r THE UNIVERSITY tl l OFWI

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LITERARY ISSUE

JANE AUSTEN, NABOKOV.

FICTION BY W. D. VALGARDSON

SPECIAL POETRY SECTION

REVIEWS

SPRING-SUMMER

Vol. XI, No. 2

1976

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The University of Windsor

Review A Publication of the University of Windsor Press

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Editor

EUGENE MCNAMARA

Associate Editors

JOHN DITSKY (Poetry)

ARANKA KOVACS ( Social Sciences)

EVELYN G. MCLEAN (Art)

ALISTAIR MACLEOD (Fiction)

LOIS SMEDICK ( Book Reviews)

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Spring-Summer 1976/Vol. XI, No. 2/Windsor, Ontario

© The University of Windsor Review All Rights Reserved

This publication of The University of Windsor Review has been made possible by the generous assistance of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.

The Review is indexed in The Canadian Periodical Index.

ISSN 0042-0352

Back issues of the Review are available on microfilm from Micromedia Limited, Box 34, Station S, Toronto, Ontario, MSM

4L6 and from Xerox University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michi­gan, 48106.

Contents

JOSEPH M. DUFFY 5 The Politics of Love: Marriage and the Good Society in Pride and Prejudice

TUULI-ANN RISTKOK 27 Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters" -"Once in a thousand years of Fiction"

OFELIA COHN-SFETCU 49 At the mercy of winds and waves?-Over Prairie Trails by F. P. Grove

SPECIAL POETRY SECTION

W. D. SNODGRASS 58 Setting Out

Two Poems

RICHARD HORNSBY 60 Shrine Hill

61 Beauty, Pain, and Hunger

STEPHEN SHU NING LIU 62 The Encounter

M. H. SCHEELE 63 Nearby a crumpled horse mumbles, ...

Two Poems

LEWIS B. HORNE 64 Saturday

65 A Rule of Rainy Days

PETER STEVENS 66 Really the Blues

DAVE SMITH 68 First Hunt at Smithfield

ERIC IVAN BERG 70 Al Purdy, My Pa & The Good Old Bullshitters

H. A. NIELSON 72 Shopworn Popcorn

JOYCE CAROL OATES 76 Addiction

LARRY RUBIN 77 Cabin Mates

E. A. WATSON 78 Pour E. P.

ERROL MILLER 83 Delila

Two Poems

MIRIAM WADDINGTON 84 Notes of Summer

85 Old Chair Song

Two Poems

GIORGIO DI CICCO 86 The Elder

88 the fascists

Two Poems

TOM WAYMAN 89 Saturday Afternoon in Suburban Kitchener

92 Gossip

W. D. V ALGARDSON 94 Celebration

Book Reviews

LOUIS K. MAC KENDRICK 107 Summers, Merna, The Skating Party: Stories

Bowering, George, Flycatcher & Other Stories

Metcalf, John, The Teeth of My Father

Carrier, Jean-Guy, My Father's House: Stories

McWhirter, George, Bodyworks: Stories

TOM WAYMAN 110 Rosenthal, Helene, Listen to the Old Mother

Mayne, Seymour, ed., Cutting the Keys

Harasymowicz, Jerzy, Genealogy of Instruments

Cockburn, Robert, and Gibbs, Robert, eds., Ninety Seasons. Modern Poems from the Maritimes

A. MOURATIDES 116 Browning, Robert, Byzantium and Bulgaria: A Comparative Study Across the Early Medieval Frontier

120 Notes on Contributors

I

The Politics of Love: Marriage and the Good Society in Pride and Prejudice

JOSEPH M. DUFFY

THE MARRIAGE THEME is basic to all Jane Austen's fiction and the married state is the condition in which all her best characters per­fect their humanity and the worst lose or diminish theirs. Jane Austen uses provincial society as the stage on which the common­place conflicts between nature and civilization can be dramatized and she depends upon courtship and marriage as the droll action where the breakdown of the tensions of ordinary life can be minutely observed. As a controlling and civilizing force marriage enables society to operate more efficiently by insuring its orderly continu­ance and as a structure for the arrangement of natural feelings it enables individuals to live more meaningful human lives by exalting their mutual esteem into shared understanding.

At any level but especially at that of social intercourse where gestures of spontaneity and calculation mingle, civilization is like a carefully appointed cage fitted out with complex and suave restrain­ing devices which both permits men to exhibit self-esteem and guarantees their self-protection. The cage masks but does not dissi­pate the musky odors of its inhabitants, and it also holds in abeyance but does not paralyze their muscular power. A precarious human construct, the cage of civilized society is a fictional form like the shapely order of the three volumes of Pride and Prejudice which record the double line of accomplishment and disaster in the life of one dilapidated English family. As a trophy of the management of the motley of human feelings and impulses, society is thoroughly banal in the predictability of its human material; it is admirable in the promise it holds out for that material; and it is absurd in the divigations it reveals of that material from the promise. Pride and Prejudice is a high comedy of the banal, the admirable, and the absurd in human affairs. It is a novel which at last records how a fine equilibrium of order can somehow result from the collision

5

between man's unruly nature and the regularizing forces of society. Both the validity of commonplace wisdom and the shabby im­

plausible gestures arising out of that wisdom are invoked in the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally r acknowledged, that a single man in pas.session of a good fortune, I must be in want of a wife."1 This "truth" about the single man, his 1 need, and his relationship to society is only a fanciful aspiration "well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families," especially of mothers of unmarried daughters. It represents a wish for their daughters' release from the threat of spinsterhood and for their own vicarious material and social aggrandizement. But the irony of the opening statement, which is apparently a ludicrous one, is com­pounded in the course of the novel when the marriages of both Bingley and Darcy demonstrate that the sentence does indeed express "a truth," "however little known the feelings or views" of such men may be on their "first entering a neighbourhood." The emblematic device of this first sentence, the subsequent description of the Bennet household, and the account of the assembly at Meryton establish in the opening three chapters the limits of the novel's concern: the marriages men and women enjoy or are compelled to endure and the marriages others are on the point of making or of having made for them. Out of these commonplaces of human need and social experience, the drama of the following pages derives its motivating energy.

Among Jane Austen's novels Pride and Prejudice is second only to Emma in symmetry of structure. The first volume introduces all the important characters and sets up the lines of attraction or an­tagonism among them. Each of the subsequent volumes records more action and increased plot complication than the previous one; yet the crisis and equilibrium of the third volume are initiated in the material of the first. In Volume I, action is confined to the town of Meryton and its environs, specifically to four residences within that neighborhood - Longboum House ( the Bennets' home), N etherfield ( Bingley's rented establishment), Lucas Lodge, and the Phillips' house in Meryton. Into this limited environment but complete social world four strangers enter- Darcy, Bingley, Wickham, and Collins-whose presences act as catalysts for the feel­ings of the inhabitants and affect in permanent fashion the design of the community. Each stranger in a peculiar way tests the resources of this minor world, and all four ultimately marry from it but not

6

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into it although only one of them, Collins, had this object in view when he entered - and he marries at variance with his initial inten­tion. All four of the men including Bingley come under careful scrutiny of the society and three of them in serious conflict with one of its members - Elizabeth Bennet.

Although he ends up as the most involved, Darcy makes his appearance as a marginal figure, the friend and advisor of Bingley who has recently leased Netherfield where he intends to live at least temporarily and perhaps, according to some observers, for "the remainder of his days." Since he is resident tenant of a large prop­erty, Bingley is the man "considered as the rightful property of some one or other" of the daughters of Meryton. Nevertheless, because Darcy is "fine," "tall," "handsome," and "noble" in appearance and above all, because he is rumored to have ten thousand pounds a year, it is Bingley's friend who at first captivates the Meryton assembly. But this gush of admiration lasts no longer than "half the evening"; then "his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity" and the community becomes his antagonist:

What a contrast between him and his friend! Mr. Darcy danced only once with Mrs. Hurst and once with Miss Bingley, declined being intro­duced to any other lady, and spent the rest of the evening in walking about the room, speaking occasionally to one of his own party. His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and every body hoped that he would never come there again. ( I ,iii)

The opinion is that of the members of the assembly whose repre­sentative figure is Mrs. Bennet, and their style of exaggerated dis­approval is imitated by the narrator. In this novel, as in life, the public are apt to be hasty, biased, and mercurial arbiters of con­duct especially when their standard is no higher than the hysterically unreliable Mrs. Bennet who was "amongst the most violent against him." But a specific incident particularizes Darcy's bad manners and seems to justify society's negative judgment. Elizabeth overhears a conversation between Darcy and Bingley in which the former com­ments on her merely "tolerable" good appearance and disdains "to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men."

Certainly Darcy's rude manners in this episode are subversive to the Meryton image of itself as agreeable society, and his boorish remarks are an affront to Elizabeth's self-love. Even though his

7

remarks are intended to be private, they enforce in Elizabeth an immediate and fixed prejudice against Darcy. In this first encounter, so critical for both their subsequent lives, Darcy's failure of manners, his social blunder about her appearance, is the cause of Elizabeth's failure of judgment, her moral error about his character. As it turns out, Elizabeth's fault is greater because she enjoys and cultivates it and then justifies and deepens it by her wilful failure to discriminate between the appearance of truth and its reality in Wickam's tale of his persecution by Darcy. 2

In such a society as Elizabeth and Darcy inhabit, surf ace manners count for a great deal in the public routine: men and women are prone to "perform" for each other and thus embellish their natures with the grace or protection or receptiveness of art. Under these circumstances it is often difficult to distinguish between the quality of the performance and the quality of the person giving the per­formance. In Mansfield Park, for example, there are several serious objections to the theatrical venture, but one perceived more from the distanced position of the narrator and the reader than by any of the young people involved is that the scenes between Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford permit such an extension and heightening of their "real" flirtation that the validity and responsibility of their lives may be lost in the deceptions of art - as inevitably happens in their flight at the end of the novel. Where there is a perceptible space between art and life, between surface and substance, between the disguise and the person, the refinement of civilization, which is a comely art form, decays into artifice, craftiness, or cunning. Where art is excessively elaborated, life too carefully guarded, and candor diminished, a game is often being played, a deception practised, and consequently moral uncertainty projected which may be as relatively minor- though it is a source of major confusion for Emma Wood­house - as the concealed engagement between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill or as corrupt as the relationship between Mrs. Clay and William Elliot in Persuasion. In Mansfield Park Henry Craw­ford who is such a good "actor" in reality resembles those other per­forming young men- Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, Wick­ham, Frank Churchill, and Wililam Elliot-who in order to secure advantage for themselves deliberately confuse the distinction between what they are and what they seem to be.

During a meeting at Rosings, Lady Catherine's residence, Darcy rather smugly declares a resemblance between his character and

8

Elizabeth's: "'We neither of us perform to strangers.'" In extenua­tion of his social awkwardness Darcy has just described his reserve:

'I certainly have not the talent which some people possess,' said Darcy, 'of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I can­not catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their con­cerns, as I often see done.' (11,vii)

Objecting to this defense with a revealing analogy to art, Elizabeth maintains that such "talent" is mainly a result of practice and is like the labored acquisition of skills needed for playing the piano. With a view towards the world they both inhabit, Elizabeth might also have pointed out that no one is altogether natural in the public cage - the exposure would be dreadful - and that Darcy's claimed social awkwardness is itself a disguise since even bad manners are nonetheless a mask between self and world. Even a token acceptance of responsibility for managing an agreeable performance would have protected Darcy from Elizabeth's original misunderstanding. Indeed the activities of the novel indicate that the assumptions behind Darcy's statement are inadequate if one is going to live in the social world : if the word is used in the theatrical sense, a "performance" is always required before strangers since full candor is reserved for those whom one knows well - or those whom one wishes to know. Darcy and Elizabeth cease to perform before each other in the isola­tion of their angry encounter at Hunsford after his proposal and, late in the novel, during their conversations of mutual discovery after their engagement.

On Darcy's behalf, however, it must be pointed out that although there is gaucherie in his behavior towards strangers, it is he who makes a candid effort to know Elizabeth - to gauge the depth and quality of her character - long before she comes to know him. In fact her "performance" before him, while it is wittier and more assured than his awkward curiosity, is for a long time as brittle, as self-glorifying, and as indifferent to the other's person as that of the average player in her society. And her knowledge of Darcy comes at last as a gift rather than an achievement of will and feeling as is Darcy's love of her. When Elizabeth comes to Netherfield to care for her ill sister, Darcy becomes an increasingly involved spectator as seeking knowledge of her, he watches her and converses with her during the evening gatherings of the Bingley party. This search for knowledge of and through another is a mode of understanding the

9

commonplace in order to transcend it in the creative activity of love. Such understanding and subsequent transcendence is the basis for successful marriage in Jane Austen's fiction. And the successful marriage is the primary society out of which the larger good society develops.

During Elizabeth's visit to Netherfield the social atmosphere varies between boredom and factitious activity as the residents are idle and static in their positions or as they walk, talk, and engage in games. After tea on one such occasion, except for conversation between Elizabeth and Bingley the members of this society are des­cribed as indolently separate from each other:

When tea was over, Mr. Hurst reminded his sister-in-law of the cardtable - but in vain. She had obtained private intelligence that Mr. Darcy did not wish for cards; and Mr. Hurst soon found even his open petition rejected. She assured him that no one intended to play, and the silence of the whole party on the subject, seemed to justify her. Mr. Hurst had therefore nothing to do, but to stretch himself on one of the sophas and go to sleep. Darcy took up a book; Miss Bingley did the same; and Mrs. Hurst principally occupied in playing with her bracelets and rings, joined now and then in her brother's conversation with Miss Bennet. ( I, xi)

Moving from stasis to activity the characters feign interest in one another by coyly offering or loftily rejecting conversational gambits. Miss Bingley sets the artificial tone by her desperate capers towards Darcy and by pretence of intimacy with Elizabeth. In this deceptive and apparently listless environment the human actors are shown as craving liberation from the banal solitude of self and yet muffling themselves in egotistical imposture. Even those who are married (like the Hursts) or who seek marriage (like Miss Bingley) are divorced from each other in the vapid social space where their con­sciousness lies. Darcy contributes his own periphrastic rhetoric to the edgy social climate, and yet he would move through that climate towards clarity by discovering what Elizabeth is really like. Affected by Elizabeth as she is by Wickham - by the truth of her looks -he wishes to know what true space of character lies behind her beauty. The stirrings of love move him to seek this knowledge.

Although the novel is told from Elizabeth's point of view, the narration is not enclosed within that point of view but assumes, instead, an awareness of the whole of the reality in which she par­ticipates. Frequently the narration is distanced from Elizabeth and

IO

presents more than she sees - presents, indeed, what she has blinded herself from seeing. During the scenes in the first volume where Elizabeth and Darcy are together, the reader recognizes, therefore, through the man's articulate presence the assertion of a further aspect of reality and the filling out, consequently, of the "truth" of the situation. Darcy is not so inflexible and boorish as Elizabeth takes him to be and as some readers have understood him to be -influenced as they are and as the narrator is not by Elizabeth's antagonist judgment. Too often Darcy has been seen as a man of misanthropic and saturnine temperament, a semi-domesticated Heathcliff somehow astray in a comedy of manners; yet examples of his faults of abrasive temper and of conceit are minor and are represented only by prejudiced observers as being more than imper­fections of character. Instead Darcy is a man of principle, of innate grace, and of complex understanding whose character is sufficiently liberal and resonant to admit the influence of even so unusual an experience as finding himself in love with a daughter of the Bennet family.

The result of this arduous educative experience of love is not the breakdown of principle and the subversion of understanding but the vitalizing of principle and the enlargement of Darcy's under­standing as well as that of the audience. Unlike Knightley who has had a long acquaintance with Emma and is therefore susceptible of few surprises from that young woman, Darcy initially views Eliza­beth as a stranger must and then make a progress of discovery about her character. Shortly after their first encounter Darcy does Eliza­beth the honor of taking her seriously, a courtesy she does not accord him until their acrimonious exchange after his proposal. The narra­tor ironically notes Darcy's early interest in Elizabeth and records with equal irony her self-centered neglect of him:

Occupied in observing Mr. Bingley's attention to her sister, Elizabeth was far from suspecting that she was herself becoming an object of some interest in the eyes of his friend. Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty; he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticize. But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect sym­metry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light

I I

and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness. Of this she was perfectly unaware; - to her he was only the man who made himself agreeable no where, and who had not thought her hand­some enough to dance with. (I,vi)

At a subsequent party given by Sir William Lucas, Darcy's desire to know Elizabeth is particularized : "He began to wish to know more of her, and as a step towards conversing with her himself, attended to her conversation with others. His doing so drew her notice" (I,vi). But Elizabeth refuses Darcy's invitation to dance and elsewhere in the scene archly parries his attempts at conversa­tion. Yet even her capricious sparkle sustains Darcy's interest and prepares him for their closer contact at Netherfield.

The reader watching Darcy observing and talking with Elizabeth during her stay at Netherfield sees that the truth not only about Darcy but also about Elizabeth is more complex and that the grounds for admiration in each case are more evenly balanced than he had previously suspected. Darcy's seriousness is related to the best aspects of his pride and his pride is linked to his integrity -to his sense of who he is, of the limits of his position, and of his responsibilities towards others. Although Darcy is measured and sometimes leaden in his reactions, his mind is capable of facing up to issues that others treat frivolously or ignore altogether. During the important conversations in Chapter Eleven, Darcy observes about himself: " 'But it has been the study of my life to avoid those weaknesses which often expose a strong character to ridicule.'" And in response to Elizabeth's question whether that endeavor included the avoidance of vanity and pride, he replies: " 'Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride - where there is real superiority of mind, pride will always be under good regulation.'"

Darcy is clearly open to the charge of priggishness in the smug handling of his own case, and much later repudiating his former " 'pride and conceit' " he expresses gratitude for the experience of having been " 'properly humbled' " by Elizabeth ( III,xvi). In the situation at Netherfield, the reader may at first be inclined to approve Elizabeth's reaction as she "turned away to hide a smile" at Darcy's presentation of his ideal self. The real absurdity, how­ever, is not so much Darcy's gravity about himself as the levity of the audience including Elizabeth whose " 'spirits' " she admits later " 'might often lead [her] wrong.' " At Netherfield Darcy's language

I2 r

exposes a strong element of vanity diluting the idealism of his self­appraisal: here and elsewhere in this exchange with Elizabeth he embellishes with self-inflating rhetoric the favorable assumptions he has made about his own character. Nevertheless, although his pre­sentation may be mismanaged, the content of his speech - his con­viction about true pride - is not reprehensible unless one is a moral anarchist. Moreover, the very activity of self-explanation as an effort towards mutual enlightenment - his own and Elizabeth's - should be highly regarded in this self-deceiving milieu. Miss Bingley makes ungainly pirouettes of devotion and Elizabeth remains acerbly inter­rogative, but Darcy has the courage to examine himself in public.

While the others are content to stand still, Darcy shows himself willing to engage in a rhythm of dialectic; and in so doing he becomes more like himself as they remain less like themselves than they might be. At Netherfield Darcy is in process as he talks with Elizabeth who, despite her wit, remains static. She makes no attempt to alter her view established by Darcy's rebuff at the Meryton assembly, and she uses language in order to sustain her prejudice rather than to discover a truth. Her observation to Darcy in the context of Chapter Eleven that his defect is " 'to hate every body' " merely reveals her own limited point of view. But when Darcy con­cludes their conversation with a smile and the comment that her defect in tum is "'wilfully to misunderstand,'" he shows a much greater comprehension of Elizabeth's character at this point than she does of his.

Later, when they meet for the last time at Netherfield, Elizabeth has already heard and accepted Wickham's story of unfair usage from Darcy. On this occasion- the ball given by Bingley for the community- Elizabeth's indifference towards Darcy has stiffened to asperity and under guise of continuing their previous discussion she suggests that his "'unappeasable'" resentment towards anyone who has offended him may result from his being " 'blinded by pre­judice' " (!,xviii). Their dialogue ends with the finish of the dance and they part dissatisfied with each other. For Darcy, however, "a tolerable powerful feeling" for Elizabeth enables him to pardon her and direct "all his anger" against Wickham. Even here the measure of Darcy's generosity is displayed, in negative fashion, by his tactful refusal, despite his feelings for Elizabeth, to expose Wickham's lies.

Such generosity which is consistent with Darcy's character throughout the novel and is eventually seen as magnanimity is con-

cealed at this point from the audience as well as from Elizabeth. The impact of its revelation is reserved until his letter in the second volume, and its extent is finally made clear in the third volume with his active assistance of the Bennets in the Lydia-Wickham elope­ment. Even in Volume One, however, Darcy is customarily seen as more open to new aspects of Elizabeth's character than she is towards him. It is Elizabeth herself who is" 'blinded by prejudice'" - the sight image is appropriate for one who has been so profoundly deceived by appearance - in her contrasting judgments of Darcy and Wickham. Because Darcy once offended her vanity, she refuses to "see" the man before her and is prepared to live comfortably with a distorted view of him. Because Wickham flatters her, she indiscriminately trusts his good looks and easy manners and even extenuates in him what she would clearly recognize as faulty in another. 3

Despite the evident wit of her performance before Darcy, Eliza­beth is often indecorous and inconsiderate towards him. Her spor­tive approach to his character, always the result of early hasty judg­ment, shows a lack of awareness of his complexity; and she fails as a matter of course to respect his person which, if only because of his respectful attention to her, deserves this human tribute. During their talk at Netherfield, Elizabeth, mocking Darcy's rather morose self-esteem, emphasizes the moral selectiveness of her laughter and makes an implied claim for it as an instrument of instruction and as a guardian of human values: " 'I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at these whenever I can' " ( I,xi). Elizabeth describes here the laughter of the novel as well which ridicules the debasement of standards and the warping of proportion by members of the society it represents. In practice, however, Elizabeth sometimes resembles her morally anarchic father who does not notably discriminate among objects of his wit and seems indifferent to its potentially demoralizing effects. Confronting the crowd of human follies in the society around him, Mr. Bennet evidently sees no meaning behind or beyond this extravagant discord: " 'For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?' " (III,xv).

