Fiction

FICTION 385 FICTION F. W. W att The arrival of Mr. Stephen Vizinczey on the scene as author and as publisher of his own work enlivened what was nevertheless a disappointing year in Canadian fiction, certainly the leanest of the seven years in which I have served (and now end my term) as reviewer. None of the three most ambitious and serious novels, by Robert Harlow, Charles Israel, and Denis Godfrey, sustains itself above the plane of good intentiOJ ?S, while others soar off toward the insubstantial gaieties of a John Clare or the commercial glitter of an Arthur Hailey. Intelligence, experience, honesty, wit, and even eloquence are scattered everywhere, but there emerged no single novel which is likely to be read and re-read with deepening interest. Mr. Vizinczey's first novel with its felicitous title In Praise of Older W omen: T he Amorous Recollections of Andras Vajda (Contemporary Canada Press, pp. viii, 183, $4.95) , displaying a degree of irony which is difficult to estimate, pretends to offer an ideal combination of pleasure and instruction. The book's lesson is in general that sexual life is delightful and in particular that a young man's initiation is best served by "older women." After all, the narrator Andras Vajda tells us with bland persuasiveness, "Trying to make love with someone who is as unskilled as you are seems to me about as sensible as learning to drive with a person who doesn't know the first thing about cars either." The fresh impact of the book comes from the easy impudence with which the narrator presents his "amorous recollections" from his boyhood in Hungary to what he thinks of as his maturity in Toronto and Saskatoon. The sourness that creeps in towards the end despite the tone of urbane insouciance comes for two reasons. First, in order to stress his emancipation Andras falls into the error of overstressing the inhibitions, perversities , and priggishness·of others, and of overemphasizing the importance of his own special virtue. Though he claims eventually to have "learned that there were more important obstacles to overcome in this world than a difficult woman," there is nothing in the book to bear him out. Second, while Andras does succeed in showing that in his case to learn to make love was as easy as learning to drive (though not without dangers), eventually his lovers come to be as varied, as·numerous, and as interchangeable as makes of cars. The literary presentation remains unchanged, though change would seem called for. The backgrounds of 386 LETTERS IN CANADA: 1965 post-War Europe, of the Hungarian rebellion, and then of Toronto in the 1950's are hinted sketchily.if at times deftly from the self-absorbed narrator's confessional point of view, and they do not alleviate the impression of a certain narrowness in his preoccupations. Finally we are obliged to doubt the wisdom of the teacher and to question the indulgen <;:e shown him by the author. Or, in more literary terms, the novel begins to seem disappointing and inconsequential, despite its originality and its charming irreverence, because its plot is merely linear· and its urbane tone. masks implications raised by changing events but unpursued . Through infatuation with his hero or uncertainty the author loses control of his readers' reactions; at this point the literary critic departs and the moralist takes over. Readers who find In Praise of Older Women lacking in moral seriousness will have nothing to complain about in this respect in the next three novels to be considered. Like his first novel, Royal Murdoch, Robert Harlow's A Gift of Echoes (Macmillan of Canada, pp. viii, 248, $4.50) is a carefully contrived work with a complex plot, a detailed realistic ·social context, and a large cast of characters. Like that novel, too, it attempts to base a rich, significant mental life on a small, relatively primitive rural community, a foothill town of the Rockies. The focus of this life is John Grandy, the school master who after the war is drawn back to the community apparently by a need to reassess his past, his "echoes," in this intimate society where he finds, paradoxically, "closeness of body coupled with privacy of spirit." The plot that develops has a turgid density which is fascinating but in the end discouraging. The encounters and entanglements of Grandy are meant to bind together the lives of those he meets-the lumber mill owners and workers and others-but for all the exposure he and his broodings are given he remains a lifeless and unconvincing shell: his motives mysterious, his emotional and spiritual turmoil unedifying, and the revelation towards which he moves unilluminating. There is a forceful presentation of some scenes and events, notably the spectacular burning of the mill, and of some of the lesser characters, for .example, the restless schoolgirl, Velma, and Nairn, the alcoholic heir to .the mill. But the Haw of Royal Murdoch is even more ·evident here: there is a gulf between the action, even (or especially) when it rises into melodrama , and the dense, complex How of introspective life, which leaves the reader at best confused and at worst with a sense of artificiality and pretentiousness. Shadows on a Wall (Macmillan of Canada, pp. 350, $6.50), Charles Israel's