), which reflects nothing but the old man's self-contained and book-lined environment, as well as a stuffed lion (with dust on its eyes), another epitome of his lack of any association with real life. Stacks of National Geographic, as well as Irish linen and Waterford glass, are an ironic comment: the old man is no adventurer beyond his own circumscribed house and mind. Do we wonder at this point if David is in the hands of a molester (as in one sense he is), even as we receive some indirect assurance that the old man is at least a former schoolmaster, or perhaps a decayed, slightly dotty gentleman? With another sudden shift in his undecipherable agenda - "Well? Do you think you're ready? Shall you see them?" (p. 124) - the old man produces his useless keys after closing the "red velvet curtains" (p. 124), giving a strong indication of paranoia as well as reinforcing the idea of confined exotic luxuriousness. The curtains also look back to the "bright bead" of blood (p. 118) on David's knee, and forward to the "red silk lining" (p. 128) of the old man's leather case. The immediate environment continues to reflect the nature of an inner self: the old man's sitting room is like a well-appointed coffin. In the gloom the lion loses its colour - its last hold on the green world - and becomes a "dark shape" (p. 124). The phrase has been used of the hall stand and anticipates the old man's complete surrender to his mania and his loss of all distinguishing features as a "black shape" (p. 128). The sacks of keys are "like the pictures in pirate books" (p. 125), reminders of David's childish innocence and of adventure books more appropriate to his youth, where treasure hoards are the vital stuff of fancy. Some of the keys are for "clockwork toys" (p. 125), another indication that he is only a boy (as opposed to the old man's rather mechanical nature). David has all the real innocence of the friends in "A Thing They Wear", and none of their pretense of being cigarette-smoking sophisticates. The old man's insistence becomes more peremptory and

selfish; David is now merely an audience in this perverse private theatre which gazes only at itself. (The escalation of the old man's violent manner superficially links this story with "The Strange Aberration of Mr. Ken Smythe", in which a performance by the Essen International Amity Boys Band is turned into a re-enactment of the Second World War by an increasingly drunken and chauvinistic master of ceremonies.) David does not treat the collection of keys "properly" (p. 125), again a reference to an unfamiliar order of behaviour which reaches its bizarre climax in the old man's virtually orgasmic heaving of the keys. The word "silence" now begins its repetition as the old man's frightening, crazed, and arbitrary authority ("I will not tolerate the telling of lies!") becomes severe (p. 126). His final illogical (but knowingly sly) appeal to David's boyish curiosity - "It's a great pity because I don't show it to many people" (p. 127) - is the last temptation: "almost reverently" (p. 128) the holy of holies is to be revealed in a mystery beginning in silence and ending with all but physical attack. David is charged with being silly, brainless, and stupid; his identification of the bullet as a marble reminds us that, after all, he is just a boy who is beyond his depth in the old man's strange pursuits. As the atmosphere becomes more oppressive - "The dim light in the room seemed to be failing into darkness" (p. 128) - the boy has been figuratively hooked, like his eels, by the old man, a "crowding presence" (p. 128). The word "presence" here has a potentially religious implication: the earlier reference to "perilous stacks of yellow National Geographic magazines" (p. 122) may suggest the Siege Perilous of Arthurian legend, the location of the Holy Grail. The old man is evidently a former military personality wounded in the Boer War, which explains to some degree his habit of command and his derogatory characterizations of David, a person of inferior rank. The last touch is truly grotesque: the old man dwells on his wound masochistically, and, again presuming to understand the nature of boys, insists on its attraction: "You would like that, wouldn't you? ... Of course you would" (p. 129). His feverish excitement, more horridly intimate than his implicitly sexual action with the keys, is strangely hypnotizing, as he urges David, "If you press hard . . . it sinks right in" (p. 129). The old man's eager offer goes beyond the physical invitation: he has been figuratively pressing David hard throughout their association, so that his lessons will sink in: "I've tried to teach you" (p. 129). Undoubtedly, like the eels which "swallow the hook right down and you can't get it out" (p. 119), David has been well and truly caught, perhaps traumatized by his unpleasant experience. From another perspective, has he been punished enough for his innocent trespass, and for his automatic obedience to the world of adult authority? The old man's voice from the darkness finally condemns him as having "no appreciation" (p. 129), and in the accusation, blackly humorous as it may be, we may also appreciate Metcalf's oblique commitment to the fragments of real culture, a familiarity with particulars, which the old man represents. "The Years in Exile" is another fine example of Metcalf s ability to embed an interior structure within an apparently 19

unforced narrative surface - here, the recollections of an unnamed old writer "exiled" in Canada from the vivid memories of his English boyhood, and now virtually alienated from his immediate family by its superficiality. The story also contains several comments on his former craft which are inseparable from Metcalf s own practice. Like many Metcalf fictions, "The Years in Exile" features a substantial repetition of themes and their variations, a web of connections which shows both the firm psychological consistency of the narrator and the structural sensitivity of his creator. Like "Keys and Watercress", it too implies the gracious culture of the past, a sustaining but fading measure of real civilization in a desensitized world. One of Metcalf's greatest successes in this story is his control of its sentiment: many of the narrator's recollections move the reader. His emotions are treated with a sympathy and care which never sacrifice the accuracy and detail of his memories. "Robert, Standing" is another story which may invite the reader's excessive sympathy for the detailed physical difficulties of the wheelchair-bound protagonist; on the contrary, his intelligence, his patience with religious obsession, and his refusal of self-pity make him admirable. Metcalf has never more deftly managed to evoke the proper and necessary degree of the reader's emotional commitment to his stories. The old writer is exiled from everything. (He is not unlike the narrator of "The Estuary", whose games with his psychiatrist conceal his intense identification with the freedom of the porpoises which he attempted to follow, and his bitter rejection of fragmented, mechanical people.) He has nothing but mildly ironic distaste for his relatives. He implies that his daughter is obsessively clean - "the voice of the vacuum cleaner is heard in the land"2 - in an allusion to the Song of Solomon ("The voice of the turtle[dove] is heard in our land") which points up his abhorrence of the mechanical and its perversion of feeling. He all but rejoices that his mind "is full of pictures" (p. 81), unlike the young college men, one of whom is scheduled to interview him with a machine. He detests photographs and believes that Edwin Land's claim that the Polaroid process is "the most basic form of creativity" is "so obscenely wrong" (p. 99) because, we assume, the mechanical form is devoid of heart, history, and a living memory. The remoteness of the narrator's grandfather is the first in a sequence of personal historical memories, or archaeological re-creations, in which he illustrates his (and Metcalf s) commitment'to "particular life" (p. 98): the action and place of cutting tobacco are seen with an almost slow-motion vividness. The past is more immediate to him than the present; the focus of his recollections is "the spoiled mansion, Fortnell House", whose "insistence" (p. 82), in line with his career, escapes the form of the short story. Yet Metcalf's story manages to encompass the nature and impact of this psychological and physical remnant through particular detail and, almost as tellingly, through a series of the narrator's personal associations and historical-cultural parallels. These, too, give the depth, range, and texture of place which the narrator claims to find so unapproachable through short fiction. 20

The region the narrator remembers is echoed in a passage he recalls from Joyce Gary's To Be a Pilgrim, which also specifies a man who "ran away from so much history" (p. 82), a point the old writer has already emphatically denied about himself. In a touch of Metcalfian subtlety, Gary's novel also features a manor house which shares some of the historical and emotional values embodied by Metcalf s character. Gary's title prompts the reflection, "I, too, have thought myself a pilgrim . . . not knowing all my life that the mecca of my pilgrimage had been reached so young" (p. 83). This story, too, is not without its sense of the holy and numinous, and its virtually religious enactments. When the narrator recalls the practice of the Dogon tribe, who included masks and carvings as "a fixed abode for spirits liberated by death" in their burial rites (p. 83), the clear parallel with the meaning of Fortnell House is anticipated. The narrator's identification of his wrist with a "wrist of land" (p. 85) metaphorically demonstrates his total identification with the seashore of his boyhood "scavenging" (p. 84): what he remembers is part of him. This crude form of collecting, besides being recalled in almost tangible physical detail, is given several historical parallels in various earlier plunderers, smugglers, and collectors. It constitutes both a credible boyhood activity and an equivalent of the narrator's present telling-over of his own treasures, his memories. His remembered "journey" (p. 84) to The Rocks echoes the earlier idea of pilgrimage; that this shoreline feature represented "a fossilized monster" (p. 84) to the boy he was then is a more distant extension of his historical sense beyond "another time more real to me" (p. 82). The solitary cormorant the boy noted epitomizes his own singularity, then and now in memory. The Iron Age earthworks, the Double Dykes, are also significant: they are another historical remainder whose name suggests the two time schemes of the narrator. Again the details of his memories, a convincing attachment to place, are highly visual, filled out with historical facts as well as with the boy's informed imaginings. His climbing of the headland was a "ritual" (p. 85), a term with religious associations. Hengistbury Head was his "Valley of the Kings" (p. 86) - see his almost immediate respect for "Monarch" butterflies - where he "always poured a trickle of lemonade" (p. 209), a ritualistic gesture of reverence to the imagined presence of Hengist. Here again land and body became inextricably associated: as a boy and as a man the narrator has been attracted to burial mounds, versions of the as yet unvisited Fortnell House. He has also told us of his youthful proclivity to name things, which carries over into his adult life: "How I hug these words to myself, savouring them" (p. 94). The narrator's son-in-law likes a weed-free environment, but he himself relishes unregulated nature; like the Monarch butterflies he prefers "ground less disciplined" (p. 88). This leads to his admission of undisciplined bladder problems: "I have to suffer the indignity of struggling from this reclining chair like a wounded thing to go indoors to the lavatory" (p. 88). Yet this account and the subsequent "dribble of urine" (p. 88) also find a parallel in the old man's recollections. A gamekeeper's ferrets have wounded rabbits in their bur-

rows, some of which "were wet underneath with trickles of thick bright yellow urine which stood on the fur" (p. 95). Nature and the old man's nature continue to be inextricably linked, and we recall the ritualistic trickle of lemonade. The narrator's dislike of Wordsworth ("I am uncomfortable with abstraction, his or mine", p. 89), while seemingly a dislocated reflection, is primarily an endorsement of his dedication to natural particulars. The reference to the poet also introduces several moments of the boy's Wordsworthian "feeling of holy terror" in Nature (p. 89) - see, for example, the poet's frightened reaction to a cliff which seemed to stride after him in Book First of The Prelude, and which filled his dreams with "huge and mighty Forms" (1. 398). As a boy, Wordsworth "journey'd towards the Vale that I had chosen" (1. 93), and the narrator's personal Valley of the Kings is perhaps more than an incidental parallel. The old man's boyhood reaction to the grass snake, the "great shape" (p. 89) in the woods, and the "slow worm king" (p. 90) certainly repeat the youthful Wordsworth's accounts of moments of awe if not actual terror. The narrator's "killingjar" (p. 90) for butterflies - the antithesis of his present approval of Monarchs - is a variation of Wordsworth's "the bird / Which was the captive of another's toils / Became my prey" (11. 319-321). Finally, that Wordsworth saw himself as a "plunderer" (1. 329) - the old man's epithet for Sir Charles Fortnell and his like - is another confirmation of the narrator's less-than-complete rejection of Wordsworth. The narrator now remembers that his own children "were always too young to begin to learn and appropriate things and place" (p. 91). These are abilities he has already amply demonstrated in himself as a youth, and are perhaps backhanded justifications of his present dismissive feelings about his family. It becomes increasingly evident that the old man has always been more alive to things and places than to people. The reflection leads him to derogatory and comic sketches of the personnel of the Rosen College Preparatory High School, incongruously located "above the Chateau BarB-Q Restaurant and Take-Out Service" (p. 91). The contrast of this place with the old man's youthful pastoral favourites is telling. The Rosen teachers were ludicrous: geography was handled by an ex-masseur, while the science teacher believed pea-hens were fertilized by the wind "because his grandmother had told him" (p. 92). This dry, comic, Metcalfian turn makes its points: people are not to be preferred to nature, and the uninformed grandmother is another invocation of the past. The narrator's memory of a desolated Mrs. Rosen serves to show the truer generosity of his spirit, beyond his initial acknowledgment that "I am an old man; I am allowed to be crotchety" (p. 80). The narrator's earlier, apparently unconnected reflection "Words on paper. Words on paper" (p. 90) now takes on substance, in a hierarchy of paper. First come the inventions he and his accountant practise annually, next his own literary papers in cartons and his testamentary dispositions ("I should not pretend any longer", p. 93), and finally his memory of "abandoned" manuscripts (p. 93) in Fortnell House. The progression runs from the amusingly conspiratorial to the elegant, but also from the practical through the threat of "oblivion" (p. 93) to that which is ultimately discarded.

Once again an active sensuous memory possesses him: as formerly he could smell the honeysuckle, now he can feel the texture of the "half-leather ledger" (p. 94). Death and decay are never far from the old man's consciousness. The papers of Fortnell House lead to the bludgeon "used to kill fish" (p. 94) and to the gamekeeper's "gibbet" (p. 95) employed by other collectors, and to the images of animal decay. The speculative attraction of "children ... towards death and dying" (p. 95) and the narrator's vivid memory of the "ambivalence" of a young girl's reaction to a newborn litter (p. 95) direct him back to fiction: "as with so many of my stories, I could find no adequate structure" (p. 96). The aesthetic observation is a comment from within this story by Metcalf himself, whose narrative structure is that of memory, with its apparently haphazard arrangements which nevertheless have their own order, logic, consistency, and careful repetition. The boy's first visit to Fortnell House emphasizes associations with death and decay: iron spears, rank laurels, an overgrown dark wood, grass and weeds, blind boarded windows, a padlocked door, and broken windows - a catalogue of details which follows his acquisition of a cutlass. The weapon recalls his grandfather's clasp knife and Hengist's "Bone-Biter" (p. 86), and anticipates "a treasury" (p. 97) of killing implements discovered in Fortnell House. The reader becomes aware that by this point the story has been figuratively and literally filled with an extraordinary number of forms of death, attack, and the ravages of time. What the old man recalls of his boyish discoveries continues to have a singular dimension and texture. Sir Charles Fortnell, for all his sophisticated collecting, is implicitly linked with earlier plunderers like Vikings and smugglers; yet his wish to preserve, like the Dogon and the narrative itself, is honourable. His "repository of collections" (p. 97) is but one aspect of the old writer's primal dedication to "particular life". The added comment, "all else is tricks of the trade or inexpressible" (p. 98), ties together the nature of narrative as well as this narrative's central motif of the collecting of particulars. Both are epitomized in Josiah Wedgwood and his refusal of anything less than a personal commitment to perfection, a "story" (p. 99) much loved by this lover of various forms of Mecca. The memory of the genitals of Patricia Hopkins, "better remembered than the bodies of two wives" (p. 99), is not a gratuitous sexual incident, but yet another instance of particular life - though it does confirm that the old man's limited interest in people ended very early in life, as he became possessed by more personal repositories. His final memory is of his last visit to Fortnell House, and it is given in decidedly Gothic, haunted house terms - including the cataloguer of the library as "a black shape" (p. 100). The persistence of memory now finds the old man revisiting Fortnell House in his dreams, climbing the stairs again to "reach the rooms above" (p. 100) and complete his last visit. His is the interrupted dream which each night gets closer to the dark at the top of the stairs, where something is awaiting the fearful but compulsive dreamer, a traditional situation of Gothic stories and a familiar metaphor for death. The old writer's concluding desire to watch dace and 21

perch swim in "the refracted sunlight" (p. 101) is not just the final detail in his life of particulars. Refraction is the term used to describe the bending of light rays as they pass from one medium to another, and it may be seen as Metcalfs final implicit comment on the technique of "The Years in Exile", for the old man's memories have not suffered refraction through time. Instead, we have been persuaded by his particularity, his ironies at the expense of the present, and his controlled but genuine sentiments. These observations about "Keys and Watercress" and "The Years in Exile" may suggest the implicit treasures of the majority of John Metcalfs short stories. His stories continue to be many-faceted performances, rich in suggestive physical detail, infused with emotional accuracy, and, above all, executed with an artistic control and confidence which have been rarely equalled in Canada. 1 John Metcalf, "Keys and Watercress", The Lady Who Sold Furniture (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1970), p. 129. 2 John Metcalf, "The Years in Exile", The Teeth of My Father (Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1975), p. 80.

1971-75

1976-78

Chronology 1938 1938-56 1957-61

1961 1962-65

1966-68

1969-70

22

John Wesley Metcalf born November 12 in Carlisle, Cumberland, England, the second son of a Methodist minister and a former teacher. Attends grammar schools in Bournemouth and Beckenham. Reads English and theology at the University of Bristol on a scholarship (Second Class Honours B.A., 1960), and travels in Europe. Certificate in Education, Bristol. Teaches secondary modern school in Bristol and at a boys' reformatory until dismissed. Emigrates to Canada; teaches English and Canadian history at Rosemount High School, Montreal (1962-64), and in other schools administered by the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal. First story, "Early Morning Rabbits", wins prize in CBC's Young Writers' competition and is read on the network program "Anthology". Eight stories appear in two issues of Prism International, 1964. After father's funeral in England, teaches at RCAF station in Cold Lake, Alberta. Marries Gale Courey, 1965. Hoping to write full-time, he returns to England, but lack of money forces him to teach at a comprehensive school in Bristol. Returns to Montreal. Two stories included in Modern Canadian Stories. Teaches at Ross High School, marked matriculation essays, edits three Canadian educational texts, and begins compiling and co-editing textbooks of poetry (1968, 1970) and the five-volume Wordcraft series (1968,1969, 1970,1977). Awarded first Canada Council grant in 1968 (also 1969, 1971). Five stories included in New Canadian Writing', "The Estuary" awarded the University of Western Ontario's President's Medal for the best story published in Canada in 1968. Teaches at Loyola College, Montreal (1969-71). In 1970, his first book, The Lady Who Sold Furniture, issued, and

1979-81

1982-84

1985

1986

1987

1988

Canadian citizenship granted; edits Sixteen by Twelve. Establishes the Montreal Story Tellers (to 1976) and teaches part time at McGill University (197172). First novel, Going Down Slow, released (1972); edits The Narrative Voice and Kaleidoscope, 1972. Helps to establish the Writers' Union of Canada and serves on its executive; writerin-residence, University of New Brunswick. Marriage dissolves. Edits The Speaking Earth (1973). In 1973-74, teaches at Loyola and Vanier College, Montreal. In 1974, receives first Canada Council Senior Arts Award (also 1976, 1978, 1980, 1983, 1984, and 1986). In 1975 marries Myrna Teitelbaum and publishes The Teeth of My Father (stories). Writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa, where he organizes the Canadian Short Story Conference. Writer-in-residence, Loyola. Co-edits 76: New Canadian Stories, subsequently Best Canadian Stories (1977-82), and, with Clark Blaise, Here & Now (1977). Moves to Delta, Ontario. Fiddlehead, No. 114, features a "Special John Metcalf Section"."Private Parts: A Memoir" wins the Canadian Fiction Magazine's Annual Contributor's Prize for 1977 and is published in Girl in Gingham (two novellas, 1978). Edits Stories Plus', writer-in-residence, Concordia University (1980-81), where he also teaches creative writing. Family moves to Ottawa; publishes General Ludd (novel, 1980) and edits First Impressions (1980, with successive volumes in 1981 and 1982). Essay collection, Kicking Against the Pricks, appears, as well as Selected Stories in the New Canadian Library series (1982). Edits Making It New. Lecture and reading tour of German universities for the Department of External Affairs, 1983; in 1984 co-edits The New Press Anthology #1 with Leon Rooke (#2, 1985). Guest editor of The Literary Review; writer-inresidence, University of Bologna. "The Curate's Egg" published in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 30; No. 70 of The Malahat Review is a special issue on Metcalfs work. Wins the Western Magazine Award for Fiction. Edits The Bumper Book, and publishes Adult Entertainment, which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. In October co-sponsors the "New Canadian Writers/New Canadian Critics" conference at Queen's University. With Michael Ignatieff represents Canada at the international PEN conference in Yugoslavia; lecture tour of Yugoslavian universities for Department of External Affairs. Writer-in-residence, Vancouver Public Library; wins the OttawaCarleton Literary Award. Edits Writers in Aspic and Carry on Bumping, and co-edits The Macmillan Anthology 1 with Leon Rooke (#2, 1989). Writer-in-residence, Nepean Public Library. What Is a Canadian Literature*! published. In November, the conference "Coming of Age: John Metcalf and the Canadian Short Story" is held at the University of Guelph.

There's nothing I want to say to anybody. I want to make people/££/. I want them to live inside the experience of the story and by doing that, by responding to the story's texture and rhetoric, they'll find that meanings grow out of the seemingly meaningless. Geoff Hancock, "Communiqu6: Interview with John Metcalf", p. 23. When one advances the literary commonplace that the way a writer writes is what he writes, bafflement is palpable. Readers are going to continue missing all the fun until they learn that the search for "le mot juste" is not some quaint, writerly eccentricity. Mangled rhetoric, purple prose, slapdash vocabulary, the odd patch of total incomprehensibility - these are not mere facial blemishes, as it were, but mortal wounds. "What Happened to CanLit?", Globe and Mail, Books Literary Supplement, November 19, 1983, p. 1.

Comments by John Metcalf

As I've said many times before, literature is a relationship between books and readers. It's a relationship which in Canada is tenuous. A large part of the reading audience is passive. There is an urgent need to build that relationship through discussion and argument, through the passionate exchange of views. We must make our literature ours through our love of it. Introduction to The Bumper Book (Downsview: ECW Press, 1986), p. 5.

Take joy in the Placing of words. Know the weight, colour, and texture of things. If your main interest is prose, study poets. Rewrite. Rewrite. "Soaping a Meditative Foot (Notes for a Young Writer)", in John Metcalf, ed., The Narrative Voice (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972), pp. 154, 155, 156, 159. [ Notes 6, 8, 19, 29, 30. ]

The State looms behind our writing. I'm not trying to say that our writers set out to write nationalist tracts or that the Canada Council consciously attempts to influence the nature and direction of the work but what I am saying is this: because the Canadian literary world is wholly subsidized by the State it is impossible to write imaginatively or critically without being conscious of being Canadian, without being self-consciously Canadian, without being conscious of the pervasive social and political desire for "Canadianness". Freedom from Culture (2nd ed; Vancouver: Tanks, 1987), pp. 8-9.

. . . my use of paragraphing is to get different weights and emphases - rather than for syntactical purposes. I write and re-write endlessly to get the exact look and feel of what it is I'm saying. I'm very concerned that the voices on the page convey the exact nuances that I want the reader to hear. And I can only get the reader to understand those nuances by a very careful control of punctuation and typographical device. And even by the silence of white paper. Geoff Hancock, "An Interview with John Metcalf, Canadian Fiction Magazine, No. 39 (1981), p. 114.

Canadian literature, then, is not a commonly-agreed-upon corpus of work. There exists no consensus. We cannot even agree about who our best writers are. There exists no hierarchy. Criticism is in the hands of rabid factions. There exists no single critical work which offers an undisputed overview. The readership is seemingly far too small to apply to all these problems the brake of common sense. What Is a Canadian Literature! (Guelph: Red Kite Press, 1988), p. 21.

Where twenty years ago Canadian stories stressed content - what a story was about - the main emphasis now is on the story as verbal and rhetorical performance. Our best writers are concerned with the story as thing to be expertenced rather than as thing to be understood. This more than anything else is what seems to baffle some readers - and not a few critics; it is difficult for those of us writing stories to understand why this is so since these concerns have been dominant since about 1920. "Editing the Best", Kicking Against the Pricks (Downsview: ECW Press, 1982), p. 168.

Stories are not puzzles to be solved. Nor do they convey simple moral messages. They are not sermons; they are not propaganda for any cause. Their primary purpose, I must insist, is emotional. But that emotional impact will not be felt until the reader has responded with great skill and knowledge to all the nuances of a highly complex performance. Reading a story is a purely literary activity. "The Curate's Egg", Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 30 (Winter 1984-85), p. 52.

23

Selected Bibliography

Comments on John Metcalf For Metcalf, the short story is an approximation of poetry in that it offers to the reader through the subtlety and complexity of its linguistic and imagistic patterns a brief but intense insight into life at its most fundamental psychological and emotional level. The words of a Metcalf story are a springboard, points of departure, for the actual story that we, the reader, create with an imaginative response; for, through its conciseness and intensity, a Metcalf story asks us to fill out its narrative or dramatic frame by acts of inference and imagination. Barry Cameron, "An Approximation of Poetry: The Short Stories of John Metcalf, Studies in Canadian Literature, II, No. 1 (Winter 1977), 17. Most important, he is preoccupied with a well-worn theme: the relationship between art and human experience. For Metcalf this relationship is elusive, problematic, and in need of constant redefinition. Consequently his stories return again and again to explore the nature of aesthetic process, and to find the ingredients from which his own art is composed. Robert Lecker, On the Line (Downsview: ECW Press, 1982), p. 59. I have the feeling - and I'm sure there are other writers who have it - that he is one person who can tell where the soft spots are, where the words are pasted over the cracks, can tell what's fake, what's shoddy, what's an evasion, maybe even mark the place where a loss of faith hit you, not momentously like an avalanche but drearily like a dry trickle of clods and stones. It won't matter what compliments you've been getting from other quarters. Alice Munro, "On John Metcalf: Taking Writing Seriously", Malahat Review, No. 70 (March 1985), p. 5. A product of "New Criticism" thinking, which he argues is "the only critical tool that's of the slightest value," Metcalf has set out to create fiction distinguished by compression, intensity, allusiveness, and austerity. He prizes imagery over statement, the detail that illuminates over the detail that merely adds. His work, in short, is a metaphor-hunter's paradise. Michael Peterman, "In Praise of Shorter Fiction", Journal of Canadian Fiction, No. 35/36 (1986), p. 160. Thanks to Metcalf, whose numerous anthologies of short stories have been appearing regularly since the early 1970s, a whole generation of talented writers is emerging who find the short story a satisfying and infinitely varied form of expression. W.J. Keith, Canadian Literature in English (London and New York: Longman, 1985), p. 172.

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Works by John Metcalf Books "Stories by John Metcalf, in New Canadian Writing 1969: Stories by John Metcalf, D.O. Spettigue and CJ. Newman. Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1969, pp. 1-63. The Lady Who Sold Furniture. Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1970. Going Down Slow. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972. The Teeth of My Father. Ottawa: Oberon, 1975. Girl in Gingham. Ottawa: Oberon, 1978. General Ludd. Downsview: ECW Press, 1980. Selected Stories. New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982. Kicking Against the Pricks. Downsview: ECW Press, 1982; repr. [with corrections], Guelph: Red Kite, 1986. Adult Entertainment. Toronto: Macmillan, 1986. What Is a Canadian Literature? Guelph: Red Kite, 1988. Books Edited Sixteen by Twelve: Short Stories by Canadian Writers. Toronto: Ryerson, 1970. The Narrative Voice: Short Stories and Reflections by Canadian Authors. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972. 76: Best Canadian Stories, 77: Best Canadian Stories. [With Joan Harcourt] Ottawa: Oberon, 1976, 1977; 78: Best Canadian Stories, 79: Best Canadian Stories, 80: Best Canadian Stories. [With Clark Blaise.] Ottawa: Oberon, 1978, 1979, 1980; 81: Best Canadian Stories, 82: Best Canadian Stories. [With Leon Rooke.] Ottawa: Oberon, 1981, 1982. Here & Now: Best Canadian Stories. [With Clark Blaise.] Ottawa: Oberon, 1977. Stories Plus: Canadian Stories with Authors' Commentaries. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1979. First Impressions, Second Impressions, Third Impressions. Ottawa: Oberon, 1980, 1981, 1982. New Worlds: A Canadian Collection of Stories with Notes. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1980. Making It New: Contemporary Canadian Stories. Toronto: Methuen, 1982; rev. ed., 1985. The New Press Anthology 1: Best Canadian Fiction', The New Press Anthology #2: Best Stories. [With Leon Rooke.] New Press Canadian Classics. Toronto: General, 1984, 1985. The Bumper Book, Carry on Bumping. Toronto: ECW Press, 1986, 1988. Writers in Aspic. Montreal: V6hicule Press, 1988. The Macmillan Anthology 1, The Macmillan Anthology 2. [With Leon Rooke.] Toronto: Macmillan, 1988, 1989.

Uncollected Articles "Soaping a Meditative Foot (Notes for a Young Writer)", in John Metcalf, ed., The Narrative Voice: Short Stories and Reflections by Canadian Authors. Edited by John Metcalf. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972, pp. 15459. "The Curate's Egg". Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 30 (Winter 1984-85), pp. 35-59. "What Happened to CanLit?" Globe and Mail, Books Literary Supplement, November 19, 1983, p. 1.

"Notes on Writing a Story", Fiddlehead, No. 114 (Summer 1977), pp. 68-72. "Author's Commentary", in John Metcalf, ed., Sixteen by Twelve: Short Stories by Canadian Writers. Toronto: Ryerson, 1970, pp. 198-203. "Paintings about Painting: Notes Towards an Essay on Tony Calzetta", Malahat Review, No. 70 (March 1985), pp. 81-97. Interviews Cameron, Barry. "The Practice of the Craft: A Conversation with John Metcalf, Queen's Quarterly, LXXXII, 3 (Autumn 1975), 402-24. Smith, Michael. "Interview", Books in Canada, VIII, 1 (January 1979), pp. 23-24. Hancock, Geoff. "An Interview with John Metcalf, Canadian Fiction Magazine, No. 39 (1981), pp. 97-123. [Reprinted as "Communiqu6", in Kicking Against the Pricks]. Selected Criticism Cameron, Barry. "An Approximation of Poetry: The Short Stories of John Metcalf, Studies in Canadian Literature, II (1977), 17-35. [Reprinted with abridgement and revision as "An Approximation of Poetry: Three Stories by John Metcalf, in The Montreal Story Tellers, pp. 159-68.] . "Invention in Girl in Gingham", Fiddlehead, No. 114 (Summer 1977), pp. 120-29. . John Metcalf. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Darling, Michael. "The Use of Language in Metcalf s 'Single Gents Only'", in John Metcalf, ed., Writers in Aspic. Montreal: V6hicule Press, 1986, pp. 155-70. Garebian, Keith. "General Ludd: A Satire on Decadence", Canadian Literature, No. 101 (Summer 1984), pp. 43-55. . "The Deflationary Structure in Metcalf s Novellas", Malahat Review, No. 70 (March 1985), pp. 11830. Keith, WJ. Canadian Literature in English. Longman Literature in English Series, gen. eds. David Carroll and Michael Wheeler. London and New York: Longman, 1985. Lecker, Robert. "John Metcalf: Unburdening the Mystery", in On the Line: Readings in the Short Fiction of Clark Blaise, John Metcalf, and Hugh Hood. Downsview: ECW Press, 1982, pp. 59-97. Ledger, Brent. "Fighting Words", Books in Canada, XVI, 3 (April 1987), 9-10, 12-15. Martin, Sandra. "Critic", Saturday Night, CIII, 10 (October 1988), 89-92.

Moss, John. "Metcalf, John", A Reader's Guide to the Canadian Novel. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981, pp. 196-200. Nischick, Reingard M. "Contrastive Structures in John Metcalf s Artist Stories", Critique XXIX, 2 (1988), 16378. . "The Short Story in Canada: John Metcalf and Others Making It New", Die Neueren Sprachen, LXXXVI (June 1987), 232-46. O'Rourke, David. "John Metcalf, in William Toye, ed., The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 523-24. Peterman, Michael. "In Praise of Shorter Fiction", Journal of Canadian Fiction, No. 35/36 (1986), pp. 160-64. Rollins, Douglas. John Metcalf and His Works. Vol. VII of Canadian Writers and Their Works, Fiction series, ed. Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Downsview: ECW Press, 1985, pp. 153-211. Rooke, Constance, ed. Malahat Review, No. 70: A Special Issue on John Metcalf (March 1985). . "Pastoral Restraint: An Essay on John Metcalf s The Lady Who Sold Furniture", Malahat Review, No. 70 (March 1985), pp. 131-45. "Between the World and the Word: John Metcalf s The Teeth of My Father'", New Quarterly, No. 7 (Spring 1987), pp. 240-46. Struthers, J.R. (Tim). The Montreal Story Tellers: Memoirs, Photographs, Critical Essays. Montreal: V6hicule Press, 1985. Thompson, Kent. "John Metcalf: A Profile", Fiddlehead, No. 114 (Summer 1977), pp. 57-63. [Reprinted, revised and updated, in The Montreal Story Tellers, pp. 14858.] Vauthier, Simone. "Rambling Through John Metcalf s The Estuary'", Malahat Review, No. 70 (March 1985), pp. 98-117. Woodcock, George. "Critical Complicity: The Ambiguities of General LudcF, Malahat Review, No. 70 (March 1985), pp. 146-57. Reprinted as "John Metcalf and the Ambiguities of General Ludd"', in Northern Spring: The Flowering of Canadian Literature. Vancouver: Douglas & Mclntyre, 1987, pp. 147-58. A Note on the Contributor Louis K. MacKendrick teaches at the University of Windsor. Editor of Probable Fictions: Alice Munro's Narrative Acts, he has written monographs on Robert Harlow and Al Purdy and has published reviews and articles on Canadian writers.

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Michael Ondaatje

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by Barbara Leckie In Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, the main character, Buddy Bolden, warns his reader, "As you try to explain me I will spit you, yellow, out of my mouth."1 These words apply equally well to Ondaatje's work as a whole: explanations do not hold. Ondaatje was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), educated in London, England, for eight years, and has been living in Canada since he was nineteen. The images in Ondaatje's work reflect both his affection for the Canadian landscape ("scrub snow", "stacked wood", "a bare tree") and his tropical background (the "maniac monsoon", "thalagoyas" [a cross between an iguana and a giant lizard], "spice gardens"), and his themes similarly range from the everyday (farmers, dogs, babysitters, personal relationships) to the strange, unexpected, or bizarre (the farmer who breeds mad dogs, the babysitter's impression that her employer licks her ear when it is the employer's dog, the almost surreal marriage of Ondaatje's parents recounted in Running in the Family). The manner in which Ondaatje tells a story or writes a poem, moreover, is crucial to its interpretation; in an interview he notes that many critics overlook what he calls the "architecture" of the text in their attempt to locate and pin down "meaning". Ondaatje is a poet, a writer of long narrative works, a novelist, a screenwriter, a movie director, and a photographer. In part, the difficulty in "explaining" Ondaatje's work results from his blurring of the distinctions between these different domains. His long narrative works and his novel include photographs, his poetry is often structured thematically (he wanted, for example, to call his collection of poems, Secular Love, a novel), and his non-poetic work displays an extreme sensitivity to the poetic quality of the narrative. Ondaatje's challenge to traditional genre distinctions is matched by a similar challenge to distinctions between personal and public domains, fact and fiction, order and chaos, reason and madness. It is not Ondaatje's aim to reconcile these apparently opposed poles; rather his work conveys the lively tension and often startling effect produced by the combination of disparate formal and thematic elements. How many poets, for example, celebrate conversation conducted in an outhouse? He writes: "How you and I talked! / Casually, and

side by side,... / in a double outhouse in Blyth."2 Ondaatje's work typically conveys such radical departures from what one conventionally expects of the writer. The narrator of his poems is as comfortable in an outhouse as he is at a desk; and he is, moreover, always careful to acknowledge the community to which the writing is indebted. One finds in Ondaatje's writing, then, a mixing of genres (poetry with prose, fiction with autobiography), a calling into question of the single authorial voice (and by extension, 27

of the sort of literary authority which posits a single meaning), and an exploration of categories that have traditionally been treated as mutually exclusive (madness and reason, fact and fiction, and so on). While Ondaatje has always combined public details with private concerns, the development of his writing reveals a decisive shift from the public to the personal. His early writing frequently deals with historical figures (Mrs. Fraser in the man with seven toes, Billy the Kid in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Buddy Bolden in Coming Through Slaughter) and mythology (the last section of The Dainty Monsters), while later works focus on more personal subjects (the family history recounted in Running in the Family and the still more personal history related in Secular Love). His most recent novel, In the Skin of a Lion, returns again to the fictional recreation of historical figures and periods but differs from earlier works in that it is set in Toronto. Ondaatje's stated preference for lies, rumours, and unverifiable stories over facts in his accounts of historical figures, his family, and himself lends to his work a sense of surprise, sometimes even alarm, and, unexpectedly, a heightened sense of authenticity. Ondaatje's use of history, his stress on multi-voiced narratives spoken from unusual locations, and his self-consciousness about different art forms are indicative of the time during which he has written. His first collection of poetry, Dainty Monsters, was published in 1967, a time when Canadian literature began to see a great deal of experimentation by writers like Leonard Cohen (about whom Ondaatje wrote a short critical study), Margaret Atwood, and bp Nichol. Linda Hutcheon has discussed the subsequent changes in Canadian literature in the 1970s and 1980s in terms of postmodernism, and she has identified Ondaatje as one of its prominent practitioners. Put briefly, postmodernism as defined by Hutcheon stresses self-reflexive texts (art that self-consciously reflects its status as art); social and historical awareness (with a focus not on history's "truth" but on the idea that history is produced or created in the telling); and a rejection of fixed and stable meanings. While Ondaatje never explicitly aligns himself with any literary movement and rarely writes critical essays himself, the affinities between his work and postmodernism are clear. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see Ondaatje's work only as an example of postmodernism; ultimately, like Bolden referred to above, he defies the categories within which critics attempt to contain him. Prom Dainty Monsters to Secular Love, Ondaatje's poetry has expressed a strong unmistakable voice, attentive to unusual details and unexpected combinations. One finds in Dainty Monsters a poet who casually drives over two birds copulating in the road and is not shocked by the "flurry of red feathers"; plants which are calm and peaceful by day but which at night "in frenzy heave floors apart, lust with common daisies / . . . release a fart";3 and in a final section entitled "Troy Town", poems based on Greek mythology. In this collection the bizarre and startling images, the combination of violence and beauty, the interest in the relation between animals and humans, and the mechanical metaphors (of clocks, watches, machines) frequently noted in his sub28

sequent work first emerge. Rat Jelly, his second collection of poetry, is divided into three sections entitled "Families", "Live Bait", and "White Dwarfs". The first section closes with the poem "Letters and Other Worlds", a touching and sensitive account of the flamboyant life and solitary death of the poet's father. It is in this collection too that one finds the poems that are often cited as representative of Ondaatje's aesthetic. In "'the gate in his head'", Ondaatje expresses concerns that recur in much of his writing: the tension between chaos and order ("My mind is pouring chaos / in nets onto the page");4 the blind accidental quality of artistic discovery ("A blind lover, don't know / what I love till I write it out"); and perhaps most importantly the desire not to capture what is loved in the fixed net of artistic creation. Like the photograph the poet receives in a letter, writing too is "caught vision" but "caught at the wrong moment", so that "the beautiful formed things" are "shapeless, awkward / moving to the clear." The final poem in the collection, "White Dwarfs", expresses the theme and form of silence ("my fear / of no words of / falling without words" [RJ, p. 70]) pertinent not only to Ondaatje's poems but also to his longer narrative works. Ondaatje refers here to "that perfect edge / where there is no social fuel" as a place of silence and privacy which he both fears and respects. He likens this position to imploding stars and "the perfect white between the words" where "what we cannot see is growing / in all the colours we cannot see" (RJ, p. 71). The attempt to maintain one's balance without falling - or more specifically here, without imploding - signified by the white dwarf star, is repeatedly addressed in Ondaatje's work. The boundary between balancing and falling, for example, is explored in poems such as "Letters", "White Dwarfs", and "Claude Glass", and in Billy and Slaughter. The loss of balance will often lead to madness, suicide, or tragic death. In these poems, then, Ondaatje expresses both the tension between chaos and order, between silence and writing, and by extension between an extreme privacy and a cautious publicity. Ondaatje's desire to express, but not reconcile, mutually opposed ideas in the same act is perhaps best stated in these lines from "Burning Hills": "He has written slowly and carefully / with great love and great coldness" (RJ, p. 58). There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, for which Ondaatje won his second Governor General's Award in 1979, includes poems from both Dainty Monsters and Rat Jelly in addition to nineteen new poems in a section entitled "Pig Glass". The poems in "Pig Glass" include the rivers, trees, and birds of the Canadian landscape, domestic poems involving family, friends, and fellow poets, and exotic descriptions of the "dream journey" to Sri Lanka, the "expanding stories" that will later be recounted in Running. In Ondaatje's most recent collection of poetry, Secular Love, the poetic mood shifts to a poignant and unflinching account of the breakup of Ondaatje's marriage and the growth of a new relationship. The text is divided into four chronological sections: "Claude Glass", "Tin Roof, "Rock Bottom", and "Skin Boat", each of which deals, in a confessional but unsentimental manner, with a certain stage of the breakup and recovery. The poet refers to "giant scratches / of pain"

beneath the sea (SL, p. 36), "the children wise / as tough shrubs / but they are not tough / - so I fear / how anything can grow from this" (SL, p. 77), and people "grim with situation" (SL, p. 47). Ondaatje's style in this collection has a precise spare beauty, a sense of magic and hope in the midst of pain and sadness. From the opening poem in which the drunk poet feels as if he is walking underwater, incoherent, drowning in moonlight, to the poem about the moon reflected on water as people swim, to the final poem in which the poet is underwater grasping both for something to hold on to and for a "name", the stress on water, moonlight, and naming are significant in a text which both vividly registers the outer (trees, loons, colours) and inner (sadness, pain, hope) landscape of the poet's world. Ondaatje's long poem man and his long narrative works Billy and Slaughter share many of the concerns found in his poetry: the sensitivity to language and the interest in silence, chaos, and order. In addition, however, these longer works develop the distinction (or lack of distinction) between fact and fiction and, in the case of the latter two texts, between different genres. The story line in each of these works is similar: a character gets lost or disappears and the narrative records both the struggle to find the lost person and the interaction between the pursued and pursuer in terms of the tension between the outlaw and the law. This plot then extends Ondaatje's artistic concern with chaos and order. In man, Mrs. Fraser turns in the convict Potter; in Billy, Billy the Kid is pursued, captured, and killed by the sheriff Pat Garrett; and in Slaughter, Buddy Bolden is pursued and brought home by the detective Webb. In both Billy and Slaughter, Ondaatje is careful to stress the friendship which existed between Billy and Garrett and between Buddy and Webb; pursuer and pursued are in this way doubles of each other. A short paragraph at the end of man informs the reader that the sequence is based on the true story of a shipwrecked woman, Mrs Fraser. In Ondaatje's version the unnamed Mrs. Fraser, helpless and frightened in the Australian bush, encounters and is raped by aborigines. She is found by a convict, Potter, whom she ultimately betrays when they return to civilization. The sequence is composed of thirty-four lyrics; these poems are startling both in the highly charged immediacy of often brutal images and in the condensed, spare precision of the poet's voice. The distinction between a reasonable surface and a wild, manic depth conveyed in the closing poem - "Green wild rivers in these people / running under ice that's calm" - is increasingly developed in Ondaatje's later work. Like man, Billy is based on a real historical figure. In both, Ondaatje explores the way in which a myth, or fiction, is created out of the given facts; he states, "facts start suggesting things, almost breed."5 The nature of fiction and fact as human constructs and as indigenous mythology is in this way emphasized. Meaning is never fixed in a real historical truth because the "real" story can be changed, told again with a different emphasis, interpreted differently at a different time. Ondaatje himself notes that there is never only one version of a story. He says in an interview, "I guess you

always do go back and write the same story. The least you can do is make it look like something else."6 And the epigraph to his most recent book, In the Skin of a Lion, "Never again will a single story be told as if it is the only one", stresses Ondaatje's interest not in what is said, but in the way it is said, not in a single fixed meaning, but in a variety of meanings. Ondaatje's style itself exemplifies these beliefs. In Billy he uses a number of sources, from transcribed interviews to songs and photographs, in his attempt to present several different perspectives on the story. The description of Billy's death itself is told six times in the text. This style, which has been called "layering" by Tom Marshall, creates a very dense and concentrated energy, similar to the white dwarf star described above. The difficulty in separating life from death and madness from reason in Billy is also indicative of Ondaatje's style. A considerable portion of the text, for example, is apparently written by Billy after he is dead. On the first page the narrator teases the reader with a "picture" of Billy which is only an empty frame; and in Billy's list of the dead, he includes himself: "and Pat Garrett / sliced off my head. / Blood a necklace on me all my life."7 The tension between madness and reason is cleverly expressed in the description of Garrett as an "assassin sane" (the perfect white between the words provides the double meaning: sane, in/sane) and in Chisum's description of Livingstone, who seemed "a pretty sane guy" but was "mad I guess". Livingstone inbred a race of mad dogs - "Their eyes bulged like marbles; some were blind, their eyes had split" (BKt p. 61) - who in their final pitch of madness turn on Livingstone and devour him and then turn on one another. Ultimately, Livingstone was unable to maintain the balance between his surface appearance of sanity and his peculiar madness. Billy, too, is trying to maintain a careful balance. The animal madness parallels not only a potential human madness (as people turn on each other) but also a potential mechanical madness. The imagery of clocks (and more generally, mechanical precision) first seen in Dainty Monsters is developed further here. The "beautiful machines pivoting on themselves" threaten to collapse like stars if they submit to "the one altered move that will make them maniac" (BK, p. 41). This uneasy balance between control and madness thus conforms to Ondaatje's aesthetic discussed above. The imagery in Billy is often vivid: Billy's "brain coming out like red grass" after he is shot, is a typical example. But there is also a dark humour: after Gregory is shot a chicken digs its beak into his throat to tug out a vein until it is twelve yards long. Gregory's last words are "get away from me yer stupid chicken" (BK, p. 15). Billy's relationship with Angie and Sallie is expressed with a sensitivity to human concerns in the midst of the violence and cruelty. Ondaatje notes that he was trying to find a balance between "gentleness and violence" in Billy; this attempt is consistent with his desire to write with "great coldness, and great love." The careful mixing of historical documents, poems, prose, interviews, songs, and photographs not only makes the line between fact and fiction difficult to determine, but also invites questions about the genre in which Ondaatje is working. 29

Is Billy a long poem? Is it a novel? Is it a historical account of what "really happened"? Is it all three? Or something else? How can we tell? Ondaatje does not provide any easy answers in his writing, but rather encourages questions which challenge traditional methods of interpretation. It was noted earlier that one concern Ondaatje shares with the postmodernist writer is a self-consciousness about the status of art as art. His use of both photography and movies in Billy, his references to the process of writing itself, and much of his poetry exemplify self-reflexive narratives. In Slaughter, written seven years after Billy, this concern is made explicit in a scene in which the narrator identifies with the text's main character, Buddy Bolden. Ondaatje himself notes that Bolden "became the metaphor for any kind of artist: painter, writer, or jazz musician" (BB, p. 10). The ostensible story of Buddy Bolden is not complex: he was a successful jazz musician in New Orleans around the turn of the century. In 1907 he inexplicably went mad while playing his coronet in a public parade and subsequently was placed in a home for the insane. Ondaatje complicates this story by introducing Webb, who, as a detective and as a friend, tries to find Buddy after he disappears, and Bellocq, the hydrocephalic photographer of Story ville whores with whom Buddy forms a close and strange acquaintance before disappearing. In addition, Buddy's wife, Nora, and Robin Brewitt, the woman with whom Buddy has an affair while he is "gone", play key roles in the reader's understanding of Buddy's approach to his art and to his life. Like Billy, Buddy's life has "a fine and precise balance to it" (BK, p. 13) which, when upset, leads to a disturbing and elusive madness. The text is divided into three non-chronological sections. The first section deals with Buddy's "geography" and provides an overview of Buddy from several different perspectives. The second section opens in Buddy's voice; Buddy addresses his narrative to an absent Webb and recounts events unavailable to the other narrators. In addition, new details are presented in this section from both Buddy's and other's viewpoints. The third section describes the parade at which Bolden "goes mad into silence" and explores the nature of his madness. In the acknowledgments to Slaughter, Ondaatje writes: "While I have used real names and characters and historical situations I have also used more personal pieces of friends and fathers. There have been some date changes, some characters brought together, and some facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction." Once again, therefore, the line between fact and fiction is difficult to determine. The text itself is composed of interview statements, narrative sequences, songs, and medical documents, all of which contribute to a multiple point of view and several different versions of the same story. The opening photograph and caption convey the extraordinary intensity and energy which Ondaatje creates in the narrative. There is a photograph of three dolphin sonographs, described in part as follows: "The middle sonograph shows how a dolphin makes both whistles and echolation clicks simultaneously." This simultaneity is paralleled both in 30

Bolden's music (a music which shows "all the possibilities in the middle of the story" [CS, p. 43]) and in the structure of the text, which repeatedly overlaps images, characters, and voices. The simultaneous representation of Bolden and the narrator, strategically placed directly after Bolden's fall into madness and the official documentation issued by the mental hospital, is striking: "When he went mad he was the same age as I am now. The photograph moves and becomes a mirror. When I read he stood in front of mirrors and attacked himself, there was the shock of memory. For I had done that" (CS, p. 133). In Slaughter, as in the middle sonograph, the voices - the factual voice and the fictional voice, the mad voice and the reasonable voice - are constantly intermingling and overlapping. This simultaneity, like the white dwarf star, produces both a dangerous intensity and an irresistible appeal. In 1978 and again in 1979-80 Ondaatje returned to Sri Lanka, his birthplace, to visit relatives and old friends of his family. Running was the product of this experience. It is tempting to call this work autobiographical, although again Ondaatje manipulates facts to suit his artistic vision. In the acknowledgments, he deliberately warns his reader against reading the narrative as a standard autobiography: "I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or 'gesture.' . . . in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts." Again then, Ondaatje plays with the distinction between fact and fiction, between publicity and privacy (his father oscillated between "manic public behaviour" and "secrecy"), as he reconstructs with meticulous detail the "sleepy green landscape" of Ceylon and the story of his family, particularly of his father. The stories Ondaatje presents are colourful and touching: his father's "crooked humour", his love of trains and drink; his grandmother Lalla's "last perfect journey" as she is carried by a flood to her death; the Visitor's Book controversy in which personal attacks lodged by Ondaatje's father against another man and vice versa made it necessary for "the first time in Ceylon history" to rip pages from the guest book. The landscape is described as "crowded surrealism", a description which aptly captures Ondaatje's own style. Ondaatje's most recent work, In the Skin of a Lion, returns not only to North America but to a specifically Canadian setting: Toronto and northern Ontario in the 1920s and 1930s. Ondaatje affirms the power of the story to create a compelling mythology and a history which, like the history of Mrs. Fraser and Buddy Bolden, has gone untold. Instead of focusing on a specific historical personage, however, this time Ondaatje focuses on a specific time and place. The novel is populated by an eclectic cast of characters: Patrick Lewis, the "searcher" hired to find the disappeared millionaire Ambrose Small (again one sees the pattern of lost and found); Nicholas Temelcoff, the immigrant to Canada who builds bridges and later owns a bakery; Clara Thomas, Patrick's and Ambrose's lover; Alice Gull, nun, actress, and later Patrick's lover; Caravaggio, the thief; and all the immigrants who do not speak the language or who are learning the language. They intersect at unexpected moments and create a community from which they can develop a distinct and meaningful identity. Ondaatje's fascination with private acts of madness

(and the silence and implosion with which they are related) is replaced here by public and communal storytelling, a careful blending of historical fact with fictional recreation. It is not surprising, given his adeptness in incorporating other media into his literary works, that Ondaatje has carried his interest both into photography and into the production of a number of films. In 1970 he produced Sons of Captain Poetry, a thirty-five-minute documentary on bp Nichol; in 1972 he produced a short humorous film about kidnapping the family dog called Carry on Crime and Punishment and directed The Clinton Special (about the Theatre Passe Muraille's documentary, The Farm Show). In addition, he has worked with Coach House Press as an editor and has edited a number of books himself, including two books on "beasts" and The Long Poem Anthology. His interest in the design of his own books invites a study of the covers, the liberal use of white space in the texts, the positioning of the photographs, and so on. Performances of his written work range from the dramatic readings of man and Billy to the dramatic performance of Slaughter, the most recent of which took place at Toronto's Silver Dollar in 1989. Ondaatje has made a significant contribution to contemporary literature in his experimentation with genre boundaries. His prose texts resemble novels, poems, histories, biographies, and autobiographies. He moves easily between the written word and visual art (the painter Henri Rousseau is frequently invoked in his earlier work, and man is based on a series of paintings by Sidney Nolan), photography (Billy both uses photographs in the text and uses the camera as a literary analogue for one type of artistic description; in Slaughter one of the main characters is a photographer), music (Slaughter is about a jazz musician and one frequently finds songs inserted in his texts); and Him (in an interview he says that Billy is the film he couldn't afford to make). The formal experiments - the mixtures of different genres and different medias - inevitably affect the story being told. Like Buddy, Ondaatje exhibits a "fear of certainties"; he constantly explores new territory in his attempt to avoid the final, the conclusive, and the absolute. If Ondaatje's work frequently invites this sort of comparison between the writer and his protagonists (especially between Ondaatje and Billy, and Ondaatje and Buddy), it is probably not wise to extend such analogies too far. Ondaatje's writing demands from the reader an unusual degree of involvement and an ability to discriminate between different characters. Ondaatje's privileging of the fluid, unfinished work which cannot be fixed or labelled is similar to the approach of many of his contemporaries, such as bp Nichol, Victor Coleman, Margaret Atwood, George Bowering, and Gwendolyn MacEwen. Situating Ondaatje within the context of the postmodern, however, can obscure the distinctiveness of his voice, the rare beauty, the pain and gentleness that is uniquely his own. Like the "rat in rational" "travelling mad within the poem" to which he refers in the collection Rat Jelly, madness always resides in control, fiction in fact, community in privacy. The "tail of shit" to which one of the characters refers in Slaughter becomes a tale of shit and a tale of truth celebrating a clarity which defies explanation.

1 Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter (Toronto: Anansi, 1976), p. 140. Subsequently cited as CS. 2 Michael Ondaatje, Secular Love (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1984), p. 116. Subsequently cited as SL. 3 Michael Ondaatje, The Dainty Monsters (Toronto: Coach House, 1967), p. 20. 4 Michael Ondaatje, Rat Jelly (Toronto: Coach House, 1973), p. 62. Subsequently cited as RJ. 5 Mark Witten, "Billy, Buddy, and Michael*' [interview with Michael Ondaatje], Books in Canada, VI (June-July 1977), 9. Subsequently cited as££. 6 Sam Solecki, "An Interview with Michael Ondaatje", in Sam Solecki, ed., Spider Blues (Montreal: V6hicule, 1985), p. 325. 7 Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: LeftHanded Poems (Toronto: Anansi, 1970), p. 6. Subsequently cited as BK.

Chronology 1943 1954 1962 1964 1965 1966 1967

1969 1970

1971

1972 1973 1976 1977

Born September 12 in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Moves to London, England, for schooling at Dulwich College. Moves to Canada to live with his brother Christopher. Enrolls in Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec. Marries artist Kim Jones. Moves to Toronto and finishes the last year of his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto. Moves to Kingston, Ontario, where he begins an M.A. in English at Queen's University. Becomes a Canadian citizen. Completes his Master's thesis written on the Scottish poet and critic Edwin Muir. Publishes his first collection of poetry, Dainty Monsters. Hired to teach English at the University of Western Ontario, in London. Publishes his long narrative poem, the man with seven toes. Publishes his long narrative The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, which wins him the Governor General's Award. Publishes a critical study, Leonard Cohen. Directs a thirty-five-minute film on his friend and poet bp Nichol, Sons of Captain Poetry. Writes a screenplay, "The William Dawe Badlands Expedition, 1916", based on Robert Kroetsch's novel Badlands. Accepts a teaching position at the Glendon College Campus of Toronto's York University after choosing not to do the Ph.D. thesis required to maintain his position at Western. Directs and films Carry on Crime and Punishment. Directs The Clinton Special about Theatre Passe Muraille's The Farm Show. Publishes his second collection of poetry, Rat Jelly. Publishes Coming Through Slaughter. Publishes Elimination Dance, his third collection of poetry. This collection is a playful list of prescribed eliminations such as all those who sleep between black sheets, men who shave their beards off in stages, pausing to take photos, all women who have not had their bra stolen by a dog, those who have committed illegal acts in elevators, and so on.

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1979

1980 1981 1982 1984 1987 1988

Wins his second Governor General's Award for There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, his fourth collection of poetry, which includes both poems from his earlier books and new material. Teaches during the summer at the University of Hawaii. Publishes Claude Glass, his fourth collection of poetry. Separates from his wife, Kim Jones. Begins to live with writer Linda Spalding. Wins the Canada-Australia Exchange Award. Publishes his "fictional memoir", Running in the Family. Publishes Tin Roof, his fifth collection of poetry. Publishes Secular Love, his sixth collection of poetry, which includes both Claude Glass and Tin Roof and two new sections. Publishes his "first formal novel", In the Skin of a Lion. Wins Wang Festival of Author's Award and donates the cash portion of the prize to the bp Nichol fund for promising young writers.

Comments by Michael Ondaatje I am interested in myth. Making it, remaking it, exploding it. I don't like poems or works that cash in on a clich6 of history or personality. I don't like pop westerns and pop Billy the Kids. Myths are only of value to me when they are realistic as well as having other qualities of myth. Another thing that interests me about myth is how and when figures get caught in myths. Interview (by mail) with Michael Ondaatje by an anonymous correspondent, Manna, No. 1 (March 1972), p. 21. There's a great deal of lying in poetry, by necessity. It's not a case of being tactful or misrepresenting something but of making art; art is, to a certain extent, deceit. And what disturbs me in having my work interpreted as either physically or biographically right or wrong is that there's an emotional or psychological lightness which, for me, is more important than the other two. Sam Solecki, "An Interview with Michael Ondaatje (1975)", in Sam Solecki, ed., Spider Blues (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1985), p. 23. It's been said that violence is normal in our lifetime just as good manners were normal to the world that Jane Austen created. You know, it's a reality. It's getting a balance between the two worlds - the violent and the gentle - but both exist. I think it only damages a poem to have the poet try to explain it. ... The statement that a poet makes in a poem is just as much the way he says it as what he says. . . . What he wants to say he has said, and a poem is important in what it doesn't say as well as what it says. I know when I was writing Billy and Slaughter, I had a sense that it wasn't just my point of view that was writing the book; it was people around me that I knew, the interests of 32

people around me, being aware of certain things - certain questions - from the point of view of people around me as much as from myself. . . . the book was almost written by a community, and this is very important to me. Jon Pearce, "Moving to the Clear: Michael Ondaatje", in Twelve Voices: Interviews with Canadian Poets (Ottawa: Borealis, 1980), pp. 136, 137, 141. I like fiction that says less maybe than it should say. Lots of spaces and inquiries but never fully rounded off and framed. Alice Klein, "Ondaatje Writes Home" [interview with Michael Ondaatje], Now, October 7-13, 1982, p. 7. [T]he kind of architecture . . . I want is something more physical, something having to do with the placing of a scene in one place and not in another - that kind of thing. How one composes a book. How one turns the real everyday object into something more by placing it in exactly the right place, with the right tone. There is an architecture of tone as well as rhythm. What academics are obsessed with is who won the horse race or what it really means. But if you watch a replay you start discovering form. You don't watch the horse in front anymore - the leading horse representing "content" - but it's the horse in fourth place saving himself. For writers in Canada today, there's so much stuff being written around them that it's almost like being surrounded and locked up. There is a tendency for critics to try to nail writers down within a literary tradition. But really who cares? A true literary tradition has nothing to do with 1850 to 1980. It's not a line like that. Sam Solecki, "An Interview with Michael Ondaatje", in Solecki, Spider Blues, pp. 323-24, 328.

Comments on Michael Ondaatje In his work Ondaatje expresses no moral outrage. He dwells on paradox in the dangerous cognitive region which lies between reportage and myth. Sheila Watson, "Michael Ondaatje: The Mechanization of Death", in Solecki, Spider Blues, p. 164. In his career to this date, Michael Qndaatje has been a poet who makes art that is like the best of Canadian poetry. As a novelist he writes stuff most of our respected novelists do not begin to dream of. As a fiction writer he is superior; as a poet he is one of our most proficient. George Bowering, "Ondaatje Learning to Do", in Solecki, Spider Bluest 1985, p. 69. The entire thrust of his [Ondaatje's] vision is directed at compelling the reader to reperceive reality, to assume an unusual angle of vision from which reality appears surreal, absurd, inchoate, dynamic, and, most importantly, ambiguous. His poetic world is filled with mad or suicidal herons, one-eyed mythic dogs, tortured people, oneiric scenes, gorillas, dragons, creative spiders, and imploding stars. These extraordinary images function as a kind of metaphoric short-

hand to disorient the reader, to make him enter a psychological or material reality which has been revealed as almost overwhelmingly anarchic or chaotic. Sam Solecki, "Nets and Chaos: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje", in Solecki, Spider Blues, p. 93.

about the accuracy of the account nor to undervalue the truth of fiction. Naomi Jacobs, "Michael Ondaatje and the New Fiction Biographies", Studies in Canadian Literature, XI (1986), 17-18.

In my experience one of the first reactions of readers of this poem ["Farre Off] is to ask, "Why does he put in that line about his thin blue parka? It ruins the tone; and besides, it is irrelevant." They usually don't mind the asses of the dogs nearly as much. But that thin blue parka is central to Ondaatje's strategy, his use of shifting tones and unexpected voices. J.E. Chamberlain, "Let There Be Commerce between Us: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje", in Solecki, Spider Blues, p. 36.

We need a new term to describe the new kind of long poem represented by Secular Love, a poem made by a process of "collecting and sorting" all kinds of oddments, concrete objects, images, personal experiences, and based on the faith that "things fit together." The term should convey the improvisational nature of the "open process form" involved, to use George Bowering's phrase: at the same time, it should suggest the roots of this kind of poetry in ancient mythmaking; finally, it should convey the sense that this poetry is at once personal and communal, taking its fundamental impulses from deeply felt personal experience but capable of speaking to a community able to respond on the same level. Patricia J. Eberle, "Secular Love", Journal of Canadian Poetry, No. 1 (1986), p. 86.

Whatever the "private and fictional magnets" that drew him [Ondaatje] to his subject [Bolden]... Ondaatje did not allow his artistic impulses either to be intimidated by the authority of truth, or to simulate historical truth. It is the mixture of factoid and fact, of absolutely convincing psychological development and yet absolute refusal to claim real knowledge, that makes Coming Through Slaughter so successful and offers a way out of the dilemma of the writer drawn to the historical subject, who wishes neither to mislead readers

Selected Bibliography Works by Michael Ondaatje Articles "O'Hagan's Rough-Edged Chronicle", Canadian Literature, No. 61 (Summer 1974), pp. 24-31. Books The Dainty Monsters. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1967. the man with seven toes. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1969. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems. New York: Norton, 1970; Toronto: Anansi Press, 1970; London: Boyars, 1980. The Broken Ark: A Book of Beasts. [Editor.] Ottawa: Oberon, 1971. Rat Jelly. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1973. Personal Fictions: Stories by Munro, Wiebe, Thomas and Blaise. [Editor.] Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1977. Coming Through Slaughter. Toronto: Anansi Press, 1976; New York: Norton, 1976; London: Boyars, 1979. A Book of Beasts. [Editor.] Ottawa: Oberon, 1979. Elimination Dance. Ilderton, Ont: Nairn Press, 1979. The Long Poem Anthology. [Editor with Introduction.] Toronto: Coach House Press, 1979. There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do. New York: Norton, 1979; Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979; London: Boyars, 1980. Claude Glass. Toronto: Coach House Press Manuscript Editions, 1979. Running in the Family. New York: Norton, 1982; Toronto: McClelland and Stewart; London: Gollancz, 1983. Tin Roof. Lantzville, B.C.: Island Writing Series, 1982. "The William Dawe Badlands Expedition, 1916", Descant, No. 42 (Fall 1983), pp. 51-73. [Screenplay by 33

Ondaatje, taken from the book Badlands, by Robert Kroetsch.] Secular Love. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1984. In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987. Interviews Interview (by mail) with Michael Ondaatje by an anonymous correspondent, Manna, No. 1 (March 1972), pp. 19-22. Barbour, Douglas, and Stephen Scobie. "A Conversation with Michael Ondaatje", White Pelican, No. 2 (Spring 1971), pp. 6-15. Pearce, Jon. "Moving to the Clear: An Interview", in Twelve Voices: Interviews with Canadian Poets. Ottawa: Borealis, 1980, pp. 130-43. Solecki, Sam. "An Interview with Michael Ondaatje",Rune, No. 2 (Spring 1975), pp. 39-54. [Reprinted in Solecki, Spider Blues. ] Solecki, Sam. "An Interview with Michael Ondaatje (1984)", in Sam Solecki, ed., Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje. Montreal: V6hicule Press, 1985, pp. 321332. Turner, Barbara. "In the Skin of Michael Ondaatje: Giving Voice to a Social Conscience", Quill & Quire, May 1987, pp. 21-22. Witten, Mark. "Billy, Buddy, and Michael", Books in Canada, VI (June-July 1977), 9-10, 12-13. Selected Criticism Books, Articles, Reviews Blott, Ann. "Stories to Finish': The Collected Works of Billy the Kid", Studies in Canadian Literature, II (Summer 1977), 73-96. Davey, Frank. From There to Here: A Guide to EnglishCanadian Literature Since 1960. Erin, Ont: Press Porcepic, 1974, pp. 222-27. Eberle, Patricia J. "Secular Love", Journal of Canadian Poetry, I (1986), 74-88. Ferris, Ina. "Michael Ondaatje and the Turn to Narrative", in John Moss, ed., Present Tense. Toronto: NCL, 1985, pp. 73-84. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988. Jacobs, Naomi. "Michael Ondaatje and the New Fiction Biographies", Studies in Canadian Literature, No. 11 (Spring 1986), pp. 2-18. Kamboureli, Smaro. "The Poetics of Geography in Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter", Descant, No. 42 (Fall 1983), pp. 112-26. Lee, Dennis. Savage Fields: An Essay in Literature and Cosmology. Toronto: Anansi, 1977, pp. 14-49, 115-16. MacLulich, T.D. "Ondaatje's Mechanical Boy: Portrait of

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the Artist as Photographer", Mosaic, No. 14 (Spring 1981), pp. 107-19. Maxwell, Barry. "Surrealistic Aspects of Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter", Mosaic, No. 18 (Summer 1985), pp. 101-14. Mundwiler, Leslie. Michael Ondaatje: Word, Image, Imagination. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984. Nodelman, Perry. "The Collected Photographs of Billy the Kid", Canadian Literature, No. 87 (Winter 1980), pp. 68-79. Owens, Judith. "'I Send You a Picture': Ondaatje's Portrait of Billy the Kid", Studies in Canadian Literature, VIII (1983), 117-39. Scobie, Stephen. "Coming Through Slaughter: Fictional Magnets and Spider's Webbs", Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 12 (Fall 1978), pp. 5-23. . "His Legend a Jungle Sleep", Canadian Literature, No. 76 (Spring 1978), pp. 6-21. [Reprinted in Solecki, Spider Blues.] . "Two Authors in search of a Character", Canadian Literature, No. 54 (Autumn 1972), pp. 37-55. [Reprinted in Solecki, Spider Blues.] Solecki, Sam. "Coming Through: A Review of Secular Love", in Solecki, Spider Blues, pp. 125-34. . "Making and Destroying: Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter and Extremist Art", Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 12 (Fall 1978), pp. 2447. [Reprinted in Solecki, Spider Blues.] . "Michael Ondaatje: A Paper Promiscuous and Out of Forme with Several Inlargements and Untutored Narrative", Descant, No. 42 (Fall 1983), pp. 77-88. [Reprinted in Solecki, Spider Blues.] . "Nets and Chaos: The Poetry of Michael Ondaatje", Studies in Canadian Literature, No. 2 (Winter 1977), pp. 36-48. [Reprinted in Solecki, Spider Blues.] . "Point Blank: Narrative in the man with seven toes", Canadian Poetry, No. 6 (Spring/Summer 1980), pp. 14-24. [Reprinted in Solecki, Spider Blues, pp. 135-49.] , ed. Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje. Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1985. Van Wart, Alice. "The Evolution of Form in Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Coming Through Slaughter", Canadian Poetry, No. 17 (Fall/Winter 1985), pp. 1-28. Watson, Sheila. "Michael Ondaatje: The Mechanization of Death", Open Letter, III, 1 (Winter 1974-75), 158-66. Wilson, Ann. "'Coming Through Slaughter': Storyville Twice Told", Descant, No. 42 (Fall 1983), pp. 99-111. [Reprinted in Solecki, Spider Blues.] A Note on the Contributor Barbara Leckie has written articles and book reviews on literary theory, feminism, and Canadian literature. She wrote her dissertation on conjugal infidelity and the law in the Anglo-American novel. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at University of California at Berkeley.

