From the Heart of the Heartland: The Fiction of Sinclair Ross

The Dark Laughter of As for Me and My House

The Dark Laughter of As for Me and My House WILFRED CUDE Trecycle a sentiment Robertson Davies loves to borrow , the one from the schoolboy summarizing the writings of Matthew Arnold, Asfor Me and My House is undeniably "no place to go for a laugh." Yet Robertson Davies and his analysis of laughter do have a special place in Ross criticism,I would contend, and not merely because our foremost writer of comedy was the first to identify As for Me and My House as "a remarkable addition to our small stock of Canadian books of first-rate importance." Davies, in his reviewof the novelalmost halfa century ago, correctly observed that "the story is told with great delicacy and sensitivity": and he further insisted that "Mr. Ross is keenly aware of the subtleties of the human mind." No mention here of laughter: on the contrary, Davies went on (with restraint surpassing even his favourite schoolboy source) to remark that the book is "not precisely gay in tone."1 Between Davies and the schoolboy, there wouldn't appear to be much room to manoeuvre. Nevertheless, we do find an intriguing range of laughter in this most sombre of Canadian works— and Robertson Davies is the right critic to place that phenomenon in its appropriate context. Not that Davies ever discussed the matter directly. He did, however, underscore the rich possibilitiesof intertwiningcomic and tragic and it is that technical wealth we should now explore. Commenting on the more sophisticated productions of those artists passing beyond what he termed the "humorist's climacteric," he itemized in A Voice from the Attic features that bring humour "to its fullest ripening." "A sense of tragedy, a sense of the evanescence and dreamlike quality of life, and a sense of the imminence of death," he argued, are things "to be heard" in the finest comic art, "not aggressively, but as a continuing pedal point, supporting the other 60 harmony, whatever it may be" (225). Surely a similar principle applies to the most sophisticated of tragedies, with the dominant and subordinate roles transposed. In a finely worked piece of literature haunted by "a sense of tragedy, a sense of the evanescence and dreamlike qualityof life, and a sense of the imminence of death," we will also detect laughter: it will manifest itself "not aggressively, but as a continuing pedal point, supporting the other harmony, whatever it may be." And this, I submit, is precisely what we find in As for Me and My House. There is no human peculiarity so beguiling and mystifying as laughter , nor one (we should confess at the outset) so resistant to the procedures of formal scholarship. Rising out of our recognition of life's incongruities, laughter points up many situations and moods, often in a bewildering perplexity of ways. Ross understands this well, and uses the resultingdiversity to attain a variety of emotional tones. Throughout Asfor Me and My House, laughter of one sort or another helps to intensify nuances of feeling. We have the rollicking Chaucerian earthiness of the Ellingsons, their shared mirth no more than rural good humour, as they watch from a distance the new mistress of the manse entering with evident apprehension her tilted and rickety outhouse for the first time. "My neighbor, Mrs. Ellingson,came over this morning to tell me how she and her husband laughed," Mrs.Bentley good-naturedly reports, capturing with candour the lack of malice in the anecdote (13—14). And we have the secretive sensuality of "a frightened, soft, half-smothered little laugh," slipping out duringjudith's seduction and paralyzing Mrs. Bentley on the other side of the door. "I just stood there listening a minute," she reports numbly, "a queer, doomed ache inside me, like a live fly struggling in a block of ice" (123). And we have the brittle mockery of Philip's "forced, derisive little laugh," rejecting his wife's claim that her recent piano triumph was for him, rather than Paul. "He's a stillfaced , sober man," she reports with horror; "the laughter was unbearable" (145). This is a subtle device, all the more effective because it is employed with understatement and restraint. Since this device does function as pedal point, though, we should begin our analysis with a brief survey of the dominant harmony. In some of his later correspondence, Ross has repeatedly insisted he was "writing blind" when composing As for Me and My House. "I do remember, very distinctly, thinking 'I'm writing blind,' just...