most impressive novel to date, does not avoid some of the same FICTION 387 sense of contrivance, though its emotional and intellectual preoccupations are simpler and much more successfully integrated with the characters and events. The element of contrivance is related to the "social problem" approach to people and situations which has so far been one of the limitations on Israel's imaginative work. This novel, moving easily through African, European, and American settings, explores the "colour problem" at times heavy-handedly. But its focus on the complex and troubled American couple who adopt the African girl, Akua, introduces a far greater richness and subtlety. Even here what is genuinely absorbing and convincing is perhaps not the central action, in which Akua's unchildlike diabolism shocks the couple into recognizing the blaclmess in their own hearts, but the growth of tenderness and understanding between the man and his wife. Here there is a new penetration and a new candour which suggest that Israel, for all his experience and success as a professional writer, is still pressing on with admirable determination to free and fulfill his talents. Denis Godfrey's No Englishman Need Apply (Macmillan of Canada, pp. viii, 272, $5.95), like the two just discussed, fails in a basic requirement of any novel cast in the realistic mould: to maintain a convincing illusion of the way things really happen. Even those prepared to believe anything of English departments in Canadian universities will balk at the background of intrigue and internecine warfare in a "western Canadian university" against which Godfrey sets the troubled career of his visiting Englishman Brent and his wife. The elaborate diabolical conniving of Professor Floyd, who has "a 'thing' against Englishmen," to get Brent fired is too prominent and important a deyice in the story to be overlooked as a minor Haw. The impression of artificiality is enhanced by recurrent caricaturings of faculty and student talk. The portraits of Professor Broddick, the aging Anglophile head of the English department, and of his unconquerably English wife, are·more persuasive. The treatment of the central characters, Brent and his wife, in their precarious, fluctuating relation to each other is also much more effective: this seems the sound core of a novel which moves clumsily against its social setting and breaks apart in its sub-plots. Godfrey fails to convince us that alienation from and integration into the Canadian context have much to do with the delicate essential life of his hero and heroine: symptomatically the story of the student couple, Stephen and Debbie, and their illegitimate child ends the novel without any apparent significance for the main plot. In T he Gilded Rule, his first novel, and now in The Unmelting Pot (Hutchinson, pp. 208, $4.95), Michael Sheldon makes the. immigrant 388 LETTERS IN CANADA: 1965 theme less central and handles it more effectively. The chief strength of Sheldon's first novel was its creation of one striking character whose vigour and fascination went beyond mere realism. His second, T he Unmelting Pot, rejects that line of development and instead moves with more care and skill within the bounds of verisimilitude. It does so with little of the awkwardness in reconstructing Montreal life that marred the earlier book, and it also shows an advance in its increased power to penetrate varied psychological natures. The three or four central characters are interesting enough: Brian, the rising young executive, easygoing , sensual, self-centred; Rosemary, the intelligent young Englishwoman fighting desperately against an incipient Lesbianism; Stephen, the Roumanian intellectual, protecting himself from hurt in his writing and reading. But the use of a single locus, the building they all live in, and of the immigrant theme, are not enough to bind their lives adequately together. Despite its effective and candid presentation of characters and of strong moments (like the unexpectedly violent encounter between Brian and Rosemary), the novel loses shape and dies away in a clutter of insignificant realistic detail. It is somthing of a relief to tum from the Canadian scene, with the quagmire of ineptitudes and solemnities it seems to lay at the feet of native and immigrant writers alike, to Cambridge, England and to the wit and fluency of Simon Gray's second novel, Simple People (London: Faber [Toronto: Queenswood], pp. 293, $5.75). The wit begins with the title: it is difficult to imagine a more sophisticated collection of types and caricatures than Gray's. The protagonist is indeed a simpleton. There is more than a little of the young Lieutenant-Governor of Gray's earlier Colmain in Logan Bestor, the awkward, earnest, provincial Canadian out of his depth in England's complex and decadent 'Nays. The satire with its touches of Dickensian grotesque is often hilarious, and usually it is aimed in several directions: at Bestor's naivete, but also at English social smoothness and literary smartness, the pretentious of Cambridge dons, and the more ethereal aspects of English Literature research. Gray is a master of dialogue, especially deft at creating complicated misunderstandings and the undercurrents of conversation, though