David Adams Richards of the Miramichi: A Biographical Introduction to His Work 9781442687202

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Cultural Life on the Miramichi
1. Richards’s Ancestry
2. Richards’s Birth and Early Years
3. Oliver Twist and the 1960s
4. Stepping Outside and In: St Thomas University to Small Heroics
5. Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter
6. Ties of Friendship and of Blood
7. ‘The great unwholesome anonymity of North America’: Lives to AA
8. Rebuilding the Base: Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination
Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index

Citation preview

DAVID ADAMS RICHARDS OF THE MIRAMICHI A Biographical Introduction

Widely considered to be one of Canada’s most important authors, David Adams Richards has been honoured with a Giller Prize and two Governor General’s Literary Awards. Despite his success, there has been a dearth of critical appraisal of his life and work. In David Adams Richards of the Miramichi, Tony Tremblay sheds light not only on Richards’s art and achievements, but also on Canadian literary criticism in general. Tremblay maps the early influences on Richards’s thinking and writing by drawing on interviews, archival records, and cultural studies of New Brunswick. He argues that the author is a more sophisticated craftsman than his critical reception has assumed and he makes the case for a more nuanced analysis of his Richards’ writings. Equal parts literary biography, literary criticism, and cultural study, David Adams Richards of the Miramichi provides a rare glimpse into the struggles and triumphs of a New Brunswick artist in a national and provincial milieu. tony tremblay is a professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of English at St Thomas University.

This page intentionally left blank

TONY TREMBLAY

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi A Biographical Introduction

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4162-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-1077-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Tremblay, M. Anthony (Michael Anthony), 1962– David Adams Richards of the Miramichi : a biographical introduction / Tony Tremblay. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4162-4 (bound). ISBN 978-1-4426-1077-4 (pbk.) 1. Richards, David Adams, 1950–. 2. Richards, David Adams, 1950– – Criticism and interpretation. 3. Miramichi River Region (N.B.) – History. 4. Authors, Canadian (English) – 20th century – Biography. I. Title. PS8585.I17.Z64 2010

C813′.54

C2010-900949-5

‘Miramichi Lightning’ by A.G. Bailey appears on page 1 with the permission of G.S. d’Avray Bailey. Every effort has been made to secure permission for the material reproduced in this book. Any oversights or omissions brought to the publisher’s attention will be remedied in subsequent printings of the book. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For Ellen

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

xv

xvii

Introduction: Cultural Life on the Miramichi 1 Richards’s Ancestry 18 2 3 4 5 6

3

Richards’s Birth and Early Years 39 Oliver Twist and the 1960s 62 Stepping Outside and In: St Thomas University to Small Heroics Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter 137 Ties of Friendship and of Blood 177

7 ‘The great unwholesome anonymity of North America’: Lives to AA 210 8 Rebuilding the Base: Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 256 Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 299 Bibliography

327

Illustration Credits Index

345

347

Illustrations follow page 166

102

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

Biography and literary studies constitute a kind of cartography or mapmaking designed to make it easier for travellers to find their ways into and around the territories concerned, which are the writer’s milieu and the writer’s works. Cartographies are often designed for different audiences and for different purposes. It is too much to expect early pioneering maps to be altogether accurate and comprehensive, but all future mapmakers must take these initial findings into account – in other words, must correct their biases and fill them in in order that a more detailed, accurate, and comprehensive pattern may emerge. Fred Cogswell ‘Alden Nowlan’ (46)

For readers of the broader cultural narrative of Canadian literature, David Adams Richards is an intriguing figure. New Brunswick’s foremost English-language writer since the Fredericton School of the Confederation Poets in the 1890s, he is most frequently characterized as an enfant terrible, his presence seeming to unsettle those in positions of institutional power. The reasons for this are numerous and complex. For one, he has refused categorization and has publicly shunned the ideological barometers of his day. For another, he has perfected a very un-Canadian realism that is, to some, disturbing in its contrast to what they take to be real. Whatever the reason, his position on the outside has meant that his apprenticeship has been difficult, leading him to end relationships, burn bridges, and pull himself back from the near-fatal clutches of alcohol and despair. He has done battle with critics, fighting in essays and interviews for a more considered reading while turning his own struggles for legitimacy to his art. He has not written about himself directly; instead he has put the examination of his own person to an understand-

x

Preface

ing of the fragilities and contradictions that all characters, fictional and otherwise, confront. In the still colonial, still adolescent, still overheated field of Canadian literature, he has been for fiction what Al Purdy was for poetry. He is not and has never been an academic, nor has he been affiliated with any school or movement. The single-minded pursuit of his vocation cast off those choices as compromises. He rarely talked about writing; rather, he read and he wrote, embracing the solitary craft with a steadfastness that eludes most people. First published at twenty-three, and financially impoverished for most of the next fifteen years, he has written more than one book every two years of the past thirty, an astonishing track record that contains little of what is not essential. Roughly every second book has been a refinement or departure – an indication of restlessness and growth and of his own unease with what he has made and how it has been received. Despite his lack of academic credentials, his talent, like Purdy’s, has been nourished by years of self-study. From the start, he possessed the ability to find writers when he needed them, displaying a precociousness of inquiry obscured by an unbookish persona that, like Van Gogh’s, always preferred the company of the working to the professional class. ‘By the time I was 19,’ he told one interviewer, ‘I had the philosophy that is now the core of what I have today’ (G. Williams 7). Like Purdy, he has cultivated what Nancy Robb has called a remarkable ‘ear for common speech’ (24), an ear that most critics consider the cornerstone of his extraordinary fidelity to the real. But his achievement must also include the battles he has waged for the legitimacy of social realism as literary expression. In this, his writing life and reception are paradigmatic of the way in which art has always been received through the filters of institutional power. Because his realism has been particularized in a region, class, and ethical system that have enjoyed little more than fetishized attention over the past thirty years, the reception of his Maritime, working-class, Catholic world has been politicized by those interested in controlling the terms of the always public literary discussion. In short, his realism has too boldly countered the accepted social romance of our day, challenging the folk stereotypes that Ian McKay has so eloguently described. His reception thus brings to the fore the struggle in Canada to claim the political ground for which literary language is used to popularize what is in the national interest. So it is true there has been much disagreement about his work – that readers react emotionally to it, rarely taking a middle ground – yet that very reception, his astute critics remind us, reflects ‘the way Richards has

Preface

xi

been positioned in [the] cultural economy’ and should therefore raise questions for readers ‘about literacy, individual responsibility, and social power’ (Armstrong and Wyile 17). Richards’s work has been no more political than that of other Canadian writers. Few of those writers, however, have been received as politically as he has – something that tells us more about the institutional practice of reading in Canada than about Richards. As Northrop Frye still reminds us, ‘while value judgments tell us nothing reliable concerning the poet about whom they are made, they tell us a great deal concerning the cultural conditioning of the person who makes the judgment’ (‘Myth’ 465). Lawrence Mathews would repeat these words almost exactly when he called into question the ‘central-Canadian assumptions about class and region’ that inform so much of Richards’s reception (189). That reception affirms Valéry’s statement that, in teaching us that we have not seen what we see, the artist stands alone, more often censured than celebrated, sometimes driven to madness by the denials of what he sees so clearly. As a child with a birth injury, Richards began a step behind others when physical prowess was the sole measure of achievement. He caught up on the strength of a stubborn and tenacious resolve, the first signs of a wilful personality that would later manifest itself in obsessions with tobacco, alcohol, and nationalist politics. Excess has always been his rule: nothing by halves or compromises. As was said of Dostoevsky, he has refused neither poison nor pain. His sometimes rabid protection of his vision has cast him with the visionaries, rife with the same paradoxes of certainty, suffering, loneliness, and toil. Fiercely loyal to his river and his people, and unswerving in his protection of them, he has felt betrayed and unwelcomed by the misjudgment of his townsfolk. Yet for all the wildness and scars, and despite his journeys through self-doubt and the dark spiritualists who guided him, an undeniable innocence pervades his work. It is an innocence of simple faith in mercy and human concern, communicated in a manner that causes what Heinrich Heine called weltschmertz, or wound in the heart. To read his work with care is to be saddened by the world’s contradictions and pained by its lack of charity. His rebel yell is no more complicated than that, yet it has been ridiculed for finding enlightened New Age humanisms self-interested and unjust. His spiritualism has been especially unwelcome in an age when secular prophets have grown fat on social evangelism. Not surprisingly, the harshest critics of his work have been the power brokers who fix and usurp, who use ideas to represent special interests. What has been surprising is the number of professional bookmen who have taken up

xii

Preface

their cause. Their censor has kept him on the outside. He has been fêted and celebrated, yes, but the Maritime, working-class, Catholic world he created has been treated as anachronistic, as something of a spoilt idyll in an age of more progressive urban concerns. His body of work can thus be viewed as a palimpsest through which struggles of definition over nation and region, society and individual, power and freedom are discernible. In disturbing and provoking us, his work reminds us that the artist’s role in society is to interrogate, not affirm, social and ideological truth. In his treatment of Rimbaud, Henry Miller posed a question appropriate to Richards: ‘Of what use the poet unless he attains to a new vision of life, unless he is willing to sacrifice his life in attesting the truth and the splendor of his vision?’ (87). In the pages that follow I chart the confluence of myth, history, and social milieu that form Richards’s cultural and imaginative inheritance. It will become clear how his investigations of the sinewy ties of family and tribe reflect, at base, the preoccupations of a river poet. If the island writer’s prevailing sense is of isolation and circumscription, Richards’s is of restlessness and motion – of tension, moodiness, change, and flux. His syntax has always been that of a river poet, his moods always coloured by the sombre greys and browns of a moving waterway. Not surprisingly, his deliberation has been slow and meandering, as if a world under his pen is steadily gathering. Long before the ideological warriors found him in their crosshairs, the great river at the heart of his work had seduced him. Because the working assumption of this book is that Richards is a writer who has emerged out of a particular place to address a wider humanity, I open my examination with a historical overview of the Miramichi that will establish important cultural and spatial markers. As to the book’s temporal scope, I take it up to the year that Richards won the Governor General’s Award for Nights Below Station Street. Three factors influenced that decision. First, a living subject is too impermanent a figure to warrant a summative biography. Better a formative study. Second, critics of living subjects have access to materials and sources that later biographers do not – a circumstance that prompted me to use the diminishing resources of memory and aging witness to focus on his formative years. Third, winning the GG was a watershed moment, an event that – for reasons I will describe – marked the close of the first half of his writing life. His work after Nights is temperamentally different – more measured and detached, more confident in ethical scope, though, as I argue, anchored

Preface

xiii

firmly to what he wrote early in his career. Since no other critical book on Richards exists, a study of foundations seemed as essential as arriving at preliminary interpretations. Surprisingly, these are still early days in Richards criticism. As with all introductions to an artist’s work (and as I wrote in compiling the first collection of essays on Richards in 1998), I have opened pathways that others will follow and dispute. This biography, then, is both a continuation and another starting point. As Richards’s Uncle Harry observed, David the artist is a work in progress. So too is the public assessment of what he has made.

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

Acknowledging indebtedness for help with a book that has taken the better part of ten years to research and write is no easy task. I’ve had a lot of assistance along the way. I will begin by citing the generosity of many people whom I’ve interviewed, both formally and informally, over the years. To start, I wish to thank members of the Richards and Adams families who consented to interviews, sometimes more than once: Bill Richards (Jr), Mary Jane Richards, John Richards, Paul Richards, and the late Harry Richards, as well as Mac Adams and the late Richard Adams. David Richards, my subject, was also generous with his time and patient with my questions. For his permission to quote from unpublished materials in his papers, I am particularly grateful. David Richards’s teachers, Newcastle neighbours, childhood and university friends, and literary peers were also invaluable to my work. Though too numerous to list, the following were especially helpful: Sr Kathleen Chisholm [Sr St David], Sr Nona Daley [Sr St John Daniel], Doug Underhill, Doug Shanahan, Leo Ferrari, Richard Kennedy, Tony Rhinelander, Allen Bentley, Stan Atherton, Richard Parks, Giles and Yolande Kenny, Bruce Wallace, Glenn Black, Fred Glover, Kerry and Mrs Casey, Robert McCoombs, Peter McGrath, David Savage, Peter Baker, Robert ‘Trapper’ Newman, David Smith, Neil McEachern, Bill Richardson, Robert Gibbs, Kent Thompson, Brian Bartlett, Eric Trethewey, Wayne Johnston, Sharon Fraser, Ted Colson, the late Fred Cogswell, Michael and Nicholas Macklem, Jon Pedersen, Michael O. Nowlan, Elizabeth Brewster, Jack Hodgins, Greg Cook, and the late Joseph Sherman. For guiding me through the intricacies of Miramichi culture, I am especially grateful to Wayne Curtis, Ray Fraser, Bill Spray, Paul and Maureen Morrissy, the late David Butler, and the many amateur (but important) historians on whose work I relied.

xvi

Acknowledgments

I also wish to acknowledge the significant role my university played in supporting this project. Vice President Academic Richard Myers provided unstinting support, as did my peers at St Thomas, especially Sylvia Hale, Peter Toner, Michael Boudreau, Michael Higgins, Doug Vipond, and Stewart Donovan. I have been equally lucky in the support and advice I received from distant colleagues (Herb Wyile, Jeanette Lynes, Cynthia Sugars, Paul Tiessen, Gwen Davies, Andy Wainwright, and the late Terry Whalen). Each played an important role in enabling me to write this book. As well as having generous colleagues, I have been fortunate in the quality of the clerical support I’ve received at St Thomas from Margie Reed and Anita Saunders. Student researchers – notably Paul Watson, Amy Marie Saunders, and James McKay – as well as archivists Mary Flagg, Tanya Brown, and Pat Belier at the Harriet Irving Library, UNB, have also been invaluable. Parts of this volume have been published in essay form in the following journals and books, whose editors I also wish to acknowledge: ‘David Adams Richards: Canada’s “Independent” Intellectual.’ Hollins Critic 36, no. 4 (October 1999): 1–14. Reprinted in Twayne Companion to Contemporary Literature in English, ed. R.H.W. Dillard and Amanda Cockrell. New York: Twayne, 2002. 277–86. ‘“Lest on too close sight I miss the darling illusion”: The Politics of the Centre in “Reading Maritime.”’ Studies in Canadian Literature. Special Issue (‘Surf’s Up! The Rising Tide of Atlantic-Canadian Literature’). ed. Herb Wyile and Jeanette Lynes. 33, no. 2 (2008): 23–39. ‘Mapping David Adams Richards’ Imagined Miramichi in “The Upriver Accent and the Accent of the Bay.”’ A Literary Atlas of Atlantic Canada, ed. J.A. Wainwright. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Forthcoming.

Thanks, as well, must go to SSHRC for support in the early days of my research; to the Canada Research Chairs Secretariat for support in the last two years of writing and editing; and to the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences for a subvention to publish this work. In the ASPP process I had the good fortune to work with Kel Morin-Parsons, who provided support and advice with the utmost professionalism. Final thanks must go to my many friends in the CCRR (especially Bernie, Tom, Steve, Harry, Jeff, Mike, John, and Dave) for years of spiritual sustenance. And, inadequate as it will be, the last word must be reserved for my wife Ellen, herself an academic, whose radiance and care make everything possible.

Abbreviations

For convenience, abbreviated titles of Richards’s works are below. For full bibliographic citations, see the bibliography at the back. Dancers Evening Snow God Is Gusties Hockey Dreams Hope Lines Lives Meager Fortune Mercy Nights River Stilt House Winter Wounded

Dancers at Night Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace God Is: My Search for Faith in a Secular World The Keeping of Gusties Hockey Dreams: Memories of a Man Who Couldn’t Play Hope in the Desperate Hour Lines on the Water: A Fisherman’s Life on the Miramichi Lives of Short Duration The Friends of Meager Fortune Mercy among the Children Nights below Station Street River of the Broken Hearted Road to the Stilt House The Coming of Winter For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down

This page intentionally left blank

Lastly, among the scrolls, the book of the living was opened. The dead were judged according to their conduct as recorded on the scrolls. The Book of Revelation 20.12

Miramichi Lightning The sachem voices cloven out of the hills spat teeth in the sea like nails before the spruce were combed to soughing peace. They said a goliath alphabet at once and stopped to listen to their drumming ears repeat the chorus round a funeral mountain. Hurdling a hump of whales they juddered east, and there were horse-faced leaders whipped the breath from bodies panting on the intervals. The lights were planets going out for good as the rancour of a cloud broke off and fell into the back of town and foundered there. A.G. Bailey, Thanks for a Drowned Island

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: Cultural Life on the Miramichi

A river, a great teeming river the likes of which would not be seen after St Lawrence for two thousand miles or more … a river in New Brunswick that would swallow you with its life, shout in its rapids, laugh in its eddies, create industry in its currents, a river of Irish and Scottish myth, wedded to the soil … our great sad river in New Brunswick, what had it created for the outside world? It had created the greatest ships under sail ever to be managed by a line, and that line was the Cunard shipping line. In like fact, it had created the man, emboldened and disliked, who would help Churchill win the Battle of Britain – Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. Our great river in the north so obscure had guaranteed the Spitfire, had quarried the stones for the Parliament Buildings, had matured a prime minister of Canada and a prime minister of Great Britain. River (56)

Here[,] Steven thought[,] there once was salmon forever, and in the spring my grandfather was kept awake at night hearing the June run. ‘We, Who Have Never Suffered’ (85)

The Miramichi region of central New Brunswick extends the length of the main southwest Miramichi River from the lumber villages of Juniper and Boiestown in the west, past the coastal towns of Newcastle and Chatham, to the mouth of Miramichi Bay near Loggieville and Bartibog. From its headwaters to the harbour’s entrance, the river runs more than 150 miles laterally through the middle of the province, encompassing a great variety of communities, farms, mills, and other industries along the way. The region is resource-dependent, and its most important resource is the river.

4

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

The river is unique in New Brunswick for the singularity of the community along its length. For locals, ‘to come from Miramichi’ (pronounced MARE-ma-shee) means to have grown up somewhere along the inland waterway. The remote villages of Doaktown and Blackville lay as much claim to its waters as do Newcastle and Chatham fifty miles away. While there are many differences among the river people in language, religion, politics, and ethnicity, the river is a powerful constant that moves through their history of fish, lumber, and sail. It defines their clannishness, informs their history, and feeds their myth. For Blackville writer Wayne Curtis, their bond is made mystical ‘by a simple flow of water’ (Currents xiii). Richards has been unequivocal about the river’s central place in his own life, and lyrical in his descriptions of its waters. ‘I remember the water as dark and clear at the same time,’ he wrote in his non-fiction memoir Lines on the Water. ‘Sometimes it looked like gold or copper, and at dusk the eddies splashed silver-toned, and babbled like all the musical instruments of the world’ (1). His characters have the same affinity with the fictional river that is the life force of their landscape. From upriver or down, they follow it like a songline, tossed and implicated in its various moods and seasonal changes. What makes their river great, makes them great in turn, and what diminishes it, diminishes them accordingly. Many come to know themselves by first getting to know their river. Cathy from Blood Ties is typical, her sense of self and lifeblood defined by waters: ‘It was downriver now, the night and the open bay. The bay swelling large, and the wharf smelling of the nets and traps pulled up on it, the distant blackness of water, and the smell of tar … It was the blackness of the water and night inseparable one from the other. The small wharf light flickering, the sound of the waves brutal over the slip. [Cathy] could be with it, know it – the scraps of the herring rotting, the salt brindled into the net’ (64–5). Neither the Saint John nor the Restigouche (the other two major rivers in New Brunswick) has cultivated a similar identification. Vibrant communities with identical resource economies populate those rivers, but without the equivalent sense of ethos and clan. The difference is important, for it has given rise to a body of myth, folklore, and music that sets Miramichiers apart from other New Brunswickers. Some 10,000 years ago, before the arrival of the Europeans, the Mi’kmaq (of the Algonkian language group) inhabited what is now central New Brunswick. Their name for the river – ‘Lustagoocheehk’ – along with

Introduction: Cultural Life on the Miramichi 5

the Montagnais word for ‘Mi’kmaq Land’ gave rise to the anglicized ‘Miramichi.’ The survival of these first peoples depended on their intimate knowledge of the land and river systems, for they did not merely live on the land; they viewed themselves as part of it, as one animal in an interconnected web of life. Rabbit populations, cloud and wind patterns, and yearly differences in ice floes and blueberry yields constituted their sign system. Europeans might explain these natural phenomena by science or superstition, but for the Algonkian people the north woods were inseparable from the textures and rhythms of community life. Today, Mi’kmaq communities still exist along the Miramichi at Burnt Church, Red Bank, Eel Ground, Big Hole Tract (Sevogle), and Indian Point (Sunny Corner). First contact with the Europeans was made in the early 1500s, when Breton and Basque fishermen followed runs of cod and salmon west into Miramichi Bay. In 1534, Jacques Cartier sailed by on his ‘First Voyage,’ noting in his journal that the salmon along the northern coast (particularly the Baie-des-Chaleurs) were so thick they could be scooped up in buckets. Not until the Seigneury of Gaspésia was granted to French governor Nicolas Denys de Fronsac in 1648, however, were settlements founded in what is now New Brunswick. Nicolas’s son Richard Denys de Fronsac was placed in charge of his father’s fort at Nelson, a few miles upriver from the present site of Chatham, and his followers conducted trade along both sides of the river. Unlike most Acadian settlers in the Maritimes during this period, who were farmers, Denys’s Miramichi French were merchants, many of whom had come to enrich themselves as traders. As Denys’s journal entries on the salmon resource indicate, their penchant for myth making started early: ‘So large a quantity of [salmon] enters into this river that at night one is unable to sleep, so great is the noise they made in falling upon the water after having thrown or darted themselves into the air’ (199). The Miramichi place names of Bay du Vin, Baie-Ste-Anne, French Fort Cove, and Neguac owe their origins to early French settlement on the river. More French settlers arrived after the expulsion of the Acadians in 1755. In 1756, French General Charles de Boishébert established a refugee camp for the expelled at the east end of Beaubear’s Island (a later corruption of his name). Covering approximately 300 acres at the confluence of the north and southwest branches of the river three miles above Newcastle, Boishébert’s ‘Le Camp d’Espérance’ or Camp of Hope held more than three thousand Acadians fleeing from farms around Chignecto and the lower Saint John River Valley. During their first win-

6

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

ter on the island, almost eight hundred of these refugees died from starvation and exposure after British troops blocked essential supplies and corrupt French bureaucrats traded food intended for the refugees for furs. The area around Beaubear’s Point where the dead are buried is now a Parks Canada National Historic Site. That incident is remembered to this day as the first great tragedy and betrayal on the Miramichi. In 1765, five years after British Commander John Byron razed Boishébert’s camp, British settlement of the Miramichi began when two young Scots, William Davidson from Banffshire and John Cort from Aberdeenshire, acquired a 100,000-acre township grant from George III. Their first enterprises were a salmon fishery and a shipyard on Beaubear’s Island. One of New Brunswick’s first ships, the 300-ton Miramichi, was launched from their shipyard in 1773. Scottish settlers from New Hampshire, Vermont, Banffshire, Aberdeenshire, and Moray Firth soon began arriving to aid Davidson and Cort; most of them earned their livelihood catching and salting fish and exporting it to overseas markets. This influx in turn attracted artisans, labourers, and merchants to the region, thereby fulfilling Davidson’s promise to ‘[settle] this vast wilderness tract with “one Protestant person” for every 200 acres’ (quoted in Hamilton, Miramichi Papers 84). Today’s larger towns and villages on the river were originally individual or corporate lots parcelled out to settlers at this time. Reliance on the fishery was short-lived on the Miramichi, however; once the pine stands had been depleted along the St John River Valley one hundred miles to the south, lumbering operations moved northward, where ‘the Miramichi was to ring with the chop of the broad-axe and the shriek of the sawmills’ (MacNutt 139). The Protestant ethic of the hard-working Highland Scots made this transition possible. After quick retrofits of his shipyard and two sawmills, William Davidson landed a major contract to export white pine (for masts) and black birch (for staging) to the Royal Navy. As surveyor Sir John Wentworth wrote in a 1787 letter to Edward Winslow, ‘I have found on this river the best mast timber in British America … which are inestimable to Great Britain. I think the pine timber for size, length, and soundness exceeds any I have seen in New England, & there are enough of them’ (quoted in Fraser, Gretna Green 40). Just before the Great Miramichi Fire of 1825 wiped out these vast pine stands, timber was leaving Miramichi ports by the following tonnage, as reported in James A. Pierce’s paper, The Mercury: ‘351 vessels left the ports of Chatham and Newcastle for Britain, carrying 155,040 tons of

Introduction: Cultural Life on the Miramichi 7

pine, 1,300 tons of hardwood, 3,161 cords of lathwood, 1,069,260 feet of deals, 1,752 spars, 615 price oars, 1,418 handspikes, 48,633 staves, 103,369 stave billets, 627 feet of birch plank, 288 poles, and 220 rickers’ (quoted in Mannion 29n32). Even twenty-five years after the Great Fire had destroyed six thousand square miles of forest around the Miramichi, ‘almost every foot of shore on both sides of the river from Beaubair’s [sic] Island to Loggieville was part of a shipyard’ (Manny and Wilson 26). Crews of five hundred men each were building a ship every two weeks at numerous sites on both sides of the river. Yards at Beaubear’s were competing against yards at Nordin and Douglastown, a few miles downriver; yards at Newcastle were competing against yards at Nelson and Chatham. There were more shipwrights on the Miramichi during this period than anywhere else of comparable size in Canada. Venture capital was easy to secure, and inducements to shipwrights promising high wages were plentiful in the regional press. The transition from fishing to lumbering and shipbuilding after 1800 brought major benefactors to the region. Among the most notable were Alexander Rankin and James Gilmour, who brought Gilmour, Rankin & Co., a Glasgow business, to Douglastown in 1812; William Abrams, who built a shipyard at Rose Bank, now Nordin (just below Newcastle); Joseph and Henry Cunard – younger brothers of the Halifax shipping magnate Samuel Cunard – who began business in Chatham in 1820; and J.B. Snowball, who became one of New Brunswick’s largest lumber barons at the height of the timber boom. Though rivals in industry, these businessmen were single-minded in their pursuit of the built community, distributing the capital for infrastructure in the region. Classically influenced, if not educated, they became the region’s most magnanimous citizens, practised in the eighteenth-century gentleman’s ethic of extending charity of various kinds. Hospitals, stores, company houses, smallpox and marine vaccination centres, light and telephone utilities, schools, churches, and railway links were built with land and materials they donated. One citizen’s thoughts in the Chatham Gleaner after the opening of the Seamen’s Hospital in Douglastown in 1830 reflects the social ethic of the times, recalling the legacy of northern Italy’s Santa Maria della Scala, the hospital that had been in service since the eleventh century: ‘We want a building that will tell future generations the extent of our commerce and stamp with the epithet “humanity” the era that produced the Seamen’s Hospital at Miramichi’ (quoted in Martin 57). The hospital more than earned its reputation for humane action, becoming the region’s centre for relief and fund-raising campaigns in

8

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

aid of Highland and Irish famines, as well as a smallpox treatment centre for the region’s Aboriginal people. Though the admix of entrepreneurship and philanthropy among early builders was common in emergent settlements, the Miramichi experience was different in degree, setting a precedent later followed by other benefactors and native sons, many of whom tried to outdo their rivals in civic largesse. Their names continue to be respected on the Miramichi, none more than Max Aitken, known to New Brunswickers as Lord Beaverbrook, the name taken from Beaverbrook Stream near Newcastle, where a four-year-old David Adams Richards took his first trout (Lines 128). Lord Beaverbrook continued the tradition of philanthropy that had enriched the region, practising the gentleman’s covenant of charitable giving as the highest form of citizenship. With the end of the American Revolution in 1783, English-speaking Loyalists began arriving on the Miramichi. Because immigration quotas had not been met, Davidson and Cort’s original land grant was redistributed in two-hundred-acre waterfront lots to hundreds of refugees fleeing the now independent American Republic. The Mi’kmaq and the French, who had backed the Americans during the revolution, and the merchant Scots, who resented their British overlords for reneging on the original township grant, were not happy with the favour being shown to the Loyalists, dubbing them the ‘King’s Friends.’ The bitterness that resulted from the clash of ‘old’ and ‘new’ settlers was more intense on the Miramichi than elsewhere in the province. The area’s first sheriff, Benjamin Marston, recorded the lawlessness in his 1785 Diary, and the Miramichi folk songs ‘A New Song Called Mullins Boom’ and ‘The Banks of the Gaspereaux’ capture the social unrest that accompanied rapid expansion. One of the original sources of tension on the Miramichi had manifested itself. When Irish immigration to the Miramichi began around 1815, tensions became more heated still. Once the economic boom of the Napoleonic Wars had ended and pastoral farming began to take hold in Europe, famines and land shortages forced a number of poor Catholic Irish to seek a new start. Many came to the Miramichi from rural areas in north Munster, where agrarian rioting had been widespread. Their migration marked the beginning of the Catholic presence on the river. (Anglican and Presbyterian churches had established the earliest footholds, registering marriages and baptisms in the 1810s. Not until the 1820s, however, would Catholic churches be built on the Miramichi.) These poor

Introduction: Cultural Life on the Miramichi 9

northern Catholics were the ‘folk’ Irish of W.B. Yeats’s Celtic Twilight – those not yet entirely detached from their pre-Roman Druidic roots. Besides a love of music, storytelling, and drink, they brought with them the agrarian rituals of planting the spring May Bush (connected with the worship of the Virgin Mary) and celebrating the fall harvest with the traditional caulcannon meal followed by a raucous Halloween eventide. Both traditions of revelry continue to find expression on the Miramichi, where church suppers followed by the burning of tires and potato stalks are popular Halloween events. Their significance would not escape Richards when he penned his historical epic of the region: There’d be the strangely comical and hideous dress of the Hallowe’en party – of skirts and dresses out of age and fashion and rouge implanted on the cheeks of girls, and the stony smell of alcohol, sweat and crêpe in the night. There’d be fights along the river also this night – maybe a dozen sets of dishes would be broken, there’d be men and women in the bars, and a barrel thrown through this window and that … There’d be the police sirens – the thousand and one rooms not giving up one ounce of human commitment until morning, with fog in the hollows – the bottles and sacks and masks in the ditches. (Lives 148)

Crammed into the holds and steerage decks of timber ships – ‘Overcrowding being a matter of simple economic greed’ (MacLeod 23) – the Irish arrived on the Miramichi sick and weakened by their long voyage, having endured rough seas and meagre rations only to be deposited on unwelcome shores. Many were quarantined at the mouth of the bay during their first months in New Brunswick. The strong ones logged in the woods or loaded boats for their return voyages to the British Isles. A lucky few acquired riverfront lots on the Barnaby, Bartibog, Renous, Sevogle, and Cains rivers, all tributaries of the Miramichi. The choice lots on the main river had already been taken by the ‘King’s Friends’; the Catholic Irish took what was left on the secondary waterways, continuing their status as ‘have-nots’ in the New World. Class differences were visible everywhere, including in the schoolhouses. Henrietta Hamill, who attended the same school as William Davidson’s grandchildren, recalled ‘the other pupils [rising] when the Davidsons entered the schoolroom, and … standing until the Davidsons were seated’ (quoted in Manny and Wilson 33). This early division between Irish and French Catholics and Scots and Loyalist Protestants would have a marked impact on the later social and economic development of Chatham and Newcastle, the two

10

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

main towns on the river. Chatham continues to be more Irish and Catholic than wealthier Newcastle, a result of early Irish settlement patterns in and around Nelson and Barnaby River on the south (Chatham) side of the Miramichi. Richards’s early work is rife with the inheritances of this historical sociology of settlement. His description of the Savoie family in Wounded captures the feelings of inadequacy in the face of privilege – feelings that continue to inform the subculture of the region: Once, Lucy remembered, a man came into the house, a short man with the kind of ginger-coloured, finely tailored fur coat of a man who has always managed to make his life complete by acquiring things those around him did not have. And she remembered the worst terrible abuse coming from this man’s mouth because her father had forgotten to move a crate for him. This was the man, her father had told them, who had as much as a million dollars. He had also told them that he was in this man’s will, and Lucy and her little sisters had always thought of this man, and how he was helping them, and how they would all be quite rich, just as soon as he died. And then with all the children standing there he began to yell abuse at her father: ‘I don’t need to take this from you, you rotten, no-good son of a bitch,’ he said to her father while their fish Timmy swam on its side in a bowl of milky water, wagging one fin. ‘You’re a useless, no-good son of a bitch.’ Alvin was sitting at the table, bent over, stirring his tea with a huge tablespoon. Every once in a while he would look up at the man and nod, and then put his head back down again. (40)

The social and psychic ennui caused by the deflation of expectations – the Irish going from tenant farmers in the Old Country to equally lowrent status in the New World, their descendants continuing to have ‘no power over anything’ (Wounded 38) – is part of the remembered history of the region. Chatham historian James A. Fraser recorded the class animosities that formed much of this lore, animosities written up, he noted, in Protestant-owned newspapers and bulletins: ‘A detachment of the 74th Regiment under Lieutenant Davies was sent to Miramichi in 1822 to restore order … The most violent outrages were daily committed upon the Inhabitants, their property seized and carried away by force in open day and in one or two instances their Houses and Barns burnt by Gangs of uncivilized emigrants from Ireland with whom the Country was at that time and is at present thronged’ (quoted in By Favourable Winds 28). The unruliness caused by rum also fanned the flames of class difference and

Introduction: Cultural Life on the Miramichi 11

animosity. The import logs from the Port of Miramichi tell the story: in 1818, 9,511 barrels of flour and 1,717 barrels of pork were brought into Miramichi Bay; the same year, 58,715 gallons of rum, 4,442 gallons of wine, and 8,382 gallons of brandy and gin landed on the docks (Arbuckle 64). The volume of arriving spirits far outweighed that of dry goods. Ethnic and class tensions between Newcastle and Chatham reached their height in the ‘fighting elections’ of 1843. John Ambrose Street, a Newcastle lawyer backed by Alexander Rankin of Gilmour, Rankin & Co. (Douglastown), faced off against John T. Williston, a Registrar of Deeds and Wills backed by Joseph Cunard of Chatham. In that era, writes Fraser, ‘all those in a candidate’s employ were expected to vote for him or the man he backed’ (Gretna Green 72). And since voting by secret ballot would not become the law until 1852 in New Brunswick, elections to the House of Assembly were wild and often violent public affairs that lasted for days. Supporters of each candidate travelled from poll to poll trying to outnumber and intimidate rivals. When the threat of greater numbers didn’t work, mob coercion and violence ensued, as it did in 1843. Street brawls and property damage were rampant during the week of voting that year. The worst of the lawlessness occurred when three hundred of Cunard’s employees arrived at the Newcastle courthouse to vote for Williston. Rankin’s employees, led by Big Jim Bass of Douglastown, were waiting with rocks, sticks, and bottles that had been concealed under sod. Special cudgels had even been crafted in Gilmour, Rankin & Co.’s mill for the siege. By the time it ended, forty people had been injured and one man had died, thereby widening the divisions between citizens on the two sides of the river and solidifying the north-side coalition of Newcastle and Douglastown. William Wyse’s account of the aftermath of the 1843 riot is still well known to Miramichiers: Enmity between the parties was very bitter for a year or more, so that very few ventured to cross the river into the other enemy’s camp. I saw a young man from the Rankin party, who had come over from Douglastown to Chatham, kicked and cuffed from Water Street to Coulson’s Slip, where the ferryboat crossed at that time, and was very badly hurt. A night or two after the election, someone went around after everybody had gone to bed, and marked the windows or doors with tar, of every Rankin voter or suspected sympathizer. (quoted in Curtis 1988, 141)

The editorial in the following week’s Gleaner renewed the call for greater civil and military authority.

12

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Though the ‘Golden Age’ of the Miramichi lasted some three generations until the 1850s, outside factors were conspiring to bring an end to the early settlers’ prosperity. Most decisive was the advent of steampowered ships with their iron-clad hulls. Joseph Cunard’s bankruptcy in 1848 – he was chased out of town by unemployed shipbuilders – and Alexander Rankin’s untimely death in April 1852 were the final blows. The Gleaner’s obituary for Rankin signalled the end of an era: Mr. Rankin came to this country in the year 1812; and has thus been for forty years a resident in Miramichi. By the blessing of God upon his steady industry and careful attention to business, he had realized a large fortune; while by the uniform uprightness of his conduct, and kindness of his manners, he secured the esteem of all who had dealings with him, to a degree which has seldom been equaled … He devoted a great deal of his time to public affairs, uniformly supporting whatever he believed would be for the real interest of the country. (3 May 1852)

Gilmour, Rankin & Co. would continue to build its ‘ABC’ ships – socalled because they were named in alphabetical order. Even so, the boom times on the Miramichi had ceased by the time of Confederation. Market swings in the lumber industry and losses from the Great Fire finally ended the region’s prosperity. The last square-rigged ship was built at The Rocks in Newcastle in 1880, only a few months after the infant Max Aitken’s arrival in Newcastle and the beginning of the modern, postConfederation era. The clash of interests and fortunes among settlers was an inescapable part of the Miramichi’s frontier decades. Part of the region’s uniqueness is to be found in the stories and colourful chroniclers who recorded those years, thus contributing to a cultural narrative that is the still-living legacy of the region’s early period. The beginnings of a storytelling tradition are always indeterminate, a matter of circumstances and pressures that collide fortuitously with history. The Miramichi case is no exception. One of the contributing circumstances was the disproportionate number of Miramichiers who served in provincial and federal politics, their presence ensuring that the interests of the area would be heard in centres of power. James Fraser (William Davidson’s close friend), Joseph Cunard, and Alexander Rankin enjoyed long terms in the New Brunswick House of Assembly. J.B. Snowball, another industrialist, became Lieutenant-Governor. Peter

Introduction: Cultural Life on the Miramichi 13

Mitchell of Newcastle and John Mercer Johnson of Chatham were Fathers of Confederation. As premier in 1867, it was Mitchell who brought the Intercolonial Railway (the ICR, which had been promised to New Brunswick at Confederation) through Newcastle and east along Chaleur Bay in 1875 (his formidable opponents from Fredericton and Saint John had favoured a western route along the Saint John River Valley). Renowned for his fierce devotion to his people, he once held up federal government estimates for days until the ICR agreed to reimburse a Barnaby River woman for running over her cow. His law partner, John Mercer Johnson, served as Northumberland County’s first Member of Parliament in the new Dominion. Together, Johnson and Mitchell became known nationally as ‘the Northumberland County Smashers’ for their promotion of the Miramichi’s interests. While the politicians attended to the Miramichi’s economic interests, the region’s storytelling tradition was rooted in the labour and entertainment of the folk, particularly from the lumber camps and the docks. Story and song provided diversion for woodsmen, shipwrights, mechanics, cooks, domestics, and carpenters. As folklorists Louise Manny and James Wilson write: The settlers often made up rhymes about local happenings, which were modelled on the earlier songs [‘street songs and come-all-ye’s and the socalled “goodnight songs” which were sung at Execution Dock’] and sung to old tunes. A mixture of old and new songs is still sung in Miramichi. Many of our singers can remember when entertainment in the lumber camps (before the days of radio and television) consisted of songs, dances, fiddle tunes, and stories all given by the woodsmen themselves. But even with the advent of modern ways it is surprising how much of the folk entertainment has survived. Songs sung here two hundred years ago are still known and still sung. (26)

As early as 1826, folk tales were a central feature of the local paper, The Mercury. Stories first told in the camps by bards and river poets were later recycled for the sportsmen who began arriving from the United States in the 1880s to fish and hunt. These stories helped foster an exaggerated sense of region and history – of thunderous log booms, conniving poachers, and immense hook-jawed salmon – which local wits were happy to encourage. Blackville writer and salmon guide Wayne Curtis still entertains sportsmen with his grandfather’s tales of exploits on the river:

14

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi Tom was born in the Gray Rapids district [of Blackville], on the Miramichi River, in December 1870 … Tom’s strength was said to be equal to that of two men his size … He was a stocky, solid man of five feet eleven inches in height. He had thick shoulders and chest, a lean square face, piercing eagle eyes and thinning brown hair. His arms and hands were huge and he was known to have great quickness of both hand and foot. He could walk on his hands across a floating boom of logs or turn a handspring on a log adrift in midstream. He could kick a nine-foot ceiling with both feet or turn a flying handspring with both hands in his pants pockets. So supple was he that he could drop a pocket handkerchief on the floor behind him and, bending over backwards, pick it up with his teeth. Until he was an old man he never opened gates on his farm but jumped over them. One witness said he watched Tom Curtis, aged 70, hold one foot up behind him and use his supporting foot to kick a snowshoe from its resting place three pork barrels high. In Fredericton’s Waverly-Lorne Hotel, in 1892, Curtis kicked a ninefoot ceiling to win a bet that was put up by Alexander ‘Boss’ Gibson, the Marysville industrialist. The astonished hotel proprietor had the footprints in the ceiling framed as a novelty and they remained on display for sixty years … In Blackville, when Tom was working on a mill chimney for Alex Gibson, witnesses watched him lift a 500-pound cask of lime into an express wagon. When the 82-foot mill chimney was officially completed, he walked on his hands around the top rim of the stack while the villagers celebrated. (Currents 59–60)

Miramichiers to this day can recount similar stories and the names of the legendary storytellers: John Jardine of Black River, who survived and wrote about the Great Fire of 1825; rhymer Larry Gorman, whose pre-meal graces were irreverent cante fable; and Michael Whelan, Poet of Renous, the most famous balladeer in Miramichi history. It was Whelan, born at the forks of the Renous and Dungarvon rivers in 1858, who wrote ‘The Dungarvon Whooper,’ a seventy-two-line narrative poem about the murder of a young cook and the haunting of a lumber camp. Whelan was a devout Catholic whose poems and stories maintained that the highest calling was to work on behalf of one’s fellow man, whatever one’s vocation. Whelan did this not only by celebrating and memorializing his beloved Renous, but also by writing politically about the hardships of the common man. When his natural gift for story met the ‘proletarianism … rooted in Robert Burns’s poetry, and … the more radical labor philosophy of the time’ (Hamilton 69), the result was a local popularity that has not been emulated since. Young people from the Miramichi today,

Introduction: Cultural Life on the Miramichi 15

as in David Richards’s time, continue to memorize and recite Whelan’s ballads. Foremost among Whelan’s enthusiastic readers was the young Max Aitken, who had come to the Miramichi as an infant. Max’s father William, a stern Presbyterian minister, was a strong supporter of Social Gospel, which Whelan propounded in his columns in the Union Advocate. It was through his father’s teachings about Whelan’s sympathetic humanism that young Max learned about civic responsibility. After his financial and political careers made him wealthy – he was a press baron and the Minister of Aircraft Production in Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet – he endowed scholarships and donated money to renovate churches and civic buildings, local parks, arenas, theatres, and much of Newcastle’s town square. In 1953, Beaverbrook bought his boyhood home, the Second Empire–style Old Manse, and donated it to the town, along with thousands of books, as a public library. It was this library that the Richards children visited. Beaverbrook’s encouragement and financial support of Dr Louise Manny, manse librarian, was instrumental in establishing the Beaverbrook Collection of Miramichi Folksongs, one spinoff of which was the Miramichi Folksong Festival, the longest-running folk event of its kind in North America. That support of cultural and historical projects would have a strong impact on the creative life of the community in the 1950s and 1960s, which were Richards’s formative decades. Miramichi ‘society’ was likewise robust, despite the occasional frontier unruliness. In the early nineteenth century, temperance societies, reading clubs, lending libraries, and guild institutes provided opportunities for townsfolk on both sides of the river to attend concerts, dramatic recitations, weekly lectures, and adult literacy classes. In 1906 the well-known Canadian elocutionist Pauline Johnson gave a recital of her poems in the Temperance Hall in Loggieville, appearing ‘in an embroidered buckskin outfit, fringed, with silver brooches pinned around the neck of her dress … a necklace of bear claws, given to her by author Ernest Thompson Seton, beaded bracelets, and a scarlet blanket over her shoulder’ (Belier 11). On other occasions, visiting clergy and scholars lectured on science and philosophy, often to packed houses. Chatham’s society paper The World advertised these evenings as multimedia extravaganzas, complete with photography and illuminated ‘lantern views’ (3: 3 January 1903). One evening, the monologist Elsie McLuhan (mother of Marshall McLuhan) delighted Newcastle audiences from the balcony of the Miramichi Hotel (‘Delightful Recital’ 4). During the same period, the

16

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Mechanics’ Institute – known to locals as the ‘Poor Man’s University’ – hosted free lectures by the country’s leading intellectuals, ‘Dr. Benson, on the Eye; W. Carman, Jun., on the Constitution of Great Britain; Rev. John McCurdy, on the Cultivation of the Mind, … [and] James Caie, on the present Intellectual Condition of Man’ (James Fraser 1975, 97). James A. Pierce’s The Mercury – the first newspaper printed in Chatham (in 1826), and renamed The Gleaner in 1829 – contributed to intellectual life during this period by printing sermons, polemical editorials, and sometimes lengthy extracts from learned overseas magazines. While cultural societies on the river emphasized the importance of knowing the imperial past, Pierce encouraged local clergy to write Miramichi history. His first editorial in the 1829 Gleaner & Northumberland Schediasma announced that ‘we shall hold ourselves indebted to such persons as shall favour us with their correspondence, to which we shall gladly give publicity, so long as they exercise their talents with propriety, and upon such subjects as will be conducive to the benefit of Miramichi, or to the edification of our readers’ (28 July 1829). Declaring himself an amateur scholar of the area’s first two histories – Nicolas Denys’s Description géographique et historique des costes de l’Amérique septentrionale (1672) and Father Chrestien LeClercq’s Nouvelle relation de la Gaspésia (1691) – Pierce became a vocal supporter of Robert Cooney’s A History of Northern New Brunswick and the District of Gaspé (1832), a book that later encouraged William Ganong, D.F. Hoddinott, and other writers to focus on what the Reverend Hoddinott called ‘From Whence We Came.’ Pierce’s call to document the region’s history resonates to this day on the Miramichi, where local histories (by William Spray, James A. Fraser, William MacKinnon, Edith MacAllister, J. Leonard O’Brien, Lois Martin, Doreen Menzies Arbuckle, and William Godfrey) far outnumber those written about other districts in the province. Formalized education for all classes and creeds, legislated by the Free School Act of 1871, further contributed to the social and cultural life of the Miramichi. In the late 1860s, John Harkins’s gift of money built Newcastle’s Harkins Academy, the school attended by Max Aitken as well as by David Richards many years later. In 1869 the Congregation of Notre Dame established a school for girls in Newcastle (St Mary’s Convent), which became a cultural centre of the community. The opening of St Thomas College in Chatham in 1910 enhanced the life of the community – especially its Catholics – even more. Administered by the Diocese of Chatham and the Basilian Fathers of Toronto, that college provided secondary and junior-college level instruction for boys, night courses in

Introduction: Cultural Life on the Miramichi 17

adult and ‘domestic’ education, and a variety of opportunities for locals to attend concerts, lectures, and sporting events. Newcastle Catholics sent their children to St Thomas, as did Catholic families from communities farther afield. The area’s Anglican, Presbyterian, and Catholic denominations shared a commitment to higher learning, and their schools, halls, and service clubs became community centres where the unique Miramichi character was shaped, defined, and handed down to subsequent generations. It was into this milieu that revered history, education, civic munificence, and frontier lore that David Richards’s ancestors arrived. The place they found was an incongruous mix of the rough, sectarian, and parochial with the refined and free-thinking. It was a hyphenated place (of two towns, two religions, and two ethnicities) and a place in transition. It was a place that, thanks to abundant natural resources, had experienced rapid and affluent settlement, attracting immigrants of different backgrounds, classes, and aptitudes who worked out their differences through sometimes violent negotiations – and a place where the fallout from those negotiations was still part of community and family history. It was a place, not nearly as prosperous as it once had been, that had one foot in the nineteenth century and another in the twentieth.

1 Richards’s Ancestry

I wanted things solved for my father’s sake. And Kipsy took an interest in me, and I in her. So she listened to both my father and me for weeks, trying to distinguish fact from fiction – our lives, of course, were filled with both. River (376)

You may think you’ve rejected religion with your mind, but your personality has no more rejected it than dyed cloth rejects its original colour. MacLennan (63)

The earliest record of Richards’s descendants refers to his maternal great-great-grandfather, John Adam, born in Scotland sometime after 1775. John and his wife Elizabeth Gillespie were married in the small hamlet of Echt, Aberdeenshire, on 29 November 1806 and immigrated to Canada with four sons in 1817, settling in the Sillarsville–Kempt Road area of Restigouche, Quebec, a few miles northwest of Campbellton, New Brunswick. The Old Kempt Road, built when the English were forging overland pathways to Quebec to escape possible American invasion, extended from the Restigouche River towards St-Fidèle on the far St Lawrence shore. Its eastern section was one of the first areas to be settled in the early 1800s. By the time John and Elizabeth arrived, other Presbyterian Scots had established farms and lumbering operations. In 1833 their oldest son, John Adams (the ‘s’ was added to the surname in Canada), married Margaret McDonald, a Scot from the Isle of Arran. John and Margaret raised their family in the same fertile Sillarsville area at the junction of the Restigouche and Matapédia valleys. Their seventh child, the youngest, was born in 1846 at Restigouche, Quebec.

Richards’s Ancestry 19

‘Willie’ was a serious child who grew up to be a highly respected member of the community. He married Elizabeth Newcomb MacCaulay in August 1870. They worked hard and got by with little, their lives indistinguishable from those of their parents and grandparents, their concerns ruled by the spring run of logs, the summer salmon, and the fall harvest. Like the generations before them, they developed an intimacy with the Matapédia River, the last tributary that empties into the larger Restigouche River just above Sillarsville. Willie, an elder in the Presbyterian Church, became what locals called a ‘river guardian.’ The precursors of fishing wardens, river guardians were charged with ‘fair dealing’ responsibilities on the waterways, which meant upholding the conservation laws of the Crown Lands Act in New Brunswick. For the devout Willie, however, there was man’s law and there was God’s. Protecting the rights of the salmon was part of the latter, an extension of a larger ecology that his Toryism and Presbyterian ‘election’ conferred. The fifth child of Willie and Elizabeth was George Hudson, David Richards’s maternal grandfather. Born on 15 March 1880 in Sillarsville, George became an occasional farmer who, like the other men of his line, laboured seasonally in the woods. By George’s time, though, sports fishing had become big business on Atlantic Canada’s major salmon rivers, so he spent much of his life in the employ of the Matamajaw Salmon Club in the Causapscal Lake area north of Sillarsville, where he guided fishermen for the Canadian International Paper Company, owners of the club and the lake. ‘One of the most notable concerns of its kind in the world,’ according to one local paper, the Salmon Club included thirty-two members in George’s time, many of whom were among North America’s richest men. People like the Vanderbilts (William K. and Cornelius) were often seen in the area when fish were in the rivers. Only multimillionaires were admitted, club shares running at $10,000 each. Members fished by day and donned evening dress for dinner, while chefs from New York prepared gourmet meals for their delicate palates (Events 7: 28 July 1904). To work in the kitchen or in the boats was the height of achievement for locals, even if the excesses of the time were grotesque, adversely affecting the resource. These were not catch-and-release fishermen but trophy hunters whose social standing demanded that they be able to boast of ridiculously large catches. One report about the nearby Cascapédia River recorded that ‘in one season [1904] Lord Lansdowne and his party killed … 320 salmon, weighing 7,277 lbs. and in the following year Lord Stanley of Preston, now the Earl of Derby, and his party

20

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

killed 300 fish, weighing 7,992 lbs.’ (Events 7: 28 July 1904). On the same river a Mr R.G. Dun caught a fifty-four-pound salmon. As a child, David Richards was brought to Sillarsville to visit his grandfather and uncles on the Matapédia. One of his first memories was of being placed by his Uncle Richard in the bottom of a twenty-four-foot cedar canoe for a picture, the CN train trestle gleaming in the sunlight overhead. Richard had just pulled into shore with a salmon for his mother, the size of which dwarfed the four-year-old boy. With their gear and canoes and mastery of the green-watered rivers, these big men on his mother’s side cut impressionable figures for the young Richards, who would celebrate them later in The Friends of Meager Fortune. When not guiding sportsmen, George worked with his wife’s people, the Pratts. His wife, Mina Pratt (Richards’s maternal grandmother), came from third-generation Presbyterian stock in the village of Matapédia, though she was known to say that it didn’t much matter what race of horse you were as long as you could work. Her brothers had established themselves in the lumber business while working the drives on the Matapédia and later running sawmills of their own, one of them on the family property behind the house. For a time, Mina’s brother Sandy became involved in provincial politics, attempting – with futility, said his mother – to convince Duplessis’s Union Nationale to pay more attention to Quebec’s peninsula. Alongside his wife’s brothers, George cut logs, hauled pulp, and cleared land. With his team of horses, he’d saw railway ties and long lumber for the flat cars lined up along the river in front of his house. In May and June, he and his in-laws would join a crew of 120 men to work the north boom, where the winter’s wood had been corralled from upstream cutting, sorting logs for mills in the area: yellow for Champoux, a sawmill out of Sherbrooke; black for Shives, a mill in Atholville; and green for the Dalhousie Lumber Company. In late October the men would leave for Kedgwick or Nouvelle to spend the winter months cutting trees and hauling them to riverside sheds for the spring drives. Sixty men to a camp would be up at five to feed the horses and haul, often walking for thirty minutes in the morning dark to the cuttings as Christmas neared. The day’s quota was one hundred logs, shared among a team of three men and two horses – two on a crosscut saw and one with an axe for trimming branches. Though the work was hard, the food was plentiful: two lunches during the day (9:30 and 2:30) and supper at 6:30. For six months they subsisted on biscuits, beans, and black tea. In March the men emerged from the woods to follow the logs downriver, breaking up jams along the way. When they got to Sillarsville,

Richards’s Ancestry 21

the bachelors would continue to the larger village of Matapédia, four miles upriver, to unload their earnings in taverns or hop the train for greener pastures. Montreal was the favoured destination of these men, who were perpetually broke, wearied from work, and often on the move. While George was in the woods, Mina would tend the farm’s cows, pigs, and chickens, working with her sister Jane (‘Aunt Janie’ to the kids) to care for her nine children. She always had a big garden and was an expert at making butter from cream. She supervised the children’s hen and egg business. Locals would come to the house to pick up milk and cream at 60 cents a quart. She read the bible every night and knew many of its passages by heart – a small penance, she explained, for having to attend United Churches in Sillarsville and Kempt Road (there was no Presbyterian Church nearby). She was also a history buff who passed on her love of reading and the past to her children. None was more eager to learn than Percy, the third oldest. He became the family’s great reader and locally renowned for his memory. Teased by neighbours for her independent and fighting spirit, Mina once faced down some of her own people, the Pratts, who had come in the night with bank creditors to claim a portion of the family farm. With her children in the cellar and the house fortified against assault, she directed one of her sons to sneak through the woods to fetch his father while she held off her relatives with a shotgun. Her mettle was so strong that none of the Pratts or their posse dared encroach beyond the barn. By the time George arrived at the house, she had kept them at bay for a full day, regretting, she said later, that she hadn’t had the chance to fire. Many years later she defiantly flew the Union Jack in front of her house at the height of the separatist troubles in Quebec, daring francophones to take it down. Even as an old woman she’d pick strawberries on her hands and knees in the worst of black fly season. Her son Richard Nelson – named by Mina after King Richard the Lionheart and Lord Horatio Nelson, victor at the Battle of Trafalgar – joked that there wasn’t a black fly born that would dare bite his mother. In his non-fiction memoir Lines, Richards remembers her ‘[coming] into the dooryard and [grabbing] my arms in hers, and [shaking] them with her still-strong hands, a kinsman of her blood’ (102). When his sons reached working age, anytime after ten, George took them on the river and into the woods. Richard, the second oldest, was a bowman in his father’s canoe at twelve, eventually becoming a legendary salmon guide on the Matapédia, the favourite of sportsmen such as U.S. president Jimmy Carter. Always the wit, Richard delighted in taunting his

22

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

sister’s sons, asking them to send up some Miramichi salmon as bait for the larger fish on the Restigouche and Matapédia rivers. Young David grew especially fond of his uncle’s stories of the woods and water. In one such story, recounted later by the adult writer to describe his ancestry, Richard, a young man of seventeen, accompanies an older man on a full day’s winter trek from one logging camp to another. Halfway through the journey, the older man tires, compelling Richard to build a fire to warm and dry him. After an hour by the fire, the older man tells Richard to go on without him. With the wind shifting and night coming on, the young Richard does what he knows he must: he carries the older man on his back for the rest of the journey, covering seven miles through knee-deep snow. In David Richards’s imagining, Richard’s mother, ‘who cooked for sports and men all her life, would never have expected anything less’ (Lines 105). An equally poignant story that the adult Richards recounts as part of his family narrative is of his Uncle Richard’s big break on the river in the late 1930s. While working on the north boom with his father, Richard is asked by the woodlands manager to go to Causapscal Lake to guide R.J. Cullen, New York Chairman of the International Paper Company. With a bit of fateful luck brought by an overnight rain that has cooled and raised the river, Cullen and his party catch three big salmon with a combined weight nearing one hundred pounds. Cullen is so impressed with Richard’s knowledge of the river that he tells his staff to find a place for him in the company, thus beginning Richard’s seventy-five-year association with the Matamajaw Salmon Club. A grateful Richard looks after Cullen in turn, providing loyal service to him every year and extending similar attention to his American associates, John H. Hinman, President, and Harrison R. Weaver, First Vice-President. For three generations Richard guided every company executive who came to the Matapédia to fish – payback, he would say, for Cullen’s faith in him. Until age ninety, he continued to spend his days in waders and tartan neckties attending to gentlemen anglers who had more money in their pockets than he made in a year, yet he didn’t resent them, for they came to his world as guests and, like all cultivated men, privately envied his wealth. That was the secret that Richard knew and that his nephew would write about: the difference between ‘life knowledge’ and ‘acquired taste’ (Lines 104). These stories of the inner resources of his mother’s people impressed on David Richards the physical courage and loyalty of the working class – markers of character that would become central to his fiction. And while Richards didn’t know his mother’s family as well as his father’s, the values

Richards’s Ancestry 23

and experiences of the Sillarsville Adams would become an integral part of his personal narrative. Less is known about Richards’s mother, though Mina instructed her daughters in the intricacies of domestic work every bit as much as George instructed his sons in the ways of woods and waters. The oldest daughter, yet coming towards the end of the large family of nine, Margaret Jane was born on 14 February 1919 in Sillarsville. A favourite of Aunt Janie, she was smart and pretty, with a fun-loving personality and an easy laugh. As the oldest girl, she was attentive around her mother and aunt, becoming a very good cook as a result. Starting at fourteen, she cooked every summer in Saint John merchant David Pidgeon’s salmon lodge on the Matapédia, leaving in winter to attend the local school half a mile upriver from the family home. She was an above-average student, having absorbed from her strict Presbyterian upbringing the importance of education, but she also felt confined by the high seriousness of her mother’s Calvinist traditions. She wanted to be a nurse – a profession that would have been her passport out – but her family’s financial situation didn’t allow it. Instead, at seventeen, she left Sillarsville for Dalhousie, New Brunswick, a pulp-and-paper town of about four thousand some twenty miles to the southeast. The move was a calculated risk; though Margaret would be on her own, she was going to a town that was still under the protectorate of the International Paper Company, employers of her father and brothers. There, while at a dance one night after her shift at a Cash & Carry grocery, she met Bill Richards, a young Miramichier working as a teller for the Royal Bank. Margaret had seen him a few times driving along the front street in his car – a rare sight on the North Shore in the 1930s. With a good job and a few dollars in his pocket, he was one of the town’s most eligible bachelors. She was independent and striking, having inherited from the Pratts the air of self-possession. Bill Richards’s background was markedly different from Margaret’s. He was of Anglo-Irish stock, the Richards name originating in Wales at the time of William the Conqueror. Little is known about the Richards of Kent because the family records were destroyed during the war and contact with Canada was cut off after remarriage. It is known that William Sr, Bill’s father, was born in Greenwich in 1885, grew up in Bromley in southeast London, and was fragile from birth. His early-onset diabetes disqualified him from a labourer’s life on the family’s small subsistence farm. Instead he developed artistic aspirations, owing partly to the example of a famous writer, Joseph Conrad, whose move to Kent coincided al-

24

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

most exactly with William’s birth. The Greenwich Park area of William’s early days is the site of the Royal Observatory, which anarchists targeted in 1894 – the incident that inspired Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). William acquired a degree in music from the Royal Conservatory in London, becoming a respected pianist and a Victorian gentleman. Seeking a Conrad-like adventure in the clean air of Canada to improve his health, he left England for an impromptu musical tour in the early part of the century. He had been duped, he later said, by the CPR’s Urban Company propaganda films, which literally bribed British citizens to settle in Canada with promises of jobs, land, and all manner of business and leisure opportunities. He boarded ship with a fine piano and all the sheet music he could transport inside it. He planned to visit, not to settle down, and nothing is known about his concerts in Montreal and Halifax (probably because he was not a headliner). His story becomes clear, however, at the point he arrived in Newcastle in 1911. During that stopover, his regular accompanist fell ill, requiring him to look for a replacement violinist among the locals. He found one in Mary Jane (‘Janie’) McGowan, six years his junior, whose family went back three generations in New Brunswick. Next to William’s cultured English worldliness, she was working-class, descended from famine Irish Catholics (Curtis and Ryan) on the Miramichi and Acadian Catholics (Hache and Gallant) fifty miles north in Luger, near Bathurst. The history of her line was that of the vanquished. Her father, Owen McGowan – whose line on the Miramichi originated when three brothers came over from Ireland as brass fitters on the old sailing ships – would dress up in a suit and tie for Battle of the Boyne Day and retire to bed, convinced that the marching Orangemen were going to kill him. Though coming from common stock and living in the rough Enginetown district of Newcastle (so-called because the Irish block housed the big pumps that carried water from the river to the town and mills), Janie was every bit William’s equal in force of personality. In short order, she convinced him to stay on the Miramichi and form a musical partnership with her. He agreed, playing scores for the silent movies at the Opera House in Newcastle and often performing vaudeville numbers in larger ensembles around town. In May 1913, William and Janie married in Saint John while on a tour of southern New Brunswick, Janie’s McGowan relatives in the port city witnessing the nuptials. When they returned from their honeymoon, attitudes towards them had changed. Most thought that Janie had married up, the meaner wags speculating that she had done so with William

Richards’s Ancestry 25

at a disadvantage, his worsening diabetes clouding his judgment. Had she trapped him? Was he desperate for a caregiver? Rumours started to spread; everyone, it seemed, knew her business and opined freely about it. The gossip that reached her said she would have to do a lot more than marry well to secure a future on the Miramichi. She had inherited from her family the suspicion that Protestants looked down on her (she had only a grade eight education), and she could see no reason to question this, so she put her energy into levelling the playing field for herself and her heirs, realizing that she would have to win success on her own terms. She prepared William for a fight, knowing better than he did what was in store for them in Newcastle. Her first task was to convince him to trade on his contacts to get the position of manager of the Newcastle Opera House, which he did in 1914. From then until 1920, she helped him book shows, movies, and concerts. From there, they slowly worked their way into the town’s confidences. From all accounts, she was enterprising, strong-willed, and shrewd, a woman with her stare fixed on the horizon. The Opera House was merely the first step in her plan. However the future unfolded, she wanted more control over her destiny than her brothers had enjoyed: Hughie and Willie had gone off to the Great War, been gassed and shell shocked in the trenches, and returned home as broken men. She would find that control in business, becoming one of Canada’s first female motion picture pioneers. The motion picture industry was a natural choice for Janie and William. They were familiar with film, having provided musical accompaniment for years, and their work at the Opera House had brought them into contact with the people and technology of the new medium. By 1920 the Bioscope Company of Canada had established a national foothold in film. Thirty-five films depicting Canadian life had been produced in their Living Canada series, and a key member of the original Bioscope group, F. Guy Bradford, ‘a very fine type of cultured English gentleman with a real genius for creating enthusiasm’ (quoted in P. Morris 36), had moved to the Maritimes and set up Saint John’s first deluxe movie house, The Nickel. Moreover, the non-propagandistic wing of the burgeoning industry had become concentrated in Montreal and the East: the first Canadian feature film, Evangeline, had been made by the Canadian Bioscope Company in Halifax in 1913. The Eastern Passage, Grand Pré, and Annapolis had been used as backdrops for Longfellow’s tale of the starcrossed Acadian lovers. Even the renowned filmmaking duo of Ernest and Nell Shipman of Back to God’s Country had come to the Maritimes to make feature films.

26

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

When France and Italy withdrew from international film production in 1914, the North American motion picture industry boomed. To exploit this opening, the Motion Picture Patents Company of America streamlined the post-production process in North America, vastly improving distribution so that even small-town Canadian theatres had access to the latest multiple-reel features. Saint John and Miramichi audiences of the 1910s and 1920s were thus as familiar with Mary Pickford, Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Gish, Geraldine Farrar, and D.W. Griffith as were audiences in the big American cities. And the films that were popular in Chicago and Manhattan – Mack Sennett’s slapsticks Mabel’s Dramatic Career (1913) and The Surf Girl (1916); the early westerns Bronco Billy’s Capture (1913) and Hell’s Hinges (1916); and the first films of Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Buster Keaton – were also favourites in Halifax, Saint John, and Miramichi. At this point, Janie and William bought into the motion picture business. However, it wasn’t long before they discovered one of the downsides of a bull market: competition for patrons on both sides of the river was so fierce that some proprietors were not above using questionable and even criminal tactics to eliminate rivals. The muscle employed must have reminded the McGowans of the historical rift between Chatham and Newcastle two generations earlier. It was Cunard versus Rankin all over again as theatre managers vied for first runs of the biggest hits south of the border. The Opera House that William managed was targeted – someone threw a stick of dynamite on the coal pile, hoping it would find its way into the stove. At other times, rivals resorted to threats and vandalism. To make matters worse, the American protectionist monopoly over ‘first-class first-runs’ meant escalating rental costs, which forced William to boost prices at the gate. To survive, he appealed to the goodwill of his patrons, promising to treat them ‘fairly and candidly, and give them the finest productions for the money as can be found in any city throughout Canada.’ He pledged ‘never to charge a cent more for pictures of any kind than is being charged for the same program elsewhere,’ asking the public: ‘Is this not fair?’ (The Union Advocate 1: 13 January 1920). Seeing how these pressures were weakening her husband’s fragile health, Janie left the care of her small children to others so that she could join him in the new business. Her first major challenge was to devise a legitimate way to trump the competition. Aware that the film industry in the United States had transitioned from the nickelodeon era of smoky storefronts and converted concert halls to the more elegant dream palaces of the Hollywood studio system (like the opulent 3,300-

Richards’s Ancestry 27

seat Strand in New York), she concluded that there was money to be made from modernizing theatres on the Miramichi. She suggested to William that they acquire and retrofit a second theatre, the Old Empress. This, she calculated, would enhance the theatre experience for patrons and would also enable her and her husband to double their theatres’ capacity while increasing the number of movies shown. The Union Advocate covered the announcement of the new venture, including its promise of enhanced decor. Janie’s name was prominent: ‘Arrangements are being made for the reopening of the Empress Theatre about the latter part of February. New opera chairs have been ordered and when opened good music will be provided. The new theatre will be managed by Mrs. William Richards of this town’ (8: 17 January 1922). Janie’s anxieties at this time must have been considerable. By 1922, she had a young family – Bill, their first child, Richards’s father, had been born in February 1920, and Katherine two years later – and William’s health was working against her plans for independent success. With William’s health declining rapidly, her real strength of character was revealed in 1923, the year their third child, Harry, was born. That year would be one of Janie’s most tumultuous. On 16 October, two months after the local barber-cum-surgeon had transported him by horse and wagon to the Newcastle station and loaded him onto a train to Montreal, where he would receive experimental insulin treatments, William died at Victoria General Hospital. Janie had left his side the previous day to return to Newcastle to attend to work and the children. He was one of the first patients in Canada to have been administered insulin, a guinea pig for Banting and Best. But it was too late – his condition was too far gone. Harry and Katherine were infants, and Bill was three years old. Janie was a widow with three small children and diminishing prospects, still far from her goal of financial independence. She was, moreover, an Irish Catholic woman in a pinched town of Protestant businessmen. To some, she had not just married up, but trapped a man of higher standing, offering to nurse him in exchange for the social advantage he could bring. To others, she had abandoned her babies to join her husband in business, displaying at best questionable maternal ethics. Rumours started to circulate that William’s parents – who, it was said, had never approved of the marriage – might be coming from England for the children of their blood. And so the town whispered about Janie, its favourite subject. In her grandson’s imagination two generations later, the unrelenting gossip is one of the scourges of his fictionalized family:

28

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi ‘Well, aren’t you the Englishman’s boy and didn’t he start the theatre? And didn’t he bring that kind of music, and all of that? And the movies, and all of that? And the loud pictures from Hollywood, and all of that?’ Rebecca asked, cutting some gristle off her chop. ‘Who says so?’ Miles asked. ‘Well, not me, Miles, dear – I am not the one to say you are a sissy. It’s people downtown. I’m not the one to say it’s Janie’s fault – it’s people downtown. I just sit and listen, a fly on the wall, I am. I don’t think I’m better than youse is – it’s people downtown. I don’t think Janie betrayed her Irish heritage by marrying a Limey. As I say, it’s people downtown.’ (River 114)

With the odds of achieving success now stacked firmly against her, Janie redoubled her efforts. After taking a break from the business upon William’s death – a break during which she partnered with an upstart to establish another theatre in Newcastle, only to be cut out of her share of the profits when the newcomer reneged on promises made – she reentered business as her own boss. As much as she despised betrayal, it was just what she needed to reopen the Empress. A local lumber baron, trusting her mettle, advanced her the necessary start-up cash to reactivate her lease on the property. His was the only Protestant door she ever knocked on, she told her family. Not only did she engage the competition, who were no less ruthless with William gone, but she also continued to battle the middle-class snobbery which held that an unmarried woman – a working-class Catholic from Enginetown, no less – had no place in a man’s business. Unmoved by what her grandson would call the ‘conscious bit of terror heaped upon her’ (River 293), she ran The Empress solo for a number of years, even taking to prowling the Newcastle streets at night with a policeman’s flashlight to catch the young culprits who were pulling down her posters. More than one transgressor felt the crush of her flashlight on his head. Complementing this ‘immaculate will’ (River 195) was her ability to out-think the competition – a quality evident in a shrewd business decision she made a few years after William’s death. Having succeeded with the experiment of modernizing theatre spaces, she correctly intuited that rapid advances in film technology were on their way. With steady improvements in lighting and projection, could sound motion pictures be far off? Few knew as well as the former film accompanist the disjunction in silent films between the audio and visual narratives. And few could imagine the new technology’s potential as well as Janie, who with William had seen Edison’s new epoch-making kinetophone at The

Richards’s Ancestry 29

Nickel in Saint John. Trusting her instincts, she made a bold business decision: she would prepare for the talkies. With loans, mortgages, and a formidable reputation as collateral, she built the Royal Theatre just off the town square in Newcastle – ‘for a long while,’ wrote her grandson, ‘the largest and most imposing structure in our town’ (River 119). It was unique in the area: a dedicated theatre with ‘350 comfortable seats,’ a twenty-eight-foot floor elevation, a twelve-by-forty-foot stage with base lights and a picture screen, and a projection room rivalling ‘those in the large cities’ (‘Royal Theatre …’ 1). It opened on 10 November 1928 with two evening showings of The Lone Eagle. To welcome her customers, Janie took a page out of her late husband’s charm book, announcing that the new theatre reflected ‘her faith in the town’ (1). But that was as friendly as she would get. To show her competitors that she would not tolerate hijinks, she insisted that The Royal’s ads in local papers contain this warning: ‘Any person destroying advertising on bill boards will be prosecuted’ (‘Warning’ 8). Janie had been widowed for only three-and-a-half years when her plans for The Royal took shape. At the time, her second husband, Vincent (‘Vince’) McLaughlin, a CN railway man from Nelson, had just come into the picture, and her oldest son Bill was not yet ten years old. To understand the respect she earned from town and kinfolk alike, we must make note of her daring. In the mid-1920s, synchronous audio accompaniment – as the technology of the talkies was then called – was still in its infancy and thus a highly speculative proposition. Studio executives had calculated that theatre conversions would cost them millions – as much as $25,000 per theatre. The entire film industry might collapse if the transition from silents to talkies was handled rashly. The capital investment in silent productions would have to be written off; the star system would have to be reconfigured to account for actors’ voices; and costly translation services would be needed in order to sell American productions in foreign-language markets. To complicate matters, the industry was reeling from competition from radio and automobiles, both of which were suddenly within reach of families. In this climate, most theatre proprietors had dismissed talkies as a fantasy and a passing fad. Movie critics concurred with the proprietors, musing in print that soundon-film would diminish aesthetic values, for talkies lacked the texture and sweet lyricism that gave silents their imaginative range. Who, after all, would want the coarseness of the human voice to dispel the celestial magic on the silver screen? Considering their bottom lines and what they judged to be their patrons’ lack of interest in the new technology,

30

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

proprietors in small markets without studio backing for retrofits rejected the talkies and pressured their peers to do the same. But these practical concerns did not deter Janie. She had the foresight to insist that her builders wire the new theatre so that when the talkies came, the interior could be quickly converted to accommodate the new medium. If talkies didn’t materialize, she would be out five thousand dollars for unused knob-and-tube wiring, sound equipment, and projection design. But as we know from history, her gamble paid off. When the talkies came to New Brunswick in late 1928, Janie signed an exclusive ten-year contract with American distributors of the new sound films that made her the unchallenged doyen of talking pictures on the Miramichi. The first such picture was shown at her Royal Theatre in Newcastle in 1929, only a few months after it opened. As she had planned, the conversion was almost seamless: The Royal made the shift from silents to talkies overnight. The conversion took less than twenty-four hours. Some townsfolk said that Janie became wealthy overnight. But the fact is that she had been working in the movie business since 1911. While her foresight was indeed fortuitous, it was her enterprising nature that always moved her to action. She worked in the theatre business until the day she died, overseeing every aspect of the growth of her small media empire on the Miramichi. Coveting old ground, she negotiated the purchase of the Opera House from Senator Burchill in 1939 (feeling triumphant, no doubt, that the Catholic girl from Enginetown had bought the old Loyal Orange Lodge #47, where she and her first husband started out – a coup both commercial and political for her and her Protestant-fearing father). She built the Uptown Theatre in Newcastle in 1953, and with her oldest son Bill at the helm of the business, she participated in the acquisition of the Midway Drive-In in 1962, only a few years before her death. A country girl from an insulated small town that never let her forget who she really was, she carried her businesses through two marriages, two world wars, and the Great Depression. In her lifetime, she amassed and lost a million dollars, proudly insisting that she remain working class no matter what the state of her fortunes. In the end, she became what she most desired to be: a woman of independence and means who was respected by family and community alike. When she travelled on the river, people knew who she was. When she went to Boston to visit her relatives, they were impressed by her carriage and style. Two generations later, Janie’s story had lost none of its power in the Richards family narrative. Though David Richards was just fifteen when she died, he has been haunted by her mystique every bit as much as his

Richards’s Ancestry 31

father was. Remembering her as ‘a fanatical wrestling fan, [who] loved sports in general and hockey in particular’ (Hockey Dreams 35), he positions her at the centre of the ‘King/[Richards] dynasty’ (River 242), as the matriarch whose achievements and enemies are the inheritance of subsequent generations. When he investigates his own family’s secrets in the fictional autobiography River of the Broken Hearted, a series of cascading effects are traced backwards from son (Wendy/[David?]) to father (Miles/[Bill?]) to grandmother (Janie), with each generation forced to endure a ‘terrible youth’ (‘The Turtle’ 71) as a consequence of living in her shadow. The coming to terms with living in that shadow is what forms the revelation at the end of River, as Wendy learns: ‘I caught a glimpse into father’s terrible world I had always known was there yet had not seen … walking around, inhabiting the same space as we did, yet invisible as specks of hatred in the eye’ (326). Along with his maternal grandmother Mina Pratt, Janie McGowan is the young writer’s model for self-reliant women. In scolding contemporary ideologues for celebrating the power of modern women – ‘The modern agitation on behalf of women … would not allow for our Janie, could not allow for such true independence’ (River 377) – Richards is defending the memory of his grandmothers’ struggles against the certitudes of this era’s seemingly progressive thought. Growing up in Janie’s house in the 1920s and 1930s was difficult for son Bill, though he would always remain secretive about that part of his life, even with his own children. When the adult Richards imagines his father as a boy in River, it is ‘shame’ that forces the lad into a lifetime of reticence (200). As the oldest child of a single mother whose responsibilities extended beyond the home, Bill had no choice but to be a surrogate caregiver for his two younger siblings. When Vince McLaughlin entered the family in 1927 as stepfather, Janie was managing The Empress and planning the construction of The Royal, which meant that most of his time was spent supporting her endeavours, not caring for her children. As a train engineer with a few dollars, he quickly cut himself into her enterprise. However, the pressures of two jobs and a new family occasionally brought out his dark side. He was a mildly schizophrenic boozer, given to wild rampages in the home. As the oldest and biggest of Janie’s children, Bill became a target, often having to hide from his stepfather’s outbursts. What made matters worse was that Vince was paranoid when he drank and given to imagining conspiracies that were only vaguely based on reality. In all probability it was Vince who convinced Janie to

32

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

cut off contact with the Richards in Kent, which fanned rumours downtown that the middle-class relatives of her first husband were coming to Canada to take William’s children. For the working-class Irish girl from Enginetown, the daughter of a man who annually feared the marching of the Orangemen, the warning found fertile ground. Janie abruptly severed contact with her overseas in-laws, thus eliminating one of Vince’s imagined rivalries. In this environment, Bill naturally became protective of his younger sister and brother. He kept them cleaned, occupied, and out of harm’s way, meaning away from Vince’s wrath. As the eldest child of a woman who was rapidly progressing through the social ranks – and who, in smalltown eyes, had forfeited all class connections (though looked upon suspiciously by the working class, she was not accepted by the elites) – Bill learned to fend for himself on streets that were often unfriendly. Fictional father Bill’s fate in Janie’s town was to be ‘considered rich by the poor and callow by the rich’ (River 168) – a fate that condemned him to brutal loneliness: My father was alone on the street from the time he was eight. He was left to his own devices because he had no father ... and his mother worked. Mrs. Redmond reported to me that she had seen him many nights walking along the street after ten lugging his pigeon coop home from a show he had given, with his cane and magic box. No one remembers him with a friend except [his sister] Georgina, whom he would take care of most days by himself out in the yard, or take on little excursions with a lunch, to go fishing or flower picking. (River 145)

One photograph from that time has survived to become emblematic of the second generation’s position between classes. It is a photo of Janie’s three children. On the day it was taken, Bill had cleaned and dressed his siblings and marched them through downtown streets to the portrait studio. He had told the photographer what he wanted and whom to charge. And he had done this alone, an eight-year-old boy. The flesh-and-blood Bill Richards would cherish the photo until he died. It was the only one he kept from his youth, a reminder, it suggests, of small triumphs in a difficult childhood. Not surprisingly, the family photo turns up in River (100). In that telling, Bill (Miles in the novel) is depicted as a protector, a ‘lonely solitary figure’ (370), sad and brave. But there were other legacies. Growing up in Newcastle in the 1920s and 1930s could also be idyllic. Bill and his younger brother Harry

Richards’s Ancestry 33

learned to hunt and fish and snare rabbits in the fields and woods above their home. The main river, busy with commercial and recreational traffic, became central to the boys’ life. Strawberry Marsh near the old dump was also familiar ground, as were the areas around Anderson’s Mill and Wireless Field, where baseball was the sport of choice. Before the war years, travelling circuses raised their big tops on Dalton Field above the town – the same field that was flooded for an outdoor rink in winter. The movies, too, were an important part of the town’s social life. As the owner’s children, Bill and Harry saw many, counting Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, and other cowboy heroes as their favourites. Janie would walk up and down the aisles keeping everyone in order. In a town as small as Newcastle, everyone knew her and came to know Bill and Harry by association. The Miramichi between the wars was especially alive with what today would be called an active folk culture. Radio programs and songs recounting the area’s fishing and lumbering histories filled kitchens and dance halls, while travelling stock companies played to large audiences. Civic concerns centred on the quarantine station on Middle Island where the immigrants landed (many without a word of English), and, as always, on the Miramichi’s golden past – on loading the schooners, harvesting oysters, riding the old ferries, and catching big salmon with cane rods in pools called North Pole, Jinn Rock, Tea Cup, and Clearwater. Impromptu concerts were held on summer nights in the town square or organized by women’s auxiliaries or cadet bands. Bill and Harry became musical almost by default, having inherited the ear for it from their parents. As a teenager, Bill once picked up a guitar and, without ever having had a lesson, started playing folksongs from the radio. There was a sense that place was important, and that bred an affecting pride in one’s heritage that no Miramichier could escape. That pride of place was abetted by a sense of protective isolation in Bill’s youth. Newcastle was an island in the middle of the province. There were fierce political and economic rivalries between the two sides of the river, with each side (and each of the various divisions on each side) looking after its own. Labourers from Chatham couldn’t get work in Newcastle, and vice versa. Catholics had a better chance in the more Irish town of Chatham. Catholics in the Protestant town of Newcastle, like Janie’s crowd, had to fight hard to hold their ground but could count on favours from their own kind. People were vigilant when it came to monitoring the progress of the other side of the river – making sure that neither town prospered disproportionately, counting the pulp boats that arrived at the Chatham and Newcastle docks to ensure equitable

34

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

distribution, and generally keeping local politicians and newspaper editors on their toes. Locals learned to navigate these biases and to garrison themselves with like-minded folk. The closeness was comforting, if sometimes smothering, for a personality as retiring as Bill’s. Especially difficult for Bill was Newcastle’s unease with difference – and Bill was perceived to be different, at least from his kin. His uncles, Janie’s brothers, were well-known local fixtures, their boozy antics behind the feed mill in Tin Can Alley legendary around town. Stepfather Vince had developed a similar reputation for wild, inebriated behaviour, and Janie, the old vaudevillian turned movie maven, was larger than life wherever she went. Bill, by contrast, was serious and austere, a committed teetotaller from an early age. He excelled in math, wrote poetry, collected wildflowers, and played the mouth organ. He also had narcolepsy, an unusual medical condition that triggered sudden lapses into deep sleep. In the eyes of the townsfolk, he was moneyed, some thought spoiled. Because of his medical condition, he was also perceived as soft. He was to many in town ‘the Englishman’s boy,’ a moniker of unusual ridicule in a post-imperial place of disaffected Scots, Irish, and Catholics. When he finished grade ten – grade eleven was the highest in the province at the time – he quit school and moved one hundred miles north to Dalhousie to work as a teller in the Royal Bank. His mother’s disdain for education, coupled with his aptitude for numbers, made the decision easy. But his leaving was also an escape to freedom. To be as successful as Janie (and also free of her), he had to leave, much as Margaret Adams had to leave Sillarsville to forge her own identity. When Bill and Margaret met in Dalhousie in the late 1930s, they would have agreed that though their upbringings were very different, their reasons for departure were much the same. Both had felt smothered in the towns they had left and confined by the absolutism of their families and were more than a little eager to escape. Though neither was settled enough for any kind of permanent relationship, Bill and Margaret did make a serious impression on each other. They went out often to hotel dances and for walks on the gas-lit Inch Aaron beach. Bill’s unexpected transfer to the Sussex branch of the Royal Bank ended their year together. But Bill wasn’t to be deterred, almost immediately quitting the bank to take a job selling food essences, thereby acquiring the travelling salesman’s excuse to visit his sweetheart. But that job, too, was short-lived – it would not win him the success he sought. He did not yearn to exceed or even rival his mother’s accomplishments, but

Richards’s Ancestry 35

ambition and self-reliance had been bred into him. He wanted to stand on his own two feet and prove that ‘the Englishman’s boy’ could make it on his own. In 1942 he found in world events a way to make a contribution. By then, Hitler’s armies had overrun the Low Countries and swept across France and the Luftwaffe was laying waste to Britain, bombing the area where Bill’s father had come from. The North Shore Regiment, made up of some of his relatives from Bathurst (many of them Haches from Janie’s mother’s side), were receiving commendations for their war efforts – and, of course, never far from memory were his Miramichi uncles, who for all their difficulties off the battlefield had distinguished themselves in the Great War. Bill decided to enlist, joining the Royal Canadian Air Force. In the provincial papers, the War Department had been advertising aggressively for tail gunners, leaving out the reason why: the high mortality rates among those men in the early weeks of the war. But Bill read no deeper than the headlines. Reports of German Uboat wolf packs prowling Atlantic ports for naval and merchant shipping were reason enough to volunteer; another was the recent story of the RCMP’s Corporal Theriault, who had detained a German prisoner off the Caraquet coast. Bill wanted to be in a plane – perhaps even a pilot – to avenge his father’s people. When his narcolepsy was discovered during the medical, however, he was rejected for flight school and trained as an airplane mechanic instead. Posted to Cape Breton, he worked briefly on planes before switching to an administrative paymaster’s job in the Army – he was a banker, not a mechanic. Before going overseas, he and Margaret were engaged, a custom not uncommon among soldiers shipping out. He served in a non-combat role from 1942 to 1945, meeting his father’s brother, Uncle Angus, after whom he was named, and his paternal grandmother’s people, the Weebles. He was the first Canadian Richards to visit his relatives in Kent since his father William’s last visit two years before his death. While Bill was overseas, Margaret worked in Montreal as a receptionist for CIL, a chemical manufacturer with links to northern New Brunswick. Like many young women her age, she moved to the city for the work and there found an environment that offered couples the best chance for a new start after the war. She waited in Montreal with strong faith that Bill would return. She had seen enough of his world to know that she could never go back to her own. The social life of the Catholics had won her over. Their card playing, music and dances, hospitality, and greater tolerance for human foible were much more to her liking than the aus-

36

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

tere traditions of her own Scots Presbyterianism. And there was little of the bible-thumping self-abnegation that in her childhood experience was too often an instrument of censorship or sanctimony. Bill’s world offered the things that were missing in hers. In Lives, Richards imagines the cheerless desiccation of the milieu in which his mother had been raised: [Because] there was still not even a tavern to go to [the] boys drank behind barns and sheds on lobster boats or in the back of cars and drove back and forth past the regional high school ... The taverns being closed from the summer of 1917 until the summer of 1963 – that presbyterian madness of the law ... in a house that had not only no drink but not a book either, with vases and imitation fruit on the dusted furniture and the smell of linoleum along the hallway and the sad cardboard light-shades in the living-rooms which no-one entered until the priest/minister was invited for Sunday dinner and the children were dressed and washed and the table arranged and religion and town-council affairs discussed and parish duties discussed and business/banking and local charities discussed. Until the one thought in a child’s mind was how fortunate you were to live here in a nice community without drink or books either, except the encyclopedia – until out of that, out of it all it would take an imbecile or a lunatic not to become a drunk before he was twenty. (113–14)

In May 1946, shortly after he returned from duty, Bill and Margaret were married in a Catholic ceremony in Montreal. Margaret’s people in Sillarsville were shocked. She had married a Catholic, and not only that, but her letters home revealed that as part of the marriage preparations she had vowed to convert. There was talk that some might disown her – one of her brothers almost did, refusing to speak to her for years. But the pressure was not only from her side. The Catholic Church frowned just as strongly on mixed unions, requiring that couples be in a state of grace before they could receive the sacrament of marriage. This meant that each had to be of the same faith in order to make confession before the ceremony, receive Communion during the Nuptial Mass, and undertake holy duties that only Catholics could, such as raising children in the church and never divorcing. Only through papal dispensation, and ‘with great regrets’ (A Catholic Catechism 290), did the church sanction mixed marriages. If Margaret did not convert, she would find a chilly reception among members of Bill and Janie’s community. If she did, she would be excoriated by her own family in Sillarsville.