Elizabeth's levity is amusing but it can be a self-serving device used as a means of avoiding judgment rather than as a function of judgment itself. 4 Because she tends to be rigid and personal in her

view of character and conduct, Elizabeth shows herself to be incap­able of recognizing the good in such a mixed character as Darcy. For she can not rely on her own experience nor on the example of parents nor on the advice of friends to guide her in facing the com­plex and unexpected in human affairs. The " 'unaccountable' " engagement of Charlotte Lucas depresses Elizabeth and leaves as her only confidante the apparently faultless Jane, a low-pressured saint about whom nothing significant can be observed except her total want of elan. Jane may be" 'really angelic' " but her charisma is too flimsy to lighten Elizabeth's pessimism about human nature:

'You wish to think all the world respectable, and are hurt if I speak ill of any body. I only want to think you perfect, and you set yourself against it. Do not be afraid of my running into any excess, of my en­croaching on your privilege of universal good will. You need not. There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense.' (II,i)

Both for her own sake and for the development of the novel, Eliza­beth needs experience and she must travel in order to gain that experience.

II

In Volume One the marriage theme is defined in negative terms: the actual marriage of the Bennets and the pursuit of a spouse by Collins are themselves metaphors of a discordant reality. It is a reality created by erring members of society content with merely projecting an image of order which is no more than a rhetorical glaze over a scrawl of emotions or a paper cage for real beasts. Having once been "captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humor, which youth and beauty generally give" ( II,xix). Mr. Bennet had married erratically in tribute to sexual desire and, after the dissipation of desire, had survived in solitude and dryness of spirit. One after the other in Jane Austen's novels, the Mr. Bennets of this world win their Mrs. Bennets until one day they find their ardor spent and themselves reluctantly institutionalized in the family. Throughout the fiction there are examples of such indi­viduals whom the disappointments of marriage have turned into

men more eccentric, more bored, more functionless, or more irritable than they otherwise would have been: Mr. Palmer in Sense and Sensibility, Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park, John Knightley in Emma, and Charles Musgrove in Persuasion. In Pride and Pre­judice the history of the Bennet household manifests the dissonance any society exhibits when mere freedom follows the abdication of authority. Formal practice tends to become tedious and conven­tional and finally haphazard and disingenuous while natural spon­taneity degenerates into sporadic impulse.

The public appearance of the Bennet family at the Netherfield ball (!,xviii) offers an inane spectacle of the failure of communal order: the scene discloses the japeries of Mrs. Bennet who speaks more than she should, the pedantic attitudinizing of Mary Bennet who would sing interminably on the basis of negligible encourage­ment, the egregious conceit of Collins who unctuously intrudes on Darcy and the Bingleys, and the bemused irresponsibility of Mr. Bennet who enjoys the panorama of a world askew- even a world set in motion by himself. For Elizabeth, however, who also is specta­tor of her family's self-exposure, the experience of humiliation the evening provides is calculated to erode respect for those nearest in blood to her. The evening and its gaucheries are otherwise functional in the novel and have serious plot and thematic consequences since Darcy's expression as he looks from her mother to Elizabeth changes "gradually from indignant contempt to a composed and steady gravity." Evidently he is making his final assessment of the Bennet family and trying to gauge Elizabeth's involvement in their unreason. Shortly after the ball, the Netherfield party, with Darcy's encourage­ment, leave Hertfordshire for London. The remaining five chapters of the first volume are mainly concerned with Collins' two proposals of marriage and the acceptance of one of them by Charlotte Lucas.

In search of a spouse but obviously not one of the ardent young men in pursuit of a bedmate, Collins is a coxcomb clergyman shopping for a permanent addition to his household. His presence in the novel is important not so much for the plot complication of the entail to the Bennet estate which is simply the device for bring­ing him to Longboum. More significantly, Collins helps to expose the functional and practical view of marriage as objectified in his and Charlotte Lucas' requirements. Moreover, the insanely trivial conceit of his character is a parody of Lady Catherine's irascible domineering vanity which is itself an empty mock of Darcy's con-

16

cept of pride. Collins is in fact the kind of person Elizabeth assumes Darcy to be: she does not sufficiently distinguish between the bloated self-importance within which Collins' spirit rattles like a pebble and the affectation and mannerism which Darcy's self-regard intrudes between his true character and a world he holds in indifferent esteem. That Collins and Darcy both propose to Elizabeth in a style unflattering to her ego may join them in her imagination, but this linking circumstance directs the reader to see, instead, the essential differences between them.

In a novel where real communication between men and women is rare and yet indispensible as the basis of a reasonable and stable society, Collins' proposal is a rhetorical structure empty of significant meaning for its living audience. In contrast, Darcy's proposal, which occurs later and must recall to Elizabeth Collins' address, speaks too clearly to his listeners: it is affronting precisely because it takes its audience so seriously as to introduce candor and confidence in its matter and tone. Rather than revolving among the stock phrases of dry form as Collins' speech does, Darcy's words try to communicate the desperation of love and so move with the indiscriminate energy of living matter. Since Collins has no interior life, only a public manner, the clergyman depends upon the same bogus formalism and spurious logic as he probably uses in his sermons. His utterance is only superficially sequential: actually it is a cluttered hoax, a snarl of trivial irrelevance without any real meaning except as evidence of sycophancy and egoism. A mechanical man incapable of appre­hending or making gestures of intelligent love and programmed in this instance only to an affirmative response, Collins does not "hear" Elizabeth's careful and emphatically asseverated rejection:

'You are uniformly charming!' cried he, with an air of awkward gallantry; 'and I am persuaded that when sanctioned by the express authority of both your excellent parents, my proposals will not fail of being acceptable.' (I,xix)

Whereas Collins is stylized and vague except on matters dissociated from sensibility, Darcy is dynamic, elaborately clear, and spon­taneous in explaining his feelings. Not only is his mind in motion but his body is as well as he moves about the Collins' sitting room at Hunsford or changes color or shows "disturbance ... in every feature" ( II,xi). This volatile external activity is in accord with the internal movement of his spirit just as the larger external move-

ment of travel in the novel coincides with the great theme of explora­tion of the new region of love. Although Darcy's proposal is sum­marized, it is said that he "spoke well' but also that he detailed "feelings besides those of the heart," feelings about Elizabeth's "in­feriority - of its being a degradation - of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination .... " The effect of Darcy's declaration is to open up for the first time the possibility of candid speech on both sides. On the basis of this new under­standing Elizabeth is compelled now to take Darcy seriously even though seriousness entails an angry and resentful response. After categorically rejecting Darcy's proposal and explicitly denying even such a gesture of gratitude as she had offered Collins, Elizabeth charges Darcy with having been "'the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a most beloved sister' " and of reducing Wickham "'to his present state of poverty, comparative poverty.'" In his long critical reply Darcy does not answer Elizabeth's melo­dramatically phrased accusations but gives instead a defense of his own position, which is essentially a defense of his character, and shows, in passing, a bitter understanding of the power of her pride:

'And this,' cried Darcy, as he walked with quick steps across the room, 'is your opinion of me! This is the estimation in which you hold me! I thank you for explaining it so fully. My faults, according to this calculation, are heavy indeed! But perhaps,' added he, stopping in his walk and turning towards her, 'these offences might have been over­looked, had not your pride been hurt by my honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design. These bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I with greater policy concealed my struggles, and flattered you into the belief of my being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination; by reason, by reflection, by every thing. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence. Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connec­tions? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condi­tion in life is so decidedly beneath my own?'

Assuredly Darcy is wrong in not calculating the effect of such plain speaking on the woman he professes to love, in not under­standing that even in the closest human relationship too much hon­esty may be intolerable: as a routine procedure disguise may indeed be abhorrent but under certain circumstances it is a necessary token of considerateness, even an act of charity and consequently an emanation of love. At the same time he is right in noticing that

Elizabeth's pride has been wounded because he does not see her separately from her family. Elsewhere, as we have already observed, this fear of association causes her embarrassment when she suspects public observation of the Bennets' conduct at the Netherfield ball. Apart from the matter of Darcy's poor strategy in his address, how­ever, it is questionable whether Elizabeth has any right to her pride in this instance, whether her ego is not inflamed because she does recognize the plausibility of Darcy's position. As for her argument about Jane and Bingley, even Charlotte Lucas had early made the suggestion that a more encouraging outward appearance of affection by Jane might precipitate a favorable outcome to her romance ( I,vi). Although his conclusion in this case was wrong, Darcy did act with good intentions on behalf of a friend of inferior understanding and acted only after close observation of Jane's apparent lack of "'peculiar regard' " for Bingley. Finally, knowing himself to be unjustly accused of impoverishing Wickham, Darcy, hitherto tact­fully reticent, is still silent on that subject and only reveals in his subsequent letter to Elizabeth the real measure of that young man's bad faith.

Elizabeth's thoroughly emotional predisposition against Darcy -her blindness - is evident in the pitch of hyperbole with which she casts aside his proposal :

'From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that ground-work of dis­approbation, on which succeeding events have built so immoveable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.'

What has been seen as gradually revealing itself in their relationship - her lack of progress in understanding Darcy as opposed to his movement towards her - is summarized here by Elizabeth herself in terms more literate perhaps but as irrational and even hysterical as those Mrs. Bennet might use in one of her spasms of irritation. Neither the disguise of wit that she had previously assumed nor this new candor of feeling brings Elizabeth any closer to Darcy, and like a dancer who keeps time to imaginary music she ignores the partner who would lead her into a pattern of rhythmic contact. But the next morning Elizabeth's prejudice, which has been so thoroughly

19

confirmed during this dialogue as to be verbalized as objective truth, is annihilated by Darcy's letter.

Having received the letter during a morning walk, Elizabeth reads, rereads, and reflects upon its contents as she wanders "along the lane for two hours" ( II,xiii). She admits to herself that her folly was " 'vanity' " and that in her estimation of Darcy and Wickham she had "'courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned.' " Her experience in self­discovery that follows recognition of new aspects of the once familiar objective world is immediate and revolutionary: ." 'Till this moment, I never knew myself.' " She sees and accepts instantaneously the fu­sion of subjective and objective reality. Elizabeth is like a figure from romance who is taken unaware by the surprises of this world and who is therefore suddenly obliged to ad just to a new and radical percep­tion of herself and the terrain of her reality. As with Emma Wood­house in her moments of discomforting realignment with the "truth" of things Elizabeth's discovery of herself is like entry into a new found land: the voyage is painful though necessary and its effect is ulti­mately expansive and gracious because it presents her with a new and permanent landmark of judgment and leaves her ready, if the occasion should arise, to react to Darcy in a new way and to move with him into new spaces of love. In the actuality of events it enables her to change from a declaration of bitter isolation against Darcy in the proposal episode to an avowal in her talk with Lady Cath­erine of a readiness to join with him in the heroic solidarity of a new society against the conspiracy of forces from the old and corrupt society:

'Neither duty, nor honour, nor gratitude' replied Elizabeth, 'have any possible claim on me, in the present instance. No principle of either, would be violated by my marriage with Mr. Darcy. And with regard to the resentment of his family, or the indignation of the world, if the former were excited by his marrying me, it would not give me one moment's concern - and the world in general would have too much sense to join in the scorn.' (III,xiv)

Her sense of the justice of the cause that links her life to Darcy's is finally so dazzling that its very power seems to make the outcome in objective reality inevitable.

20

III

Ironically Darcy's proposal and the subsequent quarrel and revela­tion occur at Hunsford where Charlotte and Collins live their dry and emotionless marriage under the grittily meticulous authority of Lady Catherine at Rosings. Formerly Elizabeth's only intimate friend, "a sensible, intelligent young woman, about twenty-seven" (l,v), Charlotte Lucas had never thought highly "either of men or matrimony ... " ( I,xxii). With cool-eyed assessment of her unmar­ried predicament, however, Charlotte's reactions to Collins' proposal "were in general satisfactory," since "marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want." Despite her intel­ligence - or perhaps because her intelligence has disposed her to be rational in this matter - Charlotte regards her engagement not with resignation but with complacency:

'I am not romantic you know. I never was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins's character, connections, and situa­tion in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair, as most people can boast on entering the marriage state.'

This utilitarian attitude towards marriage is disappointing to Eliza­beth who is convinced that she herself would not "have sacrificed every better feeling to worldly advantage." Nevertheless, in her low estimate of Charlotte's chances of being even "tolerably happy in the lot she had chosen," she is wrong, for Charlotte's demands upon life are not as large as Elizabeth's and her conception of marriage is, as she emphatically states, not at all romantic.

At Hunsford Charlotte achieves her accommodation to her low­pressured marriage by physically separating herself as much as pos­sible from her husband. In particular she has arranged a less com­fortable sitting room for herself in the rear of the parsonage in order to insure Collins' remaining in his own apartment for the greater part of the day. The plan of the small sitting room with its inferior outlook reflects the cramped and evasive nature of the Collins' marriage: a dour, inferior, yet workable relationship authorized by the loveless politics of compromise. Place is used here to typify the quality of the marriage and the society it promotes just as it is in the Bennet household where Mr. Bennet's library is a womb of

2I

retirement from the nagging prox1m1ty of his family. There he retreats like a man in exile accepting his abdicated position in a loveless marriage, his ardor cooled and intellectual remorse settled down upon him. Similarly, late in the novel, the nomadic existence of Lydia and Wickham, who "were always moving from place in quest of a cheap situation" ( IIl,xix), represents not only their economic instability but also the vagrancy, mutability, and ulti­mate emptiness of their married lives.

In much larger and altogether more significant fashion, Pemberley is emblematic of the power, discrimination, and complexity of Darcy's character; and at last, as the real and symbolic house of his married life with Elizabeth, it manifests the civilized capacity for order as well as the natural vivacity of their union. In the opening chapters of Volume Three Elizabeth meets Darcy for the first time in an environment where he is literally and metaphorically at home. After initial surprise at their appearance Darcy responds with cour­teous self-possession to Elizabeth and the Gardiners. He plays the role for which his character and upbringing have prepared him­that of cordial master of the family abode at Pemberley. For Eliza­beth who is now capable of perceiving him undimmed by her former haze of prejudice, it is a new view of the man; and for the reader it is a more spacious one. It is indeed a "view" of the human being in full and interesting perspective as artfully arranged by the nar­rator as the immediately preceding one of house and grounds. Both the place and the man are observed for their expression of the merg­ing of nature and cultivation. With accomplished avoidance of extravagance or crudeness the handsome rooms of Pemberley and their furnishings are kept within the limits of "real elegance" and the inher.ent substance and natural beauty of water, trees, and eleva­tion are not lost in the careful landscaping ( III,i). The housekeeper, Mrs. Reynolds, performs a mediating function as family retainer and chronicler who is able to relate Darcy to his historical and per­sonal background. Darcy himself is found by Mr. Gardiner to be " 'perfectly well behaved, polite, and unassuming,' " while his wife sees him as " 'a little stately' " but finds that this quality is " 'con­fined to his air, and is not unbecoming.'" Everything about the scene at Pemberley - the house and grounds, the affectionate gos­sip of the housekeeper, and the appearance and manner of Darcy - is expressive of an equilibrium achieved between the refining

22

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power of civilization and the spontaneous regenerative power of nature.

Astonished by the alteration she finds in Darcy, Elizabeth ponders his new civility in place of his former "self-consequence" and "un­bending reserve." If Pride and Prejudice were a romance, the setting of Pemberley would have been appropriate for the revelation of Darcy's unimpaired love for Elizabeth, for the marvelous burgeon­ing of her feelings towards him, and for the settling of their relation­ship. But the moral realism of the novel's point of view warrants an abrupt change from the pastoral serenity of Darcy's home: that realism insists that life's affairs do have consequence which cannot be arbitrarily or miraculously dissolved as in romance. The change of setting and the intrusion of morally rancid plot complications in which Darcy becomes involved are required unless Pemberley is to be idealized as a retreat from reality and its master fabulously isolated as a superior but limited authority figure incapable of action outside his own enchanted domain - as, in ironic reversal of such romantic isolation, Mr. Bennet is a withered and helpless individual both within and outside Longbourn. The melodrama in which Lydia and Wickham have been caught up has been correctly indentified as having been spun out of the conventional plot material of popular eighteenth-century fiction. Except, however, for the plethora of epistolary matter which evidently reflects an insufficient "lopping and cropping" of a version of First Impressions 5 the elopement is an effective representational consequence of the social and moral imperfections of the Bennet household, and the havoc it creates is indicated by the apparent structural disarray of the last volume. The characters move about so adventitiously because the situation pre­cludes calculated action, and surprising turns of plot occur because improvised responses must be made to uncommon events.

Of all the effects of the elopement probably the most momentous is the opportunity it affords of involving Darcy directly in the now grimy problems of the Bennets. He alone is able to bring some sur­face respectability to the attachment between Lydia and Wickham - a result Mr. Bennet cannot achieve because he has insufficient character and Mr. Gardiner cannot achieve because he has insuffi­cient money. Darcy's act - not simply the giving of money but his expooure to the seedy negotiations - is performed generously and tactfully, and he is fully revealed for what he is - a delicate and magnanimous man. 6 Although his main concern is Elizabeth's com-

fort of feeling, he works privately in order not to seem self-seeking to her. And with artistic tact matching that of her protagonists, the narrator insures that Elizabeth acknowledge to herself her love for Darcy before she discovers his management of Lydia's marriage:

She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man, who in disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It was an union that must have been to the advantage of both; by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved, and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance. (III,viii)

This process of mutual instruction and refinement that Elizabeth prematurely regards as lost to her begins during their final con­versations after the lovers have come together. On Darcy's part, however, learning through love had been underway since shortly after their first meeting when he showed himself willing to test his customary pride upon the hard facts of new experience. Darcy's traditional self-knowledge is an inheritance, like Pemberley, having an objective status of its own and transmitted to him with his family history. But the self-knowledge acquired through love conflicts with his traditional awareness of who he is; and the struggle that ensues involves a modification of the tradition, for it develops from the effort to absorb the new and anomalous into the framework of the old and the regular. Elizabeth, however, limited by no tradition but a captive of her personal vanity and prejudjce, comes late to the discovery of self; yet when she does reach awareness, her acceptance is whole-hearted and she takes in equally with the joy the pain and the responsibility that such knowledge imparts. Now at Pemberley, a traditional place which has been changed it must be assumed by succeeding generations of inhabitants, the man and the woman together can establish what is substantially a political order, a system of government where feeling and intelligence, liberty and restraint will prevail in a state of creative movement generated by love. The politics of love creates a society adequate for human fulfillment.

Although the rights of exclusion are practiced at Pemberley -Mrs. Bennet and Wickham, for example, are denied admission -the place is not a retreat from reality. The society established there is different in quality rather than in kind from society elsewhere in the novel: Its order, confidence, and purity of feeling are what that

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other society only mimics in its subservience to form, its adoration of property, and its twitches of emotion. That meretricious form of civilization - in the lives of the Bennets, the Collins, and Lady Catherine - could appropriately be described as institutionalized discontent. A miasma blights them and all such figures enthralled in the cages of their persons and their class, their lives alternating between torpor and spasm. At Pemberley, instead, the married lovers both exercise their freedom and submit the vitality of that freedom to meaningful form. There, the variegated inner life, that of the individual, and the regulated outer life, that of the house and its tradition and that of society, can be composed in harmonius community. Through the merging of nature and art, life- com­monplace in origin and always in danger of remaining commonplace - becomes legendary. Like all Jane Austen's novels, Pride and Prejudice is the witty statement of a great artist who expressed for the last time in English fiction confidence in the possibility of a stable human order, a habitable society where the traditional forms of civilization and the spontaneous power of individual will are not in irrevocable opposition. After Jane Austen, the novels of Dickens, George Eliot, and Conrad enunciate a new and desperate crisis affecting the individual and his relationship with social reality. These later artists represent the breakdown of traditional values, the spread of social discord, and the strain of individual solitude.

NOTES

1 All references to Pride and Prejudice are from Volume II of The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen ed. R. W. Chapman.

2 After Elizabeth confides to her sister Wickham's account of his "ill treatment" from Darcy, Jane is baffled but willing to believe the story because "it was not in her nature to question the veracity of a young man of such amiable appearance as Wickham" (!,xvii). Nevertheless, she resolves "to think well of them both, to defend the conduct of each, and throw into the account of accident or mistake, whatever could not be otherwise explained." To Jane's quest for an alternative and more complex explanation of the case, Elizabeth at first urges the cogency of statistical evidence - " 'names, facts, every thing mentioned without ceremony' " - and then peremptorily asserts: " 'If it be not so, let Mr. Darcy contradict it. Besides, there was truth in his looks.'" And while Jane is doubtful on the matter, Elizabeth is irrationally certain: " 'I beg your pardon; - one knows exactly what to think.' " Her vanity having been once affronted, Elizabeth brings this same fierce certitude to all her meetings with Darcy.

3 In conversations with Mrs. Gardiner she justifies Wickham's pursuit of the heiress, Miss King: " 'A man in distressed circumstances has not time for all

these elegant decorums which other people may observe. If she does not object to it, why should we?'" (II,iv)

4 In an effort to escape the claims of Mrs. Gardiner's good sense about motives in marriage, Elizabeth dismisses the subject of Wickham and claims to dis­regard as well another young man from Derbyshire and his friends in Hertfordshire :

'Oh! if that is all, I have a very poor opinion of young men who live in Derbyshire; and their intimate friends who live in Hertfordshire are not

much better. I am sick of them all. Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has neither manner nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing, after all' ( II,iv).

11 " 'I have lop't and crop't so successfully, however, that I imagine it must be rather shorter than S. & S.' " Letters ed. R. W. Chapman, p. 298.

s "Delicate" seems like an odd word to apply to Darcy, but the artist herself thought of him as a man of delicacy. After attending an exhibition in Spring Gardens in London and a showing of Reynolds' work she claims to have been disappointed to have seen "'nothing like Mrs. D. at either.' " She playfully explains the omission as due to Darcy's love and reserve: "'I can only imagine that Mr. D. prizes any Picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye. - I can image he wd have that sort of feeling -that mixture of Love, Pride & Delicacy.' " Letters, p. 312.

Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters" - "Once in a thousand years of fiction"

TUULI-ANN RISTKOK

OF THE MANY REFERENCES to occult and psychic phenomena in Nabokov's fiction, some of the most explicit and important appear in "The Vane Sisters." Not only is the texture of the story per­meated by a pattern of occult events, but alert readers will spot even without Nabokov's helpful gloss in his Foreword to the story that a most peculiar trick has been played on the narrator, who "is supposed to be unaware that his last paragraph has been used acrostically by two dead girls to assert their mysterious participation in the story."1 Moreover, the text gives some interesting clues to Nabokov's readings in the literature of spiritualism and of psychic research. Just as in Speak, Memory, he hints that in the quest to find evidence of the mind's survival of bodily death, he has con­sidered even the possibilities of theosophy, having "mentally endured the degrading company of Victorian lady novelists and retired colonels who remembered having, in former lives, been slave mes­sengers on a Roman road or sages under the willows of Lhasa," 2 so in "The Vane Sisters," Nabokov reveals his familiarity with a variety of works on modern spiritualism through the account that his narra­tor gives of its history, from the events of 1848 in Hydesville, N.Y. to the investigations of mediums in the 192o's and 3o's.

Nabokov's recent remark in Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories (McGraw-Hill, 1975, p. 218) that "The Vane Sisters" was written in 1951 links it chronologically as well as thematically with the first edition of Speak, Memory, where he describes the strength of his commitment to fight "the foul, the inadmissible abyss" of death -"Short of suicide, I have tried everything." Yet in the story, his approach seems more ambiguous. Why, for instance, should Nabokov introduce an apparently authentic message from two ghosts into an otherwise realistic story in which the narrator recounts episodes of fraud and delusion in spiritualist literature? "This particular trick,"

27

writes Nabokov, "can be tried only once in a thousand years of fic­tion. Whether it has come off is another question" (Foreword) . The acrostic message itself isn't difficult to decipher ( consisting of the initial letters of the words of the last paragraph), but why attempt a trick at all? Yet a detailed examination of the narrator's efforts to refute the existence of supernormal phenomena, of the girls' mes­sage, and of the pattern of occult events in the story shows that far from being merely a trick, "The Vane Sisters" represents a major stage in Nabokov's treatment of some of the central themes of his later fiction. Thus a close look at the story also casts light on Pale Fire, which it clearly anticipates, and which was begun in the same year, 1959, in which "The Vane Sisters" was first published. 3

The pattern of occult events starts with the chance encounter of the narrator, a fastidious professor of French, and a former col­league, D., who tells him that Cynthia Vane has died recently of a heart ailment at the age of thirty-six. We aren't told how the narra­tor and Cynthia came to know each other, but when her "hysterical younger sister," Sybil, has an affair with D., Cynthia asks the narra­tor to intervene. D. retreats, moves away with his wife, and the episode "came to an abrupt end" ( 77). Watching Sybil take his French midterm examination, the narrator feels "acutely unhappy about my dutiful little student as during one hundred and fifty minutes my gaze kept reverting to her," but he does not suspect that she is using her bluebook to convey a farewell message to them: "Cette examain est finie ainsie que ma vie. Adieu, jeunes filles! Please Monsieur le Prof esseur, contact ma soeur and tell her that Death was not better than D minus, but definitely better than Life minus D." ( 78-79). The narrator's hasty phone call is too late, Sybil has swallowed two bottles of pills, and the only comfort he can off er is to point out her grammatical errors, pleasing Cynthia with these "rather tasteless trivialities" ( 79).

Four or five months later, after Cynthia has moved to lower Manhattan from "artistic motives," and while the narrator is doing research at the 42nd Street Public Library, they begin to see a good deal of each other, at least partly out of a shared sense of guilt over Sybil's death. Although the narrator admires her "artistic gift," her painting - "those honest and poetical pictures" - he is sharply critical of her occult beliefs and superstitions: "fundamentally there was nothing particularly new about her private creed since it pre­supposed a fairly conventional hereafter, a silent solarium of immor-

i

tal souls ( spliced with mortal antecedents) whose main recreation consisted of periodical hoverings over the dear quick" ( 82) . In fact, the only part of her "tame metaphysics" that interests him is the "theory of intervenient auras," her belief that for a few hours, days, sometimes recurrently, or in an irregular series, anything that hap­pens to her is in the "mood and manner" of the psychic emanations of one of her dear departed. The aura might be good or bad, impor­tant or unimportant, "the main thing was that its source could be identified. It was like walking through a person's soul" ( 82). Thus when Cynthia wins a vacuum cleaner, she is convinced that this lucky event has come about through the friendly agency of her late cleaning woman. With pedantic irony, the narrator tries to pose logical objections to her "auras": "I tried to argue that she might not always be able to determine the exact source since not every­body has a recognizable soul," and that in fact, what Cynthia calls "a usual day," might be "a weak solution of mixed auras or simply the routine shift of a humdrum guardian angel" ( 83), but his efforts are wasted, and nothing can shake her firm convictions.

Indeed, the "theory of intervenient auras" is only part of her occult notions. Fascinated by mysterious coincidences, she befriends "an eccentric librarian caller Porlock," and helps him in his mad search for "the chance that mimics choice," miraculous misprints "such as the substitution of 'I' for the second 'h' in the word 'hither' " ( 84). Her theory of auras in confirmed, she decides, when on the third day after his death, she happens to read in a magazine a quotation from "Kubla Khan" and concludes that Alph must be a "prophetic sequence of the initial letters of Anna Livia Plurabelle [both works alluding to a river and a dream], while the extra 'h' modestly stood, as a private signpost, for the word that so hypno­tized Mr. Porlock" ( 84). It's no wonder that the narrator is exas­perated by all her transcendental claims and accuses her of evading evident difficulties: "And what about God? Did or did not people who would resent any omnipotent dictator on earth, look forward to one in heaven?" - and how can we solve the problem of time? Will dead soldiers, for example, be doomed to fight as phantom armies in a life everlasting? But "with J amesian meanderings that exasperated my French mind," Cynthia ignores his rational argu­ments.

Thus it is curious to find that the narrator is rather tolerant of her "ridiculous fondness for spiritualism." We might expect him to

29

refuse, but he accepts invitations to "attend little farces rigged-up" by Cynthia and her friends, amateurish seances of table-tilting, though he declines "to accompany her to sittings in which paid mediums took part: I knew too much about that from other sources" ( 8 5) . What these sources are he doesn't indicate at this point, but the remark itself is evidence that he has been concerned enough about the problem of afterlife to make an investigation of spiritualist claims. Cynthia's seances are every bit as farcial as the narrator says, and Nabokov's description of one offers an excellent parody of such sessions as they are recounted in the literature of spiritualists and of psychic researchers. The little wooden table that she uses, for example, is a mid-Victorian invention for the entice­ment of hovering spirits. Placing their fingertips on the table's sur­face, the sitters touch their neighbors' hands and then wait for the table to move and tilt, rapping out with its legs a coded message in answer to questions addressed to the spirits through the medium.4

When the narrator sits down with Cynthia "crackling tremors started almost as soon as we laid our fingertips upon it" ( 85), and they are "treated to an assortment of ghosts": Oscar Wilde, speak­ing in "rapid garbled French, with the usual anglicisms," two coal miners from Colorado who perished in an avalanche in 1883, and finally, "with a great crash and all kinds of shuddering and jig-like movements on the part of the table," they are visited by Leo Tol­stoy, who leaves a particularly enigmatic message, to be considered later in this essay.

But the most important guest that Nabokov introduces to Cyn­thia's circle is Frederick Myers, whom the narrator calls "an old hand at the game" and who communicates a piece of verse "oddly resembling Cynthia's own fugitive productions" ( 8'). Frederick William Henry Myers ( 1843-1901) was indeed "an old hand at the game." A poet and inspector of schools, he was one of the foun­ders of the Society for Psychical Research, established in England in 1882, for the serious investigation of psychic phenomena. He coined such words as "telepathy" and "supernormal," but he is best known for his monumental work, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (published posthumously in 1903), in which he develops a theory of a "subliminal self," a "vast organism of which the ordinary consciousness is but an accidental fraction." 6 This was intended in part at least as an alternative to the spiritualist notion that all supernormal phenomena are produced by the spirits of the

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dead. And though he attended many seances, Myers was very cau­tious about accepting the claims of professional mediums, particu­larly their readiness to produce physical phenomena such as raps, levitations, and disembodied voices. Myers' two-volume compen­dium of information may be a chaotic pot-pourri of clairvoyance, genius, hallucinations, somnambulism, hypnosis, and telepathy, but William James, for example, reviewed the book with respect, if with scepticism. Nabokov's inclusion of Myers in this scene is all the more appropriate since Myers had a remarkable way of communicating posthumously, thanks to his personal acquaintanceship with so many mediums, "succeeding where scholars have traditionally failed, in continuing to publish after his death. " 7

The poem that Myers transmits through Cynthia is much more important than the narrator suspects, and its bearing on Nabokov's intentions in the story will be discus.5ed later in the essay. For the narrator, however, the poem simply appears to be as frustrating as the other phenomena that take place. He attends two or three more sessions at which he tries to take careful notes, but despite his efforts what occurs is "difficult to take down, hard to understand, and impossible to verify," and while the ghosts "rapped out their reports most readily," he also finds them "refusing to elucidate anything I did not quite catch." What messages come cannot be decoded. Finally, bored with these, and irritated by Cynthia's noisy and messy parties, he sends her a note criticizing her guests and her drinks. When he next encounters her on the steps of the 42nd Street Library, where he finds her "struggling with a couple of armpitted books," Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World and "something" on spiritualism and Christianity, Cynthia attacks him with "vulgar vehemence, using poisonous words," accusing him of being "a prig and a snob," and he breaks off his relations with her: "Having suffi­ciently studied her interesting auras and other odds and ids, I decided to stop seeing her altogether" ( 88) .

Given their manner of parting, his reaction to her death four years later seems disproportionately strong. They were neither lovers, nor truly friends, he is not responsible for her fate, as he is in a sense for Sybil's, yet the news has a devastating effect on him. When he gets home that evening, he cannot sleep, and even his bed "gave no sense of safety; its springs only made my nerves bounce." Trying to escape by reading himself to sleep with Shakespeare's sonnets, he finds that memories of Cynthia's acrostic searches haunt him, and

he starts "idiotically checking the first letters of the lines to see what sacramental words they might form. I got fate ( LXX), ATOM ( CXX), and twice, TAFT ( LXXXVIII, CXXXI) ." But the illusion of a message here is as vague as in the case of the communi­cations at her seance table. More and more nervous, he checks his furniture for signs of telekinesis, "my heart would burst if a certain suspiciously tense-looking little bottle on yonder shelf moved a frac­tion of an inch to one side," and though she is well past teenage, he fears that the raps and cracks that he hears in his room might be the mysterious noises that sometimes occur in hauntings in which young­sters near puberty are involved: "It would have been just like Cynthia to put on right then a cheap poltergeist show."

From his earlier remark about professional mediums, we know that Nabokov's narrator has either in person or through reading investigated their claims and that the possible persistence of life after death has concerned him far more than he admitted to Cynthia. On this night, terrified that she might haunt him, he decides to use his researches to combat his fear of her ghost: "I decided to fight Cynthia, I reviewed in thought the modem era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of I 848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y. and ending with the grotesque pheno­mena at Cambridge, Mass .... " ( 89). The most important feature of his cryptic summation of his readings in the literature of spiritual­ism and of psychic phenomena is the number of instances in which delusion and fraud played a part. The account clearly shows Nabo­kov's familiarity with a variety of texts on the subject, from the mid­Victorian period to the 193o's, including case histories and detailed reports of investigations published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. In fact, even the open phrase of the passage, "The modern era of raps and apparitions," closely echoes similar ones in other reports of the incident.

In March, 1848, in Hydesville, N.Y., two young sisters, Margaret Fox, aged fourteen, and Kate, aged twelve, claimed to hear mysteri­ous raps and knocks at night, caused apparently by no human agen.cy. The Fox family, devout Methodists, were persuaded that some demonic or spirit force was communicating with the girls. After curious crowds overwhelmed the family, Kate was sent to stay with another sister in Rochester, but there the "Rochester knock­ings" attracted even more of an audience. The incident aroused national attention, a wildfire of similar phenomena was reported,

and soon a mass movement of amateur spirit hunters got under way on both sides of the Atlantic, almost immediately to be exploited by tricksters and professional mediums. 8 One account of the episode that is close to the contemporary events is given by Robert Dale Owen in his Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World ( 1860), which the narrator finds tucked under Cynthia's arm as they stand on the library steps. He himself has evidently read the book. Owen, an American diplomat and congressman, was horrified when his own father became involved with spiritualists, but soon after en­countering the famous medium, Daniel Dunglas Home ( the object of Browning's anger in "Mr. Sludge, the Medium"), Owen was converted to the belief that discamate spirits haunt the terrene realm. 9 Footfalls was widely read and very influential - it is plau­sible enought that Cynthia should be interested in Owen's farrago of ghosts, demons, poltergeists, and mysterious knockings.

What Owen leaves out of his description of the Hydesville inci­dent is any hint that the Fox sisters were detected in fraud and that in fact the entire spiritualist movement was to a considerable extent based on their trickery. As early as the 185o's, there were many sceptics who tried to counter the massive acclaim of the sisters by investigating the raps with scientific techniques. This is what N abo­kov's narrator has in mind when he evokes the "ankle-bones and other anatomic castanets of the Fox sisters ( as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo)" ( 89) . In I 8 5 I, three professors of medicine at the University examined the girls and stated in a public report that "the raps were the result of voluntary effort, and con­cluded that they were made by the dislocation of bones at the joints: knees, ankles, toes, or hips." The weight of medical evidence against supernormal manifestations was given little regard, and the Fox sisters continued their highly successful public careers as mediums, though Margaret in particular was an unhappy and guilt-ridden woman who made several confessions. The most spectacular of these occurred in 1888, in New York, when on stage in front of a large audience Margaret wriggled her toes in stockinged feet to produce clearly audible raps and knocks, but despite the admission of fraud ( occasionally retracted), most believers did not allow them­selves to be dissuaded. 10

Thinking of the phenomena produced by the young Fox sisters, the narrator appears to recollect other similar stories, again seem­ingly drawing some of the details from Footfalls on the Boundary of

33

Another World. The noisy raps and knocks, as well as the other phenomena, of poltergeists are almost always associated with young teenagers, described by the narrator as "the mysteriously unifonn type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru" ( 89) . The allusion is to Owen's account of the preternatural door-knockings and other goings-on in the parsonage of Samuel Wesley ( father of John, the founder of Methodism), involving his three young daughters, Molly ( 2 o) , Hetty ( I 7 ) , and Nancy ( 1 5 ) , in I 7 1 6- I 7 I 7. The episode of the sisters in Epworth is linked in Owen's book to a lengthy report of the demonic hauntings described by Joseph Glanvil in his Sad­ducismus Triumphantus ( 1666) as "The Daemon of Tedworth" which appeared in the guise of poltergeist disturbances involving a ten-year-old girl.11 Owen undoubtedly intended to use this material to bolster contemporary evidence of spirits with older memories of witches and demons. Nabokov was probably led to borrow these details from the book by the "link and bobolink" of Epworth and Tedworth, bleak villages where religion and superstition nourished fears of the devil.

The events of 1848 had such an enormous following that within a few years amateur and professional seances were taking place everywhere, many of which the narrator of "The Vane Sisters" accurately characterizes as "solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music." Some mediums, for example, specialized in the "apport" of objects, the seeming penetration of matter by other equally material solids with the help of discamate spirits. Daniel Dunglas Home, among other phenomena, regularly produced roses from thin air, accompanied by music from an accordion that seemed to play by itself or as if touched by a ghostly hand, while he was supposedly under the scientific scrutiny of one of the pioneers of serious psychical research, the distinguished physicist, Sir William Crookes. 12 Even more excit­ing were the dark-room sessions arranged by a Mrs. Guppy, a highly successful medium, "discovered" by Alfred Russell Wallace, whose contributions to the theory of evolution have proved to be of more lasting value. A typical evening with her has been described as follows: "Delicate musical sounds were heard without the presence of instruments. A German lady guest, a perfect stranger, sang several songs and the strains of music, as if coming from a fairy-box, accompanied her throughout." Moreover, Wallace and his circle

34

were delighted when quantities of all sorts of flowers fell on the seance table, with the evening reaching a climax as "A friend of Dr. Alfred Wallace asked for a sun-flower, and one six feet high fell on the table, having a large mass of earth about its roots."13 Even mass delusion or hypnosis would hardly seem to explain such "solemn orgies" but the mediums were often skilled con jurors.

In fact, the next item in the narrator's list illustrates the easy credulity with which scientists and other educated men and women accepted such phenomena. Specifically, he is thinking of Wallace, the famous biologist, in the more ludicrous role of dupe: "old Alfred Russell Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained comer, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings" ( 89-90). The narrator's reference here combines details of two incidents involving Wallace's contacts with Katie Cook, a young medium, sister of the more famous Florence Cook, with whom Sir William Crookes con­ducted his investigations. Both were attractive girls ( Florence almoot certainly was blackmailing Crookes ever since she came to his labora­tory as a nubile teenager) ; both seemed to have specialized in the materialized figure routine. Miss Cook, dressed in black, would retreat into the medium's cabinet or comer ( supposedly designed to prevent the medium from manipulating objects in the seance room), go into a trance, and thereupon a white figure, female, would appear elsewhere in the room. At least one bold guest insisted on grabbing the phantom in the dark and swore that it was a living, breathing girl, wearing nothing but white undergarments.14 In his two-volume autobiography, My Life, Wallace describes at length his experiences with Katie Cook. Just as Nabokov recounts, she would come dressed in black, with laced-up boots and earrings, and enter the cabinet; after the curtains parted, a white figure would emerge, with bare feet, and as Wallace claims, "somewhat taller than Miss Cook." After the apparition vanished, Miss Cook would be found in the cabinet "in a trance, her black dress, laced boots, etc. in the most perfect order as when she arrived, while the full-grown white-robed figure had totally disappeared," and positive proof of their distinct existences was the fact that the white-robed figure's ears were un­pierced: "I could look closely in to her face, examine the features and hair, touch her hands, and might even touch and examine her

35

ears closely, which were not bored for earrings."15 It must be assumed that Wallace had never come across the clip-on type.

The narrator, who has evidently read this chapter in Wallace's book, combines this reminiscence of Miss Cook with the later episode of the Boston sittings. In 1886-87, while Wallace was on a lecture tour of the U.S., he was invited to the home of a Mrs. Ross to attend, along with William James, a series of seances which Nabo­kov's phrase, "a private pandemonium in Boston," describes very accurately. On the first evening, as Wallace recounts it, he, James, and the others were treated to "materializations" of three females dressed in white, a male figure identified by a guest as his son, a woman with a baby ( that Wallace kissed), and then "a tall Indian figure came out in white moccasins, he danced and spoke." On the next night, again in the company of James, he saw another Indian chief in warpaint and feathers, a little girl, and a "beautifully draped female figure," who approached him familiarly "and on my appear­ing doubtful, said in a whisper that she had often met me at M~ Kate Cook's seances in London. She let me feel her ears, as I had done before to prove she was not the medium.m6 The limits of Wallace's credulity were apparently strained by nothing, and he was extremely indignant when others attacked Mrs. Ross's character, accusing her of operating with a team of con£ ederates.

The outrageous tricks practiced by some mediums and the seem­ing inability of even scientists to penetrate obvious instances of fraud are also evident in the next case that the narrator cites. Just as M~ Cook got the better of Wallace, so the narrator notes below how a shrewd medium defeated "two other investigators" despite their efforts to control her movements in the dark seance room: "small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump, elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them" (go) . The reference here is to Eusapia Palladino, an illiterate N eopolitan woman, first intro­duced to the public in 1872 by the same Signor Damiani who arranged for Miss Cook's sittings. Eusapia was quickly acclaimed for her spectacular phenomena, including apports, telekinesis, raps, apparitions, and levitations of the table and of herself. Over a period of years, she was investigated by a number of scientists and other learned men and women, among them Charles Richet, a reputable physiologist at the University of Paris, Cesar Lombroso, and the Curies.17 The narrator's comment suggests that he has seen a photo-

graph of the "small, puny" men who held on to Eusapia, and we know that photographs were attached by Richet to the article he wrote of his investigation with Lombroso of her claims in 1892 in Milan. The picture of the darkened room "shows the table suspended horizontally some inches above the floor, while Eusapia's hands were held, on the surface of the table, by Professors Richet and Lombroso respectively, the former having his other hand pressed on the me­dium's knees, and his left foot in contact with one of her feet." 18

However, since Eusapia was not at that time elderly, the narrator may be thinking of a photograph taken on a later occasion, though the description of this one sounds as though it might have struck Nabokov's fancy.

In 1909, for instance, the Society for Psychical Research decided to undertake yet another examination of her phenomena, though by that time, she had been caught on several occasions in employing such tricks as attaching nearly invisible threads to objects which could thus be manipulated at a distance or in slipping her foot out of the boot pressed by an earnest investigator to move by toes what she couldn't reach with immobilized fingers. Perhaps the most im­portant of these exposures came during a series of seances in Cam­bridge, England, in the presence of Frederick Myers himself, who was left considerably disillusioned. By the 1909 SPR investigation, Eusapia was certainly plump and elderly, at least in the photographs that are available. Podmore's description of the researchers at work may well be echoed in Nabokov's version: "At 11.10 p.m. Mr. B ( aggally) reports: 'I am holding her hand with my left hand, and her right foot is on my left foot, and I am feeling the whole length of her leg' " 19 He and his colleagues were suspicious, but not entirely convinced that their suspicions were justified. Regardless, however, of whether this is the incident that the narrator has in mind, his point is clear enough. Neither probable fraud nor proof of it could deter intelligent men of considerable education from being fooled by an illiterate old woman who wasn't even very good at her tricks.