Gilbert La Rocque

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by Kenneth W. Meadwell Renowned as a gifted and provocative prose writer, Gilbert La Rocque acquired an enviable and important place in Qu6bec literature before his sudden death. His works feature extreme contrasts, from tenderness to brutality, childhood nostalgia to adult self-loathing. The perspectives offered by his characters are singularly personal and bear witness to exaggerated idiosyncrasies which often translate in a somewhat surreal fashion the people and things present in his works. The position occupied by these external observers is one of extreme power alternating with moments of utter helplessness. The thematic structures deployed by La Rocque are reminiscent of the existential novel in which the hero, or more accurately antihero, empowered by brief periods of lucidity, discerns with acute precision the nature and motivation of those surrounding him. More innovative, though, is La Rocque's style. Free flowing and extremely evocative, it communicates the subjectivity of the narrative voice in a spontaneous fashion without conventional punctuation. The focus, both visual and intellectual, shown by La Rocque's main characters serves to separate them markedly from those they observe, and it is precisely this process of cinematographic visualization, similar to the expression of intense feelings in an interior monologue, that creates within each of his protagonists a unique narrative voice. Gilbert La Rocque's prose, purposeful and often poignant, is a distinctly singular voice in Qu6bec literature. Serge d'entre les morts (1976) is essentially the story of deliverance through death, of the rights of passage of a young boy whose liberation in manhood is recounted in a fragmented and sometimes redundant fashion. More importantly, it portrays an individual's inextricable participation in his destiny, a destiny that is seen initially as a governing force directed by adults, but that progressively takes on a faceless guise as these very adults relinquish their influence upon their death. As is indicated by the title, Serge, the main protagonist, is indeed from among the dead. He has survived a childhood punctuated by occurrences of death, and must now attempt to take stock of his life. It is precisely the notion of defining one's

present life in terms of the past that dominates this work. "Nosce te ipsum" is the credo that inspires Serge, now adult, to recapture past events and memories which he feels played determining roles in his current life - a life about which the reader learns no details. To know oneself, one must, according to La Rocque, know one's past. Serge d'entre les morts takes on the form of a labyrinth constructed of memories, a structure of uncommon solidity but created in an unpredictable manner. This form is 35

extremely well suited to the plot since Serge does in fact undertake to solve the puzzle of his past, to examine past words and deeds of friends and family members in order to find the path leading to his future. As Serge says in the opening lines of the novel: But I knew ... it had taken place and lasted through my memory's short circuits and the fluctuations of my consciousness, it transformed itself into words that I released as the things and souls and all of life's secret movements took hold of me and then little by little left me, as my estrangement led me progressively to a form of oblivion or of absence in which I would not be well served by knowing anything and in which everything would be said once and for all, yes, I knew it outwardly as well as inwardly, and I knew that this time I would not talk about dreadful Montreal, although ever present, nor of the distressed swarming of anonymous insects living their long collective agony under the tons and tons of asphalt and brick . . . and I would not talk either of the slow death of bodies from soluble poisons or deadly smoke ... the moment had come, quite naturally, to look at what I had left behind - as "popa" had left behind a large handful of steaming guts strewn over the dashboard of his demolished car on the Saint-Elphege turn - at that moment, I had to identify by name what was pursuing me and clinging to my back like a back pack growing heavier and heavier, the voices and hands and faces that were still living somewhere in the false oblivion of my mind and of my heart, I wanted to remember, I wanted to say that I knew them.1

It is somewhat paradoxical that as an adult Serge endeavours to recapture and sift through a past that obviously haunts him, for his childhood and early youth were hardly periods of great happiness. However, it has become apparent that he must rid himself of an often hostile attitude towards the past in order to be able to live happily in the present: I walk in the darkness, in the stench of the alley. . . . Grandmother, I throw you, insensitive brute, I drag you into the alley, the great eternal darkness of Montreal's alleys terrifies her, and I continue as always, in the fetidness of the garbage, rotten oranges and all sorts of vegetable and fruit cores, walking with the old bat under my arm, rather light actually, scarcely a soft shadow under my arm, thinking of Dali's watches, time empties itself from the interior and consumes itself and reabsorbs itself. (S, pp. 13-14)

The symbolic aggression shown to the memory of Serge's grandmother is of course a larger metaphor evoking the imperative need he has to shed the past. During his childhood and until her death, she was a mute presence, but one whose gentle and permanent motion in her rocking-chair was a rare constant which communicated to the child a sort of security and continuance of family life. It is, however, this very constancy that constrained the young Serge's imagination and potential development. Unlike the portrayal of the archetypal grandmother in Marie-Claire Blais's A Season in the Life of Emmanuel (1966) or Gabrielle 36

Roy's The Tin Flute (1945) and The Road Past Altamont (1966), the dehumanized grandmother in Serge d'entre les morts does not represent preservation of family and tradition, nor is she the embodiment of wisdom. She is, rather, a sign of disintegration, of the feebleness of a life lived in an isolated country setting, in exile from the modern world. In young Serge's eyes, her death was simply the end of a life that had been extinguished many years before. At the age of five, Serge was profoundly affected by the violent death of his father in a car accident. This death, like that of his grandmother, haunts Serge in the present just as he knew it would: . . . just as later, he had disappeared forever from my sight, and for a long time I thought and still do think of "popa" his dismembered body eviscerated his belly emptied into the twisted metal of his Dodge and I saw again many times and I still see as before his face preserved as if by miracle bloodless and almost smiling defiantly in the coffin I wanted to put my arms around him I wanted to place my lips on that cold thing that really no longer resembled my father nor anything that could have lived except in my memories and in the dreams that I would make and in the white apparitions that I would force from the shadows each time that I would utter or write his name or that I would conjure up the changing profile of his face. (5, pp. 18-19)

The images that come to obsess Serge do so in an unforeseen and haphazard fashion, but evoke consistently the presence or physical consequences of death in the form of decomposition, putrefaction, and flaccid flesh. The repugnance expressed through these images communicates man's existential nausea when faced with the contingency of existence, with its fatality over which one has no power, and which one knows will inexorably influence one's future. The white apparitions forced from the shadows of which Serge speaks in the preceding quotation represent the essence of haunting memories, from his dead grandmother to his misshapen and mutilated father, memories which are transformed into poignant and raw images. The power these memories hold over Serge is evident in that these recollections of the past rush repeatedly into Serge's mind without warning and without following chronological sequences. The final lines communicate the sensitivity with which Serge views the past as well as the ultimate realization that life is in a sense a cycle, returning periodically to its eternal beginning, and in doing so renewing itself without ever losing entirely its fundamental components: ... the flames rose again from the deepest dream of the past that I could not finish dreaming, and as I let it all be said and be dreamed . . . I knew that nothing would ever be finished (just as nothing had ever begun), and that the noble and useless gesture of releasing it all from within me, of wanting to articulate it in order to state it clearly, would not do away with those ghosts that refused to be silent and to die forever, this could resemble a form of sustained obstinacy . . . I knew that everything would be constantly repeated, that the snake would always bite its tail and that one lifetime would not be enough to

attempt (as if the game were worth the trouble) to break the circle of perpetual and new beginnings. (5, pp. 14748)

Serge d'entre les morts is an intriguing work, given the structure and form it adopts. The narrative voice situates the plot in the past while obviously existing in the present, without, however, offering any elements that might shed light on the main character's current status. Any ambiguity surrounding the latter serves only to reinforce the importance the past occupies in Serge's life as he recounts all that has led up to the commencement of the narration. Serge d'entre les morts recounts an individual's attempt to exorcise from his most inner being memories and images of the past. In an effort to relinquish whatever ties he holds with those who loomed large in his youth, Serge discovers his own consciousness as a sensitive and thoughtful man who realizes that he is, ultimately, in some way formed by his childhood experiences, and that he carries them, indelible, with him into the future. Woven around the drowning of a young boy, Les Masques (1980) also reveals one by one the masks - son, father, husband, lover - worn by the main protagonist, Alain. Layers of consciousness peek through his acts and thoughts to reveal an individual seeking to discover an inner peace. Les Masques is a novel within a novel, but what is especially curious is that the writer is also an actor, for Alain the writer composes a novel about his past and present in which the main character is his twin. There exists, therefore, one plot whose elements are reflected one from the other in the same way that two mirrors bounce images, identical in their distortion, off each other. The act of writing takes on more importance than mere creation in Les Masques. It represents, much in the same way that Serge in the preceding novel attempts to decipher his present in function of his past, a compulsive longing for tranquillity. Between the initial scene, during which Alain, the novelist, faces the cruel banality of questions during an interview he finds repugnant, and the work's conclusion, the reader is confronted with various versions - lived, remembered, and fictionalized - of the drowning of Eric, Alain's eight-year-old son, while Alain and his relatives celebrate the ninety-first birthday of his own grandfather, stultified in his advanced age. The irony in this juxtaposition of the death of youth with the prolongation of useless longevity is obvious. Despite this pronounced symbolism, Les Masques is not a plea for the protection of our youth. It is, rather, a muted, disjointed cry for freedom from the incomprehension with which man tends to view tragic events. The power of the daze in which Alain finds himself is translated by the recurring river scene: Alain standing at the river bank under the sky bleeding from all its veins . . . the sky slid over the river like the lid of a coffin, and little by little it became dark, shadows there was not even a moon, fly-speck stars, on the opposite river bank handfuls of light whose reflections bounced off each other with a strange luxuriance as their number increased on the folds of the shivering water, but he stood standing in the black, in the torrid August night,

insensitive to the mosquitoes buzzing in his ears, standing and taking root like a weeping willow.2

Alone and at the mercy of forces beyond his control, the father ponders his son's fate. Les Masques assumes the form an aquatic labyrinth composed of ever-expanding circles, from which Alain ultimately emerges. Serge's realization, in Serge d'entre les morts, of the necessity of knowing oneself is repeated in Les Masques. Through his writing, Alain has come to terms with the past, with its present as well as with its future implications. He can now remove his masks and take pleasure in the here and now of his life. Unquestionably La Rocque's most unsettling (and some would argue prophetically autobiographical) novel, Le Passager (1984) treats one lone male protagonist, who, somewhat like the main character in Serge d'entre les morts, leads the life as a dysfunctional adult anchored in his childhood memories. Physical cruelty and verbal aggression characterize Bernard Pion, a novelist, who is enslaved to an explosive temper. Again in this work, the reader is sensitive to the depiction of a fatality-governed existence, the root of which can be traced to childhood. The narrative thread that gives this work a consistency not found, for example, in Serge d'entre les morts inexorably leads during a three-day period to revenge and murder, acts depicted by Pion with a fury bordering on insanity. Pion is quite literally, as his name suggests, a pawn, an actor who unavoidably plays out his fateful role. The title of this work - "the passenger" - conveys also the idea that Bernard is not in control of the forces directing his life. This metaphor is in fact represented in its first meaning in the initial scenes. Transported about in the back of his alcoholic and abusive father's automobile, the little Bernard is a mute passenger who must tolerate the drunken whims and verbal abuse of his father. Frightened at night by eerie images of shadow and light, he seeks parental consolation, but receives beatings and insults from his father. In Bernard's childhood memories, it is significant that his mother rarely appears. Abused by his father, Bernard retreats into himself, vowing revenge. There is little in this first sequence of memories that would lead the reader to believe Bernard capable of such horrifying and sinister acts as is his father. One scene is of primordial importance, however, and as will be seen, it is one which will be in some ways re-enacted by Bernard Pion, the adult: . .. his father was standing right beside his bed he heard the wheezing breathing above him and suddenly his father ripped off the blanket and screamed "shut your goddam mouth!" and his hands struck, his buttocks hurt and his thighs felt as if in Hell's flames but he did not cry, not yet, any way it was not the first time that this dreadful thing happened to him, he knew very well the bony hands, cold and hard, of his father, and when it was over and he felt once again alone in his room he got up and carefully spread the blanket back on his bed, then lay down again swallowing his tears ... and when he opened his eyes again the morning flowed golden under his blind and he sat at the edge of the bed . . . then he removed the cover from the bird cage and the canary shook and

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trembled in its pale yellow plumage and it began to sing as the child dressed, but after a few seconds Bernard dropped his shoe, walked towards the cage and cried "shut up!" . . . and he opened the cage, in his hand the bird was scarcely a warm and soft shudder, and the child squeezed he squeezed with all his force until his joints hurt and he closed his eyes, victim to a spasmodic trembling that shook him all over.3

The allusion to this seizure-like reaction foreshadows similar scenes of extreme anguish followed by physical violence and what appear at times to be hallucinations. The prophetic and autobiographical nature of such scenes is noteworthy, since on the day of his death Gilbert La Rocque exhibited similar symptoms of nausea, pressure in the cranium, and progressive loss of contact with reality. Taken home after falling ill, La Rocque believed he was in Mexico.4 For Bernard Pion, although there is evidence in the text that might explain on a physiological level his fits of anger, it is exasperation at a rather unsuccessful career as a novelist as well as at a failed love affair that pushes him towards two final acts, one a murder and the other a near-murder. Pion, obviously the unhappiest of men, has taken on one of the guises of his own father. Alcoholism and violence are traits of this once-abused child and, moreover, are means of evasion by which he vents his deeply felt anguish. Even as a young adult, signs of these predispositions are disturbing: . . . although at this time he did not yet see those rats which would gnaw at his anus and testicles, nor . . . the millepedes grouped in rows on the eider-down, all those little creatures, terrifying nightmare animals which would, later, near the end, make him scream like a lunatic, or scream with the voice of a hysterical dwarf, screech in the night while neighbours would come out on balconies and someone would ring the doorbell and the whole house would become unsettled like a human being. (P, p. 74)

La Rocque's treatment of what some might call the baseness of man, the vulgar or the obscene, is a constant in his writing. Emile Zola's (1840-1902) rendering in L'Assommoir of the vicissitudes, vulgarities, and moral turpitude of the working class of Paris in the nineteenth century has an emphatically sociological quality to it. So too does La Rocque's depiction of Pion as the abused child who himself becomes the abuser of both people and alcohol. Throughout La Rocque's portrayal of Pion's alienation, there is on the part of the reader a feeling of the truth of the depiction, and despite the dark side of Pion's character, one is reminded of the fragility of the human being who feels that all is in opposition to him. The solitude and ultimate failure of which Pion is so cognizant are extensions of his desperately sad childhood. Quite simply, like Serge in Serge d'entre les morts, he is unable to live in the present. The failure he feels in the present colours his interactions with others. His altercation with Marcel Guilbert, an unappreciative literary critic, at a cocktail party results in his receiving a humiliating blow to

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the face. Hours later Pion has tracked Guilbert to his home, where he hits him powerfully in the chest, into which he thrusts the whole blade . . . for an instant they are paralyzed, one against the other, statuesque and puzzled, the little pyjama-clad man, standing as a motionless stuffed animal, almost chest to chest with a tall thin bearded man, posing one might say for a photograph, or readying themselves for grotesque movements, resembling two dancers, or two lovers . . . and as his adversary is about to fall, Bernard has the presence of mind to withdraw the knife from the wound . . . Guilbert lets forth a sort of hiccup or gurgling sound, while blood begins flowing, it makes a blackish stain that quickly grows in the pyjama fabric, releasing into the room a rather acrid smell, metallic-like mingling with the odour, sweetish and riveting, of intestines poking through the wound . . . and he slips to the floor... he does not fall, he does not really collapse: he flows, like water, like his own blood, almost without noise . . . he curls up at Bernard's feet. (P, pp. 118-19)

This spell-binding description bears testimony to La Rocque's eloquence in the morbid, to his effective use of a cinematographic slow-motion image in order to reinforce the horror of the scene. The savage descriptions of the destruction of the human body are recurring components in La Rocque's novels. Pion's rampage is not completed, however, for his lover, Liliane, nearly dies at his hands just as in his youth he crushed his canary in a fit of insane exasperation. Arrested, he is taken away for a psychiatric examination: "He was sleeping, his face colourless, peaceful, he was almost not breathing. He looked like a cadaver being taken to the cemetery" (P, p. 212). The simplicity of these last lines conveys in an uncanny fashion an episode in La Rocque's own life, one from which he would not recover. The poignancy of the conclusion thus given to the ensemble of La Rocque's work is ironic, indeed, but serves also to show that in his eyes writing and living are inseparable, that the novel is the study of man, in his glory but also in his abjectness. Recounting one man's final fall, Le Passager tells of helplessness and failure. Through it all, La Rocque maintains a sense of quiet compassion and makes each one of us a Bernard Pion, destined to different ends but sharing a common origin and path. The sweeping images of compulsion and psychosis which structure this work reach the readers' innermost nightmare, and in doing so establish an irrefutable link with their own frailty. Gilbert La Rocque's work, often bleak and eerie, is, above all else, impassioned and entrancing. His fatalistic view of the determining forces of the past is tempered by a strong belief in man's unceasing quest for understanding and renewal. Possessing an eminently personal style, urgent in its force, La Rocque has left a body of work that probes human consciousness, obsessions, and love. Inventive in its

form, his writing bears eloquent testimony to the richness and evolution of Quebec literature. 1 Gilbert La Rocque, Serge d'entre les marts (Montr6al: VLB Editeur, 1976), pp. 10-11. Subsequently cited as S. [Translations by K.W.MeadwelL] 2 Gilbert La Rocque, Les Masques (Montrdal: Qu6bec-Ame*rique, 1980), p. 165. [Translation by K.W. Meadwell.] 3 Gilbert La Rocque, Le Passager (Montreal: Que'bec-Ame'rique, 1984), pp. 11-12. Subsequently cited as P. [Translations by K.W. Meadwell.] 4 Donald Smith, "Images int£rieures et symboles dans 1'oeuvre de Gilbert La Rocque*', in Gilbert La Rocque: L'Ecriture du reve (Montr6al: Qu6bec-Am6rique, 1985), p. 72.

Chronology 1943 1954

1970 1971 1972 1975 1976 1978

1979 1980 1982 1984

Born April 29 in Rosemont, Qu6bec, to CharlesEdouard and Lucie Savard La Rocque. Studies at the Ecole Br6beuf. At age eleven moves to Montr6al-Nord where he takes five years of the "cours classique"; assumes a series of menial jobs: tinsmith, construction worker, bank employee, city clerk. Publishes Le Nombril Publishes Corridors. Becomes Editor in Chief of the Editions de FHomme. Is a founding member of VLB Editeur; appointed literary director of Editions de 1'Aurore. Publishes Serge d'entre les morts. Is appointed literary director of Editions QufibecAm6rique, and founds the series "Literature d'Am&ique" in which fifty titles appear over the next six years by authors from Quebec, English Canada, the United States, and South America. Publishes Le Refuge. Publishes Les Masques, for which he is awarded the Prix Canada-Suisse and the Grand Prix du Journal de Montreal. Is elected Grand Montr6alais de 1'Avenir for his contribution to Qu6bec literature. Publishes Le Passager, dies suddenly on November 26 of a cerebral hemorrhage; is survived by his wife, Muriel Ross, a daughter, Catherine, and a son, S6bastien.

Comments by Gilbert La Rocque (translated by K.W. Meadwell) The writing of a novel is not the exact transposition of reality. Kerouac, for example, wanted to describe exactly what he had lived. But, by playing with memory and imagination he deforms and enlarges . . . the events of his life. I refer to him as an extreme example, of course.... In the writing of a novel, two forms of memory come together: that of the past - but here again, memory distorts - and that of the novelist, the "false" memory, that is to say a type of amalgamation of memory and imagination. A novel is always more or less a voyage, at least in the mind of the reader, after having been so in that of the novelist.

It is difficult, I believe, to look lucidly at contemporary life without falling into a world of caricature because, very simply, people are caricatures. Violence is everywhere, a little like caricatures as we've just discussed. Violence is ever-present, especially in our society, but in a novel, it is possible to do something with it. ... Subjects are of little importance. Everything depends on the way they are treated. The act of writing is grounded in what is often erroneously called style. If writing is successful, one can talk about anything. For almost one hundred pages Nathalie Sarraute did nothing but describe a doorknob, something not entirely interesting, but someone had to do it. CSline used to say that great subjects in novels are wonderful, but secondary. When one writes a novel, one is involved in the act of writing. That's what's important. To succeed in mobilizing the reader, starting from one's own topic, but with various instruments at one's disposal: that's writing. Donald Smith, "Gilbert La Rocque et la maitrise de r6criture",Ltftfray quebecoises, No. 37 (printemps 1985), pp. 14-16.

Comments on Gilbert La Rocque While La Rocque has often been compared to Faulkner, and once or twice to Proust, one of his closest affinities is with French novelist Louis-Ferdinand C61ine. . . . There is a remarkable and rather C61inean consistency in the morbid intensity of La Rocque's vision, in his narrow repertory of almost entirely negative sensory impressions, in the run-on breathlessness of his underpunctuated interior monologues, and in the capacity of both author and characters for hatreds that must be largely self-hatreds. Five of La Rocque's six novels deploy and re-deploy the same thematic plot elements: in each a hero tries to fight free of his obsession with a series of childhood traumas, among which the (accidental?) drowning of a young child is frequent. Both the interleaved childhood recollections of the central consciousness and the adult's struggle with those recollections partake of the mud, the stink, the decay, the grinding poverties of material life and of the interpersonal relationships of the claustrophobic families which, in Balzacian fashion, grow out of and correspond to those poverties. This at times monotonous pattern encourages the notion, shared by some of his critics with the author himself, that all of La Rocque's books are, as it were, parts of one huge work. Patricia Merivale, "Gilbert La Rocque", in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 60: Canadian Writers Since 1960 (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1987), pp. 172-73. In his six novels, Gilbert La Rocque initiates an inner voyage of country and soul. Quebec is lived as a wound: complexes inherited from a theocratic society; working class atmospheres that offer no respite from fatigue and stress; polluted and polluting cities; political crises apparently without resolution; intellectual elitist groups that are jealous of and backstab

39

Bibliography Works by Gilbert La Rocque Novels Le NombriL Montreal: Editions du Jour, 1970; Montreal: Qudbec/Amerique, 1982. Corridors. Montreal: Editions du Jour, 1971; Montreal: Quebec/ Amerique, 1985. Apr$s la boue. Montreal: Editions du Jour, 1972; Montreal: Quebec/Amerique, 1981. Serge d'entre les marts. Montreal: VLB Editeur, 1976. Les Masques. Montreal: Qu6bec/Am6rique, 1980. Le Passager. Montreal: Quebec/Amerique, 1984. Theatre Le Refuge. Montr6al: VLB Editeur, 1979.

Selected Criticism

each other; capitalist society in which profit and mediocrity are more powerful than quality and fineness. La Rocque's characters are, therefore, inevitably troubled. The novelist conjures up affective mechanisms, archetypal and as powerful as they are mysterious. Corridors, masks, rights of passage and of travel cling to universal mythology. A more personal mythology also becomes evident, evoking abysses (vaginas, mouths, basins, wells), navels, chest cavities, cutting instruments. In an unending nightmare images of despair appear and reappear; mud and snow, rot, decomposition, rust and decaying sicknesses. Rats, scaly dogs, terrifying calves, gutted fish, strangled birds and unsettling insects haunt his characters. Donald Smith, "Images int&ieures et symboles dans 1'oeuvre de Gilbert La Rocque", in Gilbert La Rocque: L'Ecriture du reve (Montreal: Qu6bec/Am&ique, 1985), p. 73. [Translation by K.W. MeadwellJ

40

Basile, Jean. "Le Nombril de Gilbert La Rocque", Le Devoir, 16 mai 1970, p. 14. . "De nouveau avec les 6crivains" [review of Le Refuge], Le Devoir, 5 aout 1975, p. 12. -. "Gilbert La Rocque, un style et un pouvoir de souffrance" [review of Serge d'entre les morts}, Le Devoir, 10 avril 1976, p. 14. Bessette, G6rard. "Les Masques de Gilbert La Rocque", Voix et Images, VI, 2 (hiver 1981), 319-21. Boucher, Marc. "Gilbert La Rocque, Les Masques", Livres et auteurs quebecois 1980, pp. 47-48. Dorion, Gilles. "Les Masques", Quebec frangais, tevrier 1981, p. 10. Ethier-Blais, Jean. "Des fleurs pour Minou et un nombril pour Jerome" [review of Le Nombril}, Le Devoir, 27 juin 1970, p. 15. . "Les couloirs de 1'amour" [review of Corridors], Le Devoir, 12 juin 1971, p. 16. -. "Nos derniers nouveaux romans" [review of Apres la boue}, Le Devoir, 14 octobre 1972, p. 19. Fisette, Jean. "La modernit6 de Fecriture comme inscription anthropologique d'un contre-reve qu6b6cois. A propos de Serge d'entre les morts", Voix et Images, XV, 3 (printemps 1990), 363-73. LeBlanc, Julie. "Glissements deictiques et recit schizophrenique dans Apres la boue de Gilbert La Rocque", Voix et Images, XV, 3 (printemps 1990), 352-62. Lettres quebecoises, No. 37 (printemps 1985). [Special issue dedicated to Gilbert La Rocque.] Malenfant, Paul Chanel. "Le Passager", Nuit blanche, fevriermars 1985, p. 6. Martel, Reginald. "L'art de tuer les enfants" [review of Serge d'entre les morts}, La Presse, 29 mai 1976, p. E 3. . "Une autre chronique de ce temps" [review of Corridors], La Presse, 26 juin 1976, p. C4.

Merivale, Patricia. "Gilbert La Rocque", in Canadian Writers Since 1960. Vol. 60 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1987, pp. 172-74. Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine. "Un livre qui envote et derange" [review of LesMasques],LeDevoir, 17 Janvier 1981, p. 19. Piette, Alain. "Focalisation, voyeurisme et sc6ne originaire dans Serge d'entre les morts", Voix et Images, XII, 2 (printemps 1987), 497-511. Post-Pierterse, Els. "Vers la d6couverte de I'identit6: letrois premiers romans de Gilbert La Rocque", Voix et Images, III, 2 (dScembre 1977), 277-301. Poulin, Gabrielle. "L'enfance, terre de contradictions" [review of Apres la boue], Relations, fSvrier 1973, pp. 5557. . "Le testament d'un grand romancier", Lettres quebecoises, hiver 1984-85, pp. 11-12. Richmond, John. "Study of Cowardice, a Second Novel for La Rocque" [review of Corridors], Montreal Star, June 3, 1971, p. 67. Royer, Jean. "Le hfros bless6 de la page 111" [review of Le Passager], Le Devoir, 1 decembre 1984, pp. 21, 32. Savoie, Claude. "Le Nombril de Gilbert La Rocque", Livres et auteurs quebecois 1970, pp. 65-66. Smith, Donald. "La violence avant et apres la lettre dans le roman qu6b£cois d'aujourd'hui", Livres et auteurs quebecois 1971, pp. 29-36.

. "Images int6rieures et symboles dans Foeuvre de Gilbert La Rocque", in Gilbert La Rocque: L'Ecriture du reve. Montreal: Quebec-AmSrique, 1985, pp. 13-73. Tetu de Labsade, Fran?oise. "De nouveau avec les 6crivains" [review ofLe Refuge], Livres et auteurs quebecois 1979, pp. 199-201. Vanasse, Andre. "La femme & la bouche rouge" [review of Les Masques], Lettres quebecoises, 6te 1981, pp. 23-24. . "Violence et fantasme" [review of Le Passager], Lettres quebecoises, hiver 1984-85, pp. 13-14. Whitfield, Agnes. "Une fragile renaissance: images du corps masculin dans les Masques et le Passager", Voix et Images, XV, 3 (printemps 1990), 374-86.

A Note on the Contributor Kenneth W. Meadwell is Chair of the Department of French at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of "L'Avalee des avales", "L' Hiver de force" et "Les Enfantomes" de Rejean Ducharme: une fiction mot d mot et sa litteraritt (1990). Some of his articles have appeared in Voix et Images, Etudes canadiennes, Lettres Romanes, Canadian Literature, Profiles in Canadian Literature, and The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre.

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Ken Gass

111

by Reid Gilbert Ken Gass is - in the truest sense of the expression - a man of the theatre. He has been intimately involved in the development of Canadian theatre, especially during the lively period of Toronto's "Alternative Theatre Movement" during the 1970s, and has been a theatre administrator and political advocate, director, playwright, and screen writer. His chief contribution to Canadian theatre is probably his determined work to promote original Canadian scripts, especially in his association with the Factory Theatre Lab, which he founded in 1970 and ran almost alone until 1977. His own stage and television writing, while also an impressive body of work, loses much on the printed page and, frankly, the plays are not Gass's greatest success. No production can be wholly captured in a written text, but the collaborative ventures of Factory Lab and Gass's highly theatrical and often cartoon-like style demand a stage life to express their full potential. As Malcolm Page puts it, "I think Gass would be difficult to communicate on paper",1 and yet that is exactly what this overview must attempt to do. It is important, therefore, to bear in mind Gass's layered career, to find a set of interrelationships among the various plays, public statements, and directorial decisions, and to envision the printed texts as pieces of theatrical collaboration which might demand revision and updating in future productions, if one is to evaluate to any extent the career of Ken Gass. Light (a little tragedy)2 gave its name to a group of four experimental plays which introduced Gass the playwright to Toronto as part of a Festival of Underground Theatre which Gass the administrator helped to organize in 1970. The link was immediately established between these two parallel vocations, as was Gass's continuing view of theatre as an "underground", or revolutionary enterprise. Light is a mimed performance piece between a MAN and WOMAN who occupy "a large empty space with a dark floor" (p. 58) in which a mound provides the only texture and the only escape from nine vertical beams of intense, white light which slowly and then frantically flash on and off, terrifying the primitive humans into a variety of defensive and then aggressive actions. The one-act piece, which plays in "less than twenty min-

utes" (p. 59), differs considerably in tone from later work by Gass - it is abstract and intellectual theatre typical of a graduate student in drama - but it displays a number of Gass characteristics: it is highly theatrical; it invites directors to "develop their own style", suggesting they are free to "borrow from traditional mime, dance, silent films, as they see fit" (p. 59), preparing the way for Gass's later love of popular styles and cultural kitsch; it creates a tension and energy in performance which is more arresting than its 43

somewhat obvious thematic comment; it introduces violence both by the universe against humankind and by humans with power over those without. The notes allow a director to choose props which "appear as souvenirs of a particular civilization", permitting the theme - of the rise and fall of civilizations each as hopeless as the last - to be set in any specific historical context and suggesting Gass's consistent interest in the effect of history on human will-topower, or of the power of certain human beings on history. He says in an interview with Robert Wallace that he had begun to think of the later play, The Boy Bishop, as early as 1970,3 and something of that play's sense of historical fantasy can be seen in this early statement of the myth of the eternal return. Perhaps most disturbing in a rather obvious concept is the relationship of the MAN and WOMAN themselves. The play displays a standard Western reading of history in which the WOMAN, although at first terrified of the power of the light beams (as divine, as demonic, as forces of control), eventually becomes "mesmerized", and "gyrates her body against the light. Accepts the light falling on her face and body. Finally enjoys it" (p. 64). The MAN "panics. Real panic" as his Eve succumbs to the sexual attraction of the light beams and falls from grace; he uses her hypnotized body as a weapon against the beams - once fallen she is objectified - and then strangles her. "She resists for only a moment" (p. 64), accepting her own fate and her own part in her downfall and that of the MAN. Although the play ends with the MAN red eyed and cradling the WOMAN on his lap, his belated tenderness cannot alter the inevitable outcome of this phallocentric lesson of history. It is interesting that each of the plays to follow displays somewhat similar attitudes: sexuality is violent and women are both victims and predators - and sometimes cartoon characters - but never real; men are almost always victims of their ambition and sexuality (which are usually linked), and are often trapped in cartoon heroism. There is a theme of revolution recurrent through the entire canon (including the latest TV dramas), but it seems consistently to miss the crucial point that the struggle for freedom from oppression and cultural alienation is not ultimately ennobling as long as humankind allows itself to remain trapped in gender myths and the political myths of history and to see as external and inevitable the forces of domination. Gass's plays become progressively more ugly and violent in their depiction of power, but they also become more ugly and cynical in their depiction of human interaction because they do not move from the insidious attitudes of the very histories they satirize, nor from the Western tradition from which they emerge. In 1970, with only a $3,000 loan, Ken Gass founded the Factory Theatre Lab, in a factory space on Dupont Street in Toronto. From the outset, the aim was to be the "Home of the Canadian Playwright",4 and its "commitment to do only Canadian plays . . . seemed an extravagantly foolish ideology for the time", 5 to quote its first artistic director. Yet Canadian theatre historians agree that despite a varied degree of excellence in scripts, periods of creative exhaustion (particularly by mid-decade), and some self-indulgent experimentation, the Factory Theatre Lab was of pivotal im44

portance in the development both of the Toronto Alternative Theatre Movement and of Canadian stage writing. "The freedom to experiment and to fail [which this company, together with Toronto Free Theatre, Theatre Passe Muraille, and Tarragon Theatre, provided] was central to the development of new Canadian plays and to the search for Canadian themes and talents."6 Gass states that the Factory's mandate "did not stem from any passionate nationalism", but, rather, "forced [its members and audiences] to abandon the security blanket of our colonial upbringing."7 By creating a theatre which removes colonial dependence, of course, one is asserting nationalism of a political as well as aesthetic kind and, for Gass, the process of creating drama is a revolutionary activity. He commented in 1975, when the Factory was in the midst of financial and artistic problems, that "there has always been a discrepancy between what the public (including the critics and funding agencies) recognized about the Factory and what we considered our most important accomplishments. The public has wanted recognizable products, more hits, and a clearly defined policy. They can't pin us down. The Factory has been preoccupied with the search itself, with the process, with experimentation, yet with an outward energy that often borders on proselytism. Somehow [in the face of bureaucracies and critical comment] we have tried not to compromise our ideals."8 The early seasons at the Factory introduced playwrights who have become major Canadian writers. They also provided venues for a large number of playwrights who have received few (if any) other performances. As well, Gass attempted to mount marathon festivals of short plays: fourteen over two evenings in the first WORKS Festival in 1972, and ten in a single day in the third, in 1976. These three concentrations of work may have been, as Gass himself calls them, "chaotic",9 but they were also an exciting opportunity to compare contemporary work and to participate in the process of theatre. The festivals presented serious problems for the Factory as an organization: Actors' Equity closed the theatre, a grant was lost, and "audiences lost track of what [the theatre was] doing", but the Factory Theatre Lab (as its full name suggests) was intended as much as a laboratory for actors and playwrights as a commercial house. Gass's own first Factory production, "The Red Revolutionary", is a reconstruction of Charles Mair's 1886 play, Tecumseh. The play concerns the Shawnee hero, Tecumseh, who died in the War of 1812 after uniting various tribes into a cohesive force loyal to the British and after playing an instrumental role in stopping the American advance. His true aim was, in fact, to halt the white advance at the Ohio River in order to safeguard the land for the Indian people. Mair's play, despite its sonorous pace, cardboard characters, and clich6d poetry, does capture the majesty of the man and the complex, internal conflict among the Indians and between Tecumseh's vision of the future and that of the antagonistic figure, The Prophet, who counsels immediate revenge against the whites. In Gass's treatment, the play is much shorter than the original, but still runs two hours and fifteen minutes and retains what Don Rubin, in a negative review, called Mair's "19th century verse banalities such as

'Oh wretched age / Oh injured motherhood' and 'Oh for a Pontiac / Oh for an age of valour like to his'",10 which the Vancouver Sun, in a positive review, admitted could be "occasionally tiresome".11 Dave Billington, in the Telegram, also pointed out that "some of the most serious speeches read like a farcical put-on", but did not feel that this "serious flaw in Gass's adaptation . . . [was] enough to destroy the evening."12 Rubin found the production, with its "touches of anti-imperialism thrown in ... surely suspect theatrically and totally baffling artistically." The Vancouver Sun review, concentrating on the inner conflict of wills, found the play "never contrived and often gripping." In his staging, with eight actors doubling and tripling roles, Gass casts women as the Indians, men (dressed entirely in white) as the whites. The semiotic power of this decision is compelling; by investing the Indians with signs associated with females, Gass explores their positions as victims, examining the power hierarchy of White and Indian, man and woman - a motif, it has been noted, which recurs through the plays. "Red Revolutionary" also gives the Indians/women a highly dignified but balanced position, making a visionary leader of Tecumseh, but allowing for the psychological conflict which the two emanations of Chief and Prophet disclose. It is for its staging that Gass's adaptation of the old play is most often praised, and this often audacious sense of the stage is probably what most characterizes Gass's work as director, designer, and playwright. It is in the staging that the chief interest lies in Gass's next Factory Lab play, Hurray for Johnny Canuck.13 During the Second World War, as Gass points out in his introduction to the play in its second publication, the Canadian government "placed an embargo on imported 'nonessential reading material'. . . . As a result, a series of Canadian comic books sprang up to fill the gap."14 Although these comic books developed a style of their own somewhat different from the models of American superhero comics, they did not survive the lifting of the importation ban at the war's end. These children's strips were, Gass feels, "an accurate mirror of Canadian attitudes during the war: the desire to overthrow the Nazi menace, the heroism of Canada's fighting men, as well as a tendency towards quick generalizations that are clearly racist by today's standards."15 Hurray for Johnny Canuck traces the exploits of the woodsman, Johnny (who is sent to fight the Nazis, the Japanese, and even extraterrestrials), with his bumbling French Canadian sidekick, Derek Bras D'Or, and his platonic girlfriend, Nurse Ruth Barton. Spurred on by Corporal Dixon of the RCMP - himself a heavily parodied icon - Johnny moves at a breakneck pace from adventure to adventure, finally winning the victory, if only in the nick of time. The six actors double and triple to become some thirty characters, making costume changes in sight of the audience, finding themselves in and out of situations without explanation or logic, and yet carrying on quite believably within the comic book reality which the total design quickly establishes. The faithful dog/companion is portrayed simply by an actor's putting on a hat (with earmuffs) and a fur cape over casual human clothing; a WAC jacket alone creates Ruth Barton's

uniform. The dog's thoughts are presented, in cartoon style, with a "thought bubble" drawn on a backdrop, allowing the dog to "talk" back to Johnny. It is this immediate identification with a type of popular literature which resulted in the initial, positive reception of the piece by Toronto audiences and has made the play successful with audiences of children. The surface satire of the form, however, yields a second satirical comment: in the crude theatricality of the production, Gass exposes the naivete of the period and the sham of false heroism. What is interesting is that Johnny (and his present-day audience) both recognize the falsity of his kind of make-believe valour. In a manner typical of a Canadian sense of hero - an iconoclastic style which can also be seen in Sharon Pollock's Walsh, George F. Walker's "power plays" and Zastrozzi, and John Gray's Billy Bishop Goes to War16 - Gass shows a hero perform his role and enjoy it, while realizing that the true heroes are quiet Canadians, unknown and uncelebrated. Johnny quickly learns the opinion of a more typical Canadian soldier: Brian: Johnny:

Brian: Johnny:

Are you sure you weren't crawling in the mud with me in Normandy? No, you don't understand. I was on special assignment. You see, (Striking a pose) I'm Johnny Canuck. Oh yeah. You're the guy that fought all his battles on the home front. (He exits abruptly.) Now look here. . . . No, I give that kid credit. Those boys fought a great war. Well, think I'll move on. (pp. 151-52)

In this least political of Gass's plays, both this theme and the anti-American bias are secondary to the affectionate deconstruction of the form, but both are consistently implicit in the superficiality and theatricality of the play. In an encounter between Johnny Canuck and his American counterpart, the swaggering Captain America laughs at Johnny's uniform ("Well, at least it's Canadian") and responds to Johnny's sober analysis, "I did my bit, but I'd like to just say it was a great team effort", by "producing a grand, colourful comic book" and bragging, "Well, I can tell you what I did in full colour. It was Captain America that won the war, not the Brits, not the old Allies. We saved their skins in Europe and we wiped the Pacific. Clean. And we don't mind taking credit for what we done" (p. 151). It is clear that the audience is meant to deplore Captain America and find the humble Johnny more attractive, yet in dismissing Captain America, the audience must also dismiss Johnny as a mere extension of American pulp folklore. The Canadian audience, then, sees through the bogus hero and yet yearns for the highly entertaining mode in which he expresses himself, a mode that satirizes its own borrowed version as being appallingly tacky and yet somehow more true. As Johnny says in his final speech: "Well, guess there's just me left. Think I'll go back to being plain old John Campbell for a while. I'll head up to those great timberlines of Northern Ontario on my own" (p. 152). At this point, he hangs his sweater on the Sun "which opens for him, and 45

walks into the horizon", while the Narrator reassures the audience that "Johnny Canuck has not disappeared. You can still find him swinging his axe in Northern Ontario. He is not dead. And if the Fascist Menace ever returns, you can count on Johnny Canuck to save the day. Hurray for Johnny Canuck!!" The point is that in the Canadian view, heroes like Canuck are really non-heroes like Campbell and only if war again breaks out - with another embargo on American comics, perhaps - will Canadians need to reinvent Canuck from Campbell. In the meantime, it is easy for Canadian audiences to laugh at the form while using their laughter to participate in the myth their pragmatism must otherwise reject. It is in the laughter that the play finds its true centre. As Brian Boru pointed out in his review of the first production, "the important thing to note . . . is that everything in the Factory Lab's show (the acting, directing, d6cor, costumes and the gags) is, by product-oriented-middle-class drama's terms, cheap, shabby and shameless, or, in theatrical terms, just as it should be."17 There is, however, a sense of rushed writing and a lack of realization in the play that cannot entirely be forgiven by accepting the shallowness as part of the implicit message. As Urjo Kareda observes, "Eventually the fun runs out, overthrown by tedious repetition. Half an hour of this stuff would already be pushing the limits; two acts is more reckless, though much less effective, than Ruth Barton herself."18 The camp style of the show and its own self-consciousness not only demonstrate Gass's highly effective use of the stage; they also underline his tendency to replace script development and attention to literary matters with bravado effects, a tendency which grows with the next two plays. In 1976, Gass travelled to Europe to relieve the strain of six years as a theatre administrator and to work on his most ambitious play, The Boy Bishop. Gass confessed in an interview with Joseph Erdelyi that he found the job of administrator "very boring . . . a constant repetition of detail." He had "just reached the point when I stopped fighting", but by the time of the interview Gass felt "a sense of the future, a sense of direction."19 His new focus appears to have emerged with the completion of The Boy Bishop, which Gass considered "my first real play . . . for the first time I really committed myself."20 The play was also the first script Gass developed directly as writer without workshop involvement by actors or source material like the Johnny Canuck comic books. The play is a large "historical fantasy" set in an imaginary eighteenth-century New France. Again, production values give the play enormous energy, making it "a grandiose, over-blown . . . audacious extravaganza, a bawdy cartoon of epic proportions, that uses a slight bit of history to take a topsy-turvy leap into a B-movie pageant."21 Once again, also, serious revision is needed, especially in the dialogue, in the characterizations, which are largely caricature, and in the second act structure to make the writing cohesive and to develop adequately the intriguing possibilities of the situation upon which Gass bases his action. The play turns on the importation into New France of the medieval custom of making a poor and innocent boy into a bishop for one day, an act of humility for the ruling classes 46

which was, of course, in reality a carefully controlled social safety-valve. The festival placated the disenfranchised majority with a momentary sense of power orchestrated to lead into another year of servitude to the hegemony of Church and Crown. In Gass's play, New France is shown as totally corrupt, highly sexual, and driven by false religious zeal. The historical figures of Governor Montcalm, Bishop Laval, and the Intendant Francois Bigot are fictionalized into a self-serving ruling caste who share absolute power with fictional religious figures, such as Sister de la Peltrie and the homosexual priest who sponsors the Boy. In Gass's treatment, the Boy is elevated to his temporary episcopacy in order to divert attention from the economic and sexual corruption of his superiors. Once in power, however, he refuses to relinquish his position, leading a de facto revolution in which the legitimate government is supplanted rather than overthrown. When first introduced, the Boy is in bed with the Priest, announcing his ambivalent sexuality, his lack of innocence, and his highly manipulative personality. The Boy assures his selection by blackmailing the Priest and then forcing his former mates into positions of obedience to his plan. The play's preoccupation with sexuality, as a metaphor for social corruption and as a device of the stage action, is thus immediately introduced. Once the Boy has attained power, he learns that the adult responsibilities of administration are far different from his adolescent vision of Utopia, and that power wearies even as it corrupts. It is the self-doubt which slowly descends on the protagonist which offers the most interesting dimension of the play and which probably comes nearest to autobiography. By the end of the play, the Boy announces that he has only two choices: "The best choice would be for me to become a super-tyrant" and "My second is to become a martyr."22 Instead, the Boy recognizes that he is "a fraud" (p. 118), and although playing out what he calls "the cycle" (p. 117) to the end - "Kneel to me! I am your Bishop!" (p. 120) - he ultimately urges his own assassination: "Would somebody just shoot me! It doesn't matter. I don't even have a name" (p. 121). At the end, the Boy appears to go mad, but his insane speech presents the duality of power and pointlessness which lies at the heart of the play: "You people can't live with greatness. You worship mediocrity. . . . I was the only adult to ever rule the earth. I was the stars. I was the plague. I was power. I am Christ. I am shit. I am you and always will be. Wowwu wowwu wowwu iiiiiiii ooooooooiooiooiooi" (p. 121). Taken at face value, the Boy's degeneration has considerable thematic interest and raises a universal comment which might have been further explored, had it not been mixed with more personal references in the apparently therapeutic process of writing. At its premiere, the play was labelled as "the apotheosis" of the Factory Lab movement, and while Gass insists it is not symbolic, he told Frank Rasky of the Toronto Star it was "a summation of what I've been trying to do ... for the past six years and a reflection my own frustrations. . . . It also explores my own love/hate relationship with Canada. I've tried to plant a few flowers in what I consider to be our country's cultural desert. Like the Boy, I've attempted to create a new order

in the wilderness and, like him, I've realized the futility of effecting an overnight change."23 Gass tells Robert Wallace in The Work that "the whole experience of running the Factory had somehow found its way into the fibre of the play itself. The play really became about me in that context, I suppose" (p. 203). In an interview following the published version of the script, Gass adds, "There are times when I identify with the Boy, with the frustrations and the literal banging of the head against the wall."24 Mixed also into the character of the hero is the comment on Canadian culture, a comment Gass might have developed better by concentrating on the interplay of forces in a colonial environment, rather than on the effect of these forces on a disenchanted prophet. In the homosexuality of the Boy, Gass hints at an enlargement of the theme of male and female sexuality and power which has been present in each play. He depicts Sister de la Peltrie and Montcalm's daughter, Angelina, as sexually rapacious and destructive and, in the disturbing curtain scene of Act II, has Angelina thrown to a crowd of randy beggars who "paw and tear at her" (p. 96). It is unclear whether the Boy loathes (or, indeed, loves) Angelina for her femininity, her social class, her resistance to him, or for his impotence in the face of her challenge to possess her. It is equally unclear whether his own sexuality is simply a means to an end or should be extended in some way into a comment on power, on heightened sensitivity, or on ennui. As with so much in the play, issues are introduced and left incomplete. The violence of the sexuality and the grossness of the language, however, especially with reference to women and to rape (both as a physical act and in figurative language), remain disquieting features of the writing. Gass was anxious to avoid a documentary approach to his subject, determined not to produce "a pompous history play".25 He was also attempting a complex design of history, pseudo-history, cultural critique, theatrical metaphor, sexual allegory, and personal analysis. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the play was met by highly various responses, some finding it "audacious and funny"; some, "a sassy shocker" which "is a mess, but such a glorious mess you forgive it nearly everything in order to exult in a medium that, for once, has triumphantly found its message";26 others commenting that the author had turned "dross to dross".27 It is also not surprising that while the exterior of the production assisted its episodic plotting and carried its three-hour length, it also finally defeated the play's thematic possibilities by submerging them in a maelstrom of stage business and rather adolescent sexual exhibition. Appearing in the same year, "Revolutionary Project" displays something of the more experimental "new direction" which Gass suggested would herald the Factory Theatre Lab after Boy Bishop. It also demonstrates Gass's working style as it moves from version to version, medium to medium. It is a collective piece, continuing workshop development from the Works '76 festival; later adaptations appear as a radio play, "Terror", on the BBC in 1980 and as a stage play at Hart House in 1984. The performance was generally well received as a workin-progress, although, as David Roche points out in Scene

Changes, "there is nothing beyond an arbitrary seven-scene structure to draw [impactful individual scenes] into a whole and we are left with a multitude of impressions that do not reinforce one another. . . . The images, music and acting power are there; they simply need to be fused into a vision."28 Perhaps it is in this failure to complete an exciting initial design that Gass's work most often falls short of his own obvious potential and of the Brechtian models to which he seems drawn. Of course, workshop productions are "often produced before they're ready," as Gass discusses with Robert Wallace in The Work (p. 202), and it is for this reason that the totality of his work in the theatre must be borne in mind. As was stated at the outset, Gass is not a writer, nor a director, whose contribution to the Canadian theatre can be fairly judged by a snapshot of any one play or production. The staging of "Revolutionary Project" at Factory Theatre Lab was particularly interesting: the audience sat behind chicken-wire fencing and shards of light subdivided the space, creating deep shadows. As Roche paints it, "It is a repellent locale where interrogations, tortures, and much gunplay are manifested to make a show ... [about] political domination and international terrorism." Here, Gass uses terrorism as a theatrical device to discuss itself; he uses its techniques to put the audience in the position of victim. In a review of the later adaptation, "Terror", Daniel Casse observes that "the play is over-ripe with suggestions of the legitimacy of terrorist activity and the absence of distinction between terrorist and counter-terrorist, but these ideas are left dangling as undeveloped thoughts."29 The relationship of terrorist activity to political protest obsesses Gass, but the body of plays does not clearly articulate a reasoned position on the morality of violence as a revolutionary force. What does become stronger is Gass's own use of stage violence against his audience. In the first scene of Act III of The Boy Bishop, the Boy asks the Priest, "Who was the greatest king?" In response to the answer, "Nebuchannezzar", he asks, "How many people did he kill in his lifetime?" To the further question, "Who was the greatest killer of all time?" and its answer, "Hitler", he "stares at the audience mournfully for a long time" and states: "I wish all Frenchmen were Jews" (p. 98). The speech prefigures the Boy's final degeneration into corruption and madness, but it also mixes the recurrent themes of power, sexuality, murder, and (Nazi) totalitarianism which can be traced through the series of plays. Emerging again in "Revolutionary Project", these motifs finally come together in Winter Offensive. Winter Offensive, the great cause celebre of the 1977 Toronto theatre season, was a turning-point for Factory Theatre Lab and for Ken Gass. The action takes place in the drawing-room of Mrs. Eichmann during Hitler's final "winter offensive" of 1944. Mixing historical document and fiction (as in Boy Bishop), Gass places the Nazi inner circle together and under the grotesque domination of Mrs. Eichmann, a gross and sexually insatiable she-devil. The play opens with Mrs. Eichmann forcing Albert Speer (from whose Spandau diaries the impetus for the play arose) to submit to fellatio, and moves through a long series of sexual acts mixed with 47

cannibalism and necrophilia. The cast includes a young soldier, Karl, who allows himself to be mutilated (his ear is slowly cut off while he is sexually stimulated) in a bid to enter the inner sanctum of Nazi power, a number of Hitler's top henchmen (including the generals who actually attempted to assassinate the Fuhrer elsewhere and at a different time), two Jewish servants under threat of transportation to Dachau, Mrs. Eichmann, and Hitler himself. The message is clear: the evils of Nazism will suck in anyone who wants power desperately enough; the world is based on hierarchies of power; and the violence of human sexual perversity is an apt metaphor for the depravity of the human condition. In a final speech, Hitler points out that theatre is the true reflection of civilization: Gass tells Robert Wallace he meant the play to "reflect Western civilization up to the present" (p. 206). That message, however, is unrealized. Critical and popular reception of the play was devastating, grants to the theatre were cut, and Gass resigned the following year from his position as artistic director. The notoriety of the production may well have been exaggerated: certainly some of the conservative outrage published in Ontario newspapers seems small-minded, yet, as Gina Mallet remarked, "it is rare to be overwhelmed in the theatre. To be immobilized, thunderstruck as it were, is even rarer. . . . But last night . . . [njausea, horror, disgust and finally fury swept over one in waves as this wretchedly conceived attempt at drama filled the theatre with the evil spawn of illiteracy and adolescent sniggering at dirty jokes and unusual sex acts."30 In a retrospective review of the previous season and removed from the controversy in the daily newspapers, John Herbert provides a more thoughtful, and even more damning comment: "To take [the play] seriously is to give the effort an attention it does not deserve. It is the flat-faced version of an adolescent's idea of fascism, a piece of nonsense fiddled and doodled out by someone who has never experienced police brutality, hopeless imprisonment, threat of death or ruthless removal of all human rights and freedoms . . . sad and pathetic, because it all falls so far short of being what theatre can be when it matters."31 He also notices the stylistic and thematic connection to The Boy Bishop which, as he points out, the newspaper reviewers miss in their general liking for the earlier play and detestation of the later one. Gass accepts that he was naive to expect a different reaction, to expect the Toronto audiences to see the play "as a serious kind of allegory of the contemporary world" (p. 206), but he does not accept the nai'vet6 of his own revolutionary vision. Gass quite correctly argues, as have many schools of theatre, that drama has a role to shock, that "it's valid to provoke, challenge."32 He does not adequately prove, however, that his conception does more than provoke; neither his play nor his bitter subsequent apologias for it explain how Winter Offensive can be seen as anything but a failure. In his interview with Wallace, Gass explains that Hitler saw himself as an artist and that the play was conceived as a series of paintings by Hitler (p. 207), but also admits that he didn't "develop the play formally as a series of paintings." How then is the audience to see the implication, so tenuously symbolized, that the drawing-room, itself, 48

is a Hitlerian canvas painted in blood? Wallace pushes his ironic observation that the play uses the very techniques of empty "sensual stimulation" which Gass claims to be criticizing, to which Gass replies that he "didn't want the audience to be voyeurs" (p. 208). The play, however, tricks the spectators into exactly that role, forcing them to watch acts which suggest heavy symbolic importance beyond their crude surface statement, but which, in the end, turn out to say nothing more. From a thematic point of view, the play might have stopped at the first mutilation scene with Karl. Gass insists that he wanted the audience to "cry out too, and follow Karl's growth as he begins to re-examine the world around him" through the rest of the play,33 but his is a most peculiar enlightenment: seventy-one pages into the printed text, Karl is still kneeling before Hitler and offering him "my life and my total devotion." His final line - "Look!" - comes only four pages later and it is unclear whether he is suddenly looking out the window at the destruction of Berlin, at his long-awaited epiphany, or at the angels inexplicably descending from the ceiling.34 At any rate, the locus of the play is never Karl, even if he is meant to be protagonist; it is Mrs. Eichmann, who looms larger than life as antihero, arch-fiend, and, once again, destroying woman. The play contains motifs of biting and the tearing of bodily parts (especially sexual organs); these motifs are introduced immediately in the opening scene's fellatio rape, appear in speech after speech about scalpels, shrapnel, and "slivers of meat," and continue to the gruesome sexual cannibalism in which the Jewish prisoners are compelled to eat into each other. In their struggle to the death, the female kicks the male in the crotch and bites his ear (perhaps to repeat Karl's bizarre initiation) and then retreats from the fight in a moment of moral outrage. The male immediately knocks her out and, although he hesitates, obeys Mrs. Eichmann's command to "devour her, piece by piece, and you will be free. I may even let you sleep with me. Begin at her cunt, and work upwards" (p. 47). The struggle of the mute MAN and WOMAN of Light against nameless forces which control them reappears yet again, in a more complex system of power where females are both dominant (in their sexual power over men) and victimized, and men are both dictator and toady. In a speech in which the predictable Canadian cultural allegory and sophomoric Freudian symbolism fall together out of Karl's frightened mouth, the voice of a pubescent boy caught playing with himself sums up the play: "The Americans ... I'm scared. I've never had anyone to look after me before. My father left me. My mummy didn't want me ... I'm not ready" (p. 73). In a pre-production interview in the Toronto Star, Gass advertised the play as containing "some sex (simulated), some violence (likewise), and some brutality. But the overall tone is comic and elegant."35 The comedy, however, is rare and perverse, and the tone better described, in Bryan Johnson's phrase, as "gratuitous grossness."36 If, as Gass tells Wallace, he wanted the play to begin "very innocuously], ... wanted it to have the feeling of an elegant drawing-room comedy" (p. 207), why would he immediately introduce a forced, oral sexual act, and why immediately make Mrs. Eichmann brash and vulgar and absolutely unlike the ladies

who inhabit elegant drawing-rooms in a host of plays? That he wanted to move deeper and deeper into the body/bodypolitic can be seen in the progress of the image patterns which finally lead, Wallace notices, to Mrs. Eichmann's reaching into the corpse of her servant and bringing out feces to smear over the rest of the cast. Is it that the audience is too conservative to see beyond its own revulsion at such an image, or is it that the image is so crude that it alienates the audience before it can be assimilated? Or is it that the audience cannot separate what speaks to it (however horribly) in purely theatrical terms from what seems like a childish fascination with body parts and excrement? (The language of the play, which is over-full of sexual swearing, tends to encourage the latter reaction. If Karl is to be explained away as caught in a Freudian Oedipus complex, the play itself would appear to be fixated at the anal/oral stage.) That Gass was attempting a significant comment is abundantly clear, as is the growth of this comment from earlier work and its continuing presence in later scripts. What is sad about this play is the degree to which the attempt to replicate depravity of the political soul in stage images of the depravity of the human body fails, becoming simply disgusting and, frankly, boring. Erwin claims "I wanted to keep tearing off my flesh until I reached my own essence. .. . Then I realized that my own essence was in the scabs of meat that I'd torn off (p. 57). Perhaps this is simply too terrible a nightmare to dramatize, especially in its final horror. But, perhaps, as a number of plays and films which have used the Nazis and the cruelties of war to make a similar statement demonstrate, it simply requires more discipline. After Winter Offensive, Gass retreated from the Toronto stage, moving into a freelance writing and teaching career. In his 1979 article in Canadian Theatre Review, Gass argues that Alternate Theatre is not dead in Toronto, but states that the conservative environment of the city "has caused me, for one, to plan my future theatre work elsewhere" (p. 134). However, he has continued to teach and direct in the city, involving himself in a number of student productions and small theatres. In 1984 Gass wrote and directed a musical collaboration with composer John Mills-Cockell which again reveals his interest with revolutionary activity. "Victor Jara, Alive" relies heavily on Jara's own music to detail, in a rather "straightforward chronology",37 the life of the Chilean activist put to death in 1973 by General Augusto Pinochet. The cast was made up of people deeply committed to the Chilean struggle, but not uniformly accomplished as actors; the script was, in Ray Conlogue's phrase, "uninspired", though the music was the show's "real triumph". Gass's political concerns seem to have prompted a show which was neither fully thought out nor complete. In 1985 Gass created a new Toronto theatre company, the Canadian Rep Theatre, which aimed to produce both new scripts and to revive recent Canadian plays. Here again, one sees the theatre administrator and cultural animateur in Ken Gass, who struggled for eighteen months to realize another worthwhile plan: if, he argued, the Alternate Theatre movement in Canada's major cities did establish an indigenous drama during the 1970s, then it is necessary to mount revivals of the plays to nurture the Canadian theatre.

Gass's own writing, however, has moved to electronic media, although a stage play, "Guardian Angel", was produced in 1985 at the University of Regina. In 1988 the CBC broadcast a film by Ken Gass which concerned an urban, guerrilla terrorist cell, The Squamish Five. The film shows a considerable maturity in Gass's writing and a good sense of the role of the camera. The restricted perspective in some scenes - both in camera closeups and in the claustrophobia of the group crowded together in small rooms - allows the author to concentrate more on the dialogue, perhaps by refusing to allow the bombastic movement which characterized the earlier stage plays. As in "Jara", however, the narrative moves in strict time order and has a disappointingly "flat" quality. The drama revolves around the character Julie Belmas, who is used as the psychological entry into the group. It is significant that the real Ms. Belmas, the youngest of the group, was the only member to allow herself to be interviewed; her sympathetic treatment is, therefore, unsurprising. This character is not, however, deeply analysed. She is shown as a dupe in the hands of more determined terrorists such as Ann Hansen, although Hansen (who can comment, "I might go back to West Germany. . . . Look at the situation here. There's hardly any leftists. The ones there are, are wimpy. There just isn't the possibility of radicalism on a major scale in this country") is treated as a facile and unthinking revolutionary. That she became caught up with these particular terrorists, then, suggests Julie was especially naive, as she is sometimes portrayed. From time to time, however, she offers more astute insights into their situation than do the others. Her characterization does not convincingly show us her growth in self-realization (though such a growth might well have taken place). Her guilt over her mistake in the first bombing and her dependence on a rather stupid lover whom she has dragged into the group are also disquieting facets of her treatment, and perhaps yet another example of Gass's negative treatment of women. On the other hand, it is perhaps quite natural for an unsure teenage girl to form such an attachment. The viewer fluctuates between sympathy for her passive efforts to halt the inevitable, the feeling that the writing is biased in her favour, and frustration at her inability to save herself. Critical viewers at its Vancouver Film Festival showing complained that the film trivializes the group by paying too much attention to secondary issues and too little to its legitimate concerns, the feminist issues in their historical context, or the political philosophy which motivated them. What the film does succeed in showing is the amateur quality of their enterprise, which, one might argue, itself trivialized the higher aspirations of political protest. Ken Gass has, then, contributed significantly to the theatre in Canada and has produced a body of work - both as writer and director - which builds on itself. Often marred by incomplete writing and by dramatic designs larger than he seems able to control, and very often gratuitous in their use of violence and sexuality, the plays nonetheless strive to work out a consistent pattern of political concerns which have legitimacy in Canadian life. In the most powerful moment of The Squamish Five, a close-up of Julie's eyes during her arrest reveals her sudden realization of her fate. Curiously,

49

the depiction of the police action is more violent than are scenes of the group's bombings, making it unclear exactly where the author finally stands on force as a means of social control or social change. Indeed, it still seems that Gass has not worked out a thorough analysis of his position on the role of revolution despite a series of plays about dictatorships, heroes, revolutionaries, terrorists, and the victims of society. 1

In a letter to the writer, June 7,1989. In Quarry, No. 28 (Summer 1979), pp. 58-66. 3 Robert Wallace and Cynthia Zimmerman, The Work: Conversations with English-Canadian Playwrights (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982), p. 203. Other references will appear parenthetically in the text. 4 Ken Gass, Introduction, in Connie Brissenden, ed., The Factory Lab Anthology (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1974), p. 7. 5 Ibid. 6 Robert Wallace, "Growing Pains: Toronto's Theatre in the 1970s", Canadian Literature, No. 85 (Summer 1980), p. 81. 7 Gass, Introduction, Factory Lab Anthology, p. 7. 8 "Perspective", Theatre Notebook, I, 1 (October 1975), 3. 9 "Toronto's Alternates: Changing Realities", Canadian Theatre Review, Winter 1979, p. 132. Subsequent reference to this article will appear parenthetically in the text. 10 "Theatre draws its sabre on Americans", Toronto Star, May 8, 1971. 11 "Red Revolutionary exciting play", Vancouver Sun, August 20, 1971. 12 "Red Revolutionary depicts Tecumseh as a visionary, almost Grecian hero", Telegram, May 29, 1971. 13 Ken Gass, Hurray for Johnny Canuck (Toronto: Playwrights Coop, 1975) [repr. in Five Canadian Plays (Toronto: Playwrights Co-op, 1978]. All references will be to the later edition and will appear parenthetically in the text. 14 Ibid., p. 105. 15 Ibid. 16 For a larger discussion of this point, see my article, "Mounties, Muggings and Moose: Canadian Icons in a Landscape of American Violence", in Flaherty and Manning, eds., The Beaver Bites Back (Chicago: Lyceum, 1990). See also, Alexander L. Amprimoz, review of Five Canadian Plays, Quarry, No. 28 (Summer 1979), pp. 79-82. 17 "Absence makes the art grow fonder", TSB, January 29, 1975. 18 "Theatre Lab's comic book romp is for kiddies", Toronto Star, December 4, 1974. 19 "Gass resurfacing as playwright", Ottawa Citizen, April 3, 1976. 20 Ibid. 21 David McCaughna, "The Boy Bishop an audacious and funny play", Toronto Star, April 22, 1976. 22 The Boy Bishop, in Canadian Theatre Review, No. 12 (Fall 1976), p. 116. All references will be to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text. 23 "Playwright stops griping to put his anger on stage", Toronto Star, October 4, 1976. 24 Roy Keizer, "Postscript: Interview with Ken Gass", Canadian Theatre Review, No. 12 (Fall 1976), p. 122. 25 McCaughna, "The Boy Bishop an audacious and funny play". 26 "Time-tripping Boy Bishop a sassy shocker," Globe and Mail, AprU 4, 1976. 27 Myron Galloway, "Author Gass changes dross to dross", Montreal Star, May 10, 1976. 28 In Scene Changes, January 1977, p. 14. 29 "Ken Gass experiment in terror visually and aurally stunning", the newspaper [University of Toronto], January 18, 1984, p. 7. 30 "Winter Offensive disgusting garbage", Toronto Star, November 23, 1977. 31 Orion, January 1978. 32 "Theatre's job is to outrage", Toronto Star, December 12, 1977. 33 Ibid. 34 Ken Gass, Winter Offensive (Toronto: Playwrights Co-op, 1978). All references are to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text. 35 Toronto Star, November 18, 1977. 2

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36 Brian Johnson, "Of a terrible play, the most and the least one can say: Winter Offensive Is", Globe and Mail, November 23, 1977, p. 12. 37 Ray Conlogue, "Powerful Jara story is moving, but production has some flaws", Globe and Mail, Toronto, March 28, 1984, p. M9.

Chronology 1945 1967

Born September 10, in Abbotsford, B.C. Graduates from the University of British Columbia with a B.A., taking courses in theatre and creative writing. 1968 Earns an M.A. from UBC. 1969 Writes four short experimental plays with the collective title "Light". 1970 Having moved to Toronto, teaches English at Parkdale Collegiate, works as a freelance director at Theatre Passe Muraille and the Garret Theatre, helps to organize the Festival of Underground Theatre at the St. Lawrence Centre, at which he directs his four "Light" plays, including the later published Light (a little tragedy). Founds the Factory Theatre Lab (FTL). 1971 Directs his play, "Red Revolutionary" at FTL. The production travels to the Arts Club Theatre in Vancouver. 1974 Directs his play Hurray for Johnny Canuck at FTL. The play later tours Ontario in a production by Young People's Theatre, also directed by the author. Presents the first WORKS festival, a marathon series of plays in repertory; the festival receives critical interest, but the work schedule causes ACTRA to close FTL temporarily. 1975 FTL presents a second run of Hurray for Johnny Canuck. Presents WORKS Two, a second concentrated festival of plays. 1976 Directs his play The Boy Bishop at FTL. Mounts a third WORKS festival. Directs "Revolutionary Project", a collective creation, work-in-progress at FTL. 1977 An adaptation of "Revolutionary Project" is broadcast on CBC radio. Creates a collage show, "Tea Cup Entertainments" at FTL. Directs his play Winter Offensive at FTL. 1978 Resigns as artistic director of FTL amid the controversy of Winter Offensive; begins freelance writing and directing, as well as teaching assignments. 1979 Publishes "Toronto's Alternates: Changing Realities", in which he states that he must work outside Toronto. 1980-83 Teaches at York University, George Brown Community College, and University College, University of Toronto. Directs student productions at U.C. Playhouse; co-ordinates student collaboration on "The Heroes Play" at the Yes Company, U.C. Playhouse. BBC broadcasts his "Terror" in August 1981. Publishes critical articles and works on film and television projects. Directs in the 1981 Toronto Theatre Festival and at the Bay view Theatre. His "Private Chambers" is read in the FTL's Brave New Works series, 1981. 1984 Co-authors "Victor Jara, Alive" with John MillsCockell, produced at Toronto Workshop Productions. Directs his play "Terror" at Hart House

1985

1988

Theatre. CBC broadcasts "Passion of the Patriots". Founds Canadian Rep Theatre which aims to produce original Canadian plays and to revive plays in the Canadian repertory. Named play wrightin-residence for the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre's Third Annual Festival of New Plays. His play "Guardian Angel" is produced at the Open Stage Theatre, University of Regina. CBC broadcasts his film, The Squamish Five. The play is first screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival and at a number of other film festivals.

Comments by Ken Gass Theatre is a rather special place where one can create a particular and immediate experience with an audience. In the same way that I've never been extremely interested in Naturalism of the kind that attempts to pick life off a street and present it to an audience, I've never been really interested in a play that simply finds an interesting historical event and tries to tailor it to the limitations of theatre. Robert Wallace and Cynthia Zimmerman, The Work: Conversations with English-Canadian Playwrights (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982), p. 203. I think that as a playwright, one starts with fragments of oneself and one extends them in one's writing. Roy Keizer, "Postscript: Interview with Ken Gass", Canadian Theatre Review, No. 12 (Fall 1976), p. 122. If the conservative forces of the past few years had merely reduced the quota of naked bottoms on stage, one might have just waved them fondly goodbye. What seems to have died along with the outrage is the whole notion of theatre as a force for change and a place of serious experiment. "A Fond Farewell to Outrage", Globe and Mail (Toronto), January 24,1981. ... my own feelings about the shortcomings of workshops as they have existed in Canada are that they are often shortterm stop-gap measures with no follow-through. The quick production followed by a discussion can easily lead to final play-doctoring and the imposition of subtle (and not so subtle) formulae simply "to make the play work". . . . Also, the workshop process tends to favour a literary approach as it can not easily accommodate the visual and spatial components (I don't mean scenery) that have become integral to much recent world theatre. At the Factory we became dissatisfied with our workshop readings. . . . We felt we were begging the questions about the plays, and indeed about theatre itself. More often than not, the actors would open their bag of tricks, give performance values, and often wallpaper over the cracks in the play's foundations. Our main concern was to provide the author with concrete directions for his next draft, and, further, to consider the implications of performance style on the text. Theatre Quarterly, No. 32 (1979), p. 71.

Comments on Ken Gass On the face of it there would seem to be something inherently dramatic in the conflict that is built-in to political causes. . . . But the problem in making theatre out of this is that issues, no matter how deeply felt, must first be rendered accessible in dramatic terms before those who "make" the theatre can hope to move us. It isn't enough that they feel deeply about their material - passionate involvement may even be an obstacle if, in their desire to persuade, they let passion do the work of sound aesthetics and proselytizing take the place of craft. David Roche, review of "Revolutionary Project", Scene Changes, January 1977, p. 14. The Factory Theatre Lab's inability to find "the Canadian middle road [between] meaningful experimentation on one hand [and] public acceptability on the other" has resulted in its loss of profile in the daily press but not its status in the theatre community. Nor has it disappointed a consistently loyal audience eager to participate in the theatre's experiments despite negative reviews. Robert Wallace, "Growing Pains: Toronto's Theatre in the 1970s", Canadian Literature, No. 85 (Summer 1980), p. 73. Wallace quotes Gass, "Toronto Alternates: Changing Realities", Canadian Theatre Review, No. 21 (Winter 1979), p. 132. Although the Factory's dramatic skill and presentational daring . .. may have been meagre, its name is nevertheless synonymous with the new spirit of Canadian theatrical bravura. Clearly, the reputation which the Factory enjoys is based upon something other than its on-stage attainments. The Factory is, in fact, well known for its Promethean loyalty to the idea of an exclusively Canadian drama and for the zealous, uncompromising style with which it pursues this end. Brian Boru, "Factory Theatre Lab: Out of Gass", That's Show Business, May 22,1974. Selected Bibliography Works by Ken Gass Published Plays Light (a little tragedy), in Quarry, No. 28 (Summer 1979), pp. 58-66. First performance St. Lawrence Centre, Toronto, 1970; dir. Gass. Hurray for Johnny Canuck. Toronto: Playwrights Co-op, 1975. [Reprinted in Five Canadian Plays. Toronto: Playwrights Co-op, 1978.] First performance Factory Theatre Lab, Toronto 1974; dir. Gass. The Boy Bishop, in Canadian Theatre Review, No. 12 (Fall 1976), pp. 42-122. First performance Factory Theatre Lab, Toronto, 1976; dir. Gass. Winter Offensive. Toronto: Playwrights Co-op, 1978. First performance Factory Theatre Lab, Toronto, 1977; dir. Gass.

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Unpublished Stage Plays "Red Revolutionary". First performance Factory Theatre Lab, Toronto, 1971; dir. Gass. "Revolutionary Project". First performance Factory Theatre Lab, Toronto, 1976; dir. Gass. "The Heroes Play". A collaborative piece written by students at the Yes Company at University College Playhouse, University of Toronto, direction and writing supervised by Gass. First performance U.C. Playhouse, July 1980. "Private Chambers". First performance Factory Theatre Lab, Brave New Works Winter Series, 1981. "Terror". Stage version of the radio play. First performance Hart House Theatre, University of Toronto, 1984. "Victor Jara, Alive". Co-authored and with music by John Mills-Cockell. First performance Toronto Workshop Productions, 1984. "Guardian Angel". First performance Open Stage Theatre, University of Regina, May 1985. Selected Television, Film, and Radio Writing "Revolutionary Project". CBC Radio, 1977. "Terror" [adaptation of "Revolutionary Project"]. BBC Radio, August 1981. [A 60-minute version of this 90-minute radio script was prepared for various European radio broadcasts.] "Passion of the Patriots". Some Honorable Gentlemen series, CBC Television, 1984. The Squamish Five. CBC Television, 1988. Selected Criticism Freeman, Brian. "In Review: The Boy Bishop", Scene Changes, April 1976, p. 17. Horenblas, Richard. "Ken Gass - checkered career", Toronto Arts News, April 1982, p. 14. Keizer, Roy. "Postscripts: Interviews with Ken Gass", Canadian Theatre Review, No. 12 (Fall 1976), pp. 123-26. Miller, Mary Jane. "They Shout! They Score?" Canadian Drama, IV, 2 (Fall 1978), 140-49. Rasky, Frank. "Playwright stops griping to put his anger on the stage", Toronto Star, April 10, 1976, Roche, David. "In Review: Revolutionary Project", Scene Changes, V, 1 (January 1977), 14. Toushek, Gary. "An idealist lost in the urban guerrillas' jungle" [review of Squamish Five.], Globe and Mail (Toronto), November 11, 1988, p. 10. Wallace, Robert. "Growing Pains: Toronto Theatre in the 1970s", Canadian Literature, No. 85 (Summer 1980), pp. 71-85. , and Cynthia Zimmerman. The Work: Conversations with English-Canadian Playwrights. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982.

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A Note on the Contributor Reid Gilbert teaches English, with a special interest in Canadian drama and literature, at Capilano College, where he has been a member of faculty since 1971. He has written a stage play and has published a number of articles and reviews for Canadian Theatre Review, Canadian Drama/ L'Art dramatique canadien, Capilano Review, and Profiles in Canadian Literature. He has read papers on the role of drama in Canadian popular culture at two international symposia; these are published in edited volumes, including The Beaver Bites Back. His current interest is in metadramatic design. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Tamanhous Theatre, Vancouver.