Richards’s Ancestry 37

For his part, Bill was buoyant with postwar freedom. Except for witnessing the buzz bombs over London, he had returned from the war unscathed. After marriage, however, he found himself doing most of the same things he had done before the war, and as a consequence he again felt unsettled. He worked for a time in Hamilton, Ontario, in banking, insurance, and sales, but in each case his narcolepsy prevented advancement. Plans for a large family simply added to the stress of finding direction. He was twenty-six years old, newly married, and still aimless. He and Margaret would soon find stability in the theatre business on the Miramichi, though both would have to swallow some pride in accepting Janie’s request for help. In 1946, the year of their marriage, the domestic audience for movies was at its peak in North America. By 1948, however, the theatre business was in decline. Postwar inflation and disillusionment, protectionist tariffs on American films going abroad, and the beginnings of the Hollywood inquisition (later chaired by the Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy) combined to seriously threaten the studio system. As box office profits fell, small-town theatre owners lost patrons – and in some cases their businesses. Janie had seen soft markets before, so she wasn’t overly alarmed. But in 1948, nearing sixty, she was getting tired. Wanting her oldest son close so that the enterprise she had worked so hard to build could stay in the family, she called on Bill for help. Tired of drifting, Bill agreed to return to the Miramichi, not unaware of how difficult it would be to run a family business in a small town and remembering well how isolating the town’s innuendo had been. Nor was he naive about the difficulties he would encounter back among his own family. Janie was a challenge, but he and his mother needed each other. Margaret, though, was even more reluctant. She wanted to remain independent from Bill’s family, just as from her own; and she wanted no part of the domineering ways of Janie, who was a master at playing the matriarch. In the end, circumstances and blood ties prevailed. Bill moved back to Newcastle with his family, taking up residence on Blanche Street, a short distance from Janie’s house in the centre of the old town. Two years later, in 1950, David Richards was born, the third child in Bill and Margaret’s rapidly growing family. His inheritance would be that of pioneers on two frontiers: the hard-working woodsfolk on his mother’s side and the self-reliant businessfolk on his father’s. One side was Scottish, Presbyterian, private, and austere; the other Anglo-Irish, Catholic, public, and performative. But the two lines were more alike than different. Essentially working class, both lines valued independence

38

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

as the highest personal ideal. And both held similar attitudes to family: families were insular, but not in ways that would be considered affectionate or familiar. After Margaret married Bill and left the Church of Scotland, her Sillarsville and Matapédia relatives were welcoming and cordial but never close. After Bill returned to the Miramichi to work with his mother, their relationship, including family visits, was professional and businesslike. Both lines were also intimately connected to place, a closeness manifest in the importance each placed on what might best be termed, after Michael Ignatieff, civic nationalism. Generations of hard work, struggle, and incremental advancement meant that neither side had much tolerance for secessionist ideas or enlightened practice, both tending instead toward the conservative ethos of their original ancestors. At the nexus of both ancestral lines would be David Richards’s certitude and intransigence, his push towards the absolutes. When, for example, he writes about adopting others’ styles and tastes – ‘we love our country so much that we’ve brought back [American] songs and adapted them, because we refuse to be speechless’ (‘Just Singing’ 31) – he is expressing this ancestral affinity to place. ‘We are illiterate,’ he writes elsewhere, because ‘we are glutted with information that is either almost absolutely irrelevant to us, or makes us part of someone else’s hinterland’ (‘Our Magazines’ 35). This indirect call to arms is principally a call to home, a caution that we ‘not be scornful’ or ‘diminish [the] worth’ of what we have, even if it is systemically denigrated in the social registers of the day (Lines 104).

2 Richards’s Birth and Early Years

They said I would not live; if I lived, I would not walk; if I walked, I would not run. That I would not speak or learn. That I would never attend school, let alone university. Meager Fortune (329)

The creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the great public world we all share. Graham Greene, quoted in Margaret Laurence, ‘Heart of a Stranger’ (13)

Besides, my birthplace is a myth, like everyone else’s, and many of the people among whom I grew up have agreed on a different myth and find mine displeasing. Alden Nowlan, ‘Growing Up’ (17)

In the fall of 1950, almost three years after they had moved back to Newcastle, things were going well for Bill and Margaret. The movie business had stabilized and the two principal towns on the river were booming. The sawmills and mines were running at full capacity, a new pulp mill had just been built, the Chatham Air Base was expanding to accommodate a peacetime air squadron, and increased traffic between the two sides of the river had accelerated construction of a new bridge in Newcastle to replace the one lost to fire in 1947. Miramichiers were beginning to prosper after the war rationing, and increases in personal income and family size translated into good times for local merchants. As Janie liked to say, when the town ate, so did the Richards.

40

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

In October of that year, Margaret, as the locals phrased it, was ‘seven months gone’ with her third child. With the pregnancy advancing normally, Bill went hunting with his brother Harry – an unusual decision for a man who had long given up on the trifles of leisure to concentrate on business. The brothers spent most of the day in the woods north of town calling and tracking a big buck, unaware of what was happening at home. When they returned, they learned that there had been an accident. Margaret had fallen on the back steps while hanging laundry to dry. She had landed on her stomach – her unborn child’s head – and was not feeling well. Bill rushed her to hospital, where she started delivering in the elevator. David Richards was born that night, 17 October, two months premature, with brain swelling. The fall had caused hemorrhaging. Besides being dangerously small (about three pounds) for the capabilities of the Miramichi Hospital, he had what appeared to be paralysis on his left side. The Catholics prayed, lit candles, and said masses, all to the good, for after a long period of hospitalization he was brought home, likely to have restricted use of his left arm and leg, the extent of which doctors could not predict. There was also the possibility of brain damage. A similar accident had happened to a Newcastle woman four years earlier, leaving her child mentally disabled. Only in time would doctors know whether the Richards baby would suffer the same fate. Margaret never fully forgave herself for the accident, inadvertent though it was, and Bill would always wonder whether his being away that day had contributed to what happened. The infant, however, proved the rule that babies are resilient. Neighbours doted on Margaret and the child. His older siblings vigilantly kept the house in darkness (keeping the curtains drawn) so that the small baby could gather his strength in sleep. For some, like the quasi-fictional old Alvin Simms in Lines, the new baby became the young Christ child, a small figurine to be sheltered from the outside world. As the child became mobile, his lameness became pronounced. He was smaller than the other kids his age and developmentally delayed. When he finally walked, he did so with a noticeable limp. For a time, he had braces and big shoes, which he refused to wear, determined to manage without them. He played happily with other children, who accepted him as their equal, but he struggled to keep up. The adult must have recalled the impact of this struggle when creating Cindi, the young epileptic in Nights who is ‘protect[ed]’ and ‘humiliat[ed]’ by her own disability (142). What Margaret’s army of concerned crusaders could not have known was the double edge of their protectiveness – the fact that, for the recipient,

Richards’s Birth and Early Years 41

protection itself is a kind of contagion. ‘I’m convinced [my disability] helped me to an essential understanding of cruelty,’ Richards told interviewer Nancy Bauer, thinking, no doubt, of both conscious and unconscious acts of harm (quoted in ‘The Long Distance’ 31). Richards’s sense of himself, like Cindi’s, developed early. His awareness of his own difference made him more sensitive than most to how others treated him. This caused some remove from his peer group. His first memories involve this feeling of distance. He remembers that when he was three he sat on the floor of his grandmother’s house by the radiator listening to the adults talking at the kitchen table. The memory is typical enough. Untypical is the memory of understanding the flow and logic, also the context and inferences of the adults’ conversation. As significant is remembering the sense of harboured privilege in that he knew they didn’t know he was following their conversation. To intuit, at the age of three, why things are being said, and to feel power in that private knowing, is indeed unusual, though perhaps less so for a child whose condition has already placed him on the periphery – and, of course, less so for the artist, who is always separate and observing others. Perhaps this was portent to a vocation. That childhood memory helps us isolate those places of refuge and habits of mind that characterize the creative, inward personality. The young child found not only safety and power in his precocious knowing, but also a fascination with what people said and a curiosity to know more about why they said and did things. This ‘why’ would become key for Richards, his way to get inside, as he explained in an essay many years later: I have been often asked why I became a writer. I had to. I had no choice. There was nothing else I could do. I had a need to write about and remember, and give some voice to my terrible youth ... People live through terrible experiences and experience full lives and never recognize anything. Others see while throwing down pulp from a truck stuck on the bridge over Little River, helping a truck driver who’s had a heart attack and his frightened ten-year old son, everything that ever needs to matter about the world. It is never the action, but why the action, that must be understood by us all. (‘The Turtle’ 71)

Of course, for the infant, this private exploration of the ‘why’ had nothing to do with being a writer. It was, rather, about possessing the world in ways that his peers could not. In the novel Blood Ties, the young Orville, who is blind in one eye, makes a similar discovery about himself

42

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

and his aptitudes. He discovers that he understands the subtleties of the world – and, therefore, his place in it – better than the presumably more sophisticated Rance. In this discovery, he begins to come to terms with and accept himself: Now in the evening something strange filled him. As he walked in the woods, the branches drooping below a black sky, it was if he wished to be a part of it forever. It was as if all this was the church wax he had used in his room one dark night to get that feeling of removal that he could never explain to anyone ... ‘Stealin stupid candles,’ Rance said. Orville said nothing. The light brown stick moved the water and Orville could hear the water lapping: lapping. Then in an instant he realized Rance knew nothing and that he knew everything – about the water and the spring air and Rance’s legs soaked by jumping too soon ... For whole minutes he stood still. And it was different from physical contentment. He gazed at the sky and then at the muddy pathway. He picked up a leaf brown and dead and held it to his nose ... and he could see where he had taken it from, a small film, impression it made on the ground. He was aware that that was where the leaf should be. (245–6)

The significance of Richards’s early memories of remove and precocious understanding is not that it would develop years later to fit the temperament of a writer, but that it gave the young boy a safe haven where he could feel equal in a world that otherwise left him behind. Beyond the strides in self-knowing that he was making, Richards’s early life was similar to that of other kids on the Miramichi. He was a step slower, but this did not prevent him from partaking in neighbourhood and school activities. Bill and Margaret, acting on the best parenting advice they could solicit, insisted that he do so. Though his motor skills were impaired, his mental skills turned out to be fine – a fact corroborated by a cognitive specialist from Montreal who saw him when he was two. The first test performed was on motor reflexes. The doctor handed him a ball and asked him to give it back, each time more quickly. After repeated exchanges, Richards became annoyed, snatched the ball, and threw it at the doctor’s head, confirming the specialist’s suspicion that the child was normal, not retarded. Reviewer Douglas Glover would write many years later that this episode was emblematic in exhibiting ‘the three hallmarks of a David Adams Richards story: horror, violence, and comedy. Through fate or bad luck, the baby is damaged. Society

Richards’s Birth and Early Years 43

jumps in with a glib assessment; the word retarded is value-loaded, welfareworker, pseudomedical jargon that dismisses the child, pigeonholes him. It is a type of psychic violence’ (12). The prognosis from Montreal was as good for the child as for his parents, for it meant they could get on with a normal family life that had an abundance of concerns. By the fall of 1957, six children had been born to Bill and Margaret in the span of ten years. After David’s birth, Margaret had a series of difficult pregnancies, including three miscarriages, before her next child arrived. The ages of the children therefore divided the family into two distinct sibling groups: an older group of three, of which David was the youngest, and a younger group of three. He was the bridge between older and younger siblings, in particular, between an older brother Billy – whose sports prowess and woodsmanship made him somewhat of a mentor – and younger sister Mary Jane and younger brothers John and Paul, whose speed and interests were closer to his own. Arriving in the middle meant that he had access to the more mature discussions and concerns of his older siblings, and to the play of the younger ones. The help of a cleaning lady allowed Margaret to spend time with the neighbourhood kids, none of whom remember her ever uttering a harsh word against them. Bill, too, was the traditional parent of the 1950s, more distant than her in the lives of his children but a looming presence nevertheless. His son would write many years later, perhaps with him in mind, that ‘a man’s ignorance of [his] offspring showed a healthy character’ (Meager Fortune 6). To David and his siblings, Bill was always a no-nonsense personality, rather stiff and cold. That he never wore jeans bothered them. His focus was the business, which kept him away from home each day and for long periods at night. When there was a double feature in the evening or a midnight show, he would leave after supper and not arrive home until two a.m. To the community’s youth, he was the great yeller at the theatre, forever telling the raucous crowd to ‘pipe down’ during reel changes. He could have hired someone to keep discipline at the theatre, but like his mother, he did that part of the job himself, causing embarrassment for his children as they grew. For all his stern practicality, though, he was generous with the local kids, especially on Saturday afternoons, when, with his car loaded to capacity, he would treat the friends of his children to a free matinee. His only everlasting wish was for one uninterrupted meal, for at suppertime, like clockwork, the phone would ring in the Richards house (the one time of the day when they were all together) and a stranger would ask what was playing

44

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

at the movies. The disruption became a standing joke around the table, though it drove him crazy. ‘The screen was my family’s only refuge,’ wrote Richards in his fictional autobiography. ‘The screen was where we lived. It came at a price, but it gave us our sadness and our laughter’ (River 270). The Richards were a public and high-profile business family in a small town. Their success depended on maintaining the goodwill of the townsfolk. On rare occasions, Bill would take David to Saint John to preview and select first runs. The boy would return from these trips with talk of the milkshakes and ice cream floats he sampled in the big city. It was during one of these trips that the normally reticent Bill gave his son the strongest piece of advice the adult remembers: not to ruin his life with alcohol as so many in their family had. It was advice that, in hindsight, rang with special premonition. By 1957 the walls were bursting in the small, adobe-style Richards house on Blanche Street. And Margaret and Janie were quarrelling – ‘at constant war,’ remembers Richards in his fictional family saga, ‘over the prospects of my father,’ over ‘jelly donuts,’ and over ‘a raise’ that never seemed to come (River 195, 96). With some haste, Bill found property between Ritchie’s Wharf and the King George Highway on a cliff overlooking the harbour. The location was east of the centre of the old town in an active neighbourhood, away from the two theatres, and away from Janie, whom Bill saw every day at work. ‘The Rocks,’ as the location is known in Newcastle, towers some fifty feet above the town centre, so high that Margaret, worried about endangering her children, insisted that they build far from the cliff edge. In January 1958 the family moved into their newly built home on 175 Buckley Avenue (now Matheson). The new neighbourhood was to become the formative social space of David’s life. Ten families – including thirty-five kids – lived in The Rocks, a self-contained neighbourhood of four blocks, with Ritchie Avenue on the west and Hamilton Street on the east. In the middle was a large field called The Commons. Unlike other distinct areas of Newcastle at the time – CI Road, Skytown, Skunk Ridge, Tin Can Alley, and Enginetown – The Rocks was a mixed neighbourhood of classes so seamlessly blended that socio-economic and religious divisions, while visible, seemed not to matter. It is this mosaic that the adult Richards has always remembered when writing about his childhood: ‘Our houses were a mixed bag. You took what you got. It was a neighbourhood half white collar and half industrial

Richards’s Birth and Early Years 45

and at least a good part poor. I grew up beside boys who never had a decent meal and whose mothers were last seen somewhere else. And next door our MP was grooming his sons for law and politics’ (Hockey Dreams 28). The children of the moneyed played with the children of mechanics and the unemployed. Some were rich, most were poor. Most were not Catholics; however, parents of different social standing did not inculcate their children with the prejudices of religion or class, so the neighbourhood wasn’t cliquish or volatile. Fights were non-existent. The middleclass notions we have today did not exist in the 1950s on the Miramichi. Rather, there were the old families whose members never seemed to work but who owned everything, and people who had worked all their lives but who owned almost nothing. Those of means looked out for those who had less and did not ask for a tax receipt in return. Their kids did the same. No one put a name on a hockey stick or a ball glove because those things were, in a sense, neighbourhood property. If someone stood out, it was because of superior abilities, not greater opportunity. The most gifted and respected in the area were often the least well off. One such boy from the poorer east side made a profound and lasting impression on all the Richards children. Emmerson Laroque was a small boy who walked slowly but could run like the wind. He possessed talent, style, and a big-league curve ball that belied his age. Extremely popular for repairing old hockey sticks and keeping the ice cleared on the outdoor rink he kept on the river, he had a reputation around town for schoolyard bravery. He was tough without belligerence and noble in the face of hardship, keeping the bullies from the rival Back Road area at bay. He became the protector of the small and defenceless. He would later achieve renown for foiling the cops on regular occasions, once fashioning cell bars out of broomsticks and shoe polish, then escaping the county jail after lights went out. The police would invariably arrest him at his local hangout near the creamery. Filtered many years later through Richards’s imagination, he became the Michael of Hockey Dreams, a kid who had lost his teeth at fourteen and who had grown up stoically inside the loneliness of poverty. ‘In his house,’ wrote Richards, ‘rats ran along the walls and there was a cot behind the stove where he slept’ (49). His poverty had ‘the smell of darkness, of evening, of leaves in the earth’ (49). Yet his natural grace and athleticism were envied, and he was everything the other kids wanted to be. When creating the big-hearted Little Simon of Lives and Jerry Bines of Wounded, tough kids with a hard-won morality, Richards no doubt drew on his memories of this remarkable boy.

46

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Another notable character was the garbage collector, a man who won the affections of all. Though poor, he was never hungry because the neighbourhood women filled his cart with pickles, vegetables, and preserves. When he died a young man, victim to the hard bargains of his trade, he had one of the largest funerals in Newcastle’s history. The cantankerous grump whose house on the bank the kids avoided at Halloween was another notable in the palette of local characters, as was the old town superintendent on Ritchie Avenue. Old Flett had a harsh, raspy voice and a sense of humour that delighted, even when he’d call the police to quiet the noisy parties on the street. There was also retired Colonel Barry – the Colonel in Hockey Dreams – whose stories fuelled the boys’ curiosity about the life of military men. It was to celebrate the lives of these people, Richards has often said, that he began writing. And it is to these people that his non-fiction memoirs are dedicated: to Emmerson and Curly Laroque (Michael and Tobias), who grow into a world less accommodating than the old neighbourhood of their youth, and to ‘those children … left alone to fend for themselves’ (Hockey Dreams 76), their dreams extinguished by the realities of adulthood and social change. In Lines, Richards recalls the old neighbourhood as his first step into the social realities of the Miramichi: I grew up with poor boys who knew when the smelt run was on, and when the tommie cod came, because much more than me, they needed these things for their families to eat. We were wasteful – they were not. To them, fishing, and their fathers’ hunting, had a whole different perspective. Some I grew up with ate more deer meet than beef, and relied upon it ... I remember a child who fell off an ice floe and started crying, not because he fell in, but because he’d lost the tommie cod he had promised his mom he would bring home. (8–9)

The social dynamic of the neighbourhood was an equally important initiation for young Richards, who before the move had more often watched than participated. In his new surroundings he was an undifferentiated if slower part of a crowd that mapped the seasons according to what activity was in play. Groups from the neighbourhood would travel by bike to play baseball against the Sweeney Lane crowd at the west end of town or ride north beyond the tracks to fish in Buckley’s Pond, the water source for the old trains. For those without a bike, the trains were an easy way to get from one end of town to another – one only need hide in the field above the tracks until the engine was out of sight then

Richards’s Birth and Early Years 47

jump on the flatcars going by. In summer, eastbound trains would carry gangs to the bridge at Mill Cove to swim. In winter, westbound trains were launch pads into the snowdrifts near Dalton Field. The most common activity was hockey. Pickup games on the Green Street extension or in the Richards’s driveway were ongoing (superblades and pucks dented Bill’s garage door and broke his windows). And, like other things in the neighbourhood, hockey was inclusive and democratic, as Richards describes in Hockey Dreams: One of our goalies was a girl. Another was a huge boy with fresh-pressed pants and the smell of holy water, who believed in Santa Claus until he was thirteen. He carried his books like a girl and was in school plays with my sister. ‘I am of the thespian family,’ he would say, because his mother had once played Catherine of Aragon ... Another – Phillip Luff could skate like the wind and had the brain of a salamander, and ended up playing the bongos. (24–5)

Ritchie’s Wharf and the waterfront, though strictly off limits, were other sources of interest, the incoming ships bringing questionable characters to the docks looking to do business with the locals. The younger children would sit in the field at the end of Ritchie Avenue and watch the crews load pit props and ore onto these boats. The older boys would go down to the water despite warnings of the commerce and the tides to trade with the sailors, using Canadian Tire money to buy vodka from unsuspecting foreigners. A favourite spring pastime was hopping along the ice floes in search of tommie cod. A fork attached to the end of a broken hockey stick with electrical tape was used to spear the docile fish. Someone always fell in, so a fire perpetually raged on the beach for drying off – and for cooking potatoes. Since Ritchie’s was a working wharf, four-foot peeled pulp for the fire was plentiful. For Richards, those fires were a link to the past: When we lit a fire to warm ourselves, we were doing something that had been done for generations ... On this river fires were always lit and kept burning by loved ones for loved ones. And that fire near our rink seemed to be like this. It burned when Michael was there alone shovelling the snow from it, after supper when the air was so splintered and cold that each breath pained. It burned near us at night when the wind howled and there were only a few of us left flipping pucks or chunks of snow across a

48

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi windswept, deserted rink. It was all so primitive I suppose – hockey, frozen hands, ice in your lungs and the fires burning here and there about the river. (Hockey Dreams 71, 72–3)

For the younger crowd, Norton’s Gully, called ‘the gulch,’ was the main hangout in the neighbourhood. Extending from the top of the cliff to the waterfront below, it was home turf free from the prying eyes of parents. The gully was also the shortest route – and therefore the corridor – to downtown. The boys would sneak down the gulch to smoke the cigarettes they got from the local bootlegger-cabby (when you wanted a bottle in those days, you called a cab and asked for a special delivery). The gulch could always be counted on to reveal an assortment of characters hiding in the alders at the edge of the embankment. It was here at night, Richards wrote in Lives, that ‘the whores would be sitting with the sailors’ (215). The nearby spring was where the winos mixed their Hermits with fresh water. This was the territory that Joe Walsh would later roam in his battles to quit the booze: ‘He would take his bottles down to the bank and throw them over – only to climb down after them in the middle of the night. The bank was about sixty yards from their back door, which faced the river. There were small spaces of grass and alders where men and women hid away in the afternoons to drink – old veterans and girls who had grown up to go nowhere, and ended up at fifty somehow still in print dresses, their hair clasped by some silver broach [sic]’ (Nights 60). High Bank Hilda was one of those colourful winos, a tattered old woman from the shacks below who perched herself at the edge of the gully so that she could keep an eye out for an imaginary constabulary that nevertheless seemed to leave her and the winos alone. The proximity of these shack dwellers gave the kids the opportunity to see how an underclass lived. For Richards, this learning was an essential part of a childhood unfettered by the constructed paranoias of class: In that age – in the age of my youth – with all of those people I used to know, there was no campaign about childhood safety. No worry about going up the street alone ... Essentially my brother and I were out on our own at the time we were six. I knew drunks and prostitutes from the age of nine ... When we played hockey we played it on the street, where drunks would stop to watch us, weaving back and forth, looking like the last snowflake to hit them would crumple them to the ground. They would offer us money

Richards’s Birth and Early Years 49 to chase their hats, which tumbled end over end down an ice-slicked road ... The fear others had of drunks and prostitutes and physical life in general surprised me when I went off to university. (Hockey Dreams 64–5)

The neighbourhood boys travelled as one big crowd through this diverse social landscape, never far from the sound of shunting trains, dockside machinery, and hollering winos. ‘There was always the smell of wood and smoke at night, and the smell of earth,’ Richards would remember. ‘There were ships in at the wharf, and old men still wore Humphrey pants’ (‘Smoking’ 22). The young Richards participated happily in this milieu, a somewhat shy kid considered average and nondescript by his peers. He didn’t have the physical wherewithal to be a leader, nor the temperament, being more sympathetic than bold, but he had an amiable personality that allowed him to fit in. Beyond the fact that he always knew more about movies than any of his friends, his peers of the time remember only his limp and his fierce determination to do what they did so effortlessly. ‘I never thought of myself in any way except willing to give most things a try,’ he later corroborated in Lines (17). For a shy kid, though, he had an unusual interest in talk. He voiced opinions and didn’t take easily to those being challenged or ignored. On occasion, he spoke against what the crowd did, especially when it was done cruelly. He wasn’t squeamish about hunting or fishing or clubbing eels, but he was sensitive about inflicting pain. He disliked when the kids trapped the big snapping turtles at the ponds, hated the sight of their drilled shells and the baling wire holding them snug to posts. The first time he saw these tormented creatures pulling against their own bodies to escape he became enraged, vowing to strike out in their defence. The next time he came across some boys torturing a wounded animal – this time a porcupine – he returned with his shotgun and killed it. ‘I don’t know if I killed the right animal,’ he recalled, ‘but something had to be done’ (‘The Turtle’ 70). Like his protagonist Duncan in Gusties, ‘he never felt as close’ to his friends after these incidents (100), sensing in their actions a pathological need to inflict pain on the powerless. His own experience of being less able than others had hardened his position against cruelty of any kind and given him an early sense of his responsibilities in the moral universe – a clue to the characterization of his childhood friend Stafford Foley in Hockey Dreams. Wounded without remorse by those who should know better, Stafford reacts with a good-

50

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

natured innocence that belies his pain. As Richards writes it, Stafford’s struggles give him and all the wounded a wisdom of the heart: And so it spread, and Stafford was known, secretly as Piss the Bed and Idiot Arse. If you went over and told people he was a sleepwalking, fall-down diabetic with a maniacal desire to participate in events normal children around the country did, it might have made a difference. But he did not do this. Nor would he want anyone else to ... Every moment on the ice must have been agony for some children. And Stafford was one of those children. Those who made it with ease ... would not have much idea what Stafford went through. (Hockey Dreams 134–5)

Later portrayals of characters victimized by the privileged or powerful suggest a fidelity to the moral ecology of the universe that Richards started developing during his adolescent years. As he would explain in Lines, the acted upon rather than the actors began early to solicit his sympathies: ‘At night in our little cottage, when I was eight or nine, I would lie in bed and listen to the wind whistling off the dark and fearsome bay. I was going to become a fisherman and know the sea. And then perhaps my ancestry, or some other mysterious inclination, would draw me to the fir- and spruce-armoured woods, the sound of the river rushing around suicidal bends and cedar swamps. This, of course, was not so much a love of nature, I was to discover, but a response to the love of mankind’ (26–7). It was this feeling for the elemental and disabused that the older Richards would fashion into art, ‘writ[ing] about it,’ he said, ‘in one way or another my entire life’ (Lines 236). The most vivid sense of difference that young Richards noted was in his own home. Compared to others in the neighbourhood, Margaret’s new home was embarrassingly state-of-the-art. Its spic-and-span order gave it an asceticism that he found off-putting at times, imparting a certain pinched quality that he captured when writing about a similar house in his first novel, Gusties: ‘One thing he hated when he walked into his house after school was the smell of wax floors – and the sight of chairs piled out of the way. There was something so empty in the cleanliness’ (14). If Margaret’s house was clockwork clean, the Casey and Kenny households were the opposite. The Caseys had nine kids, known in the neighbourhood as ‘the ball team,’ and the Kenny house was Grand Central at The Rocks. Mrs Kenny, like Rita in Nights, looked after and fed

Richards’s Birth and Early Years 51

many of her neighbours’ children, and hers was the place to go after school for cookies and breads. But though quieter, the Richards house was not solemn – nor was it bookish. There was a set of Funk and Wagnalls from a Dominion Store promotion years earlier, but except for Margaret’s fondness for history and biography, nothing that would have rivalled the home libraries of the Methodist preachers of the time. To compensate, the Richards kids made twice weekly visits to the Old Manse library, the childhood home that Beaverbrook had donated as a public library to the town of Newcastle. Like most young boys his age, Richards was a reluctant reader who preferred picture books about sports and combat. In fact, he liked the library far more than its books, especially the smell of leather bindings and the hardwood floors, the hand-worked staircases and the hollow, quiet sounds echoing in the tall ceilings of the old house. The antiquity of the place provided refuge, as it would for Robert, one of his early protagonists in the story ‘In This Age of Chess.’ That character has a similar reverence for the quasi-sacred places where books are enshrined: The window was oval, and overlooked the street. This was the highest room in the whole place, and it was cozy and warm, soft with age and books dusty in the shelves. Outside winter; it was January – the pathways long and narrow, and bleak street-lamps glowing against the ice; but inside in this library’s attic it was different, everything hard pine and oak, ancient finishing done by hand, square headed nails instead of the round, and the roof beams smelling like the timber of a ship ... It was as if he was sole protagonist in a play, as if this room was the essence of his soul, where he realized victory and defeat, joy and sorrow, anguish and exuberance. It was a catacomb, a den where he hid from the vileness of mankind. And at the small table in its centre he would sit imagining things that only he could imagine, while away hours in delight. (24–5)

His feelings about hallowed old places suggest a sensibility that predated bookishness. But if books were scarce in the Richards household, the aims they served were not. Education assumed the highest rank in the domestic hierarchy of values. In Bill’s time, schooling was not important on the Miramichi. All one needed to get a good job was a functional reading ability, easily acquired by grade eight. High school was thought unnecessary unless one aspired to be a doctor or a priest. By the 1950s, that

52

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

attitude was still prevalent, but not in the Richards house, where Margaret’s insistence on the primacy of education would have special reverberations for her second son throughout his adolescent years. Starting with their first experiences at St Mary’s Academy, called ‘the Little White School’ by everyone in the neighbourhood, she was fully present in her children’s schooling. St Mary’s Academy, the only Catholic primary school in Newcastle, had been built in 1923 by the Catholic diocese. It was run by the sisters of the Congregation of Notre Dame, the CND, who had been operating the adjacent St Mary’s Convent since 1869. Founded by Marguerite Bourgeoys in 1698, the CND was a group of uncloistered sisters who chaperoned girls (the King’s Wards) emigrating from France as brides and nursemaids for the new settlers. Once in Canada, the sisters organized themselves as a teaching order, setting up private girls’ schools in rural parishes in Quebec and the Maritimes. By the 1950s, the CND sisters were firmly in charge of Catholic schooling in Newcastle, supervising about four hundred children by the time David Richards began school. The school offered grades one to eight for girls, grades one to three for boys. After grade three, the boys attended Harkins Academy, a public school next to St Mary’s. The teaching staff at St Mary’s consisted of twelve religious sisters and laywomen, the difference clearly marked by the habits of the former (the children wondered if any of the nuns had long hair, the peaked coif of the CND habit covering all but a few strands at the front). Blue-and-white school uniforms were mandatory, as were the silver crosses adorning the girls’ necks. Classes were large and were separated by gender. Except for daily religious instruction, the curriculum was identical to that legislated by the Common Schools Act and administered by the Newcastle Board of School Trustees: Math, Reading, Social Studies, Writing, Spelling, and Nature (subjects of the physical sciences). Because the school was owned and run by the diocese – and because tuition was often in arrears, most parishioners lacking the means to pay – money was always very scarce. Funds for maintenance and supplies came from special church collections at Christmas and Easter. The sisters sold their knitting at markets, and parents like the Richards donated privately to keep the lights burning and the furnace running in winter. (Years earlier, Janie had sold the Royal Theatre for a nominal price to the church for a bingo and dance hall, so support of this kind was not foreign to Bill.) Unique to St Mary’s Academy was the emphasis placed on music, painting, and drama – the ‘humane arts,’ as the Catholics called those sub-

Richards’s Birth and Early Years 53

jects at the time. Other CND sisters would come over from St Michael’s School or St Thomas College in Chatham to instruct the primary school children in music and art after regular classes in the afternoon, often extending their instruction to the Catholic community as a whole. Bill’s brother Harry trained for years under one of these teachers, becoming an accomplished painter as a result. Junior and senior choirs, art exhibits, and stage performances were common at St Mary’s. Stories from the missal and classroom readers were often staged, and each child was taught to play an instrument or develop an artistic ability. For the sisters, creative aptitudes were gifts from God that had to be nurtured in each person. To do otherwise was to deny the Holy Spirit within, thus turning against the will of God. Religious instruction was also central to the experience of the children at St Mary’s. Every morning from 9 to 9:30, those in the primary grades read the New Testament stories in Butler’s Catechism as preparation for the early sacraments: First Confession and Holy Communion in grade two, followed by Confirmation in grade three. The sisters delivered the instruction, the priests administered the sacraments. Levels of seemingly infinite variety attended this instruction. There were First Steps, Prepatory, Middle and Advanced Prepatory, Intermed, and Higher Local. When the boys left St Mary’s to attend Harkins in grade four, religious training was provided after school and on Sunday afternoons. Long processions of children travelled from the Academy to St Mary’s Church to celebrate feast days and saints’ days, to observe regular duties, and to attend confession on the first Friday afternoon of each month. Even the youngest children learned the ways of prayer and devotion, including the litany of impressive words that, according to the sisters, the Holy See had codified just for them. This catechism was learned by memorization, rote, and drill. By age ten, all were familiar with mortification, breviary, transubstantiation, extreme unction, and postulants. Most could also recite the Litany of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, acquiring in the process the formal syntax of ‘ponderous [as opposed to lighthearted] devotion’: Heart of Jesus, Tabernacle of the Most High, Heart of Jesus, House of God and Gate of Heaven, Heart of Jesus, burning furnace of Charity, Heart of Jesus, abode of Justice and Love, Heart of Jesus, abyss of all virtue ... Heart of Jesus, loaded down with reproaches, Heart of Jesus, bruised for our offences,

54

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi Heart of Jesus, obedient unto death, Heart of Jesus, pierced with a lance, Heart of Jesus, source of all consolation.

Statues of the Blessed Virgin or St Joseph were placed on desks during exams (the sisters believing that incorporeal bodies occupied space); pins of personal saints were affixed to collars; entire classes said The Rosary to mark joyful, sorrowful, or glorious occasions; and sacraments and mysteries were regularly discussed, from birth and marriage to Immaculate Conception and the Holy Trinity. Foremost in the teaching was each Catholic’s personal responsibility to the advancement of social justice in human and community service. Since Baptism had imprinted on the soul the mark of ‘character’ – the mark of a follower of Christ – each young Catholic was taught how to soldier for that quality in outward service, thus striving to become Christ-like in action. The more Christ-like one managed to become, the more grace one received. And grace, taught the sisters, would be judged by degree. While the average person’s store might fill a teacup, St Juliana’s would fill a bucket. Never just canonical, this catechism brought the young into the culture of Catholicism. Thus the sisters shared their fears openly with the children. One such fear, common in Richards’s time, was fear of the irreligious Communists. He and his peers were instructed in how to hold on to their faith if the eastern heathens descended, as it appeared from world events they might. They were told of the errors of Eastern Orthodox churches, which had denounced the Pope as the Vicar of Christ, and of the schisms of the sixteenth century, when followers of Luther and Calvin lost the true faith by denying the lawful succession of the Church hierarchy, thus setting a precedent for autocrats like England’s Henry VIII to refashion faith as a matter of personal convenience. Was it any wonder, they opined, that the British outlawed Catholic seminaries, forcing Irish priests and nuns – some of whose forebears had settled on the Barnaby River – to train at convents like Port-Royal-des-Champs? Social Studies lessons were likewise sprinkled with warnings that detailed in dramatic fashion how many had been cut off from the real Church, the consequence being a great yearning for the true faith among millions of misguided souls around the world. Catholic overseas missions, the children were told, fed a hunger for the faith that could not be satiated, a hunger requiring ever greater numbers to carefully consider the calling. Evidence of the Church’s overseas work was plentiful, and on a number

Richards’s Birth and Early Years 55

of occasions, missionaries visited the school to tell stories about exotic places in Africa and the Far East. Children who underwent this sort of instruction developed an insular sense of community and would never forget the Manichean dramas that were so integral to the experience. Many would move away from the Church as adults, but most would never completely reject the faith values that were central to its doctrine. Nor did many forget their early teachers, since instruction from the sisters exceeded in scope that of teachers in the public system. The principal reason for this was the single-mindedness of the sisters’ teaching vocation. Without domestic concerns to attend to after school, they stayed for hours helping the children with homework, music, spiritual preparation, or whatever else was needed. Students who had gone on to Harkins for higher schooling were welcomed back for advanced tutoring in grammar or algebra. And because the Catholic community was so tightly knit, the help provided to students often extended to their families. The sisters would visit the homes of struggling students to determine needs, then quietly raise money or petition the parish council for the necessary food, heating oil, or – as was often the case – shoes and other clothing around First Communion time. Everything was kept in the strictest confidence, euphemistically referred to as ‘in the parish family.’ The children of St Mary’s were required to participate in community work as part of their service commitments. For boys, this began with duties on the altar. They started in grade four, beginning their training by assembling in the sacristy to learn about the gifts, vestments, and Latin responses. Mother St David (Sister Chisholm) and her assistant, Sister St John Daniel (Sister Daley), were in charge. Once the boys passed the Latin test, they served as novitiates to older altar boys, starting with High Mass every Sunday morning and then going solo at seven a.m. weekday Mass at the Church or the Convent. (One of the benefits of being an altar boy was meeting the girls boarding at the Convent. And since the CND’s historical vocation was matchmaking, the sisters delighted in organizing dances and skating parties, where they paired their boys with good Catholic girls from the choir.) When the boys were not serving, they sat as a large group on both sides of the altar during High Mass. They were not allowed to move a muscle, look out at the congregation, or look up at the priest – this was the pre-Vatican II period, when the priest, to maintain solemnity, kept his back to the congregation. Mother St David kept a constant watch in the front pew, showing no tolerance for

56

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

hijinks. A boy who turned his head or otherwise broke form was whacked with a coat hanger afterwards. In an environment that demanded the utmost concentration to maintain form, Richards was notorious for laughing, earning him ‘sacristy whacks’ and a few stern words from Bill on the way home. Mother St David’s punishment was the easier to take. Mother St David was, in fact, one of the more popular sisters because of the monthly initiatives she organized to raise money for various causes. The boys would bring fudge and baking for sales, collect clothing for the poor, and go on food drives throughout town. These endeavours taught them the faith values of human service – specifically, that each according to the Gospel of St Paul was answerable for what he did or did not do to alleviate the suffering of others. Mother St David said that this meant ‘actionable intent,’ living the faith as it was professed. One headline that survives from the time is revealing in this regard. A piece of social news in the North Shore Leader, ‘Children’s Gift,’ described how ‘eleven children living in the neighbourhood of the Miramichi Hospital gave a gift of $1.50 to buy a treat for patients in the children’s ward. The children calling themselves “The Beavers” who made the donation from their own allowances were Douglas and Tommy Prince, David and Leslie White, Billy and David Richards, Beverley and Richard Parks, Gerald and David Smith, and Jackie Delano.’ These were kids from The Rocks, all around ten years old, the kids of ‘promise’ whom Richards described in ‘My Old Newcastle’ as those of privilege, hunger, and constant worry, none with more future than any other (14). The Richards siblings also received Catholic instruction at home, where Mother St David’s ‘actionable intent’ was often in evidence. The Richards were that breed of Catholics called ‘upstanding.’ Bill’s brother Harry typified the family’s commitment to its faith. As a young man he had attended the seminary in London, Ontario, for three years, leaving just before final vows. Conversant with the works of Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton, and the Jansenists Blaise Pascal and Pasquier Quesnel, he loved to talk theology and philosophy over a rum-and-coke at the Legion Hall. Never one to let his small-town locale restrict him, he went to Toronto one year to speak with Malcolm Muggeridge and the Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan. Bill was less scholastically inclined than his younger brother but deeply involved in the practical business of the Church. He was a lector, picked up the collection on Sundays, and was active in the Knights of Columbus, advancing to the position of Grand Knight. The elder Richards were especially considerate of the sisters. They

Richards’s Birth and Early Years 57

provided money for their special needs and took great care that the movies they showed were not offensive. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Church still maintained the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list or ‘index’ of books and movies deemed contrary to the faith of Catholics. (The movie part of the list was compiled by the Legion of Decency, an American Catholic organization that monitored morality in Hollywood films.) This list was controlled by diocesan bishops, who assigned parish sisters the responsibility of keeping it updated on school bulletin boards. The list banned young Catholics from seeing movies like Gone with the Wind and Blue Hawaii because of their light treatment of marriage; the sisters, in turn, provided spiritual counsel in the requisite acts of contrition to their female boarders who had become smitten with Elvis Presley. When Cecil B. DeMille’s epic The Ten Commandments came out in 1956, Bill and Harry invited the sisters to a private showing at The Uptown, a practice that became routine when a film arrived that might provoke alarm. In 1978, when Pretty Baby was released, the Richards brothers organized previews for various religious groups to ensure that none would be offended by Louis Malle’s controversial study of a young girl (played by Brooke Shields) growing up in a New Orleans bordello. If the priests had censored it, Bill and Harry would not have shown the film at their Miramichi theatres. This sense of Catholic obligation extended to civic duties as well. In a town where the leading businessmen had always been involved in community development, Bill became a town councillor, president of the Recreation Council, a long-time Rotarian and Paul Harris Fellow, benefactor to the Kinsmen Centre for the mentally disabled, and a longserving chairman of the Easter Seals campaign. Margaret was active as a member of the Catholic Women’s League (CWL) and the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire (IODE) – an apparent contradiction perhaps, except that from her point of view both did good work. But it was Margaret and Bill’s public service at the theatre that the Richards children (and few others) saw. In the early 1950s, Bill started the Christmas Toy Exchange, an initiative that would later become known as Santa’s Helpers. In exchange for a new or used toy, patrons would receive free admission to a matinee. Bill would then take the toys to a woman across the river in Chatham Head, who would wrap and distribute them to needy children in the area. He and Harry would also organize special shows for charity, and they often gave free admission to kids with disabilities or insufficient means. In River, the adult son records his fictional father’s generosity in the midst of his town’s calculated indifference:

58

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi ‘Mister King – we used to sneak into the theatre – did you know?’ [Ray Winch] nudged Gary Fallon, standing beside him. ‘I knew, son, I knew.’ ‘We used to wait by the exit door – did you know?’ Miles smiled. ‘Your father once waited by the door as well. I often left the door open for you, Ray,’ he said. ‘I often did that for you, boy, for I knew your circumstances better than you cared about mine.’ (353)

Bill and Margaret regularly dipped into box office revenues to buy winter boots for the needy or something for the sisters. (One weekend’s receipts contributed to sending Mother St David to Scotland for her twenty-fifth anniversary as a religious.) They also intervened quietly in times of personal tragedy. Their largesse in this regard is difficult to document because it was so secretive, but on one occasion when a man’s son drowned, Bill and Margaret gave the gate from a couple of movies to an intermediary to give to the family for a proper burial. They swore the intermediary to secrecy, but after years of badgering by the dead boy’s family, the middleman revealed the source of the money. Bill and Margaret received a letter from the family shortly afterwards. Though sometimes indifferent to the social complexities of human service, children absorbed the imprint of these actions, even when negative, as actions could be in an institution whose authority was often exercised with impunity. One such action left a deep impression on Richards and his friends in the early 1960s. They were in grade eight at Harkins Academy, receiving religious instruction from the priests at St Mary’s. Two priests were easygoing, while the third, an avid hockey player from Chatham Head, was popular for his athleticism but an uncompromising disciplinarian during Catechism class. He would take the altar boys to the rink to play hockey, pepper them with heavy hits and shots, then ridicule those who had backed away. It was said that he hated sissies more than sinners. During one evening class, he warned Richards twice to stop talking. When he did not, the priest reached down three rows, lifted the slight boy overhead with one hand, and threw him so savagely to the floor that the other boys gasped in shock. The assault was so quick and ferocious that it stopped time. An eternity seemed to pass before Richards picked himself up and ran home crying, deeply wounded, his feelings about the Church changed forever. To do that to a child, no matter the era, was a fundamental corruption of the faith, and though he could not articulate the feeling of betrayal at the time, the episode would remain with him as a marker of the fault line between the fallibility of

Richards’s Birth and Early Years 59

the institution and the incorruptibility of the faith. Years later, hardened by the excesses and abuses of the institutional Church, he recalled the violent priest in his creation of Father Lacey in Blood Ties, ‘the small unconscious drool of saliva on [his] lips’ as he ‘swung him around and struck him hard on the face’ (164). The abuse of power in the name of righteousness would come to dominate Richards’s critical poetics. What is key, as the following lines about his old school and childhood chums illustrate, is that corruption and emancipation cling to the same root: I go by the place I went to school, past the faded buildings of my youth where those children their tiny bodies in coats and boots once lined up in schoolyard rows. Thirty of them dead, So the old nun’s shoe won’t smart now when a kick to the arse was given the boy who could not recite a prayer Nor would he cry to heaven ... Thirty of them dead, thirty more gone lives in grief or tatters but I think, in defiant whim, no battered strap or bettered school unlearned lesson or school yard rule will ever bother them again, Even though in this thin cold air the hope in their hearts still matters. (‘The School Yard’ 16)

For all the regimentation and strictness and occasional outbursts from thugs, most of the sisters and priests at St Mary’s were generous, contrary to what is assumed today. Discipline was enforced, but without the wilful permissiveness of today there were fewer incidents when severe measures had to be taken. For those who lived under the authoritarian benevolence of the Church before the social revolutions of the 1960s, the experience was one of rich enculturation. One of the many incidents of the time that attests to this insularity involved a town councillor

60

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

who was also a Newcastle merchant. The man owned the area’s busiest bakery. He had a fleet of trucks that daily carried his breads and baked goods downriver to Neguac and as far north as Tracadie and Caraquet on the peninsula. The vast majority of his customers were thus Acadian Catholics. When a suggestion came before Newcastle council that the town give money to the sisters at St Mary’s to offset the costs of private Catholic schooling – the Catholics were, after all, paying municipal and provincial taxes like everyone else, and running a school on top of that – the local merchant, a good Protestant descendent of William Davidson, took a stand, arguing that as long as he was a councillor, there would be no money for the nuns’ parochialism. The Catholic communities in the area took note. Within months, the baker had lost the Acadian peninsula; within a few years his entire business was gone. There was nothing ecumenical about this boycott, nor had any edict been issued from the vestry. Rather, this was the reaction of a community that had learned to stay close in order to survive, employing containment strategies as checks on absolute power. Survival depended on kin and tribe. In an effort to accommodate these differences, the Newcastle and Chatham mayoralties would shift from Protestant to Catholic, each group waiting its turn for favours the office would confer on the lucky constituency. Likewise, growing up in Newcastle in the 1950s meant that one didn’t associate with the presumably Catholic mob in Chatham. There was simply no need. Unless a person had business on the other side of the river, he stayed on his own, for as every Miramichier knew, ‘a man never forgot which side of the river he was born on.’ The children of both communities picked up on these divisions. They were not forbidden to bring non-Catholics to dances, nor were they told explicitly to camp on their side of the river. Even so, the taboos were clear. They had heard about the cancelled hockey games between the two rivals – about the fights on the ice and in the parking lot, and the police escorts and slashed tires – and they saw the prejudices around them. How could they not be affected? As a boy, Richards acutely felt this ‘nefarious cauldron of … bigotry’ (Lines 17). He grew up surrounded by Catholicism in a predominantly Protestant community, yet because of his family’s public profile in business, his mother’s early Presbyterianism (which made her marriage ‘mixed’ among the cradle Catholics), and a disability that to him was pronounced, he was hardly sheltered by the protective benevolence of town, family, or church. Rather, living in a town where divisions were neatly homogenized, his unorthodox circumstances pushed him to the

Richards’s Birth and Early Years 61

margins, rendering him lonely without privacy and thus very close to his father’s early condition. That lack of anonymity accelerated his independence every bit as much as it did Bill’s. Being an ‘open target,’ he said, ‘made me aware of the mob … By the time I was six or seven it was my strategy not to be near [them]’ (God Is 100). The following verse by the adult hearkens back to the boy’s sense of moral and intellectual freedom in that public sphere: Self knowledge – hard won; Secret advice to those halt or lame: You’re far greater than any pain, They’ll never really let you join, So you don’t have to play their game. (‘Self Knowledge’ 9)

3 Oliver Twist and the 1960s

I’m subjected to a psychiatric evaluation before being sent to trial. But I know that this very expertise contains an unspoken assumption that confers legitimacy on the system I’m fighting and a pathological connotation on my own undertaking. Psychiatry is the science of individual imbalance enclosed within a flawless society. It enhances the standing of conformists and the well-integrated, not those who refuse; it glorifies all forms of civil obedience and acceptance. Hubert Aquin, Prochain Épisode (7)

The day is nice and I never care if I go to school. Today is the day they lock me up, tie me up ... and school is drab with pencil cases. David Richards, ‘Mercury Month’ (19)

By 1960, Richards had moved to Harkins Academy, the public school adjacent to St Mary’s. Much of the institutional landscape was familiar. Days were still highly regimented, the same Old World maps papered the walls (with Britain’s colonial holdings highlighted in pink), and ‘Oh Canada’ was sung each morning. The striking difference was the demographic mix: Richards now encountered kids from areas surrounding Newcastle, from the eastern end of Douglastown all the way upriver to Red Bank and Millerton. Many of the boys were strangers, and furthermore, the rituals of managing them were unfamiliar. Discipline was not maintained by the old codes of honour and self-restraint, but enforced by the strap, which was used regularly on the poorer Skunk Ridge and Back Road rowdies to keep the others in line. It seemed that in the public system, social class was a determinant of discipline. At St Mary’s, the boys were rarely strapped – threatened, yes, even their eternal souls, but not strapped.

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 63

Richards found the move difficult. A shy, diminutive child with a pronounced limp, he found himself ostracized by a large crowd of strangers he didn’t know as well as marginalized scholastically in classes that were divided according to aptitude, from Academic 1 and 2 all the way down to Remedial 5 and 6. Margaret insisted that he be placed in the A1 class (6A1, 7A1), but he struggled to stay there. He liked History and English, in that order, but little else. And what he didn’t like he didn’t apply himself to, thereby running afoul of his mother’s high expectations. His process of adolescent differentiation began at this time, starting, as it often does, with family. He asked himself whether their values were also his own. His family was considered rich, as are all business families in small towns, but he knew enough about his ancestry to know that their modest comforts were recent and perhaps not the best option for him. Janie had come from famine Irish poverty in Enginetown; her brothers, Hughie and Willie, had been heavy drinkers who traded in horses; his mother’s family had all gone into the woods as labourers; and the mix of kids around him at The Rocks had elicited his sympathies and instilled in him a respect for the less fortunate. Complementing this questioning was a hardening of his fealty to place. He was becoming increasingly intolerant of people from away – his relatives from Boston, for instance – who considered his town a backwater, fine for fishing and hunting but otherwise insignificant. Not yet a teenager, he made a pact that whatever he was going to do, and however much he had to compensate for his disability in doing it, he was going to be ‘of the Miramichi’ – not just a citizen, living there by accident of birth, but intimately a part of place. This would make him unique in a large family of children who were excelling – an older brother who was an athlete, a younger sister who was academically gifted, and baby brothers who seemed able to master anything physical. His nose would be dirtied just a bit, his moods darker and coarser than theirs. When he encountered Rimbaud a few years later, he immediately understood the French poet’s insistence on lousing. This transition, by a small, thin-faced boy who had always been clean and orderly, would make quite an impact and change the way he interacted with those around him. He began to challenge the authority of teachers, especially when he detected that they were putting on airs. He also began to test the limits of his own moral precocity. Honour-bred, even as a boy, he began to insist that action follow intent – that if a person said he was going to do something, he should do it. As a consequence, he started getting into scrapes, most of them a result of daring himself to do one thing or another. He

64

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

smoked in the schoolyard and pushed the limits of others’ tolerance to the point that he became one of those kids who was always watched. It was a standing joke among his friends that though they all would partake of some mischief, he was the one most likely to be caught. When they all dug a hole near the top of the bank to trap one of the local winos (a favourite prank), it was Richards who would have the bad luck of holding the shovel when the other winos arrived. When he and his older brother jostled while digging worms for a fishing trip, it was his foot that was impaled by the pitchfork. Trouble seemed to follow him, whether he was the cause or not. As we know from our psychoanalytic primers, most wilfulness is an attempt to make a connection and is often necessitated by some limitation in circumstances. David Richards was a textbook example. While most boys his age were connecting with the world through sports, he was on the sidelines, possessing their energies but not their physical abilities. His connections were therefore disconnections, disentanglements – albeit gradual at this point – from family and middle-class stability, essentially from what obedient boys from good families were supposed to do in order to uphold the privileged status that was their birthright. One of his most powerful memories from this period provides evidence of this psychology – specifically, of his moving away from the standard (one might say conformist) expectations that others had placed on him. He and one of the Casey boys (a model for Stafford Foley), both perennially weak students, approached their grade five teacher at Harkins to ask if they might be considered for the Christmas play. His young friend was diabetic and Richards was lame on the left side, yet the two imaginative boys thought that play-acting might be a connection. Besides, both had had some exposure to drama at St Mary’s, where the sisters had put on How Six Boys Keep House two years earlier. They were, of course, wrong about making that connection at Harkins, and once again they were rejected, as the adult Richards recalls bitterly in Hockey Dreams: Our school [Harkins Academy] was a dark, aging, high-ceilinged place. Always I have tried to describe the peculiar aspect of oppression it fostered upon me. I have never managed it. It had heavy, grey hallways and linoleum floors ... And here I was, with Stafford, close to Christmas of 1960, standing at the door of Mrs. Grey asking if I could be in the school play. Mrs. Grey got her actors from the top – the crème de la crème of scholars. We weren’t the crème de la crème. We weren’t even close to the crème de la crème.

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 65 She was writing in her attendance book when we went in on that grey afternoon in mid December. The remarkable thing about this is that I remember her as being as pleased with herself as any child of twelve when she said this: ‘Well well well well – are you two at the top?’ And that was it. Not only were Stafford and I not able to skate well enough to play hockey, we were too stupid to act. (56)

That was the final time that Richards attempted any connection whatsoever with school. Forever after he would remember it in the same way as his protagonists: as ‘all one colour, one mood ... grey’ (Gusties 7). Though he probably didn’t know the full extent of his paternal grandmother’s contempt for Protestant education – a system that has always been called ‘public’ in New Brunswick – years later he would adopt an attitude similar to hers regarding the bullying inherent in that particular enterprise. It was a bullying he hadn’t experienced in the Catholic system. He reacted as most boys do, developing strategies of indifference. He performed poorly and worked at ridiculing what his teachers valued. If they dismissed him, he would do likewise to them. So began at Harkins, in Lord Beaverbrook’s little schoolhouse, Richards’s disdain for academic certainty, prejudiced dismissal, and credentialed high-mindedness. He had inherited the propensity that experience would only strengthen: the mix of a little knowledge and even less real authority was a dangerous combination, especially among small-town literati. As the Rocks crowd grew into adolescence in the turbulent 1960s, the ‘old Newcastle’ – as Richards would later call the incorruptible town of his youth – was in the final days of its old-economy isolation. Slow-paced, clapboarded, and treelined, it was struggling to preserve the conventions of pioneering times. My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music were the big hits at the Richards’s Uptown and Midway theatres in 1965, and when the beach party movies played, the kids still sided with the fair-haired Frankie Avalons against the greasy Eric Von Zipper types. The world represented in Beach Blanket Bingo seemed as idyllic and full of promise as the one on the river. Though postwar expansion had brought outsiders in, Newcastle was still a nineteenth-century lumbertown where the tide-turning spirit of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967), though encroaching fast, could not yet be imagined. Storefronts, diners, and hotels ringed the square, and most of the town was still run by the old families. Burchill’s and Anderson’s employed large numbers in pulp operations. At Clelands, just north of The Rocks beyond the tracks, fifty men still worked on the big bark piles, peeling pulp by hand for pit props, then

66

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

trucking it down to the dock for shipping. Boys David’s age worked there as spotters and water carriers, not old enough to handle pulp but relied on to furnish cigarettes, ice, and other necessities. Richards discovered his vocation at a time when old Newcastle’s Victorian character was being co-opted by the outside world. The culprit, of course, was television, which was so threatening to the Richards’s livelihood that Janie wondered whether ‘the town no longer needed us’ (River 186). Television’s material threat to town and family was crucial to his development as a writer, becoming a symbolic marker that separated the old stability of Janie’s culture from the new reality of ‘empty [theatre] seats’ (River 186). This social transition spurred the young Richards to another kind of pact, albeit one that at this juncture was formulated elusively in his mind: when things on the river started to change after 1965, he began preserving in memory those aspects of his place that were rapidly fading. Without fully understanding why, his instincts called on him to do so. What affirmed the rightness of his instinct and set the stage for the discovery of his vocation was an episode at Harkins just before he was fourteen. His teacher, administering a test to determine student aptitudes, asked a question about local history, but before he could answer, the student next to him did. Not only had he known the answer – a rare thing for the generally inattentive student – but he’d begun to pride himself on his knowledge of the subject. The teacher next read a passage from a Henry James story as an overture to asking why a particular thing was said. This time, he answered without thinking, surprising his teacher, himself, and his friends. His response to the history question had been intellectual; the answer he gave to the writing question had been instinctual. Though the teacher declared him the class authority on literature, he still felt let down, for he wanted to be known as the historian in the group. Just a few months after this episode, Dickens’s Oliver Twist would deliver the revelation that placed him on his life’s path, enabling him to combine his passion for history with his deeply personal experience of place. Who gave him the Dickens novel for Christmas in 1964 is now lost to history, but regardless of who did, its choice in hindsight seems propitious, for if ever two soulmates existed in the literary world, it was Dickens and Richards. Dickens had trained himself to be a journalist, and accordingly, his subject matter was both topical and provocative – for many genteel souls,

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 67

alarmingly so. Oliver Twist was no exception. Subtitled The Parish Boy’s Progress for its examination of an orphan’s life, the novel was Dickens’s first attempt to interrogate through fiction the rawness of London’s notorious social conditions. He was especially interested in the Saffron Hill district of London, an area with the worst reputation in the city, a place where vice and pestilence swarmed. Saffron Hill was home to prostitutes, pickpockets, and waifs, a district where people of breeding did not go. Yet the place was not solely its own creation; it was also the consequence of one of London’s more infamous social experiments: the parish workhouses that issued from Parliament’s Poor Law of 1834. The Poor Law applied a kind of social eugenics to the masses of Saffron Hill, offering them the rudiments of relief – in Dickens’s telling, ‘three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week’ (11) – in workhouses where conditions were kept deliberately harsh. Husbands and wives were separated, idleness was forbidden, and families were kept on the verge of starvation, their spirits eroded by unending social interventions. The new theory of the day held that the way to break the generational cycle of poverty in areas like Saffron Hill was to prevent the real poor from breeding. In this social experiment, little thought was given to the children, who often suffered the most. Dickens’s Oliver was one such waif, born in a parish workhouse, never knowing his mother (who died on the night of his birth). In the preface to Oliver Twist, Dickens explains why this treatment of London’s degraded populations interested him: I had never met (except in Hogarth) with the miserable reality. It appeared to me that to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really did exist; to paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid misery of their lives; to show them as they really were, forever skulking uneasily through the dirtiest paths of life, with the great black ghastly gallows closing up their prospect, turn them where they might; it appeared to me that to do this, would be to attempt something which was needed, and which would be a service to society. (xv)

Dickens surmised that a documentary-like portrayal of one of the hidden truths of the social register would render a service at least equal in importance to that being legislated by Parliament. He would not challenge the theories of population control – that was being done daily in the press by partisan wags. Rather, he would show the effects of the application of those theories on the children of Saffron Hill, thereby

68

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

illuminating for ‘gentle’ readers the street-level consequences of social welfare policies. In exposing London’s underbelly in this way – literally, by forcing delicate sensibilities to ‘look upon’ (xvii) ‘Nancy’s dishevelled hair’ (xvi) – he would reveal the truth without the histrionics and in this way bring about social reform. In other words, he would apply realism as an instrument of covert social commentary. Though the work of a youthful political idealist – Dickens was twentyfive when he began writing it as a serial in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1837 – the novel nevertheless bears powerful witness. To read it is to be assaulted by Oliver’s misery. Those acquainted with Richards’s mature work, especially Stilt House and Mercy, will realize why it appealed to the young Miramichier: Oliver is an orphaned child in squalid conditions. Present in space but belonging to no one, he is victim to circumstances over which he has no control. Moreover, as ‘badged and ticketed,’ he wears a licence ‘to be cuffed and buffeted through the world – despised by all, and pitied by none’ (3). Oliver is thus strikingly similar to the child Richards knew from Hamilton Street, the mass of innocents from his youth: ‘the 11 children whose dad was a fireman and was killed fighting a fire in 1955, or those other boys and girls … waiting at the back door of the bakery, in winter, to get a piece of bread before they went to school’ (‘Children’ 18). Oliver is the Everychild whom Richards has been writing about for forty years. He is also the inner child. Dickens’s description of him as ‘a pale thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and decidedly small in circumference’ (5), must have registered with a shock of recognition. Even his adventures in the adult would have struck familiar chords. When the nine-year-old Oliver is recruited by a council of rogue boys to ask for more food, he is summarily beaten and sold off the premises by a ‘fat, healthy [master]’ (12) and by a guardian who opines that the ‘boy will be hung’ (13). Though the reprimand to Richards’s own daring of a few months prior was not nearly as severe – ‘Well well well well – are you two at the top?’ (Hockey Dreams 56) – the humiliation would have been familiar to a well-meaning and overly sensitive boy. The mature Richards would always cherish precocious boys who, as outcasts, see more clearly or empathize more deeply than adults who inhabit the inner circle. The young Andrew in Wounded typifies this ability or quality: his character is that of the all-knowing eavesdropper and the compassionate witness: The boy was generally kept away from all of this conversation in any other locale; but because he was in the camp with men there was a certain idea that he was of age. The talk was not disturbing to him, except for one thing

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 69 which none of the men knew. He thought of how sad it must be to be outside of life, and that Jerry’s physical aspects took on a certain heaviness, as if the physical space he inhabited was somehow different and more limited than that of the other men there. He did not know how to articulate this, of course, and perhaps this feeling came because he was young and not given to all the froth and worry of the men themselves. (9)

In Richards’s telling, the revelation of his life’s vocation occurred just after he read the passage where Oliver is dismissed for temerity. He was reading along not quite engrossed, having difficulty with Dickens’s syntax, when suddenly he understood the work’s interior cadence, not the story Dickens was telling but why he was telling it in the way he was. He suddenly saw the construction for its deeper architecture. As in his grandmother’s kitchen at the age of three, he knew intuitively why the adult was proceeding as he was. ‘It was the most richly satisfying experience I’ve ever had,’ he would recall (interview with author, December 1996). Without a critical vocabulary, he knew the how and why of Dickens’s manoeuvrings. He saw how Dickens was defending Oliver without ever speaking in the orphan’s defence. And, once again, that knowing brought feelings of assurance and mastery. Perhaps this was a way that he, too, could speak. It quickly became evident that this was the way of speaking he had been searching for. From that point on, he mused, nothing could be done with him: ‘After I read Oliver Twist, I wanted to be a writer, and that’s all there was to it. I never thought of doing anything else’ (quoted in Garrod 211). From this revelation came ‘Charlie,’ the story of an orphaned boy in Newcastle. Thirty years later, it was Dickens’s sarcastic treatment of the Malthusians that Richards would recall when writing his own polemic on childhood: It was what Dickens’ fictional Oliver Twist had to face growing up in the 1830s – the demagogy of an adjustable social program. A program that is always scaled for people we consider beneath us, but which we refuse to admit we consider beneath us. Children have often been used as poker chips in the game of self-seeking, so much so that even the pictures of starving children create a degree of cynicism that no new diet fad could match. And allow us to vent our arguments against the children themselves. (‘Children’ 17)

Dickens’s handling of sociological realism was equally important to what Richards would become. Among the more famous legacies of Oliver

70

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Twist was its author’s delight in reading the episode of the murder of the prostitute Nancy – a legacy carried forward in Richards’s dramatic readings of the allegory of the wise old buck from Wounded, its sacrifice in luring the hunter away from its progeny, a moving pathos analogous to the selflessness of Jerry Bines. The parallel suggests that both writers chose these passages for reading aloud in order to push their audiences to the brink of tolerance. The fourteen-year-old Miramichier would not have known of Dickens’s delight in the ‘contagion of fainting’ (ix) that afflicted many of the delicate ladies on hearing of the murder of Nancy – ‘I should think that we had from a dozen to twenty ladies taken out stiff and rigid at various times’ (ix). He did, though, relate viscerally to the physical realism of Dickens’s atmospheric scenes. It was Dickens’s evocative skills that attracted him to writing: ‘[Dickens and] Edgar Allan Poe never really grew out of that fine sort of temperament adolescents have to create their own mysterious world, and I wanted to do that too. I really wanted to write … “atmospherically” – everything had to be shaded’ (quoted in Garrod 212). In reading Dickens, observed Doug Glover, ‘Richards must have recognized … that it was really possible to express [his own] experience in beautiful and exciting ways – the subtle dance of wealth, class, and poverty, the contrast between professional do-gooders and the truly good, the manipulation of youth, the drinking, and the violence’ (12). Dickens wrote unapologetically of the streets and alleys of his childhood home, just as Richards would come to think of his old Newcastle as a very Dickensian place – ‘It was a different era, but I knew girls around town like [Nancy] and I knew people almost as sinister as Bill Sikes’ (quoted in Garrod 211). Dickens loved the abandoned Oliver as Richards would love Orville (Blood Ties), Randy (Stilt House), Percy (Mercy), and François Villon, the youthful subject of one of his plays. Dickens portrayed violence, crime, and the social hierarchies of the underclass without romance or restraint, much as Richards would represent calculation and treachery. Dickens plumbed the psychology of class and degradation, delighting in theatrical narratives that he made provocative with dramatic intensity, just as Richards would amplify his own dark interiorities until they acquired emotive, filmic dimensions. The most telling parallel in the work of the two adult writers, however, relates to the investigation of character in its social milieu. Dickens’s narratives are character-driven novels of personality, their plots turning on the consequences of action in the lives of the acted upon. He is, as a result, a political moralist, one whose social gospels were often (and de-

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 71

liberately) misunderstood in his own day. One of the first widely circulated reviews of Oliver Twist concluded that the book was immoral. What Dickens’s biographer Peter Ackroyd said of his subject could also apply to young Richards: The style that emerges [after Oliver Twist] is one which will pervade the rest of his writing. For what are the essential themes brought to life in Oliver Twist as he now continued it? Home. Death. Childhood. All of them so curiously blended in the wish to revert to some primal place, some Eden of remembrance, some innocent state ... And here we glimpse all the memories of Dickens himself – his memory of early infancy when nothing could separate him from his mother, his memory of life before the blacking factory ... all these things utterly torn from him but returning now, returning in his memory, returning in his fiction as the parish boy himself wakes to find himself saved. (231)

In Dickens’s story of a precocious child’s progress through isolation and suffering, the lonely parish boy from Newcastle found his own way. He found a way to preserve his old town and to stand up to the forces bent on destroying it. If this discovery seems intellectually rapacious for a boy of fourteen, then his unusual determination is being underestimated. Even as a boy, he was single-minded and far-reaching. Once he discovered what literary writing actually addressed and could accomplish, his own direction in the world became both clear and urgent. Not even his first love, Murial, a Convent girl, could deter him. He became, by his own admission, difficult, beginning a practice that he would continue whenever he sensed a threat to his writing or to the integrity of his art. He cut himself off from people who discredited what he was doing. Though only an adolescent, he would accept nothing less than being a full-time, self-supporting writer. With a romantic flare characteristic of his age, he told those close to him that he would write or die. What did not sustain his ambitions he simply dismissed. Single-minded determination of this sort causes problems in one so young. It turned Richards into a quarreller. He quarrelled with his parents and teachers. He quarrelled with the emissaries they sent to dissuade him. He quarrelled with the idea that his welfare hinged on the choice of a more sensible path than that of an artist. Much of the problem lay in how these people presented their opposition to his plans, for it was cast in the conservative, middle-class propriety that had always been dismissive

72

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

of difference. Already practised in sensing the grander gestures towards conformity, he rejected the view that creative work was especially trifling and impractical in a have-not, rural setting like New Brunswick. But the more vigorously he rejected the middle path, the more strenuously his parents insisted. All of the Miramichi’s writers, they explained, were only secondarily employed as such. Father Murdoch and Monsignor Hickey were ministers, Michael Whelan was a lumberman, and Louise Manny and her benefactor, Lord Beaverbrook, were a librarian and a journalist respectively. Arguing farther afield, they noted that Fred Cogswell and Alfred G. Bailey, the most visible creative writers in the province, were university professors, and that Alden Nowlan, the poet/columnist from Saint John, was a night news editor. Even Joseph Conrad, the famous writer from William Sr’s hometown in Kent, had first been a merchant seaman. Each had concluded that a weekly paycheque attached to some kind of professional designation was necessary. Only a fool would miss that logic, Bill insisted. Without admitting it, he and Margaret were secretly worried about their son’s disability. Margaret knew the demands of physical labour and doubted her son’s ability to make a living with his hands. Even a walking boss, she knew, must walk for miles in the woods or on the grounds of a mill – something impossible for a man with limited use of his left side. Buoyed by reports from a junior high school principal that the wilful boy might make a good lawyer, argumentative as he was, they pleaded with him to set his sights on teaching or law. But their son, who by this time was reading the poems of another orphan, Edgar Allan Poe, would have none of this advice. Instead, he threw himself into the life of a writer, doing what he thought would advance his prospects of becoming a witness and champion of place, the only kind of writer he wanted to be. He deliberately sought public work – at his father’s Bushville Drive-In, at Sobeys, with the Department of Lands and Forests. In work, one of the dominant rituals of his place, he would be attuned to speech, story, and personality. With the foresters, he would come to know the woods, and though the heat and flies were relentless, the experience was functional, as one of his fictional episodes reveals: ‘Picking cones he got scraped, bruised, cut by the shears, bitten by flies and burned. The sun seemed always hot, blistering the bare backs of the pickers. It had to be the worst job in Canada, Duncan thought. Duncan wouldn’t move much all day just hunch over and pick. By the end of that summer the greatest sight had been a whole patch of cones, ripe and brown, on two or three closely

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 73

felled trees’ (‘The Fire’ 99). The drudgery was worth the discomfort, he told friends, for in drudgery he was raising the experiential capital that is the essential currency and freedom of the writer. It was at this time that he took his first of many drinks – an action that, while contravening his father’s advice, put him in sympathetic company with a fraternity of writers – Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Malcolm Lowry, his current fascination, Edgar Allan Poe, and others – a fraternity, that is, of selfdestructive boozers. By the time he began high school at Harkins in 1965, his path had been set, his focus narrowed, his vices sampled, and his empathetic attachment to the people of the Miramichi entrenched. While most kids his age were trying to figure out who they were, he was beginning his life’s work. He began to write at this point at a feverish pitch. He wrote to get outside of himself and to get in – to get away, that is, from the preoccupation of his disability, but also to explore it more deeply. Showing signs of his father’s unusual sleep patterns, he stayed up all night writing poems and reading Poe and Thomas and Stephen Crane. The dining room table became his nocturnal sanctuary. When he couldn’t write, he drew in the margins of his notebooks, elongating the nighttime hours and his sense of perfect isolation. Only Bill’s yells of ‘Goddammit David, get to bed’ broke the silence of the house. He would emerge for breakfast looking haggard and exhausted, often missing school because of fatigue. Bill and Margaret wanted to be encouraging but truancy was beyond their limit. He was only sixteen, after all, doing something that made no sense to them. Was it a phase, was he rebelling, was it worth his failing a grade? These questions constituted the fundamental disagreement between parents and child that marked the beginning of two years of heated arguments in the Richards household, two years during which David emerged as the black sheep of the family. The more Bill tried to bully and cajole, the more his son rebelled. As the adult writer later admitted, rebellion was a natural, if painful, part of his apprenticeship: In my early years the Miramichi gave me a sense of real community, a sense of order that small towns give. But I had to rebel against that. And rebelling against that kind of order is a very lonely feeling. But you do rebel against it if you want to be an artist. And by rebelling you do not dismiss or disown it, but you look upon it with reflection and see it for what it really is. Those who don’t, remain in the community. Those who do, have to leave because

74

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi if they remain, they do so as oddballs or eccentrics. (interview with author, August 2001)

His isolation during this period of discovery was acute. He was inventing a way into writing that had no precedent in family or community; furthermore, he had no one to talk with in any depth about it. The interests of his friends, while compelling, were not his own. He inhabited their world more than they inhabited his. This became the secret he never told them. He was reading two or three books a week, filing things away for later use, while they were talking about hunting and fishing and taking engines apart. ‘There was a sort of duality,’ he explained, ‘I was one guy one time, one guy another’ (quoted in Garrod 213). He was a Tom Sawyer among the Huckleberry Finns. One of his early protagonists of similar sensibility expresses what he must have felt himself: ‘sometimes it did get lonely telling himself how a poem affected him ... he needed someone there to talk with’ (‘In This Age of Chess’ 25). However much the mature Richards would come to regret what change ultimately brought to his old Newcastle, the rapid changes of the 1960s complemented his growing sense of inwardness as well as his need for imaginative freedom. His was the first generation of Miramichiers – and the first group within that generation – to feel the liberation of the times in terms of both the freeing of restrictions and the testing of conventions. To understand Richards’s later social philosophy, one must consider the paradoxical mix of energy and ennui that characterized this transitional time on the Miramichi. By the latter half of the 1960s, serious questions were being raised about the moral authority of Eisenhower’s postwar pax Americana. The paranoid conservatism that had driven McCarthy’s Communist witchhunts and the sickening realism of CBS’s depictions of ‘Zapping the Cong’ – as the slaughter of the agrarian Vietnamese was being called by embedded journalists – shook the foundations of America’s dispassionate austerity. The large and demographically uniform group of young people born between 1945 and 1952 was beginning to rally behind the reactionary temper of the times. These young people proved adept at unravelling the thinly disguised allegory of slaughter in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), and they aligned themselves with the romantic rebels in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Their awakening changed the tenor as well as the agenda of social discourse. They insisted that establishment mores emerge from the shadows for open discussion,

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 75

much to the chagrin of functionaries who had long been employed to shape public opinion. When they discovered that the corridors of power were closed, rebellion seemed the right response. And rebellion was as portable a metaphor as the fedora hat worn by Warren Beatty’s Clyde in Penn’s anti-establishment film. The new phenomenon of ubiquitous media brought these images and attitudes to the Miramichi. By the late 1960s, the rather bucolic, nineteenth-century insularity on the river was weakening quickly. What had been a semipermeable barrier against outside incursion was disappearing. America’s business seemed as important in Newcastle as it did in New York and San Francisco. In less than two years, Miramichiers of Richards’s age had gone from observing October and May devotions to discussing America’s military-industrial complex. Within two years, the innocent fun of Beach Blanket Bingo at the Richards’s Drive-In had given way to Peckinpah’s dystopian vision, an opera of bloodshed that revealed the real motives of the paranoid imperialists (the My Lai massacre occurred one year after The Wild Bunch was released). The previously vast and limitless world was indeed shrinking, which only deepened the divisions between parents and teenagers. The fictional father in River typifies this disjunction; he desires ‘to live the last years of his life in a kind of nostalgia, where the drive-in continued memories of dances and singalongs and top hats in a parade along the white picket fences of middle America’ (240). Because Richards had been weaned on film and television (Janie owned the first TV in Newcastle), and then on the social gospels of Dickens, the anti-establishment and gangster motifs were already familiar to him. America’s outlaws and Saffron Hill’s rogues had both suffered at the hands of the powerful, both responding to aggression in ways that had been predetermined to eradicate them. The adolescent Richards did not have to be convinced of the rightness of the revolution. With his hair already messed, his mood already dark, and his temperament already aligned with the underdog, he was quite ready for the emancipating politics of the times. The era’s ethic of rebellion against the established order paralleled his yearnings for intellectual and imaginative freedom. He had vowed to become a writer before the full onslaught of the 1960s, but he became one during that period. And like everything around him, he began to change rapidly. The most apparent change was the narrowing of his circle of friends to a small group of colourful Byronic characters who were among the first on the river to adopt the look and attitude of the times. They grew their

76

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

hair long, rode motorbikes, wore army jackets, and embraced an easy, non-judgmental style that complemented his temperament. Giles Kenny was one – an independent thinker whose self-reliance had been honestly won from two grandfathers who were guides on the Miramichi and Restigouche rivers. Giles’s mind was always working against convention. Fascinated by Buckminster Fuller’s treatises on alternative lifestyles, he built two geodesic homes, the first of them on Buckley Avenue across from the Richards. Peter Baker and Richard ‘Beep’ Parks were two other neighbourhood kids in the narrower circle. Peter had moved to The Rocks in 1965 from Vancouver. His father had worked in asbestos in northern Ontario and Quebec and was the new manager at Heath Steele Mines. With a shock of white-blond hair, he was an exotic character with a natural ability to gather a group around him. Beep Parks was not as exotic a character but became a quiet confidante to the others, a fixture who was always ready for a road hockey game or a drink on the bank. When Richards gave up organized hockey for curling, Beep became one of his closest buddies on the schoolboy circuit. Two other noteworthy personalities from outside the neighbourhood inhabited this circle: Robert ‘Trapper’ Newman and Glenn Black. A brother of Bugsy and Johnny Newman, two of the toughest lads on the river, Trapper got his nickname from trapping muskrat and rabbit as a kid – something the poorer boys did to earn a few cents for a Saturday matinee and a pop. He was from Enginetown, where Janie had grown up and where her brothers Hughie and Willie were fixtures. Trapper arrived with a big reputation as a scrapper, as someone who could handle himself when things got dangerous. As with most fighters, though, he didn’t look for trouble as much as it looked for him – others were always trying to dethrone him. The mild-mannered Rocks gang eyed him warily at first but soon discovered that he was another original – smart, freethinking, and especially knowledgeable about the Miramichi. He became their untutored raconteur. His grandfather and father had been in the two world wars, and Trapper, by code of birth, was a fierce defender of military men. None dared slight the uniform in his presence. At fourteen he’d taken the Romeo and Juliet ferry from Newcastle to Chatham to drink at the Ambassador Tavern, and though the drinking age was twenty-one, his own earned money from the docks was passport enough for entry. There he had impressed the older men with his knowledge of wartime heroes and campaigns. Once, on a binge, he had taken a taxi to Newfoundland; another time, he’d knocked a man cold for a drink of wine. Like Emmerson Laroque, he walked and talked slowly but with

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 77

depth. After Richards mentioned his own literary aspirations in a conversation about Honoré de Balzac, Trapper stole a biography of the French novelist from the Old Manse to gain insight into how a writer thinks. He became interested in how Balzac’s interconnected stories and characters in La comédie humaine re-created in microcosm the social strata of French society, and he encouraged his new friend to try something similar for the Miramichi. ‘I remember telling him that I thought Balzac’s hundred stories and nearly two thousand characters of the comédie were too much,’ he would remember, ‘but I thought a few dozen from both sides of the river would be just right. If you don’t have loyalty to your friends,’ he added, unconcerned that this extended to stealing books from the library, ‘you are breaking the faith’ (interview with author, November 1999). As a sign of that faith, Trapper conferred on Richards the nickname ‘Rock.’ Glenn Black was another character in the smaller circle, mechanically inclined like the others but with a keen interest in art. Especially knowledgeable about music and film, he possessed an unusual aptitude that psychologists today would term affective mapping. This manifested itself as a gift for visualizing, in talk, what the past had been like at Passchendaele, The Alamo, and other historical locales. In Black, Richards found a mind equal to his own in its ability to imagine more than surface textures. With another friend, Robert McCoombs, they would spread out old maps of the river as a pretext for discussing land and lot allocations. Because Robert’s uncle was the sheriff, he had a wealth of information about the river that few others possessed. Black and Richards were eager listeners, especially regarding Miramichi history and the old families. One interest shared by all members of the group was motorbikes, a signifier for waywardness and rebellion. On the river in the late 1960s, bikers were still viewed as outlaws; but if the Rocks crowd thought of themselves as nomadic Easy Riders after Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, others thought of them as more sinister Marlon Brando types, wild ones to be avoided. Glenn Black was the first to enter the bike culture when he purchased a 1951 250 BSA. A year later, Peter Baker arrived from Vancouver with a Honda 90, an all-black T-framed oil-sucking street bike, which he sold to Richards. Giles joined in by purchasing a Honda 160 and then persuaded his friends Fred Glover and Charlie Morrissy to bring their bikes along. The crowd rode the horseshoe (called ‘the tour’) of Miramichi Bay; the length of that route necessitated a graduation to larger bikes the following summer. With bigger bikes came longer tours, notably one trip to Bathurst to visit Roddy Veniot’s bike club, where rau-

78

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

cous weekends of women and beer were reputed to be the norm. When the boys from the Miramichi arrived, they found ‘no women but lots of beer,’ as the chorus went. The clubhouse turned out to be a rough little camp in the swampy wilderness south of Bathurst, where they drank their way through a dozen flats. The only words clearly remembered were shouted by a hung-over reveller the next morning: ‘Drop yer cocks and grab yer socks, she’s daylight in the swamp.’ Richards used that line six years later in the opening of his play ‘The Dungarvan Whooper.’ For all their leather jackets and long hair, the Rocks bikers were an innocuous group. They were even-tempered subversives who preferred discussion to violence and who, in 1960s fashion, tried to get along without confrontation. Only rarely did trouble arise, and only once did it involve Richards. He had driven solo one night to Chatham to meet friends. At an intersection in front of the CY High Lounge, a bowling alley hang-out where many of that town’s high school kids gathered, he started revving his bike. The Chatham crowd took offence to his trespass, sizing him up as one of the rowdy bikers from across the river. Someone threw a punch and knocked him off his bike. Outnumbered, he rode uphill to the house where the Newcastle crowd had gathered. The Chatham kids dispersed when ‘Rock’ Richards and his buddies, Trapper striding ahead, came down to settle the score. Except for rare instances like this, no one in this group went to Chatham or The Pines on Friday night looking for trouble. Their bikes were merely statements of a vagabondia typical of the age. If biking was their freedom, high school was their bondage. Every last one of the constellation of Rocks’ characters hated their final years at Harkins. Most of their teachers hated it too, resenting the social changes that had turned their once compliant charges into rebels. Feeding that resentment were the sweeping policy reforms that had arisen from Equal Opportunity, the brainchild of Premier Louis Robichaud and Bathurst lawyer Edward Byrne. Released in March 1965, the White Paper on Government Responsibilities changed the way that New Brunswickers were taxed and that municipalities were governed. Services that had been dispensed locally – and paid for by district offices staffed by local tax collectors – were now centralized. Services to rural and Acadian areas in the north were brought up to par with those of the more prosperous urban centres of the south. For New Brunswick’s powerful industrialists – none mightier than K.C. Irving – Robichaud’s Equal Opportunity reflected a French bias that threatened their monopolies (they famously

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 79

described the reforms as ‘robbing Peter to pay Pierre’). The townsfolk of Newcastle, predominantly English, Conservative, and employed by the forestry giants, joined provincial Conservative leader Charlie Van Horne in opposing the reforms, worried that their economic advantages would be threatened if the Catholic Robichaud conferred favours on Catholic Chatham at the expense of Protestant Newcastle. Turmoil reverberated through the civil service. Tax-subsidized government employees, such as teachers, were unsure where the reforms might lead. Would they be forced by the redistribution of resources to relocate elsewhere in the province? Would schools be closed? Teachers were on the front lines. Those whose main concern was their students took the changes in stride. Those who felt frustrated by the political machinations and threatened by the loosening of social mores delighted in making life intolerable for everyone. In grade ten, the Rocks bikers encountered a Hemingwayesque figure who grudgingly taught history. This man resented that others had the monopoly on literature courses at Harkins, and he responded by cultivating the hard-drinking machismo of his favourite author, right down to his interest in boxing and bullfighting. He was more popular than most teachers because he never forgot that he came from Nelson, Miramichi. Despite his entertaining bravado, he never pretended that he was anything more than what townsfolk perceived male teachers to be: underemployed and a tad womanish. In this teacher’s homeroom, Richards got along without trouble, advancing on the strength of English and History. His teacher’s influence was minimal, except perhaps for his belief in Hemingway’s aphorism that the job of a writer is to write. When the time came, Richards would follow this advice as mantra. Grade eleven was different altogether. Richards was staying up half the night writing poetry and dozing off in class. The fights at home with his father had escalated, and he was testing the limits of what he could get away with. By October, he’d been kicked out of class twice already. When Giles and Peter dared him to bring a pint of rum into school, he bought a bottle from one of the Saints downtown and placed it on his desk. (The Saints were local bootleggers who had done steeple work all over the Maritimes before losing their nerve and turning to the streets.) A collision with his English and homeroom teachers was close at hand. His English teacher was a self-consciously stagy character, dramatic in voice and gesture. Though infamous for butchering pronunciations, he seemed to be an authority on every literary subject, Shakespeare foremost among them. He was loved or hated, and he preferred his drama

80

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

students above all others. What made him controversial among Richards’s crowd was what appeared to be his disdain for the working classes. Wanting his students to escape what he considered the dead end of Anderson’s Mill, he encouraged them to set their sights higher and farther afield. For kids whose fathers worked at Anderson’s and whose previous generations had laboured in the sawmills along the river, his advice registered as class snobbery – a sore that continued to fester on the Miramichi. Was a grade eleven English teacher in Newcastle any better than a millwright at Anderson’s? Not in the bikers’ estimation. They knew millwrights with less than grade eight who could strip, grease, and reassemble a bike in an afternoon. They knew illiterate men who could track a deer through the woods by night, surviving in the bush – as Joe Walsh would do in Nights – by reading the wind and stars. Years later, when constructing characters like Jerry Bines – whose unbookish wisdom is a counterpoint to the supposedly more learned men who feel superior to him (Wounded 74–5) – Richards would draw on these formative experiences to parody class snobbery. A grade eleven English teacher in Newcastle was not going to dismiss the labourers on the Miramichi in Richards’s presence. Each quickly learned that the other was intractable. The result was a final mark of 31/100 in English (‘Miramichi Novelist’) – the first time that Richards had flunked his chosen subject. Much like Ezra Pound, who once failed a course in the history of literary criticism at the University of Pennsylvania (Tytell 30), this failure became part of a personal folklore that relegated teachers to the lower circles of Dante’s Inferno. Richards’s experience in Chemistry that year was no better. His teacher, a large man over six feet, was a button pusher. He would walk down the rows of desks with his pointer and jab students lightly in the ribs, smiling innocently as he did so. (Richards must have remembered him when describing Mr Holt in Blood Ties [143–4] as a teacher with long arms and a huge head.) He and Richards argued openly in class with an intensity that sometimes verged on the ferocious. Their mutual animosity boiled over one day late in the year when Richards was staying after class for detention. He wanted to go curling – indeed, his teammates were counting on him to be there. His teacher said he had to stay and study Chemistry (he’d made 2/100 on his previous test). He pleaded his case but could get no concession. Finally, after more taunting, Richards threw his chemistry book at him, yelling as he walked out, ‘You study it! I’m going curling!’ He was expelled the next day for the remainder of the school year. Of-

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 81

ficial notice of the termination carried the condition that he would be allowed to return the following year only if he agreed to go back to school to get the strap. The principal who negotiated the terms with his parents also advised that he see a psychiatrist, for the young Richards seemed too intense and inwardly focused for a boy of sixteen. Some of the teachers, he added, were worried for his safety (by which, it was clear, they meant their own). What choice did his parents have but to agree? His embarrassed mother bought him new shoes and a sports jacket, hoping to impress on the psychiatrist that he was from a good home. His inquisitors collected samples of his poetry, asked him why he was so introverted and angry, and tested his aptitudes. One doctor started him on tranquillizers. Those closest to him wondered whether Margaret’s fall the day before his birth had made him strange – ‘given to social maladjustment’ was the psychiatric term then in use. His buddies and new girlfriend from Bartibog stood by him; even so, he would never forget the humiliating irony of the situation: once expelled, he would have to be beaten and assessed psychiatrically in order to re-enter an institution he wanted no part of in the first place. Moreover, his wilful nonconformity was being touted as mental imbalance – a strategy clearly meant to bring him into line. It was an irony right out of Oliver Twist. The final humiliation was Bill and Margaret’s insistence that he attend summer school. When Richards fictionalized a similar incident in Gusties, he chose execution and confinement as the dominant metaphors for the sadistic ritual of strapping: ‘Then they went upstairs, the back way, not through the tunnel, but up the wooden stairs, smelling of dust, creaking, echoing, smelling of school sweat. And they went into a side sick room, a cubicle, no windows, and it too smelled, of ointment, leftover sickness, first aid. Mr. Bellia carried a strap … He was strapped in a tiny cubicle, in a box like something wild – something wild that lived on the river’ (Gusties 8, 12). His grade eleven teachers had their way that year. Most of The Rocks’ bikers flunked out. Other students had the gumption to advance despite the bullying, but it was not in their nature to acquiesce. They fought back, regardless of how that action might imperil their futures. As Richards remembers it, principled rebellion was a badge of honour, and that rebellion found its way into his writing: ‘There was something within the school system – the idea of gain and promotion, the idea of what was learned and how it was taught – that I was fundamentally opposed to all the time. It was strong enough to prompt the confrontation between Clinton and the teacher in The Coming of Winter and that between Cathy

82

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

MacDurmot and Mr. Holt in Blood Ties. All the characters I care about generally rebel against school, though not against learning’ (quoted in Garrod 214). Advancement in the high school system in Canada was different in the 1960s than it is today. Large numbers of students – often nearing 25 per cent – failed grades, and most who failed never returned. Giles, Fred Glover, and Robert McCoombs failed grade ten. Richards, Peter, Giles, and Beep failed grade eleven. Giles would get kicked out twelve times over the course of his high school career. ‘It was like doing hard time,’ he said, ‘and if you escaped they added to your sentence’ (interview with author, November 1999). It was as much a failure of the system as a clash between uninterested students and disgruntled teachers. Most of the latter didn’t have a university degree, only the teaching certificates that colleges had dispensed before the reforms. When they chastised their charges for poor study habits in preparation for university, mouthier students reminded them of their own lack of credentials. Teachers responded with the punitive strategies allowed by the system, placing students in a transparent hierarchy of aptitudes. Discipline was maintained through promises of advancement (and threats of failing), and students were often reminded of the tenuousness of their position. If a student made below 60 per cent in just one subject, the entire year would have to be repeated. For the bikers from The Rocks, who refused with defiant pride to put any effort into the subjects they didn’t like or teachers they didn’t respect, failure was just part of the high school experience. Looking back, Richards has always been mystified by the inherent contradiction in the system: ‘It always did puzzle me how those who commend Saint Francis or Saint Joan of Arc still cringe at the fact that their own child might have a vision to do something out of the ordinary’ (God Is 135). Luckily for Richards, there were more constructive influences during his final two years at Harkins. Two teachers in particular were influential. Indeed, they were the first two adult mentors with whom he could discuss his literary interests. They were ‘the two Dougs,’ Doug Shanahan and Doug Underhill. Shanahan was already something of a legend on the Miramichi. Originally from Nelson, he had been a gifted student under Leo P. Chaisson at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia. On Chaisson’s recommendation, he had taught at St Thomas College in Chatham before going to England on a Beaverbrook Scholarship. There he wrote a thesis, ‘Vi-

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 83

talism as a Biological Concept’ (the idea being that life, as soul, is materially discernable). By the time he returned to the Miramichi in the mid-1960s, St Thomas had moved to Fredericton, which necessitated his transfer to Harkins. With a Master’s degree from a British university in a predominantly Scots Presbyterian and High Anglican town, he was the undisputed scholar at Harkins; backed by that authority, he was able to give free rein to his unorthodox methods. According to the ledger, he was a chemistry teacher, but he was a chemist in the Primo Levi mode – that is, he taught everything but chemistry. His classes amounted to wideranging seminars in history, biology, literature, film, and world politics. Chemistry, he liked to say, was merely the molecular starting point from which all life flows. Always seeking innovation, he had subscribed to John Canaday’s Metropolitan Seminars in Arts series of colour reproductions of Western art. Canaday’s editions used the works of Rembrandt, Rubens, Michelangelo, and Van Gogh to define Realism, Expressionism, and other aesthetic modalities. Each week, Shanahan would introduce the life of one painter and explain how to recognize the artist’s style and subtleties. He would intersperse his discussions with lectures on writers and musicians of the same period, thus presenting the arts as an organic paideuma – that is, as a unified expression of a particular era. He had busts in his class of Aristotle, Aquinas, and the great literary figures of the past, and he used these to discern peculiarities in personality. One day he psychoanalyzed Mussolini, associating his economic reforms with his look of angry self-loathing. Another day he introduced Michelangelo as the rube who painted the Sistine Chapel while fighting with the Pope. Students came to class just to hear what he would say next. As a culturalist drawn to the exciting new mosaic configurations that McLuhan was popularizing in his just released The Gutenberg Galaxy, he was years ahead of his time, especially pedagogically. Shanahan’s enthusiasm sometimes outdistanced his knowledge, but both were contagious. He had a talent for getting normally torpid young people charged up and involved, and he was especially skilled at helping them find their way. All he insisted was that they discover something to be passionate about. ‘Don’t lie around all day stoned listening to music,’ he’d say. ‘If music is your thing, get your hands on a guitar and learn how to play, look into the different styles of the past, then you’ll know something about music.’ He gave similar advice to those pining to leave. ‘You want to go to Taiwan?’ he’d ask. ‘Go, there’s no problem with that. Get yourself over there, look around, and come back and tell us what it’s all about.’ In a town of tough-minded Protestant schoolmen, his libertinism

84

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

was just what Richards and his crowd needed. He gave them the freedom to explore while taking away the censor normally associated with that exploration. Just as important, he taught them to recognize the forces that held them back from within. For him, ‘regional’ was not a pejorative but a circumstance of birth to be celebrated. Like all great teachers, he was living proof that a life of the mind was possible even in remote places. To Richards, he was Virgilian, the kindly Mr Brownlow of Oliver Twist. Never had he encountered such an engaging and quirky literary intelligence. There had been other mentors in his life – the old Colonel from the neighbourhood who knew about hockey and the world of fighting men – but never had he encountered a more scattered, Dickensian bookman. For a man who was all over the place, a disorganized Aquinas, he had the ability to focus people, much as Fredericton’s great George Parkin had focused Bliss Carman and Charles G.D. Roberts. And what Roberts had once written about his most important early teacher could also have been written about Shanahan – that ‘it was a very phlegmatic pupil indeed who could resist catching fire from his vivid and sympathetic enthusiasm’ (412–13). Shanahan didn’t talk about art as dead artefacts, which is what most of the other teachers at Harkins did; instead he brought authors to life, made their work relevant to the day, and persuaded even the sceptical and utilitarian that art mattered. One day he brought in a vinyl recording of Dylan Thomas reading Under Milk Wood, the myriad-voiced radio drama about the residents of a small Welsh town. Having just read Fitzgibbon’s 1965 biography, he made much of Thomas’s youthful exuberance, chronic drinking, and love-hate relationship with the ‘smug darkness’ of his own ‘provincial town’ (Fitzgibbon 91). The similarities between himself and Thomas fired Richards’s mind. They were the same mass of contradictions striving for the light: both reluctant yet loyal provincials, both poor students yet precocious readers, both outwardly dark yet inwardly hopeful. And just as Richards had told the high school principal who expelled him that all he wanted to do was write, so had Thomas left the Swansea Grammar School under a similar cloud to pursue his own vocation. Richards wondered secretly whether there was something in the Gael blood, remembering that his paternal grandfather had come from Welsh stock generations before. The firebrand in him was especially drawn to Thomas’s full-throated rhetoric, a connection made possible because Shanahan had brought in the voice recording. Next to the even-tempered whispers of Auden and the social poets of the 1930s, Thomas was a vul-

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 85

gar starling who shouted out loud about the glories of life and the miseries of sickness. If Dickens’s political satire had reached deeply into his sense of social justice, Thomas’s bombast touched the wildness in him. In Thomas he discovered a personality as untamed as his own, an untutored youth who sang and drank with anger and intensity. To Richards, Thomas’s short life must have seemed a testament to the virtues of rejecting compromise. Shanahan developed a special fondness for Richards, partly because his close friend Harry, David’s uncle, had asked him to look out for the boy. What Shanahan observed in class, however, was not a lost boy but a searing soul: He looked in 1968 like he looks today. He didn’t shave that much. His hair was long and a bit shaggy. What was distinguishing about him was alertness. He paid attention, and he’d stop me and ask questions. I noticed him without realizing he was Harry’s nephew. His eyes stood out for being alive. There were thirty kids in the class, all interested, but he was more interested than most. There was something else different about him too. He had a sympathy for misfits and for dark, heavy authors. He liked writers who delved into the psyche, and he liked reading about personal conflict. I remember him liking James Joyce’s treatment of the underside of Catholicism. He was unusually perceptive to the sufferings of other people. He was different in that regard, edgy and brooding. (interview with author, October 1999)

Richards began visiting Shanahan after class. He’d show early, unformed drafts to his trusted teacher, who would make suggestions and corrections. ‘I knew there was talent there,’ Shanahan said, ‘some of it penetrating, but it was undisciplined, the work of a young man starting out.’ They had disagreements, as Richards later would with teachers and editors, but Shanahan was a generous mentor. In his own unique way, he put Richards on to writers (Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Lawrence) that the young man would spend the next ten years reading. A person of even greater significance entered his life at this time. In November 1967, at the Newcastle rink, he met Margaret ‘Peggy’ McIntyre, his first serious girlfriend. There had been other girls before Peggy – he and his friends used Bill’s car at the Bushville Drive-In to entertain them – but Peggy was different from the others, sweeter, it seemed, and instantly trustworthy. ‘I’m going to be a writer,’ he told her that first

86

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

night (‘Remembering’ 12), condemning her from that moment, he later mused, to an uncertain and difficult life. Peggy was from a large, singleparent family in Bartibog, ten miles downriver from Newcastle on the north side of the bay. She had been born in the kitchen of the family house, the winter weather that night being too treacherous for a trip to the Newcastle hospital. Her father, a military man, had worked for the Henderson Lumber Company out of Prince Edward Island, scaling logs for the pulp boats between Miramichi Bay and the Gaspé Peninsula. He had died suddenly of heart failure in Montreal in February 1964, when his oldest daughter was making her vows to enter religious life. He left nine children, Peggy near the middle. His wife Edna had kept the family together on his military pension, somehow managing to stay calm and cheerful throughout her many ordeals. Peggy was like her mother: dark, petite, and enigmatic. She liked to party but never drank to excess. She liked to socialize but listened rather than talked. Everyone was fond of her, but few knew her well. Richards adopted her family shortly after meeting them, showing the same affinity to their joie de vivre that his mother had shown to the Catholics. Unlike his own family, however, the McIntyres were a large and harmonious group who never seemed to quarrel. Their life together consisted of family parties, singing, and salmon barbecues. There was no talk of business or politics, but of Hank Snow and repairs to so-and-so’s skidder. The normally retiring Richards was not shy in their presence and could be relied on for a rendition of ‘The Lumberman’s Alphabet’ (‘A is for axes that you may all know / And B is for the boys that make them all go …’ ) once the party got going. He soon preferred Edna’s place to his own, as he would reveal in an unpublished poem, ‘The Lilliputian Looks Up’: Well, A party in the dooryard Rough and ready boys singing; the winter snow, where the lights went gold, grader passing on the road, ... The kitchen–ah the kitchen, my love, Of bacon, onions and wine. (55)

With Peggy’s encouragement, he readied himself to show his work to the public. He had been writing at the dining room table and the local library for a few years but had not shown his work to anyone beyond

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 87

family, and confidants like Shanahan. He was not ashamed of it – he was telling everyone around him that he was a writer – but he lacked a means of distribution, which is where the second ‘Doug’ became instrumental. Doug Underhill was well known to the Richards. He was only a few years older than David; indeed, the two had served High Mass at St Mary’s as altar boys. By 1968, Underhill had graduated in English from St Thomas University and returned to Newcastle to teach at Harkins – disobeying, he said, the first two commandments of teaching: never start with high school and never start in your hometown. Richards was in his first class. Taking a page from Shanahan’s book, the neophyte teacher asked his grade twelve English class what extra-curricular activities would interest them. When a large number said writing, he formed the Harkins High Literary Club, from which sprang a broadsheet, typed and circulated by the school’s Commercial Department. The regulars in the Club were Richards, his sister Mary Jane and cousin Cathy, Karen Hubbard, Sandy Bunting, Don Doiron, Maggie Johnson, Marsha McNamara, Dawn Kay, and Kathy Lyons. Underhill supervised. Doiron, an Acadian who worked in metal and read precociously, was the star of the group. His loan of the 1966 Laurel edition of Four Great Russian Short Novels was Richards’s introduction to the Russian masters. So enthralled was Richards with their inner world, evident especially in Dostoevsky’s The Gambler and Tolstoy’s Master and Man, that he moved immediately to the complete works of Dostoevsky and Pushkin (The Queen of Spades). The Russians’ tactile immersion into darkness was the aesthetic complement to the ethos of the 1960s that he had been seeking. Doiron and the small group of Underhill regulars were the first public readers to hear his work. He showed them the stories ‘An Afternoon of the Mercury Month’ and ‘Old Man’s Town’ and the poems ‘The Snake’ and ‘On the Death of a Woman.’ These, not surprisingly, reflect the young writer’s influences – notably Dickens, Thomas, and François Villon. Their imagery is vivid (sometimes florid), their narrative flow rhythmic, and their observing eye often the child’s (reminiscent of Pip’s in Great Expectations) – a perspective that hovers in the dark hollows in which Dickens and Villon revelled. ‘Mercury Month’ has passages like the following: The wax snow was being melted by the afternoon. In the Fox house, Mrs. Fox was having a tea party. She had a bright blue dress on, with flowers on her royal blue shoes. She sat with her legs crossed eyeing all her friends. No

88

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi one dared to move. They just drank tea and agreed with Mrs. Fox. Mrs. Fox of High Street! ‘I chew jelly beans all the time.’ Chorus of girls: ‘They’re delicious, Mrs. Fox.’ ‘Miss Reginald is having a baby.’ ‘How disgraceful. They ought to lock her up.’ ‘And that man ... ’ ‘Oh, definitely, Mrs. Fox.’ ‘I chew all the time.’ ‘You’re good at it, Mrs. Fox.’ (22)

Though this passage is clearly influenced by Thomas’s voice dramas – and the title is reminiscent of the first line of Bob Dylan’s ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ – its controlled, understated satire offers hints to how the older novelist would portray the halting and often uncomfortable nature of formal interaction. Read carefully, the dialogue reveals a precocious understanding of how language can be used evocatively to show rather than tell. The spareness of the dialogue hints at what we need to know and what the author wishes to communicate about social manners. Because signposts are mostly absent (we have to infer who said what), the reader is free to wander without authorial intrusion. This openness would become stock-in-trade of Richards’s narrative technique. On the whole, ‘Mercury Month’ is not the kind of story that a writer wishes to have recollected, but it is representative. Its imagery is rich and syntactically stretched (‘In the bakery the men melted dough and the women waxed bread and the smoke curled grey from the boiling rooms’ [21]); its metaphors are appropriate to place (‘cow-coloured snow’ [19], ‘the bald-headed bridge’ [21], ‘she sits in her rocking chair remembering old stew dinners’ [24], ‘his brass ring walnuted around his dirty finger’ [26]); and its point of view is impressionistic (‘The ice was breaking. It was early March. There was little sun. Jones walked on the flows [sic] of ice. In the town school was just in. A penny for your thoughts. No thoughts!’ [19]). No one but Richards could have written the piece. From its ability to draw us tightly into place to its sacrifice of plot for the development of the characters of a truant and his colourful neighbours, the story is characteristic. Though flawed, it is an impressive experiment for a boy of sixteen, the beginning of his own Comédie humaine of the Miramichi. These are not Chaucer’s pilgrims, but Richards’s people, equally dynamic and readily identifiable as Miramichiers.

