Making connections through The Paston Letters

Last Wednesday I made time to partake of one of my favourite activities: I walked to my local second hand bookshop, The Bookseller, and spent an hour or so browsing unencumbered by companions or rush. As usual, the proprietor, Mr. Prins, had set aside a few hardcover Everyman’s Library Editions and an old blue hardcover Oxford World’s Classic for me to consider.  Unlike most visits, today I had time.  I left the four volumes on the counter, the seed of a number of large stacks I would build as I browsed.  Throughout my visit, Mr. Prins pottered about the store, flitting from the computer on his book-stacked desk, to the shelves and to “the back” where I imagine an infinity of yet-to-be- and never-to-be-catalogued books wait to be brought into the light.

The one volume I had come specifically seeking was H. G. Wells’ little war-time (WWII) anti-Catholic diatribe, Crux Ansata (“Why don’t we bomb Rome” it begins). I had been reading it online, but, as well as finding the digital a completely unsatisfying, indeed, unsettling manner of reading, I knew that I would someday require a real copy for the Wells collection I’ve been building since that day in about 1980 that I stumbled on a copy of Ann Veronica in that bookstore that used to be in Hub Mall on the University of Alberta Campus.  If I remember correctly, that bookstore, since shifted locations a number of times, is now The Edmonton Book Store on Whyte Avenue, in the location that one time was Bjarne’s Books, a shop and proprietor I sadly miss.  Edmonton’s loss — Victoria’s and Cyberspace’s gain.

I went straight to the Fiction section and was at first disappointed by the slimness of the Wells selection.  A few of the usual War of the Worldses and Time Machines. And, there in the middle, a slim little volume bound in dark leather. Crux Ansata! With a large smile on my face I strode back to the counter and plopped my find onto the Everyman Shelley and Langland and the little blue Paston Letters.  Now to some truly unencumbered browsing!

Oh, the treasures I found!

An early edition of the Tolkien/Gordon edition of Sir Gawain; Skeet’s two volume edition of Piers Plowman and Richard the Redeless (I already had one, but this was in better condition. The next day I traded the old one for a copy of  Bentham’s Fragment on Government); a lovely copy of the first edition of Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (in four volumes); Brown’s English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century; a 1959 copy of Vinaver’s Malory; nice old hardcovers of Quirk & Wrenn’s Old English Grammar and Campbell’s venerable volume on the same subject; The Oxford Book of Medieval Verse; nice editions of Ancrene Wisse and The Parlement of Foules . . .

And a copy of Sisam’s edition of 14th Century Verse and Prose, a volume I find oddly common in Edmonton — I have three copies now myself. But this latest copy, unusual in that it still had a (rubbed) dust jacket, had a little surprise for me which made me take a second look at the other books in my stacks. There on the flyleaf was written in small letters in ball-point “Raymond J. S. Grant”.

During my days at the University of Alberta, Dr. Grant was the senior Anglo-Saxonist in the English Department, standing in a venerable line stretching back to R. K. Gordon, a professor at the University’s foundation and, by the way, translator of number 794, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, in Everyman’s Library.

It was Dr. Grant who surprised me during an undergraduate directed reading of The Seafarer by saying “I think you might have a publication here.”  Because of Dr. Grant, I had my first scholarly publication accepted before I got my Bachelor’s degree.

I have gradually have fallen out of contact with the people of my University days. I regularly return to campus, but it’s a different world with different people now.  Not worse, not better, just different.  I had some sort of memory that Dr. Grant had retired and perhaps gone back to Scotland. As I gathered my thoughts for this piece I found on the University web page that Dr. Grant is, indeed, emeritus, as is my thesis supervisor, L. N. McKill, the man who first taught me Old English.  After I got home from the bookstore I discovered Dr. McKill’s name on the flyleaf of Brown’s English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century.  I held in my hands volumes that had educated my educators. These books had been around me in those offices three decades ago as I puzzled my way through great poetry sadly experienced by only a few.

What I find of extreme interest in second hand books is the little bits of paper one finds tucked into them.  Dr. Grant’s copy of Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose (1959) is undoubtedly a text from his student days.  Tucked into book at the first page of the Introduction are two slips of paper, one laying out the geography of dialects of Middle English with representative authors (information repeated in the facing map) and the other a cryptic, multicoloured graph of English sound changes.

These are meticulous thoughts-on-paper of a student of a different time, brief glimpses of the learning process in an age of paper, conversation and information hard-won from beautiful, tactile, fragrant objects with their own individual histories — books in a library.

Mr. Prins filled a banker’s box with my selected volumes and agreed to hold the heavy collection for me to pick up later when I’d be out with a vehicle. When I returned two stacks of brick-red hardcovers were on the counter.  “I told you I thought I had a lot of Wells back there!” Mr. Prins announced with a grin.  Indeed, he had brought from “the back” a twelve volume matched set of Wells’ novels ranging from The Time Machine to The Undying Fire.  A fine day’s discovery!

Later Wednesday evening I looked more carefully at the World’s Classics copy of The Paston Letters.  There was no name on the fly leaf.  It seemed an anonymous book with no story to tell outside of its text.  But, tucked in the back was a small blue slip of paper which indicated that this, like some others of the volumes in the box, was a review copy sent out by the publisher in the hope that professors would say nice things about it. On the back of the slip was a hand written note:

Raymond:

pp. 41-72 seem to be missing from this book as also 73 to 104. I suppose that is a whole gathering! Give him hell next time — you might get a real find from them.

Joan

Sure enough, a gathering is misplaced in the book.  But of far more interest to me is the note. Considering the number of Dr. Grant’s books that had recently come into the Bookseller, I have no doubt that “Raymond” addressed in the book is Dr. Grant. And I am equally certain that “Joan” who wrote the note is Dr. Joan Crowther, a Chaucerian I never met during our shared time at the University.  But I did meet and get to know Dr. Crowther in her retirement as each weekday morning I got her clubs out of storage for her round of golf.  I lost touch with Dr. Crowther after leaving the world of golf just a few years before she left this world.

As I stood looking at that little blue note on Wednesday night I recalled a brief exchange, one of many conversations we shared over clattering golf clubs.  These words came shortly after my reading crossed a very special threshhold:

“Dr. Crowther, do you find that the more you read the more everything seems to connect together?”

Dr. Crowther held her golf bag still and looked at me.

“Oh, yes, John!”

“Mind at the End of Its Tether” by H. G. Wells: a final testament of hope

I’ve just revisited H.G. Wells’ last book (apart from that thing on which he collaborated with Uncle Joe Stalin) Mind at the End of Its Tether, published in November 1945.  I feel I must emphasize at the outset that the title is not A Mind at the End of Its Tether — Wells is explicitly not saying in the title that his own mind is at the end of its tether (although that may have been a fact). No, this little collection of odd essays is about the coming end of “self-conscious existence” as the European intellectual elite had conceived it for centuries and also about the probable (from the late 1945 point of view) obliteration of Life itself:

. . . within a period to be estimated by weeks and months rather than by æons, there has been a fundamental change in conditions under which life, not simply human life but all self-conscious existence, has been going on since its beginning.