Dennis Lee

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by Peter Hinchcliffe Dennis Lee has played more roles on the Canadian literary scene than any other writer of the last twenty years. He has written poetry for both adults and children and song lyrics for the television series "Fraggle Rock"; he has been an educational reformer, cultural critic, publisher, editor, and anthologist. Yet in comparison with many of his contemporaries, Lee has published relatively little (in round numbers, at least): four books of poems for adults and four for children, one book of criticism and a handful of essays. But that statement is misleading, for a complete bibliography of Dennis Lee's writing would show many versions of his poems and essays, often with several years intervening between the drafts. Many writers revise their earlier work, striving always for greater verbal precision, but Lee's concerns go far beyond the demands of precise craftsmanship. One theme that binds his work together is an anxious, almost guilty, search for adequate language, and a paralysing fear that this language may be unattainable: there is a question, not my own, which stymies my life: 'What good are poets in a time of dearth?' Ho'lderlin asked that, master of poets. Who knew. But I just get embarrassed. ('The Death of Harold Ladoo", part II)

Friedrich HGlderlin, the German Romantic poet, was writing of his own life in the early nineteenth century. For Dennis Lee the "time of dearth" is the present time in Canada, but beyond the present moment Lee's vision encompasses a "dearth" - a scarcity of nourishing words - that extends back to the beginnings of the modern age in the sixteenth century. Lee's own reticence as a poet goes beyond "writer's block"; his concern with language is religious and political rather than psychological. From the time he began to write, Dennis Lee has seen his situation as one of loss. As North Americans we have inherited the world view of Western Europe since the Renaissance, with its emphasis upon the power of human reason to understand and therefore control the forces of nature. This

has brought great advantages, of course. We live more comfortably than our ancestors, and we can do more things than they could, but we have also lost some abilities that our ancestors possessed. Earlier societies were free to wonder at mystery, and to worship either the God of the Bible or Nature itself. But our society has no tolerance for mystery. We see problems instead of mysteries, and we cannot rest until we have subjected every problem to a rational solution. Forms of worship may remain in the modern world, but they 53

have lost the power they once had. The language of prayer has lost its power as well, and so has the language of poetry. As a general critique of modern society, there is nothing unique about this view. Romantic poets and their successors have been saying similar things for the last two centuries, and Dennis Lee is keenly aware of his Romantic heritage. As a Canadian poet Dennis Lee experiences another kind of loss. Like many nationalists who became active in the 1960s, Lee sees Canada as still a colonial territory. Even though Canadians have achieved political sovereignty, we do not have imaginative sovereignty. As in the days when Canada was ruled by Britain or France, we can describe our political lives only in terms supplied to us by another culture, which therefore seems more real to us than our own. The "other culture" now is that of the United States, which has colonized our minds and exercises more control than France or Britain ever did. As a colonized people, Canadians neither possess nor are possessed by the land they occupy; we take up room, but we don't really live here. We are exiles in our own country, and we do not even have the words to describe our plight. The appropriate literary form for dealing with experiences of loss is the elegy, which has a recognizable pattern apart from any particular conventions through which it is expressed. Elegies begin by acknowledging and lamenting a loss, whatever it may be: the death of a friend or hero; the failure of love or of meaning; banishment from a homeland. The elegy moves from loss to consolation or recovery. Its artistic task is to find some way of denying or transcending loss, perhaps by stating that the dead friend is alive, in heaven or in Nature, that a new love or faith can replace the old one, or that the exiles can build a new home for themselves. To accomplish this task, the elegist draws on two literary techniques, apotheosis and anagnorisis. Apotheosis literally means "becoming a god", and it describes the moment of miraculous or magical transformation when the elegist turns the object of loss into an object of admiration and power (examples from English poetry are John Milton's imagining the soul of his drowned friend raised into heaven in "Lycidas", or Shelley's transforming the soul of John Keats into a star at the end of "Adonais"). Anagnorisis, a term used by Aristotle in his Poetics, is usually translated "recognition" or "discovery". It refers to the elegist's construction of a new imaginative and moral order to replace the order destroyed by the original experience of loss. Unlike the apotheosis, which is usually sudden, the anagnorisis of an elegy is slow and tentative. The elegist meditates upon several possible solutions until the right one finally emerges. Stating Dennis Lee's themes and his favourite literary forms is a simple matter. Describing what he has actually done with them is more complicated. Lee's first book of poems, Kingdom of Absence (written through the early 1960s, published in 1967), states nearly all the concerns that he has elaborated in his later work. The religious and patriotic search for valid language that I have mentioned is considered from different perspectives. Companions who have died or ruined their lives are mourned. The poet meditates on the multiple selves that seem to inhabit him: "my troop of scruffy 54

selves/ / All my limping rabble" (Kingdom of Absence, XXII). As he will do in later poems, Lee shows distrust of his own intellectual and artistic talents, and tries to flee from them to the non-rational ecstasy of sexual love or to the simplicity of childhood. Key words in the later poems, especially "void" and "abyss", make their first appearances here. The Kingdom of Absence poems are technically ambitious. Forty-three variations on the sonnet form are arranged in seven related sections. They are also very static poems. The poet moves through different landscapes, but nothing changes; the spiritual vacuum is never filled. However, this is the point of the book. As the title indicates, Lee is writing of a world where absence reigns. Two sections, entitled "Muskoka Elegiac" and "Annex Elegiac", contrast northern Ontario and downtown Toronto, but despite these subtitles I would classify the Kingdom of Absence poems as laments rather than elegies. Acknowledging loss is the whole of their action, and the achievement of consolation or recovery is almost unimaginable. The following year, 1968, Dennis Lee published a first version of Civil Elegies, his next poetic sequence, but then followed four years of silence during which he found himself unable to complete any new poems. In his essay "Cadence, Country, Silence", Lee describes how he would sit at his desk day after day, only to tear up whatever he had written. All his fears about the impossibility of finding an adequate language seemed to have come true. Lee was certainly not idle during those years; in fact they marked his greatest participation in public life. In 1967, together with the novelist Dave Godfrey, Dennis Lee established the House of Anansi Press, which for several years was one of the most innovative publishers in Canada. Lee quickly became known as a generous and painstaking editor, and some of his friends felt that his total involvement in other people's writing diverted energies that should have gone into his own. Also in 1967 Lee helped to found Rochdale College, intended as a co-operative alternative to the established university system. Rochdale quickly fell into the hands of radical activists, and then became a haven for drug users and dealers. Lee resigned from Rochdale after only two years, but it had already become a drain on the energies of everyone associated with it. Finally, in 1972, Dennis Lee found that he was able to write again, and he attributes this recovery to his reading of the Canadian philosopher of history George Grant. (Lee edited the collection of Grant's essays that Anansi published under the title Technology and Empire in 1969.) Grant's work is a critique of Western civilization's belief that modern humanity has become the measure of its own goodness. In earlier ages, in medieval Christendom, in Israel during biblical times, in classical Greece and Rome, people believed in a changeless, transcendental Good - whether this was the biblical God or Platonic virtue. This idea of the Good provided an absolute standard by which human actions could be judged, and the highest action was reverence for that Good. But over the last five hundred years Western civilization has lost this concept of a Good that stands outside civilization's achievements and measures them. Now we have become our own measure, and freedom is prized as an

end in itself rather than as the condition that enables us to perform virtuous actions. The highest human role is no longer reverence for the Good, but has become domination of the whole world, both natural and human, through a set of attitudes that Grant has labelled "technique". This freeing of the mind from traditional restraints has led to many benefits, of course. Scientific discovery, technological development, political and legal rights all flow from this new freedom, but George Grant fears that the freedom that we have chosen as our defining quality can lead us to evil as easily as to good. A state that acknowledges no external limits can use its own freedom to become a tyranny. Grant believes that regimes like Nazi Germany were not conservative or reactionary, but instead thoroughly modern. Even well-meaning countries like the United States contain possibilities for radical evil, and Grant saw the Vietnam War of the 1960s as a realization of those tendencies. George Grant writes as a Canadian nationalist, but his attitude to Canada is deeply ironic. For many years Englishspeaking Canadians have prided themselves that they could create in North America a society that would be fairer, more law-abiding, more humane than the United States. Grant once shared this hope, but he has come to see it as an illusion. Canada is part of the American empire, not just because the United States is more powerful than we are, but because we share the same modern ideology. Even in its Loyalist beginnings Canada was founded by people who believed in freedom and progress as ends in themselves. These similarities matter more than historical differences, and we Canadians are complicit in the evil tendencies of modernity. In Lament for a Nation (1965) Grant relates his general argument to the condition of Canada in the 1960s. He finds his worst fears confirmed by the resurgence of the Liberal Party, then strongly continentalist, and their adoption of nuclear weapons for Canada, the Bomarc missiles that were housed in the air force base at North Bay. (This work - a lament, not an elegy - is consistent with the generic pattern I have sketched above.) George Grant offers no political alternative to the modern predicament. Indeed, he finds the attitudes that he fears so pervasive that we lack a language to criticize them. "Technique is ourselves", is one of his favourite phrases. The only alternative he can envision is philosophical or religious contemplation of our state of loss in hopes that this will recover for us some apprehension of the Good. Grant's critique of modernity and of Canada's place in history is nobly phrased, but it is not self-evident that he is right.1 Nor do Grant and Lee agree fully about many philosophical and religious matters. But the two men's thoughts touch at so many points that Grant's work revitalized Lee's imagination. In particular, Grant's pinpointing the lack of adequate language as part of our predicament seems to have given form to Lee's own anxieties about language, and paradoxically this enabled him to write poetry once more.2 The first result of this imaginative collaboration was Civil Elegies and Other Poems (1972), an expanded and reordered version of the sequence Lee had published four years earlier, together with sixteen short new poems. The

short poems continue the concerns of Kingdom of Absence, though their style is more various and their tone more personal and anxious. Love is no longer a refuge but a difficult, painful task. The longest of these poems, "Sibelius Park", is a complement to the elegies that follow. In this poem, a man described in the third person (though he shares all Lee's experiences) broods on the losses and failures of his life, and is almost overwhelmed until he comes upon the consoling vision of a downtown park after rain: And then Sibelius Park! The grass is wet, it gleams, across the park's wide vista the lanes of ornamental shrub come breathing and the sun is filling the rinsed air till the green goes luminous and it does it does, it comes clear.

But the poet cannot sustain this vision, and the next stanza cancels it: Supper is over, I sit holed up in my study. I have no answers again and I do not trust the simplicities, nor Sibelius Park; I am not to be trusted with them.

In place of a transforming vision, the poet must recognize that visions and losses are both only distorted reflections of reality, "like a mirror in the grass." This refusal of vision becomes an important element in the elegies that follow. Civil Elegies is a sequence of nine poems, all set in Nathan Phillips Square in downtown Toronto. There, in front of City Hall (which represents bureaucratic technology) and beside Henry Moore's sculpture "The Archer" (which represents art but also natural forms), the poet meditates through the seasons of a year. The meditations are "civil" because the losses that they acknowledge and try to recover from are political and historical. In Lee's bleak vision Canada has always been a defeatist country, refusing to assert its collective will. In Elegy 1 the poet is haunted by the ghosts of those whose lives were frustrated and humiliated by Canada's willing acceptance of colonial status and by its will to fail. In the present, our loss is embodied in Canada's timid complicity in the Vietnam War. Canadian politicians reluctantly support American policies, Canadian businessmen quietly profit from selling arms to the United States, though we insist that it is not our war. Loss is personal and domestic, as well. Like the short poems in the first half of the book, the elegies lament the difficulty of achieving satisfaction in love and work, but this loss is also political. It arises from the alienation of people who cannot join their personal and civil lives together. However, the poet of Civil Elegies meditates on metaphysics as well as politics. His other main topic is what he calls "Void".3 Void has several meanings in the sequence. 55

At its most negative, it is simply a manifestation of Canada's loss of political will: And this is void, to participate in an abomination larger than yourself. It is to fashion other men's napalm and know it. (Elegy 5)

But not all of Void's connotations are evil. It is the emptiness of the Canadian landscape, waiting for us to develop the courage to fill it. Void is our awareness of the "real absence" of God from the modern world, as strong an experience for us as the medieval belief in God's real presence in the Eucharist. Void suggests all the thoughts and feelings that lie beyond the brink of language. Finally Void holds itself out as a way of escaping from painful experience to a transcendent realm of contemplation. Elegy 8 invokes Saint-Denys-Garneau, the Qu6becois poet, whose obsessive theme was the need to withdraw from the world to a life of religious mysticism. But Garneau's example is a temptation, like the treacherous vision of Sibelius Park; it must be refused. Because they reject transforming visions, the Civil Elegies reach only a tentative conclusion. Dennis Lee does not advocate revolution as a way of recovering from our political loss; the best he can counsel is stoic endurance. In place of the consolations of Void, Lee proposes instead a prayer of acceptance to the Earth, using the necessarily tainted language of modern discourse: And though we have seen our most precious words withdraw, like smudges of wind from a widening water-calm, though they will not be charged with presence again in our lifetime that is well, for now we have access to new nouns as water, copout, tower, body, land. (Elegy 9)

Lee's Civil Elegies explicitly reject apotheosis as part of their resolution. Recognition is the best that one can hope for. The Gods (1977) follows the same format as the 1972 Civil Elegies volume, a collection of short poems followed by a meditative sequence. This meditation takes the form of a long elegy for Harold Ladoo, a novelist from the West Indies who was a protege of Dennis Lee at Anansi Press and who was murdered in a family quarrel while visiting Trinidad in 1973. Most of the short poems in this collection are about love, and they are jauntier than their counterparts in Civil Elegies (though the last one begins and ends with the phrase "Forgive me"). The title poem of the collection functions rather like "Sibelius Park" in stating the focus of the whole book, which once more is the deprivation of language. Although Lee is sure that some source of spiritual power must exist in the world, we can no longer name or properly describe it:

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for want of a common syntax and lacking a possible language who, now, can speak of gods?

The language of science and technology has no place for gods, and the religious language that we still possess has dwindled to platitudes. In face of this deprivation the poet can only "stand against this bitch of a shrunken time / in semi-faithfulness", acknowledging the gods that he cannot pray to or know. "The Death of Harold Ladoo" begins with Lee's intention to write an elegy in the tradition of "Lycidas" or "Adonais": waiting on magisterial words of healing and salute, the mighty cadence poets summoned in their grief when one they cherished swerved from youth to dead, and every thing went numb until their potent words resumed his life. . . .

But, as so often in Dennis Lee's poetry, the necessary words are hard to find. Before he speaks of love and grief, the poet must first acknowledge that his relationship with the dead writer was one of mutual exploitation. Harold Ladoo manipulated his Canadian patrons: "you were / a routine megalomaniac taking the short-cut/through living men and women to try and make it big." But Dennis Lee, "that gentle editor / with his tame thesaurus & verse", must admit that he allowed himself to become a parasite on the violent energy of Ladoo's life and art: "Say it: I used you, Harold, / like a hypocrite voyeur." After this act of confession the elegy moves to an apotheosis. Harold Ladoo's death was not random or meaningless. He was possessed by the gods of the earlier poem, but like the ghosts of dead Canadians at the beginning of Civil Elegies, the gods have become avenging furies. Denied by the modern world, they return as the irrational, monstrous forces of our time, and the self-destructive frenzy of a writer like Ladoo is our version of divine inspiration. Like Civil Elegies, "The Death of Harold Ladoo" ends with a tentative, ironic prayer. The poet prays to be delivered from the anger of the gods until some future time when reverence and language are restored: "to wait / till their fury is spent and they call on us again / for passionate awe in our lives, and a high clean style." Dennis Lee has written critical essays as well as poetry. His main subject continues to be the difficult quest for adequate language, and as one might expect, he finds it hard to articulate his concerns. The essays comment on each other, and they insist that any summary of their content misses the point. Lee is not concerned with critical analysis of texts, but with something more like worship. The key term in his essays is "Cadence", which is his name for the grounds of poetic impulse that lie beneath the words. Cadence cannot be described because, like the gods of Lee's poems, or like the Good of George Grant's writings, our modern vocabulary does not allow us to say what we really mean. So Lee has recourse to metaphors of music, of physical sensation, and finally of prayer. His essays are closer to the traditions of Christian mysticism than perhaps he realizes.

The book-length essay Savage Fields is a commentary on two other works, Michael Ondaatje's long poem The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Leonard Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers, and it is also a work of metaphysics: "The book tries to think through a new paradigm of order. In fact, it attempts to re-conceive the character of rational coherence - to imagine a different logos".4 In Savage Fields Lee sees all existence as lived between two force fields, Earth and World. Earth is existence from the perspective of all that is; World is existence from the perspective of the human will and intellect - what we want and do. Each field claims to occupy the total space of existence, and their irreconcilable conflict is reflected in the violence of contemporary life and art. Dennis Lee reads Ondaatje's poem as a parable of World determined to subdue Earth, and Beautiful Losers as a parable of Earth's failed attempt to redeem World. Yet what matters at the end of the book is not the accuracy of Lee's analysis, but a possible resolution that transcends all our categories and which Lee hardly dares to imagine -joy, "the taboo thought": The nineteenth century had to think despair. . . . But now the most difficult, unacceptable, wholly subversive thought is joy, the good resonance of being: which is a scandal, since shit prevails, and will get worse. Try thinking that. (Savage Fields, pp. 108-9)

We come finally to Dennis Lee as a children's poet, the role in which many readers know him best. Apart from limited editions, he has published four collections of children's verse, three of them illustrated by the Canadian artist Frank Newfeld, whose pictures add gorgeous exuberance to Lee's sometimes dour poems. The same imagination is at work in Alligator Pie as in Civil Elegies, and even in Lee's children's poems, joy is fleeting and hard to come by. When he began to write children's poems in the mid1960s, Dennis Lee's stated intention was to domesticate and Canadianize the traditional nursery rhymes, "not abolishing Mother Goose, but letting her take up residence among hockey sticks and high-rise" (Alligator Pie, "A Postlude"). So Dennis Lee writes verses in which Peter Rabbit is put on TV as an example of table manners ("Peter Rabbit", Alligator Pie); all the figures of children's culture - Snoopy and Piglet and the Grinch and Batman - are mixed up in one poem: ("Thinking in Bed", Alligator Pie)\ the place names of Canada and the street names of Toronto are used as refrains. It has been suggested that the language in Dennis Lee's children's verse exactly mirrors the linguistic anxiety expressed in the poems for adults: "the nonsense of words against the need to name a country".5 This seems an extreme position, insisting on identity when a family resemblance would do - but the resemblance is strong. Despite his use of Canadian names, Lee's poems for children are not free from the restraints of genre and influence. They are filled with echoes of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and A. A. Milne, melancholies all. The children in Lee's poems are a docile lot, much concerned with security and routine. They may defy authority on principle (as Nicholas Knock does), but there are not many successful rebels or anarchists among

them. Mister Hoobody, the grubby fairy who lives in the furnace (Nicholas Knock), is anarchic enough, but even he is valued by the child-speaker mostly as protection against adults and their rules. Nicholas Knock is the most elegiac of the four books. It shares themes and subjects with the adult poems, and some of its verses have been incorporated in The Gods and in Lee's most recent collection, The Difficulty of Living on Other Planets (1987). Lee's own comments stress another of his concerns, the poet who possesses - or is possessed by - multiple selves, and the hope that he can bring them together: I don't write "for" children; I write as children, as an adult children. And I write well only when there is an integration of the two: the child sniffing out the words and subjects that excite him, the adult supplying the craft, the pacing, the decorum that will let those words and subjects come into their own as poems, as objects of use for other children and other adults. And in the directness and wholeness which sometimes prevail for that adult child, I find possible a lyrical clarity that has mostly escaped me in writing just for adults.6

In one respect Nicholas Knock truly complements Lee's other work. Some poems in that book, notably "Summer Song" and "The Cat and the Wizard", present a state of full acceptance of and by the Earth: All I wanted was to let The light and maples be, Yet something came together as they Entered into me. And what was singing in my mind Was in my body too: Sun and lawn and aster beds Murmuring, I do Earth, beloved, yes, I do I Too am here by grace, As real as any buried stone Or any blade of grass. ("Summer Song")

In "The Cat and the Wizard", the lonely cat and the outcast wizard come together in Casa Loma to form a perfect bond of human and non-human love: One is dressed In a tall silk hat: The lord of the castle, The jet black cat. The other's a wizard Of high degree. The wizard is grinning. The wizard is me.

This is whimsical, one might say, but in comparison with the tentative resolutions of poems like Civil Elegies and "The Death of Harold Ladoo", it is actually very bold. There

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are a few places in his work where Dennis Lee dares to make the scandalous affirmation that he calls for in Savage Fields. Joy is not always a taboo word. Fortunately for Canadian literature, Dennis Lee's distrust of words has never extended to the language of other writers. Perhaps his greatest achievement will turn out to be his work as an editor and critic. This is the hardest part of his career to document, for Lee has always preferred to work behind the scenes, but writers as diverse as George Grant, Robert Bringhurst, and Paulette Jiles have all paid tribute to Lee's efforts in editing their work. Canadian writing has profited immensely from gifted editors who have encouraged new talents, even at the expense of their own, and who have formed the taste of a generation of readers. In the 1940s A.J.M. Smith, Alan Crawley, and John Sutherland fulfilled this role. In the 1950s and 1960s the role was taken on by Robert Weaver. It is an honourable tradition, and Dennis Lee belongs to it. 1 For some criticisms of George Grant* s thought and of its effects on Dennis Lee, see Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind: InnislMcLuhan I Grant (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1984); Eli Mandel, "George Grant: Language, Nation, the Silence of God**, in The Family Romance (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1986), pp. 87-103; and the essay by R.D. MacDonald cited in the Bibliography below. 2 Dennis Lee discusses George Grant*s influence upon him in his essay "Cadence, Country, Silence** (Open Letter, pp. 42-45) and warns against summarizing it in a facile way. 3 The double motifs of loss and void are signalled by the two epigraphs in Civil Elegies. One is a quotation from George Grant on the impossibility of full citizenship. The other is a phrase from the Buddhist sage Saraha about "the notion of emptiness**. Robert Bringhurst*s essay "At Home in the Difficult World**, in Tasks of Passion, discusses the significance of this epigraph. 4 "Reading Savage Fields**, Brick, p. 32. 5 Sean Kane, "sThe Poet As Shepherd of Being*'*, in Karen Mulhallen, Donna Bennett, and Russell Brown, eds., Tasks of Passion (Toronto: Descant Editions, 1982), p. 133. 6 Dennis Lee, "Roots and Play: Writing as a 35-year-old Children**, Canadian Children's Literature, IV (1976), 37.

Chronology 1939 1952-57 1957-59 1959-60 1962 1962-63 1963 1963-67 1967 1967-69 1969 1972 1972-73 1974 58

Bom in Toronto, Ontario. Attends University of Toronto Schools, Toronto. Attends Victoria College, University of Toronto. Works in United Nations-sponsored refugee camps in Austria and Germany; travels in Europe. B.A., Honours English. In England, working on Kingdom of Absence poems. Returns to Canada, begins graduate studies in English at University of Toronto (M.A., 1965). Lecturer, Victoria College. Founds House of Anansi publishing house with Dave Godfrey. Resource person for one of the founders of Rochdale College, Toronto. Resigns from Rochdale College Leaves House of Anansi; Governor General's Award for Civil Elegies and Other Poems. Teaches Humanities at York University, Toronto. Children's book awards (CACL Bronze Medal and

Toronto IODE Award) for Alligator Pie. 1974-79 Consulting editor, Macmillan of Canada. 1975 Writer-in-residence, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario. 1977 Children's book awards (CACL Bronze Medal and Ruth Schwartz Foundation Award) for Garbage Delight. 1978-79 Writer-in-residence, University of Toronto. 1980-81 Holder of Scottish-Canadian exchange fellowship in Edinburgh, Scotland. 1981 Literary adviser to McClelland and Stewart. 1984 Phillips' Information Systems Literary Prize. 1986 Vicki Metcalf Award for a Body of Work for Children.

Comments by Dennis Lee All my poetry is a response to cadence. And maybe some of the strangeness of what I write will diminish if a reader perceives that. That would please me, of course. But it doesn't make the poetry any better or worse to say these things. Indeed, the poetry is finally by the bye from this perspective. It depends on cadence. But cadence doesn't depend on it. "Polyphony, Enacting a Meditation", in Karen Mulhallen, Donna Bennett, and Russell Brown, eds., Tasks of Passion (Toronto: Descant Editions, 1982) p. 99. A poem enacts in words the presence of what we live among. It arises from the tough, delicate, heartbreaking rooting of what-is in its own nonbeing. Out of our participation in that rooting, there arises an elemental movement of being - of celebration, of desire, of grief, of anger, of play, of dying. That movement is always particular, speaking of the things which are. It does not issue just from what is outside us, nor just from what is inside us. A poem enacts that moving cadence of being. To be human is to live through such movements of being. Quick in its own silence, cadence seeks to issue in the articulate gestures of being human here. "Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space", Open Letter version, p. 53. I have lots of private experiences and opinions, of course, but why clutter up the airwaves with more of that stuff? If that's all there is, better the paper stays empty. So I start from square one, which is silence. Often enough I just stay there. Interview with Alan Twigg, cited in Robert Bringhurst, "At Home in the Difficult World", in Mulhallen et a/., Tasks of Passion, p. 60. When I started reading nursery rhymes to my children, I quickly developed a twitch. All we seemed to read about were jolly millers, little pigs, and queens. The details of Mother Goose - the wassails and Dobbins and pipers and pence - had become exotic; children loved them, but they were no longer home ground. Not that this was a bad thing. But I started to wonder: shouldn't a child also discover the imagination playing on

things she lived with every day? not abolishing Mother Goose, but letting her take up residence among hockey sticks and high-rise too? "A Postlude", in Alligator Pie, p. 63. My adult poetry is meditative. It struggles to trace the process by which a person meditates on dissonances and disharmonies, finds them chiming against one another and sometimes orchestrating a music that achieves its own concord - bitter or sweet - without ever ceasing to express the dissonant particulars. But until I started writing kids' poetry, I was pretty well mired in the dissonances of those particulars. I could seldom find a way to release the lyric sense, which sometimes comes, that the particulars are sounding for once in the one key, that they are suffused with a coherence of being. Such a coherence may be joyous or despairing or terror-stricken or zany, but for a time it holds, and the universe comes whole That one-ing of the world, I think, is the essence of lyricism. "Roots and Play: Writing as a 35-year-old Children", Canadian Children's Literature, IV (1976), 35. LEE: There's a phrase in one of George Bowering's poems. ... The title is "The Flowers Are Easy to Paint, the Leaves Difficult". The lines I want to quote go, " . . . I said of heaven, I would rather arrive there as a man than as an artist". . . . I'll buy that. If there is not a way of entering heaven, whatever that may mean, as both . . . I sure as hell don't want to enter with the artists. [INTERVIEWER]: In your view then, the artist is a man who happens to write, rather than a writer who happens to be a man. LEE: Yes. R.W. Stedingh, "An Interview with Dennis Lee", Canadian Fiction Magazine, VII (Summer 1972), 54.

Comments on Dennis Lee Lee has driven his talent courageously and warily against the central vacuum of our botched and thoughtless culture and, at great personal cost, has found words for us - which we might use, as he has, to begin to understand our sometimes beautiful, often ruinous presence in the world. He has not been content to make fine-tuned, lovely, essentially useless, ornamental poems around the edge of the gaping wound, or to blaze gorgeously and meaninglessly down the track of his own personal, heart-rending madness. He is that rarest of things in our age: not merely a poet, but a poet who knows, almost, what poetry is for. Robert Bringhurst, "At Home in the Difficult World", in Mulhallen et al., Tasks of Passion, p. 57. Dennis Lee's poems are important to me above all because, more consistently than those of anyone else whose work I know, they manifest a full awareness of the poem as a form of musical score, in which melody - the pitchpatterns of the voice - is indicated to the reader by means of the deployments of the words on the page. He utilizes linebreaks and indentations with intelligent intuition to produce effects accessible to the reader without any need for special training: as long as the poem's structure is respected, and the typo-

graphical units are not disregarded, the melody emerges, audible out loud or to the inner ear. . . . I have been making a practice of getting my students to study his poems as illustrations of what my own theories of technique are. The techniques he exemplifies are not a manner, to be imitated - or to avoid imitating - but a use of tools which demonstrates their function, so that (given an ear and something to say) another person taking up the same tools is enabled to sound forth his or her own voice more clearly. Denise Levertov, "The Poem as Score", in Mulhallen et al., Tasks of Passion, pp. 55-56. When [Graeme Gibson's novel Five Legs] came to Anansi in 1967, it was a book desperately in search of a publisher. Dennis Lee, reading it, decided that what it really needed was an editor. By the simple expedient of cutting it almost in half - the deletions taking place on a line-by-line basis - he transformed the novel into Anansi's first big success. Then followed The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje, still Ondaatje's best-known work; Bartleby by Chris Scott, a novel so wide-ranging in its use of the dictionary as to be virtually unreadable - and which, in consequence, attracted a reputation as the Anansi novel; Technology and Empire by George Grant; Survival by Margaret Atwood. In each of these books Dennis's participation was not only crucial, but far beyond the role normally assigned to an editor. That is, he not only acted as a copy editor, or made structural suggestions, but he lent his energy to the day-byday struggle of the writing and often - even usually - made suggestions so crucial that the books were fundamentally affected. Matt Cohen, "Dennis Lee and Andy Warhol", in Mulhallen, et al., Tasks of Passion, pp. 34-35. So it is that Dennis Lee gropes his way toward his own poetics by means of Grant's politics. And from that Lee goes on to an odd and deeply moving perspective from which to criticize contemporary barbarism under the guise of defending its brilliance and courage. Lee is, of course, profoundly sympathetic to what he called Grant's eschatological methodism, though [Grant] would never call it that. Civil Elegies is the poetics of Grant's political lament, Savage Fields the critical ground of Technology and Empire. Eli Mandel, "George Grant: Language, Nation, the Silence of God", The Family Romance (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1986), p. 93. After all, Lee's world is still a very nice WASP world somewhere between Honest Ed's and Casa Loma, filled with laundromats and swings and dads and mums and bicycles, where the toughest problem for a kid is how to get your neck through the hole in a particularly stubborn sweater. It is a far cry from the world of many Canadian children, especially the immigrant kids just now getting attention from Canadian children's writers - as in Come With Us, by the Women's Education Press, where children speak for themselves about working every evening in dad's store at age ten, or getting punched out every day at school. Some of these kids might find Dennis Lee's content tame - but even they would undoubtedly enjoy his rhythms and his skill with words. That's because Lee began with nursery rhymes, discarding the subject matter - all those jolly millers and shepherd59

esses - as exotic, and using instead good Canadian mailmen, Eaton's and Simpson's, Medicine Hat and the Mississauga rattlesnake. Occasionally, like the bored creators of the TV Saturday morning series, he slips in stuff intended to tickle the adults primarily, such as the sly references to William Lyon Mackenzie King and his mother. But generally he follows the time-tested practice - that goes back to cows jumping over moons and cats talking to kings - of mixing the familiar and the absurd. Lee is great on diction. He gets exactly the right word to describe the "swish" and "fizz" of swinging and the "fuzziness" of bears. Best of all are the poems that are almost entirely word play, like "The Sitter and the Butter and the Better Batter Fritter" and the skipping rhymes. Alison Acker, "Dennis Lee's Children's Poetry", in Mulhallen et aL, Tasks of Passion, p. 50.

Selected Bibliography Works by Dennis Lee

"Roots and Play: Writing as a 35-year-old Children", Canadian Children's Literature, IV (1976), 28-58. Savage Fields: An Essay in Literature and Cosmology. Toronto: Anansi, 1977. "Enacting a Meditation", Journal of Canadian Poetry, H (Winter 1979), 6-22. "Reading Savage Fields", Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory/Revue canadienne de theorie politique et sociale, HI (Spring-Summer 1979), 161-82. [Reprinted in Brick, No. 13 (Fall 1981), pp. 32-39.] Anthologies An Anthology of Verse. Edited by Roberta A. Charlesworth and Dennis Lee. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1964. T.O. Now: The Young Toronto Poets. Toronto: Anansi, 1968. The New Canadian Poets, 1970-1985. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985. The Dennis Lee Big Book. Toronto: Gage, 1985. Selected Criticism

Poems for Adults Kingdom of Absence. Toronto: Anansi, 1967. Civil Elegies. Toronto: Anansi, 1968. Civil Elegies and Other Poems. Toronto: Anansi, 1972. Not Abstract Harmonies But. San Francisco and Vancouver Kanchenjunga Press, 1974. The Death of Harold Ladoo. San Francisco and Vancouver: Kanchenjunga Press, 1976. The Gods. San Francisco and Vancouver: Kanchenjunga Press, 1978. The Gods. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979. [Includes the three poems published by Kanchenjunga Press, plus twelve other poems.] The Difficulty of Living on Other Planets. Toronto: Macmillan, 1987. Books for Children Wiggle to the Laundromat. Illustrated by Charles Pachter. Toronto and Chicago: New Press, 1970. Alligator Pie. Illustrated by FrankNewfeld. Toronto: Macmillan, 1974. Nicholas Knock and Other People. Illustrated by Frank Newfeld. Toronto: Macmillan, 1974. Garbage Delight. Illustrated by Frank Newfeld. Toronto: Macmillan, 1977. The Ordinary Bath. Toronto: Magook Publishers/McClelland and Stewart, 1979. Jelly Belly. Illustrated by Juan Wijngaard. Toronto: Macmillan, 1983. Lizzy's Lion. Toronto: Stoddart, 1984. Essays "Getting to Rochdale", in Dennis Lee and Howard Adelman, eds., The University Game. Toronto: Anansi, 1968, pp. 6994. "Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space", Open Letter, second series, No. 6 (Fall 1973), pp. 34-53. [Reprinted in Boundary 2, III (Fall 1974), 151-68.] 60

Barbour, Douglas. "Dennis Lee", in W.H. New, ed., Canadian Writers Since I960, First Series. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986, pp. 267-75. [Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 53.] Davey, Frank. "Dennis Lee", in From There to Here. Erin, Ont.: Press Porcepic, 1974, pp. 165-67. Dragisic, Peggy. "Between the Intolerable and the Inscrutable", Brick, No. 11 (Winter, 1981), pp. 8-12. Lent, John. "John Lent Interviews Dennis Lee", CV 2, V (Autumn 1980), 14-17. MacDonald, R.D. "Lee's 'Civil Elegies' in Relation to Grant's 'Lament for a Nation'", Canadian Literature, No. 98 (Autumn 1983), pp. 10-30. Middlebro, T.G. "Dennis Lee", in Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley, eds., Canadian Writers and Their Work, Poetry Series. Toronto: ECW Press, pp. 189-228. Mulhallen, Karen, Donna Bennett, and Russell Brown, eds. Tasks of Passion: Dennis Lee at Mid-Career. Toronto: Descant Editions, 1982. [Contains seventeen essays on Lee's work; "Riffs", an uncollected long poem by Lee; letters between Dennis Lee and George Bowering; a revised version of Lee's essay "Enacting a Meditation"; a chronology and bibliography.] Scobie, Stephen. "A Scheme Is Not a Vision", Canadian Literature, No. 78 (Autumn 1978), pp. 53-58. Stedingh, R.W. "An Interview with Dennis Lee", Canadian Fiction Magazine, VII (Summer 1972), 42-54. Twigg, Alan. "When To Write", in For Openers: Conversations with 24 Canadian Writers. Madeira Park, B.C.: Harbour Publishing, 1981, pp. 241-52. Zieroth, Dale. "Reclaiming the Body/Reclaiming the Nation: A Process of Surviving Colonization in Dennis Lee's 'Civil Elegies and Other Poems'", Canadian Literature, No. 98 (Autumn 1983), pp. 35-43. A Note on the Contributor Peter Hinchcliffe teaches English at St. Jerome's College, University of Waterloo. He has published on Canadian and British writers, both Victorian and modern, and he is a fiction editor for the New Quarterly.

Rick Salutin

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by James Noonan Rick Salutin is best known as a playwright, the author of two of the most successful plays in recent Canadian theatre, 1837: The Farmers' Revolt andLes Canadiens. Both were first produced in the 1970s, one in Toronto in 1973, the other in Montreal in 1977. Both demonstrate Salutin's commitment to Canadian life and history, and his ability to entertain and at the same time make Canadians examine their present in the light of their past. This determination to make Canadians see themselves and their history clearly, thereby enabling them to take steps to defend and improve the quality of their lives, is at the heart of Salutin's work. He is passionately concerned about the quality of life of Canadians, and has used several forms of writing besides plays to communicate that concern. An indefatigable social critic, Salutin has written many articles in leading Canadian magazines and newspapers. Some of these are in-depth analyses from a Marxist perspective; others are wry and humorous commentaries on Canadian life and cultural institutions from the CBC and the Canada Council to "Hockey Night in Canada" and the McKenzie brothers. In the same vein he has written television drama, biography, political commentary, and the text for cartoon booklets on American domination of the Canadian economy. His most personal work, a novel entitled A Man of Little Faith (1988), draws on another important vein of Salutin's life, his Jewishness. Salutin was born to parents living in a Jewish workingclass district of downtown Toronto. His father was Saul, a dressmaker's agent in business with his two older brothers, and his mother was Freda Salutin, a secretary. Though the family moved north to an apartment in Toronto's more affluent Forest Hill Village when Salutin was nine, their material prospects did not greatly improve, and his father continued working as a salesman. Rick would also retain his affinity for the working class throughout his life. The family was not very active in the synagogue, but the son grew in his Jewish faith in those years. He maintained his sense of Jewishness even when he ceased to believe in Judaism and after he had antagonized many Jews by criticizing the state of Israel and asserting the rights of Palestinians to their own state.

Before he began his writing career in Canada in 1971, Salutin spent ten years abroad, mostly studying in the United States. He even enrolled in a program at New York's School for Social Research and, as he says, "just narrowly escaped a Ph.D. in Phenomenology".1 Besides studying in those years at the Jewish Theological Seminary with a view to becoming a rabbi, he took classes at the Protestant Union Theological Seminary in New York and spent a year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He received a B.A. in Near Eastern 61

and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University and an M.A. in religion from Columbia University for his studies in the New Testament. By the end of the decade he had lost the fervour for Judaism that had held him during his teenage years. The reading of Harold Innis's The Fur Trade in Canada convinced Salutin that Canadian history could be as interesting as British or American, and he returned to Canada on October 16, 1970, the day the War Measures Act was invoked by Pierre Trudeau in response to the FLQ crisis in Quebec. Salutin had not lost his attachment to the working class or his belief in the rights of ordinary citizens. It was to these that he now devoted his energies and talents, imbued with a Marxist view of the conflict of classes and the destructiveness of capitalism. Before leaving Canada he had been taught that Canadian history "was a tale of progess, with scarcely a bump and no detours. . . . We learned that all our problems were resolved 'peaceably' long ago: that there is nothing in our history to get excited over."2 Much of his writing would show there is a great deal to get excited about in Canada. Salutin's nationalistic and creative instincts also drew him to the theatre, which was undergoing a rebirth at that time, supported by the wave of nationalism and increased government funding stimulated by Canada's centennial year. His first play, "Fanshen" (unpublished), was based on William Hinton's book about revolution in a small Chinese village. It drew parallels with Canada's October Crisis of 1970 and with the injustice Salutin saw in the imposition of the War Measures Act. It was produced in Toronto in 1972, and its topicality became a hallmark of Salutin's other plays, all of which address the Canadian scene more directly. Among these unpublished plays are "The Adventures of an Immigrant" (1974);3 "I.W.A." (1975), which dealt with the 1959 woodworkers' strike in Newfoundland; "Money" (1976), a one-act musical about money as the greatest of all mystifications; and "Maria" (1977), a CBC television drama about a young woman and her efforts to unionize factory workers, as Salutin himself did in the 1970s. In The False Messiah (1975), he drew on his Jewish background to retell the story of Shabtai Zvi, a self-proclaimed messiah in Constantinople in the seventeenth century who abandons his Jewish faith and takes the turban. This serio-comic play was Salutin's attempt to make sense of his own religious experience and to explain why he was unable to find what he was looking for in religion. 1837: The Farmers' Revolt is by Salutin and Theatre Passe Muraille. Like many of his plays it is a collaboration, in this case between him, director Paul Thompson, the designer, the stage manager, and the various actors who took part in the two original productions in 1973 and 1974. Salutin's openness to collaborative theatre comes from his populist approach and the respect he has for the actors he works with. As he wrote in the diary he kept during rehearsals: Actors have been so infantilized. Writers tell them what to say and directors tell them where to stand and no one asks them to think for themselves It shocked me that they were like any other group in the country, politically, that is. But the actors are also the real proletariat of the

62

theatre. . . . They are the bottom of the rung. They take shit from everyone else, and their labour holds it all up: reproduces it all, night after night.4

The collaborative approach, however frustrating at times, enabled the actors to bring their insights and experience to the play, giving it a freshness and spontaneity that made the second version (which added "The Farmers' Revolt" to the title) a runner-up for the Chalmers Award in 1974. It also gave the play a disjointedness and collage-like effect that made the end result less than the sum of its parts. The play was one example of the documentary theatre that came into prominence at that time; other examples were The Farm Show, Paper Wheat, and Ten Lost Years. The strength of documentary theatre lies in the authenticity of its representation of actual events, but it also challenges the author's imagination to make the scenes more than a mere recreation of a past or present situation. Salutin's and the actors' imagination raised 1837 above a simple re-creation of history through the poignancy, wit, passion, and humour of many of the scenes. One of the most memorable, a scene entitled "The Lady in the Bush", indirectly satirizes Susanna Moodie. A character called Lady Backwash, "an English gentlewoman of the memoir-writing ilk", relates her trials to her audience: Ladies, I should like to talk to you this evening about my adventures in Upper Canada. I call this lecture Roughing It In The Bush. The Bush is a term which these quaint Canadians use when describing the vast trackless forests which cover nine-tenths of the colony; dark impenetrable woods much like a jungle, complete with insects, but not the heat.5

On a journey from Toronto to Niagara-on-the-Lake, her coach gets stuck in the mud and she must rely on her driver, assisted by an Indian, to get them free. After the ordeal she addresses the driver: Johnson, I haven't felt so good since I arrived in this wretched colony. A sudden inspiration. Johnson - quickly, my diary. Johnson fetches it and takes down her dictation. She addresses posterity. We had fought the good fight and won. We had been faced with insurmountable obstacles and we had overcome them. And we took the rest of the victorious, and what better place than here, in Nature's Cathedral, (p. 23)

Like many scenes in the play, this one is effective satire, but it does not lead anywhere, nor are these three characters seen again. Although the play does not have a central character, much of its poignancy comes from the revolutionary fervour of William Lyon Mackenzie, the leader of the revolution, who clearly has Salutin's sympathy. We see this as he rouses the populace against the Family Compact, which dominated the colony under the governor general, Sir Francis Bond Head:

But don't you think a turkey shoot would be more fun if there was a little drilling beforehand? And don't you think you could shoot turkeys a bit better if everyone shot at once - bang bang bang bang. Because you see, the thing about a Tory -1 mean a turkey - the thing about a turkey is you can shoot it with a rifle, you can cut its head off with an axe, a pike is an excellent tool for getting turkeys out of high places - and if worst comes to worst, you can always grab a turkey in your own bare hands and wring its bloody neck! (p. 36)

The second act has more continuity and deals with events immediately before and after the battle of Montgomery's Tavern on December 7, 1837. It ends with the hanging of two rebel leaders, Peter Matthews and Samuel Lount, in the Toronto City Jail on April 12,1838, before which Matthews says, "Sam, we lost -", to which Lount replies, "No. We haven't won yet" (p. 64). If that final remark seems melodramatic, it is also very important for Salutin's intent in the play and for the connection he sees between the Rebellion of 1837 and presentday Canada. For him, the play is a statement not only about the oppression of Upper Canadians in 1837 at the hands of their British and Tory masters, but also about the oppression of Canadians today by the imperialism of the United States. It is a given for Salutin that the American empire is the most powerful the world has ever known and that Canadians are its primary colonists. What he is trying to do in 1837 is to make Canadians see that their situation today is like that of their nineteenth-century forebears, and that they must take the lead from Mackenzie, Matthews, Lount, and the other rebels and fight against the domination and injustice of their masters. Salutin makes this clear in his own analysis of the play: The idea was that the main problem with Canada today is the fact that it's not independent. It's still dominated by the structures of modern, American imperialism. I thought the one place in Canadian history that the Canadian people actually addressed that problem head-on was in 1837 you have to go back to where they were in 1837, and then you have to do it successfully instead of unsuccessfully.6

The Rebellion of 1837 continued to fascinate Salutin, and in 1987 he contributed a ten-part radio drama to CBC's "Morningside" entitled The Reluctant Patriot. It was the story of Samuel Chandler, who gave refuge to Mackenzie after the siege of Toronto and helped him across the border into the United States. One group Salutin saw attacking their problems successfully was the French Canadians, and he addressed their past and present in his most popular play, Les Canadiens. Rather than undergoing the collaborative process of 1837, Les Canadiens was written with an "assist" by Canadien goalie Ken Dryden, who also contributed a preface to the published text of the play. Salutin wrote an introduction to the text, outlining how he wrote the play and paying tribute to the Canadien players, administrators, and media people he consulted in the course of his work.

Once again, in Les Canadiens Salutin takes the audience through an important segment of Canadian history, in this case the story of Quebec from the conquest of 1759 to the victory of the Parti Qu6becois on November 15, 1976. The Montreal hockey team becomes what it was in life - a symbol for the French people of the province. Their victories and defeats become the victories and defeats of the Qu6b6cois; in fact, the Queb6cois are able to bear their ongoing sense of defeat by identifying with the triumphs of their team, with its Drydens, Moores, and Morenzes as well as its Beliveaus, Plantes, and Richards. Salutin has ingeniously divided Act One of the play - "Survival" - according to the time clock of a hockey game; he begins the action at 17:59 of the first period and proceeds through other crucial dates in Quebec history up to recent events, including the War Measures Act at 19:70. In act two - "The Day of the Game" - the time clock marks the hours of one day - November 15, 1976 from 10:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., when the PQ victory is announced to the crowd in the Forum and they leave their seats delirious with joy. The political victory has overshadowed the on-ice 4-2 victory of the team over the St. Louis Blues that night. The point of the play is that the Queb6cois reached a stage of political maturity when they voted into power a separatist party. They were able to assert their identity politically and thus had no need to assert themselves vicariously through a group of hockey players. Salutin's populist views are evident here, as he sees the Queb6cois standing up to their masters in 1976 in a way they never had before.7 He summed up his point in the introduction to the play: "It was as though, on that night in the Forum, the people of Quebec finally transferred their need of victory from the shoulders of the hockey team onto their own backs."8 Of the structure of the play, Salutin explained: "Act One would be myth: the myth of les Canadiens, standard-bearers of the Quebec spirit; and Act Two would be the demythologization of les Canadiens, and their replacement by the reality of 'just a hockey team'" (p. 21). Act I comes to a climax with the Forum riot after the disciplining of Maurice Richard by NHL President Clarence Campbell in 1955 and with the recitation of a series of social and political events leading up to 1970, when the Canadian army moves in and the Forum is dark and closed. The very different structure of Act II contributes to an unevenness in the play, but it does serve to show how the demythologization of the team came about. The central scene of this act makes its point by showing how the more important game to the fans that night was not the one between the Canadiens and the St. Louis Blues, but the election struggle between the PQ and the Liberals in Quebec. What the crowd now cheers is not the game on the ice, but the election results that are announced periodically on the PA system. When the final count is announced - PQ: 48, Liberals: 20 - the crowd erupts, ignores the classic Canadien goal scored by Dave Kirk, the fictitious main character of Act II, and surges onto the ice. The ice then becomes the Plains of Abraham of Act I, now a place where the French are celebrating victory. Salutin's enthusiasm for the self-respect shown by the Qu6becois in the election is echoed by his closing words in 63

the introduction: "What a season! Montr6al won the Stanley Cup; the people of Quebec reversed a historical verdict; and, on another level to be sure, we made Les Canadiens. What a hell of a season it was!" (pp. 23-24). And to top it off, Les Canadiens won the Chalmers Award that year for the best Canadian play produced in the Toronto area. Salutin insisted that the hopefulness of the play rested not on any political party or government of Quebec, but on the self-respect asserted by the people of Quebec in the election. Nevertheless, his own respect for the Qu6b6cois was dampened by their support of the Conservative Party in the free trade election of 1988. In Waiting for Democracy, his disappointment is clearly voiced: ". . . . for some of us in English Canada, it wasn't all bad, after twenty years of feeling comparatively unsophisticated in culture and politics, to finally get the Quebec monkey off our back. Maybe they could even learn something from us."9 Although none of his subsequent plays matched the success of Les Canadiens, Salutin continued to work in the genre until recently. And he continued to choose prominent Canadian subjects and individuals to write about: drama critic Nathan Cohen, Newfoundland Premier Joseph Smallwood, National Film Board founder John Grierson, and the intelligence service of the RCMP. Nathan Cohen: A Review (1981) concerns the life and career of the critic who dominated the Canadian cultural scene from the 1950s until his untimely death at the age of forty-seven in 1971. With Douglas Campbell in the title role, the play ranged over the issues that Cohen was passionately concerned with - Canadian culture, the CBC, television, Broadway musicals, the Dominion Drama Festival, the Stratford Festival - and the contribution Cohen made to Canadian theatre by the high standards he set for it. However provocative these topics are, we do not get to know Cohen the man very well, nor do the many parts of the play blend together, so that in the end it is more of a discussion piece than an effective drama. With the remarkable Newfoundland actor Kevin Noble in the title role of "Joey", this play is a tribute both to the premier who said, "God created man but I created Newfoundland", and to the pluck and wit of the Newfoundland people. Unlike Salutin's earlier play "I.W.A.", which had harshly criticized Smallwood for crushing the woodworkers' strike in 1959, this was a sympathetic satire. It so pleased the former premier that he saw the play several times and declared: "It's entrancing, dramatic, stirring and it's all about me."10 S: Portrait of a Spy (1984) was written by Salutin and Ian Adams, on whose 1977 novel of the same name it was based. Its central character is a "mole" who becomes director of counter-espionage for the RCMP and is finally brought to heel by an RCMP sergeant from Saskatchewan. Much of the play is set in Ottawa and gives a distinct flavour of the city and of the world of the spy. Though it lacks dramatic tension, it raises important issues concerning the efficiency and accountability of Canada's security service. Grierson and Gouzenko (1986), a ninety-minute docudrama, is also about the world of the spy, but the emphasis in the film is on John Grierson, who, after founding the National Film Board in 1939, was forced to leave Canada and the NFB on flimsy evidence taken from Gouzenko's 64

revelations of a Russian spy ring in Canada. In the film Salutin explores the duplicity and injustice of the Canadian government in its treatment of Grierson. He had written about this earlier in an article in Weekend Magazine (September 23,1978) entitled "The NFB Red Scare", reproduced in Marginal Notes as "It happened here. Earlier. And worse." Somewhat disillusioned with the state of Canadian theatre, Salutin began a novel in 1985; it was published in 1988 as A Man of Little Faith. Its plot is very loose, yet the book shows Salutin's special talent for creating character, evoking the life of a Jewish community in Toronto in the mid-twentieth century, and commenting with poignancy and humour on life, love, sex, faith, history, and human relationships. Its central character is Oscar, a director of religious education at the Pillar of Fire Temple in Toronto. The novel takes us on his journey of self-discovery that ends on a note of bemused self-mockery as Oscar recounts his own death. The warmth and humanity of the work suggest that Salutin is very much at home with the novel form. To date, Salutin's most enduring contribution to Canadian life and culture is his social criticism. Writing from the margin of Canadian society with a Marxist-socialist and nationalistic perspective, he has been goading the Canadian establishment since his return to Canada in 1970. Wielding his goad with telling insight and biting humour, he has contributed to many magazines, including Maclean's, Harper's, Toronto Life, Weekend, Today, Saturday Night, Canadian Business, Malahat Review, Monthly Review, Quest, and TV Times. He wrote satirical pieces for the CBC radio series "Inside from the Outside" in the 1970s and has contributed to the network's "Ideas" program. Many of his articles and columns from This Magazine, as well as some from other publications, were assembled in Marginal Notes: Challenges to the Mainstream. Speaking of his marginality in the introduction to this book, he says: As for those of us who heartily abominate these criteria [of the mainstream], we cannot deny that we are marginal. There is no point, our marginality is real. We can however reject the evaluation which those at the centre make, and which our society largely accepts, about our marginality. We can deny that marginality is negative. We can claim it as a strength, (p. 6)

One of those Canadians on the margin with Salutin was the labour organizer Kent Rowley, whose eulogy - reproduced in Marginal Notes - Salutin gave in 1978 at a memorial service in Toronto. Salutin later wrote the biography of his hero and mentor, Kent Rowley: The Organizer - A Canadian Union Life, which is as much a history of unionism in Canada as it is a biography of Rowley. Salutin's serio-comic bent expressed itself in two illustrated works that protested the domination of Canada by the United States. The first, written in 1975 with Murray Soupcoff and Gary Dunford, was entitled Good Buy, Canada!; the second was a twenty-four-page anti-free trade cartoon booklet distributed during the 1988 federal election campaign called What's the Big Deal? (Le libre-echange? Par Ionsen!), with cartoons by Terry Mosher (alias Aislin), a political cartoonist for the Montreal Gazette.

During that campaign Salutin travelled around Canada taking the political pulse of Canadians and keeping a journal that formed the basis for the book Waiting for Democracy: A Citizen1s Journal. Salutin is an effective memoirist, as shown in his journal of the rehearsal process of 1837, and he is just as effective here recording and reflecting on the reactions of Canadians during the campaign. His populist position is clear in the subtitle of the book, and though his vigorous stance against free trade was not supported by the numbers returned to the House of Commons, it was, he felt, supported by the popular vote. He was elated by the involvement of Canadians in the campaign:

sations with English-Canadian Playrights (Toronto: Coach House, 1982), p. 257. 7 A similar reaction was felt by Que'be'cois playwright Michel Tremblay, who allowed his plays to be performed in English in Quebec only after the victory of the Parti Que'be'cois. 8 Rick Salutin, Les Canadiens (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1977), p. 20. 9 Rick Salutin, Waiting for Democracy: A Citizen's Journal (Markham: Penguin, 1989), p. 295. 10 Quoted in the National Arts Centre press release, October 15,1982, prior to its Ottawa production. 11 Quoted in Birgitte J0rgensen, "If You Loved This Country . . . You* 11 hate the 51st state'*, CanPlay: The Canadian Playwrights Magazine, VI, 4 (August 1989), 3.

... the single most hopeful element in the entire election of 1988 was the role played by the Canadian people. If there is a hero to this tale, they are it. When they got a chance, when they were given a minimal amount of help, they responded with animation and intelligence, (p. 298)

Chronology

Like many anti-free traders and Canadian nationalists, he was depressed by the signing of the deal but is uncertain what this will mean for the nationalists. In 1989 he said: "We may have passed our phase as nationalists or nationalism may now increase as a force. Can this be fought? In the name of what can it be done?"11 Further thoughts on free trade are given in Salutin's book Living in a Dark Age (1991), whose title reflects his view of Canada since the 1988 election. The book contains many of his recent essays, including "Redeeming the Tube", a collection of columns on television he wrote for The Globe and Mail. Salutin has put together another collection of his work, entitled Just Keep Writing, which will be published in 1991, and he plans to write another novel; he has worked on a play based on his experiences in Mozambique; and he is writing a young people's play on democracy for the Toronto-based Theatre on the Move. He will undoubtedly remain in Canada and will continue in his role as a social critic, prodding the establishment from his precarious but ultimately satisfying position as a writer on the margin of Canadian society. Canadians can expect to see more of both the art and ideology of Rick Salutin.

1 Peter Copeman, "Rick Salutin: The Meaning of It All**, Canadian Theatre Review, XXXIV (Spring 1982), 196. 2 Rick Salutin, "The Great Canadian History Robbery**, Maclean's, LXXXVI, 4 (April 1973), 27. 3 Dates in parentheses after the titles of plays are for their first productions. 4 Rick Salutin, 1837: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Canadian Revolution (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1978), p. 187. This edition of the play contains a long (172-page) historical introduction by Salutin entitled "1837: Mackenzie and Revolution'*, as well as SaluthTs preface, a diary he kept on the development of the play from the beginning of rehearsals to opening night. Peter Flaherty has written a 23-page commentary on Salutin*s historical introduction and on the play, with both history and literature teachers in mind. 5 Rick Salutin and Theatre Passe Muraille, 1837: The Farmers' Revolt (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1976), p. 19. This paperback edition contains only the text of the play. 6 Robert Wallace and Cynthia Zimmerman, eds., The Work: Conver-

1942 1960-70

1970 1971 1972 1973

1974

1975

1976

1977

Earl Richard (Rick) Salutin born on August 30 in Toronto, the first of two sons of Saul and Freda (Levenson) Salutin. His years outside Canada. 1964: Receives B.A. in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University in Boston. Spends a year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Studies to be a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and also attends classes at Union Theological Seminary there. 1967: Receives M.A. in religion from Columbia University in New York with a thesis on the New Testament. Begins studies in philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. October 16: returns to Canada the day the War Measures Act is invoked by Pierre Trudeau. Writes his first play, "Fanshen", about a revolution in a Chinese village. February 17: "Fanshen" opens at Toronto Workshop Productions directed by George Luscombe. January 18:1837 opens at Theatre Passe Muraille directed by Paul Thompson. Participates in the Artistic Woodwork strike in Toronto, and serves a short jail term for his activities. Becomes an editor of This Magazine, for which he writes a regular column "The Culture Vulture". February 14: "The Adventures of an Immigrant" opens at Theatre Passe Muraille directed by Paul Thompson. June 7: a second version of 1837, subtitled The Farmers1 Revolt, opens on tour in Southwestern Ontario. 1837 is a finalist for the Chalmers Award. March 12: The False Messiah opens at Theatre Passe Muraille directed by John Palmer, with music by John Gray. November 4: Collaborates on "I.W.A.", produced by the Mummers' Troupe in Petty Harbour, Newfoundland, directed by Chris Brookes. April 12: "Money", a one-act musical for touring, is produced at the Young People's Theatre in Toronto, with music by John Gray. Publishes 1837: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Canadian Revolution to accompany the text of the play. January 9: "Maria", a 60-minute television drama, is shown nationally on the CBC "Here to Stay" series, directed by Allan King. Later that year it is shown on the CBC "For the Record" series.

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1978

1981

1982, 1984

1986 1987

1988

1991

February 10: Les Canadiens, written with an "assist" by Ken Dryden, opens at Montreal's Centaur Theatre directed by Guy Sprung. October 20: Les Canadiens opens at Toronto Workshop Productions directed by George Luscombe. Les Canadiens receives the Chalmers Award for the best Canadian play produced in the Toronto area that year. February 8: Toronto, gives the eulogy at a memorial for labour leader Kent Rowley (1917-78), and later writes a biography Kent Rowley: The Organizer-A Canadian Union Life (1980). Summer: Visits the newly independent Mozambique and writes several articles about his experiences there. Becomes chairman of the Guild of Canadian Playwrights, which he helped found. January 28: Nathan Cohen: A Review opens at Theatre Passe Muraille directed by Paul Thompson. "Joey", written in collaboration with the Rising Tide Theatre of Newfoundland, opens in St. John's directed by Donna Butt. '84 Receives National Magazine Awards for comment and criticism in "The Culture Vulture" columns in This Magazine. February 8: S: Portrait of a Spy, written with Ian Adams, opens at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa directed by Patrick McDonald. Publishes Marginal Notes: Challenges to the Mainstream, a collection of his writings largely from This Magazine. January 30: Grierson and Gouzenko, a ninetyminute CBC television play directed by Martin Kinch, is shown nationally. December 7-18: The Reluctant Patriot, a ten-part radio play about Samuel Chandler, is produced on CBC's "Morningside" to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the 1837 rebellion. A Man of Little Faith receives the W.H. Smith Books in Canada First Novel Award, with a cash prize of $5,000. Travels in all ten provinces and the North to research and write Waiting for Democracy: A Citizen's Journal (1989) about the free trade election. During the election campaign, What's the Big Deal? is included as a twentyfour-page insert in many Canadian newspapers. Publishes more thoughts on free trade in Living in a Dark Age (Toronto: HarperCollins).

Comments by Rick Salutin A lot of journalism I've done contains first-person reactions so I'm not averse to that kind of personal voice in writing. But in theatre what you're trying to do is draw a picture of reality that people will recognize and find useful and truthful. The main concern is to sketch reality, not some sort of personal expression. Basically, the important things to understand are why the world is the way it is, why Canada is the way it is, why we live in a world of plenty that's full of misery. Quoted in Robert Wallace and Cynthia Zimmerman, The Work: Conversations with English-Canadian Playwrights (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982), p. 254.

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When I look over things I have dealt with since I began writing in 1971,1 am amazed at how much could be tucked under the heading of marginality. A self-hating Canadian in the U.S. A nationalist in a country that has always suspected nationalism. Among nationalists, a Marxist. A middle-class writer in the labour movement, and within labour a dissenter against the mainstream. A Quebec independantiste in English Canada. A Jew among Gentiles, and among Jews an outsider for criticizing the community and Israel. The first writing money I ever made came from a radio program called Inside from the Outside. I wrote about Canadian revolutions that failed and Canadian heroes who were unknown. My first play was set in China, and I went to Mozambique to learn about culture and politics. I doubt that any Jew stops being Jewish. At times one can be more or less involved, but the connection persists. For about ten years, starting in my teens, I was intensely involved in my Jewishness. Before that I'd attended classes and services at Toronto's Holy Blossom Temple, which was on the liberal, less traditional end of the Jewish spectrum. and where our family was not very active This religious phase ended gradually, with no dramatic revelations or reversals. . . . Yet the sense of Jewishness remained. Marginal Notes: Challenges to the Mainstream (1984), pp. 3, 218. I've got a last line. Talking with Suzette about Canadian plays and what downers they are - always about losers. Yet what to do? our past is negative. The country has remained a colony; the struggle in 1837 did not succeed. I've thought of changing the ending, having the rebels win (Stop the Hanging!); or cutting off before the battle and the defeat, at, say, the high point in October '37. But finally we have to wrestle with what actually happened and wring something positive out of that. Losing, I argued, does not have to make you a "Loser"; there are winners who lose. It is the difference between saying, "We lost", and saying, "No, we just haven't won yet." There it is. Preface to 1837: The Farmers' Revolt, in 1837: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Canadian Revolution (1976), p. 193. We are all implicated politically because of our social and historical interdependencies, so politics affects all of us all the time - as many kind people pointed out while I travelled during the election of 1988. That's not the same though, as being a citizen, which involves consciously acting back; doing what we can to affect what affects us. It is obviously possible to live a life without that active kind of politics. It might be a rich life, and possibly a happy one. It wouldn't though — if Aristotle and others were right — be a fully human life. That's all. Waiting for Democracy: A Citizen's Journal (1989), p. 300.

Comments on Rick Salutin One of the objectives of the Theatre Passe Muraille in the production of 7837 is to encourage Canadians to take their history seriously. Other countries know that they have a past

and devote themselves to reinterpreting it. But English Canadians must be convinced that there is a past that is their own. At present, the thought of something historic happening at Bay and Adelaide street provokes laughter. Salutin and the actors of Theatre Passe Muraille, who view the production as primarily a political rather than a theatrical event, are determined to move the audience beyond this nervous self-denial to an appreciative identification with their past and a realistic appraisal of the current state of Canadian independence. Margaret Pappert-Martinello, "Revolutionary Parallels", Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 7/8 (Fall 1977), p. 197. . . . the importance and singularity of Rick Salutin as a playwright are that he willingly confronts social issues and attempts to address them dialectically. His results have varied, but he is the author of at least one play that can rightly lay claim to the status of reasonably sophisticated dialectical theatre, which finds quite comprehensive images for the contemporary flux of social dynamics in Canada. It is my belief that such plays are the ones that history will judge to be of lasting value. Peter Copeman, "Rick Salutin and the Popular Dramatic Tradition: Towards a Dialectical Theatre in Canada", Canadian Drama/L'Art dramatique canadien, X, 1 (1984), 32. In the most accomplished pieces in this collection (Marginal Notes), Salutin is as smooth as his good friend, former goaltender Ken Dryden. He doesn't make writing look easy, the way Guy Lafleur used to make scoring look as easy as falling off a log, but he does what Dryden would do on the ice: makes you know he was working to stop that goal the way no one else had before. This is Salutin, the journalist at his best: he is committed and opinionated, while being neither obtuse nor platitudinous. In his best pieces, he makes politics as fun to observe as hockey. Joyce Wayne, "Salutin's gritty journalism goads the Establishment", Quill & Quire, L, 6 (June 1984), 33. In his production diary of 1837, the original version of 1837: The Farmers' Revolt, Rick Salutin remarks how the opening night audience in Toronto laughed at the mention of Bay and Adelaide, a downtown intersection. That reaction brought into sharp focus for Salutin the reasons for having created the play in the first place, the bizarre attitudes typically held by Canadians towards their own history. "We are so imbued with self-denial," he concluded, "so colonized, that the very thought of something historic happening here, at Bay and Adelaide, draws laughs." His ongoing project and that of Theatre Passe Muraille under Paul Thompson has been to get Canadian audiences to laugh at themselves in the right places, presenting the everyday life and history of Canadians in theatrically playful and often brilliantly comical ways while at the same time insisting that they are subjects worthy of serious dramatic treatment. Jerry Wasserman, Modern Canadian Plays (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1986), p. 101.

Selected Bibliography Works by Rick Salutin Plays 1837: The Farmers' Revolt. [With Theatre Passe Muraille.] Toronto: James Lorimer, 1976. Les Canadiens. [Assist: Ken Dryden.] Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1977. The False Messiah. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1981. Nathan Cohen: A Review, published in Canadian Theatre Review, 30 (Spring 1981), pp. 45-105. S: Portrait of a Spy. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1985. Novel A Man of Little Faith. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988. History 7857: William Lyon Mackenzie and the Canadian Revolution. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1976. "The Great Canadian History Robbery", Maclean's, LXXXVI, 4 (April 1973), 27-29, 58, 61-62, 64-65.

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Biography Kent Rowley: The Organizer - A Canadian Union Life. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1980. [Translated as Kent Rowley: une vie pour le mouvement ouvrier. Montreal: Albert St. Martin, 1982.] Journalism

Good Buy, Canada! [With Murray Soupcoff and Gary Dunford.] Toronto: James Lorimer, 1975. Marginal Notes: Challenges to the Mainstream. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1984. Introduction to Spadina Avenue by Rosemary Donegan. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & Mclntyre, 1985. What's the Big Deal? (Le libre-echange? Parlons-en!). [With Terry Mosher (cartoonist) and Ron Kaplansky (designer).] Ottawa: Pro-Canada Network, 1988. Waiting for Democracy: A Citizen's Journal. Markham: Penguin, 1989. Living in a Dark Age. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1991. Selected Criticism

Copeman, Peter. "Rick Salutin and the Popular Dramatic Tradition: Toward a Dialectical Theatre in Canada", Canadian Drama/L'Art dramatique canadien, X, 1 (1984), 25-34. . "Rick Salutin: The Meaning of It All", Canadian Theatre Review, No. 34 (Spring 1982), pp. 190-97. Crook, Barbara. "Playwright at peace with first novel", Citizen (Ottawa), October 8, 1988, p. C3. Filewod, Alan. Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.

Flaherty, Peter. A Guide to 1837. Toronto: James Lorimer, 1977. Garebian, Keith. "Rick Salutin", in Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly, eds., The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989. Jorgensen, Birgitte. "If You Loved This Country ... You'll hate the 51st state", CanPlay: The Canadian Playwrights Magazine, IV, 4 (August 1989), 1-3. Knelman, Martin. "Hello, fans! It's Canada Night in Hockey", Saturday Night, XCIII, 1 (January-February, 1978), 6162.

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Miller, Mary Jane. "They shoot! They score?" Canadian Drama/L'Art dramatique canadien, IV, 2 (Fall 1978), 140-49. . "Two versions of Rick Salutin's Les Canadiens", Theatre History in Canada/Histoire du Theatre au Canada, I, 1 (Spring 1980), 57-69.

Noonan, James. "Rick Salutin", in W.E. Toye, ed., The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983. Nunn, Robert C. "Performing Fact: Canadian Documentary Theatre", Canadian Literature, No. 103 (Winter 1984), pp. 51-62. Pappert-Martinello, Margaret. "Revolutionary Parallels", Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 7/8 (Fall 1987), pp. 196-99. Rubin, Don, and Alison Cranmer-Byng, eds. "Rick Salutin", Canada's Playwrights: A Biographical Guide. Toronto: Canadian Theatre Review Publications, 1980. Usmiani, Renate. Second Stage: The Alternative Theatre Movement in Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1983. Wallace, Robert, and Cynthia Zimmerman. "Rick Salutin", The Work: Conversations with English-Canadian Playwrights. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982, pp. 252-63. Wasserman, Jerry. "Rick Salutin", The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. Edmonton: Hurtig, 1988. ."Rick Salutin and Theatre Passe Muraille", in Jerry Wasserman, ed., Modern Canadian Plays. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1986, pp. 101-2. Wayne, Joyce. "Salutin's gritty journalism goads the Establishment", Quill & Quire, L, 6 (June 1984), 33. Whittaker, Herbert. "Playwright Rick Salutin: sniffing out the stuff of history", Globe and Mail, January 18,1973, p. 11. . "1837 engrossing handling of history", Globe and Mail, January 19, 1973, p. 15. Wood, Susan. "Found History", Canadian Literature, No. 81 (Summer 1979), pp. 111-12. A Note on the Contributor James Noonan is Associate Professor of English at Carleton University. He has published many articles on Canadian drama and theatre, several of them in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1983) and The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre (1989). He is working on a study of culture and Rideau Hall.

Marie-Jose Theriault 114 by Kenneth W. Meadwell Dancer, singer, lyricist, translator, literary critic, writer, publisher: these many facets of Marie-Jos6 Th6riault bear testimony to the passion with which she involves herself in the arts. While her career has encompassed all media - from radio, television, recordings, as well as live performances and readings to published literary works - her current endeavours lie squarely in the field of literary creation. It is precisely this aspect of her creativity, since the publication in 1972 of her first poetic work, Poemes - Comme une offrande aux grandes betes-A jour fermant, that has brought her sustained and important critical recognition. Having been a singer with classical and solfeggio training and a dancer of ballet, jazz, flamenco, and baladi, Theriault shows an equivalent versatility in her writing. Poet, novelist, shortstory writer, she exhibits as varied a focus in her choice of genre as she does in her themes. However wide-ranging the latter may appear - alienation, belonging; love, hatred; acceptance, renouncement; permanence, metamorphosis - it is to be noted that Th6riault casts a profoundly sensitive and penetrating look around her. Her preferred subject is the unique individual, the majestic being, quietly ferocious and somehow anomalous in contemporary civilization. Reading Th6riault's works is quite literally an absorbing activity; one is bedazzled and intrigued by the exotic nature of the world she depicts, a foreign universe that is, paradoxically, strangely familiar. Her encyclopedic vocabulary and graceful stylistic symmetry transport the reader towards a true depiction of human sentiment. It is perhaps this "trueness", the accuracy and fullness with which she renders human emotion and perception, that invites and retains the reader's participation in her works. Pourtant le Sud . . . (1976), a prose poem celebrating an America of glacial cold, of an abandoned and resilient people, evokes the isolation, purity, and gentle security offered by an unidentified location and primitive customs. The narrative voice seems in exile from a far-away place simply designated as "South"; in its anonymity, the voice embodies the consciousness of a civilization yet to be born from the potential of this mythical and as yet undefined culture.