In fact, not many years after the events of 1848, the public demand for spectacular stunts that could be ascribed to spirits was so great that telepathy, rappings, messages from the medium's con­trol, and other such phenomena could not satisfy it. To account for newer, more astounding, effects the mediums evolved a con­venient new notion - the existence of a psychic substance, neither

37

flesh nor spmt, but something in between, "extruded" by the medium in a trance induced by discarnate spirits. The stuff was variously called "teleplasm" or "ectoplasm" and supposedly resem­bled protoplasm, appearing either as a diaphanous mass of jelly-like consistency or in the more solid form of "rods" by which objects could be moved. Eusapia, for example, explained some of her ap­ports and other telekinetic manifestations as the products of her "psychic rods," strange poker-like implements that seemed to emerge from her in the dark, "phantasmal limbs," that moved when she was apparently held down hand and foot. Again, leading scientists lent their authority to these claims. For instance, it was Richet who endorsed and named ectoplasm. 20 Though ectoplasm and teleplasm supposedly could not be subjected to the light of day for fear of causing harm to the medium, photography in a dark room with red light was permitted. By the end of the century, there were plenty of "spirit photographs" of gelatinous or cloudy substances envelop­ing the medium and sometimes even the sitters.

In fact, the last two cases that Nabokov's narrator cites in his fight to disprove the existence of supernormal phenomena both involve claims for the existence of "teleplasm" and both were exposed as fraudulent. His first reference is somewhat oblique, "pro­fessional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth," but he adds a helpful clue in the next phrase, "Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dig­nified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear" (89). In 1930, a Mrs. Victoria Helen Duncan was the focus of considerable atten­tion when she claimed that through her communcation with spirits she could generate a psychic "teleplasm." There are impressive photographs of Mrs. Duncan, an obese woman of thirty-two in a sort of black jumpsuit, with a large mass of white goo flowing over her face and chest and dangling from her mouth. Harry Price, a shrewd investigator of mediums, invited her and her husband to his laboratory for tests. During several sessions, he gave Mrs. Duncan a thorough going-over, suspecting her from the beginning of swal­lowing cheesecloth that she would then regurgitate as the supposed "teleplasm." The disappearance of the cheesecloth from the seance room was a puzzle - until they asked to inspect her husband's clothes: "Mr. Duncan refused to be searched, murmuring some­thing about his underclothing." 21 No doubt the ludicrous details of

this case appealed to Nabokov's sense of irony and led him to include it in the narrator's history of frauds and delusions.

The second case of "teleplasm," and the final item on the narra­tor's list, is that of the famous medium, Margery, the attractive young wife of Dr. Crandon, a surgeon on the staff of the Harvard School of Medicine. In 1923, while attending some seances, Margery discovered that discarnate spirits were communicating with her through a "control," her dead brother Walter. She rapidly developed a repertoire of physical manifestations in her trance sessions, and after a trip abroad, where she considerably impressed Richet and even Price, she began to generate "teleplasm" from various parts of her body. 22 This explains the narrator's allusion to "the sceptical and embarrassed magician" who was "instructed by charming young Margery's 'control' not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh- upon the warm skin of which he felt a 'teleplastic' mass that appeared to the touch uncommonly like cold, uncooked liver" (go). In less reveal­ing photographs, Margery is shown seated in a chair with a fleshy sort of mass oozing out of one ear and nostril, supposedly to form a "voicebox" for Walter's messages, delivered in a voice quite unlike hers and remarkable for their sarcasm and foul language. 23 The most obvious candidate for the role of magician here might seem to be Harry Houdini, who was one of the team of investigators invited by The Scientific American in 1924 to determine the validity of her claims. Houdini had long made it a point to attack mediums by using his expert knowledge of sleight of hand to uncover their tricks, and in this case too he saw evidence of fraud. Although others sup­ported her, The Scientific American did not award its prize for authentic psychic phenomena to her, and Dr. Crandon engaged in a virulent war of pamphlets with Houdini. Unfortunately, there is nothing in Houdini's records of the case to indicate that Margery gave him an opportunity for such intimate inspection as Nabokov's phrase implies. 24

The narrator may, however, be thinking of another magician who investigated her, along with a team from Harvard. A lengthy account of this series of sittings was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1925, describing how the suspicious participants tried to keep her immobilized by tying her ankles with luminous tape, from which she managed to escape in the course of the evening. William Code, the skilled con juror ref erred to above, showed that

39

he could duplicate her phenomena with a few simple tricks after he had watched her at work in the dark. But Code also makes no remark about being permitted to search her bodily, though he states that she was wearing only a bathrobe in order to guarantee that she had a minimum of places for concealment of props. 25 The man that Nabokov probably has in mind is Eric Dingwall of the SPR, who as their chief researcher was asked to give his expert opinion of her manifestations. Dingwall is not described as a magician, but there are facts and phrases in his report in the Proceedings of the SPR that clearly parallel the narrator's words in "The Vane Sisters." During the sittings, Margery wore only a bathrobe and stockings, and while in a trance state had to be addressed as Psyche. The "great feature" of the occasion was the production of two sorts of teleplasm, a "blanc-mange-like" lump on the table in front of the medium and a mass of tissue on some part of her body. One member of Ding­wall's group, a Mrs. Richardson, states that at one point "My wrist was held by Mr. D. I put my fingers on the table near Psyche. Mass rested on back of my four fingers. It felt like ice-cold, uncooked liver."26 This is obviously echoed in the narrator's description of Margery's teleplasm, which felt to the sceptical magician "uncom­monly like cold, uncooked liver."

The details of the next evening's sitting establish quite certainly that this issue of the Proceedings is Nabokov's source. Again, Mar­gery was naked except for the stockings and bathrobe. The passage in the Proceedings reads as follows:

A rustling sound was heard almost at once in Psyche's lap, and at about that time she passed into trance. Walter instructed Dingwall to fallow up left stocking until he reached the thigh. D. then reports on top of the warm skin of the left thigh a mass like a pan-cake, ice-coldJ similar to that which was described yesterday .... D. was slow in orienting himself where-upon Walter said, 'Your hand is caught in the lining of the bathrobe, follow the stocking.' D. said this was true. Just after the rustling in the lap, a mass was apparently laid on the table ... Under instructions of Walter, D.W., and M., were allowed to feel down along the cord leading from the table mass toward Psyche's abdomen. 27

(italics added)

But Margery's seductive tactics weren't entirely successful with Ding­wall, who suspected that she concealed a bulb between her thighs to which the cord was attached, permitting her to move it about the table. The mass itself, he thought, was probably brain tissue or lung

tissue, but not "teleplasm." In all likelihood, it is Margery and her uncooked liver that Nabokov's narrator has in mind when he des­cribes the spiritualist movement that began in H ydesville in 1848 as ending with "grostesque phenomena in Cambridge, Mass." ( 89), home of Dr. and Mrs. Crandon.

Nabokov's remarkable familiarity with such details can only have been acquired through extensive reading in these volumes of reports and investigations, however unlikely it might be that even mentally he would be willing to endure their "degrading company." For it is evident that his own attitude to such phenomena is not as unam­biguously ironical as the narrator's scepticism might suggest. In fact, the question is whether Nabokov may be hinting that despite the examples of fraud, he accepts at least to some degree the possi­bility that occult and psychic phenomena may be "veridical." Even the narrator acknowledges that his attempt to keep Cynthia's ghost at bay by evoking these examples of fraudulent phenomena has been a failure: "I was appealing to flesh, and the corruption of flesh, to refute and def eat the possible persistence of discarnate life" (go) , for the existence of fraud does not, of course, disprove the possibility of life after death. It is as if to confirm this that Nabokov permits Cynthia and Sybil to triumph over the narrator by inserting their message, "Icicles by Cynthia meter from me Sybil," into the concluding paragraph of his account. Apparently the Vane sisters, unlike the Fox sisters, offer genuine phenomena. Moreover, begin­ning with the opening sentence of the story, Nabokov weaves into the narrative the kind of pattern of events that seems to justify Cynthia's belief in occult coincidence: "I might never have heard of Cynthia's death, had I not run, that night, into D., whom I had also lost track of for the last four years or so; and I might never have run into D., had I not got involved in a series of trivial investi­gations" ( 7 5) . Thus it should not surprise us that these investiga­tions are far from trivial, but instead offer proof that the narrator, unknown to himself, is caught up in the "mixed auras" of Cynthia and Sybil, confirming her "theory of intervenient auras," and pro­viding him with the clues, had he the perception to recognize them, that would permit him to decode the acrostic message to which he remains blind.

What attracts the narrator from the usual course of his walk that day is "a family of brilliant icicles drip-dripping from the eaves of a frame house." That the icicles might be the contribution of

Cynthia, the "painter of glass-bright minutiae," he does not guess, anymore than he will perceive later that the "drip-dripping" is the meter Sybil refers to in her part of the message. That afternoon, looking at the shadows cast by icicles on the wall of the house, he supposes that "the shadows of the falling drops should be visible too," but he can't see them, perhaps because he doesn't "chance to be watching the right icicle when the right drop fell." Mystified, he pursues the investigation, "There was a rhythm, an alternation in the dropping that I found as teasing as a coin trick," until he is led by coincidence, no doubt by the sisters' intervention, "right to the house where D. used to live," and where the magic feat is per­formed: "I was rewarded at last, upon choosing one, by the sight of what might be described as the dot of an exclamation mark leaving its ordinary position to glide down very fast - a jot faster than the thaw-drop it raced." Not fully satisfied, but aware that he has seen something out of the ordinary, he walks on "in a state of raw awareness that seemed to transform the whole of my being into one big eyeball rolling in the world's socket." In that state, he wanders far from his usual path and by chance meets D., and thus happens to learn of Cynthia's death.

His interest in the "twinned twinkle" of the thaw-drop and its shadow has two parallels in Speak, Memory. In Chapter I 3, first pub­lished in 1949, Nabokov tells how at Cambridge he watched from a punt on the river a petal from a blossoming tree fall toward the water: "with the odd feeling of seeing something neither worshipper nor casual spectator ought to see, one would manage to glimpse its reflection which swiftly - more swiftly than the petal fell - rose to meet it; and, for the fraction of a second, one feared that the trick would not work, that the blessed oil would not catch fire, that the reflection might miss and the petal float off alone, but every time the delicate union did take place .... " 28 The phenomenon of the shadow that moves faster than the thaw-drop itself is obviously related to that of the reflection which is swifter than the petal -Nabokov characterizes both as a "trick," both are somehow eerie, perhaps because as legend and superstition claim, shadow and sub­stance can only be separated in cases of the demonic or the super­natural, thus being "something neither worshipper nor casual spec­tator ought to see." The implications of such a phenomenon are made even more significant in a passage in Chapter I I of Speak, Memory, written in the same year as "The Vane Sisters." Describ-

ing how he wrote his first poem, Nabokov asks, "What set it off?" As he watched, a drop of rain-water on a leaf, "caused its tip to dip," the drop "performed a sudden glissando down the center vein," and as it fell, "the relieved leaf unbent." This seemingly tri­vial sequence leads him to the apprehension of a moment outside the tyrannous bounds of time: "Tip, leaf, dip, relief - the instant it all took to happen seemed to me not so much a fraction of time as a fissure in it, a missed heartbeat, which was refunded at once by a patter of rhymes ... " 29 The "shock of wonder" produced thus is clearly analogous to the feeling of "raw awareness" of the universe that the narrator of "The Vane Sisters" experiences when the "rhythm, an alternation in the dropping" of the icicles is resolved as he glimpses at last the drop and its shadow, falling simultaneously, yet discontinuously.

The narrator, however, doesn't fully share Nabokov's awe at being permitted to escape for a moment from the limits of time, complaining that the glimpse, though "delightful," was "not com­pletely satisfying," as if he were capable of perceiving just so much, but no more. We have already seen how on the night that he learns of Cynthia's death, he examines the pattern formed by the intial letters of Shakespeare's sonnets in memory of her acrostic searches, while failing to recollect the far more important key she gave him four years before when she told him about a "novel or short story (by some contemporary writer, I believe) in which, unknown to its author, the first letters of the words in its last paragraph formed, as deciphered by Cynthia, a message from his dead mother" ( 84-85). Thus at the conclusion of the story, at the very moment he dismisses Cynthia's "inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies," she slips in her message. These failures of perception were evident even before her death. At Cynthia's seance table, the spirit voice of Leo Tolstoy is asked to identify himself "by specific traits of terrene habitation" and offers in reply an enigmatic phrase, "figures on boards- man, cock, horse, man, horse, cock," which despite look­ing like gibberish proves to make sense. On a visit to northern Russia, Tolstoy admired some carved wooden ornamentation on peasant houses and had similar ones cut for the verandah at Y asnaya Polyana. A photograph records just such a series of figures cut into wooden planks - man, rooster, horse. 30 Yet the narrator, who shrewdly guesses that Tolstoy is describing what "seemed to be some Russian type of architectural woodwork," rejects his own insight as

43

"impossible to verify," in the same way in which he doubts the significance of all the "psychic" phenomena he encounters.

In fact, from the beginning of the story, Nabokov treats his nar­rator with considerable ambivalence. The professor is witty, he is ironic, amusingly so at the expense of Cynthia's sillier superstitions and habits, but correcting the grammatical errors in Sybil's suicide note, criticizing Cynthia's make-up and her guests, he is also what she accuses him of being, "a prig and a snob." Cautious and literal­minded, he prides himself on his "French" rationality. At least in part afraid of the overwhelming implications of finding evidence that life persists beyond death, he takes refuge in scepticism and eagerly collects reassuring instances of fraudulent "psychic" pheno­mena. When Cynthia helps eccentric Mr. Porlock to hunt for miraculous misprints, "the chance that mimics choice," the narrator sees only "a quest that in the light of the examples she cited struck me as statistically insane." Perhaps it is, but perhaps Cynthia, the artist of subtle minutiae, has perceived a more profound truth -that evidence of survival of mortal life will never be susceptible to logical "proof," that there will never be a message "in the clear," but at best we may be given some indirect clue to decode if we can.

In this context, the communication from Frederick Myers at Cynthia's seance acquires a significance that the narrator overlooked. The poem may resemble her own "fugitive verse," but it states in essence the problem that Nabokov has explored throughout the story:

What is this - a con juror's rabbit, Or a flawy but genuine gleam -Which can check the perilous habit And dispel the dolorous dream? ( 85)

The perilous habit and the dolorous dream ref er no doubt to the casual belief that life survives and that somewhere we can meet again those we love, common-place mournful fantasies that could be restrained only by some genuine affirmation or genuine negation. Myers, "an old hand at the game," describes the two major possi­bilities: does the evidence of the mind's survival of death consist merely of the conjuring tricks of a paid medium out to fool the credulous and the grieving, as in the cases of fraudulent phenomena collected by the narrator, or is there, as Cynthia suspects, some other kind of hint or clue, however flawed, which offers a "genuine gleam"? The fact that Nabokov chooses to illustrate in the next of

44

the story Cynthia's theory of auras and her belief in the occult significance of coincidence suggests that he gives stronger weight to the latter possibility. This is not to assume that the message from the Vane sisters at the end of the story is to be taken as Nabokov's personal statement of faith in discarnate communications from the other world, nor is it credible that despite the extensive record of fraud and delusion that the narrator shows has been part of the literature of spiritualists and psychic researchers. Nabokov is off er­ing his endorsement on their behalf. Yet neither is the sisters' acrostic merely a clever trick on his part - the presence of the message is intended as a paradigm, an illustration of the kind of "gleam" that is possible, even if "flawy" and imperfect. The narrator who wants more definite proof, something logical and verifiable, may not be able to see the code woven into his own words, but for what it's worth, we know that it is there.

There are many parallels between "The Vane Sisters" and Pale Fire in both themes and narrative method. Like "The Vane Sisters," Pale Fire deals with occult coincidence, poltergeist phenomena, seances, and a message from a ghost which cannot be decided. John Shade grieves over his adored daughter's suicide, just as Cynthia mourns over Sybil's. Shade's crystalline art is reminiscent of Cyn­thia's paintings, such as the one the narrator particularly admires, Seen Through a Windshield. But while Cynthia, superstitious and guilty, hopes for a message from Sybil, Shade doesn't expect Hazel to communicate, having given up the attempt to discover literal evidence of life after death, though he had dedicated his life "to explore and fight/The foul, the inadmissible abyss" of death.31 This quest has included lecturing at the Institute for Preparation for the Heareafter ( IPH), where at least as he says he learned what to avoid when in their period of decline "A medium smuggled in/ Pale jellies and a floating mandolin" ( 1 I. 639-640), and other such debris of spiritualism. On Hazel's death he knows that "there would be nothing: no self-styled/Sprit would touch a keyboard of dry wood/To rap out her pet name .... " ( 11. 648-650), and for a while there is a pause in his "survey of death's abyss."

Then, one night years after her suicide, Shade has what he believes is a heart seizure, and for a moment at least, he thinks he has seen beyond mortal bounds, a vision crowned by the image of a tall white fountain against the blackness of his unconscious state. Though convinced that his "vision reeked of truth," he seeks confirming

45

evidence. This appears unexpectedly in a magazine article, "The Land Beyond the Veil," by a Mrs. Z. who claims that in the interval between her heart stoppage and rescue by a doctor, she also had a vision of the other world, including among other details the image of a tall white fountain. Driving three hundred miles to interview her, Shade is disappointed to find an incoherent woman with noth­ing to say, and even worse, in talking with her editor is told that the key word in her account should have been mountain, not fountain. Yet precisely at the moment of what might be profound discourage­ment, Shade experiences a new and final insight:

But all at once it dawned on me that this Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme: Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream But topsy-turvical coincidence, Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense. Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind Of correlated pattern in the game .... ( 11. 806-13)

Returning home, Shade has groped his way at last to some "Faint hope." This is evidently analogous to Cynthia's belief in the occult significance of coincidence, which leads her to sympathize with Mr. Porlock's searches for similarly significant misprints. Seemingly, an intelligent ordering principle operates in some fashion in the uni­verse, "proving" that consciousness is not limited to the term of bodily life. And if Cynthia's metaphysics are made suspect by her sentimentality and often ridiculous behavior, and if the narrator's scepticism is too rigidly literal-minded, in Shade their approaches are combined in a reasoned vision.

But what Nabokov gives, he also takes way. Shade completes his poem, confident of "fantastically planned/Richly rhymed life" in a universe of galaxies moving in iambic rhythms, "reasonably sure" that "we survive" and that his daughter "somewhere is alive," just as certainly as he's "reasonably sure that I/Shall wake at six tomor­row, on July /The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine" ( I 1.g77-81 ) . But of course, we know that he will not wake the next morning -in a few minutes Jack Gray will shoot him, mistaking him for Judge Goldsworth - and if that reasonable certainty proves to be so wrong, what are we to think of the rest? Is Shade's "faint hope" a delusion? Perhaps, but in the text of Pde Fire, Nabokov includes repeated instances of occult coincidence, paradigms of the kind of pattern that

Shade has discovered. One of the most significant of these appears in fact in the last lines of Shade's poem, as he refers to a man, "Some neighbor's gardener, I guess," who goes by, "Trundling an empty barrow up the lane" ( I .999). He is Kinbote's young Black gardener, who very shortly will disarm the killer. Much earlier in the novel, Shade describes his first intimations of immortality, when at the age of eleven he fell into a terrifying and fascinating trance in which his mind expanded beyond the bounds of space and time ( I I. I 40- I 66) . It was these "strange nacreous gleams" from his childhood on which Shade lectured at IPH. The trances were set off one afternoon as he played on the floor with a mechanical toy, a clockwork figure of a boy with a wheelbarrow. The boy is Black. And now by mysterious coincidence, the memento mori of his childhood vision becomes the sign of his own impending death, as past and present are compressed into one instant. In the "plexed artistry" of Nabokov's fiction, theme and narrative method again comment on each other, just as they do in "The Vane Sisters," written almost ten years before. The story gives a remarkable insight into Nabokov's interest in the writ­ings of psychic researchers and spiritualists, revealing his paradoxi­cal attempt both to expose this material in all its ludicrous details and then by a tum of the screw to make his own improbable ghost story into a serious statement about the possible persistence of intelli­gent consciousness outside the limits of time. Text and texture echo each other, the magician's hand is quick, but perhaps his "trick" is not entirely brought off until Pale Fire.

NOTES 1 "The Vane Sisters," in Nabokov's Quartet (New York: Phaedra Publishers,

1966), pp. 7 5-90. All subsequent references to the story and to the Foreword will be to this edition.

2 Speak, Memory, Revised ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1966), p. 20. All quotations have been verified as identical in text with the 1951 edition of Speak, Memory.

3 Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 55. 4 The Steinerbooks Dictionary of the Psychic, Mystic, Occult (New York:

Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1 973), p. 2 1 1. 5 See Frank Podmore, The Newer Spiritualism (London: T. F. Unwin, 1910),

p. 1 64, for a description of a seance attended by William James at which the ghostly visitors included "an Indian girl named Chlorine, Mrs. Siddons, Bach, Longfellow, Commodore Vanderbilt, Loretta Ponchini," and others.

6 Nandor Fodor, Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1966), pp. 260-261, offers a good summary of Myers' career.

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1 Leonard R. N. Ashley, "Introduction" to Phantasms of the Living by Edmund Gurney, Frederick W. H. Myers, and Frank Podmore (Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970), I, p. vii. A reprint of the 1886 edition. Ashley gives an excellent account in brief of Myers' work and of the modern spiritualist movement.

8 John E. Coover, "Metaphysics and the Incredulity of Psychologists," in The Case for and against Psychical Belief, ed. Carl Murchison ( Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1927), p. 235; Earl Wesley Fornell, The Unhappy Medium (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1964), pp. 20-21. Both off er a concise, but detailed, description of the 1848 incident.