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 89

Richards’s first story, ‘Old Man’s Town,’ also shows the later preoccupations of the mature writer. As in ‘Mercury Month,’ the story turns on character as the fixed point around which other narrative devices revolve. The fixed point here is an old man in hospital, encircled by nurses and a priest. On the outside it is Saturday, a day for ‘shovels, tractors, and snow-blowers pushed and shoved in every street’ (2). Children move in the winter weather, icicles drip, a stranger comes into town. Boots and baby carriages are pushed through slush. A boy’s nose bleeds. Families sit down to mashed potatoes. Because the story is plotless, nothing really happens, except that an entire town moves, restless and suspicious of the stranger in its midst. What becomes evident in hindsight is that the young writer has deliberately set out to map a psychic terrain. Plot is dispensed with because structural taxonomies are not important. Instead, sensory impressions are assembled, camera obscura, as the writer walks through his town with the shutter open. Smells and sounds drift in; when the sun goes down, everyone feels the chill. The reader is lowered into the middle of Richards’s world, another character observing from the fixed point he has constructed. Though the technique is undeveloped in the early work, the intent is clear enough: he is working to enable us to see. Even in his juvenilia, he is less interested in telling a story than in having us experience it. He seems to know instinctively that while journalists tell stories, taking care to make all the parts cohere, artists make stories tell. The difference is key, as the adult author describes while looking back on his early days: Most of what I think of as ‘instinct’ comes from self-examination, especially when one is a teenager. It is the self-examination that allows you to know other people. It is not the examination of other people that allows you to know them – that is reporting, not insight. Only from self-examination can come War and Peace. Where does it come from? Well, it probably is rooted, first, in seeing things differently, and then in examining and coming to grips with why you see things differently. This happens at an early age, and doesn’t much change for writers. It’s not because we are enclosed, but because we have formed, through self-examination, a vision of the world that we are trying to explore. (quoted in Tremblay; 2005 42–3)

Following Oscar Wilde, Henry Miller called this precocity the writer’s ‘instinct for life’ (58). The two poems Richards shared with his peers in the writing group affirm this primary (non-analytical) interest in drawing readers into a felt

90

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

world. ‘The Snake,’ written at this time, is an experimental poem that answers Emily Dickinson’s and D.H. Lawrence’s poems of the same name – an indication that the young writer had been reading others to develop his own work. Like the early stories, ‘The Snake’ achieves its effect by association, displaying more ideogrammic than literal connection to the thing in itself (to Kant’s noumenon, that is). Here is ‘The Snake’ in its entirety: It was a remarkable change, the first day In the unclean meadow When we looked to see, across the border tracks, The progress of more affluent crimes. The grass Stemming up like Romantic prayer Fastened deep to the hitches of our eyes Discontinuing the progress of our thought. The town bell Rang in the drumming world, Shattering the almost mossy stillness of the trees. The ground blackened in secret corners of the sun. We looked up with Blood blue eyes At the tree winding sky and blowing birds With the hearts of cannibals, As a train skimmed through the north. – A snake silently spangled its coils tighter on the belly of a mouse. (18)

Richards’s snake, like Lawrence’s, is ‘one of the lords / Of life’ (319), but more than a symbolic albatross or an old king. It is, rather, another fixed point upon which an uncaring world encroaches. Its dominion is shrinking, ‘the progress of more affluent crimes’ choking it out. Anticipating Richards’s later views on mutability, the poem laments what change portends for the mouse and the snake while each acts naturally on the other. Proximate to this drama are the grass, the town bell, and the buffeted birds, all of which are as helpless to stop the movement of progress as the ‘blood blue eyes’ of strangers are to stop the dominion of predator over prey, of the powerful over the powerless. In his analy-

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 91

sis of the poem for the writing group, Richards said that he wrote the piece because of the staggering possibility of man destroying all natural occurrences if he insists on plundering the resources of the earth. Inevidablely [sic] civilization is creeping upon nature (as a train skimmed through the north) and therefore, strangling the means of all pastoral survival. In the poem I represent man by a snake because of his remarkable slyness in quickly destroying his prey. In the poem I represent the earth by a mouse because of its seeming helplessness. Just after we had settled into the stillness and quiet of the fields (stemming up like the Romantic prayer), the sounds of civilization shattered our peace – such as a snake startling a mouse nest (the town bell rang in the drumming world). The town bell brings us sharply into reality and we look up as a train goes by. [The last line] is the expression of my feelings that man is slowly, almost unconsciously, draining the life out of the earth. (‘“The Snake” Analysis’)

The poem and its commentary arc forward to the mature Richards. The meadow is ‘unclean,’ which is a euphemism not for dirty but for natural, sterility being the opposite of normal in Richards’s world. (He would later delight in ‘the black healthy dirt under [a river guide’s] fingernails’ [Dancers 48].) Also, the perspective is both diegetic and extradiegetic – that is, both part of and distinct from the narration: the town bell interrupts ‘our’ thought, not just the subject’s. We are being implicated in the poem’s action and in its reflection. To the young poet, readers are not outsiders. Finally, the narrative moment is rendered imagistically, just as in his stories. We are not coached, as in Lawrence’s poem, where ‘[t]he voice of my education said to me / He must be killed, / … And voices in me said, If you were a man / You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off’ (318); rather, we are inclined towards understanding by visual and auditory metaphors that impart sense. Whether the effect works completely is less important than the intention, for the intention suggests a young writer with an unusually developed understanding of how literary meaning is created. He has delved into Dickens’s architecture and clearly has been studying other formulae of the writing craft. ‘The Snake’ amounts to a single-minded attempt to crack the literary code – impressive for a boy of sixteen. The only other poem of this period that warrants discussion is ‘On

92

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

the Death of a Woman,’ published in the November 1969 edition of the Literary Club’s broadsheet. Notable is the name at the bottom, David Adams Richards – the first time Margaret’s name appears as part of his own. He was honouring her and announcing his signature, knowing early on that his name would become a signifier. The poem is equally personal, recalling a tragic incident on the Miramichi in the early fall of 1969. Just above The Rocks on the King George Highway, a truck laden with logs missed a turn one night and went through the front of a house. Mrs Dealy Landry, a well-known local woman, was killed, leaving behind a husband and a family of ten. The accident left a deep impression on Richards, who wrote the following poem about the aftermath: I came by after it happened After the blood and glass Were stain-washed from the face Of the pavement; And the last volumed eye Swept on – and moved across different visions. I felt cheated for coming late The screams of terror and the bleating children Confused, alarmed, faithless in cold. I felt cheated Felt the groaning of my loins – my hope Deteriorated as I brushed hair from my eyes And sweat from pores of my skin. The moment’s dance of agony had lifted From her to me – The black sound of death Confused with madness in an evening’s gore. I walked among it – after it was over After the bulled-timber was sliced like wine bread And the earth spread and rerooted And the coiled men and women with angry teeth Fed home the misery of their one-night’s learning. And all around the silence of departure, The quiet of the old, tired, and the black. The evening’s sacrifice to heaven molded in the eye. Swore; lost; torn;

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 93 The shiviling [sic] bodies lay to rest In patterns and patches This dead earth. How cold the sun in morning puddles? How diseased curiosity wanders? And still I felt cheated as I turned to tears Moved only by the movement of man. I came by after it happened Soldiered in the thought of action, Rammed into the lust of wanting, Branded and herded and stabled, Cornered by the onlookers after it happened. I felt cheated for the worst was over – I left, went back to feeling sorry Because after a war we hide our guns. (31)

On the surface, the poem’s language is metaphorically appropriate to the circumstances. ‘Bleating’ is how one imagines children sounding after a horrific incident. ‘Diseased curiosity’ is an equally apt descriptor of the mordant attraction we feel towards ‘the misery’ of that particular kind of ‘learning,’ repulsive though it is. Below the surface of these metaphors, however, is something of greater significance for an understanding of what David Richards would become. ‘I walked among it,’ the poem’s convening voice says, conjuring a thematic concentration of interiority. Though the older Richards will become peripatetic, the writer is first a wanderer inside the darker recesses of place. The poem’s indulgence involves not just a visitation of the scene but a lingering – one that does more than satisfy mordant curiosity. The point is easy to miss behind the powerful self-loathing that the curiosity elicits. Put precisely, the lingering infers that Richards, again like Dickens (xv), wants to tune outsiders into the suffering of his people, for they are worth our attention, monumental in their own right. Through him, we might come to know them. This early poem, then, is a rare statement of aesthetic concentration. Over the course of what now is a forty-year career, Richards has never strayed from this concentration, no matter where he lives. His people are a trust. The pain and joy and peculiarities of their lives are what he feels called to communicate. In ways reminiscent of Michael Whelan, Poet of Renous, his proclivities to kin and tribe render him incapable of ignoring their hardships, as he confides in Lines:

94

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi It was June 1959 ... This was the day of the Escuminac disaster, when men drifting nets for salmon got caught in a storm as fierce as any seen at sea. Their boats were twenty-five feet long, the waves they faced were eighty feet tall. But so many of them would not leave other boats in trouble, and continued to circle back for friends being swallowed up, cutting their nets so their drifters wouldn’t sink, but being swept away, tying their sons to masts before losing their own lives. Handing lifelines to friends instead of keeping them for themselves ... That night I slept through the death of thirty-five men out in the bay. (13–14)

His first collection would be titled One Step Inside to capture this concentration. Stepping inside is an appropriate metaphor for a writer who, from the beginning, has gone inside his characters so that readers may know them as they are. Richards’s creative efforts of the late 1960s tell us much about his personal signature: that he was single-minded in pursuing his vocation and dogged in reading others for style and craft; that he valued localism, desiring first to populate place, then listening closely for peculiarities of voice and rhythm; that he believed the best way for readers to see was to proceed by imagistic and impressionistic suggestion, thus transporting us to his world on its terms rather than our own; and that despite his battles with the authority of church, home, and school, the original premise from which he worked hinged on the monumental significance of his people, however compromised they might be by the accidents of class (Mrs Fox) or power (the snake) or frailty (the old man). He did not emerge as fully formed as Thomas or Rimbaud – that some maintain he did is a corruption of fact that Lawrence Mathews attributes to Toronto mythmaking (188); but his voice, style, and empathies were unusually advanced for a teenaged writer. And though his ambitions outdistanced his learning, the gaps in his formal education were perhaps fortuitous. Doug Shanahan recalls of his wide-eyed student: David had holes in his education when I knew him as a high school student. He didn’t know the vacuity of his own intellect; he didn’t know that he didn’t know, that is. He was raw – not shallow, mind you, but empty. He has since filled in. He was too young to take on the heavy themes that he did. His ignorance was more than bliss, however; it was ecstasy. A high education would have been a handicap. He didn’t need his vision obscured, so what he didn’t know probably helped him. (interview with author, October 1999)

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 95

What he did have was a sympathetic temperament, a stubborn work ethic inherited from both sides of his family, a place-based instinct for story and divination, and a clear view to the future. These attributes and the quirky interiority of his style put him on the path to becoming one of the unique voices in Canadian literature. But still there was high school, which felt to him like a prison. Though grade twelve was made easier by Shanahan’s guidance and by the regular meetings of Underhill’s Literary Club, he skipped school whenever possible to hide on the third floor of the Old Manse library, called ‘the French Room’ by the librarians. He spent afternoons and evenings there, like Wendall in River, ‘[with] François Villon, Victor Hugo, James Joyce, and a bottle of wine’ (214), convinced that ‘[t]here was less vice and more virtue in [that particular] truancy’ (God Is 119). He dozed contentedly among Beaverbrook’s books, many of which had been signed by their authors (Kipling, Wells, Orwell). He had stumbled down a rabbit hole to the tradition where the institutionalized drudgery at Harkins seemed far away. He wouldn’t need chemistry or algebra to become a self-supporting writer, so why bother? Dylan Thomas had followed George Bernard Shaw’s example in divesting himself of formal obligations in order to write, so why couldn’t he? He sought further distraction in curling and music. Curling became his sport, for hockey, his first love, was too physically demanding for someone with his disability. What he loved about the game was the glide and feel of the ice. The puck was larger and made of stone, and the sticks had broom heads instead of blades, but the frosty textures of the game were those of his beloved hockey. Even the lines were painted the same colours. His mother sewed a thick pad inside his jeans so that he could slide on his knee out of the hack. Unlike most right-handers, who slid out on their left foot, he did a mid-throw shuffle and landed on his right. The delivery was unorthodox but effective enough for him to become a competitive player in the schoolboy league. Representing Harkins, he participated in bonspiels and the New Brunswick Winter Games, finding the camaraderie that participation alone confers. Curling also suited his temperament. It was blue collar, socially marginal, and quintessentially Canadian, which in his mind opened it to derision. Thus, curling was a sport that he played and that he defended by playing it. Just as he cut his patriotic teeth on the drubbing of our national sport in the early 1960s – reacting to how morally cowed and

96

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

‘indentured’ (Hockey Dreams 126) we were to others’ perceptions of our own game – so did he take ideologically to curling. The more the sport was maligned as small-town and boozy, a rum-soaked pastime for the middleaged, the more defiantly he curled. In Hockey Dreams he wrote about that defiance: As with hockey, curling was our game, and we hated when we were beaten at it. I learned also that the same things about hockey applied to curling. 1. That it was part of our national consciousness and we couldn’t separate ourselves from it. 2. The Europeans and now and again the Americans, would become much better. 3. That we were abundantly generous with our time and our coaches and our clinics, to help other nations. 4. As long as we were the very best, we would never have it as an Olympic game. Only when the Europeans felt that they could match us in prestige would they allow us, and therefore themselves, this. 5. Once again ... countries such as Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, would get a vote on Canadian sport. (155)

His embrace of music became similarly politicized during this period. Music, of course, was integral to the youth culture of the 1960s, and by 1969 it had infiltrated even remote corners of North America. The music of the time was angrier than it had been even a few years earlier, for recent events had made Elvis and The Beatles seem banal – clichéridden jingles like ‘She loves you, and you know you should be glad’ no longer seemed appropriate to the age of assassination and protest. There had been a series of high-profile political murders (Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, and Robert F. Kennedy). Civil rights demonstrations across the United States had been marked by sectoral and Klan violence, then by race rioting in most major cities. Students in Washington and Paris had marched against Vietnam, expressing outrage that American aggression was contributing to an escalation in international militarism (India and Pakistan were at war, as were Israel and the Arab countries, and China had joined Russia in nuclear capability, exploding atomic and hydrogen bombs). Vocal opponents of establishment policies were being monitored and rounded up. Two years earlier, hippies in San Francisco had taken over Golden Gate Park after the CIA murdered freedom fighter Che Guevara in Bolivia. It was a time of deep anxieties that seemed to touch all areas of the globe, even Newcastle.

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 97

Provincial papers were monitoring a volatile situation at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, where controversial physics professor Norman Strax had been suspended in September 1968 for inciting students. An American activist and self-professed radical with a degree from Harvard, Strax had come to UNB in 1966 on a mission to involve Canadian students in protesting the Vietnam War. In October 1967 he led a group of 150 UNB students – Richards’s later characters Nevin White and Gus Busters among their imagined number (Wounded 122; River 241) – in an antiwar march in Washington. When UNB introduced ID cards for students the next fall, Strax denounced the move as a surveillance tactic and a sign that the administration intended to curtail the civil liberties of faculty and students. He and student organizers responded with the ‘bookie-book’ campaign. Students were advised to select an armful of books from the library stacks, bring them to circulation, then refuse to show their photo ID for checkout, thus contravening the ‘no ID, no book’ policy. They were told to leave the books on the circulation desk and return to the stacks for another armload. By the end of the campaign’s first day, hundreds of books were clogging the circulation area, forcing the library to close. Strax was suspended from the university shortly afterwards and took refuge in his office, 130 Bailey Hall. His occupation became headlines across the province. Student loyalists joined him in his office, which became known as ‘Liberation 130.’ Only after a court injunction, police arrests, and a forty-eight-day occupation was Strax removed from university grounds. The situation continued to worsen, however, when the Canadian Association of University Teachers censured UNB in March 1969 for its conduct in what was now known as the ‘Strax Affair.’ Fearing that their institution’s future was at risk, UNB’s Student Representative Council sent letters to high-ranking political officials to protest the censure; the council also mobilized non-aligned students against Strax. Students lined up on both sides of the issue, and violence ensued. Bailey Hall was besieged, its windows broken, and its offices damaged. Protesters for and against Strax numbered several hundred, making the situation potentially explosive for the local police. The military at nearby Base Gagetown was placed on standby alert. Eventually, with the mediation of Premier Robichaud, CAUT withdrew its censure; however, the UNB student population, the largest in the province, had been politicized. Young people now viewed activism and protest as more effective strategies for change than long-haired indifference. The Strax Affair proved to them that change occurred when students checked in instead of checking out.

98

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

The music of the period galvanized young people in much the same way. This strengthened Richards’s instinctual attraction to those forgotten people on the outside and to those who were fighting for others’ freedom. The folksongs he sang covered exactly these types. His tastes gravitated towards the unrefined. His favourite musical artists, mostly singer-songwriters, were poets without veneer. He loved folk music and balladeers, but only if their lyrics expressed wisdom hard won by suffering. (He dismissed Simon and Garfunkel as too idyllic and melodious and embraced Jim Morrison as suitably dark.) He related to artists who lived fully and died young, to poets tormented by the times, to drifters on the road, to misfits railing against the stultifying conformity of postwar North America. He listened to Phil Ochs and Gordon Lightfoot, Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, Neil Young and Lou Reed. He also became a fan of Leonard Cohen, who had begun forging his music in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, the place where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death in 1953 and where Cohen worked on his first hit, ‘Suzanne’ (1966), the score of which Richards sang to his high school buddies. Of all the musical dissidents of the 1960s, however, Bob Dylan was his favourite. It wasn’t Dylan’s innovative style, his free-form fusion of rock and folk, that was so compelling, but his creative independence. He had left college and hiked across the United States to visit his idol, Woody Guthrie, who, languishing in hospital, became the source of his political awakening. He had reinvented himself after a serious motorcycle accident, fashioning a new, pared-down folk/country sound that spoke to a moral order quite different from his previous rage and alienation. And he cultivated a ragged integrity, producing his music without rehearsals in poorly equipped recording studios. For him, songs were poems set to music. He was an artist first, then a performer. The dark lyricism of his ‘Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands’ became a touchstone for Richards. Formally experimental, with a hypnotically repetitive melody, ‘Sad-Eyed Lady’ was a quasi-mystical political statement that rejected the hypocritical dogma of institutional charity, be it Christian or liberal, for a personal, faith-based empathy that would come to characterize Richards’s later ecumenicalism. The ‘sad-eyed lady’ was one of Dylan’s many victims who had been summarily dismissed without notice or attention, forced to ‘stand with [her] thief ... [doing] his parole.’ Who she actually was has been debated for years – she may have been a Boston waitress or even the Virgin Mary – but her identity is less important today than her strength in the face of dismissal, a strength not dis-

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 99

similar to Dickens’s Nancy, for, ultimately, none among her tormentors ‘could destroy [her].’ The song castigates the social forces responsible for her pain while declaring the artist’s bond with her suffering. For Richards, who was learning to bring himself to eye level with his characters, Dylan’s song was more than politically engaged – it was morally accurate. Its empathy was borne of fellowship, which was captured formally in the rhythmic chanting of the song’s refrain, which seemed to universalize the connection, tapping a deep well in the collective unconscious that Richards, too, would seek in his efforts to locate the ubiquitous, non-ideological rhythms of human life. Like Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan was a histrionic poet of concentrated themes whose work opened a window onto the inner world of the tormented young artist. In turning to the native traditions of their own worlds (Dylan to the rhythm and blues of Chicago and the Mississippi Delta, Thomas to the forms of the Welsh bards), they offered Richards licence to explore the private, mythic world of his native Miramichi. For nascent artists mapping the geographies of their fictional worlds, the discovery of like-minded technicians is of paramount importance. So Richards played Dylan repeatedly in an attempt to enter the poet-musician’s private world. ‘On the Death of a Woman’ and other poems of the period owe much to Dylan’s surreal interiority, his radical independence, and his search for a universal human cadence in the commonality of suffering. Dylan’s music also articulated the dissent of the counterculture of which Richards was a part. He had only to go home to be reminded of how separate from the mainstream that culture was. In his final year of high school, he was continuing to grow apart from his father. He bristled against the matter-of-factness of Bill’s authority. Bill was no philistine, but with six children and a wife to support on the slim margins of a smalltown family business, his practical concerns did not allow him to tolerate his son’s rebelliousness, which must have seemed pointlessly disruptive. In his mind, the boy needed a stiff bromide of strictness to dissuade him from risking his future on the pipe dream of being a writer. Strictness he could provide, but direction he could not, for his own circumstances had made him temperamentally different from his son, something that Richards recalls in Lines: ‘My father’s father died when he was four years old. And in the truest sense he was an orphan. He never knew about the

100

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

woods. He didn’t own a camp. He had no knowledge of the great empire of the northern woods that spread in all compass readings on all sides of him … I was a town boy. And my father owned a business downtown and went to work in a suit and tie’ (29, 30). When Bill did attempt to connect with his son, the result was often discomfort leavened with comedy, which the adult writer would capture in River with his exaggerated portrait of the fictional father, Miles. ‘Often he would carry his briefcase with him into the woods,’ he wrote, ‘And of course this caused a crisis, if not in his life then certainly in mine’ (178). His father was living a life removed from the real Miramichi to which he had laid claim. He sometimes wondered whether his father resembled Dickens’s sophisticates more than he did the average Miramichiers who filed into his theatres. In the above quotation, Richards seems to be suggesting that if his father was an orphan by age four, so was he. The old colonel (Hockey Dreams 109–11) and the kindly fisherman next door (Lines 32) might have been surrogate fathers in his childhood, as were the two Dougs in his late adolescence, but he felt himself to be pretty much alone, destined to be as ‘outside of life’ as the reformed Jerry Bines (Wounded 9). Which is not to suggest that he did not contribute to the widening gulf between father and son. He had a talent for getting into scrapes that required his father’s involvement. One such incident involved Bill’s new car, a big Buick LeSabre with a state-of-the-art rubber suspension – fine in the corners, but bouncy on uneven roads at high speed. Since first impressing the girls in Dalhousie with his car, Bill had always prided himself on owning a new vehicle. As it was for other men of his generation, a new car was a status symbol, and he traded his old one in regularly as a reward for the long hours he worked at his business. One cool autumn night of his final year of high school, Richards asked for the car to visit Peggy downriver. It was too dangerous for the motorcycle because a midnight frost was likely. When he arrived in Bartibog, he and Peggy got in an argument. He sped away, getting increasingly angry as he neared town. At eighteen, he wasn’t a very good driver, and he often drove too fast for the conditions. (His friends would often joke that if he was in a foul mood at the wheel they got in the back seat and put both seatbelts on.) Driving west on Highway 11 at high speed on a dark fall night was dangerous. When he came to the dip in the road under the Centennial Bridge, the car started to bounce, then spin. Before Richards knew what was happening, the car was on its roof up against a sign a short distance from the overpass. The car was only months old.

Oliver Twist and the 1960s 101

Bill wondered aloud what other calamities his second son might bring down on them before he left the house. ‘He’s caused more grief than any of the others,’ he was overheard to say. ‘What happened to him, this beautiful child?’ When Richards graduated a few months later in the spring of 1969, Bill got a bit of revenge, insisting, after reminding him of the accident, that his son shave and get a haircut for the ceremony. Thus ended the turbulent 1960s. Richards had found his vocation and had begun sorting out his relationship with characters and place. In the process, he had differentiated and sometimes alienated himself from family and friends. He had rejected the authority of school, the church, and his father. He had found the love of his life in a workingclass girl from a family that in no way resembled his own. And she was equally smitten. The year after she graduated from Harkins with a business diploma, she took a job at Fraser’s mill in Newcastle to be close to him while he finished grade twelve. She used her typing skills that year to type his first novella, Home for the Seasons, lost now to history. He had also somehow passed high school despite failing two grade twelve courses and four ‘mentals’ (the pejorative term for departmental matriculations). He had been expelled three times, had repeated a year, and had been strapped and forced to see a psychiatrist in order to graduate. In the midst of that turmoil, he had declared his devotion by statement and action: he was going to be a writer and whatever did not serve that end did not warrant his attention. Like Oliver Twist, he was orphaned in his own place, often feeling more connection to the working-class strangers on the docks than to those closest to him. But though orphaned, he was not adrift. Having inherited the ‘immaculate will’ of his grandmother (River 195), he was setting out to bear witness, determined that writing, not his disability, would come to define him. Knowing the strength of his conviction, his high school friends dubbed him the ‘Homer of Harkins High’ as he went off to meet his future.

4 Stepping Outside and In: St Thomas University to Small Heroics

I managed to flunk all matrics except two, and the only way I got into university was by a kind of special dispensation, handed to me by St Thomas. Not the saint. The university. ‘Remembering’ (12)

He has tried over the years to find the meaning of various incidents in his life and to give form to them. The briefcase that he carries with him on this trip contains a number of manuscripts in which he has attempted to explore and explain his past. But though the plot may be fixed the pattern is constantly changing. The childhood Kevin remembers at twenty-five is different from the childhood he remembered at twenty. The childhood that he will remember should he happen to be alive twenty years from now will be something else again. Nowlan, Various (23)

Richards faced a serious problem after high school. His grades were insufficient to get him into university, yet his relationship with his father had deteriorated to the point that he knew he must leave. He considered two options: travelling west to join the construction crews in Alberta, or moving to Fredericton to join the staff of the Daily Gleaner, where he had been offered a probationary job on the sports beat. The latter, at least, would allow him to write, perhaps even work next to Alden Nowlan, who had tried repeatedly to join the Gleaner staff. Richards had a summer to raise his stake. To cover the bases, he took the suggestion of one of the Gleaner’s editors and learned to type – ‘an invaluable aid to his profession,’ he noted later (quoted in Montague 3). In June, he followed his friend Peter Baker to Heath Steele Mines,

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

103

where Peter’s father was manager. To traverse the thirty-five miles of dirt roads to the site, he would leave Newcastle at 6:45 a.m. each morning in one of the many vans going north – the travel allowance portion of his cheque handed over to the driver at week’s end. As a summer student, he was part of the crew that did odd jobs and scheduled maintenance. Students weren’t allowed to go underground, but the yard work was just as dirty and hot. One of his jobs was to neutralize the acidity of waste water, which was done by dumping hundreds of eighty-pound bags of lime by hand into beaters that agitated the effluent. Often he’d get lime into his socks and jacket. When he began to sweat, the lime would burn, sending him to the first aid station and earning him a few days off. That and other experiences at the plant – his first exposure to industrial work – were recorded by his writerly imagination, eventually finding their way into Winter. Kevin Dulse’s ordeal in that novel is made more poignant by the fact that it was Richards’s own: Often he would sit on the stacks of lime watching the cold yellow water funneling through the pipe below the railing with his wheel cart ready and loaded, ready should the foreman making his rounds come to inspect. He detested the job of pouring lime and today being Monday was the worst for pouring since he was stiff and cold, even with the thought of what he had to do, more so with the thought of it. (73)

Though he enjoyed the camaraderie of Trapper and some of the old gang at the mines, his future was elsewhere. His good relations with Doug Shanahan again proved fortuitous. In a chance encounter with Bill and Margaret one evening, Shanahan was surprised to hear that his former student, the young writer of promise, was not continuing his education. He agreed to do what he could (given that the application deadline had passed) to get Richards enrolled at St Thomas University in Fredericton. Calls and letters followed to his former colleague, the Reverend George W. Martin, Registrar of the recently relocated university in Fredericton. Shanahan touted Richards as ‘well read and studious,’ as a young person with an unusual interest in literature, and ‘of fine Miramichi character’ – qualities corroborated (surprisingly) by the school principal in a ‘Confidential Report’ (‘Registrar’s File,’ 28 May 1969). Richards was accepted into first year Arts a few weeks later (30 May 1969), contingent on successful completion of his final exams and matriculations. When those marks arrived at STU in August, however, Father Martin revised the earlier acceptance to ‘qualified,’ writing that ‘this is acceptance granted, not

104

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

by reason of your over-all performance on departmental examinations, but by reason of the recommendation of your English teacher and your reported success in the area of creative literature’ (ibid., 18 August 1969). Richards was in, but just barely, his early talents having won the day. Fredericton in September 1969 was a quaint provincial town of twenty thousand souls that ‘was the physical and social embodiment,’ wrote Richard Wilbur, ‘of nineteenth century Britannia’ (200). It was founded in 1783 by United Empire Loyalists fleeing the revolutionary battles at Lexington and Concord. Frederick’s Town was established as a safe haven for ‘the King’s friends.’ One hundred seventy-five years later, it was still a white-collar Anglican town of upper-middle-class professors, parsons, and retired gentry who affectionately thought of their town, in Wilfrid Eggleston terms, as the ‘somnolent sylvan capital’ (101). The active garrisons were gone, but the genteel refinement of the old culture remained, as did an atmosphere of prosperous insularity that Charles G.D. Roberts, its most famous literary son, once described as ‘hardly democratic’ (416). Louis Robichaud’s program of Equal Opportunity had not yet trickled down to the capital, so francophones in the city were as scarce as labourers. The University of New Brunswick, which, as the King’s College, had received its Royal Charter in 1829, was the jewel in Fredericton’s crown. Still Protestant in its emphasis on professional versus reflective and pastoral education, it was the largest university in the province as well as the preferred training ground for the children of Canada’s wealthiest families. The Eatons sent their children to UNB, as did the Bassetts and the Olands. Harry Hindmarsh, son of the former editor of the Toronto Star, typified this group. A colourful character who held court at the ivy-covered Lady Beaverbrook Residence, the preferred accommodation of the moneyed, Harry treated the campus as his own family compound, roaming the grounds as a young emperor. What had made Frederick’s Town a safe haven for the King’s friends, made UNB an anachronistic bastion for Canada’s Protestant elite. When upstart St Thomas relocated to Fredericton from Chatham in 1964 to occupy real estate at the top of UNB’s famous hill, the long history of class difference in Fredericton immediately asserted itself. The small Catholic college with its two hundred students and seminarians was welcomed as a poor cousin, parochial at best. Beyond the public edict of a Royal Commission on Higher Education that had recommended the move, no one was certain why STU had relocated to Fredericton so quickly. The Protestants assumed that it had been lured to the capital

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

105

to become UNB’s Catholic college and thereby win the favour of francophones, who were increasingly aspiring to positions of power in the provincial legislature. The Catholics, conditioned to assume the worst, thought the move was a ploy by the Saint John diocese to accelerate the demise of the small university and thereby coerce Catholics into going to St Francis Xavier, the larger denominational institution down the road. The STU faculty, comprised mostly of teaching priests and Holy Cross fathers, felt marginalized by early administrative decisions. Humanities students, for example, had to take introductory courses at STU but advanced studies ‘down the hill.’ When students reported back that their UNB professors seemed unhappy to have them, the rallying cry at STU became a fight against a second-class status. By the time Richards arrived in the fall of 1969, this rallying cry had become an institutional mantra. In moving to Fredericton, he had entered one of the most class-conscious towns in Canada. At STU, the Catholic boy from the Protestant Miramichi town found himself embroiled once again in the same kind of Royalist politics that existed between Chatham and Newcastle. And again he was among the underdogs, hunkering down with the like-minded Irish in a small Catholic enclave surrounded by a sea of more powerful English Protestants at UNB and in the town beyond. Despite that containment, he felt the freedom that young people do at university, at least initially. In his residence at Harrington Hall were a number of Miramichiers he knew from home. They sneaked beer into their rooms and enjoyed the company of girls from their sister house, Vanier Hall. They carried phony IDs to get into the Brown Derby Tavern downtown, the STU favourite, and played cribbage and penny poker late into the night. When the Derby closed at 11:30 p.m., many rushed back to campus to don the requisite jacket and tie needed for admission to the River Room at the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel, the only late-night watering hole in the city. STU’s band, the Thomists, played at dances and socials, and residence lounges on Saturday nights overflowed with patrons of Hockey Night in Canada. For students away from home for the first time, the residence experience was as educational as the classroom. The strong sense of community there was matched by a solidarity on campus borne of the struggles with the goliath down the hill. Activism brought students together. Editorials in the student paper The Aquinian railed against the faculty and administration for plots real and imagined. In its pages, characters were assassinated, rumours of faculty cabals were fanned, and nasty political cartoons lampooned those

106

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

in authority. Not even Monsignor Duffie, STU’s president, was spared. One cartoonist depicted him as a steaming pile of excrement outside the doors of the annual Higher Education Commission meeting. The caption read: ‘Then one of the big wheels looking him straight in the eye said to him, “Duffie, you’re nothing but a pile of shit”’ (‘Poetic Apathy’ 10). Richards felt comfortable in the cut and thrust of this environment, one that was rich with creative and political energy. In many ways it was not much different from home. He took courses in English, Philosophy, History, and ‘the old’ Theology, so named by the younger faculty because it had not yet become the wider field of Religious Studies (Vatican II’s agiornamento, or updating, had yet to fully take hold). His professors were teachers first, then scholars, and many of them had eccentricities reminiscent of Shanahan’s. For Theology 101 he had Father Louis Kingston, a Miramichi priest whose easy manner was in stark contrast to the subject matter of his Old Testament classes. After lectures, Father Lou would adjourn to the cafeteria to continue discussions with the large group that followed. He could often be found late into the night drinking coffee and playing cards with students. Richards felt immediate fraternity with him when he cancelled class one September day to go moose hunting. When he later asked people on the Miramichi if they’d ever heard of the priest, he was told that Father Lou was well known to locals and wardens for getting up at four a.m. and fishing through the private salmon pools on the main river south of town. Because he was a priest, and considered harmless, no one much cared. (Father Lou died of a heart attack many years later while fishing on the Miramichi, the ten-pound salmon he was playing still hooked on his line when they discovered his body face down on the shore.) In first-year Arts, Richards also had Leo Ferrari, a philosophy professor who that same year (1969) co-founded with Alden Nowlan the Flat Earth Society, an organization dedicated to ‘renewing “faith in the veracity of sense experience”’ (Ferrari fonds). The stunt brought him and STU temporary if quirky celebrity. Ferrari was an Irish Catholic from New South Wales, Australia, who had trained in science at the University of Sydney. Dissatisfied with his work as an industrial chemist, he attended night classes at the Aquinas Institute, sitting mesmerized at the feet of a brilliant priest who gave free lectures in medieval philosophy. He had come to Canada in 1955 to do doctoral work at Laval University, landing his first permanent teaching position at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax three years later. After being fired from MSVU for growing

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

107

a beard – which he was told disgraced the university – he followed the Mount’s chaplain, Donald C. Duffie, to STU in Chatham, where Duffie was appointed president in 1961. By the time he arrived in Fredericton as a member of the relocating faculty, Ferrari had earned a reputation as a performer. Though an expert in Augustine, his real specialty was rhetoric – using his scientific training to prove and disprove philosophical statements – the display of which laid bare the rudiments of critical thinking. He would pick a position, argue for and against its logic and fallacies, then turn his jacket inside out and switch sides, defending expertly what he had just refuted. Students found the performances dazzling, learning about the use of evidence, the need to be familiar with both sides in debate, and the rigours of argumentation. The approach impressed on Richards the seductions of rhetoric in the construction of absolutes. He liked Ferrari instantly, getting the highest mark in his firstyear courses in Philosophy 101. So enamoured did he become with the subject that philosophy replaced history as his minor at STU. He would go on to take courses in Philosophy of Art, Philosophy of Mind, and Existential Philosophy, studying in his third year Gabriel Marcel, a French Catholic philosopher and playwright whose thought reconciled existentialist doubt with Christian doctrine. As a convert, dramatist, and self-termed concrete philosopher, Marcel would become instrumental to Richards, who had come to believe, through Dickens, that in being moral, art was fundamentally ecumenical. Marcel thus became an essential thinker in Richards’s arsenal of engagé humanists. Marcel believed that the West’s obsession with scientific rationalism since the Enlightenment had reduced humanity to the servo-mechanistic – specifically, to a set of anarchic, objective responses that hailed the world as ‘reserve,’ that is, as raw materials waiting to satisfy our desires. As a result, every thought was now governed by the idea of function (McLuhan, another Catholic, had developed this idea in The Mechanical Bride). This functionalism, however, had alienated humans from sacredness and diminished their capacity for authenticity, for, habituated to the power of ‘function,’ they had become the sole agents of creation and meaning in the universe, thus Godless and immoral in their relations with others, whom they objectified in order to know and possess. People’s questions now reflected this functional bias: Who is she? What does he want? Where is she coming from? So reduced, humans are little more than problems to be solved, raw materials for technical intelligence to categorize. But categorization in this way, Marcel warned, is a ‘claim to

108

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

possession of that which cannot be possessed’ (169), and the inevitable consequence of this is frustration when others don’t accede to our need to solve them. Frustrated and confused, we become further alienated from our world. To counter the malaise that follows from this, and from the nihilists’ insistence on the essential loneliness of the human soul, Marcel proposed an individual way of ‘being’ that opened communion with God and His creatures. This way is found in instances of human courage and struggle when people relinquish the power of possession over others and refuse to know, deciding instead to let others ‘comprehend [them]’ (141). Only with this orientation, said Marcel, does one’s metaphysics change. The phenomenal world is no longer considered an object to be classified but a presence to be cherished. People, likewise, are no longer categorized but affirmed. Marcel describes this orientation as an act of radical abandonment: ‘Love, in so far as distinct from desire or as opposed to desire, love treated as the subordination of the self to a superior reality, a reality at my deepest level more truly me than I am myself, love as the breaking of the tension between the self and the other, appears to me to be what one might call the essential ontological datum’ (167). Freedom, then, comes with the knowledge of interrelatedness, not in one’s acceptance of abstract or authoritarian laws for salvation. Defining the aim of life as working through doubt to discover a personal way to communicate with God, Marcel’s ideas challenged class, sectarianism, and other prescribed orthodoxies as the means by which one achieves grace. The non-institutional concreteness of Marcel’s humanism provided Richards with a doctrine that matched his own belief in the sanctity of the individual and the rightness of spontaneous action. Marcel’s thought was evidence of the divide between the authenticity of faith and the ingrown abstractions of the institutional church. That thought would percolate for some years before fully manifesting itself in the animus of Vera Pillar, who seeks to possess Jerry Bines in Wounded (23–5), and in the attitudes of Joe Walsh and Ivan Basterache, characters who accept the subordinate role of being acted upon in order to serve (and save) those around them. When Joe Walsh at the end of Nights forsakes ‘knowing’ for ‘being’ as the greater human conduct, the actions that follow are not the consequence of ignorance, as some have stated (Davey 17–26), but of a highly evolved spiritualism. Joe’s rescue of Vye, who throughout the novel has ridiculed him from the position of class and intelligence, is a spontaneous and selfless action that Marcel’s thought elucidates:

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

109

Then [Joe] crossed the brook, with Vye on his back, and made his way up through the clear cut and slag and moved toward his truck. His back pained only slightly but he did not feel it so much – not knowing the process of how this had all happened, only understanding that it was now irrevocable because it had. (225)

Joe’s acceptance of the irrevocable would have been naïve only if he didn’t have Vye on his back. With the burden of Vye (the burden of ‘thy enemy’ [Luke 6.27–42]), Joe’s acceptance is ontological. Though Richards would fully develop Marcel’s thought only in the second trilogy (1988–93), the French philosopher’s ideas more immediately affected the way he began to think about characterization. His decision at this time to give his characters complete autonomy (the freedom to act in their own best or worst interests) and a sometimes unnerving agency (their lives as real to him as those of flesh-and-blood beings), must be considered in the light of Marcel’s teaching. If philosophy equipped Richards with an ethical stance for his writerly aims, English studies provided the means. Though he was a quiet student in class, he did make himself known to professors, especially Allen Bentley, a friendly and unpretentious Upper Canadian who had come east to teach after studying under Northrop Frye. Richards took three courses from Bentley, each time making special arrangements to substitute part of the course for something he considered more practical. Adapting the curriculum was not the norm for Bentley, but, like other colleagues who agreed to do the same, he saw something unique in the young Miramichier – ‘something in the eyes,’ he recalled, echoing Shanahan, ‘not exactly an intensity, that’s too common a word, but a hunger’ (interview with author, October 2003). The first request he honoured was to allow Richards to read his work to the class instead of writing a term paper. The work was The Keeping of Gusties, a novel he began writing midway through Bentley’s English 200 course in 1971. Richards’s dimensional understanding of character held the class spellbound, prompting Bentley, as Shanahan before, to invite the student to his office for informal chats about literature. ‘He talked about Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov,’ Bentley remembers: Dostoevsky’s ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ chapter [of Brothers] really intrigued him. He loved how the Russian novelists probed the soul. He loved the

110

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

darkness of their world, their rhythmic, compound sentences and brooding moralism. My office became an echo chamber where he worked out his ideas. I usually let him wander because I could tell that his efforts to make me see something were really his attempts to understand ideas at a deeper level. He was no ordinary undergraduate, not at all scholarly or polished, but a keen thinker with ambitions. He had what I have described to others as a ‘searching intelligence,’ which means he accepted nothing at face value. He liked to take things apart and refute, and sometimes made quite a mess doing so. (interview with author, October 2003)

Richards’s dismantling of the Grand Inquisitor chapter of Dostoevsky’s novel is proof of those ambitions. One of the most critically celebrated passages in Russian literature, the chapter proceeds as a complex ontological debate. In its simplest form it is a poem that Ivan reads to his brother Alyosha. The poem’s action centres on an encounter between the Almighty, who has abandoned His children to suffering and iniquity, and a bloodthirsty Cardinal of the Spanish auto da fé, whose ruthless presence commands more belief among the people than the absence of their Creator. The discussion that ensues between the Inquisitor and the Almighty in a dingy cell the night before the Almighty’s planned execution is one of the great theological exchanges in modern literature. The Inquisitor, in effect, puts God on trial, condemning Him for the freedom He has given His followers, a freedom that he argues has been their undoing: ‘For fifteen centuries,’ he says (258), ‘we have been wrestling with Thy freedom,’ the very freedom within which the gospels say we either come to God or reject Him. ‘Didst Thou forget,’ he asks, ‘that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil’ (261) – that humans ‘cannot navigate within the open waters of free will’ (259)? Releasing people to the vacuities of choice is harmful, he adds, for they desire endlessly without fulfilment, their hunger for belief in something, in anything, inviting the tyrannies under which they live: ‘For the sake of common worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. They have set up gods and challenged one another. “Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!”’ (261). Proceeding logically, the Inquisitor imperils God to see that in granting free will, He laid the foundation for the destruction of His own kingdom. Shaken by what he thinks is Ivan’s allegory of Romish Catholicism, Alyosha understands only the rudiments of the poem’s irony – that in putting God on trial, the Inquisitor is really interrogating himself, ‘the worst of the Catholics, the Inquisitors, the Jesuits’ (268), those for whom the fab-

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

111

rications of ‘miracle, mystery, and authority’ (262) were but hoaxes in a ‘simple lust of power, of filthy earthy gain, of domination’ (268). Wanting his brother to see deeper, Ivan complicates the fable by asking Alyosha to consider that the Inquisitor is not ruthless at all, but a great man among the filthy materialists, one so great that ‘his incurable love of humanity’ leads him to ‘accept lying and deception … so that [his subjects] may not notice where they are being led, that the poor blind creatures may at least, on the way, think themselves happy’ (269). Finally, adds Ivan, if this man were himself Godless, having irrefutable knowledge of the fabrication of the gospels, yet, out of love for mankind, still abiding by the dictates of the myth, would this man not be even greater than God? Surely, concludes Ivan, one such man exists. Surely one: ‘Who knows, perhaps the spirit of that accursed old man who loves mankind so obstinately in his own way, is to be found even now in a whole multitude of such old men, existing not by chance but by agreement, as a secret league formed long ago for the guarding of the mystery [of the lie of Christ], to guard it from the weak and the unhappy, so as to make them happy’ (270). The importance of Dostoevsky’s allegory for the sceptical young Catholic at STU went far beyond the philosophical brilliance of its imagining, though Richards must have recognized in Ivan’s intellectual deftness something of Ferrari’s manoeuvrings. Rather, the complex allegory of power, faith, and selflessness – the three qualities ascending in that order – demarcated for him the manufacture of spiritualism. His own experiences of the corrupting nature of impunity, of hopeful devotion, and of service to others in simple acts of kindness and courage were masterfully conceived in Ivan’s poem. ‘Who was the real prophet,’ he asked Bentley, ‘the captive Christ or the fond old Inquisitor?’ Without the evidence of miracles, was faith enough? And were miracles the proof or the smoking gun? The allegory, he explained, provides neither avowal nor refutation – it provides direction. It is a road map to action. That goodness is done in the name of God matters little. What matters is that goodness be done in the name of humanity, even (and especially) with no evidence of God. This is what Dostoevsky’s little understood aphorism really meant, he said. ‘When existentialists interpret the meaning of “If God were dead all things would be possible,” they are almost always dystopian,’ he expounded to his professor, who had the good sense to preserve what followed in memory: They speak of a dissembling of God’s laws, of chaos on earth. But the Grand Inquisitor indicates that Dostoevsky could have meant the opposite: that in the absence of God’s laws – without punishment, wrath, and retribution –

112

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

godliness becomes paramount. If God was proven to be a fabrication, we would not only have greater need for His laws, but we would have more responsibility to each other to live by them, thus creating a utopia. The evidence doesn’t matter any more than the authority of the church or the infallibility of the pope. What matters is acting towards others as if it did, as if the idea of God were true. (interview with author, October 2003)

No ordinary undergraduate, indeed. Richards’s infatuation with Dostoevsky (and it was clearly nothing short of that) would lead Bentley to observe that much of his former student’s work explores the moral consequences of an absent God: ‘The cultural apparatus of power, faith, and selflessness is what he examines, and what he set out to explain to himself (and me) in my office years ago.’ Bentley’s instinct to hold back as his student was working this out for himself was pedagogically astute. What he was witnessing in his office was the working factory of a writer’s mind, what Yeats called the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. It was in another of Bentley’s classes – English 3465, a seminar on modern literature – that Richards showed how his philosophical ideas would serve his literary ambitions. The first occasion was during a discussion of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams was another kindred spirit, a writer whose physical frailty (he suffered from paralysis of the legs) and ostracism from society and family had led him at the age of fourteen into the solitary ‘retreat [and] refuge’ of writing (1539). By the early 1970s, his reputation had deteriorated to that of a tormented playwright whose exploration of taboo subjects – violence, class, homosexuality – had plunged him into a dark world of drug addiction and alcoholism. Richards told Bentley that Williams’s life warranted examination of his art, since both were so transparently interwoven and so obviously tilted towards the quest for self-knowledge – towards an inquisition of self to which Richards had already been drawn. Seeing in Williams a number of preoccupations that were similar to his own – the incompatibility of the belle reve (or halcyon dream) with the decayed present, the smothering grip of family ties, and the often unwelcome burden of the past intruding in memory and community – Richards undertook an intense study of the playwright. During that study, he was uncharacteristically vocal and uncompromising. He not only sided with Stanley Kowalski – a character whom polite southern gentry and the growing tide of second-wave feminists condemned as lowbrow and brutal – but also took up Stanley as a cause, defending him as the play’s hero-victim, not its aggressor. Bentley recalls:

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

113

His strategy for doing this was unusual. He didn’t probe the play like a literary critic, looking for scattered pieces to a puzzle. Instead he read into it, extending its meaning further than the norm, certainly further than I was comfortable with. I’m not implying that he made things up, only that he saw an intention that wasn’t readily apparent, and, as such, was open to dispute. He was perceptive and sympathetic there is no doubt. That he had the imaginative capacity to enter deeply into a literary text – deeper than any student I’ve seen – was, I think, his gift. (interview with author, October 2003)

Richards argued that the coercive social forces necessary to keep the illusion of Blanche DuBois’s cultivation afloat are ultimately responsible for Stanley’s brutish outbursts, perhaps even to the point of precipitating his violence against her. He acts, then, in ways predetermined by the conditions of her existence. When challenged by his female peers on the question of Stanley’s own sense of right and wrong, Richards defended him as a character of human weaknesses – not, like Blanche, of egomaniacal self-delusions. The adult writer would pick up the argument two decades later in an essay detailing what he felt was the ideologically laden adaptation of Alden Nowlan’s work in the play Lockhartville. ‘The lack of courage,’ he protested, ‘is in the fact that we must all pretend to believe, like certain feminists do, that Blanche should no longer be capable of self-deception. Within this particular 1980s interpretation, Blanche never had to be forgiven her delusions and anger; and Stanley, as a man, couldn’t be’ (Lockhartville 36–7). The continuation of this argument is more than a historical footnote, for the same view, built around social conditions rife with the same class presumptions about gender, appears in Richards’s handling of the Kowalski-like character Cecil, who throws his son Ronnie against the stove in Blood Ties; and again in the archetypal opposition of Jerry Bines and Vera Pillar in Wounded. In each instance, Richards examines the consequences of action against socio-economic and ideological forces that, while presumed by the enlightened to be benign, predetermine violent outcomes as surely as do individual acts of aggression. ‘There is violence,’ he would explain in an interview, long ‘before fists are ever used’ (quoted in Garrod 218), a view that echoed Orwell’s belief that coercion always leads to physical violence. At STU, Richards the artist-thinker finally had people to talk to. His loneliness was temporarily assuaged, and he made friends, in some cases, lifelong connections – he was still in touch with members of Bentley’s English 3465 class twenty years later. Through directed reading, he learned from world-class technicians. And there was nothing random

114

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

in his selection of courses. He took Shakespeare because he wanted to learn how the world’s greatest dramatist used physical space. He took Canadian history because he wanted to know about the restrictive tariffs that had impoverished the post-Confederation Maritimes. And he took literary modernism to gain exposure to the fiction of the American South. His early reading and precocious sense of vocation gave him an uncanny feel for what he did and didn’t need to do to become a writer. James Joyce’s stream of consciousness in Ulysses was less useful to him than Faulkner’s in The Sound and the Fury. Guy de Maupassant’s notions of class were provocative but not as transportable to the Miramichi as Williams’s or Flannery O’Connor’s. While he did not excel academically – he had difficulty writing essays and couldn’t consolidate information into the schema necessary for recall – he did make an impression as a highly focused student. Richard Kennedy, his first-year English professor, was another in a long list of teachers who detected that focus, deliberately saving his class notes for a posterity that he knew would be rich for the young Miramichier. As he recorded it, Richards’s gift was, as Ovid said of writers in Artis Amatoriae, est deus in nobis, that there is a God within us, ‘by which Ovid meant talent, inspiration, and spark’ (‘Introductory Notes’). As compelling as the intellectual world of STU was, Richards’s writing was not developing as he had hoped. All he had managed to publish in his first year was the short story ‘Charlie’ in the university’s magazine Floorboards. The two senior members of the editorial board liked the story, but he was unsatisfied, both with the story and with the literary culture at the magazine. The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Dan Dawson, wore a Fu Manchu and big glasses to affect an Allen Ginsberg style. Acolytes followed, growing their hair long and skipping classes to write lyrics that captured contemporary attitudes of whimsical non-involvement. Despite inclinations to join, Richards hovered on the periphery of the group, for he couldn’t pretend to be whimsical any more than he could pretend bemusement. ‘Charlie’ was an uncomfortable reminder of just how far removed he was from the affected literary styles of the time. But there was more to this than an unwillingness to strike the right cultural chords: ‘Charlie’ did not fulfil the ambitions he had for himself as a writer. The story was flat. Enumerating the thoughts of a lonely nine-year-old boy who had lost his father the summer before, the story merely duplicated what he had been writing for the past three years. Though the phrasings were fresh – ‘Charlie ran hamper-damp up the stairs’; ‘The sun was hidden again and a small breeze drew the sweat from his arms’; ‘The birds flew belly

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

115

soft in the grass. The cats prowled neat-tuck in garbage and the marshes held the grey rats’ (13, 14) – the art was not developing beyond the bite of its language, and that was merely a bit of old conjuring that he had grown tired of. The heavy schedule of classes, readings, and assignments prevented him from doing anything more elaborate. Needing more time to fill a broader canvas, he decided he was due for a change. On 6 October 1970, five weeks into his second year at STU, he met with Father Martin, the Registrar, to withdraw. He told the priest that the purchase of his books a month before had depressed him – they looked so heavy and lifeless, especially the Government of Canada textbook (against his better judgment, he had decided to take another crack at Political Science, a subject he had failed in first year). To make matters worse, he found the food bad and the smell of the residence off-putting. But these were excuses. The real flashpoint for his frustrations was the rising political tension in Quebec, which was about to explode in what we now remember as the October Crisis. He was troubled by the safe, theoretical distance from which social problems were being addressed by artists and academics. Why were local poets borrowing idioms so foreign to place, he wondered? Why wasn’t his Political Science class discussing the Quebec situation? He put these questions to Father Martin, adding that the disconnect between the working-class world he knew on the Miramichi and the theoretical social contract he was encountering in political science at STU was leading him to question the authenticity of the latter. It was the first time he had quarrelled openly with bourgeois liberalism. Father Martin granted his request for withdrawal on the condition that he use his time to explore the authenticity of his home world. He repeated Shanahan’s advice about action: You want to quit school to write, then write! Richards returned to the Miramichi, much to the disappointment of his parents. Heeding Father Martin’s advice, he got to work on a chapbook of poetry and stories, seeking, as before, the advice of his old high school teachers, ‘the two Dougs,’ the younger of whom was also thinking of selfpublishing. At Underhill’s suggestion, the two brought their best work to Bill Walls at Miramichi Press, a Chatham printer. To give his book some scholarly heft, Richards asked the elder Doug to write an introduction. Shanahan, who was teaching first- and second-year college English in Bathurst, introduced the book and its author against the backdrop of the times:

116

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Once in a while a writer like David Adams Richards comes along and speaks of his generation and to his generation. These are unsettled times. Everywhere one looks one encounters violence, riots, kidnapping and murder. Our very own Canada is at present subject to the War Measures Act brought on by sedition and insurrection. Never before, apart from all out war, has the air and the mass media been so crowded with turmoil and dissension. Of these uncertain times and uncommitted people ... David Adams Richards expounds. (5)

Five hundred copies of the chapbook appeared as One Step Inside on 22 December 1970, two months after Richards’s withdrawal from STU. The run cost two hundred dollars and sold for one dollar at Hogan’s Tobacco Store on Water Street in Chatham. It bore the simple dedication ‘To Peggy.’ Ever the supporter, Shanahan invited Richards to read at Bathurst College, a first public reading made memorable by the fact that the young writer had left his headlights on in the frenzy of arrival. Shanahan took the edge off his triumph that day by scolding him for carelessness while rushing around to get him a boost. Years later the chapbook would be used by an unscrupulous member of the Ice House Gang as evidence of what Richards was writing before he met UNB’s literary elders. The small collection became, as a result, something of a talisman, a reminder of what had to be endured along the path of his literary apprenticeship. Much of the chapbook consists of the high school poems and stories that had been in various forms of draft for three years: ‘The Snake,’ ‘On the Death of a Woman,’ ‘An Afternoon of the Mercury Month,’ and ‘Charlie.’ Most are stylistic studies of other poets and balladeers – Thomas, Keats, Dylan, Cohen. For this reason, and because Richards aspired early to be a poet rather than a novelist, the poems are consistently stronger than the fiction. Appearing for the first time are the memorable poems ‘To the Ants,’ ‘Between Us,’ ‘Time Has Come,’ and ‘The Architectural Dead,’ the first and last of which show clear evidence of his development. ‘The Architectural Dead’ successfully yokes disparate metaphors with a musical cadence that the young poet is starting to master: Here there is stillness over the jarring streets

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

117

and sepulchres of cement, where the architectural dead slouch from the early cloud and tobaccoed houses, pin-headed on the spleen of time, into the groin of factory dust that grits their empty heads. And out of distance from the eye on a vegetable clothed and throated ground, the church grows old against the musical tide where scaffolded centuries ebb away and thunderclapped mice limp and pray, in a long and mathematical line. (32)

As an evocation of the indifference of those who march unquestioningly to work and worship, the poem is effective. Its enjambed rhythm carries the slow movements and pulsing monotony of the dead-in-life, for whom the term ‘architectural dead’ is well chosen. Evident in the poem’s intonation is a close reading of T.S. Eliot’s early and later work (Prufrock and Four Quartets respectively). Less technically accomplished, but more indicative of the young poet’s federation with the larger – or in this case, smaller – world, is ‘To the Ants,’ quoted here in full: May I have a worm to worship with you? And cream my jaws With jelly from the dead mouse; And run along with you When others say we crawl. May I have a pit to live with you And die crushed upon some vagrants [sic] shoe. (9)

The poem’s significance is best understood by what Don McKay terms ‘poetic attention’ (1018): ‘the quality of attention surrounding a poem’ that enables the poet to ‘shift the relationship from knowledge as ownership [to catching] reverberations with both visiting and distance’ (1018). This attention, McKay argues, diminishes solipsism (the poet must journey outside of himself) and is ‘a natural check on our genius … for making things, for control and reduction, for converting the world to human categories’ (1019). In the brief foreword to One Step Inside, Richards says

118

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

much the same thing, illuminating both the title of the chapbook and his own ars poetica: It should not be that a modern poet after reading the ‘Meteamorphoses’ [sic] or ‘The Aeniad’ [sic] sit and write an ode to Ovid or Virgil claiming them objects of profound inspiration. Nor should it be that he when struck by the complexity of Eliot dedicate himself to writing simple poetic frames in some distorted form of retaliation. Rather a poet take [sic] one step inside, ‘to begin at the beginning,’ and dedicate his work to revealing man’s emotions, humanity, or the lack of both. (7)

Rarely has the adult writer articulated his aims so explicitly – aims that have changed little since he penned that foreword forty years ago. He is ‘stepping inside,’ he explains, not merely to see with another’s eyes, but to feel and speak as others do. The objective, contra the detached Ginsberg affectation of the times, is one of fraternity with the living, whether with those suffering in his community (the coffee man in ‘The Servant’) or the ants and insects that share his earth (‘Enemys [sic] of our Planet’). As he further revealed in a reading of the chapbook to Underhill’s grade twelve class in April 1971: ‘My ideas … come from experience – sometimes third- or fourth-hand – but experience is the key’ (‘Underhill notes’). It is his own ‘poetic attention’ that will enable him to translate the experience of others, not for his own benefit but for ours. That attention will become his theodicy, his program for action in a world where others refuse or are unable to see. He will show how ants ‘run … When others say we crawl.’ Though the careful reader might detect solipsistic indulgence in the choice of the word ‘we’ (we, after all, enjoins the ants and the precocious parish boy with a disability that never allowed him to run), the poem’s attention is clearly outside the self. In February 1971, two months after the release of One Step Inside, Richards’s older brother Billy, flush with money from a Christmas season at the Post Office, decided to go to Spain. He, too, had dropped out of university and was at loose ends on the Miramichi. Since Peggy had left Fraser’s to work at Eaton’s in Moncton, Richards saw no reason to stay in Newcastle. With money from his parents, he and Billy flew to London, then booked a train to Spain. They spent six weeks travelling around Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon, and the Canary Islands, circling the latter as third-class passengers on a banana boat. They camped in a Spanish Civil War bunker for two weeks, visited Valencia and the island of Ibiza,

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

119

and weathered a storm (and near mutiny) on a tramp steamer. They returned to Newcastle in March 1971 with less than five dollars between them. Though Richards used the long train rides to refine Gusties, the trip’s lasting importance was not the novel’s incubation. In the 1920s and 1930s, North American artists went to London and Paris to explore their literary personae. In the 1960s, Spain and Greece were the preferred destinations – Spain for those on a budget. Cheap lodging and temperate weather served as a magnet for creative expatriates. Likewise for Richards, for whom the journey marked a significant step in the development of a literary persona. He knew from his non-fiction reading that he had to create a writer in order to write. Travel became the means for doing this, but less for the stimulation of new experiences than for escaping the demands of his ever-encroaching vocation. Spain was the first place this impulse took him, a place where he could create himself anew while at the same time suspending his old self. Later, airports would become the rabbit holes through which he escaped to temporary freedom. His friend Trapper Newman observed the darker side of this impulse, commenting that in travel, ‘Dave found a way to run away from himself that he fashioned into the better, greener-pasture game.’ One of the characters in Wounded makes the same observation – ‘once you run you almost always run forever’ (61)– articulating a pattern of behaviour that parallels the author’s own. The irony of travel, of course, is that as soon as you leave, your imagination brings you back home. Richards described this paradox in a short essay on his own need for escape: ‘It can be argued, also, that we never go anywhere without bringing along what we most want to leave behind – namely, ourselves. I have found this true enough on more than one occasion. Therefore, we can say, with some measure of certainty, that we never do go anywhere. That where we are is as close to the centre of the universe as we are bound to get’ (‘Travel’ 102). When he returned to the Miramichi, he entered more fully than before a culture he finally knew he needed. The protagonist in Gusties makes the point he might have made himself: ‘His home was here. Oh, he really didn’t mind living on the river; he had come to believe that it was as good a place as any to live. He had reasoned that he might travel to hell and back and still not be satisfied’ (4). Newcastle was home, even as it was changing from a nineteenth-century frontier to a commercial hub where domesticated homesteaders came to shop and bank. When

120

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

malls and chain stores turned the mom-and-pop front-porch canteens into folklore, however, the town’s enfeeblement became a concern that needed addressing. Richards and his buddies from The Rocks took up that challenge, bemoaning how change had enervated their once vibrant township. They fought back by living large as Miramichiers, choosing entertainments that recaptured an authenticity that was being lost to the modernizing pressures effacing history and culture. Richards, Giles, and Peter Baker trekked on snowshoes to the Heath Steele Mines’ fishing camp that year in the dead of winter. Their five-mile walk in on a mild Friday evening was easy; not so a day later after the temperature plummeted to minus twenty-five. It was so cold that the heel of Richards’s bottle of black rum was slushy by the time they got back. The gang also became rabid boxing fans, particularly of Yvon Durelle, ‘the fighting fisherman’ from Baie-SteAnne, a small fishing village a few miles downriver. Durelle had fought Archie Moore twice for the light-heavyweight championship of the world a decade earlier, knocking Moore down four times in the first fight in Montreal before losing in the eleventh round. (Sportswriters covering the 1958 fight reported that Durelle had been robbed of the victory by a long count in the first.) By the time he retired from the ring in 1963, Durelle’s renown on the Miramichi had become legend. Fights were regularly held at the old Sinclair rink, where undercards featured local amateurs such as Moses ‘Spider’ Russell, Bimbo and Ernie Durelle, and Henry Larry. In his last exhibition match, Yvon Durelle fought Clarence ‘KO’ Malley, a skilled Miramichi amateur and a regular at the Black Horse Tavern. Malley, in tremendous shape, came out flailing on Durelle, whose corner sent a runner to Malley’s people between rounds telling their man to stop before Yvon got mad. Richards developed a plangent respect for Durelle as well as for George Chuvalo, the Canadian heavyweight who went the distance not only with Muhammad Ali but also with Floyd Patterson, George Foreman, Joe Frazier, and Ernie Terrell. No one ever knocked him off his feet. ‘To fight back like this,’ Richards wrote in Hockey Dreams, ‘a man must love as much as he ever hated. That’s one of the clues for my respect for boxers’ (59). The Rocks crowd also partied, most of them as rebels, some as if on a suicide mission. A favourite gathering spot was ‘the Pagan Palace,’ an old farmhouse turned motorcycle club for members only in Oak Point, a small cottage community on the north shore of Miramichi Bay. The Richards’s family cottage was nearby. The ramshackle farmhouse rented for fifty dollars a month and accommodated twelve to fifteen revellers,

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

121

who would arrive Friday night and drink all weekend. In this group, living safely was a greater fear than dying, the one exception being the special care taken with one of the boys who had a plate in his skull. Before the first beer was opened someone always placed the ceremonial helmet on his head so that he could partake of the fun. There were also road trips to test engine speed and driving skills, some to Bathurst and points north, others on the treacherous Rogersville Highway south of Nelson. One trip to the Gaspé became the most memorable of the lot, its misadventures characterizing the life Richards led during his last summer as a bachelor on the Miramichi. Partly a send-off before his September return to STU, the tour of Gaspé’s Ste-Anne-des-Monts region was Giles Kenny’s suggestion. His wife was from the area and so, too, he knew, were Richards’s mother’s people. Thirteen of the gang signed on, the size of the crew dictating the vehicle they chose: Fred Glover’s 1957 Cadillac hearse, complete with velvet cushioning and smoked windows. Giles performed a quick ‘slip & slide’ on the block head the night before the trip to staunch the leaking oil – since so many bodies would be stuffed into the back, he didn’t want fumes from the dripping oil asphyxiating anyone. Their number also dictated light carriage, so beer was disallowed for gallon jugs of StGeorges red wine, a more portable libation. From the time they started north on Highway 8, Fred rarely took his foot off the floor. The sheer weight of the hearse – almost twice that of a normal vehicle – kept them on the road. But its size was also conspicuous, so it didn’t take long to attract attention (the boys speculated that the captain of the ferry that took them across Chaleur Bay had called ahead to notify the Quebec Provincial Police that a gang of pirates was coming ashore). One of the boys got locked up the first night. Another chugged fifteen draft in a row and became rowdy when boasting of the feat. Within minutes, the QPP were there to take him away. Trapper disappeared completely. On the second day, the QPP met the boys again, this time in front of a bakery, where Fred was vomiting down the side of the hearse. Nonplussed at the sight of thirteen inebriated Miramichiers in a hearse at midday, the officer calmly explained that throwing up in front of a local eatery was bad for business. A photo remains of him scolding Fred. Their final meeting with the QPP was in the Emergency Room of the Ste-Anne-des-Monts hospital. Richards and Beep Parks had been playing ‘Chicken,’ a more daring version of the game ‘Stretch,’ in which two men face off and throw a knife between each other’s feet. Whereas ‘Stretch’ challenges the knife-thrower to extend his opponent’s

122

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

feet, ‘Chicken’ challenges him to bring his opponent’s feet closer together, throwing the knife between the ever-decreasing span. Richards and Beep were playing the game with daggers. Beep’s feet were less than an inch apart when Richards threw the knife through the top of his boot and into his toe. Feeling no pain, Beep was loaded into the hearse and backed up to the Emergency Room doors, where a doctor and a QPP officer gave them the third degree. When Fred got the hearse’s occupancy up to twenty-three and its speed over 130 miles an hour – and this, he boasted, on bald tires – the saner among them decided it was time to quit. On exiting Gaspésie Provincial Park for home, they saw a man on the road ahead who was in trouble. He had crawled up from the ditch and was in tatters, as if he had been lost in the woods for some time. As they passed, Fred slammed on the brakes. It was Trapper, who had been missing for the past two-and-a-half days. His friends had checked the jails and had called the QPP and the hospitals but hadn’t been able to locate him. They assumed he’d fallen in love or hiked home. To their astonishment, he had crawled onto the road just before they came by. Over time they learned that he had dropped too much acid the first night and had a bad trip. For two days he had been running through the woods, battered and bruised, trying to find his buddies. He was unable to talk – didn’t for some time – and had little recall. They stretched him out in the back of the hearse and made for home, arriving with three fewer bodies, a lacerated toe, and a near comatose man without speech lying in steerage. Peggy worriedly followed these antics from Moncton, deciding to return to the Miramichi, in part to offset the influence of her man’s wild friends. But her fears were unfounded. With no promise of anything on the Miramichi beyond road trips and tavern talk, Richards had decided to return to STU in September 1971. As important as his friends were, he continued to stay aloof. Similar in temperament, he was different in sensibility, not unlike the character Duncan in Gusties: When [Duncan] was younger he always was healing birds – or trying to heal them – and feeding cats. He was always doing stuff that made him look like a sissy. That’s what everyone else had thought him as. He never played hockey or ball or other sports – he wasn’t good enough. And it wasn’t until later when he acted out in school and developed almost a hard look that he came to be accepted ... The funny part of it was how he had ever become close to people that didn’t share his way of thinking. Share his way? Christ, they forced him into sharing theirs. More or less they forced him into be-

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

123

coming what he was ... He was skeptical on how to act. He usually played the part of being quiet, letting the others tell the jokes and stories. Usually, for a while, anyway, he would sit without saying a word. He felt more respected this way, it was something like his energy being reserved. (Gusties 2, 4)

Returning to STU focused Richards in unexpected ways. Shortly after arriving, he announced that he and Peggy were getting married. They were both twenty-one. He was a student, and she, with a secretarial diploma, was unemployed. Their families were sceptical. The Richards liked Peggy but wondered how David would complete his education with a wife to support. The McIntyres cared nothing about his education, just about their sister. Someone close to her made threats and pulled a shotgun. The wedding went ahead anyway on 19 November at the Saint Peter’s and Saint Paul’s Roman Catholic Church in Bartibog, less than a kilometre from where Peggy had grown up. It would have passed as just another rite of passage in a small country church if not for the priest’s relentless criticism and scorn. Assuming from the haste of planning that she was pregnant, he made it clear throughout the mass that he didn’t like marriages of expedience or ‘those nameless Catholics’ who treated the sacraments so lightly. Expecting no less from a professional Christian, the powerless Richards aimed his fury at his buddies, Giles and Peter, who, liquored up for the occasion, found great sport in the old man’s taunts. Sensing that someone might suddenly break form, one of the priest’s minions – a severe old matron – called for an ordered exit, forbidding the throwing of confetti on church grounds. ‘You will observe the piety of this place,’ she croaked as both families left, confirming, again, Richards’s feelings about the uncharitableness of the institutional church. ‘The wedding was horrible simply because it was a wedding’ (River 349), he would write of a fictional union many years later, the experience of his own having left an indelible mark. Though the nuptial ceremony was difficult, marriage settled him. ‘Only after, did I begin to write things that were worthwhile,’ he told Kent Thompson (interview with author, January 1997). His first bit of changed luck arrived in a letter from Atlantic Advocate. They wanted to publish ‘The Child and the Boy,’ a story written two years earlier and reworked after rejection. It was the first story he had ever sold, and more important, it was his first cohesive story from beginning to end. It has none of the false notes or awkward pacing of his early work. No journeyman writer would be embarrassed by its quality. Disarmingly simple, it is the tale of two boys hitchhiking home during a cold winter night.

124

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

As it develops, we learn that the two boys are brothers, one ten and the other sixteen; that they took a bus into town to buy Christmas presents earlier in the day; that one, without knowing it, is going to receive a new coat from the other. They are Richards’s first two people on the road, the originals of an archetype that he will develop in novels to come. As people cast out, they depend on themselves until they stumble; then they rely on the charity of others. When they are forced to seek shelter from the intense cold, the younger sees for the first time his older brother’s vulnerability: This was the first time Paul [the younger] had heard [his brother] speak so strange a tone. ‘We were hiking sir, and there is no drives and maybe we could come in and get warm for a while?’ ‘Who’s that?’ the woman asked beside the man. ‘Two Indians want to come in the house.’ ‘Lord no – close the door, are they drunk?’ ‘I think one is – I smell wine somewhere.’ ‘I’m not drunk, sir,’ but already the door was slammed shut and the warmth that had crawled about their faces for a minute was gone. They heard the woman speak and the door lock and they moved into darkness at the foot of the porch. (46)

The tale is a conflation of the Christmas Story and that of the Good Samaritan. The boys seek shelter and are scorned, cast out into the darkness and cold. Both have no choice but bravery. As in all parables, not much happens – the essence of the form is to limit action. In rabbinic literature, a parable of this type is termed mâshâl, meaning ‘similitude’ or ‘double’ – a story with allegorical intent. Rabbis use the mâshâl as a pedagogic tool to elicit interest from students while focusing their attention on a moral lesson from scripture. Richards’s story does the same, its simplicity of form compelling us to ruminate on the meaning of samaritanship. The story, then, only incidentally concerns the uncharitable dismissal of the two boys; more fundamentally, it addresses the social consequences of moral delinquency. The road the boys are travelling may not lead to Jericho, but the archetypal echo of their treatment forces us to consider the atemporal nature of our own social conditioning every bit as much as it did for the well-heeled lawyer who first heard Jesus’s parable. While it is unlikely that Richards, at nineteen, understood the affective and pedagogic nature of the mâshâl’s form, his instinct for

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

125

narrative, coupled with his close reading of Tolstoy and scripture, was leading him to increasingly fruitful experimentation. That experimentation is especially evident in the rhythms that animate the story. Imported from his versification for the first time, those rhythms are used in two distinct musical dimensions. As underscore, the cadence of his rolling syntax simulates the icy wind that swooshes around the boys as they walk down the wind tunnel of the road, while, as notation, the long vowel and ‘w’ sounds capture the howl of that wind as it gusts towards them. The attention to prosody places us in the middle of a particular kind of road at a particular time of year that northerners know well. This is New Brunswick in December, windswept and bitingly cold: ‘As they walked they were cold and would stamp their feet for warmth and walk faster for warmth and wave their arms like wings of wounded birds for warmth. But always they were cold and the clean air of night cut into their bones and they spoke only whispers and never laughed too much’ (23). In conjoining ideas with the formal materiality that is necessary for their full expression, the story is Richards’s first successful evocation of the natural language of Winter. His imaginative territory had already been mapped, but in ‘The Child and the Boy’ he gets the voice just right. Nothing is extraneous, nor is there any dissociation of narrative, point of view, and language. And while his influences are apparent, his emulation of Russian formalism is not jarring. So how did he finally get it right? And where did the voice come from? Clues abound in his domestic circumstances. The pared-down simplicity of his work paralleled that of the early days he and Peg shared as newlyweds. ‘We lived in a single room on Aberdeen Street in Fredericton,’ he wrote. ‘The bathroom was two flights up. We had a hot plate, a single cot, and I wrote at the table we ate on, late at night’ (‘Remembering’ 12). ‘We were twenty-one at the time,’ he added, ‘and hope was like that’ (12). ‘Hope’ is the key word, one repeated often in Richards’s lexicon. Used in this context it points forward clearly from a zero ground. What came before was pretext and apprenticeship. Now, settled into the permanency of marriage, he had the order, calm, and horizon to do his real work, work that before had always been fitted into the other demands in his life. In marriage, the distractions at the tavern were gone; his parents, teachers, and critics were miles away; and unlike any time before, he was responsible for what he would become. It was in the autumn of 1971 that his literary career began. If the cost was spartan surroundings, then that is what he and Peggy would endure, for simplicity and hope were the twin forces pushing them forward.