Haunted by the memories of lush vegetation and provocative scents of heat-oppressed lands, the narrator's sensitivity must confront two poles of attraction by turns: And yet the South, From some other worlds whose skies are identical, comes to search my body with its initiatory hands so that poppy colonies burst

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forth in my mitten. I no longer hear the frost. And the metamorphosis unravels the great pines - frost-riven cathedrals - , already shapes them, as I wish, into the form of cypresses.1

A lyrical chant in celebration of a primitive America, snowbound and foreboding, Pourtant le Sud . . . expresses both desire for liberation from this glacial atmosphere and awe at its natural beauty. Liberation by the individual from a powerful and seductive force is a recurring theme in Th6riault's work, one that will be seen also in Invariance. It is to be noted that the narrative voice in Pourtant le Sud . .. invokes a fantastical voyage in time and in space that leads ultimately to a South which is Mediterranean in landscape, with its references to Tuscany and Florence. This is a medieval land, bearing the memory of Beatrice, Dante's inspiration, where the Poet, a harbinger, renews the vitality of the city through his spellbinding verse: Nor does the great Poet, visionary, sleep: look for him strangers, atop the porticos and under the bridges! His song is reborn at each new dawn, stanzas succeed each other in procession down the alleyways, painful and spotted with shadow, or shining with sunlight, they burnish cupolas up to the great pulsations of the River which will burst through the gates of Hell. (PS, pp. 35-36)

The power and depth of the Poet's vision lead him to a new place of discovery, to the America of ice and barren lands: Man from the South, Under the sky, crackling with electric curtains and upon frost, unrelenting and shallower than an ocean of salt, Against shale blue forests, spilling down into gulfs and deserted, Along a string of islands, women immersed in free waters, And along capes, In a country of winter, of night and of wolves, There is your dream, There, not elsewhere, lives your poem, Would that one evening, far from fire ravaged forests and failures, in the pure encampments of a new type, you will retell ancient fables and profess your God, We will be able to pronounce our names together, our voices will send forth as one their poem from sea to sea! And singular alliances will be established in the finally abandoned substance - let them not be broken oh South! everywhere intermingling quests and realizations will mark the North, And a splendid breeze will rustle through the resin trees. . . . (PS, pp. 71-72)

The circular movement of this text, a recurring structure in Th6riault's works, represents a movement that is essentially dialectical, continually oscillating between two poles of attraction. Pourtant le Sud . . . is an intriguing work, structured by unforeseen and unexplained movements in time and in space. 70

The narrative voice expresses an abiding love for its own land, the feeling of belonging and identification with the natural elements of the environment. This affirmation of identity is not unlike that found in Quebec during the 1960s when the "Parti pris" movement rallied against the dispossession of the land and people of Quebec through the works of such poets as Gaston Miron and Paul Chamberland. While Th6riault's writing shares the same passion and lyricism as the Parti pris poets, her work does not possess an overt socially engaged level of understanding. The individual she creates is limited to a solitary existence - indeed, seems to seek out isolation - and while doing so displays a profound appreciation of life's gifts. "Pofcmes & 1'absent" forms the first portion of Lettera amorosa (1978). The absent man referred to in the title of this section is the lover of the woman writing the poems. Nostalgic for the past, the woman expresses a profoundly strong attachment to "1'absent". This expression is couched in what might seem a language of submission, of bewitchment. It should be stated, however, that the woman in Lettera amorosa exhibits both strength and passion. As will be the case in Invariance, Theriault evokes the union of two individuals, and while it is true that the woman is all-consumed by the force of her love, the interest of this text resides in the power of language to convey the relentless presence of her lover, both in her past as well as in her vision of the future. Just as the text of Pourtant le Sud . . . is woven around the opposition of presence and absence, so "Pofemes & 1'absent", divided into fifteen sections, offers a lyrical chant in honour of the far-off lover: Here, autumn has the scent of orange, obviously, and from this garden the entire temple is visible. What was it you were saying. . .? From the house, stippled and pink, your voice is heard, and again inducing blossoms, rolls towards the sea. Sweeping arcs of foam are breaking - I hear them and rising, they lick the temple: your salty voice renders it divine.2

Although this first part of Lettera amorosa is an apostrophe to the absent man, the second section, consisting of three letters, does not represent attempts at overt communication with him. Rather, the woman's presence is evoked through that of an unnamed, courtesan-like figure, and the man takes on the guise of a desert prince, savage yet noble in the woman's eyes. Theriault's consistency in the choice of themes is noteworthy. Although one might question the depiction of the woman's passionate submission to the man, one is inevitably drawn to the mysterious beauty of both language and rhythm. Invariance and Celebration du prince (1982), while reminiscent of the exalted tones of Saint-John Perse (18871975) or the refined sensibility of Paul Eluard (1895-1952), both poets, remain deeply personal texts. One is soon enveloped in the soothing flow of words, the "jewels sculpted in rare vowels" of which the former work makes mention. Whatever obscurity there might be during the first reading of the poems comes from the rapidity with which images

accumulate and are concentrated into a sweeping motion of both joy and anguish, tenderness and brutality. Further readings reveal a marked structure built of oppositions and similitudes, a musicality perceived through a system of pauses and stresses achieved by the freeness of the punctuation. To reduce the texts to the solitary theme of love would be to deny them their inherent richness. It is, nonetheless, an element of undeniable importance. Invariance describes the difficulties and final disintegration of a love affair unlike any other. The man and the woman are never identified, but their presence is conveyed by sensual imagery evoking scent and substance. Speaking to her absent lover, the woman says: I recognized you; it was a yellow morning like so many others north of Providence, when children, still brownskinned, make each other nests of leaves and polish their dreams like so many crisp, chilled apples, it was a reddish morning like the few remaining in the large photo albums offered to passing princes or prelates, it was a sky rarely blue—it is hardly talked about any longer except in certain poems, we would have gone swimming had it not been for the coolness—it was an exquisite day such as no longer exists, a day that one is tempted to relive but cannot for it is a false conjuncture, an element is always lacking, it was the one and only moment, the one that brought you a setting, a sedan-chair, a silk shirt, you were everywhere and shone from inside, that is why the children laughing while eating apples appeared so beautiful to me, I recognized you, it was not difficult: I had only to look there, from where the warmth was coming.3

Even when absent, the man is thus ever present in the memory of the woman. Invariance is a monologue in which the latter undertakes a somewhat Proustian search for lost time. Just as Marcel Proust (1871-1922), in A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1922), used affective memory to reawaken past sensations and, by extension, people who loomed large in his life, so, too, does Theriault attempt to recapture the past. However, while Proust studied the evolution of the society that he depicted, Th6riault is more inclined to end her quest once having achieved that which served as the basis for Proust's writing: timeless experiences. It is precisely the transitory nature of time which the woman in Invariance strives to overcome: In your big, too white house, a secret place where you seek refuge, a place so full of your echo that no one enters, no one dares, apart from myself, for lustra you had been saving a secret drawer for me, where I could curl up among old photographs, bottles of blue and red ink, slate-coloured pebbles lovingly polished by the rubbing of fingers against their curved edges, a list of all the country's bad gardeners and a notepad where day after day all the rendezvous that we did not have were recorded, and a leaf, small sun-dried fragment of October, picked in this very bed of autumn where we never made love, but where we did unceasingly - timeless beasts without the body's shelter (/. p. 30)

The age of the photographs, the time required to polish stones, and the orange of the autumn leaf reinforce the woman's preoccupations with temporality. She realizes, however, that the timelessness of the experience shared with her lover can live on only in her memory. By suggesting that the woman has survived the anguish brought about by the ending of the relationship, the final words of Invariance convey the idea, shared by Proust, that life continues to evolve in spite of the permanence of things: Alone, I must have been reborn, but my rebirth is long, I have not entirely succeeded, You say nothing now, nothing more, you threw out the notebooks, booklets and lists, you stained the drawings, tore up the letters, crossed America off maps, and closed the shutters, Again you say nothing, my unworn love emerges nevertheless like a red star or else like this long poem without pause in which I write such naked and simple words, You, you think: "Agape" . . . but my invariant love lives beyond the tears of the aorta. (/, p. 46)

Celebration du prince opens with an evocation of the still-present despair felt by the woman in Invariance. This is to change, though, for with the arrival of the "prince", she is to undergo a metamorphosis which will leave her joyous once again with newly found love. One cannot but hear the echoes of Saint-John Perse's "La Gloire des rois" and, in particular, "Amiti6 du prince" in this text. Both poets celebrate a prince of mysterious origin, and it is noteworthy that he is, in their eyes, an eternal nomad, a silent figure possessing divine knowledge. Celebration du prince communicates the rebirth of the woman through expressions of spatiality. The temporal elements in Invariance served to isolate the moments of happiness and sadness by expressing them through images in which time stood still. It is not surprising, then, that in Celebration du prince the love yet to be conquered is rendered by imagery evoking movement. It is again the woman who addresses the enigmatic "him" in this text: Captive I am still of your ever silent word, of all our places yet to be conquered, I hear already all that the memory of the unborn embrace reveals to me, their amber circle, your arms are my wandering and liberation, who then will show me the path leading to them? What do you fear if to capture your gaze is to lose myself in it, to initiate with your body an eternal migration, a chant as fresh as risen bread wells up in me at your approach . . . (CP, pp. 59-60)

The progression of this work is linear and leads the woman along a path towards the potential fulfilment of her desire. Once the union between the man and the woman is achieved, the distance that once separated them is no longer an obstacle. Moreover, it is replaced by a personal, newly created space which is their private world. Invariance and 71

Celebration du prince form a cyclical ensemble in that the texts reveal themselves in three successive stages: discovery, loss, and rediscovery. Celebration du prince, which ends on a note of exaltation, carries the reader to the initial point of departure. Besides Th6riault's refinement in her use of provocative imagery and extraordinary vocabulary, it is refreshing that she should have chosen to avoid any partisan involvement in her writing. She treats love simply, and perceives it as the union of two individuals. One feels, therefore, that Th6riault depicts in good faith the essence of the human element which must come to terms with the passing of love and, ultimately, of time. Les demoiselles de Numidie, Th6riault's first and only novel to date, recounts a fantastical tale of love, voyage, and discovery. The title of the work - The Maidens ofNumidia - refers to the name of a legendary ship, but a ship which is unlike any other. An oaken vessel, built in the fourteenth century, with lavish silk trimmings, gold decorations, and brilliantly coloured banners, it navigates the waters of the Mediterranean, suddenly materializing in the middle of the sea in order to tempt forlorn sailors with its bounty, for it is a floating brothel. Set in 1956, Les demoiselles de Numidie recounts the obsession and fascination with the sea, as experienced by Filippo Giusti, captain of the cargo ship Maria Teresa G. headed for Newfoundland after having docked in Tangiers. Giusti, a seasoned mariner, communicates above all the massive strength of the sea, its foreboding nature as well as its enormous age. Woven around Giusti's character, the text resonates with three voices. The narrative voice opens the work with a poetic evocation of a calm sea at sunset, the colour of orange coral, through which glides the Maria Teresa G. on its northern voyage. Contemplative, Giusti, the sea's accomplice and at times master, reflects upon the ocean's majesty, and his thoughts are communicated by the narrative voice: He believed that the nearby land acts as a handrail along a staircase; it forewarns of the fall. But, be there coasts or not, nothing prevents the catastrophe if it is written that it is to take place. There are moments, though, when the sea rings truer than experience, it cajoles our weaknesses, awakens our primordial childhood fears, especially at night, it commands a sacred horror (to which the immobility of maritime life is not foreign, the impression that time suddenly stops and that the ship enters into a state of suspension in which it moves in slow motion. The landmarks which from time to time appear when one sails close to the coast, these earthly elements that govern existence according to a complex scheme by forcing the mind to retain its alertness in order to avoid all that is precarious, these landmarks no longer exist. With their absence, spatial perception changes. The rhythm of movements changes. The order of thoughts. The notion of time. The sea, all in all, penetrates us by the same dark paths as love).4

As has been seen in Pourtant le Slid . . . and Invariance, man's solitude is again evoked in these thoughts. It is to be noted, however, that in contrast with the preceding texts, it 72

is the male character who experiences isolation, and whose link with the past is represented by a letter he writes to his daughter in three successive stages, each forming a chapter in this work. Thus, Les demoiselles de Numidie is composed of chapters narrating the on-board activities of the Maria Teresa G., of epistolary sections in which Giusti addresses his daughter, and of sequences in which, magically, the consciousness of the phantom ship, les Demoiselles de Numidie, finds its own voice. The fantastic and sudden apparition of this vessel beside the Maria Teresa G. is in fact prepared for by the narrative voice evoking the power and vastness of the sea. Magical and inviting, this phantom ship reveals its identity and history to the reader in an astounding chapter, written in an archaic French, governed by the syntax of Old French but with a modernized spelling. The exotic and anachronistic nature of this language serves to transport the reader to a time and place far removed from the modern age. In this way, expression is given to the potential of the sea to transform reality, to halt the passage of time, as well as to inspire in man a profound feeling of helplessness in the vastness of time and space. However, it must also be stated that, despite this dreamlike description of the phantom ship, its presence is not known to all. The disappearance of a passenger, who in a dreamy scene boards les Demoiselles de Numidie, then stationary alongside the Maria Teresa G., is explained by Giusti as a sea accident. Although he is profoundly con-

Si

scious of his love of the sea, Giusti's sensitivity does not allow him access, paradoxically, to this magical dimension of existence. As one sees in the letter he composes for his daughter, his is a world anchored in the past, full of selfanalyses and justifications for previous actions and decisions. Just as the woman in Invariance must confront the past in order to evolve, Giusti must also take stock of his life during his voyages so that he might receive the liberation that he seeks. Rarely leaving the ship when it docks, he takes on the guise of a nomad, perpetually sailing towards a welcoming port. His love of the infinite and mysterious sea incites and comforts him in his solitude. An initiation to the sea, Les demoiselles de Numidie celebrates the power of love and evokes man's helplessness to control his destiny. Marie-Jos6 Theriault occupies a singular place in French Canadian literature. As do many of her characters, she possesses an unusual vision that encompasses past and present, ancient and modern, European and North American. An encyclopedic vocabulary, combined with a lyrical and often luxuriously baroque style, symmetrical and intricate, characterizes her writing. Solitude, love, and the power of the imagination, all distinctive traits of her writing, are treated with such originality that comparisons with the works of her contemporaries seem futile. Marie-Jos6 Th&iault is unquestionably a unique voice in Canadian literature. 1

Marie-Jose Th6riault, Pourtant le Sud . . . (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1976), pp. 15-16. Translations are by K.W. Meadwell. Subsequent references to this work are to this edition, cited as PS. 2 Marie-Jose Th6riault, Lettera amorosa (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1978), p. 59. Translation is by K.W. Meadwell. 3 Marie-Jose The*riault, Invariance suivi de Calibration du prince, (Montreal: Editions du Norot, 1982), p. 17. Translations are by K.W. Meadwell. Subsequent references to this work are to this edition, cited as / (Invariance) and CP (Celebration du prince). 4 Marie-Jose TheViault, Les demoiselles de Numidie (Montreal: Le Boreal, 1986), p. 12. Translation is by K.W. Meadwell.

Chronology 1945 1962-63 1967-68 1972 1974 1974-75 1975-76 1975-78 1976 1978 1978-84 1980 1981-82

Born March 21 in Montr6al. Studies at the Couvent Villa-Maria and College Marie de France, both in Montr6al. Travels in Italy and Yugoslavia. Receives study grant from Canada Council for dance. Publishes Podmes - Comme une offrande aux grandes betes - A jour fermant. Publishes Notre royaume est de promesses. Co-ordinator and translator for the journal ENTR'ACTE. Receives grant from Ministere des Affaires culturelles, Quebec, for literary creation. Assistant to vice-president, Editions Hurtubise HMH, Montreal. Publishes Pourtant le Sud . . . . Publishes Lettera amorosa and La ceremonie. Literary director, production director, Editions Hurtubise HMH, Montreal. Publishes Invariance. Receives grant from Ministfere des Affaires culturelles, Quebec, for literary creation.

1982

Publishes Invariance suivi de Celebration du prince and Agnes et le singulier bestiaire. 1983-84 Receives grant from Ministere des Affaires culturelles, Quebec, for literary creation. 1984 Is awarded the Prix Canada-Suisse for Invariance suivi de Celebration du prince; publishes Les demoiselles de Numidie. 1985-86 Receives grant from Ministfere des Affaires culturelles, Qu6bec, for literary creation. 1986 Publishes Uenvoleur des chevaux. 1986-87 Receives grant from Canada Council for literary creation. 1987 Founds Les Editions Sans Nom in Montrdal, a publishing firm specializing in art books.

Comments by Marie-Jose Theriault (translated by K.W. Meadwell) Dance, song and poetry are a part of my life and will continue to be a part of my life. If I don't have a variety of interests, literary as much as artistic or otherwise, if my interests don't simultaneously go off in different directions, or at least alternate, I sink into a profound boredom which is rather devastating. I quite literally become ill if I feel limited to one type of activity. Jail. I have to be able to jump from one island to another, speak with different voices, of course because what I have to say can't be said by one voice alone, but also because, otherwise, I would suffocate. Men are enchanting creatures. I love them with passion. I've often said so, and not only in Lettera amorosa and especially Invariance (in which, I should say, there is more than this element), two works that have been criticized unmercifully because the evocation of the lovers' breakup didn't conform to the taste of the times. I believe that each individual is free to love where, whom and how he or she chooses, and I don't see how someone can resent me for my passion. But it has been done. This forced me to take a stand, to be on the defensive, undoubtedly to exaggerate my opinions whereas in the past, I hardly thought of it. I find it most regrettable and even dangerous for a society and its culture that those who do not appeal to a fashionable collective emotion should face possible ostracism. This is a form of censorship, the desire to domineer which to me seems harmful. Radical feminists are not the only ones to have rejected scornfully those who didn't wear their garb. This unfortunate attitude has been entrenched in our mentality for decades. But their stubbornness is as obvious and as unacceptable as that of those men who refused to grant women the right to vote or even to have a soul. I believe that my writing has not yet acquired - to use, without recalling who said it, an expression which makes me laugh whole-heartedly - "the status of cultural sign". I mean that I don't feel recognized "officially" as a full-fledged writer. This uncomfortableness comes from little things, good heavens without great importance, for example the fact that I am "forgotten" systematically in anthologies of Qu6b6cois poetry although I've been publishing for fourteen years. 73

My writing is more precise than precious. Of course, there is research, refinement. In my view, a writer must work at writing. It's an art. One practises it or one doesn't. Everyone can write grocery lists. One questions a plumber in order to know what he does, one should demand the same questioning of writers, not reproach them for it. Michel Lord, "Marie-Jos6 Theriault. Interview", Lettres quebecoises, No. 40 (hiver 1985-86), pp. 41-43.

Comments on Marie-Jose Theriault (translated by K.W. Meadwell) Closely involved with Qu6bec literary life, [Marie Jos6 Th6riault] tackles prose writing [inLey demoiselles de Numidie], however, with particular attention to the exotic, magical, to the high seas and primordial images of the human psyche, combining in that way her personal mythology with universal structures of the imagination. Through her work, MarieJos6 Th&iault reveals a rare passion for writing. Michel Lord, "Marie-Jos6 Th6riault. Interview", Lettres quebecoises, No. 40 (hiver 1985-86), p. 40. The female narrator in Lettera amorosa takes on the restricted pose o f . . . courtesan, geisha, prostitute. She exists and defines herself in relation to the man, who actually is without existence. The wait is passive, the need frenetic, the dependence total. Pierre-Louis Vaillancourt, "Lettera amorosa: ventriloquist love", Le Droit, February 17, 1979 [quoted in Clement Moisan, "Marie-Jos6 Theriault: lectures d'une oeuvre po&ique", in E. Kushner and M. Bishop, eds., La Po£sie quebecoise depuis 7975, Dalhousie French Studies, December 1984, p. 139].

Selected Bibliography

Invariance suivi de Celebration du prince. Saint-Lambert: Le Norot, 1982. Bilingual extracts, translated by Kenneth W. Meadwell. Northern Light, Nos. 7-8 (Fall/Winter 1981/1982), pp. 79-94. Les chants de I'oiseleur. Montreal: Art Global, 1988. Prose La ceremonie. Montreal: La Presse, 1978. Translated by David Lobdell. The Ceremony. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1980. Agn£s et le singidier bestiaire. Montreal: Cercle du Livre de France, 1982. Les demoiselles de Numidie. Montreal: Le Boreal, 1984. L'envoleur de chevaux et autres conies. Montreal: Le Boreal, 1986. Selected Criticism Boivin, Jean-Roch. "Dans sa neuvteme vie, Marie-Jose Th6riault, 6ditrice et ambassadrice des lettres", Le Devoir-, 17 juin 1989, p. D6. Laurin, Michel. "Les demoiselles de Numidie'", Nos livres, No. 15 (d&embre 1984), pp. 33-34. Lord, Michel. "Quand 1'esprit glisse entre deux eaux", Lettres quebecoises, No. 36 (hiver 1984-85), pp. 21-23. Marcotte, Danielle. "Une super rentrde!", Livres did, X, 2 (octobre 1984), 5. Meadwell, Kenneth W. "Invariance suivi de Celebration du prince", Contemporary Verse II, VIII, 1 (May 1984), 1415. Moisan, Clement. "Marie-Jos6 Th&iault: lectures d'une oeuvre po6tique", in E. Kushner and M. Bishop, eds., La Poesie quebecoise depuis 7975, Dalhousie French Studies, December 1984, 135-47. Rudel-Tessier, Danifele. "Ecrire, dit-elle", Chatelaine, XXV, 12 (d6cembre 1984), 22. Turcotte, Susy. "Les demoiselles de Numidie", Nuit Blanche, No. 16 (d6cembre 1984-janvier 1985), p. 5.

Works by Marie-Jos6 Theriault Poetry Poemes - Comme une offrande aux grandes betes - A jour fermant. Montreal: Fides, 1972. Notre royawne est de promesses. Montreal: Fides, 1974. Pourtant le Sud . . . . Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1976. Lettera amorosa. Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1978. Invariance. Montreal: Art Global, 1980.

74

A Note on the Contributor Kenneth W. Meadwell is Chair of the Department of French at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of "L'Avalee des avales", "L* Hiver de force" et "Les Enfantomes" de Rejean Ducharme: une fiction mot a mot et sa litterarite (1990). Some of his articles have appeared in Voix et Images, Etudes canadiennes, Lettres Romanes, Profiles in Canadian Literature, and Canadian Literature.

Yves Beauchemin

115

by Jacques Cotnam and Nicole JobinJohnson Before publishing L'Enfirouapt, Yves Beauchemin had published a few short stories, notably in the magazine Sept Jours in 1966 and 1967; he had also produced a short film entitled Burlex in 1972 for which he received a bursary from the Ministry of Cultural Affairs. With this limited background, Yves Beauchemin was virtually unknown in the literary milieu of Quebec when L'Enfirouape was published in 1974. The critics were unanimous in their immediate acclaim for this first novel. They recognized him as a "true novelist" and correctly predicted a successful career for this Montrealais who had dreamed of becoming a writer. One year later, at the age of thirty-three, Yves Beauchemin was awarded the Prix France-Quebec for this first novel. L'Enfirouape tells the story of Maurice Ferland, a young man who, like many anti-heroes of the Quebec literature of the 1960s, is first introduced to the reader as a prototype of the dispossessed, exploited person who is held up to ridicule. The word "enfirouape" in fact describes someone who is a victim of circumstances as well as a victim of his superiors, who are mostly of foreign origin and who become rich at his expense. In order to show the representative character of his protagonist, Beauchemin situates him in a historical perspective. Born in Peribonka in 1951, Maurice Ferland is, in fact, a descendant of Rodrigue Ferland de la Barre, who arrived in Qu6bec on October 16, 1665. As with many of their compatriots, the long lineage of the Ferland de la Barre family has unfortunately experienced many difficulties, particularly since *Tarriv6e des Anglais", who reduced their name to "Ferland". This was the first attack on their identity. And this was the beginning of their fall. "They came as merchants and soon found themselves farmers, travelling salesmen, beadles, jacks-of-all-trades and finally unemployed, when the Great Depression broke out."1 When he is introduced to us, fed up with badly paid jobs which do not allow him to earn enough money to pay his rent and drive the old Volkswagen he had bought "with a loan from Household Finance", Maurice is experiencing the beginning of a feeling of revolt. Just as he finishes pressing 247 shirts for M. Christofaccis, at a temperature of 95°F, he decides that he has had enough of working as he does for

a miserable salary. To hell with the Maple Leaf Valet Service! Maurice is now en route to the family home in the country of Maria Chapdelaine. This is the beginning of an incredible adventure, which often resembles a vaudeville comedy. It will suffice to indicate the main episodes to give a good idea of Yves Beauchemin's fertile imagination. In his works, fantasy and reality seem to merge naturally in supporting each other. On his way to Peribonka, Maurice's car breaks down, and after he finds a garage he meets a friendly old man who offers to help him while his car is being repaired. Maurice learns through their conversations that the old man, who retired after having been exploited all his life, is a fervent admirer of Ren6 Levesque. L6vesque was "nothing less than the first acceptable politician since Jean Talon, to appear in Quebec."2 The old man enjoys the company of Maurice, and wishing to help him with an act which presages Ratablavasky's in Le Matou, he gives Maurice a substantial amount of money. Halas! the old man dies during the night. In the 75

morning, after finding the old man dead, Maurice, in a state of panic, decides to leave the house in a hurry. He could thus easily be suspected of theft as well as murder. But, following the intervention of Jerry Turcotte, a dubious politician, Maurice eludes the police, who, by strange coincidence, have lost his file. In return for his services, Jerry Turcotte requests, of course, a small favour from Maurice. This is to perform, he is told, a legal seizure at the home of a stubborn debtor during his absence. In fact, Maurice steals, without knowing it, the electoral lists and other documents belonging to the pequiste candidate who is contesting the fraudulent election of Turcotte. Arrested, Maurice is condemned to serve four years in prison. There he meets Henri-Gustave Platt, "poete professionnel", and Robert Marcil, "a revolutionary whose only concern is destroying the political machine."3 That is especially where he is subjected to "a slow metamorphosis which transforms a wretched individual, incapable of understanding his own destiny, into a self-taught rebel. His lucidity, transformed into frustration, acted as a spur for his intellectual curiousity, a process riddled with conflict between a form of masochism and a thrist for knowledge. Such is the fate of many Quebeckers."4 Determined to have his revenge on Turcotte, Maurice formulates a plan to kidnap the politician and demand a ransom that will help compensate for the years he has just spent in prison. He requests Plait's help and is soon joined by Robert Marcil. Marcil's presence will give another meaning to the kidnapping of the politician, since this directly recalls the October Crisis of 1970. This is how Maurice ends up playing a role beyond his capabilities, one that makes him a tragic hero. From then on, his frustration and his will for revenge take, in spite of himself, a collective and highly political meaning. "You've just been kidnapped", explains Marcil to the politician. "Why? Because Quebeckers have had it with being exploited by weasels like yourselves. They're fed up with being vegetables subsisting on welfare or unemployment insurance, while you spend your winters in Florida."5 And, on top of the ransom he demands, Maurice requests the release of all Qu6b6cois whom the government "has thrown in jail for political reasons." After a series of events which take place at a heady pace and often open the door to crazy situations highlighting the bad faith of the government, represented by a prime minister called "Le Prince", the "terrorists" succeed in their negotiations to leave for Cuba. We guess from the Machiavellian smile of the Prince that the plane will not arrive at its intended destination. However, he has not anticipated Maurice's action. Just as the plane takes off, the young man forces the pilot to parachute from the plane and, like a Kamikaze, flies the plane towards the airport looking for the Prince's car. The latter gets off with only a scare. Recovering quickly, the Prince turns towards his adviser and "with a scornful sneer" cynically says, "'I don't know of any martyrs who can resist good press coverage for long. What is important is that we will be alive and they will be dead.'"6 This picaresque novel is a novel of defeat. There is no doubt that, despite of its exaggeration, it is a serious social critique denouncing the dishonest tactics of the policemen, a rotten judicial system, dubious politicians, and an English presence which is domineering and contemptuous towards the Qu6b£cois. Beauchemin's ability to build an exuberant

76

story with black humour, grating irony, and simple dialogue makes his denunciation come alive; otherwise it could have taken the route of a novel expounding a philosophical or social thesis. This first novel reveals its author's skill in creating original characters who, in spite of their unusual and somewhat ridiculous personalities, touch the reader. Le Matou and Juliette Pomerleau, novels which in many ways are already embedded in L'Enfirouape, will confirm and accentuate this ability. Characters such as Platt, the misunderstood poet; Blandine, the mystical eccentric; Marcil, the self-taught rebel; Turcotte, the dishonest and villainous politician with a Lucifer-like look; and Pellerin, the cursed soul who finally repents, could very well be found in either novel. Indeed, they can be found but under different names. The publication of Le Matou (The Alley Cat) in 1981 couldn't have better met the expectations of the critics. They spoke of a "tour de force", a "consummate art of narration", a "living and effective prose", a "great imagination", a "remarkable book, original colourful, a constant invention", a "true celebration of intelligence and the senses"; in summary, they praised almost unanimously this novel of almost six hundred pages which, according to Monique de Gramont, "tugged at the hearts of millions of Quebeckers and gave them a thirst for reading."7 In fact, not only the Qu6b6cois took pleasure in following the numerous adventures of Florent Boissonneault or were moved by the unforgettable Monsieur Emile; the novel was translated into more than fifteen languages and was successful in many countries - more than a million copies sold, which is exceptional for a Qu6b6cois novel - before a film was made. Once again, the critics raved, acclaiming Beauchemin's imagination and his gift as a storyteller; they especially acknowledged his ability to create living characters who immediately captivate his readers' attention by seeking their sympathy, even their pity, and by arousing their surprise or provoking their anger. In this respect, Beauchemin was compared with Mario Vargas Llosa and associated with the family of the "grands romanciers" and famous storytellers such as Rabelais, Dickens, and Balzac. Since Beauchemin has a great admiration for the work of the author of La comedie humaine, in whom he recognizes "a creator of the universe, a sort of god who created the world", the author of Le Matou couldn't be more flattered by such a compliment. Without dismissing his debt to the highly realistic American novel, Yves Beauchemin confided to Frances J. Summers that his image of a novelist is similar to that of Balzac. "For me, it is not so much a matter of projecting oneself in one's own work that is important, it is to create characters."8 On another occasion, he was more specific while talking to Monique de Gramont: "The characters appear to me, they come, they go, they are each mini nuclear reactors within the story I attempt to tell. When they please me, it's because they are alive. They live and the action of the novel flows from their psychology, from their passions, from their obsessions, from their repulsions. The plot, the dramatic structure must be perfected, it must be corrected, it must be shortened, it must be constructed... but that cannot be done with the characters."9 In keeping with literature of fantasy and allegory, as well as the realistic novel, Le Matou presents a fight against adversity, a confrontation of good and bad

forces, life and death, love and hatred. In a kind of initiation into life and in search of freedom and autonomy, the innocent Florent will have to learn to fight against his oppressors by becoming one himself, and by using the same weapons: slyness and money. In a capitalist society composed of people such as Ratablavasky, Slipskin, Florent, and Emile - a rotten society where good and bad often merge - there is no place for innocent and weak people who can only be victims. To this effect, Florent's adventure takes on, in the eyes of many, a symbolic value. For example, his determination to fight against all obstacles which could prevent the opening of his own restaurant has been interpreted as the will of the young Qu6b6cois generation to build a modern Quebec on a base of entrepreneurship after learning the rules and secrets of capitalism. From this perspective, and even though his success remains incomplete, Rorent can be seen as breaking away from the tradition of defeated heroes who were often "enfirouap6s" without knowing it. It is certainly not a coincidence that Florent had learned the capitalist game in the United States. Le Matou is nevertheless an eloquent denunciation of the moral turpitude of the world we live in, a world threatened and threatening, where in the name of progress the old values are destroyed as easily as old buildings are condemned. Building the future should not be a reason for destroying the past - note that Florent at one point makes money by becoming an antique dealer and by exploiting his own compatriots - the future should instead base its foundations on the past. "One creates by adding, not by subtracting!" explains Yves Beauchemin. "There is a sort of contempt of the past which governs our behaviour. But a people that despises its past is in grave danger. When we level our consciences, humanity loses something. And we, Quebeckers, are in the process of losing our identity."10 Yves Beauchemin brings back the theme of demolition in more detail in Juliette Pomerleau, since this is a theme which is particularly important to him: Since the end of the 70s, I have been living under the effect of a terrible shock. At one point I realized that the city that I loved was slipping through my fingers: Drapeau was destroying it. He's made great strides, you know. He is in the process of destroying our collective and historic memory. He has obliterated a large part of Montreal's urban landscape, a multitude of beautiful old buildings, sections of streets, scenic views which each day, without our even realizing it, gave us pleasure. I suddenly realized that the civilization in which we live no longer has a heart, a memory; it has lost its sense of beauty and the sweetness of life and has become obsessed by efficiency - a sort of monstrous efficiency - and profit This situation torments me and makes me suffer.11

A few months earlier, he had said to Micheline La France that "When we destroy the architectural past, we destroy our own memory. It's an act of extreme violence which is manifested in the actions of daily life."12 The devastation of Montreal is further discussed in Du sommet dun arbre (1986), which is a collection of pages taken from Beauchemin's diary and broadcasted on CBFFM between 1979 and 1985. This book records Beauchemin's first impressions of Montreal, which from the beginning gave him a sense of adventure and vitality. It also exposes

Beauchemin's childhood in Clova and Joliette. While mentioning some of his favourite novelists and musicians, he inserts political commentaries on the situation in Qudbec between 1983 and 1985. "I suffer from home-sickness . . . right in my own country", he explains. Yves Beauchemin loves Montr6al, and he clearly brings it to life in Le Matou and even more so in Juliette Pomerleau, his last novel of more than six hundred pages which has already sold 120,000 copies in Quebec alone. As he wrote in Du sommet d'un arbre: "Life is a novel. The city is a novel." 13 In Juliette Pomerleau the metropolis is more than a simple background where he situates a fast-moving plot; it becomes a character in the novel. The fight Beauchemin carries on to save the architectural heritage of Montreal, working through such organizations as Sauvons Montreal and L'association des residants du Vieux Longueuil (of which he became president for some time), is picked up by Juliette Pomerleau, who fights without respite against shameless speculators in order to repossess the family house. She succeeds just as she will succeed, at the end of many adventures, too numerous to recall here, to find her niece who disappeared many years earlier. However, these victories remain incomplete: the old house has been looted and the surroundings are not the ones which were familiar to Juliette. Moreover, Ad61e, her niece, leaves once again. In fact, the plot in this novel remains open-ended; it could go on almost indefinitely. If readers of L'Enfirouape and Le Matou find the extraordinary adventures of Juliette Pomerleau familiar, and if they sometimes think that they recognize some of the characters, they will also find in this novel a heroine of a rare moral strength. In spite of numerous and unremitting obstacles, she never abandons the fight. Her passion for classical music, which she shares with the author, becomes her refuge and her source of renewed energy. Like Le Matou, Juliette Pomerleau could be interpreted politically. However, since this interpretation is unnecessary for its appreciation, this novel succeeds outside Qu6bec more easily than L'Enfirouape, a more clearly political novel. Although Yves Beauchemin is a strong nationalist, he does not believe, or at least not any more, in the "romanmessage" even though his characters sometimes express ideas which are of particular importance to him.14 In public life, however, the author doesn't hide his political position. In fact, he has worked towards the independence of Qu6bec. Convinced that bilingualism is only "a power tool of assimilation", Yves Beauchemin took a position for a unilingual French Quebec. "If the language of a nation does not occupy all of its cultural universe", he said to Jacques Cimon, "it is because those who speak it do not occupy the whole country." 15 Beauchemin is preoccupied with this idea. Yves Beauchemin works slowly. He admits that he is a perfectionist. "For me ... a book is a craft. It's a slow, patient work, my style of writing."16 He took twelve years to write Le Matou and Juliette Pomerleau. Confiding to Micheline La France, the author said: "It's torture to ask oneself before writing each sentence, each word: Is this proper French? The vocabulary, like the sentence structures that I hear, that I read, that I use in daily conversations, is only approximate. The correct word does not come to me naturally. Language is not given to us at birth, and to acquire 77

it demands an effort and constant alertness."17 Yves Beauchemin is part of a generation of Qu6becois writers which is fully aware of its North American identity and claims it with pride and in French. This identity is translated through the intensity of life inhabiting his novels and the heady pace maintained from beginning to end, as well as the profound anxiety that underlines his work. The publication of Le Matou and Juliette Pomerleau has made Yves Beauchemin one of the best known of all Qu6b6cois writers. 1

Yves Beauchemin, L'Enfirouapt (Montreal: La Presse, 1974), p. 5. Ibid., p. 21. "Despite the questionable policies of his last years, my admiration for and my devotion to Rene* LeVesque remain. I still agree with the opinion of him held by one of the characters in L'Enfirouape': he is the greatest political figures that Quebec has known since Jean Talon.*' (Yves Beauchemin, Du sommet d'un arbre [Montreal: Que"becAme>ique, 1986], p. 136). 3 Ibid., p. 85. 4 Ibid., p. 108. 5 Ibid., p. 168. 6 Ibid., p. 254. 7 Monique de Gramont, "Yves Beauchemin, un Matou sur la conscience", Chatelaine O'anvier 1987), p. 20. 8 Frances J. Summers, "Entrevue avec Yves Beauchemin", Voix et Images, printemps 1987, p. 382. 9 de Gramont, p. 20. 10 Ibid., p. 22. 11 Summers, pp. 360-61. 12 Micheline La France, "Le Repertoire des auteurs qu6b6cois", Magazine litteraire (octobre 1986), p. 103. 13 Yves Beauchemin, Du sommet d'un arbre (Montreal: Que'bec-Ame'rique, 1986), p. 42. 14 Summers, p. 360. 15 Jacques Cimon, "Yves Beauchemin, 1'apres-Matou", Le Nouveau Masculin, V, 8, 22. 16 Jean Royer, "Yves Beauchemin", Le Devoir, 4 juillet 1981. 17 La France, p. 103. 2

Chronology 1941 1947-53 1953-62 1962-65 1965-66 1966 1966-69 1966-67 1969 1970-72 1973 1974 1975

78

Born June 26 in Noranda, Quebec. Primary School de Clova, Quebec. College of Joliette, Qu6bec. Receives a B.A. Faculty of Arts, University of Montreal. Receives a Licence &s Lettres in French and History of Art. Teaches at the College Garneau, Quebec City. Teaches French Literature in the Department of Continuing Education at Laval University. Works as an editor at HRW Ltd. in Montreal, where he is responsible for the theatre and the history collections. Publishes humorous short stories for the magazine Sept-Jours. Works as a researcher at Radio-Qu6bec in Montreal. Writes and produces Burlex, a humorous film (27 min.). Receives a bursary for this production from the Quebec Ministry of Cultural Affairs. Marries Viviane St-Onge; they later have two sons: Alexis (1977) and Renaud (1980). Publishes the novel L'Enfirouape. Gives numerous media interviews. Wins the Prix France-Qu6bec 1975 given by the Association des 6crivains de langue frangaise and the Association France-Quebec for the novel

L'Enfirouape. Publishes the short story Le vieux capitaine in the review Tele-Cle. 1977 Contributes to the special issue of the review Liberte (May-June 1977) on "La litterature qu6b6coise par ses ecrivains". 1978 Publishes "Literature et Medias" for the magazine VActualit^. Gives a series of conferences in the Outaouais region. Gives a conference at TAlliance frangaise (New York) to the Societe des professeurs de frangais en Am6rique on "La literature qu6b6coise contemporaine". Contributes to the Petit dictionnaire des 6crivains, published by L'Union des Scrivains qu6b6cois. Publishes the article "Etre 6crivain: un metier comme les autres?" in Le Devoir. 1979 Prepares a radio text (1 hour), "Un enfant de village", presented in the series Un ecrivain et son pays (CBF-FM); producer: Louis-Philippe H6bert. Participates in Bookclub; interviewer Francois Ricard; producer: Andr6 Major. 1980 Publishes an article in the review Longueur d' onde (Radio-Qu6bec). Gives a conference at the Collfege de Saint-Jean entitled "La pratique de I'ecriture". Publishes the novel Le Matou. 1981-87 Gives more than 300 interviews (for radio, television, newspapers) and conferences. Participates in various salons du livre, promotional tours in Quebec, English Canada, France, Belgium, and the U.S.A. Receives a Canada Council grant for the completion of a third novel. 1982 Publishes the novel Le Matou in France (Paris: Julliard). Promotional tour for three weeks in Fiance and Belgium. Le Matou wins the Prix du roman de T6t6, Cannes. Sells the film rights of Le Matou to the International Cinema Corporation (Denis H6roux, President) for the French and Italian coproduction of a mini-TV series and a film. Publishes La Vac he et d1 autres animaux, a collection of poems for children (Montr6al: La Courte Echelle). Publishes "Sueurs" in Fuites et Poursuites, a collection of detective stories (Montreal: Quinze). Publishes the short story Cybele (Montreal: Art global). Story for Radio-Canada: Le Voyage aux Antilles; producer: Gilles Archambault. Le Matou wins the Prix des jeunes romanciers offered by the Journal de Montreal at the opening of the Salon du livre in Montreal. 1983 Le Matou is selected and published by the French book club France-Loisirs in Paris. Reads a paper entitled "L* Affichage frangais" and dated October 7, 1983, before the Commission permanente des communaut6s culturelles et de rimmigration. 1983-84 Writes five radio texts (30 min. each) for the summer 1985 series Journal intime produced by Jean Lacroix and presented by Radio-Canada. Prepares the radio text "La Ville" for the series Eloges, produced by Aline Legrand and presented by Radio-Canada. Tour of universities in southern U.S.A. Norwegian translation of Le Matou. 1985 Jean Picollec publishes in Paris the final version of L'Enfirouape under the title ofL'Entourloupe. Danish, Finnish, and Portuguese translations of Le Matou. 1985-87 Involved in various urban and architectural pres-

1986

1987

1989 1990

ervation movements such as Sauvons Montreal, L'Association des r6sidants du Vieux Longueuil (as President), and Les Amis de la Montagne. Nominated Honorary Member of Amnesty International. Becomes member of the writing committee for the review Liberte. Elected president of L'Union des 6crivains queb6cois. Nominated member of the Board of Directors of the publishing company Quebec-Amerique. English translation of Le Matou. Publishes Du Sommet d un arbre, a diary (Montreal: Qu6bec-Am6rique). Represents L'Union des 6crivains queb6cois in the movement Quebec fran^ais. Translations of Le Matou into Swedish, Polish, Spanish, Dutch, Hebrew, and other languages. Publishes the novel Juliette Pomerleau (Montrdal: Qu6bec-Am6rique). Wins the prize Jean Giono (France) and the "grand prix Iitt6raire des lectrices d'£/te" (France) for Juliette Pomerleau.

Comments by Yves Beauchemin Our literature looks more and more like American literature. I find that to be a positive quality. We stopped writing like second-rate Mauriacs. Our literature is an American-Qu6bec product. And I am just realizing, as a reader, that Quebec literature is more and more worth reading. It is stimulating to read the new publications. You have the impression of participating in a movement of collective creation. What is taking place in literature is what is going on in politics. That proves that literature and life are one and the same. I like to tell stories. I remember extraordinary novels and plays. My ambition is to be original. With those three things in mind, I try to write. There is no theory in that. It is a matter of memories, needs, ambitions. And it's a pleasure. Jean Royer, "Yves Beauchemin", Le Devoir, July 4,1981. The first impressions I had of Montreal, while we were driving along the Metropolitan Boulevard, one late afternoon in August 1962, are forever associated with a feeling of adventure, of feverish vitality and almost of voluptuousness. What I love in the city is this effect of compression and concentration that life gives. It's what I call the Balzac effect. All you need are eyes, ears, a little empathy and imagination to feel it at every instant. It's Montreal that has made me discover that I am a Quebecker for better or for worse. It's here that I learned about my condition, in front of the unilingual English signs, in demonstrations and political gatherings, or simply by listening to passers-by, people sitting near me in the subway, waitresses, the corner grocer, taxi drivers in a good or bad mood, children with their cowboy guns, their bicycles, their skipping ropes, their colourful language, their smiles that take your breath away. The city, this big book with its dirty and torn pages, that I will never completely learn, always chang-

ing, hideous and admirable, full of contradictions like life itself. Montreal picturesque and teeming. Montreal mutilated. Devastated. Amputated from its past. From its memory. The Drapeau years: a lobotomy. The modest and pretty Lagauchetiere Street, eviscerated by parking lots. The SaintHenri district, pulverized. The East-West Highway: like a sabre blow to the face. Sherbrooke Street, sumptuous and solemn, ruthlessly demolished by developers in order to plant these rows of sky-scrapers that send shivers down one's spine. And you, my poor, old Dorchester Street, in the past so sweet and nonchalant, from your beautiful mouth with its thick lips almost all your teeth have been removed and replaced with pieces of concrete and steel which crack your jaws, I will not be able, therefore, to take a walk except in your yellowed photographs? The city, that time accelerator and feeling amplifier. Today I began writing my third novel. For several weeks I had postponed the moment of truth. For five or six years, I have accumulated a jumble of material in my little black notebooks. . . . The first difficulty: the names of the characters How can you know a character when you haven't brought him to life by writing about him? . . . In my mind, in fact, there is a sort of magic link between the name of a character and what he is. Go and try to convince citizens to free a country that looks almost free! Balzac's books, from the beginning - the very beginning made an impression on me which has remained. That of not finding myself in front of a literary work, but in front of life itself, in front of the fundamental, instinctive urge to live. . . . Balzac is a vociferous python charged by a narrative which hurls itself at us as if by its own power. His sentence structure is compact, vigorous, sinewy, a little unpolished at times, and gasps for breath under the pressure of things to say. It is as concise, effective and complete as reality itself. One senses right away that for him the boundary between real life and the imaginary world was tenuous. Yves Beauchemin, Du sommet d un arbre (Montreal: Qu6bec-Am6rique, 1986), pp. 38,41,43-44,51,62, 68-69. To write is to cultivate one's interior world and to try to project it outward. One writes starting with oneself and in solitude. I am not a novelist with autobiographical tendencies. I am an admirer of Balzac who was a creator of a universe, a sort of god who created the world. Perhaps it's because I spent so much time on his works that I developed the same attitude towards literature. For me, it's not so much a matter of projecting oneself into one's works that is important, it is to create characters. A novel for me is a kind of imaginary city with mazes of streets, of squares, of allies where I try to compete with reality.

79

A part of my inspiration comes from the authors I have loved and whom I try to emulate by using my own means. Another part comes from real life. Among other things, from my twenty-year stay in Montreal. Another part comes from music. In fact, classical music stimulates me enormously. I listen to a lot of it. I almost prefer it to reading. It gives an intensity, a profundity to my life. I write every day. This habit of regularity came from the necessity to incorporate writing into my daily work. I am a researcher, a journalist at Radio Quebec. I write during the lunch hour - between noon and one thirty - and after five o'clock, between five and six o'clock ... six-thirty. It's my profession that imposes a discipline on me. Frances J. Summers, "Entrevue avec Yves Beauchemin", Voix et Images, printemps 1987, pp. 380,382,366,372. Bilingualism is a powerful instrument of assimilation. For immigrants, it makes English the common denominator, the "all-terrain" vehicle which allows one to get around and to cope in all of North America and in all circumstances; in short, it makes French useless. Jacques Cimon, "Yves Beauchemin, I'apr6s-Matou", Le Nouveau Masculin,V, 8,22.

Reading Le Matou was a wholly esthetic experience, pure magic. William Johnson, "An old-fashioned novel packs a novel punch", Globe and Mail June 19,1981. In many respects, in the large cast, the frequent change of scene, the twists and turns of plot, in its humor and melodrama, Le Matou reminds one of Dickens. Philip Stratford, "Matou as satiating as a sumptuous meal", Gazette, February 19,1983. Energetic and wildly inventive, Beauchemin reminds you of Charles Dickens, John Barth, E.L. Doctorow, and especially Robertson Davies ... he is indisputably an original The writing is vivid, charming, fantastic. John Gabree, "Crazy Stuff in Quebec", Newsday, November 9,1986. Yves Beauchemin . . . is a gifted storyteller with a robust sense of humor and a capacity to create memorable characters. Reviewers have applied to him the epithet "Dickensian", for Beauchemin shares with Dickens an irrepressible metropolitan gusto. Robert Taylor, "A Mephistophelian touch from Montreal", Boston Globe, December 24,1986.

Comments on Yves Beauchemin

Selected Bibliography Works by Yves Beauchemin

A fantastic storyteller. Funny, moving, picaresque. A revelation. Bernard Pivot, Apostrophes, 1982. Beauchemin's genius lies in his ability to keep readers on the edge of the edge. Judith Fitzgerald, "The Alley Cat: A raucous masterpiece", Sunday Star, April 27,1986. A celebration of narration. . . . For almost 600 pages there is not one moment's respite. . . . We become so involved that we continue to read late into the night An excellent novel. . . . Beauchemin demonstrates a consummate art of narration and an amazing liveliness. NoSl Audet, "Le Matou. Une fete du r6cit", Le Devoir, July 4,1981, p. 15. . . . no novel in decades has captured the spirit of Quebec, or the texture of life in Montreal, so well and so richly. Kenneth McGoogan, "The Alley Cat captures spirit of today's Quebec", Calgary Herald, May 10,1986. Beauchemin has placed Montreal in a sisterhood of cities which includes Honor6 Balzac's Paris, Dickens's London, Franz Kafka's Prague and James Joyce's Dublin. Alberto Manguel, "Le Matou", Globe and Mail, January 15,1983. It is already possible to declare that Yves Beauchemin is part of the family of great novelists. Beauchemin has accomplished an amazing feat. Gabrielle Poulin, "Le Matou de Yves Beauchemin Un roman avec des griffes", Le Droit, August 8,1981. 80

Novels L'Enfirouape. Montr6al: LaPresse, 1974. [Published in Paris, by Editions Jean Picollec, in 1985, under the title L'Entourloupe.} Le Matou. Montreal: Qu6bec-Am6rique, 1981. Den satans katten. [Norwegian translation of Le Matou, by Axel Amlie.] Oslo: Ashehoug, 1984. Han katten. [Danish translation of Le Matou, by Karen Mathiasen.] Copenhagen: Chr. Erichsens Forlag, 1985. Katti. [Finnish translation ofLe Matou, by Jukka Mannerkorpi.] Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtio Otava, 1985. O gato. [Portuguese translation of Le Matou, by Octavio Mendes Cajado.] Sao Paulo: Difel, 1985. The Alley Cat. [English translation of Le Matou, by Sheila Fishman.] Toronto: McClelland and Stewart; New York: Henry Holt, 1986. Juliette Pomerleau. Montreal: Qu6bec-Amerique, 1989. Tales and Short Stories "Le Premier Noel du Pere NoSl", Sept-Jours, No. 15 (24 d6cembre 1966), pp. 31-33. "L'etrange sommeil de J6r6mie J6rome", Sept-Jours, No. 17 (7 Janvier 1967), p. 33. "Un m6decin d6brouillard", Sept-Jours, No. 18 (14 Janvier 1967), p. 35. "Un monument & Claude-Henri Grignon", Sept-Jours, No. 27 (18 mars 1967), pp. 28-29. "Idyle 1913", Sept-Jours, No. 28 (25 mars 1967), p. 29. "Le vieux capitaine", Tele-Cle [Radio-Quebec], III, 2 (marsavril-mai 1975 ), 26-27.

[Under the pseud, of Jiviri Marxovitz], "Je vous 6tranglerai avec mon caleson", Bulletin SGERQ [Syndicat g6n6ral des employ6s de Radio-Qu6bec], Montreal, 29 mai 1978. Cybele. [Avec une preface de Jacques Godbout et des sdrigraphies de Cosgrove, L'Archeveque, Le Sauteur, Masson et Tanobe], Montreal: Art Global, 1982. "Sueurs",dansFw/tesef Powrsw/tey. Montrdal: Quinze, 1982. Y. Beauchemin et al. La Vache et d'autres animaux [stories for children]. Mondial: La Courte Echelle, 1982.

Le Matou [film by Jean Beaudin, based on the novel of Yves Beauchemin, 133 min. in colours]. Produced by Justine H6roux, Montreal, 1985. Selected Criticism A detailed bibliography, compiled by Th6rfese Pouliot and Frances J. Summers, can be found in the Special Issue on Yves Beauchemin, published by Voix et Images, No. 36 (printemps 1987), pp. 416-28.

Diary On UEnfirouap6 Du sommet d'un arbre. Montreal: Quebec-Am6rique, 1986. Articles "D6fense du f6d6ralisme", Dimensions, VI, 4 (mai 1969), 30-31. "La literature qu6b6coise par ses 6crivains - en attendant le feu d'artifice", Liberte, XIX, 3 (mai-juin 1977), 18-22. "Les M6dia - reformation Iitt6raire: une faillite! ",L'Actualit6, III, 2 (tevrier 1978 ), 6. "Etre 6crivain: un m6tier comme les autres?" Le Devoir, 18 novembre 1978, p. 3. "Le Crane de monsieur Duchene" [from Le Matou ], Le Devoir, 24 novembre 1979, cahier 3, p. 2. "Courrier du lecteur", Longueur d'onde [magazine de Radio-Qu6bec], I, 5 (d&embre 1980/janvier 1981), 18. "Author says his book not intended to be anti-Semitic", Gazette, December 11, 1981, p. 6. "L'Exemple du Matou ", Le Devoir, 27 f6vrier 1982, p. 17. "Le Pays-bonbon", Quebec-Amerique, IV, 8 (1982 ), 14-15. "La Ville, la musique et le reste", Le Devoir, 20 novembre 1982, p. 6. "L'Affichage fran^ais", Journal des Debats, Commissions parlementaires, 4e Session, 32e Legislature, Audition de personnes et d'organismes sur la Charte de la langue frangaise (8), le vendredi 4 novembre 1983, No. 162, pp. B-9008-11. "En quSte de la modernit6", Possibles, VIII, 3 (printemps 1984), 117-19. "Un petit pas en avant... deux pas en arrifcre", Journal de Montreal 10 septembre 1984, p. 16. "Journal intime" [extraits], Possibles, IX, 3 (printemps 1985), 137-48. "Question de besoins", Le Devoir, 18 juin 1985, p. 8. "Stop finding in my work ideas that I find nauseating", Gazette, September 11, 1985, p. B3. Unpublished Lectures "Naissance d'un pays" [unpublished lecture given on April 1,1978, in New York at 1'Alliance fran?aise, before the Soci6t6 des professeurs de frangais en Am&ique]. "L'Humour et la literature" [unpublished lecture given at the Salon du Livre, December 2, 1979, in the series, Conference sur un bane de pare]. Films Burlex [film by Yves Beauchemin, 24 min., in black and white, 16 mm]. Produced by L.F.B. Via Le Monde Canada Inc.: Montreal, 1971.

C6t6, Paul Raymond, "L'Enfirouape d'Yves Beauchemin ou Timpasse de la crise d'octobre", Quebec Studies, VII, 1988, 105-15. Ethier-Blais, Jean. "La Quadrature du cercle de la dSfaite", Le Devoir, 15 juin 1974, p. 17. Perron, Jacques. "Un enfirouSp6, pas d'enfirouapfete", QuebecPresse, 2 septembre 1974, p. 56. Laroche, Maximilien. "Yves Beauchemin. L'Enfirouape", in Livres et auteurs quebecois 1974 (Qu6bec: Les Presses de TUniversite Laval, 1975), pp. 46-48. Sugden, Leonard W. "Quebec's Revolutionary Novels", Canadian Literature, No. 82 (Autumn 1979), pp. 13341. On Le Matou [the novel] Beauregard, Micheline, Louise Milot, and Denis Saint-Jacques, "L'inscription du Iitt6raire dans Le Matou d'Yves Beauchemin", Etudes litteraires, XX, No. 1 (printemps6t6, 1987), 131-47. Demers, Dominique. "Le virus du best-seller", L'Actualite, d6cembre 1986, pp. 142-48. Desrosiers, Yvon. "Mythes et symboles fondamentaux dans la Iitt6rature qu6b6coise", Canadian Issues/Themes canadiens, VII (1985), 232-45. Dorion, Gilles. "Romans: Le Matou. Yves Beauchemin", Quebec frangais, No. 43 (octobre 1981), p. 10. Fraser, Graham. "Can anti-Semitism in Quebec be rooted out?" Gazette, November 3, 1981, p. 7. Fraser, Graham. "Qu6bec's in a Tomcat Mood", Globe and Mail, September 21, 1985, p. 8. Fraser, Matthew. "Quebec experiences 'une r6v61ation' on its literary scene", Globe and Mail, March 22,1986, D3. Fratta, Carla. "I due 'matous' di Yves Beauchemin ovvero quanto costi essere 'domestique' e 'viril'", Letteratura Francofona del Canada, Seconda serie, 3, Firenze, Olschki, 1985, 195-204. Gagnon, Lysiane. "Dis-moi ce que tu Us ... ", La Presse, 14 aout 1982, p. A7. Gagnon, Maurice. "Yves Beauchemin: Le Matou ", French Review, LV, 6 (May 1982), 920-21. . "Le Matou d'Yves Beauchemin: une lecture id6ologique", L1 Esprit createur, Fall 1983, pp. 95-104. Garcin, J6rome. "Les Quebecois arrivent. . . Le Montreal d'Yves Beauchemin vaut mieux que le Paris de Roger Fournier", Les Nouvelles litteraires, 11-18 mars 1982, pp. 40-41. Genuist, Monique. "Cin6aste, moraliste. Yves Beauchemin: Le Matou. Agn6s Guitard, Les Corps communicants", Canadian Literature, No. 92 (Spring 1982), pp. 111-13. Gramont, Monique de. "Yves Beauchemin. Un Matou sur la

81

conscience", Chatelaine. Janvier 1987, pp. 18-22. Johnson, William. "An old-fashioned novel packs a novel punch", Globe and Mail, June 19, 1981, p. 5. Manguel, Alberto. "From the golden age, a novel with hope. Le Matou by Yves Beauchemin", Globe and Mail, January 15, 1983, p. 13. Martel, Reginald. "Le Matou de Beauchemin. La joyeuse chronique d'une jeunesse qui reve . . . et calcule", La Presse, 25 avril 1981, p. C3. MeAndrew, Brian, "Little black book fills in two years with ideas for novel", Sunday Star, April 27, 1986, p. D8. M£lanfon, Robert. "Literature qu6b6coise. Andr6 Major, La Folle d'Elvis, Yves Beauchemin, Le Matou ", Liberte, XXIV (juillet-aout 1982), 80-83. Perel, Shloime, et Henry Srebernik. "Signs of the Times", Jerusalem Post, January 22, 1982, p. 12. Perreault, Luc. "Yves Beauchemin: J'ecris commeje vois la vie", Qutbec-Amerique, III, 5/6 (1981), 10-11. Petrowski, Nathalie. "Yves Beauchemin", En Route, XIII, 11 (novembre 1985), 58-59, 91-95. Poulin, Gabrielle. "Le P6re est mort; vive le parrain! Le Matou de Yves Beauchemin", Lettres quebecoises, No. 23 (automne 1981), pp. 17-19. Robert, V6ronique. "Le Matou, c'est lui", L'Actualite, f6vrier 1983, pp. 32-37. Royer, Jean. "Le Nouveau souffle littSraire. Quelques labels de qualit6", Le Devoir, 8 Janvier 1983, pp. 13, 24. Saouter, Catherine. "Le Matou d'Yves Beauchemin: du fait Iitt6raire a la chaine de productions-m6dias", Voix et Images, No. 36 (printemps 1987), pp. 393-402. Stratford, Philip. "Matou as satiating as a sumptuous meal", Gazette, February 19, 1983, p. B7. Turbide, Diane. "Two Solitudes", Saturday Night, December 1984, pp. 59-60. Vanasse, Andr6. "Romans: Turgeon, Beauchemin, Tremblay et les autres", Voix et Images, hiver 1982, pp. 417-19. Zand, Nicole. "Le Qu6b6cois, ce n'est pas une langue, c'est une musique", Le Monde, 26-27 juin 1983, p. 12. On Le Matou [the film] Ackerman, Marianne. "Le Matou jumps from book to screen", Gazette, August 28, 1985, p. C7. . "Le Matou1 s rhythm is lost on film", Gazette, August 29, 1985, p. DIG. Alaton, Salem. "Rambling Le Matou is a taxing drama", Globe and Mail, March 14, 1986, Cll. Bonneville, L6o. "Entretien avec Jean Beaudin", Sequences, No. 118 (octobre 1984), pp. 5-9. Choquette, Gilles. "Dans Le Matou, selon le cin6aste Jean Beaudin, 1'univers reconstitue du Plateau Mont-Royal", Liaison St-Louis, 28 aout 1985, p. 1. Lemieux, Louis-Guy. "Jean Beaudin: Le Matou, c'est 1'histoire de 1'independance", Le Soleil, 15 septembre 1985, p. Bl. . "L'Adaptation d'un roman peut-elle servir a la fois lecin6maetlat616vision?",L^fo/d/,15septembrel985, p. Bl. -. "Le Film Le Matou rend mal ce remarquable roman", Le Soleil, 29 aout 1985, p. B8. Saouter, Catherine. "Le Matou d'Yves Beauchemin: du fait Iitt6raire & la chaine de productions-m6dias", Voix et Images, No. 36 (printemps 1987), pp. 393-402.

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On Juliette Pomerleau Boivin, Jean-Roch. "C'est un Titanic, mais ga flotte!" Le Devoir, 18 mars 1989, p. D3. Drouin, Linda. "Acclaimed Quebec Author launches second novel", Globe and Mail, April 8, 1989. Fortin, Marie-Claude. "Juliette Pomerleau, la grosse femme d'& cot6 est une sainte", Le Devoir, 16-22 mars 1989. Marcotte, Gilles. "Et alors, cette Juliette?" L'Actualite, juin 1989, p. 165. Martel, R6ginald. "Yves Beauchemin, un nouveau roman plein de richesses", La Presse, 9 mars 1989. Pelletier, Francine. "A Hero for His people", Gazette, March 18, 1989. Voisard, Anne-Marie. "Yves Beauchemin, le perfectionniste, tail ce qui 1'habite", Le Soleil, 11 mars 1989, pp. El-2. Interviews with Yves Beauchemin Lacroix, Yves. "Entrevue avec Yves Beauchemin" [January and April 1987], Voix et Images, No. 36 (printemps 1987), pp. 376-82. Roy, Mario. "Je n'ai pas essay6 de refaireLe Matou, ce serait terrible des'imitersoi-meme", La Presse, 11 mars 1989. Smith, Donald. "Yves Beauchemin ou le gout de 1'action, du baroque et du gigantisme: une entrevue avec Donald Smith", Quebec-Amerique, I, 5 (octobre 1985), 3-5. Miscellaneous B6rub6, Renald. "Du sommet d'un arbre ou le regard en plongee et en quatre temps", Voix et Images, No. 36 (printemps 1987), pp. 404-15. David, Michel. "La Loi 101 est essentielle, dit Beauchemin", Le Soleil, 5 novembre 1983, p. A7. Ethier-Blais, Jean. "Les Frangais et le roman quebecois", Le Devoir, 16 octobre 1982, p. 22. Kaufman, Michael T. "Celebrated Novels Fail to Link Canada's Separate Cultures", New York Times, May 3, 1984, p. C26. Le Cours, Rudy. "Affichage en frangais. L'6crivain Yves Beauchemin presse Qudbec de ne pas toucher & la loi 101", La Presse, 5 novembre 1983, p. A4. Peritz, Ingrid. "City's neglect threatens heritage group", Gazette, June 26, 1985, p. A3. Summers, Frances J. "Entrevue avec Yves Beauchemin" [September 1984], Voix et Images, No. 36 (printemps 1987), pp. 360-74. Wilson-Smith, Anthony. "Changing Course in Quebec", Maclean's, January 21, 1985, pp. 14-18. A Note on the Contributors Born in Quebec City, Jacques Cotnam is currently Professor of French and Quebec Literature at York University. He has published extensively on Andr6 Gide and Qu6bec literature. He received his Ph.D. in French Literature from University Laval. Among his better-known works are Poetes du Quebec and Bibliographic chronologique de I'oeuvre d'Andre Gide. Nicole Jobin-Johnson has a B.A. in Translation and French from Glendon College of York University and a B.Ed, from the University of Toronto. She is pursuing her M.A. in Quebec Literature at the University of Toronto.

David Adams Richards

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by Linda-Ann Sturgeon David Adams Richards has emerged as a unique and powerful voice in contemporary Canadian literature. Fred Cogswell hails him as "the voice par excellence of social realism",1 and asserts that he has the most democratic vision of any novelist writing in Canada today. Richards creates a fictional world which is based on his native Miramichi River Valley in northern New Brunswick. Characters and events from one novel often reappear in other novels, which points to the intertextuality and continuity of his work. Richards has a strong sense of the interconnectedness of place, time, and history: his readers receive rich insights into the heart and soul of a whole region, with its traditions, its legends, and its struggle to retain its unique identity in the midst of rapid economic and cultural change. His focus on one region and on predominantly working-class characters has prompted critics to compare his style and themes to those of William Faulkner and Ernest Buckler. Richards also writes in the tradition of the great Russian existential novelists; other writers who have influenced his work are Charles Dickens, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Alden Nowlan, Cicero, Albert Camus, and Edgar Allan Poe. He is one of Atlantic Canada's best writers, yet there is a danger in narrowly defining his work simply as regional realism. Richards's novels transcend the regional. Their socio-political implications are important, but to regard his works merely as bleak studies of poverty or of regionalism is to miss their fuller significance. Richards's central concern is always with his characters and the things of the heart; his sensitive exploration of the human condition makes his writing universal rather than regional. In this sense, the fictional world he creates becomes an extended metaphor - a microcosm - for Richards's compassionate vision. Much of the critical response to Richards's work has been very favourable. He has been praised for his experimentation with narrative technique and for his unique style, which often ignores the conventions of writing and fractures grammatical rules. He has received acclaim also for his masterful command of vernacular dialogue, the intensity and passion of his writing, and for his strong character portray-

als. Critics have also liked the psychological focus of his writing as well as his use of dialogue. Richards's novels are characterized by a prose style that is often poetic, and much of this quality stems from his characters' sensual responses to nature and to the local landscape. These responses evoke a powerful sense of home and of belonging. The ever-present River is one of Richards's most important images, and both the River and the landscape of his fictional world serve as 83

unifying elements which link his works together. As Old Simon in Lives of Short Duration knows, it is "one of the most violent rivers in the country",2 and even though the River is being corrupted and destroyed by encroaching commercialization and pollution, there is still a stubborn beauty about it that can never be destroyed. This fierce determination and indomitable spirit are mirrored in the lives of the people on the River, who, beneath their coarse, sometimes violent exteriors, are capable of moments of compassion and spontaneous generosity - of loving against all odds. The "impossible love/violence of the river" (LD, p. 178) flows in their veins. Many of Richards's characters share a keen appreciation of nature, and their responses reveal much of their hidden sensitivity, which often is not expressed verbally. In Blood Ties, the eccentric Orville is conscious of every sensuous experience, of "the rich smell of the woods with rain, the woods clotted and heavy and silent with rain",3 of the sounds of birds, of the pleasure of feeling the drizzle on his face, and of his own sense of being part of the infinite, of the "massive silence of the woods" (BT, p. 71). What Orville is seeking is a "pocket of emptiness" (BT, p. 70) where time is suspended, where time is not, a place where he can be alone and can feel independent in his communion with nature. In Road to the Stilt House, Arnold's life is violent and chaotic, and yet he is capable of experiencing others' suffering not only intellectually, but also through sensual perception: "It is autumn and I smell how my mother has suffered. I smell it in her eyes. I smell it in her coat that will be taken out and worn to bingo and church" (RS, p. 44). Much of Richards's power as a writer is revealed in haunting descriptive passages which are charged with emotional intensity and rich in sensual imagery: Old memories are like cranberries in the sun, like pebbles on a tin roof, like ice in a ditch. Old memories are like a balm to ease pain, are like anail driven in your spine, are like a shadow across the sky with heavy wings. Are like a full gourd in a well near grass so green its odour stains you, near fish-and-chip stands on lonely highways, straight as a bolt. Weather-beaten men when they pull nets. Girls who laugh because they love. Are chinks of pavement broken up in the back of a lonely province. Memories are life's casualties long before the end is near. To make you suffer in houses with boot marks and stabbed walls.4

The passage also highlights other devices used in Richards's work, including his use of short, terse lines, and his frequent omission of the subject in his sentences. The extensive use of simile demonstrates the poetic power of his prose. Critics sometimes complain that the structure of Richards's novels is obscure and confusing, and that his fracturing of "correct" syntax, his excessive use of pronouns, and his circuitous style make it difficult to read his works. There are places in Richards's novels where pronoun reference is confusing, and his style is often challenging and demands careful reading. His broken or incomplete sentences capture the often dislocated quality of ordinary thought processes and the 84

broken flow of life on the River. The need for careful, sensitive reading is a natural extension of Richards's central philosophy, which challenges a narrow, black and white vision of the world, and instead, seeks a willingness to look beyond surfaces and illusions. Richards excels in the use of dialogue, and he has a good ear for the vernacular - for capturing the distinct local speech rhythms and vocabulary of the fictional Miramichi. No matter how bleak his writing may seem, there is always humour in his novels, although it is not always a gentle humour. Much of this comedy is found in the colourful language of his characters. Little Simon in Lives of Short Duration is one of Richards's most expressive characters, as demonstrated in the description of his arrest: "Sure - boys, once a month now they have kinda a slow day, so they say ta one anothers - 'Less haul in Little Simon and look at his scrawny little pecker - same as we did las month - that always brightens us up - don't it?" (LD, p. 240). Richards is especially successful in his handling of time, place, and theme, and in unifying these elements into what is often a complex plot structure. In his earlier novels, he frequently experiments with narrative technique. This technique is important because it is tied to one of the most important themes in his works: the problem of communication. Although many of his characters appear to be hard, inarticulate, and insensitive, Richards himself is a compassionate interpreter of withheld emotion, who achieves great psychological insight into his characters, particularly through his technique of juxtaposing the narrative vision with that of the perceiving characters. His novels usually have a thirdperson narrator. The narrator, who often is more articulate than many of the characters, moves into their consciousness and expresses what they are often incapable of saying out loud. The sensitive passage which follows demonstrates Richards's technique of using both thought and language to capture his characters' attempts to communicate: In the room, his mother-in-law's. She had used this room in her last year, an existence she was unaware of (except at moments when she would become perceptive of things she had known during the whole course of her life - things such as the kettle on the stove when Irene was there, and suddenly she would turn to that kettle, the steam raiding and hissing from its spout; she would turn to the kettle and then to Irene and smile, innocent with her gapped mouth). And the thought of this filled him. She was afraid of him - why was she afraid of him? When Irene said: "Leah is not Annie's child cause she's my child," he was happy -something welled inside him to know that she had given birth to a child who that afternoon had played with a doll in the centre of the floor. Lome moved from the chair in the room and went upstairs. And because he loved Irene he loved the child as his own, because what made him love Irene made him love the child. And why didn't Annie know this? (#T, p. 255)

Structurally, Lives of Short Duration is Richards's most complex work. The novel covers a long time span and has an abundance of characters, and he experiments with technique and periodically shifts the point of view. Non-linear narration is a familiar device employed in Richards's novels,

but it takes on an added complexity and force in this work, and the effect is comparable to cinematic techniques of juxtaposing dialogue, narration, and flashback memories. He weaves a rich tapestry which gives voice not only to three generations of the Terri family, but also to a whole community and its history. The first part of the novel is actually the last part of the story in time sequence, which produces a circular narrative. This requires attentiveness in the reader, but such careful reading is rewarded by a well-orchestrated work in which what sometimes appears to be a fragmented labyrinth gradually fuses into a unified whole. The novel moves backward and forward through time and memory, with frequent and rapid shifts in perspective. It is divided into four sections; each has a presiding "vessel of consciousness" - a dominant voice - which acts as a controlling framework within each section, but Richards shifts the point of view freely to interweave a variety of different perspectives. He skilfully uses repetition, recurring images, and phrases to set up a powerful rhythm which captures the spirit of a community steeped in tradition, yet vulnerable to economic and cultural marginalization and the effects of transience. Interior and exterior landscapes are inextricably tied together; the pulse of the River intermingles with the pulse of the people. Richards extends the use of an omniscient, privileged narrator: the self-effacing, third-person narrative voice actually moves directly into the consciousness of characters and articulates their thoughts and feelings. He alternates this third-person voice with multi-figural narration interspersed with dialogue, and frequently employs a kind of psychonarration. Richards's sense of history and how it shapes the present is especially keen in Lives of Short Duration. In a personal reflection on northern New Brunswick, he writes: "Our beauty is rough. It has shades like the soul. . . . Here our triumph and tragedy is living in a land that contains so much power. ... Our gifts, our legends are as in every responsible nation - our own. We have breathed them into our blood. They are physical presences in a room. We meet them on the stairs."5 Among the many recurring images in Lives of Short Duration are references to the Great Miramichi Fire of October 7,1825, to the legend of Hudson Kopochus, who was on his way to kill a man when the Great Fire forced him to take refuge from a bear by perching on a rock in the middle of the River, and to the story of Hitchman Alewood, the village benefactor, and his Indian woman, Emma Jane Ward, who was murdered by her brother, Tom Proud. Together, these form the collective memory of the whole region. Intricate ties link the entire community to Alewood. His legacy has initiated a series of changes which have led to the importation of an alien, homogenized North American culture one that destroys old values and replaces them with decadence and a moral void. Transience is an important theme throughout all of Richards's work, but it is even more central in Lives of Short Duration and Road to the Stilt House than in his two earlier works, The Coming of Winter and Blood Ties, which are set in the 1960s. Cultural and economic changes progressed at an accelerated pace during the 1970s and 1980s, and so it is natural that Richards's later novels show an increased

concern with cultural and economic deprivation. Nevertheless, the powerful River links past, present, and future. The violence of the River, with its hostile landscape, mirrors the violence of the characters' lives. These lives are marked by a growing frustration caused by commercial exploitation and by economic marginalization which has corroded their traditional way of life. Richards knows, however, that violence and love are intricately intertwined, and he shows that beneath all the surface violence there lies a hidden level of frustrated love which may be suppressed, but nevertheless is still powerful. A common thread which links all of Richards's novels, in addition to character and setting, is the exploration of family life. For Richards, the family is a powerful force; although its ties may be damaged easily, they are difficult to sever completely. In the first two novels, The Coming of Winter and Blood Ties, family bonds are still relatively stable and reliable, but in Lives of Short Duration and Road to the Stilt House, transience is a more pervasive force which seriously weakens, although it never completely breaks, the power of blood ties. Closely related to the theme of kinship is the power of place, of home. Although many of Richards's characters curse home and long to escape, a powerful force draws them back, and the River remains always in their blood. In Lives of Short Duration, Richards deals with a society and a family in chaos, but what he celebrates is the courageous spirit of his characters, which allows them to love against such seemingly impossible odds. Road to the Stilt House is Richards's darkest novel, but it is also his most controlled and powerful work, and its striking style is testimony to his versatility. In marked contrast with the complex, intricate style and abundance of characters in Lives of Short Duration, Road to the Stilt House is more simply structured with its terse, haunting passages and densely textured prose, and is more narrowly focused on fewer characters. H.W. Connor describes it as "controlled poetic naturalism".6 The novel also has two firstperson narrators - Arnold and Norman. With Arnold, Richards makes extended use of a first-person narrator for the first time. Arnold's section of the novel alternates between his present-tense responses and the voice of a third-person narrator; thus, Richards allows even closer psychological insight into Arnold's inner world by juxtaposing his perceptions with those of the narrating voice. The inclusion of Norman's section at the end of the novel serves to fill in the details of Arnold's tragic fate. While Lives of Short Duration has epic qualities, the compressed style and the precise, laconic language of Road to the Stilt House are more suggestive of a prose poem. It is a very angry novel and a harsh sociopolitical critique which examines the fragmentation and disintegration of a family trapped within a soul-destroying cycle perpetuated by the welfare system. Richards directs his anger at society in general and at the social welfare system in particular. He explores his familiar themes of loss of home, power and powerlessness, action and intention, and the triumph of the human spirit through simple, courageous dignity and spontaneous generosity. In the novel, the scarred, bleak environment becomes one with the internal landscape of the inhabitants of the stilt house. One of the most powerful

85

images in the novel is of the trapped hornets in the walls of the stilt house. They symbolize the family's entrapment and its brooding frustration and rage. Despite his success and the positive acknowledgment which his novels have received from some critics, far too much of the critical response to Richards's work has been founded on misconceptions which greatly distort his artistic vision. By focusing too exclusively on the surface violence, the bleakness, and the perceived lack of verbal communication in Richards's novels, many critics have dismissed them as dark visions of despair. In his review of The Coming of Winter, for example, I.E. Bellive argues that there is "never a touch of wit or humour, never a light moment" 7 in the novel, while Douglas Barbour dismisses Blood Ties as a "dark, bleak work of fiction, unrelieved by dark humour, let alone the gentle sort".8 But one only has to hear Richards read a brief passage from any of his works to appreciate the subtle comic technique which redeems even his darkest novel, Road to the Stilt House. There is a powerful, hidden undercurrent - a spiritual level - in all of his works which belies their surface darkness. In face, Richards's literary canon unfolds by means of the tension created by the discrepancy between outer and inner realities. His main concern is with the undercurrent of humane feeling and the hidden level of frustrated love which lie below the surface violence. However inarticulate people may appear, strong, deep feelings and bonds do exist, but they are sometimes frustrated because they find no adequate means of utterance. Vulgar curses often substitute for expressions of pain or love: "Tuck ya, fuck ya,' for *I love you, I love you,' or 'Help me, help me'" (LD, p. 110). However inappropriately phrased they may be, these powerful feelings are nevertheless given expression. Richards's characters may find it difficult to talk, and their methods of communication may seem blunt or coarse, but even their simple monosyllables or curses can convey a rich meaning which constitutes an intuitive language of their own. No matter how hardened many of these people may appear, they are still capable of moments of spontaneous generosity and of caring relationships. These do not always have to be voiced to be understood, but rather are often conveyed through simple gestures or small acts of kindness. Little Simon never directly tells his sister Lois that he loves her, for example, but he shows it when he brings her a gift after she has been raped. Packet Terri is both the most violent and the most sensitive character in Lives of Short Duration. Yet, Richards allows rare glimpses into the caring side of Packet's personality by describing how he protects his nephew when the boy has drugs in his possession, how he playfully rubs Little Simon's head, or how he takes a retarded boy home after someone steals his winter boots. Similar incidents are to be found throughout all of Richards's novels, and readers should be prepared to find redeeming qualities even in his toughest characters. To sum up, his novels do not lack emotional intensity, and the power of his work comes from his exploration of strong but often muted feelings about home, place, family, relationships, and about change and progress. One of the most common misconceptions about Richards's work centres on the theme of violence. In their emphasis on 86

the surface violence of the novels, critics often overlook what Richards is really saying about the nature of violence, particularly in its less overt forms. He explores the idea of a manipulative violence which is both societal and individual, and this theme is especially well developed in his last three novels. Authority figures do not fare well in any of Richards's novels. His distrust of these figures is centred on a dislike of the status quo, which he believes is damaging to the human spirit because it often suppresses individuality along with spontaneous and generous actions. Closely related to Richards's dislike of the status quo is his view of what constitutes violence: Violence has nothing to do with using the fists, because there is a violence before fists are ever used. There is violence in how people try to manipulate others, whether it's how they speak, or what they do.9

The idea that manipulation and coercion are covert forms of violence is central to any discussion of Richards's dislike of authority figures. What troubles him most is that such people often attempt to control those who cannot fight back. This tug-of-war between power and powerlessness is particularly evident in institutions such as the education system, the church, the legal system, and the social welfare system; criticism of such institutions is common throughout Richards's novels. Richards is often critical of the clergy, and he suggests that there may be better places to help people spiritually than in the confines of a church. The clearest abuse of religious power is seen in the actions of Father Barry, the young priest in Lives of Short Duration who plays soccer in steel-toed boots against sneaker-clad cub scouts. Through the figure of the withered, aged Father Lacey in Blood Ties, who stubbornly upholds the hell-fire values of the Old Testament, Richards explores the problem of an old priest clinging to stale, outdated ways and still trying to maintain a precarious dominance over a community. Father Lacey also abuses his power when he angrily strikes Orville for stealing candles, rather than upholding the Christian values of forgiveness and compassion. Kevin Dulse in The Coming of Winter rejects traditional Christianity in favour of a more personal religion which he finds in his communion with nature. When he and Pamela go to see Father Murry to make their wedding arrangements, Kevin is struck by how clean everything is in the church, and the statue of Mary makes him think about the bootlegger Mammie's shack, with its large Virgin on the windowsill. Although Mammie's house is dirty, there is something earthy and life-giving about her icon, while the atmosphere of the rectory is sterile, cold, and impersonal. Kevin refers to this alien feeling of artificiality when recounting to Pamela how he told Father Murry, "if God was alive the last place he'd be found would be in a church" (CW, p. 213). In Road to the Stilt House, Richards challenges those who adhere to a rigid, black and white vision of the world. He explores the ineffectiveness of social liberalist programs which fail primarily because of the absence of "lived expe-

rience" on the part of their administrators. No matter how repulsive Arnold's stilt house family may seem, Richards asserts that it is both impossible and unfair to pronounce judgments on these people by trying to impose middle-class values on their lives. No one can fully understand the intricacies of their situation without having lived out their experiences, and any attempt to apply alien values can only lead to further misunderstanding. Father Billy realizes, too late, how society has destroyed the stilt house family, and how attempts to legislate morality are soul-destroying: Meddling has killed them - legislation has destroyed their house - how can anyone be legislated to have honour, to love or hope for goodness - when there is triumph in the social worker's face and pride in the scoutmaster's eyes? (W.p.158)

Richards's latest two novels, Nights Below Station Street and Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace, further explore his neglected theme of a subtle, manipulative violence. Nights Below Station Street examines Adele Walsh's coming of age and her struggle to sift through the myriad values competing for the hearts and souls of her generation. Paralleling Adele's rite of passage are her father Joe's heroic efforts to leave behind an alcoholic past. Adele's adolescence is a time of saucy irreverence and painful insecurities. She struggles to find a unique and personal voice amid choices which appear to be liberating and democratic, but which in reality are often soul-destroying and 61itist. Richards has a quarrel with feminism, but this in no way makes him any less an advocate of women's rights. His chief misgiving is that the feminist movement is predominantly a middle-class organization, and thus has very little to do with the characters he loves the most. Adele is influenced by the ideas of two strong feminists, Myhrra and Vera. Although Myhrra is kind in her own way, she is a woman who is caught up too easily in the new culture, in doing and saying things she thinks are in vogue and will win her more acceptance in a world of middle-class values, with its malls and curling rinks. She volunteers at the hospital not because she genuinely cares, but merely for the sake of appearances. Richards is critical of what he sees as her veneer of altruism. Adele idolizes and is influenced by Myhrra's attitudes and her lifestyle. She is also influenced by her boyfriend Ralphie's sister, Vera, who personifies the hippie movement, with its back-to-the-land doctrine and its irreverence towards old values. Vera and her boyfriend, Nevin, exert a great deal of influence on both Ralphie and Adele, who are both sensitive, insecure adolescents trying hard to be a part of the "in" group. For Richards, there is violence in the manner in which Vera and Nevin constantly manipulate Ralphie and Adele by indoctrinating them into their supposedly non-aggressive creeds. The central irony is that while people like Vera and Nevin advocate individualism and freedom of choice, and rage against what they perceive to be a rigid society that stifles personal freedom, they actually are trapped by what amounts to a new, narrow, and rigid orthodoxy of "political correctness". Their "enlightened" beliefs paradoxically suppress rather than nurture individuality, and in the end turn out to be just as Slitist

and conformist as the values they so emphatically reject. Richards exposes the hypocritical quality of the world which Vera and Nevin build for themselves: it has an artificial deliberateness about it, and it lacks sincerity. As Ralphie perceptively observes, "Everything about Nevin was forced, everything unnatural."10 As she struggles towards womanhood, then, Adele falls under the influence of attitudes which are soul-destroying and confining rather than nurturing and liberating. At first, she will do anything to gain acceptance by Ruby and her popular friends, but in the end, her defiant individuality and spontaneous goodness triumph. Such a triumph demands unusual courage and the ability to love unconditionally. Adele's authentic self emerges during one of Cindi's epileptic seizures. Ruby delights in manipulating and taunting Cindi because of her disability, yet when Cindi suffers a seizure and needs help, Ruby and her followers run in fear. It is only Adele who shows enough compassion to stay with Cindi, and it is this scene which most clearly demonstrates her true, generous nature: "Adele immediately went over to her and dragged her out of the puddle, and tried to shove a pencil in her mouth, while Ruby and Janet went into Jean's Restaurant and hid behind the coat rack. Adele kept kissing Cindi's albino eyelashes and petting her, and Cindi later on told Ruby she was sorry" (NBSS, p. 52). Even though she curses her family and tells exaggerated yarns about her father, Joe, Adele's love for them is unmistakable. She rubs Joe's back to relieve his pain, and she even carried soup cans around in her pockets for him when he was drunk, thinking that this would cure him. Despite her wild tales, Adele is fiercely loyal and protective, and she finally comes to realize that the spontaneous generosity and quiet courage of people like her parents matter far more than the calculated altruism of Vera and Myhrra. Like Adele, Joe is an outsider, and one reason he is kept that way is that society refuses to acknowledge his genuine efforts to stop his alcoholism and to build a new life for himself. Rather, they judge and make assumptions about him based solely upon his past actions, and never give him credit for his heroic efforts to break free from his drunken past. It is Joe's quiet, fierce determination which Richards admires most, as well as his capacity for gentle, profound expressions of love, particularly for Adele, who is not even his real daughter. The theme of covert violence is explored again in Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace. The novel centres on the disintegration of Ivan and Cindi's marriage, which is caused by the meddling interference of a judgmental town too quick to make inaccurate assumptions. The only two people who truly understand the complexities of the relationship are Cindi and Ivan, and yet they are treated as passive onlookers rather than as active participants in their own drama. In his childlike attempts to be the centre of attention, Ivan's father Antony is one of the main betrayers who perpetrate the rumours which spread throughout the River, and his meddling eventually destroys his son. Because of his upbringing, his rough, determined appearance, and his "loner" mentality, Ivan is stereotyped as a violent, good-for-nothing man whom society assumes will be a wife-beater. Although she under87

stands the real dynamics of her situation, and knows that Ivan did not abuse her, Cindi is caught up in the excitement of being the centre of so much attention. Soon, however, people begin to lose interest in Cindi and turn to other causes. However passive and gullible Cindi may seem, Richards makes it clear that she nevertheless has a strong, stubborn will, and she finally realizes that she has been used by people like Ruby. The truth about Ivan is that he is a kind, patient, and generous man who loves Cindi very much. He tries hard to help her to be independent and to build up her sense of selfworth. He is much like Joe in Nights Below Station Street, Cecil in Blood Ties, and Packet and Little Simon in Lives of Short Duration. All five men have been scarred by their pasts, and society expects them to act in certain predictable ways. Yet each is capable of powerful expressions of love and generosity, and it is the combination of physical and psychological bravery which redeems them. Ivan's true nature emerges, for example, in passages describing his defence of Ralphie against cruel taunts. He dies in a forest fire deliberately set by his father, in an attempt to rescue his stranded horse. Richards is an important voice in Canadian literature. He not only captures the unique identity of a particular region, he also writes with deep compassion and sensitivity about universal themes. To truly appreciate the richness and the complexity of Richards's novels, readers must look beyond the surface violence to explore his more intricate themes, such as power and powerlessness, inarticulateness, transience, love, home, and problems of a socio-political nature. Far from being bleak, depressing works, Richards's novels are filled with love, humour, and spontaneous generosity. He shows that no matter how bleak things are, the good that is inherent in each individual - the best of the human spirit is invincible. Richards's novels are affirmations of hope, not visions of despair, and it is his characters' courage, compassion, and their ability to love against all odds which he celebrates. 1

Fred Cogswell, "David Adams Richards in Reprint** [review of Blood Ties] Atlantic Provinces Book Review, XII, 13 (1985), 1. 2 David Adams Richards, Lives of Short Duration (Ottawa: Oberon, 1981), p. 84. Subsequently cited as LD. 3 David Adams Richards, Blood Ties (Ottawa: Oberon, 1976), p. 72. Subsequently cited as BT. 4 David Adams Richards, Road to the Stilt House (Ottawa: Oberon, 1985), p. 138. Subsequently cited as RS. 5 David Adams Richards, "Northern New Brunswick - A Personal Reflection*', UM.B. Perspectives, December, 1983, p. 4. 6 H.W. Connor, "A Controlled Poetic Naturalism**, Fiddlehead, CXLVE (1986), 107. 7 I.E. Bellive, "David Adams Richards'* [review of The Coming of Winter], Quarry, XXIV, 1 (1975), 65. 8 Douglas Harbour, "Realism With A Vengeance**, Journal of Canadian Fiction, XIX (1977), 169. 9 Andrew Garrod, Speaking For Myself: Canadian Writers in Interview (St. John*s: Breakwater, 1986), p. 218. 10 David Adams Richards, Nights Below Station Street (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988), p. 48. Subsequently cited as NBSS.