I think too often Mind at the End of Its Tether is condemned or dismissed (or praised) as a disjointed (Orwell’s description) wallow in pessimism by an old man disappointed or even heartbroken over the failure of his life-mission as he feels that life winding down to an end he knows to be only days or weeks away.  When I consider another little book Wells published just before Mind at the End of Its Tether, I find the suggestion that Wells had lost hope and given up to be preposterous.  The Happy Turning concludes with an idea very similar to the conclusion of Mind at the End of It’s Tether:

So we found ourselves in agreement that the human mind may be in a phase of transition to a new, fearless, clear-headed way of living in which understanding will be the supreme interest in life, and beauty a mere smile of approval.  So it is at any rate in the Dreamland to which my particular Happy Turning takes me.  There shines a world “beyond good and evil”, and there, in a universe completely conscious of itself, Being achieves its end.

Well!  That’s nothing other than an evolutionary jump!

And how does Mind at the End of Its Tether end?

. . . my own temperament makes it unavoidable for me to doubt, as I have said, that there will not be that small minority which will succeed in seeing life out to its inevitable end.

What? Bloody convoluted British piling up of negatives to confound whether or not one is making a positive statement!  If I parse correctly, Wells is saying that, in fact, he can’t help but think that there *will* be that small successful group which will reach life’s inevitable end.

But what is that end?

I would argue that life’s inevitable end in Wells’ view is an intellectual evolutionary jump to the situation described in The Happy Turning, that world “beyond good and evil”, that “clear-headed way of living.”

Let’s look at the book.

I think the chapter headings can vital to an understanding of what Wells is arguing:

The End Closes In Upon Mind
Mind is Retrospective to the End
There is No “Pattern of Things to Come”
Recent Realisations of the Nature of Life
Race Suicide by Gigantism
Precocious Maturity, A Method of Survival
The Antagonism of Age and Youth
New Light on the Record of the Rocks

Here is the pattern of Wells’ discussion. Self-conscious life is facing conditions which will end it, but thought will look back to past patterns till the end because there is no pattern in the chaos of the future. So Wells himself looks back to the past through the lens of evolutionary biology and presents some patterns he sees, including a tendency to large body size, except in the case of humans who have evolved through a process of progressive infantilization. Just as humanity has survived by evolving a permanent arrested physical development, it is necessary that Mind remain vibrantly youthful if there is to be a future for life.

Throughout the book, Wells is frustratingly vague about the threats to Life he sees and use deceptive terms to describe exactly what he thinks is in danger.  Just as there may be a tendency to read the title as A Mind at the End of its Tether, it is easy to misunderstand Wells’ talk of “our universe” ending rather than “the Universe”: at one point he writes “our ‘universe’” and at another it is “Our universe”.  Wells is decidedly not talking about a rolling up of the firmament and God wandering off to start anew.   At most he is anticipating a nuclear sterilization of the planet. At least he is talking about a restructuring of human society and intellect into something his generation of old men would no longer recognize as human.

Now, in more detail:

Chapter One is partly a description of the Mind of Wells’ time, of the intellectual approach to existence that Wells sees in the common folk (keep calm and carry on) and in the educated classes (keep calm and carry on).  Wells describes what his own attitude has been:

The habitual interest in his life is critical anticipation. Of everything he asks: “To what will this lead?” And it was natural for him to assume that there was a limit set to change, that new things and events would appear, but that the would appear consistently, preserving the natural sequence of life.  So that in the present vast confusion of our world, there was always the assumption of an ultimate restoration of rationality, an adaptation and a resumption.  It was merely a question, the fascinating question, of what forms the new rational phase would assume . . .

But Wells has come to the conclusion that there has come a complete breakdown in predictability, perhaps an anticipation of Chaos Theory, and he seems to be anticipating Toffler’s Future Shock in his description of the trauma of a world in which “everything was driving anyhow to anywhere at a steadily increasing velocity.”  And his description of his mid-twentieth century world is remarkable:

Distance had been abolished, events had become practically simultaneous throughout the planet . . .

If 1945 appeared to be at Tether’s End, what would Wells have done if confronted with the world today?

Although Wells has stated that prediction is no longer possible, he predicts that

the normal multitude, which will carry on in this every contracting NOW of our daily lives — quite unawake to what it is that is making so much of our existence distressful and evasive and intensifying our need for mutual comfort and redeeming acts of kindliness.

and

We pass into the harsh glare of hitherto incredible novelty.

Welcome to the 21st Century, Mr Wells!

What I find troubling about Chapter One is Wells’ introduction of what he calls “The Antagonist”, some sort of almost-almost personal force which is Hell-bent on destroying life.  I have trouble reconciling Wells’ seeing acceptance that the world is purposeless and virtually lacking in causality with what seems a wholly unnecessary hypothesis of an Enemy of humanity.  He is vague to the point of meaninglessness about the nature of the Antagonist.  Is the Antagonist simply entropy?  Wells’ frequent references to radioactivity — they appear in almost every chapter — makes me wonder if the Atomic Bombs dropped on Japan just a few months earlier are not the root of Wells dread.  Or is the Antagonist something about human nature, a race-suicidal imperative which nuclear fission could only exacerbate?  I don’t know, but I don’t understand why Wells felt it necessary to personify this “force” as “The Antagonist”.

The brief second Chapter is simply a condemnation of religion as a usually malicious fiction but also a necessary anodyne for the common person in the face of the futility of life:  the priests help the people keep calm and carry on until they die.

Chapter III is probably the one that causes people to judge Wells a pessimist:

After all the present writer has no compelling argument to convince the reader that he should not be cruel or mean or cowardly.  Such things are also in his own make-up in a large measure, but none the less he hates and fights against them with all his strength.  We would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack.  But this is a matter of individual predilection for everyone to decide for himself.

In Chapter IV Wells looks at evolutionary theory as it stood in his time and then applies it to humanity and the problem he sees coming.  Wells suggests that within his lifetime there has been a huge change in the relations of the sexes in Britain, a hint that evolution continues in humans.  And then, he suggests that the sorts of forces which bring about these relationship changes “may play incalculable parts in the production of a new humanity” capable of adapting to the new world.  A hint of a sort of absent-minded eugenics as the future hope.

In Chapter V Wells suggests that the first law of Life is “the imperative to aggression” which leads to large body size.  As I understand modern evolutionary theory — and the comparative numerical and biomass success of, for example, whales and beetles — Wells is beyond wrong in this detail (as he is on the diet of basking sharks).  But Wells is correct in his main point in the chapter: species rise and fall, usually to be replaced by other species but sometimes a species rebounds from an evolutionary bottle-neck.  Again, Wells is closing on a hopeful note.

In the title of Chapter VI, “Precocious Maturity, a Method of Survival”, and in the Chapter itself, Wells makes clear the basis of his hope for the future:

time after time Nature has cut out an adult form from the record altogether, abolished it, and made some larval stage the sexually mature form.

Wells is arguing that the future must be made by the young in youth, and as he closes the next chapter, he states such explicitly:  “The young are life, and there is no hope but in them.”  Is this pessimism?  I think not!

