Five Legs (1969), and a digression on James Joyce

     Graeme Gibson Five Legs (1969) I’ve read bits and pieces of this book for several years. I should say I’ve tried to read this book for many years. It made a splash when it first appeared (my copy is a First Edition), but as it turns out the ripples dissipated very quickly.  It looks like Gibson tries to do a Joycean stream-of-consciousness, but he’s no James Joyce. Not that this is in itself a disability, but it becomes one when you want to write like Joyce. Joyce is overrated in my opinion; Ulysses is barely readable (another book I’ve read at over the years), and Finnegan’s Wake will forever be merely a time- and academy-bound curiosity. No amount of scholarly interpretation will convince me that it’s worth the effort of deciphering the book for myself. Why should I, when the scholars have done such a good job of it?
     A book whose interpreters do a better job of telling the tale than the author did becomes a mere puzzle, and when it comes to puzzles we all have our tastes. I prefer jigsaws and crosswords. If I’m told that Ulysses does in fact trace the ancient legend of the title in a modern life and setting, I’m left wondering why I shouldn’t read the original. Reading Joyce’s book doesn’t dispel that wonder, but at least the digressions and pastiches have a charm apart from Joyce’s Grand Theme. In fact, I think they are more important than the self-conscious imitation of an old Greek tale. Joyce’s earlier work is better, especially the Portrait of the Artist. Perhaps Joyce didn’t trust the stories he had to tell, and felt he had to make them obscure in the telling to demonstrate that they had in fact the significance he ascribed to them. They certainly did, and the technique doesn’t add to that significance. For most readers it detracts, because it interposes itself between the tale and the reader.
     I was unable to discern much of a narrative in Gibson’s book; the central thread seems to concern the narrators’ trouble with women, but just exactly what that trouble is isn’t very clear. It appears to begin with the failure to impregnate his wife. But he is difficult to empathise with, despite Gibson’s obvious attempts to make his anguish palpable. But broken syntax and allusive phrases merely reveal a typically fractured consciousness, not necessarily an interesting mind. As for interesting digressions, there ain’t any.
     Perhaps Gibson thought that an avant-garde technique would lend significance. Perhaps he thought that a common-place mind would be more interesting when its working is exposed. We do have a puzzle here, but as I said above, that’s not enough. The puzzle must be worth solving, for its intellectual difficulty and/or for the solution. I didn’t find the rewards of solving the puzzle on either count sufficient to keep me reading. The stream-of-consciousness becomes an irritating impediment, and the solution (insofar as I’ve understood it) is mere commonplace. No stars. (2002)
     Update 2013: The book is out of print. Amazon offers 6 used copies of Five Legs/Communion. Various online entries report his work promoting Canadian writing, as well as his enthusiasm for bird watching. His Bedside Book of Birds looks like it's worth reading.

Daughters of Passion (1982)

   Julia O’Faolain Daughters of Passion (1982) A collection of short stories, all previously published in magazines. It’s magazine fiction alright, designed to engage interest while waiting to do something else, briefly startling, mildly provoking, witty in places, prurient in places, sentimental. Some of it rises above this level, but none of it’s memorable. O’Faolain writes skilfully, plots well, and draws vivid characters. The faint and not so faint melancholy of her stories reminds me of Mavis Gallant, but Gallant’s stories seem drawn from a deeper well. These stories are clever in the sense that student’s work is clever: one wants to give them a mark. I started this book on our trip to Brownsville last year, and stopped reading it somewhere in Texas. I finished it this morning, and can barely remember the last story. ** (2002)

The Merry Heart (1997)

     Robertson Davies The Merry Heart (1997) A collection of speeches plus a couple of pieces written for publication, and a fragment of autobiography. Because Davies spoke many times on the same themes, there is some repetition of ideas and of even of whole sentences, but that doesn’t disturb the reader unduly. Anyone who has heard Davies, even if only on TV, can read these pieces with his voice in mind, and that certainly adds to their charm. But I think what comes through most strongly is Davies’ wisdom, which is not a heavy freight of solemnly declared platitudes, but a cheerful apprehension of the way life is, passed on to us with a twinkle in the eyes and the occasional sigh. Davies knows his and our darknesses, but he does not dwell on them and dislikes those writers who present us with horrors merely to fascinate. His insistence that fiction is a necessary grace in our lives, and his belief that the imagination serves to help us understand ourselves, may be suspect but still is necessary in our country, which looks on the arts as mere frills, and prides itself on a realistic approach to the difficulties of life. But Davies is right.
     A good book; but like all collections of occasional pieces a single reading suffices. It’s worth keeping on the shelf for possible quotation, though. *** (2002)

It Could have been Worse (1980)