9 Fodor, p. 270; Robert Dale Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1860).

10 Coover, pp. 236-239; Fornell, pp. 22-23; 178-180. 11 Owen, pp. 210-214; 224; 284. 12 William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (Manchester:

The Two Worlds' Publishing Co., 1926), p. 20 et passim. 13 Fodor, p. 403. 14 Fodor, pp. 61-63; 403. 15 My Life (London: Chapman & Hall, 1905), II, 344-345. 16 Wallace, pp. 354-356. 17 Fodor, pp. 271-273. 1 8 Podmore, Newer Spiritualism, p. go. For complete reference, see note # 5.

19 Podmore, pp. 121-122; Fodor, pp. 272-274. 2° Fodor, pp. 329-330; Joseph Jastrow, Wish and Wisdom (New York: Apple­

ton Century, 1935), pp. 367-3 7 4· 21 Harry Price, Regurgitation and the Duncan Mediumship (London: National

Laboratory for Psychical Research, 1931), pp. 62, 1 oo, et passim. 2 2 Fodor, p. 67; Fodor's account is usually sympathetic to the claims of mediums. 23 L. R. G. Crandon, "The Margery Mediumship" in Murchison, The Case for

and Against Psychical Belief, pp. 84-85, includes photographs on figures # 4-5. For comments on Walter's vocabulary, see Hudson Hoagland, "Science and the Medium," Atlantic Monthly, November 1925, p. 678; Harry Houdini, Houdini Exposes the Tricks Used by the Boston Medium "Margery" to win the $2500 Prize Offered by the Scientific American (New York: Adams Press, 1924).

24 Houdini, passim. For an excellent account of the case and the various investi­gations, see Walter Franklin Prince, "A Review of the Margery Case," in Murchison, pp. 200-201, et passim.

2s Prince, p. 207; Hoagland, p. 679. 26 Prince, pp. 205, 207; Eric J. Dingwall and others, "Report on a Series of

Sittings with the Medium Margery," Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (Glasgow: University Press, 1928), 36, pp. 94, I08.

21 Dingwall,Proceedings,pp. 112; 114-115.

28 Speak, Memory, pp. 270-271. 2'9 Speak, Memory, pp. 216-217. 30 Michel-R. Hofmann, ed. Leo Tolstoy (Geneva: Editions Minerva, 1969),

p. 64. 31 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1962), p. 39. All other references to the

text of the novel will be to this edition.

At the mercy of winds and waves? -Over Prairie Trails by F. P. Grove

OFELIA COHN-SFETCU

READERS AND CRITICS have been unanimous in recognizing that the sketches of which F. P. Grove's Over Prairie Trails is composed are not only factual reports, but also testimonies to his profound love for the Canadian northern landscape and his consummate poetic craft in communicating a wide range of experience.1 A more detailed examination, however, will reveal that the scope of the book is expanded by one more mature dimension; perhaps less easily ap­parent, yet no less significant. The seven rides from and to Glad­stone, Manitoba give him the opportunity to make a general com­ment on the human condition predicated on space and time.

From the recognition of man's exact position within the general pattern of existence, springs the idea of "constant battle," the arti­culate premise of Grove's discussion of the life of man. The Cana­dian author considers that the individual has to reach that state of acquiescence in which he is able to accept himself as a finite creature surrounded by a hostile universe, but capable of scoring victories and making contributions in spite of his frailty. With a view to proving his point in an epoch predominantly convinced that the experiential properties of time are more important for human lives than the scientific concepts involved in the same dimension, he constructs a theory of time which satisfies objective conditions, even if by so doing he partially discourages the practice of certain suh­jective qualities of time which are charged with great significance in human experience. Yet, while advocating rigorous synchroniza­tion with the objective reality, he is not rejecting temporal perspec­tive, but expressing concern over the harmful effect which an ima­ginative approach to life may have under conditions of extreme environmental pressure. Grove himself considered his brief com­ment "not too trivial to detain for an hour or so a patient reader's

49

attention." 2 Indeed, a few pages only, and the reader feels in the presence of a work of rare humanistic profundity.

The framework of the book is deceptively simple: an almost bare stage and three performers in dramatic confrontation: Man, Space and Time. The man is alone and stands against space in its most brutal form: hostile nature; 68 miles of cross-country driving over the prairie as long as the season is clement enough to threaten him only with impenetrable marsh fog, but go miles beginning with the second week of January when the roads become impassable through snow, and the blizzard reigns supreme. The temporal index attached to the story is autumn and winter, Fridays, from four in the after­noon when school is over till the fall of darkness which once set in turns driving over unmarked rut-trails into a perilous enterprise. The stage properties are distilled to essentials: the prairie, the forest, the marsh, a creek, and a few scattered signs of human habitation. Yet, this very poverty of setting is instrumental in conveying a mes­sage founded in "the simpler, the more elemental things" constitut­ing human life, "things cosmic in their associations, nearer the beginning and the end of creation." ( 5 1 )

Under the immensity of the Manitoba sky, the man is seized with the overwhelming sense of his insignificance within the universal totality. Watching "that insensible, silent and yet swift shifting of the things in the heavens that seemed so orderly, pre-ordained, and as if regulated by silent signals," the individual realizes that space, in spite of its beauty, threatens his physical existence, that time, in spite of its endlessness, allows him only a few hours to wrest distance and light. ( 1 34) But he also knows that success under the concrete data of his battle can be scored only on condition that he is able to use to his advantage harnessed space and present time - the two arms paradoxically supplied to him by the very dimensions against which his life is pitted. The literary notation for this newly emerg­ing sense of time and space are the watch and the horses. Without their concourse all his endeavour would be abortive, and, with the recognition of this painful truth, the idea of anticipating danger and of preparing for it is introduced in Grove's argumentation. "I believe in getting ready before I start," he openly admits, and, indeed, throughout the book he tries to tum theory into practice. (31)

The common goal of six of his journeys is "home," and fully aware that in order to reach it he "had to have a horse that could

50

stand the trip," Grove's criteria for buying his horses are utilitarian rather than aesthetic. ( I ) To this, one may add other preparatory measures such as the selection of a light buggy in autumn and of a heavy cutter in winter. Essential, however, are the horses, and indeed, during the whole season, there were numerous occasions when only their sense of the road and muscle power prevented fatal accidents. Of the three major concepts involved in the system of time, i.e., metric, duration and order, it is through metric that the driver fights darkness. Each moment constituting the trip is there­fore at once central and determinant. Grove's constant preoccupa­tion with the importance of the present is obvious in all his works, but in Over Prairie Trails it is articulated with particular poignancy. Here, the challenge issued to him by sidereal time as measured by clocks and calendars is at its utmost, and his response is propor­tionate to the degree to which he realizes this datum of his environ­ment. Not surprisingly therefore, the first chapter of the book begins with the phrase: "At ten minutes past four, of an evening late in September ... " ( 1 ) The point defining physical time is fixed both in terms of season and hour, and to the reader who could not infer the real significance of the reference, he later explains: "At this time of the year I had at best only a little over an hour's start in my race against darkness." ( 21) Under the double pressure of darkness and distance, upon which bad weather superimposes, Grove has a keen consciousness of every second ticking off, and once on the road, his watch becomes his best ally; the whole development of the story being in effect function of correct timing. "I looked at my watch," and "I looked at my watch again" are phrases which punctuate the narration, for Grove plays upon this theme abundantly and repeatedly.

Within the general framework of the journey, the first drive is of particular importance, since it is now that the space between Glad­stone and Falmouth is mapped out. A fence, a gate, or the wire con­necting certain cedar poles becomes important landmarks for Grove on future drives. He is fully aware, however, that snow, thick marsh fog or darkness could envelop him, thus rendering all these objects invisible. Therefore, as a measure of additional but vital precaution, he times his horse and translates the distances between spatial ele­ments into units of time. Knowing the speed of his horse and the precise time, he can always approximate when he should reach the most important points of his itinerary. But not only is space con-

51

verted into temporal units; time too is translated into space, and the interplay between the temporal and the spatial is consummate when Grove looks at the height of the sun in the sky and concludes: "a ball of molten gold - two hours from 'town' as I called it." ( 1 o) A particular position, therefore, can simultaneously be ex­pressed, and hence determined, in two different codes, providing thus the driver with a double control system.

In a tight situation, of which Grove's seven rides are an example, the present is man's ally yet in another way: it is the sole dimension within which action is possible. The author fully recognizes that the human condition is not one of absolute freedom: winter cannot be turned into summer, nor darkness into light, for instance. Never­theless, man has the power to transform each instant from a situa­tion of being acted upon into an opportunity to act, thus making it possible for himself to reach his destination rather than get lost in the marsh, or freeze to death in the blizzard. Consider the moment when the driver finds himself and his team under a layer of snow which reached the top of the surrounding trees, facing the danger of being buried alive if the horses do not rear and plunge rhyth­mically together. He has a fraction of a minute to take in the situa­tion and make a decision. Coordination of movements and imme­diacy of action are at once necessary, and understanding this he summons up all his will power to control his fear, and calls to his horses: "Peter-Dan-now!" (86) With this "now," the force of the instant is asserted. At war with hostile forces, man is given no time to pause and weigh his difficulties; the promptness of his response is of utmost importance. To defer committing oneself to action means danger ultimately. In the particular instance men­tioned above, a victory was won, but the next moment was ready to Undo what the previous one had created. When the team emerged on top of the drift, the driver realized with astonishment that they were above tree-top level, and "the problem of how to get down loomed larger than that of getting up," for the horses "were fast sinking away." ( 87) Again, he had to act in a flash, thus once more revealing that to catch in flight what each instant offers is essential.

At this point, it is interesting to note that for Grove action is not a mechanical performance, but a voluntary process by which the mind is fertilized and made to bear fruit. The child thus born is the right thing, the thing to do at the right time. The sixth drive, for example, takes place under the evil omen of his daughter's illness,

52

and the desire to join her continuously prompts him to send his horses into a gallop. Yet, with an effort, he checks himself, since he can fully appreciate the consequences of surrendering to this "call for speed."

Not yet, I thought . . . I was unstrung, I told myself; this was mere sentimentalism; no emotional impulses were of any value; careful planning only counted. So I even pulled the horses back to a walk. ( 122)

Control over one's actions is sometimes taken to the point of syn­chronization with sidereal movements. A graphic example in this respect can be found in the seventh trip. The moon was high in the sky, but whenever a cloud floated in front of the crescent, Grove "drove more slowly and more carefully." ( 139)

Perfect timing and control, however, cannot be achieved if man is not attuned to the present. Only the present instant is at once objective and subjective, only within its span thinking identifies itself with the external object. This vital identification Grove sees realized in two ways. Firstly, by permanently taking inventory of external reality through the senses. Sight is the most solicited in the particular situations in the book, but, when sight fails, the driver relies on his hearing, so that certain landmarks come "through the ear, not the eye." ( 34) Affixed to the present through his senses, the moment they are numbed by cold or fatigue the driver faces the danger of losing his sense of reality. But, when this happens, it is to his watch that he resorts in order to re-establish contact with his environment, and direct his next movement. His second drive on the dam over the marsh is illustrative in this respect. Blinded completely by fog and unable to walk beside his horses on the very narrow dam, Grove decided to go on riding for another five minutes. He timed himself, and when "the time was up," he "pulled in and got out" with precision. ( 42 )

But why this insistence on the significance of the present? Why this detailed presentation of the many ways in which the instant is man's ally, though time as a whole is his fiercest enemy? Because, Grove seems to say, man has a special propensity for abusing this unique point of authentic and vital contact with reality. And the fifth drive comes to prove his contention. In truth, this particular trip started under doubtful auspices: horses extremely tired and a snowstorm ready to break. But the trail was relatively good, and the driver, convinced that "so long as you have such a trail and

53

horses with road sense, you do not need to worry about directions," released his attention for other things. ( 96) Then the drama started. The horses missed the right trail, and, since everything was covered with thick snow, there was no possibility of telling the direction in which they were going. That he eventually found his way is less important for our argument. What is of significance is the fact that the almost fatal accident happened in a moment when the driver's interest was shifted from a life in reality to a life in the mind. Was there any explanation for Grove's special frame of mind on this particular trip? Yes, there was. During all other drives, he was "on the go" from his solitude in Gladstone to his family in Falmouth; during the fifth one he was "on the coming back" from the warmth of his family to the desolation of his town apartment.

I am afraid that the prospect of going back to rather uncongenial work must have dulled my senses ... (Grove himself comments in his preface to the book.) Or, again, since I was coming from "home," from the company of those for whom I lived and breathed, it might just be that all my thoughts flew back with such an intensity that there was no vitality left for the perception of the things immediately around me. (xiv)

Lifting one above the immediate surroundings, thoughts, it is true, create a world immune to the ravages of the present; cold and wind are more easily bearable when one thinks of family and home. But, on the other hand, the lack of coincidence between objective and subjective time exposes man more to the hostility of space, and implicitly makes him more vulnerable.

This is not to say that Grove advocates the restriction of an adult's temporal perspective to one single element. On the contrary, numer­ous pages in his book are written precisely with a view to encourag­ing the expansion of man's intellectual and imaginative grasp of objective reality. The way in which he endows with physionomy the houses he sees by the road, or the attention with which he pauses over moments when the spirit transcends objectivity testify to his interest in modes of perception which do not suffer from shallowness and unilaterality. Lifted on top of a drift which hurried the trees around, he feels seized with a

feeling of estrangement, as it were - as if I were not myself, but look­ing on from the outside at the adventure of somebody who yet was I ... a feeling of having been carried beyond my depth where I could not swim ... (86)

54

Such moments do exist and are immensely precious. Enriching man's life with new dimensions, they become the basis for an experiential depth denied to merely sensory perception. However, Grove was too astute an observer of the human condition not to point out that the intense instant at the top of the drift was flanked on both sides by moments of cruel factuality: one of urgent necessity to ascend, and one of equally imperative need to descend. A peak squeezed between two points of low altitude, a situation whose symbolic value is obvious: private time cannot and should not be annihilated, for this would mean a contraction of human experience, but man must also stay keyed up to objective reality. The cheerless night when he nearly lost his life taught Grove a painful lesson: if Peter stumbled, it was not the horses's fault but his own, for he "should have watched the road more carefully instead of giving in to the trend of his thoughts." ( I I g )

The writer is perfectly conscious that the adult mind has a ten­dency to detach and ultimately free itself from a serious immersion in the affairs of a dissatisfying present, that only with an effort can he himself force his own attention to apply itself to immediate events.

We have lost the childlike power of living without conscious aims ... , the author comments. If no such awakening supervenes, since we never live in the present, we are always looking forward to what never comes; and so life slips by, unlived. ( 1 18)

Yet, for the adult individual, even when living in the present, not a child's view and behaviour is recommendable, but responsible action springing from a mature estimation of all the elements involved in this short drive which is human life. For the man of age, acting is crucial. Emerging from the brief alignment into which time, space and man himself have clicked, the act is the embodiment of the individual's capacity to avoid being driven aimlessly by correctly assessing his situation, and by deciding upon a course.

Significantly enough, when in A Search for America Phil Bran­don falls victim simultaneously to a hostile environment and to his own incapability to oppose it through his own volition, he admits: "I was at the mercy of winds and waves." 3 The last three words of this sentence, serve as a title to chapter five of Over Prairie Trails, 4

where the nearly fatal accident caused by the driver's lack of involve­ment in the present is described. This can hardly be a linguistic coin-

55

cidence for an author who re-wrote his books so many times. On the contrary, the repetition of the three words seems to be an indica­tion of a unifying intellectual concept in terms of which waves and winds, fluctuation and drifting are irremediably part of human life, but man has enough creativity to enable him to resist them rather than be at their mercy. Grove's message becomes thus transparent: a significant human life is an act not a state of being, for of ulti­mate importance is the spirit in which the individual responds to the sum total of factors which constitute his environment.

NOTES

1 See for instance Desmond Pacey, Frederic Philip Grove (Toronto, 1970), or F. P. Grove, Over Prairie Trails (Toronto, 1970), Introduction by Mal­colm Ross.

2 F. P. Grove, Over Prairie Trails (Toronto, 1970), xiv. After this footnote reference, all references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text.

3 F. P. Grove, A Search for America (Toronto, 1971), p. 104. 4 See also W. J. Keith, "Grove's Over Prairie Trails", Literary Half Yearly

vol. xiii no. 2 (July 1972), pp. 76-85, where, regarded from a different point of perspective, the interplay between the objective and the subjective is used to demonstrate that an artistic patterning is present in this supposedly non-fiction work.

>

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I

;

Special Poetry Section

MIRIAM WADDINGTON

DAVE SMITH

TOM WAYMAN

JOYCE CAROL OATES

LARRY RUBIN

W. D. SNODGRASS

AND MANY OTHERS

W. D. SNODGRASS

Setting Out

Staying here, we tum inflexible, Stiffening under laws that drive Sap through the tight stems, Roots to break down rock; Relentless as the fall Of rhymes in a folk ballad. You are called toward someone free To come or go as the wind's whim, Casual as the air whistles, Trembling all that stands with Mortal touch, while your hand Slips through every which way.

Here, we find ourselves unstable As our fields: crops, cloud-shadows wash across us; The various weed-flowers fade To flat snow; dogs tear Our deer; streams flow again ... You are drawn to someone constant As a room where the costly wallpaper Blooms in half-light, Where at last somebody dearly Loved is always almost Ready to appear.

I

We know we tum exactmg, Monotonous as the hours Wheel, as the seasons Wheel, as the arrogant Stars tum wheeling on their Cold, determined track. Go, then, find someone tender As a child's eyelid closing In his first sleep, sky As the warm scent we all seek, That mild and absent voice Numbing the sense away.

Perhaps, who knows, in so much Searching you may not be lost; Paths you take may take you Into comforts past our thought; It may be that the finding Won't enervate your grasp. You can find us here, still Going about our rounds, Fingering out the beat Of old songs, fixed on ways Worn out as a star chart, Unimaginably far.

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TWO POEMS BY RICHARD HORNSEY

Shrine Hill

Wind forever surrounds the houses pitched like tents upon the hill A small buffeted encampment still though people would forget the ancestry living on in their names and accents and the rockbound fields they fill with onions and potatoes

The tight perfection of that first fist of settlers has grown deformed as children delivered over the years by doctors addicted to forceps With time resentments have blossomed from deaths and wills and whiskey and boundary lines until now only these few survivors remain to refuse the buyers from London and Ohio

Close neither to each other nor their past they cling from habit to plots of land which hold some vital but forgotten myth that has nothing to do with signs the tourists read It lives in the storms they must endure and the need to be still in this place where all is in motion forever surrounded by wind

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r

1 t

Beauty, Pain, and Hunger

Beside the wood stove hung a breadboard and a leather thong A miniature whip with a knot at the tip tied tight as a little muscle so it would cut

The boys who climbed our apple trees showed me their welted backs and legs and spoke respectfully of their father whose punishment was natural to them and as freely given as bread

When their mother kneaded and formed the floury loaves and they had risen fat as flesh she would slit them down the top with a razor used only for that purpose

Taken from the shimmering oven and placed on the table to cool the sweet loaves with golden puckered scars begged to be eaten though each delicious mouthful hurt

61

STEPHEN SHU NING LIU

The Encounter

Can you imagine that I, a landlord's son, slipped away from reading Confucius, and bathed in a sedge pond, on an evening hot and dusty as any other.

Sitting there, among the floating greens, a water buffalo casually looked me over: his nostrils quickened, puffing forth mist, his tail splashed, rippling the water's face.

The hillside was private, hidden in bearded tamarisks, the air was stale, punctuated by sudden dashes of grasshoppers' wings; my mate gawked at me again, and for a moment

my eyes appeared indifferent as his, I smelt like him, like the floating greens, my feet, entangled with the sedge roots, sinking deep into the oozy mud.

1 .

M. H. SCHEELE

Nearby a crumpled horse mumbles, ...

Nearby a crumpled horse mumbles, its hooves ridden thin and cracked, its belly ripped open and its colored plastic flutters where its mane once flowed proud in the wind as it galloped in races through woody hills over tracks it made itself in trial runs through rocky sages and all the others would follow, a heavy breathing pack stinking and snorting in a clustered bunch, who never really tried to catch up because they knew he was a thoroughbred stallion studded and finely honed with racing stripes which bled only on others and they remembered those times when he was held in the starting gate, spirit rearing and ears cocked for the gun to release his roar on the track where he would arrow past the others and finding nothing ahead, would accelerate around to bite their flanks again and again and again.

TWO POEMS BY LEWIS B. HORNE

Saturday

It has its melancholy - much like a person brassy with energy borne in a coach of delusions with an old guard and driver gee-hawing.

We approach, giddy still with Friday's bubbly expectation, and find a large stockade - like any day - but desert-dry, sunny,

open. The danger of stray dogs nips the air: all the vagrant things not finished. Security is lax. There are snarls close to home,

the gate is open, and water's low. Our shadow's dark and obvious, repeats our too free postures, reiterates how fast the budget's over-drawn.

The day's as quick as a sandstorm forming. Mountains are obscured. We're thrown in the rocking bed of lovers who spill us with their quick desire.

r

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A Rule of Rainy Days

Everything is heavy - the gray clouds like a drenched orchard, dark as loam; the days of rumbling dripping air; and we - awake, asleep - shut in on roads without horizons. Nothing is flammable. Strange currents nudge.

Everything is heavy, wet, reflective on such days. Whatever quickens is slowed. Think sometimes of a reeling in, feel sometimes at fingers, hair - extremities -a pull and urge. Sometimes to dark caves, to tidal clouds, or to a high tug as though you are a strike, not snarled, but springing shadow-light up from worm and mud.

PETER STEVENS

Really the Blues

Uncle Charlie mocking his own near­blindness strains to read the news asking his wife 'Ethel read this, the cricket scores, that's the game boy' he'd tell me eating his meal with clacking dentures, slobbery mouth, 'read this, Ethel', the rugby matches, 'that's the game, boy, don't play soccer'

And promising a watch when I got good results, never understanding my listening to jazz, his owlish eyes blank behind thick glass

And I passed all the exams but never got the watch

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And one evening alone listening to jazz : Sidney Bechet deep in the blues "Really The Blues"

My brother came in and he liked jazz as well, but 'Turn it off' he said "Really The Blues" deep blues blackness 'Tum it off. Uncle Charlie's dead.'