126

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Buoyed by the acceptance from Atlantic Advocate, he redoubled his efforts on Gusties, his second most ambitious project to date (the novella Home for the Seasons, written in grade twelve and since lost, was the first). Gusties is the local tavern that anchors (protagonist) Duncan’s turbulent world of school, parents, and teachers. Beer and camaraderie are stabilizing forces as Duncan navigates the manifold nuances of social ritual. Like later novels, Gusties depicts an entire world of manners below the textures of the surface. Archival fragments of early drafts suggest a pattern of development that would be repeated in later work: starting from the germ of character, Gusties grows from a series of word pictures and interior landscapes into a complex array of interdependent psyches. Because the story is animated through character, the fictional world is presented from the inside out. We thus enter Gusties through Duncan, whose moods affect the way we experience his world. Critics who literalize the connection between character and author have failed to see this, so it bears repeating that, from the start, Richards’s fictional Miramichi has been rendered by the sensory output of characters like Duncan, whose perspective is limited, biased, and not necessarily the author’s. In each of the next four novels – from Winter to Stilt House – this ‘inside-out’ perspective dominates. The opening paragraph of Gusties illustrates the technique. Duncan’s sensory apparatus is in the foreground, filtering what we receive as reality: Gusties was quiet for a Saturday. It was September now. The nights smelled like autumn even in the town. The water had that slackness that comes with fall – comes with the cooling down, the making of something sluggish. And the sidewalks themselves were changing, changing to dull grey – losing the brightness of the sun, or if not the brightness, the warmth. He could feel the change himself slightly, enjoyed the sharper air of evening that seemed too clean. He thought ahead to winter – to the bleakness of slush and snow. (1)

Gusties cleaves to Duncan’s interiority, sometimes so closely that the perspective becomes autobiographical and thus fails to achieve the analytical distance that Richards creates between himself and his characters in later work. Kevin Dulse, for example, is almost nothing like his creator, though Kevin’s world in Winter is unmistakably Richards’s (and Duncan’s) Newcastle of the early 1970s. Nevertheless, Gusties was an important exercise that allowed Richards to imagine and incorporate his people in a larger literary frame, one that invited more ambitious

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

127

exploration of social manners and interior moods, as the following illustrates: There wasn’t any more [Duncan] could say. Earl was too fast with the comments. He drank his beer and silently raged. There was plenty he might say if he wanted to – things that Earl had confided in him – things that would tear into that bastard if he ever had a mind to expose [them]. But that was like the breaking of an honour – a code of some kind. It was said in confidence, drunk or sober, it was said with the stipulation of secrecy ... ‘Did I ever tell you about the squaw I had, Duncan?’ That was a way to make amends – a way to get him back in to the conversation. Usually when it happened, and it had a good many times before, Duncan would give in, saying, ‘No, bud, tell me about it,’ and sit there listening to whatever story anyone had to tell him, making them feel that they had triumphed over his moodiness. (Gusties 5, 6)

Gusties was that novel common to most young writers, the one that had to be written and was wisely discarded. Its greatest value was as generic experiment. It served the purpose of allowing Richards to write himself out of his narrative and into Winter. As he told interviewer Don Conway in 1984: ‘I don’t know whether I’m interested in the novel or the novel is interested in me. The thing about it is I never set out to be a novelist. It’s what I became because I’m a writer; it’s what eventually my work turns into’ (4). Gusties’s final importance was as a work-in-progress read on Tuesday nights at UNB’s Ice House, a weekly meeting of Fredericton writers that had more influence on Richards than almost anything else. Though the impetus for a reading workshop in Fredericton started in the late 1940s with the Bliss Carman Poetry Society, whose membership was drawn exclusively from those who had been published in The Fiddlehead, the stirrings of the Ice House Gang go back to 1967, when poet Dorothy Livesay began a one-year term as writer-in-residence at UNB. Feeling a lack of creative nutriment in the rarefied air of UNB’s academic atmosphere, she invited writers to her University Avenue apartment to read, imbibe, and converse. By the time she left at the end of her term, she had created the expectation of a writer- and reader-friendly forum. After some false starts, it found a permanent home in UNB’s Ice House, where Iowa-trained Kent Thompson, who had succeeded Desmond Pacey as creative writing teacher at UNB, was offering classes to third-year students. The Ice House had recently been renovated and renamed Mc-

128

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Cord Hall after David T.W. McCord, an honorary alumnus and former executive director of Harvard University’s Fund Council. Every Tuesday night in Fredericton for the next eighteen years, writers from all walks of life assembled around a huge oak table in the little Ice House to read poetry and fiction. The format was almost exclusively oral. Rarely were handouts distributed, and more rarely still was work closely scrutinized or edited. Voice and vision were what won or lost the endorsement of the other writers present. As long-time Ice House member Nancy Bauer writes, the romance of the nineteenth-century structure contributed to the creative work that was incubated there: The charm of the building had something to do with the longevity of the group. The lower walls of its one room are fieldstone, its upper walls wood, and its peaked roof crisscrossed by beams. A long, heavy antique table, a dozen black and gold UNB chairs, a curious chest with two figures carved on it, and an eccentric heating system sounding like a jet taking off give the place character. The whole room looks like a miniature Viking banquet hall, both cozy and strange. (48)

During its busiest years, McCord Hall accommodated the who’s who of New Brunswick writers. Bob Gibbs, Kent Thompson, and Bill Bauer were the elders, all tenured members of UNB’s English Department. Joe Sherman, Brian Bartlett, Michael Pacey, Dale Estey, and Yvonne Trainer were the younger, mostly student writers who arrived later. Established writers like A.G. Bailey, Fred Cogswell, and Alden Nowlan stayed away by design, habitually shy of the group’s performance-oriented practice, which seemed better suited to less experienced or more flamboyant writers. UNB’s writers-in-residence also visited: Margaret Atwood wrote ‘Rape Fantasies’ there; John Metcalf pronounced on Bob Gibbs’s inventive stories and ‘the beginning of an audience’ (122); and Eric Trethewey recoiled from the banality of some of the discussion, recording in a funny story the whimsical pretensions of a discussion about the substitution of ‘that’ and ‘which’ (72). George Bowering, Hugh Hood, John Newlove, Elizabeth Brewster, and Raymond Souster were among the many others who visited when in the city. These writers wondered whether the group’s mandate was entertainment, incubation, or camaraderie. The simple answer is that it was different things on different nights. For the regulars, it was a forum for ‘using the creative process to … find a way to say what they had been wanting to say for a long time’ (Bauer 50). For others, it was a place for therapy,

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

129

respite, or escape from a bad marriage or a dark past. No one could predict who might walk through the door on a Tuesday night, and the stories of those who did, and the communicable diseases they carried, became folklore at UNB. But one thing is certain: many apprenticing writers learned their craft from the weekly workshops, and many initiatives were launched there to cultivate creative expression in the East, including the New Brunswick chapbook series and the Maritime Writer’s Workshop. For Richards, the Ice House was an audience, the most literate and academic public he had yet encountered. Richards had two Ice House experiences, the first just after self-publishing One Step Inside. Wanting contact with other writers, he hitchhiked to Fredericton with the book in tow one Tuesday night to read the new long poems ‘Dungarvon’ and ‘Working Sevogle,’ both later published in the chapbook Small Heroics. To the older, more polished writers assembled, he was scruffy but innocuous, a young writer whose businesslike approach to reading invited curiosity. They had welcomed many other student writers, but few with the same sense of personal ambition. He explained that what got him started was listening to vinyl recordings of Dylan Thomas. And indeed, the first thing the group noted, remembers Bob Gibbs, was the strong, subterranean rhythm in his work, ‘DylanThomas-like in intonation’: ‘His impulse was musical. There was an inner flow in the work, attributable, we thought, to his oral, folkloric background’ (interview with author, October 1999). The elders were initially divided in their assessment. He was rough-cut, they agreed, but was he as good as the younger Brian Bartlett, who had been reading and writing prodigiously since age ten (and who could recite long passages of verse from memory)? If not, was he as good as Michael Pacey, whose work displayed a fine, almost pre-Raphaelite sensibility exactly opposite to that of his father Desmond? The consensus was that the Richards of the first Ice House term was not as good as his peers. He had potential but his work seemed derivative, perhaps because he had made a wrong choice of genre. They felt that his impulse for narrative, coupled with his innate sense of rhythm, was better suited to fiction. Richards took the criticism without complaint, feeling the elders’ assessment in the rather neutral tones of their encouragement. He decided, after only a few visits (during the last of which one member corrected his grammar on the blackboard), that the workshop was doing him no good. When he returned for the second Ice House term less than a year later to read from Gusties, the group’s assessment changed. What had been

130

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

indifference became unqualified support, an embrace the young writer found both welcoming and smothering as it intensified. Kent Thompson remembers a dramatic turnaround, puzzling in its abruptness: ‘There was no gradual improvement, no shift in voice or form, no touchstone that could have attributed to his sudden turn around. One month his work was flat, the next month not. I remember us looking at one another and saying, “This guy’s got it!”’ (interview with author, June 2004). In Nancy Bauer’s estimation, Richards became ‘the all-time star of Tuesday Night’ (49), the one member whose weekly readings were anticipated more than anyone else’s. Word soon spread through Fredericton’s artistic community that something special was happening at McCord Hall. Membership swelled just to hear Richards read. One night he held them ‘spellbound as they insisted he go on by candlelight during a power failure’ (Bauer ‘The Long Distance’ 30). The more he read, recalled Thompson, the more effortless his writing became: My favourite Dave Richards anecdote is the one I tell about his abrupt stop in the middle of a reading one night. It was in the middle of one of his long, sonorous 30-page passages that we loved so much. He looked around with a smile on his face and said to the group, ‘you aren’t going to believe what this guy says next.’ David read the line laughing so hard he could hardly contain himself, and we all burst out laughing in turn. The point is that he hadn’t expected the line any more than we did, and his not expecting it had surprised him. But that’s the way things are when the writing is going well – the story takes over. (interview with author, June 2004)

As adulation for the young star grew, a question begin to take shape in Richards’s mind: Was his talent all his own, or did the group’s encouragement and advice shape and direct that talent to its full potential? That question would become central as his relationship with members of the group evolved. What he was to discover is that talent of a high order is not a value-neutral commodity. In nurturing it, some will want to stake their claim. It was in this atmosphere of a slowing growing tension invisible to all but a few that he undertook regular Tuesday night attendance at McCord Hall. He stayed for two years, reading most of Winter and Blood Ties, being showered with approval and praise – feeling, indeed, the ‘vague and elusive kind of attraction’ that ‘joining with a volley of strong, seemingly worldly opinion’ brings to a young person (Playing 21), but also becoming increasingly uneasy that these expert listeners were claiming him as their creation. He tried to convince himself otherwise, but there seemed something amiss in their approval. In this

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

131

feeling, a significant aspect of his artistic personality had revealed itself: along with his single-minded determination to become a self-supporting writer, he carried a deep insecurity that manifested itself only when he started getting positive responses to his work. ‘I never thought I’d get published anywhere,’ he later confessed, ‘and my early success didn’t diminish that. I was always waiting to get the boot from somewhere’ (interview with author, January 1997). If the advent of television marked the fault line between the old and new Miramichi in the late 1960s, Tuesday nights at McCord Hall marked the end of his idealization of gentleman scholars, those ‘fine people with solid motives,’ he would write satirically, ‘who would never in their lives think of betraying or cheating anyone’ (River 287). His apprehensions became manifest in uneasy relations. He quarrelled openly with Bill Bauer over the suggestion that snowmobilers should be encouraged to drive onto the thin ice of the Saint John River during the spring thaw, thus ridding Fredericton of the noisy menace. Interpreting Bauer’s comment as a class-based attack on rural New Brunswickers, he accused the expat American of dismissing the pleasures of the working class, telling those closest to him that, while entertaining, the flourish that sometimes passed for talent on Tuesday night was becoming a distraction. A distraction, perhaps, but there is no doubt that he learned from the group, especially from the discerning eye of Gibbs, whom he later credited with teaching him more than anyone else about what is good and bad in art (French ‘Novel’ E1). But while the confirmation from expert, mostly academic, readers at McCord Hall told him that he was on the right track, the endorsement came at a price that would forever harden him against academics and gadflies alike. To cool his heels, he got involved in creative initiatives at STU, where he was a student again. With the help of Leo Ferrari, he organized a series of literary readings, none of which attracted much interest. Beyond the fact that Canadian literature was not valued in the English Department, ‘poetic apathy,’ as the student newspaper The Aquinian defined it, was a growing problem. With limited space for creative work in The Aquinian – the ‘Seed’ section for germinating talent was so ridiculed that new writers avoided it – and the recent demise of Floorboards (Dan Dawson was driving a taxi in Moncton and Louis Cormier had joined a Zen Buddhist Centre in Montreal), Richards saw the need for a new student-run literary magazine. He approached Brian Bartlett and Michael Pacey, two literary friends

132

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

from McCord Hall, to help with a start-up. Their mandate was simply to ‘augment the efforts of the [STU] literary club, and to provide a review for literary talent at St Thomas’ (‘Poetic Apathy’ 14). Late on Christmas Eve in 1971, using Desmond Pacey’s big black IBM Selectric, Urchin was born, so named after the roguish, mischievous boys in Dickens’s works. It sold for fifty cents and, with Fred Cogswell’s usual generosity of spirit, was advertised for free across the country in the back pages of The Fiddlehead. With Richards as editor, Bartlett and Pacey formed the editorial board, each agreeing that the magazine should be more literary and less predictable than Floorboards. Richards’s trenchant manifesto in the second number reflected this spirit in a tone that echoed the polemics of A.J.M. Smith and Louis Dudek: ‘The trouble today is simply art is dead. Everyone says so. This is a new age – it’s time to do something more significant than painting, writing, or drama. It’s time to experience something new – something different’ (2). Though only two numbers were produced, Urchin published poets of note such as John Thompson, Sheelah Russell, Al Pittman, and Alden Nowlan. The effort of putting the magazine together extinguished Richards’s interest in the praxis of cultural work. Frustrated with the disinterest of STU students, he put his energies into his own writing projects, two of which were blossoming at the time. A story that had been rejected by The Fiddlehead was accepted by the Reverend R.J. MacSween’s recently launched Antigonish Review. ‘“The Promise” was indeed that,’ marvelled MacSween, ‘a story written by an unknown writer from somewhere in New Brunswick that had the music of Faulkner and Tolstoy resonating in it’ (interview with author, August 1989). The story of a young couple burdened with crying infants and fading hopes reminded MacSween of the strained lives of many of the Cape Bretoners he had known in rural parishes. He accepted the story, coarseness and all, because its portraits were so finely drawn: ‘Here was a young man, a student, writing as convincingly about the fatigue of the working class as [Hugh] MacLennan and [Morley] Callaghan, much more practiced writers.’ So highly did MacSween regard the story that he left the ‘f-word’ intact, one of the few times it appeared during his decade of editorship. Richards’s successful appearance in The Antigonish Review spurred critical acceptance at home. Members of The Fiddlehead’s editorial board, noting the national status of the other writers he had been published with (Jack Hodgins, David Solway, Seamus Deane, Peter Van Toorn), wondered why The Fiddlehead had rejected ‘The Promise.’ They urged

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

133

their young star to reconsider UNB’s magazine for his new work. He answered by submitting the poems ‘Then With Dagger,’ ‘Small Heroics,’ ‘Traditional,’ and ‘Working Savogal’ [sic], all published in the 1972 summer number. He also submitted a section of Gusties titled ‘The Fire,’ the only part of his first novel to see publication (it would be reprinted in Thompson’s Stories from Atlantic Canada [1973]). ‘The Fire’ found an enthusiastic audience at STU, where the Creative Writing Committee awarded it the Edwin Flaherty Prize as best submission by any student in poetry, fiction, or drama. After years of work at makeshift kitchen tables and public libraries, writing all night and between classes, Richards was finding success. When he was invited to assemble a collection of poems for publication as a New Brunswick chapbook, the success, for the first time, was institutional. Only the best Ice House writers were published in the series, and only after rigorous editorial scrutiny. Endorsement by an art-house audience and publication in literary magazines was encouraging, but having a collection published at arm’s length was another matter. When 250 copies of Small Heroics came out in 1972, Richards was twenty-two years old, young by all accounts, except that he had been working for this kind of recognition for seven years. The ten mostly narrative poems in Small Heroics demarcate the moral and geographic landscape of his subsequent work, containing, in distilled form, the broader spiritual vision of the older novelist. We encounter for the first time in a unified body of work his careful documentation of dialect and place; his interest in collecting memories, personal histories, and sensory impressions; his feel for emotional suffering and lived experience; and his preoccupation with the resilience, perseverance, and hopes of citizens who live outside of middle-class comforts and concerns. These intentions come to life in a series of portraits that evoke the often-autumnal inner worlds of river and woods folk, the same ‘stunted strong’ that Cogswell immortalized in his signature poem ‘New Brunswick’ (12). Like Cogswell, Richards treats landscape as birthright, as a kind of psychic inheritance, one that he will explore fully in his first trilogy. As ‘The Collector’ illustrates, Richards’s characters are not garrisoned against place but inhabit it as fully as place inhabits their own moods and identities: I know the city’s layout like a whore and have walked the streets like a whore at night,

134

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

slipping through the lanes choking with the heat of day and sometimes terrified at night. [ ... ] Stand here in the placid mud and smell the feeble seconds in the wind, smell the broken fences as the passing generation – the spoiled hay fields waiting to be crept upon and cut. (Small Heroics 29, 30)

These images rise above literary contrivance to constitute a kind of dark pastoral born of generational familiarity with space – a space that Richards is claiming, from the inside, as his own. His characters, likewise, inhabit place as a palpable condition of their lives. Theirs is the rural compact, nurtured, as Cogswell wrote, ‘by surrounding soil’ (12). In title, imagery, and language, the collection clings to the ruck of the ordinary, whether ‘angered dogs / Who behind hedge rows / Bark at flakes’ (‘Barren Man’ 4) or old women who ‘Strain out excrement in pain / And think of tired things’ (‘An Old Woman’ 3). Paramount in this non-conventional subject matter is the young writer’s concern with the constancy of decay and suffering. The proximity of smallness to pain in the order of poems suggests material and spiritual relation. The ‘small heroics’ of bees valiantly but hopelessly defending their hive against extermination (‘Small Heroics’ 6) is thus linked ontologically with the arbitrariness of human misery: There is a certain Harmless Walking on the road A beggar in the morning Wading spring water Collecting bottles as he goes; Before his time another Existed exactly the same

St Thomas University to Small Heroics

135

Collected refuse in a ditch A wet sack making him lame. (‘Traditional’ 7)

In pairing incongruities contiguously, Richards is not proffering a New Age ecology of ‘anxiety’; rather, he is laying a ‘philosophical and spiritual foundation on which his … world is constructed’ (Connor 1998, 32). In that construction, adds Connor, ‘is a belief in and fascination with the potential of human beings (and bees as well) for selfless, heroic action’ (32). Pain and suffering in Richards’s universe, then, should be considered in light of their potential to presage nobility. Viewed this way, Small Heroics maps the social contours of a moral universe that can both ensnare and liberate subjects. In charting the inconsequence of small heroics against insurmountable social obstacle, how could Richards’s landscapes not be dark? Contrary to the critics’ assumption that this darkness exhibits a bleak, even existential, world view, the shading employed has more relevance to moral consequence (what is done to others) than to human limitation (what individuals do, or are unable to do, for themselves). ‘Then With Dagger’ illustrates the point, the lading of moral consequence darkening the lives it touches: To brave men Who ride at night Shall I compare them To hunters Diana and Zeus Shall they be glorified And cut into granite Immortal on blocks of stone? Oh how they roar with engines And glow with lights Chase the trapped fox Until it drops with fright Mucus and blood from its nose, Shall I compare them To gods of the kill As they urinate green in the snow. (5)

For a young man not yet twenty-two, this short poem reveals an unusually mature theodicy – and a rare conceptual unity of vision that anticipates his more expansive inquiries into an apposite good and evil in

136

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Evening Snow and Wounded twenty years later. The poem reverberates all the more powerfully in light of Richards’s defence of these ‘brave men’ against their casual dismissal at McCord Hall. Like Bauer, Richards finds nothing admirable in their chauvinisms, but he loves their humanity sufficiently to defend them. That intention opens to an essential figure/ground dichotomy that will become the basis of the critical assessment (and misreading) of his work. Small Heroics does indeed display a gritty realism and a regionalist’s interest in straining mimetically towards spatial, linguistic, and other figural fidelities. But the collection’s deeper ground extends figural exactitudes, what Linda Hutcheon calls ‘local ex-centricity’ (19), to parallel psychic and spiritual conditions that are just as raw and disabling. Richards’s characters, as a consequence, do not live in Romantic harmony with their world; instead, like flotsam on the river that flows through their lives, they are carried along its surface in jarring and unpredictable ways. To focus just on a sociology of that movement, its documentarylike figural apparatus, is to miss the deeper psychological and spiritual ground within and below. The next phase of Richards’s writing began in early 1972 with the realization that the metaphoric distance he had achieved with Small Heroics had freed him and his subjects from the limitations of mimesis and equivalency. Confident that the technique could be brought to the novel form, he played with the idea of a trial in which a boy is accused of shooting a farmer’s cow. Being a hunter himself, he understood the boy’s emotions, but those were secondary to the social context he wanted to explore. He wanted to present the boy in his wider milieu – decipher the figure against the ground of his generation – so that readers might understand the relationship between the agon of the times and his generation’s selfdestructive behaviour. In the foreshortened days of 1972, he began what would become The Coming of Winter. The Ice House readings and his publishing success had confirmed that he was on the right track. Marriage and classes had focused him, and Gusties had taught him how to extricate himself from character so that character and author could grow. He was now thinking of himself as ‘a long distance runner’ (Harder 4), agreeing with Virginia Woolf’s assertion that only the novel form was expansive enough to contain the dramas of life as they are actually experienced. With Winter, he was going to get it right. He was going to be a novelist, and he was heading out for the deep water.

5 Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

It was cold outside that morning, the rings of day hung in the east – below the bridge they hung like light paint breaking on dark wood – and the trees had their first snarls of emptiness, with leaves somewhat bloated on the ground. Duncan knew how the fall would smell in the woods, by the dam how it would be rich with rot, with overgrown logs, and the very first glimmers of ice coating the pool, melting by mid-day into a deep silence. He knew also what it would be like to work the woods today and shivered almost with repulse at the thought. But the freedom of it was entirely another matter, yes just to sit there hidden and be free, his boots sinking in the soft moss, his eyes trained on nothingness, and everything, everything a wholesome brown and green. Gusties (19)

Oh, you don’t see where his ideal lay – it lay in her, his ideal, you understand, his conviction ... like Rodin gave much of his happiness for his art, but in essence derived his only happiness from it – but not worldly happiness, happiness of the soul, of psyche. ‘In This Age of Chess’ (26)

The winter of 1972 was cold in Fredericton. The river had frozen early and a January thaw had left the landscape cratered and slippery. With icicles growing steadily outside their window, the young couple huddled next to an electric heater in their small King Street apartment to stay warm. Composing on his old Remington standard typewriter, Richards began the first draft of Winter in conditions similar, he imagined, to those of the Russian masters he admired:

138

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

[Winter began] in an apartment in a house … in Fredericton with my cat Pushkin lying across my neck. The house was torn down years ago. The boys would drink beer and wine sitting on the steps outside. Sooner or later there’d be a fight. In the one apartment above us, two or three families lived, squabbled, and our mail was rifled through to see if we were getting money. Unfortunately for all concerned, we weren’t. (‘Remembering’ 12)

While Peggy worked as a secretary at the Research and Productivity Council, he kept to the night-shift routine he had started as a teenager. He’d rise late in the afternoon when the sun was going down, then write from midnight until dawn, sometimes never seeing the sun. If he awakened early, he’d go for a drink at the nearby Brown Derby, or go to class, or – worst of all for a writer – hang around and wait to write. The Old Fredericton plat that surrounded him that winter – the section of town extending from the river to the base of the UNB/STU hill – was not dissimilar to the 1960s world that was unfolding in his imagination. Tightly bunched two-storey wooden houses in various states of repair made up the residential neighbourhoods. On the east side of University Avenue, close to the river, stood the houses of the university elites. A.G. Bailey and Desmond Pacey lived there among the moneyed descendents of Anglican Loyalists. West of University Avenue were student apartments, rooming houses, diners, and corner grocers. The farther west one went, the cheaper the rents and the less stately the tall elms that shaded the more affluent parts of town. The King Street strip of row houses was ideal for Richards, closer to the quotidian bustle of the old town than to the unreal metropolis on the hill. The night shift offered all the silence and freedom he needed to compose. Like a predator he roamed the empty streets of the old town, working on ideas in the privacy of darkness. The distractions of residence and the temptations of friends were gone. Peggy was undemanding. He reached out to others only when he desired. That people were mostly asleep when he sought their company eliminated one excuse not to write. It was to assuage his loneliness and seek a counterpoint to the adulation at McCord Hall that Richards sought out Alden Nowlan at this time. While the young writer no doubt found it ego affirming to be in the company of writers who met socially to encourage one another’s efforts, he needed to test his work against a higher standard, preferably in the company of someone who was as serious about the vocation of writing as he was. He wanted the understanding and companionship that only an

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

139

independent artist could give. Nowlan, whom he knew had quarrelled with some members of the Ice House Gang, was that artist, a working writer of immense talent, wide reading, and international renown. If any New Brunswick writer approached Johnsonian status, it was Alden Nowlan, ‘an 18th century Tory in 20th century Fredericton’ (Cameron 28). Nowlan was born in the Mosherville–Stanley area of central Nova Scotia. His paternal line had come from Wexford, a county town in southeast Ireland not far from where Janie McGowan’s ancestors had originated. And he had inherited values similar to hers. Thoroughly self-educated, he had a well-known disdain for formal education that rivalled her contempt for the Protestant schoolmen. Whereas she had quit school in grade eight, however, he had quit in grade five; later, he would joke that the worst mistake of his life had been not quitting in grade four. He also became fond of declaring that he was the only recipient of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry who, according to the standards of Statistics Canada, was functionally illiterate. Yet despite a self-deprecating wit, he was a master conversationalist who had read exhaustively for thirty-five years. With the help of Desmond Pacey and Fred Cogswell, he had come to UNB in 1968 to be its third writer-in-residence, following Norman Levine and Dorothy Livesay. He had meandered through jobs in journalism, arriving in Fredericton as the published poet of six critically acclaimed collections, among them the Governor General’s Award–winning Bread, Wine and Salt (1967). He had also won a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, making him, as dean of Canadian poetry Louis Dudek wrote, ‘one of the two or three most exciting young writers to appear on the scene in recent years’ (quoted in Cook 118). Leading Canadian poet Raymond Souster had recommended him vigorously to Pacey for the UNB post. Though Nowlan was almost twenty years older than Richards and much further along in his literary career, the two were remarkably similar. Both were students of history, each an odd combination of Royalist and libertarian. Both had grown up on the social periphery, Richards because of a disability and Nowlan because of a debilitating shyness that his neighbours had mistaken for mental retardation. Through those trials, both had developed an unusually advanced empathy for the downtrodden, viewing their circumstances as a consequence of social structure rather than personal deficit. In Nowlan’s case, the roots of this empathy were inextricable from a childhood in which the indignities of Depression-era poverty had lasted well into adolescence. Both men had also grown up amidst Puritanical small-mindedness, a feature of the rural isolation of

140

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

their frontier towns. Rather than become embittered by this narrowness, however, both came to consider the underclasses as the most genuine of their people. ‘With the examples in his own work,’ Richards told William French, ‘Alden Nowlan showed me the kinds of subjects that could be used in fiction’ (E1). To Dave Butler, another Miramichier in Nowlan’s circle, each writer completed the other: ‘Where David couldn’t discuss things well, Alden was a master conversationalist. Where Alden felt his time coming to a close, David was full of youthful energy. Alden and David blended according to the real meaning of the word affinity – as in chemical bonding’ (interview with author, December 1999). Finding Nowlan, then, was far superior to discovering Dickens and Tennessee Williams. Nowlan was a flesh-and-blood Maritimer living on the UNB hill – and word was out that he welcomed visits from young writers. If Richards was initially unmoved by Nowlan’s poetry, he was moved by the man and his reputation, as he explained to interviewer Don Conway a year after the poet’s death: The first time I met the man, we hardly spoke at all because I had gone to [his] house with someone else and I was rather intimidated being in the presence of Alden Nowlan, whom I’d heard about and whom I’d read only slightly. I think what intimidated me the most was that I hadn’t read the man, and I didn’t know how to react if the subject of his poems came up. As it was, the subject of his poetry didn’t come up at all. He was filled with anecdotes, humorous stories, and all types of things that were really just amazing and great to listen to. It endeared the man to me right off the bat because it wasn’t a stiff conversation about poetry and about why or how he wrote poems; it was a conversation about life. Then I was invited back to the house a little while later, and I got to talk to him; he encouraged me with my work, as he encouraged a dozen or more young poets around at the time. (4)

Richards’s reference to ‘a dozen or more young poets’ is accurate if a bit modest. Nowlan did indeed invite many young writers into his home – by his own estimation ‘there’s [not] been a single day since I moved here late in 1968 when there hasn’t been at least one student in my house on the campus’ (quoted in Cook 230) – but while many came once or twice, few became regulars. And fewer still developed the intimacy that Richards and Nowlan would share, even if that intimacy was stormy and yoked to the tides of the older poet’s moods and sensitivities. And while it is true that Nowlan and Richards became fixtures in the

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

141

other’s universe shortly after Brian Bartlett introduced them in 1971, it is also true that each circled the other cautiously, never sure of the extent to which guards could be let down. Nowlan was the most significant artist Richards met in his early years, the writer whom he would come to admire more than any other in his life, the closest thing he would have to a mentor. Richards was likewise the most talented and promising of the young artists who entered Nowlan’s circle. Friendship was an investment Nowlan made against loneliness, a difficult investment for a man so pathologically shy and easily wounded. Louis Cormier and Al Pittman, his closest young friends – writers like Richards who had wandered into his life seeking an older writer’s companionship – had recently finished their studies and moved from Fredericton, leaving him glum and fretting about their futures. Cormier’s situation was especially worrisome because he had gone off to study Zen philosophy under Buddhist poet Tyndale Martin, whose esoteric verse, Nowlan thought, would take Cormier in the wrong direction. When Richards arrived in his orbit from the more academically inclined McCord Hall group, the other UNB camp, Nowlan was tired, scarred, and wary. The loss of his two friends had diminished his contact with the outside world at a time when he was fighting to retain his position as writer-inresidence and terrified of the prospects of returning to the drudgery of the Saint John newsroom. (Campus rumour had spread that overtures had been made to John Metcalf to replace him. On top of that, word had reached him that Kent Thompson, the likely person behind Metcalf’s nomination, was Richards’s mentor.) Thompson was the flamboyant enabler of McCord Hall, a dynamo always agitating to get others published. He had come to UNB in 1966 to get things done. A self-confessed ‘hustler’ (quoted in Cook 228), an American, no less, he was the kind of dandy that third-generation working-class Maritimers like Nowlan distrusted. That Thompson was purportedly a draft dodger further raised the ire of the military historian in Nowlan, the historian who memorialized Canada’s wartime youth in poems such as ‘Ypres: 1915’ and ‘Sailors.’ So when the two most powerful figures of both camps clashed – Nowlan dressing down Thompson publicly for the latter’s appropriation of poverty, thus discrediting his experience of the real thing – it was not unexpected. The snootier members of the Ice House Gang blamed Nowlan’s behaviour on boozy bravado; the regulars of Windsor Castle dismissed their host’s behaviour on the same basis. Both were correct. Though Nowlan made a series of peace offerings to Thompson, and moderates on both sides intervened to keep

142

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

things peaceful in the small town, the gulf between the two camps developed into a schism. References to ‘that awful Alden Nowlan’ began to circulate on one side, as did remarks about ‘Kent’s Club’ on the other. Thompson never again entered Nowlan’s home, and Nowlan likewise avoided McCord Hall. Unfortunately for Richards – one of the few writers who moved regularly between the two groups – the stigma of association with ‘the other’ camp could never completely be overcome. That stigma further fuelled his insecurities, leading him to wonder at an impressionable time of his career whether he was accepted by either group. At just the point when he needed to relax the grip of McCord Hall, he was perceived by Nowlan’s regulars as ‘Kent’s boy,’ a rich man’s son with literary aspirations. When he wearied of that label and returned to the Ice House, his talent was used as an instrument to strike at Nowlan. In touting him as the great writer from New Brunswick, destined to put Fredericton on the world’s literary map, Ice House members, perhaps unwittingly, were speaking of him and above him, for Nowlan, twenty years and six books ahead of Richards, and already reaching an international readership, could not help but overhear. It must have appeared to Nowlan that this talented upstart was trying to usurp his territory. In his darker moments, he lashed out, accusing the young writer of hanging around just to be invited to his parties and going behind his back to win favours from Kent’s crowd. In hindsight it is easy enough to see that Nowlan was trying to protect himself, but Richards could not have known that at the time. Not yet twenty-two years old, only partly through the first draft of Winter, and seeking no part in the actions of which he was a pawn, Richards had become embroiled in literary politics. The something that was amiss in the praise he was receiving from others, the something that he could sense but not quite put his finger on, was the machinery of politics grinding away in the background, using him for its own ends. What is clear thirty-five years after the fact is that circumstances conspired against both men. Nowlan was isolated by his distrust of academics, disadvantaged by a talent that invited jealousy, and plagued by his own demons and insecurities. Richards was similarly handicapped, disarmed by a talent that others coveted and plagued by the naive good will and wish to belong that are the hallmarks of youth. Each was used against the other, if not through outright maliciousness, then through the subtler dictates of ‘writerly’ politics. No single person was guilty of anything – there was no warrant on anyone’s head – but many were complicit, confirming, again, that talent of a high order is not a value-neutral commodity. Just

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

143

as sure as talent blooms, so are there gadflies to gather round it. ‘My only regret,’ said an older Richards looking back, ‘is that I can’t revisit that kid as a 46-year-old and protect him. It would only take one day, but I could do it, and I would. But the thing is I can’t go back and protect him, and since I can’t, I’ve been running ever since’ (interview with author, March 1997). Richards loved the literary world that Nowlan had created; the poet was correct on that account. He attended his parties, drank his liquor, and participated actively in the to-and-fro of the living room debates. But Richards was the guest who lingered, one of the few who was treated to a four a.m. breakfast or a bear hug at the door. He was even given ceremonial titles in Nowlan’s playful restoration of the Jacobite Royal Court, a stunt dreamed up four years earlier to make a shy young writer feel more at ease. When Nowlan, a student of royal genealogy, discovered that his young friend Jim Stewart was a distant blood relative of the Earl of Fife – the rightful heir to the Royal House of Scotland, which had ruled Britain before the removal of James II in 1688 and the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745 – he declared Stewart ‘King-in-Exile’ and established a Royal Court. He appointed himself Prince of Fortara, Duke of Wexford, and Lord High Chancellor, signing his name ‘Alden Princeps’ and conferring the name ‘Windsor Castle’ on his 676 Windsor Street bungalow. By similar decree, he made Leo Ferrari, the Augustinian, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Al Pittman, the Newfoundlander, Duke of Fogo. Richards, the man who could sing all twenty-six choruses of ‘The Lumberman’s Alphabet,’ was also knighted and commissioned in Nowlan’s Court of James IV. As a special ‘Letters Patent’ attested, It has pleased us to raise the said David Adams Richards and his lawful heirs of the blood forever to the titles, styles and estates of The Honourable Baron Bartibogue The Honourable Viscount Richards of Burnt Church The Right Honourable Earl of Shiloh The Most Honourable Marquis of Metipedia [sic] The Most Noble His Grace the Duke of Dungarvon and that it hath further pleased us to confer upon him the rank of Knight Commander of Our Most Ancient and Honourable Order of the White Rose of Charles the Martyr, and to commission him Rear Admiral in our fleet and Major-General in our army. (‘Letters Patent’ 1973)

144

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

The titles were a nod to his birthright and to the famous poet who had earlier sung the praises of the Miramichi. Beyond loving the idea of Alden Nowlan, Richards loved the man, for he was a brilliant raconteur for whom knowledge of the human condition opened the door to self-examination. It was precisely that process of striving to know others through oneself that was constantly on display as Nowlan held forth from his chair, drink in one hand and cigarette in the other. It was what Richards and others found so compelling and so rare. It was why the world, as Brian Bartlett recorded in his journal, opened up at Nowlan’s feet: ‘Bringing the whole world into his house, showing us his portrait of Queen Victoria, playing us recordings of Ezra Pound, Wlm. Carlos Williams and Vachel Lindsay, reading parodies of Wordsworth to us. His mind ranging over history, over acquaintances, over his own emotions’ (quoted in Cook 232). Conversation and story were community-building rituals that radiated outward from his small circle to engulf the wider world. Whether he was phoning switchboard operators late at night to halt their loneliness, insisting to guests that Hitler was knowable on the basis of the ‘embryonic Nazi inside every one of us’ (‘Dustin Hoffman’ 45), or finding greatness in a disgraced Nixon or a deluded farm girl at a Pentecostal meeting, he was insisting that all people are redeemable, including, by implication, himself. That was perhaps the greatest of his teachings. Confronting oneself through the human condition was painful and unpleasant, as he had written in the poem ‘Letter to a Young Friend’: ‘So you aspire to be / yourself and no one else! / An aging freak, / for whom there was no choice, wishes you strength / to bear it should you find that which you seek’ (Between Tears and Laughter 28). The poem had been a tribute to John Gardner, whose theory of art ‘as a kind of laboratory experiment [undertaken] to find out what [artists] think’ (On Moral Fiction 77) was a common point of departure at Nowlan soirees. As Richards knew from the early days of his own apprenticeship, that battle for knowledge of the self was the only endeavour worthy of art. Yes, Nowlan could be cruel and difficult and gruff – a complex Saint Francis struggling to free himself from his own torments – but his service to the higher calling while attending to the small dignities of hospitality and care endeared him to Richards, who was able to see the man in cosmic dimension, and thus able to forgive him. Forgiveness smoothed the way to accepting his criticisms, which were always more pointed than his praise. Nowlan wondered aloud, for instance, about the floridness of Richards’s prose, an ornateness that the

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

145

journalist in him perceived as a looseness of style that his own tight forms would never allow (Garrod 215). Yet despite criticism, Nowlan’s poetics were a better fit with Richards’s than those of the Ice House crowd. Nowlan’s seriousness in the face of large questions, his haste and directness as a self-made man, his dedication to the craft of writing, and his fundamentalist-like scorn for the pretences of academic bean counters, as he called university posturers (borrowing the phrase from Pound), pointed to where Richards wanted to go with his own writing. Even Nowlan’s physical stature impressed Richards, for he believed that big men like Nowlan developed a vulnerability that came from being picked on. These affinities divided Richards’s loyalties. He workshopped his ideas at Nowlan’s home, finding in that rich atmosphere what he needed to sort out back at his King Street apartment; and later, at McCord Hall, he delivered the results of that sorting. At Windsor Castle he listened and tested, refined and rejected; at McCord Hall he spoke. Nowlan was the monologist in his own home, reserving the last word for himself; Richards, ‘the all-time star of Tuesday Night’ (Bauer 49), was the principal voice at McCord Hall. Which begs this inevitable question: To what extent did Nowlan influence Richards? It is always tempting to conclude that older writers influence the young, especially when their work inhabits the same orbit of ideas (Verlaine went as far as trying to kill Rimbaud for perceived trespass). That said, Nowlan for Richards was more an outrider than a model. Bob Gibbs, the one figure who moved effortlessly between both writing groups, doubts any direct influence: ‘[The older writers around him] got the feeling early that Dave was not a writer we could help because his sense of his own course was so strong, and he already had that whole world inside his head. It was only a matter of realizing it in fiction’ (interview with author, October 1999). Nowlan’s conversation and art more likely affirmed Richards’s impulse for a literature that was elemental and testamentary, a literature rooted in catholicity that treated the nobility of the person and the social conditions of his existence as the moral ground for narrative. ‘It isn’t that I write like [Nowlan],’ he told an interviewer on the Miramichi, ‘but I think if Alden hadn’t written his poems, I might not have written the type of books I have’ (‘Local Author’s Novel’ 8). The slant of this acknowledgment recalls Etienne Gilson’s well-known view of mentorship: ‘There is more than one excuse for being a Descartes, but there is no excuse whatsoever for being a Cartesian’ (7). Citing the parallel of Richards’s experience of Miracle at Indian River

146

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

with his own experience of a poem by Ray Souster, Nowlan equated the transfer from artist to artist to apostolic succession, in much the same way that T.S. Eliot viewed the admixture of tradition and individual talent (quoted in Donnell 27). What Yeats described as the occult circuitry that allows one writer to recognize another yoked Nowlan to Souster as securely as Richards to Nowlan. That both Maritimers had the same passion for country musicians as for literary artists, followed the same sports teams to a near fanatical degree, felt comfortable among the same kind of people, drank to excess for many of the same reasons, and espoused the same attitudes to class, centralized authority, and credentialism was a reflex of place that had long considered self-reliance the greatest of all virtues. So it was in the arena of influence: a young Richards took from Nowlan the finished forms that modelled what he already had. What Nowlan epitomized were the successes of the self-made man. His rise from the hardscrabble of what he disdainfully called ‘Desolation Creek’ – his name for Stanley – served to illustrate that learning had nothing to do with class but rather with the labour-intensive process of meeting difficult minds in the pages of their books. If he could achieve an emancipating literacy in the swamp of grinding poverty, then others could do it too. He never prescribed more Dylan Thomas or Brendan Behan, but Richards followed the clues from conversations that unfolded. Nowlan’s opinions were respected all the more coming from a man who had worked hard to acquire them. Twenty years after his death, Richards remembered him as ‘a large, imposing, generous, self-deprecating, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, complex, irascible, irritating wonder of a man’ whose humanity was tempered by ‘grave knowledge and a curious soft heartedness’ (‘I Went to Meet’ R1). He tolerated Nowlan’s outbursts and suffered the wounds of association that moodiness and insecurity brought. (Nowlan’s pet names for him – ‘Davie’ and ‘Fyodor’ – were sometimes affectionate, sometimes not.) Like other devotees, he felt secure in the warmth of the great man’s presence: ‘As Gorky said of Tolstoy, so someone might have said of Nowlan,’ Richards quipped. ‘“As long as this man lives no one will be an orphan”’ (R5). For young writers adrift in an era of social revolution and political change, not to mention a complete reconfiguration of the old systems of patriarchy and authority, Nowlan was unlike any adult they had ever encountered. He talked to the young as an adult should, wrote Richards. And the young came – came, he added, ‘as the young must have sought out Emerson or Socrates. Why? It is simple. The young have to’ (R5).

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

147

When the winter of 1972 ended, Richards had a nearly completed manuscript of a novel he was calling The One in Many (later, A Sense of Loss). The months of its creation had been harried. He had written quickly, as if possessed, sometimes producing more than five thousand words before dawn. Those who witnessed the novel’s unfolding at McCord Hall recollect a series of word pictures that followed aural rather than lexical dictates. The language sounded more like poetry than fiction, and the mechanics of form were unconventional. Sentence structure and punctuation had been sacrificed for sinuous stream-of-consciousness. Plot had been ignored for psychological accuracy. It was something fresh, messy, and alive with energy. Richards knew in his gut that it was publishable, but where? As a twenty-one-year-old first novelist from New Brunswick, a virtual unknown outside Fredericton’s insular writing community, his options were limited. Post-centenary cultural nationalism had been good for Canadian publishers, but not in the regions. Publishing down east – whether with Ragweed, Square Deal, Breakwater, Lancelot, or Pottersfield – still doomed a writer to a small readership and limited distribution. Wanting more than cottage-industry attention, Richards broached the subject of publishing with a professor at STU, who suggested he send the manuscript to Toronto for the Norma Epstein National Student Creative Writing Prize. The competition was open only to full-time students in undergraduate or graduate programs at Canadian universities and carried a $1,000 first prize. Winning such an award, he was told, could be instrumental in helping a young writer find a publisher willing to gamble on a first-time novelist. He bundled up the first five chapters of the novel and sent them to Toronto. He next questioned the writers closest to him about finding a publisher in central Canada. Nowlan suggested Clarke, Irwin, his own publisher, but cautioned that Bill Clark, the new editor-in-chief of the family business, was having trouble countering his mother’s conservative attraction to commercial trade publishing. Roy MacSkimming, he added, was looking to build a list of up-and-comers for New Press. Nowlan punctuated his advice that evening with an off-hand remark about Oberon Press in Ottawa, Raymond Souster’s publisher. He didn’t elaborate, though he could have, for Souster had been central in his own literary apprenticeship. If Oberon was good enough for Souster, Nowlan inferred, then Oberon is good enough for any of us. Richards picked up the same subject with Kent Thompson, who differed only in proposing his own publisher – Macmillan – as a first choice.

148

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Macmillan and St Martin’s Press, its New York distributor, were about to launch The Tenants Were Corrie and Tennie (1973), his first novel. John Gray, he said, had turned Macmillan into one of the most important publishing houses in Canada, a company with a commitment to nation but an international reach. He then appended what Nowlan had: if Macmillan is too big, try Oberon. He was more effusive about Oberon than Nowlan had been, though. David Helwig and Hugh Hood, writers whom Thompson admired, had published with Oberon with good results. Helwig and Tom Marshall’s Fourteen Stories High (1971), a collection of short fiction in which Thompson and Nowlan had appeared, had also been a success, both books receiving careful editorial attention and classically spare design. Oberon’s books simply looked good. In inimitable fashion, Kent the Enabler volunteered to write a letter of introduction to Michael Macklem, Oberon’s editor-in-chief. Since he already knew Macklem through Helwig, since Helwig was actively freelancing for Oberon, and since Oberon had expressed interest in looking eastward, nothing could be lost in mining the contact. Richards agreed, giving him the manuscript, which Nancy Bauer had corrected for spelling and punctuation. (Because Richards’s focus on interiority had privileged the grammars of psychological realism above those of expository prose, the edit was necessary.) A month later, Richards received a call from Thompson. ‘Dave,’ the familiar voice said, ‘I’ve got a letter here from Oberon that you’ll be interested in seeing. Would you like me to read it to you?’ The letter was an acceptance. It said ‘Dear Kent, Tell David Adams Richards we think his novel is wonderful and we’re going to publish it’ (interview with author, January 1997). The acceptance came without a written contract – an oversight that each party would regret. That night, two groups celebrated. Senior members of the Ice House Gang, including ‘The Bauers of Fredericton [Who] Help Writers to Write’ (Nowlan 1981), raised a glass to Richards’s success, glad that one of their own had made an important advance. Across town, David and Peggy went out to supper. Only weeks from his twenty-second birthday, he felt he had achieved an important beachhead. The novel had taken him nine intense months to create – a difficult pregnancy, he joked. For weeks, he had written from midnight to six a.m., not seeing the sun. Near the end, he had nearly collapsed from exhaustion. His worried brother John observed that, while a few people put their heart into their passion, he had put his soul. The young couple ordered wine that night and fried scallops, a rare indulgence that the good news allowed.

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

149

The period between Oberon’s acceptance of The One in Many (soon to be retitled The Coming of Winter after an Archibald Lampman poem) and a contract was unusually long. Summer and fall passed, then another winter. Because this was his first encounter with the editorial process, Richards tried to convince himself that the delay was normal. To fill the time, he began planning another novel and reworking earlier poems and stories. One piece in particular – the long poem ‘Dungarvon’ – continued to intrigue him as a problem of craft. In its latest iteration, he played with applying the generic conventions of the ballad (a song that tells a story) to the old myth of the Miramichi logging camp. Like the traditional Latin and Italian forms, his poem is occasioned by the importance of local history – ‘None of the old stories / Nor any songs are played / Our minds are incomplete’ (Small Heroics 14) – and advances through dialogue, tragic action, vivid characterization, and dramatic intensity. The refrain’s controlled monochrome is a meditation on ‘November,’ evoked in psychological terms. Expressed as pathetic fallacy, the coming of winter that November portends is presented as a state of mind brought on by the collision of natural and supernatural dimensions of landscape: ‘The naked trees are waiting winter, … Already the pain of winter / Is laden in the skies’ (8, 9). One of Richards’s first experiments in building a realism of sensory perception, ‘Dungarvon’ clearly anticipates Winter. Evident in its shift from sociological to psychological realism is a change in the dominant mise en scène – from cataloguing the materiality of landscape to dissecting the psyche of those who inhabit it. Though the detail in the poem luxuriates in capturing the ‘roaring heat’ and smell of ‘men / Stinking in their cots’ (12), the psychological register of the conditions of winter, work, and isolation-induced madness is even more finely attuned. The poem, then, illustrates a new preoccupation in Richards’s work: a desire to linger over temperament to the extent that an entire work becomes a meditation on how circumstances of locale feed emotion. The slower deliberation in the poem also signals the emergence of patience, a novelist’s first requirement. ‘Dungarvon’ doesn’t succeed nearly as well as Winter and Blood Ties in capturing the protracted, slow-paced complexities of psychological realism, but it does clearly signal the intention of invoking personality through environment. Richards sent ‘Dungarvon’ to R.J. MacSween at The Antigonish Review in late 1972, but the poem was rejected. That rejection, arriving shortly after an acceptance by the Journal of Canadian Fiction for the story ‘In This Age of Chess’ (a story that won him a second Edwin Flaherty Prize

150

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

for Creative Writing at STU), finally convinced him that fiction, not poetry, was his métier. ‘Dungarvon’ was the last poem he wrote for many years, though he would miss the concentration and licence of the form’s polemics. In June 1973, just days before Oberon finalized the contract and galleys of Winter, Richards accompanied Alden Nowlan to Campobello Island, one of the province’s storied regions. Situated in Passamaquoddy Bay off the coasts of New Brunswick and Maine, the island had been the summer retreat of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who according to local lore had contracted polio from one of the island’s many ponds. The original Roosevelt cottage was by then a heritage property in the centre of an expansive international park. The island was also important as a nature reserve, boasting some of the best birdwatching in North America (the archipelago is a flyover for migratory birds of many species). To promote the island’s cultural and ecological significance, the Roosevelt Campobello International Park Commission needed a commemorative history. They made it known to the Maine and New Brunswick Tourism Departments that they were looking for a professional writer from the area who could write lyrically of the island’s past without sentiment or verbiage. They were looking for a cultural journalist. By training and nature, Nowlan was perfect for the job – and he needed the work. The rumours had proved true – Nowlan had indeed been replaced by John Metcalf as writer-in-residence at UNB. He remained in Fredericton only through the efforts of Cogswell and Desmond Pacey, whose calls to New Brunswick premier and long-time Nowlan friend Richard Hatfield had resulted in the poet being installed as an unofficial speechwriter for the premier. But Hatfield was having his own problems. He was deeply embroiled in the Bricklin fiasco and needed to distract the media from his government’s losses on a car that didn’t work. He was looking, in other words, for the kind of positive spin that a high-profile tourism project might provide. Taking Progressive Conservative insider Libby Burnham’s advice, he nominated Nowlan as his choice for professional crier of the natural wonders of Campobello and its environs. By the early summer of 1973, Nowlan was nearing the deadline for the first draft. Grant money from the Canada Horizons–Exploration Program of the Canada Council had already funded an earlier visit to the island, and he still had no copy. He needed a research assistant and a companion for the road. So he enlisted Richards, as much to drive as to assist with field research. (His fear of the road rivalled his hatred of exer-

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

151

cise, and just as he would pay people to exercise for him, so he would pay drivers to take him around.) With no word from Oberon, the Richards agreed to join Nowlan and his wife Claudine for the week on Campobello. Peggy was available because she, too, was on a student’s schedule. Their receipt of $1,200 from Oberon a few months prior had enabled her to quit her job and take courses at STU towards an Arts degree. With Richards in the driver’s seat, the foursome scoured the island for stories of the Roosevelts and the Owens, descendants of Captain William Owen, the original (1770) ‘sovereign prince’ of the island (Nowlan Campobello 34). Three generations of Owens who followed him owned most of the island for a century before wealthy Americans claimed it as their summer playground. The New Brunswickers drove from Mulholland Point and Welshpool in the south to Wilson’s Beach, Curry’s Cove, and Head Harbour in the north. They learned about the founding families through old photos of the great houses and hotels. They talked to locals about the sportsmen and the herring runs, and they uncovered accounts of the Irish-American Fenian occupation of the island in 1866 – an occupation that, though unsuccessful, was threat enough to have hastened the confederacy of provinces that created Canada a year later. The trip was the first time Nowlan and Richards had been together for more than an evening’s revelry. And without alcohol to help ease the transition into talk, tension was the norm, especially for Richards, who could barely see over the steering wheel of his friend’s large Buick. He worried at every turn that he would put the car in the ditch, until he finally did, bottoming out on soft earth to let an oncoming car pass on a narrow lane. Realizing that Nowlan would have likely done the same (or worse), the couples laughed about the incident at the Prince cottage later that night, a rare moment of levity on an island that was notoriously ‘dry.’ Richards’s signature in the book that followed is only fleeting, but Nowlan does work in the occasional nod (and wink): ‘Spruce beer is still made and drunk in some parts of the Maritime Provinces, notably in New Brunswick’s Miramichi country, although not – as far as is known – on Campobello’ (32). The impression the trip made on Richards is more difficult to assess. With Winter behind him and Blood Ties, his second novel, taking shape in his mind, it is likely that Nowlan’s generational history of a founding family in an isolated place reinforced where he would go. While suppositions of this sort are generally spurious, there is no doubt that both writers were intrigued by the coterminousness of family, place, and culture. Both thought of history as the conjunction of these three elements.

152

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Upon their return, the galleys from Oberon were waiting in Fredericton. With them came the standard contract: a 90/10 royalty split unless thirdparty international rights were purchased, in which case a 50/50 share would follow. Macklem appended an endorsement from outside reader David Helwig that said The One in Many is ‘the best first novel since [Ernest Buckler’s] The Mountain and the Valley.’ When Richards started reading the galleys, however, delight turned to bewilderment. The manuscript had been altered significantly, parts of it rewritten. Oberon’s editors had clearly misunderstood the novel’s voice. In Kent Thompson’s view, they had corrected what they perceived as untutored syntax: ‘David was pushing the limits of expository prose. His grammar and punctuation reflected an immersion into thought and feeling, not a carelessness of style. When we know or feel something deeply, do we stop to wonder if the experience is properly punctuated or if tenses are consistent?’ (interview with author, June 2004). In short, Richards had become ensnared in the old problem of how far one goes in the editing process to formalize creative expression. The manuscript did unsettle the conventions of linearity and representation, but it did so to push the work towards a more faithful rendering of cognitive and emotive patterns as people actually experience them. Richards’s style did not seem standardized, but it hadn’t been since ‘Mercury Month’ and ‘Old Man’s Town,’ his early stories. Without that wider context, Oberon saw the voice as idiosyncratic, perhaps because, in publishing Raymond Souster and Hugh Hood, they had worked with some of the most ‘literal’ stylists in Canada. Richards’s prose, by contrast, must have appeared brashly impressionistic. It must also have appeared sloppy. Richards saw the matter differently: I felt that Oberon had immediately labelled me by locale. I was from the Maritimes, so they naturally assumed that I was a regionalist and wanted me to write regionalism like Alice Munro – not the same details of landscape, of course, but in the same domesticity of voice. But at the best of times I don’t write like Alice Munro, nor do I want to, much as I admire her style. I was furious with them for putting me in that spot, and I wondered if getting published meant compromising to that extent. (interview with author, January 1997)

Richards called his two principal confidantes (Nowlan and Thompson) into action. Perhaps because of his own difficulties in finding a publisher for The Wanton Troopers or perhaps because of too much gin,

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

153

Nowlan was unsympathetic to the point of cruelty, entering into one of his repetitive rants: ‘Oh David, you are the great writer. You can’t have a word changed. ‘Oh, they changed a word, they changed a word. Oh my God, David, they changed a word. ‘Oh, you are the great young writer. ‘You are God’s gift to literature, aren’t you David?, the young god who can’t have a word changed.’ (ibid., January 1997)

The litany did not cease until Richards left the house. On his way out, he countered that he wouldn’t have cared if they changed a word, but he certainly did care that they changed the novel. The incident provides a glimpse into the sometimes difficult relationship between the two writers. Thompson was more supportive. He suggested that Richards demand his manuscript back, which he did. He then wrote a pointed letter to Oberon accusing them of riding roughshod over a first novelist. Finally, he convinced the Writer’s Union of Canada to hire a lawyer to protect artistic integrity. In taking up his young friend’s cause, Thompson nearly ruined his own relationship with Oberon. To halt the growing momentum threatening his still-new family enterprise, Macklem suggested that he and Richards meet in a neutral location away from the barbs and fray. He still wanted to publish the novel but wondered if its style would dampen its success. Without conceding so at the time, he must also have felt that Oberon had taken too many liberties. Macklem set two conditions for their meeting: both were to appear alone (no wives or counsel), and neither could leave until the task of negotiating the changes was complete. When they met at the Wandlyn on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal later that month, the mid-summer humidity was insufferable, the temperature rising noticeably when Richards introduced Peggy. Macklem’s first condition had been struck so that both men could share a room and save costs. The mood grew tenser still when Macklem commented on Richards’s jeans (he was wearing Peggy’s). The discomfort lightened when Richards explained that, with no air conditioning in the room, he had slept in the bathtub the night before, the drip from the leaky faucet ruining the pair of pants he had planned to wear. ‘I’ve never written a complete draft over again,’ Richards told Macklem. ‘If I were to start a draft over again, it would end up a different novel’ (quoted in Milner 6). He would not rewrite the book, for Oberon’s

154

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

changes amounted to ‘taking the soul or spirit out of [it]’ (6). As the two men talked, Richards’s hunches were confirmed: the assumptions underlying Oberon’s rewrite were not flaws in Macklem per se, but flaws in Upper Canada’s perception of who he was and who he was writing about. With this established, he moved from a defensive position to one that explained his literary vision. After two difficult days, the book was restored to his satisfaction. Idiosyncrasies of expression and fragments of syntax were restored, and Oberon’s additions were deleted. It had been a fight, but winning back his manuscript had gained Richards the respect of his publisher. It was clear in the end that Macklem had wanted the book all along, however difficult its acquisition proved to be. (Years later he would admit to Richards that he ‘was half-drunk for weeks on end … while Winter was in press – that book almost blew the company apart’ [letter to DAR, 16 May 1977].) He knew the novel was substantial, but he worried that its freshness might work against its success in a fickle and conservative Canadian market. He worried too that his company had limited capacity to promote books to the same extent as Macmillan or McClelland & Stewart. During the meeting in Montreal, none of this was discussed, but it was understood. When it ended, both men departed on friendly terms, Macklem asking his new-found Diogenes to reserve his next novel for Oberon. In the weeks after the meeting with Macklem, Richards must have felt he was gaining ground. His publisher wanted first right of refusal on his second novel, which was now underway. Winter, though not yet released, had the markings of success. Oberon’s catalogue of forthcoming books cited Douglas Spettigue’s assessment that Richards’s ‘vision is one of astonishing intensity and power. For a writer of his age (he’s 23) he has unusual authority … A formidable talent’ (3). Spettigue seconded Helwig’s view that Winter was as fine a first novel as The Mountain and the Valley. The environment of the early 1970s was supportive of artistic endeavours, providing more reason for Richards to be optimistic about his writing. The culture-friendly Trudeau government had responded to the 10 per cent import surtax on Canadian goods entering the United States by investing in cultural industries, thereby strengthening Canadian nationalism in the face of Nixon’s protectionist siege. The Arts Program of the Canada Council distributed more than $25 million in grants in 1972–3, the largest amount in a decade (16th Annual Report 116). For emerging writers like Richards, that meant more money in the council’s Young Artists and Writers pool. At Macklem’s suggestion, he applied for a grant.

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

155

The possibility also loomed that he might win the Norma Epstein Prize. His future as a full-time, self-supporting writer seemed to be taking shape as he’d hoped. But one impediment continued to take time away from his writing: university. After the spectacular success of Bentley’s Modern Literature seminar the year before, classes in Chaucer and philosophy (Theilhard de Chardin and Epistemology) were flat. Peggy began asking why he was paying tuition for classes he wasn’t attending. Stan Atherton, who arrived at STU in 1970 to teach Canadian literature, recalls Richards’s preoccupations: I was teaching a course in Canadian fiction ... and although Dave couldn’t fit it into his timetable, he asked if an independent study credit could be arranged. From the beginning Dave made it clear that he was committed to becoming a serious writer himself, and would like our discussions to focus on two things – development of character and character relationships, and ways in which good writers create identifiable and credible fictional worlds ... I think Dave came back only twice to talk about what he was reading, and part of one of these conversations was about Buckler, whom he admired tremendously. Over the next few months he began to spend less and less time at the university and more and more time writing. In November ... he appeared at my door to announce ... his decision to leave university to write full time. (64)

Richard Kennedy, who had Richards in a course on the Romantics that year, remembers the same preoccupied young man appearing at his door to announce his desire to quit university to write his novels. Richards officially, and finally, withdrew from STU on 23 October 1973, a week after his twenty-third birthday. Because he was so close to completing his degree (he had earned 12.5 credits towards a 20-credit General BA), Registrar Larry Batt allowed him to continue studying parttime that year, hoping the lighter load would enable him to refocus. But Batt’s hopes were dashed when he went blank during a Shakespeare exam for Anthony Brennan, an event that marked the unceremonious end of his formal education. He had read the material but had not studied for the exam. Brennan passed him anyway, granting a credit that Richards felt he hadn’t earned. There seemed a contradiction in the result, something dishonest at the heart of it. Brennan’s was the last exam he would ever write. He quit STU – ‘cold turkey,’ he said – with 14.5 credits, which was 5.5 credits, or one full year, short of a degree. That he left so

156

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

close to completion served purposes both functional and symbolic, as he explained: There’s only one way to do something, and that’s to burn your bridges, so that’s what I did. University was very suppressive but there was conversation and intellectual activity there, and if I had chosen that, I wouldn’t have gotten my writing done. And I felt I had to burn my bridges to get my writing done. And I’m glad I did. I’m quite proud of the fact that I did. (interviews with author, December 1996, January 1997)

Like Mark Twain, he had quit school when it started interfering with his education – just like his grandmother, just like Dylan Thomas and Alden Nowlan. His parents didn’t approve, but they weren’t burdened with the sense of vocation he felt. As he curtly told a reporter, echoing Hemingway and his grade ten teacher, ‘If you’re going to write – then write’ (quoted in Wishart 2). The events of the following months vindicated his decision to leave STU. On 19 November 1973, the night of his second wedding anniversary, he learned that he had won the Norma Epstein Prize for the first five chapters of Winter. Even sweeter, he had won it on the strength of his manuscript copy, the same copy that Oberon had tried to fix. More good news followed after Christmas when he was awarded an Ontario Arts Council fellowship and a Young Artists and Writers Canada Council grant, their values totalling four thousand dollars. The money brought self-respect and a clear path to his developing project, the novel Blood Ties. He would be able to write the prequel to Winter without the distraction of classes and part-time employment – no more cutting lawns for persnickety lawyers’ wives on Waterloo Row. By the beginning of 1974, he was at work on the new novel. His successes were not without consequence, however. It was around this time that his drinking started to escalate. Between October 1973 and April 1982, his drinking would develop into chronic alcoholism and threaten his talent, his relationships, and all that he had worked since the age of fourteen to build. He first touched the bottle when he was fifteen, when five dollars bought two quarts of beer from a bootlegger. Originally a peer drinker, his consumption in the gravel pits at French Fort Cove and by the springs down at the docks had always been coloured by his romantic inclinations. Drinking was more than a rite of passage on the Miramichi; it was an indulgence of writers everywhere. Alden Nowlan, the man

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

157

credited with teaching Al Pittman and Ray Fraser the muses’ curse, was so afflicted; so were Faulkner, Poe, Thomas, Fitzgerald, Williams, and Behan, the writers with whom Richards had apprenticed as reader and craftsman. He would come to discover that it was their personalities that predisposed them to drink, as he admitted of himself when stating that he would have become an alcoholic whether he was a writer or a welder: ‘I never drank to have a drink but to get drunk. Why would anyone drink to have a drink? That’s ridiculous’ (interview with author, January 1997). A factor in the acceleration of his drinking was the abruptness with which he quit university to write full-time: ‘Even if quitting was the only thing I could do, the thing I had to do, it wasn’t easy. I was writing without a safety net after October 1973, totally on my own. And my knees were shaking. I kept thinking of everything I’d always heard about how important a degree was, and I couldn’t help thinking “Maybe I’m crazy to be doing this”’ (interview with author, December 1996). Adding to the pressures of independence was a loosening of the once inexorable moral codes of the Miramichi. Much of what he had spent his life getting to know from the inside was changing, turning his beloved river into a plastic replica of the larger world: I realized almost immediately when I began to write my novels that the world was changing away from the vision I had. The whole idea of suffering, and of people’s rights and privileges and entitlements to suffer, had taken a very different turn in the early 1970s. Suffering became the battle-cry of the victimized, who suddenly were accorded the status of the new heroes – not the noble and the austere and the long-suffering who I wanted to write about because they never had a voice. So, suddenly, my characters’ suffering didn’t count, didn’t mean anything, because it wasn’t part of the politically correct suffering of the 1970s. (interview with author, December 1996)

Finally, the challenge of meeting others’ expectations – of writing a better book than Gusties, then a better book than Winter – drove him to despair. Well-meaning though it was, the encouragement that had raised him to ‘the all-time star of Tuesday night’ had a dark side, especially coming from older professional men of literature whom he admired but who had not themselves achieved the youthful success he was having. ‘It all boils down to insecurity,’ he recalled, ‘a feeling that I didn’t deserve the success I was having because I was too young’ (interview with author, January 1997).

158

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

The circumstances surrounding the arrival of the advance copy of Winter did not assuage those insecurities. That copy, destined for review in The Fiddlehead, arrived in McCord Hall on a Tuesday night in the late summer of 1974. Richards had not yet seen a copy, but he had dreamed of his continued dissociation from the book in a vivid nightmare in which his friend Brian Bartlett handed it to him. The strange premonition proved correct when Brian and Bill Bauer delivered the book to his St John Street apartment one Tuesday night after the workshop. ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ he said matter-of-factly when he learned why they’d come, ‘but where is Kent?’ (Thompson, too, had appeared in his dream.) In wakefulness and dreamwork, the episode implied that even the post-production of the novel would be out of his hands. Though he had written the manuscript and had struggled to reclaim it, the novel seemed to be a possession of others. Even his acquisition of the first physical copy had to be shared with the Ice House group, whose sense of ownership was now becoming intrusive. When he wanted privacy – time alone with Peggy to reflect on the thing made – they wanted ceremony. The launch of Winter was freighted with the same expectations, thrusting him publicly under a spotlight that furthered his discomfort at being a ‘club’ writer. In a bid to save money by grouping its launches by region, Oberon introduced Winter and two other titles at the home of Bill and Nancy Bauer in Fredericton on 12 October 1974. The Sisters, a novel by Bliss Carman Society member Elizabeth Brewster, and Chaim the Slaughterer, a collection of poems by Joseph Sherman, were the other books being launched. Sherman and his wife had driven to Fredericton from Edmundston, where he was teaching at the Collège St Louis-Maillet, a campus of the Université de Moncton. Brewster, who had moved west in 1972 to teach at the University of Saskatchewan, was a surprise guest, having flown to Fredericton to attend the annual general meeting of the League of Canadian Poets, whose members, including the first reviewer of Winter, flocked to the Bauer house that evening. Michael Macklem contributed one hundred dollars for wine, Nancy Bauer provided the food, and Oberon displayed as many titles as trunk space allowed, selling books at close to cost to cover travel expenses. Assembled guests dropped money into a cash box on the counter. Even this early in Oberon’s history, it was clear that Macklem was no Jack McClelland. He simply didn’t have the money or the brashness to market books. With no formal program, the evening was more Maritime kitchen party than launch, but that was recognition enough. Richards and Sherman were Ice House regulars, Brewster had been a founding member of

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

159

The Fiddlehead, and the other writers in attendance were happy for the attention to New Brunswick writing. What made the night memorable was the sense of a gathering literary renaissance in the city, of which Gibbs and Thompson were stewards. Thompson had been Sherman’s MA supervisor at UNB. Gibbs had provided similar help to Brian Bartlett and other poets in the room. The sense of renewal was punctuated that night by the feeling that Winter was a major accomplishment. ‘When was the last time a Maritime novel so ambitious had been published?’ asked Cogswell. With only one novel, Richards had emerged as a talent to rival what Nowlan was doing with poetry. Cogswell’s question touched on the worry that the region’s prosefiction bragging rights had lapsed. The region that had generated the satires of Thomas McCulloch and Thomas Chandler Haliburton and the animal stories and idylls of Charles G.D. Roberts and Lucy Maude Montgomery, and where Hugh MacLennan, Ernest Buckler, and Charles Bruce had written some of the best Canadian fiction of the mid-twentieth century, had not produced a novelist of national stature in almost twenty years. Palpable at the Bauer house that October evening was the hope that Richards might fill that role – and others were eager to groom him. Off in the corner with his parents in his ‘“about-to-be-published-forthe-first-time” suit jacket that Peg bought’ (‘Remembering’ 13), Richards seemed a bit player in this drama, more a fifth business than the agent around whom events would unfold. He chafed against the attention and good manners, clearly uncomfortable with the role for which others were casting him. He longed to go back to his apartment to open a bottle of wine and write. With the stabilities he had enjoyed either gone or diminishing (his education at STU finished, his friendship with Nowlan shaken, his anonymity no longer secure, and anticipation of his success growing rapidly), the weeks before the release of Winter tested his resolve. He had manoeuverd himself into a position where he was largely alone, yet he felt he was carrying the expectations of others. He was unsure whether he was up to a repeat performance of Winter, and the reviews that began arriving reinforced all the reasons why he had escalated his drinking in the first place. First came informal comments from two former professors at STU. One laughed at the cover, a print by Michel Leclair depicting a tavern scene (‘Patrons at the Tavern’). The other scoffed at the title. Both felt that the book’s opening semiotics adjudged the contents negatively, the likely result being that the book would be condemned before it

160

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

was read. Some might think it was a story about the weather, a favourite topic among Maritimers; others might dismiss the book on the basis of its drinking, still a taboo subject in New Brunswick. Unable to counter these criticisms because he respected both men, Richards tried to pass off their mockery as self-defence. He must have thought, however, that quitting STU was the best thing he could have done. The early print reviews of the novel were more encouraging, though mixed and often contradictory. On balance they were positive, but something about the book’s tone and style clearly irked reviewers, leading them to ‘[feel] it necessary to qualify their praise’ (Connor 1984, 31). The first published was Janis Rapoport’s review in the Globe and Mail, which appeared a week before the Fredericton launch. Starting with ‘the bloodied slaughter of a local farm animal,’ her review was rife with negative stereotypes about the region and the psyche of Maritimers: ‘The Maritime climate (if it isn’t outright rain and cold then it’s wind and drizzle) contributes a mood of unremitting sadness that accentuates the oppressiveness of these events as well as the moroseness of the characters who live them’ (34). ‘Kevin’s parents Bena and Clinton are particularly exemplary,’ it continued: ‘“Never bothered with his wife now though he used to beat her,” Clinton reminisces freely. Perhaps it is from such a standard that the town’s youth has inherited the degrading treatment they consistently lavish upon their women’ (34). Rapoport’s bellicose dismissal of the suffering of the book’s characters – by ‘exemplary’ she meant ‘characteristic,’ not ‘desirous’ – sheds light on Richards’s sensitivities about the changing mores of the 1970s. Indeed, his characters’ suffering didn’t seem to count, didn’t mean anything, because their suffering wasn’t part of the politically correct suffering of the era. Rapoport’s review ended with a criticism of Oberon’s design of the book, repeating some of the concerns of the STU professors. Two weeks later, poet Peter Stevens wrote a more favourable review for the Windsor Star; however, its title, ‘Two Gloomy Weeks Inside N.B.,’ and its barbed language (‘terrifyingly gloomy lives,’ ‘stupendous drunks’) echoed Rapoport’s assessment. Russell Hunt’s review the next month in Canadian Forum was the most careful of the early appraisals. It was also the one that Richards felt the deepest. Hunt was a transplanted American Midwesterner who had been teaching at STU since 1968. He was on the Ice House periphery, an editorial board member of The Fiddlehead, and sympathetic to working-class New Brunswickers, having just co-authored a book that was critical of the neo-feudal rule of K.C. Irving. However judicious its appraisal, though, his review struck all the familiar chords:

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

161

The percentage of drunk drivers on the road on a Friday night in New Brunswick is higher than in any other province in Canada ... If you want to understand why this is so – if you want real reasons, not the ones given by the clergy or the editorial writers – there is a new novel you will probably want to read. In The Coming of Winter you can live through at least part of the sort of life that would make you feel that nothing was more important than going out and getting hammered on cheap wine and beer and driving through town shouting at the passing citizenry. (23)

Hunt’s reproach of Oberon’s careless editing – ‘syntax is often inadequate, grammar is distractingly incorrect, there are repetitive adjectives’ (23) – blunted, for Richards, an otherwise positive opinion of the novel. The ‘ruthless and loving editor’ (23) that Hunt called for was presumably the same one Michael Macklem and others had felt was lacking. For an insecure first-time novelist of twenty-three, the suggestion rang with paternalism. Another teacher turned grammarian had let him down. Richards took Hunt’s review and another by Pat Barclay and burned them in his backyard. Reviewers’ recriminations about editing masked a habit for censure that was being reconstituted among Canada’s professional readers at the time. The furor over Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers seven years earlier had set the benchmark for this; as a consequence, the easy moral censure that had always been present in Canada’s conservative devotional society had been unleashed on high culture. Robert Fulford’s judgment of Cohen’s novel as ‘the most revolting book ever written in Canada’ (27) had become a contagion (Fulford made similar remarks about Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners in 1974 [King 324]). If the dean of Canadian literary journalism could excoriate a book with impunity in the pages of the Toronto Star, the country’s most influential daily, then reviewers in lesser papers felt licence to do the same. Winter arrived at a time, then, when the moral high ground had been reclaimed by expert readers who, without questioning reconstituted neo-Puritanism, seemed eager to disapprove of coarse behaviour and various realist vernaculars. Vern Fowlie’s description of Richards’s dialogue as ‘vulgar’ (20) and Leonard Russo’s condemnation of the book’s ‘compulsive drinking’ (8) illustrate the moral program at work in the reception of the novel. Both reflected the same sententiousness that had kept Hugh MacLennan’s Barometer Rising out of Manitoba classrooms until the early 1960s (the book’s heroine conceives a child out of wedlock). But an impulse far more sinister than prudishness was also at work: a

162

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

made-in-Canada revulsion to difference. Obscured behind objections to form – to the book’s ‘deadly monotony’ (Donald 75) and ‘disappointing’ style (Claus 26) – the real problem many had with the novel had more to do with character than with language. The Montreal Star’s review, while unfavourable, was at least honest in that regard. ‘[Richards’s] characters,’ it said, making no effort to disguise its dim view of New Brunswickers, ‘are real, and callous, as is the language they use’ (Michaels D4). Slipshod editing, then, was merely the straw man that allowed mostly urban, middle-class reviewers – many of whom, curiously, made strong cases for their working-class roots – to avoid addressing the novel’s more overarching issues of region and class. The few reviewers who did address these two particularities of place read both ideologically, in effect misreading the book’s realism. The most common misreading of this type regarded the book as a sociological treatise on regional disparity, one that reviewers seemed to delight in labelling ‘Maritime’: ‘The reader is plunged into the tough desperate world of the Maritime poor,’ wrote Oleg Michaels. ‘The violence of poverty is omnipresent’ (D4). ‘It is, then, at least in part, a book about New Brunswick and its problems,’ agreed Hunt (23). Joan Harcourt’s view that ‘the people in Richards’ grim world are too defeated (or realistic) to envision escape’ echoed a myth of ‘Maritime defeatism’ that continues to have currency with those outside the region. ‘Instead, they scrabble at the bars of the cage’ (137). One wonders whether Harcourt was being Kafkaesque or just insulting. Some reviewers, notably Carmichael (80), compared Winter to Don Shebib’s 1970 film Goin’ Down the Road, the only other Maritime story in their frame of reference (none, it appears, had read Nowlan’s Various Persons Named Kevin O’Brien or Ray Fraser’s Black Horse Tavern, both published the year before, nor had they read Charles Bruce or Ernest Buckler, though many claimed Helwig’s comparison of Richards and Buckler as their own). In retrospect, the difficulty of assessing Richards’s novel in a wider social context is to some extent understandable. Not since Morley Callaghan’s work in the 1930s and Hugh MacLennan’s Each Man’s Son in 1951 had Canadian reviewers had to contend with a novel of the working class. The recent groundswell of new theory coming from Canadian Studies programs across the country had equipped these mostly academic reviewers to read the anti-pastorals of Rudy Wiebe and Sinclair Ross with some critical authority, but a story of underemployed labourers in a mill town on Canada’s east coast was another matter entirely, certainly not ‘rural’ in the bucolic or Buckleresque sense, and definitely

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

163

not urban, yet wanting categorization nevertheless. Reviewers were thus caught between terms. Newly inured to Atwood’s and Kroetsch’s postmodern experiments (Surfacing and The Studhorse Man had appeared two years earlier), they were not yet prepared for, nor could they place, the perspicuity of Richards’s characters or the uninhibitedness of his prose. Michael MacDonald, echoing the thought of Erich Auerbach on the representational or ‘figural’ nature of reality (566), considered the problem one of schooled ignorance: ‘Very few [academic critics] have been able to see in his brutally true vision a sympathetic faith in human life, a basic conservatism about human values, a belief in the central role of the family, and finally, a tempered optimism in the face of brutality, change, and a mindless consumerism’ (28). Though Winter was widely reviewed in all the major Canadian dailies and soon sold out its first edition of 1,200 hardcover copies (5,000 was considered a Canadian best-seller at the time), the public reception disappointed Richards. There were moments of lavish praise, as when John Metcalf echoed Emerson’s 1855 welcome of Walt Whitman with the observation that Winter is ‘the beginning of what I am convinced will be a major literary career’ (‘Tough Life’ 41), but most assessments either missed the mark or, in qualifying the praise they offered, left the impression that the book was at best a promising start. Reviewers condemned or ignored what Metcalf thought were Winter’s strengths, while praising its trivialities. In the months after the book’s release, Richards became preoccupied with attempting to articulate what lay behind the disconnect between his own feelings and those of reviewers: [Winter] was really recognized in a lot of ways as an important Canadian book, but for reasons I didn’t want it to be. A lot of the reviewers said it was about poverty and growing up poor in the Maritimes, the plight of people with no way out. My intention was to show three people coming to grips with the death of a friend and a marriage of another and the love-hate bond of John and Kevin. The psychology of the characters was far more important to me than whether John was going to work next week. (quoted in Garrod 211–12)

The disconnect had unwelcome consequences. As reviews circulated so did the consensus that he had written a vulgar book about the Miramichi’s poor. No reviewer used the word ‘ethnographic,’ but that was the inference. Always attentive to how their region was represented, the

164

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Miramichi literati took note. Local literary doyenne Elda Cadogan unwittingly corroborated in this consensus in a review of the novel in the North Shore Leader, the Miramichi weekly named after Beaverbrook’s first paper. Hers was the only appraisal of the book that most Miramichiers saw. Though her intention was to bestow praise, her comments about the book’s language lent support to an opinion on the river that their native son, the literary heir of Whelan, had cast them in a negative light. Those who wanted to believe this – who for political and other reasons wanted to oppose councilman Bill Richards and his mother for what they presumed to be a monopoly of power in the small town – pointed to the following lines in Cadogan’s review: The language of the book may, as they say in advertisements for the current movies, ‘be offensive to some.’ If it is, it could only mean that the reader is where he ought not to be. If he or she does not want to know how young men along the Miramichi talk in taverns, when they are out patrolling the country roads at night, when they are purposely and purposefully getting drunk, when they are with the ‘sluts’ they can pick up, then they ought not to open the cover of The Coming of Winter. (9)

Read without reference to the broader frame of the work’s realism, those lines are damning indeed. It did not matter that Cadogan’s long review was otherwise complimentary, much of it in fact glowing, or that Richards had not set out to besmirch his own people. But small-town innuendo is always more arresting than fact. What took root among the few Miramichiers who discussed such things was that Richards had written negatively about them. Those on the river who had no intention of reading the novel took this snippet of Cadogan’s assessment as proof that he was making fun of them. The town’s enemies of Janie and the Englishman’s Boy had another reason to hate the Richards. The river’s churchgoing, civic-minded, thin-skinned, and prudish lined up behind this opinion and whispered about the book’s impieties. Mothers of the children that Richards grew up with pledged never to read a page. Miramichi loyalists spread word that he should watch his back at the tavern. ‘Worse for me,’ said Richards, ‘was [the idea] that I sent Peg out to work so I could drink and write “dirty books”’ (‘Drinking’ 117). For a writer who, from the early days of ‘Mercury Month,’ wrote to explain to the larger world the monumental significance of his people and place – ‘to give them some sort of voice,’ he told Harry Thurston

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

165

(51) – this misrepresentation was devastating. It was what drove him to drink himself to the brink of death in the next few years. If most of the reviews of Winter misjudged the book, and if Miramichiers were so easily convinced of its animus, what had readers missed? What more was there to a first novel in which, wrote Elda Cadogan, ‘nothing of any great moment takes place … A cow is shot, a youthful driver has a fatal accident, a husband and wife mourn a son long dead, some Frenchmen get drunk in a tavern, a girl is pregnant, some youths have an all night drinking party, a bootlegger is visited, a woman dies quietly at home, [and] there is a family wedding’ (9)? So forensic was Richards’s presentation that his autopsy of small-town life indeed seemed sociological on the surface. So what had critics missed? They missed, first, his preoccupation with character as primus motor. ‘I want my focus through character,’ he told William French, ‘[therefore] I never felt it was necessary to give [my place] a name’ (quoted in French, ‘A Novel Celebration’ E1). This meant that he developed story as a circumstance of character, much like Dickens. Character was story to the extent that there was no story outside the one the characters experienced – and what they experienced was not always what the narrator described or what Richards, as creator, desired. His characters, as a result, often besieged and surprised him, as Dostoevsky’s did in the much discussed polyphonic middle novels, where they ‘are capable of standing beside their creator, of disagreeing with him, and of even rebelling against him’ (Bakhtin 4). In discussing the genesis of Winter, Richards admitted abandoning his own ending for the one that character decreed: ‘I thought it would end in a court-room scene, that Kevin would be taken to court for killing the animal. But, as it turned out, he never got to court. He got married instead’ (quoted in Milner 5). This usurpation of story by character parallels Gardner’s view – much discussed at Windsor Castle – that art is only moral when ‘it does not start out with clear knowledge of what it means to say’ (On Moral Fiction 13). When they did focus on character, expert readers misinterpreted Richards’s characters as Rousseauean or Herderesque – as anachronistic reclamations of the Volk. Because they had not met bootleggers, winos, mill workers, hunters, poachers, tavern waiters, and the mentally retarded in the pages of a Canadian novel, they assumed that he was politicizing these types. Inasmuch as he was presenting them as legitimate people worthy of literary attention – thus reaffirming ‘what is necessary to hu-

166

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

manness’ (On Moral Fiction 5–6) – he was politicizing them, but not with strident ideological intent. Without simplifying the matter too greatly, the characters in his first novel were the people he had lived among at The Rocks, and seen in the tavern and at the rink – the cross-section of people, observed Andrew Seaman, who ‘tell us the whole truth about the society around us’ (37). As Richards would explain to reviewers in 1988, ‘I’m not writing about [characters] to make a statement about bad times in the Maritimes’ (Chris Morris 14), but because ‘it always amazed me that [the virtue of these people] didn’t seem to be recognized the way it should’ (Wernick E2). Like most boys who had grown up in small-town Canada in the 1950s and 1960s, a time before television made ubiquitous the domestic tropes we now accept as standard, he had seen many more boozers and shift workers than CEOs. And the world known to him was the world also known to his characters. In the Newcastle of his youth, shacks, beer bottles, open-field dumps, and scattered pulpwood were mise en scène. Loud and dirty mills were signs of prosperity, not dereliction of civic duty. Properties and roads were likewise unkempt. A horse in the backyard was as common as a car up on blocks, both signifying self-reliance, not poverty of means or intellect. The Miramichi of the 1960s was a time before scrubbers, inspection stickers, restrictive covenances, and curbs. In foregrounding this socio-economic apparatus, he was simply writing about his own people from the vantage point of what constituted their realist milieu. To do otherwise would have been to misrepresent his place. Winter is set in his Newcastle of the late 1960s, not the Eisenhower America of Hollywood’s postwar imagination or the sanitized idylls of Glengarry, Jalna, or Green Gables. In taking offence at Richards’s candid treatment of unfamiliar literary types, expert readers were being dishonest about Canada’s regional differences; they were also betraying the bias of their own canonical educations, which were still coloured by the Protestant belief that literature should be ecumenical, concerned with uplift, triumph, and overcoming. Put simply, Richards’s realism did not reproduce their own assumptions – and he felt no obligation to adopt their imagined sense of the nation. Comparing Winter with Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, the Governor General’s Award–winning novel and major literary event of 1974, makes the point clear. While readers were willing to abide Morag Gunn’s upbringing in Christie Logan’s nuisance grounds as long as she was able to transcend Christie’s grotesque locale, they were less tolerant of Kevin Dulse’s upbringing because he showed no desire or ability to

Mina Pratt, David Adams Richards’s maternal grandmother, ca 1908 in Sillarsville, Quebec.

Mary Jane ‘Janie’ Richards, his paternal grandmother, ca 1913, in Newcastle, New Brunswick.

William Richards, his paternal grandfather, ca 1911, place unknown.

Richard Adams, his maternal uncle, with fishing net, in 2002 on the Matapédia River, Matapédia, Quebec.

His parents, Margaret Jane Adams and Bill Richards, after Bill returned from the war, ca 1946, at the Richards’s family cottage at Burnt Church, New Brunswick.

Richards, at 4½, with his first fish (trout) at Beaverbrook Stream, outside Newcastle, New Brunswick. His sister Mary Jane is in the foreground.

With his brothers and sisters, 1967, at the family home on Buckley Avenue, Newcastle, New Brunswick. From left: Susan, Mary Jane, David (aged 17), Paul, Billy, John.

Richards as a young writer having just finished Blood Ties, 1975, Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Peggy and David Richards in 1978, Prince Edward Island, after a friends wedding.

Richards receiving Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English Language Literary Arts in New Brunswick, 1993, Fredericton. From left: Gilbert Finn, Lieutenant-Governor; Marcelle Mersereau, provincial cabinet minister; Richards; Frank McKenna, Premier.

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

167

transcend it. Most reviewers of Winter were frustrated by this unwillingness, concluding that Kevin’s ennui made him delinquent. It didn’t matter that Kevin’s circumstances were more favourable than Morag’s, nor that he was far more loyal to his own parentage and place than Morag was to Christie and Hill Street, her childhood home. Kevin’s inability to move forward, coupled with Richards’s refusal to anthropomorphize his fictional environment, garnered Winter more sociological than literary attention. Morag’s more generationally appropriate turn from the Hill Streets of the world – reinforced when she counsels her daughter to leave at the end, bidding that she ‘Go with God’ (475) as she moves west – was taken to be more classically literary, for rural place was viewed as that trope that young people escape, deny, or destroy in order to fulfil themselves. Next to Morag’s dynamism, Kevin’s stasis was read as defeat, and Richards, accordingly, was labelled a sombre nihilist, the words ‘grim,’ ‘searing,’ ‘gloomy,’ and ‘dour’ recurring as the favourite adjectives used to describe his protagonist’s entrapment. When read as realism instead of romance – opposite, that is, to the cultivated fantasy of socially sanctioned dreams – Winter opens to the conditions of Kevin’s stasis, and thus to character rather than outcome. The novel, then, is a broad relief map of moods and manners that attend the incidents and relationships of youth. Reviewers Michael O. Nowlan and William Connor were alone in seeing this clearly. ‘The great novelists,’ Nowlan wrote, ‘concentrate on human and social conditions. We might call their novels psychological. That is to say, they have to do with reflection on thought and action rather than action itself … Throughout the book’s pages we live with the characters, experience them, understand them. We become aware of why they live as they do’ (1). In an essay on Richards’s ‘Autumnal Vision,’ Connor expanded on Nowlan’s inference that Richards’s skill at evoking the minutiae of place had become the delimiting criterion by which he was judged: ‘This initial tendency to place Richards in the important Canadian tradition of regional realism was natural in view of his talent for capturing the details of life in his region, yet it is unfortunate that Richards’ success in depicting the surfaces of his characters’ restricted lives should have caused so many critics to miss the psychological and symbolic depth beneath these surfaces’ (31–2). Winter’s beginning signals the emphasis that Nowlan and Connor place on character and psychology. The novel opens in medias res to a mind only peripherally aware of itself while fully alive to the sensations of the larger world of woods, hunting, and youthful élan. Such a mind recog-

168

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

nizes itself only by impressions: the glimpse of blood on the hands, a smell on the breeze, a patchwork of colours. As experienced, the mind’s impressions are ungrammatical because thought and sensation are affective functions that rise to the level of consciousness in fragments rather than in the organized syntax of conventional narrative. Since none of us experience the world in perfectly modulated periodic sentences, neither do Richards’s characters: Blood had dried to his hands by mid-morning, thin streaks of blood on his fingers and knuckles. He cradled his rifle, walking slowly over wet gully leaves, his jacket opened, his blond hair in sweaty knots. The stench of a headless yearling partridge, foot-strung and dangling, a splatter of its dried blood on his pants. He walked cautiously, almost awkwardly, hearing thin sounds in the quiet, sounds that became audible because he was alone and silent. He hoped nothing would catch his scent or the scent of the bird. Another partridge perhaps fanning in the side gravel, digesting as he supposed this one had, uncertain whether to fly or straighten, and so sitting startled waited. He hoped for a spikehorn late to the spring, insensible to the conditions of survival. He hoped for a fawn, easy and tender, easy to ground. (5)

In evocative writing of this kind, plot as tableau is secondary to sensory impression because the moment being conveyed resides most immediately in consciousness. Fidelity to the mind’s conditions of engagement is therefore paramount. This is what critics missed in their assessment of Richards’s poetics. His prose was ungrammatical and messy, his dialogue was disjointed and difficult to affix to the agent speaking, but, in capturing the abstractions of consciousness, his style was as functional as that of poets who manipulated the formal properties of language for literary effect. Ezra Pound, whose advances in form had been discussed in Alden Nowlan’s living room, was one of the 1970s’ favourite examples of a writer so engaged. Over a long career, Pound explored the ‘mediumistic’ potential of language, preferring what he termed the ‘beauty of the means’ over the ‘beauty of the thing’ (‘I Gather’ 41) to convey the ‘primary pigment’ (Gaudier 81) of the thinking subject. Pound defined this method as ‘the means of conveying an exact impression of exactly what one means in such a way as to exhilarate’ (‘I Gather’ 33), qualifying elsewhere that such exhilaration requires, ‘of necessity … many attendant inventions’ (‘Affirmations’ 377). Aesthetically, it was the job of the

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

169

artist to invigorate; methodologically, vigour was possible only through the inventive use of new forms. Without new forms, he said, there is ‘NO renaissance’ (Guide to Kulchur 204). He explained his theory of forms in a series of twelve reflections that became ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,’ one of the seminal essays of the New Criticism: ‘Any given work of art is bad when its content could have found more explicit and precise expression through some other medium, which the artist was, perhaps, too slothful to master’ (36). He counselled that the burgeoning writer’s study of masters should be focused less on what is said than on how it is said. Warning young writers to ‘mistrust people who fuss about paint and finish before they consider girders and structure’ (Selected Letters 220), he focused attention on the mechanical properties by which meaning is conveyed: ‘It would be well to start by thinking of the different KINDS of expression, the different WAYS of getting meaning into words, rather than of particular things said … The term “meaning” cannot be restricted to strictly intellectual or “coldly intellectual” significance. The how much you mean it, the how you feel about meaning it, can all be “put into language”’ (ABC 47–8). Pound’s concern with form as ‘rigorous technique’ (Kulchur 204) became for modernist practitioners of the New Criticism a cornerstone of twentieth-century poetics, the bridge to later methods of luminous detail, overlayering, ideogrammic pastiche, subject rhythm, analogical and epigrammatic technique, ideoplasty, and polyphony, all usable in the language, wrote Pound, for the purpose of providing the reader with unobscured access to the inner world of subjectivity (‘I Gather’ 33). Ridding story of the artifice of narrative was key, and this required a complete elimination of self-reference. Because people in the depths of their feeling are not attentive to the courtesies of time, measurement, and narrative unity, writers should expunge these in character, for ‘sense’ and ‘sense making’ are completely different operations of cognition. The former is a first-degree operation, the experience itself, while the latter is third-degree, the experience in translation. To make story accurate, conveyed Pound to I.A. Richards, was to render it in the emotive first-degree language of experience disentangled from standard literary conventions of usage. Knowing Pound’s influence on the New Critics, Richards had been especially attentive to the readings of I.A. Richards’s Poetries and Sciences in Bentley’s Literary Symbolism and Myth class while writing the early chapters of Winter. His concurrent reading of Pushkin’s poetry and fiction, notably The Queen of Spades, had also brought Sergei Eisenstein’s theories

170

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

of montage to his attention, theories that were closely aligned to those of the New Critics. Richards’s simpatico with the Russian formalists, who, wrote Eisenstein, ‘[chose] a realistic method to produce and achieve an emotional quality’ (47), had developed considerably during the writing of Winter, making it reasonable to conclude that he understood the rudiments of Pound’s and Eisenstein’s theories of organic form. It is also clear that he was aware of Max Weber’s contention, equally popular in the early 1970s, that place is not defined by a shared language, religion, or set of customs, but through subjectivity. Consciousness, Weber’s theory held, was a fundamental determinant of place – to repeat Pound, ‘The how much you mean it, the how you feel about meaning it, can all be “put into language”’ (ABC 48). To write ‘place’ was thus to reveal consciousness, which is exactly what Keefer understood when she described the emotional landscapes in Winter as revealing ‘the indeterminacy and immediate meaninglessness of experience among people for whom survival has ceased to be an active issue and subsistence has become a norm’ (Under 171). There is little doubt that Richards absorbed these dominant literary theories of the 1970s. His quarrels with Michael Macklem to restore the uneven grammars of his manuscript, and his disappointment with the reviews of Winter, indicate a frustration over missed intentions. What editors, critics, and Ice House supporters did not fully understand was the degree to which his voice had been attuned for particular effect. It was a natural voice, he would have argued, even a gift from higher powers, but its apparent quirkiness had method and purpose beyond the lucky inheritance of an untutored child. Attempts to fix his voice or misrepresent its authenticity by labelling it sloppy or despairing discredited his entire poetics. If the tendency in Richards criticism has been to place disproportionate emphasis on what William French called the ‘ungrammatical lives’ (C17) his characters lead, a more considered reading of his language and forms reveals a carefully mapped fidelity to each character’s sense of place rather than to sociological abstractions such as welfare tribulation or chronic despair. The abundant evidence of his use of form as having both synchronic (or sensory) and diachronic (or historical) functions reflects an author’s ultimate gesture of goodwill towards characters, a gesture that rescinds judgment and allows them the freedom to succeed or fail on their own terms. That freedom elevates them above mere simulacra in a morality play.