Wells’ final Chapter brings the suggestion that a small minority of highly adaptable individuals will survive the coming “end”.  Wells recaps human evolution, pointing out the progressive infantilization which must continue into any viable future and then concludes with his convoluted affirmation of his own hope for the future.

Certainly Mind at the End of Its Tether is uneven and at times frustratingly vague.  But I cannot call it disjointed — there is a very strong coherence in Wells’ discussion. And there is nothing pessimistic in the little book!  This is the final testament of a man who has seen his world very nearly destroyed in two world wars, of a man who has seen his life long work of building peace repeatedly dashed — this is the final testament of a man in a time of vanishingly little hope who stands up and points to a young couple daring to begin a life together and announces “There are the new Lords of Creation!”

And, you know what? Those young people Wells passed the torch to are our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.  We’ve made it through the End Wells expected.  We are the New Humanity, navigating a world more complicated, chaotic and terrifying than Wells could have imagined or handled.   We navigate that world with all Humanity’s knowledge at our fingertips, in our back pockets. We chat instantly with a friend on the other side of the world, with people living off the planet, for goodness sake.  We are the Shape of Things to Come.

Let’s try to keep up the “mutual comfort and redeeming acts of kindliness”.

Lester del Rey’s “The Eleventh Commandment”: An Elder Handmaid’s Tale

It’s funny.
I’m not actually a fan of Lester del Rey, but here I am writing about him again.  As a youngster I read very little of his work.  I was all Clarke and Asimov and Larry Niven.  But when I was rereading Nerves a while back this ad on the back cover caught my eye:

The back cover of “Nerves”

and I thought, “The Eleventh Commandment looks interesting, in a schlocky sort of way.”  Through the magic of Abebooks, within a week or two I had a copy of the exact edition advertised in my silly little hands:

The front cover of “The Eleventh Commandment”

What a pleasant surprise this two dollar (ten dollars shipping) book has been!  No, the writing continues to be pedestrian, the plot is perhaps a little contrived at times, the characters are more stock and wooden then  the yard at Totem down on 51st (that’s local, Edmonton colour), but . . .

This is a sort of mainstream, white bread work from 1962 somehow filled with drugged-out orgies in churches, socially sanctioned adultery, and empowered (in an odd way) women.

The Eleventh Commandment has a pretty standard old science fiction plot:  a colonial (from Mars in this case) finds himself exiled to Old Earth and must make a home for himself in this strange new old world.  The Martian, Boyd Jensen, seems like pretty much a typical mid-20th Century American fellow.  The reader is meant to find him familiar, I would think.  Post-nuclear-apocalyptic America, however, is quite different, it seems.  The land is full of fallout remnants, society is ruled by the American Catholic Eclectic Church and the Eleventh Commandment (Be Fruitful and Multiply!), and, we learn, the landscape is dotted with secret orphanages filled with the pitiful products of the mating of the Eleventh Commandment and  radioactivity-induced mutation.  Society is a completely Church-dominated pre-industrial cesspool in which women are indoctrinated to want nothing other than to produce babies until they die and men are similarly (but more easily, one would guess) brainwashed into a desire to father as many children as possible.  There is, however, a fairly clear emphasis in the Catholic Eclectic Church on trying to keep it all within the bounds of marriage, despite the orgies in the underground and Wiccan churches.  The Church wants to keep track of the genealogy of every birth.  As becomes clear at the end, all this breeding is the Catholic Eclectic Church’s eugenic system for purifying the genetically damaged human stock.

We are left with a sort of nausea.  Through the whole book the Church has seemed to be the horrid, psychotic institution bent on forcing women to be baby factories on the basis of ridiculous religious superstition.  Our conviction — cultivated by del Rey — that science needs to enlighten this superstitious world is suddenly overturned.  It isn’t superstition that drives the church — it is science after all!  We end the novel firmly impaled on the horns of the dilemma.  Everything about the lying Church and its horribly logical eugenics is beyond objectionable, but, in the world del Rey has created, is it not the only way to preserve humanity?  We know that Mars, which has been presented as a positive society, deals with its own genetic sports through exile to Earth, most often ending in death soon after arrival.  It is unclear what is happening on Earth outside of North America, but it is safe to assume that the entire globe is contaminated and that maintaining genetic health would be a challenge to any society.  The Church’s plan, to keep the population at a sustainable, if barely, level of development while breeding and selecting out harmful mutations in as few generations as possible, is disturbingly convincing.  But we can’t help but feel that this evil is only slightly the lesser to the alternatives.

The Eleventh Commandment is certainly a product of its time blending Cold War fears with some of the Dangerous Visions — the book is dedicated to Harlan Ellison — about to burst onto the science fiction scene and American society at large in the sixties.  But somehow The Eleventh Commandment seems to me a tale for our time, at least as much as Margaret Atwood’s later and much more famous The Handmaids Tale.  Del Rey shows us a fundamentalist religious society with some noticeable similarities to the perversities of fundamentalists in our own day (Talib, I’m looking at you.) And Father Epstein’s recitation about nature speaks eloquently to our time:

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help . . . But there is no help left to the race of man.  The mountains have been stripped of their cover and their substance runs down with the unchecked rains to bury the valleys below.  The buffalo and the wolf are gone from the plains, along with the tough grass that evolved there, and dry dust sweeps like a cutting scythe before the pleasure of the wind.  The puma is missing from his den and the eagle from his lair.  The predators are vanished, and without them the game herds have suckled the weak among their young to bring forth more weak, until their gene pools have failed and even they are dead or dying. . .

Father Epstein continues to describe the accidental nuclear catastrophe as being the only thing that could have saved humanity from its own relentless, unthinking growth.  If not for the nuclear holocaust, there would have been a population and environmental apocalypse.  No alternative in del Rey’s imagined future is a pleasant one.

All in all, Lester del Rey’s The Eleventh Commandment must be termed a hidden gem of mid-20th century science fiction, well worth seeking out by students of feminism, religion, environmentalism and the rights of the disabled.

A (Nuclear) Blast from the Past: Lester del Rey’s “Nerves”

In 1942 Lester del Rey, a second-string Golden Age science fiction stalwart, published a story titled “Nerves”. In 1956 he published an expanded version as a novel with the same title. It is to the 1956 version I refer here.  Nerves is the story of an accident at a nuclear plant, the political machinations which helped cause it, and the struggle to control the disaster and save the injured. Almost all the science in Nerves is what is sometimes called “rubber science”: to be less polite, it’s made up and inaccurate, although often based on speculation and hopeful expectation of mid-twentieth century popular science. The writing is unremarkably workmanlike. One might expect that this little book of science fiction, with its poor fiction and worse science would be best forgotten, but . . .