And the notes rose really the blues that's the game, boy, and tears really and the watch never the blues to be remembered and my own eyes near blind and Bechet playing "Really The Blues".

DAVE SMITH

First Hunt at Smithfield

Pulling in we're careful to be quiet, don't shut doors, ease everything, careful as we cock the Winchesters. No good, the farmer's bitch licks a chain of barks, dirty chickens sound the alert.

You smoke. He's up anyway because it's never early for a man whose skin wakes up without the lie of clocks.

A black snake slithers off the road we take, his muscles ticking dew.

To me, to you, is the same high weaving green, boil of yellows, black trunks of oak? Where our road ends you angle off, camouflaged almost, and almost hang like an aging leaf under the eddying light, a shadow on that slope. I hardly heard you whisper here but felt my buttocks take the rotting trunk. What words I had to bite back, thousands it seemed.

You sweep the air like a hawk and load.

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I know you'll calculate my shots, my time, unbreak your father's double, portion out the shells. Will I do it right? So many things to think about, each one my need to please you.

I watched the gray creep in a fickle drift at your temples. I made my eyes track the trees like yours. I learned each knob, each distant sound, the way morning heat tricked the wet leaves to sing with snapping, how

one shape implies a family, a line in wait. The guns bent my bones

when you were done. It was a long road back. You dumped their bodies in a pile. Cold water washed the tufts of fur from my small knife. Later you tendered the farmer meat and smoked awhile on the step of his truck. What you said was gone before I heard it. I watched for that deep act to pass between us, not knowing what it was. Dreaming

the dingy sinews of all those guts, the nights played the same tune until I knew you well. I always scrubbed the guns when we got home, made coffee below the stairs, until your chair stopped rocking, and your snore.

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ERIC IVAN BERG

Al Purdy, My Pa & The Good Old Bullshitters

Purdy's pure Canadian bullshit-drinking Uncle Ben's Beer, almost always stewed and ass-end malted in hls own crock.

Now Al is banging on the lunch counter of the LION'S BURGER drive-in restaurant. The old bastard's lamblasting us all

for eating Amerikan franchised shit, for watching Amerikan teevee stupidity, for listening to Amerikan rock & roll.

Purdy's preaching hellfire for betraying hockey and the whole Canadian shitamarie. By God, we're almost guilty of being Amerikans !

But now I think of the good ole farts like my pa panhandling in MACDONALD'S brick shithouse and I can laugh again at Purdy's reading

about being caught pants-up under the crankshaft while watching the wanton thighs of a teenybopper tart wiggling by and just jiggling away from him.

Well hell, my pa and Purdy are both good old bullshitters, great beer drinkers, loud liars, veteran bummers just like I, the young sonuvagun, would like to be.

Because all their viciousness is delivered with a bellylaugh, ass-kicking our damn Yankee cultural domination. Then they'd drink up again,

backslapping each other and ordering more beer, more BEER by damn! And whacking the old barmaid on the bum if she was too slow ...

H. A. NIELSEN

Shopworn Popcorn

Stuck in the salt-grass at all angles Like mauled birthday candles on the dune The stanchions of a barbed-wire fence Mark off the township's landfill. Here, sixty years ago, my soft Ten-year-old toenails kicked up arrowheads, And now the signboards call for fill,

Wishbones, fishbones, Moldyrotten workpants, Cat-skulls, Flit sprays, Dixiecups and breastpumps.

What can my dentures do but beam When kids from chalky rental cottages Torpedo jellyfish with sticks? I walk close by the tideline Of seaweed, cork, and crab-debris To keep a masking ridge Between me and the landfill Where small fires putter, and the rat Leaks its mean glint among the nondescript

Shopworn popcorn Christmastrees and hacksaws, Hubcaps, cheque-stubs, Dutch Boy paint cans.

This week a year ago By the creek outlet on a falling tide I found a puffed-out milkbag, plastic, Sealed with a screw of wire And lettered in blue: 'For Strength- Glow- Vim!' With a fetus inside. Its feet were crossed, the legs Positioned not quite right For me to sex it. My cane-ferrule touched the swollen aspic Chasing away some flies.

I placed its absolute beginning In days of doubtful green, when nothing's up But fairy-rings and jonquils -

When April tacks her sudden banns On cold shoots and sprigs,

And horns call to the pouting clans In cobweb periwigs ...

But that's another tune. I lifted it, a featherweight. Suspended by its wire The bag, a turret-lens, Drank it all in:

Doorknobs, corncobs Mattresses and lightbulbs, Salt-caked throw-rugs, Paperbacks and roach-paste.

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I dot-and-carried up the beach To a nice burying spot, Quiet, too stony for the swimming crowd, A cove loveliest in spring Where sweethearts often lay, the pairs In sight of one another Getting theirs.

Say something, love, make me forget -Speak up, my weak, my wet!

To speak I'd need a dark tuxedo - no, My hourglass thoughts sound all alike, As mooted as the Jubilee Edition Of some all-time, all-purpose Definition.

As I walked it, so to say, up the beach Like a small, twisty gamin Bent on escape, disputes about its status -Polyp, vermin, saviour-bait -Meant nothing, but the gossipy eyes And busy Don't-look-now of Rattus rattus Back in that pale of waste

Dry cells, pie shells, M uffintins and shoeheels, Bedsprings, Mum jars, Empty broken pocketbooks

Gave the two of us if nothing else Something to walk with, talk about. The badlands of my insides ache enough; Rats I can do without.

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With the Atlantic at my back, Clamshell in hand I scraped a hole, Then sucked in oxygen and stooped For a last close look. Recall went blank. Where had I seen that set of mouth before, That wry degree of strain, A vague lipline parched for something, yet Obedient? In what lumpy pier-glass, in what year?

Nothing was frantic, nothing federal. I laid the milkbag down In dry, caving, pushy sand, Then, whispering, I scooped. "I'm no damn good at rites, and anyway After that do-si-do in sewer places You've been through too much crap, Your lids are too I've-seen-it-all To trust God's memory for faces. Offer a silence, then, if not your cheek To the eternal slap." That covered it. I'm not a run-off-at-the-mouth old coot.

A waxwing in the nightshade fussed; A couple playing stop-and-go Gawked for a bit. I think they saw a nuisance-man Bald as the prince of nuisances, Saint Paul, Down on one burning knee Working a clamshell at an infant's pace, A nuisance-man.

- Mortician, stitch a smile on me.

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JOYCE CAROL OATES

Addiction

Always this hunger this perfect thirst

Always a gusty wind! -the flags fly the sailboats race

Always the drama of snow always the spillage of sun always the chiming of the hour always the perfect hand dealt to you always that crunching of the gravel as Fate draws nigh!

There are other times. They are not this time. This is the only time.

Always this hunger this perfect thirst

Tum the knob and the image appears it is yours! Lift the receiver and the voice leaps forth it is yours !

The air snaps with tiny kisses the Christmas ornaments are big enough to ride always perfect calm and every hair in place always a bracing wind and the edge of the world in sight!

What had you done with your life before this?

LARRY RUBIN

I i Cabin Mates

J When he comes in at five, I wake From schemes of love between the waves -Until the light unveils the porthole I swim within the darkest pool.

What he has done I see in clouds Of dawn: the impulse to swell, to curl The particles of light. The girl Who dances through the ship is his

And I have kissed her hair. Lanced Beneath the moon, she's gone - the nights Are his. Yet in that final sky Where sun and night are one, she dances

To my bed. Light streams through The porthole. My roommate sleeps. I rise.

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E. A. WATSON

Pour E.P.

I

Because I am whole again, I have returned to the point of startings Sure now that You who turned me loose Have really died - no longer a "living poet" Sterilized by esoteric explications Or already-doomed expectations.

When or how is unimportant; For if death is the sealing-up of the past ( And all future with that past) Then I, too, unwinding from the daze of yesterday, Died Say here, in Kingston town, Somewhere in the fifties, not too far from St. Elizabeth's.

That's where we met again: After the Pre-Columbian days of Seeing my Lady in the sun, A worn book held casually in her hand: "And is it all because of Poetry, Because you do not understand 'poor old Horner blind, blind, as a bat ... ?' "

And I explained -Because I needed to be whole again.

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II

The necessity of speech and song ... And such throbs and heart-beatings Are the emanations of One Who would dance in his loose chains Even in Washington, on sombre days, The trumpet-sound of his ageless words Making and reshaping a barbaric speech Into the timeless oratory of blind persuasion.

It is true: "He who is now vacant dust Was once the slave of one passion."

When did I come to know this? From what text? Under what pretext? Through what Emanation?

I remember ( though I really never forgot; The pose is such a tern pting one) : Art Becomes Culture Creeping on all fours towards the civilization That we almost didn't see.

And after such knowledge, Body sings of its own eternal freedom.

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III

These are the things you didn't say But might have said:

"If you must begin in the middle, Then you must also guard your ignorance against That classic Cm-Magnon of Poetics, Who sees fire as that undefinable tertium quid Of the Symbol's foundation Rather than the frenetic copulation of two sticks; Who sings in time to his own dactylic obsolescence, Leading you to believe that Form has no beginning Rhyme no reason Wit no grace. You poets, in your perverse rhetoric of the senses, Doomed to speech which keeps no language alive ...

Because you did not begin at beginnings."

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IV

And here I am Between two moods One, caught by the eye in retrospect; The other, bloated with the vanity of understanding, Wondering: Whose antenna are you? Whose Pisanello? Whose Mauberley? Whose Sordello? Whose Picasso?

So, am I really whole again? Grey years the only difference?

V

This is no Aphrodite, This full-grown Calypso-woman Whose every motion repeats a thousand years Of interminable poise and counterpoise.

This is no Giaconda, This tempestuous Caribbean Siren Whose daily waltz is a smile Across the blue perfection of the sky.

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This is no Attic myth Of gods and goddesses Chastising pride with metaphysical pain.

This is what it is: Passion released from the menace of decorum; Joy rampant from the calm of sobriety; Order seeking apology for its chaos-bred birth ...

XAYAMACA!*

And from all of this, This back and forth and back again, I am made anew Like refashioned words, once archaic, Dressed now in the fine fabrics of nicer thought.

In spite of yourself, Fascisti, You made me see, And I am Caliban to your Setebos, Laughing Because you thought I had no history.

* Arawak Indian spelling of Jamaica.

.... ~~~~tr:•-~.J,<,C'• ~. ~ :--=--=----==~ .. ,...-.. ~-~· •~~ ~ .... ~ ""'.;""h _,,4.;...:,._ .... "' .. : ... ~~~-J~,'t'9 ..... ~ .. --"··--- .... -"""'~~ .. : • ·-"" ..... ;~ :: .. ·~-, ., ..

- -- - - -~-. .

ERROL MILLER

Delila

Deplorable: rip out your dumb eyes. You are no woman now, limited cousin, Ears made of silk, linen purse disguised. How I hate your hate, wind rustling The air above your waist.

Granite arms slay the morning flies. Tomorrow is yellow, burning like exhausts Of jets zooming blue in unique headmaster formations. Rotor, rotor, the belly of the universe Is swollen, puffed and still.

You want laughter. I too have experienced the gentle stares Of moths, blank-faced. Girl, your house Is wet with slimy mucus, no art, China lace and tea.

Your carriage waits with wheels greased, Your body-parts lubricated in sweet date oil, Shiny and pretty in the August moon. Pouty, your lips explode contagious On ragged city streets.

Now you have stolen A bag of poison switches, lumbering poems With a shortage of love. Perfumed notes Arrive on clean slates. Lady: start Your wings, your static breath.

TWO POEMS BY MIRIAM WADDINGTON

Notes of Summer

Love still lives in a place where the wind stands and fiddles for north country dances, where the rabbits run across morning lawns their paws diamonded with dew, where the forsythia bush studs with flowers the golden tiara of April, and the violins everywhere are filled up with the grazing notes of peaceful summer.

Old Chair Song

Knots and crosses, thread and leather, cut your losses stitch a feather.

Knots and crosses dot your i's, baste your losses with your sighs.

Mend what's broken, make old new, forms are false and shapes are true.

So flash your thimble, push your luck, if you win a chicken lose a duck;

If you find a chair that's old yet new it might teach you how chairs grew

From knots and crosses silk and tweed, so close your eyes and twist a bead.

Ask a riddle, tum your head, and you might learn to raise the dead.

TWO POEMS BY PIER GIORGIO DI CICCO

The Elder

uncle mike, fond of the bottle, for 50 years a recluse with a still

charmed out of hiding by no reason. it was his way.

in america, he lounges on his brother's porch.

he is being good for two months. when the family returns from the

supermarket one day, he will be splashing in the basement with wine.

*

he speaks little, sleeps with his pants on stays under the catalpa leaves in the back lot

does not dress for visitors, but stoops in the orchard behind the driveway, in the old fedora the sagging britches

pruning stones from the lettuce patch. digs slowly with the beer locked up.

michael stares at the sun at noon waits for the house to empty

for his binge, soils the rugs of his sister-in-law is found belly-up to the sun & happy.

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*

ah michael. it is 1962. they will smash the still you hide in the back lot.

in lawn chairs old biddies hear that you never change your undeiwear

old man of the hills, they will send you back to the old country, back to your one acre under the vines.

where with gentle death, tall nephews never scold you in english

the fascists

bum the woods, glibly & run for it black funnels come up from the hills. up thin roads, boys bicycle, get an eyeful & dash back. the towns go about their business in the valleys.

it is a shame, say the lovers of cyprus & sublime color. at night, they form rings around a blazing hill top & shake their heads.

at vicciomaggio, I saw a lumpish glow sit on the backyard hill. under the window, dry leaves clattered,

under the ancient ladies murmuring holy names

& the pheasants, up from the brush, make for the sunny flames, & light their wings.

the blind foxes run too much & scorch this is italy, where things on a grand scale are fireworks from a neighboring hill,

& the hurt things happen quietly

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TWO POEMS BY TOM WAYMAN

Saturday Afternoon in Suburban Kitchener

Through the front window: the rest of this street of duplexes.

Inside, between the easy chair and the sofa, the arborite dining table and its chairs, the sound of the stereo flows like the wall-to-wall rug: soft, insistent, the smooth bland melodies, faint strings, gently falling choral harmonies repeating over and over.

The sound also slides around the antique wooden chair refinished last winter in the basement: its old wood sanded smooth and shellacked. Windows in the rear of the house face across the small back yard to a similar dwelling.

These are rooms filled with a vague regret: like sighs, choices made and accepted. Each object in these rooms is assigned four numbers: the date it was purchased, what the price was, exactly how much was saved in the transaction and how much the same item would cost today. These numbers have been spoken of so often they hang in the rooms like whispers, like sighs. There are also numbers given to the entire half of this building.

All night the numbers go on whispering disagreeing with each other like the merciless arguments of the television. In the morning the numbers subside a little, but soon after breakfast they start up again.

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The numbers say this is a place where people go mad. They tell how one still afternoon, when the woman sits by herself, when the baby is upstairs asleep, his plastic tricycle motionless against one wall, when there is no sound in the house but the low, soothing murmur of the stereo, when the dog, too, rests by the coff eetable suddenly the woman rises, moves into the kitchen and begins to yank open drawers. She dumps their contents onto the floor: cutlery, cooking utensils, bits of string, her old notebook stuffed with recipes tom out of magazines and cards left by various home repair agencies.

Cupboard doors are pulled ajar; her hand and arm shovel out dishes and plates so they smash first onto the kitchen counter and then drop to shatter in the litter piling up on the linoleum floor.

The baby upstairs is wakened by the noise. He begins to cry. The dog becomes excited : he barks wildly as cans of soup and infant food, tins of peanut butter and flour are hurled into the mess. The doorbell rings: it is the paperboy here for his monthly collection. The woman does not answer: she rips open packages and boxes of powdered desserts, orange juice, oatmeal and sugar and empties the contents into the air. The telephone rings: it is a rug shampoo salesman calling to announce that the woman will win a prize if he is allowed to demonstrate his product in her home. The telephone, too, is disregarded. The woman is digging with both hands in the interior of the refrigerator: milk bottles, eggs, fresh celery and boxes of fish sticks fly out into the room around either side of her body.

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Then the woman stops. She kicks her way through the debris and sits down at the kitchen table. She stares through the kitchen widow across the back yard. Outside everything is very calm.

Perhaps when the husband comes home, he agrees to move. The place is put up for sale. The numbers whisper hollowly to themselves in the empty rooms until the new owners arrive. Then the numbers change but the faint hissing goes on.

The new people, too, one day sell their part of the building. And of all those who will ever sleep in this place, not one will recall with fondness the rooms and items which made up their life in this house. It is as though a kind of death is in these rooms : no one wants to remember they were alive here.

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Gossip

A fire is burning in the pure air: bright as a white illuminated plastic sign flashing the name of a store into the night.

Fort Collins, Colorado is the centre of the human universe. There is a house in Fort Collins that eats itself alive. Sometimes it lives in an oxygen tent, but sometimes it tears this out of its mouth and stuffs booze down its throat,

sobbing. The house is eating its children.

Fort Collins is the centre of the human universe. There are parents who have not seen their children for five or six years. They try not to think about them. When they go out with another couple after work to a cocktail

lounge each of the women imagines for an instant the young waitress

resembles her daughter.

Her daughter is in a cabin in the foothills. She and some professors, some professors' wives and some students are trying each other out and on. The President of the University is a Director of the local bank. Only he knows the direction the University is going to expand. The young people in the hills want to buy another dozen acres but if two of them sign a paper together it is certain they will split up.

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Cameron David Bishop has made the list again of the seven most wanted men in Canada. This is because four years after he left Fort Collins, Colorado Cam is still on the FBI's 1 o-most-wanted slate. Appearing with him on the Canadian list is the man sought for killing the daughter of a Vancouver English Department

chairman and her boyfriend, as the two were sleeping in the bush near Tofino. Cam, they say, shut off the power for an afternoon to a war plant

near Denver by applying some dynamite to certain isolated power poles.

No one was hurt, but Cam had to run. Despite this Kodak has located a new factory near Fort Collins. Water-pik, Woodward Governor and Monfort Beef are some other local industries. Larry Davidson got arrested for two joints. Larry Lechner passed the union's exam and has been working as a carpenter. Fort Collins

is the centre of the human universe.

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Celebration W. D. VALGARDSON

WHILE Mabel fried the potatoes, she watched Eric out of the comer of her left eye. He was stretched precariously over a kitchen chair, the sharp points of his shoulder blades pressed against the high, wooden back, his spine resting on the edge of the wooden seat. The heavy lids of his eyes were nearly closed but she knew that he was only feigning sleep and that beneath the wrinkled skin and thin lashes, his eyes were constantly shifting, following her every move. The last time she had taken her eyes off him, he had kicked her in the back of the leg.

She saw Eric's hands tense. He started to ease himself toward her. "I've got a pan of hot grease," she warned. As she spoke, she

lifted the pan from the stove. "Lousy bitch," he replied, just barely moving his lips. "Lousy

bitch." The windows were feathered with frost and, in the comers of the

frames, ice had gathered in thick knots. Cold drafts swirled under the door. It was only four o'clock but, already, outside the windows, it was as black as if the sky had been drenched in tar. The darkness had forced its way into the comers of the room and under the furni­ture. Here, it lay like a silent animal, ready to pounce at the first opportunity. Outside, a blizzard tore at the frozen land.

"We need more wood," she said, rattling the cast iron pan against the stove to emphasize her point. "We gotta keep up the heat."

There was a space heater sitting mutely in the middle of the floor. It worked but they had been unable to pay their last year's fuel bill and the deliveryman had cut them off. They had to depend on wood for both cooking and heating.

"Get it yourself," he replied at last. Mabel seldom spoke. Now, because she had been drinking, she

shifted her wide hips and said, with the studied seriousness of some-

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one who has come to a conclusion after long thought, "You're ugly when you're drunk."

Eric snorted. "You're ugly all the time." On the table, there was an open quart jar. It was a third full of

homebrew. Eric's arm, as though it had a life of its own, snaked across the table, picked up the jar and brought it to his mouth. He drank without taking his eyes from Mabel, put the jar back and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. The social worker had said she thought she could get them onto welfare and they were celebrating. Eric had walked five miles to buy the liquor from a pulp cutter. Mabel and he had shared the first half but then, seeing how quickly it was being used up, he had decided to keep the rest for himself.

"Don't be so cheap," she said. She let go of the pan and pushed her red sweater up over her elbows. She had short arms and legs and her clothes were always too long for her. "Gimme a drink."

When he was sober, Eric was generous, letting her have money for mail order clothes and, when they went into town, buying her french fries and taking her to bingo. When :he drank he was different. He sat and brooded about how little he had, listing a life's accumulation of grievances. It was then that they fought. Mostly, it was kicks and slaps but, sometimes, when she turned on him, they fought with fists and feet, teeth and nails. Once, he had broken her arm with a piece of stovewood and, once, she had cut open his thigh with an axe.

She was short, shorter than he was, with straight dark hair hacked off at the shoulders. Her body was round, with three large rolls of fat between her hips and her large breasts. Eric had found her in the Eddyville beer parlour. They had not married but, despite their differences, had stayed together for ten years.

Mabel turned the potatoes over, checking to see that they were brown and crisp, then skidded the pan to the edge of the stove.

"Feed them kids," Eric said. They both spoiled the children but they were his particular pets. He never denied them anything. He fed them jawbreakers and raspberry drops and potato chips and bought them plastic dolls with pink cheeks. Even when he was drunk, he did no more than brush them out of his way.

"That's what I'm doing." Incensed by her answering back, he opened his eyes. They were

as pale as shallow water in harsh sunlight.

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"No damn good hotel trash. Lying under a table with your skirt over your head, that's you."

"I ain't been in a hotel for over a year and when I was, I walked out on my own two feet. Nobody had to carry me." She turned her head just enough to watch half his face purse with annoyance.