     Peggy Holmes It Could have been Worse (1980) Chatty reminiscences of Peggy and Harry Holmes first and only two years on their homestead in northern Alberta. Peggy also tells of her childhood in England. Harry selected the homestead when he and three buddies went hunting up there, a romantically silly way to pick land. In the event, the Holmes's managed to prove the land, that is, clear the minimum amount and build a dwelling of minimum size, but they left immediately after that, and lived in Edmonton. The narrative is piecey, probably because it was cobbled together from stories Peggy wrote for and read on CBC Calgary.
      The events she relates are the usual mix of horror, tedium, and joy, and the book is interesting on that account. But Peggy’s lack of literary skill, evidenced in everything from poor organisation to flat and trite descriptions, takes away from the narrative. She is more of a teller of tales than a writer, which means that she was undoubtedly better on the air and in person. I don’t get a sense that I really know Peggy after reading this book: I know about her, and I speculate that she was a stubborn and wilful girl with a strong romantic streak, but that’s all. She had two miscarriages, but we don’t really know how these affected her, nor how it affected her relationship with Harry. I suppose she would consider inquiry after these matters an impertinence, but I want to know more than the facts of her life. It’s all very well to tell about the things you had to do to survive, but thousands of other people had to do the same things. What makes a life interesting is not what happened in it, but the person it happened to, and the people that mattered to them. Harry was Peggy’s great love, she says; but I get only the vaguest sense of what he was like. I still recall Susannah Moodie’s book, not just the events she relates, but Susannah as the personality that experienced the southern Ontario wilderness, and the fecklessness of her husband (who like Harry clearly had silly romantic notions about land). Peggy’s book is worth reading as one more record of the pioneer life, and that’s all. *1/2 (2002)

We Are Still Married (1989)

     Garrison Keillor We Are Still Married (1989) Collection of occasional pieces, mostly written for The New Yorker. Keillor’s wry and melancholy persona drifts through these pieces like smoke through the bush. He has the knack of making you feel that you, too, lived the life he lived. This book contains the famous Young Lutheran’s Guide to the Orchestra, and several of his poems. There is a streak of rage in Keillor that he rarely lets show, but there are hints of it here and there, like lightning on the far horizon. Some of the essays have little intrinsic interest, but matter as items in Keillor’s list of works. Varies from *** to ****.

All That Heaven Allows (1955)