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

171

When read as a formal evocation of place-based consciousness, Winter unfolds as a fugue-like composition of voices that demarcate the conditions of place: what it means to be a New Brunswicker, to grow up in an insular town, to be predetermined from the inside on the basis of family, neighbourhood, and class. When Clinton, Kevin’s father, accompanies his son to negotiate with the man whose cow Kevin shot, the interior world of the Miramichi is opened for our viewing. What we see is a smalltown world where history and memory are made dynamic in consciousness: ‘But the man knew [Clinton] also and that was the point. The man, staring at him, knew his history of drinking and whoring, of dropping nets out of season – of where he lived and what he did, of his wife and dead son and that was the point. So that it became not Kevin that butchered the cow but Clinton – it became Clinton that must explain himself to the man’ (87 italics added). Only the evocation of consciousness by emotive grammars could provide this inside view. Richards does not tell us who the man is because Clinton, whose consciousness we inhabit, knows exactly who the man is, ‘that is the point.’ Consciousness does not provide itself with discursive cues. Richards is not interested here in ideological issues, nor does he prejudge, defend, or champion Clinton. Instead, he presents him as he is perceived by others, allowing the tension of that private versus public perception (that drama of character) to carry the meaning of the scene. It is the owner of the slain cow, Holden Belyea alone, who stands in judgment, injuring Clinton accordingly. Characterization throughout the novel is similarly dynamic. Characters are manifold shades of grey – heroic and cowardly, spontaneous and calculating – their actions sometimes corresponding to others’ expectations, sometimes not. On occasion, some even rise above what gossip and reputation allow them to think of themselves. This disjunction between individuals and community, so vital in Richards’s later novels, is not the author’s comment on the moral superiority of one class over another, but a feature of the dynamism of consciousness, which, when examined, reveals multiple and contradictory motives. John Delano in Winter, a character who will resurface in later novels as something of Richards’s Marlow, is an example of this dynamism and contradiction. Dismissed as a self-serving vulgarian by most of the other characters in the community around him, John struggles throughout the novel to come to terms with the accidental death of his best friend while trying to find a way to reach out to his friend’s girlfriend, who is left pregnant and alone. The outcome of John’s struggle, so important sociologically, is not at all important to Richards, whose preoccupation is with the anguish of

172

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

the struggle, manifest as a fuzzy abstraction in John’s unconscious mind. John is, in effect, confused by his emotions and thus an enemy to himself. But alcohol and his own worst tendencies only defer a resolve that his deeper instinct of loyalty to his dead friend cannot deny. Sooner or later he will go to her: ‘He kept glancing from side to side as he drank but more often glancing up the road toward her place, her home as if he knew in himself he must see her now’ (128, 134). To read John as insensitive, or his actions as wanton, is to completely miss the care Richards took to put him in conflict with his own developing maturity, hence to misread an inquiry into psychology as a problem of sociology. Like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, John is a character in moral crisis whose delinquency on the outside refracts a spiritual anguish within. If his deliberations are tentative it is because he is trying to come to terms with himself in late adolescence, a messy prospect at best. Because Richards has no interest in showy, angst-ridden emotionalism, his psychological tableau, while complex, is spare. Winter thus charts, as all subsequent novels will, the quiet insecurities, perplexities, and loyalties of inner lives – the prosaic struggles to overcome personal weakness, confront the private demons of alcohol and fear, and battle the various attitudes that seed inferiority. As Sheldon Currie observed, the allowance for emotional uncertainty that Richards gives his characters is not the stuff of popular fiction, nor is it for the faint of heart: All Richards’ work requires close attention, a healthy tolerance for ambiguity, and an ability to get along without cheap novelistic tricks: silly sex, needless violence, fashionable ideas, au courant dialogue, and romanticized characters. And more than anything else the reader needs to bring the kind of intelligence and imagination necessary to discover meaning without the author’s intervention, as well as the wit and sense of humour to see the comic in the tragic and vice versa; these are troubled waters, these Miramichi River stories, complex and profound, simultaneously comic and tragic, [not] for the inexperienced or the inattentive. (1994, 67–8)

Currie’s comments about ‘ambiguity’ echo those of Lionel Trilling in calling to account the larger critical context within which realists like Richards are always read. Trilling’s imagined critic has more often than not been Richards’s, the reader who has extended ‘sympathy [and] tolerance to works of an obviously inferior sort merely because they are easy to read, and “affirmative,” and “life-giving,” and written for the needs and desires of the many’ (95). This certainly explains a consistent com-

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

173

plaint directed at Richards, best articulated by critic John Mills: ‘Why is Richards making me work so hard?’ (105). The simple answer, says Lisa Moore in another context, is because ‘real literature is always the fight against that desire to make culture easy to digest’ (111). A more complex answer to the incongruity of emotional uncertainty and populist accessibility lies in poetics – in particular, in what George Levine theorized as the realist’s use of closed systems of consciousness, whether limited or streaming perspective, to extend the limits of human sympathy. Richards, with varying degrees of success, attempts to do this in Winter. Deliberately impeding consciousness as formal technique evokes the dynamism of a felt world – Pound called this method ‘periplum’ (ABC 44), crawling inside to see as others see; in heightening the intimacy between reader and character, it is also a writer’s best chance to win sympathy for his characters’ experiences of reality. As Levine observed in Joyce, the closer humans are to the private experiences of others, the more likely they are to empathize. At the risk of appearing the apologist, it would seem to matter less that the first-time novelist is successful in applying this rather complex theory of discourse than that he has the inclination towards understanding its potential in the narrative exchange. Since place emerges through character, it too is subject to the turmoil and contradictions that are more typical of realism than of romance. Winter’s main character, Kevin Dulse, ranges over the land with a familiarity that invokes a kind of insular comfort. Like later Richards protagonists (Maufat MacDurmot from Blood Ties, Joe Walsh from Nights, Ivan Basterache from Evening Snow, Jerry Bines from Wounded), Kevin finds more solace and spiritualism on the land than in community. After his run-in with the farmer whose cow he shot, his return to the land is restorative: [Kevin] returned to the truck, the sun still warm and bright on the gravel, the smell of stale heat inside the cab. He sat there with the door open, his mud-laced boots on the runner, drinking coffee from a thermos which was too hot for his thirst and surveying the quiet peacefulness of the day, feeling the breeze on his woodshirt. Sounds of shots in the distance echoed something of the remarkable solitude of the land ... There was still good light to hunt left, the best hunting time left. The birds would be in the trees in an hour and it was always peaceful hunting at dusk, the brooks were always so dark, the land quiet and stiffened, the shadows so inviting, familiar. Being

174

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

in the woods alone at dusk was fulfilling, walking the pathways watching the birches, hunger. (11)

But though the land can revivify, Richards is no writer of pastoral, nor are his landscapes inert. Characters whose lives intersect with the land must also live by its dictates. That uneasy codependence touches the Dulse family when the river claims the life of Kevin’s older brother William, effectively ending Clinton’s life as a fisherman. Kevin is haunted by this memory and visited by recurring nightmares of suffocation and drowning, of ‘waves that came over him and burdened him’ (159). The uneasy compact with the land is also evident in what becomes the defining contradiction of Kevin’s life: a child of the river, he knows he must leave, for if he stays the river will turn him into another of the diseased old men who populate the dying town. But like many before him, he can no more leave than stay. In short, he is caught in a maelstrom not unlike his nightmare, his plight paradigmatic of his father’s: [Clinton] never went to war. He had wanted to so desperately that he sometimes cried because he felt that in it was his one chance. He had two cousins who were lost at sea and at times he wished he were one of them. But the war ended and Kevin was born and one night he found himself an old man with his wife coming in to where he was and sitting beside him agitated, and though she was only 36 and still had her slimness, she was also old. (50)

Kevin’s attempts to chart the future with his fiancée Pamela are rife with the hesitations that reflect his fear of being similarly consumed. He knows he is not as strong or defiant as his friend John, not as able to resist or leave. He knows, too, that his father’s fate will likely be his own, and that Pamela is the reason he will surrender to the suffocating ‘groin of factory dust,’ becoming one of ‘the architectural dead’ (One Step Inside 32). His indifference to her, though appearing to Rapoport and others as blame, is in fact a self-loathing for his inability to stop fate. The languorous pace of their conversations brings this emotional despondency to the surface: ‘Yes, damn it – I hope you don’t plan to stay on this damn river forever.’ ‘No, why?’ ‘Because I’m sick of it here already – one year, one year after we’re married and that’s it, okay?’ ‘Sure.’

Alden Nowlan and The Coming of Winter

175

‘And where do we go from here once we leave?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he shrugged looking at her. ‘Somewhere – I suppose.’ (107)

At the end of the novel, Kevin and Pamela marry, but their future is not bright. The only certainty is that ‘it would be frozen soon, the water and the earth’ (259). Winter has come. For Kevin, at twenty-one, it is an end – an end, said Richards, because ‘there’s something lacking in his backbone’ (quoted in Milner 6). Kevin doesn’t have the wherewithal to resist being sucked into the spiritual void at the heart of his society. As a young man who belongs entirely to the atavistic orders of heredity and environment, he is naturalism’s child, a reason, no doubt, why so many critics read Winter as Thomas Hardy-like in its clinical analysis of a character’s surrender to the connate forces that consume him. Kevin does indeed become a human animal at the end of the novel, suffering the same fate as Jude Fawley (Jude the Obscure), a Richards favourite, but his degeneration into landscape does not completely relegate Winter to naturalism – not as long as John Delano exists. His existence, though peripheral, suggests the presence of naturalism’s antithesis: Catholicism’s provision for free will, identified by William Connor as ‘the spirit of resistance that runs counter to the deadly monotony of respectable adult life’ (1984, 36). Functional in ways that Kevin is not, John rises above social determinism by accepting the powers of decision and action, thus wresting the responsibility for his spiritual condition away from the customs that determine destiny (work, marriage, family, maturity). Unlike his friend, he refuses to be an automaton in a society where the collective’s will supersedes the volition of individuals. Instead, he places the health and independence of his own soul first, showing an instinct for self-preservation that is only made clear at the end of Blood Ties when he ridicules Kevin’s compromise: ‘Kevin’s married, the gutless son of a whore, the gutless son of a whore’ (277). John’s refusal to give up the night, to accede to Kevin’s marriage, even though he is the best man, and to accept the authority of convention, opposes the denuding effects of naturalism’s erosion of the self. (John’s defiance in the face of his friend’s easy capitulation may also explain Richards’s own refusal to compromise his writing for the safer, more socially sanctioned pursuits of education and professionalism.) In accepting responsibility for himself, John (and perhaps Richards) will attempt to survive psychically and spiritually in ways that Kevin and Clinton cannot.

176

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

With just this slight inference to personal freedom, Richards closes his first novel. In its pages, a group of young people struggle to come to terms with the death of their friend and their own feelings towards one another. They drink, carouse, work, bicker, and, being in their early twenties, prepare for their lives. What matters most to them, as to young people everywhere, is the pulse of their experience in a particular time and place, a pulse of such rapturous immediacy that social analysis is unnecessary to its evocation. Richards set out as a young writer to show the ‘monumental significance’ of his people to the larger world. In Winter, he did that ‘with relentless honesty’ observed Alden Nowlan (‘250,000 Russians’ 43), doing his people the courtesy of showing them without embellishment, censure, romance, or apology.

6 Ties of Friendship and of Blood

There is joy in your life with your friends and family and this young girl but you have to decide because you will travel in your life and you will have money sometimes and then sometimes you will not have money but mostly you will have enough money and friends though you will be sad in your life also. Blood Ties (102–3)

You know, I’ve lived to see long rafts on this river – I’ve lived to see long logs on this river – I’ve lived to see pulp drives on this river – and now I’ve lived to see nothin on this river. Ibid. (256)

The period between the completion of Richards’s first and second novels was one of increasing activity for the now full-time writer. After a short break in the spring of 1973, he began working on Blood Ties, building to a pace to rival Winter’s. (He would finish Blood Ties in January 1975, thirteen months after starting.) Besides writing through the night, he was reading chapters of the new novel on Tuesdays at McCord Hall and dealing with the reviews of Winter. He would disengage from friends for long periods, then return with a new story or chapter. Peer pressure was having less and less effect as he answered the need to attend to his work. He was also widening his network of writers beyond the Ice House and Windsor Castle, an addition precipitated by the media attention that Winter was receiving. One of the first of these contacts was Ernest Buckler, the writer to whom he had been so often compared (strange in his mind because, before Helwig’s comment, he had never read the man). He and Buckler

178

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

were vastly different personalities – he knew that much from a Windsor Castle discussion that followed a phone call to Centrelea in the early 1970s. As Alden Nowlan was wont to do after a few drinks, he had picked up the phone one evening to extend greetings to fellow writers. The first on his list was Morley Callaghan in Toronto, who was readying himself for bed when he received the call. Delighted that a clutch of New Brunswick writers thought enough of his work to rouse him, he enjoyed a friendly exchange with Nowlan’s revellers, who were interested foremost that night in Callaghan’s TKO of Ernest Hemingway in Paris. They next rang up Buckler, whose reception was not nearly as warm. His shyness and reserve annoyed Nowlan and led to a spirited discussion afterwards about a writer’s obligation to meet his public. Buckler’s refusal to entertain the idea of being writer-in-residence at UNB in 1966 because of an inability to deliver a public lecture was, for Nowlan, simply irresponsible. From what little else Richards could find in the library, Buckler’s circumstances and personality seemed opposite to his own. He had been a prodigy at the University of Toronto (MA Philosophy), publishing his work in the literary pages of Colliers, Esquire, and The Atlantic well before the CBC began airing his radio plays and short fiction. In the years since the Canadian release of his now famous first novel, The Mountain and the Valley, he had become a reclusive farmer who shunned outside contact – a consequence, Nowlan theorized, of a long-standing addiction to Librium. When Richards read Brian Bartlett’s copy of Buckler’s famous novel in late 1974, his confusion over the comparison deepened. Buckler’s story was essentially a künstlerroman set on a Nova Scotia farm in the interwar years. Though identifiably eastern Canadian, it was a novel more of ideas than (like his own) of character and collective. Its protagonist was intellectual, stunted, and Promethean; by contrast, Richards’s characters were emotive, restless, and elemental. But if the younger writer found the comparisons tenuous, he did not entirely object to the association, for he grew to love Buckler’s novel – so much that, as he had with the Russians, he read as much of Buckler’s work as he could locate. After three weeks of immersion, he wrote Buckler a letter of admiration. Enclosing a copy of Winter, he began, ‘I am sending you my book with the hope that you will enjoy it a hundredth part as much as I enjoy your work … Nothing would please me more than if I were able to express in words my emotions when reading The Mountain and the Valley and Ox Bells and Fireflies, but I find that I cannot. My love for them, and rightly so, is too embedded in the heart and soul. Anything I might say would be feeble imitation of such feeling’ (2 December 1974).

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 179

Buckler reciprocated with a rare hardcover copy of The Mountain and the Valley, expressing amazement ‘that someone your age … can wield a pen with such nimbleness and dexterity’ (letter to DAR n.d. [Winter 1975?]). Complaining that most writers of the day spent inordinate hours sucking themselves dry, he congratulated Richards for not indulging in onanism. (Buckler was no doubt thinking of Erica Jong, whose best-selling 1973 novel, Fear of Flying, had raised onanistic introspection to the level of popular culture.) Coming from a writer whose novel verged on the autobiographical, Buckler’s compliment indicated to Richards that someone besides Nowlan understood that self-analysis did not mean selfindulgence – it was, rather, the process by which one came to know and empathize with others. In seeing clearly that the young Miramichier had succeeded in eliminating vanity from his introspection, Buckler provided insightful affirmation at a time Richards needed it. But despite Richards’s hopes, neither a correspondence nor a relationship materialized. When he proposed a visit, Buckler declined. The two met only once, after an especially testy reading at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, in 1975. When Richards inquired about Buckler’s health at lunch that day, one of his hosts, a woman who thought Richards’s work was stridently misogynist, answered that Buckler was just an old man, hardly worth the attention paid to him in the past and certainly not in possession of the same gifts as Margaret Atwood or even Susanna Moodie. Furious with her assumption that gender was a signifier of talent, Richards accused her of shallow-mindedness, scolding her (not sharply enough, he later told Greg Cook) for treating humans so shoddily. He carried his anger to the reading that afternoon, responding to a pointed question about the novel’s ponderousness with the comment ‘if you don’t like the book don’t buy it’ – a response that got back to Macklem, who in turn scolded him for jeopardizing sales. When Richards asked again at the book signing if anyone knew about Buckler, Cook, who had earlier agreed to drive him to the Digby ferry, offered to detour to Centrelea for a short visit – he had done the same for Alden Nowlan after a reading at Acadia in 1968. Cook had befriended Buckler ten years earlier while researching his Master’s thesis. The brief stop in Centrelea was uneventful, however. Seated in his wooden rocking chair in the kitchen nursing a Moosehead beer, a sullen Buckler only became animated when Richards queried him about the mention of The Mountain and the Valley on the cover of Winter. With a grin born of the knowledge of the politics of literary publishing, Buckler feigned bewilderment, sensing in Richards’s innocence something that brightened

180

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

his mood. Profoundly alone and warmed to his guests, he insisted they stay for a game of cribbage, offering to call a taxi to fetch more beer. The brief encounter confirmed the wisdom of Nowlan’s assertion that writers must emerge from themselves to meet their publics, however difficult they found this. Nowlan, a man temperamentally similar to Buckler, had forced himself out, often having to ply himself with gin to meet the occasion. After witnessing the lonely wages of Buckler’s reticence, Richards understood why. From that time forward, he never missed the chance to read his work in public, especially to young people, whom he wanted to cultivate as readers. When Michael O. Nowlan began organizing the Canadian Literature Happening conference at Oromocto High School, Richards was an annual participant. On his first visit there he read ‘In This Age of Chess,’ a story about two friends who spend an evening in Newcastle’s Old Manse library. Two years later, in 1975, he was the principal draw, even though he was the youngest of the seven New Brunswick writers present. As one journalist recorded, his pitch to the assembly of young people bussed in for the afternoon was remarkably shrewd: Some of the students had read his novel. The rest had heard about it from friends. They were bursting with questions, an unusual characteristic of any student gathering. Dave didn’t disappoint his youthful admirers ... His slight build, sandy drooping mustache and delicate features made him look close to them in age. His black turtleneck sweater, faded blue jeans, and shoulder-length hair were conventional. The heavy hunting shirt (Dave’s was red and black check) with its pocket pouched out by a crushed cigarette packet is a favourite jacket with many boys ... If Dave’s costume hadn’t won his student admirers, his beery breath did. Here was a rebel indeed at a high school afternoon event. (Claus 26)

While a rebellious look may have endeared him to students, other motives lay behind his desire to win their approval. First, he had become an advocate of reading, the path that had freed him (and Alden Nowlan) from the fate of Kevin Dulse. ‘You could tell from his delivery that he wanted to give young people the sense of what it meant to read,’ recalled Michael Nowlan. ‘His inflections and jumps, changes in tone and voice, and other verbal tricks prompted students to ask questions about literature they previously had not considered’ (interview with author, July 2004). But a desire to counter the kind of narrowness that Lucy Maud

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 181

Montgomery lampooned when her Marilla warns Anne that while ‘reading stories is bad enough … writing them is worse’ (224) was not his only motive. The grandchild of businesswoman Janie Richards knew a thing or two about marketing. He sensed correctly that cultivating readers among high school students and teachers was the key to selling books. That Winter and Blood Ties would soon be among the most heavily used high school and university texts in Canadian literature classrooms was not, then, surprising. Besides displaying his work, there were good pedagogic and fiduciary reasons for going on reading tour. Not every tour was pleasant for the young writer with the ‘rebel’ look, however. On one trip to the town of Edmundston in northwestern New Brunswick, where Joe Sherman was coordinating a reading series at the Collège Saint-Louis-Maillet, Richards was detained by border guards while crossing into Maine. The guards didn’t like the body language and inflection of the long-haired writer in the back seat of Sherman’s Austin Mini. After being questioned for twenty minutes, Richards was sent back to the car with a temporary pass permitting him to stay in the United States for sixty minutes, long enough to buy cigarettes and beer. But incidents like this were rare. Reading tours and classroom visits became an integral part of his life as a full-time writer, providing the socialization that balanced his increasing withdrawal into the interior world of Blood Ties. That world was indeed a secure place at a time when readers were missing what he thought he had written so clearly into Winter. It was precisely that comfort – the beginning of the new novel so much like the middle chapters of Winter – that made Blood Ties so easy to enter. Despite perceptual shifts in Blood Ties that offered different viewpoints on similar events, the two novels were virtually identical in terms of fictional time, place, and troupe. Identical, quite simply, because he was not ready to give up his attachment to characters. The first time he spoke of the book, in the winter of 1973, he told Peggy it would be the story of a young girl (to be named Cathy) who has a bad love affair with John Delano. The intention expressed that day was simply to write another novel about a group of characters on the (unnamed) Miramichi in the late 1960s, the especially poignant period of his own high school years. If traces of the naturalism of Hardy and Dostoevsky were apparent in Winter, another writer’s imprint would leave its mark on Blood Ties. By the winter of 1973, the year he began his second novel, Richards had already begun grappling with William Faulkner. Allen Bentley’s English

182

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

3465 seminar at STU that year provided the occasion to test his opinions of the southern writer in his own fiction. Like other artists seminal to his ambitions, Faulkner was of interest initially because of similarities in their pasts. First published as a poet, he had found his voice only after he turned his attention homeward to limn the contours of Oxford, Mississippi, a post-bellum Southern town struggling to hold on to its past. Growing increasingly impotent by refusing to let go of a frontier memory that was no longer viable, yet retaining charms that were preferable to the brave new world that was unfolding, Faulkner’s South was Richards’s Miramichi, ‘places used up and passed over,’ wrote Doug Fetherling (57). Faulkner’s turn to his own family to explore the dimensions of this impotence had a strong impact on Richards, who believed, since writing ‘Old Man’s Town,’ that community is best explored in family, for the smaller social unit concentrates the values of the larger in ways more easily managed in narrative. Alden Nowlan’s design for Campobello, the cultural history of how a founding family shaped place, further reinforced this belief. Bentley’s choice of The Sound and the Fury for English 3465 focused Richards’s study. Faulkner’s use of parallelism to extend story beyond the limits of conventional perspective was a technique that Richards had never encountered, even if his impetus to limit perspective tipped him towards Faulkner’s method. When he read the opening sequences of The Sound and the Fury, he recognized the method as a more developed version of his own. As he had done with Kevin in the opening pages of Winter, so had Faulkner done with Benjy, opening his novel in the obtuse halfthoughts of the thirty-three-year-old ‘idiot.’ Benjy’s clouded emotions are not sanitized, nor does Faulkner make concessions for accessibility. Rather, sense is made of those impressions only later when they are mirrored, in parallel, in the perspectives of Benjy’s siblings. It was this opening of interiority by competing perspectives that Richards found so functional. The quadripartite structure allowed for a radical alteration of perspective – from authorial and omniscient to limited and unreliable, thus truer to life and morally superior; it also had intriguing possibilities for staging narrative. The incremental expansion of story through character that it allowed, whether for clarifying or problematizing personal history, seemed perfectly suited to an inward psychological novel that would expand upon Winter. Since Richards’s approach to characterization had always been corporate – clusters of individuals as social groupings – Faulkner’s techniques would also work to capture the interrelations of characters within a circumscribed space. Like Pound,

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 183

Faulkner was an ‘eccentric and original stylist’ (Milner 4) and therefore another essential piece in Richards’s formal apprenticeship. Blood Ties itself, totalità, would be the parallel story; its retelling of the same events of the late 1960s would broaden, deepen, and – most important – disrupt the certainties of the first novel. It would circle back to add dimension to Winter, not for the purpose of making it more understandable but, ironically, of making it less. The intent would be threefold: to destabilize the authority to contain the world of others, to show how complex and unknowable individuals are, and, ultimately, to return to those being represented the power behind representation. Faulkner’s formal apparatus thus ideally complemented a developing poetics affected not only by the New Critical tenets of environmental realism (that striving for the purest enactment of life), but also by Gabriel Marcel’s desire to free post-Enlightenment subjects from a scientific rationalism that had reduced human experience to mere function. Having no wish to continue what Marcel identified as the error of objectifying others in order to know and possess them, Richards, through Faulkner’s example, would refine his abandonment of the authority of creation and allow his characters to interact freely in their own world. They, in turn, like Dostoevsky’s Ivan and Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, would come to accept or reject their freedoms in the higher drama of life, thereby illustrating ‘that the individual is everything or the world is nothing’ (‘My Miramichi Trilogy’ 84). Dickens, Thomas, Dylan, Williams, Dostoevsky, and Marcel had helped Richards formulate his positions on class and power; Faulkner now added functionalism to ideation. Blood Ties encompasses slightly more than two years in the life of the MacDurmot family. Maufat, the father, works as a labourer in the town’s rail yard. His wife Irene looks after her senile mother in the farmhouse across the road. Irene’s oldest daughter Leah (not Maufat’s child) is married to a rough character named Cecil, and Maufat and Irene’s other children, Cathy and Orville, grow in maturity over the course of the book. Cathy has a bad relationship with John Delano, attempts to shield her older half-sister from the past, and has a run-in with a high school teacher whose scant power comes from manipulating adolescents. Orville snares rabbits, steals candles from the vestry, and is beaten by a faithless old priest who demands reverence for the wrong reasons. As in Winter, it is the interrelations among characters that hold the story together. The channelling of perspective that brought the felt world of Winter’s characters under the reader’s skin is matched in Blood Ties by a patch-

184

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

work of voices that are more multiple and counter-distinct. Their marshalling is also more assured and less consciously elliptical: unqualified pronouns surface in dialogue, tense is disobeyed in reverie, shifts are abrupt and undirected, and psyches are befuddled by half-remembered stories of a murdered cook, the Great Miramichi Fire, and smatterings of local history. None of the novel’s characters are introduced or ordered genealogically; they just appear as if the narrating consciousness knows them, which of course it does. (Richards’s liberties with narrative convention must always be considered in light of the structural and tonal demands of private perspective.) This patchwork of voices is difficult to invoke when read silently. Its impressionistic consciousness comes alive in oral performance, which brings to the surface the humour, humanity, contradictions, and frailties of each character. When Leah, for example, speaks about her husband Cecil, her language contains below the surface of her expressions the struggle she has throughout the novel to leave him: You know when he went back to Lester’s field I was scared, I didn’t know he was serious or not because he gets awful mad at times, like when he threw Ronnie against the stove he weren’t himself, he come in the house there and looked mad even before he started talking. Then he started saying he weren’t going back to work and if I tried to make him he’d go out west with Shelby ... I got scared but the hell with him I’ve had enough of that – I weren’t going to chase him, nosirree. He couldn’t get me to chase him – not like he used to – not runnin around catering to him. That bastard what he is. (30)

Blood Ties advances beyond Winter in the sophistication with which private thoughts and self-delusions are disclosed in the unconscious. Cecil is thus most fully Cecil when he tries to justify to himself throwing his son Ronnie against the stove. Shelby and John are most characteristically themselves when trying to work up the nerve to confront their girlfriends. And Leah is at her self-deluding best when trying to convince herself that it is possible to leave her past behind. This is not to suggest that the language of Blood Ties carries only characters’ delusions, but that the novel is most fully alive when rife with the small negotiations and compromises that people constantly make with themselves. To look for declarative markers in the early novels is to miss much of the subtlety that his patchwork of voices carries, as Richards explained:

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 185 When Leah in Blood Ties was talking about Cecil, I almost had her go on for another ... I don’t know how long. I like my characters. I love having them talk, and maybe some day that’s all I’ll have them do; then no one will be able to say they are inarticulate ... No one could read Chapter Three of the second part of Blood Ties, especially out loud, and not see Cecil’s tremendous love for Leah, although I never once said he loved her. As a matter of fact, I said the opposite – that he couldn’t tell her he loved her. And he’s shown doing the opposite – he locks the door, kicks her out of the house, and he hits Ronnie. Yet the whole idea of that part is to show his tremendous love for her. I think the language proves his love. I didn’t have to explain that he loved her. (Garrod 223, 225)

Another example illustrates the technique. When Leah is harassed on the road by a man from her past, Cathy’s instinct to protect her older half-sister is the episode’s most powerful action, yet the act of unleavened love begs to be overlooked in the telling: ‘So you got a kid now eh, and you don’t remember me – are you married?’ The men laughed. The horn started honking. The highway was silent ... [Leah] glanced down at Cathy, her face blank as if something was there behind the blankness ... ‘No not really – I don’t think ... ’ Her voice was dry, not like it had been before when they were alone along the shore, when they were talking, when she was painting Cathy’s nails ... ‘I’d pick her ass out anywhere,’ he said. ‘Okay, okay let’s go,’ another man said. Cathy kept staring at Ronald. ‘Ya bitch my name is Niles,’ he said. ‘An yours is Leah – horny little Leah.’ She brought Ronald up against her. Cathy looked up at her blank face. Then she nudged Cathy and they began to move away, walking along the side of the road rapidly. ‘Home after four years – after four years, eh,’ the man shouted. They kept walking. ‘Well, are ya married ya slut – or is that the one I give ya?’ They kept walking. Then the car started again to follow behind them. Cathy was staring at a thousand pebbles, each different, she was staring and walking quickly because Leah was walking quickly. Then the car started honking again, it started honking behind them. The highway silent heat. Then the car sped out around them, the dust coming up against their faces, its wheels tearing at the pavement ... As they neared the house Cathy laughed quickly.

186

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi ‘They musta been drunk, eh?’ ‘They musta been,’ Leah said. ‘That’s for sure,’ Cathy said. (38–9)

Muted as coda, Cathy’s comment that ‘They musta been drunk, eh?’ gives Leah a way out, restoring some dignity to her in a simple act of sisterliness. It is at this level that much of Richards’s early fiction works. To get the full measure of the characters in Blood Ties requires delving below the surface of their actions and the literalness of what they say, for the accidents of story belie the richness the novel contains. Orville, for instance, steals candles from the vestry, but he is no delinquent. He is a thirteen-year-old boy attempting to capture ‘a certain perfection of stillness’ (157) and ‘feeling of removal that he could never explain to anyone’ (245), his action (theft) and motive separated by 100 pages. Likewise, Cecil pushes hard against a world that discredits him, but he is no thug. Rather, his thoughts as he enters the house of his friend Shelby are those of a man feeling hunted for what he has done: ‘Shelby let him in and led him to the kitchen. The dishes undone piled in the sink. Shelby was smaller – came to his shoulder, the smell of him through the place. He threw a package of cigarettes on the table’ (42). In writing these scenes as facsimile rather than reportage, Richards taps the negative capability of language – what poet John Keats described as the ‘capa[bility] of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (quoted in Bush 59). Negative capability in Blood Ties brings us into the realm of the same halftones. In Cecil we meet a character’s sense of himself as a big man, thus always preparing for confrontation. We also meet the illogical but powerful uncertainties of a man wounded by what he has done to his son, fearing that his actions will cause his wife to leave him, and expecting others to seek physical retribution in kind. We must therefore intuit about Cecil what Richards writes about a similar character in Meager Fortune: ‘The idea that failed men lose their wives is partially true – many drive them away, feeling unworthy’ (44). Feeling this way, Cecil circles his possible adversaries carefully, even when they are friends (Shelby) and family (father-in-law Maufat). In effect, he projects his guilt and insecurity on them. Cathy’s half-thoughts of the bay convey a kaleidoscope of similar doubts: the sense of her world detaching, growing remote and therefore lyrical. As in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, points of orientation are found in what characters feel and perceive, not in the accommodation the author makes for readers.

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 187

From this patchwork of unconscious impressions emerges a sense of place that is more often felt than contemplated. It is high summer. The river brings a storm, as rivers often do. Family and friends gather, play cards, drink beer, and in casual ways look out for one another. There is a night at the exhibition, a school dance, fights. Catholicism is part of the milieu, a presence as pervasive but no more or less important than the smell of the mill or the enveloping oppressiveness of July heat. Real Miramichi landmarks are recognizable – French Fort Cove, Oyster Bridge, the convent, the mines, and the trains – and so is the actual topography of Newcastle (north/south, fields and tracks) and the bay (east/west, upriver and down). Space only becomes actualized, however, in movement. Following the river as songline, characters travel up and down old Highway 11 between Newcastle and Neguac, ‘a highway only Maritimers could know’ (Mercy 11): ‘Now they were in the car and driving downriver. The farther down they went the fewer lights there were, the deeper the blackness, as if it were the blackness of the bay swallowing the land’ (189). Downriver becomes a refuge, the movement towards it a metaphor for the harmony found in a stabilizing rural tradition. When characters are facing crises, they go downriver for solace, an action that recalls the Emersonian injunction to go to ‘these plantations of God [where] a decorum and sanctity reign’ (quoted in Geldard 54) The land provides some of their happiest memories. Many make their living on the land, build their camps on the land, and court their sweethearts along the banks of the river. The land is especially meaningful for characters with the least social status. Cecil locates his talent for knowing in the land, as will the recovering alcoholic Joe Walsh (Nights) and the redeemed Jerry Bines (Wounded). Cecil’s ease with the natural world reveals an intelligence overlooked or dismissed in more civilized enclaves: He had watched so many times from this position that he could, if he acknowledged it to himself, know every trace of sunlight and dampness that hit the road, and tell the season, day and hour just by that – just by the wind blowing the leaves and the way the sun spoke of them, just by the clotted dooryard mud in April, the way the heels of her shoes were scuffed by the mud or the film of dust they collected in June. (129)

Cecil’s form of knowing sets up a dichotomy between nature and culture that will form the basis of Richards’s later explorations of class and the broken social contract in the second trilogy. Suffice it to say at this point

188

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

that early characters find in the land an alternative to social machinations that, deliberately and otherwise, discredit them. As if preparing the ground for this encroaching dichotomy, Blood Ties luxuriates in what is arguably Richards’s richest and most detailed rendering of place. Thus, though the action of the novel occupies the same late-1960s period of growing social and familial instability – the generations are diverging, the outside world is intruding, and the young are about to leave the river, the first generation to have to do so in some time – the spatial landscape is more intensely realized than in Winter. Cathy and Orville’s private experiences of place are characteristic of this embellishment. For both, place is a weighted constituent of consciousness: weighted, for Orville, with ‘the rich smell of the woods with rain, the woods clotted and heavy and silent with rain’ (72), and, for Cathy, ‘stronger now also – every smell came to her and into her nostrils with more poignancy – the food, the oil and grease, the night, the half-wet tarps and the men’ (98). The more intense their shared sense of place, however, the more it disquiets, for the heaviness they feel (like the storm that opens the novel) mirrors their deeper fear of family disintegration. The grotesque intimacies of place that Richards introduces – from old Annie’s mole to Cecil’s scars – are therefore presentiment of a summer of change, a summer that will alter the cohesion that the MacDurmot family has so far enjoyed. Richards’s embellishment of the experience of place for thematic purposes is complemented by an equally sophisticated treatment of time. Because his characters always ‘dictate what [his] book is going to be’ (Randolph 104), the multivalent temporality of their voices further upsets our highly edited Cartesian logic of causality and order. Thus, for example, though she is only a word in Winter (119), Cathy MacDurmot is a central presence in Blood Ties, while her boyfriend, John Delano, a main character in the first novel, exists only peripherally in the second. (The friends will reappear at different times in Lives, the third novel.) Temporal planes intersect as well, further unsettling the chronological sequence of the novels. Near the beginning of Winter, Kevin learns of the death of Andy Turcotte, John’s best friend. Blood Ties, released two years later, closes with Andy and John driving recklessly, revisiting, essentially, the last days of Andy’s life. John reappears again twenty-five years later in Mercy (2000), a middle-aged man still preoccupied by the events of the summer of 1969. The second and tenth novels do not turn back structurally to revisit the first, but encompass the first in the sweep of their localism, a localism that consists of what characters know, remember,

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 189

overhear, intuit, and, most important, inherit as genetic and communal memory. ‘The effect,’ wrote one interviewer, is ‘eerie verisimilitude – as if they were all really alive somewhere’ (Glover 10). Such a poetics of enactment further embellishes the imagined Miramichi, making it as real a place as the simulacrum of fiction allows. We come to know characters across many novels, each of which reveals different biases of personality, clues about context, and takes on motive. The imagined world that results is dimensioned by characters whose lives and times intersect. For readers, there is no safe haven on the sidelines. To read Blood Ties after Winter is to enter an organic world where the energies of voice and pre-existing histories make dispassionate witness difficult. This admix of simulated truth and fiction – of characters with impinging wills and histories – is largely what has contributed to the polarized response to Richards’s early work. Because of his skilful rendering of place in such intensely felt spatial, temporal, and personal dimensions, readers have reacted very strongly – some very negatively – to his world. Few have been indifferent to it. The final and perhaps most significant difference between Winter and Blood Ties is the changing attitude towards place in the final sixty pages of the latter. Imbedded in those pages are the discontents that would move Richards to the next phase of his writing and to a new despair in his personal life. The first indication of trouble was his inability to read the ‘October 1969’ chapter at McCord Hall on Tuesday nights. The second was a worsening of his drinking that prompted Peggy to leave their apartment while he finished the novel (his drinking had been the cause of their separation twice before). The change in his attitude towards place, though focused in the last chapter of the new novel, had not been sudden. In Winter, his discontent was foreshadowed in a growing sense of mutability that only incidentally affected the lives of the young. Rubena, Kevin’s mother in Winter, voiced this feeling as disgust at what change was bringing: ‘We used to take [the children] into the park every Saturday for the longest time, buy them ice cream and walk about. But you couldn’t do that today – not now. Everywhere you look there’s wine bottles broken and children no older than Deborah cursing and fighting and drinking’ (154). In Blood Ties, discontent with change grows stronger and more affecting. The joy that had been abundant in the MacDurmot family – in the celebration of Cathy’s eighteenth birthday and in the earlier relationships between Cathy and John, John and Andy, and Cecil and Leah – is over, the ending repeated

190

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

in a mantra that haunts Cecil: ‘she’s gonna go, she’s gonna go’ (234). Characters are losing their grip on what they previously held with so much certainty. Annie, the old family matriarch, is in the final dehumanizing clutches of Alzheimer’s. The old homestead has literally deteriorated, its barn sunk into the ground. Mighty and oppressive storms reminiscent of Faulkner’s natural forces are harbingers of bad things to come: of Cathy slipping on wet ground and falling into the nettles, of Cecil and Shelby’s car accident, of fights in parking lots, of a spreading gonorrhea contagion, and of a general feeling of unsettledness that will become the new inheritance of place. Even the river is complicit in decay, depositing a drowned dog on its banks, which closes the beach to swimming. What was only an abstract instinct for escape in the first novel becomes the realized goal of young people in the second. Mary, Karen, Cathy, and Leah leave, while Orville builds a ‘goddamn fort in the woods so as [he] won’t haveta come back here again’ (69). Though characters drive downriver with increasing frequency to be enveloped in the forgetting darkness of the bay, the comforting insularity of the natural world felt by Kevin in the first novel and by Cecil and Maufat at the start of the second diminishes towards the end – and diminishes further in Lives (1981) and Stilt House (1985). The purchase of the entire twenty-three-acre Everett homestead by an American couple with ‘thin arms’ and a ‘flat, lacking’ (253) tone is the novel’s final humiliation. The couple is a type that will recur in Richards’s later fiction. She is a painter; he works in pottery and glass. Their schooled humility is both false and demeaning. ‘We don’t know how many people will relate to our work,’ says the professor turned hobbyist, ‘as yet none have’ (257). The couple are Vietnam draft dodgers, whose escape to Canada rings with a smugness that irritates Maufat. When they inquire about an old sewing machine in Annie’s porch, he tells them firmly that it is not part of the sale. What he does not tell them – and what we must infer – is that the sewing machine he saves for Irene will someday become Cathy’s or Leah’s, a symbol of the bloodline, one last hope. In the present, however, the larger symbolism is of loss. Despite Maufat’s actions at the end of the book, deracination is the novel’s final note. Abandoned to the same fate as the strippers in the travelling circus – ‘damaged and remote as not to be affixed to any time or place’ (92) – so will the Everett line vanish with old Annie’s tug boats and pulp drives, all lost to a new gentry of moneyed urbanites homesteading on local lands. ‘The world I’d known was suddenly dragged into a New Age economy of lies,’ Richards lamented, ‘and I was furious’ (interview with author,

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 191

January 1997). Worth noting is that the early reviews of Winter – one source of what he thought of as those lies – and the writing of ‘October 1969’ occupied the same period in late 1974. And as that chapter suggests, those lies were tantamount to an aggressive new politics of encroachment. That last chapter effectively closed the first phase of Richards’s career. Its final notes marked the transition from a poetics of literalism and reenactment to a more consciously political writing in which a distanced, objective style would replace what had been a deeply subjective presentation of temperament. In Winter and Blood Ties, political comment, if any, came from character. In his next novels, it would come from narration. The ‘economy of lies’ that was beginning to gain legitimacy convinced him that an active defence of his characters was necessary. The last chapter of Blood Ties also marked his farewell to McCord Hall. Its pages were too personal and too poignant to read there, especially to an audience of émigrés whose backgrounds were similar to the New York intellectuals who homestead on the old Everett property. Richards was having increasing difficulty separating their views from those of the Mysterious East crowd, a group of come-from-away, left-leaning academics who used their magazine to satirize political foibles and the incompetence of Atlantic Canadian journalism. According to Alden Nowlan, a newspaperman himself, their magazine was an insult to Maritimers generally – a view that Richards shared. The idea that New Brunswickers suffered from a plantation malaise caused by feudal thrall to big industry and the Irvings seemed to Richards to be finding a foothold at McCord Hall, where Thompson and Bauer raked students for intellectual passivity, which was essentially the same condition. His tribal instincts aroused, Richards began to detect disparagement in the tone of the attention he was receiving at McCord Hall: ‘The idea of at least some Frederictonians, who came from places like Connecticut, was that I was the “real thing” because I came from the wild Miramichi, and could actually write about work. Because I was young, it was hard to fight this – and harder still to exactly analyse what was so terribly mistaken about that kind of applause’ (‘My Miramichi Trilogy’ 77). Though no fan of big business, he forever after took up the Irving cause when he heard their name besmirched by those ‘from away,’ knowing that ‘it is not who the groups include as kindred spirits, but who they have excluded’ that really matters (Playing 35). The completion of Blood Ties in January 1975 left Richards emotionally withdrawn, with barely enough energy to package the manuscript and

192

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

send it to Oberon. Dispirited by the turn his fiction had taken, he could not celebrate the completion of the novel. He and Peggy went to the STU cafeteria to have a coffee instead. Given the despair of the novel’s final notes, understatement seemed the appropriate gesture. At the cafeteria, he broached the idea of a trip, ‘a long run’ that would repair their relationship and put McCord Hall and Blood Ties behind them. Peggy agreed to leave university and accompany him to Spain, where Ray and Sharon Fraser had been living since early January 1975. Richards had met Fraser at Windsor Castle in 1973 when he was the Miramichi’s big writer of the 1970s, a raconteur whose bloodlines were rumoured to go back to Charles Dickens. Nine years older than Richards, he had worked as a teacher, journalist, and magazine editor after graduation from STU in 1964. He was also active in the Flat Earth Society and the Royal Court and was author of the acclaimed short story collection The Black Horse Tavern (1973). More impressive to Richards was that both were children of the same river (during the summers, Fraser lived on his boat, Spanish Jack, named after one of his characters in The Black Horse Tavern and christened by Alden Nowlan with a bottle of beer). Richards looked up to Fraser as a writer of similar birthright who had succeeded with some of the same subject matter he was exploring. Like Nowlan, he was the genuine article, his art a distillation of Maritime life, his heavy drinking a tacit acceptance of his role as serious artist. The Frasers had been in Spain for three weeks when David and Peggy arrived in February 1975. The couples rented villas on Las Marinas Road, near the town of Denia on the eastern Mediterranean, two miles from the sea. Surrounding them on all sides were bohemians from England and Germany living as expatriates on cheap wine and brandy, the favoured drinks of l’esplansa squares. Richards and Fraser joined them, but only after beginning each day at their typewriters with a litre bottle of overproof beer to steady the hands from the night before. Fraser was writing The Bannonbridge Musicians, Richards the stage play ‘The Dungarvan Whooper.’ Though Blood Ties had been exhausting, his vocation, like Fraser’s, decreed that he live imaginatively in his own milieu, however far from it he might be, and that he forge ahead with new projects in order to leave the pain of previous ones behind. After the morning regime, the couples would meet at a café to drink, usually late into the night. A ‘Canadian Club’ of wayward students and writers soon formed. At thirty cents a litre, wine was their beverage of choice. They talked books and authors and world events, each striving

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 193

to follow what Douglas Day described as Spain’s dignidad, or code of the cup: ‘Here, a man drank, and drank often; but he must drink well. He must sit in a café for hours, swallowing one copita of aguardiente after another; but at the end he must pay his bill, rise decorously, and walk with dignity to his home’ (175). ‘There I drank every day,’ Richards wrote. ‘I got drunk only once, but I came back home with an appreciation for the morning drink’ (‘Drinking’ 113). He also came home with a nearly completed draft of his first play. Michael Whelan’s Miramichi legend of a murdered logging camp cook had continued to interest him after his ballad form of it was rejected for publication in 1972. As the Miramichi’s most powerful new voice, he must have felt pressured – perhaps even duty-bound – to try his hand at the river’s most compelling myth. When he did, he recast the 1880s story in the language of Shakespearean tragedy – a rather strange choice, but only at first glance. After all, the immediacy of the stage would foreground the dramatic intensity of Whelan’s language every bit as much as Elizabethan tragedy would suit the legend’s dark and heavy moods. If that wasn’t enough, Shakespeare’s preoccupation with insecurity, jealousy, and greed anticipated the legend’s central character, a foreman named Dwane who becomes crazed with bloodlust after losing a year’s wages to an underling in a chopping contest, then losing his girl to a young Irish cook. Heroic in lordship over his men, Dwane, like Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, is fatally flawed in thinking that his betrothed is ‘a perfect lady’ (n.p. [Act I, scene 1]). Thus he reacts out of all proportion when he begins to suspect ‘the ungrateful slut’ (11) of infidelity. Like Shakespeare’s flawed heroes, he is surrounded by men whose essential goodness blinds them to his vanity and weakness. Ryan, the young cook, attempts to comfort Dwane when he should stay away; Goodin, the winning chopper, jokes with Dwane when he is at his most vulnerable. The result is catastrophic for both. Because he is ‘a bastard for honour’ (12), Dwane, like a wronged Othello, is driven by ‘a darkness in the earth … to fury’ (13). The young cook is killed in his bunk and his money belt is stolen. As the mystery of who killed him deepens, each lumberman’s suspicion of his fellows casts ripples of self-doubt throughout the camp. True to Shakespeare’s tragic lading, dreams, misdeeds, ghosts, storms, and a constant banging of the wind follow, all keeping time to Dwane’s slow disintegration into madness. Surprisingly, the play does not suffer from the juxtaposition of Miram-

194

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

ichi legend with Elizabethan form; this is attributable to Richards’s keen ear for language as well as the dramatic apparatus to which he turns it. The bard’s language of intrigue, high drama, and entendre is, in fact, so effortlessly deployed that the larger tragic vision seems at home in the New Brunswick swamp, as the following illustrates when Dwane bemoans his loss of the chopping contest: It was the spirit – their mouths are the ice and snow & make me cold, & in all the world they know who wins and loses games – and help the winner out. I was ahead I know, and Ripper yelling on – ‘you are ahead ahead’ – and yet I lost. Oh what feeling hearing his cedar grate and split inside – ah, it still is in my ear, & that heavy weightlessness of everything – so full did it drop and clear the sky, the shouts of men still agitate my flesh – as if I could turn and strangle everyone for applauding his victory. (10)

Richards’s ear for Shakespeare’s language may ultimately say less for the play than for Richards, but it is nevertheless significant as a measure of just how careful a reader he could be. Possessing what Douglas Glover described as ‘an autodidact’s appreciation of books’ (10), he was able to enter entire worlds through peculiarities of voice and style. His delight in Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson is indicative: One becomes immersed in that wit, the deployment of language, that emotion tempered by rational thought which stands as a testament to the man’s genius and elegant sensitivity. For days afterward I was prone to calling men Sir and women Madam as I walked the street, and wished to address them in discussion as such, ie: ‘It would seem to me sir that such a man is either a liar or a thief’ or ‘No sir do not say that, if Mr. Burke were here he would tax me onto death’ etc etc [sic].’ (Letter to Ray Fraser n.d.).

His sensitivities to text, combined with what he knew of the conservatism of his townsfolk, caused him to worry about how his Shakespearean take on the legend would be received when it toured New Brunswick in the summer of 1975. Thanks to the efforts of an earnest Saint John summer stock company, his worries were averted when the play was staged to an appreciative audience at Miramichi Valley High School in Newcastle on 8 July. He spent the post-production hours monopolizing a quart of Ray Fraser’s rum, pleased, he told his friend, that he had not embarrassed his family. What would not have been apparent to theatregoers at the time was

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 195

the extent to which the play actually completed his work on Blood Ties, for it had cycled back to the period of old Annie’s past. Richards’s return to this era after writing himself out of the pastoral at the end of Blood Ties was important for several reasons. At the level of craft, the play gave him the chance to let his characters speak, as he had said repeatedly he wanted to do (Garrod 223). The freshness of the drama’s language and the playfulness of its delivery were opposite to the threnody of ‘October 1969.’ Lyrical lightness like the following countered the denuding effects of a monoglot interiority and brought him temporarily out of his despondency: ‘Out [of the woods] – You’ll be that in spring, and not a long time off I assure you – ah the rout’ll be over and the drive begin and I’ve seen drives boy, miles long winding, splitting earth and air with the sound, the good drenched timber and the happy men – and out, past the head water and the falls, the dark eddies sparkling white to take us home’ (2). At a deeper level that would have repercussions for his later work, Richards’s turn to Miramichi history and myth was a rearguard action that sought to investigate the origins of change in place, character, and time. Though his exploration led him to conclude that human weakness and ambition were atemporal – a conclusion that further eroded his idealism – he carried that exploration forward to his next big project, the novel Lives of Short Duration, which he was trying to find a way into. Especially attentive to her husband’s behaviour when he was between writing projects, Peggy fretted over the increase in his drinking during that summer of 1975. They were renting a cottage on the Miramichi, so he was close to his old friends and watering holes. But, still, he was floundering – drinking heavily, angering easily, and brooding over scrapes for far too long. During a reading from the about to be published Blood Ties, he became irate when a young female student at UNB, adopting a fashionable ideology that discredited marriage, expressed relief that Leah had found the strength to leave Cecil. He countered that no matter how insignificant his characters’ lives seemed to outsiders, the break-up was tragic for Leah and Cecil, Maufat and Irene, and Cathy. He agreed that she had found the strength to leave, but it had only been because she lacked the courage to stay. He went home and told Peggy that more of the same misreading of his work was about to begin again. Complicating matters was the mess Bill Richards was embroiled in on town council. The long-running dispute over Newcastle’s proposed waterfront development was on full boil again. Town councillor Richards, bending towards the Toryism of his ancestry, favoured a scaled-down ver-

196

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

sion of the development in order to preserve the area’s history and spare citizens a hefty tax increase. Opponents on the other side accused him of timidity and provincialism, citing the new Kmart/Dominion shopping development that was about to break ground in Douglastown. Allegations swirled that businessmen like Richards were on council only to protect their own interests. Though Bill insisted that he was protecting the integrity of the old town, he was accused of myopia. When the mayor of Douglastown was commandeered to speak against Bill regarding the benefits of the proposed shopping plaza and marina, Richards felt his old town was doomed, for the mayor was the high school teacher who’d had him expelled. To shield him from these pressures and from the reviews of Blood Ties that were about to start circulating, Peggy proposed another trip. They discussed Victoria, a destination as distant from the Miramichi as Canadian geography allowed. There, she surmised, they might be able to make a new start. Richards relented rather than face the next novel. Lives had been percolating in his mind for months, a major source of the grief he was feeling. Even at this point, he knew it would be his walk through the underworld. Victoria seemed a reasonable, if facile, alternative. Trapper had spoken well of the bars on Esquimalt Road when he had been stationed there in the Navy in the late 1960s. By the fall of 1975, David and Peggy were flying to the other side of the country, ‘gone west,’ he later wrote, ‘to escape from – well, actually from me’ (‘Visit’ 11). The couple stayed on the west coast for almost eight months, travelling between apartments with only their clothes and a card table bought from the Salvation Army to hold Richards’s typewriter. But when the time finally came to write, Richards ‘went out for a walk … the first of many “walks” in which [he] would disappear from home, sometimes for days – drinking’ (‘Drinking’ 114). One set of bad circumstances had replaced another. As one of his characters in similar straits mused in Lives, Victoria became another of ‘a trail of cities that went nowhere’ (77). ‘Music reverberated through the walls’ of their apartments, and hallways were filled with ‘the smell of hashish and bacon rind’ (‘Visit’ 11). One of the first people they met was John Nowlan, Alden’s son, who matched Richards drink for drink and bar for bar in the early weeks of their stay. Their first night together, described in a letter to Ray Fraser, was a harbinger of things to come: The first night we were the cause of a stormy fight in the apartment where we stayed. (Some wanted to be rowdy and others, for our benefit, wished

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 197 them to desist.) We left the apartment late in the morning to stay at another down the hall, and when I returned next afternoon the place was in shambles. Broken lamps, broken windows, blood on the walls and carpets. They were all a little mad with drink and went at it. One luckless bastard got his nose broken, a tooth chipped, and his eyes so blackened and puffed out he couldn’t wink for 3 days. They had to take him to the hospital, and as a party mood would have it the five of them got in a regular old row with another group in the out-patient hall. They all rolled around the floor a while scaring everyone, punching, kicking, and biting until the cops came. (5 October 1975)

More unsettling was the west coast’s left-wing politics. Victoria’s latterday hippies denigrated his Maritimeness, love of hockey, and interest in Irish music. One person’s dismissal of The Dubliners on the basis of their wild Gael blood compelled him to break into an Irish rebel song for spite. When Packet Terri finds himself in similar company at the close of Lives, he concedes that Victoria is a land ‘where a person’s gloating ignorance of his fellow countrymen was considered the height of achievement’ (258). Contrary to what Peggy had hoped, his drinking intensified. He drank more, and more destructively, than before. It did not help that a domestic beer strike on the island made rum one of the few alternatives. He began spending mornings in bars, confiding to fellow drinker Ray Fraser that ‘toward the end of December I suddenly discovered that I’d been drunk or almost drunk every day for seven months (and that’s not counting Spain or before)’ (20 January 1976). Drinking started to dictate what he could and – more important – could not do. He found it impossible to block the time necessary to focus on a novel, so he took to the short story form, beginning what would become the collection Dancers at Night. Fraser’s anthology East of Canada provided the occasion. Richards wrote ‘Ramsey Taylor’ for the anthology in early 1976, finding in short fiction the smaller world and more rapid closure that would move him through this difficult period. When not writing, he promoted his first book through readings and interviews. In one radio station common room another writer recognized him from his picture on the back of Winter. Neither realized at the time that they had been published in the same issue of The Antigonish Review in 1972, though Jack Hodgins, author of the recently released collection of short stories Spit Delaney’s Island, would soon become a close friend. By early 1976, Peggy realized that her experiment in starting anew in

198

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Victoria had failed. The same demons and the same torments had followed them to the west coast. Near the end of their stay, they received a letter from a tenured professor at UNB, one of the elders who had always championed Richards’s rustic bravado. He advised Richards to stop being so ‘male’ now that the social tide had turned towards the female and domestic voice. He explained in the letter that he’d just received a ‘fat’ grant from the Canada Council to defer his sabbatical costs and was ‘finally going to live by his wits, like all true writers’ (letter to Ray Fraser, 2 March 1976). ‘It’d be laughable if he weren’t so out of touch,’ Richards told Fraser, comparing his friend’s $15,000 Canada Council grant to the $1,500 grant he had applied for three months earlier from the Ontario Arts Council. They were living in an apartment with no furniture and struggling to buy groceries on Peggy’s secretarial salary. The dirty green of the shag carpet and disarray of the garbage cans outside their window seemed an answer to the question his old friend’s letter posed. That night Richards went out to The Beaver and spent the week’s grocery money on booze. As difficult as the Victoria experience was, it was not without some important lessons. The most significant was the realization that, exiled or not, Richards the writer was alone – alone not just on the west coast, where an all too familiar smugness towards the working class thrived, but alone in the kind of statement he was making in his art. Journeying to the other side of the country thus became a metaphor for what he perceived as a perpetual state of expulsion: The years from Blood Ties to Lives of Short Duration were years when I suppose I finally managed to make a decision, and the decision was that to be scorned in certain ways in my home town by people who did not read me, was no worse than being applauded in the press by certain critics who did not understand me. It was all the same. I was and have remained pretty much and fairly often on the outside. (‘My Miramichi Trilogy’ 80)

Victoria enabled him to finally understand the extent of this isolation and to begin reconciling himself to the fact that his sensibility made it likely that he would always be alone. Only when this became clear was he able to take his writing forward, leaving the subjective, pastoral world of Winter and Blood Ties for a much sparer analytical mood that would manifest itself in Lives. A more objective prose would allow him to make statements outside the consciousness of character and thereby add his own editorial voice to a narrative that previously he had placed off lim-

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 199

its to himself. When he returned to the river in the spring of 1976, he was ready to experiment with this voice but not at all convinced that he would succeed, nor that he was strong enough to face the next novel. The enclave of writers he joined in Bay du Vin Beach ensured that his transition to Lives would be gradual. With the companionship of Ray and Sharon Fraser, he and Peggy settled into one of the grand old houses on the south shore of Miramichi Bay. The men bought a chainsaw together to cut wood for the winter; Peggy and Sharon made daily trips to the nearby village of Black River Bridge for supplies. As they had done in Spain, the writers wrote during the day and the couples socialized at night, though the pace of their drinking had toned down considerably as a concession to Fraser, who had nearly died in January of kidney failure from alcohol poisoning. Richards curtailed his drinking around his friend, who struggled throughout the winter to stay sober. However, when the reviews of Blood Ties started coming out in June of that year, the reasons for drinking resounded once again. Oberon thought highly enough of the book to take care with its design. They chose it as their one-hundredth title, gave it a striking gold and red jacket, and printed a larger-than-normal first-edition hardcover run. The dust jacket copy hailed it ‘as a major achievement for both writer and publisher.’ Reviews were generally more positive than they had been for Winter, but still mixed. With the exception of UNB’s Michael Taylor, who referred to himself as Richards’s ‘prejudiced biographer’ (129), fewer readers were disturbed by its style. In the first widely distributed assessment, Marian Engel, whose novel Bear would win the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction that year, praised Blood Ties for achieving ‘a kind of brilliance through its slow precision’ (35). The perceived ponderousness of two years earlier was now considered a celebration of ‘the textures of landscape and feeling’ (35). Engel’s mostly positive review, however, was not without the kind of conceit that drove Richards to his cups. Her description of Cecil as Leah’s ‘drunken husband’ and of the MacDurmot family as ‘members of an inbred, depressed community’ (35) was still more evidence of a tendency to view Richards’s treatment of character as anthropological, the result of fieldwork rather than empathy and commiseration. Effectively hived off as specimens, subjects under this designation were safely different, not the frightened, hopeful, loving, confused, adrift creatures that convention had decreed normal in fiction. For a writer whose own novel chronicled the story of

200

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

an intimate relationship between a reclusive woman and a bear, Engel’s presumption of fictional normalcy was tenuous indeed. As much as she praised Blood Ties for its textured and evocative prose, then, her analysis was paradigmatic of how the Canadian reading establishment, those guardians of the canon, perceived him: they looked down on his characters, perhaps without even knowing they did. In Richards’s mind the reasons resonated with the constructed prejudices of region and class. He wrote to Macklem of his exasperation with the high-mindedness of some in the Writer’s Union, complaining that ‘their newsletters alone are enough to make a man become a plumber’ (letter to Macklem, 11 May 1977). Cecil, in particular, became a flashpoint for the enlightened scorn of many of the reviewers who followed Engel, prompting Richards to come to his defence: I defended him ... because not only in the context of the novel was he forgiven by Leah, and finally by himself, but Leah would be the first to defend him to the death – as he would her ... That, in the end, is what Blood Ties [sic] are for. The great idea of noble literature having purgation of emotion, as Mortimer Adler says, is an insistent quality in my defence of people like Cecil, and never seemed to matter to some. But often truth finds itself buried under a trend. (‘My Miramichi Trilogy’ 78)

Elda Cadogan’s review in Richards’s hometown paper (one of the appraisals he watched closely) was also contradictory, though Cadogan, as ever, meant well. Using Buckler’s line to marvel at how ‘so young a man [could] have such profound understanding of human nature’ (7), she welcomed his ‘more compassionate, more tender’ treatment of the ‘untidy lives’ in his midst, calling for more of the ‘rough vitality and raunchy life of the Miramichi.’ Untidy, raunchy lives? Despite opening with Buckler’s language, she was echoing Engel’s bias. She clearly liked the idea of Richards as a realist portrait painter more than she liked (or identified with) the subjects whose portraits he was painting. And she was a child of the same river. Still, her subtext, like Engel’s, implied distanced judgment and ultimately dismissal – she, too, had removed herself from the human commons he was writing about. Newcastle readers of the North Shore Leader who knew that Richards had not come from the underclass, and who were already sensitive about how he might be representing them, concluded from Cadogan’s review that, once again, he was slum-

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 201

ming. The review’s title alone – ‘Raunchy Life of the Miramichi Pulses Vigorously in Blood Ties’ – told people who wanted to condemn him all they needed to know. Two other assessments of Blood Ties were especially wounding because of the high esteem in which Richards held their authors. Nowlan’s comment on the telephone – that the language of the novel was heavy with adjectives – cut deeply (quoted in Garrod 215); so did his annoyance at finding out that Orville was blind in one eye halfway through the novel rather than at the start. If Jack Hodgins’s opinion of the book as a Canadian classic took some of the sting away, Nowlan’s criticism must have felt like betrayal. Not only had the period between Winter and Blood Ties been the high point of the Nowlan/Richards friendship, but the novel was dedicated to Nowlan, the first such dedication to someone other than Peggy. When Nowlan later walked out of a reading of the novel at UNB’s Memorial Hall, finding it difficult to breathe in the auditorium, Richards sensed that their friendship had changed course. Nowlan apologized soon after in a letter, but the statement that his young friend’s success with prose was leading him to re-evaluate his own fiction gave Richards pause. The sentence seemed to impart regret about not being the novelist that Richards was. The joy that might have existed in his elder’s validation was instead extinguished by these mixed signals. Fred Cogswell’s opposite reaction to the novel had similar effect. His review for Canadian Literature was glowing to a fault. He opined that ‘the novel is a classic’ (‘Orchestrated’ 114) and proceeded to praise Richards’s ‘orchestration of time, event, conversation and memory’ (116). Enamoured to the end, he concluded with what would become a loaded question: ‘Where, however, can Richards go from here? More of the same would, I feel, be anti-climax’ (116). Already denuded by the final chapter of Blood Ties, Richards could not help but agree. Where would he go from here? Cogswell’s question on the back of his own difficulties of the previous twelve months forced him to confront the possibility that he had exhausted his stores and might never write again. Perhaps he secretly feared what Cyril Connolly once said: ‘Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising.’ By the time Richards arrived at Bill and Nancy Bauer’s Stanley Street home in Fredericton for the launch party of Blood Ties in September 1976, he had plied himself with sufficient alcohol to face his fear that the evening might be the last such occasion celebrating one of his books. He had almost convinced himself that he was doomed. Bay du Vin was close

202

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

enough to Newcastle for him to know how maligned his reputation had become among those whom he had chosen to represent. Farther from home but still in the region, schools and universities were dropping his name from Canadian and Atlantic literature courses because Winter was out of print. It had become clear that Oberon was more interested in publishing new books, for which they were subsidized, than keeping their backlist in print, for which they were not. Only after multiple appeals to Oberon and a letter-writing campaign initiated by Joe Sherman did Macklem agree to reprint Winter in a paperback edition. The gesture, however, meant that the budget for the anticipated second printing of Blood Ties would be depleted – not good news for Richards, who depended on book sales to live. Still farther afield, the reviews of Blood Ties kept confirming that readers were still not getting what he had intended with character. Were readers dense or was his presentation inadequate? At his worst times, disarmed by alcohol, he believed the latter – that after eleven years of almost full-time writing and two nationally reviewed novels, his talent was, perhaps, a creation of others. Maybe, he pondered, he was merely the up-and-comer whom Ice House elders had decreed as the star – their best chance for notoriety. His next move was clear: If they wanted a wild child from the Miramichi, a home-grown François Villon, he would give them one. The vomit in the upstairs bathroom of the Bauer’s home that night, Jim Stewart’s burning of an Oberon book of poetry in the backyard to protest Macklem’s refusal to publish his own, and the drunken debauchery of Richards, Nowlan, Dorothy Livesay, and John Zanes all seemed appropriately tuned for the occasion. ‘Throughout it all,’ wrote Nowlan to Ray Fraser, absent because he was still on the wagon, ‘Michael Macklem of Oberon stood with his face in disbelief’ (30 September 1976). Richards’s later poem, ‘The Launch of Blood Ties (1976),’ captures his changed feelings towards his Ice House friends: I have listened to that great thunder I have listened in the long evening where heat of electricity runs in the wires and have remembered it all again at the end of a troubled summer. I lived in what was called a backwater Worked even then in isolation. I suppose they loved me as Saul loved David

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 203 and smiled when I came their way, walking in my halting jitterbug fashion Thinking my wife and I did not know. At my book launching, they came as guests of honour – I saw, after a fashion, my friends instigate my downfall for their gratification: men, became mocking buffoons their wives playing ribald tunes, they never understood penny whistle on beer bottles like drunken page boys or kilted squires. I suppose they felt my literary ruin should be acceptable to myself (as one of them) and a life’s work, a life’s work my brave pals, a jest that never mattered. (8)

After six months of heavy drinking and more Saul-like kicking against the pricks, Richards finally admitted to himself that he was in the early stages of his ‘four year struggle’ with Lives (‘Visit’ 13). It was spring of 1977. He and Peggy were back on the river but still drifting, having decided not to return to Bay du Vin. They lived for a while in Bartibog with Peggy’s mother, then moved to Newcastle to stay with Bill and Margaret. If Victoria was the loneliest place he had lived, Newcastle, his hometown, was the worst. A drinker’s paranoia and the scorn of the river’s literati – impossible at this point to separate – followed him everywhere. Threeday drunks became week-long, then more. Former friends and teachers lectured him on who to read and why, trying to dissuade him from his unfashionable themes. There were reprimands about how Miramichiers were affected by his unflattering portrayals. His refusal to acknowledge that they were damaging caused angry arguments at the Black Horse Tavern, which had become his second home. Only a few close friends stuck by him. He would recall later: I had descended pretty much into hell. I would return to my wife and my study in tremors, filled with remorse. I would look at my manuscript in progress and realize I hadn’t put a word to paper in weeks. I would … literally stink of booze. I would remember snatches and snippets of conversation, realizing that I had been somewhere, had spoken about something.

204

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

The words would come at me, pierce my skin like bullets. I would remember railing and ranting at someone – perhaps a friend – and then I would hear that I had threatened someone, or someone had threatened me. (‘Drinking’ 117, 116)

Peggy sat him down one morning with the famous ‘twenty questions.’ Do you lose time from work due to your drinking? Is drinking making your home life unhappy? Is drinking affecting your reputation? Only three yes’s would confirm what they both already knew: that he was an alcoholic. He answered yes to nineteen, only leaving ‘does alcohol cause problems between you and fellow workers?’ Like Ray Fraser’s character, who takes the same test in ‘They Come Here to Die,’ he had no fellow workers. The stories that would make up Dancers at Night (the title suggested by Andrew Seaman two years earlier) were unsatisfying – so replete with characters who felt pinched, Richards told David Butler, that the collection was an experiment gone awry. Even so, a number of Dancers’ six stories (not five as Oberon’s jacket says) were later anthologized. Most were as good as the stories being published by Hugh Hood, John Metcalf, and Leon Rooke at the time. Metcalf, the fastidious custodian of the short form, read the first draft of the collection for Oberon and recommended it for publication with only minor revisions. Formally and thematically, Dancers anticipated Richards’s next big project, Lives of Short Duration, mimicking that novel’s uneven but unified landscape. The non-linearity of a short fiction collection, in which stories are nodes that radiate outward to form a larger constellation, challenged him to construct relational inferences in seemingly unrelated episodes. His choice of the work of a local photographer for the cover reflected this desire. The photo of three youths drinking Hermit wine on the banks of the river at twilight was a metaphor for his nostalgia for the camaraderie of drink at a time when expressions of male fellowship were being subsumed by the isolating pressures of the new postmodern order. (The photo was not used because Oberon felt its imagery was too literally yoked to the title story.) Two of the strongest stories in Dancers hearken back to history, reflecting the larger turn his work was taking towards examining behaviour as historically determined. ‘A Rural Place’ is the story of Janie Bell, a ninety-six-year-old woman who has run away from a nursing home. In her confused state, she crosses the river by ferry, ending up near a bridge

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 205

that a vulgar crew of young workers is demolishing. It is the same bridge she remembers her betrothed building three generations earlier. Like the destruction of the Everett line in the sale of old Annie’s acreage, the destruction of the bridge is made symbolic by the wantonness of its destroyers. But the loss of the structure is not nearly as significant as the fact that the young crew doesn’t know why it was important in the first place. Having lost the capacity to value what is important, they devalue the most important thing of all: the nobility of a frightened old woman needing kindness. Ramsey Taylor’s actions in a story of the same name are equally callous but with more tragic results. A wise old man of the river, Ramsey takes charge of an American sportsman and his son during black salmon season. When he swamps his canoe, he cares for the injured sport in the only way his pride allows; thus he chooses to let him die on wet ground rather than shelter him in the warmth of his estranged brother’s camp. The story’s achievement lies in Richards’s refusal to turn Ramsey’s failure into a morality tale. Instead, in a flat, documentary-like tone, Richards depicts him as a stubbornly proud man who is not strong enough to prevent a death that no one but the reader will know he was complicit in. Kent Thompson and Alden Nowlan heralded the story as one of the best written in the Maritimes in that decade, and Fred Cogswell compared its economy of form to Hemingway’s Michigan stories, later reprinting it in his Atlantic Anthology of fiction (1984). No one knew that the tensions between the old riverman and his inexperienced charges were a fictional recreation of an episode from a year earlier, when Richards and three friends had been part of an ill-fated canoe trip to Napadogan at the headwaters of the Miramichi. In the spring of 1975, before Richards left for Victoria, the four had decided to run the river during spring run-off in a couple of small canoes – their first mistake. They were refused salmon licences in Doaktown because their half-ton (Fred Glover’s) had Alberta plates. Sensing their inexperience, the old proprietor warned them against testing the river in May. They went anyway, their second mistake, swamping one of the canoes between Big and Little Louie, two protruding rocks in the middle of the river. When his canoe bent in two, Richards scrambled onto Little Louie with only his camera in hand. With most of their gear lost to the fast water, they stopped at two camps to dry off, reluctant to break into either, even though shivering and soaked to the skin. Early the next day a large freighter canoe came to shore with the old Doaktown proprietor at the stern. He walked right past the boys to check on the camps, both

206

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

his. When satisfied that neither had been damaged, he offered to help, explaining that if they’d broken in, he’d have shot them all with his .303. He took what was left of their gear and sent them on foot down a logging road to Burnt Hill, nine miles over windfall and puddles. He became their gruff saviour, more interested in his own property than the precariousness of their situation. Richards clearly had not forgotten his callous indifference to their plight when he sat down to write ‘Ramsey Taylor.’ A less subtle brutishness marks ‘We, Who Have Never Suffered’ and ‘Dancers at Night,’ stories in which middle-class concerns mask the more powerful back stories of true victims. ‘Dancers’ displays Richards’s proclivity for redeploying the fictional community of his two previous novels. John Delano, Dwight Everett, Orville MacDurmot, and Dane are brought back, Dane emerging as a recognizable character from Richards’s past. ‘Dancers’ also stands out for its simpler narration; the following passage suggests how far Richards has moved from the focalized, limited point of view of the first two novels: He was deaf to the sound of the wind, the long low moaning as it moved through the shed, the sound of scarred hinges creaking. He only looked at the boy before him who had three teeth missing at the front of his mouth, his face tough and lonely looking, his eyes, for some reason, impressive, watchful – the sound of a slight rumble when he breathed as if he smoked too much or was cold. There wasn’t a scrape of beard on his face yet the contours were adult – old. (138)

Syntax here is sparer and the voice clearly bifurcated; easily discernable is Gérard Genette’s distinction between inward perspective (being solely the one who sees) and outward perspective (being also the one who speaks). Though Lives would not be completely free of the mannered interiorities of consciousness, the short story form had taught Richards that narration could be simpler and at the same time more editorially freighted than Faulkner’s style allowed. That none of the stories in Dancers employs the emotive language or mood phrasings of Faulkner suggests that Richards had shelved him after Blood Ties. Perhaps the comment at the close of Cogswell’s review helped him do so. The most forward-looking stories in Dancers are ‘Kopochus 1825’ and ‘Safe in the Arms,’ the finest of the collection. ‘Kopochus 1825’ is another remythologizing of a moment in Miramichi history – one that Richards would develop more fully in Lives. The story’s epigraphs – Benjamin Marston’s ‘You are a drunken and illiterate lot’ (52), and James

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 207

DeMille’s ‘A Celt is at once gentle and bloodthirsty’ – recall the historical conditions of drunkenness and violence that Richards feels increasingly compelled to explore. In his story, the loutish Hudson Kopochus is waylaid by the Great Fire of 1825 on his way to fight Carmen Rochet, the Rose Bank strongman. He spends the night on a rock with a bear while fire burns around him. The story presages Lives’s investigation of interethnic conflict between the Irish, Scots, and French. While ‘Kopochus’ is memorable as a study for Lives, ‘Safe in the Arms’ is a much finer accomplishment, one that contributes leitmotifs to the next phase of Richards’s work. The Fiddlehead’s fiction editors Ted Colson and Anthony Boxill insisted that it appear in their spring issue, regardless of its forty-page length. The story is skilfully and unashamedly political – the first such story in Richards’s mature oeuvre and the best example of a new freedom of statement that emerged after he advanced beyond the limitations of focalized perspective. Present in the story is the full spectrum of interventionists that will become prominent in subsequent novels – types that constitute what Dennis Duffy called the ‘standard Canadian literary trope [of] the broken white administrator … attempting to uplift his wretched, demoralized Indian charges’ (38). As the idealistic but morally deficient priest at the centre of the story explains, ‘I’m kept pretty busy here settling disputes and arranging recreation and warring with the bootleggers and consulting the social workers’ (‘Safe’ 91). Actually, Father Gordon wars mainly within, attempting to convince himself that his love for a fifteen-year-old Indian girl is more than a weakness of the flesh and that his involvement in the lives of the middle-class cottagers near the reserve is more than crass envy for their comforts and self-delusions. The understated satire of Richards’s descriptions of the cottagers is as delightful as it will be ten years later in Nights: ‘Mrs. Ripley finished her tea and looked out over her front lawn which had been cut the day before. There was a smell of insecticide that rose in the sweltering white air from the manicured hedges; and along the borders of the cottage porch wild rhubarb grew and tangled vines, and now and then a boreal chickadee flitted across the grass or chirped from the shaded bushes’ (‘Safe’ 91). Beyond this plastic world an Indian drunk on wine is planning to burn down Father Gordon’s church while the holy man figures out how best to seduce the young Indian girl. The priest’s sins are made poignant by the fact that none of the gentry suspect his motives and none of the Indians are powerful enough to confront him. Instead, the powerless self-destruct as the powerful heap their scorn on the people whose land they inhabit, whose poached grilse they buy with-

208

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

out forethought, and whose girls their sons ridicule and rape. None of these connections are neatly made, mind you. Richards simply writes the story as the collision of the Indians, the cottagers, and the priest, leaving the solution, said one reviewer, ‘like all good literature [does,] to the reader’ (Watling B3). When the story flashes back to the object of Father Gordon’s lusts – the eight-year-old Sara confessing that she lied to her father about unspeakable things – we have all the evidence necessary to form a conclusion. Father Gordon, we infer, is a fallen priest, his strong mind tormented by a weak body that is corrupted further by institutional malice: ‘the more he prayed the worse he was’ (117). ‘Safe in the Arms’ queries social privilege and power to determine the extent to which bigotry is both a structural condition and a moral one. The social politics of this query thrust Richards into the next phase of his work; at the same time, the repugnance of those politics forced him to contend with a certain ubiquity of loss. Unlike Winter, where there was at least the possibility of hope in the defiance of John, none of the stories in Dancers end hopefully. Hudson Kopochus is beaten by Carmen Rochet; Father Gordon is unchallenged in his quest to take Sara into his clutches; and Dane, in the collection’s final story, is put in handcuffs and beaten by police. The powerful, it seems, have taken control. It is their world now, the Miramichi of Ceril Brown and the other small-time hustler-entrepreneurs who will populate Lives. The reviews that appeared after the collection’s release in April 1978 must have seemed a metaphor for this turn towards animus. Former supporter Michael O. Nowlan bristled at the ‘overkill of four-letter words’ (1978, 92), and the Globe and Mail’s Dennis Duffy concluded that with practice Richards ‘may quite possibly reach the stride of [Alistair] McLeod [sic]’ (38). To reinforce the point that ‘Richards has not mastered a way of closely presenting his people,’ Duffy compared the stories in Dancers to Ray Fraser’s ‘shapeless stories’ and ‘far from outstanding [humour]’ in The Black Horse Tavern. If Fraser’s technique was that bad, and Richards’s was worse, what was the point of reading either? As a novelist, Richards had been endlessly compared to Buckler and Faulkner. As a short story writer, he was now being compared to Fraser and MacLeod. And always he was the undercard, always promising and worth watching but never quite satisfactory. The poor reviews and despondency over his work were but a prelude to the unhappy events that followed. In October, a few weeks after the launch party for Blood Ties, Margaret was admitted to the Chalmers Hos-

Ties of Friendship and of Blood 209

pital in Fredericton for what she was told would be routine abdominal adhesion surgery. It turned out to be much more when a doctor nicked her bowel without noticing during the procedure. By November, something clearly was wrong. Stomach cramps were doubling her over with pain. She saw Newcastle doctors, but in deference to their authority, she didn’t insist that they readmit her. Her Protestant stoicism notwithstanding, when she could no longer endure the pain, she returned to Fredericton for a consult, now in critical condition. When the surgeon realized what he had done, she was flown to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal for emergency surgery. For the family, the episode was eerily reminiscent of William Sr being loaded onto a Montreal-bound train for urgent insulin procedures. With Margaret’s death on 13 January, the outcome was similar as well. She was not yet sixty. Her mother Mina Pratt had lived to be 97. David, still largely exiled from his father, was devastated, shocked, bewildered, and angry. It was Margaret who had raised him, who had worried him into wellness after the fall she never forgave herself for, who had enlisted the help of teachers to keep him on track, who had welcomed Peggy without reservation. It was Margaret who had bought wedding gifts for his friends when there was no invitation, who had smoothed things over with Bill when reports of her son’s antics reached home. And it was Margaret and the Sillarsville Adams about whom he most often and affectionately wrote. In his grief, he memorialized her as the woman who smiled when her heart was broken. She died needlessly, he wrote in a poem, victim to ‘another botched operation / by a cursory ill-bred doctor’ (‘November 1977’ 34). He couldn’t get out of his head the memory of her suffering obediently, refusing to challenge or bother her doctors. Nor could he expunge the image of her in a hospital bed wanting to be released from indignities so she could die at home. The words of a tavern goer at the close of ‘We, Who Have Never Suffered’ supply what might have been his own thoughts at the time: ‘“I believe in nothin anymore – ya understand that, especially kindness or whatever I believe in nothing – I bet ya’d thought it would just pass over or somethin, but I believe in fuck all now”’ (87). With his mother gone – in his mind, butchered by doctors – and most of the long ‘four-year struggle’ with Lives still ahead of him, the early months of 1978 were the bleakest days yet in a string of unhappy years.

7 ‘The great unwholesome anonymity of North America’: Lives to AA

To wake in the night in the midst of a shuddering hangover when the dismal past threatens you, when faces form in slow motion before you, so every particle of their flesh breathes misery. Lives (233)

He hated this age – it was this age, it made enemies of people, they were afraid to show their feelings – to be a captain, a saint, a martyr, a rogue. They were afraid of being laughed at. ‘In This Age of Chess’ (27)

Perhaps I drank to forget it. River (323)

The death of his mother, who had been his staunchest supporter, forced Richards to take stock of himself. He struggled to do this while sober, quitting the bottle for days at a time then lapsing into long binges. Friends would see him sitting in the graveyard looking out to the river. When they doubled back to talk, he’d be gone. Peggy’s witticism that ‘the only time he was happy was on the second day of a three-day drunk’ (quoted in Furlong and Kubaki) was doleful at best. His literary progress, though significant, continued to be hampered by a reception that cast him as unschooled and vulgar, as a dark romancer of the working class. In some ways, neglect would have been less damaging to the fragile sense of his own talent. He battled against himself not to believe the chorus lines of the self-appointed. He battled also to suppress the long-held feeling that he was the failure from Newcastle who couldn’t do anything but write

Lives to AA 211

about the company of drunks. Only many years later could one of his characters observe that the same town ‘did not wish greatness from its citizens. It secretly wished mediocrity’ (Meager Fortune 31). Those closest to him observed his suffering and tried to help. Cogswell’s angry letter to the Globe and Mail in early 1978 vindicated Richards’s talent by placing some of the blame for his troubles on the Canadian literary establishment. ‘Fashionable Canadian literature,’ he wrote, ‘is encouraged to deal either with trendy city themes or wilderness Gothic. In both these areas, writers from the Atlantic provinces are naturally at a disadvantage’ (‘Until Time’ 6). Cogswell’s letter pulled no punches in criticizing the professional schoolmen of the reviewer caste whose capitulation to ‘the present trends in literature has deprived [Maritime writers] of the kind of moral support that might have helped them to make their literature a manifestation of their own unique personality’ (6). As an example of capitulation, Cogswell cited the fact that Engel’s Bear won the Governor General’s Award over Blood Ties. (He didn’t mention that Blood Ties hadn’t been nominated.) ‘What is wrong with the kind of trendiness that is so manifest at the moment,’ he concluded, ‘is that it makes literature and literary values depend not on fixed standards of workmanship but … on the degree of emphasis the writer puts upon such temporary “issues” as ecology, women’s lib, or the quest for a national identity’ (6). Engel had the formula, in other words, and Richards merely the talent. Alden Nowlan offered similar succor by making Richards the subject of his weekend column. The province’s most popular columnist, he knew that his description of Richards as ‘quite possibly the most richlygifted young novelist in Canada’ (‘He Sees A Lot’ 7) would get a wide airing among the New Brunswick literati, who were increasingly championing the fashionable causes identified by Cogswell. ‘Richards is that refreshing rarity,’ he wrote, ‘a young writer who doesn’t keep endlessly chanting, Me! Me! Me! … In short, he’s a bloody fine writer, whose books deserve to be more widely read in his native province’ (7). Nowlan addressed, finally, the suggestion that Richards wrote bad things about his people by describing Richards’s territory as ‘the country of his heart’ and its ‘obdurate, wistful people’ as those ‘whom he loves.’ However much Richards must have appreciated the endorsements, the material conditions of his existence bespoke another reality. Despite a $35 million upgrade to the Newcastle Pulp & Paper mill and millions more promised for a maximum-security prison at Renous, he and Peggy were barely surviving. They lived that year on Peggy’s part-time work at

212

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Northwood Panelboard in Bushville and his $1,000 grant from the Ontario Arts Council. Summer jobs at the family’s Bushville Drive-In bought groceries. When Oberon launched Dancers along with three other books at a scaled-down wine and cheese reception in late September 1978 (five months after the release), Richards finally understood that his publisher didn’t have the means to get him the money he needed to live comfortably. Though Dancers had been released in April, there were no copies in New Brunswick for most of the summer. Macklem’s earlier caution ‘to keep the risks to the point where we can afford them’ (Letter to DAR 8 May 1977) meant that Winter was out of print and that the inventory of Blood Ties was diminishing even while professors were adding the book to their reading lists. Letters to Macklem registered his frustration, first with mild exhortations – ‘Winter and Ties [sic] could be in pocket book – its not unthinkable’ (n.d. [Spring 1978?]) – and then with frustration: From a writers [sic] point of view, I who’ve been writing 8 years cannot support myself. I’ve given you 4 books, three of them quite important. Last year at a conference in Halifax I gave a reading where people from B.C. and the prarie’s [sic] were asking why and hell hadn’t they heard of me. I don’t know ... its [sic] not the money (of course its the money – the 950 I’ll get is practically already owed ...) as it is everything. I’m tired of the country – I’m tired of Canada, and how damn smug it is. I’m tired of writing my guts out and not being read. (Letter to Macklem n.d. [Spring 1981?])