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Chronology 1950 1970

Born October 17 in Newcastle, New Brunswick. Studies English and history at Saint Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Becomes involved with the Ice House Gang, a group of writers which includes Alden Nowlan and Fred Cogswell. 1971 Marries Peggy Mclntyre. 1972 Publishes Small Heroics, a collection of poetry. 1974 Wins the Norma Epstein Prize for Creative Writing for part of his first novel, The Coming of Winter. The Coming of Winter published. 1976 Blood Ties published. 1978 Dancers at Night, short stories, published. 1980 The State Publishing Agency of the USSR buys the world rights in the Russian language for The Coming of Winter. The book sells 200,000 copies in the Soviet Union. 1981 Lives of Short Duration published. 1983-87 Writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick. 1985 Road to the Stilt House published. 1986 Road to the Stilt House short-listed for the 1985 Governor General's Award for English Fiction. 1986 Named one of Canada's "Ten Best Fiction Writers" in the "45 below" competition. 1986 Wins the Royal Society of Arts Silver Medal for his contribution to literature in Atlantic Canada. 1988 Nights Below Station Street published. 1989 Receives the 1988 Governor General's Award for Nights Below Station Street. 1990 Writer-in-residence at University of Alberta. 1990 Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace published. 1991 Wins the 1991 Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for Fiction.

Comments by David Adams Richards My humour is not a gentle type of humour; it's rather abrasive at times. I don't think any humour worth its socks is gentle. I think every character I've had that is outside society, outside part of society, or is being ostracized by society, or society does not understand them or does not want to help them at the right time, has a baptism of fire. Kevin does. And the less they are outside the mainstream of society, the less they are burned; the more they are outside, the more they are burned. I can't write starting from A and going to B; I have to write starting from D and travelling backwards in time to A and forward in time to F and then back. My greatest polemic in my novels stems between the acquisition of power and the powerless. It doesn't matter whether it's in a family or it's in a society. In Linda-Ann Sturgeon, "David Adams Richards" (unpublished M.A. dissertation, University of New Brunswick, 1987) [interviews of March 21,1986; October 30,1986; February 25,1987].

always spontaneously good. I'm not just talking about physical courage, but moral courage and human decency. What I'm showing is that trendy sophistication that runs contrary to the very nature of spontaneous courage. Mark Turney, "David Adams Richards", Saint John Telegraph-Journal, November 3,1990, p. 37.

Comments on David Adams Richards Like Richards's later novels, The Coming of Winter conveys its meaning on two levels - one realistic, one symbolic. On the one hand is the social reality, which critics have rightly viewed as negative; on the other is a spiritual reality, which critics have largely ignored. Concentrating on the realistic surface of Richards's work naturally encourages the idea that he views his region negatively because at this level he does. However, Richards is more concerned with his characters' feelings, with a spiritual intensity that runs counter to the soul-killing social circumstances that make up the surface of their lives. H.W. Connor, "Coming of Winter, Coming of Age: The Autumnal Vision of David Adams Richards' First Novel", Studies in Canadian Literature, IX, 1 (1984), 32.

It's always been a prick in my side that I've been recognized as a social realist or a writer who writes about social things. I know in a way that's true, and it cannot and shouldn't be denied by me, but I also write from the point of view of character. When I put Arnold in the dilemma he was in in Road to the Stilt House, I could only do that by seeing myself or many other people in a similar dilemma. When people act spontaneously or in the best interest of others in my novels, they are acting with no other motivation except to be good, to be the best part of them, to become the best they can. Andrew Garrod, Speaking For Myself (St John's: Breakwater, 1986), p. 211,217-18. . . . if a person doesn't have physical courage, he cannot have moral courage: I've always felt this to be true. And what I'm talking about in my novels is decisions, a lot of times about moral courage. But I've found that only people who make courageous decisions about life and about themselves generally have physical courage, because if they don't, they cannot have moral courage. This has always been one of my ideas about human nature. That is why when I show that Cecil in Blood Ties has physical courage, it seems to me to suggest that there is a possibility there for moral redemption. Don Conway, "Courage and Compassion: An Interview with David Adams Richards", Educational Services, VI, 1(1984), 5. What I have a great deal of feeling for is the idea of virtue as courage and courageous acts as virtue. True courage is

When Richards develops characters at length, he does so with intelligence and sympathy regardless of their sex, their adherence to conventional codes of morality, or their potential benefit to their community. Any interpretation of Richards' novels that presumes to arrange the characters in groups of good and bad, sympathetic and unsympathetic, is not only doomed to failure but doomed also to underestimate the complexity and depth of Richards' work. H. W. Connor, "A Note on George Byrne's Argument That Qrville Is the Central Character in Blood Ties", Studies in Canadian Literature, VIII (1983), 144. Dave is the most natural writer I've ever come across. The way he structures his novels is quite incredible. There's a very sure movement, as if it were all preordained. He never talks about his characters as if they were characters in a novel: It's as if he had known them personally and was simply writing down what they had done. Nancy Bauer, in Alden Nowlan, "Dave Richards's First Novel May Reach 250,000 Russians", Atlantic Insight, H, 3 (1980), 82. Selected Bibliography Works by David Adams Richards Articles "Northern New Brunswick - A Personal Reflection", C/JV.B. Perspectives, December 1983, p. 4. Drama "The Dungarvon Whooper". [Unpublished play.] Richards, David Adams, and Jon Pedersen, screenwriters. Tuesday Wednesday. Capital Films. 1987. "Water Carrier, Bones and Earls - The Life of Francois Villon". [Unpublished play.] 89

Novels Blood Ties. Ottawa: Oberon, 1976; Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985. The Coming of Winter. Ottawa: Oberon, 1974; Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982. Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990. Lives of Short Duration. Ottawa: Oberon, 1981; Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986. Nights Below Station Street. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988. Road to the Stilt House. Ottawa: Oberon, 1985; Toronto: HarperCollins, 1990. Poetry One Step Inside. Fredericton: privately published, 1972. Small Heroics. Fredericton: N.B. Chapbooks, 1972. Short Stories "Charlie", Floorboards, III (1970), 13-14. "The Child and the Boy", Atlantic Advocate, LXII, 4 (1971), 23-46. Dancers at Night: Stories. Ottawa: Oberon, 1978. "A Drift of Sparrows", in Peter Grant and Finley Martin, eds., Afew Atlantic Writing. Charlottetown: Square Deal Publications, 1975, pp. 37-43. Selected Criticism Articles and Reviews Appenzell, Anthony. "The Gem-Like Flame Extinguished", Canadian Literature, No. 64 (1975), pp. 107-11. Bauer, Nancy. "The Long Distance Running of David Adams Richards", Arts Atlantic, II, 4 (1980), p. 304. Byrne, George. "The Blood Hardened and the Blood Running: The Character of Orville in Blood Ties", Studies in Canadian Literature, VII, 1 (1982), 55-62. Claus, Jo Anne. "David Adams Richards: The Man Behind the Name", Atlantic Advocate, LXVI, 2 (1975), 25-28. Cogswell, Fred. "English Prose Writing in New Brunswick: World War I to the Present", in Reavley Gair, ed., A Literary and Linguistic History of New Brunswick. Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1985, 229-44.

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. "Orchestrated New Brunswick", Canadian Literature, No. 76 (1978), pp. 114-16. Connor, H.W. "Coming of Winter, Coming of Age: The Autumnal Vision of David Adams Richards' First Novel", Studies in Canadian Literature, IX, 1 (1984), 31-40. . "A Note on George Byrne's Argument that Orville is the Central Character in Blood Ties", Studies in Canadian Literature, VIII (1983), 142-48. French, William. "A Novel Celebration of the Miramichi", Globe and Mail, July 30, 1983, p. El. Garrod, Andrew. Speaking For Myself: Canadian Writers in Interview. St. John's: Breakwater, 1986. Gibbs, Robert. "A Book's True Music", Journal of Canadian Fiction, IV, 3 (1975), 166-68. Glover, Douglas. "Violent River", Books in Canada, XVII, 4 (1988), 9-12. Milner, Philip. "Structure in David Adams Richards' Unfinished Miramichi Saga", Essays on Canadian Writing, 31 (1985), pp. 201-10. Nowlan, Alden. "Dave Richards' First Novel May Reach 250,000 Russians", Atlantic Insight, II, 3 (1980), 82. Robb, Nancy. "David Adams Richards: Universal Truths From Miramichi Roots", Quill & Quire, LIV, 4 (1988), 24-25. Scherf, Kathleen. "David Adams Richards: He Must Be a Social Realist Regionalist", Studies in Canadian Literature, XV, 1 (1990), 154-70. Dissertations Sterrer-Hauzenberger, Ingeborg. "*Oigoa Sepoitit - You Are Beautiful': Narrative Technique and Major Themes in Two Novels by David Adams Richards". Unpublished M.A. dissertation, University of Vienna, 1989. Sturgeon, Linda-Ann. "David Adams Richards: Loving Against the Odds". Unpublished M.A. dissertation, University of New Brunswick, 1987. Wylie, Herb. "'Now You Might Feel Some Discomfort': Regional Disparities and Atlantic Regionalism in the Writings of David Adams Richards". Unpublished M.A. dissertation, McGill University, 1986. A Note on the Contributor Linda-Ann Sturgeon is a librarian and author of several historical pamphlets. She completed her Master's thesis, "David Adams Richards: Loving Against the Odds", at the University of New Brunswick.

Margaret Gibson

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by Susan J. Warwick Entry into the world of Margaret Gibson's fiction marks the beginning of a passage to a harrowing realm. It is a world in which pain and abuse, emotional and physical, seem almost constant, and in which moments of happiness are few and fleeting. Here things more often fall apart than find their centre. In general terms, Gibson's writing reveals an understanding of human existence as an ongoing experience of loss, betrayal, and loneliness, as tragedy. Yet her work is not entirely without a measure of hope that ways can be found to alleviate, though never entirely eliminate, the pain of existence. Many of the individuals peopling Gibson's fiction have been labelled mentally ill, both by others and by themselves. And even in the cases where the condition of mental illness is not directly asserted, the reader recognizes Gibson's characters as people perceived as not functioning "normally" in society. While it is true that much of Gibson's writing centres upon a concern with madness, with the fine lines separating sanity and insanity, reality and fantasy, the normal and the abnormal, this is not its only concern. Throughout her work this concern intersects with a wide range of other issues, including family relations, the position of women in society, racism, poverty, and criminality. The temptation to see Gibson as a writer with one subject, madness, is one that must be firmly resisted. Born in 1948, Margaret Gibson began writing early in life, but her first story was not published until 1974. Since 1974 she has published two collections of short stories, The Butterfly Ward in 1976 and Considering Her Condition in 1978, as well as several pieces in other genres. Critical response to the first collection was overwhelmingly positive. With few exceptions, readers of these stories praised Gibson's ability to render the world of those labelled mad or sick without patronizing or extolling its inhabitants. Admiration was expressed as well for the form and language in which the stories were written. Inevitably, commentary on Gibson's work in The Butterfly Ward drew parallels between her personal history and the experiences of the characters in her stories. Hospitalized for the first time at the age of fifteen, Gibson's knowledge

of the treatment of those designated as mentally ill, mad, or crazy is first-hand. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Gibson has spent various periods of her adult life in hospitals and mental institutions. But to see her work solely as autobiographical fiction is a mistake. While it may be true that personal experience stands at the source of her writing, this experience is transformed by the fictive imagination in her stories. A reading of Gibson's first two published works, "Ada" and "Making It", makes this clear. Both utilize material 91

which can be connected to events and experiences in Gibson's life, but the correspondence between story and experience is not exact. The first of these, "Ada", was included in Oberon Press's 74: New Canadian Stories. The power and technical excellence of this story prompted Michael McKlem of Oberon Press to request of Gibson additional ones, which would eventually be published as The Butterfly Ward. "Ada" later attracted the attention of the CBC's Drama Department, and in 1976 Gibson assisted Claude Jutra in the adaptation of the story for film. Directed by Jutra, "Ada" was first televised in February 1977. These facts alone argue for the importance of "Ada" in any assessment of Gibson's work, but there are other, more significant, reasons for paying particular attention to this story. Here, in her first publication, Gibson introduced the theme which many regard as standing at the centre of her writing, that of mental illness. It is important to recognize at the outset that Gibson's primary concern in relation to this theme is with responses to mental illness, rather than with its causes or manifestations. While she clearly does not neglect the latter issues, her writing often focuses upon the ways in which those categorized as mentally ill and those assigning or accepting the label respond to the condition. While "Ada" is clearly important to an understanding of the thematic core of much of Gibson's subsequent work, its significance extends beyond the realm of subject matter. An analysis of the form and style of this story allows for key insights into the fictional techniques which Gibson, in various ways, employs throughout all her work. "Ada" is set in a mental hospital and focuses upon a group of women residing there. Given Gibson's own experience of mental institutions, the reader initially is tempted to equate the author and the story's narrator, Jenny. But, as suggested earlier, such an equation fails to take into account the way in which Gibson transforms personal experience into fiction. Jenny, the narrator, is a woman of twenty-nine who has been in the hospital for seven years, during which time she has been subjected to thirty shock treatments. (The length of Jenny's incarceration is sufficient ground upon which to discredit the equating of author and character, for Gibson herself has never been hospitalized for a period of this duration.) As the story opens, the reader learns that Jenny is quieter than she once was, but that she, seemingly unlike the title character, has managed to maintain lucidity as well as some measure of her true self despite her incarceration and treatment. When Jenny first arrived in the institution, Ada "had a whole brain and an incandescent frenzy".1 But soon after that Ada was given a lobotomy, and since then she has shown no signs of her intelligence or her frenzy. As the story unfolds, the reader learns more about Jenny, Ada, and the other inhabitants of the women's ward, the "chain gang" as Jenny so aptly describes them. The chains that link these women to one another and those that keep them locked in the institution are strong and varied. But, to some extent, all these chains are forged out of the same metal, isolation. Jenny's isolation is from her feelings for others, even from emotion itself. Each time Jenny approaches expression of her true feelings, a "winged darkness" over92

comes her, causing her to lose contact with the world around her. Ada's isolation, the apparent result of her lobotomy, is from adult intelligence, from knowledge. Throughout the story Ada is presented as a child inhabiting an adult body. Her daily pleasures consist of painting little stick figures, singing nursery rhymes to herself, and circling the days on her calendar. Another patient, known as the Virgin, has effectively separated herself from her body, her sexuality, refusing now to let anyone even touch her. Into the midst of these "isolated cases" comes Alice, a young woman whom the others see as an outsider, someone whose madness is manufactured and feigned. Alice has been hospitalized because she "took some drug on the Outside that made her go crazy" (p. 19), but she doesn't seem crazy to the others. Unlike Jenny, Ada, and the others, she seems able to manipulate and control the world around her. She is cruel and abusive to Ada, tells the doctors what they want to hear in group therapy sessions, and it is her words and actions that lead to the story's climax. Hearing Alice call Ada an idiot, a half-wit, and a joke, Jenny is finally forced out of her isolation. In defending Ada against Alice, Jenny acts upon her affection and concern for another instead of retreating into herself. Her action prompts the Virgin, in a terrifying scene, towards an acknowledgment of her sexuality. But more importantly, Jenny's release from isolation allows Ada to make a return to her self. The story ends with the murder of Alice by Ada, but it is not this action alone that reveals the authentic Ada. As Jenny wakens on the night of Alice's death, it is Ada's voice she hears quoting lines of poetry as she did long ago. Ada has not forgotten what she once knew, but instead has chosen not to let anyone know she remembers. For Ada, near-silence was a strategy of deception designed for self-protection. Ada's distrust of language brings to the forefront important aspects of Gibson's writing technique. Despite the horrible situations in which the story's characters appear, Gibson's prose here is essentially calm and matter-of-fact in tone. The sense of control apparent in the story's language suggests that words are threatening, dangerous if allowed full rein, and that open expression of thoughts and emotions only brings disaster. In the scene of Jenny's mother's visit we learn that Jenny began talking in sentences at six months. Given Jenny's life experience, it would seem that linguistic ability does not ensure understanding or happiness. And as Jenny thinks, "What is left to say after all these years?" (p. 15). Throughout most of the visit, Jenny and her mother converse politely and superficially, never daring to say what they are really thinking and feeling. But as her mother prepares to leave, Jenny asks, "Were you glad, were you grateful, joyful, when I was born?" (p. 16). Her mother's reply painfully reveals the limitations placed upon genuine communication. "Of course dear, what a strange question" (p. 16). Ada, no longer trusting in her own words, creates pictures and quotes nursery rhymes instead. Both pursuits convey a sense of childhood as a time before authentic communication became difficult and problematic. Jenny's promise that she will not tell anyone that Ada still possesses the ability to think and speak as an adult suggests that silence and

deception are necessary strategies for survival in an inhuman social order. A similar awareness of the dangers inherent in open expression marks Gibson's second published story, "Making It". This story, like "Ada", can be linked to her own personal history in certain respects. It is presented as a series of letters between a woman named Liza who, as the story opens, is pregnant and living alone in a city we can identify as Toronto (although this is not specified), and Robin, a man with whom Liza used to live, but who now resides in Los Angeles, where he makes his living as a female impersonator. For approximately a two-year period, some time after her first hospitalization, Gibson lived with Craig Russell, the well-known female impersonator. And in an extended example of art imitating life, Craig Russell later played the character of Robin in Outrageous, the 1976 film version of the story. Yet, as in the case of "Ada" and all Gibson's work, to see this story as entirely autobiographical is inaccurate. "Making It" may take its inspiration from Gibson's relationship with Russell, but the details of the story do not correspond exactly to lived experience. In this story, Gibson once again effectively translates personal history into powerful fiction. The story begins with a letter from Liza addressed to Bette. Bette is, as the story unfolds, revealed to be Bette Davis, one of the many women Robin impersonates in his act. Through this initial letter, Gibson establishes the present situations of Liza and Robin, as well as presenting some of their past history together. Both have lived, and continue to live, solitary lives under the scrutiny of others who regard them as abnormal, sick, potentially crazy. In the fight against the damage these others could cause them, Liza and Robin must remain constantly alert, on guard. During the public health nurse's visits, Liza concentrates upon functioning, making sure that the coffee is always the right temperature, that the apartment is clean and tidy, so that the nurse's reports cannot be used to take her child from her. Robin focuses his attention upon "making it", becoming "the best female impersonator ever" (p. 99), to defend himself against a society that rejects his homosexuality. It is only in their letters to one another that the the full range of their emotions and experiences can be revealed. At the end of the first letter, Liza writes, "Has the Great Divider got you yet?" (p. 98). As the story unfolds, the Great Divider, the bone-splitting spectre which threatens to sever Liza's hold on reality, seems to lurk everywhere. But, with the birth of her child imminent, Liza makes plans to move to Los Angeles, accepting Robin's invitation to live with him. Happily preparing for the future, Liza and Robin believe that the Great Divider is conquered, that they have cheated him. But the last line of Liza's final letter hurls them back into the Great Divider's void: "Vanessa was born dead" (p. 118). Despite all their best efforts to escape their isolation, their past pain, and to achieve a measure of acceptability in society, Liza and Robin seem at the mercy of a malevolent destiny. As in "Ada", here adulthood and its demands are perceived as destructive, as life-denying. As Liza writes, "I never wanted to grow up and know all the terrible things

that I know" (p. 108). The only individual Liza has regular contact with, besides her nurse, is a young man named Marvin who lives in a childlike fantasy realm that effectively separates him from the world. He receives messages from Mao, who has told him that he will be Superman of the world, possesses a protective invisible shield through which no one can hear, and keeps notebooks in his own secret language. Marvin's defence against normal society is withdrawal, and given the tragic ending of Liza's and Robin's dreams for the future, the reader suspects that they too may opt for that position. Taking these first two stories together, the reader can identify a number of common concerns and elements. Both focus upon individuals who have become objects of scrutiny to others. These others, whether they are doctors, social workers, or audiences, exercise a great deal of power over those who have failed to adapt to the expectations and demands of normal society. This power takes many different forms, and Gibson is particularly effective in her dissection of the strategies of control practised upon those without power. First and foremost among those strategies is simple observation. Jenny, Ada, and all the other inhabitants of the mental institution are under almost constant surveillance by nurses, doctors, even family members. Similarly, Liza in "Making It" seems always aware of the watchful eyes of those who possess the power to deny her her child. Observation is often followed by labelling and classification. Whether an individual is labelled paranoid or simply maladjusted, the effect is similar. The individual ends up excluded from normal existence and confined within another territory. The responses of those so observed, excluded, isolated, and confined are various, but all, in some way, reveal attempts to escape this condition. These attempts, however, seem doomed to failure. Ada will no doubt be punished for the murder of Alice, and Liza and Robin no longer are united in a shared purpose for the future. Significantly, both these stories include a vision of childhood as a realm of innocence to which no actual return is possible. In the world of post-childhood experience, violence, emotional and physical, seems the norm rather than the exception. The acts of violence from which Gibson's characters suffer, and which they at times perform, range from shock treatments, lobotomies, and murder to verbal abuse and rejection. And, as in a significant number of Gibson's stories, both "Ada" and "Making It" end with death, the final violence. But death in Gibson's work does not possess only one meaning. It simultaneously suggests defeat, escape, and liberation. While the baby "born dead" to Liza is the defeat of her dreams, the reader also recognizes that this child will never have to endure the inescapable pain of existence. Furthermore, the linkage of birth and death in this image of a stillborn child reinforces Gibson's sense of adult experience as a living death for many. With the loss of the safety and protection of childhood, Gibson's characters often spend the remainder of their lives as if they were stillborn. Their adult experience appears to be one of thwarted, stunted growth due to their inability or refusal to meet the demands and expectations of the world around them. Like the child "born dead", they seem too frail to withstand the blows 93

inflicted upon them by life. Frequently, their frailty is conveyed through images of wings and particles of dust, elements easily susceptible to damage and destruction by stronger forces. Both "Ada" and "Making It" were included in The Butterfly Ward, along with four other stories. Like "Ada" and "Making It", these four stories focus upon individuals who, in the eyes of the world outside, have moved beyond the accepted, the normal, the conventional. In "The Phase" we read of a young girl's obsession with her older sister's boyfriend. The girl, Catherine, focuses all her attention on the boyfriend, Andrew, believing that only he is capable of understanding her. Her parents, her sister, her schoolmates are the "watching ones", capable only of judging and rejecting her. Andrew eventually leaves her sister to marry another, but Catherine persists in believing that she will meet him again and her love for him will be reciprocated. Finally, at the age of twenty-seven, after years in and out of mental institutions, she thinks she has found him on the streets of Toronto. Accepting the supposed Andrew's invitation of a lift, Catherine believes that now everything will be all right. But this stranger is not Andrew, and the story ends with Catherine's murder on a deserted lakeside road. Unable to move out of "the phase" of her obsession, Catherine can only escape her pain in death. Escape into death from suffering, from the unacceptable demands of "normal" society, appears again in "Considering Her Condition". Five months after the birth of her son, a child she did not want, Clare, the story's central character, commits suicide. Her husband, Stephen, bears much of the responsibility for her death, though not all. Clare's revulsion for her body, for sex, and for pregnancy has roots deep in her past. She had never wanted to marry or bear children, but Stephen had persuaded her that he would not want sex or children from her, that he loved her as she was. But Stephen is essentially incapable of love for her or anyone else. He sees life, in one of the story's repeated images, through a camera-eye which always aims for the perfect scene. His need for a child has little to do with Clare or with love, and much to do with the emptiness inside him. As the story unfolds, the reader learns that he has another child, a seven-year-old daughter with whom he has little contact. It is the loss of this child that makes him refuse to allow Clare an abortion, despite her desires and the advice of her doctors. "That is why I have Clare, that is why this baby must come and be perfect, as perfect as you were" (p. 62). This story, more than any other in The Butterfly Ward, calls attention to Gibson's bleak vision of relations between men and women. Between Stephen and Clare there is little genuine communication, no sense of shared experience and emotion. Clare, like so many of Gibson's female characters, is incapable of acting for herself, except in the moment of her death, and her essential helplessness and passivity make her seem a child. The dream she has of the child she is carrying, as a fleshy thing with no bones that hardens into a beautiful shell under the sun, is a dream of herself. In her portrait of Clare, Gibson provides a powerful critique of a society which denies women the education, the opportunity, and the self-esteem necessary to shape their lives according 94

to their own needs and desires. Stephen, watching life as if it were a movie he is directing, may be less helpless than Clare, but his activity merely covers over an inner void as deep as his wife's. When we last see him he is at his desk looking at a photograph of a beautiful, perfect little face. Cut off from his emotions, Stephen reduces experience to filmed images which cannot ask or demand anything of him, for he has nothing to give. Similarly, while the young father who kidnaps his daughter from her mother and her cocaine-using boyfriends in "A Trip to the Casbah" may display more emotion than Stephen, there appears to be little he can actually do to improve his life or his (laughter's except to run away. Throughout all these stories, images of arrested, stunted growth predominate. Frequently, the adult's inability to engage in effective, meaningful activity is traced back to a childhood in which parental expectations could not be met. Failing to be as others expected, the child experiences a profound sense of inadequacy which continues on into adult life. The father in "A Trip to the Casbah", knowing he has failed to live up to his parents' wishes that he be a good Jew, cannot truly parent his own child. In the collection's title story, Kira, the main character, also seems a victim of parental expectation. Given a Russian name by her mother, who dreamed of visiting the Kremlin one day, Kira is overwhelmed by the visions other people have of her life. Despite the satisfaction Kira takes from her work at the Home for Retarded Children, her mother continues to dream of their visit to Russia after which her daughter will go to university. Eventually Kira collapses under the tension between her own needs and wishes and those of her mother. As the story opens, Kira is on the neurological ward of a Toronto hospital, undergoing tests to determine the cause of the seizures she experiences. Kira thinks of these tests as "Knnings" in which she is a butterfly, wings pinned with needles to a board. No longer able to withstand the pressures of her life, Kira seems to have retreated into an interior world. Here she feels herself safe, "the secret of the amoeba held within [her] lovely, fluttering wing tips" (p. 87). In this story, as in so many of Gibson's, retreat into silence, fantasy, and deception seems the only escape from the unmeetable demands of the world. The seven stories appearing in Considering Her Condition reveal certain affinities with those in The Butterfly Ward. Here again the reader encounters images of childhood as a fragile, temporary realm of happiness, of adult existence as painful and life-denying, of failed relationships between parents and children, between men and women. Yet this collection is distinguished from the earlier work in a number of ways. In the first place, there is less emphasis here upon the institutional setting: Gibson here extends her concern with alienation to encompass the experience of socially marginalized groups other than the mentally ill. In "Dark Angel, Pale Fire" the pressures faced by a black West Indian immigrant to Toronto are revealed through his relationship with a troubled young white woman. In "Brian Tattoo, His Life and Times", Gibson focuses attention upon the experience of an ex-convict about whom the central character is endeavouring to write. "Still Life" concerns the quiet desperation of a forty-two-year-old female

alcoholic who still lives with her parents, while "Goldfish and Other Summer Days" deals with a woman whose obesity and implied lesbianism have occasioned her isolation from others. This is a world still controlled by the Great Divider, but here the strategies of division extend beyond those associated with the mind and sanity. Here the divide between a life filled with promise and accomplishment and one filled with despair and failure is marked by negative social attitudes towards all those regarded as different, as other. Racial minorities, criminals, alcoholics, unmarried women, lesbians, women unattractive according to conventional norms: all suffer the same exclusion from happiness and success as Gibson's mentally ill protagonists. Interestingly, many of these stories stage encounters between those labelled mentally ill and those who exist on the margins of society by virtue of other disadvantages or disabilities. Thus, in "Dark Angel, Pale Fire" Nora, the woman involved with David, the West Indian, reveals a history of mental illness, while Meg, the tentative journalist in "Brian Tattoo", is presented as a potential manic-depressive. Clare, the writer of letters to a soldier in Vietnam, in "All Over Now", moves in and out of mental institutions. One might imagine that these encounters between abused and damaged individuals, albeit in different ways, would result in empathy and communion. But such is not the case for long in Gibson's black vision. Nora and David are allowed to share only a temporary communion, a communion ultimately fractured by the demands and expectations of the world beyond their fragile sanctuary. For Meg, Brian's existence with his grotesque, dysfunctional parents is finally incomprehensible, despite her intuitive sympathy for his predicament. While concern for another, be it fellow patient, lover, friend, child, is the only source of hope and comfort within Gibson's dark world, these consolations can rarely be sustained for long in daily life. Nothing more clearly reveals Gibson's sense of a malevolent world existing beyond the havens we temporarily create for ourselves than the endings of the stories in this collection. "Dark Angel, Pale Fire" concludes with Nora alone, David having departed for parts unknown, acknowledging "We lost" (p. 28). The final moments of "Brian Tattoo" show us Brian with a shotgun "jammed into his open and flesh mouth", "grinning somehow around the barrel", while Meg wants to say "don't, please", but cannot.2 By the end of "All Over Now" the young soldier is dead, and Clare is left thinking "now it is all too late, it is all over now" (p. 67). Reading Gibson's stories, one is often tempted to turn, halfway through, to the final paragraph, hoping against hope that the disaster lurking will have been averted. But it rarely is. Even in "Still Life", one of Gibson's most optimistic stories, the reader remains uncertain whether Jane's escape from her parents' house will take her any further than the bar we see her sitting in at the end. To some extent, Gibson's stories suggest that complete escape from present pain and despair could only be accomplished if the past were to be erased. However, while many of her characters engage in efforts at forgetting the past, these never succeed in entirely obliterating memory. And with memory always comes pain

in Gibson's world. That many of the roots of this pain lie in early parent-child relations makes Gibson's stories particularly disturbing. Rather than seeing the family as a sanctuary against the pressures of social norms and values, Gibson often envisions the family as a microcosm of the world outside in which love and compassion succumb to mistrust and anger. The child, variously betrayed by parents, learns early to keep emotions hidden and to regard all others with suspicion. As in The Butterfly Ward, the stories here are replete with images and instances of violence. In "Dark Angel, Pale Fire", when David's ability to withstand the racial slurs heaped upon him daily finally crumbles, significantly it is Nora whom he slaps across the face, not those who abuse him. "Mother's Milk" details ayoung man's movement towards the attempted murder of his mother, while "The Water Fairy" presents the rape of a woman in the presence of her fiveyear-old son. In "Still Life" we hear of another child born dead, flushed down a toilet, and buried in the sewer system. Brian Tattoo commits suicide with a shotgun in his mouth, and the soldier in "All Over Now" is killed in Vietnam. Everything seems to die here, individuals, relationships, emotions, innocence. The only escape from this death-filled life is in fantasy, in the realm of pretense and disguise. Reality, real life, brings only anguish and pain. For those individuals who do discover a fantasy world within which they feel protected from the outside, the price is high. The cost is separation from meaningful contact with others, for the realm of fantasy is a solitary one. Like Alice in Wonderland, a figure these stories occasionally mention, Gibson's fantasy-dwellers cannot communicate, for there exists no shared or common language. Those who have decided to withdraw from the world into an interior realm of fantasy repeatedly resort to speaking in nursery or other rhymes. Here the pretense at speech and communication is maintained, but the content of the communication offers no real promise of connection with others. Here the Great Divider wins again. Margaret Gibson's two volumes of short stories from the 1970s remain her only major published work to date. Since 1978, her only publications have been a poem for her son and an article treating her mother's medical treatment prior to her death. While such a small body of work makes it difficult to adequately assess Gibson's strengths and importance as a writer, the intense power of her best stories is unmistakable. Contributing to this power is Gibson's distinctive prose style. It is marked by unusual strategies of punctuation, by an emotionally stripped down, often deadly calm tone despite the distressing and disturbing events depicted, and by a facility with figurative, poetic language. Often Gibson's stories move abruptly from a matter-of-fact account of experience into highly evocative and imaginative renderings of responses to experience. The effect is to throw the reader off balance, and in so doing force a reconsideration of the lines which divide the real from the fantasized, the sane from the insane, the normal from the abnormal. In the end, Gibson's writing asks that we consider the conditions of everyone with compassion and care, and that we discard strategies which exclude non-conforming persons 95

from full and meaningful participation in the world. The Great Divider need not always win, but his defeat will only be possible when the intolerance and discrimination which consign the different to the butterfly wards of isolation and exclusion are overcome.

and poetry got darker in theme and tone. Even when I try to write something "light," there are always strange, sad rumblings underneath, and inevitably the "craziness" breaks through. I guess I'm stuck with a tragic sense of life. John Hofsess, "One Flew Over the Butterfly's Nest", Canadian, August 13,1977, p. 17.

1

Margaret Gibson Gilboord, "Ada", in The Butterfly Ward (Ottawa: Oberon, 1976), p. 7. All quotations are from this edition, and subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text. 2 Margaret Gibson, "Brian Tattoo, His Life and Times", in Considering Her Condition (Toronto: Gage, 1978), p. 51. All quotations are from this edition, and subsequent citations appear parenthetically in the text.

Chronology 1948

Born June 4 in Scarborough, Ontario, to Dane and Audrey Gibson; one of four daughters. 1963-67 First institutionalized at the age of fifteen; diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Upon release when she is sixteen she meets Craig Russell, with whom she lives for a two-year period. 1971 Marries Stuart Gilboord. 1973 Son, Aaron Dane, born. 1974 First story, "Ada", published. 1975 Separates from husband. Completes a novel entitled Still-Life which is never published. Hospitalized again. Awarded first of several Ontario Arts Council grants. 1976 Publishes The Butterfly Ward, her first collection of short stories. 1977 Wins the City of Toronto Book Award for The Butterfly Ward along with Margaret Atwood for Lady Oracle. Film Outrageous released. 1978 Publishes Considering Her Condition, her second collection of short stories. 1979-91 Living in Toronto, raising her son, and writing. Various time spent in hospital during these years. Continues to work on a third collection of stories.

Comments by Margaret Gibson I used to write notes to the doctor in the hospital. Longer and longer notes. And he kept saying, "Margaret, there's a lot of talent here, have you ever thought of writing for a living?" And so I began reading constantly - poetry, fiction, philosophy - and writing down my own thoughts, in what eventually became stories. Writing was my one contact with the outside world, the one thread that didn't snap. John Hofsess, "One Flew Over the Butterfly's Nest", Canadian, August 13,1977, p. 16. If I lost my hands, I would learn to write with my feet. Interview, Miss Chatelaine, August 2,1977, p. 8. Writing is like playing a complex game of solitaire with my memories. Ken Adachi, "A Gifted New Writer Explores Madness", Toronto Star, February 26,1977. I used to think when I was a child that I would write happy stories when I grew up. But as each year passed, my fiction 96

Writing is lonely, like calling from the bottom of a well. At the typewriter, there's a pleasant isolation, but I'm alone 98% of the time. Interview, Miss Chatelaine, August 2,1977, p. 9. All my life I was considered a nuisance, the black sheep of the family. Not that I did anything wild. But simply because I didn't amount to anything. I was thought of, angrily or pathetically, as "poor Margaret," shunted back and forth from hospitals. I was a violation of all that my family believes in. When Margaret Laurence called and asked me to come and spend a day with her, I nearly cried. John Hofsess, "One Flew Over the Butterfly's Nest", Canadian, August 13,1977, p. 17. You can't write a book without past experience. Where else would it come from? But some of the characters and situations never existed except in my head. Ken Adachi, "A Gifted New Writer Explores Madness", Toronto Star, February 26,1977.

Comments on Margaret Gibson Most effective are [Gibson's] stories narrated in the first person. These are highly introspective and personal monologues, not intended for an audience, but spoken silently as part of the characters' inner musings; and thus, some of their enigmatic, confessional aspects will leave many readers feeling strangely unwelcome, rather like outsiders, which is perhaps as it should be. This simply means that [Gibson's] characters do not come neatly packaged for mass commercial tastes. Michael Fuhrman, review of The Butterfly Ward, Quill & Quire, XLII, 9 (July 1976), 33. These characters could almost be compared to Flannery O'Conner's grotesques, characters who move beyond the ordinary into the extreme. Gibson has a definite ability to etch situations in fine detail, but she sometimes fails to employ the useful tool of understatement: the stories are slightly marred by a tendency to overdramatize, to push everything to the furthest possible extreme. Aritha Van Herk, "All Victims, but Finely Drawn" [review of Considering Her Condition], Branching Out, VI, 1 (1979), 55. This Canadian writer understands the cracked rhythms and the obsessional language of madness, and her achievement in this collection is to communicate its horror to the sane. Nina Bawden, review of The Butterfly Ward, Daily Telegraph (London, England), October 14,1976. Gibson sees life essentially as a nightmare and her portrayal of her nightmare visions is so vivid, so searing, that reading her stories is an emotionally wrenching experience. In the world of her stories we encounter mainly the pain, the brutality, at times the sheer horror of life, and she portrays

masterfully the feelings of those people who can barely cope. Her characters' sensitivity, fragility, leaves them constantly vulnerable; they are threatened both by their own inner fears and by the real terrors of the outside, "normal world." RP. Bilan, "Honor Studies" [review of Considering Her Condition], Canadian Forum, LDC (April 1979), 30. Occasionally the effect is as if Alice Munro's gentle stories of innocence lost had been rewritten by Dostoevski. . . . There's an intensity and honesty in [Margaret Gibson's] stories that make them eerie, disturbing and memorable. William French, "Eerie and Memorable on the Edge of Sanity" [review of The Butterfly Ward], Globe and Mail May 6,1976, p. 13. She writes sometimes in chant-like images and phrases, by turns rapid-fire and melancholy, almost lyrical. At other times, her prose is as cold and unadorned as a hospital corridor. It always is suited to the scene described, or the person describing. She is a consummate storyteller, capable of building atmospheres with a few phrases, of creating tension with an inexorable power. Ted Schrecker, "Nothing Simple" [review of The Butterfly Ward], Canadian Forum, LVI (DecemberJanuary 1976-77), 49. Much of the considerable power in [Gibson's] stories derives from her ability to reveal how people struggling with mental illness act; in their dealings with the "normal" world many of her characters must practise deceptions and subterfuges to prevent those around them from knowing their true state. [Gibson] also provides us with a revealing glimpse into the harrowing interior world of madness, but the most compelling aspect of her work lies in her presentation of the human relationships that survive despite madness. R.P. Bilan, "Letters in Canada: 1976. Fiction" [review of The Butterfly Ward], University of Toronto Quarterly, XLVI (Summer 1977), 353. Madness is Gibson's central theme. Often her protagonists are shown "functioning" outside of institutions, disguising themselves, walking "the fine line between reality and fantasy"; but reality - which cannot simply be equated with normalcy or its opposite - is the hideousness of the world, from which the narrator tries to avert her gaze, as well as those rare moments of innocence when delight takes over. Although in both perceptions of reality Gibson's beautiful losers are more "real" than her normal people, madness is no escape Violence is everywhere - much of it directed against women. But there is also tenderness, especially for small children and for others who suffer alongside Gibson's protagonists. And there is sometimes a lovely gallantry in all the pain. Gibson's style has a fine authenticity, lapsing very occasionally into clich6. She uses run-on sentences as well as unconventional punctuation, and her stories are often interestingly structured. Constance Rooke, "Gibson, Margaret," in William Toye, ed., The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 298.

Selected Bibliography Works by Margaret Gibson Collections The Butterfly Ward. Ottawa: Oberon, 1976. [As Margaret Gibson Gilboord.] Considering Her Condition. Toronto: Gage, 1978. Articles, Stories, Poetry, Scripts "Ada", in New Canadian Stories 74. Ottawa: Oberon, 1974. [Included in The Butterfly Ward.] "Making It", in New Canadian Stories 75. Ottawa: Oberon, 1975. [Included in The Butterfly Ward', the story was the basis for the 1978 film Outrageous.] "Ada". Script for CBC TV drama directed by Claude Jutra. Produced March 1976. First televised February 6,1977. "Aaron", in Morris Wolfe, ed., Aurora: New Canadian Writing 1978. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 1978, pp. 19598. [Poem.] "Chemical Lobotomy: Drugging the Mentally 111", Citizen (Ottawa), September 20, 1986, p. B3. [Article dealing with the medical treatment of Gibson's mother.] Selected Criticism Articles, Reviews Adachi, Ken. "A Gifted New Writer Explores Madness", Toronto Star, February 26, 1977. Bawden, Nina. Review of The Butterfly Ward, Daily Telegraph (London, England), October 14, 1976. R.P. Bilan. "Horror Studies" [review of Considering Her Condition], Canadian Forum, LIX (April 1979), 30-31. . "Letters in Canada: 1976. Fiction" [review of The Butterfly Ward], University of Toronto Quarterly, XLVI (Summer 1977), 353-54. -. Review of The Butterfly Ward, Fiddlehead, No. Ill (Fall 1976), pp. 130-31. Dabydeen, Cyril. Review of The Butterfly Ward, Chelsea Journal, November/December 1976, pp. 310-11. Farkas, Edie. "Madness and the Individual", The Last Post, V, 2 (October 1976), 40-42. Fowler, Mary. Review of Considering Her Condition, in Dean Tudor, Nancy Tudor, and Linda Biesenthal, eds., Canadian Book Review Annual 1978. Toronto: PMA Books, 1979, p. 150. Freedman, Adele. "Going Mad in Order to Survive" [review of The Butterfly Ward], Saturday Night, XCI (JulyAugust 1976), 62, 64. French, William. "Eerie and Memorable on the Edge of Sanity" [review of The Butterfly Ward], Globe andMail, May 6, 1976, p. 13. Fuhrman, Michael. Review of The Butterfly Ward, Quill & Quire, XLII, 9 (July 1976), 33. Fulford, Robert. Review of The Butterfly Ward, Montreal Star, June 14, 1976. Galloway, Priscilla. Review of The Butterfly Ward, in Dean Tudor, Nancy Tudor, and Linda Biesenthal, eds., Canadian Book Review Annual 1976. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1977, p. 158. 97

Hamilton, Jamie. Review of The Butterfly Ward, London Free Press, August 14, 1976, p. 20. Hofsess, John. "One Flew Over the Butterfly's Nest", Canadian, August 13, 1977, pp. 16-17. . "Second Crop Picked Too Soon" [review of Considering Her Condition], Books in Canada, VII, 8 (October 1978), 14-15. Locher, Frances, ed. "Gibson, Margaret", in Contemporary Authors: Volume 103. Detroit: Gale, 1982, p. 159. McKee, Anne Holloway. "And Here There Be Dragons" [review of Considering Her Condition], Maclean's, XCI, 25 (October 30 1978), 48g. Mallet, Gina. "Young, Making It", Chatelaine, XLI, 9 (August 1978), 55. Mills, John. "Confirming Her Condition" [review of Considering Her Condition], Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 16 (Fall/Winter 1979-80), pp. 208-12. Ricou, Laurence. "Story and Teller" [review of The Butterfly Ward], Canadian Literature, No. 76 (Spring 1978), pp. 116-18. Ripley, Gordon, and Anne Mercer. "Gibson, Margaret", in Who's Who in Canadian Literature 1987-88. Toronto: Reference Press, 1987, p. 128. Rooke, Constance. "Gibson, Margaret", in William Toye, ed., The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 297-98.

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Schrecker, Ted. "Nothing Simple" [review of The Butterfly Ward], Canadian Forum, LVI (December-January 1976-77), 48-49. Strachan, Al. Review of The Butterfly Ward, Gazette (Montreal), July 31, 1976. Struthers, J.R. (Tim). Review of The Butterfly Ward, Western News, December 2, 1976, p. 6. Swartz, Shirley. "Who Was Then the Crazy One?" [review of The Butterfly Ward], Branching Out, SeptemberOctober 1976, p. 44. Tudor, Kathleen. Review of Considering Her Condition, Fiddlehead, No. 122 (Summer 1979), pp. 140-42. Van Herk, Aritha. "All Victims, but Finely Drawn" [review of Considering Her Condition], Branching Out, VI, 1 (1979), 55-56. Wolfe, Morris. "Sad, Mad, and Good" [review of The Butterfly Ward], Books in Canada, July 1976, p. 7. A Note on the Contributor Susan J. Warwick is Assistant Professor in the Division of Humanities at York University. She has published on Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, and Ellery Queen. Her fields of interest include North American cultural studies and ideas of the criminal in modern culture.

Jack Hodgins

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by Peter Buitenhuis Among the younger generation of Canadian writers, Jack Hodgins has the most distinctive, some would say most eccentric, voice of all. His novels and stories, mostly set on Vancouver Island, introduce the reader to a world of fantasy, myth, folklore and down-home realism, weird characters and wild swings in narrative form and technique. There is no question that some critics have been put off by these apparently erratic and often crazy fictions. It is a matter of expectation: some readers accept the down-home realism cheerfully enough - Hodgins is very good at it - and then are upset when the story turns fantastic or mythical. Hodgins's purpose is often to confound expectation to create strange and dynamic fictional worlds which are self-contained and self-justifying. The rationale for all this can be found in the last story, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Barclay Sisters", in his most recent collection, The Barclay Family Theatre (1981). The narrator of the story called, symbolically enough, Clay (short for Barclay), is by his own reckoning "a dull and sensible boy". He looks on in amazement and envy at the antics and practical jokes of his mother's six sisters. Not only do they spread wild rumours and make exaggerated tales about the lives of their neighbours in the small Vancouver Island town in which they live, they then go on to create melodramas from these events, stage them in a garage, and charge their neighbours a few cents to come and see them. At last, fed up with being dull and sensible, Clay takes advantage of a minor accident that his mother has with a shotgun, rushes off to town and spreads a wild tale of a shooting spree ending with an attempted suicide. He then returns to the family farm to enjoy the spectacle of the entire town turning out to see the results of the catastrophe. He has the satisfaction of seeing his six aunts also taken in by his elaborate ruse. They turn on him in anger and call him a "bloody little liar", but they they have to go on to admit that Clay has more imagination than they had given him credit for. Eleanor, one of the aunts, is, however, critical of Clay in that he hadn't kept control of the whole prank. It had got so far out of hand that no one would ever believe a thing he said again. This doesn't seem fair to Clay. Eleanor re-

plies: "If no one is going to believe you anyway, you may as well tell them lies from morning to night. . . . You can tell them any old thing that goes through your head. Or write it down in a book, where people will assume it's the truth." Eleanor then suggests that Clay write a play about the whole prank, "a jazzed-up version of my mother's escapade." The sisters would play the parts as usual, but, "Naturally there'd be no role for [Clay]." He would be billed "as just the author" - a perfect role for someone "basically dull 99

and uninteresting and totally lacking in flair." It is difficult not to read this story as an allegory of Jack Hodgins's own career as a creative writer. While by no means "basically dull and uninteresting", Hodgins has led a fairly ordinary life as a family man, high school teacher and university lecturer, and yet has made a fantastic theatre out of the life and times of Vancouver Island, giving free rein to that love of lying that is at the root of all really original fiction. Some critics have made the error of assuming that it's meant to be "the truth", in the sense of being a portrayal of life on the island, whereas in reality Hodgins is after a profounder moral truth of the imagination or, as Nathaniel Hawthorne once put it, "truth of the human heart". Like many writers before him, Hodgins did not find it easy to break into print. Writing in the scant time left to him as a teacher, he still turned out a good many stories which he sought to sell in the North American market. But he had eight years of rejection slips before his story "Every Day of His Life" was accepted by the American magazine Northwest Review and published in February 1968. After that the dam broke and his work soon appeared in many U.S. and Canadian little magazines. He was fortunate enough then to be taken up by one of Canada's most gifted editors, Doug Gibson of Macmillan. With Gibson's help, Hodgins revised and arranged several of his magazine stories for his first book publication, Spit Delaney's Island (1976). It was this volume which demonstrated Hodgins's strong sense of roots and community and his identity as a regional writer. One of the strongest influences in turning him in that direction was William Faulkner, whose tales of the mythical Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi and whose richness of language fascinated Hodgins. In fact, one of Hodgins's most difficult tasks was to emerge from the shadow of that formidable Southerner. When he was still in his twenties, he determined not to read any more Faulkner. But, as David Jeffrey has pointed out, the Latin American writers that Hodgins next turned to, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Vargos Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes, among others, had themselves been strongly influenced by Faulkner, so he has never entirely escaped the influence. It can still be seen in the richness and complexity of Hodgins's language and in the fact that his characters and settings appear and reappear in story after story as if his whole fictional world was, like Yoknapatawpha county, one community. Hodgins is actually an omnivorous and catholic reader. Those who have influenced him include Joseph Conrad, Wright Morris, John Fowles; the Irish writers Frank O'Connor, Edna O'Brien, Flann O'Brien; and, among Canadian writers, Alice Munro, Rudy Wiebe, Robert Kroetsch, Roch Carrier, and his fellow British Columbians, Robert Harlow and Earle Birney. Birney, who founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia, was the teacher who most influenced Hodgins. Spit Delaney's Island, however, showed that Hodgins was very much his own man. The first and last stories are about Spit Delaney, just before and after breaking up with his wife; these framing stories set the context for all the rest. The writer figure - also called Barclay - appears in one story, a boy with his nose in a book yet keen to listen in on 100

local tragedies. But most of the stories are told from the point of view of ordinary people: loggers, farmers, touristindustry workers, and so on. There is generally a realistic framework that contains the other elements of mythology, fantasy, and eccentricity which frequently create the context for a crisis of personality or belief or for a breakup, or sometimes the making, of a relationship. One of the stories, "At the Foot of the Hill, Birdie's School", gives a hint of what other things in fiction Jack Hodgins might get up to. This has all the illogic, violence, and shifting scenes of a hectic nightmare, but it ends not with the protagonist dying of tuberculosis under a pile of junk in Birdie Atwell's Free School as it had threatened to, but with him throwing all the junk off and fleeing back to the hills and forests. The creative imagination, the writer seems to be saying, can escape all the constraints of bodily weakness and crap and become, as the protagonist says, "An idea. Somewhere else, everywhere. An idea in the Old Man's mind and therefore perfect. You can't destroy that." This is the clearest articulation of a theme that haunts all of Hodgins's fiction - that of the Platonic view of a world of ideal forms that lies behind and animates the so-called "real" world. Spit Delaney's Island was a remarkably original first book and signalled to the world the arrival of a gifted new writer. The promise was more than realized in his second, the novel The Invention of the World (1977). The novel form offers far more scope than the short story for Hodgins's creative talent. It allows him to explore more deeply the question that tormented Spit Delaney: * 'Where is the dividing line? . . . Between what is and what isn't." It's a question that faces many of Hodgins's characters as they go through various crises: the loss of a job, the alienation of children, personal failure, or simply generalized angst. The normally clear boundaries between what is - what can be touched, seen, tasted, or heard - and what isn't - dreamed, fantasized, imagined, or believed - fade and blur. "The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n", wrote Milton. A surprising number of Hodgins's characters go through these self-created hells in which the dividing lines are never clear. Just getting through the day in such a state of mind is chore enough - let alone succeeding in anything. Becker the ferryman-compiler-narrator of much of the material in The Invention of the World is a compulsive packrat of a man, whose cabin on the beach north of the ferry terminal on the Island is full of scrapbooks, clippings, cassette tapes, notebooks, and photographs. He is "determined to make a few years of [the world's] history his own." He wants to be God, and for that reason is attracted to Donal Keneally who had similar divine ambitions when, eighty years before, he persuaded an entire Irish village to emigrate to Vancouver Island and there to become his slaves in the Revelations Colony of Truth. Mythology and history intersect repeatedly in The Invention of the World. There really was a man like Donal Keneally, who called himself Brother Twelve and established a colony called the Aquarius Foundation over which he had complete dominion. There has been a good deal of scholarly speculation over the extent to which Hodgins used

this local history for his book. The essential thing is, however, that he found in the story the ideal material for myth. Donal Keneally's mother, according to Becker, dreamed that her child would be fathered by a black bull from the sky, which recalls the classical myth of Taurus and Europa. In that myth Zeus became enamoured of Europa, the daughter of Phoenix. He took the shape of a bull and carried her off to Crete, where she bore him a son, Minos, and two other children. Cecelia Coulas Fink has claimed that there is a larger analogy in the novel with the Taurus-Europa myth. "The siring of Keneally by a bull", she writes, "suggests a double connection with the myth of King Minos and the minotaur. . . . Like Minos [Keneally] abdicates his public role in favour of personal gain. His sin, moreover, is greater than that of Minos, since he not only defies the gods but sets himself up as a god."1 But the other major characters in the book - Maggie Kyle, who has taken over the old Colony of Truth buildings, running them as lodgings and a trailer park, and Wade Powers, who runs The Fort, a tourist-trap museum - are also busy inventing their worlds. They are both trying to determine the location of the dividing line. The novel is a crazy palimpsest of the history of the colony that Becker tape-records from the surviving descendants, of Maggie's escapades with her trailer park and lodgings, of Wade's strange adventures with a double who is or is not there, and other assorted stories and legends. As Hodgins has himself said, however, the novel's structure is created as an X - the fall of Keneally from the peak of his power in his Colony of Truth to his death in a hole under his house, and the rise of Maggie from the ruins of that colony to triumph and marriage. Near the end Maggie, Wade, and Becker take a pilgrimage to Ireland. They have with them the ashes of Donal Keneally, which they are taking back to scatter in the village where it all began. They are also hoping to find out why it all began. Wade is skeptical about the whole pilgrimage because it appears to give legitimacy to the Keneally legend. Becker says in reply: "Myth . . . like all the past, real or imaginary, must be acknowledged. . . . Even if it's not believed When you begin to disbelieve in Keneally you can begin to believe in yourself." It's not exactly an epiphany, but Becker's words serve to bring Maggie, with her restless yearning, and Wade, with his equally restless skepticism, to some sense of the self. Becker even partly convinces himself of the truth of his remark, although he goes on recording and editing his tapes. Having at last settled that the world does not always have to be invented, but can be accepted as creation and history and myth, the characters can begin to settle down. The novel ends with the great carnival of the wedding of Maggie and Wade, which includes a feast, a dance, and an epic fight. The wedding of Wade and Maggie is a reassertion of the ideal in this disordered world. Wade's fabulous double reappears and drives them back to the House of Revelations. Becker closes the novel with the mythic words: "And i f . . . they're not dead nor gone they're alive there still." David Jeffrey has well said of this novel that it "particularly bears the stamp of literature written for an apocalyptic age and culture, one which is afraid that the end might well come upon it before there can be any real sense of

personal conclusions.... It records also the contemporary desire to flee history, the script already written, and to become fully the author of one's own mythology, to escape creation for invention."2 Hodgins's next novel, The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne; or, A Word or Two on Those Port Annie Miracles (1979), is in much the same style as The Invention of the World. A realistically presented, remote coastal Vancouver Island small town is the setting for the wildest kind of mythological and fantastical events. Joseph Bourne is a former famous poet, traveller, and statesman who is sedulously cultivating obscurity and cynicism in this town. He is living with a group of other squatters in a shack on the beach and holding down a part-time job as disc jockey and talk-show host on the local radio station. When the novel begins, the town has recently suffered a tidal wave which has washed up all kinds of debris, even a fish boat which is now lodged high up in a Douglas fir. It has also apparently washed up an incredibly beautiful girl, Raimey, although she might have come ashore from a visiting Chilean freighter. She has come for Bourne - she may in fact be his daughter, born of a woman he had lived with in Jamaica - and she tells him on his talk show - "to turn his vision back until he was forced to see his own life, his own soul, his -" The shock of this attempted confrontation apparently kills Bourne on the spot; at least the doctor summoned to the studio pronounces him dead. But Raimey brings him back to life, and this is the beginning of a whole series of apparent or wished-for resurrections in Port Annie. Dozens of projects start up because of the influence of this sea goddess. The town pulsates with restlessness and vitality. The novel follows these many characters and their adventures and misadventures with a comic exuberance that reminds the reader of those huge eighteenth-century novels. But, slowly, two main contrapuntal themes develop. One is generated by Joseph Bourne, a new man since his resurrection, who goes around helping people, giving them visions and new hope; the other is that of Mayor Weins, who is looking for real estate development, profits, and worldly fame. The novel develops into a morality play in which materialism and spirituality are pitted against each other in a life-and-death struggle. The town's leading poetaster, Mrs. Barnstone, starts a long epic poem in rhyming couplets to record these events, but though urged to do so, Joseph Bourne refuses to return to poetry. He thinks that the old metaphors for eternity don't work any more. "Works of art could be burned or smashed", he says, "oceans could be killed off by men, even that famous steadfast star could have burned itself out years ago. If symbols don't work - and what else can a poet use?— then eternity can only be expressed by implication, by the way we live our lives." This may well be Jack Hodgins's confession of the difficulty of the artist's role in the modern period, particularly in an age and a country where the idea of development, or "progress", is so dominant and where the old language and symbols seem inadequate for the task of countering this headlong materialism. Events in the novel rush towards their 101

conclusion, but just when it seems that materialism has won, that the development may go ahead, there is a divine intervention: the town, which has been deluged for days by incessant rain, is destroyed by a landslide. But the ending seems only to be a new beginning. Few are hurt and only one is killed by the landslide. The dead man's widow, who is a former stripper, begins a dance at the edge of the mud slide. Everyone joins in. The spirit of Joseph Bourne, who has apparently already returned to Jamaica, has finally triumphed. In his next novel, The Honorary Patron (1987), Hodgins initially deserts Vancouver Island to begin in Zurich, where his protagonist, a former professor of art history, Jeffrey Crane, is happily retired. There bursts upon him a former sweetheart from Vancouver Island, Elizabeth Argent. Her purpose is to dislodge him from his comfortable seclusion and persuade him to come back to his home town on the Island to act as the honorary patron of an art festival. After having lived in Europe for so many years, Crane is initially totally opposed to returning, but he eventually allows himself to be persuaded and, as could be predicted in a novel by Hodgins, soon finds himself up to his neck in all kinds of zany experiences and chaotic encounters with school chums and acquaintances not seen in forty years. Practically everything goes wrong with the festival, from a downpour on the day of the opening ceremonies to a crazed actress interrupting the closing night of Macbeth. Shreds of Crane's past return to haunt him: the image of a series of tunnels under the town that recurs throughout the book is the analogy of a past that has not been confronted. It turns out that Jeffrey Crane can go home again. His energy that has dribbled away in his retirement years in Zurich returns in the new world. When he goes back to Switzerland, he looks forward to more travelling and to resuming teaching - even perhaps for a term at the college in the Vancouver Island town where he had been the patron at the festival. He tells his old friend, Franz: "This is no ending— I've merely gained a little momentum where once I had none. Decisions can now be thought about, at least." On the whole, however, The Honorary Patron is not as successful as the two previous novels. Professor Crane is too passive a hero; he can do little about or with the aggressive females who keep confronting him about his past - and trying to get him to make some sort of commitment to them. Crane, even though he does gain some momentum for a renewed career at the end, is too much committed to his own selfish needs. The lack of energy of the hero somehow transmits itself to the rest of the novel, which lacks the wild inventiveness and creative fantasy of The Invention of the World and The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne. It is significant that Crane is an academic, an art historian, committed to a recording and interpretation of the past rather than to an active representation of the present. One of the best stories in the collection The Barclay Family Theatre, alluded to earlier, has to do with the role of the artist and the problematic question of finding and communicating with an audience. In "More Than Conquerors", a painter, a Finnish immigrant long domiciled in Canada, is looking forward to the opening of the biggest show of his career in 102

Nanaimo, the Vancouver Island seaside town where he lives. One of the portraits he is most proud of is of a contractor who lives with his wife in an apartment on the lowest of the three levels of the same house. At the show, the contractor rejects the portrait completely. "It hasn't got nothing to do with me", he tells the painter, "It don't even look like me. ... A camera could of done better." Stunned by this rejection the painter sits and reflects: "You offered what you had to give and they did one of two things every time: didn't recognize what it was or rejected it without even looking." The search for a larger audience better able to understand his work may have led Hodgins towards the more realistic texture of The Honorary Patron - and away from what he is better able to do with myth and fantasy. Another artistic problem is addressed in the next story in the collection, "The Lepers' Squint". Here the protagonist is again the writer Barclay who has left his native Vancouver Island to live in Ireland, looking for his roots and for a place to write. But it is not so easy. Meeting a young and beautiful Irish writer, Mary Brennan, he is tempted to start an affair with her and, through her, to join a fraternity of Irish writers. Since he can't get started on his new novel, this looks like a good way out of his writer's block. He identifies, however, with the lepers that a tour guide has told him about. They were only allowed to participate in the church service by squinting out of a tiny hole high up in the wall of the cathedral. Although he knows he could easily get together with his fellow writers, "celebrating something he's come here to find", he knows that he has another job to do: "That words, too, were invented perhaps to do the thing that stones can do. And he has come here, after all, to build his walls". Every writer has his point of view, or squint, and his hole through the wall that his life has created. Barclay knows that to do his job, he has to keep the faith with that wall. The problem of point of view has been better resolved in Jack Hodgins's most recent novel, Innocent Cities. This is a historical novel set in the 1880s in Victoria, Vancouver Island, the capital city of British Columbia. The central intelligence, Logan Sumner, is an architect and builder, full of dreams of what this capital city should be. Like previous Hodgins heroes, Sumner is a bumbler and an innocent, preoccupied with the loss of his young wife. His adventures and misadventures keep pace with the growing city. Hodgins has avoided the usual melodrama and claptrap of historical romances. This is a rich and robust comic novel revolving around an innkeeper who has bigamously married, and whose first wife comes to town to claim her rightful place. Innocent Cities is not a historical abstraction papered by flim flam, but a solidly real presence created from careful but unobtrusive research and based on historical figures. Hodgins has shown his loyalty to his region in other forms too. He has, for example, collaborated in putting together three anthologies designed to introduce students to the best of English and western Canadian literature. The selections are marked by a boldness and originality unusual in anthologies designed for teaching. Hodgins has also ventured into children's literature with a book called Left Behind in Squabble Bay (1988). It's the story of a boy, Alex, left behind to live unhappily with a

grouchy aunt and uncle in a little town on the Vancouver Island coast while his father is away researching in South America. After a series of adventures, including a kidnapping, a stay in a derelict house on a remote log boom, a storm, and a dramatic rescue, the book culminates in a reunion with his relations and a coming to terms with the townspeople. It's a vigorous, simply written, cheerful adventure, bound to appeal to children between eight and twelve years old. The ten books that Jack Hodgins has so far published reveal a writer of manifold talents and wide interests who has, however, staked out his ground and declared his interest. Even when he chooses remote settings, like Ireland in "The Lepers' Squint" and part of The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne, or Switzerland in part of The Honorary Patron, or Japan in "The Sumo Revisions" in The Barclay Family Theatre, the characters of his fiction remain firmly attached to their roots in the Island. Many critics have tried to characterize the work of Jack Hodgins. Geoff Hancock, the editor of Canadian Fiction Magazine, has put him in the category of magic realism. The job of the magic realist, Hancock asserts, is "to convince us that the marvellous is possible in a bland surface, and indeed, inherent to the place, whether it be Nanaimo or Halifax." The painterly equivalents of these fictions are the canvases of Alex Colville, Ken Danby, and Christopher Pratt.3 David Jeffrey, on the other hand, has claimed that the label magic realism is a misleading one for Hodgins's work. Jeffrey points out that there is a stronger strain of psychological realism in Hodgins's work that allies him more closely to the

fiction of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy.4 Most critics agree that, in spite of the innovative nature of much of his fiction, Hodgins is not a postmodernist writer. As Waldemar Zacharasiewicz has said, "For Jack Hodgins, the fictional communities that he depicts clearly have more stability than they would have in postmodern fiction."5 R.P. Bilan points out that while Hodgins may properly be said to belong to the modernist movement, he makes "a deliberate effort to write against the bleak side of modernism and to emphasize the reality of love, hope, and passion".6 Unlike most of his contemporaries, Hodgins is basically an optimist about human nature. His essentially comic vision is based not on a satirical, critical view of life, but on an affirmative, essentially pastoral vision. That is not to say that he writes pollyanna fiction. As the discussions above should amply show, his characters have troubles enough, face tragedies, disappointments, and failures of various kinds. But their struggles and quests are often towards enlightenment and self-control, and seldom result in defeat and despair. Spit Delaney's attempt to find "the dividing line" between death and life, between what is and what isn't, between imagination and passivity, is a common quest by his characters. They usually decide in favour of the affirmative vision, of love and commitment. 1 Cecelia Coulas Fink, "*If Words Won't Do and Symbols Fail': Hodgins's Magic Reality", Journal of Canadian Studies, XX, 2 (Summer 1985), 122. 2 David Jeffrey, Jack Hodgins and His Work (Toronto: ECW Press, 1989), p. 26. 3 Geoff Hancock, Introduction to Magic Realism (Toronto: Aya Press, 1980), pp. 9-10. 4 Jeffrey, p. 12 5 Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, "The Invention of a Region: The Art of Fiction in Jack Hodgins' Stories", in Robert Kroetsch and Reinhard M. Nischik, eds., Gaining Ground: European Critics on Canadian Literature (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1985), p. 190. 6 Quoted in Jeffrey, p. 46.