I can’t help but feel a fascination with the thing, principally because of del Rey’s confidence in the power of technology to solve our problems and remake the world for modern humanity.  This idea of the improvability of Nature has become largely foreign to modern public discourse (although we in the West silently continue to take part in just such an idea as we painlessly adopt every new bit of technology).  I happily acknowledge (guiltily confess?) my strong nostalgia for the nuclear-powered, sky-scrapered, monorailed future metropolis that never was to be.  So, del Rey’s future in which nuclear plants’ prime function is to produce inconceivably useful and beneficial trans-uranic elements in the (non-existent) Islands of Stability while generating vast amounts of power as a cheap byproduct — this world stirs my naive childhood technocratic dreams of a future life made better through chemistry and physics.  And I can’t help feeling sympathetic to del Rey’s depiction of the Ludite mobs opposed to the nuclear industry as a bunch of ignorant fools wanting to destroy all the benefits of the magnificent modern world in order to return to the brutish pre-Atomic age.

Of course, we know better now, don’t we?

Of particular interest in this Post-Chernobyl, post-Fukushima age, is del Rey’s description of the heroic efforts to shut down the out of control reactor.  Certainly these heroes are to some extent typical two-fisted, square-jawed  pulp fiction American heroes. But, think about those who dove into the radioactive water in the shredded reactor at Chernobyl and the volunteer workers in Fukushima, fully aware that theirs was likely a suicide mission.  Perhaps del Rey’s most reassuring achievement in Nerves is the prediction that nuclear catastrophe would produce self-sacrificing heroes.

Del Rey also makes a sadly accurate prediction in describing the machinations of the Congressional fellow from Missouri, playing his constituent cotton farmers, the anti-nuclear lobby and the nuclear industry off against each other in order to stay in office, all by forcing the attempt to produce a potentially earth-destroying isotope, the production attempt which leads to the meltdown.

Nerves has many shortcomings for the modern reader, not least the solution to the problem of the nuclear accident — dump the radioactive crud into the river out back and presto! the world is saved.  But as an historical document demonstrating mid-century attitudes to technology I find it fascinating. Right now I have beside me a copy of the July 1978 issue of Analog magazine containing a “Science Fact” article by Ralph Hamil titled “Terraforming the Earth”.  Even into the last quarter of the twentieth century, just a few years before Chernobyl changed everything, there was serious discussion and planning for megaprojects to divert rivers across continents and “reshape the face of the globe to [humanity's] liking.” How things have changed in a single generation.

A worthwhile cautionary tale, Nerves also warns both of the dangers of political interference in scientific research and of uninformed knee-jerk reactions to real or imagined threats from that research.  Certainly the thing was targeted at adolescent American boys like so much of the Science Fiction of the time and it induces near-constant eye-rolls.  But somehow bits of surprising progressivism slip in: a character with a disability; a number of female characters who are strong, competent professionals taking control of the situation and in command of all those two-fisted square-jawed heroic men; even a Japanese scientist (albeit with embarrassingly stereotypical dialect) as a part of the team in a story written only a few years after Pearl Harbour.

For all its flaws, and they are many, Nerves can be a remarkable trip back to the time before nuclear accidents were real history, before technology had in fact remade the world (for the worse), to a time when technology and hope for the future were to some degree synonymous.

Sadly, Nerves seems to be out of print at the moment.  Why not take a look in your local second-hand bookshop?

I also have a little something to say about del Rey’s The Eleventh Commandment.

Update, within a few hours of the original post:  I’ve just reread Ralph Hamil’s Analog piece “Terraforming the Earth”, Analog, July, 1978, pp. 46-65 for the first time since I was in high school and . . . Oh, my Goodness!  This is going to need a blog post of its own!  But how’s this for a taste?

Other proposed peaceful uses of atomic devices include the blasting of  harbours in Alaska and Madagascar, and underground reservoirs, and facilitation of oil, gas, and mine production.  But the missing element of general world sanity may long inhibit such uses.

Yes, the “absence of general world sanity” is what inhibits the use of nuclear devices to aid the extraction of hydrocarbons from Alberta’s oil/tar sands, something that was actually proposed at one point in history.

It was a very different world, indeed.

On “Midnight Sweatlodge” by Waubgeshig Rice

 

A short way into Waubgeshig Rice’s Midnight Sweatlodge I said to myself “This little book is a gem!” but now that I’ve finished reading and rereading it I say loudly “This big, grand book is deceptive in it’s tininess and it is not a single gem but a glistening, sparkling, icy string of brutally sharp-edged diamonds.  Outwardly, Midnight Sweatlodge has the appearance of a short novel, but it is actually a collection of short stories linked together by a frame narrative — the titular Sweatlodge.  Because I’ve been rereading Bradbury lately I couldn’t help think of The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, but Midnight Sweatlodge‘s frame is much more tightly bound to the stories than anything Bradbury threw together, and Rice’s stories are actually dense and challenging prose poems.  The poetry of Midnight Sweatlodge moves Rice’s novel/prose poem cycle into the company of The Decameron, the 1001 Nights and the Canterbury Tales.  Lest I seem to be giving absurdly high praise . . .  although I see Rice as serving at the same restaurant as Boccaccio, Scheherazade and Chaucer, those masters serve luxurious infinitely coursed banquets while Rice presents us with an exquisitely ballanced and beautifully plated appetizer. I hope a banquet is in the future of his career. And that metaphor has certainly run its course . . .

Midnight Sweatlodge is four stories, three told within the blackness of the healing sweatlodge, the fourth told in the days and weeks after the ritual is abruptly ended. The frame which ties the stories together is the course of the ritual and the words of the elder attempting to guide the young people of his community toward healing.

The stories in order in absurd nutshells:  “Dust” is childhood (“I bet we’d trade everything to be there again”), land rights, confrontation, death.  “Solace” is adolescence, peer pressure, human potential, tragedy. “Bloodlines” is young adulthood, Urban Indian life, integration, extended family, expectations, racism. “Aasinaabe” is maturity, parenting, prophecy and apocalypse.

Rice’s descriptions of the Rez on an island in Georgian Bay, of the woods and the lake, of the dusty roads and the run-down, leaky houses is remarkably vivid.  I have vague memories of being a child in the back of a car driving on Manitoulin Island and more recent memories of driving through First Nations land here in Alberta: Rice has nailed the light, the air, the very feel of Rez landscapes with all their beauties and tragic uglinesses and the phenomenal determination of the people.

I made copious notes throughout but the text is so tightly interwoven with metaphor and internal references that it is impossible to get into details without including spoilers, which I won’t do.  But I will reveal that Midnight Sweatlodge with disarming economy and amazing power envelopes us in Treaties, warriorhood, parenting, childhood, love, abuse of spouses and substances, Rez life, urban life, work, play, ritual, rebirth, transformation, corruption, death and the potential end of the world — an attentive reading of the novel is an experience I imagine to be similar to an actual sweatlodge experience.

I invite everyone, particularly non-native readers, to join Waubgeshig Rice in the Midnight Sweatlodge for a transformation and an education.
Midnight Sweatlodge is published by Theytus Books and if you are literate you should buy it and read it.

Reflections on Edmund Burke’s “Philosophical Enquiry”

Are the literary and visual arts in the midst of a Gothic revival?  Twilight in print and on the screen, two Sleeping Beauty films at pretty much the same time, Lemony Snicket and Harry Potter and umpteen other children’s and adult series.  And less than a decade ago Damon and Ledger as the Brothers Grimm and I seem to remember a novelist named Rice.  But . . .