After driving to Fredericton for the launch, David and Peggy sold their car, moved in with Bill, and began taking tickets at the theatre to pay the bills, and this when the family’s business had fallen on such hard times that Bill was preparing to sell the family cottage to make ends meet. When added to the royalties from the first two novels and an advance of $200 for Dancers, the income from all sources brought less than $6,000 into the Richards household in 1978. The Ontario Arts Council’s decision that year to restrict funding for non-resident artists meant that things would get worse. Only 10 per cent of Oberon’s $18,000 grant would be available for writers outside the province, meaning that Richards had to share $1,800 with every non-Ontarian that Oberon published (Macklem gave him the bulk of this money, $1,000). The final humiliation came with the Canada Council’s suggestion that he not bother applying for an A grant because it might jeopardize his chances at a B. He and Peggy were poor, without a car or apartment of their own, contractually bound to a tight-fisted publisher whose grant distribution formula had been

Lives to AA 213

rewritten, terminally in the B pool of subsidized writers, and dependent on a weakening family business to pay the bills. Knowing family history as he did, Richards must have imagined himself in as uncomfortable a predicament as Bill had faced when he returned from Hamilton to join his mother in 1948. The difference in 1978 was that, though the Uptown and the Midway Drive-In were still running, there was only a shred of Janie’s empire left. As was now his habit, Richards drank to forget these troubles. The romance of drinking to legitimize his art was long over, however. He now drank like Malcolm Lowry, who went for the bottle because ‘he had to: from one source or another, he had acquired, by the age of eighteen, enough guilt … and resentment and insecurity to have made it almost impossible for him to be anything but an alcoholic’ (Day 98). Richards’s own guilt and insecurities, his sense of personal failure, his quarrels and resentments, made him equally vulnerable to the refuge of drink. The culture of drinking on the Miramichi made it easy to indulge. The mixed social drinking of the middle classes that we know today did not exist in the 1970s. Rather, carried over from pioneer times, drinking on the river was ritualized business. Men drank separately from women, and they rarely drank at home, many tipping the bottle, as Jack London once observed, because of the pressures men feel to drink. The Black Horse Tavern, Newcastle’s most celebrated beer hall and one of the oldest in the province, disallowed women into the 1970s. When required by law to admit them, its owners refused to build a separate washroom, forcing women to use the facilities across the street or upstairs at the Miramichi Hotel. Against all the changes happening outside its doors – the same changes that were dismissive of Richards – the Black Horse fought doggedly to preserve its reputation as a working men’s tavern where patrons ordered a tray of Moosehead draft and a pickled egg from apron-clad waiters who enjoyed the status of Mafia dons. Beer cost three draft for a dollar plus a ten-cent tip. There was no jukebox, no entertainment, and no kitchen. One entered in order to drink in half-darkness and talk loudly in the company of men. Besides Richards’s group, two crowds predominated at the tavern: the old male residents (mostly veterans) from the Miramichi Hotel, and shift workers from the mills, docks, and mines. When Alden Nowlan visited, he observed that Richards was inseparable from the place, perhaps ‘tallyman in a sawmill or the fellow whose job it is to keep a record of how much gravel is being trucked away from the pit’ (1980, 43). From his

214

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

own chilly reception, Nowlan also noted that the place was essentially a closed shop. When a stranger entered on a layover from the bus station nearby, absolute silence confronted him. Familiarity, as respect, was earned, sometimes taking years. The process, mused Richards, allowed for an uncanny knowledge of one’s peers: ‘Many of my friends … can tell by a person’s accent whether he is from up river, … the sou’east or the nor’west branch, or whether he’s from down river or across the river or from Nelson … [Another friend] can tell where a person’s from by the way he walks’ (quoted in Milner 4–5). The storied tavern became Richards’s second home. Giles Kenny, Peter Baker, Trapper Newman, Beep Parks, Bruce ‘The Moose’ Wallace, and other friends from The Rocks joined him at a corner table on the river side, their company confirming Dylan Thomas’s observation that a man’s best friends are those of his youth. Everyone used Copenhagen snuff except Richards, who chewed and spit Red Man tobacco into a bottle – an oddity even at the Black Horse. When Fredericton acquaintances came to Newcastle, they met him at the tavern. As Glenn Black recalls, talk was the main attraction of these gatherings: The subjects would go around and around the table. ‘How is your bike working’? ‘Did you know so and so was home’? We bonded as characters facing situations together. We never cried in our beer or bemoaned any great injustice to us. The only problem we discussed regularly was that there weren’t any common men left anymore. By common men we meant people with a well-developed work ethic, and a moral and ethical streak. To us, the common man was quite extraordinary, more than the presumably extraordinary man because that man has the crutches of power or wealth or fame, whereas the common man has to go through life without any of those advantages. And there is, of course, more courage involved in having to face something without backing. We were cynical in that way, and idealistic. The only establishment we respected was the moral one passed down. Morality was always at the back of our discussions. (interview with author, December 1999)

Richards would rise at noon after writing late into the night and go straight to the tavern, as he had done in Victoria. After nine or ten p.m., he’d move with the crowd to the Hi-Tide for the hard liquor upstairs (the Black Horse served only beer), sometimes borrowing a 40-ouncer from the bartender at closing. Since Trapper was the bouncer there, that little negotiation was easy – and always replaced, for the boys never bit

Lives to AA 215

the hand that fed. Their libation of choice was Captain Morgan black rum, drank ‘down and dirty’ as they called it. Richards and Beep Parks (to whom Lives is dedicated) sat through many a night ‘with the Captain’ waiting for the liquor store to open so that they could cut their thirst with a quart of beer. They wouldn’t retire until every bottle was empty; to do otherwise would have been to let the night defeat them. For all the doggedness of this drinking, Richards was never the undignified drunk that Milton Acorn had become. His drinking was always more conspicuous than his drunkenness, his tolerances allowing sufficient alertness to events that few details escaped his recall. From the late 1970s forward, these events begin appearing in his work. One day, after switching from beer to tequila, his friend Bruce Wallace began to turn orange. The more he drank, the oranger he turned – an episode recalled humorously in Lives (53). Another day, four lads came into the tavern from the first Friday the 13th movie aiming to confront Richards about the violence of his characters. He turned the tables on them by pointing out the violence of slasher films, which was so evident in the genre’s fear of sexuality and genuine emotion. They were so disarmed by the rapidity of his analysis that they left. Richards revisited that exchange nine years later in the essay ‘Stag Films, Teen Movies.’ On more regular occasions, local toughs from outlying areas came looking to unseat Trapper or another of the Newman brothers as Newcastle’s heavyweight champions. None succeeded, yet their attempts to bully powerful, vulnerable men are recollected often in Richards’s later work. Richards’s habit of incorporating his life and experiences into his work reflected his continuing emphasis on character. Like Jung, he believed that insight into the condition of others radiated outward from the starting point of self-knowledge, as he explained to Mark Tunney: ‘Every character is me. The drunks, the brawlers, the lonely. All of them. I’m explaining my own mind … I’ve a great deal of compassion for my characters [as a result]. What they’ve done; I’ve done. What they’ve said; I’ve said. What they’ve thought; I’ve thought. What they’ve felt; I’ve felt. I’ve been as generous and as cruel’ (quoted in Tunney ‘Hometown’ 5). Echoing the Roman poet Terence, who said ‘I am human and nothing human is foreign to me,’ this avenue to understanding did not make Richards’s writing less fictional but did make it more intimate in the knowledge of triumph and pain. When writing required periods of sobriety (Richards, unlike Faulkner, never wrote when drunk), he chain-drank buckets of tea and hid bottles of rum for later consumption. Friends who helped him move from

216

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Ritchie Avenue to an apartment in front of Brunswick Oxygen on the King George Highway uncovered a dozen bottles in varying stages of fill. They also recalled how his personality was changing. He was often brooding and sullen, and his black moods brought on long bouts of selfabsorption during which he binged reclusively or travelled with strangers, occasionally, like Little Simon, ‘waking up in strange rooms at five in the morning … with no means to get back home’ (Lives 265). He began keeping company with murderers and he also began using cocaine. He was becoming increasingly embittered by his drunks but unable to put an end to them. He would appear at the tavern dishevelled after three or four days and bicker or shrug, only incidentally participating in discussion. Another conversation, subterranean, was clearly preoccupying him. Reminders of ‘old days’ and happy drunks were replaced, as they would be for his alcoholic characters, with ‘wonder at eleven-thirty in the morning where the rest of the day was going to come from, or how to get it to go away’ (River 305). Alcohol had once been the lubricant that enabled him to open up to his friends; now it fuelled his antisocial behaviour. The more he got into Lives, the more drinking became an endurance sport that helped him fail. Lives was composed during periods of sobriety followed by days of inebriation. Only sickness or voluntary trips to detox ended the binges and let him return to the space of the novel, where he would write copiously, compulsively, to keep the next binge at bay. Writing was the tenuous grip on life that drinking continually tried to extinguish. Now he wrote, however, with a loaded shotgun by his side. While the struggle to produce Lives in the midst of this battle for sobriety was arduous to endure, it was, for Peggy, torturous to observe. ‘I was drinking so I would not have to write what I knew I must,’ he later admitted. ‘And if I did write what I knew I must, then most of the people whose friendships and opinions I valued would almost certainly turn away from me’ (God Is 161). The novel’s structure partly reflects these conditions of creation; however, its form is far more complex than ‘the relentless pursuit of random associations’ that led Andrew Seaman to wonder whether ‘the author is capable of concentration’ (4). Manuscript evidence suggests that the scope of Lives was so ambitious as originally envisioned – as polyphonous as Lowry’s Under the Volcano, its structural antecedent – that Richards struggled through one false start and two discarded drafts while building the architecture that the work’s historical sweep demanded. Covering the period from 1889 to 1980, it encompasses five generations

Lives to AA 217

interlinked by a series of events precipitated by a murder – events that none can entirely escape. In a letter to Macklem (n.d. [Summer 1987?]), Richards introduced the project as ‘not a novel but an accumulation of events seen almost totally in time past.’ When Bob Gibbs saw its first parts he exclaimed that Richards’s ambition was no less than to create a world in full – historical and three-dimensioned. What made the initial orchestration so difficult was his attempt to summon that more distanced omniscient voice that would allow him to speak through character. Given what critics had said about his ‘impeded’ forms (Bauer 1980, 31), not to mention Cogswell’s earlier caution that ‘more of the same [as Blood Ties] would … be anti-climax’ (116), he felt he had to make the attempt, even if he didn’t know how. Likening himself to a carpenter with new tools, he wrote himself into the project, trusting that the process would point the way. He worked for months on the story of the Grattens, a poor Irish family that rises to respectability on the river during the last of the Battle of the Boyne parades (Orangemen marched every July in Newcastle until the 1930s). Daryll Gratten is a Dickensian waif who makes his pennies shining Beaverbrook’s shoes before becoming wealthy himself, then teeters on the edge of ruin, saved only by his wife. The direction, which produced almost four hundred pages, proved to be a colossal false start. The tone seemed sterile, lacking feeling for the clannishness he wanted to convey. He drove to the dump with a bottle of rum and set the manuscript on fire, convinced as it burned that he was losing his mind. He couldn’t see how the work began or ended or where it was going, and he couldn’t get its pieces to cohere. Yet he had to continue. He started again, this time giving even more licence to authorial statement. After the first failure, he must have felt he had nothing to lose. If his characters couldn’t convince readers of their worth, he himself would have to explain the full dimension of their lives. He would do so in a layered saga that showed, with ‘a wide-angle lens’ (Keefer Under 174), the manifold historical conditions out of which community, family, myth, and social milieu emerged. He would call his three-part story Lives of Short Duration. As he explained to his publisher in late spring 1978, the new project would be leviathanic: The work covers 1897-1977 and it’ll be written in three volumes each with three books. Each volume will be apr. 550 pgs in length, and I’d like to publish each volume separately. For a couple of reasons. First I think I’d attract a larger audience that way and secondly publishing a 1700 pg book is a bit

218

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

out. Thirdly each volume (I hope) will be contained. The first Volume ends in 1933 ... So really (if you decide to stick with me and me with you) you’ll God willing have three publishable books by me over the next seven years. (Letter to Macklem nd [June 1978?])

Between 1978 and 1979 he worked on two drafts of this project, eventually scrapping both because his epic world had become grossly overpopulated. ‘It had 501 characters in it,’ he told Nancy Bauer (1980, 48), explaining that he felt besieged by their competing desires to be heard. Moreover, too much historical range was making the structure untenable. He communicated to Macklem his desperation with the project, that after three tries and hundreds of discarded pages he still had no form that could adequately contain his story. Macklem’s response didn’t help; indeed, his choice of metaphor to frame the struggle compounded the problem. ‘There’s so much riding on this one,’ he wrote. ‘It’s like Bobby Hull coming back to the NHL.’ Clearly, Macklem knew more about Richards’s rabid love of hockey than about the sorry state of Hull’s physical conditioning when he returned to the Hartford Whalers (letter to DAR, 9 December 1979). Richards didn’t have to be reminded of his own precarious physical and mental state. Macklem’s impatience grew until late 1980, when he stated flatly that ‘I’ve waited quite a while for a new book from you and there’s no use pretending that it’s a matter of ordinary importance’ (letter to DAR, 2 December 1980). Indeed it wasn’t, for his reputation was at stake. He had whispered to buyers that another Richards novel was forthcoming, this one epochal. He needed a manuscript. Richards not only felt pressured to produce something, but pressured to complete a project that had double jeopardy stamped all over it. Provocation finally emboldened him, the desire to create a ‘very tough [and] hard hitting’ work guaranteed to have ‘critics … telling constipated Canadians how insensitive I am’ (letter to Macklem, n.d. [January–February 1979?]). Obviously there had been a change. He was no longer writing in the manner of the Gospel According to John (as the beloved disciple of the river) but as an angry and cynical old prophet in the tone of the Book of Jeremiah. Much of his lyricism had gone. Despite the difficulties, he was further along than he could have known at the time of his letter to Macklem, for his central characters had emerged from the draft process. They were three generations of the Terri family: Old Simon, the patriarch, his son George, and George’s children Little Simon, Lois, and Packet. An earlier and current generation

Lives to AA 219

(Old Simon’s father and Lois’s children) had also materialized. George’s distraught handling of ‘The Death of Little Simon,’ as the first section was originally called, was to be the start, the Terri family’s disarray a metaphor for an entire people colonized and alienated by change. George’s burning of the bridge in a pique of distress in the opening scene would be symbolic of the hopelessness of their condition – and reminiscent of their author’s flaming early manuscript at the dump. The fire would be infernal: not merely incendiary or purgatorial but apocalyptic. It would be hell’s fire. Lives would be the start of Richards’s descent into the underworld. For the next fifteen months he narrowed his treatment to these three generations while keeping the larger aims of the historical project in focus. His intention was to move readers away from a preoccupation with character deficit towards the universal and mitigating law of historical recurrence: that events of the past are repeated in the present not because past circumstances narrow probabilities, but because human nature is constant across time. The effort required careful condensation so that characters and events would be understood in historical time but recognized as constituents of an elongated present. Only when so recognized, he surmised, would localism cease to be the delimiting feature by which characters are judged. The novel, then, would transliterate clan and tribe, past and present, event and echo, through an array of nonlinear shifts in perspective and time. In sheer audacity it would be the most ambitious undertaking he had yet attempted – and certainly the most personal. The novel would exhibit his Miramichi in ways historically broader, socially more complete, and spiritually darker than in his previous work. Four main sections, each encroaching on the others but each using a different centre of consciousness, would stage this historical drama of recurrence: Graduation, Halloween, Graduation, and Victoria. The first section takes the reader through the alcohol-crazed thoughts of George Terri, who is celebrating his daughter’s $50,000 Atlantic Loto win while lamenting his father’s death, one son’s suicide, and another son’s absence. Temporal clues suggest a May–June 1980 date. The next section goes back in time six months to the previous Halloween, when Old Simon and Rance (of Blood Ties) are in hospital together. The clash of Rance’s indelicacies with cascading memories of changes and injustices on the river lead the eighty-two-year-old illiterate Simon to escape managed care. He later dies in the woods, presumably at peace, covered like Buckler’s David by layer upon layer of snow. The third section, the sec-

220

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

ond Graduation section, revisits the night of George Terri’s bridge-burning debauchery, but from the perspective of a different cast of characters on the other side of the river. Old Simon’s half-brother Lester Murphy, who took a bullet for George in the war, is the subject around whom that narrative moves. Throughout the section, Lester’s mind is troubled by a court appointment the next day on arson and fraud charges. His death in a car accident ends the section. The final section is the most complex. It shifts between the time of Old Simon’s death on Halloween (the same night Packet Terri leaves for Victoria) and the events of the immediate and distant past that lead to Packet’s psychic trauma at the end of the novel. The novel’s structural complexity met historiography head on, exposing the fact that the social narrative we accept as ordered, seamless, and evolved is only such by omission and coercion. This challenge to the record advanced Richards’s view that attitudes towards what constituted ‘the human’ had been changing rapidly in the past decade, a result of unchecked increases in social bifurcation, class intolerance, and institutionalized intervention in the lives of ‘marginal’ people. In short, the Miramichi of Hugh John Flemming was becoming the Miramichi of Frank McKenna. And in the process, the river’s past, to paraphrase Harold Pinter, was becoming another country. As society vaulted forward on a progressive agenda that created a new middle class, it was creating a new underclass among the long established. The sanctioned grab at fast money and quick solutions overshadowed the endurance and nobility of this latter group, the Maufats and Irenes of Blood Ties, the last of the self-reliant. The second- and third-generation Terris of Lives are that underclass, lost and cynical by contrast, living by the leavings of a powerful new haut monde that has no knowledge of – or interest in knowing about – the disasters its comforts perpetuate on others. The only promise for the dispossessed in the new world is a lottery win – though Lois’s $50,000 jackpot buys little more than trinkets and a string of champagne breakfasts – or a frantic scramble into the consolations of the middle class, where requirement for entry is the denial of one’s past. Corroded by these changes, the fictional Miramichi of Lives is a place without much compassion. The new consensus ‘along the roadway’ is that ‘no matter how many priests came in to civilize the bastards, [the Indians] would always be [murderers]’ (97), the French would always live with swarms of flies in bogs, Halifax would always be full of ‘niggers’ (198), and jobs would never again be plentiful, for as George asks: ‘[H]ow in cocksucker can we get jobs in this country if they’re lettin

Lives to AA 221

in those no-nourished Pakistanis and Cambodian Jiggiboos?’ (8), ‘the yellow infected slant eyes’ (32). George is the soulless progeny of the new world’s guilt and dismissal. Once the son of a respected river guide who ‘would walk up to 30 miles a day and prepare bedding for his sport’ (138), he must now live in a world where ‘guide[s] while cooking their first feed of salmon [have] friends … deliver a Big Mac with onions and pickles’ (153). Once owner of the Hamburger Palace, he is forced out of business by the modern enterprise of the new middle class. Left to himself in the swamp of ridicule and sanctimony – a television fantasy land where ‘Anne Murray … [wags] her finger at him, telling him of the [starving] bodies overseas’ (122) – he is terrified and gone mad on drink. He acts out in ways that the dissolute condition of his existence dictates, ways – and here is the key point – that are expected of him. He sodomizes Mammie, one of the local winos, with a statue of the Virgin Mary, burns people out, awakens others with shotgun blasts in the night, and dunks his children’s heads in the toilet in cowardly deference to the nouveaux riches, gladly playing the stooge to Ceril Brown: ‘That’ll teach [you kids] some respect when Ceril and I are on the telephone talking business – eh Ceril, that’ll teach them some respect’ (49). George has been robbed of the resources that would allow him to confront the world on his own, a lack that makes him want ‘to hit something to try and make it proper’ (35). The once stabilizing authority of traditional roles and certainties has been replaced in his world by a transient wealth and celebrity that make him their puppet. Without ‘a moon or stars to follow’ (95), he is the product of Richards’s long-held belief that ‘the individual is everything or the world is nothing’ (‘My Miramichi Trilogy’ 84). But George proves that the inverse is also true: that when the world has collapsed, so does the individual. The violence of individuals in Richards’s work thus always begs the larger social question. Rance is another hollow shell whose overdetermined comic crudity masks an absence of ground: ‘He’d say cunt at least 50 times a day. “Cunt,” he’d say. “There’s good cunt, eh Simon?” “Lookit the cunt on that, eh Simon?”’ (66). His language is not rhetorically inventive like Old Simon’s; instead it desecrates, like George’s. Early in the novel, he shares with Old Simon one of the secrets of his ex-father-in-law’s undertaking profession: ‘I found out a few things – when we drained the blood out of a girl – say fifteen or whatever – nice pussy and everything, eh – the old man would bend over her and examine her, and then he’d pump her tits to get the blood out’ (63). Rance’s indecencies are those of a person unhinged from human connection and thus from ethical commitments.

222

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Like the strippers in Blood Ties, ‘their eyes so damaged and remote as not to be affixed to any time or place’ (92), he represents the generation in Lives that has become déraciné by a mass culture from away that has seduced people into reaching for the ephemeral so that they lose their hold on stable continuities and standards of conduct from the past. Rance’s powerlessness to oppose ‘the great unwholesome anonymity of North America’ (254) is the deeper tragedy that separates him from his fellow patient Old Simon. He and his generation live in ‘Ceril Brown’s world now’ (158), a world of men who wear ‘jogging-suit[s] … and fulllength fur coats’ (14), whose hands are ‘plump and white’ (14), whose wives get facelifts in upper New York State. The Rances of this new world live by the motto ‘I don’t give a fuck fer nothing – never did, never will’ (60). Their anger is destructive and is turned inward as often as out. The anomie to which he and George succumb is a symptom of their society’s complete surrender to cultural colonization. According to sociologist Ephriam Mizruchi, this kind of malaise is structural, ‘most often the disordered condition of a society that possess[es] a weak conscious collective … If there are no shared rules or norms of conduct in a community, or if the goals defined by these rules are not attainable … then men suffer … feeling[s] of pointlessness’ (48). Thwarted in their attempts to act in accordance with normative goals – mainly because few such goals exist anymore – George and Rance resort to antisocial behaviours. Over time, they give up on ambition, believing it to be futile. Because they start with nothing, they expect to amount to nothing, thus fulfilling precisely the role scripted for them by those who wish them to be nothing. George’s party, Little Simon’s death, and Packet’s breakdown inhabit a fictional present so encrusted with insinuations of memory that, as Seaman observes, ‘the effect of the novel, its real structure, is cumulative rather than explicit’ (4, italics added). Thus the end of the novel recalls the beginning, when Packet and ‘his new-found Indian woman, Emma Jane Ward’ (23), are flying back to the river for the funeral of Little Simon. The technique is not exactly cycling – the narrative doesn’t turn back to revisit events – but juxtaposition. As an organic history, the novel’s moments and events pulse in an elongated present that contains both subjective and objective time. Its subjective time is perceptual, obeying universal orders of succession (i.e., time moves forward or back along the horizontal planes that individuals perceive), while its objective time is conceptual (i.e., it includes all periods of time, stacked one atop the oth-

Lives to AA 223

er, that the perceptual, being rational, normally separates). Usually associated with Einstein’s theories of relative measure, conceptual time (or ‘space time’) is determined by the relations among events in ‘real’ time and space. As such, it is changeless, more the unruly and indeterminate time of memory than the predictable time of the watchpiece. Michael MacDonald’s contention that Lives is ‘the most complex novel of the twentieth-century in Canada’ (28) acknowledges this, as the novel’s formal complexity is its greatest achievement. The key word Seaman uses above is ‘effect.’ It is as effect that Lives was cast, and it is as effect that readers receive it. Richards’s critical reading of Dostoevsky and Faulkner in his early twenties had led him to experiment with the formalist dimensions of estrangement, the technique by which the familiar is made to resonate with so much fidelity to the actual that it is perceived as strange – so strange, in Richards’s case, that critics bristled against its verisimilitude. Winter and Blood Ties were such enactments: stridently evocative recreations of the commonplace. Their achievement was in constructing the familiar as consciousness normally receives it. By the time he began thinking about Lives, Richards’s critical reading had shifted to Yeats, Joyce, and Lowry and their more ‘occult’ models. Though it is normally conceded that Yeats and Joyce perfected their affective conveyances through Pound’s influence, Pound’s own peculiar telegraphic style came from the French Symbolists, a primary reason for his move from London to Paris in 1921. In fact, Pound’s offer to publish Joyce’s ‘I Hear an Army’ in the anthology Des Imagistes owed more to the symboliste resonance he heard in the poem than to Yeats’s lobbying on his countryman’s behalf. While it is unlikely that Richards knew much about the network of affiliations that carried the Symbolists’ avant-garde through Pound to Yeats, Joyce, and then Lowry in the early years of the century, his close reading of these writers brought him enough distilled Symbolist technique to want to track down its sources. His subject matter must also have seemed to demand it. His Miramichi subjects were, after all, the folk Irish of Yeats’s Celtic twilight, the ‘pioneers who’d come from Scotland/Ireland with leprous settlers in the holds of their ships … to the place that was to become Ireland on one side [Chatham], Scotland on the other [Newcastle]’ (Lives 152). Repeated reference in Lives to John Synge’s Riders to the Sea provides an important clue to the sources of this new form. Synge, like Pound and Joyce, went to Paris to seek out the Symbolist style. The lives and poetics of the Symbolists proved to be fertile ground for a young writer seeking a new direction while battling the demons

224

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

of alcohol and incredulity. Richards discovered in each of the French writers qualities he admired – Baudelaire’s poverty and discovery of Poe, another malfamé; Rimbaud’s early genius (his life’s work done by twenty-one, then self-exile in travel); Mallarmé’s Tuesday nights around the literary table at the Rue de Rome; Laforgue’s dark laughter and early death at twenty-six; and the almost universal madness and alcoholism that plagued each of these poètes maudits. Each practised an intensity of living and self-inflicted degradation that mocked bourgeois comforts. The Symbolists, in short, were anarchists of subject matter and voice who unsettled the conventions of genteel prose and the arrogant certainties of the unexamined life. They insisted that art should always assault those certainties, that suggestion was richer than explanation, and that the thing made must efface all signs of its making. To achieve these ends, they crafted reality as it appeared to the majority – fragmented, halting, and inchoate, a carnival of fear, love, laughter, delusions, and resentments. Richards did not read these writers academically, with pen in hand, but telepathically, as most artists do, divining from their work, conversations, lives, and torments what was in the air they breathed and how they shaped that into artistic form. Mallarmé’s technique showed how a multiplicity of moods, ideas, and voices could coexist in a narrative without an intrusive authorial will directing the reader; in this way he led Richards out of the tangle of early drafts. Baudelaire’s method of configuring the epoch in the deeds and gestures of bystanders likewise encouraged him to stay with the familiar at a time when a totalizing or documentary realism was under attack by Canada’s anti-nationalists (Frank Davey, George Bowering, Fred Wah). Laforgue’s forms were also helpful, their tactile way of unsettling readers in order to evoke the restlessness of unbelief (not disbelief but unbelief) exactly the effect he was aiming at in Lives, in which religion was a contagion but spiritualism absent. As in the Catholic liturgy, life, though vulgar and stinking of mortality, was important enough, finally, to become art. In the end, Richards abandoned himself to recording the rituals of being for the ethical reasons that Verlaine enumerated in Art Poétique. The decision was as Catholic as experimental, bringing him back to the mediumistic properties of pure experience that the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel espoused. The epochal nature of Lives demanded that he listen without judgment – that, like Chaucer and Balzac, he record the comings and goings of his pilgrims. AA would later impress on him that freedom was only possible with the same suspension of judgment. The symbology in Lives manifests itself in multiple images of frag-

Lives to AA 225

mentation and falsity that recur with ironic undertones. The presiding symbol of fracture is George’s book Torso, the story of a woman’s dismemberment in Hamilton, Ontario. Though the connection is never explicitly made, the analogue is clear: George and company, too, have been cut, scattered, and humiliated, their river a crime scene littered with evidence of decay. Random jingles and slogans play on the radio: ‘Where will you do your shopping today? / What will you get and what will you pay?’ (140). Facile fashions assault the senses; television’s denuding images from The Price Is Right and Fantasy Island seep into consciousness. The plastic arches of McDonald’s and the buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken disfigure the landscape, their importation the civic largesse of small-minded entrepreneurs like Ceril Brown, owner of the Real Thing Disco. False prophets, teachers, priests, and evangelists abound, each franchising an ideology of truth that is blind to anything but self-interest. Once a source of pride, the label ‘Atlantic Salmon Centre of the World’ (64) is now only a magnet for tourists ‘from Vermont’ (260) whose claim to what’s left of the land supersedes that of locals, who live in a plastic world of the immediate present. They party, drink, scheme, and dance like Dionysius – but as automatons, not revellers. Confused by the imbroglio of the television universe, they know the price of everything and the value of nothing: Since George had sold the three acres to the New York firm that owned the mines, and since Lois had won the $50,000 on Atlantic Loto, they’d been here most days and nights. And Lois stood, in her tight terrycloth shorts, without panties. One man chewed at his lip and pretended to be staring at the ground while looking at her. Behind them in the pit, half the pig loin in blackened tin foil. (9) Lois in her tight terry-cloth [sic] shorts, without panties, was now bent over trying to make herself sick. (36)

The American invasion has continued from the end of Blood Ties, but as a deadlier occupation. The Terris’s lack of unanimity is synecdoche for the community’s spiritual lassitude. Proximate to the novel’s symbols of fracture and decay are a series of violent episodes that weave a bloody trail through the river’s history. There is the ‘white flat rock Hudson Kopochus lay upon on his journey to kill a man in 1825’ (232), the strangling of Emma Jane Ward in 1889, George’s killing of a young German soldier in the Second World War,

226

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

the slaughter of salmon and wild game in the 1950s, and Little Simon’s self-inflicted death by Russian roulette in 1980. As a laying on of hands, however perverse, ‘compulsive violence’ (237) is the new baptism. Only Packet Terri and his grandfather Old Simon, the novel’s half Marlow / half Orpheus characters, are able to understand these events with some kind of coherence, though the process exacts a high price for both. For everyone else, the violent wellsprings of the past are either dismissed or ignored, their origins and cumulative effects beyond comprehension and (more troubling) concern. The consequence of such ‘bedevilled smugness’ (Lives 84) is the assumption, now unquestioned, that the Miramichi is ‘one of the most violent rivers in the country’ (Lives 110, 114). As a study of preconditions, Lives explores and disputes that claim. ‘The novel,’ Richards would explain, ‘was my angry response to what was happening on the Miramichi at the time. There was a lot of ambivalent silence about criminal activity. People were being robbed, bullied, and tormented. There was a lot of silence about it, a lot of people saying, “well, we know that goes on here but they’ll never harm me.” People were not taking responsibility for their community’ (interview with author, March 1997). Lives is structured as the terrain of that disregard, with the reader positioned as detective (Richards’s interest in the crime genre is traceable to his reading of Poe and François Eugene Vidocq, master detective of the Napoleonic era). On this terrain, as in Lowry’s Mexico, flow and unity are absent. The narrative voice provides almost no direction. Plot as syntagmatic unifying device – as the ordering principle that sequences events into a legible teleology so that readers can move from past to present, cause to effect – gives way to the messy, disruptive fields of memory, fear, and emotion, horizons susceptible to near constant revision. Readers, like detectives, must find their way by analogical association: Lester Murphy’s tennis court is where twenty-two-year-old Tom Proud carried his murdered half-sister Emma Jane Ward in 1889; the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant sits on the lot where town benefactor Hitchman Alewood’s mill used to be; and the rock on which Lois’s son Bradley hits his head is the same one that supported Hudson Kopochus and the bear on the night of the Great Miramichi Fire in 1825. Because memory is a genetic inheritance – ‘present in all women/men of the river’ (52) – characters have a dim sense of the past, which must be nourished by myth to grow vital and healthy. The new multisensory gratification enterprises of popular music, fast food, fashion, and advertising, however, have brought disorienting changes that do not nourish.

Lives to AA 227

Instead, rapid and disembodied stimuli form the new psychic reality, and the ever-present cacophony of ‘cement and jackhammers’ (235) triggers a reflex that appears intermittently in Lives: ‘Now you might feel some discomfort.’ In recognizably postmodern fashion, Richards stacks detail upon detail to simulate this sensory overload. Only an extended quotation can capture the effect: And the freezers full of contraband moose and deer – the moose having been snared – a snare being a barrel, a drum, buried on a moose trail, the tin cut into pie-shaped wedges, and the moose running, his right or left fore-foot sinking into the barrel through the cut pie-shaped wedges so there is no way it can get free, dying of loss of blood and shock, after maybe a two- or three-day struggle – struggling, struggling and grunting in rage and complete bafflement – and the men coming onto the moose and disembowelling it and hacking the hind quarters and slicing the pelvic bone, and the profitless guts of the disembowelled creature filling the quiet light under the snow-covered spruces, the frozen rock where Hudson Kopochus lay with a bear on his journey to kill a man in 1825, and the children catching the bus for school the next day, the dark-faced displaced French, the stubborn self-destructive Irish, the Celtic blood on one of the most violent rivers in the country, ‘Fuck ya, fuck ya,’ for ‘I love you, I love you’ or ‘Help me, help me,’ the passionless day in the school where nothing was said or learned, the poor teachers with baseball caps on their heads, their university rings polished on their fingers, looking at the fifteen- and sixteen-yearold girls, and the docile never-to-be-taught Indians, some pregnant, sitting at the back with their heads on the desks, some knife-scarred along their bellies in the rites of drunken manhood, as day by day the afternoon winter months played on resolute, determined – like the lanterns in the camps ... of 50 years ago, the electric lights beaming out over the grey ice, the purple ridges, this roadway, as if not giving up one ounce of human commitment – commitment for what is the question, commitment for what – and Begin and Sadat came over on the radio in the houses, in the imitation pine scent of the cars, with frozen cinder-packed snow at the back of their wheels, and Levesque says something and says something else and Trudeau says something too and the Premier goes to a meeting and sits with the mill manager from away ... who says the company needs more money – this province, the north of this province having to bring people in to set up businesses and having to pay them to make them stay, until the trees are gone, thousands of acres downed and nothing planted and the men working in the same part of the mill for ten years, driving the same

228

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

type of tractor over the frozen roads with their faces freezing and transmission oil over their strong hands, the pulse-beat in them beating out over the fields and wires and ridges and swirling gusts of wind, looking around in absolute bafflement and going home to their wives and sitting on the edge of their beds in the half-lit room, and the wives who’ve done the accounts and taken care of the house, the money, the input/output of all the families’ lives listening as their husbands talk, and then saying, ‘You’re drinking too much.’ (110–11)

The passage’s near incoherence captures the modality: the social grammars of thought and syntactic continuity are gone, vanished with spatial and familial harmonies. Nothing is stable. Nothing coheres. Nothing equals anything else. As Yeats foretold in his great prophetic poem of the twentieth century, the old order’s centre has not held. Things are falling apart. ‘Mere anarchy is,’ indeed, ‘loosed upon the world’ (346). The structural parallel of this anarchy is madness: the lunatic obsessively collecting without reason or constraint. ‘You remember strange things’ (141), one voice interjects, breaking parenthetically from a fixed point in the story to make itself heard; circuses whirl in the brain (30), thinks another. ‘It is a world [in which] Gogol or Gorky would go mad,’ wrote Patrick Lane (‘The Despair’ C10), where everything ‘seems to dance crazily,’ said Michael Taylor (1983, 108). The novel is not a descent into the whirlpool but the whirlpool itself. In the pivotal essay ‘Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press,’ Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan historicized the development of modernism’s aesthetic of evocative disarray, identifying craftsmen that Richards had studied closely: Well before the French impressionists and symbolists had discovered the bearings for art of modern technology [sic], Dickens had switched the picaresque of the eighteenth-century novel to the representation of the new industrial slums. Neurotic eccentricity in the sub-world of the metropolis he proved to be a much richer source for the rendering of mania and manic states of mind than the crofters of Scott or the yokels of Wordsworth. And Dostoevsky mined from Dickens freely ... But just how valid were the impressionist techniques of the picaresque kind familiar to the news reporter appears in the notable essay of Eisenstein in Film Form where he shows the impact of Dickens on the art of D.W. Griffiths. (10–11)

The trajectory of modernity’s aesthetic from Dickens (through the Sym-

Lives to AA 229

bolists and Russians) to Joyce sheds much light on Richards’s own experiments in this novel with montage, patterned recurrence, narcissistic subjectivity, exaggerated exteriority of sense, temporal overlay, flashback, and simultaneity. Had McLuhan read Lives, he would probably have recognized its tribal, oral, Catholic tableau; however, he would also no doubt have commented on the absence of associations (community, belonging, togetherness) that the tribal realm normally furnishes. But this absence is not error. The manic overlay of disconnected fragments in Lives forms a deliberate postmodern architecture that constitutes, in full, the new social and psychic disarray of Richards’s field, an essential part of which is the absence of the solaces of the acoustic realm. To repeat, it is as both effect and polemic that the novel was cast. The novel’s scant concessions to the reader contribute, as well, to an unease of dissociation. The fictional Miramichi shows itself spatially and temporally, but through ‘a haze [that] settl[es] over the earth’ (85). The trains and creamery (107) reappear, the convent casts its shadows over the entire town (217), and sailors still sit on the bank with the whores (215). The landscape that occasionally rises out of the haze is that of previous novels, though it has been noticeably despoiled. Paper boats now glide ‘over the surface of the oily water,’ salmon ‘struggle through flecks of fibre and swill’ (226), and the skyline is ‘sulphurous’ with stench (176). To simulate underworld conditions, metaphors of darkness and sewage back-up dominate instances of temporal orientation. George’s children are described as coming ‘up out of the sixties’ (203), their arrival calling to mind the bubbling of a spawn. Also familiar are members of Richards’s larger fictional community, though their interrelations and shared genetic past go unqualified. Again, the reader has to sleuth. Ramsey Taylor appears as Lester Murphy’s brother-in-law, thus he’s also connected to Old Simon and Clarence and Bobby Simms. Pamela Dulse is Rance’s nurse, thus closing the circle among Kevin, Orville MacDurmot, Dale Massey, and Little Simon. Emmerson Morrison shelters Little Simon, giving him wine and counsel, and John Delano begins his transition from delinquent to detective. As unqualified metonymy, these familiar markers are flashpoints rather than beacons, signifying only that the fictional town is still the imagined, unnamed Miramichi. Richards’s restraint in keeping the details of his place elliptical is all the more interesting given that Lives was the first book he wrote while living almost exclusively on the river (Winter and Blood Ties were written mostly in Fredericton). The detail is accurate, as proximity would dictate, but overdetermined to meet the book’s manic textures. The effect

230

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

is befuddled intimacy. The mind’s eye recognizes details but not patterns or relationships: They passed now, [Old Simon] and Lois, houses that had corridors and hallways and light fixtures and loved-ones’ pictures, with cars and mopeds and motorcycles covered in tarps, and skidoos in the outer barn – with the sons/daughters of those houses riding around in the cars and racing around on the motorcycles, the younger ones putting about on the mopeds, and the whole family roaring over the desolate tracks of snow in the forest into the deer yards in the grey evenings on skidoos, the old trails shocked with treads and the sterile smell of metal – and the laughter as the stars winked out in the half-dead sky, back to those houses where the earned money was accounted for and spent and children sat five to a couch and watched programs from southside on TV, in the long splintering cold nights, and the atmosphere of aerosol as their pictures sat on an unused bookshelf with an unused Bible and a copy of Jacqueline Susann, and the noiseless second-hand of the clock on the kitchen wall with the children watching. (109-110)

Like Mallarmé, Richards relies on readers to untangle his text – but to untangle a text that always appears elliptical. This is one of the important messages behind the form, a message that rescues the narrative project from the ultimate hopelessness of Fredric Jameson’s postmodern condition: obscured always by private experience, the elliptical is the only version of the real accessible to outsiders and thus accurate to Richards’s telling. The death of Lester Murphy at the end of Section Three provides the best example. What had been clearly stated two hundred pages earlier – ‘“Hey,” Lois yelled. “They found Papa’s body today … and Lester Murphy was run down”’ (31) – is nearly fully submerged in Lester’s unconscious when the event surfaces later in the novel: The van honked its horn somewhere: ‘Ahooga-hooga.’ Were they screaming? He was aware of the fleck of bugs above his head, the terrible light glowing from up out of the water; and didn’t he hear: ‘Sexy eyes – sexy eyes.’ The song. A girl screamed, who might or might not have been fifteen. (232)

This abrupt, decontextualized incident is Lester’s actual experience of impact and dying. Its obscurity is, of course, disorienting to us in real time because the experience can be only Lester’s. But interiority is not Rich-

Lives to AA 231

ards’s primary interest in Lives. Only exteriorized – glimpsed sideways as headline, gossip, or relational trace – do these instances live; thus, without Lois’s early comment and the echo of the accident on others’ lips, the event is so understated that it would otherwise be missed. We have to intuit further that the vehicle that kills Lester is Dale Massey’s, since his was the only van out on that wet, dark highway. The work it takes to make these connections, some across hundreds of pages, is not easy, but that effort does parallel the sense-making process we all labour at to meet the world – and this is where Richards’s hope resides. What we know outside of ourselves we can only know second-hand, peering through windows as Lois and Old Simon do in the long passage above. It is, then, the orders of second-hand experience and knowledge formation that must responsibly nuance the messy, sometimes incoherent, non-linear landscapes of Lives. Hence the novel’s scaffolding of impressions and galaxy of details. The challenge that faced Richards at the outset was to bring the epoch forward in an unadulterated form while resisting the impulse to order it. It could not cohere as his previous novels had. To be authentic, it had to appear as the vast unedited hash of the collective unconscious of place. Its structure had to stand as a signifier of meaning: typography without maps, conceptual or space time without real time. The novel’s tentativeness around finality is therefore a deliberate function of its form. Sense making has to come from reading the fragments for pattern or pulse of recurring symptoms and symbols. The novel is evidentiary. Much like Torso, it brings readers to the scene of a crime. What makes the exercise more difficult than it might otherwise be is that Richards re-creates the crime scene for us without exact knowledge of the crime. He has hunches and questions but no definitive answers. He wrote Lives, it appears, to explain to himself what had happened – to explain the sources and conditions of violence on his beloved river. He knows no more than Packet where all the fragments lead: Packet sat very still in the night, drinking from his rum – thinking, what did this road, these V-roofed buildings, these corner stores, this Reserve, this maddened river – these thousand and one families ... this McDonald’s fast food, this shopping centre ... all this Packet thought – means? The humped-up backs of cars, the querulous tires, the smell of the blood of jacked animals emanating from the trunks, along perhaps with rusted jacks, dated papers, all this as the breeze blew the scent of saddened grasses, the lovely brown withered branches that struggled upward like crooked fingers, holy holy holy Lord God of hosts, and when he came from Commun-

232

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

ion that morning, in one city or another, all faces anonymous, all buildings ashen-sided, all cement crookedly cut out, wisping from the funnels of alleys an odour of swamps – like the bog Ceril Brown was lost in; seeing the shaven men on their way hunting, leaving their wives for the great adventure – means? Means that we too, Packet thought, have joined, and bragged about having and wanting, the great unwholesome anonymity of North America – houses, like ideas, straggly corpses from one end to the other, and it is what we wanted, what we bragged about having until we succeeded in having – means? (254)

What does it all mean? Marxist critic Georg Lukacs believes that the aesthetic of fragmentation is the artist’s referent for a society broken by class divisions. The artist’s motive in adopting such an aesthetic is ethical, a desire ‘to reconstruct the complete human personality and free it from the distortion and dismemberment to which it has been subjected in a class society’ (5). He observes that many artists do this by subjecting fragmentation itself to estrangement – that is, by exposing fragmenting pressures to literal fragmentation, thereby triggering an appositional historical memory that begins the reconstruction of dismembered identities, family relationships, and civic associations. The process only begins, however, by exposé aimed outwards at readers, who must then complete the project. This process of reconstruction is evident in many post-colonial works of the 1960s and 1970s. The alteration in narrative strategies across Richards’s first three novels fits Lukacs’s pattern. Where the implied reader in Blood Ties is a confidante of the characters, bound up in their interior worlds of private sensation, that reader is an accomplice in Lives, his task performative rather than vicarious or spectatorial. The reader must assemble the evidence towards reconstruction with little help from the author, whose ethical compact gives him no dominion of knowledge over his characters. This ethic belies coercion, yet it was clearly Richards’s hope – like Lukacs’s and Jameson’s – that readers might come to some of the same conclusions as the artist. The first of these, in Richards’s novel, is that lives are tenuous and easily lost to the promises of social mobility and moral comforts – the same lesson that Tolstoy’s Ivan Illich learns. The short duration of lives in the book’s title is thus a metaphor for both mortality and compromise, the latter as desiccating as death. In Lives, the modern efficiencies that together promise to make life happier, faster, easier, safer, and wealthier actually quash human potencies of various types. The

Lives to AA 233

new age’s insistence on consensus around Hollywood lives, urban music cultures, imported styles, and better, more relevant histories destroys older forms of ‘dark genius’ (53) and self-sufficiency, leaving imagination – the locus where characters usually make sense of themselves and their place – ill equipped to handle the task of identity formation. The book asks, How does one live with dignity and hope on a job at Kmart or McDonald’s? The question resounds loudest for a people already marginalized by geography and a history of deference to others. The reconstruction project that the novel’s form invites might begin with just that insight into New Brunswick’s cultural condition. Richards’s characters are a people of paradox, suspicious of outsiders but unusually susceptible to their condescension. They are easily recruited to others’ causes and are quick to deny themselves in service to ‘managers from away’ (110), yet they blame themselves when things turn out badly. Lives illustrates how this innocence turns the nobility of war into a Gallipoli for the New Brunswickers of the North Shore Regiment, sentencing a figure like George Terri to a lifetime of self-doubt: ‘They went to war, and George fought bravely. There was a town, and because of the communiqué they were ambushed. Boys in uniform, something peculiarly Canadian about them, fell startled at their wounds, stood up once before they died’ (162). Their tragedy is that they have always been manipulated by others. Though they are ‘dissected,’ reassigned ‘all over hell,’ and die ‘in every major engagement in the war,’ they ignore the abuses suffered at the command of their leaders for the obstinate delusion ‘We showed them, we showed them’ (60). Showed them what? Richards asks. In describing the faces of these soldiers as ‘a little too stubborn, remote’ (113), he agrees with Alden Nowlan that obstinacy is ‘nothing / on which to found a country’ (Nowlan ‘Ypres: 1915’ 65). Undone by his inability to surmount what Tolstoy called ‘the terrible if of war,’ George is a case in point. His weakness, moreover, is paradigmatic, for the tendency to defer to power or roll over others to acquire it is at the root of violence on the river. It becomes clear as the novel progresses that the first Emma Jane Ward’s death in 1889 was caused by the same forces of abuse that are pushing George to self-destruct. Where Emma Jane Ward was courted as a plaything by the manipulative Hitchman Alewood – an action that culminates in her murder – George is manipulated by Lester Murphy and Ceril Brown, Alewood’s descendants in the game of status-related abuse. George hurts his own children and makes a fool of himself as he aspires to some of their power: ‘Lester could wear a raccoon coat and high steel-toed black boots and could and

234

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

would be comfortable anywhere … George tried a raccoon coat on once … and looked like nothing more than a big raccoon’ (52). He doesn’t understand that the idols of the Northumberland County Conservatives are no more redeemable than idols elsewhere. Inge Sterrer-Hauzenberger writes: ‘The fate of Emma Jane Ward seems to be a small-scale anticipation of the fate that lies ahead of everyone … Hitchman Alewood represents the first generation of successful entrepreneurs and he, symbolically, laid the foundation for an economy based on the exploitation of the people, the land and the river’ (62). George admits that indeed, ‘her ghost is still hauntin us’ (281), though he does not understand the complicity of his actions in his own defeat. But George is not alone in this condition. Even characters of strong moral ballast are not immune from the social expectation of exercising power over others, thus limiting their freedom. Packet’s dreams of finding little Billy Massey drowned in a cesspool are darkened by the knowledge that he participated in teasing the boy, whose abject poverty seemed to invite abuse. A century of manipulation on the river leaves characters with only two ways of interacting socially: deference or control, each dehumanizing. ‘It’s better to be in the goddamn woods’ (59), Old Simon concludes before walking away from institutional care to his death in the bush. He will not be controlled or control others. Packet struggles with these clotted histories of abuse that cling slavishly to his memories of place. He is closest to being the novel’s observing eye, parallel in temperament (and predicament) to Richards as he fights to achieve conciliation with his past. He is aloof, victim to wrestling the ‘whore of night’ (274) with a bottle of rum by his side. An intellectual without pretensions of class, he is a reader of Villon, Marlow, Lessing, Hardy, Voltaire, and Gorky. He moves to Victoria to escape his pain only to end up in bars in mid-morning drinking glasses of Guinness as the down-and-outs around him play their games. Suffering the torments of his people as deeply as a saint, he struggles, again like Richards, to reconcile himself to ‘everything [that] would always be there’ (267): his people’s history of deference and control, the exploitation of his land by outsiders, his own complicity in the river’s legacy of violence, and the final necessity that he accept the irrevocable condition of decay if he is ever to return. (While Richards was agonizing over this final section of Lives, his father sold the Opera House to buyers who turned it into a discotheque.) This history of place pierces Packet’s heart like ‘[a] steel rod of pain, as exacting as a surgeon’s instrument at the centre of his life’ (237).

Lives to AA 235

Pierces but does not extinguish, for his (Lukacsian) sense of the beauty in disarray – and from that, his duty to others – is what finally begins his own process of reconstruction. He concludes that beauty and ugliness are not objective states; rather, they are the constructions of egos seeking power over an absolute agency that only God possesses. This, of course, has been Richards’s theodicy from the start, expressed to one interviewer as ‘a giant evil trying [unsuccessfully] to crush a kernel of good’ (Garrod 220). What ultimately matters, Packet discovers, is to act in ways that affirm life. The onrush of past torments at the end of Lives obscures Packet’s arrival at this emancipating knowledge, yet earlier evidence suggests that he does indeed manage to quiet his past. As the new Adam, he attains peaceful sleep, his hand curved like Michelangelo’s subject in the Sistine Chapel (274) while archangels keep vigil over him. With him is his Eve, the third-generation Emma Jane Ward, whom he saved from asphyxia as an infant. To the community she is merely ‘Alewood’s great grandchild’ (278), but to Packet she is a chimera, ‘her river the same, the same history’ (280). Their promise, buried in the ephemera of the novel’s early pages, is a return to the garden of their genesis, now weed-entangled but still home. Like his namesake, St Patrick, the apostle of the Irish, Packet/ Patrick returns from abduction to his family. He makes enough money up north ‘to buy the land behind his house, buy his ploughs and a second-hand tractor’ (167). He gives up alcohol and drugs. But his return is much more than completion of the bucolic cycle. It takes control back from the absentee poachers and small-time dons whose ownership of the land kept the Terris in servitude. His return breaks the cycle and the feudal grip on his family, opening the possibility that, like his namesake, he might chase the snakes out of his homeland. His purchase of the land is a small victory for his father George, who failed with his hamburger stand, and a larger victory ‘for the hundreds, the thousands of men gone from the Maritimes to work and to build the rest of the country, and then to come home [to] a land bought and played with by foreigners, in a country that didn’t know them’ (249). Hope is thus present both in his return and in his example of sober self-reliance. Packet may have started with nothing, but in his return is the refusal to believe that he will amount to nothing. Defying the epidemic of social and economic anomie surrounding him, he returns to cultivate a personal faith in himself that will enable him to succeed. On a higher spiritual plane, Packet also comes to understand that reconstruction of oneself begins in a duty to others. His nightmares of

236

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

taunting little Billy Massey dissipate when he acknowledges the bravery of Billy’s sister Susie trying to protect him: ‘it was not the [spindly chickenbone] legs so much as the blue stockings sewn to [Susie’s] one piece of underwear – and that she tried to protect her brother’ (271). Similarly, Packet’s recollection of Little Simon’s compassion for Lester Murphy – ‘abandoned by friends, tormented by youngsters and alone in a house with a retarded boy’ (266) – allows him to forgive Lester for the damage done to his family. Between the lines of this compassion, and known only to Packet, is his brother’s own torment at the hands of a social welfare system, abetted by Lester, that moved Little Simon to a foster home in town. Peace is restored to Packet when he lets the Lester Murphys of his town off the hook and surrenders judgment to a higher power. Only then, in Tolstoyan fashion, is he able to see what is obscured by the hatreds and the pain: ‘all around him … the beauty of the earth, the stars forever, and the sun gracing the window after rain, or [Lester’s retarded son] Donnie Murphy walking along collecting bottles silently’ (237). Packet’s ability to restore himself in filiation with the wounded recalls an aspect of Richards’s own past only once before revealed publicly: ‘I was born in 1950. Down the street from me, in a large house, a girl was born in 1946. The same thing happened to her [premature birth], except for her it was far worse. It left her permanently mentally disabled ... I see this woman now from time to time, have a strange affinity with her, want to be near, look at her as long as I can’ (‘The Turtle’ 73). It is, finally, human filiation alone that saves Packet and that enables Richards to write with so much tenderness about a character like Lois Terri, unwed with three children by three different men, loose and self-destructively reckless, but eternally hopeful in her guileless ways: And it always came over the fields, the trees being broken down by graders, the dust, the new houses on shale-beds with cement foundations – one after the other – on and on, children in cars, Lois going to the discothèque to drink zombies in a glass and toking with the boys in the back corner as they eyed her uplifted breasts and the beautiful slant of her belly. It was all the same. She came over to Simon and cried, ‘Papa – Papa,’ and he’d see her beautiful round eyes as the rain poured greyly against the window and the stove ticked – the space-heater in his room. And he’d get up out of his chair and give her money. And she’d leave Leona with him, with the top of Leona’s lip blistered from cold and her nose running. (70)

‘It doesn’t matter what happens,’ explained Richards to Andrew Garrod.

Lives to AA 237

‘[It doesn’t matter] what she says or how she reacts – you know Lois loves everybody’ (216). She becomes adorable because of this, says Richards of a similar character: ‘her weakness for sex a weakness we forgive because of something greater than her human frailty. That is her generosity and kindness to those around her’ (God Is 121). In trusting to the powers of love, Richards seems to be echoing T.S. Eliot’s interest in the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich at the end of ‘Little Gidding’: ‘And all shall be well / And all manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one’ (223). The crowned knot of fire and the rose at the close of the Four Quartets, says Helen Gardner, symbolize the commingling of divine love and human mercy that alone leads to rapture (181–4). The simple joys that Lois finds in living are therefore the small ‘kernel[s] of good’ that affirm Richards’s faith. Says Richard Paul Knowles: ‘each of [his characters] … is celebrated as fully human and resiliently capable of the kind of unquestioning love and compassion that, combined with their unassailable, sensual vitality, represent Richards’ central values and the essential unsentimental hopefulness of his vision’ (39). And so Janice Kulyk Keefer can quite legitimately admit Lois to ‘[Alden] Nowlan’s “great communion, the human race”’ (176). It is not surprising, then, that for all its structural complexity, the novel ends in appeasement, the final atonement shrouded in the Mi’kmaq words ‘OIGOA/Sepoitit’ (283). The work of untangling the ending, like the rest of the novel, is a vital part of the reconstruction project, for the effort of reparation requires a commitment of determined action. The Mi’kmaq phrase, translated as ‘You Are Beautiful,’ is not meant to amend generations of bigotry and exploitation; but in restoring some dignity to the wounded, whose lives are indeed beautiful, it is at least a beginning. ‘God Bless,’ as Old Simon Terri would say. The risks that Richards took with this novel were not insubstantial. In turning his historical place into a crime scene of graphic dimensions, he was subjecting it to penetrating scrutiny, trusting that readers were up to the reconstruction task – that they were willing and able to sift through the rubble. Exposing the underbelly of his river in this way was exactly what the response to his earlier work should have dissuaded him from doing. He told Macklem he had moved beyond caring: ‘I don’t give a damn anymore what the critics accuses [sic] me of either. I’m working too fucking hard for that – and when Im [sic] not working Im drinking, so Id rather be working’ (letter to Macklem, n.d. [June 1978?]).

238

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Discernable between the lines of this and similar letters was Richards’s conviction that he had written Lives on the faith that a deep order inhered in the fragments. From Faulkner’s experiments, he had learned that one must take risks in order to arrive at higher truths. The ruination of the society he had written about with so much affection in Blood Ties compelled him to take risks in seeking answers, wherever they might lead and however they might be received. Like Packet, his phantom self, he had committed himself to journeying through hell if necessary – to following the ‘demented inner voyage[s]’ of Lowry and the Symbolists: ‘like Rimbaud’s seer, [the writer’s] various personae were to plunge into themselves, to extinguish their inner identities, usually with the aid of alcohol; and then to emerge from their own inner hells regenerated, now with their perilously gained vision able to rejoin mankind, and to serve it’ (Day 203). That trajectory is not only Packet’s; it was Richards’s through the darkest days of his alcoholism. The new novel was thus transitional, thematically and formally but also morally and personally. Richards had tested this ground in ‘Safe in the Arms’; Lives was his first book-length examination of the imported values that had effaced the harmonies of Blood Ties – values that had created, in half a generation, the community of Lives, in which the Terris have forgotten what the MacDurmots knew so well: namely, how and what to celebrate. By recreating the scene of this crime of mutability in multilayered conceptual dimensions, he was purposefully objectifying the terrain in order to alter conventional reading practice. The dizzying novelty of its form unsettled and repelled affectively, as if to say This is what dissociation feels like. Rimbaud had advanced this technique in his Lettres du voyant; then William Carlos Williams had perfected it as a poetics of immediate experience, of the thing-in-itself. What atomization disclosed was that human beings cannot live full and meaningful lives separated from their past and the land of their mythology. Coupled with his alcoholism and exertions to move beyond the restrictions of Faulkner’s style, the social changes around Richards made Lives an excruciating book to write. It was his version of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. Richards’s work on the novel persisted into the final weeks of 1980. Again he wrote to Macklem, but in a more upbeat mood: ‘The novel is long but Ive [sic] come through it now and Im [sic] excited by almost every part of it. One of the main things Im excited about is I didn’t quit it when the going got rough’ (n.d. [October–November 1980?]). His op-

Lives to AA 239

timism came on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, a milestone that Peggy feared he’d never reach. Though drinking had brought him close to 190 pounds, they were curling regularly at the Newcastle Club and seeing old friends again. Eighteen months earlier, Prism International had accepted a much condensed version of ‘Husband and Wife Gratten (1927),’ the story of the poor Irish family that was the discarded, false start of the current novel. Meanwhile, a Books in Canada survey of the reading tastes of the country’s writers had come out on his side. David Helwig, Fred Cogswell, and Michael Thorpe classified him as one of the most underrated novelists in Canada, Helwig observing that ‘Richards is too male and too working-class for those who create reputations. Also too tough minded’ (‘Balancing’ 5). Winter and Blood Ties were also doing well, both enjoying third- and fourth-run printings. Winter had become something of a Canadian Catcher in the Rye, an underground classic for malcontented Maritime youth. In the past two years, Richards had read twenty times at high schools and universities in the region. Financial prospects had brightened as well since Peggy got a job at Heath Steele Mines. Macklem’s off-hand remark about ‘writers need[ing] good, industrious, hard-working wives’ (letter to DAR, 9 December 1979) had always been true for Richards. Peggy was his faithful Penelope, typing final drafts of his work and doing what was necessary to support them. As he told Nancy Bauer, ‘my dependence on her is almost frightening’ (1980, 31) – a reference not just to Peggy’s emotional support but to her ear for language. After four books and wide public exposure, she was still his best reader, the first sounding board for whether his writing was working. ‘I find that if she likes it, it turns out to be good,’ he told Elda Cadogan. ‘If she doesn’t, it’s bad’ (1981, 2). The brightest news came in a letter from Macklem. Oberon had received an offer from the State Publishing Agency of the Soviet Union for world language rights to reprint Winter in Russian. His tone was exuberant: ‘Do you know what this means? … In the USSR people read, if they read at all, what they’re told to read … I wouldn’t be surprised if Winter were to be read by 100,000 people altogether’ (letter to DAR, 31 July 1979). He was right to be enthusiastic. In the Canadian market, Winter had done well to sell 2,500 copies. Even if his estimate was low, the offer meant that forty times that number would be circulating in the Soviet Union in the first year of the deal alone, with the potential for 250,000 more if it found a positive reception. On top of that, a flat fee of 2,700 roubles would be split by writer and publisher – a small fortune for both, claimed Macklem – more than Richards had earned in royalties from

240

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

any book he’d published to date, and the most profitable foreign sale Oberon had ever secured (more lucrative than selling the U.S. rights to Margaret Gibson’s The Butterfly Ward the previous year). While 100,000 copies amounted to more books than Oberon had sold in its publishing history to date, Macklem’s claims of an exorbitant sum were exaggerated. On the 1979 exchange, 2,700 roubles amounted to about US$450 (or C$382, but the Russians didn’t transact in Canadian dollars). Regardless, his intuition of six years earlier had proven correct: Winter had turned out to be as good for Oberon as for its author. Richards, whose novels had reached the United States, Scotland, and Denmark, was delighted but curious. Where did the Russians find out about the book, and what were the politics – with the Soviets there were always politics – behind the selection? Macklem speculated that his earlier sale of a Helwig story to the State Publishing Agency of the Communist East German régime had put Oberon in their sights. Other theories held that the Soviets, who had also purchased world rights to Stephen Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets, were interested in the literature of disaffected western youth (Maggie is the story of a young girl turned prostitute who drowns in the East River). In Soviet News and Views, Elvira Trofimova offered another reason for the Soviets’ interest after discovering Winter in a Moscow public library next to books by Margaret Atwood, Morley Callaghan, and Jack London. She concluded that the novel’s appeal was in how it ‘touches upon the problems of a personality and its relations in society’ (16); in other words, Winter’s social and familial fabrics were the draw for a people still culturally tribalized by communism’s autocracy. Alden Nowlan initially agreed with Trofimova, writing to Richards that because the Maritimes’ sensibility is closer to that of Russia than to the rest of Canada, the Soviets chose a novel with familiar socio-economic subtexts for their citizens. Nowlan’s hunch was naive at best, as Richards would learn. When the translation of Winter came out in the summer of 1980, Anthony Rhinelander, a STU professor of Russian language and history, quieted the excitement by surmising that the translation had been done by government hacks. The novel read like an elementary school primer. But that was not all. Large sections had been altered or omitted, most of them relating to the book’s human concern (to the fact, Richards later said, ‘that people really love each other’ [quoted in C. Morris 14]). Worse still, the book’s environmental realism – the moody, atmospheric shadings that evoked naturalism’s stasis – had been exaggerated and darkened to serve the social realism of the Marxist state, to ‘represent,’

Lives to AA 241

that is, ‘capitalism at its worst’ (14). The entire project had been a covert exercise in Cold War propaganda, and Richards had been used, like London and Crane, as an ‘engineer of human souls.’ The manipulation of art in service to the state that Soviet dramatist Mikhail Bulgakov had written about with savagery in Master and Margarita had ensnared him. The Western books that Soviet citizens were permitted to read had been tampered with to stand as witnesses to capitalism’s dying days, thus fulfilling Marx’s predictions. The only interest the Soviets had in Miramichi realism was in how its animus could be rhetorically amplified to malign the West. When the offer came to fly Richards to Moscow to promote the book, he declined, resisting the chance to visit the land of his beloved Gogol, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. He consoled himself with the thought that he wouldn’t be paraded around as an anti-Western puppet. It was now clear what Bulgakov’s satire of socialist realism really meant: that regardless of the central place the Communist bureaucrats reserved for art, no independent artist could work in their system. Richards chastised himself for not seeing the ruse sooner, since he had been following Solzhenitsyn’s exile in Zürich only a few years earlier. Besides offending his artistic integrity, the Cold War trick inflamed his cultural nationalism at a time when international hockey was again testing Canada-Soviet relations. After Canada’s defeat of the Russians in the Christmas series of 1976, we had lost the Canada Cup in 1980 – a loss Richards had been brooding over for months. The much-hyped triumph of the American ‘Miracle on Ice’ team coupled with our country’s always predictable masochistic navel gazing had been unending since the upset. Though the Russians, too, had lost, all he talked about at the Black Horse were the hundreds of penalty minutes doled out to our teams on their ice, the self-flagellation we were always willing to endure when extending to others the olive branch of fairness, and the thousands of tax dollars that Hockey Canada had given to the Russians for the cultivation of their sport. The trick that had been done to Winter, he told Ray Fraser, was just another of their cheap shots. That he would just have to let the translation go, damaging as it might be to his reputation, irked him the more because it was the Russians. Nowlan sent him a poem of appeasement, ‘A Psalm for Trumpets,’ playfully rubbing a little salt in the wound by adding a salutation that read ‘Dear Fyodor’ (letter to DAR, 11 September 1980). The sabotage occurred only weeks before he sent the completed manuscript of Lives to Oberon in early 1981. He had composed the book, like

242

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

others, on his Remington standard typewriter, then made corrections on the typescript. In normal circumstances, Peggy would have incorporated those into a final draft. However, because the novel’s production had spanned years, she had not retyped the entire manuscript as usual. It was tangled, as a result, and colossal, a Brobdingnagian giant of text saturated with inserts, marginalia, and arrows. True to the desire to make room for his own statement, he had put everything in – save that Lester Murphy was Little Simon’s father and that most of the characters in the novel were biologically related (those findings were to be the reward for careful readers). The Russian episode redoubled his resolve to protect his work from editors. His caution to Macklem – ‘be careful of the words you start to change’ (letter to Macklem, n.d. [Spring 1981?]) – was thus a warning shot over Oberon’s bow. He need not have worried about his publisher’s reaction to the manuscript. Since the difficulty with Winter, Macklem had established an Oberon policy that he alone would have responsibility for Richards’s material, presumably because he alone understood the man and his work. He wrote to Richards that, though messy and substantially more difficult than his previous novels, Lives is ‘solid, substantial and poised,’ its structure ‘beautifully unobtrusive’ (24 February 1981). After four years of agonized experiment, to hear that it ‘reads like a musical score … with theme and variations’ (letter to DAR, 12 March 1981) must have exceeded Richards’s expectations, for he had indeed sought to create a chorus of lyrical and cacophonous voices, each integral to the overall composition. As before, Macklem normalized spelling and punctuation – in the interest of sales and reading tolerances, he said – and discouraged Richards from pulling punches with dialogue, cautioning him against using abbreviations for vulgarities. To hell with the prudes, he advised, direct statement is always the best means of evoking character and milieu. His only substantial criticism addressed the awkward way the book’s social philosophy had been incorporated. It was obtrusive. He didn’t disagree with the philosophy, only the presentation of it. By late February of 1981, Richards had eliminated thirty pages by tightening some of the relationships and trimming much of the social philosophy. He sent the new draft back with the expectation of a September 1981 release. In the accompanying letter, he appealed again for money. The Oberon contract offered $950 for the manuscript. That amounted to $237.50 for each year it had taken Richards to write the book, not including the usual 10 per cent on sales. ‘I’ve lived off my

Lives to AA 243

wife far too long,’ he complained (n.d. [Spring 1981?]), knowing his publisher’s affection for Peggy. Macklem expedited another OAC grant of $920 and sent a cheque for $500 as an advance against royalties. The largesse was partly to placate Richards for missing the release date. Problems with Oberon’s Canada Council grant had delayed the release for four months, which was ten months after Richards had sent the final edit back to Macklem. Not until the last week of December 1981 did the book reach the market – a circumstance that virtually excluded it from every major award competition for which it was eligible. This blunder was the tipping point that initiated Richards’s search for a new publisher. He queried the usual old friends about alternatives. Kent Thompson, who agreed that the latest Oberon contract was terrible, suggested that he approach Nancy Colbert, a Toronto literary agent – adding, however, that agents were unlikely to be interested in his work because it was not lucrative enough. Cogswell and Helwig advised him to stick with Oberon but try to change Macklem’s mind about his regional appeal. (That bias had been communicated in a letter from Macklem two years earlier which said that because Richards ‘come[s] from the wrong place[,]’ he is ‘easy to sell on a small scale … but … hard to make into a national bestseller because he doesn’t come from Toronto’ [8 August 1978]). With a reputation still developing nationally, and thus having only an outside chance of signing with a big publishing house, Richards heeded Cogswell’s and Helwig’s advice, demanding a national reading tour. After three books that had done well for Oberon, he felt he was owed. Days before Lives was released, he put them on notice that he would no longer tolerate the second-class status that Macklem’s tightfisted promotional policy and regional stereotyping relegated him to: I don’t think you’ve done enough as my publisher. I’m non-existent as a Canadian writer – and I really can’t see you promoting this new work with any more vigor. [The latest run of] Winter is out of print ... even though at one time there would have been a sound and enduring market for [it]. I’m cut off from all forms of media exposure, not once have I been west of Newcastle to read yet when western Professors of Canadian Lit arrive here to teach they have read me and put me on their courses, some quite astonished they’ve never heard of me ... I’ve never once been seriously promoted. I’d like to know how you intend to promote this new one – late as it is. There is no use in belly aching any longer. But if somethings [sic] not done I’ll find a way to buy my work back from you – I’ve nothing to lose by keeping it in my drawer. (6 December 1981)

244

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Lives would be hitting the fiction market in Canada at a time when things were getting tough again for writers and publishers of serious literature. The halcyon decade that followed 1967 had ended. Macklem wrote that ‘people are short of money and they want to go back to their old habits, which means American television, American football (even the CFL is losing money) and American books, especially paperbacks’ (17 December 1981). Richards didn’t need convincing; indeed, a theme of Lives was the nationalist fatigue that was sweeping the country. The public’s interest, he knew, was being radically renegotiated; his father’s now dwindling theatre business made that clear. Kramer vs. Kramer and On Golden Pond were drawing record audiences, while Raging Bull – a far more genuine film that might have doubled as the life of boxer Yvon Durelle, the Rocky Marciano of the Miramichi – was languishing in art houses. Sentiment was the latest flavour, melodrama its pabulum. Brutality had become ‘male.’ At the same time, arts councils were harping about the changing status of the book from artefact to commodity – a development that privileged a few writers with the right cachet while impoverishing the many. Cogswell had been vocal about the change for some time, writing in the Globe and Mail that ‘the urban centralization of the publishing industry and of the mass media, together with the application of chain-store methods to the bookstore industry,’ was turning the country into ‘one vast suburbia’ (1978, 6). He might have cited Oberon’s sales as proof. That year, W.P. Kinsella’s Dance Me Outside was in its fourteenth printing and still selling briskly, while Winter was stalling, finally going out of print in late summer. Reissuing it without subsidy or promise of sales didn’t make sense. Richards knew about the fickleness of market commodification, having watched how vertical integration of the media served Macmillan’s writers in the pages of Maclean’s magazine (both were owned by the same corporation) and how the national literati’s fetish for art had moved to the now fashionable islands of the B.C. coast. Macklem’s admission that he had rejected writers now being lauded in the pages of Maclean’s provided little solace. He was not altogether indifferent to his young star, however, asking his publicist to arrange a reading tour for Lives through the Canada Council’s Public Reading Program, Richards’s first tour in his seven years with Oberon. While preparations were being made for the tour – with Maritimefriendly contacts at Ontario universities rushed into service in the first two weeks of 1982 to secure the novel’s last-minute addition to the Governor General’s Award long list (Helwig at Queen’s, Bruce Whiteman

Lives to AA 245

at McMaster, David Staines at Ottawa) – Richards was at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, for a three-week term as writerin-residence, his first appointment of this type. With Lives completed, he wanted an escape as he had after each of his previous novels. He had an idea for a project about the theatre business that would take him to England, the territory of his paternal grandfather. While there, he wanted to call on Alan Sillitoe, whose Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner he greatly admired. He wanted to visit Malcolm Lowry’s grave as well. The Symbolists had opened him to Lowry, whom he now considered the finest writer of the century. He also had been writing a four-act play on François Villon, the swashbuckling fifteenth-century French poet whose ribald lyrics had inspired the Symbolists. With Rossetti’s translations and D.B. Wyndham-Lewis’s François Villon: A Documented Survey by his side, he had written parts of the script while waiting for Oberon to release Lives. Originally titled ‘The Interrogation,’ the play now bore the name ‘Water Carriers, Bones and Earls: The Life of François Villon.’ For three weeks in Sackville he put the finishing touches on his translations of Villon’s verse while struggling to stay sober, the half-bottle of sherry in his office – a remnant of Hugh MacLennan’s recent stay – tempting him the entire time. A seemingly odd subject of interest at first glance, Villon was another of those mad visionaries – part sinner, part saint, both vagabond and bandit – who had always intrigued Richards. Once the perfect companion for a rebellious truant in the Old Manse library in Newcastle, he was now a sympathetic figure for Richards to commiserate with. Villon was medieval Europe’s most infamous literary gangster. Born into poverty and orphaned as a child, he was active as a student revolutionary, jailed for capital offences, including murder, and finally exiled from France while out on appeal of a death sentence. He was thus the darker side of the coin that Oliver Twist might have become. Like other Richards favourites, he died young, leaving a body of work that is mocking, facetious, grotesque, and strikingly personal in how it reaches towards modernism’s confessional tones. Villon’s voice is that of a tavern goer, one whose Catholic penchant for the underdog manifests itself as a distrust of the rich and fashionable and as grand bonhomie with his peers. At thirty, Richards had become much like the poet he admired. Both felt trapped by vice and circumstance, Villon in ‘the community of doxies quacks beggars mummers rascals and all their kinds’ (‘Villon’ 49) and Richards in the company of similarly highly prized touts and rogues, ‘the wisest and most brilliant people I knew’ (‘Drinking’ 118).

246

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

In the play, Richards sets Villon’s life against a backdrop of cheating cops, disbelieving priests, drinking songs, and hapless lowlifes destined for the gallows. While lusty clerics peddle indulgences to bureaucrats who serve under the privilege of the decadent pre-Reformation church, rotting corpses and dangling bodies pervade the charnel of St Innocent, spreading the scent of death as Catholicism, quite literally, rots away. Under the gibbets of Montfaucon sit Villon’s friends – a circle of ‘boozy criminals with fingers like glue’ (‘Villon’ 2) – friends not unlike Richards’s own. Characters with names like Bloat and fat Margot exhibit the same energy and blasphemous wit of those in the earlier play ‘The Dungarvan Whooper.’ Their rapport with Villon gives the play its ribald fun: ‘Pull doglips – pull ratface,’ says Villon to his crew when urging them to move a rock. ‘Pull hairy legged nob gobblers, pull dicky licking snake fondlers’ (9). Though the dialogue is raucous, the drama of the play is consistently dark, much of it reflecting a tension between Villon and his adoptive father Guilliume de Villon, whose well-meaning conformity to social mores frustrates his rebellious son. Says Villon at one point, ‘No I will not be the cutest most pleasant well mannered mealy-mouthed peckerhead of all time – I become more violent … when I think how poor Guilliume de Villon wants me to act in front of those with a little fortune … you get nothing to drink from that but your own blood’ (17). The tension hearkens back to Mrs Fox of High Street in the early story ‘Mercury Month.’ The rub of social class still fascinates and disturbs, and ‘the bigger ups are [still] safe’ (34). Those below are betrayed and sacrificed for the maintenance of the social order, an injustice that the idealistic young Villon cannot abide. As Richards explained: ‘I think it’ll become more obvious that I’m writing about the manipulation of certain classes of people by others who think they are doing the manipulating for the benefit of all’ (quoted in Allen 2). Subject to just these social machinations, Villon’s fate is that of the scalawag, all the more deeply felt because he understands more than most how tilted the social ledger is towards the rich. He tells his father: ‘Nothing left for me but to drink loin water somewhere – to end being interrogated in the small chamber of some petty official – a fat one – all my brightness frazzled – frittered, embittered – in some dirty provincial town’ (43). And later, after stabbing a priest: ‘I must leave here father – and go away for good–the goddamn pain won’t go’ (59). The pain is Packet’s: the pain of remembrance, of inequity, of the inability to let injustice go. The play situates Villon in Richards’s pantheon of visionary rebels

Lives to AA 247

whose lives contain equal parts of the tragic and the brilliant. Like Poe, Williams, Thomas, and Fitzgerald, he becomes a scruffy moralist whose intolerance for hypocrisy sends him into quarrels with the world that he cannot win. As a study of Villon’s life and era, the play enabled Richards to explore the relationship between an avant-garde artist and his times, to open the creative process for examination and expose the nature and politics of literary reception. Preoccupied with the latter, the play dismisses the Robin Hood romance normally associated with Villon for the actuality of the poet’s pain and suffering. As the stage direction makes clear, ‘[Villon] is old (at 31) weak and tired’ (81). He has wandered in exile, endured torment at the hands of the Bishop of Orleans and various police provosts, and seen his father weakened in the discharge of his debts. His is hardly the ‘Joyous life’ (67) that myth has conferred. ‘I see [Villon] differently now,’ Richards explained on the eve of the premiere. ‘It’s easy to associate excitement with that kind of life, it’s easy to glamourize it, but as the years go by the truth becomes more apparent … [The play] is about the thousands of lies that are being told us by the various media about how we should act, how we should think, etc.’ (quoted in Allen 2). After the term at Mount Allison ended, Richards began the Ontario reading tour for Lives. It was the first time he had been west of the Maine border to read, and he spoke about how marginalized he felt as a New Brunswick writer, describing the frustrations he had shared with Harry Thurston six weeks earlier: that ‘[Central Canadian critics] overlook me … they overlook us all. They just don’t know where the country begins and where it ends’ (quoted in Thurston 50). Aside from a dismal turnout in Hamilton, his mostly academic audiences were receptive to his work and message. Most had heard of him by reputation and were curious to see the young author whose new book was garnering so many rave reviews. Their interest in his work surprised him, as did their most frequent question: Why are you not with one of the bigger publishers? As he toured Ontario, his confidence grew to match the importance that reviewers were assigning to his latest book. If Winter had been a very promising start (Metcalf) and Blood Ties the best novel ever to be written about New Brunswick (Cogswell), Lives was the novel that made the country’s most respected readers stand up and be heard. Writing in the Edmonton Journal, 1978 Governor General’s Award–winning poet Patrick Lane, writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, summed up the consensus that was building across the coun-

248

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

try: ‘If this book doesn’t win the Governor General’s Award for fiction this year, then we’re all in trouble’ (‘The Despair’ C10). Simon Fraser University professor Peter Buitenhuis, chair of the GG jury the year before, would have agreed, as he was on record saying that the prize should ‘recognize new, emerging talent and new forms’ (quoted in Wachtel 12), two criteria that should have made Richards a certainty for the short list. Not only was he a rising star – in reviewer emiterus William French’s estimation ‘a major writer, a voice to be reckoned with’ (1982, E15) – but the formal complexity of Lives was a ‘virtuoso performance’ (E15) that matched the formal complexity of Robert Harlow’s Scann and the historic volition of E.J. Pratt’s Towards the Last Spike. In scope, the work’s expansive, brooding intensity more resembled Thomas Wolfe’s early material or Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems than anything being done in Canada. ‘There is no one in Canada today who writes like David Richards,’ stated John Moss, ‘nor has there ever been’ (293). Lives, however, would not be short listed for a GG Award that year – a distinction that admitted it to the company of Swamp Angel, As For Me and My House, Pélagie, and Fifth Business, each passed over in its year of eligibility. Nevertheless, critics raved about the book, many admitting that it compelled them to reread and reassess the author’s earlier work. ‘Powerful is the word to describe [it],’ opened Fred Hazel, editor-in-chief of Saint John’s Telegraph-Journal (6). ‘Richards shows a kind of compassion in compulsive violence, and a kind of beauty in ruin,’ wrote Patricia Morley. ‘Here is a major voice in the land’ (1982, 39). The title of Morley’s review – ‘A Passionate Image of Life Along the Miramichi’ – and her delight in Richards’s ‘cheerful disregard for conventional syntax’ (39), signalled a radical departure from previous attitudes towards what most expert readers thought were his dissolute, Dogpatchy backwater and his undisciplined style. The consensus now held that Richards, with ‘incomparable [and ‘uncompromising’] integrity’ (Moss 293), was melding form and subject matter to enable middle-class readers to enter ‘a world [they] pretend does not exist’ (Lane C10). Most reviewers understood Richards’s intention to exhibit ‘the absolute insidious violence of soap operas and commercials and McDonald’s’ (quoted in Thurston 51), and were able to separate his characters from the orders of that violence: ‘If his characters are too battered, too confused, too twisted into the confines of limitless poverty and change to express and direct their anger, Richards isn’t; his empathy is total’ (Russell 20). John Bemrose agreed that ‘an appreciation of the impulsive virtues [of the poor] animates [‘the penetrating seriousness and the driving potency of’] Lives’ (56-57).

Lives to AA 249

Most startling of all was the critics’ openness to read the fictional Miramichi as Everyplace. ‘The book is a challenging and expertly constructed example of realism that easily transcends its roots in Canada,’ remarked Judith Russell in the Kingston Whig-Standard (20), a sentiment echoed by George Woodcock in Books in Canada: ‘[The novel] is not merely an account of the experiences of individuals or the history of a single family, but also the portrait of a society observed at the point of transition with an empathy … subsumed in a larger vision of the fate of men, collectively condemned to exist by the moral necessities of natural life’ (1982, 14). Woodcock’s comments recalled similar statements made in his 1980 NeWest Lecture ‘The Meeting of Time and Space: Regionalism in Canadian Literature.’ In that lecture he vindicated the work of ‘regionalists’ such as Margaret Laurence, Roderick Haig-Brown, and Charles Bruce by making the case for Canada as a confederation of autonomous regions rather than as one nation undivided. ‘To deny regionalism [in] the face of our history of confederation,’ he wrote, ‘is to deny the Canadian nation as it historically and geographically exists’ (9–10), an argument that occupied some of the same ground as the ‘imagined community’ thesis that Benedict Anderson was working on at the time. Whereas Anderson’s nation was constructed from the artifice of collective myth, however, Woodcock’s federation of autonomous regions denied ‘artificial political forms and boundaries’ (37) for ‘the geographical feeling of locality, the historical feeling of a living community, the personal sense of ties to a place where one has been born’ (9). For Richards, living in a rented house in his father’s backyard and jokingly comparing himself to a seventeenth-century peasant in the Ruhr Valley of Germany – ‘born, lived, and buried under the shadow of the same church spire’ (quoted in Thurston 50) – Woodcock’s words must have been welcome indeed, no less for coming from Canada’s pre-eminent man of letters. Since many of the most innovative new writers in the country had the strongest identifications with place (Richards and Jack Hodgins were often cited together in this context), it seems only fitting that critics like Woodcock and Lane were now challenging the long-held Canadian belief – eloquently defended by Northrop Frye in his ‘Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada’ – that regionalism was second-rate. Fitting, too, that one Frye statement in particular should be contested: ‘if no Canadian writer pulls us away from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary experience itself, then at every point we remain aware of his social and historical setting’ (214). To the new, post-Centenary way of thinking, Frye’s attitudes reflected a colonial bias that remained en-

250

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

trenched in the national ethos. The inference that art should extinguish the particular for the universal sounded like the sort of pronouncement that cultural elitists like Eliot and Woolf made. Were readers of Faulkner and O’Connor not aware of Mississippi and Georgia? Were readers of Hardy, Lawrence, and Wordsworth not aware of Wessex, Nottingham, and the Lake District? Did these great regionalists not occupy ‘the centre of literary experience’? However much Frye’s attitude was the great lie of cultural imperialism, it was a lie that Canada, wedged uneasily between the two cultural monoliths of Britain and the United States, had ceded to, and which was taking considerable effort to undo. The reviewers of Lives positioned themselves on the fault line of this debate, the majority siding with Alden Nowlan’s belief – paraphrased from William Carlos Williams – that ‘localism alone can lead to culture’ (quoted in Donnell 26). Suddenly it was being said of Canadian regionalists what Yeats had said of his countryman Synge: that the more Irish he became, so also the more universal. In Richards’s case, Keefer’s pronouncement ‘that the Miramichi is not just some grimy corner of the world, it is the world’ (Under 171) signalled the change. This change in attitude towards his little postage stamp of earth led Richards to view Lives as a watershed book and, consequently, his ‘life as a writer [as] in two parts – before and after [Lives]’ (‘Remembering’ 16). The novel had indeed thrust him, as French wrote, ‘into the mainstream of contemporary Canadian literature’ (E15). But as before, and perhaps predictably (his insecurities still raging within), Richards’s triumph was bittersweet. He celebrated as Winston Churchill did, drinking in victory because he deserved it and in defeat because he needed it. Positive reviews could not take the edge off what it had cost him to write Lives. But did he have Packet’s strength to surmount the past? When ‘the demons’ encroached (his term for bad memories), he reached for the bottle, embarking on a number of especially destructive drunks that forced his alcoholism into the open as never before. He continued to drink in binges, but increasingly as vendetta, quite clearly at war with himself. On most days, too hung over to vomit (or risk it), he took the edge off illness by starting in on the booze as soon as he awoke. For the alcoholic, this is the best part of drinking, the instant rush from sickness to an illusory health as alcohol re-enters the bloodstream. Richards was now hard core, taking cocaine and bennies to modulate his highs, going for days without proper food and rest, seeing the ‘creepycrawlies’ advance up his arms and stomach, visited by voices, hallucina-

Lives to AA 251

tions, and shivers. He was in the grips of what alcoholics call the horrors. Drinking was now not only impeding his work but seriously threatening his marriage and health. He had written about the change he knew he must make in the final pages of Lives, when Packet, voluntarily entering the psychiatric wing of the out-patient ward, admits to the ‘spiritualism of the incomplete’ that drink allows (260). Yet the more he ruminated on alcoholism’s false promise, the more he drank. The demon rum was controlling him. He lay for long periods on the sofa, clutching his Bible and praying to quit, entering into compacts familiar to alcoholics: he made promises to God in exchange for calamity, accident, even death, anything that would end what writer Jack London, another alcoholic, called the long sickness. Like London and Lowry in their final days, he didn’t feel he had much to lose. His life’s work seemed finished: he had completed the novel he’d struggled to write. He hit bottom in late December 1981, three weeks after borrowing $1,000 from the bank for Christmas presents. By mid-month, he’d drank through the money; then, ignoring the final notice from the provincial power utility for immediate payment or cancellation of hydro, he moved on to the only bank account he and Peggy had left. There would be no Christmas that year. As if to reinforce the misery, the advance copy of Lives appeared at the door. After the smart design of Blood Ties, its cover was an insult – a clear demotion. The jacket was a piss-yellow colour, he mused to friends, printed on a flimsy end paper that wouldn’t stand up to a good arse wiping. When Peggy came home later that day with cross-country skis, the bottom was in sight. ‘How could I ski with a bad leg?’ he thought. ‘I couldn’t. What would people say when they saw me trying? Better to get drunk and stoned and forget it’ (‘Drinking’ 118). That Christmas, Peggy celebrated alone, finding her husband on Boxing Day morning at their kitchen table drinking warm beer to nurse his hangover. It became clear in that instant that they needed help in a way that they’d never needed it before. Help came, as it often does, by destiny’s decree, in this case in the hulking, 250-pound form of an old friend, Trapper Newman, who had been in AA, and sober, for three months. He and Peggy and David sat at the Richards’s table that morning and talked in the only way the big man could: with a brute frankness as imposing as a brick wall. He didn’t pull any punches. He had been in the same predicament, desperate and near suicidal, only months before. He spoke of things he knew would bother his friend – of weakness, disloyalty, self-loathing, and, worst of all, what

252

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

his self-destructive behaviour was doing to Peggy. ‘You’re using booze to fight booze,’ he barked. ‘You hit the bottle, it will always hit you back’ (quoted in Richards ‘Drinking’ 119). When he finished, he asked Richards to accompany him to a meeting that night, the first step, he said, to a lasting sobriety that starts with learning to own your crap. Trapper was employing the classic AA buddy system, offering his own witness to what his friend desired but could not imagine accomplishing. (Even after all the pain that alcohol had caused, he still believed that boozing was the visionary’s weakness.) Richards only agreed to go because he owed Trapper a favour and the big man wasn’t to be deterred. In the weeks that followed, he and Trapper went to meetings together every second day. They were cheered from afar by Ray Fraser, who too was struggling, without AA, to stay off the bottle. After the first meeting, Richards knew he had made the right decision. When a month passed, he told Trapper that it was the first time since age fifteen that he’d been sober for thirty consecutive days. But then came the Ontario reading tour and a glass of wine one evening in Ottawa ‘to test the sobriety.’ Peggy’s warnings were to no avail, and Trapper was too far away to throw his friend over his shoulder. What followed was a three-month binge that brought the demons back ‘ten times worse’: ‘Feeling there was no hope, I decided I would drink until I died. I went for drives dead drunk, closing my eyes for snatches of sleep while doing sixty miles an hour. I would wake up in strange places, drive a hundred miles for a drink at a bar where no one knew me. The drunk went on and on and on’ (‘Drinking’ 120). Just before bottoming out for the last time, he found himself at the hospital, dropped there by someone he’d been drinking with. But who? Remembering a few years earlier when he’d seen Milton Acorn in similar shape, he staggered home to an empty house that looked mockingly desolate. His drinking had almost completely depleted their resources; they had not been able to buy furniture in years. Peggy was at work. He sat at the kitchen table shivering uncontrollably. With the humming of the fridge driving him crazy, he telephoned Trapper, who, without judgment, helped him resume his recovery. It was April 1982, the start of a sobriety that has lasted to the present. As the weeks passed, he began to taste food again, sleep through the night, and reconnect with family members who had become like strangers. It soon became evident that he was a good candidate for recovery and that his sobriety was as singleminded as his abuse. He turned rapidly from the company of drinkers and the habits of his former life. When he finally did quit, able to face the truth about the reasons for his addiction, he quit for good. With Trapper by his side, he got his one-year AA medallion in April 1983.