Chronology 1938

Born October 3 in Merville, in the Comox Valley of Vancouver Island, B.C., son of Stanley Hodgins, farm worker, and Rita (Blakely) Hodgins. 1944-56 Educated at the local school, in Tsolum. Belongs to a small, close-knit farming community. 1947 Writes his first story, a murder mystery. 1957-61 Attends the University of British Columbia. Studies English literature, taking a course in creative writing with Earle Birney. Takes a Certificate in Secondary Education. 1960 Marries fellow student Dianne Child. Three children: Shannon, Gavin, Tyler. 1961-79 Teaches at the Nanaimo District High School. Clears a large lot and builds his own house in Lantzville, a coastal settlement north of Nanaimo. 1968 Publishes his first short story, "Every Day of His Life", in the Northwest Review. Subsequently publishes in many North American magazines, including The Canadian Forum, The Capilano Review, Wascana Review, The Antigonish Review, Canadian Fiction Magazine, and Journal of Canadian Fiction. 103

1972 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979

1980 1981 1983 1987 1988 1990

Edits a high school anthology, Voice and Vision, with W.H. New. Lives in Ireland with his family, seeking knowledge of his own roots and writing. Edits the anthology The Frontier Experience. Publishes Spit Delaney's Island and edits the anthology The West Coast Experience. Publishes The Invention of the World. Writer-inresidence at Simon Fraser University. Receives Eaton's B.C. Award for Spit Delaney's Island. The Invention of the World receives the Gibson's Best First Novel Award. Author's Award from the Association of Periodical Distributors. Resigns from Nanaimo High School to become writer-in-residence, University of Ottawa. Makes tour of Japan under the auspices of the Department of External Affairs. Publishes The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne: or, a Word or Two on Those Port Annie Miracles, which won the Governor General's Award for Fiction. Receives Canada Council Senior Arts Grant. Publishes The Barclay Family Theatre. Appointed to the Department of Creative Writing at the University of Victoria. Publishes The Honorary Patron. Publishes Left Behind in Squabble Bay. Publishes Innocent Cities.

Comments by Jack Hodgins I've written stories all my life. Even as a little kid, when I ran out of something to read, my mother would say, "Write your own." And I did. But when I got to UBC I thought I'd take this more seriously and enrolled in Earle Birney's creative writing class the first chance I got. This was before there was a writing faculty. About seven of us met every Thursday evening and ripped each other's work to shreds. Interview with Geoff Hancock, Canadian Fiction Magazine, No. 32-33 (1979-80), p. 37, and Canadian Writers at Work: Interviews with Geoff Hancock (Toronto: Oxford University Press 1987). Used by permission of the author. There is something in the nature of man which has kept him seeking in this country the new Eden, which has moved him gradually from right to left across the map, stopping only long enough to discover that what he'd thought was less than paradise after all and full of dangers. Taming it only resulted in a reproduction of the garrison society he'd left behind. Not even the Pacific coast reduced him to frustration; he turned northward into colder landscapes or, remaining in one of the thousands of ex-frontiers across the land, turned to the exploration of less obvious frontiers, the exciting geography of mind/soul: science, art, religion, the future. Introduction to The Frontier Experience, pp. 1-2. It is important to me that the theme of a story finds its own way out, that it be an unselfconscious part of every word in the story without dictating its direction. I would prefer to put my energies into the job of making the characters seem alive, since all stories - whatever their individual themes - have the same purpose: to explore what it is to be a human being and alive in this world. 104

"An Experiment in Magic", in Edward Peck, ed., Transitions II: Short Fiction: A Source Book of Canadian Literature (Vancouver: Commcept Press, 1978), p. 238. I think all writing has to be regional to start with. It has to come from somewhere, it has to take place somewhere. But the important thing is, if the fiction is any good it rises above the place and talks to people anywhere. I have no sense of a typical Canadian readership. I think I'd be fooling myself if I thought there was one because Canada is a collection of regions with a collection of regional literatures. I've written very little out of personal experience. I'm not all that interested in doing it. My first motivation in writing is a nosiness about other people. I already know more than enough about myself. I like to take somebody who's out there and pull him up close and have a good look at him. Not only that but to get inside and find out what it's like to be him. Before publishing my first book I had no association with other writers whatsoever, and being part of a group or school of writing has never been attractive to me. Especially something that is4abelled "experimental." Whenever a writer sits down he hasto experiment in order to see whether what he wants to do can work. Even the most traditional writer is experimental in that sense. I tend to resist fictional forms that come from elsewhere. The forms of my stories have to grow out of the subject matter. The people I'm writing about tell me how to write their stories. When I was writing The Invention of the World I was aware that this was not the way novels are supposed to be shaped, but this is the way the novel had to be shaped. This is the way Maggie's story had to be. Interview with Geoff Hancock, pp. 41,43,50,48.

Comments on Jack Hodgins Hodgins seems to have avoided first-person narration. In his first collection, Spit Delaney's Island, it is used only once. His favorite mode has been the fairly consistent use of the figural narrative situation, which suits his tendency to immerse himself in the roles of characters through whose senses and minds the physical setting - the "feel" - of region and its social structures - are largely filtered. In several interviews Hodgins has referred to his early habit of watching other people and of being "supersensitive to the way they might feel", and he has plausibly claimed that unlike many contemporary writers he is not writing about himself. Waldemar Zacharasiewicz, "The Invention of a Region: The Art of Fiction in Jack Hodgins' Stories", in Robert Kroetsch and Reingard M. Nischik, eds., Gaining Ground: European Critics on Canadian Literature (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1985), p. 186. Magic realism is is a popular, convenient label, and Hodgins has openly admitted the influence upon him of writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Amado, and Mario Vargas Llosa. But, like all labels, it ultimately proves insufficient. Reality, Hodgins reminds us, can be idealistic (Platonic) or down-to-earth (materialistic). His own brand of realism attempts

to combine both ends of the spectrum. The vivid immediacy of his presentation of northern Vancouver Island should not prevent us from recognizing his quest for what he has called "The Reality that exists beyond this imitation reality that we are often too contented with." In the last analysis, Hodgins' vision of reality, created rather than invented, is uniquely his own. W.J. Keith, "Jack Hodgins and the Sources of Invention", Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 34 (Spring 1987), p. 90

Selected Bibliography Works by Jack Hodgins Fiction Spit Delaney's Island: Selected Stories. Toronto: Macmillan, 1976. The Invention of the World: A Novel. Toronto: Macmillan, 1977. The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne; or, A Word or Two on Those Port Annie Miracles. Toronto: Macmillan, 1979. The Barclay Family Theatre. Toronto: Macmillan, 1979. The Honorary Patron. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987. Left Behind in Squabble Bay. Illustrations by VictoR GAD. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988. "Loved Forever (Work in Progress)", Books in Canada, XVII, 6 (August-September 1988), 13-15. Innocent Cities. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990. Essay "An Experiment in Magic", in Edward Peck, ed., Transitions II: Short Fiction: A Source Book of Canadian Literature. Vancouver: Commcept Press, 1978, pp. 237-39. Edited Anthologies Voice and Vision. [Edited with W.H. New.] Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1972. The Frontier Experience. Themes in Canadian Literature. General editor David Arnason. Toronto: Macmillan, 1975. The West Coast Experience. Themes in Canadian Literature. General editor David Arnason. Toronto: Macmillan, 1976. Selected Criticism Beckmann, Susan. "Canadian Burlesque: Jack Hodgins' The Invention of the World"9, Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 20 (Winter 1980-81), pp. 106-25. Bilan, R.P. Review of The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne, in "Letters in Canada 1979: Fiction", University of Toronto Quarterly, XLIX (Summer 1980), 331-33. Delbaere-Garant, Jeanne. "Isolation and Community in Jack Hodgins' Short Stories", Recherche Anglaises et Amlricaines, No. 16 (1983), pp. 31-44. Fink, Cecelia Coulas. "'If Words Won't Do, and Symbols Fail': Hodgins' Magic Reality", Journal of Canadian Studies, XX, 2 (Summer 1985), 118-31. Hancock, Geoff. "Magic Realism, or, the Future of Fiction", Canadian Fiction Magazine, Nos. 24-25 (Spring-Summer 1977), pp. 4-6.

. "An Interview with Jack Hodgins", Canadian Fiction Magazine, Nos. 32-33 (1979-80), pp. 33-63, and Canadian Writers at Work: Interviews with Geoff Hancock. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987. Used by permission of the author. -. "Magic Realism", Introduction to Geoff Hancock, zd., Magic Realism: An Anthology. Toronto: Aya, 1980, pp. 7-15. Horner, Jan C. "Irish and Biblical Myth in Jack Hodgins' The Invention of the World", Canadian Literature, No. 99 (Winter 1983), pp. 6-18. Jack Hodgins' Island. National Film Board, 1982. Jeffrey, David. Jack Hodgins and His Works. Toronto: ECW Press, 1989. Keith, WJ. "Jack Hodgins and the Sources of Invention", Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 34 (Spring 1987), pp. 81-91. Lecker, Robert. "Haunted by a Glut of Ghosts: Jack Hodgins's The Invention of the World", Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 20 (Winter 1980-81), pp. 86-105. Lernout, G. "Creation-science and Jack Hodgins' The Invention of the World", Revue Beige dePhilologie etd'Histoire, LXIV (1986), 532-38. McCaig, Joann. "Brother XII and The Invention of the World", Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 28 (Spring 1984), pp. 128-40. O'Brien, Peter. "An Interview with Jack Hodgins", Rubicon, No. 1 (Spring 1983), pp. 35-68. Pritchard, Allan. "Jack Hodgins's Island: A Big Enough Country", University of Toronto Quarterly, LV (Fall 1985), 21-44. Steven, Laurence. "Jack Hodgins' Invention of the World and Robert Browning's *Abt Vogler'", Canadian Literature, No. 99 (Winter 1983), pp. 21-30. Twigg, Alan. "Jack Hodgins: Western Horizon" [interview], in For Openers: Conversations with 24 Canadian Writers. Madeira Park, B.C.: Harbour, 1981, pp. 185-95. Vauthier, Simone. "Reader's Squint: An Approach to Jack Hodgins' The Barclay Family Theatre", in Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte, eds., Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian, and British Fiction. Presented to Helmut Bonheim. Wurzburg: KGnigshausen & Neumann, 1990, pp. 153-65. Zacharasiewicz, Waldemar. "The Invention of a Region: The Art of Fiction in Jack Hodgins' Stories", in Robert Kroetsch and Reingard M. Nischik, eds., Gaining Ground: European Critics on Canadian Literature. Western Canadian Literary Documents, No. 6. Edmonton: NeWest, 1985, pp. 186-91. A Note on the Contributor Peter Buitenhuis was educated at Oxford and Yale. He has taught at Yale; Victoria College, Toronto; the University of California at Berkeley; McGill; and Simon Fraser, where he was chairman of the English Department from 1975 to 1981. His publications include The Grasping Imagination: The American Writings of Henry James (1970), The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction 1914-1933 (1987), and other books and essays on American and Canadian literature.

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W.P. Kinsella

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by Don Murray Since the early 1970s, Alberta-born William Patrick Kinsella has published two novels and over two hundred short stories, anecdotes, and surreal or fantastic sketches (which he calls "Brautigans"). The first stories are about native Indian life as perceived by an Alberta Cree - Kinsella's "voice", his fictional mask - hence the early assumption that WPK was Indian. The more widely known later works are about baseball - the game is magically transformed by Kinsella's imagination. When his magic works - Kinsella admits to being a "wizard" - he makes us believe what we could never dream. He is both a romantic and a realist who believes in the power of illusion. He is an artist, in other words, not a historian or sociologist, although he is read as a tongue-in-cheek commentator on race relations, as a critic of Canadian institutions such as the CBC and RCMP, as a political satirist, and as a storyteller. There are dreams within the dreams of his fiction. He revitalizes old images and familiar situations, like the joy of people playing together, the chill of isolation - like that of the doomed "Black Sox" who threw the World Series. He blends romance and fantasy - myths of the noble savage, the fallen angel, the wily trickster - with frontier humour and baseball jokes. He brings people out of the cold or off the Indian reserve and onto the pages of very funny books. Humour is basic to W.P. Kinsella. From his earliest Indian stories, which are updated versions of the tall tale, through the experimental forms of non-Indian narratives (Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, The Alligator Report) and his first novel, Shoeless Joe, to the most recent assorted stories and second baseball novel, Kinsella has continued to re-create life's amusing accidents and fabulous surprises. However, in the introduction to The Thrill of the Grass (1984), Kinsella warns: "I am much more cynical than my characters, much angrier, I am always very conscious of the absurdity that surrounds me." Kinsella's readers would do well to remember this warning about cynicism and anger, for his first books, beginning with Dance Me Outside in 1977, are by no means as unremittingly funny as is commonly thought. Although there are raucous moments, there is a hard edge to life among the imaginary Ermineskins on

the reserve at Hobbema in Alberta. Kinsella's career in fiction began when he discovered the voice of Silas Ermineskin, the narrator of "Illianna Comes Home": My name is Silas Ermineskin. I am eighteen years old. Me and Frank Fencepost and a couple of other guys are taking a course that the government offers on how to be mechanics. I fix things pretty good and our instructor, Mr. Nichols, say he think he can get me an apprentice job with a tractor company in Wetaskiwin when I finish.1 107

It is in this way that we meet the young Cree who will narrate at least one-half of Kinsella's published work. "I'm not so sure anymore that it is such a funny thing that I have written about", Silas says at the close of his first story, "but if it gets me a job with the tractor company, then I guess it is okay." The die is cast: Silas opts for the white man's language and for part of his world. His command of English improves as the years and volumes go by, thanks to his instructor Mr. Nichols, his friend and a source for his growing store of words. Mr. Nichols relishes the boy's sense of humour and encourages him to "just write about the funniest thing that ever happened to [him]." The first funny thing he writes about is when his sister, Illianna, brings her white husband home to the reserve to meet the family. Kinsella said that he intended the story to be a bittersweet narrative along the lines of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the 1960s film about the problems of racial intermarriage. But he was taken aback when his first audience (a group of fellow creativewriting students) laughed at it. It was then that Kinsella realized he was a humorist. The story's comedy is typical of all his Indian stories. For example, the Indians hide from the white man (a "finance man", as Kinsella once was) by playing name games. They call the unfortunate Robert McVey their "blood brother" because one of them has just seduced Illianna; they call him "Robert Fire-chief, the name of the local Texaco garage, though oddly enough this is a name the white man might have borrowed from the Indian originally. They war-whoop and chant, like Indians in Westerns, though the song they sing is "One Little Indian". As so often in Kinsella's work, the Indians act in accord with the white man's expectations. But here the Indian is in control and not a passive victim, and there's humour in these situations. In "Illianna Comes Home" it is the white man who becomes inebriated by ceremonial drinking, which is his own custom. In addition to Silas, Illianna, and Frank Fencepost, Kinsella now creates Mad Etta, the 400-pound medicine woman who sits on a tree-trunk chair and makes fun of the white man in her own language. Mad Etta is a splendid character and a force who never becomes too familiar or domesticated despite her many appearances in the stories. The descriptions of Brother Bob and Silas's "Ma" in this early story are worth noting because of what they indicate about, first, Kinsella's presentation of Indians, and second, the way in which the races look at each other in later stories: Then [Illianna's husband got out of the car], and he look like one of them pictures out of the Eaton's catalogue. He got a hat with a funny little brim, an overcoat, and a suit and tie. He got shiny black shoes with toe rubbers too. He shake hands with me, and Ma too. Ma ignores him, and she don't speak so much on Illianna. Ma's wearing her good speckled dress and her purple kerchief. She looks in the back of the car, not walking over to it but just by rolling her eyes. Then she looks hard on Illianna's tummy and say, "Where your babies?" "Ma," Illianna say, giving her a real harsh look. "Well, where your babies?" (DMO, pp. 7-8)

The white man's and the Indian's views of each other are socially conditioned. But Kinsella believes that social stereo108

types are a reality, and they certainly are in his fiction. In the passage above, for example, Silas's mother appears to be as firmly rooted as Mad Etta. She is speckled like a trout; she is colourful, not pallid; she is not insulated from the earth by a layer of rubber like Brother Bob. In Kinsella's fictions, people are often seen as little different from decorator mannequins or film stooges. Indeed, in a later story, "Indian Joe" in The Fencepost Chronicles, an Indian and a doll are interchangeable. As in much other comic literature, there is a flatness of characterization in Kinsella's stories which might be mistaken for authorial prejudice unless we remember that Silas, the narrative voice, generalizes liberally and in a wholly unfocused manner about all sorts of ethnic groups. For example, in "The Ballad of the School Trustee", he says: The man [he meets in an office] smell like cherry candy, and he be an Indian, only one of those that come from the Pakistani Tribe on the other side of the earth. I always wonder why the Government offices be full of those kind of Indian and never any of our kind. (MT, p. 71)

Silas believes that the RCMP are especially ready to pounce on his own kind of Indian, although "they never bother the kind of Indians come from India" ("Fugitives", MT, p. 190). He knows what it means to "act like we figure white peoples expect us to" ("The College", MT, p. 109). He is aware that there are "churches in Wetaskiwin who like to have an Indian or two around to show they ain't prejudiced" ("Pius Blindman Is Coming Home", MT, p. 167). Sometimes Kinsella has been thought to be patronizing because he dares to speak for Indians. This charge may well be justified when he strays into certain areas - for example, he playfully and perhaps ill-advisedly invents fanciful Indian scriptural tales in "Caraway" (DM0). Nevertheless, he is a student of Indian culture and knows enough about it to have been asked (in 1989) to write the biography of Allen Sapp, the great Cree artist. Along the same lines, Kinsella has remarked (rightly or wrongly) that is is even possible for modem Indians to learn about their ancestral burial customs from the white man's film Jeremiah Johnson. In his Indian fiction Kinsella often draws upon textbook knowledge and accurate historical sources (we recall that Silas himself likes to read Indian history), but it must be admitted that other events or ritual practices are clearly the concoctions of Kinsella's own fertile imagination. For example, here is how Frank Fencepost describes Indian weather forecasting in "Parts of the Eagle": I take a little rock, nice and smooth, weigh maybe a pound. I tie a string around it, hang it from a fence rail. If the stone is wet, it's raining. If it's dry, it ain't. If it's swinging, it mean the wind is blowing. If there's a shadow under it, that mean the sun is shining. If it's white on top, that mean it snowed. (MT, p. 48)

This of course is just a hoax - Frank offers to teach his Indian lore to whites for $20 a lesson, and Silas, the narrator, comments on his friend's ingenuity: "It never occur [to the white man] that us Indians have a sense of humour." While the weather-rock episode is only one example of Kinsella's possible misrepresentation of genuine Indian practices, it is

done humorously and behind the narrative mask of Silas. Perhaps this is why Kinsella can claim that so far as he knows native people have never objected to his habit of speaking for them in his stories. Far from being prejudiced, Kinsella attacks prejudice, and we can feel his anger in the superb title story of Dance Me Outside. A gang of white men rape and murder an Indian girl and get away with it. They boast about the deed just as the killers of a Cree girl did in Manitoba in 1971, in a case which finally received a judicial inquiry and national news coverage in 1989. In Kinsella's story, the injustice of the legal system and police and the racial prejudice of the churches (Protestant and Catholic) and white society are clearly presented. In "Dance Me Outside", the murder is eventually avenged by the Indian women at the Blue Quills Dance Hall in Hobbema where the sordid business began. Kinsella got his title from Cathy Ford's poem, "Another Old Story", which spells out the vengeance: "the women dressed carefully / danced him / outside / castrated the bastard / with the jagged lid / from a can of brown beans." Kinsella told Ford that he would still be driving a cab in Victoria if he hadn't read her poem. The land around Hobbema is territory that Kinsella had known when, as a young man recently out of high school, he worked at various jobs, including that of credit manager for a finance company. He is angered by the squalor of life - caused by alcohol and drug abuse - which is the plight of many dispossessed or urban Indians (though he has noted that the real Hobbema Indians are relatively well-off). But he came to know Indians well only years later, during his taxi-driving days in Edmonton and Victoria, when he saw them in places totally different from their grass roots. He admired their toughness and resilience; and he especially enjoyed the humour and native wit of the young, whose spirit and resourcefulness he idealized in Silas Ermineskin, Bedelia Coyote, Frank Fencepost, and others. Kinsella captures the idealism of Silas in "Panache", which might almost be called "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". The story is about the tribute paid by Silas to Tom Pony, an Indian friend who died heroically in an attempt to save a white man's life. The simple use of the title word, which Silas learned from Mr. Nichols, implies a complex change in his attitude towards the white world around him. When a tombstone salesman asks for an inscription for Tom Pony's grave, Silas recalls the word discussed in Mr. Nichols's final lecture to his class. "Panache" is the effect of a plume on a helmet, he said, and Indian chiefs had more nobility than any armoured knight. "Panache," I say. "What's that?" said the tombstone man, who was making notes with a pencil in a scribbler. "It's what I want on Tom Pony's tombstone. Panache." I had to speak it for him about six times before he got it right. "What is it anyway, some kind of Indian word?" "Yeah. I think it is," I say. (DMOt p. 40)

There are men with whom Silas can share language and spirit; there are others who will never understand his words.

Silas knows that someday he will write stories "good enough to get printed"; he is aware of the values of the marketplace. He knows that Tom Pony's mother needs money more than Tom's grave needs a tombstone. Mrs. Pony's financial plight is not an "absurdity" of the sort Kinsella mentioned in the 1984 introduction cited above - it's just a fact. The absurdities that most anger Kinsella result, he says, from our looking at ourselves too exclusively; they are failures of moral vision. But in talking about Kinsella as a storyteller, we may also use "absurd" to refer to a kind of plot, to the more or less improbable turn of events in his stories, especially the bizarre happenings in his experimental writing. Here one thinks of some of the fictions in Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa and The Alligator Report, or of the baseball episodes that ramble on in The Thrill of the Grass and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. The "absurd" in plot includes the broadest comic complications of action and the pratfalls of farce. It does not include the tribulations of love affairs and business dealings, nor sexual politics (as championed by Bedelia Coyote), nor racial politics (the antics of "apple" Indians who are red outside but white within), nor the AIM movement (referred to by Silas as "Assholes in Moccasins"). "Absurdity" in this usage does not include the more profoundly comic relationships that develop between individuals or groups and the institutions (RCMP, court, church, school, media) that are supposed to support, not disrupt, human life and harmony. "Absurd" refers to the special cases of situational comedy that involve shifting perspectives. Such perspectives may be physical (space, time - the popular "back to the future" mode that Kinsella anticipated in his fictive world), or metaphysical or spiritual perspectives. It may also refer to Kinsella's supernatural realm of freaks, mystery kids, albinos and black angels, dwarfs, geeks, and the wonderful "madonna of the cornfield". The fictional special cases usually involve dislocations of time and space which transform the mechanics of farce into the contours of fantasy (especially in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy). At its farthest remove from realism, a Kinsellan plot posits a world in which degrees and kinds of anarchy are artistically justified and undoubtedly hilarious. Far removed from realism, this is nevertheless a traditional domain of comedy - the old carnival of the Lord of Misrule - whose spirit is inseparable from the fibre of humankind. Kinsella's humour derives both from plot, as we have just seen, and from character. With respect now to characterization, Kinsella's people are most engagingly funny when they strike the chord of our common humanity. These are the characters who predominate in his straightforward comic stories. There is no viciousness in their actions (unless they're provoked by the red tunics of the law - the RCMP) and little vitriol in their words. We sympathize with them. Kinsella's narratives fit the definition of "humour" as a relatively harmless species of the comic genre. Readers are drawn to Kinsella's world mainly because of its essential goodness and gentleness (despite the cartoon violence of The Iowa Baseball Confederacy or the documented crime of some of the Indian stories). It is true that his fiction contains rude social jokes and sexual banter, 109

emphatic anticlericalism, and political wisecracks (the latter being aimed at provincial fat-cats and Ottawa bureaucrats, like the white minister of Indian affairs "who think in French so his English always come out backside-foremost", and that other francophone who speaks sideways). These harsh and mocking ingredients notwithstanding, Kinsella is a humorist, not a satirist. His humour is inseparable from the warmth of his world - Frank and sidekick Silas are a dynamic duo of jokesters within a living group. Kinsella writes about figures within families, though the family may be a baseball team or an Indian band. "Major characters are realized through recurrence, repetition, and association", Geoff Hancock notes, "until finally what we recall is the community itself."2 But as Mark Duncan says in reviewing The Fencepost Chronicles, Kinsella demonstrates that "prairie fiction need not follow the rigid structures of an outdated naturalism."3 Kinsella's fiction is dynamic. Hancock shows that writing is process in Kinsella: what is important is how things are narrated, the "telling" itself. However, Kinsella does not embrace the modern (some call it postmodernist) concern with linguistic self-consciousness or "reflexivity", the idea that literature is about itself. Though he is familiar with the intellectual exercises (the "LitCrit game", he says) of academics, Kinsella is not the kind of "metacritical" writer dear to some he knew while teaching at "Desolate U" (University of Calgary). Kinsella gives us the vivid image and the arresting simile; he has the ability not only to tell a rapturous tale but to vitalize language - as when grass is secretly used in place of artificial turf at a ballpark and the old-time fans "raise their heads like ponies, as far away as the parking lot, when the thrill of the grass reaches their nostrils." Kinsella is one of those rare storytellers who turn writing into a mode of magic, so enthralling is his spell. He can perform his magic in "alternate universes" as adroitly as other contemporary authors, and he is in tune with the presentday interest in multiple time schemes and their comic possibilities. He is also a moralist whose vision of man is tonic and stable. As Neil Randall has demonstrated in his reading of Shoeless Joe, Kinsella uses "sympathetic humour" to unite theme, style, and character into an artistic whole. Randall points out that "fellow-feeling is essential for both the fantasy and the morality to be accepted" by the reader. To quote from a fan letter that narrator Ray Kinsella reads to his friend, the writer J.D. Salinger, You do something in your stories that few writers do well - especially today - and that is to make the reader love your characters. They exude a warm glow. They are so real, so vulnerable, so good, that they remind me of that side of human nature which makes living and loving and striving after dreams worth the effort. I, for one, came away with a delicious smile on my face and a soft little tear in my eye - and I feel pretty damn good about being alive for the rest of the day. Thank you. (SJ, p. 134)

The healing power of baseball is a great myth that Kinsella has been building ever since he wrote the magical short story "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa" in the late 1970s. He then expanded it into a prize-winning novel at the suggestion of his publisher. Shoeless Joe is unabashedly 110

romantic; it is about love that makes dreams come true. The book celebrates being alive and the family as the centres of earthly happiness. Elspeth Cameron reviewed the "religious dimension" of the book and hoped it would become a vehicle for a Steven Spielberg film. Shoeless Joe overflows with sweetness and warmth, indeed with an excess of sentiment that often lapses into sentimentality, even though the author tries to strike a delicate balance by means of jovial humour. For example, the moonlight bathes Iowa like butter on an ear of corn. A happy rookie hits a fly ball "like a streak of forgotten rainbow as it drops over the fence, silent as a star falling into a distant ocean" (SJ, p. 166). Kinsella believes in the power of baseball to affect us not only as mere spectators. In his view, the game is a modern ritual or redemptive process for weary humankind. It seems hardly sufficient to take the novel as pure fantasy to be savoured for its own sweet sake. In "The Thrill of the Grass", even more strongly than in Shoeless Joe, we find an entrancing belief in the reality of the game. "The Thrill of the Grass" picks up Joe Jackson's phrase about the thrill that he feels even when he dreams of chasing a ball in his shoeless way. In the story a fan stands alone in a stadium just before dawn and drops to his hands to touch the field. "Water touches the skin beneath my spread fingers. I lower my face to the silvered grass, which, wonder of wonders, already has the ephemeral odours of baseball about it" (SJJCI, pp. 195-96). This might be called the transfiguration of the earth, but the thrill of the grass is the thing, for to touch it opens the heart of the aging locksmith hero in the story. The comradeship of player and fan is more illusory than even the ephemeral odours until the reality of the game takes on an undeniable subjective truth. This truth, if shared by enough people, as during baseball's drought of 1981, makes baseball a fact of our common life and, depending upon circumstances, our commonweal or commonwoe. As the New York Yankees' owner put it in the summer of 1989, "Baseball is bigger than George Steinbrenner and Pete Rose [the fallen angel of the Cincinnati Reds]." In other words, baseball has existential power and meaning for W.P. Kinsella. The dust jacket of Shoeless Joe claims that baseball is a "microcosm for the human condition." Not just a tiny model of what we are, it opens the door to a world of possibilities more numerous than, and different from, those of habit - a different karma, as they used to say in the days of Kinsella's beloved Janis Joplin. With something like karma in mind, the imaginary real author in the book - J.D. Salinger - says to the narrator, Ray Kinsella, "What do you think you are, some kind of mystic?" (SJ, p. 204). At the time of writing Shoeless Joe, W.P. Kinsella found a kindred spirit in Salinger, the writer who "captured the experience of growing up in America" (SJ, p. 85), just as years before he found the stylistic model he needed in Richard Brautigan, a writer of Joplin's generation, whom Kinsella once tried to visit. (The need to go straight to the author is traceable to Holden Caulfield in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.) While film has influenced Kinsella, 1980s filmmakers in turn have adapted his works (including Dance Me Outside, Shoeless Joe, and at least one of his "Brautigans"). In 1989 he agreed to write a screenplay on an Indian subject

for director David Pears. Phil Alden Robinson caught the spirit of Shoeless Joe in his remarkable Field of Dreams, which appeared at the start of the 1989 baseball season. The fallen "Black Sox" of 1919 came to life again on the screen. "It's so perfect, it's like a miracle", reviewer Roger Ebert said, "a completely original and visionary movie." The script is faithful to the novel and overflows with the affirmation written into every line of Shoeless Joe. The film's setting, like the book's, is lush cornfields in magical light, enclosing a family on a porch swing at evening, near the ghostly brightness of the Sox as they take the field again, led off by a twinkle-eyed phantom rookie in his first turn at bat. The film focuses on the son's atonement with the father, clarifying the hero's extraordinary task, which vaguely recalls the Grail Quest in medieval sagas. The quest theme and the magic of good feeling work in Shoeless Joe as they do not in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, the second baseball novel, which critic Chris Hill has described as a more symbolic, "obsessive and less wholesome" tale of the American Dream. Field of Dreams - which brought tears to Kinsella's eyes is about caring and taking care. The fantastic turns of The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, The Alligator Report, The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt, and other works since 1985 may be traced to Kinsella's writing of science fiction during his teens. Thus, the fictions of middle age, which illustrate absurdities of plot in their disregard of spatial and temporal limits, hark back to visions unconfined by natural boundaries. It is precisely the conjunction of infinite extension (foul lines) with the circuit of baseball's "roundtrip" which makes the game an intellectual wonder for Kinsella. As for characters - ballplayers or not - they may pass through guises or states of being and possess a blessed instability of ego, which might be called the transformation theme in Kinsella's work. In "A Quite Incredible Dance", a love story epitomizing the romantic solipsism of this mid-life fiction, a father speaks in all innocence to his daughter: We could whirl off across the meadow and up into the hills and not stop until we reached the mountains and not even then if we didn't want to. We could be the most famous dancers in the world, except for one thing. . . . (SJJCI, p. 29)

The thing to which he takes exception is reality, the hard substance beneath his feet, which he cannot escape no matter how fast he dances; it is also time, which slows him down and takes his breath away. In Shoeless Joe, the high point of Kinsella's romantic idealism, the "real" characters, the narrator and his family, seem to exist in dimensions that are not those of everyday life. Although Elspeth Cameron sees Kinsella's people as rebels against their powerlessness, the author sees them "powered by dreams". The people in *The Grecian Urn", a story in Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa, hope that "the ultimate in wth dimensional living [is] waiting for them", but in their attempt to make themselves more than human they wind up less than human. Their fate is more comic than tragic because there must be limits. (The absurd, in its modern philosophical sense, is a defiance of limits.)

W.P. Kinsella maintains his comfortable position as an entertainer with homes on each side of an international border; he is his own man, neither American nor wholly part of the "CanLit" scene. He resigned from the Writers' Union of Canada because he supports free trade. He made his name with books about the fabulous Ermineskins and he continues to chronicle these people who are as universal as minorities of all shades and persuasions. He has written about marginal men and women in the dreary cities of Canada and in such eerie places as Las Vegas and the L.A. airport. His great interest continues to be baseball, a game with a few heroes and many second-stringers who soon fade. He so thrills to the grass that he laments the harsh climate of the country where he was born. To understand why he is so ecstatic about baseball, we must immerse ourselves in his stories and delight in the singular combination of slapstick comedy, accurate description of play, and extravagant fancy that transforms fictional narrative into a mode of magic. 1

W.P. Kinsella, Dance me Outside (Ottawa: Oberon, 1977), p. 5. This work is subsequently cited parenthetically in the text as DM0. Other references are to The Moccasin Telegraph and Other Stories (MT)\ The Fencepost Chronicles (FC); The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (IBC)\ Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa (SJJCf); Shoeless Joe (SJ)\ The Thrill of the Grass (TG). 2 Geoff Hancock, "The Thrill of W.P. Kinsella", Canadian Author & Bookman, LXI, 4 (Summer) 1986), 4. 3 Mark Duncan, review of The Fencepost Chronicles, Border Crossing, VI (June 1987), 24. 4 Neil Randall, "Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of FellowFeeling", Modern Fiction Studies, XXXHI (Spring 1987), 173-83.

Chronology 1935

1945 1950 1970 1971 1974 1976 1977 1978

1982 1986 1987 1988

Born May 25, in Edmonton. Grows up on a farm at Darwell, Alberta; takes correspondence classes because there is no school; begins "creating fictions to entertain" himself. Moves to Edmonton; attends Parkdale School and plays in his first baseball game. Enters Eastwood High School where he excels in English and edits the Gazette. Enters the University of Victoria; studies with Lawrence Russell, W.D. Valgardson, and others, and edits the Martlet. Writes his first Silas Ermineskin story, "Illianna Comes Home". Graduates with a degree in creative writing and a major in playwriting. Enters University of Iowa Writers' Workshop for M.F.A. degree. Publishes his first book, Dance Me Outside. Marries writer Ann Knight in Iowa; does his first baseball writing since childhood; graduates from the Workshop. Begins teaching English at the University of Calgary. Publishes first novel, Shoeless Joe, winning many awards; leaves teaching for full-time writing. Publishes second novel, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Wins Stephen Leacock Medal; sells screenrights for Shoeless Joe (filmed as Field of Dreams in 1989). Stages three one-act plays (based on The Thrill of 111

1989 1991

the Grass) at Vancouver's Waterfront Theatre. Continues to work on a "comic trilogy"; contracts for biography of Allen Sapp, the Cree painter; begins a screenplay on an Indian subject. Publishes third novel, Box Socials (Toronto: HarperCollins).

Comments by W.P. Kinsella Having the discipline to write, whether you feel like it or not, probably contributes to my success more than anything else. If you waited around for inspiration, you'd probably never get anything done. As far as story writing is concerned, I consider the ending most important - it's everything. Give me a good climax and I'll build the story that leads up to it

of baseball or the subject of Indians - and these readers assume that what I'm writing is nonfiction. Well, it's not nonfiction: I'm a storyteller - first, foremost, and always and the storyteller's job is to make the reader say, "Yes, this is the way I believe it is." Don Murray, The Fiction of W.P. Kinsella: Tall Tales in Various Voices (Fredericton: York Press, 1987), pp. 9, 11,30,8,47,49,31.

Comments on W.P. Kinsella Because everyday life provides grist for his particular brand of artistry, Kinsella places a premium on staying in touch with the common person, whether it is by sitting in the 300level at Mariners games in the Kingdome, reading and answering all his own mail or writing in the downtown public library during his stays in Seattle. And he is driven to produce - partly by the force of his imagination, but also by concerns over his health [WPK is a diabetic]. Paul Andrews, Seattle Times/Seattle PostIntelligence, August 31, 1986, p. 14.

When you start out writing at an early age [WPK began at five] you produce fantastical stories because you have no life experience to write about. And then, as you get this experience, you write about it (or your perceptions of it); later on, you return to the fantastical. I think I've gone that route because I started out writing science fiction.

He has a view of the world that is strongly evident. . . it's anti-middle class; he views members of that group as passionless, overly concerned about security, and - when they think about it - bored silly. His sympathies are with the loners, the risk-takers, the anti-establishment individuals who swim against the current. William French, Globe and Mail, September 3, 1987, p. Cl.

There is a lot of absurd humour in the Indian stories. There is also a lot of innocent humour in the early stories where Silas doesn't realize that some of the things that he is telling you are funny. I pretty well had to abandon the innocence later on.

The final destiny of established archetypes is that they become reversible. The Alberta writer, W.P. Kinsella, talks about Indians by reversing cliches. . . . Unlike Leonard Cohen's "Beautiful Losers," Kinsella's Indians are never completely victims because their victimization serves to put in relief their endurance and strength. Frances Kaye, Mosaic, XIV, 2 (1981), 174.

I didn't want to leave Iowa [where WPK studied writing]; so I fantasized about Shoeless Joe's return to this time and place. I felt like using a poetic voice, and I was able to do that, to talk about baseball and show my love of the land. Those three things came together in ["Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa"]. I like to do audacious things in fiction, but it's difficult to find such things that will work. Also, it limits my possibilities for the future by doing something like that [using author J.D. Salinger as a character in Shoeless Joe]. . . . I don't know where I got the idea of kidnapping Salinger - a living person - and taking him to a game. I knew I'd have to handle him with kid gloves in order to avoid a lawsuit.

I've been extremely lucky in that I've had two or three voices accepted as real. It doesn't matter that you know about a subject: fiction writers are inventors. I get all kinds of readers - who don't know much about either the game 112

Kinsella also relies heavily on the pun and certain jokes are not far removed from "Hee-Haw". . . . A more serious complaint can be made of Kinsella's racial stereotyping. There are more than a few references to the characters' excessive drinking, indolence and, perhaps most disturbing, childlike incompetence. Mark Duncan, Border Crossings, VI, 3 (1987), 23. . . . the problems of Kinsella's writing extend beyond narrative style. Indian characters are flat: wisecracking, sullen, hurt, or puzzled, but never changing. The extreme brevity of many of the stories may account for this lack of character development, but it does not justify it; and the lack of cohesion in [e.g., Born Indian] allows for no growth in Silas himself. Kinsella clearly wanted the centre of consciousness here to be in the world of Silas on the reserve, but an element which is oddly missing from the stories is a sense of physical place. Anne Blott, Fiddlehead, No. 133 (July 1982), p. 93. Kinsella is not afraid to change direction in his writing either. It would be easy to go on with a winning style of

W.P. Kinsella is one of the most loving promoters baseball ever had. In the past, he has shown that love in short stories and novels alone; with The Thrill of the Grass [three oneact plays], which opened recently at the New Play Centre [Vancouver], he expands his territory a little, making his theatrical debut with his awe of baseball magic intact. Stephen Godfrey, Globe and Mail April 14, 1988, p. A20. U.S. exposure is the key to making a living as a writer, he says. "Even if you are a best seller in Canada, there just aren't enough people to buy enough books to make a living because the author only gets 10 per cent of the purchase price." George Bentley, Weekender, September 26, 1987, p. B3.

Selected Bibliography Works by W.P. Kinsella Books

picaresque. He could forever write 18-year-old-SilasErmineskin stories. But a writer has many selves, many voices to tell.... Kinsella leaps off into surprising tangents with his homages, or parodies, or metafictions, or slightly surreal, or maddeningly risky departures. Geoff Hancock, Canadian Author & Bookman, LXI, 4 (1986), 5. [Excerpt from an editorial critical of the newly published Baseball Encyclopedia's history of the 1919 World Series brouhaha.] Out of the statistical ashes rose the phoenix of literary truth, the "real" story according to writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, W.P. Kinsella and any number of short storyists and novelists. When facts don't go far enough, fiction can always be counted on to get the job done. Editorial, Innings, August 2, 1986, p. 13.

Dance Me Outside. Ottawa: Oberon, 1977. [17 stories.] Scars. Ottawa: Oberon, 1978. [16 stories.] Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa. Ottawa: Oberon, 1980. [10 stories.] Born Indian. Ottawa: Oberon, 1981. [14 Stories.] Shoeless Joe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Toronto: Thomas Allen & Sons, 1982. [Novel.] The Moccasin Telegraph and Other Stories. Markham, Ont.: Penguin, 1983. [16 Stories.] The Thrill of the Grass. Markham, Ontario: Penguin, 1984. [11 stories and introduction.] The Alligator Report. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1985. [26 stories and introduction.] The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Toronto, Collins, 1986. [Novel.] The Fencepost Chronicles. Don Mills, Ontario: Totem Press, 1986. [13 Stories.] Red Wolf, Red Wolf. Don Mills, Ont.: Collins, 1987. [13 stories and introduction.] Chapter One of a Work in Progress. Vancouver: William Hoffer, 1988. [Chapbook.] The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt. Don Mills, Ont.: Collins, 1988. [10 Stories.] Box Socials. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1991. [Novel]. Interviews

Surrealism was also based on the revelation of gamesmanship and playing. The writer becomes a god in these games, filling the bleaker side of reality with fun. This is also a reminder that writers, as image makers, were held responsible for our evolutionary success. W.P. Kinsella, in Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa and The Thrill of the Grass, assimilates some of these elements of the marvellous in his magical stories about baseball. Geoff Hancock, "Magic or Realism", Canadian Forum. March 1986, p. 30.

Murray, Don. "Prairie Indians and Peregrine Indians: An Interview with W. P. Kinsella", Wascana Review, XX, 1 (Winter 1985), 3-12. . "An Interview with W.P. Kinsella", NeWest Review, October 1985, pp. 16-17. "An Interview with W. P. Kinsella", West Coast Review, XX, 4 (April 1986), 61-66. [Material from the above interviews has been gathered together in The Fiction of W. P. Kinsella, cited below.]

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Selected Criticism Books Knight, Ann. W. P. Kinsella: A Partially-Annotated Bibliographical Checklist (1953-1983). Iowa City: A-Cross Publications, 1983. Murray, Don. The Fiction of W. P. Kinsella: Tall Tales in Various Voices. Fredericton: York Press, 1987. Articles, Reviews Abley, Mark. "Up the Creek Without a Paddle", Books in Canada, November 1978, pp. 19-20. Adachi, Ken. "W.P. Kinsella: Writer on a Hitting Streak", Toronto Star, May 14, 1983, p. F10. Andrews, Paul. "From Out in Left Field", Seattle Times/ Seattle Post-Intelligence, August 31, 1986, pp. 11-14. Blott, Anne. Review of Born Indian, Fiddlehead, No. 133 (July 1982), pp. 91-96. Boe, Alfred F. "Shoeless Joe Jackson Meets J.D. Salinger: Baseball and the Literary Imagination", Arete, 1,1 (Fall 1983), 179-85. Brennan, Anthony. "Down and Out in Montreal, Windsor, and Wetaskiwin", Fiddlehead, No. 115 (Fall 1977), pp. 127-40. Bukowski, Anthony. "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa", Fiddlehead, No. 129 (Spring 1981), pp. 126-27. Burtch, Brian E. "W.P. Kinsella", Canadian Journal of Sociology, V (Winter 1980), 80-82. Cameron, Elspeth. "Diamonds Are Forever", Saturday Night, August 1986, pp. 45-47. Choyce, Lesley. 'Three Hits and a Miss", Books in Canada, November 1984, pp. 19-20. Cockran, Robert W. "A Second Cool Papa: Hemingway to Kinsella and Hays", Arete, IV, 2 (Spring 1987), 27-40. Duncan, Mark. Review of The Fencepost Chronicles, in Border Crossings, VI (June 1987), 24. French, William. "The Whimsical Spinner of Tales", Globe and Mail, November 15, 1986, p. E3. . "Middle Class Under Fire", Globe and Mail, September 3, 1987, p. Cl.

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"The Game That Time and Iowa Forgot", Sports Illustrated, April 14, 1986, pp. 110-141. [Excerpts from The Iowa Baseball Confederacy with full-colour illustrations.] Hancock, Geoff. "The Thrill of W.P. Kinsella", Canadian Author & Bookman, LXI, 4 (Summer 1986), 4-5. Hill, Chris. "The Disintegration of the American Dream: W.P. Kinsella Shatters the Myth". [Unpublished essay, 1988.] Kaye, Frances. "Don* t Freeze Off Your Leg", Prairie Schooner, LIII (Spring 1979), 84-86. . "The 49th Parallel and the 98th Meridian: Some Lines for Thought", Mosaic, XIV, 2 (1981), 165-75. Lenoski, Daniel S. "Smelling of Home Brew", NeWestReView, May 1977, pp. 3-10. Lewis, Maggie. "A Fantasy for Baseball Lovers", Christian Science Monitor, July 9, 1982, p. 14. Murray, Don. "Search for the Unflawed Diamond", NeWest ReView, January 1985, pp. 6-7. . "Butterfly Winter", Canadian Literature, No. 119 (Winter 1988), pp. 141-43. New, W.H. "Canada", Journal of Commonwealth Literature, XIII, 2 (1978), 52-53. Plummer, William. "In Another League", Newsweek, August 23, 1982, p. 64. Randall, Neil. ''Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling", Modern Fiction Studies, XXXIII (Spring 1987), 173-83. Wasserman, Jerry. "Fantasy Lives", Canadian Literature, No. 91 (Winter 1981), pp. 106-9. Weatherbe, Steve. "Kinsella Conquers America", Western Report, June 5, 1989, p. 41. Zwarun, Suzanne. "Who's on First?", Quest, September 1983, pp. 51-58.

A Note on the Contributor Don Murray teaches Modern Literature at the University of Regina. He has published articles on Canadians Timothy Findley and W.P. Kinsella, as well as on numerous British and American authors.

Margaret Hollingsworth 120 by Cynthia Zimmerman Margaret Hollingsworth immigrated to Canada in 1968. As soon as she began writing in this country the reality of her immigrant status shaped her perspective and permeated her work. Because she experienced herself as an "Englishspeaking alien",1 the central characters in her early plays appear as foreigners, outsiders, intruders. The sense of place tends to be powerfully felt in these plays; the location chosen, one Hollingsworth has known herself. In fact, each location can be seen as another way-station in the search for a home: Home comes in again and again in my work. It's about relating to the place that you're in and finding a place for yourself in a foreign environment, which is what I'm doing. Feeling out of context, out of place, motivates me and informs my work. Without it I wouldn't be writing anywhere.2

Or, as she put it in her short story "Widecombe Fair": "Home meant limits, security, love - a barrier against the outside. Home meant familiarity."3 So one finds in her work, especially in the early pieces, a kind of oscillation: the yearning for a place of one's own, the place where one is at home, and the restlessness, or the remoteness, of one who continues to feel a foreigner. Rarely are the details themselves personal, retelling tales of the writer's life; rather it is "the essence", the emotional core which, as Hollingsworth says, is "extremely revealing".4 Her first plays, Bushed (March 1973) and Operators (April 1974), were both written while she was doing her Master's at UBC. Both plays are set in a small northern town surrounded by a vast expanse of forest and are born of her experience of living in northern Ontario. She said she wanted to write "what that town did for me."5 Bushed takes place in a rundown laundromat which the stage directions say "need not be too realistic" (p. 1). In the background three unidentified women "wash, fold, chat and wait in a slow rhythmic sort of ballet-mime " The light on them is muted, the impression is imprecise, but the light on the foreground is very bright, glaring. It shines on two unemployed, middle-aged, immigrant men. One is tall, one

small; one a widower, the other a bachelor; one had worked for the CN trains while his companion had worked "the bush bush" (p. 10). Now both are "tuckered out" (p. 10) and so they fill their time exchanging memories, complaints, and insults. They remain on the fringe and it is clear what they are shut out from: domestic routines, the warmth and conviviality of sharing chores, the communal rhythms expressed by the mime of the group in the background. Their potency, their male pride has been whittled down to a secret bravado; 115

exhausted, like drones, they've been used up by the wilderness. Isolation and loneliness, boredom and frustration, are also central to Operators. Even more straightforwardly realistic in presentational style than Bushed, it is set in the claustrophobic garden shed adjacent to the factory where the women work the night shift. Jerri, the new employee, comes to the shed to share "break" with Sara and Christmas, two older women who have been a working couple for years. The title of the piece suggests both "mechanical functionaries"6 and skilled manipulators; either possibility is in ironic contrast to the emotional dynamics of the play itself. During the course of the play, Jerri - an intense former hippie - discovers through her probing that these women have continued a ritualized kind of intimacy for years and yet know almost nothing of each others' "real" lives. Shocked by their insularity and driven by her own frustrations, Jerri seems to enjoy provoking them. They, in turn, find her lifestyle incomprehensible and her openness shocking, especially her lurid description of sexual encounters. The two turn on Jerri, but Jerri proves the catalyst to their own confessions and revelations. With the mystery about Christmas's life gone and finding the facts bitterly disappointing, Sara is about to walk out when Jerri, referring to her own past lesbian relationship, says: "I walked out. I didn't have the guts - she wanted me and I didn't have the guts" (p. 40). Then Jerri leaves and Sara joins Christmas at the table. It is possible that the intruder has helped the couple find a more honest way of loving each other. The unconventional Jerri, a woman living on the edge, reappears in a more developed form in several subsequent plays. But what Jerri understands and then is able to communicate is an empathic appreciation of the desperate importance of relationships, especially for people "locked in situations like that."7 Her keen awareness is partly because she is the outsider, the foreigner. The outsider's intense need of connection, the yearning for a home which will be "a barrier against the outside",8 becomes a natural partner to Hollingsworth's focus on the female experience. The play which followed Operators, Alii Alii Oh (March 1977), was commissioned and first produced by the nowdefunct Toronto feminist group Redlight Theatre. It was the third in a program called Shorts, and each one-act by a woman presented an intense emotional encounter between two women. In Alii Alii Oh, as in Operators, the location is remote, the isolation keenly felt (in fact, in this play it is taken even further, into madness), the struggle for connection central, and the main character not unlike Jerri in some important ways. Alii Alii Oh takes place in the kitchen of an island farmhouse. Its owner, Muriel, a dairy farmer, brought Alii here a year previous to be her partner and helpmate. When the play begins, Alii is alone preparing preserves and talking in a distracted manner, "with short pauses as her mind leaps from thought to thought. She speaks with a tone of irony and self-deprecation. Muriel's speech, in contrast, is far more clipped and matter-of-fact" (p. iv). Muriel is a competent, solid, take-charge kind of person. Although agitated at the moment because one of her cows is experiencing difficult

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labour, she, like Alli's veterinarian husband Karl, is good with animals, likes order, seems calm. Alii does not like animals, even after all this time, and her long monologues reveal that she is deeply troubled. Alii speaks of her soul-destroying marriage to Karl: how she had functioned as wife and mother ("I was just the one who buttered the bread. Passed the sardines. Poured the coffee"[p. 6]), how her husband had refused to let her get a job, and how, finally, her humiliating him at a banquet had resulted in her confinement in a rest home. This, Karl proclaimed, was "brought on by the change of life" (p. 11): "Such manifestations of unnatural behavior are not uncommon among women of her age" (p. 1). Alii and Muriel met at the clinic. Initially Muriel was there to visit Wendy, the lady who preceded Alii in Muriel's affections but who proved "too emotional" (p. 6) and slit her wrists. Alii, calmed by Muriel's assurances and strong presence, goes home with her but, as she puts it: "I didn't know who I was I didn't know whether I could function"(p. 19). Unfortunately, Alii also proves "too emotional". For some reason Muriel's admonishments and directives stop working. Alii does not respond to "I'm going to teach you to love this place Alii" (p. 4); "We're going to shake you out of it Alii. You won't know yourself (p. 5); "Alii, you're as solid as a rock" (p. 13). At some level Alii is identifying with the cow that is not functioning properly, and so Muriel's remark - "If she doesn't put out this time we'll get rid of her. Shoot her or something" (p. 2) - is particularly callous. At the play's conclusion Muriel is pressing Alii to help with the birthing; Alii says, "after a certain age women and cows must comfort each other. Isn't that so?" (p. 19), grabs a carving knife, and rushes out. When she returns, without the knife, she phones her doctor at the clinic: "tell him I'm coming back. Tell him I'm cowed" (p. 21). Islands (February 1983), written as a one-act sequel to Alii Alii Oh (although it can be performed alone), was first performed with it in January 1986. Focusing on Muriel this time, it presents the return of Alii to the island six months later. Now the animals are gone and it seems Muriel has forged for herself a life of solitude and self-sufficiency. This is her island; the visits by her mother and by Alii are experienced as upsetting intrusions into her separate space. Muriel tries to explain to her mother her decision to create a business on her own, "Without interference from outside" (p. 126). She understands her separateness as a survival strategy. For her it is a personal defence against her own failures and a way of adjusting to how things really are: "Whenever you turn on the radio every other song's about love and togetherness, and meanwhile everyone's freaking out" (p. 128). Muriel says she feels "centred for the first time", to which her mother responds, "Yes. Self-centred." It is at this point that Alii shows up unexpectedly. She is immediately aware that things have changed, and it is not simply that Muriel has gotten rid of all the animals. Muriel never once visited her at the asylum, Alii says, nor answered her letters. Released from the institution, Alii now wants to come "home"; she has nowhere else to go. But Alii is clearly still in bad shape psychologically. Talking non-stop about

herself and her horrendous hospital experiences, she is abrasive, offensive, and insensitive. Caught in the middle and feeling suddenly overwhelmed by the emotional demands made by both these women, Muriel rushes out of the house. Rose and Alii know it is they who must leave. Alii Alii Oh and Islands are interesting as a pair of plays. The most realistic in presentational style of her plays to date - although the extensive monologues and pervasive animal imagery do tend to give a surreal quality to Alii Alii Oh they share an emotional intensity and a clarity of affect that is powerful in production. But their most profound connection is thematic. The subject is the reaction to an intimate relationship. Here it is seen from the point of view of the two participants, both of whom represent an extreme response. Alii represents the loss or surrender of self to the union; consequently she doesn't know who she is or what to do if she's not Karl's wife, or her children's mother, or Muriel's partner. Her madness is the culmination of her confusion about identity and self-definition; it explains her lack of motivation, her depressive state, her inability to do anything, and her total insensitivity to the emotional needs of others. In Islands Muriel's mother had made the conventional kind of marriage, and is eager to do so again. Although a manipulative and narrow-minded woman, she has found a way that suits her need to cater to the dominant other and yet keep hold of herself. Alii has not. Muriel, wounded by the failure of past intimacies, now wants no more. Muriel is the opposite extreme to Alii: she will not lose herself because she will not give herself. Her insularity is a defence. The fact of her lesbianism seems essentially irrelevant.9 Ultimately then, these can be seen as companion pieces about the separateness of each person, about isolation and islands both physical and psychic. The plays are a variation on Hollingsworth's ongoing themes, presenting, as they do, both the yearning for a home and intimate connection, and its obverse: the claustrophobia, the sense of invasion, or the loss of self when home comes to feel like a prison. This oscillation between separation and connection is also central to Mother Country. Directed by Tarragon Theatre's Bill Glassco, Hollingsworth's first full-length play opened in February 1980. At one level Mother Country is the story of a dominating, castrating mother who has kept her children dependent and the great anger these children need in order to be able to leave home. The play explores the psychological dimensions of family ties. It can also be seen as a kind of morality play: these ties are too restricting and must be broken. At another level it is a play about culture and country, about expatriates making themselves at home by recreating the Mother Country which might nourish them but deprives their offspring. According to Hollingsworth, her play suggests that is part of the problem with this country, that we're still tied to the apronstrings yet we deny it we keep trying to cut ties with the Mother Country, just as the daughters do . . . literally sever the connection if we can, becoming delighted both when we think that it's achieved and when it isn't.10

Coming to a better understanding of this oscillation may permit us, says Hollingsworth, to move on. Of all her plays, Ever Loving has proved to be the one most popular, best known, and most produced. Ever Loving premiered at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria, British Columbia, in November 1980, directed by James Roy. By the time it opened on the Belfry stage, the original script, entitled War Brides, had been radically changed during intensive workshops in the spring of 1979. The workshop material was extensively revised and then retitled. Since then, Ever Loving has been remounted in Montreal (1981), Halifax (1982), Toronto (1983), Vancouver (1983), and on Vancouver Island (1989). First produced in the same year as Mother Country, but later, Ever Loving has interesting thematic links to it. Both are about immigrants, both are about connecting to the place you are in. But whereas Mother Country's focus is on leaving home, Ever Loving's is on adapting to the new one. Written after Mother Country, Ever Loving is a deliberate exploration of the experience of dislocation. Hollingsworth says, "I finally pinned down my sense of smallness in the vast outside and the sense of the outside always impinging and my having to make a small space that can be mine."11 Ever Loving presents the stories of three European women who come to Canada as war brides. The women are of differing class and nationality: Ruth is Scottish, a fishmonger's daughter; Diana is an upper-class English woman (her father is going to be mayor); and Luce is from an affluent Milanese family. The script traces their courtships with their soldier lovers, their journeys to Canada to be reunited with their husbands, and their lives until 1970. What these women share is the strong wish to leave their present circumstances, a tremulous excitement about emigrating, and great romantic hopes for marriages with men they hardly know. By incorporating brief enactments of their particular fantasies, the play makes clear the enormous gap between what each one imagines and what they in fact experience. In all three cases, remaining loving proves difficult. Act I ends with each couple in a firm embrace, full of optimism for their life together. The play concludes in 1970 at a supper club in Niagara Falls - the site for honeymooners, where again the couples are embracing. But it is twenty-five years later and romantic hopes have been entirely deflated. This is no portrait of marital bliss; rather it is "variations on the marriage theme. Submission, detachment, and divorce."12 While characterization and dialogue are carefully naturalistic in Ever Loving, structurally the play is very complicated. Composed of thirty-eight short, swift scenes which move back and forth in time, the script covers the years 1938 to 1970, is set in varying locations in different parts of the country, and enacts something of the characters' internal world through a number of brief fantasy scenes. Ever Loving spotlights similar moments in three separate stories. The split focus is even-handed and consistently maintained. Realistic costume and contemporaneous music serve as "quick indicators of change of period and leaps in time" (p. 34). Ever Loving, like almost all of Pollings worth's plays which precede it, is written from a female point of view. By 117

that I mean that the central characters are women and that the central issues and concerns are theirs. The themes of isolation, alienation, and the need of and the disappointment with a relationship are developed with the emphasis clearly placed on the woman's experience. The female point of view is even more marked here, for while men are included, the author's sympathy is obviously with the women, who prove, in every case, braver, stronger, and more admirable than their partners. Perhaps guilty of some wilful blindness during the courtship phase, these war brides pay dearly for believing what they want to hear. As immigrants and as women they are entirely dependent on their relationships. In later plays the woman character's dependency on a man remains a focusing concern, and in many of them the male figure continues to be de-idealized or physically absent or both. The female orientation, however, is more pervasive than simply affecting character portrayal; it also influences fundamental attitudes and ways of perceiving. According to Dorothy Parker, Hollingsworth is "interested in a female' approach to problems, which takes the form of explorations rather than answers or solutions".13 In other words, there is no father in her plays who knows best, nor is there a sense that behind the scenes the playwright fills this role. Hollingsworth has herself gone further and stated that she suspects there is a female way of writing: Male drama she describes as "linear, with conflict." Female drama, with the characteristics she values, "has anew way of looking at material. It's unlinear, concerned with getting inside people's heads, into the thought process— there's an earthy rhythmic sense to a lot of female writing, an effort to be more universal, to find a wholeness, a diffusing quality."14

Certainly plays by men may have many or all of these traits. It is also possible that they are more consistently present in plays by women. Regardless of the usefulness of making such distinctions by gender, the focus on women, the psychological orientation, the use of an unlinear structure which emphasizes rhythm and chooses a diffuse effect are qualities Hollingsworth values in her own writing. Ever Loving is Rollings worth's last play which focuses on the immigrant experience. From Bushed to Ever Loving her plays present the attempt to secure a place, establish a space for oneself, but they do so from more than the expected, single perspective. Evident is not only the outsider's yearning for connection, home, intimacy, but also the flipside - the vantage point of the wilful exile - as seen in Islands with the resistance to encroachment, the retreat to islands physical and psychic, the use of isolation and withdrawal as a defence. And in all of these plays, even when they point to the price of attachment - as in Mother Country or Ever Loving - making connections remains essential. This is also true of her next full-length play, War Babies (January 1984), but the two mini-dramas which precede it - Diving (March 1983) and The Apple in the Eye (1983) - are darker and more surreal. In these the fantasies of the woman on the edge, the Alii figure, take over the play. Diving and The Apple in the Eye are short one-acts set on a bare stage, with a single female character who monologues her own stream of consciousness. A dominating male 118

presence is suggested through the use of an offstage voice. Deftly and powerfully both plays evoke the psychic states of these daydreamers. As precursors to her most recent full-length play, War Babies, these mini-dramas are significant for several reasons. First, it is clear why Ann Saddlemyer calls these surreal performance pieces "challenges for directors":15 it is easier to imagine them enacted for radio (in fact The Apple in the Eye was originally written for radio) than it is to imagine them staged. Second, they alert us to the centrality of fantasy in Hollingsworth's portrayals: from the romantic fantasies in Ever Loving, to the bizarre ruminations of Alii, Viveca, and Gemma, to the creative use of fantasy by the playwright Esme, the protagonist of War Babies. Initially an adjunct in Ever Loving, fantasy is the heart of the portraits of Alii, Viveca, and Gemma and, with Esme, the fantasy materials become an elaborate play-within-the play (hereafter identified as the PWP) which is as central to the structure of the work as is the play's adjacent "reality". Finally, while the politics of relationships have been a theme in every play, the outsider motif has altered. These protagonists are not immigrants and yet they continue to feel marginalized, invalidated - they are still struggling to locate their "rightful" place. As Ann Wilson succinctly puts it, these women, "like all of Hollingsworth's women - perhaps all women - must negotiate [their] way through a male world from which [they are] alienated".16 So, as the immigrant/outsider perspective recedes, the feminist comes into sharper focus. Psychically it is similar terrain. In War Babies, Esme, a playwright, is pregnant at fortytwo; her husband, Colin, is a war correspondent who, she claims, "feeds on war" (p. 166). For fifteen years they have had a liberated marriage supportive of equal opportunity and shared responsibility. But now biological imperatives threaten the balance of power. The title refers not only to the apparent contradiction between making war and making babies, but also to the domestic conflict, the "war games" characteristic of their relationship. Esme's creation, her play, is another child of their conflict. Apart from its violent, shocking conclusion, the plot of the PWP is the stuff of soap opera. The characters are all from Esme's current life but now her imagination offers up the distortions and exaggerations of her unconscious. Her fears about her marriage, her motherhood, and her career are now embodied. The story of the PWP is that a highly neurotic, house-bound Esme becomes aware of her husband's illicit affair. She decides to escape her confines in the most macho, flamboyant way she can imagine. Using Colin's car and dressed in his clothes, she robs a bank, then leaves him in bed with the hold-up gun. The PWP has been interpreted as a kind of reversal - now he is trapped and she is out doing violence in the world.17 War Babies is a highly ambitious and complicated play in both its form and content. Using a non-linear chronology, presenting a multi-layered reality with a realistic frame-play adjacent to a surrealistic PWP, the play requires careful decisions regarding staging and casting. The constant juxtaposition of the actual and the imagined reveals a complex connection between the creator's biography and her created

fiction, and also introduces provocative notions about how creativity works. Hollingsworth has said "War Babies is a play about writing; a play about the decision to have or not have a baby."18 To continue the analogy, once conceived the offspring seems to grow all by itself unaffected by the hopes or fears of its author. War Babies engages a number of other significant issues as well: parenting and late pregnancy, the politics of relationships and the battle between the sexes, war and its reverberations for "the big lake and the small pond" (p. 180). These are different ideas, and, ultimately, the play is undermined by its own ambitiousness. There is simply too much going on, too much density of meaning; the multiplicity becomes confusing, the complexity overwhelming. "[It] tries to do too much in too little time."19 Subsequent to the 1984 production of War Babies, Rollings worth's next major work was a script commissioned by John Neville, artistic director of the Stratford Festival. Set in the Middle East, The Green Line of the title refers to the borderline between the Christian and Muslim sectors of Beirut. Unfortunately, the exciting possibility of mounting a play at Stratford never materialized. Hollingsworth continued her affiliation with those small companies, like the feminist collective Nightwood Theatre, which were supportive of her work. Nightwood Theatre (the producer of War Babies) and other fringe Toronto theatres did workshop productions of the plays that followed. While these were open to the public, they were done on a small budget in small theatre spaces. In 1988 Hollingsworth decided to publish four of the scripts herself in a collection called Endangered Species, the title cleverly alluding not only to her protagonists but also to the survival of the plays. The four plays are short, intense, surprising, and offbeat. They represent a range of presentational styles: two nonnaturalistic, absurd pieces; a clown play; and one of nightmare realism. They share their feminist orientation and their focus on the experience of women. According to Hollingsworth: All the plays are preoccupied with male/female relationships. I am looking at the ways in which women have been marginalized. Almost all the female characters are in a state of flux. They are caught in inappropriate relationships, and the question of what is "appropriate" arises, (p. 7)

In the most powerful play in the collection, It's only hot for two months in Kapuskasing, the protagonist is suddenly pulled into the middle of a friend's inappropriate, bizarre relationship only to discover it closely mirrors her own. Since she is overwrought to start with, the experience pushes her over the edge. What is communicated to the audience or reader is a heightened mood state - the tense unease of nightmare where what begins realistically becomes increasingly alien, increasingly dangerous. The play is framed by interrogation scenes - the protagonist is being questioned by the police. The creation of this kind of intense, psychologically provocative, and mysteriously alien landscape is Hollingsworth's forte. This collection makes clear that Hollingsworth is continuing to explore the various technical possibilities of her

craft. She has experimented with length, with structure (including the use of a framing device, a play-within-a-play, multiple focus and episodic structure), and with style a blend of realism and surrealism seeming to suit her best. It also reveals her continuing desire to present emotional realities, not simply the external ones, and to give the audience access to the inner world of her complicated characters. Her affinity is for unsettling psychic events or circumstances as experienced by female characters who are trying to "make sense of the situations in which they find themselves" (p. 8). The heroines of Endangered Species are in one way or another displaced persons, marginalized immigrants in a man's world. Hollingsworth writes with a unique and distinctive voice. She claims she often tries to suppress the surreal images and black humour which come naturally to her since, as she says, "directors have found it difficult to find a style or a way to interpret these elements in my work."20 But her most interesting plays have an emotional power in part derived from their psychological density, their enigmatic and oblique character. Her unusual work deserves greater visibility. In spite of her obvious talent and her considerable efforts, the comment she made in 1986 unfortunately still applies: "It seems that so few people have heard of me, and I'm an established playwright. What does that mean for the women that have less of a profile than I do?"21 1

"Widecombe Fair**, Room of One's Own, IX (August 1984), 48 "Margaret Hollingsworth**, in R. Wallace and C. Zimmerman, The Work: Conversations with English-Canadian Playwrights (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982). 3 "Widecombe Fair**, p. 49. 4 The Work, p. 93. 5 Ibid., p. 95. 6 Dorothy Parker, "Alienation and Identity: The Plays of Margaret Hollingsworth**, Canadian Literature, No. 118 (Autumn 1988), p. 98. 7 The Work, p. 96. 8 "Widecombe Fair**, p. 49. 9 Dorothy Parker argues that Muriel*s lesbianism gives her strength and independence as an individual (Parker, p. 101). 10 The Work, pp. 97-98. 11 Ibid., p. 93. 12 Sylvia Spring, "Ever Loving - Is that all there is?** Broadside, II, No. 8 (June 1981), 14. 13 Parker, p. 97. 14 Lloyd Dykk, "Drama with the feminine touch**, Vancouver Sun, January 25, 1984. 15 Ann Saddlemyer, Introduction to Willful Acts (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1985), p. 14. 16 Ann Wilson, "Willful Acts: Five Plays", Canadian Drama/L'Art dramatique canadien, XII, No. 2 (1986), 381. 17 Parker, p. 110. 18 Rina Fraticelli, "Willful Acts: Five Plays by Margaret Hollingsworth*', Canadian Theatre Review, XLVII (Summer 1986), 150. 19 Ray Conlogue, "Shuttling between layers of reality**, Globe and Mail, March 4, 1987. 20 Author's Note, Poppycock program. 21 Quoted in Jon Kaplan, "Double dose of Hollingsworth**, Now, V, No. 18 (January 9-15, 1986), 9. 2

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Chronology 1939

1956 1959 1960-62 1962-63 1963-66 1966-67 1968

1971 1972 1973

1974

1977

1979 1980

1981 1983

1984 1985

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Born in Sheffield, England, the only child of working-class parents, Nellie Potts and George Hollingsworth. Although her parents move to London when she is an adolescent, the family frequently returns to Sheffield. Leaves school at sixteen and begins work as a laboratory assistant, determined to become a scientist. Takes training as a librarian at Loughborough College. Works for a London publishing firm. Travels to Italy where she stays for a year. Works in various libraries and then, in 1966, travels to the Middle and Far East. Works as a foreign correspondent to support her travels. Lives in Japan for a year and teaches English. Immigrates to Canada, landing in Montreal. Her first job opportunity takes her to Thunder Bay, Ontario, where she spends four years as a librarian in the public library. Receives her Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from Thunder Bay's Lakehead University. Moves to Vancouver where she Snrols in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of British Columbia. Bushed co-produced by the New Play Centre (NPC) and the Vancouver Playhouse, directed by Jane Heyman and David Latham. Produced as part of the NPC's du Maurier Festival of one-acts. Completes her M.F.A. in theatre and creative writing. Operators produced as part of NPC's du Maurier Festival, directed by Pam Hawthorn. Moves to Galiano Island where she continues to write and work as an editor and freelance journalist. Alii Alii Oh commissioned and produced by the Redlight Theatre in Toronto. Part of a program called Shorts, it was directed by Francine Volker. Revised version produced in May of the same year by Vancouver's NPC during its du Maurier Festival, directed by Jane Heyman. War Games nominated for Actra Best Writer of Original Radio Drama. Mother Country premiferes at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre in February, directed by Bill Glassco. Ever Loving premieres in November at the Belfry Theatre, Victoria, B.C., directed by James Roy. Moves to Nelson, B.C., to teach creative writing at David Thompson University Centre. Stays two years. Toronto production of Ever Loving, directed by Graham Harley, is a runner-up for the 1983 Chalmers Award. Islands produced by NPC, du Maurier Festival, directed by Kate Weiss. Diving produced by NPC, directed by Larry Lillo. The Apple in the Eye produced at UBC for the Women and Words Conference, directed by Bonnie Worthington. Hollingsworth moves to Toronto, Ontario. War Babies premi&res in January at the Belfry Theatre in Victoria, a co-production of the Belfry and NPC, directed by James Roy. The anthology Willful Acts is published by Toron-

1986

1987

1988

1989

to's Coach House Press. Includes The Apple in the Eye', Ever Loving; Diving; Islands; and War Babies. War Babies nominated for the 1985 Governor General's Award. Responsible Party wins an Actra nomination for Best Writer of Original Radio Drama. As part of their R & D Festival the Theatre Centre in Toronto stages a workshop version of It's only hot for two months in Kapuskasing, directed by Francine Volker. Spends the winter as writer-in-residence at Concordia University in Montreal. Alii Alii Oh (a revised version) and Islands produced together by Tomorrow's Eve Theatre Company at the Tarragon Theatre, directed by Randy Maertz. Prim and Duck, Mamma and Frank staged as a workshop production by Nightwood Theatre, directed by Mary Vingoe. Spends the summer as writer-in-residence at the Stratford Festival Theatre; writes The Green Line. Poppycock staged as a workshop production by the Theatre Resource Centre in the Extra Space at the Tarragon Theatre, directed by JoAnn Mclntyre. Writes the film script Smiling Under Water for Metaphor Productions of Toronto. Creates Act One Press and publishes the anthology Endangered Species (Coach House Press), which includes the one-acts The House that Jack Built\ It's only hot for two months in Kapuskasing\ Poppycock, and Prim and Duck, Mamma and Frank. Commissioned by the Nanaimo Festival of Vancouver Island to write a play for their 1990 season. Called Alma Victoria, it is the story of the career and murder of nineteenth-century architect Frances Rattenbury. Her adaptation of the J.G. Ballard story, The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D, is a finalist for Actra's award for Best Writer of a Dramati-

zation. Appointed writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario in London. Smiling Under Water published (Lazara Press). The collection of twelve short stories includes many which have been previously published, among them "English-Speaking Aliens" and " Widecombe Fair".

Comments by Margaret Hollingsworth I'm fairly objective any way. I tend to stand backin life. I wouldn't be an outsider living in a culture which is not my own if that weren't the way I approached life anyway. So I approach characters and plays with a sense of distance. Interview with Jason Sherman, What, No. 8 (January/February 1987), n.p. She'd finally recognized that she was looking for a new nationality fifteen years ago, in Japan, but had never dreamed that the choice would fall on Canada. . . . Home. What a strange word. In a hot tub in the Tibet of the Far East she felt more at home than she had felt in years. Home meant limits, security, love - a barrier against the outside. Home meant familiarity. "Widecombe Fair",/ta?m of One's Own, IX (August 1984), 48-49. Too much Canadian playwrighting [sic] is heartwarming; we're such romantics in this country. I'm not. The rhythms of a play are mine -1 feel them strongly from inside and don't chart them before I start to write. Once I have the right rhythm for a character, I can see the figure work and move in my head. Everything, what they do or say, comes from that rhythm. But they're all part of me, too, even if they don't seem to be. Interview with Jon Kaplan, Now, V (January 9-15,1986), 9. My work has got a surreal level to it. I can compare it to Magic Realism in that it's got that something extra. That's the way I see life. I see it in a very surreal way but rooted in practical Realism. Canadian plays tend to be stylized in form rather than content, I think. Mine are stylized right through and absolutely packed with detail. The work goes in all directions. It finally does come together, or, if it doesn't, then I abandon the play. I tend to write a lot about people on a knife edge, about an emotional world where one leap in the wrong direction is going to be catastrophic. I suppose that must be self-revealing in some way. "Margaret Hollingsworth", in Cynthia Zimmerman and Robert Wallace, The Work: Conversations with EnglishCanadian Playwrights (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982), pp. 92-93. I'm more interested in making it understood on the subliminal level than on the conscious level. Interview with Jason Sherman, What, No. 8 (January/February 1987), n.p.