      All That Heaven Allows (1955) [D: Douglas Sirk. Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead] Cary Scott, a 40-ish widow (Wyman), lonely and bored a few years after husband’s death, falls in love with her hunky tree-trimmer Ron Kirby  (Hudson), whose age is not specified, but one gathers from “internal evidence” that he’s 30-ish, i.e., “much younger”. He’s also of a different class, being a rude mechanical, unlike Scott’s circle, all well-off business types who foregather at the country club and each other’s homes for cocktails. One of these acquaintances is a cad who figures Scott is easy prey. When Scott brings Kirby to one of the house parties, this cad figures she’s just slumming and tries to move in on her, whereupon Kirby belts him one. This neatly divides Scott’s group into true friends (one, possibly two) and those who disguise their envy of Scott under censorious remarks about Kirby’s gauche behaviour.
     Kirby fixes up the derelict mill on his property (he owns a tree nursery), which of course impresses Scott, and she agrees to marry him. Besides, he has free-spirit type friends, who seem much more genuine and in charge of their lives than the socially constipated circle that Scott has known so far. But when her children object, she decides to sacrifice her happiness for theirs. But she soon learns that they are too focussed on their own affairs to pay any real attention to her, so she returns to Kirby, but when he’s not home she drives off, and Kirby, waving frantically to get her attention, falls off a cliff. Scott rushes back to nurse him; when he wakes up she agrees that she has come home. Fade out.
     As you can tell, this is a slick reversal of the Harlequin Romance (which at the time was not yet the world-beating brand it later became). Here, the woman is the social superior, and it’s a masterful younger man who awakens her suppressed desires. It’s clear that Kirby has aroused feelings that she perhaps never experienced in her marriage, which seems to have been pleasant enough, and which her children wish her to reprise with a pleasant and decidedly unsexy older man of her own class. In that sense she’s the ingenue. Like any Romance heroine, she’s also virtuous, unwilling to acknowledge her feelings, and ready to stifle them in the service of maintaining her children’s respectability as they claim to understand it. This self-sacrifice is a required trope in Romance, too.
     The movie is well-made. The plot is complex enough to sustain interest, but simple enough that mild distractions such as candy or pop-corn purchases or satisfying gossip with one’s friends will not interfere with understanding it. It was aimed at women who were or wanted to be in the semi-leisured class of the comfortable (and somewhat bored) housewives whose husbands earned enough that they didn’t have to work. There were many such movies. What makes this one different was the issues of class, age difference, pointless sacrifice (the children really are selfish prigs), and of course (discreetly implied) sex. The treatment of these issues is dated, and nowadays naive viewers may well be frustrated by Scott’s self-immolation, but there’s no question that the issues were real, and that many movie-goers at that time identified with her and  may have wished they too could make the kinds of choices she made.
     Two years after this movie appeared, Betty Friedan surveyed her Smith College classmates, and in 1963 published the results in The Feminine Mystique. Most middle and upper-middle-class women felt their lives were pretty pointless. It’s not much of a stretch to read the movie as an example of how to break out of the trap of useless, boring upper-middle-class lives. Both the book and the movie presented women constrained by social attitudes that made it difficult (and often impossible) for them to live fulfilling lives. This movie offered the class-renouncing choice of following your feelings, of making decisions that were authentically your own. The free spirits that Kirby hangs out with are what a generation later evolved into hippies. Betty Friedan offered work as the solution. Using one’s talents and skills to do useful work outside the home would enable women to take control of their lives. Either way, women’s lives would no longer be wasted sacrifices on the altar of respectable matrimony.
     There have been many similar movies about bored, frustrated, unhappy women and their attempts to find meaning in their lives. Around the same time, stories and movies about men’s failures to live fulfilling lives also came to dominate literature and movies. Consider The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, made as a movie in 1956. The hero sacrifices his ethics on the altar of respectability, that is, his ability to support his family. The underlying malaise was not so much one of gender roles, but of life roles. Neither men nor women were satisfied with the effects and demands of an economic system that generated immense wealth and made comfortable lives possible, even though for a time that wealth was distributed equitably across all social classes. There’s more to life than stuff and reputation. A couple of decades later, the stories dealing with these themes would have a good deal more edge. James Updike is one of many writers who made careers of chronicling the effects of affluence on the American psyche.
     This movie is worth seeing. It’s slow, you may be tempted to laugh at some of the scenes, the dialogue is passable, the acting competent, there are too many close-ups of suffering-in-silence faces, and there’s a distinct lack of chemistry between the leads, but as documentation of a certain time in America’s social evolution it’s the first of an essential triad. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and Peyton Place (book 1956, movie1957) are the others. As a romance flick of its time, this one rates ****, as a plain old movie **½.

Edited 2023-04-29

5 short book reviews

     Fred Archer The Village of my Childhood (1989) Just what it says. Pleasant low-key style. Archer doesn’t gloss over the bad bits, but he doesn’t emphasise them either. As he says, childhood is a time when he felt secure and nothing seemed to change. Much of the narrative consists of character portraits and anecdotes about particular events. Not as witty as Keillor, but has much of the same affection for small town or village life. Interesting words - a glossary at the end would be a bonus. The photos are not very well reproduced, a fault of much UK printing, even today. I liked this book. ***

     Garrison Keillor Lake Wobegon Days (1985) The first in a series, though GK didn’t know that at the time. A semi-fictional memoir of GK’s years in his hometown, represented by Lake Wobegon. By turn sentimental, wry, cynical, furious, ironic, loving, jaundiced, satirical, etc. Keillor has the knack of making you believe you’ve lived there. The Prairie Home Companion stories preceded and underlie this book, as they do the subsequent ones. ****

     Garrison Keillor Happy to Be Here (1981) Sketches, some of them relating to Prairie Home Companion, and some not. Not as consistently good as Lake Wobegon Days, but pretty good anyhow. My, there I go sounding like a Lutheran! Some of the pieces have real bite; others are merely absurd. Keillor has a good ear for hypocrisy, stupidity, illogic, and especially for fashionable cant. Varies from ** to ****

     Paul Fussell, BAD, or, the Dumbing of America (1991) An attack on stuff that it is not merely bad (on account of ignorance, for example), but that pretends to a superior quality. Splenetic, opinionated, and of course dated in its references, but the principle is still valid. If anything, BAD has gotten worse. However, Fussell’s book on class in America is much superior to this one. **

     Geoffrey Trease Bent is the Bow (1967) Ill. By Charles Keeping, which is the reason we bought this book. The eight short chapters read more like the introductory section of a novel. It is set in the Welsh border wars under Owen Glendower. Hugh and Meg are taken as hostages by the wicked Lord Whitney at the beginning of these hostilities, and eventually escape and return to their own home. Whitney’s son Stephen becomes the master of the neighbouring castle when Whitney is killed. So there are possible complications to come, lots of them. Pity we don’t get the rest of the story. Did Trease lose interest? Did Nelson decide to publish these few first chapters as a teaser? We will never know. **