Is it real Gothic or just a pale (and sparkling) imitation?

I’m in the slow, savouring, wonderfully dark and delightful process of re-reading Matthew “Monk” Lewis’ exquisitely tortuous The Monk (first published 1796) and I feel compelled to say, no, the modern crop of “Gothic” doesn’t measure up to the originals, Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Beckford’s Vathek, the inimitable novels of Radcliffe, Shelley’s Frankenstein and that other Shelley’s Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, Stoker’s Dracula and, the pinnacle of Gothic creation, Lewis’  The Monk.

A little book written by a young man two and a half centuries ago has helped me come to realize the two main reasons Modern “Gothic” doesn’t rise to the level of the classics.  The first is that the authors of the new Gothic have, for the most part, not read and absorbed Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.  The second is that no one in the audience has read Burke either.  Very few readers or viewers today have any understanding of the meaning of “Sublime” in the Gothic context.  And I would wager a firkin of good claret that this lack of understanding of the sublime is a wall cutting off most readers of today from a full and happy appreciation of not only classic Gothic fiction but also from a real understanding of the work of the Romantics and even much of Victorian literature.  Today we don’t feel the sublime, and the sublime is what literature and art was all about from the middle of the 18th century to perhaps the First World War, when sublimity was shattered, perhaps for good.

Burke’s youthful work (he was 28 in 1757 when the Enquiry was published) is such a tour de force that it is itself an example of the sublime almost as much as was Lewis’ production of The Monk before he’d finished his twentieth year.  That either work could be produced by such youth is awe inspiring, and even a little frightening.  This awe and fright – Burke would call it Terror — is one side, a portion of this thing our ancestors termed “sublime”.  The other portion is what Burke called “Delight”.  The Sublime is that which stirs in our mind and body a delightful terror. Terror is “the common stock of everything that is sublime” he writes in Part 2, Section V. This terror is not sparkling vampires before whom we willingly suspend disbelief – rather it is Lucifer himself, before whom we are unable to suspend an unquestioning belief.

As I read Burke I can’t help but ask myself “is Burke’s ‘sublime’ not similar to Eliade’s ‘Terror of History’?”  As much as I have been influenced by Eliade’s writings, I’ve never myself felt the terror he describes as being a necessary after effect of the rejection of the divine.  I wonder as I read Burke “Is the sublime not lost to/transcended by the Modern World?  We contemplate the Pale Blue Dot and we feel wonder and delight, but not Terror, surely.”  And when I read Burke’s contrasting of the wild animal (sublime) with the domestic I wonder if science has not by now domesticated the universe.  Are we anymore able to experience the sublime?  As much as I enjoy and appreciate The Monk, I am as unable to feel it’s sublimity any more than I feel Eliade’s Terror of History.  All the world has been domesticated.  In Part 3, Section IV, Burke praises the new English gardens which with their mock wildness have begun in his time to replace the formal, ordered French gardens as the aesthetic standard.  I wonder whether we have made the world as a whole into a very formal garden where everything is ordered and predictable, and even wonder has something familiar about it.  I simply don’t think we experience Burke’s terror anymore.

Burke is, of course, flailing about in what from our point of view is a vacuum.  Neuroscience today stands at a point so firm and far removed from Burke that, although the Enquiry is fundamentally an essay in neuroscience, he has – can have – little to tell us about how our brains function.  But, the important thing for us about Burke is that he tells us how minds worked in the eighteenth century.  I remember the lamentation as an undergraduate:  Freud was used to interpret art and then artists started to produce to match Freud’s theories and then ordinary people started thinking according to Freud’s theories and so Freud was proven right.  It has happened with any powerful or popular psychological or literary or artistic theory. Tom Wolfe in the Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House entertainingly and frighteningly showed the fact of theory crushing art and then becoming the art itself, but sadly few seem to have noticed.  And so, that most horrid of literary expressions persists:  The Artist’s Statement.  And it happened in Burke’s time, it seems.  The sublime was the It Girl of the time.  Find her!  Hold her!  Let me get a picture!  What does she mean for us?  Burke, in his Philosophical Enquiry tried to pin her down. Whether he set the standard or grasped the concept that was developing in the artistic consciousnesses of the period, his book is a key to understanding and appreciating so much of what came after, although it may be quite impossible any longer for us truly to experience the delightful terror of the sublime.

Tim Lilburn’s “Assiniboia” and the discomfort it makes me feel

Tim Lilburn’s apparent program in Assiniboia, a poetic closet drama displaying an in-progress syncretism of a very few aboriginal and a great many European mythical artifacts with elements of nature and geography partially mediated by an accommodating Catholicism, while challenging, is not in itself an impossibility.  Whether Lilburn succeeds is another question.

Lilburn’s method, clearly stated in the Argument, is to turn loose the mythic figures of Europe in the landscape that in reality didn’t become Assiniboia and is now Western Canada.  There the figures of Europe are expected to battle with native figures and each other.  The victorious will be the new mythology of Assiniboia, perhaps a syncretism of the myths and cultures of First Nations and Whites.  Lilburn, a former Jesuit, is tapping into a long history of such syncretism, from Pope Gregory the Great’s instructions to  Augustine (later “of Canterbury”) for the conversion of Britain through to the fascinating folk Christianity  of highland Chiapas today.  Again, not impossible, but a rather large task for a  Canadian poet to set himself in his office in Victoria.  Let’s consider how Lilburn  succeeds at the task (if it is actually the task he’s set) which, of course, the Metis have lived for centuries.

The first question I ask myself is:  Are there any structural elements in  Assiniboia which don’t derive from Europe?  I don’t see any such.  There are token  bits of Cree, but, really, this is a largely European work set in Assiniboia, isn’t  it?

After the Argument, the book is divided into four parts:  Exegesis (the poem “Exegisis” is a part of this section), in which the  characters are led out into the landscape; Assiniboia (A Masque) in which a courtly  drama/pageant is presented in a prologue and eight “Watches”; Songs of Clarity in  final Procession in which the characters in fact sing their songs to the audience;  and Antiphon, literally “the opposite voice”, in which Hermocrates, with great  anachronism, addresses a group of people gathered around Socrates

Again, what of this structure is of Assiniboia?  It’s all lifted directly from  Augustan England which in turn lifted most of these structural elements from Greece  and Rome.  Lilburn has constructed a poem with purely European architecture while  claiming that the thing is “bent on overturning more than a century of colonial  practice.  I can’t help but have doubts and as I read and reread and consider and  reconsider, I can’t help but have those doubts grow.  If Lilburn has overturned that  century of colonialism, I fear the newly exposed underside is just another, this  time spiritual/mystical colonization.  Lilburn has replaced the historical English Protestant colonization of Western Canada with his mythical polyglot Catholic colonization of Assiniboia.  Are we to expect a better outcome?