What does a woman who wants to write a play from even a mildly feminist perspective do? She must either work within the system and take her play to an established theatre (in which case she will probably have written a historical drama which is almost entirely unthreatening)... or she will decide to work outside the system. But there is only one professional woman's theatre in English Canada that I know of and its members, for reasons of mutual support and growth, have chosen to work mainly collectively. (Many women's theatres have taken this route, and it leaves women who wish to develop their craft in some other way with few alternatives.) The small fringe theatres are often (though not always), more open to women's work, but there's no money for the playwright, and no real resources to develop or produce a play that is at all ambitious in terms of cast or structure. "Why We Don't Write", Canadian Theatre Review, No. 43 (Summer 1985), pp. 25-26. I wish that critics would have some kind of understanding of where playwrights are coming from, what they're attempting to achieve. And perhaps a little bit of respect for the fact they've been at it for quite a long time. The Work, p. 99.

Comments on Margaret Hollingsworth Her earlier plays to be published in Canada, Operators (1975) and Bushed (1981), demonstrate her skill in creating both situations which hover between ordinariness and tense unease, and characters who hide their vulnerability under aggressive eccentricity, and who are, typically, amusing and disturbing, sharp and alert, attuned to disaster. John Astington, "[Letters in Canada 1985:] Drama", University of Toronto Quarterly, LVI (1986), 61. As play has succeeded play [Hollingsworth] has transcended the literal and narrative limitations of realism by increasingly complex psychological exploration. Time has acquired new flexibility in her drama; space has been endowed with more subjective meaning; and language has begun to express the irrational qualities of the mind. Her early realistic plays move formally from beginning to end, but once she abandons temporal coordinates, the artistic transaction with the audience can go in any direction and include anything. And this liberation, linked with her interest in depth psychology, seems to have stimulated a naturally surrealist predisposition. Dorothy Parker, "Alienation and Identity: The Plays of Margaret Hollingsworth", Canadian Literature, No. 118 (Autumn 1988), pp. 97,111-12. Hollingsworth's War [Babies] is significant in its attempt to merge domestic realism with political events, relationships with the outside world. . . . Using a play written by the protagonist within the play, Hollingsworth explores how men are hooked into violence so that they find it hard to deal with ordinary life, to become involved with birth and the home; conversely she explores how domesticity can have a numbing effect on women. Multi-layered, lyrical and provocative, War [Babies] has yet to receive a satisfactory

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production. . . . As its playwright heroine says, "Theatre's best for showing pain, but nobody wants to pay to see pain." Eleanor Wachtel, "Two Steps Backward from the One Step Forward", Canadian Theatre Review, No. 43 (Summer 1985), p. 20. All of these plays cry out to be acted; each one provides superb roles for performers and striking challenges for directors who are not content to take the easy way out. . . . While written with stylishness and wit from a woman's point of view, these plays are not rigidly feminist; although rooted in place, they are not restrictively regional. They speak both of Canada and the human condition. Above all, they present a welcome, unique voice in Canadian theatre; they are indeed Willful Acts. Ann Saddlemyer, Introduction to Willful Acts (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1985), p. 14. Certainly as a woman, an immigrant to Canada, an artist, and a feminist, Margaret Rollings worth's perspective is several removes from the mainstream of Canadian society, factors which may begin to explain the remarkable neglect of her work by Canadian theatres. Rina Fraticelli, ''Willful Acts: Five Plays by Margaret Hollingsworth", Canadian Theatre Review, No. 47 (Summer 1986), p. 150.

Selected Bibliography Works by Margaret Hollingsworth Stage Plays Alii Alii Oh. Toronto: Playwrights Co-op, 1979. Mother Country. Toronto: Playwrights Co-op, 1980. Operators/Bushed: Two Plays by Margaret Hollingsworth. Toronto: Playwrights Canada, 1981. [Original version of Operators in C. Brissenden, ed., West Coast Plays (Vancouver: Fineglow Plays, 1975).] Willful Acts. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1985. [Includes The Apple in the Eye', Diving', Islands', Ever Loving', and War Babies. Ever Loving also appears in Richard Plant, ed., The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Drama (Markham Ont.: Penguin, 1984).] Endangered Species. Toronto: Act One Press, 1988. [Includes The House that Jack Built', It's only hot for two months in Kapuskasing', Poppycock', Prim and Duck, Mama and Frank.} Radio Plays Join me in Mandalay. CBC: "CBC Playhouse", October 29, 1973. Prairie Drive. CBC: "CBC Playhouse", December 1, 1974. Wayley's Children. CBC: "CBC Playhouse", November 9, 1975. As I Was Saying to Mr. Dideron. CBC: "CBC Playhouse", March 28, 1976. Webster's Revenge. CBC: "Hornby Collection", October 8, 1977.

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Operators. CBC: "Hornby Collection", April 1, 1978. The Apple in the Eye. CBC: "Audience", January 27, 1979. War Games. CBC: "Soundstage", October 28, 1979. Alii Alii Oh. CBC: "Hornby Collection", February 2, 1980. Responsible Party. CBC: "Stereo Theatre", February 17, 1985. Woman on the Wire. CBC: "Sunday Matinee", February 2, 1986. Surreal Landscape. CBC: "State of the Arts", November 22, 1987. The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D [dramatization of J.G. Ballard story]. CBC: "Vanishing Point", November 28, 1988. Television Plays Scene from a Balcony. CBC TV: "Airwaves", July 20,1987. The Last Demise of Julian Whittaker. CBC TV: "Inside Stories", May 22, 1989. Selected Other Writing "Why We Don't Write", Canadian Theatre Review, No. 43 (Summer 1985), pp. 21-27. Smiling Under Water: Short Stories by Margaret Hollingsworth. Vancouver: Lazara Press, 1989. Selected Criticism Astington, John. "[Letters in Canada 1985:] Drama", University of Toronto Quarterly, LVI (1986), 60-68. Fraticelli, Rina. "Readings in Review: Willful Acts" Canadian Theatre Review, No. 47 (Summer 1986), pp. 14951. Kaplan, Jon. "Double Dose of Hollingsworth" [interview], Now, V (January 9-15, 1986), 9. Parker, Dorothy. "Alienation and Identity: The Plays of Margaret Hollingsworth", Canadian Literature, No. 118 (1988), pp. 97-113. Saddlemyer, Ann. Introduction to Willful Acts. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1985, pp. 9-15. Sherman, Jason. "Hollingsworth" [interview], What, No. 8 (January/February 1987), n.p. Wilson, Ann. "Willful Acts: Five Plays", Canadian Drama/ L'Art dramatique canadien, XII, No. 2 (1986), 381-82. Zimmerman, Cynthia. "Margaret Hollingsworth", in Cynthia Zimmerman and Robert Wallace, The Work: Conversations with English-Canadian Playwrights. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982, pp. 90-101. A Note on the Contributor Cynthia Zimmerman teaches Canadian drama at Glendon College, York University. She has written on Canadian theatre for various publishers, including a study of David French for Profiles. She is co-author with Robert Wallace ofThe Work: Conversations with English-Canadian Playwrights (1982). Her current project, part of the Simon and Pierre Canadian Playwrights series, is forthcoming under the title Female Voices and includes a chapter with expanded, more detailed analyses of Margaret Rollings worth's plays as well as chapters on the work of other women playwrights.

Janette Turner Hospital 121 by Elspeth Cameron Janette Turner Hospital presents us with a unique combination of several trends in contemporary literature. Like Norman Mailer and James Baldwin, she is politically engaged in the human-rights concerns that characterized the 1960s and 1970s. Issues such as feminism and the oppression of minorities inform her work. Her writing also reflects a familiarity with elements of existentialism in such writers as Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and - her particular favourite - Jorge Luis Borges. At the same time, the moral themes in her work, along with the powerful rhythms and sensual language she employs, suggest such Old Testament stories as the fall from Eden, Noah's ark, or the various stories about Moses. This unusual, somewhat paradoxical, combination of modem left-wing concerns with both the ambiguities of existentialism and the ethical conviction of Christian tradition and myth is not surprising, given Hospital's background.1 As the overly sheltered child of Christian fundamentalist parents, she was not exposed to mass media information (such as radio broadcasts or newspapers) until she was an adolescent. Instead, she was heavily indoctrinated by frequent family prayers and passionate sermons declaiming eternal truths. This upbringing prepared her well for the academic study of medieval literature she initially took up. But it put her in an unusual situation as an adult writer encountering the wider political world of the United States (including protests against the war in Vietnam, women's liberation and civilrights movements, and concern for Third World oppression) when she moved to Boston after her early marriage to an Australian Methodist minister and theologian. The connections we encounter in her work between the socio-political events that confronted her so freshly and the exotic and mythological portrayal of good and evil reminiscent of biblical stories, were highly unusual in a largely secular generation. In other words, she was predisposed to perceive the political and moral issues of the day, which were being expounded in rhetoric as rousing as that of any fundamentalist preacher, as a further set of parables illustrating a number of philosophical and ethical dilemmas centred on the nature of good and evil.

At first, Hospital's creative writing was secondary to her pursuit of an academic career in English literature at Queen's University in Kingston, where her husband taught comparative religion. It was not until her doctoral studies were well under way in 1978 - when she was thirty-six - that her first two short stories were published.2 "Waiting", which depicts a scene in an Air India Office in Kerala, India, where she had spent four months the previous year with her husband and two children, won the prestigious Atlantic Monthly First 123

Short Story Award in the U.S. The expansion of this story into a full-length novel, The Ivory Swing (1982),3 won Hospital the high-profile Canadian $50,000 Seal First Novel Award. The Ivory Swing is a lush descriptive novel which compares and contrasts the lives of two women: a Canadian narrator, Juliet, whose situation as the wife of a Canadian academic on sabbatical and the mother of two roughly parallels Hospital's in India; and Yashoda, a voluptuous newly widowed Indian woman whose apparently exotic life is envied by the malcontent Juliet. But Juliet soon sees beneath the surface to the austerity of Hindu custom - particularly in its misogynist aspects. Both women are what Hospital repeatedly calls "caged" (75, pp. 15, 17, 19, etc.): an image that will show up again and again in Hospital's later work. Juliet, whose intellectual feistiness, flamboyant style, and aggressive drive to play a part in history have been stifled in Winston (a fictional version of Kingston), fantasizes about many freedoms: sexual, political, and artistic. Yashoda is even worse off than Juliet in Kerala, a place of misguided political demonstrations and a rigid class system which condones the exploitation of servants and the oppression of women. In reference to the novel's title and central image - an elaborately carved ivory swing on which the Hindu god Lord Krishna and his Lady Radha are seated - Juliet observes of herself and Yashoda, "We swing between worlds, always in conflict, always looking for impossible resolutions, destined to uncertainty and dissatisfaction . . . an eternity of going nowhere" (IS, p. 207). According to Hospital, both women are "mutants" (75, p. 18) in women's social evolution. The only route to triumph over this predicament, Hospital suggests, is through art. Though historical realities may be deplorable, their transformation into myth (such as Hindu religious figures) or into art (such as the ivory carving depicting myth) renders them beautiful, universal, and enduring. Myth and art, in other words, compensate for life's painful irreversibility. Hospital's overnight success with The Ivory Swing was tempered by a line of criticism which was to plague her occasionally in the future. Though she was hailed by most critics as a consummate stylist for her descriptive power in rendering the opulent world of Kerala, she was dismissed by others for her Ladies' Home Journal themes and "clich6d," "overblown", and "gushy" prose.4 In her next novel, The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (1984),5 Hospital set herself a number of constraints for both plot and style that counteracted these tendencies. She chose a central character as unlike herself as possible, a seventy-two-yearold retired school principal, and she firmly limited her plot to the hub of a family reunion from which flashbacks radiate outward like spokes in a wheel. Nonetheless, this novel explores some of the same themes as The Ivory Swing, in particular the notion of "the road not taken" (IS, p. 134) and the discontents that are the consequences of civilization. "For every moment of passionate elation", Edward's wise wife, Elizabeth, believes, "there is an equal and opposite cost" (Tiger, p. 241). Her protagonist, the cantankerous old Edward, too comfortable in his respectable marriage, is tormented by a lost era of passion, just as Juliet and Yashoda were. Edward's dubious "achievement" is the fiftieth wed-

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ding anniversary reunion in Boston which rallies his four far-flung children, who, ironically, have been warped in turn by his demands. Each of them suffers severe discontent especially Tory (Victoria; that is, repressed, as in the Victorian era), who battles a consuming mental disorder. The tiger of the title represents what Elizabeth calls "the wildness of the beast within us. At any moment we may move in some primal way, take a mere step in the direction of private desire, stretch an arm: and our claws have left blood in their wake" (Tiger, p. 233). The dramatic structure of this novel, its sombre tone and carefully crafted acceleration to a bizarre and terrifying climax, are reminiscent of Henrik Ibsen's plays (for example, Hedda Gabler) or Ingmar Bergman's movies (for example, Wild Strawberries). Despite Hospital's more controlled approach to this novel, a few patches of purple prose mar the book: "His damned up passion", she writes, for example, "would roar across the retaining wall of his caution, smashing propriety like matchwood, foaming and spuming into magnificent chaos" (Tiger, p. 85). The success of The Tiger in the Tiger Pit, especially in England, the U.S., and Sweden, encouraged Hospital to "go for broke"6 in her next novel. With Borderline (1986),7 Hospital hit her stride as a novelist and produced the book which is her best work to date. Though the theme of "the road not taken" is still present, it is treated both more literally (the novel opens with a real road on which a real moral choice occurs) and more universally (as an ambiguous existential dilemma and a precise political predicament). Borderline was inspired by a newsclip about some hapless Salvadorean refugees who froze to death in a refrigerated meat truck which was abandoned by a panicked driver en route to Canada from Mexico. The plot centres on an art gallery curator, Felicity (a name which ironically means happiness), and Augustine or "Gus" (in reference to St. Augustine), both of whom witness the appalling flight of refugees from a meat truck under inspection at the Canadian border and impulsively rescue the only one who escapes notice. This speechless woman, whom Felicity thinks of as "La Magdalena" because she resembles a Renaissance painting of that name, is later named "La Salvadora" (the saviour), "La Desconocida" (the unknown one), or simply Dolores (sadness) Marquez. As in The Ivory Swing, Hospital compares two women - Felicity and Dolores (happiness and sadness) - but her treatment of the plight of women is here raised both to wider socio-political significance and to the universality of art and myth. Hospital also manages a clever subplot centred on "Gus", the comical womanizer, whose antics parody elements of Dante's Inferno and Paradiso and provide an inverse commentary on the main plot involving Felicity. Structurally, Borderline is "framed" in a way similar to Wuthering Heights, and for similar reasons. Like Lockwood in Emily Bronte's novel, Jean-Marc is a minor character who leads us gently into a story of larger-than-life passions and betrayals. These ultimately transform him from a mere craftsman (pianotuner) into an artist (orchestra conductor). Hospital's suspenseful driving narrative, impeccable timing of episode, deft orchestration of many levels of action and theme, large vision, and adroit creation of dream-like Kafkaesque atmos-

phere make this novel a classic. Her title, Borderline, signals the importance of a theme that always lurks at the fringes of her fiction. Whether the border she refers to lies between countries, generations, sexes, social classes, types of people, or - most importantly - between fantasy and reality, bordercrossing is an existential experience which has profound implications for the meaning of life, the responsibility of the individual, and the role of the artist. As Jean-Marc observes, "the past... is a capricious and discontinuous narrative, and the present an infinite number of fictions" (Borderline, p. 122). Although some critics, such as Silvia Albertazzi,8 have classified Borderline as a postmodernist work, it does not fully warrant the classification. Certainly there are postmodernist elements in the novel, such as the complex structure in which events are juxtaposed to give what Hospital calls a "multiple exposure" effect,9 the interplay of fantasy and reality to the point where reality itself is uncertain, and the way in which characters seem at times to echo or merge with each other in such a way that the philosophical overview of the novel supersedes the delineation of particular characters. But the clarity with which Hospital conveys her moral message about the urgent need for compassion is an ethical stance atypical of postmodernism. Hospital's preoccupation with the philosophical and psychological implications of crossing borders is one of the key themes in her work. Her early experience as a child, when the introverted, self-sufficient fundamentalist world she experienced at home seemed a marked contrast to the world she knew at school, made her unusually aware of compartmentalization as an aspect of living that required different sets of vocabulary, different modes of social interaction, and, indeed, different belief systems. At home, she recalls, she was a sheltered fundamentalist, accepting givens as truths; at school, however, she was an adventurous tomboy, curious about everything. Her move from Australia, with its tropical forests and free-and-easy lifestyle, to Boston, with its sophisticated intellectual and cultural traditions and social formality, and then her further move from Boston to Kingston, with its relatively parochial and puritanical atmosphere, consolidated her early impressions of different worlds with different ground rules. In each place she felt like a different person. In an early statement of this recurring theme, Juliet in The Ivory Swing reflects, "Her life was as segmented as an orange, her fragments held together by the mere rind of her will." It follows that Hospital believes that the symbolic places of the world today are the airports and bus stations, like the Air India Office in her story "Waiting", where people are in transit. For Hospital, the person most typical of contemporary society is the traveller who moves from one country (or distinct setting or state of mind) to another. This being the case, the title of her collection of short stories, Dislocations (1986),10 is succinctly appropriate. This collection pulls together seventeen of Hospital's best short stories written between 1970 and 1986. These stories first appeared in a wide variety of publications in the United States, England, and Australia, as well as in Canada. As the title suggests, many of them deal with travellers. "Moving

Out", for example, uses the sale of a house to explore human resistance to change, but reveals, ironically, that each of us carries inside a world complete in itself. "Ashes to Ashes" juxtaposes the belief systems of a young East Indian bridegroom educated in Boston at M.I.T. and those of the bride his parents have arranged for him in India, an aristocratic East Indian woman with a college degree in English literature. "Port After Port, the Same Baggage" portrays an elderly widow's first trip abroad in the face of her daughters' disapproval. And "The Bloody Past, the Wandering Future" examines the nature of change as it disrupts more than one generation. The finest story in Dislocations is the enigmatic "After the Fall". It dramatizes a mysterious link between the gradual decay of a spectacular Christmas amaryllis bloom and a woman artist's progressively eerie obsession with recording each detail of the flower's decline and fall. The "fall" itself could be interpreted as her fall from reality into the "little madness" that is art; or it could suggest her fall from a sort of Eden of youth and happiness with her husband into alienation. Although Hospital's stories are well crafted, they seem like experimental exercises or stylistic set-pieces compared to the novels into which some of them were eventually incorporated as chapters. Unlike Mavis Gallant or Alice Munro, for whom the short story seems the ideal genre, Hospital excels in the novel, which gives more scope for large rhythmic patterns and structural complexity. Hers is a large-scale imagination (she once said she often feels "like an eagle in a very small cage").11 Despite her claim that her short stories are not "an apprenticeship to the novel",12 her finest work requires more elbow-room than the short story offers. Hospital's most recent novel, Charades (1989),13 like Borderline, is a multidimensional work (it has been termed "maximalist").14 But unlike Borderline, which is essentially a socio-political parable intended - among other things - to jolt the reader out of complacency, Charades is a bold experiment which attempts to yoke the truths of science to the truths of art. As writer-in-residence at M.I.T. since 1985, Hospital has revelled in a sophisticated kind of border-crossing in her lectures and class discussions, as her literary theories have been challenged by students trained in science. Charades draws on this experience by portraying an erotic relationship between a beautiful Australian student, Charade Ryan, and her Boston physics professor, Koenig, who is a candidate for the Nobel Prize. As the name, "Charade", and the novel's episodic structure suggest, the novel is a modernday version of the Arabian Thousand and One Nights featuring Charade as the seductive Scheherazade, who delays her execution by entrancing the king with stories. With equally compelling charm, Charade holds Koenig spellbound with tales from her past: her mother, Bea, "Slut of the Tamborine Rain Forest"; her father, Nicolas Trueman, whom she has never met; the tortured figure of Verity Ashkenazy; and many others. These tales of complex interplay - some fantastical, some real - from past and present, set variously in Australia, the U.S., and Canada, ultimately constitute a series of different perspectives on the philosophical and aesthetic 125

truths which continue to engage Hospital. As the characters' allegorical names suggest (Verity = truth; Koenig = King; Charade = acted role; Trueman = true man), what begins as a story rooted in a particular time and place finally attains the level of timeless myth. And the enduring truths of Hospital's created myth are, in turn, revealed as essentially the same as the truths of science. For Hospital, all truths - whether artistic, psychological, philosophical, scientific, emotional, or logical - are fragments of some all-encompassing whole. This amalgamation of many kinds of truth into one vast truth is highly unusual in contemporary literature. Whereas most writers today believe that truth is relative, Hospital ultimately has faith in some absolute entity - not precisely the Christian God, but something akin to that. Though she is no longer Christian in a simple way, her academic and creative explorations have led her to a sophisticated and complex confirmation of a hierarchical belief system which could be called religious. As a highly original parable about human nature and "truth" - whether aesthetic or scientific - the novel Charades is brilliant. Too often, however, the narrative momentum, which is so compelling in Borderline, lapses in Charades to produce a series of self-contained virtuoso set-pieces. In these, Hospital displays stylistic facility with a wide range of subjects. Her comical tale of the nesting habits of the scrub-turkey told in Aussie slang is hilarious; her serious scientific musings on Heisenberg's theories are pristine and elegant; her eerie account of Charade's childhood discovery of a body slowly decomposing in a swamp is morbidly fascinating. Like many of her characters, Hospital continues to move - not with ease - but as an expatriate with a sense of "dislocation" - back and forth among the three countries (Australia, the U.S., and Canada) which have influenced her and honoured her with various awards. Her disappointment that the reception of Charades in Canada was less enthusiastic than that in either Australia or the U.S. has, for the moment, resulted in her reconsideration of Canada as her main literary base. Because of this "internationality", Hospital cannot be considered a strictly "Canadian" writer, any more than she can be considered an "Australian" or an "American" writer. Her work is best seen as prominent among that of a new breed of writers who emerged in Canada after writers such as Laurence, Davies, and Atwood - more nationalistic in outlook - had established themselves in the 1960s and 1970s. Hospital is most accurately grouped with writers like Ceylonborn Michael Ondaatje or Trinidadian Neil Bissoondath, whose creative sensibilities are not rooted in any one place. This development in Canadian literature is not surprising, given Canada's evolution towards a more multicultural society in a world which has become even more a "global village" than Marshall McLuhan could have imagined. In focusing not on any one place, but on the psychological, social, and artistic implications of the nomadic identity, Hospital's work explores new and important literary territory.

1 Details of Hospital's personal background are taken from a Janette Turner Hospital interview with Elspeth Cameron, unpublished (January 7, 1986). 2 "Waiting", Atlantic Monthly, CCXLI (March 1978), 110-14; and "You Gave Me Hyacinths", Malahat Review, April 1978, pp. 137-43. 3 Janette Turner Hospital, The Ivory Swing (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982). Cited subsequently parenthetically as IS. 4 See Marni Jackson's review of The Ivory Swing, Maclean's, October 4,1982, p. 72; and Douglas Hill's review of The Ivory Swing, Books in Canada, December 1982. 5 Janette Turner Hospital, The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983). Cited subsequently parenthetically as Tiger. 6 Hospital interview with Cameron. 7 Janette Turner Hospital, Borderline (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985). 8 Silvia Albertazzi, "Beautiful Travellers: Notes on Postmodern Fiction" [unpublished research paper, University of Bologna, Italy, 1989], pp. 35-37. 9 Hospital interview with Cameron. 10 Janette Turner Hospital, Dislocations (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986). 11 Hospital interview with Cameron. 12 Hospital interview with Candide Baker, Yacker 2: Australian Writers Talk about Their Work (Sydney and London: Picador, Pan Books, 1987), p. 271. 13 Janette Turner Hospital, Charades (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989). 14 See "The Top Fifty in Fiction", New York Times, June 11, 1989.

Chronology 1942 1950 1958-62 1960 1963-66 1965 1965 1967

1967 1969 1971

1972-73 1973 1974-75 1975 1977 1978 1982

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Born in Melbourne, Australia, November 12, to Adrian Charles Turner and Elsie (Morgan) Turner. Moves to Brisbane, Australia. Education subsidized by Queensland Teachers' Scholarship. Awarded Commonwealth Scholarship (turned down in favour of Queensland Teachers' Scholarship). Teaches high school in Queensland, Australia. B.A. (English), University of Queensland, Australia. Marries Clifford George Hospital, a Methodist minister and academic. Arrives in U.S.A. and works as a librarian at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachussetts, for four years (while husband does Ph.D. at Harvard in the Comparative History of World Religions). Son born, Geoffrey. Daughter born, Cressida. Moves to Canada and works as a lecturer in English in a variety of contexts in or near Kingston, Ontario: Queen's University; St. Lawrence College; the maximum- and medium-security federal penitentiaries for men; local high schools. Awarded Ontario Graduate Fellowship. M.A. (Mediaeval Literature), Queen's University. Awarded Canada Council Doctoral Fellowship. Begins writing short stories. Lives in the State of Kerala, India, during husband's sabbatical research year. Publishes first short story, "Waiting", in an American magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and is awarded an "Atlantic First" citation. Publishes a short story in a Canadian magazine, Saturday Night, "Our Little Chamber Concerts" (subsequently a chapter in The Tiger in the Tiger

Pit), and wins first prize for magazine fiction from the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters. Publishes first novel, The Ivory Swing, and wins the Seal Award ($50,000) in Canada. From this year on, she becomes a full-time writer. 1983 Publishes second novel, The Tiger in the Tiger Pit. 1985 Publishes third novel, Borderline, and is named one of Canada's Ten Best Younger Writers. Awarded an Australia Council Literary Board Fellowship to travel in Australia for work on her fourth novel. 1985-86 Writer-in-residence and lecturer for the Writing Programme in Boston at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in the United States. 1986 Runner-up for National Book Award, Australia, at Adelaide Arts Festival; short-listed for the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards in Melbourne, Australia, for Borderline. Publishes Dislocations, a collection of short stories. 1987 Writer-in-residence during the winter and spring at M.I.T., and during the fall at the University of Ottawa. Wins second prize in the CBC short-story competition in Canada for "Queen of Pentacles, Nine of Swords" (subsequently published in Room of One's Own). 1988 Wins the 1988 Fiction Award, Fellowship of Australian Writers; short-listed for the Australian National Book Award for Dislocations. Publishes fourth novel, Charades. 1989 Writer-in-residence during the spring at M.I.T., and during July-September at the University of Sydney, Australia; then at La Trobe University, Melbourne, in October. 1990 Publishes Isobars.

Comments by Janette Turner Hospital The quest of women writers then, and of their protagonists, is a search not just for a room of their own, but for safe private space, for non-toxic air, for a place where the self can really breathe. The search involves contraction into smaller and smaller space; frequently it leads to an ultimate withdrawal into the body itself. But even this little haven of flesh is subject to emotional and physical invasion. To find safety and freedom, women first contract into smaller and smaller space; if and when contraction fails to protect, they strike out in a last desperate bid for "intimate immensity". "Space Invaders", Women1s Review of Books, July 1988, p. 3. Double vision becomes triple becomes multiple: India through Western eyes, Canada through Boston eyes, Brisbane through Canadian eyes, everything seen as though a number of different colour slides were simultaneously projected onto the same space on a wall. You now have an advanced case of dislocated perspective. The condition is serious and you have become a full-blown expatriate writer beyond all hope of recovery. "The Expatriate Writer", Australian Author, XX, 2 (July 1988), 10.

I'm always wondering about people caught in untenable situations. Hospital to Larry Scanlan, Whig-Standard Magazine, p. 13. I would call myself Christian. I am deeply affected by the symbols and mythic force of Christianity. I think the central idea of redemption and redemptive acts is essential in our daily lives. Politically and ethically, I see compassion as central. I'll never be able to do with words what Henry Moore does in his exquisite and sensuous sculpture, but it's constantly worth the effort. I want to make a perfect construct that will stand in time and speak to people across cultures and time. Hospital to Elspeth Cameron, unpublished interview, January 7,1986. Close on the heels of my interest in mongrel words and their pedigrees comes my fascination with the passions they arouse. Ah, the comfort of "correct usage", that cloak of the verbally self-righteous. . . . When a language ceases to enrich itself with foreign words, new concepts, "improper" metaphors (from quantum physics, from our ur-language Anglo-Saxon, from wherever) it dies. Weekend Australian, October 8-9,1988. It's bizarre to believe in original sin these days; but I realize that I do, not in the blind theological way, but just in the realisation that the propensity for cruelty is always there and anybody is capable of it, given a certain set of circumstances. You can't be a mediaevalist [as I am] without having a particularly integrated view of literature, art and theology as being one. Dante casts a long shadow obviously, which must be apparent from my books. My way to research is to do a lot of riding in trains and a lot of walking and talking to people. Absorbing sounds and dialogue. Getting into some quite amazing conversations with Sydney cabbies - they're great. It may involve, as it did with Borderline, reading a lot of material, quite frequently newspapers in libraries, but often the current journals and magazines. . . . For Borderline I [also] spent a lot of time walking around Central Square trying to capture the feeling I wanted. I think I absorb a novel through my nerve ends. I absorb the feel of the grit under my feet, of a city's smells. I myself am a very sensory being. . . . I'm very connected to the outdoors and the environment. I also have a very intense full-time thinking period which I consider work on the novel. Three or four months, I suppose, of bringing my characters into being. My characters have some germination point in real life, but then there's a very great distance between that real person and the character in the novel. The characters are fictional collages of a number of people, plus pure fiction. I mould them, as if they were clay models until I'm ready. Primarily in The Ivory Swing I was interested in documenting nuances; my feeling was that no matter how much people on both sides of this cultural divide bent over backwards to understand and appreciate one another, there were certain 127

premises so different that there were bound to be intractable dilemmas from time to time. I never thought of my stories as some kind of apprenticeship to the novel. The whole point [about The Tiger in the Tiger Pit] was meant to be ... that Victoria was schizophrenic from the start. I really checked out the data on schizophrenics, and I have made it clear that she was schizophrenic from childhood. The whole point of the end was that people can go on torturing themselves with guilt, regardless of whether the guilt is rational and legitimate [or not], and it will affect their relationships. The point was her madness was not caused by her father or by her mother, but that they were each afraid that they had caused it. Hospital to Candida Baker, Yacker 2 (Sydney and London: Picador, Pan Books, 1987), pp. 261,265,267, 271,277. I write to shake people up, you know, to make them see that most of the time we slide through life rather glibly unaware of what's going on within a mile of us. Anyway, [in Charades] physics seemed a way to do it. Hospital to Ron Store, unpublished interview, 1988.

Comments on Janette Turner Hospital Hospital's fiction [in Dislocations] is notable for intricate, authentic detail as well as for grace of observation and economy of language. Valerie Miner, Philadelphia Inquirer. The postmodernist awareness of the fictionality of fiction permeates Borderline. There is a constant sense of the continual generation of stories. . . . Instead of being offered a narrative line with a secret subliminal subtext, we are given one in which the subtext is admittedly the subject; interpretation is now recognized as the reader's impulse. And Janette Turner Hospital's skill is in giving these constant turns and twists of interpretation all that compelling excitement that traditional narrative action once had. For all the absence of politics [in Borderline], there is a process of development, of consciousness enlargement and change. . . . It may begin with false preconceptions, with bourgeois delusions, but the very intensity and integrity of the imagination takes it beyond those preconceptions, and it breaks through its formal devices and limited world view into a developed political awareness. Michael Wilding, "Recent Australian Writing" [unpublished paper presented at the Australian Studies Conference, London, England, March 1988]. Janette Turner Hospital reminds us that the world's surrealistic nightmares are all too real. It is our indifference to them that is the dream. Elspeth Cameron, "Borders", Saturday Night. Hospital does well [in The Ivory Swing] with cross-cultural misunderstandings. . . . And she can create mood. . . . But 128

she tends to gush, and there's far too much gluey writing, too many lines like "she smiled, and felt her body rising from the ashes of its rigid outrage like a phoenix, turning soft and moist and eager." Douglas Hill, Books in Canada. I found Charades best in the portrayal of minor characters: enigmatic Kay, Bea's men Mends, or Bea herself - especially Bea. Larger than life, raunchy, earthy, generous, she comes leaping off the page. Marian Eldridge, Weekend Australian. Despite the global lifestyles that her characters [in The Tiger in the Tiger Pit] represent, Hospital has provided them all with the same quivering sensibility and the same romantic vocabulary. Marni Jackson, Maclean's. The reader [of Borderline] must be prepared to accept the abolition of borderlines between artistic genres, literary styles, and, ultimately, between fact and fiction. Silvia Albertazzi, "Beautiful Travellers" [unpublished research paper, University of Bologna, 1989].

Selected Bibliography Works by Janette Turner Hospital Books The Ivory Swing. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982; New York: Dutton; London: Hodder & Stoughton; Australia: Hodder & Stoughton. The Tiger in the Tiger Pit. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983; New York: Dutton; London: Hodder & Stoughton; Australia: Hodder & Stoughton. Borderline. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1985; New York: Dutton; London: Hodder & Stoughton; Australia: Hodder & Stoughton. Dislocations. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986; Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1987; U.S.A.: Louisiana State University Press, 1988; U.K.: Virago, 1989. Charades. Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1988; New York: Bantam; Toronto: McClelland and Stewart; U.K.: Bantam, 1989. Isobars. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1990. Short Stories "Waiting", Atlantic Monthly, CCXLl (March 1978), 110-14. [Reprinted in Dislocations, pp. 57-68.] "You Gave Me Hyacinths", Malahat Review, April 1978, pp. 137-43. [Reprinted in Dislocations, pp. 23-32.] "Some Have Called Thee Mighty and Dreadful", North American Review, CCLXIV (Summer 1979), 33-36. [Reprinted in Dislocations, pp. 91-100.] "The Dark Wood", Dalhousie Review, LIX (Winter 197980), 696-704. [Reprinted in Dislocations, pp. 81-90.] "The Inside Story", Canadian Forum, LX (April 1980), 2831. [Reprinted in Dislocations, pp. 33-42.] "A Dream of Isfahan", Chatelaine, LIII (July 1980), 31,4245. "Moving Out", Dislocations. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986, pp. 43-56. "After the Fall", Queens Quarterly, LXXXVIII (Spring 1981), 67-73. [Reprinted in Dislocations, pp. 101-10.] "Golden Girl", Mademoiselle, No. 87 (October 1981). [Reprinted in Dislocations, pp. 135-50.] "Our Little Chamber Concerts", Saturday Night, XLVII (June 1982), 46-48, 50-53. "The Baroque Ensemble", Queen's Quarterly, LXXXIX (Autumn 1982), 505-13. [Reprinted in Dislocations, pp. 111-22.] "Walking on Water", Chatelaine, LV (November 1982), 6465, 112, 116-17. "The Owl-Bander", Canadian Fiction Magazine, No. 45-46 (1982-83), pp. 173-80. [Reprinted in Dislocations, pp. 123-34.] "How Noble in Reason", Canadian Forum, LXIII (May 1983), 20-21, 25-28. "Ashes to Ashes", Encounter, LX (May 1983), 3-8. [Reprinted in Dislocations, pp. 69-80.] "Performances", Toronto Life, October 1983, pp. 44-45,116. "Adolescence by Any Other Name", Chatelaine, LVII (February 1984), 46, 86-94. "Happy Diwali", North American Review, September 1986,

pp. 26-30. [Reprinted in Dislocations, pp. 9-22.] "Mosie", Queen's Quarterly, Autumn 1986, 499-507. [Reprinted in Dislocations, pp. 151-62.] "Port After Port, the Same Baggage", in Dislocations. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986, pp. 163-80. "Morgan, Morgan", in Dislocations. Toronto; McClelland and Stewart, 1986), pp. 191-200. "After Long Absence", in Susan Johnson and Mary Roberts, eds., Latitudes: New Writing from the North. University of Queensland Press, 1986, pp. 1-111. "The Bloody Past, the Wandering Future", in Dislocations. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986, pp. 181-90. "I Saw Three Ships", Weekend Australian, March 29-30, 1986. "The Mango Tree", Yale Review, Summer 1986, pp. 601-9. "To Be Discontinued", Meanjin (Australia), March 1987, p. 276. "Dear Amnesty", Journal of Library Translation (Columbia University), Special Canadian Issue, XX (Spring 1988). "Isobars", Overland (Australia), No. 112 (October 1988), pp. 2-5. "Here and Now", Sripsi, Australia, December 1988. Articles "Tahiti", Destinations Magazine, Globe and Mail, Winter 1986, pp. 50-58. "Violent Times", Whig-Standard Magazine, April 11,1987, p. 8. [Reprinted in The Australian, Literary Supplement, June 6-7, 1987, p. 8.] "The Third Degree at the Border", New York Times, April 19, 1987, Section XX, p. 33. "Australian Women Writers", Women's Review of Books, July-August 1987, p. 10. "Afterword", in Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Reprint. Toronto: New Canadian Library Series, McClelland and Stewart, 1988, pp. 241-45. "Queensland's Natural Wonders: A Child of the Rain Forest", New York Times, January 31, 1988, Section 10, p. 1. "Letter to a New York Editor", Meanjin (Australia), March 1988, p. 560. "The Expatriate Writer: a Case of Dislocated Perspective", The Australian Author, XX, 2 (July 1988), 9-10. "Space Invaders", Women's Review of Books, July 1988, p. 3. "Living the Life of a Bostonian on Beacon Hill", New York Times, September 11, 1988, p. 15. "Brisbane", Destinations Magazine, Globe and Mail, November 12, 1988, pp. 44-45. "An Expatiation on Expatriation", Overland (Australia), March 1989, pp. 35-39. Book Reviews Regular reviewer for the New York Times, Australian Book Review, Globe and Mail, among others. Interviews Baker, Candida. Yacker 2: Australian Writers Talk About Their Work. Sydney and London: Picador, Pan Books, 1987, pp. 248-77.

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Cameron, Elspeth. Unpublished interview. Toronto, January 7, 1986. Campbell, Terry. "Music in the Life of Janette Turner Hospital". CBC Radio, August 1987. Dessaix, Robert. ABC Radio (Australia), October 1988. Fulford, Robert. "Realities". CBC TV, December 1986. Gzowski, Peter. "Morningside". Toronto, CBC Radio, September 27, 1985. Harron, Don. "Morningside". Toronto, CBC Radio, April 21, 1982. O'Hearn, Dinny. "The Book Show". SBS TV (Australia), October 1988. Scanlan, Larry. "Arrival of a Writer", Whig-Standard Magazine, April 24, 1982, p. 18. Scanlan, Larry. "Long Distance Writer", Whig-Standard Magazine, September 1985. Store, Ron. LinQ Magazine (Queensland), May 1989. Selected Criticism Albertazzi, Silvia. "Beautiful Travellers: Notes on Postmodern Fiction". [Unpublished research paper, University of Bologna, 1989.] Cameron, Elspeth. "Borders", Saturday Night, April 1986, pp. 57-59. Moss, John. A Reader's Guide to the Canadian Novel, 2nd ed. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987, pp. 180-87. Wilding, Michael. "Recent Australian Writing: Janette Turner Hospital's Borderline and Dono Kim's The Chairman". [Unpublished paper presented at the Australian Studies Conference, London, England (March 1988).] A Note on the Contributor Elspeth Cameron is Professor of English and Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto, where she teaches courses on English and French Canadian literature, Canadian cultural history, and Canadian women writers. She has written two full-scale biographies, Hugh MacLennan: A Writer's Life (1981) and Irving Layton: A Portrait (1985). She is also an award-winning journalist who specializes in profiles of Canadian literary and cultural figures.

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Sandra Birdsell

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by Linda Lamont-Stewart Sandra Birdsell was a forty-year-old housewife and mother of three when she published her first book, Night Travellers, in 1982. As one reviewer remarks, she "seemed to leap as a fully-formed writer from the ribs of Manitoba"1 with this critically acclaimed collection of short stories, for which she was selected as the recipient of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award by the League of Canadian Poets. A second collection of short stories, Ladies of the House, followed in 1984. In 1987 the stories from both collections were reissued in one volume as Agassiz Stories. Birdsell published her first novel, The Missing Child, in 1989. Since her sudden emergence as a writer of note, Birdsell has become actively involved in the Manitoba cultural community: she has served as president of the Manitoba Writers' Guild and has worked with the Manitoba Arts Council. She has also become involved in a variety of projects as scriptwriter, playwright, and filmmaker, and served as writer-in-residence at St. Jerome's College, University of Waterloo. A few biographical details are relevant to an analysis of Birdsell's work. She was born in Hamiota, Manitoba, in 1942 and grew up in the small southern Manitoba town of Morris. She was one of ten children. Her mother was of German Mennonite background, her father, the town barber, of Metis descent. She later settled in Winnipeg, where she raised her family. The life of the small Manitoba town forms the foundation upon which Birdsell's fictional world is created. Birdsell's major setting is the invented town of Agassifc, Manitoba, which is named for the glacial Lake Agassiz, which once covered most of Manitoba. The prehistoric lake also gives its name to the fictional Agassiz River, which meets the Red River north of Agassiz and which in the first story of Night Travellers, "The Rood", has inundated the town. The vanished lake serves as a controlling metaphor for the stories in Night Travellers, representing memory and ancestry. The great flood of 1950 is a related image that reverberates throughout the text. The imagery of lake, river, and flood is not present in the stories of Ladies of the House, many of which are set in Winnipeg rather than Agassiz; however, in The Missing Child it is again central, as water from a melting glacier threatens to restore Lake Agassiz to

its prehistoric dimensions, wiping out the town and its history forever. In the stories of Night Travellers and Ladies of the House, Birdsell takes as her protagonist an entire family, the Lafrenieres. We perceive events sometimes through the eyes of the father, Maurice, and sometimes through those of the mother, Mika, but most of the stories are told from the points of view of two of the Lafreniere daughters, Betty and Lureen. Each of the stories can be read and appreciated in isolation. Some of them were originally published individually in such 131

periodicals as NeWestReView, Grain, and Capilano Review, and a number have appeared in anthologies. Their significance is enhanced, however, when they are considered in relation to each other, so I shall approach them as elements in a single narrative structure. Birdsell's stories focus primarily on the experiences of her female characters. In their almost exclusive concern with the domestic realm of female experience, they might be described as feminist; however, there is little evidence in them of a feminist political agenda. In her stories, Birdsell explores the lives of the generation of Canadian women who grew up in the 1950s and had already settled into marriage and motherhood by the 1960s, the decade of "women's liberation". Her women's lives are defined by their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. Their concerns are personal and domestic rather than political and public. Birdsell portrays their lives sympathetically but unsentimentally. Although Birdsell focuses primarily on her female characters, the foundation for their stories is laid by the first two stories in Night Travellers, which are told from the point of view of Maurice Lafreniere. Maurice is M6tis, but he has suppressed and hidden the native part of his background. In "The Rood" he recalls how when he was a young boy his mother drank herself to death and how he hid from the priest who would have placed him in an orphanage. He has made himself a respectable member of the community as the town barber, and his marriage to the upright Mennonite Mika Thiessen has enhanced his respectability. Ironically, it is his atavistic understanding of the ways of the river that enables him to take charge during the devastating flood and further enhances his status in the white community. In "Boundary Lines", Maurice's uncle, whose obvious native background embarrasses Maurice, challenges him to acknowledge and defend his ancestry, but Maurice is unable to bring himself to do so. Maurice's native ancestry is linked to his knowledge of the river and his desire to travel by boat up the river to Lake Winnipeg. He last appears in "Journey to the Lake"; here his failure to acknowledge and accept his heritage is reflected in his inability to finish building a boat. Only in death is Maurice reconciled with his ancestry. As his heart fails, he imagines that he is led by his uncle on the ultimate journey: ... and then he was skimming across the top of the water, weightless, free, upstream on the river, through its loops and curls out, out to the broad mouth where the colour of the water beneath him changed and the muddy silt settled to the bottom and there stretched before him the endless blue of the giant lake.2

Maurice's betrayal of his heritage is only one of many betrayals in these stories. Birdsell's characters seem inevitably to betray themselves and each other in a variety of ways. Mika, for instance, betrays Maurice by taking a lover. Mika is the dominant figure in the Lafreniere family. She is a strong, stern, hard-working woman who seems to have no sense of humour and has little time or patience with her children's problems. She presents an obstacle which her daughters must struggle against to assert their own identities. 132

Mika is associated with images of rock. Her name suggests the mineral, mica. In one story in Night Travellers, the sound of her laughter is compared to that of two stones being rubbed together. In another, she makes nightly forays to gather rocks for a rock garden. In the title story, we learn that her nocturnal rock-gathering expeditions are a cover for her meetings with her lover. Her affair is a betrayal, not only of Maurice, but also of the values of her Mennonite faith. Although she is such a dominant figure, only "Night Travellers" and "Keepsakes", the final story in Ladies of the House, are told from Mika's point of view. In most of the stories, the reader sees her from her daughters' points of view. In Night Travellers the point of view is most often that of Betty, the oldest Lafreniere daughter. Betty begins as the model child, well behaved, helpful around the house, a good student who wins a trip to summer camp for memorizing a hundred Bible verses. Through a series of betrayals she falls from grace. The first betrayal, recounted in "The Wednesday Circle", occurs when the ironically named Mr. Joy, to whom she is sent to buy eggs, molests her. Her guilt over her inability to tell anyone about his sordid attentions and her sense of complicity in them are represented in her memory of almost drowning in Lake Winnipeg. She looks to her mother's Wednesday Circle, a ladies' Bible-reading and sewing group, for comfort but realizes that there is no support for her in their narrow-minded religion. This story marks a stylistic departure from earlier stories in Night Travellers, which are told in a conventional thirdperson, past-tense narration. "The Wednesday Circle" has a third-person narrative voice, but is recounted in the present tense, which imparts a sense of immediacy and urgency to Betty's confusion and distress. In "Flowers for Weddings and Funerals", Betty tells her story in the first person, again in the present tense; it is the story of her betrayal of the religious values represented by her Mennonite grandmother, whom she abandons in favour of Laurence, a strange, solitary boy she has befriended. Birdsell's experimentation with form continues in "The Wild Plum Tree". In this story Betty is a pregnant inmate of a school for wayward girls. The narrative of her experience in the school is juxtaposed with a series of notes for an essay she is required to write. The notes trace her love for Laurence and his eventual rejection of her for another girl. The juxtaposition of present experience with remembered experience is also the structural principle of the final story in Night Travellers, "There Is No Shoreline". Betty, now a grown woman and mother of four, is packing dishes for her youngest child, who is about to leave home, when she notices a newspaper story that triggers memories of the time that followed immediately after she gave up her illegitimate baby for adoption. Again, this is a story of betrayals, in which the complexity of experience is conveyed through the ironic juxtaposition of present and past. The image of the glacial Lake Agassiz represents the repository of memory that subsumes life's contradictions: Somewhere, a child grew up without me, she wishes to tell the youngest. He has as much to do with shaping your existence here as have the first settlers, the women who cranked out their years in a one-room sod house, the Indians who hunted these

plains for buffalo, or the Mennonite farmers. But she won't say it. She will, instead, move the memory out across an ancient lake and leave it there to find its rest among the glaciers. (AS, p. 181)

The second most-prominent protagonist of Night Travellers is Lureen, the second Lafreniere daughter and the main figure in Ladies of the House. Lureen is the only one of the Lafreniere children to resemble her father. In the stories of Night Travellers, she is an angry and rebellious adolescent who feels alienated from her family and searches for a sense of her own identity. In Ladies of the House she finds that identity in her marriage to the attractive but unreliable Larry Cooper and in her role as the mother of three children, only to have to finally come to terms with the breakup of the marriage that has given her life its shape. Like the stories focusing on Betty, those which focus on Lureen gradually become more structurally complex. In general, the stories in Ladies of the House are more formally experimental than those in Night Travellers. Several ironically juxtapose present experience with remembered experience. The most formally unconventional is the epistolary "The Bird Dance"; it is a series of letters exchanged between Lureen, her daughter Andrea, who is away at university, and her fourteen-year-old daughter Dee, who is as angry and rebellious as Lureen was at the same age. There is no narrative commentary on the correspondence, so the reader is left to make her own connections and draw her own conclusions. There is evidence in the later stories of Ladies of the House of an awakening feminist consciousness. In 'The Bird Dance" Lureen's daughter Andrea reminds her mother in a letter of the need to overcome traditional ideas about women's roles. Lureen gropes for a new sense of herself as she struggles to cope with the disintegration of her marriage. She begins to see her handicraft as a way of expressing women's concerns, planning to construct a heritage box in the shape of a house filled with eyes staring out of windows - an image of the entrapment of "ladies of the house". She also responds powerfully to the feminist iconography of another female artist: I did something impulsive today. I went to Carol Grass's art exhibit and I bought one of her paintings. I couldn't help myself. I wanted to cry when I saw the show, it was such an emotional experience for me, the trapped wingless birds becoming women locked, caught inside tubes and uterusshaped forms beneath the ground, but still dancing and balancing the moon in the palms of their hands. (AS, p. 331)

This image, which simultaneously dramatizes the oppression of women and celebrates female power, accurately captures the feminist statement of Birdsell's work. The cover design of the combined volume Agassiz Stories reproduces the symbolic forms described in this passage. All of Birdsell's women are trapped within the limiting roles society has traditionally ordained for women; yet they have an innate strength that enables them to maintain their psychological balance and their sense of living meaningful lives. Perhaps

the most attractive quality of Birdsell's stories is their underlying optimism, expressed in the closing sentences of "Moonlight Sonata". Betty lies awake throughout the night, her silently worrying husband beside her; she alternately frets over the whereabouts of her adolescent son, wondering what danger he might be in, and recalls her own adolescent recklessness, which she has survived. She anticipates dawn and the reassurance the returning light will bring: "Soon grey light will filter through the window, a dull wash pocked by the sounds of birds rousing themselves, calling out in expectancy, faith, that the sun will rise once again" (AS, p. 251). In reading Birdsell's stories through from the beginning of Night Travellers to the end of Ladies of the House, one perceives a dual development. First there is their increasing complexity and subtlety. The stories become formally more sophisticated and stylistically more polished as the series progresses. Second there is a growing familiarity with the Lafreniere family - its history, its personalities, its secrets. The reader's knowledge accumulates gradually as she views the family's life from the shifting perspectives of the stories' varying protagonists. Often in a first-person narrative, the speaker is not named until well on in the story, so that the reader must interpret various clues to identify the protagonist. A detail from one story will reappear in another, its new context extending its significance. In some of the stories in Night Travellers, the manipulation of detail seems somewhat contrived; it is much less obtrusive in the stories of Ladies of the House. Another weakness in a number of these stories is that in their endings the morals to be drawn are too explicit. Instead of leaving us to contemplate a story's significance, Birdsell often tells us flatly what it means, thus undermining the impact of her indirect narrative technique. Again, however, one can observe a progression from the earlier stories through the later ones: the endings of the stories of Ladies of the House are generally more open and effective than those of the stories of Night Travellers. Although two of Birdsell's short stories - "Judgment" in Night Travellers and "Falling in Love" in Ladies of the House - experiment with the possibilities of "magic realism", they generally adhere to the conventions of literary realism. They are grounded in concrete domestic detail and naturalistic dialogue, which places them firmly within a recognizable social world, and the characters are complex and multifaceted, learning and developing in response to their experiences. In her novel, The Missing Child, Birdsell fully embraces magic realism. The setting is again the fictional town of Agassiz, and again Birdsell focuses not on a single protagonist but on a group of characters, in this case, the residents of Ottawa Street, which runs from the Agassiz River to the town's Main Street. Ottawa Street's inhabitants and the townspeople with whom they interact form a microcosm of the society of the entire river valley, at the centre of which Agassiz sits. Their lives are delineated in the same richly detailed realistic style as characterizes the short stories, but in The Missing Child, the surreal is allowed to coexist with the real. This novel demonstrates a considerable increase in the sophistication of Birdsell's writing and a darkening of her moral vision. 133

The novel begins with a prologue, biblically entitled "In the Beginning", which introduces the novel's pivotal character, Minnie Pullman, and its central symbol, rising floodwaters. Minnie is clearly mad; in this opening scene, she goes swimming naked in the Agassiz River in the middle of the day. Despite her madness, she is the only person who is aware that the town is about to be destroyed: As Minnie Pullman floats on the river and sings, it's clear to her that the neat lines of the valley, the charted ancestries of families, ethnic backgrounds, languages, quaint customs are going to be wiped out. The glacier is melting and the river is rising. It comes to Minnie then that she could try and warn them But they wouldn'tlisten. Her desire is lulled to death by the rocking motion of the river, by the inevitability of the rising water.3

The image of impending inundation, of course, recalls the biblical flood. Just as in Genesis, God destroys a corrupt world, so in The Missing Child floodwaters threaten to wipe out a society and a history that are radically corrupt. The body of the novel traces the lives of Minnie and her Ottawa Street neighbours during a single week, from one Thursday to the next. Already, as the week begins, flooding has become a problem for the street's residents, and town workmen are busy excavating gullies for larger pipes to handle the volume of waste water. As the days pass, the gullies gradually fill with icy water which seeps upwards from underground until by Wednesday, to the amazement of its inhabitants, the street is completely submerged: All of Ottawa Street was reflected in water. From the bottom of the street where it joined Main and up to the top and the river, reflections of the faces of the houses, the passing of clouds, and the sweep of birds and the quivering lines of telephone and electrical wires, weathered grey poles, and twinkling glass conductors, shimmered in the water - an upside-down world and a rightside-up world and, as the astonished group filed out onto the veranda, for a single instant none of them could determine which was which. (MC,p.308)

The confusion of this flooded world in which reality cannot be distinguished from its reflection serves as a metaphor for Minnie's mental state. Her contact with reality is at best tenuous; her mind is continually inundated with disordered memories and bizarre hallucinations. Gradually, through her nocturnal conversations with her eccentric neighbour, Annie Schmoon, who is dying slowly and very painfully of cancer, Minnie's tragic history and the reason for her madness are revealed, and we learn the identity of the missing child of the novel's title. At the age of five, Minnie and her twin sister, Wanda, were abducted, and Minnie witnessed the brutal rape and murder of her twin before escaping from their abductor. Wanda is not the only lost child in the novel - the motif of missing children runs throughout the text. If her sister was lost literally and horribly, Minnie herself is like a missing child, wandering bewilderedly among her fragmentary

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memories and delusions, and her own two daughters are metaphorically lost as well, missing the secure care of a sane and competent mother. Minnie's craziness frightens and embarrasses them; the elder, Rosella, furiously resents Minnie's behaviour and sets off on a pathetic quest to find a new mother among the women of Ottawa Street. Another lost child is Hendrick Schultz, who goes missing temporarily during the course of the narrative, but who is also lost spiritually and emotionally. Hendrick is a child prodigy; from early childhood he has had a miraculous ability to quote scripture on demand. His gift has made him an oddity and an outcast among the town's children, and as an adolescent he is frustrated and humiliated by his social ineptitude. He is also tormented by the constant attention paid him by the Reverend Jacob Friesen, the Mennonite minister, who frets over the decline in his church's attendance and interferes in his parishioners' lives; Friesen has viewed Hendrick as a special gift to him from God, and is dismayed to realize that Hendrick's scriptural recitations are merely an empty trick, devoid of understanding, and not the manifestation of a religious vocation. Other children go missing, temporarily or permanently. Jacob Friesen has lost his first wife and their infant daughter in childbirth. Alma Harder, a Mennonite immigrant from Mexico, insists on the truth of her strange tale of her baby daughter's abduction by monkeys, and her young son becomes the object of a community search when Hendrick, hurt by the boy's cruel teasing, leaves him tied to a tree by the river. Hilda Penner, one of the Mennonite ladies, confesses to accidentally having caused the death of a baby girl she was caring for when she was a mere child herself. But the most tragic missing child in the story is Sandra Adam. A motherless girl who has been raised by all the people of Ottawa Street, she is doomed to repeat Wanda's terrible fate. Sandra's nai'vet6 first costs her her new job: failing to understand that corruption is an integral part of adult life, Sandra exposes her boss's dishonesty and is fired for her pains. Fleeing Agassiz, she accepts a ride with Sonny Ericson, the local hoodlum. Her body is later found in the river; scratches on Sonny's neck and bloodstains in his truck leave little doubt as to Sandra's end. The lives of the adults of Ottawa Street are as bleak and tawdry as those of the children. Jacob Friesen wrestles with spiritual doubt; his wife, Lena, fights off childhood memories of Russian pogroms and the death of her young sister, yet another lost child, and is terrified of being alone. Various characters are involved in illicit relationships. June Marchand, who bleaches her hair to hide her Metis origins, has an ongoing affair with Sandra Adam's father. Hendrick Schultz's mother, Elizabeth, is involved with her neighbour Joe Harding. Albert Pullman, Minnie's long-suffering husband, declines his opportunity to marry the woman he has secretly loved for years, and breaks his lover's heart for a second time. It finally becomes clear that Albert, who continually writes letters to an English aunt who we learn has been dead for ten years, is almost as out of touch with reality as Minnie. The revelation of Albert's delusion about his aunt, to whom he writes comical pleas for assistance, is an example of the black humour that leavens Birdsell's otherwise tragic

and pathetic narrative. June Marchand, for instance, has a habit of throwing crockery and glassware to vent her frustrations; her husband keeps polyfiller on hand to patch the walls she damages, and finally frustrates her by buying plastic dishes. Sandra Adam, whose upbringing is a community project, receives hilarious advice from a variety of people at the onset of menstruation. In addition to flashes of wit and humour, the darkness of the novel is mitigated by the presence of characters with redeeming virtues: Jacob Friesen's kindly and generous neighbour Taro Yamamoto; Annie Schmoon, who is wise and compassionate despite her terrible illness; and Minnie herself, who, with her pathetic derangement and tragic past, retains a touching capacity to enjoy and even to create beauty. It is not only in the lives of the present residents of Agassiz that tragedy, corruption, and evil are manifested. The entire history of the river valley, and of Agassiz at its centre, is implicated. The valley's history is represented in the ethnic mix of the townspeople and in the figures of two descendants of the town's founders. Justice of the Peace Campbell struggles, with the aid of two RCMP officers, to maintain order. Charles Standing, the local historian, has a barn full of artifacts confiscated from the natives his father subdued with "fire-water" before dispossessing them. A significant thread in the narrative consists of the efforts of the native people to reclaim their land and culture. Young Robin Marchand conspires with Sonny Ericson to steal artifacts from Standing's barn to sell back to the Indians. In the process she comes to recognize her own native background and stakes her own land claim on a neighbour's lawn. The local natives hold pow-wows; there are fires in the hills at night. Finally, they block the roads into and out of the valley. The novel closes with a brief, surreal scene which releases Minnie from her difficult life: "The grey cornea of water curves up and up, bending the blue back of the sky until its stretched skin splits and the blue and grey melt into one and Minnie floats free" (AfC, p. 319). The sins and sorrows of Agassiz, its inhabitants, and their history are to be washed away. But the novel's final line suggests that there remains some hope of redemption: "a lantern hails from the shore" (A/C, p. 319). Perhaps, like the biblical flood, this deluge presages a new beginning. Sandra Birdsell's two volumes of short stories and her novel comprise a small but substantial body of work. It will be interesting to see in what direction her writing will take her from here, and whether there is a life for the town of Agassiz after the flood. 1

Linda Spalding, "The Ripple Effect", Canadian Forum, LXV (AugustSeptember 1985), 28. 2 Sandra Birdsell, "Journey to the Lake", in Agassiz Stories (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1987), p. 157. All quotations are from this edition, cited as AS. 3 Sandra Birdsell, The Missing Child (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989), p. 3. All references are from this edition, cited as AfC.

Chronology 1942 1967 1976

Born in Hamiota, Manitoba. Moves to Winnipeg. Death of her father. Birdsell begins to write seriously. 1982 Wins the Robert Kroetsch Scholarship, sponsored by the Saskatchewan Arts Board. Publishes Night Travellers, her first collection of short stories. 1983-85 Serves as president of the Manitoba Writers' Guild. 1984 Publishes Ladies of the House, her second collection of short stories, for which she wins the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, sponsored by the League of Canadian Poets. Wins the National Magazine Award for Short Fiction. 1986 Wins the Canadian Book Information Centre 45 Below Award. 1987 Republishes the stories of Night Travellers and Ladies of the House in a single volume, Agassiz Stories, with an introduction by Robert Weaver. 1989 Publishes The Missing Child, her first novel. 1990 Wins the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award for The Missing Child.

Comments by Sandra Birdsell When I was writing Night Travellers, I really felt I wanted to go further with some of these women. I wanted to see them at various stages of their lives, to see if they'd learned anything. There were lots of things about them that I wanted to discover and work through. I like these women very much; I'm very close to them. Although I must say, they wouldn't give you two cents for women's liberation. My writing has given me a tremendous sense of personal fulfillment over the past few years. There have certainly been struggles, and there may be more, but I'm progressing - and I don't just mean privately. Writing and my association with the arts community have opened up a whole new range of cultural experiences for me: visual art, theatre, music. It's as if I've found water after walking around on dry land for ten or fifteen years. Charles Wilkins, "Sandra Birdsell's Stories Give Voice to Women Unsung", Quill & Quire, L (November 1984), 38. From the very first time I started writing short stories, I realized that I couldn't or didn't want my prejudices or my moral beliefs or lack of them imposed at any point on any of my characters. I always wanted to stand back from them, and let them be who they were. A lot of people may think I'm a wishy-washy person, because I don't take stands on issues. I refuse to. That's because I can see both sides of issues all the time. That was what always bothered me about the very first works I read by women. Often they would just leap over the process. One day the woman would be here, and the next moment she was there. Whether she was in a family or left the family to realize her potential and become who she wanted to become - the process of becoming was missing. 135

And I always felt cheated. I always wanted to know, was there any struggle, was there any ambivalence, was there any going back and forth for a time? How did she make a living? Those sorts of things were missing. There's no comparison as far as I'm concerned. [Alice Munro is] a totally different kind of writer. I think the only comparison is that a lot of times we're writing about women. I think my way of telling a story is different from hers. My stories - maybe because I'm such a new writer - the form and shape is visible at times. You look at hers, and they just run off the page. You can't find the structure or the shape of it, but the story's there, and it just keeps coming back and back and back to you as you think about it. Nancy Russell, "Interview: Sandra Birdsell", Books in Canada, XV (May 1986), 56-57. I have always wanted to tell a story about a family, since about the age of twelve. It's probably because I come from a very large one. Family has always been important to me and still is. There's much drama in a large family! Everything that happens in the world, happens in a family. What struck me was the stories we'd tell at family gatherings, at Christmas, or Easter, on Mother's Day, or Mother's birthday. But what struck me was that someone would begin to tell a story about a particular incident and someone else would jump in with their version of it, and then a third and fourth version. And all the tellers had their own perceptions, their own reasons for telling or shaping the story the way they told it. And so that's why I wrote Night Travellers the way I did. The structure of Night Travellers came out of a growing sense of frustration with what I perceived to be the restrictiveness of the short-story form. It seemed to me too neat, too compartmentalized and unrealistic to capture and contain a character as you see happening on television every day in thirty or sixty minutes. You almost had to impose some kind of resolution on a character, just to end the story. When I came to the end of a story written that way, I'd find myself saying, "yes, but." I kept seeing that same character later on in life. The character didn't want a sixty or thirty minute treatment. And so I kept bringing the same characters back into new stories, because I wanted to see them again, working with new problems, at different stages in their lives. I'm usually not at all happy with the endings of my stories. If I could go back, I'd like to take the scissors to them and cut the last three or four sentences off most of my stories. I still haven't been able to trust the reader totally and often I tack on things to make certain that they haven't missed the point. I regret that now, but doubt that it will change. My women believe there is safety in the familiar and the known even though that may be restricting. But it's real, tangible, what they can deal with. It is safer to hide behind a role, for the sake of security and family. Sometimes I would like to think that these are noble people who give their lives to serve others, and sometimes I think they are frightened people, afraid of the unknown and afraid to take a chance. "From the Bottom of the Lake", in Birk Sproxton, ed., Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing (Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1986), pp. 134-35,135,136,138. 136

Comments on Sandra Birdsell The impressive thing about this collection is that these panhistorical reverberations are generated by stories about the rather ordinary, sometimes even tawdry, lives of a smalltown barber, his wife, and their daughters. Birdsell's uncanny eye for illuminating detail and her evocative style make these stories about marriage problems, small-town class and mores, sexual curiosity, and choices between sexual, familial, and racial allegiances and identities transcend their immediate situations. Like a tantalizing dream, this book echoes. K.G. Probert, "Echoes of a Dream" [review of Night Travellers], Books in Canada, XH (May 1983), 22. Birdsell's anthropological eye serves well the study of mankind she has set out to write. There are no judgments in these chronicles, no author's morals. The writing is smooth, paved with down-to-earth images that make use of her characters' own voices instead of the voice of a superior Author. Alberto Manguel, "Everything Under the Sun" [review of Ladies of the House], Books in Canada, XIV (January-February 1985), 16. A certain shock of recognition accompanies reading these stories. It shouldn't. But just why the women who make up the ranks of Harlequin and Silhouette readers are themselves largely unwritten about is one of the mysteries of modern lit. Frank Moher, "Closed Doors" [review of Ladies of the House], Alberta Report, XII (February 25,1985), 62.

There is no failure in either book in realizing the characters or their surroundings. Birdsell is from Manitoba; she knows Lafreniere voices well. With the confident introduction of her new characters and situations in the second book, Birdsell proves she's a storyteller with range, a writer who's developing along with her characters. These are books about the floods in our lives over which we have no control, about the slim choices we're offered, the roads to different destinations. Each choice, each character, each story affects the others. In Agassiz, inhabitants, like river stones, can be examined individually or collected and arranged in wonderful patterns. Linda Spalding, 'The Ripple Effect" [review of Night Travellers and Ladies of the House], Canadian Forum, LXV (August-September 1985), 29. Those who know Birdsell's work will recognize in this new volume some familiar characteristics: her empathy for her characters' uncertainties - a kind of capacious tolerance for folly, squalor and struggle; her ability to lift the ordinary into significance by giving articulate form to the inchoate lives of her protagonists; her paradoxical sense of the fragility and yet the tenacity of the women she writes about; her skill in juxtaposing different temporal perspectives through the shifting consciousness of her central figures; and her feeling for the edgy vulnerability, sometimes even the misfortune, of sex. If all this sounds something like Alice Munro, the impression is valid, though Birdsell's vision, if not so penetrating nor so ironic as Munro's, is grittier and more positive. Her characters are not blessed (or cursed) with the acutely selfaware consciousness of Munro's (none of them is a writer)', rather, they have to scurry for whatever bits of illumination they can get. Anthony Dawson, "Balancing and Rapping" [review of Ladies of the House], Canadian Literature, No. 106 (Fall 1985), 155. The Missing Child is, above all, a fulsome novel. Sandra Birdsell has brought enormous energy to it. The characters she has chosen for this neighborhood, in this Manitoba town, make up a carefully organized microcosm. The movement of the individual characters - chaotic, realistic and fantastic all at once - is set against fully realized forces determined by the unknown, by history, by fate and by human potential and limitation. Bonnie Bumard, "Streets Teeming with Life" [review of The Missing Child], Globe and Mail, September 23, 1989, C19.

Selected Bibliography Works by Sandra Birdsell Books Night Travellers. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1982. Ladies of the House. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1984. Agassiz Stories. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1987. The Missing Child. Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1989.

Uncollected Stories "Doll", Chelsea Journal, V (May-June 1979), 120-21. "Children Are Crying", Canadian Author & Bookman, LV (November 1979), 13-15. "Pray for Sylvia", in Rudy Wiebe and Aritha Van Herk, eds., More Stories from Western Canada. Toronto: Macmillan, 1980, pp. 215-27. Non-fiction "From the Bottom of the Lake", in Birk Sproxton, ed., Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1986, pp. 133-39. Selected Criticism Interviews/Profiles Russell, Nancy. 'Interview: Sandra Birdsell", Books in Canada, XV (May 1986), 56-57. Twigg, Alan. "Interview with Sandra Birdsell", NeWestReView, XIII (November 1987), 2-3. Wilkins, Charles. "Sandra Birdsell's Stories Give Voice to Women Unsung", Quill & Quire, L (November 1984), 38. Reviews Burnard, Bonnie. "Streets Teeming with Life" [review of The Missing Child], Globe and Mail, September 23, 1989, C19. Chittick, Kathryn. Review of Ladies of the House, Fiddlehead, CXLV (1985), 91-93. Conklin, Jamie. Review of Night Travellers, Quill & Quire, XLIX (April 1983), pp. 27, 29. Dawson, Anthony. "Balancing and Flapping" [review of Ladies of the House}, Canadian Literature, No. 106 (Fall 1985), pp. 155-57. Johnstone, J. K. "The Lafreniere Family of Agassiz" [review of Night Travellers and Ladies of the House], NeWest ReView, XII (April 1987), 12. Manguel, Alberto. "Everything Under the Sun" [review of Ladies of the House], Books in Canada, XIV (JanuaryFebruary 1985), 14-16. Moher, Frank. "Closed Doors" [review of Ladies of the House] , Alberta Report, XII (February 25, 1985), 6263. Posesorski, Sherie. Review of Ladies of the House, Quill & Quire, L (November 1984), 35. Probert, K. G. "Echoes of a Dream" [review of Night Travellers], Books in Canada, XII (May 1983), 22-23. Spalding, Linda. "The Ripple Effect" [review of Night Travellers and Ladies of the House], Canadian Forum, LXV (August-September 1985), 28-29. A Note on the Contributor Linda Lamont-Stewart teaches at York University. She has published articles and reviews on contemporary Canadian fiction and poetry.

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Guy Vanderhaeghe

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by Nicholas von Maltzahn "I believe in the importance of endurance, the stubborn refusal of men and women to submit to circumstances. That attitude sanctifies our existence."1 This assertion of human dignity lies at the heart of Guy Vanderhaeghe's work. His stories and novels affirm survival, even as the circumstances of their central characters prove bleak and unforgiving. The spiritual dimension of his work follows from this persistent argument with the world, whether in the sharp struggles of the will in Vanderhaeghe's earlier short stories or in the urgent demands and unyielding needs explored in his novels. Sudden success attended the publication of Vanderhaeghe's first book, Man Descending (1982). The collection of short stories found an admiring audience for its young Saskatchewan author, a welcome which led to still wider recognition after the book won the Governor General's Award. In his early thirties, Vanderhaeghe had discovered an audience in Canada and beyond, and established his reputation as a writer of richly imagined stories, compelling in character and theme. A second collection of stories, The Trouble with Heroes, soon followed (1983). This selection from Vanderhaeghe's earlier work raised further interest, but seemed secondary to his first success, owing in part to the late publication in an unappealing format by a regional press. Vanderhaeghe then turned to writing novels. The first, My Present Age (1984), centred on a rebarbative character already developed in the final stories of Man Descending and in the further story "He Scores! He Shoots!" (1981). An existential anti-hero with a manic ego, the troubled Ed found few admirers, and his hostile appraisal of his world led many readers to dislike both that world and Ed himself. For the most part, critical response to My Present Age foundered on the darkness of Vanderhaeghe's comedy; the literary virtues of the novel found only limited support. Five years later, the long-awaited Homesick (1989) fared much better, receiving some good reviews and winning the City of Toronto Award. The novel tells a complex story of a simple reunion, with an elaborate realism sometimes strained in its use of indirect narration. Critical opinion again turned on the attractions of its main characters, the demanding Vera Monkman and her father and son, and of its setting in the prairie world of

eastern Saskatchewan. Deserving more careful consideration were not only its formal difficulties but its deeper concern for what constitutes the social and mental health of an individual, within a family or a community. In the novels, the aesthetic and moral ambition that led to the triumph of Man Descending had come to make further demands on Vanderhaeghe and his first audience. The challenge to author and audience alike helps explain some of the mixed response to the novels. Whereas the range of stories 139

in Man Descending had presented a diverse Saskatchewan world, each novel demanded a longer immersion in the exhausting stuff of individual lives, the limitations of which may at first seem disabling. Some readers viewed endurance itself as a prize of uncertain value, whether in Ed's degradation and isolation in a provincial city or Vera's fitful reunion with father and community in a prairie town of the 1950s. Such problems were in part superficial. The move into plot, from individual to community, seemed to make unanswered demands on Vanderhaeghe's craft. If his novels, especially Homesick, at first sight suffer in comparison with his short stories, it is because in extended narration Vanderhaeghe's intelligence sometimes vies with that of his characters and tends to self-explanation, resulting in some dismaying lapses in his narrative voice. Presenting conflicts of will, however, Vanderhaeghe builds his fictions with strong characters and well-formed scenes. In creating his Saskatchewan worlds, he has exhibited the determination and independence of his favourite characters. He has shaped a growing body of fictions with a disciplined inquiry into the most profound human concerns. Vanderhaeghe's early success reflects a wider development of Canadian literature through the 1970s. He emerged at a time when established Canadian literary voices suggested models for his own short stories. Not only were there Canadian authors to influence the writer but a Canadian readership primed to expect much from short stories in particular. For the Saskatchewan writer the fiction of Robert Kroetsch provided a vital example of the fictional or mythical possibilities in his prairie world.2 When discussing influences, Vanderhaeghe further cites Alice Munro as a crucial example, as well as writers from the American South such as Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor (who seems to have encouraged the Christian dimension of his stories). But his reading seems always to have been more eclectic than such a literary list might suggest. From a wider perspective, the Saskatchewan literary tradition has its inception in the early example of Sinclair Ross, who, if unable to repeat the achievement of As For Me and My House (1941), had laid the literary foundations for later, less self-conscious explorations of the prairie world. Vanderhaeghe has never shown misgivings about the wider possibilities of a fiction from his province: he could proceed with assurance in part because of the status and variety of prairie writing, not least as fostered on a provincial level in Saskatchewan. Supporting Vanderhaeghe's confident development was the growth of Canadian publishing through the 1970s, especially in regional presses. By 1987, Vanderhaeghe could present a story rooted in rural Saskatchewan to a British audience in the London Review of Books, and British and American editions of his works and further European translations have brought him an international readership.3 In that year too, British recognition of his work led to his winning the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. It is by virtue of his short stories that Vanderhaeghe first stood as an author of note. The success of Man Descending (1982) crowned eight years of short-story writing. It was followed by the less consistent The Trouble with Heroes (1983), which, though a later publication, was earlier in 140

composition and thus provides a useful critical introduction to the achievement of Man Descending. All these stories were published over the same period, 1976-1982, but Vanderhaeghe himself half disclaims the apprentice pieces collected in The Trouble with Heroes: "There are one or two stories in it I'm quite committed to. ... The others I'd classify as juvenilia.'"4 But characters and themes central to Vanderhaeghe's later fiction show in rude relief in this early work. The Trouble with Heroes features blanker discussions of responsibility and depravity, of spiritual witness, of the awkward complexities of human relations, or of the "trouble with heroes". The subjects of The Trouble with Heroes are also more disparate in place and time (Saskatchewan in the 1970s, ancient Judaea, Paris in 1889) as Vanderhaeghe searches for appropriate figures - the figure of Legion from the Gospel of Mark, Gabriel Dumont, Lazarus - with whom to allegorize his themes. As a result, these seven stories lack the cohesion of the dozen stories chosen for Man Descending, where Vanderhaeghe achieves subtler effects with a cast of more familiar characters from a modern Saskatchewan. The title of The Trouble with Heroes signals Vanderhaeghe's long preoccupation with the heroic. These heroes have not been favoured by the gods: their achievement lies in "endurance, the stubborn refusal of men and women to submit to circumstances."5 In the title story, the cynical voice of the narrator (schoolteacher, late middle age) proves to grow out of the strain between the true cause of a veteran's disability - a car accident that follows his backstreet sexual coupling in the London blackout - and the lies he has embraced that honour his wound. This tension has grown into the narrator's character; the strain expresses itself especially in his shabby postures of sexual aggression. But he finally turns to the memory of a moment of bitter relief on the voyage back to Halifax, when he had tearfully responded to the plight of a burns victim, who shared to a grotesque extreme the same fears about homecoming. Some truer heroism proves to lie in the survival of life, rather than just in the survival of death. Vanderhaeghe often plays appearance off against reality in order to show the fictions we take for granted or choose to accept. In "Cafe Society", for example, public show plays against personal truth. The story examines the continuing integrity of Gabriel Dumont, Riel's general in the NorthWest Rebellion. His distant martial heroism is set against the commercial culture of the Paris Exposition of 1889. Can Dumont sell his remarkable story? A cynical impresario is blind to this historic survivor. Here Vanderhaeghe's preoccupations with fiction lie close to the surface: "Cafe Society" pays homage to the Rudy Wiebe of The Temptations of Big Bear and The Scorched-Wood People, but suggests doubts about the audience for the heroic and about the writer's necessary compromises with that audience. More simply, in "The King Is Dead" a boy moves beyond his mistaken regard for a delinquent friend when a sudden eruption of his own violence leads him to a sharp sense of himself, and to his own capacity for guilt. The change shapes the frame of the story: the boy is at first unable to respond to the news of Kennedy's assassination as broadcast in his school; in conclusion, he recognizes the ugly truth of Kennedy's death. In an adolescent fall into alienation, his guilt at once frees him and brings him more fully into a world of responsibility for evil.