Lives to AA 253

For cradle Catholics, the AA experience is a familiar catechism, beginning with boozing’s accumulation of guilt (a concept akin to original sin) and moving through the public confessions that alcoholics make in Steps 4, 5, 8, and 9 to prepare for atonement. Richards was therefore already susceptible to AA’s message of the interrelatedness of guilt and sin and, as a writer, already open to the cathartic power of story that was at the heart of AA’s process. He read the Big Book in earnest, drawn naturally to its belief in ‘personal inventory’ and ‘autobiographical memory’ (reflection and narrative) as the means of discovering oneself in the present in order to reshape oneself for the future. This belief corroborated his experience of writing as a way of thinking through problems of the past. However, AA’s insistence on ‘a searching and fearless moral inventory’ (Step 4) forced him into a personal encounter with himself unlike any of the refracted examinations that fed his fiction. In AA, he was revisiting the past in service not to characterization but to self, putting his subjectivity in plain view. The requisite honesty of the sessions exposed him as he’d never been exposed before, yet as he told his own story and heard it repeated by others around him, he began feeling less isolated. The pain that seemed his alone was in fact common among alcoholics, so common it was textbook. Everyone was the same sum of insecurity and self-doubt. The message at the bottom of each story was that boozing was antithetical to freedom and fulfilment. It annihilated rather than enhanced. Two of the collected AA sayings seemed exactly attuned to his predicament: ‘Try it for 90 days. If you don’t like it we’ll refund your misery’ and ‘What other people think of you is none of your damn business!’ The last one spoke volumes about his long struggle with critics. Richards’s account of these days emerged only after a decade of sobriety. With time, he saw that alcoholism was all around him. His grandfather, Vince McLaughlin (Bill’s stepfather), had been a red-nosed, leaky-eyed boozer, lunatic enough on the bottle to force Bill into a lifetime of teetotalling. Some of the first memories of the Richards children are of a drunken Grampie, as they called him, cursing their parents for one thing or another, trying always to deepen the rifts between Janie and her brood. His great-uncles, Janie’s brothers Hughie and Willie, were local boozers, too, as were many of the operators employed at the theatres. Alcoholism was environmental: When I was little, drink surrounded me as rivers did fish. It lay in burdocks and pissed its pants, or came zigzagging up walkways, answering to the names of forgotten cousins and family members ... So before I ever drank or sang an Irish rebel song or shouted out in joy and rebellion, drink was

254

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

part of me. ... Drink surrounded me, coaxed me gently with its timeless serenade, told me that it would wait, bide its time, and be there whenever I turned to embrace it. (‘Drinking’ 108–9)

Self-examination led Richards to the admission that he was ensnared in alcohol as much as his father, step-grandfather, and great-uncles had been. As his sobriety took hold, evidence of AA’s notion of self-examination through life story began appearing in his work. Joe Walsh’s fight against the bottle in Nights is one of the first instances. It invokes the circumstances familiar to all alcoholics: the chronic pain of the person, the calculated betrayal by adversaries disguised as friends, the loneliness of insecurity, and the innumerable small steps to a lasting if always precarious recovery. Only an alcoholic could write so knowingly of Joe: Every time he drank, Joe would resolve to quit. Sitting about the tavern, or down at the wharf, or working outside around the house, or hobbling once again to the liquor store through a variety of streets, as if he was making for himself some obstacle course and wasn’t really thinking of the wine he was about to buy, he would resolve to quit. (Nights 59–60)

Joe’s paths through the labyrinth of self-negotiation parallel Richards’s own, right down to Jerry Bines handing Nevin White Father Doe’s Sobriety Without End in Wounded, the same book Joe gave to Bines in an earlier novel, and the same book that passed from Ray Fraser to Richards in the early days of their recovery. The serenity that Father Doe writes about in that book becomes the key for each to a lasting sobriety. Novels subsequent to Lives treat boozing as ultimately dishonourable to the self, as the low form of creativity that Cyril Connolly elsewhere observed. It is a message that Richards has carried forward for the past twenty-five years, not just in fiction but in shaping his public persona. Whenever he speaks of drink, he does so, using AA metaphors, as a false crucifixion: Rasputin said it better than anyone else: ‘Give me a drink but I love Christ.’ He meant give me a drink for my victimization, my self-pity, though I still believe in the real crucifixion. With booze we can pretend we suffer as Christ did; we can believe we are the sacrificial lamb being crucified by the masses. The more you drink the more you feel that way. Of course, initially, you think that drinking frees you: you are rebellious, you don’t fit in with the

Lives to AA 255 social norms, you are brilliant. But any man worth his salt soon learns that it is a false freedom, and that you are destroying your brilliance because you don’t have the courage to face it. Rasputin knew this through the fog of madness – that Christ was absolutely rebellious, absolutely against the social norms, absolutely brilliant, and didn’t waste his brilliance in the taverns puking all over the floor. (interview with author, March 1997)

At the International Festival of Authors in 2001, Richards continued this reasoning, speaking of the fear of failure as a cause of drunkenness and of drink’s residual effects on those family members (meaning Peggy) whose unflagging devotion lights the path to recovery. He was able to stop, he later said, only when AA helped him see that ‘the idea of drink replaced the idea of spirit by allowing the drinker to pretend it was one and the same’ (God Is 151). The start of Richards’s sobriety was abetted by a sea change in social attitudes towards drink in the 1980s. Long past was the hard-boiled romance of the bottle that Hemingway and Jack London had made famous in the early decades of the century. Vanished, too, were the suburban pleasures of high-society drink that John Cheever had chronicled in his stories of the 1950s – gone, along with the baby boomers’ drug-addled rebelliousness of the 1960s and 1970s. By 1980 the focus had shifted from wild nights to mornings after. The hangover, not the buzz, was headlines. John Lennon had been killed in New York City by a crazed fan, the Three Mile Island nuclear leak had occurred much as The China Syndrome had imagined, and the Iran Hostage Crisis was pushing Jimmy Carter’s Democrats from office. Jim Morrison’s ‘The End,’ enjoying a second run in Apocalypse Now, was the anthem of the times, fuelling the rising chorus of the Moral Majority’s claim that America’s decline was being fed by self-indulgent substance abuse (in just months, Ronald Reagan would sign a bill that forced states to raise the legal drinking age or risk cuts in federal funding). As if on cue, the Betty Ford Clinic opened in 1982 to dry things out. Finishing Lives and quitting drinking were the biggest turning points yet in Richards’s career. Lives was an end and a new beginning. When he wrote Stilt House three years later, he was completely sober, smoking three packs a day, living in Fredericton, and embarking nervously on a new phase of his writing career.

8 Rebuilding the Base: Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination

I’m becoming more convinced that nothing can work without a sense of what the prophets were talking about, about the need for spiritual values. Quoted in Allen (2)

And wasn’t the river, gutted, finished, looking like white fingers, tree-stumps like corrupted sores – river blocks like ash-heaps in the twilight. However, wasn’t this beautiful – somehow?’ Lives (239)

The calm of sobriety smoothed Richards’s reconnection with a considerably narrower circle of family and friends. He began spending long hours with his brothers in the upkeep of their camp on Mullin Stream, forty kilometres northwest of Newcastle. It was at this time that he turned to the solitude of fly-fishing on the Sevogle and many of its small pools near their stretch of water. He’d spend entire days walking downstream six or seven miles, encountering no one while navigating the slippery rocks and low overhangs of the narrow brooks along the way. With brothers John and Paul, he also canoed on the northwest branch of the Miramichi River above Wayerton, putting in at Miner’s Bridge and drifting down to fish the sheltered pools of the lower waters. To vary his adventures, he accompanied UNB English professor Ted Colson on trout fishing trips to the Nashwaak and Lime Kiln Streams near Fredericton. Colson’s passion for Norman MacLean and Roderick Haig-Brown prompted his reading of the literary naturalists. Salmon fishing became Richards’s great love, and the noble fish a formidable adversary. Hunting was easy by contrast, and tilted unfairly in

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 257

favour of the hunter, who could sit for long hours waiting for his prey to come along. After a few kills – one a nine-point buck near Heath Steele Mines, another a nine-hundred-pound moose along the Gum Road on the Bartibog River – he’d tired of the sport. Salmon were the greater challenge: they were temperamental, and their instinctive cunning tested even the most expert fisherman. So he committed himself to studying salmon. Peter ‘Mud’ McGrath and David Savage, the two ablest men on the river, became his teachers (Lines is dedicated to them). Peter was his brother John’s friend; David was Peggy’s cousin. They taught the fundamentals of throwing a line, covering a pool, and reading the water. Their knowledge of the right speed and trajectory of presentation, combined with an understanding of sky colour and fly patterns (both tied their own flies), became a kind of occult wisdom for Richards. Their knowledge of the woods and waters reacquainted him with that part of his mother’s heritage that he wished to know better (one of the great regrets of his life was never fishing with his uncle Richard Adams, the legendary fishing guide on the Matapédia River). He kept pace with these abler men over logging roads and blow downs to isolated pools, rod, lunch, and gear in hand. He often lagged and fell, one time cracking a rib, other times bobbing down the river with his rod held high overhead. It was not always an easy apprenticeship for a man with a lame left side. But like all true fisherman, he became satisfied with less and less. If a fish outsmarted him or got away, all the better for it. The resource, he learned, was part of a larger ecology that Margaret’s people (and now he) held in trust as greater and more enduring than themselves. Killing therefore became secondary to being in the woods, which itself became secondary to being in the presence of something that excited ‘reverie and a certain spiritual readjustment’ (Lines 99). ‘Here is another life,’ he later marvelled, ‘not only the life of the fly and the rod, but a life that says that so much of our concerns – which we put so much stock in and trouble ourselves so much about – does not matter in the least’ (100). David Savage observed that ‘learning to fish had a lot to do with his recovery from booze, allowing him to get in touch with something greater than himself’ (interview with author, December 1999). It was in the precariousness of the salmon’s journey that Richards saw the triumphs of survival that would preoccupy his later fiction: It seems in a way that the entire world is against them. It is amazing to see them torpedo through this water with such infinite strength. They have come in past the factory ships, the drifters, the mills soaking the water in

258

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

pollution and rinse, the filth from the sewers, the nets on the reserve, the pitchforks and nets and jig hooks of Henry the Poacher, and are not yet done their journey. They have miles and miles of river to go. (Lines 211)

Fishing thus became the restorative liturgy that it had been for Hemingway’s Nick Adams. ‘No one can stare at a river, hear the slough of a paddle coming upon you in the evening … without being hopeful,’ he concluded (Lines 218). This hope brought a new energy to career and horizons. Determined to reach beyond Oberon, Richards floated the idea to Peggy of writing to Jack McClelland about reprinting Winter. (Oberon’s inability to keep the book in print continued to be a sore point.) Given the handling of the release of Lives, Peggy didn’t think the idea was disloyal, so he wrote the letter, hearing back that the NCL series of Canadian classics was being revived and that M&S would be favourably disposed to including Winter among the dozen books planned for reissue that year. McClelland instructed him to send a copy immediately for consideration. Consideration was largely moot, however, for the positive reviews of Lives had already sealed the deal. In April 1982, Valerie Thompson phoned to say that M&S wanted paperback rights to Winter for the series. Though second-party publishers had a difficult history with Oberon – she cited problems acquiring Audrey Thomas’s work – Macklem assured Richards that he would not be unreasonable. M&S offered an advance of $750 for the rights and an 8 per cent royalty on copies sold; Macklem countered at $1,000. The offer was less than he wanted, especially since NCL editions were priced at $4.95, 8 per cent of which would be less than fifty cents per book, but what he gave up at the start of the contract he was sure to get back later, for the NCL book would have a wide readership among teachers and students. If ever there was an established canon of Canadian classics, the NCL series was it. Since its launch in 1958, it had grown to include what critics agreed were the foremost Canadian writers. Macklem’s hope was that if Winter did well, M&S would sign similar agreements to keep Blood Ties and Lives in print. From Macklem’s point of view, the arrangement was ideal. His author’s early work would be widely circulated by the country’s wealthiest and most respected literary publisher – ‘the greatest huckster in the country,’ he told Richards (letter to DAR, 16 August 1983) – while he would be paid for the rights. In effect, M&S’s marketing would be selling the Richards titles still under Oberon imprint.

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 259

Richards’s literary ambitions had been rekindled. He started reconnecting with supporters via letters and telephone. He wrote to George Woodcock in praise of his Orwell and Gandhi books, confessing great admiration for the bravery and anarchic anti-imperialism of both men. He had recently revisited Orwell’s Burma essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’ to think through the moose slaughter in Lives (the poacher in that novel later appears as Henry in Lines). Woodcock’s response suggested that he viewed Richards as working towards the same political idealism as his beloved nineteenth-century idealists, Tolstoy and Proudhon, both of whom had dreamed of a world of free individuals working independently of government and other civil constraints. He also travelled to Mount Allison University to attend the weekly workshops of the undergraduate class that was staging his François Villon play. Under the direction of Ric Knowles, the class was researching medieval France and rehearsing scenes on Thursday nights. Knowles’s pedagogy of collective staging meant that every member of the production was involved in interpreting the script – a strategy that kept Richards busy reimagining his work materially in order to capture the sights and smells of the boisterous streets of 1450s Paris. When the play was premiered at Hesler Hall in late March, even the audience was involved in the production, sitting among the actors and playwright in what Knowles described as an environmental rather than a static stage (Allen 2). The tactility of the experience entrenched Richards’s commitment to affective realism – something that would be amplified further in his next novel, Road to the Stilt House, which was beginning to take shape in his mind. At the end of the production, he drove to Fredericton to visit Alden Nowlan, who was preparing to embark on a reading tour for I Might Not Tell Everybody This. Nowlan was ailing – diabetes had impaired his vision and mobility – though few at the time knew how ill he was. Richards found his old friend tired and enfeebled, his talk tinged with darkness. He spoke of Terry Fox, whose death the previous summer was still bothering him. He spoke of his own cancer in the 1960s and of his arthritis and sundry medications. In a voice that had thickened and slowed, he told of his regret that visitors had stopped calling. The mood of the encounter was elegiac. Though he couldn’t have known at the time that his friend was only a year from death, Richards had the premonition that something monumental was coming to a close. Moved to the contemplative, he penned a memoir of friendship, published as the personal essay ‘La Roche’ in The Fiddlehead. The memoir told of the tragic life of Emmerson Laroque, the real-life boy he had

260

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

modelled Dane after in the last story of Dancers. Emmerson was the prodigy who had protected the neighbourhood kids and run errands for the local winos on the bank. His mythic status had continued to grow in adulthood when he put a pulp hook through his hand on the docks and finished his shift without complaint, pouring rum into the wound to wash it out. When Richards last saw Emmerson, wine had withered him to a shade of his former self, yet he was still as much loved by his peers as scorned by his betters. The town’s reaction to his death in a car accident – ‘people said that was for the best, because he’d made quite a mess of his life’ (‘La Roche’ 50) – led Richards to reflect on the now pervasive middle-class smugness that had become the river’s casual morality. His essay answered that smugness by casting Emmerson as the guardian angel Michael of Hockey Dreams, the only angel besides Gabriel so named in the Bible. The essay seemed to prepare him for Nowlan’s death in June 1983, the event that ended his youth as a writer. The closest thing he’d had to a mentor, the ‘father-in-art’ (Mathews 239) whom he had shared with others, was gone. Earlier that month, Nowlan had collapsed in the shower after a night of drinking with his son. He went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance, lapsing into a coma and never regaining consciousness. When Richards heard the news, he called Nancy Bauer to ask that she sit in for him at the hospital until he arrived from Newcastle. He must have thought of his mother languishing in the same emergency room not that long ago. He and Peggy stayed at the hospital for three days without going into Nowlan’s room. Both wanted to remember him as he had been: stubborn and irrepressible, brilliant, wilful, intransigent, and original. Richards was one of the pall-bearers at UNB’s Old Arts Building and among the inner circle that Nowlan’s son John invited to the private burial at Forest Hill Cemetery, the resting place of Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Desmond Pacey, A.G. Bailey, and other of the province’s literary luminaries. Jim Stewart played an Irish lament on his prized flute that day, then broke the instrument over his knee so that it would never sound again. The act was in remembrance of something Nowlan had once said about an old conjurer snapping his wand to contain the magic as the lights went down. In similar ritualistic fashion, John opened a bottle of Jameson’s Irish whiskey and passed it around to the small group assembled at the gravesite. Though sorely tempted, Richards poured his offering into the grave with the words ‘Goodbye, brave fighter. Goodbye, great man’ (quoted in Toner 22). With bagpipes playing in the background, the denizens of Windsor Castle picked up shovels and covered

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 261

over their friend, refusing to leave such an intimate task to the gravediggers waiting in the distance. ‘It was the kind of funeral Alden Nowlan would have appreciated,’ wrote fellow columnist Ralph Costello, ‘if only he hadn’t been the corpse’ (8). Though he felt truly orphaned, circumstances allowed Richards little time to dwell on the loss of his friend. The appearance of Winter in NCL format just weeks before instigated his appeals to other publishers. He made his wishes known to John Metcalf, who had switched to General Publishing, at the time Canada’s largest trade publisher, whose stable of writers included the new fiction wave of the 1970s: Anne Hébert, Leon Rooke, Hugh Hood, Mavis Gallant, and fellow New Brunswicker Antonine Maillet. Metcalf carried Richards’s wishes to Ed Carson, Associate Publisher at General, who spoke to Macklem about the rights for Richards’s remaining books. But Richards had less control of his rights than he would have liked to admit. Always a good businessman, Macklem had already informed M&S of General’s interest, and this expedited a contract to reprint Blood Ties and later Lives in NCL format. Richards was satisfied but suspicious of why Oberon had not involved him in the negotiations. ‘I’d love to know what General’s offer was,’ he wrote (letter to Macklem, 5 August 1983). Percolating in the background was something Nowlan had told him during their last visit: that he had declined Dennis Lee’s offer to publish his Selected Poems in a Modern Canadian Poets Series that Lee was editing for M&S, in effect withdrawing from the company of Irving Layton, Earle Birney, Margaret Atwood, and other major Canadian voices. He had declined out of loyalty to Clarke, Irwin, only to see his publisher go into receivership just weeks before his death. Richards wondered whether his own loyalty might come to the same end – whether, in other words, loyalty was the poor man’s curse. The buzz from Lives, still resonating during the first half of 1983, suggested otherwise. Venerable national reviewer William French of the Globe and Mail called to request an interview. Like Phil Milner, he had long noted the echoes of Faulkner in Richards’s work, and he wanted to see first-hand the territory of the young Miramichier’s heart. The fullpage article that resulted praised him lavishly under the subtitle ‘David Adams Richards May Well Be Canada’s Most Underrated Writer’ (E1), but Richards did not approve of French’s generalizations about the Miramichi, allowing his hometown paper to reprint the article only if the following disclaimer was added: ‘Mr. French should be excused for some of his remarks about the area’ (quoted in ‘Author Richards,’ 7 Septem-

262

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

ber 1983: 5). He was vexed by what French interpreted as his disenchantment with region, a feeling that did exist but not to the extent that he cared to admit publicly. Invitations for readings continued to arrive. Organizers of the Sixth Triennial Conference of the Association of Commonwealth Literature at Guelph invited him to read, as did conference organizers from York and McMaster. Readings in Halifax, Sackville, and Fredericton rounded out the summer. After hearing about his performance at the Canadian Book Information Centre at Killam Library, CBC Halifax flew a television crew to Fredericton to film him reading at STU. He accepted as many of these invitations as money allowed, declining only when reading fees didn’t cover costs. He was again living ‘hand to mouth,’ as he told Ed Carson from General (letter to Ed Carson, 5 August 1983). In May, Peggy was one of almost five hundred workers laid off from Heath Steele Mines. They lived on Unemployment Insurance and a small Ontario Arts Council grant throughout most of the summer. With Nowlan’s death, however, the worst of ironies intervened to reverse their fortunes. UNB needed a new writer-in-residence. A number of names, his among them, were suggested. Four nationally reviewed books, two plays, and countless readings in the region had made him the most visible and accomplished English-language writer in the province. He was also well known to members of the appointments committee, a number of whom were Ice House regulars. Nowlan’s contempt for academic writers had always been a source of tension at the university, and though Richards had quarrelled with Bauer and Thompson, he was still on friendly terms with both. The decision to follow in the steps of his close friend could not have been easy. He certainly needed the money, and Fredericton was his second home, the place where his writing career had first blossomed, nurtured by the same community of writers that was now offering him the position. But his loyalty to Nowlan and his memories of what others made of their competitiveness made him wary. He wondered to Bob Gibbs how the machinations of university politics might contrive to use him as Nowlan had been used. A large factor in this was the perception that he would be stepping into his friend’s shoes. As soon as he made these concerns known, insiders began whispering that his closeness to Nowlan would continue the prejudice shown against the academic enterprise. Simply by considering the position, he found himself embroiled in the kind of university politics he detested. It must have been with more than a little trepidation, then, that he accepted the position and the

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 263

$10,000 stipend attached, as much out of financial need as commitment to his vocation. In the end, Gibbs convinced him that Nowlan would have wanted him to take the job. His one condition of acceptance was that he would not move into Nowlan’s house on Windsor Street. Living off campus was the only way he could honour his old friend’s memory while maintaining the necessary distance to make the job his own. He reassured Peggy – who was uneasy about Claudine’s feelings of usurpation – that the greatest thing about being a writer is the freedom to leave in the middle of the night. That Tennessee Williams line seemed on point to their situation. By mid-September 1983, after seven uninterrupted years on the Miramichi, they were living at 383 St John Street in Fredericton, just a few houses from where they had been living ten years earlier when Winter was conceived. They did not know at the time that they would never again make their home on the Miramichi. Meeting students, guest lecturing, reading publicly, and contributing to university broadsides seemed a full slate; however, as the first term proceeded, Richards found himself as isolated as Nowlan had been. Apart from the fact that he was producing the books taught in classrooms down the hall, his presence on campus was secondary to the professional academic literacy practised at the university. Students knew he was there, but few sought him out. One who did was Wayne Johnston, a student from Newfoundland whom he met in Bill Bauer’s fiction writing class. Johnston was amused by the casual contemptuousness that Richards displayed in filling a coffee cup with tobacco juice during his reading – a flair reminiscent of the outporters he knew; he was also taken by the verbal power of Lives. Shortly after the two writers became friends, Richards wrote to Macklem asking that Oberon reverse its decision on The Story of Bobby O’Malley, Johnston’s creative writing thesis and the finest first novel Richards had ever seen. Macklem reconsidered and published the book, writing on the back, ‘This is the best first novel to come out of the Atlantic Provinces since David Adams Richards published The Coming of Winter in 1974.’ Bobby O’Malley went on to win the W.H. Smith/ Books in Canada First Novel Award in 1986. Richards formed an even closer friendship at this time with expat Eric Trethewey, on sabbatical at UNB. A creative writing teacher at Tulane University in New Orleans, Trethewey was an accomplished poet, recipient of the Academy of American Poets prize, and frequent contributor to the Georgia, Sewanee, Southern, and Yale reviews. But it was his rural Nova Scotia pedigree that cemented his friendship with Richards: he had grown up on the same hardscrabble as Nowlan, except that he

264

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

had literally fought his way out, first as an amateur boxer and then as a professional. He had gone to high school with, and later fought on the same card as, Stu Gray. The first time the two writers met, Richards questioned him about Gray’s 1972 fight in Winnipeg with Canadian Light Heavyweight Champion Al Sparks. (Gray was knocked out in the seventh round of that fight and died the next day, an episode remembered by boxing fans as a black mark against hastily organized events.) Trethewey’s insider knowledge of prizefighting, combined with his lifelong interest in Keats and the nineteenth-century Russian novelists, solidified a friendship that, at least initially, provided an outlet for both writers’ distaste of literary posturing. Their talk turned accordingly ‘to the ways in which literature represented the moral underpinnings … of human relationships,’ Trethewey recalled, ‘[of] love, justice, compassion, egotism, greed, thoughtlessness, cruelty’ (71). The two began travelling to watch the fights, attuned in particular to Moncton’s boxing scene, where Benoit ‘Bam Bam’ Boudreau and ‘Irish’ Bob Harvey were scoring impressive wins in the 1980s. After paying homage to Yvon Durelle at his Fisherman’s Club in Baie-Ste-Anne, they drove to Halifax to see the IBF light heavyweight bout between American Marvin Camel and Cape Bretoner Roddy MacDonald, a match that turned into a melee when a stoppage due to low blows saw the Capers at the Halifax Forum charge the ring to get at Camel. Richards and Trethewey were also present at the first meeting of ‘Ray’ Guerrero (Chavez) and Ricky Anderson and at the pro debut of Darrel ‘Pee Wee’ Flint. ‘Northern New Brunswick – a Personal Reflection’ and ‘Small Town,’ Richards’s first public essays as writer-in-residence at UNB, were inspired by a road talk about Keats, whose notion of the holiness of the heart’s mirth opened him to similar panegyrics of his own heart’s affections. ‘Our men pick [berries] with the women,’ the first essay begins, invoking the material and communal culture of New Brunswickers: There is always a road, a highway. We live beside it ... To youngsters who have grown up here there is always the sense of wonderment just before dark. ‘The Browning’ the Acadians say. In the summer I grew up where the night came as solid as a stone. It had the blackness of a full tide in the dark ... Here our triumph and tragedy is living in a land that contains so much power ... Our [legends] have human blood: animals known to us by touch ... There are gods in the wind too, in the salt air. They are here in the middle of the summer anointing those who can sense them. (4)

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 265

Discernible in Richards’s fiction is the now familiar impulse to render place in distinctly geometrical dimensions. A centring metaphor – in this case, the town clock – anchors sense and perspective, the sweep of which touches the surrounding buildings, the river, the prevailing smells, and the weather, each made concrete as palpable phonic signs that, together, create a sensory mythology of place. This combination of sense apparatus and heightened language constitutes the first instance of Richards’s longer non-fiction poetics of a decade later. Less obvious in these essays is Richards’s evolving perception of himself as a formal if not official voice of the province. ‘Northern New Brunswick’ takes up the Escuminac Disaster of 1959, when twenty-two salmon boats and thirty-five men were lost in a freak summer storm in the Gulf of St Lawrence. Memorialized in song since the 1959 Miramichi Folksong Festival, when thirteen-year-old Bernadette Keating of Chatham composed the first of many elegies, the tragedy had seeped into communal memory to the extent that it merited literary treatment. In his treatment, Richards acknowledges the episode’s importance in cultural history but refuses the overarching authority of folk chronicler so as not to ‘intrude upon [the] thought’ (4) of the men who risked their lives to save others. The objective, rather, is to recognize the ‘presences’ (4) that infuse place while publicly accepting the responsibility for their recording. The touring exhibit of three writers and three photographers for which Richards wrote ‘Small Town’ was an occasion for the exercise of this responsibility. Conceived by documentary photographers Stephen Homer and Peter Gross, the multimedia project was modelled after the famous collaboration between journalist James Agee and visual artist Walker Evans in the American South. Seeking to locate the familiar in the interlude between image, text, and voice (audio of the writers played during the time it took to view the display), the project had the kind of supra-provincialism that Richards’s new role required. That licence, coupled with the allowances of creative non-fiction, enabled him to speak through his subjects instead of just for them – a change that altered the tone, range, and address of his statement. ‘Our people tell the weather by the taste of sulfur in the air,’ he illustrated in ‘Small Town,’ ‘they know the temperature by how the snow has powdered the brick, the warmth by the smell of soot … There are other smells here too, of sawmills, and the sea. They are all a part of us, a part of how we feel and breathe–and how we think’ (‘Small Town’ n.p.). It is clear that his official position as writer-in-residence of the province’s largest university had tapped an

266

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

unofficial laureateship he had always held. The same had happened to Alden Nowlan, whose popular journalism nurtured his sense of commitment to the people of New Brunswick. A long-dormant aspect of Richards’s conception of his vocation had asserted itself. With Peggy working as a teller at the Bank of Montreal and with his duties at UNB taking less time than expected, Richards accelerated the pace on two long projects during the winter of 1984. The first was a screenplay he was calling ‘Phillip,’ the second was a novel titled Road to the Stilt House. Jon Pedersen had seeded the idea for ‘Phillip’ in a meeting with him during the final days of Nowlan’s illness. A New Brunswick filmmaker, Pedersen had grown close to Nowlan in 1982 while shooting a National Film Board documentary – so close that John Nowlan had co-opted him to hide gin in his father’s casket and help dress the big man in a kilt for his final farewell. Wanting to move to feature film, he had asked Nowlan for a New Brunswick screenplay four months earlier. With script money already in hand, he approached Richards as an alternative. Though he preferred to work with a poet – thinking that a poet’s imagistic thought processes were better suited to story-boarded narrative – he surmised that Janie Richards’s grandson would be a fast study, which he was. Richards’s script idea was essentially a redemption story about an ex-drinker who comes back to the town where he killed an eight-year-old boy while driving drunk. At the heart of the story were questions about the paradox of return: whether forgiveness is possible, and to what degree communal memory figures in personal redemption – questions that would achieve full force in the moral dilemmas facing Jerry Bines and the community that receives him in Wounded. Richards delivered the screenplay, his first, in the summer of 1984. When filming started two years later, it would become the first feature film made in New Brunswick by a provincial company. The screenwriter’s process of blocking self-contained visuals heightened the concision that Richards had deployed when preparing ‘François Villon’ for the stage, providing the formula for a more direct line of storytelling (Lives had taken him as far as he could go with the conceptual dimensions of indeterminate time). That formal work done, his discussions with Trethewey were leading him to the characters whose story he wanted to tell. Trethewey’s arrival at almost exactly the time of Nowlan’s exit illustrates how important literary conversation was to Richards’s own creative process.

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 267

One novel they discussed at length was Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, which was still topical a century after release. Dostoevsky’s treatment of terrorism and personal freedom at the onset of Bolshevism answered much of the unexamined rhetoric of the new age. Wrote Trethewey, recounting their discussions: There seemed to be an uncanny echo of [the novel’s] concerns in the culture around us. There was a kind of callow liberalism/progressiveness in the air, a complex of ideas and attitudes purely notional and not seconded by conduct or rooted in any real self-knowledge or insight into human nature. It was as though many, particularly in the universities, thought they could don an ideology, like some fashionable garment, and suddenly be made whole and au courant. (71)

It was not unreasonable to wonder at the time whether the violence that stemmed from Stepan Verkhovensky’s intellectualism would not also follow from the utopianism of enlightened ideologues in the West. Like Dostoevsky, Richards felt that the best alternative to this bourgeois liberalism was a form of Christian autocracy. He told interviewer Rod Allen in March 1983: ‘I’m becoming more convinced that nothing can work without a sense of what the prophets were talking about, about the need for spiritual values’ (2). Stilt House would take him along that line of examination, focusing his opposition to New Age reformers of various inclinations. As he pursued Dostoevsky’s argument in discussion and reading, he came across Albert Camus’s 1959 adaptation of the novel for the stage. Les Possédés amplified the social politics of the Russian original by hardening the leftism that Dostoevsky had mocked with derisive laughter – rich ground indeed. Richards followed by reading Camus’s novel L’Etranger and essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus.’ He especially liked the idea of Sisyphus as an outsider, a ‘highwayman,’ telling Trethewey that what made him tragic was his full consciousness of struggle (the effort to move the proverbial rock up the hill for eternity). His torture, Richards added, summarizing Camus’s concluding point, was in knowing that his odds were insurmountable, thus torture was his fate. The brief respite he enjoyed walking down the hill merely made his fate the more absurd, for his only hope for relief was in the interregnum before torment. Camus described the paradox as follows: ‘Sisyphus … powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same

268

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn’ (314). As he searched to locate the content that would fit his new, pared-down form, Richards knew his novel must feature mockery, derision, and contempt as the defensive attitudes of a people as ensnared in fatalistic torment as Sisyphus. Powerlessness and rebellion would be their torment. Bureaucratic altruism would replace Christian morality as the engulfing ethic. Their only relief would be scorn. That one of the epigraphs to Stilt House is the slightly reworked version of Camus’s line – ‘Man can overcome any fate by scorn’ (5) – is no less coincidence than the other, from Luke: ‘For from henceforth there will be five in one house divided, three against two and two against three’ (12.52). Dostoevsky, too, had used a passage from Luke to open The Possessed. Two other literary works occupied Richards’s attentions during the period of his new book’s genesis. The first was The Family of Pascual Duarte by Camilo José Cela, a novelist whom cultured Spaniards liked to compare with Camus. Cela’s star was rising in the 1980s as a result of his nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Richards picked up his trail while vacationing near Valencia, where Cela had fought against the Republic’s troops as a member of Millan Astray’s Foreign Legion. Pascual Duarte, published the same year as L’Etranger (1942), explores violence through the same ideological lens as The Possessed. Of the three novels, however, it is the most sustained study of the intersection of family and social perturbation, unusually powerful in conveying the torments of entrapment. Its combination of a highly lyrical vernacular with limited firstperson perspective heightens the pathos we feel for the characters while deepening the disturbing irony of their actions. Pascual Duarte is a murderous bandolero, his heart ‘like a machine for making blood to be spilt in a knife fight’ (57), but the language of his heart’s motives is so pared down and colloquial that it invites empathy for his condition. Cela, like Camus in L’Etranger, achieves this effect – essentially a reversal – by using understatement to convey more redolence than brevity reveals. His description of Duarte’s parents, for example, tells us just enough that we easily, willingly intuit more: ‘My father and mother didn’t get along at all. They had been badly brought up, were endowed with no special virtues, and could not resign themselves to their lot’ (24). With a father who beats his children – ‘a child’s flesh is such a tender thing’ (23) – a mother who is unclean and slovenly, and a sister who ‘took a liking for liquor at an early age’ (32), Duarte comes from a family that has ‘little to recommend it’ (25–6), all clues to both his fear and his misanthropy. The aridity of emotion that follows builds until released in matricide,

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 269

for as Duarte confesses, ‘it takes years for a hatred to incubate’ (99) and ‘there is no deeper hatred than … hatred for one’s own blood’ (47). The novel is thus a chilling study of a family divided by the ‘evil arts’ (149) of callousness, degradation, infanticide, bickering, and cuckoldry, many of the same afflictions that will appear in Stilt House. Though Duarte hopes for more than his fate allows – a turn of mind that points to other outcomes under different circumstances – he becomes a killer by failing to rise from the squalor that eventually subsumes him. He has little choice, however, as his powerlessness is much more pronounced than his rebellion. In subjecting these forces to examination, the novel illustrates how the capacity for murder is cultivated as unceremoniously in one child as care and concern are nurtured in another. Duarte, like Camus’s Meursault in Part II of L’Etranger, is forced in the end to contemplate this fate in prison while the bureaucratic apparatus that put him there reappears in the manner of the same self-absorbed indifference to reform him. Violence trickles down, these texts say, and torment is found in conscious contemplation of the inescapability of one’s fate. Richards’s Arnold from Stilt House will possess similar insight and ennui. Exhaustion is what he will enact. The unifying work that brought these texts and themes together was discovered by chance when Richards worked on ‘Small Town’ for the touring exhibition of New Brunswick – 6 Views. Wanting to know more about the collaboration that had inspired Homer and Gross’s project, and always interested in the South, he picked up Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book that Agee and Evans co-published in 1939 about their fieldwork in Hale County, Alabama. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just begun his second term in 1936 when Fortune magazine commissioned Agee and Evans to investigate whether the New Deal – the economic policies intended to bring relief to working-class Americans during the Great Depression – was improving conditions for rural farmers, many of whom were living as sharecroppers in near feudal servitude to moneyed landowners in the South. Evans was an experienced photographer, Agee a recognized poet and journalist. It was as ‘non-authoritative human[s]’ curious about cotton tenantry, wrote Agee (xiv), that they entered Hale County and the lives of three farm families. With ethnographic precision, they recorded the degradation, shame, and guilt of stifling poverty as they saw it. Their moral pact was to avoid soft-peddling the suffering they observed and instead to capture the domesticity of its textures, a domesticity they believed to be the sine qua non of the human experience. They thus described – in

270

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

‘fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement’ (13) – the houses and possessions, land and livestock of these families. What emerged was a portrait of human dignity amidst exploitation that pioneered a new way to speak politically. The revelatory intimacy of their montage bespoke the need for social responsibility more loudly than slogans alone could. Indeed, their account was the more powerful for disguising politics in the vernaculars of a profane human comedy: ‘[their] being cheated and chocked of [fully realizing human potentialities], is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can assure itself’ (5). The New Deal’s mostly Republican opponents could not easily disagree with these words, for they appealed to the higher moral order of the ancien régime’s just society (the book’s title comes from Ecclesiastes). As rhetoric, the multisensory assault was revolutionary. In ‘contriving [to] record, communicate, and analyze’ (xiv) proprioceptively, using language as portent in the same manner as the Symbolists, the method advanced the documentary fealty that Dickens had brought to the experience of the workhouses. By crawling inside hunger, anger, and despair, Agee and Evans pioneered a new approach to evocative storytelling that achieved exactly what Richards had strived for in the family sagas of Winter, Blood Ties, and Lives. Stilt House would be his next step in advancing the poetics of the evocative. Essentially, he would rebuild from the ground up, eliminating the last traces of streaming consciousness that were the legacy of Faulkner (Blood Ties) and Joyce/Lowry (Lives). Cela’s book had shown that a tighter, leaner style could be as expressive as the intricate scaffolding of Lives. Formally, he would evoke the polemical in the sparest language possible so that the common resonated poetically. Thematically, he would provoke readers by unsettling the calm that was the hallmark of middleclass cheer. He would do this by laying bare the increasingly populist social altruism that was the accepted high truth of his day. As he told one student, ‘I wanted to show people that no one cared about and I wanted to show you why no one cared about them, and then I wanted to show you that maybe you should care about them’ (quoted in Sturgeon 190). Darkness would be the only hue appropriate for the book’s mood, for like Agee and Evans, he would be chronicling a suffering that didn’t seem to matter to anyone, especially to the people it should have mattered most to. Following Wittgenstein, he would conjoin ethics and aesthetics (77).

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 271

He stumbled upon an Arnold-like prototype in an arcade one day who solidified the novel’s main character in his mind: I got the idea ... from watching this lad with a shaven head play video games downtown. That’s where the whole conception came from – of this poor little bugger that lived in the back alleys of town, going out and spending his life in the new fangled world that he doesn’t understand any more than the video games in the Arcade. (quoted in Sturgeon 238)

The prospect of such a novel must have been frightening. Richards would again have to summon a pain that was ugly and destructive (imagining it brought memories of his mother’s suffering, which he would draw from when shaping the character of Mabel). On a social level, he was wading again into the darkness to make a political statement – this time one absolutely counter to accepted dogma. But circumstances he could not ignore seemed to demand it. Never before had he been as close to the manufacture of ideological certainty as he was every day at UNB, where the social problem most discussed was the absence of good restaurants in the city. The more insufferable the coffee room talk became, the more Richards felt it necessary to lead his new colleagues into a darkness that their ideas skirted but never touched. Though his sobriety was in its early stages, he felt honour bound to challenge the easy attitudes wafting so assuredly around him. He also felt that he had unfinished business with the Masseys – the clan, distantly reminiscent of the poor families on Hamilton Street, that had been victimized incessantly in Lives. Stilt House met the challenge to ideological correctness by fast-forwarding to the present. The novel is set in the early 1980s in a fictional environ where the postmodern has become epidemic. Place is no longer decaying, as in previous novels; rather, it is decayed, devolved to the subhuman, inhospitable conditions that Blood Ties and Lives forecast. The post-apocalyptic milieu resembles the first Acheron sphere of Dante’s Upper Hell, where, as told in Canto III of the Inferno, ‘sighs and cries and shrieks of lamentation’ (III.22) echo from damned souls whose unending punishment for being ‘undecided in neutrality’ (III.39) is to follow a banner at a furious pace while being tormented by flies and hornets. Like the souls of Sisyphus and Dante, Richards’s are forever trapped, except that their entrapment is not punishment for a refusal to make a commitment in life but a consequence of their powerlessness to sur-

272

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

mount what society decrees as their fate. Simply put, they are not able, allowed, or equipped to make any commitments. They are, in the common parlance the book invites us to use, the structurally disadvantaged, the economically downtrodden, the socially disabused. But what do those terms mean? They mean that Arnold and his family, the principals of Stilt House, must stew in their own stench while living atop of one another, powerless to do anything but sleep, as hornets, do-gooders, bullies, and rogues invade their space: Father Billy told him [Arnold] his family had no determination left to make its mark on the world. It slept. The days passed, one, two, three, as if they were nothing. Sadie slept in the best room in the house, all alone, her hair dyed, with a ribbon in it. Harry slept in the kitchen (there was a cot by the stove and he slept there almost always). Mabel slept. Or when her stomach hurt she walked the floor cursing. The TV, lone occupant of the livingroom, remained burning. The light in the upstairs hallway burned yellow. The taps in the bathroom and the pipe behind the toilet dripped. (35)

It is this condition – the one beneath the fluid sociological phrases invented to bureaucratize human suffering – that Richards leads his readers to in Stilt House. The many symbolic references to Dante’s Inferno make it not unreasonable to posit that he imagined himself Virgilian in casting the novel as he did. Stilt House is, then, our pilgrimage through a despair wrought by the socio-economic conditions that we, as citizens of the same system, are complicit in sustaining, for as Dante wrote, ‘everything … which is caused is the effect, mediately or immediately, of some intellect’ (Epistolae 205). The novel is thus a candid travelogue addressed to us, the middle class, complete with the itch and discomfort that travel brings. To be directly hailed as such would put bees in more than one reviewer’s bonnet. Two distinct family groups clash in Stilt House: Arnold’s immediate family (mother Mabel, younger brother Randy, Mabel’s boyfriend Harry, Harry’s mother Sadie), and an appointed family of institutional caregivers (Juliet the myopic social worker, Craig the Cubs leader, Billy the alcoholic priest). By whose authority the second family is appointed is never made clear, and this absence requires us to assume and then contest the assumption that there is a higher benevolence. The novel’s central tragedy is that Arnold’s biological family has no more claim to closeness than the non-biological family brings: ‘“No, you won’t have a big funeral at all,”’ chides Arnold to his dying mother, ‘“because you’re a tramp – a

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 273

bingo-loving bitch!” This is how we talk to each other when … there are no social workers or priests to tell us to be gentle’ (57). Affection of the blood is fleeting, as is the larger fraternity of a natural world that insulates and reassures. The joy and caring so abundant in Blood Ties is completely effaced as social and moral advance take hold. Bullying, opportunism, class hatred, family dysfunction, self-loathing, and violence now dominate, inheritances of a chronic dissociation from place that has grown cumulatively from preceding novels. In Lives, personal autonomy falters with the adoption of the ephemera of the outside world, the ‘achieve[ment] of our discos, our McDonald’s fast food, our shopping malls and bookstores with biographies of American politicians and Hollywood movie-stars’ (267). In Stilt House, that conquest is complete: everything that Arnold’s family knows about the world comes from away, is transitory, and lies about them (42). Home, nostos, patria mia, famille have all been vanquished: ‘The idea of “there’s no place like home” was not in [Arnold’s] soul’ (19). In his world, far more insidious than Packet’s, television and radio are the pervasive torments of the electronic age, their incessant buzz keeping time to the hornets that infest their walls. ‘No-one bothers to turn anything off’ (56), complains an overwrought Arnold. The media have circumscribed imagination in Stilt House more dissolutely than in Lives, paralleling what Baudrillard theorized as the fate of the Loud family, ‘a family who agreed to deliver themselves into the hands of television, and to die from it’ (51). As in the case of the Louds, none of the master narratives of the past are available to Arnold or his family – no Christian hope, no Enlightenment justice, no possibility of self-actualized personal rescue. Watching has replaced doing; ‘the laser … touches and then pierces’ (52). Mesmerism has spawned an enervation worse than George Terri’s anomie. The greatest casualty is memory, both personal and historical. ‘We have to understand [Sadie’s old stories],’ realizes Arnold, but ‘no-one here does. My family has forgotten so much about it by now’ (88). ‘Old memories are like cranberries in the sun’ (138). The last vestiges of continuity and myth found in Lives are absent in Stilt House, atrophied on a populist diet of game shows that ‘[tell] us things we should know’ (57) and ‘when to laugh and when to get upset’ (101) but, ironically, say nothing of importance. The media have brought a benumbing sameness to days, the TV Guide alone pointing the way forward in endless loops and reruns. In the absence of a contiguous tradition, healthy action or personal reform are impossible, for as Lives established, it is myth, fed by imagi-

274

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

nation, that leads to productive awareness and response. In its absence, people are literally dismembered, a condition that is evident in Stilt House in multiple images of fracture. Arnold and Mabel are repeatedly cut; Arnold has his nose and teeth broken; Harry is burned alive; Randy’s body is smashed against the rocks. Even dialogue, the most intimate of human operations, is broken and halting. Explains Arnold: ‘Inside our house, there are three rooms downstairs, and everyone sits apart from each other’ (14). If memory is a requisite genetic inheritance for a healthy future, then its loss is a curse that alters history. Arnold’s world is literally that hell on earth where all suffer the curse of the eternal present. ‘Interested in nothing’ (55), he spends his days fishing near a sewer pipe next to his home, watchful only of the young bully Jerry Bines, who is after him. (The parallels to our country’s pioneering work of postmodernism, The Double Hook, are plain to see.) Few people traverse his broken roadway, and no birds fly past (they’ve been killed by spruce budworm spraying). Time is painfully determinate, a dead weight that must be endured. The remarkable achievement of the novel is Richards’s inventiveness in evoking the psychic defoliation of this strain. His ‘exquisite metaphors,’ as Bergeron terms them (14S), are as arresting as Cela’s and Dante’s. The pause that precedes violence is likened to a ‘silence that can only be bettered by a hurricane’ (60). The throbbing monotony of sameness is ‘like a broken ankle’ (66). Smell emerges as the dominant sense, as one would expect of a journey through the underworld. Arnold’s family ‘smells like dark winter, like the hide of a horse’ (10), ‘like dirty wet cushions’ (24). His room smells like ‘dirty underwear and the slick that comes off washtaps’ (18), the house itself like the suffering of his mother (44). The land around the stilt house ‘smells of sulphur and urine’ (12), of ‘car metal in the heat’ (25), of ‘[s]alt and dead fish, and the human dump’ (51). Ironically, the fetid is thought ‘beautiful’ (51) because it complements the abject ugliness that characters feel inside – the ‘bad weather in their hearts’ (73). As one might also expect, the landscape changes from desiccated to malevolent. Like the characters that populate it, the land is as much victim to the transfer of powerlessness as it is a hapless agent of rebellion. On the one hand, it is sterile – ‘There was nothing to say on behalf of the yard, because nothing grew there. A little yellow grass maybe. Strangleweed, and near the road, long banana-shaped stinkweed’ (19); on the other, it is crazed – its ‘black spruce [are] angry’ (154), its winds ‘come against the house like a blast of laughter’ (149), its gravel pits are like ‘shotgun blasts in the dark’ (99). Though geographically proximate to

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 275

the territory of the previous work, the land of Stilt House no longer comforts; instead, it mocks in fatuous self-loathing. Even its flies are absurd: ‘In the back porch the garbage was beginning to stink again, a cold fly sat upon the plastic garbage bag and kicked itself in the head’ (113). Had Arnold the capacity to ask himself ‘why his ancestors came here, to this inch or so of soil’ (49), he might have delighted in the irony of the answer, for it certainly wasn’t to continue the Old World enslavement to church and state that his family now endures. What many critics missed in this starker mise en scène was Richards’s homage to his own narrative’s history and perspective. The befouling imagery of Stilt House is not dissimilar to that of Small Heroics, where the narrator in ‘The Collector’ remembers ‘the land itself [as] barren … with the rotting out of autumn / in my nose’ (24) and remembers ‘of [his] house’ ‘the smell of sick animals / the cross dog with one blind eye, / the warped timber and the peeling paint’ (26). In both novel and poem, the land’s defilement is a projection of those who themselves feel worthless and sullied. Hence, the physical and emotional landscapes are not Richards’s exactly (he’s not editorializing), but Arnold’s and the collector’s, their impressions carried by the first-person point of view. As SterrerHauzenberger reminds us: ‘To do justice to Richards’ work it is … necessary to get from the “outside” to the “inside,” from the dreary surface to the rich psychological, moral, and philosophical undercurrent’ (116). He brings us eye-level to ruin so that we experience the world as Arnold does. The view may be upsetting, but from Arnold’s vista, and therefore Richards’s, it is true. Whether we like it is beside the point. Contributing to the biological family’s dissociation from place are the seemingly well-meaning social welfare incursions into their already fragmented lives. Sterrer-Hauzenberger aptly names these incursions acts of ‘professional friendliness’ (122). Richards leaves aside, as a chicken-andegg question, the causal relationship between the family’s condition and the interventionists who accede, though the trajectory of his examination of the social welfare system over the course of his previous novels suggests that the meddlers are late arrivals to a deteriorating situation. Whoever is responsible for the family’s plight and for their inertia, the intercessors fail to offer the family anything more than a distillation of their own ethos. (In other words, their ministrations merely reflect their own social mores, demanding, at worst, capitulation.) Father Billy, Juliet, and Craig make regular visits to the family, yet none ‘see eye to eye on how [they’re] supposed to live’ (33). ‘Why does the priest have such an interest in us?’ muses Arnold (32). Why does Juliet, an early prototype

276

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

of Vera (Wounded), talk incessantly to Mabel? Why does Craig tell little Randy that he is a weakling, a comment that hardens the boy and precipitates his death? ‘Meddling’ and ‘legislation’ (158), as much as the media, have become landscape, defining and limiting the family: ‘Every fortnight their cheques came. A cheque for Mabel – the biggest. A cheque for Arnold, the smallest. A cheque for Harry, which no one saw, and a cheque for Sadie’ (105). Arnold, intelligent enough to know the contours of his doom, takes to blaming the government for his family’s woes, though only because its mandarins are everywhere around him. Severed from historical continuity and the guiding benevolence of the land, the family members embrace the hopelessness that is the inevitable outcome of dependency: ‘Their eyes [fill] with hatred’ (29, 147); they adopt dishevelled ‘amphibian’ looks (22); and they glory in one another’s humiliations (24). Because no other role is available to them, they become expert in accepting blame, turning their scorn ‘inward’ as ‘hatred diminishes them’ (125). Richards deftly captures their selfannihilating rancour with darkly comic pathos: The afternoon Randy came home with his cub cap, and a book called Cub Scouting in America, how they looked at him. First with a sly look. ‘You think you’re some big with that on,’ Sadie said. ‘Big shot,’ Harry said. ‘I am not a big shot.’ ‘Big shot,’ they said in unison. ‘Let me see your cap,’ Harry said. ‘No – you’re just making fun of me – all of you.’ Randy held on to his head. They glared at him. How saucy he was. ‘You get to bed,’ Mabel screeched. (36)

Scorn becomes their weapon, and Sadie (sadistic), its most practised gunner, her antics reminiscent of Percy Janes’s Saul Stone in House of Hate, a novel much discussed at Windsor Castle. ‘Fleshed out from 50 hot meals’ (54), Sadie is the novel’s arbiter of injury, instigating fight after fight, her wit ‘sharper than anyone else’s’ (170). ‘There’s the man,’ she taunts Arnold, ‘there’s the man that beat me up – that beat my head off – that tore my books and bounced me up and down … There’s the man that made his girlfriend cry. Who hates his mother. Who stabbed himself’ (74). So expert is she in belligerence that her black art becomes the family sport: ‘they waited for someone to make a move, a mistake, or

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 277

to do something out of the ordinary, so the rest could pounce on them and make their life less attractive’ (36). In such an environment, family members come to rely on what affirms their feelings of self-loathing, completing a perverse cycle that spirals towards doom. With analytical licence, Richards interjects that though ‘they should have known that shame causes more fights than it prevents’ (109), their roles in the larger socio-economic drama allow for no other ethical operation. Arnold’s impressionable psyche is ground for the worst of Sadie’s sorcery. Nicknamed ‘Seaweed’ (the wispy, rotting detritus of the ocean), he expresses his self-loathing in a desire for filth: ‘The sky is so blue it’s lonely. It makes me anxious. It’s so clean it makes me yearn to smell a sewer in the water, a sponge of dirt’ (32). Pain and fear are the emotions he understands best. His misery seeks satiety in harm. When not hitting his mother ‘so [he] could feel sorry for her bruised mouth’ or kicking Harry ‘so [he] might notice the instant confusion in his eyes’ (101), he selfadministers, biting down on his rotting teeth, ‘enjoying the pain’ (30). He is shame’s best edict, for his harm, fear, and masochism are all reactionary. His real punishment (his curse) is in being intelligent enough to know the nature of his tormentors and his fate, which is why he kicks in the family television set and punches Juliet in the mouth. His mother is too sick, and thus too dependent on others, for such awareness. Randy is too young, and Sadie has too long ago given herself over to the charms of the black arts. A latter-day Matthew Arnold among the philistines, he must suffer the Faustian/Sisyphean humiliations of knowledge without power. He alone understands the whimsy of Juliet’s insistence that they ‘live as a family unit’ (148). He alone understands that ‘[a] social worker is an evil thing – who comes in the morning and stays till dark’ (64). His intelligence also equips him to understand the equally hollow rhetoric of Father Billy’s pronouncements. He hears the priest’s advice – ‘forgive, and then your unhappiness will go away’ (69) – but whom does he forgive? The government, the church, democratic capitalism, his dead father? The advice, though soundly (even righteously) textbook, is ludicrous in Arnold’s case. His insight is far greater, and his ability to act far less, than that possessed by the experts around him. He thinks at one point: ‘There is something that Juliet doesn’t know – that people cut each other open just for spite and you can’t apply any words to it. The more you apply words, the more there is misunderstanding … It’s in the dry barren trees that have afforded us no money. It’s in the soil, rancid and spoiled with too many widgets of human equipment’ (58, italics added). The indirect

278

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

pronoun ‘it’s’ is indeed the most fitting abstraction he can point to, the only caprice worthy of his forgiveness. A line from Camus’s ‘Myth of Sisyphus’ bears repeating: ‘If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious’ (314). In the end, like Dostoevsky’s Ivanov in The Possessed, Arnold is murdered, joining Mabel and Randy as victims, not of neglect, but of the failure of our system to reconcile its Christian idealism (its supposed rights-based liberal democracy) with the reality (power/powerlessness) of its operations. To ensure that this point is not lost, Richards upsets the natural orders of life and death. Mabel and Randy die simultaneously on Easter Sunday, the day of symbolic and triumphant rebirth. Gripped by spiritual torpor, however, Arnold doesn’t immediately recognize the inversion – a failure that signals the lack of belief at the heart of his tragedy. Neglect has made him wayward, wanton, morally exhausted, and thus Godless. Only after the deaths of his blood does he begin to see a way to closure. At this point, Stilt House begins to echo the parables of Matthew 7.15–28. Hopelessly disarmed by the conflicting dogmas of secular (false) prophets, Arnold’s home, the house that is both literally and allegorically foundationless, is seen for what it really is: a bad tree that bears bad fruit. Like all bad trees, it must therefore be cut down and cast into the fire, as Arnold does at the novel’s end (the gesture and its motive echoing Darl Bundren’s burning of the barn in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying). It is the first productive action Arnold takes to reclaim himself, but it is too late and too impulsive, for Harry and Sadie are trapped inside. The appalling conditions of Arnold’s household force us to confront the reality of our own system – namely, the social and moral implications of both external trespass (television, fast food, popular culture) and internal intercession (social welfare, religious charity, enlightened altruism). Both, shows Richards, seed a tragic dislocation from time and place. Both create chronic conditions: houses and people without foundations, the absence of which engenders spiritual suffering. To be degraded in Richards’s world has nothing to do with economic class or social status. Rather, degradation comes with dislocation, that insidious fin de siècle sense of existential loneliness that the strippers in Blood Ties were the first to feel so acutely, ‘their eyes so damaged and remote as not to be affixed to any time or place’ (92). When deracination is compounded by intervention, much of which affirms self-disgust, absolute despair can result, as it does for the family in Stilt House. As Father Billy says in a rare moment of clarity, ‘Meddling has killed them – legislation has destroyed their house – how can anyone be legislated to have hon-

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 279

our, to love or hope for goodness – when there is triumph in the social worker’s face and pride in the scoutmaster’s eyes?’ (158). The assaulting imagery and tone of Stilt House beg a question many have asked: What is left in the aftermath of such a novel? Was Richards’s intention purely existential, the wish to create a monument to despair? Given that journeying through despair was not why Dante had sent his pilgrim through the underworld, it is unlikely that it was Richards’s. So what was the point? Indicators abound in Part II, the novel’s epilogue, where Arnold’s cousin Norman, the book’s true Virgil (‘a scent of goodness about him’ [138]), reflects on the family’s fate the previous year. Norman’s overvoice parallels the priest’s in ‘François Villon’ and Packet’s in Lives (and forecasts Dexter’s in Hope). Structurally, his recollections fill in missing information that Arnold’s limited first-person perspective either obscured or did not have access to. His witness reveals the truth of Craig’s role in Randy’s death, the conspiracy of Sadie and her friend Cy to snatch the stilt house from Arnold, and Father Billy’s regret for ‘blasted inertia’ (157) in the face of so much want. As important, he relates Arnold’s last days and hours in the provincial jail, explaining his cousin’s death wish – his appeals to free Jerry Bines from twenty-threehour lockdown (thus appointing Bines the agent of his own murder) – and his final redemption: his desire to clothe and shelter Bines after their escape from prison. But ultimately, it is Norman’s humility more than his witness that carries the message of the novel, for like Agee and Evans, he rejects judgment and blame in favour of commiseration. ‘I don’t know what to think’ (169), he confesses about the innuendo that swirls around the demise of Bines and Arnold. ‘The Norwegian might have been killed a dozen ways. Or he might never have been hurt at all … The police can think what they will about someone wearing someone else’s clothes … Who dragged Arnold’s naked body 30 yards? This is what some of us want to know. The road, sooner or later, will tell us everything. We only have to wait’ (170–1). Though as close to events as anyone in the novel – he impregnated Trenda, Arnold’s girlfriend, and interceded to stop Bines’s bullying – Norman avers the power that authority brings. In so doing he embodies a true Christian altruism that is non-invasive in its refusal to control. He accepts, in other words, the lesson of the gospels: that judgment is for ‘no man’ (Norman), but God’s alone. Matthew 7 is relevant again, and suggestive of Richards’s higher aim with the novel: ‘If you want to avoid judgment, stop passing judgment. Your verdict on others

280

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

will be the verdict passed on you’ (1–2). So Norman waits, allegiant in brotherhood to Arnold and faithful that the truth will some day be revealed. He loves without pity or scorn, exactly opposite to the mandarins of ‘the system’ who prosecute Arnold for burning down the stilt house with Harry in it. It is Norman’s mercy, not society’s or the judge’s, that Richards deems worthy of emulation, for that mercy admits the limitation of its own certainty: The only thing that [Arnold] managed to say was that the hornets had bitten him, and this vexed him. He was vexed (this is the word he used). ‘I was vexed.’ The crown prosecutor said, ‘You were vexed.’ This made us laugh. Ridiculous, with his small body, his shaven oily head, his cut-off leather vest that showed his arm tattoo and his leather pants, with a silver chain for a belt, he could do nothing more than smile when I did. And his blinking and refusal to look into people’s eyes, as always, made him look guilty. At one point, he sneered at everyone. And at another, the leaden expression came over him, an expression that looks like a cold twilight October day – and can set one cold. This expression helped him not at all. It was the one he’d tried to assume in the hospital after his brother died, but never managed to. It is the expression closest to my heart. (156)

Norman’s wish to keep Arnold close to his heart lifts one of the curses imposed on the family – their worry that ‘their suffering seemed to count for nothing’ (106). His concern means that it does. Once memory is restored through filiation, continuity and history can begin anew. The final indicator of the novel’s intent can be found in the book’s abundant humour. Never before had Richards used humour as deliberately or as copiously, yet this development was overlooked in favour of the book’s bleakness. Of the many types of humour in evidence, three are prominent. The first is the humour of unintentional expression, such as when Arnold explains how the local rats have been frozen out in winter. ‘I saw their feet sticking up,’ he says (114). The humour of that moment is extended and darkened some pages later when Harry, another rat, succumbs in flames, ‘sleeping with his shoes on, pointed straight up like little beacons’ (155). Arnold’s language is similarly humorous (and foreboding) when he comes upon Sadie forcing little Randy to drink a glass

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 281

of filthy dishwater in the kitchen. ‘Isn’t that enough,’ he demurs. ‘He’ll begin to bloat up’ (22). (And indeed he does later, falling from a cliff into the water, his lungs swelling into pontoons.) The transfer of expressive to darker situational humour would become a feature of Richards’s later novels. Another type of humour in the novel is satiric, aimed almost always at the bourgeois or the meddlesome. Richards often understates this type to enhance its impact. Father Billy, for example, asks Arnold to golf with him. ‘He has asked me here for a reason,’ muses Arnold, ‘but I can’t tell what it is.’ The next line, lost on Arnold, tells us: ‘I carry his bags over my shoulder’ (32). Harry’s sneaky condescension to power also comes under comic censor, satire deftly capturing his habit of feigned innocence. Scolding Arnold for his insolence towards Juliet, he ‘[blows] his nose for something to do. A nose-blowing session that was filled with piety’ (56). But the most widely used of the humours in Stilt House is the type that comes from not belonging. This humour grows out of grievance but is not demonstrative of protest. Rather, as the weapon of the disabused, it revels in self-mockery, seeking to affirm the negative impressions of others. Arnold is its most able practitioner. He is in love with a kindly nurse at the hospital, and his insecurities form a powerful subtext of his admissions to her: ‘This spring I’m going to kill seals,’ he said. ‘How could you kill one of those little creatures?’ the nurse asked. She smiled at him and he loved her. ‘With a club.’ (123)

Even the more self-reliant Sadie is not immune from the self-mockery of this humour. The day after her friend Cy tells her ‘she was a good woman – who’d held her own in a life of trouble,’ she announces to the world, ‘I’m a good woman – who’s held my own in a life of trouble’ (136). Her self-concept is a creation of others, just as the opinions of the people around her are a projection of media and outside authorities. The objective of the humour in Stilt House is best understood in contrast to the comic touches in other novels. The generous witticisms of Old Simon Terri (Lives) and Clinton Dulse (Winter) are absent in the present novel; so is the playful sauciness of Little Simon (Lives) and the later spunk of Adele (Nights). The humour in Stilt House is, by contrast, ironic. It lightens the darkness, but only as a penumbra demarcates an eclipse. The body remains shadowed, contained, the glow around it

282

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

enhancing the blackness. In similar fashion, the humour in Stilt House lights the way towards a more vivid explication of social conditions: as Herb Wyile observes, ‘the internecine warfare’ within Arnold’s family ‘keeps the brutal and the comic in close proximity’ (111). Like Shakespeare’s comedy, then, Richards’s offers moments of respite that allow us to travel deeper into the heart of his dark tragedy, ‘making sharper and more stark the underlying hopelessness of the characters and their situations’ (Cogswell 1985, 1). ‘My humour is not a gentle type,’ Richards has remarked. ‘It’s rather abrasive at times. I don’t think any humour worth its socks is gentle’ (quoted in Sturgeon 227). It is tempting to follow Ian McKay’s lead in citing Bakhtin here (or at least Dostoevsky’s poetics, the ground for Bakhtin’s theorizing), for the ‘dialogic realism’ (13) that McKay observes in Stilt House is indeed conflictual, anti-authoritarian, bifurcating rather than ego reinforcing, Mennippean in exposing populist opinion to sober examination, and corporeal in summoning the vernaculars of the lower orders. There is surely grotesquerie in abundance, anecdotes of piles, shingles, disease, rot, and intestinal dysfunction. ‘Often [Harry] would spoil a meal by telling you how his wife died’ (97). However, the usual motive behind dialogic invention – inversion of ‘officialdom’ to the lower realms as momentary respite for those usually there – is not, ultimately, Richards’s. Readers are not rewarded with laughs at the expense of a humiliated officialdom. Unlike in Bakhtin’s carnival, revival is not coterminous with death. Richards’s aim is elsewhere; he is less interested in the causes or agents of despoliation than in their effects. Ruination has advanced beyond what irony and satire can reverse. His intention, still Dantesque, is that we look upon these ruined shells as souls worthy of our compassion. ‘Yes, [the characters in Stilt House] are unlovable,’ he has said, ‘but that is why you must love them’ (quoted in Garrod 217). Klay Dyer’s comment that Richards’s novels make us uncomfortable ‘with what we see and the lens through which we allow ourselves to see it’ (39) frames this intention succinctly. There remains a final question: What was feeding Richards’s antipathy towards liberalism? This question is properly posed here, for Stilt House is the first of many of his later novels to challenge the view that various forms of what James Doyle calls ‘institutionalized benevolence’ (130) offer social panacea. Beyond what has already been explained above (the hostility of the Leninists to art; the ultimately self-serving nature of progressive movements, be they related to persons or institutions; the

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 283

habit of revolutionaries to expunge the past; even Alden Nowlan’s belief in magnanimous monarchism), Richards was becoming increasingly reactionary at this time. When he wrote Stilt House, social and political changes that had fuelled the polemic of Lives were altering the Miramichi beyond recognition. The relative quiet of the previous decade was now a cacophonous din. The Reagan era’s ‘New Federalism’ had injected itself into politics at all levels, right down to the municipal. Early in 1982, Reagan negotiated sweeping cuts in domestic spending to underwrite huge increases in military procurements; this policy was felt in Canada when cruise missiles began flying across our skies. The U.S. president’s undisguised and unprecedented contempt for the poor was turning the clock back on many decades-old New Deal social reforms. In structural terms, Reaganomics meant prioritizing economics over social justice. Federal funding for schools, hospitals, and the institutionalized was slashed, the result being rising numbers of the dispossessed on the streets and in the unemployment lines. Yet as homeless populations rose, so did the affluence and authority of middle-class Americans. The hippies of the late 1960s had become the yuppies of the 1980s, their appetite for material wealth as insatiable as it had been for permissiveness a decade earlier. The demand for consumer goods such as VCRs and computers strengthened this trend throughout North America, providing the mechanism for new consensus building.. With Madonna and Michael Jackson reigning supreme on MTV, the Richards’s movie business sputtered (only the drivein was still in the family). Fast money, it seemed, was fuelling a contagion of phoniness that had nothing to offer but could not be escaped. In a final irony, the owners of the new media that were churning out this pablum were becoming the decade’s new billionaires. America’s Wall Street bonanza turned out to be Atlantic Canada’s bust. By 1983, the country’s first oil boom was over. Many of the Maritimers in Alberta were out of work and returning home, speeded on their way by Ralph Klein’s comment that easterners could freeze in the dark. When the full recession hit, crippling inflation followed. Interest rates of over 22 per cent were forcing couples to forfeit mortgages, and businesses to declare bankruptcy. Twenty per cent of young people under 25 were out of work in the country. In the resource-heavy economy of New Brunswick, where lumbering, pulp and paper, and mining were the leading industries, the impacts were severe. Fred Cogswell, one of the few New Brunswickers to review Stilt House, was the only reviewer who understood that the book was a reflection of these times. ‘[The novel] delineates

284

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

the plight of a growing number of Canadians,’ he wrote, ‘caught in the grip of a culture and an economy in which they, seemingly, can play no meaningful role’ (1). Trudeau’s solutions to these problems combined left-leaning, Jacques Maritain/Isaiah Berlin–inspired federalism with wage and price controls. But none of this received a sympathetic hearing from Richards. While ‘6&5 [% wage increases]’ seemed theoretically reasonable in a climate of rising inflation, in New Brunswick, where over 30 per cent of the workforce was unemployed, 6&5 was ludicrous. How could people without a job be satisfied with a raise? Many bought Lotto 6/49 tickets, hoping for a windfall, unaware that their purchase completed a monetary cycle in which federal money for social welfare programs was kited back to national coffers through provincial revenue schemes like lotteries and sin taxes. The wrath of Richards’s satire in Stilt House did not skirt the lunacy of this federal bureaucracy: Canada has become a force in the theatre. There is a new choreographer doing wonderful things in Ottawa. The government lost 20 million dollars on eggs. We have bought a new plane for our air-force, and already the plane has cracks in its wings. A billion dollars worth of cracks. (57)

By the time the worst of the recession eased in 1984, New Brunswick’s prospects seemed grim. On the Miramichi, the promises of the new white knight, Brian Mulroney, rang hollow. Though Catholic, he was no JFK for Miramichiers, many of whom remembered him as a cocky high school student at St Thomas College in Chatham. His record as President of the Iron Ore Company of Canada was well remembered, too – specifically, his decision to shut down the mines in Shefferville, Quebec, which turned that community into a ghost town. His obsession with bilateral free trade was thus received with a good deal of scepticism. An economic policy much more Liberal than Conservative (Trudeau’s Liberals had commissioned the report that recommended it), free trade would remove protections and subsidies from many of the region’s small start-up and grant-dependent industries. Miramichiers simply didn’t buy Mulroney’s rhetoric about their fitness to compete. They knew they were fit – no one had to tell them that – but they were also keenly aware of the structural and economic deficits that had plagued them since the end of their golden age of shipbuilding. What chance was there that Heath Steele Mines would reopen or that stumpage fees would not be negoti-

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 285

ated away under Mulroney’s watch? Their tribal nationalism told them that closer economic and cultural ties to the United States would be no boon for them. At least Trudeau had gone to Asbestos and Rimouski to fight on the side of the miners. In Mulroney’s Reagan-friendly administration, what could they hope for but more cable television, more arms proliferation, and more fast food? As one of the antennae of his race, Richards suffered these changes as indignities to his people and place. He suffered quietly when the ‘unsinkable’ Ocean Ranger went down in heavy seas in February 1982 on the Grand Banks, killing all 84 men on the rig, 56 of them Newfoundlanders. When Greenpeace activists amassed on nearby ice floes that winter to disrupt the seal hunt by spray-painting pups, thus ruining their pelts, he raged loudly to those around him (mindful of the Escuminac disaster) about the near-impossible conditions faced by rural people who are trying to make a living. He was equally vocal about two decisions by the Canadian judiciary: the first had released Dr Henry Morgentaler from jail in 1983 for performing abortions at his Toronto clinic; the second had expanded hunting and fishing rights for Mi’kmaq on Crown lands. As a Catholic, childless, desperately wanting children (he and Peggy had been on the adoption list in New Brunswick for some time), he loathed the public opportunism evident in turning the most private of personal decisions – ending a pregnancy – into a campaign for liberty and equal rights. Is the right to liberty more fundamental than the right to life, he wondered? This sort of doubletalk was politically coercive, he felt, not the emancipation for women it claimed to be. It seemed a classic case of special interests riding a wave of permissive liberalism. And, as with free trade and other largely rhetorical campaigns, the language brokers – who in this case had misnamed abortion advocates ‘pro-choice’ – had easily duped the vulnerable. His novel Evening Snow would revisit these feelings five years later. The Supreme Court’s ruling on Mi’kmaq hunting and fishing rights was equally disturbing to him. The Simon case was the first challenge of Section 35 of the 1982 Constitution Act. It was being watched closely, for it would establish a precedent that the lower courts would have to follow when interpreting historical treaties between indigenous peoples and the Crown. The defendant in the case, a registered Mi’kmaq named James Matthew Simon from the Indian Brook Band near Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, had been convicted in 1980 under Section 150(1) of Nova Scotia’s Lands and Forests Act for possessing loaded firearms out of season. His intent, according to the RCMP, had been to hunt illegally on

286

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Crown lands. His lawyers argued that the provisions set out in the 1752 treaty and Section 88 of the Indian Act gave him ‘free liberty of hunting and fishing’ (Article 4, Treaty of 1752). When his appeal of the conviction reached the Supreme Court in 1985, he was acquitted on the basis of that 1752 treaty, the court ruling that registered Mi’kmaq did not need a provincial licence to hunt, fish, and gather; furthermore, treaties should be interpreted in a way that gives ‘a fair, large and liberal construction in favour of the Indians’ (S.C.R. 387). Chafing against the spirit of the ruling, Richards penned a letter to the editor (never published) pointing out that the 1752 treaty had been ‘signed essentially a world away from today in a different country by a different people, with situations and objectives that were totally foreign to ours’ (29 November 1985). The allowances of that 1752 world, he continued, had been written by and for a people without all-terrain vehicles, floodlights, high-powered rifles, scopes, 4-wheel drives, nylon gill nets. By and for a people in a land that was as yet unopened, where roads were scarce and game, most of it being inaccessible, remained untouched. By and for a people who could not conceive of going 60 or 70 miles a day to hunt or fish. In a time when there was no great market for poached meat – when it had not become the business it is today and when the sophisticated means of that enterprise was foreign to whites and Indians alike.

Citing the ‘devastating consequences’ that would result from suspending conservation laws, he concluded that the ruling ‘was tokenism of the worst sort made arbitrarily by men who do not have the least idea of what is really at stake.’ In advocating equal conservation rights for all, he was not campaigning against Native people, whom he had always treated sympathetically in his work. Rather, as a hunter and fisherman, he knew something about the fragility of the woods and waters and their importance to his region. His fiction had charted the irreversible loss and diminishing self-esteem that resulted when that traditional base was eroded by modern enterprise. The liberalizing measure championed by sophisticates from outside the region as an advance for Native rights would continue the epidemic of deracination that plagued his place. He knew it would threaten, as well, the harmony between natives and whites, and indeed, the ruling did result in violent confrontations some years later between Native and white lobster fishermen at Burnt Church, a reservation near Newcastle.

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 287

Richards was not opposing party politics per se, but the special interests that clung to the language of human rights without regard for their spirit. ‘Being of a conservative nature,’ he explained, ‘I believe that people can only benefit from growth within, and that society can’t be changed by liberal programs and platitudes’ (quoted in Sturgeon 240). This was an elaboration of his essential agreement with Gabriel Marcel, Northrop Frye, George Grant, and other conservative opponents of the reigning subject philosophy of the time – that is, of the increasingly uncontested belief that subjectivity, as sole authority, had the licence to turn everything into a reserve for its inalienable use. This belief, said Frye, was the legacy of Romanticism, which had transferred all creation to man (A Study 19). Especially distressing was what struck Richards as an Orwellian manufacture of irrefutable arguments, and in precisely the fashion – indeed, in precisely the year – that Orwell had made infamous, 1984. To oppose abortion as it was being championed by a few on behalf of the many made one a misogynist. To oppose the lifting of conservation laws for Native hunting and fishing made one a racist. The rising authority of liberal views allowed for refutation, it appeared, only if one was willing to accept a derogatory label. Yet the unexamined nature and instant uptake of many of these views warranted wider discussion. ‘And that’s why I get upset with the sixties and seventies of my generation,’ he vented. ‘[It] is simply because they don’t think things through very clearly, and they are very, very sure that their self-centered attitude towards justice is the only kind to have’ (quoted in Sturgeon 262). The rhetorical sleight of hand of this new liberalism was clearly being abetted by the growing social bureaucracy of the early 1980s. Trudeau’s newly repatriated constitution had accelerated the transition from religious to policy-based secular helping. Through Trudeau’s DREE, rural New Brunswick was becoming a social experiment of sorts, its citizens ‘interviewed, examined and manipulated by sociologists, geographers and economists’ (Wilbur 223). These ‘self-styled social planners … would write thick research reports describing the local poverty and recommending the best ways to move the natives into “growth centers” as the nearby towns were now called’ (223). One such report – Life and Poverty in the Maritimes – featured a chapter on New Brunswick’s Kent County titled ‘Kent–Unproductive Setting, Unfavourable Site.’ For rural New Brunswickers of Acadian and Scots ancestry, the social upheaval that followed was akin to the Highland Clearances and Grand Dérangement. Once again, a distant authority was ending their way of life. When David and Peggy registered with the Department of Social Serv-

288

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

ices in Fredericton for placement on the provincial adoption list, they met the power of this new authority head on. Social workers assumed the stature of strange gods, shrouding their inquisition in munificence. Powerless to do anything but defer to this authority, he and Peggy, told repeatedly of the slim chances of getting a child, were made to feel grateful for the attention of these workers. He told one interviewer: I’m sick and tired of the sort of wash that social liberals give to various programs, and the idea of benefits and welfare, and the idea of becoming aware of the circumstances of people. [Social workers may] have good intentions, but I don’t believe they can really act upon them because they don’t have the lived experience. Juliet certainly doesn’t have the lived experience of an Arnold or a Mabel, and therefore she’s at a loss when she goes to cope with it. [Sturgeon 239] You cannot come into a house and say you are going to change the lives of people without changing yourself. (262)

The argument here, a reaction to Canada’s developing policy-based social democracy, is more fully expounded by Michael Ignatieff in The Needs of Strangers, where ‘the idea that one knows what another human being needs better than they do themselves … [becomes] a warrant for abuse’ (11). Richards would sharpen his attack on this presumption of benevolence in later novels, constructing arguments similar to those made by noted feminist bell hooks, who also criticizes white middle-class feminists of the First World (such as Vera Pillar) for desiring to integrate themselves into existing male structures to win power from men, which amounts to tacit approval of the patriarchal status quo. While the social liberalism of Ignatieff and hooks is far from Richards’s, their analysis of the politics of entitlement reaches virtually the same conclusions. In championing generalized inclusivity, theoretical liberalism denies – sometimes perniciously – the dignity of life. This was essentially the quarrel that powered the vitriol in Stilt House. Catholicism’s more insular world must have seemed especially inviting, even if the certitude of its doctrinal harangue was as distasteful to Richards as that of neoliberalism. While certainly no more orthodox than when he rejected the church for the faith fifteen years earlier, his religious convictions had intensified after he read Bill Wilson’s testamentary evidence during his recovery at AA. (Richards was more willing to agree with Aldous Huxley, who famously labelled Wilson, the co-founder of AA, the greatest social architect of the twentieth century, than he was

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 289

willing to elevate the social workers he’d met to anything comparable.) Though ecumenical, his AA reading recovered some of the central tenets of Catholicism that had been quietly informing his work. Changes in the ideological climate around him prevailed to turn that quiet into a growing urgency, one similar to that which Charles Dinsmore observed in Dante just before he wrote the Inferno: Catholic truth as he understood it was vast enough to call forth all the energies of the believer’s will, and so clearly analyzed and definitely outlined that it could be held as an august entirety by a capacious mind … If we add to this … the intensity created by a firm belief that the times were wholly evil, the world ripe for judgment, and the writer called of God to make the whole vision manifest, we need not wonder that in the ‘Divine Comedy’ there is a majesty and a range of power [and] an added energy and beauty of utterance. (246)

Richards’s mind was certainly as capacious, and his enmity towards postmodernity’s indifference to the conditions of its own making sufficiently developed, to redouble his belief in the noumenal – that is, in ‘the need for spiritual values’ (quoted in Allen 2) in an age of the rising authority of secular dogmas. In answer, his Christianity became more transparent in avowing the goals of the corporative Catholicism of his early schooling. Its social face centred on the creation of a just society, which – as in nationalist Quebec, where corporatism was most fervent – meant limiting outside influence and investment and thus state control. This just society would place the individual and the family over the sovereignty of the state. (Statism as modelled in communism was anathema to Catholics.) This restructuring was necessary because of the government’s complicity in monopoly capitalism, which amounted to an economic autocracy that despoiled the earth ‘with too many widgets of human equipment’ (Stilt House 58). In pitting individuals against one another in the pursuit of self-interest, liberalized democratic capitalism had created unequal conditions that would always disadvantage a large minority; eastern Canada’s economic disparities were proof of this. Moreover, the rights-based liberal democratic formula for managing social welfare had clearly failed, as evidenced by the huge bureaucratic concentration of ideological power centralized in Ontario. And like all bourgeois institutions, these merely parroted the ideas of their class. ‘In Road to the Stilt House, it’s society, the socially accepted society, acting upon people that can’t defend them-

290

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

selves that I’m worried about,’ he would confirm (quoted in Sturgeon 229). Breaking monopolies to create space for small enterprise was a start. Restoring personal autonomy and local/regional governance under the laws of a less secular gospel (better the gospel of charity and justice) was another. Both measures, believed Catholics, would reverse the economic servitude of the poor – in Richards’s world, the Masseys (Lives) and the Arnolds (Stilt House) – and allow members of the underclass to reclaim a dignity lost to free (i.e., unequal and self-interested) enterprise. Packet’s purchase of ‘land … ploughs and a second-hand tractor’ (Lives 167) follows this tract back to the garden, finding its source in the Quadragesimo Anno encyclical, Pope Pius XI’s doctrine, which was so fundamental to eastern Canadian Catholic schooling in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. (The doctrine would become a cornerstone of the Antigonish Movement’s cooperative education program at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.) Richards’s notions of natural harmony, organic continuity, genetic memory and inheritance, order, and local autonomy all arc back to this early schooling and to the teaching that the benevolent authority of the gospels ultimately safeguards personal freedoms. In further degrading the social conditions in Stilt House, then, he was amplifying the alarm sounded in Lives in a very Catholic way. Mindful of G.K. Chesterton’s criticism of novelists who raised characters’ peculiarities above their humanity – the result being that ‘we have gained in sympathy, but we have lost in brotherhood’ (Chesterton 40) – he must have hoped that the anger of Stilt House would ultimately re-establish the communitarian link that had been severed by the false promises of the new world – promises, said George Grant in a lecture in New Brunswick in 1974, that had become consolidated in ‘bourgeois constitutional liberalism’ (51). His anger was aimed at how that bourgeois liberalism had been accepted as truth – in other words, at the differences between a public sympathy that animated the proscriptive professionalism of the social worker caste and a private, faith-based brotherhood that inspires actions more lasting for individuals, families, and communities. As Henry Miller once wrote, ‘the brotherhood of man consists not in thinking alike, nor in acting alike, but in aspiring to praise creation’ (75). This is precisely the moral postulate, further developed from Gabriel Marcel’s alternative to subject philosophy, that Nights would develop. Given the escalation of this wrath, Michael Macklem was surprised to receive the manuscript of Stilt House in February 1984. Richards’s sharp-

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 291

ened criticisms of Oberon’s tight-fistedness in the months previous and the revelation that he’d contacted a New York agent had led Macklem to think that their association was over. ‘I’m going to protect myself or no longer publish,’ he’d written. ‘This is what it comes down to. Unless I get a better deal from Oberon I’ll have to try somewhere else’ (letter to Macklem, n.d. [February–March 1984?]). Ever anxious to retain one of his stars, Macklem sent a cheque for $500 as an advance on signing Blood Ties to the NCL imprint and expedited payment for another Ontario Arts Council grant, this time for $2,400. He also offered to raise the advance on the new novel to $2,500; and since the launch of the NCL mass market edition of Lives was still several years away, he agreed to reprint the novel at Oberon’s expense. As a final concession, he said he’d be willing to accept Canadian rights only for the new book, freeing Richards to sell it simultaneously in the United States. What occurred next was the kind of recalibration known only to free market publishers. When Macklem learned that the New York agent was not interested in Stilt House – it was too depressing for the American market, which Richards interpreted to mean he was no Sydney Sheldon – he took away some of his previous largesse. He asked whether Richards would accept half the advance on signing and the other on publication, reneging on his promise two months earlier of the full amount on signing (‘That means you don’t have to wait for publication [to collect your money] and it’s possible because the angel has offered the money now,’ he’d written [letter to DAR, 23 December 1983]). He also proposed a new title, A House Divided, which in rolling off the tongue would be easier to sell. Lastly, he removed the ‘Canadian rights only’ clause from the contract he sent in late February 1984. Justifiably troubled by these reversals, Richards wrote back demanding the international rights to all his previous books. To show Macklem he meant business, he took charge of the new book’s design and schedule. There was to be no mention of the Miramichi on the jacket, he instructed; instead, he wanted quotations about his work from Woodcock, French, Engel, Lane, and Morley. He also wanted his friend David McKay’s painting ‘Changing Winds’ as the cover illustration. As to the book’s release, he wanted it out in the fall of 1984, six months before the spring 1985 launch that had been proposed. Finally, he asked for a jump from 10 per cent to 15 per cent of royalties on volume sales. As relations with Macklem deteriorated, it became obvious that Stilt House would be his last book with Oberon. His now national reputation and increasingly hands-on management of his literary career made that

292

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

plain, as did the frequency of calls from agents and editors. He was not bluffing when he told Macklem he had been contacted by three of Canada’s major publishing houses in the past two years. The failure to secure a deal in New York belied the rising interest in his work. In the twelve months prior, he had been invited to read in New Orleans and New Zealand; Winter had found its way to reading lists at the Universities of Minnesota and Florida; Lives had been favourably reviewed in Scotland, Denmark, and Germany; he had been the subject of four profiles in literary magazines and one MA thesis; he had been the principal writer featured in the first ‘Teaching Maritime Literature’ conference in Halifax; and CBC was airing his early stories on ‘Atlantic Airwaves.’ Besides the advances and his job at UNB, he had just signed a contract with Jon Pedersen’s Capitol Films for the rights to Small Gifts, a screenplay he had been developing for the past few years. Pedersen had paid $10,000 to hold the rights for five years, an amount equivalent to the stipend for eight months as writer-in-residence. These were all signs that he would soon be able, finally, to sustain himself as a writer – the goal he had set himself as a teenager. Quite simply, he had outgrown his first publisher. The posthumous release in 1985 of new and selected poems by Alden Nowlan must have been a poignant reminder of the pitfalls of loyalty to a small press. Editor Bob Gibbs had produced a handsome and useful edition; even so, Irwin Publishing didn’t have the reach of McClelland & Stewart, the company that had offered to bring out a definitive collection three years earlier (a collection that would have solidified Nowlan’s reputation as one of Canada’s greatest poets). Richards, who desired an international readership, must have taken note. But if his tolerance of publishers’ politics was weakening, his love for Nowlan was not (as observance, he often began readings with a recitation of Nowlan’s ‘Ypres: 1915’). In July 1985, he wrote a review of Nowlan’s collection that is revealing in the light it sheds on their vision as artists. He wrote of the generosity of spirit and depth of feeling in Nowlan’s poetry – attributes, he insisted, that were not schooled but rather were ‘observations from within the very fabric of life’s experience’ (‘Wisdom’ 32). His admiration for Nowlan’s ability ‘to go beyond the surface appearances that seem so often to constitute nine-tenths of our daily lives, and show us the reasons behind our actions’ (2) mirrored his own dissatisfaction with the new intellectualism, whose efficacy never addressed what he had earlier called ‘the why.’ ‘It is never the action,’ he would write in a future essay, ‘but why the action, that must be understood by us all’ (‘The Turtle’ 71). He located Nowlan’s insight into the human con-

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 293

dition in that understanding, which always saw the gulf between ‘what was merely trendy [and] what was actual’ (‘Wisdom’ 32): ‘As Nowlan’s work continued to grow and mature he worked towards a simpler and clearer way of expressing not only the ironic but the dramatic and tragic in the human condition’ (32). (Ditto Stilt House.) What was admirable in Nowlan, he observed, was his refusal ‘to let what a person did for a living or because of necessity overshadow who they were’ (32). This repeated what he had written six months earlier about one of his friends out of work on the Miramichi: One of my friends has gone back into the woods. It’s year’s end and near Christmas so I hope he’s doing okay. He’s a qualified mechanic and heavy equipment operator – and now he is out on his traplines. Trapping animals doesn’t particularly appeal to him nor is it entirely lucrative. But it is what he will have to do for the foreseeable future. If someone was to suggest to him that trapped animals suffer cruel and unusual torment I’m certain he’d agree. (‘The Way Out’ 4)

What Richards highlighted in Nowlan’s work provides insight into Stilt House. The ‘code’ – always much discussed at the Black Horse Tavern and in Nowlan’s living room – was not merely to avoid dismissal of the underclasses, but to raise their status as individuals to a level that would warrant human concern. It didn’t matter whether they were Arnolds or Sadies or George Terris. Indeed, the more undesirable they were, the more deserving of compassion. For both writers, that ennobling had democratic and spiritual dimensions associated with reversing the tide of social and personal disparity that threatened the Maritime economy and worker as never before. ‘Three thousand people have lost their jobs over the last year or so in my area of the world,’ wrote Richards in a retrospective essay on 1984 (‘The Way Out’ 4). Yet what these people did ‘of necessity’ to earn money to live invited ridicule from the enlightened, mostly middle-class bullies of the new age of non-traditional work. The nouveau riche wanted furs yet ridiculed the trapper. Well-bred socialists appropriated labour yet mocked the worker. While the machinery of Canadian government remobilized to deliver rights-based social justice at home and abroad, citizens in all but the most affluent parts of the country were struggling to survive debilitating forms of decline. ‘It is those who do not know who will make judgments upon those who do know,’ stated Richards (quoted in Sturgeon 257), who added this qualifier in an essay: ‘It has often seemed to

294

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

me that those who actually keep the mechanics of a society running are the first to be neglected, branded and stereotyped, by those of us who have benefited from them in one way or another’ (‘The Way Out’ 4). Considered in this light, Stilt House’s angry protest against what Canada had become is clear: he saw this country as one where social justice was discussed interminably but little was actually done. The legitimacy rather than the spirit of charity predominated. To highlight the shame of this irony, he framed his protest as an exposé of conditions too grim for even an uncompromising social satirist to imagine. Then, in the darkest recesses of those conditions, he set a challenge for governments and ideologues alike: to love Arnold and Sadie as human beings instead of pitying or quantifying them as welfare statistics. In James Doyle’s estimation, this challenge went directly to the novel’s reception: the negative reactions to it were not a response to its style ‘but to [Richards’s] determination to present unblinkingly a vision of Canada … that many people would prefer not to contemplate’ (327). This ‘grim parable of poverty,’ agreed Harry Thurston, illuminated ‘what we would sooner ignore’ (14). As both reviewers anticipated, the challenge was indeed too angry and too stark for some. William French was outraged by the novel, his review arguably the worst Richards had ever received, extraordinary not just for the spitefulness of its tone but for the reversal he seemed to have undergone since praising Lives so lavishly just two years earlier. His review began: ‘As a novelist, David Adams Richards seems to regard himself an antidote to middle-class smugness, an irritant to the complacent, a hair-shirt for the self-righteous. His melancholy stories … are intended to smite the conscience, and are guaranteed to turn a sunny day into an unbroken vista of gloomy clouds’ (E13). The review then described Arnold as ‘retarded’ and ‘subnormal,’ his family as ‘chronically deprived,’ his social condition as not ‘typical’ enough to be representative, and the book ‘more like a case history than a novel’ (E13). Given that the darkness of Richards’s previous work had not driven him to anywhere near the same degree of pique, what had happened to provoke such a pointed attack? The answer would seem to lie in a question that French posed early in the review: ‘Who wants deliberately to court melancholia when so many pleasant diversions are within easy reach?’ By now, the slant of this dismissal should be familiar. French, in a grand canonical gesture, was excluding Richards’s literary attentions from the arena of serious literature – and this, despite praising him in the same review for sympathy and compel-

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 295

ling powers of imagery. Literature, he was implying – much as Janis Rapoport had when reviewing Winter ten years earlier – should not smite the conscience, should not be an irritant to the smug, the complacent, the self-righteous. Rather, it should avoid the clouds for pleasant diversions. That turnkey moralism was exactly what Richards had attempted to capture in the attitudes of social workers in the novel, their ideology pre-emptive of understanding. French’s sunny moralism would find parallel in most of the negative assessments of the novel. Because Stilt House was depressing, its characters unattractive (‘not the loveable socialist-approved poor,’ wrote McDonald [373]), its emotional landscape and horizons desolate, it could not be counted as serious literature. ‘Easy affirmation and moral uplift are not his thing,’ declared one critic from Queen’s University (James 20). Another praised Richards for prose ‘extraordinarily strong’ but lamented that he was wasting his talents on ‘desperate characters and the discord and strain among them’ (Heward C2). Yet another complained that he had limned his characters’ ‘existence too well’ (Posesorski 80), suggesting that mastery of craft, if not leavened by appropriate subject matter, did not count. Here, finally, was the writer that E.K. Brown had in mind when pronouncing that ‘Canada has never produced a major man of letters whose work gave a violent shock to the sensibilities of the Puritans’ (22). Richards clearly had struck a nerve, as French and others betrayed in situating themselves (seemingly defensively) in the middle-class stratum the book was addressing. Unable or unwilling to acknowledge their class revulsion at what he had wrought, they had taken up positions opposite to that of John Moss, who was forthright about his class aversions but willing to overcome them, thus opening himself to the operations of art. ‘Why read a novel of such wretchedness?’ he asked. ‘The answer lies in art. Why read Gogol? Why read Faulkner? Not because their visions are elevating but because they are so finely rendered. What their fiction does see, we also see, and not only with the eyes of our imagination but in the heart and soul as well. That is the achievement of their art, to make us do so’ (297). Though the Canadian literary establishment had grown accustomed to divergent readings of Richards’s fiction, many expert readers were disturbed by French’s harshness. Richards received letters from a number who suspected that French was exercising a personal gripe, a few suggesting that his inability to reconcile the real and fictional worlds of the Miramichi had confounded him into thinking that Richards was be-

296

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

ing deceitful. (Their views would be buttressed by Lawrence Mathews’s shrewd observation that French’s ‘rather odd sensibility [personified] the mentality of Canadian literary culture’ [188], a mentality that had positioned Toronto critics and ‘[their] readers at the centre, Richards on the periphery’ [189].) Whatever the source of French’s spleen, a number of writers rallied around Stilt House, moved by the force of its social commentary but certain that its tersely lyrical treatment of ugliness would never be recognized as it should. One writer who delivered this double-edged verdict was Patrick Lane, writer-in-residence at Concordia University in Montreal when the novel was released. Like Harry Thurston, Fred Cogswell, and Carrie Macmillan, he fêted the novel’s seamless naturalism, declaring Richards ‘the only writer in the country who can come that close to the inchoate centre of the people who inhabit our world’ (letter to DAR, 26 December 1985). But he also prepared Richards for the novel’s likely reception: ‘I know as well that this book will not win an award, and it should. The mass of writers and judges in this country are the university student in your novel and no understanding can come from them.’ Lane was referring to Stephen (Stilt House 86), a university student who encounters Arnold when both are employed on a road crew. The student’s ridicule of Arnold, Ian McKay observed, ‘reveal[s] the contempt with which the north shore is viewed [by sophisticates from away]’ (13). Richards, McKay implied, could expect to hear that attitude echoed in central Canadian critics’ ridicule of the novel. Surprising in hindsight is how bifurcated and perhaps predictable the politics of that response would be. In following an urban/rural, west/ east divide, the response reflected a commiseration with Richards’s vision that was beginning to assert itself along regional lines. Neither absolute nor provincial, this commiseration had its roots in a loosely felt Maritime opposition to what was viewed as easy slander aimed at the east, where hard times were an inescapable part of the social fabric. Stilt House became a flashpoint for this feeling. Thus, while urban ‘sophisticates’ balked at the novel’s treatment of ‘poor, ignorant, sporadically violent rural families’ (Heward C2) – at rural families that ‘most people would write … off as a bunch of hopeless losers’ (James 20) who evoke little more ‘than a feeling of weary pathos’ (Blackburn 155) – Maritime critics uniformly commented on the small points of light in the novel’s darkness. Ian McKay termed its realism ‘horrifying and moving … despairing and humane all at once’ (13); George Bergeron considered Arnold’s ‘dreams and desires’ the expressions of a sensitive man (14S); Carrie MacMillan lauded the ‘terrible beauty’ of the lives of the inarticulate

Fredericton, Stilt House, and the First GG Nomination 297

(190); Harry Thurston noted Arnold’s loyalty to his blood (12), cautioning readers, as Fred Cogswell would (1), against sociological interpretations; and, finally, Michael O. Nowlan detected in Arnold the register of ‘loneliness’ common to a human condition shared by all, regardless of class (58). It was Arnold’s humanity that made him likeable for these Maritime readers, familiar enough for Larry McDonald to claim that he ‘presents himself as reasonably sane in his judgments, appropriately modest in his expectations, and willing to put decent effort into realizing a satisfactory level of good intentions’ (374). These qualities led McDonald to ‘care about Arnold and wonder whether lives such as his can be solved or redeemed’ (375). Uninhibited by defensiveness, these Maritime critics were able to appreciate the change in Richards’s poetics in ways that others could not. Each noticed the new direction in style: Macmillan his use of humour as an index of grievance; McKay the ‘telegraphed language’ (13) that had broken his indebtedness to Faulkner; McDonald the ‘simple, laconic style’ that afforded ‘no accounting for [his characters’] brutish or tender behaviour’ (374); and Goldman how, through symbol and montage, he managed ‘to achieve far more than an analysis of poverty-stricken people’ (154). ‘The whole is a seamless garment,’ wrote Cogswell, ‘a prose poem designed to make every reader feel what is involved in the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”’ (1). Reviewers handicapped by a denial of Canada’s class system missed how he had overcome the limitations of first-person perspective by experimenting with metonymic association – missed, in other words, that the proximity of essential detail to the orbit of Arnold’s inner monologue was less obtrusive than in earlier novels, an indication of greater control over material. They missed, as well, how the novel’s form had been orchestrated precisely for its mood (not a note is out of key), how language and metaphor had likewise been reduced for vernacular effect, how Arnold’s inability to act in his own self-interest, rather than his mental deficits, is what leads to his doom, and how Arnold, finally, is as impressionable as Packet – a sensitivity that surfaces in his love for Randy and in the dignity he shows when facing impossible odds at the close of the novel. Richards’s construction of overwhelming tension through concision and restraint marked a discernable advance in his art that denial obscured. The controversy lingering over French’s review, coupled with the novel’s pluck and accessibility, kept it in the literary spotlight for most of the summer of 1985. A well-attended reading at Harbourfront in October

298

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

extended that bloom into late fall. By the beginning of 1986, Richards had seen enough reviews of the novel to begin to reflect on its impact. Regarding Arnold’s rough treatment by critics, he told graduate student Linda-Ann Sturgeon: ‘I think every character that I’ve had that is outside society … or is being ostracized by society – or society does not understand them or does not help them at the right time – has a baptism of fire’ (207). The implication was that the book’s baptism, not just Arnold’s, had deepened the public’s interest in his work. What followed was confirmation. In early January the Canadian Book Information Centre, an initiative of the federal government’s Book Publishing Development Program, chose Richards from fifty-nine eligible writers as one of the ten best young Canadian fiction writers in its ‘45 Below’ competition. Gordon Montador, National Director of the CBIC, had stolen the idea from a similar campaign in Britain three years earlier, which had more than tripled book sales for winners. The boon for the underpromoted Richards was a nationwide media blitz culminating in a celebration of Canadian fiction at Harbourfront, where each writer would read in front of the who’s who of publishers. Because the country’s largest bookstores were involved, increased sales were guaranteed. Bigger news followed in May with the announcement that Stilt House had been short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction. The nomination was the recognition that he had struggled for from the beginning. Being shortlisted for the most prestigious award in the country meant that he had broken through. The fires of self-doubt, scorn, alcohol, and poverty had made him as much of a social outcast as the characters he most identified with. Like John (Winter), Cecil (Blood Ties), Packet (Lives), and the Miramichi itself, where the Great Fire of 1825 had been a transformative event, he had come through the infernos of Dante’s hell. His writing life was about to change, and his next novel would be a turn noticeably towards the light.