Time in this vision is clearly out of joint.  There is a sort of Dreamtime aspect  — is this the aboriginal contribution?  Is it displaced from Australia? — but it  also jumps freely to and between 19th and 20th Century moments and references (what  do Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire have to do with milk weed? but more of that later).   The landscape, however, for all its anthropomorphism, is very rooted in the actual  geography of Western Canada, but . . .

Lilburn postulates an unpopulated land and then peoples it with myth — but most of  the myth seems to be familiar Europeans stuff, historical figures and landscape  features personified in a (faux?) aboriginal manner.  I find myself concerned that  Lilburn’s efforts are more colonial, and more deeply colonial, than the economic  and cultural colonialism he decries.  Has Lilburn, a White Catholic former Jesuit  not imposed his own mythology together with his own superficial imagination of  aboriginal mythology onto a world he has himself stripped of its actual history and  mythology?

Certainly, many times there is sublimity in Lilburn’s verse, but sometimes there is  pretentious or even pompous obscurity.  “House” and “Angelology” have a great deal  to recommend them but what to make of “Exegesis”?  I couldn’t help but title it  “Under Milk Weed” to myself as I read it the first time and the title has stuck and the silliness of the piece has grown for me with each reading.  What is a  “liturgically dressed” cat, anyway?  And how is milk weed the campaigns of  Alexander the Great into India?  “Exegesis” is a great heap of metaphor and I  confess I can’t quite grasp what’s actually under all that milkweed.

In the heading of the Antiphon, Lilburn calls this place he’s made “The Uttered  Land”, a bit of a pretentious reference to John 1:1, but then he quotes a mixing  bowl creation story of Plato’s.  What? I can’t help but notice again that this world of blended cultures, with Europe  dominant and the aboriginal largely a European interpreted pastiche veneer is  depressingly similar to the actuality of Western Canada today.  Personally, I would  much prefer to hear actual aboriginal voices invoking the syncretism rather than  another Jesuit polemic.  And whatever Lilburn’s intention concerning the colonial  theft, I’m afraid he’s ended up re-thieving.

Certainly there are moving passages, beautiful passages, mystical passages and  disturbing passages in Assiniboia, but I can’t help but feel that Lilburn has  failed in this drama.  Assiniboia is a White Man’s dream vision pretending to be  other than it is, pretending to be a remedy for the very thing it repeats.

Should this have been attempted by a White guy?

Sure.

But I fear such attempt doomed to failure.  A First Nations or Metis poet is more  likely to succeed, tragically always forced to live between the two worlds.  The  White may choose to live between the worlds, but he likely will never make the  contact with the Native world that the Native can make with the White world.

In any case, while I very much enjoyed the challenge of Assiniboia, I feel  disappointment at the absence of anything that feels like a real First Nation or  Metis voice in a poem in which one can’t help but expect  such voices.  Even the bits lifted from the Manitoba Provisional  Government come across as bits of Hansard rather than the cry of a Metis voice.   When I really consider the book, I have to say that I feel I hear more of the Metis and  First Nation voices in the Canada outside my door — and they grow louder and more  hopeful each day — than is audible in Tim Lilburn’s Assiniboia.  I’m left with the disturbing conclusion that in Lilburn’s rerunning of the colonial conflict, Europe is even more genocidal than the first time around.  The only conflict is between different European mythologies — the aboriginals of Assiniboia with their mythologies have been erased from the landscape before the curtain rises.  In the end,   I’m not sure Lilburn is particularly concerned at all with what is aboriginal to Assiniboia.  Assiniboia is fundamentally a new colonization, and I find that fact very troubling, and the book very difficult to praise.

I read Roo Borson’s “Rain; road; an open boat” and then I read it again!

What an exhilarating experience!

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading and rereading Roo Borson’s Rain; road; an open boat, making notes as I go.  What a beautiful, challenging book it is!  The title of the book is a nesting of the titles of its three sections.  Within each section are interlaced poems in verse and prose riffing on landscape, nature, memory and everything else in imagination and out.  Many volumes and scholarly careers could be (and, I hope, will be) devoted to teasing out the structure Borson has erected.  Here I’ll just take a quick dip into the thunderous waterfall :

Rain

Of the opening poem, “Various Landscapes” I wrote in my notes:

What is going on?  is this pseudo-Haiku and commentary?  Are we seeing the various levels of a I Ching hexagram?

There is certainly a dialogue — or a call and response — between the verses and the prose poetry.

Although the atmosphere seems rural Japanese (or is this my expectation after Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida?) the mention of the sausage shop crashes us into urbanity  or at least suburbanity and European bratwurst.

Where is this house:  Where the river road meets the coast road.  One wall is all windows . . . It is Ossian’s Hall, which closes the book!

The prose poems have become visions, dreams, dream visions.  All floral, but cankered.  The fantasy guest room has become reality and reality is the vision.

But the Guest House is in China, not Japan.

§

I couldn’t help but think of my old Bollingen copy of the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching as I red “Various Landscapes”: while an unchanging digram replaces the varied hexagrams, the three line stanzas accompanied by long prose commentaries create something oracular about the appearance of the page.  I suspect Borson intends the resemblance.

My perplexity continued with the second poem, “California Nutmeg”:

What to make of this?  The place whence her night dreams proceed and around which her mental faculties take shape is where a solitary tree grows out of place in and alien forest.

“and makes itself at home wherever it happens to issue from the earth” as does Borson, I think.

§

“Wild Violets” (the first of this title, we later find out) at first blush is a pretty study of memory and nostalgia, much like “Radish Flowers” which follows.  I thought:

So much seems at first Impressionistic, but there’s sure to be an underlying order with Borson, I think.

Hints of future and signs of past on this day on the cusp of summer

“In the world but not of it.”

§

“Durham” made me remark that “I must reread Durham in Old English”.  A thousand years or so ago, another poet wrote of Durham, a poem both similar to and different from Borson’s.  Both are careful to mention the woods and the river, the natural landscape in which Durham is situated.  I find it very intriguing that two poets so far apart in time and tradition stood in the same spot and described the same place so similarly.  The Old English (with my translation):

     Is ðeos burch breome         geond Breotenrice,
     steppa gestaðolad,         stanas ymbutan
     wundrum gewæxen.         Weor ymbeornad,
     ea yðum stronge,         and ðer inne wunað
     feola fisca kyn         on floda gemonge.
     And ðær gewexen is         wudafæstern micel;
     wuniad in ðem wycum         wilda deor monige,
     in deope dalum         deora ungerim.
     Is in ðere byri eac         bearnum gecyðed
    ðe arfesta         eadig Cudberch
     and ðes clene         cyninges heafud,
     Osuualdes, Engle leo,         and Aidan biscop,
     Eadberch and Eadfrið,         æðele geferes.
     Is ðer inne midd heom         æðelwold biscop
    and breoma bocera Beda,         and Boisil abbot,
     ðe clene Cudberte         on gecheðe
     lerde lustum,         and he his lara wel genom.
     Eardiæð æt ðem eadige         in in ðem minstre
     unarimeda         reliquia,
    ðær monia wundrum gewurðað,         ðes ðe writ seggeð,
     midd ðene drihnes wer         domes bideð.