This final recognition of the self in the other determines comparable moves towards change in "Parker's Dog" and "The Prodigal". In the former, the degradation of his friend and another man's insolent inhumanity finally lead a drunk to Alcoholics Anonymous, where his possible redemption begins in his confession, "My name is Roy, and I'm an alcoholic." The dog in question is sacrificed to human depravity, but appears to prompt Roy's effort at self-recovery. A more familiar account of love appears in the slow reconciliation of an unsuccessful son and his dying father in 'The Prodigal". The drunken son, a "welfare artist" in his father's phrase, has returned to the prairie from a self-imposed exile in bohemian Victoria. The love he has denied his father, and himself, is slowly recovered in a summer of hospital attendance, and he and his blind and weakened father come at last to march "a little way together" under the prairie sun. Questions of the heroic lead finally to spiritual questions, and these Vanderhaeghe sometimes asks in confessedly Christian terms. The Trouble with Heroes features two stories set in Palestine at the time of Christ. "No Man Could Bind Him" tells a fuller story around the Gospel story of Legion (Mark 5:1-20); "Lazarus" describes the later strain of witness on the man Jesus raised from the dead. "No Man Could Bind Him" is the more elaborate story, especially in being presented in the voice of a first-century Greek. In his youth this Greek gained a poor Jewish boy as foster brother, a boy who later becomes the man tormented by Legion. The story suggests a Nietzschean cultural analysis in which the superficiality and falsification of the Greeks are set against the violent urgency of Hebrew belief, appearance against reality. Out of a hesitant love for his dead "brother", the Greek finally comes to act in carrying him to his burial. "Lazarus" is a simpler story, and more modern in its conception. Shaped around Lazarus's role as a witness to Christ, the story places him in the scene of wedding festivities, from which he holds himself separate. A demon has tempted Lazarus to revenge himself upon Christ: the argument is that Lazarus has only been kept alive (and long life is long suffering) so that he may eventually proclaim the return of the Messiah, and thus revenge will consist of denying Christ when the time comes. The story is a triumphant exploration of the trials of faith. The very existence of Lazarus, his strength and his exhaustion, expresses his lifelong and now dying struggle between witness and denial. The bare heroism of this Christian existentialism sounds a note that reverberates through all of Vanderhaeghe's later, more secular work. Man Descending (1982) was published as a "landmark book" by its publisher, with a glorious set of advance notices from an array of major authors. Excitement spread, and in a banner year for short stories - 1982 also saw the publication of Alice Munro's The Moons of Jupiter - Vanderhaeghe won the Governor General's Award. Through this extraordinary collection he assured himself of an enduring audience. The themes of the stories are consistent with those of The Trouble with Heroes, but in Man Descending Vanderhaeghe can observe his protagonists more closely in their Saskatchewan settings, even as he continues to develop some adventurous narratives. The result is an impressive collection, in which the whole proves more than the sum of its parts.

The larger outline of Man Descending gives the collection of stories a loose coherence. In successive stories, the narrators, dominant perspectives, or chief figures are first boys, then adolescents, then grown men, and then the dying. The collection ends with two further stories in another vein: these centre on Ed, a "Man Descending", the existential antihero to whom Vanderhaeghe will return as the controlling voice and central figure in My Present Age. Experiences, voices, themes, and setting also help structure the whole. A succession of watchful boys brings the first four stories together; later, the middle-aged psychiatric patient of "Going to Russia" is followed by a terminal patient "not yet thirty" in "A Taste for Perfection". Ed's manic voice takes over the final stories, but the lively, sarcastic voice of the adolescent Billy has already governed the linked pair, "Cages" and "Drummer", which ends the first half of the collection. A further coherence develops as changes towards acceptance and strength, towards endurance, provide the turning points in story after story. Here man seeks to survive the pressures of "descending", of aging, of meeting limitations, of losing hope. Drawn from working and middle-class life in Saskatchewan, the larger fiction of Man Descending suggests a wider provincial community, beyond its individual farms, or towns, or cities. Most impressive in Man Descending are the narrative voices through which the stories are developed. Most are in the first person, both in reminiscence and in direct narration, with a few in a third-person voice. Whether in the first or third person, Vanderhaeghe rigorously controls the limited perspectives of the figures in the stories without denying their intelligence or exaggerating their terms of reference. He ranges from the authoritative third person of "How the Story Ends" ("Carl Tollefson was what people, only a short time ago, commonly used to refer to as a nice, clean old bachelor") to the heavily inflected adolescent voice of "Drummer" and "Cages" ("Gene's pissed off because he can't make Nancy Williams do what he says, so he jumps off the chesterfield and starts yelling at me").6 Sometimes the character's education explains the range of the narrative voices: from the schoolteacher and artist who both tell a story in The Trouble with Heroes, Vanderhaeghe turns in Man Descending to more schoolteachers ("The Expatriates' Party", "Going to Russia") or to children whose education directly colours their perceptions ("How the Story Ends", "What I Learned from Caesar"). This ends in the extreme of the manically clever Ed, whose wild voice reflects the wider possibilities with which his own education has presented him. In formal terms, Ed's narrative voice is the major part of his narrative: if Ed is defective as an agent in his story, he is compensated with an almost omniscient mind and ever-fluent tongue. Beyond the schoolroom, however, emerge some comparably shrewd characters, with intelligences sharpened by anger. The seventeen-year-old Billy Simpson, the self-described "smart-ass" of "Drummer" and "Cages", needs more than his school assignment on "Religious Persecution" to guide him as he learns to be his brother's keeper. And the struggling Jack Cosgrave of "Reunion", alert to every insult and insensitivity of his more successful in-laws, can see his condition in metaphorical terms as he gets drunker at the 141

family party: "Jack helped himself to another drink and watched the tip of the shadow of a spruce advance slowly across the lawn. It's aimed at my black heart, he thought, and speculated as to when it would reach it" (MD, p. 44). Better still, with this intelligence Cosgrave can finally move beyond the terms laid down for him by his in-laws, and beyond the irony with which he has fought against them. The spiritual dimension of the ancient Palestine stories in The Trouble with Heroes surfaces in many stories in Man Descending. Here, however, the themes of witness, love, and repentance are found closer to home. Some daring transpositions invest the stories with a sacramental dimension. A gift of spiritual grace surfaces in "A Taste for Perfection", for example, in which a "terminal" patient is attended by a Jewish orderly named David, an exotic in this Saskatchewan setting who dreams of going to Israel. Unable to make such a move, David nonetheless provides a standard of love and helps the protagonist prepare for death. Still plainer signs of justice and mercy colour "How the Story Ends", where a terrified young boy is offered a way beyond his rough father by the dying great-uncle who comes to stay with the family. The old man carries a scar from a lung operation - a scarlet letter "L" which proves symbolic of his mission of love. But when the great-uncle introduces the boy to the Bible, the boy mistakes the story of Abraham and Isaac as foretelling his own sacrifice to a hungry God. The final revelation of his struggle with the mystery of divine will shows the fearful side of belief, much as "Lazarus" does, and the uncertainty of mercy even from those who intend to be benign. In many stories such transpositions venture free of Christian myth, and correspondences in the secular world guide the imagination towards some fuller appraisal of the human condition. In "The Watcher", a boy's violence to a rooster corresponds to the violence finally meted out to his aunt's manipulative beau. In "What I Learned from Caesar", another boy finds in Caesar's praise for the ancient Belgians a way to see his own father as "a man dishonoured by faceless foes" (MD, p. 80). In "Cages", the cages are both the mine elevators and the prison bars from which a father seeks to save his sons. The most striking series of metaphors organizes "Dancing Bear", where in a final movement towards death Dieter Bethge (German Gebet = prayer) wrestles with his keeper, a struggling and mean Mrs. Hax (German Hexe - witch). In two memories of childhood, Bethge recalls first the slaughter of a bear by his father, and then the humiliation of a dancing bear in a travelling show. Central to the story is his childhood identification of the first bear's carcass with a man: "Stripped of its rich, glossy fur, naked, it is no bear. Two arms, two legs, a raw pink skin." All of Bethge's dying humiliations reverberate in the insistent displacements of this metaphor. He himself has been introduced as an old man "sleeping on the taut red rubber sheet as if he were some specimen mounted and pinned there to dry" (MD, p. 175). The story later turns to the bear's skin, pegged down in the yard, and to its pink corpse. Remembering the punishment of die dancing bear leads at last to Bethge's dreaming transformation of Mrs. Hax into an embracing bear, in whose arms he succumbs to his final stroke. If the aesthetic ambitions evident in this (early) story

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find quieter expression elsewhere in Man Descending, Vanderhaeghe continues to seek subjects of high seriousness even when writing in more ironic voices. With the elaborate metaphor of "Dancing Bear", Vanderhaeghe seeks in part to complain about a lack of humane care, here for the aged. He also speaks out through protagonists whose misgivings about their condition or the present age run contrary to collective wisdom. In "Going to Russia", for example, the narrator has put himself in trouble and now finds himself in a psychiatric hospital. He spars with a numbingly prosaic psychiatrist who cannot begin to address his true concern, which is to share the "sentence" of his four-year-old daughter, who has been institutionalized for mental retardation. His desire for responsibility towards the Down's syndrome child outweighs all other relations to his community. Where his liberal contemporaries "would prefer Sweden" as a socio-cultural destination, his longing is for the nineteenth-century Russia which he imagines as a more intensely moral and intellectual world. In short, he wishes to be transported from the Saskatoon of the 1970s to a Dostoevskian world of spiritual anxiety and debate. Vanderhaeghe often gives expression to such contrary views. Social criticism and alienation are joined again in the younger, crasser, and more comic world of Ed, hero of the last stories in Man Descending and centre of My Present Age (1984). Ed too is subjected to a fatuous psychiatrist, has had a breakdown, and satirizes the social and political preoccupations of his contemporaries. Ed strains to maintain his position against his divorce and then his wife's abortion of her pregnancy by another man. Even as he makes his stand, however, his actions have already greatly contributed to the moral dilemmas in which he and his wife Victoria now find themselves. The couple is about to separate in "Man Descending", and actually separate in "Sam, Soren, and Ed"; Ed is briefly approached for help by Victoria early in My Present Age, and the rest of the novel is structured around his quest for her, both in a search for her hiding place in a wintry Saskatoon and in a wider inquiry into his and her condition in this "present age". The earlier quotation from Kierkegaard in "Sam, Soren, and Ed" now becomes the major theme: "between understanding and willing is where excuses and evasions have their being" (MD, p. 230). The title My Present Age itself recalls Kierkegaard's great denunciation of the bourgeois world of his nineteenth-century Denmark. Vanderhaeghe's novel presents a character engaged in a typically existential struggle to move from the aesthetic to the ethical realm, the opposition already explored in "No Man Could Bind Him". This heroism only slowly and obscurely emerges through Ed's uncertain career in My Present Age, and the first reviews of the work were reluctant to acknowledge Ed's progress. One critic noted that "his noxious belligerence is the principal trouble with Age'9, and another simply quoted Victoria's own rejection of Ed: "being married to an adolescent is a bore."7 Ed notes that he himself sometimes feels "entirely disassociated" from what he does, and that this is "a malady of the modern age" (MD, p. 211). Ed's growth towards some new strength or fuller existential being is drawn so tentatively that it courts dismissal.

Ed's manic voice is the centre of much of the action in My Present Age, but Vanderhaeghe also develops his persona by assembling a comic proliferation of texts which continue to speak for and against his unlikely hero. Vanderhaeghe works with texts from many media. Ed begins his story with his reactions to his neighbour's accusations against him, as overheard on a radio talkshow, an outside-inside voice with which he intermittently wrestles for the rest of the novel. Later Ed identifies with a disaffected actress in a smutty television film. But books and writing are of central importance. Ed seeks to snag his wife's divorce proceedings by holding out for a collected Balzac he once gave her. He is dogged by the texts of his writing students, and then by one of the students in person who is writing a fanciful autobiography. His earlier breakdown had accelerated amid the library stacks where he had once worked shelving books. Ed is putatively a writer and thus Vanderhaeghe can further present him through a major secondary text: providing an elaborate contrast to his own condition, Ed has written a "subliterary" Western about Sam Waters, fearless gunslinger and bringer of justice. In this faceless hero, "understanding and willing" are joined. Waters embodies a nineteenth-century ideal of self-reliance; he inhabits the world of his desires like an epic hero. The Western underscores Ed's failure as a modern intellectual, especially in the academic terms personified by the obese literary critic to whom Victoria has now given herself, one Anthony Peters, author of a forthcoming study of modern popular fiction. Other secondary texts emerge in Ed's wide-ranging literary references; he is after all a failed graduate student. He insistently returns to his favourite novel, Huckleberry Finn. Huck's journey towards redemption provides an apparent counterpoint to Ed's lonely quest. But the last passage from Ed's Western features Waters's encounter with a grown Huck Finn, a drunk (like his "Pop") who pimps and begs for drink; this black comment on the trouble with heroes, of man descending, has followed from Ed's earlier inability to see his way forward. Now as his search closes in on Victoria, however, he himself is about to show some strength and honour. Finally My Present Age can end with Ed's dreaming of a Joe who will now in turn care for his own strange Huck. My Present Age marks the end of the first movement in Vanderhaeghe's literary career. Theoretically, that Ed is described throughout a multitude of texts suggests the assimilating power of his voice and the relative presence of that larger fiction, My Present Age, which "he" narrates. But the many distant biographical echoes in Vanderhaeghe's short stories swell to a dull roar in the turbulent drama of Ed's voice. As if to slough away some lesser self, as well as to write a novel, Vanderhaeghe gives as much as possible to a figure he almost acknowledges as an ugly alter ego. His own search for the discipline and endurance needed for novels was now to take him in a very different direction. After the publication of My Present Age, Vanderhaeghe turned to a second novel, "set in the 1870s in England, the U.S. and Western Canada, and ... tentatively called 'Worlds'."8 That work has yet to appear. Instead, after five years of creative silence, punctuated by one classic short story ("Home Place"), Vanderhaeghe published another kind of novel altogether, a

story of family in eastern Saskatchewan, with the evocative title, Homesick. The title, Homesick, suggests the twin emotional urges of its central figure, the strong-willed Vera, widow, mother of a boy, and daughter of an aging widower. Vera is at once sick of home and sick for home. Her return to her native rural Saskatchewan shows her need to be reconciled to her father; she too has been a "prodigal". The narration is in the indirect third person: Vera's is the central voice, with her father Alec Monkman and her son Daniel Miller developing further perspectives in the novel. The story has two main movements. Vera's first reconciliation with her father is symbolized in their coming together in an effortless waltz. But given sexual affront by one of her father's disagreeable acquaintances, Vera then flees the house with her son and sets up on her own, as if sick of home once more. Only at her father's death does she hold him in her arms again. Homesick met with a mixed response: its simple story, the dominant characters, and Vanderhaeghe's attention to setting found admirers, but doubts remained about inconsistencies in the narrative voice. The underlying issue was whether a provincial piety had not led Vanderhaeghe to treat his characters and their world too fondly. Deeper issues in Homesick failed to attract much notice, perhaps because Vanderhaeghe covers in heavy comedy his most explicit discussion of the novel's central metaphor. The episode in question comes during Vera's struggles in Toronto after her flight from home has taken her first into the army and then, after demobilization, to a mediocre job as an assistant at a movie theatre. Here she finds herself pursued by the projectionist, who woos her with magnificent unsuccess. He is described as having "a genius for inventing stories and telling them to people who had reason to wish they were true": "Not only did he project film, he also projected wishes."9 Soon he snares himself, however, with similar delusions about Vera's relationship to him. If the results of his folly are laughable, they should not obscure the central fact of Vera's being a more relentless "projectionist" still, whose projections are the cause sometimes of sorrow but also of great good to her. With Vera, as her father observes, "everything gets blown way out of proportion" (H, p. 45). The force of her projections animates the novel as a whole, whether in her schoolgirl dreams of success, in her propelling herself beyond her prairie world, in her letters home, in her desire for the man she marries, or in her final push for success in her own business back in her home town. In theory, the author is the supreme projectionist, not least in his use of indirect narration, telling his story through putatively other minds. If the narrative colludes with Vera, it is because she has been so active in developing her own story. Vanderhaeghe is modest with his cinematic metaphor, but other central figures in the text are given to comparable habits of projection. The novel begins with the older Monkman's dream of drowning beneath ice, an insistent dream ("every week or so", H, p. 12) that takes him from the beginning of the book - "An old man lay asleep in his bed" - to his final words in his deathbed - "Cold . .. Cold . .. Cold . .. Cold . . . Cold." The novel is in part the story of his movement towards death, as governed by the introductory projection: 143

"The colder you get, the more it hurts. The more you die the more you feel" (//, p. 11). Monkman's business success begins in his buying a movie theatre where he runs the projector; his grief has made him "daring and reckless" (//, pp. 56-57). Even the supporting Stutz, sober and careful though he is, proves a projector when he sells Vera on going into business for herself, puts up the stake, and gives further backing ("You have to spend money to make money", //, p. 223); he may also have some marital project in view. The key here is the absent brother Earl, who finally proves to have died long before. He has a schizophrenic's capacity for projection that leaves him isolated, a single name on a wall (H, p. 87), ultimately leading to his committal to the Provincial Mental Hospital. The diagnosis of Earl brings the projection metaphor into relief. First the doctor asks Monkman if Earl has ever "heard things that weren't there, or seen things that didn't exist." Then the doctor asks, "Has Earl ever tried to harm himself before tonight?" - Earl having catastrophically set fire to a crop. Projection has become a defect in the helpless Earl, whose strange behaviour first emerged after the death of his mother, at the same time as his father had bought the movie theatre (//, p. 57). But the pathology of projection and self-destruction has always figured in the raging demands of Vera, as if she in her health also lives by fierce visions, and endures them, as her quiet younger brother cannot. Vera and Earl both seem to have inherited these behaviours from their father, whose mind plays him tricks in old age and who, also, had encountered terrors after his wife's death. The need for projection and the recognition of its dangers provide a new development of Vanderhaeghe's original inquiry into "the trouble with heroes". His longer meditation on appearance and reality finds a fuller if quieter expression in Homesick. Late in the novel, an argument over baseball pits the posturing of Mickey Mantle, "Mr. Showboat", against the simpler being of Ted Williams: "He never hit the ball to hear the roar of the crowd, he hit it to prove he could" (//, pp. 145-49). Later still, the aging Monkman is transfixed by the Olympian triumph in the marathon of a barefoot Abebe Bikila (//, pp. 249-51). These visible heroes speak, of course, to the characters in the novel, and the young Daniel especially can grow through their examples. They are the easy metaphors for more difficult daily demands on men and women. In his own characters, Vanderhaeghe, too, has persisted with a vision of achievement for its own sake, and of the private strain of endurance. 1

Morris Wolfe, "Interview", Books in Canada, XHI, 2 (February 1984), 29. 2 David Carpenter, "Inside Guy Vanderhaeghe", NeWest ReView, VIE, 1 (1982), 9. 3 "Home Place", London Review of Books, November 1987, pp. 22-23. 4 Frank Moher, "Stepping Backward Heroically", Alberta Report, March 19, 1984, p. 32. 5 Wolfe, 29. 6 Man Descending, pp. 51,93. Subsequently cited parenthetically as MD. 7 John Bemrose, "A Sprinter's First Marathon", Maclean's, September 17, 1984, pp. 68jf.; Michael Thorpe, "Absorbed by his Dream", Canadian Forum, LXIV (November 1984), 35. 8 Kenneth McGoogan, "Vanderhaeghe Builds on Success", Calgary Herald, October 7, 1984, p. F8. 9 Homesick, p. 98. Subsequently cited parenthetically as H.

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Chronology 1951 1964 1968 1972 1973-75 1974 1975 1976-78 1978 1978-79 1979-82 1982 1982-83 1983 1983-84 1985 1985-86 1989

Born April 5, in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan. Only child of parents Clarence and Alma Vanderhaeghe, of Belgian and older Canadian stock. Father moves from working at a potash mine to farming. Graduates from Esterhazy High School. B.A. (Honours), University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon). Marries Margaret Elizabeth Nagel, a painter. Archivist at University of Saskatchewan. Publishes "Little David Play on Your Harp", Smoke Signals, which wins third prize, Saskatchewan Writers Guild, Literary Competition. M.A. in History at University of Saskatchewan. Thesis on "John Buchan: Conservatism, Imperialism, and Social Reconstruction". Freelance writing and editing. Editor, Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine, Regina. B.Ed. University of Regina. High schoolteacher (English and History) in Herbert, Saskatchewan. Researcher/project officer, health care consultancy in Saskatoon. Publishes Man Descending. Governor General's Award, Fiction. Teaching assistant (History) at University of Saskatchewan. Publishes The Trouble with Heroes. Writer-in-residence at Saskatoon Public Library. Writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa. Visiting Professor of English at the University of Ottawa. Publishes Homesick.

Comments by Guy Vanderhaeghe My characters are overcome by feelings of powerlessness. And I think this has always been especially applicable to men because traditionally, men have been raised to be powerful, to take control of situations and to shoulder sole responsibility - in fact, to do alone, all the things that society now wishes men and women to share. But some men have not been able to fulfil these expectations. Doris Hillis, "Interview", Wascana Review, XIX, 1 (1984), 24. It could be argued that it has been imaginative writers and not historians who have taught most of us our history. "Literature and the Teaching of History", History and Social Science Teacher, XXII, 3 (1987), 126. Writers here, whether short story writers, poets, or novelists, realize that so much of what we have been and are has not been preserved and is escaping us. The anecdotal, the unwritten, needs to be written before it disappears. Maybe we sense the obligation to map the world of German Lutherans, to describe the Moose Jaw of the forties and the fifties, to draw our aged pioneers as they really are before they are lost sight of in clouds of myth. To do justice to these people and places, to make an honest and more complete record, writers may be fated to adopt and adapt novelistic strategies, strat-

egies that seem more suited to the job of documentation. "Poetic Desire and Authentic Rendering", Writing Saskatchewan (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1989), pp. 171-72. Growing up in a small town in Saskatchewan I was fortunate enough to have the benefit of the company of both my grandfathers. "Leacock and Understanding Canada", Stephen Leacock: A Reappraisal (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1986), p. 18. When I think of intellectual influences I think first of all of the Bible. I do not come from a religious home or a churchgoing family, but I have always been a Bible reader. . . . I feel the strongest affinity with those writers I can only describe as "agrarian". People who write of the American South, such as Flannery O'Connor or Eudora Welty. Or Canadian writers such as Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence, who write of small towns and rural people. Hillis, "Interview", Wascana Review, XIX, 1 (1984), 28. I remember, for instance, being very, very struck by Kroetsch's The Studhorse Man. And even though it was such a mythic book it had a tremendous amount of authenticity for me. And I think I said to myself, even before I had decided to write, this part of the world can be written about. Carpenter, "Inside Guy Vanderhaeghe", NeWest ReView, VIII, 1 (1982), 9. When asked to produce a list of those authors whom I particularly admired I was inevitably struck by the heterogeneity of the list I compiled. I could not help but imagine these authors incongruously yoked in conversation at literary cocktail parties. Flannery O'Connor and Anthony Powell? Christopher Isherwood and Rudy Wiebe? Alice Munro and Evelyn Waugh? I could not see how these converging vectors of probable influence had shaped my writing. Worse, I felt I was suppressing another, perhaps equally important list of names. Names such as Zane Grey, Walter Scott, John Buchan, and Robert Louis Stevenson came immediately to mind. "Influences", Canadian Literature, No. 100 (1984), p. 323.

Comments on Guy Vanderhaeghe Not since the appearance of Jack Hodgins' Spit Delaney's Island six years ago has such a distinctive and powerful voice appeared in Canadian fiction. Often recalling and transforming the Prairie worlds of Sinclair Ross, W.O. Mitchell and Margaret Laurence, the stories mark a compelling debut of an artist who sees with compassion the terror and sometimes the joy of the human condition. David Staines, "Short Stories Capture Moral Void of the 1980s", Gazette (Montreal), May 22, 1982, p. B8. More than anything else, Vanderhaeghe's work is intelligent. Even when his narrators are monsters, as is Ed in Man Descending (1982) or Caragan in the short story "Going to Russia", they are subtle, comic, wise monsters. Behind Vanderhaeghe's work is a wide acquaintance with literature, and he has no fear of using it, either ironically or pointedly.

He writes with an easy and fluent realism, a fine ear for the vernacular, an eye for detail. . . . Vanderhaeghe's work is technically superb. The stories are carefully constructed, the narrative always under control. . . . The closures of his stories are brilliantly done, not simple conclusions to action but rhythmic and imagistic releases from the reading act. David Arnasqn, "Leaving the Farm", in E.F. Dyck, ed., Essays on Saskatchewan Writing (Regina: Saskatchewan Writers Guild, 1986), p. 124. [Saskatchewan] was downright relieved to run off with Vanderhaeghe, downright relieved to fight with him about adolescence and fat and snow and frustration. My present age, she kept whispering to him, is beyond measure; I am growing both older and younger every day. Why are you so anxious about temporal space, about growing old? I am older than any story will ever be, my life too a withdrawal and a refusal and a knowing, oh too much knowing of too much. But he could not decide between novels or stories and while he was pondering his documents she slid out a side door, she jumped in her car, she left the motel. Aritha Van Herk, "Invented History", in K.G. Probert, ed., Writing Saskatchewan (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1989), p. 84. [Vanderhaeghe] is willing to write into the pages of his fiction the kind of extended realism that pushes what we see as being ordinary to an extreme. At the same time, he renounces the images of prairie that have been inflicted on our regional literary profile by Sinclair Ross, P.P. Grove and W.O. Mitchell. Drought, death, the Depression, and the endlessly endless landscape are quietly stepped around, or, if they are important, pushed to extreme conflagration. Aritha Van Herk, "There's No Place Like Home", Western Report, December 11, 1989, p. 28. Selected Bibliography Works by Guy Vanderhaeghe Books Man Descending. Toronto: Macmillan, 1982. The Trouble with Heroes. Ottawa: Borealis Press, 1983. My Present Age. Toronto: Macmillan, 1984. Homesick. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. Short Fiction First Published in Periodicals and Anthologies Man Descending (1982) "Dancing Bear", Chelsea Journal, II, 6 (1976), 287-97. "Man Descending", in M. Wolfe, ed., Aurora: New Canadian Writing 1978. Toronto: Doubleday, 1978, pp. 5-17. "What I Learned from Caesar", Malahat Review, No. 49 (1979), pp. 110-20. "The Expatriates' Party, or Je Me Souviens", in M. Wolfe, ed., Aurora: New Canadian Writing 1980. Toronto: Doubleday, 1980, pp. 138-59. "Cages", Prism International, XX, 1 (1981), 9-23. "Drummer", NeWest ReView, VII, 2 (1981), 11-15. "How the Story Ends", Dandelion, VIII, 1 (1981), 34-50. "Sam, Soren, and Ed", Journal of Canadian Fiction, No. 31/ 32 (1981), pp. 5-31. "The Watcher", Canadian Fiction Magazine,No. 34/35 (1981), pp. 97-124. "Reunion", Saturday Night, XCVII, 3 (1982), 46-51. 145

The Trouble with Heroes (1983) "Lazarus", Chelsea Journal, VI, 3 (1976), 125-28. "The Prodigal", Journal of Canadian Fiction, No. 21 (197778), pp. 5-14. "The King Is Dead", Wascana Review, XIII, 2 (1978), 43-53. "The Trouble with Heroes", in M. Wolfe, ed., Aurora: New Canadian Writing 1979. Toronto: Doubleday, 1979, pp. 56-63. "Gate Society", NeWest ReView, VI, 3 (1980), 5-6. "No Man Could Bind Him," Chelsea Journal, VI, 1 (1980), 22-28. "Parker's Dog", Fiddlehead, No. 132 (1982), pp. 61-69. Uncollected "Little David Play On Your Harp", Smoke Signals 1973-1974. Regina: Saskatchewan Writers Guild, 1974, pp. 18-27. "Happy Jack", Grain, II, 1 (1975), 5-13. "Magic Circles", Smoke Signals 5. Regina: Saskatchewan Writers Guild, 1980, pp. 87-96. "He Scores! He Shoots!" Matrix, XIII (1981), 3-15. "Snell", Quarry, XXX, 1 (1981), 48-52. "Home Place", London Review of Books, November 1987, pp. 22-23. Essays

"Making Essays", Smoke Signals 6. Regina: Saskatchewan Writers Guild, 1981. "Influences", Canadian Literature, No. 100 (1984), pp. 323-28. "Leacock and Understanding Canada", in D. Staines, ed., Stephen Leacock: A Reappraisal. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1986, pp. 17-21. "Literature and the Teaching of History", History and Social Science Teacher, XXII, 3 (1987), 125-27. "Poetic Desire and Authentic Rendering: Linked Collections", in K. Probert, ed., Writing Saskatchewan: 20 Critical Essays. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1989, pp. 170-72. "Afterword", in Mordecai Richler, St. Urbain's Horseman. New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989, pp. 463-68. Poems "There Is No Accounting for Taste", Queen's Quarterly, LXXXVIII, 3 (1981), 523-24. "The Doctrine of Water", Dalhousie Review, LXI, 4 (Winter 1981-82), 686-87. "Death Should Be an Elephant", Malahat Review, No. 63 (1982), p. 68. Interviews Carpenter, David. "Inside Guy Vanderhaeghe", AfeHfesf/teVfew, VIII, 1 (1982), 8-9, 15. Garrod, Andrew. "Guy Vanderhaeghe", Speaking for My self: Canadian Writers in Interview (St. John's: Breakwater, 1986), pp. 270-91. Hillis, Doris. "Interview", Wascana Review, XIX, 1 (1984), 17-28. [Reprinted in Voices and Visions: Interviews with Saskatchewan Writers. Moose Jaw: Coteau Books, 1985, pp. 17-35.] Wolfe, Morris. "Interview", Books in Canada, XIII, 2 (February, 1984), 27-29. Selected Criticism and Reviews Andrew, Ruby. "Generation Gaps" [review of Homesick], 146

Maclean's, October 23, 1989, p. 69. Barbour, Douglas. "Black Comedy" [review of My Present Age}, Canadian Literature, No. 105 (1985), pp. 151-52. Bemrose, John. "A Sprinter's First Marathon" [review of My Present Age], Maclean's, September 17, 1984, pp. 68e68f. Bissoondath, Neil. "Generations Clash... in Vanderhaeghe's Prairies" [review of Homesick], Gazette (Montreal), October 7, 1989, p. K13. Clark, Matthew. "First Fiction: Compelling and Repelling" [review of Man Descending], Quill & Quire, XLVIII, 3 (March 1982), 63. Dyck, E.F., ed. Essays on Saskatchewan Writing. Regina: Saskatchewan Writers Guild, 1986. Forceville, Charles. "My Present Age and the 'Ed'-Stories: The Role of Language and Story-Telling in Guy Vanderhaeghe's Fiction", in C. Forceville, A J. Fry, and P.J. De Voogd, eds., External and Detached: Dutch Essays on Contemporary Canadian Literature. Canada Cahiers 4. Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1988. French, William. "Fertile Soil" [review of Homesick], Globe and Mail, October 7, 1989, p. C7. Gerry, Tom. "Violence and Narrative Metalepsis in Guy Vanderhaeghe's Fiction", Studies in Canadian Literature, XII, 2 (1987), 199-211. Gray, Alasdair. "Varieties of Contempt" [review of Man Descending], New York Review of Books, October 13, 1985, p. 28. Kay, Guy Gavriel. "Writer on the Ascent" [review of Man Descending], Maclean's, May 3, 1982, p. 49. Kinsella, W.P. "Lives of Boys and Men" [review of Man Descending], Books in Canada, XI, 7 (August-September, 1982), 14-15. MacKendrick, Louis K. "The Trouble with Heroes" [review], Fiddlehead, No. 143 (1985), pp. 88-90. Mars-Jones, A. "Growing Painfully" [review of Man Descending, My Present Age], Times Literary Supplement, August 22, 1986, p. 920. Moher, Frank. "Stepping Backward Heroically" [review of The Trouble with Heroes], Alberta Report, March 19, 1984, p. 32. —. "Notes from a Fugitive" [review of My Present Age], Alberta Report, October 8, 1984, p. 44. Probert, K.G., ed. Writing Saskatchewan. Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1989. Spettigue, D.O. "The Trouble with Heroes" [review], Queen's Quarterly, XCIII, 3 (1986), 661-63. Staines, David. "Short Stories Capture Moral Void of the 1980s" [review of Man Descending], Gazette (Montreal), May 22, 1982, p. B8. Thompson, Kent. "Family Happiness" [review of Homesick], Books in Canada, XVIII, 7 (October 1989), 3233. Thorpe, Michael. "Absorbed by his Dream" [review of Man Descending], Canadian Forum, LXIV (November 1984), 35. Van Herk, Aritha. "There's no place like home" [review of Homesick], Western Report, December 11,1989, pp. 2829. A Note on the Contributor Nicholas von Maltzahn teaches literature at the University of Ottawa. He publishes chiefly on Milton and the literature, politics, and history of seventeenth-century England.

Paul Quarrington

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by James C. MacDonald Although Paul Quarrington's writing career has been relatively short, he has been extremely prolific and has achieved considerable success. In the last eight years he has received three nominations for the Stephen Leacock Award, winning for King Leary in 1987, has been acclaimed as one of Canada's most promising writers, and has won the Governor General's Award for Whale Music in 1990. Most of the praise has focused on his verbal dexterity and vitriolic wit, his mastery of the raucous, bawdy, comic situation, and his deft handling of highly eccentric characterization. The arguments for recognizing these qualities are certainly compelling, but they fall short of explaining the real achievement of his work. Using increasingly more powerful and controlled metaphoric language as he progresses in his fiction, Quarrington startles with a comic vision that is not just a one-dimensional, quirky laugh about life, but a multi-textured exploration into the mythic and moral structures of human action. Quarrington's narrative style is extremely complex; he uses many of the techniques of postmodernism that subvert a linear, rational explanation of the events of the text. Not only is the "story" delivered in a haphazard, often nonsequential and disruptive manner, but the "author" of the fiction plays with the text in an effort to impose or find meaning in the act of creation itself. In the midst of a seemingly realistic story, the reader encounters the author as a character himself talking to other characters, fish who talk, comic book figures who come alive, ticket stubs as chapter headings, poems, songs, biblical phrases, and dreams ostensibly unconnected to the narrative, fictional representations meeting real historical personalities, tall tales, fantasy, science fiction, and the ending of a novel rewritten as the beginning. Because this eclectic style is disturbing in the way it sabotages a unified form, it also creates a sense of alienation and estrangement that is at the heart of Quarrington's work. The instability and disorder of experience are reflected in his work, and the reader must try to make sense of the incongruities. However, what separates Quarrington from the most cynical of the postmodernists, who propose that meaning is impossible in life or in a text, is his unique use of myth, especially the quest theme, out of which a

problematic reality can be made at least partially sensible. In his first novel, The Service, Quarrington experiments with many of the themes and forms that will reappear, although in a much more sophisticated and subtle way, in his later work. The book introduces an oddball cast of characters searching for the solution to all their problems. The drunk, dishevelled Horace Hodgins and the dwarf clown, Little Wilberforce, encounter Watford Argyle, the slick magician/ charlatan, various mysterious females, and, both in comic 147

book form and in their own reality, Squabb, the one-eyed pirate. The plot is no more than a series of sketches involving these characters; their interaction through deception, adultery, and death parodies the serious reality beyond the fiction and parodies the fiction itself. The chaotic nature of Quarrington's world runs parallel to his heterogeneous style of farce, slapstick, cartoon, and outrageous coincidence, resisting any kind of meaningful closure. The high art of Shakespeare and Wallace Stevens is tossed together with the low art of pop songs and cheeky legends. The author even discusses how the novel is going with his characters. The mythic element of the quest, often used to gain personal identity or experience, is introduced in the form of allusions to Moby Dick to raise the fiction beyond its local and contingent reality. Even here, however, the author undercuts any easy explanation of the events by having Horace, the Ishmael figure, get rescued from his journey, in both the novel and his "real" life, by Squabb. In his first novel, therefore, Quarrington experiments with form, content, and characterization, but does not yet have the control or the artistic resources to make it memorable. He does, however, introduce the elements, including settings and characters, that will develop with increasing force in his later novels. The epigraph to Home Game, taken from Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and concerning the nature of truth and its telling, signals the serious nature of a very funny novel. The author of the tale again intrudes into the narrative to comment on his characters and to investigate the truth about life from his perspective and the perspective of his characters. In addition, the author's long-lost grandfather collaborates with him on the story and is also a participant in the baseball game which is the crux of the narrative. Each sees the action in a different way, and the multiple levels of perception force the reader to be just as directly engaged in the search for the truth. The story, which relies heavily upon character development rather than upon complexity of plot, sets former professional ballplayer Nathanael "Goldenlegs, Crybaby" Isbister and his newly adopted family of circus performers against religious fundamentalist Tekel Ambrose and his sect, the House of Jonah. The freaks of nature in the circus, including, among others, a dwarf, a fat lady, a wildman, a pair of Siamese twins, and a giant, seem to Tekel to be overt manifestations of original sin and to deserve care, not public display. Isbister suggests a challenge ball game, after which the loser must leave town. The preparation for the game and the game itself take up the bulk of this long book, but we learn in great detail about the lives of these characters - their fears, motivations, personal losses, and hopes. Quarrington's localized small-town setting becomes a microcosm of the world, and both the circus and the House of Jonah become alternative cultures which reflect and parody "normal" society. Led by his grandfather, who provides a mythic frame by acting in and commenting on the story, the "author" struggles to understand his characters and the reasons for their actions. The baseball game becomes the naturalistic conceit or metaphor for all the novel's participants and the goal of the quest for self-knowledge. Although all the char148

acters, each in their own way, undertake the mythic journey and learn more about themselves, the focus is on the two central figures, Nathanael and Tekel. As in classical mythology, both have mysterious pasts, and by journeying through an unfamiliar world which severely threatens and tests them, they gain a reward, however fleeting it may be. Quarrington also sustains an interesting duality in these two, who appear to be two sides of a single figure transcending them both: Nate is the embodiment of worldly life and individuality but lacks faith in himself and in others. Tekel is a man of faith but lacks compassion for the external world outside the House of Jonah. Both have undergone a descent into the underworld, Nate having smashed his own "golden" legs in a nightmarish, drunken stupor and Tekel, after baiting by his brothers, having crawled through a graveyard to face the terrors of irrationality and death. With the magical aid of mythic helpers, the circus "freaks" and the brothers of the House of Jonah, the two heroes, both called the best players of their time, battle on the sterile wasteland of the ballfield to understand themselves and others. During the course of the game, each begins to understand and respect the other, and through small epiphanies, Nate recaptures pride in himself and the feeling of community which he had lost; Tekel, acknowledging his own frailty, accepts the "freaks" as an equal part of God's creation. As in reality, however, and not just in the confined world of the circus or in the House of Jonah, life must go on beyond the mythic projections of the ritualistic ball game. The narrative continues by encapsulating, in a way which is ironic (the strongman, for instance, dies by lifting a boulder), humorous, and often grotesque, the future lives of the characters. The "magic spell" of meaning seems to be broken by a return to mundane, random, and often self-defeating actions, but the truth lies in the quest itself and the knowledge acquired by engaging in it. The author says at the end: "Myself, I now see no distinction between Magic and human purpose. And for that I am truly thankful" (p. 412). The Life of Hope continues the quest theme and the interest in individual renewal through trial and coming to terms with the past, but Quarrington takes a more daring approach to narrative with this novel. Although he uses many of the devices of the postmodernist again - the repetition of place names used in other novels; the intrusive author who just happens to have the same birth date as Paul Quarrington; a fish who talks; real people (such as Thoreau) who enter as characters; parodies of other fiction (Scrope Davies, like Krook in Dickens's Bleak House, dies of spontaneous combustion); and comments about creating fiction - he now also presents a parallel story, set in the nineteenth century, to shed light on present events. Paul flees from the city and his wife to the small town of Hope, Ontario, to try, through writing, to understand what has gone wrong with his life. In a bar called "The Willing Mind" he meets a mysterious group of people who act as guides for his journey through time. Mona Drinkwater, the barmaid, an earthy muse figure who is less sophisticated but as querulous as the woman in John Fowles's A Maggot, and Jonathon, the drunken, visionary Indian, are the two most potent links to past and present. They suggest a mythic

continuity to life, especially a life of truthful engagement, not Paul's apathetic life of avoidance. Through his research on Joseph Benton Hope, after whom the town was named, Paul uncovers the story of a Utopian society which started in Lowell, Massachusetts, and gravitated, under some suspicion, to Ontario. Under the guise of seeking perfection in life, Hope mesmerizes his followers into pursuing a belief system which is sordid and corrupt, and which ultimately fulfils the sexual lust of the leader more than it contributes to the harmony of the group. Eventually the society breaks down under the weight of Hope's egocentric personality and ends in terror and violence. After Hope loses control of his perfectionist disciples, and after his rape of a young woman, he is axe-murdered by Martha Quinton. Her twin brother, George, now spiritually dead, takes the blame for the murder and is hanged. Paul, who now is staying in the Quinton's house, pieces together, with inspiration from the shadowy inhabitants from The Willing Mind, the mystery of the town of Hope. He begins to accept his own imperfection and the reasons behind his infidelities and his indifference to those who care about him. With the help of Ol' Mossback, the two-hundred-year-old talking fish, Paul does a mythic dance of regeneration and baptism which renews his appetite for life. In the "Epilogue", which is a reverse image of the negative and self-destructive fertility of Joseph Hope, Paul contemplates his return to his wife and the wonder of his new-born child. As a transitional novel, Logan in Overtime succeeds as a slight but useful commentary on Home Game, The Life of Hope, and King Leary. Not published until 1990, Logan in Overtime was actually scheduled for publication in 1986, but Avon Books discontinued its Canadian line. The novel demonstrates Quarrington's preoccupation with sports and with myth but does not show an advance in his narrative technique. Using the third-person narrative with a generally linear plot, Quarrington chronicles the story of washed-up, drunken Logan, a goalie in the obscure Ontario Professional Hockey League which includes the towns of Hope and Falconbridge from The Life of Hope. Logan, like Nathanael Isbister, has a mysterious background and has smashed-up legs which prevent him from being a top-notch player. He is given one last chance by his coach to win a game or be traded. The game turns out to be the longest overtime game in history, lasting five days. The game, in effect, becomes an extended metaphor for Logan's life and his search for some kind of meaning. At the beginning, Logan looks for the constellations he once had been able to find as a child, but now cannot see. Most of the time, he just gets drunk with other equally hopeless misfits at the Dove Hotel, where his sometime lover Kristal sings her haunting song "Try to Remember". Logan, however, cannot remember the time when his life had purpose until the game, because of its unusual length, reacquaints him with figures from his past. As the game progresses, a critical incident changes Logan. During a storm, Logan sees Joe Finewater climbing a radio tower. Although drunk, Logan dons his hockey uniform, perhaps a symbol of knightly armour, and tries to save Joe. Both, however, fall from the tower, and Joe is killed. Ironically, Logan survives by landing on Lindy Olver, who caused Logan's injuries

years before. These two acts of sacrifice reveal to Logan and Lindy, who had been wracked with guilt over what he had done to Logan, humanity's essential "heart" and the quality of goodness in even minor victories. The game concludes on an outdoor pond, and as in The Life of Hope, this primitive setting suggests a rebirth of faith signified by the competitors' childlike laughter while playing. Although Bram Ridout, Logan's symbolic successor, scores on him, ending the game, Logan triumphs on a personal level. With his real love, Charlene Luttor, Logan finally sees the Dogstar Sirius, the brightest star in the sky and an image of hope and consolation. Despite the undoubted strengths of these novels, in quality of characterization, interesting variation of narrative voice, and mythological consistency, they are still too loose and often undisciplined. Not all the elements work together all the time to give the sense of a major project with full emotional impact and technical skill. With King Leary and Whale Music, however, Quarrington's themes find powerful expression in a fully developed and tightly wrought form. The settings and characters are realistic and believable, and the obvious excesses of metaphor are transformed into a more integrated symbolic system. The title King Leary provides a few clues about the content and tone of the novel. The allusions are multiple: Percival Leary, the "King", refers at the same time to the irascible King Clancy, a Canadian hockey legend, to Percival, the knight-questor pursuing the Holy Grail, and to Shakespeare's King Lear. The realistic hockey setting will be the ground on which Leary gains self-knowledge, but it will also be the forum of tragedy. Using the difficult form of the firstperson interior monologue, which is made all the more effective by Leary's colourful language, disjointed verb tenses, and fractured syntax, Quarrington gives us the immediate sense of the events as they are processed by a faintly senile old man finally confronting his past. Percival Leary lingers complacently in the South Grouse (birthplace of Logan) old folks' home with Blue Hermann, a hockey writer who spent his life praising Leary's exploits and who now suffers from liver and veneral diseases. Their lives are interrupted by Claire Redford, who wants to make a ginger ale advertisement with Leary and also have a King Leary night at the Gardens. This recognition starts Leary on the road to the place where his greatest triumphs occur, but also to recollections of the past which are both disturbing and enlightening. Past and present intermingle in the narrative as Leary conjures up memories of his life and the major influences in it. What he finds in his moments of lucidity is the truth that he did not know, or was suppressing. Percival meets his best friend, Clay Bors Clinton, as a youngster, and their friendship continues until Clay's death. At Clay's instigation, Leary inadvertently burns down a house and is sent to the Bowmanville Reformatory for Boys. Upon first seeing it, he is reminded of the castle in his brother's book The Knights of the Round Table, and is even more surprised to find out that it is run by monks. Here he learns, especially from blind brother Isaiah, the intricacies of hockey, the value of a team attitude, and the discipline that will make him a Hall of Famer. He does not understand, 149

however, why the monks play on a circular rink and chant strange songs while playing hockey. At the Reformatory, he also meets Manny Ozikean, the Wizard, who, like Clay and the monks, will exert considerable influence on him in later life. As a youth, Leary acquires friends who inspire a sense of loyalty and external traits which will make him a success, but he develops none of the self-examination and insight that would make him a compassionate moral being. As he relives his past, Leary focuses on significant incidents which take on new meaning as he puts them into context and sees how his actions have affected other people close to him. Manny, who was to marry Leary's sister-inlaw Jane, became a severe and dangerous alcoholic. After being traded from Toronto to New York, he also lost Jane. While drunk with a loose woman, Hallie, in New York, Manny cut his wrists on a broken whisky bottle and died. Although this suicide was covered up at the time, Leary always had a feeling of guilt about Manny which manifested itself in strange dreams about Manny's funeral. Leary finally realizes that he was an indirect cause of Manny's death. He knew that New York would kill Manny, but in order to be coach of the Toronto team, he would have to let Manny go. He also resisted seriously confronting Manny about his drinking problem. A memory enters Leary's mind, in which he watches Manny play hockey with the monks. He knows that part of his betrayal of friendship comes from jealousy, from the possibility that under the right circumstances, Manny would become the "King". Even more monstrous to Leary now is the way he treated his family. His neglect of his wife, Chloe, whose physical disabilities left her in a harness, he now finds unconscionable, but his blindness to her suffering made his infidelities possible. Although he could rationalize his behaviour by arguing that hockey had kept him on the road for long periods at a time, Leary begins to understand that his abandonment of his wife was more than physical; it was psychological. Leary's moral culpability is even more evident in his treatment of his sons, Clifford and Clarence. In the past, he treated the splay-footed Clifford as a simpleton who did not deserve much time or respect, and he actively hated Clarence because he caused Leary's injury (on his way to the bathroom, Leary had tripped on his son's firetruck). Leary learns, however, that the truck was actually Clifford's, but he really did not want to know otherwise. In his search for glory on the rink, Leary suppressed the fatherly quality of forgiveness and refused to acknowledge Clarence's talent for hockey and for poetry. Leary's fame in the public realm came at the expense of his private life and caused needless pain and ill will. While reliving his past, complete, like Scrooge, with ghostly commentators, Leary perceives his gravest sin, which compounds all his other sins: his total misjudgment of his "best" friend, Clay Clinton. Leary's fear of isolation and personal doubt about his own character led him to place Clinton's judgment ahead of his own. It was Clay who got him sent to the Reformatory; Clay who, in order to marry Jane, traded Manny; Clay who reaped the rewards of gambling to take financial control of the hockey empire; and it was Clay who manipulated Leary's every move. Until Isaiah, the Tiresius figure, the blind prophet and "seer", advises 150

Leary that the key to hockey and life is not to score and gain personal accolades while denying the achievements of others, but to play the "game" and to respect all the players involved, Leary lives in moral darkness. Finally taking personal responsibility for his reprehensible behaviour, Leary sets out to redeem himself and his past. Back in the narrative present, Leary confronts one of his betrayers, Blue Hermann, who had a greater desire to immortalize Leary in print than to help him in life. Percival punches Blue, who dies accidently when his head hits a sofa. With this action, Leary knows that he is not the "King" any more; that title will now go to Duane Killebrew, who rightfully deserves it. To complete his journey, he goes to the hockey Hall of Fame, the citadel from which Manny is excluded. Leary smashes the glass of the New York Americans exhibit and places Manny's crucifix on the now bloodsplattered Amerks' uniform, echoing Manny's reverence for the wounded Christ figure. With tremendous effort, Leary manages to tell Manny to stop drinking and calls him "son", thereby also pleading for his own son, Clarence, to forgive him. Bolting from the building, Leary collapses in the snow, his penitence fulfilled. He wakes to the scene of the monks playing hockey and, after a wave from Brother Isaiah, he joins them in the circle. By means of making this mythic structure coincide with the naturalistic elements of infidelity, betrayal, tragic death, personal loss, and human insensitivity, Quarrington creates a coherent and satisfying fiction of some distinction. In Whale Music, Quarrington continues the themes of King Leary and again uses the device of the interior monologue, but the complexity of the time scheme, the development of character refracting from the drug-addled brain of Des Howell, the narrator, and the authenticity of the surfacelevel rock music scene make this novel a superior achievement. Unlike King Leary or a novel such as Malamud's The Natural, which are structured on direct correspondences to the fisher-king/Percival myth, Whale Music integrates story and mythology on several levels, giving the illusion of almost seamless composition. Based loosely on the lives of Brian and Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, Whale Music develops like a contrapuntal music score with stages or "movements" creating a rhythm that leads to an inevitable conclusion. In structure, the novel is reminiscent of Joyce Gary's The Horse's Mouth, the story of an obsessive artist, Gulley Jimson, who progresses through stages in his work from "The Fall" and "The Raising of Lazarus" to his distinctive vision, "The Creation", battling both internal and external forces all the way. In Quarrington's novel, the reclusive, alcoholic musician, Des Howell, while mourning the death of his brother Danny, attempts to create his non-commercial masterpiece, "Whale Music", which includes "The Song of Flight", "The Song of Danger", "The Song of Congregation", and "The Song of Sadness". Like Jimson, Des must battle his self-destructive nature, the various demons from the past, and the numerous family members and greedy hangers-on from the commercial world of music. Des Howell, the obese "Whale-man", recounts graphically his life as a rock musician and the relationships which

have led him into alcoholism, drug addiction, and despair. His huckster father, Harry, is a sales representative for party favours but thinks Des and Danny are both disappointments. He tries to stifle any creativity they show because of his own sense of failure and his jealousy of their talent. When, as the "Howl Brothers", they gain some musical fame, he betrays them. Harry becomes the producer of their recordings but cheats them of their rightful share of the money and also takes credit for the music itself, leading to a messy court case which makes Des look like a fool. Des's mother, Claire, also takes advantage of him by giving one of his songs to her new husband, Maurice Mantle, who markets it under his own rival record label. Throughout Des's career, moreover, Geddy Cole, the writer who initially befriends Des and introduces him to drugs, uses the relationship to expose the scandalous behaviour of the rock group, including the seamy story of the electronic sound wizard, Fred Head, who is caught having sex with a ten-year-old girl. The greatest betrayal, however, which Des represses and transposes to the fictional Farley O'Keefe, comes from his brother Daniel. By accident, Des catches his wife, Fay, giving oral sex to Daniel. Because of Des's misdirected love for Danny, however, he focuses his anger on Fay, but the act disturbs him, and after his brother's death by drowning, Des locks himself up in his house and begins his composition, "Whale Music". Although Des cannot tolerate having anyone near him, he wakes up one day to find an "alien" girl in his house. She is Claire, from Toronto. Because it would take too much effort to throw her out, Des lets her stay and do as she pleases. Herself a victim of sexual abuse from her father, Claire understands Des's suffering and offers him the nonjudgmental companionship that he has not received before. He continues to create, and as his music evolves, so does his feeling for Claire. Slowly, she receives his sexual attention and the glimmering of love. Des is still suspicious of her motives, however, and by berating her unjustifiably, forces her to run away. It is only then that he realizes how much he needs her and commits himself to hunt for her in the real world outside his home. With his neighbour's dog, Barney, a comic allusion to Orion and the Dogstar Sinus, Des descends into the labyrinth of Minos's bar populated by his former guru, Babbo Nass Fazoo, and various low-life characters. After numerous scuffles, Des is saved by his producer, Ken Sexstone, and reunited with Claire. Through a series of epiphanies triggered by his imagination reaching out for Claire, Des sees the past for what it really was, without the baggage of self-deception he has carried for so long. As a muse figure, Claire rescues Des from the selfinflicted hell of drugs and booze and offers him the opportunity to reclaim his life both imaginatively and communally. He comes to understand that many of the betrayals were his own and that he lacked the compassion and moral character necessary to forgive those he loved. When Fay asked for forgiveness, Des rejected her in favour of Danny. Des also failed to see his father's good points and his mother's love for him, and he rejected Ken Sexstone and Claire, who tried to help him in his time of need. In addition, he betrayed the memory of Danny by not perceiving him as he really was, an exploitive emotional

cripple whose suffering became so great that he committed suicide. After he finishes "Whale Music", Des wishes to play it on the cliffs near his house, sending the sound out to sea as a lament for Danny. Claire, however, tells him the truth about his innermost being. She says that the music is really not for the whales nor Danny but for them all. With Des's final forgiveness of Danny, the healing process for him, his friends, and his family is complete, and the elemental, cosmic ocean which took Danny offers up, in the form of whales, an echo of the universe and the divine spirit of creation. As in The Horse's Mouth, in which the nursing mother whale smiles at Gulley Jimson, the fluke whale seems to smile at Des, and all join in a chorus of song. In Whale Music, Quarrington produces his most accomplished work to date by integrating, through an intricate series of flashbacks and time-changes, a genuine feeling for the sex- and greed-driven world of rock music and the moral strength required to survive it. The postmodernist techniques, which in the early novels are disrupting and distancing, now complement the narrative and lend it only a contextual randomness, mimicking the mind of Des Howell. The unifying factor is the song "Whale Music" itself, which develops and takes on teleological significance at the end. The mythic structure, although also parodied, is less imposed on than invoked naturally from the situations encountered in the novel. Reality is problematic for Quarrington, but there is sense to it, even if it is deeply hidden and found only after intense Job-like suffering. If Whale Music is any indication, with its precocious mastery of the language, fine sense of comic spirit, and brilliant insight into the mysteries of human nature, Quarrington will certainly be a major force in Canadian fiction for many years to come.

Chronology 1953

Born July 22, in Toronto, to Bruce Quarrington and Mary (Lewis) Ormiston. Grows up in Don Mills, Toronto, and attends Victoria Park Secondary School. 1972 Attends University of Toronto. 1975-80 Tours as bassplayer with the band "Joe Hall and the Continental Drift". 1978 Co-produces and records album, Quarrington/ Worthy. Song "Baby and the Blues" becomes number one hit single. Publishes The Service. 1982 Unpublished play "The Second" performed at the 25th St. Theatre, Saskatoon. 1983 Plays with rock band "The Suits". Publishes Home Game, which is nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour. 1984 Logan in Overtime is accepted by Avon Books, but not published when Canadian line discontinued. 1985 Publishes Life of Hope, which receives the nomination for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour. 1986 Periodical Distributors of Canada Authors' Award for most promising new writer. Named one of the ten best Canadian writers under forty-five years of age. 151

1987

Publishes King Leary, for which he wins the Stephen Leacock Award. 1987-88 Travels on European hockey tour. 1988 Publishes Hometown Heroes: On the Road with Canada's National Hockey Team, a non-fiction account of the hockey tour. Feature writer for Now magazine. With Dorothy Bennie celebrates birth of their daughter Carson (named after author Carson McCullers). 1989 Publishes Whale Music, for which he wins the Governor General's Award for Fiction. "The Invention of Poetry" is performed at the Edmonton Citadel Theatre and the Berkeley St. Theatre, Toronto, by the Canadian Stage Company. 1989-90 Writer-in-residence at the Orillia Public Library. 1990 Publishes Logan in Overtime and The Invention of Poetry. 1991 Writes Perfectly Normal, a screenplay. Admitted to Norman Jewison's prestigious Canadian Film Centre. Wins Genie Award for Best Original Screenplay 1991, for Perfectly Normal.

Comments by Paul Quarrington I think the impulse to myth-make is what motivates me. I like to make the world a little more interesting. My kind of writing could be compared to caricature - if someone has, say, a big nose, well, of course you draw a huge nose. I think I'm kind of highlighting little bits of possibility. I don't know if I'd ever really change my style, but hopefully it will evolve and progress in other directions. I don't think I would ever write a sombre novel. I think if I can do things with some humour, then I should. I get kind of ticked-off with a guy like Woody Allen when he eschews humour in his movies. He can make serious movies, but he seems to go out of his way to remove humour. If you have the gift for humour, I think you should use it. Interview with James Marck, "Author Weaves Wonder into the Sporting Life", Now, February 2228, 1990, p. 18. I think as you get older you start to panic . . . Americans tend to put out three or four books - you've got to make sure that every book counts. British authors, they put out twenty or thirty by the time they're fifty and sort of go for an average. We (in Canada) have a choice. I kind of think I'll go for the average. Interview with Barbara Wade Rose, "The Apprenticeship of Paul Quarrington", Books in Canada, XV (March 1986), 10. Well, I have a hard time relating to the 80s myself. And I guess my characters do, too. A lot of the values that I attach importance to aren't necessarily given much importance in this day and age. Things like spirituality, compassion and just trying to get along with some degree of dignity. So, my characters are genuinely compassionate men, and part of their problem is that they are too much so. And, they find themselves in situations that don't allow for any compassion.

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I was artistically-inclined as a kid. I could draw fairly well from a fairly young age, so it wasn't an unreasonable ambition. And I still love cartoons now, and not just the animated type. Sometimes I think that a lot of what I'm doing is closer to George Booth or Gahan Wilson, who are actual cartoonists. George Booth is that fellow in the New Yorker, who does all the dogs who look like they just came out of the dryer and all those peculiar people. I really find an identity with them. So, both kinds of cartoons have entered in as influences. [The Life of Hope] is definitely a book about a man's experience, but I think you can either write that to seek the approval or understanding of other males, or you can set it out in front of everyone. And, maybe it'll help someone else to hear about it. I think you have to write from your experience and I just happen to be this way. That is, for good or ill, sex has often struck me as a humorous thing. The only accusation I really dislike when it comes to those aspects of The Life of Hope, is that my intention was in any way to shock. That to me is the basest thing you can try to do. And I'm flabbergasted when people are shocked. After all, is this really still an issue? We have other things to worry about, I thought we'd gotten over this. But, I certainly don't mean to offend anyone. I think that the novelist is an odder personality, because he's got to work on his obsession over a long period of time. Poets can do their thing more quickly. To get something under your skin so bad that you're willing to invest two years scratching it out makes you, I would think, an odder character. I don't think there's as much of a difference between the public part of it and the private part of it, as the fact that the whole process is odd. The writer takes what is often an intensely private thing or experience and sets it out for everyone to look at. But, then maybe you're hiding behind the fact that it's a book. I suppose The Life of Hope could

be viewed as me confessing a lot of things that I'd probably feel uncomfortable telling complete strangers. Interview with Louise Longo, Waves, XV, 4 (1987), 4-10. There is one paragraph in Whale Music where Des describes playing in seedy hotels. That's where our careers intersected. For him it was a step on the way to the top. For me, it was about where I peaked. I just made an educated guess about what music super-stardom is like. Interview with HJ. Kirchhoff, "Whale Music Creator Sounds Optimistic Note", Globe and Mail, March 8, 1990, p. C7.

Comments on Paul Quarrington The book (Home Game) enchants, as if the Brothers Grimm and the Brothers Marx had conspired to perform pratfalls while Freud was looking on, shaking his head. Ken Adachi, "Writer's Art Brings 'Freaks' Vibrantly Alive", Toronto Star, May 7, 1983, p. H10. It would seem the whole world - past and present, private and public - tends to strike Quarrington as astonishing, incongruous, absurd. And to mirror, perhaps compete with, this ludicrous reality, he used his inventiveness, his gift for verbal pratfalls and deadpan humor, to create an even more manic world. Ken Adachi, "Deadpan Humor Creates Manic World", Toronto Star, September 22, 1985, p. A7. What lingers is Quarrington's style and attitude - he's as fantastical as Jack Hodgins, as full of arcane lore and erudition as Robertson Davies, as bawdy as Rabelais. No one in Canadian fiction has achieved that combination before. And for good measure there's a touch of Thoreau (he actually appears as a character) and more than a glance in the direction of Melville's Moby Dick. William French, "Free Love and Hope", Globe and Mail, September 21, 1985, p. 21. A superb stylist, Quarrington skates across the blue line between fact and fiction: real sports stars share the pages with fictional ones. As in his previous novel, The Life of Hope, Quarrington shows a gift for creating a comic world of eccentrics. But in King Leary, eccentricity strikes a universal chord. The author has not written just another hockey novel; he has turned hockey into a metaphor for magic. Brian D. Johnson, Maclean's, November 9, 1987, p. 64h. If Kurt Vonnegut were to do a Vulcan mind meld with Gump Worsley, you might end up with a book something like this. The supernatural, the extra-terrestrial and the just plain weird are Osterized to produce a very strange and often funny book. Tom Barrett, "Bizarre Hockey Tale Like a Literary Experiment Gone Wrong", Vancouver Sun, April 14, 1990, p. C5. Quarrington's penchant for broken-down, washed-up and burned-out heroes might suggest he has a dour view of

things, but it must be pointed out that Des Howell [Whale Music] ends up coping very well, thank you, and even Logan gets his longest-held wish at the end of Logan in Overtime. HJ. Kirchhoff, "Whale Music Creator Sounds Optimistic Note", Globe and Mail, March 8, 1990, p.C7.

Selected Bibliography Works by Paul Quarrington Articles "Home Ice: The Backyard Advantage", Harrowsmith, XVI (November-December 1990), 46-51. "Shore, Morenz, and Clancy", in Dan Diamond, ed., The National Hockey League 75th Anniversary Commemorative Book. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991, pp. 56-62. Books The Service. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1978. Home Game. Toronto: Doubleday, 1983. The Life of Hope. Toronto: Doubleday, 1985. King Leary. Toronto: Doubleday, 1987. Hometown Heroes. Toronto: Collins, 1988. Whale Music. Toronto: Doubleday, 1989. Logan in Overtime. Toronto: Doubleday, 1990. Interviews "Acclaimed Writer Has Penned Plays Since School Days", Toronto Star, October 19, 1989, pp. Cl, C4. [Anonymous.] Kirchhoff, HJ. "Whale Music Creator Sounds Optimistic Note", Globe and Mail, March 8, 1990, p. C7. Longo, Louise. "Paul Quarrington", Waves, XV, 4 (1987), 4-10. Maclnnis, Craig. "Paul Quarrington: He Writes! He Scores!", Toronto Star, February 24, 1990, p. F7. Marck, James. "Author Weaves Wonder into the Sporting Life", Now, February 22-28, 1990, p. 18. Rose, Barbara Wade. "The Apprenticeship of Paul Quarrington", Books in Canada, XV (March 1986), 6-Sff. Taylor, Bill. "Quarrington Sings Toronto's Praises", Toronto Star, July 5, 1986, p. F3. Play and Screenplay The Invention of Poetry. Toronto: Summerhill Season, 1990. Perfectly Normal. A screenplay with Eugene Lipinski for a film directed by Yves Simoneau. Produced by Michael Burns, Alliance, 1991. Selected Criticism Adachi, Ken. "Writer's Art Brings 'Freaks' Vibrantly Alive" [review of Home Game], Toronto Star, May 7, 1983, p. H10. . "Deadpan Humor Creates Manic World" [review of Life of Hope], Toronto Star, September 22,1985, p. A17. 153

Barnholden, Michael. "Puckish Humour" [review of Logan in Overtime], Books in Canada, XIX (April 1990), 41-46. Barrett, Tom. "Bizarre Hockey Tale Like a Literary Experiment Gone Wrong" [review of Logan in Overtime], Vancouver Sun, April 14, 1990, p. C5. Blackadar, Bruce. "'Down-and-Dirty' Book on Hockey Giant Nets Leacock Award" [review of King Leary], Toronto Star, May 16, 1988, p. C7. Carlson, Ron. "Hockey Is a Lot Like Life" [review of King Leary], New York Times Book Review, May 1,1988, p. 26. French, William. "Free Love and Hope" [review of Life of Hope], Globe and Mail, September 21, 1985, p. 21. . "The Skates Need Sharpening" [review of Logan in Overtime], Globe and Mail, March 3, 1990. p. C17. Gault, John. "Loony Tunes" [review of Whale Music], Maclean's, May 29, 1989, p. 61. Gray, John. "Fun and Games with a Brain-damaged Rocker" [review of Whale Music], Globe and Mail, May 13, 1986, p. C19. Johnson, Brian D. "Humor for Humor's Sake" [review of Life of Hope], Maclean's, October 7, 1985, p. 61. . "Puckish Wit" [review of King Leary], Maclean's, November 9, 1987, p. 64h. Kennedy, Paul. "Paul Quarrington: A Good Sport in Life and Letters" [review of King Leary], Quill & Quire, LIII (Summer 1987), 77.

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Maclnnis, Craig. "A Joyously Skewed Slice of Crazy Canadiana" [review of Logan In Overtime}, Toronto Star, March 3, 1990, p. M10. MacLeod, Jack. "The Teeth of Comedy" [review of Whale Music], Books in Canada, XVIII (June-July 1989), 25, 26. Malcolm, Douglas. "Smooth Skating" [review of King Leary], Books in Canada, XVI (October 1987), 27. Mason, Julie. Review of Whale Music, Canadian Forum, LXVIV (July/August 1990), 28. Mifflin, Margot. "Bad Vibrations" [review of Whale Music], New York Times Book Review, LXCV (February 25, 1990), 12. Quill, Greg. "Author Lets Beach Boy Find Weirdness for Him" [review of Whale Music}, Toronto Star, May 9, 1989, p. D4. A Note on the Contributor James C. MacDonald chairs the English Department of Humber College, Toronto. He has published many articles on British and Canadian fiction writers, including Max Beerbohm, Lord Dunsany, Muriel Spark, Morley Callaghan, and Mordecai Richler.

Who's Where Author, Series Number Acorn, Milton 4 Aquin, Hubert 4 Atwood, Margaret 2 Avison, Margaret 2 Back, George 7 Beauchemin, Yves 8 Berton, Pierre 7 Besette, Gerard 6 Birdsell, Sandra 8 Birney, Earle 1 Blais, Marie-Claire 4 Blaise, Clark 7 Bowering, George 7 Brooke, Frances 5 Brossard, Nicole 6 Buckler, Ernest 2 Callaghan, Morley 1 Carman, Bliss 3 Carr, Emily 1 Carrier, Roch 6 Clarke, Austin 4 Cohen, Leonard 6 Cohen, Matt 4 Connor, Ralph 5 Cook, Michael 4 Crawford, Isabella Valancy 5 Davies, Robertson 2 de la Roche, Mazo 5 Denison, Merrill 3 Dube, Marcel 4 Ducharme, Rejean 6 Duncan, Sara Jeannette 1 Dunlop, Tiger 3 Engel, Marian 6 Perron, Jacques 5 Finch, Robert 7 Findley, Timothy 4 Franklin, John 5 French, David 4 Gass,Ken 8 Gelinas, Gratien 3

Gibson, Margaret 8 Grove, Frederick Philip 1 Gustafson, Ralph 7 Haliburton, Thomas Chandler 1 Hearne, Samuel 3 Heavysege, Charles 7 Hebert, Anne 3 Hemon, Louis 3 Hodgins, Jack 8 Hollingsworth, Margaret 8 Hood, Hugh 2 Hospital, Janette Turner 8

Page,P.K. 7 Pollock, Sharon 6 Pratt, EJ. 3 Prewett, Frank 7 Purdy,Al 2 Quarrington, Paul 8

Kinsella, W.P. 8 Kirby, William 5 Klein, A.M. 1 Kreisel, Henry 5 Kroetsch, Robert 2

Raddall, Thomas 7 Reaney, James 4 Richards, David Adams 8 Richardson, Major John 3 Richler, Mordecai 2 Ringuet 3 Roberts, Sir Charles G.D. 7 Ross, Sinclair 3 Roy, Gabrielle 1 Rule, Jane 7 Ryga, George 4

La Rocque, Gilbert 8 Lampman, Archibald 1 Laurence, Margaret 2 Layton, Irving 7 Leacock, Stephen 1 Lee, Dennis 8 LePan, Douglas 6 Levine, Norman 4 Livesay, Dorothy 5 Lowry, Malcolm 5

Salutin, Rick 8 Sangster, Charles 5 Scott, Duncan Campbell 1 Scott, F.R. 5 Service, Robert 7 Seton, Ernest Thompson 5 Skvorecky, Josef 7 Smith, AJ.M. 1 S ouster, Raymond 3 Sparshott, Francis 6

MacEwen, Gwendolyn 6 Mackenzie, Alexander 5 MacLennan, Hugh 1 Mair, Charles 5 Marshall, Joyce 7 Mathews, Robin 6 Metcalf,John 8 Mitchell, W.O. 2 Montgomery, Lucy Maud 7 Moodie, Susanna 3 Mowat, Farley 7 Munro, Alice 2 Musgrave, Susan 6

Theriault, Marie-Jose 8 Thomas, Audrey 8 Thompson, David 1 Traill, Catharine Parr 3 Tremblay, Michel 6

Nowlan, Alden 2

Valgardson, W.D. 6 Vanderhaeghe, Guy 8 Waddington, Miriam 4 Walker, George F. 6 Watson, Sheila 4 Wiebe,Rudy 2 Wilkinson, Anne 7 Wilson, Ethel 3 Wiseman, Adele 4

Ondaatje, Michael 8 155