With a hint of satisfaction, she dumped a portion of the potatoes into a foil pie pan and placed it on the floor beside the couch. The four year old's brown arm darted out and dragged the pan into the shadows. Right away, the two year old began a broken cry of des­pair. It started slowly at first with spaces in between each cry but the spaces quickly became shorter. It was as though she was wind­ing up a spring. If it was not stopped, her cry would become an endless wail.

"Josie, you give her some or I'll give you the broom," her mother threatened. There was the shuffling of aluminum on wood. The crying stopped.

Whenever their parents fought, the children hid under the Toronto couch, lying absolutely still, making no sound for hours on end. They were like two small animals hiding in a cave; only their large, dark eyes moved. A stranger might have spent an hour or more in the room and never known they were there.

Mabel dug in the bottom of the woodbox. The box was high, with a lid that folded back. It was large enough to contain two grown people. The top half of her body disappeared over the edge so that all that was visible was the wide expanse of her buttocks in a voluminous blue dress, men's grey wool socks and snow boots, one brown, one black. She heaved herself back up and held three sticks out so that Eric could see them. Her face was bright red from the effort of nearly standing on her head.

"That's all there is. We gotta have more." His eyes regarded her with the distant blankness they assumed

when he dealt with anyone in authority. Deliberately, he picked at his teeth before saying, "Get it yourself."

She filled the stove, then skidded his plate over the pink oilcloth. Although he was hungry, he let it sit.

"You've done nothing all day," she said. Angered by the truth of her statement, he struck the table with

his fist. He accidently hit the rim of the pan. Potatoes were cata­pulted across the room.

"She what you made me do," he squawked. He had wanted the

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potatoes. In his surprise, he pushed his chair backwards until it was resting on its rear legs.

Mabel moved her plate out of his reach. "Pick that up," he ordered, swallowing three times as he thought

about his lost supper. She remained where she was, stuffing her mouth with potatoes. "Whore! That's all you are." Emboldened by the liquor, she retorted, "That's all you could get." He lashed out with his boot but she was too far away. He lost

his precarious balance. For a moment, he hung suspended, one leg stuck straight out, one foot on the floor, one hand flung out as though to grab the air and hold him in place. He fell flat on his back. Startled, he lay while his wife finished another mouthful of potatoes. Without changing position, he slowly raised his fist toward the open beams of the ceiling and shook it in silent rage as though to challenge a host of malevolent gods secreted among the rafters.

His eyes travelled across the smoke darkened ceiling, down the wall, over Mabel's moon-like face and locked on her vigorously chew­ing mouth.

"I got nothin," he shouted, "I never had nothin, and what I had, you eat."

The two year old, seeing that no one was looking her way, crept out from under the couch and began to gather slices of fried pota­toe, cramming them into her mouth until her cheeks bulged. She had on a pink sweater, green corduroy overalls and knitted slippers with felt rabbit's ears on the toes. When her mouth and hands could hold no more, she scurried back to the safety of the couch.

Gazing down upon her husband as he lay with his clenched fist raised toward heaven, Mabel said, without any change of expression, "We gotta have more wood." Her arm curved around her aluminum foil plate, cradling it so carefully that it might have been made of beaten silver.

"Is that all you can think about? Your own comfort?" Eric's face had grown mottled. "I might have injured a vital element," he paused to add weight to his statement, then added, "fatally." He saw in that instant the tragedy of his own death and was over­whelmed by it. To impress upon her what might have been, he let his arms fall to his side and rolled his eyes back into his head. In his raw, red face, they looked like eggs that had been boiled and peeled.

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Mabel wasn't impressed. "We gotta have more wood," she repeated.

"You," Eric screeched, his voice thin and high, "have no respect." His upper body popped up as though it was attached to his hips by a suddenly released spring. "No respect."

He was slight, with a long face and hardly any chin. When he got dressed up in his grey suit, he looked distinguished in a minor way like a failed bookkeeper. He had cut pulp and hired out as a shorehand all his life but, because of his drinking, had never been able to hold a job more than six months. It was one of his grievances and it made him sensitive to slights, both imagined and real.

"You don't care what happens to me," he said with the hurt voice of a child. "I might as well be alone."

The thought had not occurred to him before. Normally he lived in the present, accepting it as unchangeable. The future was a mystery, revealed only when it became the present. Now, his idea, falling on fertile soil, sprouted and immediately blossomed. He saw himself unencumbered with Mabel. His face took on a settled look.

"You might as well get going," he said, as if something had been concluded. "You can take your clothes and five dollars."

Mabel looked away. In spite of all their disputes, they had never done two things : laid charges against one another or walked out on one another. The morning after she had hit Eric with an axe, Mabel had sat at his bedside, giving him sips of pepsi and vodka from a soft drink bottle.

"I got no place to go," she replied in a quiet, defeated voice. He paid no attention. "I'll get somebody else. I've made up my

mind." His attention had wandered from her. Groping behind himself,

he found the chair, righted it and, lost in thought, lifted himself backward up the rungs until he was seated in his former position. He stared at the ceiling.

"I'll get the wood," Mabel said, her face averted. Ten feet from the front door, wood was stacked in rows. A nar­

row, waist-high path had been dug so that they could get to the woodpile and beyond. Normally, it was kept clear but, now, the path was five inches deep in loose snow.

The woodpile was so close that Mabel did not bother to put on a jacket. Because of the draft on the floor, she was wearing fleece­lined boots. As she stepped outside, blown snow rose as thickly as

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smoke from damp leaves. She hurried, running to the woodpile, pulling a stick loose, then using it to knock three more pieces free. Before she had the wood stacked in her arms, the layer of heat next

. to her skin had been swept away. Particles of dry snow struck her skin as sharply as sand. She gave a violent shiver.

She would have stacked more wood in her arms but the wind beat against her, drawing tears from her eyes. Squeezing her head down into her shoulders, keeping her face turned away from the wind, she struggled back. The white layer of frost that covered the wood burned the soft flesh of her bare hands. By the time she reached the door, she was desperate to get inside. She bent to grasp the latch. Lifting it, she pushed. The door did not open. Of ten, because of ice forming on the frame, the door stuck. She gave it a push with her knee. It still did not budge.

"Eric," she yelled. "The door's stuck." She kicked against the rough boards.

"Open the door, Eric." She thought for a moment that he might not be able to hear her over the wind but she knew immediately that that could not be. However, he did not hold his liquor well and it was possible he had passed out.

She dropped the wood, caught the handle and jerked up. She

1 threw her body against the door but the door did not move. Pounding with the flat of one hand, she yelled, "Let me in. I'm

freezing." When there was no response, she picked up one of the sticks and

began to beat on the door but it was made of birch slabs and did no more than shiver. At first, she held the stick like a bat. When that did not work, she changed her tactics, holding the log like a ram and concentrating her blows on the latch. The metal handle buckled, then broke but the door did not give way. She knew then that Eric had to have set the wooden bar in place. Years before, she had been nervous about his being away at night so he had bolted angle-iron to each side of the frame. With a two by four set across the door, nothing short of an axe would be sufficient to break in.

She dropped the log. Her anger and the exertion had combined to stave off the effects of the cold but, now, as she stood panting, her entire body began to shake. Snow had sifted into her boots, col­lecting in a cold band around her ankles. Crouching awkwardly to gain the protection of the snowdrifts, she instinctively made her body as small as possible to preserve her warmth. Her jaw and

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hands were shaking so much that she crossed them tightly over her breasts. For the first time, as she squatted, helpless, she realized that Eric might not let her in and that if he didn't she would die. The anger that had sprung up only a short time before was swept away by fear.

Turning to the door, she placed her face against it and called out plaintively, "Eric, please let me in." When there was no reply, she began to plead in a loud, anguished voice, saying please over and over again. Fear cleared her mind, dispelling the blurred confusion of the liquor. It was as though her mind had expanded, become a vast plain on which there was no light but over which she could see with perfect clarity.

She needed shelter. Unable to find it where she was, she had to seek it elsewhere. She saw, as plainly as if she was looking at it from an airplane, the stretch of road that led to the next camp. She thought of trying to reach it, then gave up the idea. On the open road, the wind would be unobstructed and would sweep down on her with its full fury. The trip would take her three hours. Dressed the way she was, she would not get past the first mile.

The cabin was long and low. Snow drifts rose nearly to the eaves. The side windows were partially hidden. Shivering so hard that she had a difficult time making her hands obey, she left the protection of the doorway and crawled onto the drift. The bank was steep and she had to dig her bare hands into the snow so that she could pull herseH forward. On top of the drift, she rose into a crouching posi• tion. She took two steps. The brittle crust gave way beneath her. Her right leg plunged down past the knee and she pitched forward.

The shock of falling and the painful wrench of her knee made her lie still for a full minute before the cold forced her to lift one stiff hand, dig it into the snow and pull herself forward. She reached out with the other hand. Her leg felt as though it had been broken. The ice had made a shallow but painful gash from her ankle to her knee. When her leg came free, her boot remained trapped at the bottom of the hole. She did not try to retrieve it but floundered ahead, half-crawling, half-swimming, muttering, "Oh, God. Oh, God." Snow pushed past the neck of her dress and up the sleeves of her sweater.

Lying flat, she pre.55ed her face to the window. Her hair and eye­brows were crusted with snow, the round flesh of her face was white and drawn. She tried to see inside but the glass was so thickly

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covered with ice that the warmth and light were reduced to no more than an orange glow.

Using her hands like claws, she tapped at the window. There was no answer. She tried to make a fist. Her fingers would not close.

Desperately, she struck at the glass. The window broke. Pressing her face to the hole, she called, "Eric let me in." A shadow obscured the light, then a board covered the hole and

she knew that Eric was barring the window with a fishbox lid. She could hear him hammering nails. In a frenzy, she flailed at the glass, cutting her hands. She felt nothing. Blood ran over her fingers and immediately congealed.

She began to cry then. Her tears froze on her face. Defeated, she twisted her heavy body away from the window and began crawling back to the door. Her mind, only a short time before had been clear and immense. Now, it began to contract as it started to close off everything except the instinct for survival.

When she reached the path, she slid down to the bottom of the trail and crouched in the doorway. Blowing snow curled over the lip of the drift and settled on her like confetti. The small, remaining part of her conscious thought would have kept her there, straining helplessly at the heat which was such a short distance away. Instinct made her get up to begin an awkward, relentless pacing.

She walked as far as the woodpile, returned, beating her arms on her body. Because of her wrenched knee and her missing boot, she limped as badly as a cripple. Sometimes, she stumbled and fell but, always, she got up. For a time, she increased her pace until she was nearly running. Occasionally, she stopped and stood helplessly, as though she had forgotten what it was that she was doing. Her eyes became unfocused, staring directly ahead of her. All the time she walked, her body jerked and shook and from her mouth there came a steady, unceasing moan.

The door opened. Light spilled onto the path and great gusts of steam billowed upward. Leaning heavily on the doorframe, engulfed in light and steam, Eric might have been standing at the entrance to hell.

"Had enough?" he called belligerently, his head waving from side to side, his words slurred.

Mabel was at the furthest point of her journey. Turning, she stumbled back along the trail she had ploughed in the snow, her

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legs rising and falling in the jerky, uncoordinated movements of a spastic.

"You had ... " Eric began again but Mabel, her eyes staring as though they had been frozen in their sockets, her face burned white, her hair thick with snow, pushed past him, nearly knocking him down. She staggered clumsily across the room, pieces of caked snow falling from her. In front of the stove, she slipped to her knees.

Eric watched her, then with stiff, exaggerated care, bent and picked up the pieces of wood she had dropped in front of the door. Shutting the door behind him, he closed one eye, sighted the stove like he was going to shoot it and crossed the room, his body teetering this way and that, constantly on the verge of falling. He managed to stuff the wood into the stove.

"You're o.k.," he said. His speech was slurred, indefinite. "I decided to keep you." He staggered sideways for two steps. "That'll teach you-to mind your mouth."

When Mabel did not reply but remained huddled as close to the stove as she could get, he steadied himself by catching hold of the back of a chair and leaned over her. Water streamed down her face and body and gathered in a pool around her. Her eyes were shut; her mouth gaped open. As he hung over her, she slumped to the floor and lay on her right side.

"I'll get you a drink. That's all you need." She made no indica­tion she had heard him. He went to the table and his skinny red hands tipped the jar up, spilling the last of the homebrew into a fish paste glass. He picked up the glass and held it out to her back. She did not move. His hand turned in a constant unsteady circle.

Unable to keep the floor from tipping first one way, then the other, he got down on his knees and walked on them to her.

"Have a drink," he said. The liquor slopped over his fingers. Mabel began to cough. Her cough was shallow and persistent as

though a piece of dry bread had caught in her windpipe. Eric pushed his face up to hers. Even through his drunkenness,

what he saw worried him. He tried to put the glass on the stove and failed. It fell to the floor and rolled away.

He pushed himself to his feet, staggered to the washstand for the basin, then continued to the door.

It was while he was on his knees in the doorway, scraping snow into the washbasin that she screamed. Her scream, high and un­broken, filled the room. At the same time, she began to twist about

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as if to escape from pain inflicted upon her by some unseen tor­menter.

Eric looked at her uncomprehendingly. Snow blew over him in a twisting funnel. In the brief time he had the door open, twin fingers of snow had formed at each comer of the sill.

He brought the half-filled pan of snow to her, setting it on the floor. Not knowing how to deal with her writhing, he sat back, his legs tucked under him, staring at her with the puzzled, stupid expression of a cat seeing something it is curious about but does not understand. He reached a handful of snow toward her but she cried, "Get away. Get away." She crawled to the far end of the stove.

Unable to stand her screaming and afraid of what he had done, he said, "I'll go for help."

It took him ten minutes to get dressed. He found his flashlight tucked in a rubber boot, tested it, then staggered outside. Negotiat­ing the path was not too difficult. I ts narrowness guided him and the high banks gave him support. The cold helped clear his head but the wind, driving full into his face, made him retch. After he had thrown up, he felt more in control of himself but his coordina­tion was still so poor that when he fell into the snow, he had to make three attempts to get to his feet. The wind and the darkness confused him.

By the time he reached the highway, he was breathing so hard that he had to rest. The snow had drifted in places until it rose to his crotch. There was no way that a vehicle could get in or out of the access road. For a time, he leaned against a tree trunk, his back to the wind, waiting for someone to come by. There was nothing but the roar of the wind in the frozen trees. His feet started to get cold so he decided to start walking to the next camp. He knew that there was a truck with chains there.

He had stumbled along for half an hour when the snow turned milky, then began to sparkle. He moved onto the shoulder of the road and waved his flashlight in an arc. The pale light divided. A truck pulled up beside him.

He climbed into the cab. When he had caught his breath, he said, "My wife got lost in the storm and got herself frozen. I gotta get her to town."

There was no place to tum around. The road had narrowed to one lane and even this was deep in loose snow. The truck driver

was tall and had a long, untidy beard. He peered through the wind­shield. There was nothing to see but the snow that slanted across the twin beams of light. It was obvious that he was anxious to keep going.

"Bad?" he asked. Eric nodded. They started back. Eric walked behind and to one side of the

truck, marking the edge of the road with his flashlight. There was hardly any shoulder before a deep ditch began. With snow blanket­ing everything, it would be easy to put a wheel off the road. If that happened, they would need a tractor to free the truck.

Their progress was slow. Three times, Eric thought he had found the access road. The first two times, he was wrong. The third time, he waded into the snow to identify a tree stump that marked the corner. They left the truck with its lights on and its flashers going.

As they opened the door, they could hear Mabel screaming. "Leave me alone," she yelled when she saw them. "Don't touch

me." Her flesh, thawing, felt as though it had swollen four times its normal size and that the skin had been roughly cut from it with a piece of broken glass.

Spreading their arms wide, they herded her into a corner. They pinned her there, one holding her arms, the other her legs, then rolled her in a quilt so that she was completely covered. To keep her from tearing off the quilt, they wound it with sideline. The wind tore at them; the snow blinded them. Mabel was short and heavy. They floundered through the snow. The quilt sagged awkwardly in the middle, frequently slipping out of their mittened hands. They lost their footing time and again. When they finally reached the truck, they were both so winded that they had to lay Mabel on the road and lean against the truck to rest before they could lift her inside.

The ride was a nightmare of noise and motion. Snow engulfed them, blinding them with its whiteness. Wind tore at the truck. They skidded time and again, sometimes ploughing down the road sideways. When that happened, they both sat rigid, holding their breath, waiting for the wheels to catch on a rut and overturn them.

When they reached curves where snow had drifted into banks, the truck driver, not daring to slow down, sped up, racing at the white barriers. When they struck, snow flew up in a solid wall, completely covering the windshield until the wipers cleared it away.

At such times, the truck shuddered as though under repeated blows. Once, they did not make it all the way through a drift and Eric plunged into the storm, wrenched a shovel from the side of the truck and attacked the snow in a frenzy.

As soon as the wheels were clear, he threw his shoulder against the tailgate, straining until he felt his body would crack. Slowly, inch by inch, the truck moved ahead. Once the wheels caught, the driver did not dare stop and Eric, with one hand on the box, ran to reach the door. He pulled himself inside and then sagged against the dashboard, sucking gusts of warm air.

Whenever they were tempted to slow down, Mabel's cries and groans spurred them on.

It took them two hours before the faint glow of street lights appeared on either side of them. The town itself was lost in the blizzard.

The driver flung the truck reckles.5ly toward the hospital. It swayed, skidded, bounced like it was a duck boat in a choppy sea. Without warning, the hospital loomed out of the snow. The truck driver jammed on the brakes and the truck spun in two complete circles before stopping with its rear wheels on the lower step.

They half-dragged and half-carried Mabel in through the en­trance and lay her on the floor in front of the receptionist's desk. Little strangled cries rose from the quilt. The receptionist rang for the doctor, then wheeled in a bed. They heaved Mabel onto it.

The doctor appeared. He was a brisk little man with grey hair cut close to his head to make him look younger. He had been a doctor in Eddyville for twenty years and nothing surprised him any longer.

"What," he said, studying the wet quilt wrapped with rope, "have we here."

"Mabel," Eric answered. "She froze herself so bad she might die."

"It looks," the doctor replied, "more like she might be smothered." He treated their in juries every time they went on a drunk and he was prepared for anything. He reached into his pocket, took out a pair of curved, surgical scissors and cut the rope.

When they pulled the quilt free, he inspected Mabel's face and hands and feet. She lay on her back, twitching and gasping like a beached fish.

"Get her into a room," he said to a nurse who had materialized at the end of the bed.

"How bad is she?" the truck driver asked. "We'll see tomorrow morning. She'll probably lose some toes and

fingers." He scowled at Eric. "If you're going to kill each other, why don't you get it over with."

As he followed the cart through the two grey metal doors, he said to the nurse, "One of these days, this damn foolishness is going to cause a tragedy."

The receptionist, an elderly lady with blue tinged hair, was more sympathetic. "You were lucky to get here," she said.

The truck driver smiled. He was relieved that the trip was over. "I guess. Half an hour more of this and nothing will move, not even the snowplows." To Eric, he said, "You got anywhere to stay? You can sleep at my place."

"I'll stay at the hotel," Eric replied. Now that the trip was over, his head ached fiercely and he wanted a drink. A fast beer, then two slow ones would drive the pain away. He felt in his pockets. "Oh, hell," he said, "I forgot my wallet."

"That's o.k.," the truck driver replied. "My old lady'II give you some supper, then we'll get some sleep. You can have the kids' bed. They can sleep on the couch."

At these last words, Eric gave a sudden start and his eyes widened as if, without warning, a terrible vision had been thrust upon him. He took a step toward the door, then stopped. Snow and darkness beat against the glass. His tongue pressed against the back of his teeth, forming a single word, but he made no sound.

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Book Reviews

Merna Summers, The Skating Party: Stories. Oberon, 1974. 120 pp. $5.95 cloth, $2.95 paper. George Bowering, Flycatcher & Other Stories. Oberon, 1974. 114 pp. $6.95 cloth, $3.50 paper. John Metcalf, The Teeth of My Father. Oberon, 1975. 146 pp. Jean-Guy Carrier, My Father's House: Stories. Oberon, 1974. 95 pp. $5.95 cloth, $2.95 paper. George McWhirter, Bodyworks: Stories. Oberon, 1974. 151 pp. $6.95 cloth, $3.50 paper.

Merna Summers' prairie tales are strongest in their characters, decent folk whose environment is almost incidental. There is little distinctive sense of place, contrary to the Canadian tendency to regard the national literature as a summoning of region. Summers sometimes skirts sentimentality closely, but the stories respectively harden, becoming les.5 intimate and more reflective. They are not complex but pleasant, unassuming, and undemanding; the writing is unadorned. The reminiscence predominates in these recollections of personality changes as reactions to behavioral departures by close relatives. Characters' motives are sound and credible but hardly arresting, like the stories themselves.

George Bowering's chief persona, George Delsing, is a self­indulgent creation who wars with coherence and reader attention in this collection. As a manuscript reader complains in one story, "Jesus, this isn't a story, I mean, Christ, you have to have some discipline over your craft", and narrators in others often cheerfully deny the neces.5ity of meaning or continuity. Bowering's style is sometimes poetically clotted and efflorescent, and suggests the spon­sorship of Jack Kerouac - as does the matter. Delsing's obses.5ion, though hardly the reader's, is Ebbe, a post-beatnik grotesque whom he desperately attempts to see as a model of knowing - somewhat like "Flycatcher", an alleged pervert who knows through constant

victimization. The best stories here are straightforward and objec­tive: "Apples", a symbol-burdened sexual mechanism; "The Eleva­tor", where a chance liaison reinforces the isolation in a world not captivated by television; "Time and Again", a would-be writer's discovery of how superficially he knows his roots; and "Ricardo and the Flower", a Lawrencian pastiche set in Mexico which pits feminine intuition and blood-conscious boy against the camera­toting, tourist-minded male.