Fully known is this town
throughout the British realm
Steeply established, stones round about
grown up wondrously
A river strongly runs past weirs
in waves, and therein dwell
many fishes in the flood
and there is growing near
a woody fastness great.  There live
full many wild beasts
in that dwelling, in deep dales
beasts innumerable.
In that town, too, known to men
they’ll find, most full of grace
the Saint Cuthbert and the head
of the chaste King Oswald
England’s lion; Bishop Aidan;
noble travel partners
Eadberh and Eadfrith.
Bishop Æthelwold
is there with them and the well known
Bede the scholarly
and Abbot Boisil gladly taught
in youth the chaste Cuthbert:
and well he took his learning up.
Unnumbered relics lie
beside the saint inside the minster
there many wonders come,
as books make known, the while that man
of God for judgment waits.

Borson mentions the blackbird’s song and relates it to an old song of a blackbird.  What is this old song?  Is it the Beatles song or is it something other?

“A Place in the Woods” is a brief prose poem describing disappointed hopes made manifest, but hints that the manifestation will be swallowed by the silent past.

“Wild Violets” (2) brings Rain to a close with a recasting of the first “Wild Violets” and the clear indication that interlace is going to be a primary structural principle of the book.

Of particular note in the recasting:  after fifty years old papers dog-eared have replaced the wild violets.

Rain; road

“Late Sunshine” begins the second section with a quite lengthy return to the pseudo-haiku and prose response.  In my notes I recast the poem, quoting the brief verse bits and reducing the prose paragraphs to bullet points:

A riff on Borson’s “Late Sunshine”

1.

“Thin sun
Thin rain
the blossoming oats –”

The turtle and his eye
Entries on dead people on the internet
The fish laid out side by side.

2.

“The world in old photos
or the world in spring –
which is younger?”

The millipede
The masks and the borrowed instruments
Smells and things
Gifts and judgement thereof
False named plants
Reputation’s growth
Dead honey eater’s eye
The cats in the tree
Time
The shock of the familiar
Dream Mart
Three questions as we die
The moth on the sidewalk after rain
The arrival of the future
The dazzling become familiar
The Kingfisher necklace
Remembering birth and death.

3.

“The delicate scent of bottle-gourd blossoms
the wisteria beans long and glat
the repetative songs of the birds of early summer”

do memories return to us or we to them?
embroidered on a pillow
restoring significance
the name game
the other name game

4.

“Standing on the right foot
lifting pine seeds with the left –
cockatoo etiquette”

indispensible stereotypes
a third name game
envy
narrow minds and broad

5.

“A magpie lark
standing guard over the waterfall
water gliding past its feet –”

the inverse law of death and intentions
buildings
pigeons in the train station in prose and verse
the face in the mirror
buildings and art
illusion
the stranger
Goldenrod
White Duck Narrows

In “Blowing Clouds” Borson shows she loves to juggle words and syntax and punctuation.  This is a virtuoso juggle!

(with prose commentary.)

My notes on the last poems of Rain; road;:

“Dictionary”

preservation.

“Black Point

Verse then prose

Memory of time with friends long later when one friend has died.

“Road”

prose and then verse
echoes of all that’s gone before.

“Roads in the Berkeley Hills”

verse then prose

the thing, which no longer exists except in memory, exists still in you, in us (in we?).

The final section Rain: road; an open boat begins with “New Rain” another extended verse/prose call and response.  Again my notes are bullet point paraphrase:

prose then verse and so on

something white in the Japanese rain

Camellia buds
minnows
statues
deer
the rain pavilion

Something strange on the mountainside
fox-bear
the wind

the bus to a temple and the driver identifies the animal
dragonflies
statues and castle
the tanuki
the tooth-regrowing temple
heron
the tour guide
Hakuin’s sermon (this stanza, describing Hakuin’s untranslated ten word sermon, is ten words long)

Journeying to Japan
sweet peas
tend days of rain and snow

Kyoto and Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Pagoda verse
to the
Golden Pavilion

Colour and cold noodles
cool
cucumbers

Tended obscurities
snails painting
with moonlight

Subtracting the self
the person I’ve never met
whose ghost is this
lost morning
old pond
longing to be like others

The Gardens of Kyoto
the lost hat

The crow calls out to the friend with his recovered hat.
Osaka Bay
tonight’s moon
among the pines.

My notes on the last four poems:

“Baxter’s Grave”

The road to locally ignored grave of a poet

The prose is explanation.

I find myself wondering at this point whether the prose explanation is advantagious or detrimental to the poetry.

“A Chaise for Sharon”

patience.

“To go to Huangshan”

Prose about Huangshan

Rain
Pine
dragonfly

the identical tourist raincoats at first are (intentionally) absurd but by the end are jewels of perseverance.

“Cathedral”

The blackbird in a filigree of images high on Bucks Hill

“and the robin
small beneath the hedge”

“all the tropes spent”

This is Durham again.

§

I have a suspicion Borson has not spent all her tropes.

The book closes with an “Afterword and a Note” concerning the eighteenth century Scottish folly called “Ossian’s Hall” and then a poem, “Ossian’s Folly, Black Linn Falls” about Borson’s visit to that place.  Here we are returned to the guest house of “Various Landscapes” with it’s wall of windows and the river outside.

Rain; road; an open boat is a densely structured beautiful interlacing of images across all the poems, a seductive mesh drawing us to it over and over again, a braided woodland waterfall, calling to us with voices of memory and hopes and dreams.

“Enter it said the river’s falling
enter it and entered instead its thunderous names.”

My Book Club Notes for “Big Town: A Novel of Africville”

I’ve never done book clubs before, but last weekend while buying a disc of the soundtrack of Beowulf the King, I bumped into old friends and they invited me to join theirs this Saturday night and the book seemed like an interesting possibility so . . .

The Chapters-Indigo website said there were two copies of Stephens Gerard Malone’s Big Town: a novel of Africville in stock.  I went down to the store and immediately went to the Fiction/Literature section.  No sign of it in the M section.  “Maybe it’s in G” I thought.  Nope.  I turned to the handy computer which told me that yes, there was still one copy left:  in the “Local Interest” section.  I’m not sure how a work of fiction set in Halifax counts as Local Interest in Edmonton, but, after wandering about for a bit I found the Local Interest shelf, and, after getting down on my hands and knees, I found the single copy I was looking for. I also picked up a copy of the Arden Third Series edition of The Merchant of Venice.  That find may or may not be relevant.

Big Town is a quick read, but it’s beautifully dense.  Malone evokes the time most wonderfully — I was struck by the offhand  mention in the first chapter of Good Friday always being overcast, something I always heard my mother say when I was a kid.  I’m sad to say that actually, Good Friday is sometimes sunny.  And the Halifax explosion is alluded to several times with personal detail rather than the big picture. And Date Squares, for goodness sake!  And the bullying Early endures  brings back sad memories of witnessing those big boys throwing stones at the boy with Downs Syndrome beside Walford Road in Sudbury.  Malone uses little details like what television show Chub watches or what now-gone street the boys walk up, details a youngster pays attention to, to make Africville and Halifax palpable.