it is a talent he is in danger of overworking. In this, and in his ability to draw the most from an apparently slight subject, he has probably learned a good deal from Henry Green. Less like Green, he continues to leave an impression of inhuman detachment. However, his creative energy is authentic and very much his own, and it should carry him a long way. Among the remaining works, three first novels deserve special atten- FICTION 389 tion. The warmest and funniest is C. J. Newman's We Always Tal~e Care of Our Own (McClelland & Stewart, pp. 272, $5.95). This is less a novel than a series of episodes strung on the brilliant but somewhat frail fantasy-thread of the fate of the young man who decides to become Montreal's only Jewish street-beggar. It has some of the same energy and exuberance that pours out of Malamud's Magic Barrell; certainly its wit, hyperbole, and comic characterization are in the Jewish tradition. The mixture of satire and love with which Montreal's Jewish community and family life are presented is essentially no different from that in Klein and Layton and Richler. After the first intentions of the protagonist to overthrow respectability and take to begging are unfolded and the first lively impact of shock and shame in the Jewish community are recorded, the plot lets Newman down and shows itself for_what it is-the basis for a good short story, not a novel. John Clare's The Passionate Invaders (Doubleday, pp. vi, 208, $4.95) relies on a comic idea which is indefinitely expandable, but which has rather less of the other's human potential: an invasion of the United States by a commando force of patriots called Snainef (Fenians to the historically minded). The job given the reluctant Magus Dillon, head of the American Eye magazine's Toronto bureau, to track down the invaders and get the story before they attack, provides the occasion for some hilarious and some satirical adventures in Toronto and the neighbouring terrain. The paradoxes of Canadian-American relations naturally receive ~ good deal of exposure, much of it apparently to amuse and instruct an American audience. Clare's reluctance to choose between satire and farce eventually leaves the field to the latter, and the book dwindles away into mere far-fetched action for want of a governing point of view. However, the author's comic zest and energy are refreshing. Robert Kroetsch's But We Are Exiles (Macmillan of Canada, pp. viii, 145, $3.95) is a more powerful and a more incoherent book than these two. Its setting is the northern reaches of the Mackenzie River: its picture of river and ship-board life, particularly as the savage arctic winter begins, is memorable. But through the realistic detail runs a dark, turbulent plot which never quite clarifies itself. The motives and needs of the river-pilot protagonist, Peter Guy, remain mysterious to the end. The central action, the macabre drowning and recovery of Guy's some-time friend Mike Hornyak and the terrible climactic identification of Guy with the corpse, appears melodramatic in part because the intense involvement of the two is too much in the background, a brief flashback in the novel's progress. Or, to put the problem another ·way, the chief 390 LEITERS IN CANADA: 1965 characters in their trouble ·and .turrnoil are struggling shapes in the middle.disi:ance: their inner life is never real enough .to us to justify the high romantic tone, the portentous intensity, which permeates the novel's dialogue, descriptions, and moments of introspection. . The remaining three novels can be dealt with more briefly. Arthur Hailey's Hotel (Doubleday, pp. viii, 376, $6.95), is another commercially successful addition to his growing series of formula novels: a technologically complex setting which is carefully and extensively researched (this time not an airport or hospital but a large hotel) and a suspenseful two-dimensional story (this time cruder and :more predictable ). The book's only moment of poetry comes (pp. 127 ff.) when. the wealthy hotel chain magnate, Curtis O'Keefe, describes his vision of the hotel of the future perfected through the wonders of technology. David Walker is a less calculating and more self-indulgent \1\'fiter than Hailey. Mallabec (Collins, pp. 223, $4.50) has a complicated plot involving an adulterous triangle which repeats itself over two generations, but the story is almost lost in the portentous nature and river symbolism that pervades the novel. The attempt !s to give more substance to a threadbare and unconvincing.set of human events by linking ·it to the elemental world of Canadian nature. Walker's undeniable fluency and descriptive power are much less evident than in his grand failure of the same kind several years ago, Where the High Winds Blow. Finally, Kenneth Orvis's Night Without Darh.ness (McClelland & Stewart, pp. 223, $4.95) is a pastiche of Ian Fleming, sufficient warning for anyone who has begun to feel that1 the cultural lag and its evil consequences are a thing of the past. HUMANITIES LITERARY STUDIES The Poet and His Faith: Religion and Poetry in England from Spenser to Eliot and Auden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [Toronto: University of Toronto Press], pp. xii, 304, $6.95) by Professor· A. P. ...