John Metcalf's volume is the most varied of those in review in terms of subject and tone, a variety that does not much extend to respectively appropriate style. His themes are familiar, though dis­tinctively presented: a lyrical sexual initiation ( counterpointed by a television's banality), the repression of all natural instinct by the secondary educational system, the contrast of the world's vulgarity with personal imaginative creativity. An actor finds, like Wilde, his Ii£ e imitating his art; a son movingly defines his father through grotesque memories and creative fictions only after the late fact. "The Strange Aberration of Mr. Ken Smythe" is splendid slap­stick with a rapid, vicious, and fascist finale, but Metcalf's best is '"The Years in Exile". With an elderly and philosophical narrator we take a memory-journey towards dissolution; in archaeological metaphor he casts over ruins and remains, holding on to treasures of words, papers, things, by which he can only now explain himself. The narrative is packed with vivid evocation, the character is actualized; the story typifies Metcalf's principal theme, an awaken­ing into a kind of personal, creative, or worldly reality.

Jean-Guy Carrier's stories are in the main about William Mor­teau and his growth in the village of St.-Camille. They have a curi­ous impersonality through the cool style; no character seems to put on much flesh except the abrupt, eccentric, sincere, original, and unpredictable priest, Fr. Alexandre. Carrier does not quite make a tight contained community of the town, nor an Everyman of William, yet both are implied. The subjects are usually sombre, though in the superbly handled "The Exorcism of Jean Matteau's Devil" an increasingly uninhibited post-election celebration is con­fronted by the inflexible priest in an effective mixture of comic chaos and deadening sobriety. Carrier's persistent theme is the closing of doo,rs between family members, particularly fathers ( in­cluding priests) and sons: the rebellions, the repeated inherited behaviour, the failures of reconciliation. Carrier writes with spare

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objectivity and precise detail; his stories, bleak and exact, are usually isolationist and poignant.

Much might be said of George McWhirter's marvellous mysteries, though the rubric "A trip to the other place through water, women or the earth; all of these are bodyworks" is little help when a story's sense is not immediately surrendered. Many of these recall the bizarre fantasias of Flann O'Brien, demanding close attention to follow the internal, often metaphoric, logic of the prose. Many stories are surreal, imaginatively beyond the linear and comfortable; they are told as myth, legend, allegory, and archetype, both creating these and employing them as points of reference.

McWhirter's subjects are nothing if not provocative. There is Hermoin, poet and marine ecologist, leading his disciples through man's next evolutionary step in his School of Marinics; there is H., vegetarian martyr, bent on returning the world to Nature; there is a mother-dominated son who mixes her with paint; there are con­temporary recreations of Moses and of Adam, Christ, and Satan on a private golf course. A baby excretes "igneous, indigenous" molten rock in "The Sphincter"; "The Entertainment" is an impressionistic nightmare of the response to mindless popular spectacles, exact in detail and phantasmagoric in visualization. The island of Sarne, grass and stone, boasts a quasi-mythical tradition which unites past and present in a perfect instinctual and archetypal memory. Several "realistic" stories further add to Mc Whirter's confusing and intrigu­ing collection, where strange boundaries are crossed and "man's amphibious nature" is keenly felt. There are few firm edges here, but shadows and challenges, collages of meaning and continuities of wonder.

Loms K. MAcKENDRICK

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MOTHERS, WRITERS, INSTRUMENTS AND FATHERS

Helene Rosenthal, Listen to the Old Mother. McClelland and Stewart, 1975. 95 PP· $3.95.

Seymour Mayne, ed., Cutting the Keys. Writing Workshop, Dept. of English, University of Ottawa, 1974. Unpaginated, no price listed.

Jerzy Harasymowicz, Genealogy of Instruments, trans. Catherine Leach and Seymour Mayne. Valley Editions, 1974. Unpaginated. $1.50.

Robert Cockburn and Robert Gibbs, eds., Ninety Seasons. Modern Poems from the Maritimes. McClelland and Stewart, 1974. 160 PP· $6.95.

In 1965, in Earle Bimey's senior poetry workshop at the Univer­sity of B.C., Helene Rosenthal handed in an interesting poem called "Voices-in the Time of the Onion". The poem combined her personal Jewish heritage with a consideration of Bimey's and Neruda's musings on the present state and possible future of human civilization. I remember the poem not only because I liked it then but also because we included it in an anthology of student writings from the workshop (which was Bimey's last at UBC). And now, ten years later, the poem is printed again as the final poem in Rosen­thal's recent collection of new and selected poems, Listen to the Old Mother.

I still like the poem, but I was a little surprised to see it in this volume. For Rosenthal has since those days begun to wrestle in her verse with all the problems and solutions contained in the women's movement. In a fine, clearly-stated poem like "Kosygin Dinner" in her new collection, Rosenthal looks at the women who are present like her at a formal banquet in Vancouver in honor of the visiting Russian and wonders:

Which of these 500 women was invited on her own account?

At the end of the dinner, she sees:

... women trailing the men, fed

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and fawning upon an anxiety of power not ours.

In other poems in this collection, Rosenthal can be heard angrily assessing the emotional and sexual roles open to women ( as in the title poem) and attacking the definition of women by their genitals ( as in the poems "Lament Reading The Energy of Slaves" and "So Lay Off!"). In "Political Poem", she uses characters from Greek myth to consider the situation of "us beautiful women" :

The lover we take in our own image of what a man should be to deserve us, seldom is.

This poem concludes by asserting, more wishfully than realistically I fear, that the battle for women's freedom is won:

The Old Man's good as dead.

Such well-presented feminist concerns as these make passages in the final "Voices" poem seem strangely dated now:

... young mothers plucking children

from the deep drowned coastline of love's country beg old men whose love has tendered roses to lead the children on mountains like Moses arguing with God.

Much of the work of the women's movement, of course, has gone to explain why women can not and should not wait for men to lead the human race to paradise. Indeed, the whole notion of a male, patri­archal, God-with-genitals has been under fire by such feminist theologians as Mary Daly. Yet in this poem Rosenthal says:

If I must burn let it be only in a wrath Jehovah taught - not to make images but to embody linear descent: his Law in the affirming power of man.

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And the poem ends with a plea to "my ancient fore/ at hers" ( my emphasis):

to never cease their fierce blossoming

This juxtaposition in Listen to the Old Mother between militant feminism and an earlier-vintage acceptance of the patriarchal models of history reflects a confusion that runs through much of this collec­tion. The book is very much a trying-out of various poetic themes and styles. Poems such as "The Poet As Process" detail this working­out of ideas- here, poetry, love and the self. But sometimes, as in "Classics", the working-out of themes within a single poem leads to a shifting of poetic styles within the poem which I think jars the reader more than the change illuminates the poem's message. "Classics" moves from a diction of complete sentences:

I am mildly interested I work at response.

to total dissolution:

- the fire behind so high

so un-availing

shadow praying the Idea, 0

praying

Because the poet often doesn't seem certain where the unfolding poem is going, she is unable to resist puns which - like the unneces­sary changes in style - don't add much to the reader's understand­ing or enjoyment. In a poem on the poet's father ( "Not To Be Borne" ) , because he operates a machine stitching various types of cloth including drill, suddenly we are given an aside about parade­grounds and drum-majors. Even in a poem on sisterhood, the poet is unable to res.ist a comment about "nuns" (in "There Are No Lovers" ) . Sometimes the puns come from the realm of concrete poetry; in "Vietnam: Vanishing Point" we have:

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But we are going goin g on.

This, I take it, can be read either "Going going on" or "Going going gone". But the visual cleverness detracts from the point of the poem here, in my view.

And yet it is the inclusion of the confusions, the contradictions, the misplaced puns that give a clue to the assessment of the whole collection for me. This is the collection of a poet-in-motion, in motion toward herself and her as yet unfound voice. What is mis­leading, I think, is the title. We are not really listening to the old mother but to a young ( despite her chronological years) poet feel­ing her way ahead. If she isn't yet clear what she means, and what she means to say, it is because she is still working and growing, as she states in "I Do Not Need":

after all I'm quite a family I've raised myself so many times

Cutting the Keys, the anthology of wm-k from Seymour Mayne's poetry workshop at the University of Ottawa, also contains poems by poets-in-progress. The book is simply produced, with a high quality of work that reflects immense credit on Mayne and his program, and on the poets themselves. The range here is wide: from Wally Bambrick's convincing chronicle of the daily drudgery of bank work ( "A Day") written in conventional free verse to two delightful concrete poems - "Concerto 7 3 ( for typewriter)" by Claude Gagnon, which features a woman holding a bird, and "The Hitchhiker (Version IV)" by Margaret Hurley, which has her hitchhiker standing in the cold rain while :

the carssssss ..... . jjuusssttt .... .

wwhhizz .......... . oooonnnnnnn ... .

bbbbbbbbyyyyyyyy ... .

In all, fourteen poets are included, with contributions ranging from one to five poems ( including two good concise found poems dis­covered by Mayne himseH). The book is an excellent way to glimpse what the University of Ottawa poetry workshop is producing. But the collection is also a marvellous anthology of poems in its own right.

Seymour Mayne is also a collaborator with Catherine Leach in translating six poems by the Polish poet J erzy Harasymowicz in

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Genealogy of Instruments. These amazing, vivid poems trace in a series of imaginative accounts how six musical instruments ( the ocarina, harp, violin, piano, viola and village organs) were invented. The poetic tales, as the poet himself suggests, are highly baroque. For example, Harasymowicz maintains that the piano came into existence through God's weakness for some fallen angels who had been turned into dragons. God threw them a sleeping maiden, the Muse, who transformed all but one of the dragons. This renegade, a "curly black dragon", in order to impress Lucifer's wife tried to bite the Muse's hand. For this foul deed, he was turned into a piano! The poet concludes:

Dear friends haven't you noticed how vainly the dragon forever clutches the lady's hand m the

snows of fangs and snivels about his tragedies to the clouds

Whatever the poems were like in Polish, the translations in English tum them into fascinating, weird, light-hearted poetic fantasies. They are wonderful accomplishments.

Ninety Seasons, an anthology of "modem poems from the Mari­times", collects poems from eighteen men and three women writers - with a variety of styles and subjects. The editors, Robert Cock­burn and Robert Gibbs of the University of New Brunswick, in an excellent brief introduction lay out their frame of reference: that the book will be "not . . . definitive but indicative", "a report on work in progress". In this aim they succeed admirably, in my opinion. I found it an interesting book throughout, and was intro­duced to a number of first-rate poems I hadn't previously seen -which seems to me is the purpose and major achievement of any anthology.

Many of the poems here, as the editors also point out in their introduction, deal with people in the Maritime landscape. Poem after poem works to encapsulate something of a human life ... with all the strengths and weaknesses these sort of Spoon River vignettes necessarily have. Thus William A. Bauer describes his character Everett Coogler of the town of Hamsterville in two poems. Three fine poems by Fred Cogswell in this collection ( "The Rock Pile", "The Butterfly", "George Burroughs") off er flashes of insight into other lives. Kenneth Leslie in "Rory's Praise of Elspeth" and Alden Nowlan in "In Memoriam: Claude Orser (1894-1968)" drop for

a moment into the existence of a rowdy fisherman and an old country friend of the poet's respectively. Often these poems are com­pletely satisfying, but the danger in these summations of human lives is a tendency toward glibness and patronizing: always the person described is simpler, less sophisticated than the poet. Occa­sionally, the descriptions can become almost two-dimensional, as in Elizabeth Brewster's "River Song". Here the hard work and hard times of lumberjacks and their wives are described as the "glory" of a river. A more accurate presentation of what the "glories" of the logging life mean in human terms is found in Robert Cockburn's moving "The Peterborough Carnivore", where the poet's hell-raising hero ends:

. . . on all fours in 1 882 In Bay City, Michigan, Growling, fighting bulldogs With his hands and teeth For one free drink.

Four of the poets- Robert Gibbs, Leslie, Milton Acom, and Brewster- have poems remembering their respective fathers. Since these poems all involve both the poet's and the subject's lives and feelings, the poems seem more real, more fleshed-out than the quick anecdote or personality summary often does. The presence of the poet and his or her feelings also adds an important extra dimension to descriptions of people in poems by Kay Smith and Peter Thomas. In Smith's "Sometimes bitterness shaped your words", she speaks of her memory of a man and his lovemaking:

... It lingers in my flesh like the fragrance in a house where flowers are still fresh after those who live there have closed the door and departed.

And Thomas remembers East India seamen, and the negative things his father said about them :

Lascars, I think, and my dead father tugs. But they smile at me shyly, turning back down Wind Street to their ship.

Ninety Seasons has some marvellous glimpses of the natural world,

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too. Acorn's frightening "Nature" is here, where newborn, still in­nocent fledglings feel the coolness of the shadow of a stalking cat who has discovered their nest, and respond by opening their beaks to be fed. Charles Bruce, in "Orchard in the Woods", describes first the ruin of a farm now overgrown in the woods, and then con­cludes the poem with the magnificent passage from which the anthology takes its name. In the fall, Bruce says, a hunter will pick an apple from one of the old abandoned fruit trees:

And thinking idly of his kitchen fire, Bite to the small black shining seeds and learn The taste of ninety seasons, hard and sweet.

Nowlan, in "Homebrew", powerfully links the natural world with the world of men. He gives something of the recipe and process of making the liquor, followed by the moment of its consumption; on "a rainy day, the mill not running", men are:

sitting on blocks of pressed hay in the barn and drinking from a single mug, their thumbs spooning out shreds of hay and frequently flies and then bolting it, holding their breath, and spitting afterwards, grunting their pleasure.

I think that without holding the breath, spitting or grunting, anyone will get a lot of pleasure from such poems in Ninety Seasons.

ToM WAYMAN

Robert Browning, Byzantium and Bulgaria: A Comparative Study Across the Early Medieval Frontier. Temple Smith, 1975. 232

pp. £4.50.

The book is the third volume in a series on comparative history covering such diverse subjects as Samurai and Knights and Amster­dam and Venice.

Till recently works on southeastern medieval Europe tended to examine aspects of political and socio-economic history of either Byzantium or of the Slavic states which sprang up in the European lands of the Byzantine Empire. Certainly the study of political or economic history of the Balkan peninsula could not ignore the inter­action between Byzantium and Bulgaria or Byzantium and Stephan

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Dushan's Empire. But these could not be considered comparative studies in the proper sense. Browning's work is the first such attempt.

He chose Byzantium and Bulgaria not only because both appeared to be rivals for the domination of the Balkan peninsula, but also because the Bulgarians were the first ones, from all the peoples of the "Byzantine Commonwealth", to challenge Byzantine imperial conceptions. The book is divided into chapters each one examining an aspect of their political and socio-economic development which would, undoubtedly, enable the reader to gain an insight in the factors which shaped their respective societies. The work could not and should not claim to be an exhaustive study of Byzantine and Bulgarian societies since neither one with its complexities and intri­cacies would be covered in less than two hundred pages of text. Therefore, the reviewer assumes that the author intended his work to serve as an introduction to a more detailed comparative work on Byzantium and Bulgaria.

The part on the historical background of Byzantium and Bul­garia, which incidentally covers a little more than a third of the entire monograph, is a repetition of the standard factual informa­tion found in any textbook on Byzantine or Bulgarian history. It appears that his main source is Ostrogorsky's History of the Byzan­tine State with a number of modem Bulgarian works added for good measure. This part of the work does not shed any new light on obscure points on the relations of Byzantium and Bulgaria. There are some minor points of interest referring to the most southern limits of the Empire of Boris or Symeon. These points, of course, are the contributions of post-war archaeology. However, by themselves, they do not alter the conclusions of present-day historians.

The remainder of the work delves into the internal developments of both Empires. In his examination of the land, cities, industry, trade and political structure, Browning correctly concludes that the Bulgarian state, even at the height of its glory, had not developed the complex and sophisticated structure of Byzantium. In his analy­sis of the Byzantine land structure the author attempts to simplify his presentation to the point where misconceptions might arise. The stratiotika ktemata is a case in question.

No comparison of societies would be complete without the exam­ination of culture. Browning's treatment of Bulgarian culture leaves much to be desired. He concluded his work with the statement that "the christianizing of Rus.5ia and the drawing of that great country

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into the orbit of Mediterranean and European civilization was largely the work, either directly or through their writings, of men from Bulgaria" ( p. I g 8 ) . In discussing the artistic inspiration of Bulgaria Browning concluded that "much has been written on the topic some of it marked more by patriotism than by scientific judge­ment" ( pp. I 84-8 5 ) . Undoubtedly the same statement would apply to the author. The over-exaggeration of the missionary activity and learning of Bulgaria reflects modern Bulgarian chauvinism. Even the author himself fails to substantiate his sweeping statements in the chapter on Bulgarian culture. Instead, he states on p. I 7 5 that "the cultural heritage of Byzantine Christianity was scarcely familiar to Boris' subjects ... in 864 or 865." And again on p. I 76 he states that "the arrival of the ... pupils of Cyril and Methodios in 885-6 was welcomed by Boris as providing him with clergy . . . and the necessary liturgical text .... The tradition of Slavonic letters was preserved by two men, Clement and N aum." In the same chapter on culture he tells us that in the next century many Byzantine eccle­siastical works such as liturgies, liturgical texts, menologies were translated into Slavonic language. These translations were followed by the Christian Cosmography of Cosmas Indicopleustes, Epictetus' Encheiridion and a few others. But he fails to present us with a similar list of Bulgarian original works. This activity would indicate that the monasteries were active in translating Byzantine works but it tells us nothing about the "nationality" of the translator or even that of the missionary. It does not tell us that the Bulgarians went to the lands of the Rus and converted them to Christianity. It does not tell us anything about the ability of the Bulgarians to draw the Rus to the orbit of Mediterranean and European civilization. The author prefers to ignore that Thessalonike was the centre of mis­sionary work among the Slavs and these missionaries were not Bul­garians. It would have been a major achievement on the part of the Bulgarians, and for that matter on the part of any newly chris­tianized group, to emerge as a civilizing and christianizing agent after less than a hundred years from their own christianization. One would be remiss not to conclude that Browning accepted too literally the stories of the Russian Primary Chronicle. Apparently he con­veniently chose to ignore the historical connections between the Rus and Constantinople. The Rus were not drawn to Pliska, Preslav or Ochrida but Constantinople. Bulgaria had little to offer to the out­sider. Even the author himself admits this in his discussion of trade,

II8

cities and political structure. "Primitive" people are not attracted to other "primitive" people; and Bulgaria in comparison to Byzan­tium was primitive notwithstanding the descriptions of John the Exarch of the royal palace and the churches. It would have been better if the author had presented us with the precise influences of Bulgaria on the Rus instead of unsubstantiated generalities. Poetic licence has no room in comparative historical studies.

"Poetic licence" also tends to colour some minor points in his study. He argues that the claim of the Macedonians to be regarded as Greeks had "not been universally recognized" (p. 22). He fails to inform us who doubts it.

The work as an introductory comparative study does indeed have a place in the historical literature of southeastern medieval Europe. But it would have been to the advantage of both author and reader if more emphasis were placed on certain aspects of their societies instead of on general, rather superficial, treatment of their relations and socio-economic developments.

A. MouRATIDES

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Notes on Contributors

JOYCE CAROL OATES, National Book Award winner and co-Editor of The Ontario Review, has most recently published a novel, The Assassins, and a volume of poems, The Fabulous Beasts.

PETER STEVENS teaches Canadian Literature at Windsor, and is cur­rently at work on cycles of poems based on the careers of Cesare Pavese and Isadora Duncan.

RICHARD HoRNSEY teaches Canadian Literature and Creative Writ­ing at Windsor, and has been widely published throughout Canada.

E. A. WATSON teaches Criticism at Windsor, and his poems have been published in such magazines as The New Yorker.

ToM WAYMAN is Creative Writer in Residence at Windsor during 1975-76; his latest volume is Macmillan's Money and Rain: Tom Wayman Live!

PIER GIORGIO ThC1cco was born in Arezzo, Italy, and lives in To­ronto; his work has been printed in The Malahat Review, Dalhousie Review, and Canadian Forum, as well as in Al Purdy's anthology Storm Warning II.

M. H. SCHEELE lives in Schererville, Indiana, where she worries about Gary and works very hard at writing.

H. A. NIELSON teaches Philosophy at Windsor, and his fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review.

ERROL MILLER has appeared in an incredible number of journals in Canada and the U.S., and lives in Louisiana.

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STEPHEN SHu NING Lrn comes from Chunking and lives in Las Vegas, where he teaches at Clark Community College. He has been widely published in such journals as Prism International, Poetry Australia, Western Humanities Review, etc.

LARRY RuBIN has been in UWR before; his third collection, All My Mirrors Lie, has just been published by Godine. He has recently appeared in The Nation, Southern Review, and Antaeus.

DA VE SMITH has been widely published in such magazines as The New Yorker; co-Editor of The Back Door, he has published a recent collection, The Fisherman's Whore, and has another in the works, Cumberland Station, due in 1976.

ERIC IVAN BERG comes out of the B.C. bush, and has done all the things that people who design book jackets love to list. He has appeared in Fiddlehead, Quarry, Dalhousie Review, Northern Lights, etc.

LEWIS B. HORNE teaches English at U. Sask., and his stories have appeared in Confrontation, The Ontario Review, Prairie Schooner, Ohio Review, etc., and his poems in W ascana Review, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review, etc.

MIRIAM WADDINGTON teaches English at York University, and is among the most widely published poets in Canada.

W. D. SNODGRASS is the author of the celebrated collections of poems Heart's Needle and After Experience and the recent volume of criticism In Radical Pursuit. Professor of English and Speech at Syracuse U., he is currently "translating a cemetery in Northern Romania; working on a series of poems about the last days in the Fuhrer Bunker ... "

JOSEPH DUFFY is Visiting Professor of English at Brooklyn College. Essays by him have appeared in Comparative Drama and Mosaic.

OFELIA CoHN-SFETCU is a Doctoral candidate at McMaster Uni­versity in English. An essay on Modem Canadian literature will

12I

soon appear in Canadian Literature and another is slated for publi­cation in Queen's Quarterly.

Tuuu-ANN RisTKOK teaches in the Department of English at Queens College in New York. She is currently working on a long study of Nabokov.

W. D. VALGARDSON teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of Victoria. His latest book is God is Not a Fish Inspector.

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