Chapter two, with Early at work and going to lunch with his found five dollars filled me with the question How do they think?  What is the inner life of the intellectually disabled?  I’ve spent eighteen years with my own Early and I’m still not sure at all.  And I’ve spent years with all sorts of different young people who aren’t what are sometimes termed “Neuronormal”  Every one is different and every day for any one is different.  I’m not sure whether the depiction of Early’s inner life is realistic.  Who can know?  But Big Town asks the question of us.

The abuse of Early is, of course, particularly uncomfortable.  For the most part, rather than explicitly depicted, it is evoked, as in the moment on page 31 when Early rubs his arm after contemplating doing a chore for his father.  As the novel progresses, the abuse becomes more and more clear and it seems to me Early’s reaction to it becomes more and more ambiguous as his memory problems come more to the fore.

Racism is an obvious theme in Big Town.  The expected racism of White Halifax against the people of Africville goes without saying, but there are more subtle layers of racism that must be mentioned.  On p. 42,  Mrs. Aada laments the (white) Trash that’s come squatting and “giving good folks a bad name”.   Whites over Blacks over White Trash over — what?  Well, over Early, of course.  Is there anyone below Early?  Early certainly doesn’t discriminate, but in another throw away line Malone has the children planning their lives as Forest Rangers and — “Early could be Indian Joe” (p. 201).   Maybe mentally disabled Early isn’t “better” than Indian Joe, but in 60s Canada, the people who would come to be called the First Nations are thought of at best as dimwitted helpers.  Malone has packed so much tension into Big Town!

Throughout I thought of Steinbeck.  Tortilla Flat came to mind quickly, but Malone is more sensitive to his characters, I think.  The workers in Tortilla Flat have a little to much of the bumbkin about them.  And, the relationship between Toby and Early can’t help but be seen as an allusion to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, with a profound roll reversal near the end.

Big Town is pervaded by an unbearable sense of dread and tension.  The reader dreads what’s coming for these characters and their community.  And there is the obvious tension of not knowing when the bulldozers will roll, of not knowing what new hurt will come to Early and to the others, but there is also the tension in the characters between wanting to leave but wanting Africville to remain a community.  I was particularly struck by the parallel between Toby’s skin “illness” driven by his desire to leave his Blackness behind, and the constantly returning thread of trying to bring Portia White (a fortuitous surname of a real person) back to Africville.  In the end Toby never leaves Africville and in real life, Portia White never returned.

I’ll probably have to leave the bookclub visit Early, but I’m certainly grateful that I was introduced to Big Town, a rich, richly ambiguous, and richly allusive novel — is that a reference to Voltaire’s Candide in Early’s prison work?

Stephens Gerard Malone is definitely an author to watch and Big Town is a novel well worth reading.

A Brief Appreciation of Tim Bowling’s “Tenderman”

Metaphor’s just a word for life,
nothing to be afraid of, or laugh at,
unless life is.
from “Please Do Not Disturb”

The Tenderman of the title of Tim Bowling‘s tenth poetry collection (Tenderman, Nightwood Editions, 2011) is literally a seasoned — and salty — crewman on a Fraser River salmon packing boat.  But, as becomes clear in the poems — not least in “Real Men Read Jane Austen” Bowling, an actual tenderman of slight ability in youth, is very much a Tender Man as he approaches the end of a half century on Life’s River, ready

to settle in with a sigh
to a few hours bliss
with the masculine prose of the feminine.

The Tenderman, Rosie, to whom many of the poems are addressed, does not seem to be a Tender Man.  In “Seminar in Ladner: Moby Dick” he asks “So does he ever catch the fucking thing or what?”  The image of the poem is  the young educated crewman trying to bring an appreciation of great literature to the older “uneducated” tenderman.  But who is leading the seminar?

Tenderman, it’s because
the story’s so simple
we complicate with meaning.

The Tenderman has cut to the working man’s heart of Melville’s novel with his question:  does Ahab catch the White Whale or not?  That question is what drives Ahab and the novel:  the rest is the complications of meaning.  And meaning is all about memory — and forgetting:

All sorts of things are caught,
forgotten, fixed in our forgetting.

While the Tenderman seems forever in the Now,  pulling the nets, counting the fish, tipping back the bottle, fixing everything in the forgetting, Bowling obsessively looks back at his childhood and youth, at memories and the meanings fixed in his forgetting, the old days of

Handwritten letters and
childhood, things we have no time for,
what our mothers called “common courtesy”

Childhood is always present, even in mortality.  Bowling requests

Inter me, tenderman,
with the blown-glass flaw
a child with absolutely
nothing to do
picks up
on his solitary way
to nowhere

(“After a Trip to the Museum and Archives”)

This flaw, of course, is not something negative: it is the irregularity, the colour variation, the random, contingent bubbles which make hand-blown glass objects more valuable than mass produced utilitarian things.  Bury me, Bowling says, with the uniqueness of the child I was, the child which is the father of the man.  Bowling mentions Wordsworth in “Between Men” but here the reference is not explicit, but there is an echo, not least in the hint of wandering lonely as a cloud in “on his solitary way.”

And here is, I think, a key to entering Tenderman:  this cycle is Bowling’s Prelude.  He is presenting a brief, somewhat impressionistic Growth of a Poet’s Mind.  Although the poems are short lyrics and elegies, Bowling provides epic touches, reference to Virgil and Aeschylus and Beowulf and Shakespeare.  I can’t help hearing an echo of Homer in “Beekeeper and Tenderman”.  Bowling’s poems are pregnant with ancient allusion, something not terribly fashionable these days:

Ah tenderman, who would be an antiquarian
the trembling meat in the piranhas’ aquarium?

(“Despair, or the Technologies”)

The answer to that question is:  The boy from Ladner, the unsuccessful tenderman told to count the Arctic Char (“A Little Song of Carnage”), now the greying father approaching fifty, most of whose friends are dead poets.  He isn’t much concerned with what is fashionable these days

My shadow bag clatters
with discarded cogs and wheels
and gears turning amongst feathers
handpicked off pheasants
and shoeboxes stuffed
with photographs that didn’t
turn out as we expected,
which are the truest images
after all . . .

(“After a Trip to the Museum and Archives”)

The poet would be an antiquarian, and damn the piranhas!

Bowling’s poems grow very much out of intimations of mortality and are no doubt at times uncomfortably melancholic.  But there is such celebration of life in, for example, “Courage” the most Homeric of the pieces in the collection, and even in the most melancholic underlies a celebration of a life lived.  But it is a celebration is of  life being recollected in tranquility:

This coffee’s not instant, tenderman,
this food isn’t fast.  If you flense
the whale of life with only haste
you’re using a dull blade, boyo.

(“Are You Contemporary?”)

Bowling, approaching fifty, has had a longer life than many of his dead poet friends.  They are in their graves.  But he is not, and oh the difference to those who appreciate poetry!  Tenderman is a magnificently rich mid-life Prelude to what one would hope will yet be a long and productive poetic life.

 

 

 

Update, April 11, 2012:  Tenderman has been shortlisted for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award .