Ella Leffland

E L IZ A B E T H RENFRO California State University, Chico Ella Leffland Ella Leffland, writer and painter, believes that “probably every­ one who turns to writing or painting or anything like that has a dol­ lop of the outsider.” For Leffland herself, this development of the artist-as-outsider perspective may be traced to her childhood in Martinez, California. Born in 1931 to Danish immigrants who referred to Denmark as “home,” Leffland says she “thought we were on a vacation here for years!” This led to her feeling what she has described as “either a double sense of belonging or no sense of belonging,” a theme she often returns to in her fiction: “I think com­ ing from a family that was different and had a different attitude toward things had a bearing on the people I [write] about” (Ross 291-92). This feeling was intensified during World War II, which Leffland describes as “‘the central experience of my childhood’” (Bolle 68). Leffland’s adolescence was filled with horror stories from Danish relatives about bombings and Nazi domination. At home, Martinez’s location in the San Francisco Bay area made it an important shipyard site for the American war effort. The nervous citizens prepared constantly for anticipated Japanese bombing raids, and Leffland witnessed acts of “patriotic” terrorism against second and third generation Japanese American and Italian American families she had known all her life. Critics agree that loneliness or isolation of the individual is a recurrent theme in Leffland’s work. As John Romano puts it, in par­ ticular reference to Last Courtesies (1980), a collection of short sto­ ries, “at the center . . . is most often a character who is profoundly alone, suffers, and cannot make himself or herself understood” (3). Leffland’s characters are isolated in a matrix of the competing 56 Western American Literature demands of their own needs and values, and the desires and value systems of others—lovers or friends, family, community, country. Critics disagree, however, in their readings of these characters. Romano calls Leffland’s authorial presence “distinctly caring,” adding that “her imagination is always bound up with sympathy.” He argues that in Last Courtesies, “the principal business of these stories is bestowing sympathy” (3). Yet another description of those stories, by Stephen Goodwin, states that they leave the reader feel­ ing the “dread power of nightmares,” as the characters, while “sym­ pathetic . . . are treated with a detachment that is the only bulwark against disgust” (5). Keith Monley wrote (prior to the release of The Knight, Death and the Devil in 1990) that while “Leffland’s novels are, one and all, tales of redemption,” this is “hardly the case in her short stories. It could even be argued that in Last Courtesies . . . the protagonists’ ‘obsession’ proves terminal, but in any case the pro­ tagonist is certainly not redeemed” (492). Much of Leffland’s fiction seems to reflect what might be called “Western Gothic,” a post-World War II West Coast version of Southern Gothic. Leffland’s characters are, as is true in Southern Gothic fiction, strongly molded by and reflective of the setting in which they live. The mood, tone, personality, even values and moral code of the characters is part and parcel of the mood, tone, and character of their land and geographical setting especially the land in which they spent their childhoods. Barren plains of Modoc County, backwoods country in Napa, icy and isolated Danish farms, Germany through its entire history—all define, reflect, create the characters reared there. As in Southern Gothic fiction, many of Leffland’s characters are aberrant or grotesque in some way, though often in more subtle ways than, for example, Carson McCullers’s dwarf (Ballad of the Sad Cafe) or Flannery O’Connor’s criminal Misfit (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”). The behavior of Leffland’s characters is often bizarre, at least in terms of expected or sanctioned behaviors, yet, fitting with the Southern Gothic tradition, entirely believable and appropriate (and therein lies some of the nightmare), and fitting with the tenor of the novel or short story, which is a blend of real­ ism and “the supernatural” (Prescott 89a). Elizabeth Renfro 57...