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above

Fredericton, that city of stately elms and small minds. River (10–11)

Always he’d come back to his part of the river. Lives of Short Duration (233)

Richards continued to forge ahead with his writing no matter what launch, reading, review, or award diverted him. Writing had become ritual and obsession. Without it he became out of sorts, edgy, a self-confessed addict in need of a fix. By the spring of 1986, he was well along with his next project, another leviathan he was calling Adele. True to his impatience with any one form, he was ready to put away laconic style and to return to the expansiveness of Lives. He was feeling robust and up to the challenge, confident now in his sobriety. He told Doug Fetherling that his new novel would be published in two volumes totalling eight hundred pages (59). In the spring of that year, he found himself on the set of Tuesday, Wednesday, the renamed screenplay he’d written for Jon Pedersen just after Nowlan’s death. Pedersen had changed the film’s name from ‘Phillip’ to capture the pedestrian pulse of a nondescript commoner who returns to a small town seeking atonement. For Pedersen, much was at stake: he had mortgaged his house to cover the costs of the $100,000 film. The shoot would be Fredericton’s first. Perhaps because of this, there were problems from the start. Because of the low budget, none of the name actors Richards wanted could be hired, nor could multiple takes be done. When shooting began, much of the dialogue had to be

300

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

cut or altered because it didn’t work on camera. At one point, when the owner of a nearby business learned that the main character was an alcoholic, she attempted to get an injunction from City Hall to stop the shooting, lest the stigma tarnish the city’s reputation. Ruined stock, loss of lighting, traffic noise, impertinent actors, and other not so minor aggravations caused further delays. To meet the twenty-eight-day production deadline, Pedersen had to ask actors to improvise, thus changing the story in front of Richards’s eyes. Conflicts between the two resulted, causing art director Ilkay Silk to observe that having the writer around when filming his script is ‘like babysitting a child whose parents won’t leave the house’ (49). Richards did leave the set midway through the May shoot. When the edited film’s opticals were completed, he called Pedersen asking that his name be removed from the credits. The disassembly of his script and the fragmentation of the production process made the work a creation of others, no longer his own. It proved a difficult initiation into the film business, made yet more disappointing by poor reviews. Writing was the one thing he could shape to his own vision. About that there was no longer any doubt. It was also where he could speak out against the ideological foments of the day. In the polemical essays he published around this time, he did just that. One in particular – on Theatre New Brunswick’s adaptation of Nowlan’s novel Various Persons Named Kevin O’Brien (the TNB production was called ‘Lockhartville’) – offers yet more insight into his feelings about art and his objectives with Stilt House. In the essay, he condemns revisionist projects that alter art ‘to fit the times we now live in’ (‘Lockhartville’ 36), citing the treatment of Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, and Tolstoy as precedents for that barbarism. Most disturbing to him was TNB’s liberalizing of the relationship Kevin O’Brien had with his father Judd. Judd was made brutal after the fact, Richards proposes, for the same reasons that Williams’s Stanley Kowalski had recently been altered: to release women and children from the curse of self-deception – a self-deception, he adds, that writers use to deepen character complexity. The result of such tampering is ‘a narrowing of focus and a diminishing of sympathy … All in the name of progressive concern’ (37) – all because feminists won’t accept a self-deluded Blanche Dubois any more than a deeply conflicted Judd O’Brien. His fury over the remaking of Judd as mean, cowardly, and brutal – in other words, the perfect misogynist – echoed similarly. In his view, the alteration of his character, while fashionable, had diminished ‘the ultimate understanding of humanity that Alden Nowlan’s genius gave us’ (39).

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 301

The problem of TNB’s play was that ‘art has become social work. Nothing more than a holding forth on a morally superior lifestyle. Much of it contrary to the novel’s genius. A genius few of the players were compassionate enough to understand’ (42). Richards’s disgust with what TNB had done to Nowlan’s novel – and with UNB academics for delighting in the interpretation – spoke indirectly to how he’d hoped readers would interpret Stilt House. That hope was couched in a defence of the poet. Nowlan did not write about poverty and war to expose their ugliness and brutality, he opined, but because he cared for the men and women in their grip – and because of the heroism and bravery always apparent when the condition of man is reduced to mutual care and protection. Nowlan hated war and filth as much as Tolstoy, but his sympathy for humanity demanded that he not deny that those conditions had shaped many of the people he wrote about. The inference was that readers should look beyond the ‘surface tensions’ (‘Lockhartville’ 39) of economics, politics, and sociology to the humanity of the characters themselves – to why they act as they do. Only then will readers perceive the true battles that are waged within each person: the epic and inexorable spiritual battles of forgiveness, bravery, compassion, and self-acceptance. Viewed through this lens, Arnold is not much different from other protagonists, though his circumstances are impoverished. Like John and Kevin, Cathy and Leah, Packet and Little Simon, he struggles to get out from under a malaise that is historical, structural, and as often comforting as deleterious. It seems to have been Richards’s intent to create a personality whose conflict, confusion, and wistful hope were on par with the rest of humanity. Loving him meant acknowledging something of his own dignity of spirit, evident in his delight in bringing home the Christmas tree, in buying Sadie a Harlequin romance, and in delivering Mabel’s favourite picture to her in hospital. Simple acts of kindness do not ultimately save Arnold, but they do free him momentarily from an otherwise debilitating fate, and therein lies the novel’s hope. What Richards clearly hoped for, and what continued to elude him, was that critics might relate to his characters not as Miramichiers, but as members of the larger human family, for kindness, he would later write, ‘is the only thing literature is seeking’ (God Is 130). Perhaps that is why he asked Macklem to expunge all references to the river from his book – and why, after sixteen novels, he continues to refuse the regionalist label, never calling his fictional place ‘Miramichi.’ Its landmarks may locate his work there, but those are incidents of setting, not determinants of character.

302

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

The final paragraph of ‘Lockhartville’ reveals something else about Richards’s state of mind in late 1986: he was not happy in his position as writer-in-residence. Reluctant as he was to admit it, French’s slam and the dismissals of his novel (most of them from academe) were growing, once again, into a distracting preoccupation. Despite his rising stock, he felt that the diversity of responses to the novel meant it had partially failed. Not winning the Governor General’s Award reinforced the message. CBC discussions of the political relevance of the winner (Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale), especially of its important feminist lessons, only heightened his impression that socialized altruism had become literary truth. Though he admired Atwood’s novel, he couldn’t find in it what most critics seemed to see so clearly. To him, it was an eloquent critique of social power, not patriarchy. In that context, he was repelled at the thought of entering the English Department lounge for his annual handout, not just because he’d be asked how he felt about not winning the GG, but because he anticipated (rightly or wrongly) that some would be pleased he had not. He’d grown tired of this game, which reminded him of why he had left UNB ten years earlier at the end of Blood Ties. This time, however, the game had a new twist: he detected the manufacture of division between him and his friend Wayne Johnston. Johnston’s The Story of Bobby O’Malley had been released a year earlier to great acclaim (thanks in part to Richards). Books in Canada had given it their First Novel Award, and University of Toronto Quarterly had declared it the most appealing book of 1985. Comparisons were impossible to avoid. Richards and Johnston were both UNB writers, both published by Oberon, and both easterners. One, however, was the antithesis of the other – Johnston was humorous, uplifting, and indeed appealing, while Richards was satirical, dark, and morally freighted. A close friend at the time compared the two as being akin to Twain and Dostoevsky. While no one wondered aloud in Richards’s presence why he couldn’t write more like Johnston, the abundant praise for the young Newfoundlander said indirectly that many preferred one’s humour to the other’s darker truths. Though much better equipped at thirty-six to handle what had driven him to drink at twenty-two, Richards took from the inference that it was time to move on. He’d always been better at leaving than staying anyway. And his instinct for endings had usually been vindicated. He agreed with Faulkner that loneliness was the writer’s condition. The memory that kept washing over him was of being asked to leave the dining room of the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel, the city’s finest, for not wearing a tie. That image seemed the perfect summation of Fredericton, the

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 303

place he would later describe as the ‘city of stately elms and small minds’ (River 10–11). When he recollected this time in the non-fiction memoir Hockey Dreams, it smacked of disappointment: I went into the [UNB] common room and poured myself a coffee and sat down – waiting for the arrival of someone to talk to. A young female professor from Newcastle Creek entered the room ... She’d once made the remark that she didn’t see how anyone would be able to live without reading Henry James. As she sat there I glanced at her. Go on, I said to myself, Ask her – she’s from Newcastle Creek – Newcastle Creek for God’s sake. She’d have cut her teeth on hockey. Turning to her I ventured, ‘Did you see the game last night?’ ‘Pardon?’ ‘Did you see the hockey game?’ ‘We don’t have a television,’ she said. ‘Oh, what’s wrong?’ I said. ‘Is it broken?’ Then I thought that maybe she and her husband had a fight over a program and someone had thrown the television through the wall – I know people who do that, so I thought … ‘We don’t approve of television,’ she said ... I had entered, for the first time, another realm, where a woman from Newcastle Creek who may or may not have grown up on salt cod and moose meat could tell me that she disapproved of television and not be a fundamentalist. (13 –14)

What followed was the last of Richards’s low periods before his turn to the light. When word reached him that another of the Miramichi’s literary dons, a former friend, had thrown Stilt House against the wall after reading the first page, disgusted that the Miramichi had been degraded yet again, he vowed to Peggy never to write another word. He would leave Adele and go on to something else, cast off his books for the woodlots and waters. He quit writing altogether for five weeks, his longest period of voluntary inactivity to date. Having the people of his heart turn against him was far more damaging than being shunned by the literati of UNB. Like Milton, he could accept a small readership as long as it was loyal and fit. But bullying never deterred him for long. Five weeks of reflection without writing – of boredom and ennui – convinced him, finally, of something that should have been obvious from the start: that the nature of his vision invited controversy and derision. Misunderstanding, wheth-

304

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

er parroted or schooled, was something he would have to endure if he was to express that vision. He would always be the rebel, the outcast, the underdog. By quitting he was only renouncing the truth of his vision and denying what he felt was the absolute, inescapable necessity of putting it down on paper. As before, his self-doubt had to crest before he could move on. He would forge ahead by himself, he told Peggy, come hell or high water. He realized he had no other choice. The episode is significant because it was the last time he allowed contrary opinions to stop his work. The first order of business was to sever his ties with UNB. Three years was enough; he would finish his term as writer-in-residence but not seek another. He told Bill Bauer what he would tell Nancy Robb a year later: ‘For me the heart of Fredericton went when Alden died’ (25). What he did not say was that taking the job when he did – right after Nowlan’s death – had been one of the worst decisions of his life. And the fallout from that decision would have lingered if not for an eventful evening at Toronto’s Harbourfront in October 1986. The shortlisting of Stilt House for the GG five months earlier made this no ordinary affair. Douglas Gibson from McClelland & Stewart had written three days prior, requesting a meeting. Two other publishers and one agent had phoned to tell him they would be in the audience. Fresh from the ‘45 Below’ publicity tour, Richards didn’t disappoint, delivering a dynamic reading of a scene from Blood Ties that was enthusiastically received. He was feted as one of the festival’s leading writers, Stilt House praised by people he had never met but whose names were familiar. Carol Shields, an unlikely admirer, wouldn’t leave without meeting him. Michael Ondaatje insisted that he include the piece Richards read in an anthology he was planning called From Ink Lake. Within days, Richards had offers from four publishers wanting his next novel, all asking essentially the same question: whether Oberon could get his books the attention and sales they deserved. Their attentions inspired him to forge ahead with Adele. When he was ready to show it to a publisher a month later, it was Ellen Seligman whom he called, much to the dismay of Doug Gibson (Richards was unaware that, though colleagues, they were competitors for books). His association with Oberon was over. Macklem’s reversal on an earlier offer to pay a $4,000 advance for his next book had been the tipping point. Adele was in poor shape when he gave it to Seligman in February 1987. Because it was the first book he’d composed on a computer, he had quite literally lost track of where he was going – the pages kept disappearing,

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 305

he would tell her. (Perhaps this is what would account for Keefer’s frustrations with ‘the random cutting back and forth’ and ‘arbitrary breaks in continuity’ [C3].) The reserved praise of first readers Nancy Bauer, Fred Cogswell, and Bob Gibbs had corroborated Richards’s own unease. Each had told him that the manuscript was expansive, seeming to be two novels in one. None had used the word ‘overwritten,’ but the message was clear. The manuscript didn’t have the focus of a completed work. So he had cut seventy-five pages before sending it to Seligman, who now suggested still more cuts and that it be reassembled into a tighter framework. The two spent three days in Toronto getting the novel into shape, both trying to avoid the difficulties that had sometimes marred editorial meetings at Oberon. Whereas Macklem had always been distracted by the extraneous concerns of a small business, Seligman applied herself strictly to editing, a focus that enabled her to see directly into what a novel was and that gave her sufficient confidence in that vision not to be intimidated by the writers in her charge. Richards, it seemed, had found the ‘ruthless and loving editor’ (23) that Hunt had earlier called for. The array of professional services at M&S, from copy editors to publicists, lent a final legitimacy to the operation. Feeling liberated from his responsibilities at UNB, and with a new publisher, Richards’s expectations for the novel were high. Renamed Nights below Station Street just before release, the new novel revisits a domestic sphere that is reminiscent of Blood Ties in the outwardly enveloping linkages of family, community, and tribe. The book’s two central characters are Adele, a fifteen-year-old spitfire, and her alcoholic father Joe, an awkward forty-three-year-old unemployed boilermaker struggling with recovery. Both are composites, but no less original because of characteristics they share with other of Richards’s creations. In Adele are Cathy’s protectiveness, Lois’s joie de vivre, and Little Simon’s verbal acuity, whereas in Joe are Maufaut’s calm, Cecil’s power and regret, Old Simon’s gentleness, and – in a gesture of solidarity to his old friend – Alden Nowlan’s great-headed bull moose, majestic in size and demeanour and picked on accordingly. Joe is also the Everyman from the Black Horse and other taverns in the country, one of the many labourers who have suffered back injuries from their work. In the ‘wars’ (Glover 9) and family history that he and Adele share is the tumult of alcohol’s legacy and AA’s wisdom towards transformation. Nights, then, does not break away formally or thematically from earlier work, as the two previous novels did; rather, it consolidates a vision that becomes

306

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

recognizable for the first time as quintessentially Richards’s. Nights is thus both the first book of the second trilogy and an exemplar for later work. The novel’s other major characters are Rita, Joe’s wife, who cleans house and babysits for extra money; Ralphie, Adele’s quasi-genius boyfriend; Myhrra, next-door neighbour and divorcee; and Dr Hennessey, a gruff old country doctor whose contrarian conservatism would remind Miramichiers of the real-life Dr Morrissy who worked among them. If the language of Blood Ties and Lives recalled Faulkner and Lowry in evoking subjectivity through private witness, the language of Nights is more conventionally analytical, reminiscent of the controlled, almost architectural, gravitas of Tolstoy. This shift reflects a maturing of vision rooted in Richards’s early training at STU, where one of the favourite Catholic thinkers among philosophers and theologians was Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan’s Thomistic methods took some time to incubate fully in Richards’s mind but changed his approach to narrative once they did. Especially relevant was Lonergan’s generalized empirical method (GEM), which posited that knowledge is advanced through data collection, hypothesis, and verification. Lonergan extrapolated that similar advances in understanding human values could be made if data were generalized to include those of consciousness and sense. From those data, he maintained, one could apply the scientific method of hypothesis and verification to trace public ideas of social order and historical development to their roots in consciousness, thus exploring how values are formed, corrupted, and even altered to promote harmony. Because GEM was not evaluative of humans but aimed at understanding a broader collective unconscious, it did not contravene the dominant Catholic belief in the essential unknowability of the human heart. It was rather a hybrid of science and humanism, inviting the kind of detachment that Richards would begin to practise in his own methodology, evident for the first time in the second trilogy and reaching full expression in Mercy, River, and Meager Fortune. That methodology is revealed in expanding compilation of data (longer and more detailed, laborious novels), diminishing hypotheses (fewer but more muscular themes), and repetition of conditions to verify outcomes (familiar social and psychic contexts across unrelated works). But this apparent rationing of concern should not be interpreted as a narrowing of vision, for it related to Richards’s larger theodicy. As he explains in God Is: ‘Even if we decided not to pick up arms and went far away from those who tormented us, they would be there when we arrived. For the world is constant and so is our difficulty in it.

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 307

We, in our own nature, attract the same kinds of enmity throughout most of our lives’ (138). Richards’s own generalized empirical method would become increasingly dependent on a theory of knowledge as dynamic process, one involving the interrelated activities of experiment, understanding, and judgment. Like Lonergan, he would employ this methodology in the service of ethics – to investigate innate moral norms in a broader effort to understand the ground for human values. In the literary realm, Tolstoy, one of Lonergan’s principal studies, was the master practitioner of this ethical exploration. Anthony Brennan, another STU English professor, had been influential in pointing this out to Richards when making distinctions among the Russian masters. The idealistic Dostoevsky, he maintained, was the novelist of youth (poetic and hyperbolic), whereas the more detached Tolstoy was the novelist of a grander pedestrian maturity. The matter-of-factness of the opening of Nights immediately calls to mind this distinction: ‘It was the Christmas of 1972. A spruce tree was decorated in the corner of their living room against the pine-board wall. There was a smell of evening. Their house was below Station Street and down beyond the hospital’ (7). The language here is more tightly controlled, more assured and scientific, not susceptible to hijacking by unconscious thought or wilful impression. For Mathews, ‘there is no oppressive weight of detail’ (233), the kind that made Lives so ponderous. Private witness as the point of entry into characterization has passed. Richards’s narrator is now omniscient, a general not a soldier, better able to meet ideological challenges with its own salvos. Using a boxing metaphor, Richards now confidently claimed that he was a writer who had power in both hands. T.F. Rigelhof was indeed correct in detecting that Nights was ‘to be a new beginning’ (1). After the method of Tolstoy/Lonergan, that new beginning is recognizably synchronic: an inquiry into social and ethical conditions at a particular moment in time. Whereas Lives had been predominantly diachronic – an analysis of change over time – Nights treats ethics as a working system of social associations that have only contiguous relation to other eras. Richards situates Nights, then, at precisely the time in his generational cycle when an analysis of the preconditions for Lives and Stilt House is most profitable, the fallout from the social revolutions of the 1960s having just begun. Citizens of a new underclass feel alienated and silenced by a nascent social configuration fabricated from ‘the prominent lexicon of progressive thought’ (Wounded 171). The investigation

308

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

of this new social configuration, deeply ideological in its construction and expression, leads Richards to conclude, much like the later Tolstoy, that ideology leads to a social determinism that nullifies the free will of all society’s members, regardless of class or status. Each of Richards’s subsequent novels undertakes similar synchronic analyses, exploring the minutiae of consequences that result from the collision of two powerful forces in the dialectic of modern man: social determinism and individual free will. Those whose strength of character can resist the bullying of progressive thought are heroic and marginalized, often suffering alone, while those who embrace the mores of the new intellectualism enjoy what amounts to only a delusion of power before eventually becoming victims of that power themselves. The tensions that arise from the collision of public and private interests form the landscape of his later work. It is a landscape where the ideological supersedes the elemental – one reason why the physical landscape so dominant in earlier works is less evident in the second trilogy. In later works, the physical apparatus that locates story in time and place recedes into the background to allow for a more sustained treatment of moral geographies. Richards’s intricate psychic mapping of Joe’s journey towards sobriety is indicative of this change. At base, Joe is surrounded by a family that wants desperately to support his sobriety, but given his previous failures, they cannot be hopeful. Adele acts out this unease. She struggles to believe in Joe despite her adolescent extremes of emotion, but ‘wait[s] for him to go for the bottle any second’ (7). Her outbursts – ‘why don’t ya slap my cheeks off or stick a fork in my bum like ya did when ya were drunk. If it weren’t fer Mom we’d all be on the welfare’ (10) – are a register of the wages of alcoholism on a family, yet in his heart, Joe understands this and is tolerant of her moods. The novel’s contours follow the paths of this unease through Joe’s hopes, compromises, fears, and battles with his own worst tendencies. The real landscape of the novel is therefore internal, encompassing the many small bargains that Joe makes with himself to become a better father and husband: Once just after he had stopped drinking, he’d gone to a party at Myhrra’s. Gloria Basterache had given him a mocha-ball filled with rum ... Joe had to leave the party and go downtown. Walking about half the night, he felt as if he had taken a drink, and since he had taken a drink, what was preventing him from taking another one, and if nothing was preventing him, why didn’t he have one? All the reasons why he might be able to get away with having a drink flooded over him. (221)

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 309

It is not until the end of Nights that we realize how much Joe has endured in an effort to redeem himself. He has been tolerant of his family’s moods and has endured the ridicule and innuendo of the social climbers who have sought to discredit him, their own insecurities evident in their efforts to keep him below them. Nights marks the beginning of Richards’s interest in the social and political mores of these tensions, and in the difficulties of finding redemption in their midst. Myhrra, Vye, Vera, and Nevin are the outsiders whose actions and attitudes are complicit in Joe’s struggles. They are the expropriators at the end of Blood Ties, the American sports in Lives, the intervenors of Stilt House, and the neoliberals of the new Miramichi. They ‘say all the right things and do all the wrong things,’ Richards observed of the types on which they were modelled (quoted in Werner A18). Vera is their best envoy. Rife with ‘all the manufactured clarity of the modern girl’ (Meager Fortune 33), she is a contemporary Anna Pavlovna Scherer, the frivolous society belle whose party opens War and Peace. The daughter of the local judge, she comes back to the river with a mid-Atlantic accent after only a year at Oxford. The prejudices of her often unexamined attitudes, founded on what Richards calls ‘notional knowledge’ (Playing 30), is a sinister force in keeping characters like Joe (and later Jerry Bines) off balance. Though a peon to the new intellectualism, and thus stunted in her capacity for genuine love, she is not handicapped socially by her lack of human concern because the ideas she adopts are ascendant in the social register of the times. Richards thus writes into her vapid certainty a large measure of self-mockery to highlight the arbitrariness of her attitudes: ‘Vera came in to visit the doctor, with that assertive step she believed was very new for women … [She] was one of those people who is normally infuriating because every new opinion is suddenly hers – and hers alone – and in another year or so she will move on to something else. The very things that in 1968 she argued for, were now vehemently argued against’ (131, 132). Evident in this construction is the more conventional omniscient voice speaking through character. Though he obviously delights in social satire, Richards has only passing interest in challenging the soundness of her opinions. He prefers we see instead that her ideological posturing robs Joe of dignity, thus adding to the already heavy burden of his recovery. In showing how completely Vera needs Joe to live in the world, Richards extends his social commentary by challenging the assumption that power and utility are linked. Vera’s dependency opens a new dimension in his examination of the moral conditions of power. Whereas Lives

310

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

and Stilt House were devoted largely to an analysis of social violence, the books of the second trilogy investigate the allowances, perpetrators, victims, and conditions of social power. Lonergan is again germane, especially in regard to how normative power manifests itself in social systems in which power is produced by language and ideas and discernable in values assumed to be universal. Vera is a delegate of this new social power but without the understanding that moral authority should confer. In a moral universe, social power does not derive from the privilege of class or education, as she presumes, but from the common purpose to which the delegates of power have been entrusted. Richards’s presentation of the dynamics of social power is increasingly profound across each of the books of the trilogy, even though its exposition is at times less than sufficiently nuanced in Nights: Joe insisted that [Vera’s] pump had to be fixed so they didn’t leave the house until late because of it. Joe took all the pipes off, and then, improvising, made one of his own out of some of the new copper pipe that was there, and out of a section of pipe he had in his trunk. So it didn’t look nice at all – it was a rather cold, fashionless sort of pipe. Except it worked. Vera, with her nose running, and her head aching, and her stomach hurting, was now able to flush the toilet. As she came out of the bathroom, the winter’s twilight made a dull reflection against all her jars of spices, and whole wheat flour, and packages of granola. (166)

The Apocrypha of granola aside, Vera is a foil for Joe. The coercive determinism of her attitudes limits his freedoms, not the least of which is his struggle to regain self-worth. The incongruity of their relative social positions is made stark because, though Vera may have the advantages of education, class, and ideological currency, her helplessness in the world is almost absolute. In this paradox is Richards’s belief that liberal and/or progressive ideology almost always enjoys more theoretical than practical or ethical relevance. This belief is central to his later fiction, which is increasingly populated by morally comfortable individuals who are willing to ‘mistake [men like Joe] as less than themselves until the time they [have] to rely upon them, either in kindness or in battle’ (Meager Fortune 81). Vera is no exception. What she cannot admit is that, even without the social advantages she enjoys, Joe’s self-knowing is more fully developed than hers, so that he is better able to rise to practical action (common purpose) when called. While the Veras of Richards’s world attempt to find traction on the slippery slopes of a shifting theoretical

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 311

ground, the Joes steady themselves on stable ground within, a difference that calls to mind one of the novel’s epigraphs (from Tolstoy): ‘Everyone wants to change the world; but no one will change themselves’ (5). Because he has undergone that transformation towards self-acceptance, Joe can look out for Vera, Nevin, Vye, and Myhrra despite their socially sanctioned dismissal of him. That is why he accepts the subordinate role of being acted upon in order to serve them. And that is why they seek his approval in the end, as Myhrra does, her vindictiveness finally exposing itself as resentment for dependency: ‘“Tell me you like him, Joe,” Myhrra said, suddenly, as if she was about to cry … “Of course,” Joe said, stuttering slightly … and at that moment Joe could not think of anything except that he did like Vye’ (209). Joe is not slow or beyond redemption at this moment, as critics like Davey and Goldie have claimed. At worst, his response suggests embarrassed incredulity. At best, his hard-won self-acceptance, the result of anguished personal change, finally trumps the faddish ideology of victimization that others have in abundance. His actions derive from the Golden Rule, theirs from a golden mean. Vera, Nevin, Vye, and Myhrra may have the power of social sanction, but he has the moral guidance of the common purpose. He is able to accept repudiation as his fate because he doesn’t need the approval of others, even though they seek it from him. As Richards told interviewer R.M. Vaughan, ‘self-sacrifice is always more important than empowerment’ (17). Joe’s awkwardness aside, he is morally generous, not intellectually naive. Putting Joe and Vera in such stark counterpoise enables Richards to make a comment about the interrelation of power and violence: that the physical violence of men like Joe and Cecil is no less harmful than the ideological bullying they suffer at the hands of the (supposedly) morally superior proponents of the new intellectualism. This view has wrongly been interpreted as Richards’s advocacy of physical violence, though he has advocated for nothing of the sort, having displayed strong aversion to violence of any kind in his work. As he explained: ‘Violence has nothing to do with using fists, because there is violence before fists are ever used. There is violence in how people try to manipulate others, whether it’s [in] how they speak or what they do … The whole thing about violence, of course, is that it is used when people do not have power’ (quoted in Garrod 218). The aspect of physicality that Richards doesn’t mention, but which each of his novels explores, is the relationship between physical and moral courage. Physical bravery is often the ground for moral bravery in his fictional world, and the latter rarely emerges in

312

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

the absence of the former. Physicality – the willingness to beat or be beat upon, to act or be acted upon – opens the way for moral redemption, a state that, for Christians, requires great courage. Joe’s rescue of Vye from a blizzard at the end of Nights is therefore doubly triumphant because it enacts a superior spiritualism in unfavourable conditions. Joe acts to rescue Vye despite having no real power or self-interest. He acts because his convictions are immune to Vye’s earlier ridicule at the Curling Club. Through those actions – what Rousseau termed moral utilitarianism, the social contract each citizen must enter into – his best intentions and true character emerge. Joe triumphs while Vera fails because he is able to follow the sureness of his instincts to their end. It bears repeating that he is not intellectually stunted in driving arbitrarily into a storm but uncluttered in ways that the more impressionable Vera is not. (She is the first who would counsel against venturing into a storm, for in accepting fear as a condition of her existence she has already severely limited her interactions in the world.) ‘By making the untutored conscience, rather than the educated intellect, the source of moral action, Rousseau outflanked all such objections [to ignorance],’ remarked Hampson (214). Joe’s actions are heroic, then, because they are selfless, brave, true to a sense of justice he has worked out for himself, and not beholding to the popular. Critic Carrie Macmillan saw this clearly, observing ‘that there are other ways of articulating than through language, and that in fact language can serve to cover up or disguise truth, which is only measurable through action’ (1991, 207). By this definition, Joe is among the most articulate of Richards’s characters. His instinctual journey towards Vye’s rescue is eloquent, not with the shifting elisions of a fashionable artifice that seeks to change the world but with the more purposeful grammars of personal action (moral utility). Misdirection and chance do not confuse or deter him, as the following illustrates: [Joe] prolonged his stay here another ten minutes by taking a sip out of the bottle now and again. Then, just as he was going to turn around, he suddenly had an impulse to drive further up the snowy road which he knew so well ... Joe felt that everything was here, and everything here was exactly the way it should be ... Then, without knowing he was going to, he looked at the bottle of vodka, and suddenly he poured it out into the snow ... He felt good, happy for the first time in a long time, and he was thinking of nothing in particular. He happened at that moment to cut along a side log road ... he saw Vye huddled up against a stump with his hands up over his face ... Then

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 313 he crossed the brook, with Vye on his back ... His back pained only slightly but he did not feel it so much – not knowing the processes of how this had all happened, only understanding that it was now irrevocable because it had. (222, 224–5, italics added)

The last line is a rare articulation of Richards’s moral philosophy – his belief in the ethical superiority of spontaneous action over calculated intent, which is always more ideologically laden. In Stilt House, spontaneous actions were those small instances of kindness that are constantly overshadowed by the calculation of various forms of social altruism, all politically derivative of models of policing, child-rearing, literacy, public health, and surveillance. In Nights, spontaneous actions are writ larger and clearer to see. They include Adele conquering her fear of blood to care for Joe, who has been hit on the head with a claw hammer after he secretly takes a job as a bouncer; Rita looking after the wayward children of her street without complaint or expectation of reward; and Joe literally following his gut to rescue Vye from the storm. These characters have the capacity to act selflessly because they have already rescued themselves from the self-loathing that is their social inheritance, the inheritance that destroys Arnold, Mabel, and Randy in Stilt House. ‘When people act spontaneously or in the best interest of others in my novels,’ Richards once explained, ‘they are acting with no other motivation except to be good … to become the best that they can’ (quoted in Garrod 217–18). In regaining themselves from the determined actions of others, Joe, Rita, and Adele are redeemed. For all her progressive fixes, Vera is not. Like Faust, she has squandered herself to change the world, removing herself from her natural environment in order to belong. So removed and unanchored, she is a product of the determined actions of others every bit as much as Arnold, though she doesn’t realize it because her socialization in culture doesn’t allow her (or us) to see it clearly. The lesson of Nights, and much of Richards’s later work, is that only when one relies on one’s inner humanity, trusting one’s instincts for goodness, can self-loathing and the stigmas of shame and presupposition be thrown off. The one-time thug Jerry Bines (Stilt House, Wounded) will discover this, as will Ivan Basterache (Evening Snow), Sydney Henderson (Mercy), and Reggie Glidden (Meager Fortune). Evident in each character is the hard-won goodness of natural man striving to live in harmony with himself and his environment, not as a representation of the folk but as something of a radical private moralist, free of the ‘coldness [that] always has its roots in sensible thought’ (Wounded 59). Through their

314

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

struggles, Richards shows that salvation is a matter of the person, not the community – and that without each person’s attention to the soul, nothing better can ever come. Discernable in the clash of public ideology and private faith (violence and the sacred) is Richards’s interest in the French historian and literary critic René Girard, an interest more fully developed in Evening Snow and Wounded, the last two novels of the second trilogy. Girard’s influential work on Dostoevsky and Camus caught Richards’s attention in 1986, when the English translation of Le bouc émissaire (The Scapegoat) was released in North America. Especially germane to his investigations of social violence were Girard’s theories of mimetic desire and sacrificial atonement, both of which equated social rivalry with desire. The theories held that rather than desiring an object in itself, a subject circuits desire through another subject, who functions as a model or stand-in for the desired. Thus, the relationship between subject and object (the desirer and the desired) is complex: not direct or lineal, but mediated and triangular. Over time, the mediator/model, not the object, becomes that which is desired, much to the detriment of the mediator, who is transformed into a rival. The psychology of desire therefore invites violence of the sort that is especially observable in sectarian environments, those characterized by a narrowing of ideology. Many of the ideologues in Richards’s novels display this mimetic character of desire. The object of Vera’s desire in Nights, for example, mirrors that of the Americans at the close of Blood Ties: the pastoral ideal of a life uncluttered and repatriated on the land. This desire is triangulated, in Vera’s case, through Joe, whose genius at just such an existence makes him first the rival and then the antagonist who seemingly stands in the way of her dream’s fulfilment. Nights and later novels are rife with the tricks of treachery by which subjects delude themselves into avoiding the obvious envy that is at the root of their desire – the lies and manipulations that darken the social landscape and that imperil models like Joe and Jerry Bines, whose powerful maleness is the secret object of Vera’s desire in Wounded. When Joe forsakes ‘knowing’ for ‘being’ in his rescue of Vye at the end of Nights, then, his higher spiritualism doesn’t simply reflect a faith in the rightness of his actions; it also illuminates the treachery of others so that we may see it more clearly. The second epigraph to Nights (from Alden Nowlan’s Vampires) is applicable in this regard: ‘There is blood on their lips, you fight back, and it’s you they blame’ (5). To make concrete this process of socialization, Richards transforms Joe into a modern-day

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 315

Job, equal to the tests he must endure but suffering mightily because he must endure them. And he certainly does suffer. A bad back pains him constantly; scorn, ridicule, and self-doubt follow him at every turn; he is dismissed by his betters until he becomes indispensable, then ostracized for his abilities; and alcohol taunts him in wakefulness and dreams. Even the fidelity of his wife comes into question. He is the victim of every conceivable social machination and trick, whether rum in a mocha ball or humiliation by friends. Despite this, he, like Job, does not curse his hardships or his fate because his essential goodness is always brighter than the tricks of others. The resilience that that goodness allows marks, for Richards, a way to illuminate and surmount social violence, bringing him out of the darkness of the previous two novels. The resilience of that higher spiritualism also arms him with an intellectual response to the second part of Girard’s theory, which involves a sacrifice of the model, thus a violent end to the social process of desire. The scapegoat theory of atonement extends Girard’s earlier ideas to the group psychology of collective desire as it relates to the use of social violence. Girard illustrates this using the example of Christ’s suffering, challenging conventional thinking about that suffering by revisiting the language of the Gospels, specifically the notion that Jesus died for our sins (1 Peter 2.21–5 and 2 Corinthians 5.15). Christ died, Girard posits, not so that we may be forgiven our sins (that is the Protestant interpretation), but to restore social peace and cohesion, much for the same reasons as the acts of sacrifice in the Old Testament (Leviticus 5; Isaiah 53). Girard’s variant interpretation of scripture relies on his earlier view that desire, being mimetic, is a contagion. As the contagion spreads through communities, the violence it seeds builds to a crisis point until a scapegoat is found who can be sacrificed – who, in fact, must be sacrificed for becoming the object of truncated rivalries. Because the scapegoat is innocent of wrongdoing, participants in this process agree tacitly to conceal that innocence and the injustice at the root of their social ritual. Girard argues that Christ’s crucifixion unmasks this ritual by revealing the baseness of social violence from the perspective of its victim. Christ, as victim, therefore becomes moral exemplar, ‘the only one capable of revealing the true nature of violence to the utmost’ (209). Christ achieves this because He is the only human not of this world, thus not bound by the social anthropology of scapegoating and desire. The Cross, Girard concludes, is the symbolic reminder of this dark social secret. As the narrator intones in Wounded: ‘Once you yourself began to suffer you wanted the suffering to stop, and you would allow someone else to take it and

316

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

bear it for you’ (84). Even the essential goodness of Ralphie Pillar is not above desiring the suffering of another for personal escape from pain, ‘even if Jerry [Bines] had to go to prison or die’ (83). Through suffering – what the Catholic Church calls mortification (the subduing of wrong impulses) – Joe Walsh (Nights), Ivan Basterache (Evening Snow), and Sydney Henderson (Mercy) become moral exemplars like Jerry, their isolated quests for self-improvement (personal change and amour de soi, or self-love) ultimately freeing them from the bondage of class and power, the bondage of a failed social contract. Though their struggles as scapegoats are difficult and seemingly hopeless – Joe dies soon after he rescues Vye, Ivan is burned in a forest fire trying to save a horse, Jerry is murdered attempting to protect his community, and Sydney is beaten for a lifetime in order to keep a promise to God – their refusal to surrender to the grinding fate that finally consumes Arnold, Mabel, and Randy gives them the kind of spiritual worth that writers like Vasily Grossman and Primo Levi championed in terrible circumstances. Their lives are thus symbolic and profound in ways they could not have imagined. ‘I think Joe is striving for, without trying to strive for, a true human nobility,’ Richards told one interviewer (Wernick E2), seemingly unsure himself of Joe’s success in reaching that end. What is clear is that the struggle for freedom that drives Joe’s quest becomes symbolic of hope in confused times. ‘Liberty,’ said Rousseau, ‘is not inherent in any form of government, it is in the heart of the free man’ (quoted in Hampson 216). Richards would continue to explore the social ethics of mimetic desire and ontological violence in subsequent novels. His later protagonists are therefore rarely comfortable, and often great, fulfilling the moral calculus that is God’s edict of them (Hope 146). Wounded, cast off, ridiculed, battling self-hatred, and used as pawns or patsies in others’ schemes, their lives are the ground upon which moral (and amoral) social forces fall out. What appears vital for Richards is the way these characters live – specifically, how their ‘sins’ are ‘overcome by personal attributes’ (Wounded 161) – for their struggles to regain themselves and their loved ones from menacing social hegemonies of culture and ideology are the real focus of his later fictions, fictions in which the secret inner life, hidden for protection from scorn, becomes the spiritual centre that elevates them to the universal. ‘This contrast between the flesh and the spirit, the outer and the inner, is everything,’ Glover observes. ‘It’s the root of [Richards’s] tragic vision and his comic insight. And this is what most critics miss – it is a theme that is universal, a theme that has generated all great art since the beginning of the Christian era’

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 317

(11). Mathews agrees: ‘The burden of Richards’ theme is that there is something intrinsic to the human spirit that permits … characters to grow, to discover capabilities in themselves for compassionate and selfless behaviour’ (248). The turn or reversal that Glover and Mathews recognize is not exactly what Aristotle termed peripeteia. Rather, in Richards, this reversal from public limitation to personal freedom recalls the distinction St Paul makes between natural and spiritual man, soma psychikon and soma pneumatikon (1 Cor. 2.14–15), natural man living on earth and spiritual man living on a higher plane. Paul’s distinction sets up the possibility that the kingdom of heaven is not otherworldly but within and among us, even if natural man remains unaware of it. The ‘turn’ that Richards’s protagonists make towards this understanding is thus closer to Aristotlean anagnorisis (or recognition) than peripeteia, for it guarantees their emancipation, freeing them from fear and narcissism and ultimately lessening their suffering. The desired outcome is described by Transcendentalist Sampson Reed as an earthly utopia: ‘Let a man’s ambition to be great disappear in a willingness to be what he is; then he may fill a high place without pride, or a low one without dejection’ (quoted in Geldard 33). The ground of the post-Stilt House work is therefore highly nuanced and mannered, tracing intersecting lines of sin and redemption through polity and blood ties. The naturalistic and impressionistic qualities of the early work are less resonant in the later because of the greater objectivity of Richards’s narrative technique and his interest in following moral rather than spatial contours. The unnamed Miramichi, however, remains ubiquitous, recognizable not merely as catchment and sacred trust but as metaphor for a larger humanity. Through its heart flows the river, ever consonant, reaching beyond individual lives to touch a temporal continuity made manifest in history, inheritance, and natural order: Over everything in town rose the hospital, the station, the church, and the graveyard. Below, the river rested, beyond the woods and through the centre of town. (Nights 26–7)

Though Nights would become Richards’s most celebrated novel, its mixed reviews established a now clearly observable trope that Mathews lampooned in his assessment of the author’s reception: ‘(1) Richards’s vision is bleak and uncompromising (or honest); (2) his characters are losers and down-and-outers who cannot control their lives (or ordinary people whose intrinsic decency and dignity are appropriately affirmed in

318

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

the text); (3) his style is dense and obscure (but then becomes stripped down and spare)’ (194). To illustrate: William French continued to disapprove of his ‘crude town of loggers, miners, mill workers and the unemployed,’ musing again about the literary appropriateness of the ‘ungrammatical lives’ of ‘society’s losers’ (C17). Rather than see Adele as precocious, he saw her as unintelligent. Joe was little more than a drunk and a plodder. When asked at the Banff Centre in Alberta about what appeared to be a feud with the country’s senior reviewer, Richards told the audience: ‘I write about characters I love – otherwise I wouldn’t write about them’ (quoted in Henderson C10), the inference being that the affections of one’s heart are always appropriate matter for literature. George Woodcock also registered ‘disappointment by the lack of any really new vision’ (‘Too Often’ 129), concerns later echoed in an especially virulent review by Donna Pennee, who wondered how ‘one evaluate[s] yet another novel on yet another northern New Brunswick mill town,’ all the while seeming to delight in declaring that Richards ‘falls short of being a major voice that early reviewers repeatedly predicted’ (41). Terry Goldie was only slightly more restrained in questioning ‘whether such an un-self-reflexive narrative voice belongs in serious fiction in 1989’ (177). True to the split decisions of the past (and Mathews’s formula), other reviewers read the novel in the opposite way, saying in significant numbers that Nights should win the 1988 Governor General’s Award. T.F. Rigelhof was the loudest of those voices, writing that ‘it is highly unlikely that a better or more enduring novel will be published in this country this year’ (1). A chorus rose saying that he was overdue – overdue, curiously, for the same reasons that French, Woodcock, and Pennee said he was stagnating. Diane Turbide recognized a maturing of his ‘sensitivity to people in deprived situations’ (59); Sheldon Currie, as if speaking directly to French, explained Nights’s realism as an attempt ‘to be accurate rather than explanatory, because [such writing] takes for granted that life is inexplicable; interesting, comic, sad, tragic, ludicrous, beautiful, but inexplicable’ (1988, 66). Though the novel and those who weighed in on it were new, the old battle lines were the same. Those who spoke against it had an ideological edge, drawing supporters into defensive postures. In that polarized environment, reviewers like Pennee and Goldie drew unusual attention to themselves. Their opposition to Richards’s work seemed mostly to advance their own political positions around canon, gender, nationality, and ‘theory’ (loosely defined); thus it was not surprising that they exhibited proportionally more grievance than sub-

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 319

stance. In ‘Firing the Regional Can(n)on,’ Christopher Armstrong and Herb Wyile are two of an increasing number of critics who have drawn attention to this, linking Richards’s conservative didacticism of the 1980s to the rising authority of neoliberalism’s institutional power. What else but a vexing neoliberal certainty – what Ian McKay elsewhere termed ‘liberal antimodernism’ (Quest xv) – could power Goldie’s call for writers like Richards to be proactive, more like social workers than artists? ‘The value of extolling regional working-class realism is not to look patronizingly at an interesting depiction of such hamsters on their wheel but to support the vision which will open the cage’ (177). Notwithstanding the long-running debate over the utilitarian function of literature – and Janice Kulyk Keefer’s sensible advice, gleaned from Henry James, that ‘our business as readers and critics [is] to judge what the writer makes of her or his choice of material and “home ground,” not to quarrel with that choice’ (Under 29) – Goldie’s condescension to region and class is quite remarkable for a critic with a long and impressive record of championing the rights of marginal peoples. About Richards, however, such pronouncements have been frequent. And all bets, it seems, are off. It was only when this trope became predictable, as it did with Nights, that Richards began to understand why his representation of place was unsettling so many people. When he finally acknowledged the reflex to cultivate blindness to the suffering in one’s own place – ‘Look at Toronto. Look at all the beatings, robberies, rapes and murders. What about that? What do we hear about them?’ (quoted in Galloway 21) – he began to think of the politics of reception in post-colonial terms, literally ‘as the struggle for control of the word’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tifflin 86). This enabled him to see that the literary establishment in Canada was selective in its choice of authors who would best represent its view of the country: I say things about Canada that no Torontonian wants New York to know. And so since I do I must be a regionalist, because Toronto wants New York to think of Canada as being urbane and upwardly mobile and progressive, a lover of baseball and concerned about violence in hockey. And God, here I am talking about people killing moose out of season and all this, and Toronto doesn’t want New York to know about that! The last thing Toronto wants to be is the true voice of its nation. (Scherf 170)

At stake for Richards – as for all artists who hold the power to re-create the world in language – was what would be altered or overlooked in this

320

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

very real struggle for control of meaning. ‘Nothing in my work should shock anyone with the courage or decency to read the great writers,’ he told Mark Tunney when contemplating this struggle. ‘I’m not trying to compare my talents with them, but sometimes when I think of the rejection every one of them went through, deep down it helps. I think I know now why artists cut off their ear lobes’ (quoted in Tunney ‘Hometown’ 5). Keefer was again a shrewd observer of this compact, placing Richards among those artists whose ‘sentiments we prefer not to hear [for] they do not belong to the Canada of our patriotic imaginings’ (Under 175). Neither contrary opinion nor literary politics could stop the momentum pushing Nights onto the national stage, however. Everywhere he went, Richards was being assured that this was his year to win the GG. At the Coulee Theatre in Lethbridge, Alberta, he was introduced, a month prematurely, as the next winner. In the national media, Fred Cogswell was reminding people that in 1976, Blood Ties – a book far superior to the winner – didn’t even make the short list. There was the sense in the country that literary politics had long conspired against Richards, even though many long-time supporters (Cogswell included) believed that Nights was not as powerful as Stilt House. So it was anti-climactic in early February 1989 when Nights was announced as one of five finalists for the 1988 GG. Other short-listed authors were Margaret Atwood for Cat’s Eye, Joan Clark for The Victory of Geraldine Gull, Mark Frutkin for Atmospheres Apollinaire, and Kenneth Radu for The Cost of Living. Curiously absent was Robertson Davies, whose The Lyre of Orpheus had topped the Canadian best-seller list for much of the year. (Too Edwardian in its concern for art, the Canadian literati whispered, dismissing it as unCanadian.) To many onlookers, the competition again appeared to be between Atwood and Richards. In 1985, both had written highly political books, The Handmaid’s Tale questioning the geopolitics of the new world order and Stilt House challenging the moral will of Canada’s social welfare system. In 1988, both had written politically again, but this was Richards’s year. His larger vision proved decisive. ‘Richards gives voice to the inarticulate, without condescension,’ jurors declared, ‘and evokes with complete fidelity the scenes and circumstances of his characters’ lives’ (Jury’s citation, no credit ascribed). Vision and form (empathy and realism), the very things that powerful readers had objected to so strenuously and for so long, had carried the day. As Keefer forecast, he had indeed ‘relocate[d] the “canon of reality” from the civilized “centre” to the backwoods “region”’ (Under 176).

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 321

Richards received his award from Governor General Jeanne Sauvé at Montreal’s Théâtre Port-Royal in March 1989. Accompanying it was a cheque for $10,000, an amount exceeding his annual income for many of the past twenty years. In a short acceptance speech, he admitted to being humbled and surprised. He thanked those closest to him but forgot to mention the people of the Miramichi, an oversight he later regretted. What he left unsaid was how surreal the evening felt. The fatwa recently brought down on the head of Salman Rushdie by the Iranian theocracy pervaded the mood in the theatre that night. It was the talk of PEN members in attendance and of a speech by the new chair of the Canada Council, Allan Gotlieb, who spoke of the privilege of writing politically and provocatively without fear of recrimination from the state. Though he would have agreed in theory, Richards must also have been aware of the subtler applications of state agency. He was accepting the country’s highest literary award for a book that he and his supporters liked the least, a book, ironically, that would become his most successful. Though Nights consolidated the vision, in his mind the award was for Stilt House, which was superior for sheer power, inventiveness, and political statement yet had been dismissed by many in the state apparatus for precisely those reasons. In New Brunswick, there was a feeling that easterners had at last been heard. The reality of Maritime society that so many outsiders had worked so hard in the national media to deny or fetishize was finally in the open. It had been twenty-five years since the country’s most prestigious literary prize had been conferred on a Maritime writer of fiction or poetry. In that time, only Alden Nowlan (1967) and Antonine Maillet (1972) had been so honoured. In his remarks to journalists afterwards, Richards acknowledged the long drought by cautioning future juries not to ‘get too claustrophobic in their decisions’ (quoted in ‘Miramichi Writer’ 2). The cultural cringe he had long written about was lifted for a time, even if the country’s major papers characterized his win as ‘a mild upset’ (Kirchhoff C3) that ‘raised a few eyebrows’ (Abley H1). The story was front page in the Maritime press and Richards the subject of many editorials. Fredericton’s Daily Gleaner saluted him for bringing credit ‘to the whole literary community of New Brunswick’ (‘New Brunswick is Proud’ 4). Premier Frank McKenna, known on the river for having successfully defended boxer Yvon Durelle against a murder charge in 1977, wrote a personal note of congratulations. Other letters followed from scores of high-placed Maritimers across the country. His win had a measure of vindication about it, for his treatment by critics, well known to those who

322

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

followed his work, was felt to be paradigmatic of what Maritimers had long endured. Most delighted were Miramichiers, who had long taken their cues from elsewhere and had always valued national recognition over provincial success. After the editorials, cartoons, laudatory ads, and fullpage ‘Forum’ in the Miramichi Leader (‘A Look at David Richards’), Bill’s phone rang for weeks with congratulations. People brought food to the house and stopped him on the street. News of his son’s success greeted him at the barbershop, the post office, and the Legion – even on the rink’s billboard, a place of honour in the working-class town. In his weekly column, Leader editor Rick MacLean summed up the conundrum of Richards for Miramichiers: He’s probably less appreciated in his home area than elsewhere in Canada and around the world. Some find his books ‘heavy’ and wish he would lighten up. Some object to his use of curse words. They feel he’s painting a bad image of the Miramichi. Yet such words and the stories he tells are part of everyday culture here – and that’s what he’s writing about. (4)

No stranger to Richards’s reception on the Miramichi, MacLean asked locals to ignore what they’d heard and read the native son for themselves – a suggestion that echoed the advice that Desmond Pacey gave to New Brunswickers about Fred Cogswell’s The Stunted Strong almost half a generation earlier. ‘If anyone pretends to be shocked by what Cogswell tells us of ourselves,’ wrote Pacey, ‘it is because he or she is afraid to face reality’ (‘Cogswell Notes’). Only in facing reality, MacLean echoed, would locals see that Richards was ‘doing that rarest of things. He’s making this region immortal through his writing.’ Two days after Richards returned to New Brunswick, Frank McKenna phoned asking for a guest list in preparation for the party of the decade – New Brunswick’s consummate publicist wouldn’t let the occasion pass without a fitting soirée. When Richards responded with a list of immediate family and four friends, McKenna was crestfallen, clearly hoping that Richards would be as enthusiastic as he in treating the occasion as a celebration of New Brunswick and the Miramichi. (He obviously knew little of the hardships of Richards’s apprenticeship in the province.) The ‘literary night’ in the parliamentary restaurant of the legislature on 6 April

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 323

was therefore McKenna’s initiative. Richards’s only stipulation was that the invitation read ‘Dress Informal’ so that his buddies from Newcastle would not feel out of place. As much as Richards detested these kinds of events, feeling awkward in crowds without the social lubricant of drink, the evening would be a watershed moment in his writing life. Over one hundred family members, friends, writers, and politicians attended, many having come through the fog from the Miramichi. ‘It looked more like a rum-drinking crowd than the white wine set,’ commented Mark Tunney (‘Richards’ Reception’ 19), adding that Richards’s ‘better-than-a-day’s growth’ erased any of the false civility that Fredericton events of this sort often tried to cultivate. The talk instead was of black salmon and the government’s new non-smoking policy that forced Trapper and Bruce Wallace outside to smoke. For the guest of honour, the preoccupation was boxer Roberto Duran’s win a week earlier in Atlantic City, when the thirty-seven-yearold 3-to-1 underdog defeated Iran Barkley for the WBC middleweight belt, his fourth title in a long career. When the proceedings moved to the formal part of the evening, Richards told one of the organizers that he felt like a tired but grateful Duran having to face the cameras after a long bout. He needn’t have worried; McKenna had gotten the message – this was a New Brunswick party. Telegrams were read and glasses raised. Speakers commented on Richards’s presentation of localized truth in an age when the claim to truth was being vigorously contested by special interests. McKenna lauded Richards for the courage to create characters on his own terms – without the marquee value of Anne of Green Gables, he joked – and Miramichier Paul J. Daigle, representing the Department of Tourism, Recreation, and Heritage, acknowledged Richards for outstanding accomplishment in staying true to his vocation. McKenna crowned the evening by announcing the creation of the annual David Adams Richards prize for English-language prose fiction in the province, an honour of singular importance in that it recognized the central position he’d occupied in New Brunswick fiction since 1974. Before taking the podium, Richards whispered to his former teacher Doug Underhill that he was overwhelmed by the tributes. His speech recognized the role that many in the room had played in his achievements. He acknowledged his father and friends, teachers and mentors, as indispensable to what he had done. He spoke in particular of Ray Fraser, Fred Cogswell, Bob Gibbs, Alistair MacLeod, and the late Alden Nowlan for providing key support when needed. (He told Claudine

324

David Adams Richards of the Miramichi

Nowlan privately that Alden’s greatest gift had been treating him like a writer long before he felt a legitimate claim to being one.) He repeated his belief that ‘the Maritimes produces the greatest writers and poets in the country’ (quoted in Flemming 3), a comment made, he later said, to honour Buckler, Bruce, MacLennan, Maillet, Raddall, and Bailey, the elders who had forged the way. Though shy and non-expansive in sobriety, his gratitude was easy to discern. His closest friends had never seen him as humbled. It was as if, in one night, in front of his family and closest friends, the struggles and humiliations of years of effort had been vindicated. He was, in effect, being thanked publicly in front of the people who had been closest to his moods, who had suffered for some of his own sacrifices, and who had kept the faith with him for so many years. The ceremony in Fredericton was far more meaningful than the awards night in Montreal because it involved the people of his heart. When many of these same friends assembled at Northumberland Square in Newcastle on 24 April for the official Miramichi signing of Nights, they observed to a person that attitudes towards the native son were shifting. Few who went to Coles Books that afternoon knew the significance of his award or what it had cost him, but they did understand that his achievement was monumental. The talk they had heard for years – of Bill Richards’s boy mentioned in the same company as Whelan and Beaverbrook – was clearly true, so they extended to him the respect garnered by a great athlete coming home with the Stanley Cup. Those three weeks in April 1989 were the capstone on the first half of his career. They also marked his farewell to Fredericton, for as affirming as the tributes were, they could not completely exorcise the past. As he would write in a later novel, ‘You cannot love the soil where your soul was mocked by lesser men’ (Meager Fortune 111). Months earlier, he and Peggy had discussed a move. He preferred Toronto as a way out of New Brunswick, but she worried that a move out of province would end their chances at adoption. After eight years on the list, they had reason to believe they were close to the top. The city of Saint John was their compromise. It was a larger version of the working-class Miramichi, full of the same kinds of people and class divisions, the same industrial conditions, the same port and mill smells. Three months after buying the first house they looked at in west Saint John, they got a call telling them that a twoweek-old baby boy was waiting for them. The second half of Richards’s writing life was about to begin. Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace, the middle book of his second trilogy, was completed just before the late-summer move to the port city. A

Conclusion: Nights Below and Stars Above 325

movie deal for Nights would soon be signed with the CBC, and Maclean’s magazine was days away from naming him one of twelve outstanding Canadians in 1989. That summer, the Miramichi Folksong Festival honoured him as a native son, Mayor Peter Murphy presenting him with the well-known song ‘Mystical Magical Miramichi.’ Literary agents also came calling; it would be Lucinda Vardey who signed him. The contacts he had once worked hard to solicit were now seeking him. But though there would be more exposure than before, he would press on, still ‘the obsequious servant of his demon’ (quoted in Brown 10). He told Doug Underhill that he was back on the nightshift, working from midnight to five in the morning. His role would continue to be that of the notable artist-conservers of the past. What Desmond Pacey said of Leacock might well be said of him: His literary role was similar to that of Chaucer, seeking to preserve amid the growing commercialism and corruption … the values of feudal solidarity … and the ancestral faith; similar also to that of Addison, attempting to persuade the new middle class to take on something of the culture and humanity of the landed gentry; similar to that of Dickens, calling amid a squalid industrialization for the colour and kindness of a slower age; similar, finally, to that of Twain, yearning amid the tinsel of the Gilded Age for the simple virtues of pioneer America. (‘Stephen Leacock as Satirist’)

His writing life would continue as it had, following a kind of intelligent design over which he believed he had little control. His vocation in that regard would follow the same laws that Ralphie had contemplated at the end of Nights: ‘An object falls, it has no idea where it will land, but at every moment of its descent it is exactly where it is supposed to be’ (220).

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography

A Catholic Catechism: Popular Edition. 1957. New York: Herder and Herder, 1959. Abley, Mark. ‘Younger Generation Comes Through in Governor General’s Awards.’ Montreal Gazette, 4 March 1989, H1. Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Adams, Richard. Personal interview. August 1999. Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. 1939. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Allen, Rod. ‘Leading N.B. Novelist Marvels at Changing Role.’ The Times-Transcript, 25 March 1983, 1–2. Aquin, Hubert. Prochain Épisode, trans. Next Episode, Sheila Fischman. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2001 [1965]. Arbuckle, Doreen Menzies. The North West Miramichi: A History of the Locality. Ottawa: Westboro, 1978. Armstrong, Christopher, and Herb Wyile. ‘Firing the Regional Can(n)on: Liberal Pluralism, Social Agency, and David Adams Richards’s Miramichi Trilogy.’ Studies in Canadian Literature 22, no. 1 (1997): 1–18. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tifflin. The Empire Writes Back. London: Routledge, 1989. Atherton, Stan. ‘A Richards Triptych.’ Special David Adams Richards Issue of Pottersfield Portfolio, ed. Tony Tremblay. 19, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 64–6. ‘Author Richards Described as “Most Underrated Writer in Canada.”’ Miramichi Leader, 7 September 1983, 1:5. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1953]. Bailey, Alfred G. Thanks for a Drowned Island. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973. 34. Baker, Peter. Personal interview. November 1999. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963 [1929].

328

Bibliography

‘Balancing the Books.’ Books in Canada 8, no. 1 (January 1979): 3–6. Barclay, Pat. ‘How Now, Dead Cow?’ Review of The Coming of Winter. Books in Canada 3, no. 8 (December 1974): 24. Bartlett, Brian. Personal interview. September 1999. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Bauer, Nancy. ‘The Long Distance Running of David Adams Richards.’ Arts Atlantic 2, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 30–1, 48. – ‘Remembering the Ice House Gang.’ Arts Atlantic 7, no. 2 (1986): 48–50. Belier, Patricia. ‘Passing Through … From Town Hall to Opera House.’ Officers’ Quarterly 11, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 10–12. Bemrose, John. ‘Backwoods Omnibus.’ Review of Lives of Short Duration. Maclean’s, 25 January 1982, 56–7. Bentley, Allen. Personal interview. October 2003. Bergeron, George. ‘Richards’ New Novel Etches Victims and Victimizers in a New Brunswick Setting.’ Review of Road to the Stilt House. The Telegraph-Journal, 17 August 1983, 14S. Black, Glenn. Personal interview. December 1999. Blackburn, William. Review of Road to the Stilt House. Canadian Book Review Annual 1985, ed. Dean Tudor and Ann Tudor. Toronto: Simon and Pierre, 1986. 155. bobdylan.com. ‘Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands.’ http://www.bobdylan.com/ songs/lowlands.html, accessed 31 August 2009. Brewster, Elizabeth. Personal interview. June 2005. Brown, Edward Killoran. On Canadian Poetry. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1973 [1943]. Buckler, Ernest. Letter to David Adams Richards. n.d. [Winter 1975?]. David Adams Richards fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG L33, series E, box 28, file 2. Used with permission of Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. Bush, Douglas. John Keats: His Life and Writings. New York: Collier, 1967. Butler, David. ‘Dancers at Night: Interesting Experiment for Novelist Richards.’ Review of Dancers at Night. Miramichi Press, 10 May 1978, 10. – Personal interview. December 1999. Cadogan, Elda. ‘The Coming of Winter Is Not about the Weather.’ Review of The Coming of Winter. North Shore Leader, 25 September 1974, 2:9. – ‘Raunchy Life of the Miramichi Pulses Vigorously in Blood Ties.’ Review of Blood Ties. North Shore Leader, 23 June 1976, 7. – ‘Richards’ River is Fictitious – Not the Miramichi.’ Miramichi Leader, 23 December 1981, 3:2. Cameron, Donald. ‘The Poet from Desolation Creek.’ Saturday Night (May 1973): 28–32.

Bibliography 329 Camus, Albert. ‘The Myth of Sisyphus.’ Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. W. Kaufmann. Cleveland: Meridian, 1956. 312–14. Carmichael, Don. ‘Fine Realism; Silly Escapism.’ Review of The Coming of Winter. Edmonton Journal, 16 November 1974, 80. Cela, Camilo José. The Family of Pascual Duarte, trans. Anthony Kerrigan. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964 [1942]. Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. The Victorian Age in Literature. London: Oxford University Press, 1966 [1913]. ‘Children’s Gift.’ North Shore Leader, 2 January 1959, 5. Chisholm, Sr Kathleen (Sister St David), CND. Personal interview. October 1999. Claus, Jo Anne. ‘David Adams Richards: The Man behind the Name.’ Atlantic Advocate (October 1975): 25–8. Cogswell, Fred. ‘Alden Nowlan As Regional Atavist.’ Encounters and Explorations: Canadian Writers and European Critics, ed. Franz K. Stanzel and Waldemar Zacharasiewicz. Germany: Königshausen and Newmann, 1986. 37–55. – ‘New Novel by David Adams Richards.’ Review of Road to the Stilt House. Atlantic Provinces Book Review 12, no. 3 (September–October 1985): 1. – ‘New Brunswick.’ A Long Apprenticeship: Collected Poems. Fredericton: Fiddlehead Poetry Books, 1980. 12. – ‘Orchestrated New Brunswick.’ Review of Blood Ties. Canadian Literature 76 (Spring 1978): 114–16. – Personal interview. September 1999. – ‘Until Time Erodes Bad Art, Maritime Writers Must Persevere.’ Globe and Mail, 14 January 1978, 6. Colson, Ted. ‘Memories of David Adams Richards.’ Special David Adams Richards Issue of Pottersfield Portfolio, ed. Tony Tremblay. 19, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 21–3. Connor, William. ‘Coming of Winter, Coming of Age: The Autumnal Vision of David Adams Richards’ First Novel.’ Studies in Canadian Literature 9, no. 1 (1984): 31–40. – ‘Small Heroics.’ Special David Adams Richards Issue of Pottersfield Portfolio, ed. Tony Tremblay. 19, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 30–2. Conway, Don. ‘Courage and Compassion: An Interview with David Adams Richards.’ Educational Services (Newsletter of the New Brunswick Department of Education) 6, no. 1 (September 1984): 4–6. Cook, Gregory M. One Heart, One Way. Alden Nowlan: A Writer’s Life. Lawrencetown Beach: Pottersfield, 2003. – Personal interviews. July, August 2004. Cooney, Robert. A Compendious History of the Northern Part of the Province of New

330

Bibliography

Brunswick and of the District of Gaspé in Lower Canada. Halifax: Joseph Howe, 1832. Costello, Ralph. ‘Alden Nowlan’s Love-in – They Called It a Funeral.’ The Telegraph-Journal, 2 July 1983, 8. Currie, Sheldon. ‘David Adams Richards: The People on the Roadway.’ Antigonish Review 99 (Autumn 1994): 67–75. – Review of Nights Below Station Street. Antigonish Review 73 (Spring 1988): 65–8. Curtis, Wayne. Currents in the Stream: Miramichi People and Places. Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1988. – Personal interviews. October 1999, July 2002, June 2003. Dante (Alighieri). Dantis Alagherii Epistolae: The Letters of Dante. Emended Text with introduction, translation, notes, and indices and appendix on the Cursus by Paget Toynbee. From Epistola X, the ‘Letter to Can Grande.’ 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966. 160–211. – The Inferno, trans. Mark Musa. The Continental Edition of World Masterpieces. 3rd ed., vol. 1., gen. ed. Maynard Mack. New York: Norton, 1974. 835–1012. Davey, Frank. ‘Discourse and Determinism in Nights Below Station Street.’ Open Letter 7th ser. 6 (Fall 1989): 17–26. ‘David Adams Richards’ First Novel to Be Translated into Russian.’ Miramichi Leader, 15 August 1979, 2:17. Day, Douglas. Malcolm Lowry: A Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. ‘Delightful Recital by Miss Elsie McLuhan.’ North Shore Leader, 28 March 1930, 4. Denys, Nicolas. The Description and Natural History of the Coasts of North America, trans. and ed. William F. Ganong. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1908. Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist, intro. Humphry House. London: Oxford University Press, 1956. Dinsmore, Charles Allen. Life of Dante Alighieri. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919. Donald, Gail. ‘Soaked to the Skin.’ Review of The Coming of Winter. Essays on Canadian Writing 3 (Fall 1975): 75–6. Donnell, David. ‘Interview [with Alden Nowlan].’ Books in Canada 11, no. 6 (June–July 1982): 26–8. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett. Kingswood: Windmill, 1951 [1912]. Doyle, James. ‘David Adams Richards (17 October 1950–).’ Dictionary of Literary Biography 53, ed. William Herbert New. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986. 326–7. – ‘Shock: Recognition.’ Review of Lives of Short Duration. Canadian Literature 94 (Autumn 1982): 130. Duffy, Dennis. ‘The Wretched in Smoldering Detachment – But a Step Away

Bibliography 331 from Being Dummies.’ Review of Dancers at Night. Globe and Mail, 8 April 1978, 38. Dyer, Klay. ‘Voices of the Miramichi.’ Review of For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down. Canadian Forum (December 1993): 37–9. Eggleston, Wilfrid. The Frontier and Canadian Letters. Carleton Library. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977 [1957]. Eisenstein, Sergei. The Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975 [1942]. Eliot. T.S. ‘Little Gidding.’ Collected Poems: 1909-1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1963. 214–23. Engel, Marian. ‘Scars and Blight Redeemed by Eloquence.’ Review of Blood Ties. Globe and Mail, 12 June 1976, 35. Ferrari, Leo. ‘Biographical Sketch.’ Leo C. Ferrari fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG H 168. – Personal interview. October 2003. Fetherling, Doug. ‘Ordinary People.’ Saturday Night (June 1986): 57–9. Fitzgibbon, Constantine. The Life of Dylan Thomas. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. Fowlie, Vern. ‘First Novel.’ Review of The Coming of Winter. Winnipeg Free Press, New Leisure Saturday Magazine, 5 April 1975, 20. Flemming, Pat. ‘N.B. Writer Feted at Reception.’ Daily Gleaner, 7 April 1989, 3. Fraser, James A. By Favourable Winds: A History of Chatham, New Brunswick. Chatham: Town of Chatham, 1975. – Gretna Green: A History of Douglastown, New Brunswick, Canada 1783–1900. Miramichi: Miramichi Press, 1969. Fraser, Raymond. Personal interview. October 1999. Fraser, Raymond, et al., eds. East of Canada: An Atlantic Anthology. Portugal Cove: Breakwater, 1976. French, William. ‘A Flowing New Brunswick River to Carry David Adams Richards into the Mainstream of Literature.’ Review of Lives of Short Duration. Globe and Mail, 23 January 1982, E15. – ‘A Novel Celebration of the Miramichi.’ Globe and Mail, 30 July 1983, E1. – ‘Desolation Row.’ Review of Road to the Stilt House. Globe and Mail, 13 July 1985, E13. – ‘Searing Fidelity about Grim Losers.’ Review of Nights Below Station Street. Globe and Mail, 14 May 1988, C17. Frye, Northrop. ‘Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada.’ Reprinted in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1971 [1965]. 213–51. – ‘Myth as the Matrix of Literature.’ Georgia Review 38, no. 3 (Fall 1984): 465–76.

332

Bibliography

– A Study of English Romanticism. New York: Random House, 1968. Fulford, Robert. ‘Leonard Cohen’s Nightmare Novel.’ Review of Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers. Toronto Star, 26 April 1966, 27. Furlong, Ken, and Maria Kubaki, directors. David Adams Richards: My Own Rivers. Sawyer Films, 1997. 28 minutes. Galloway, Graham. ‘David Adams Richards: Creating a Literature of the Miramichi.’ Moncton Times, 16 August 1980, 21. Ganong, William F. Origins of New Brunswick Settlements. Royal Society of Canada, 1904. Gardner, Helen. The Art of T.S. Eliot. 1950. New York: Dutton, 1959. Gardner, John. On Moral Fiction. New York: Basic, 1978. Gardner, John, and Lennis Dunlap. The Forms of Fiction. New York: Random House, 1962. Garrod, Andrew, ed. ‘David Adams Richards.’ Speaking for Myself: Canadian Writers in Interview. St John’s: Breakwater, 1986. 209–27. Geldard, Richard G., ed. The Essential Transcendentalists. New York: Jeremy B. Tarcher, 2005. Gibbs, Robert. Personal interviews. October 1999, July 2004. Gilson, Etienne. The Unity of Philosophical Experience. New York: Scribner’s, 1965. Girard, René. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987. Glover, Douglas. ‘Violent River: The Miramichi Novels of David Adams Richards.’ Books in Canada 17, no. 4 (May 1988): 9–12. Godfrey, William. The History of Chatham. Chatham: Chatham Commercial Press, 1962. Goldie, Terry. Review of Nights Below Station Street [1988]. Canadian Book Review Annual, ed. Dean Tudor. Toronto: Simon and Pierre, 1989. 177. Goldman, Marlene. Review of Road to the Stilt House. Malahat Review 76 (September 1986): 154. Grant, George. English-Speaking Justice. Toronto: Anansi, 1895. Hamilton, W.D. Miramichi Papers. Fredericton: Micmac-Maliseet Institute, 1987. Hampson, Norman. The Enlightenment: An Evaluation of Its Assumptions, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Penguin, 1968. Harcourt, Joan. Review of The Coming of Winter. Queen’s Quarterly 82, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 137–8. Harder, Steve. ‘Plenty to Write About in Miramichi, He Finds.’ Telegraph-Journal, 2 October 1976, 4. Harkness, John. ‘Nothin’ Doin’.’ Review of The Coming of Winter. The Charlatan (Carleton University), 25 October 1974, 23.

Bibliography 333 Hazel, Fred. ‘N.B.’s David Adams Richards Writes with Power.’ Review of Lives of Short Duration. Telegraph-Journal, 30 January 1982, 6. Henderson, P.J. ‘“Hot” Author Reads at Centre.’ Canmore Leader, 2 June 1988, C10. Heward, Burt. ‘Novelist Trudges Further Down Poverty Road.’ Review of Road to the Stilt House. Ottawa Citizen, 17 August 1985, C2. Hoddinott, Rev. Donald Frederick. From Whence We Came: Commemorating the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of St James and St John’s United Church, Newcastle, N.B., 1829–1979. Newcastle: Walco Print and Litho, 1979. hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End, 1981. Hunt, Russell. ‘A Life of Noisy Desperation.’ Review of The Coming of Winter. Canadian Forum 54, no. 646 (November–December 1974): 23. Hutcheon, Linda. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary EnglishCanadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988. Ignatieff, Michael. The Needs of Strangers: An Essay on Privacy, Solidarity, and the Politics of Being Human. 1984. New York: Penguin, 1988. Ives, Edward D. ‘Larry Gorman and the Cante Fable.’ New England Quarterly 32, no. 2 (June 1959): 226–37. James, William C. ‘Roads That Go Nowhere.’ Review of Road to the Stilt House. Whig-Standard Magazine [Kingston], 17 August 1985, 20. Keefer, Janice Kulyk. ‘Slab of Life Among Deprived.’ Review of Nights Below Station Street. Ottawa Citizen, 21 May 1988, C3. – Under Eastern Eyes: A Critical Reading of Maritime Fiction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Kennedy, Richard. ‘Introductory Notes to a Reading by Dave Richards.’ 5 February 1987. – Personal interview. October 2003. Kenny, Giles. Personal interview. November 1999. King, James. The Life of Margaret Laurence. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1997. Kirchhoff, H. Jack. ‘New Brunswick Writer Wins National Race for Top Literary Prize.’ Globe and Mail, 4 March 1989, C3. Knowles, Richard Paul. ‘The Road to David Adams Richards.’ Brick: A Journal of Reviews 32 (Winter 1988): 36–9. Lane, Patrick. ‘The Despair of the Maritimes.’ Review of Lives of Short Duration. Edmonton Journal, 6 February 1982, C10. – Letter to David Adams Richards. 26 December 1985. David Adams Richards fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG L33, series B, box 2, file 38. Used with permission of Patrick Lane.

334

Bibliography

Larson, Richard F. Letter to David Adams Richards. 3 June 1983. David Adams Richards fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG L33, series A, box 1, file 1. Laurence, Margaret. The Diviners. 1974. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988. – Heart of a Stranger. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. Lawrence, D.H. ‘Snake.’ Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, ed. Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair. New York: Norton, 1973. 317–19. LeClercq, Chrestien. New Relations of Gaspesia, with the Customs and Religion of the Gaspesian Indians, trans. and ed. by William F. Ganong. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1910 [1691]. Levine, George. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. ‘Local Author’s Novel in Third Printing.’ Miramichi Weekend, 15 December 1976, 8. Lonergan, Bernard. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. 1958. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978. Lukacs, Georg. Studies in European Realism, trans. Edith Bone. London: Merlin, 1972. MacDonald, Michael J. ‘Maritime Literature, David Adams Richards, and the Limitations of Regionalism.’ Educational Services, Bicentennial Edition (Newsletter of the New Brunswick Department of Education) (Autumn 1984): 28–9. MacAllister, Edith. Newcastle on the Miramichi: A Brief History. Newcastle: Newcastle Printing, 1974. Macklem, Michael. Several Letters to David Adams Richards. David Adams Richards fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG L33, series B, box 3, file 12. Used with permission of Queen’s University Archives, copyright holders of Oberon fonds. Macklem, Nicholas. Personal interview. 24 June 2004. MacKinnon, William R., Jr. Over the Portage: Early History of the Upper Miramichi, rev. ed. Fredericton: New Ireland, 2000 [1984]. MacLean, Rick. ‘Miramichi Should Honour Richards for His Work.’ Miramichi Leader, 8 March 1989, 4. MacLennan, Hugh. Each Man’s Son. 1951. Toronto: Macmillan, 1971. MacLeod, Alistair. No Great Mischief. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999. Macmillan, Carrie. ‘Maritime Letters.’ Review of Road to the Stilt House. Canadian Literature 112 (Spring 1987): 189–92. – ‘Works of Long Duration.’ Review of Nights Below Station Street. Canadian Literature 131 (Winter 1991): 207–8. MacNutt, W. Stewart. The Atlantic Provinces: The Emergence of Colonial Society. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965.

Bibliography 335 MacSween, R.J. Personal interview. August 1989. Mannion, John J. Irish Settlements in Eastern Canada: A Study of Cultural Transfer and Adaptation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974. Manny, Louise, and James Reginald Wilson. Songs of Miramichi. Fredericton: Brunswick, 1968. Marcel, Gabriel. Being and Having. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965. Marston, Benjamin. Diary of Benjamin Marston. 24 July 1785. In Winslow Papers, MG H2, vols. 20, 21, 22; 1776–1787. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. 14–16 November 2006. http:// www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/marston Martin, Lois. Historical Sketches of the Miramichi. Chatham and Newcastle: Bicentennial Committees of Chatham and Newcastle, 1985. Mathews, Lawrence. ‘David Adams Richards (1950–).’ Canadian Writers and Their Works. Fiction ser., vol. 12, ed. Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Toronto: ECW, 1995. 185–254. McDonald, Larry. Review of Road to the Stilt House. Dalhousie Review 66, no. 3 (Fall 1986): 373–75. McEachern, Neil. Personal interview. November 1999. McKay, Don. ‘Some Remarks on Poetry and Poetic Attention.’ 20th-Century Poetry and Poetics, 5th edition, ed. Gary Geddes. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2006. 1018–19. McKay, Ian. ‘Notes from Underground.’ Review of Road to the Stilt House. New Maritimes 4, no. 8 (1986): 13. – The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994. McLuhan, Marshall. ‘Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press.’ The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan, 1943–62, ed. Eugene McNamara. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969. 5–21. Metcalf, John. Kicking Against the Pricks. 1982. Guelph: Red Kite, 1986. – ‘Tough Life in New Brunswick.’ Review of The Coming of Winter. Montreal Gazette, 21 December 1974, 41. Michaels, Oleg. ‘Contrasting Climes.’ Review of The Coming of Winter. Montreal Star, 18 January 1975, D4. Miller, Henry. The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud. New York: New Directions, 1962 [1946]. Mills, John. ‘Recent Fiction’ [Review of Blood Ties]. Queen’s Quarterly 84, no. 1 (1977): 99–105. Milner, Phil. ‘Yoknapatawpha, N.B.’ Books in Canada (October 1980): 4–6. ‘Miramichi Novelist Wins $1,000 in National Contest.’ North Shore Leader, 28 November 1973, 3.

336

Bibliography

‘Miramichi Writer Wins G-G Literary Award.’ The Times-Transcript, 4 March 1989, 2. Mizruchi, Ephriam. Success and Opportunity: A Study of Anomie. London: CollierMacmillan, 1964. Montague, Susan. ‘Ten Years After: Richards Returns to University.’ UNB Perspectives (October 1983): 3. Montgomery, Lucy Maud. Anne of Green Gables. Toronto: Ryerson, 1965 [1908]. Moore, Lisa. ‘All Over the Canvas: An Interview with Lisa Moore,’ by Herb Wyile. Antigonish Review 152 (Winter 2008): 107–23. Morley, Patricia. ‘A Passionate Image of Life Along the Miramichi.’ Review of Lives of Short Duration. Ottawa Citizen, 16 January 1982, 39. – ‘Fine New Voice from the Maritimes.’ Review of The Coming of Winter. Ottawa Journal, 22 March 1975, 40. Morris, Chris. ‘Soviet Interpretation Misses the Point, Says Richards.’ The TimesTranscript, 4 June 1988, 14. Morris, Peter. Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema 1895–1939. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978. Moss, John. A Reader’s Guide to the Canadian Novel. 1981. 2nd ed. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987. ‘New Brunswick Is Proud.’ The Daily Gleaner, 7 March 1989, 4. Newman, Robert ‘Trapper.’ Personal interview. November 1999. Nowlan, Alden. ‘The Bauers of Fredericton Help Writers to Write.’ Atlantic Insight 3, no. 9 (November 1981): 82. – Between Tears and Laughter. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1971. – Campobello: The Outer Island. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1975. – ‘Dave Richards’s First Novel May Reach 250,000 Russians.’ Atlantic Insight 2, no. 3 (April 1980): 43. – ‘Dustin Hoffman and Adolf Hitler.’ Double Exposure. Fredericton: Brunswick, 1978. 45–8. – ‘Growing up in Katpesa Creek.’ Double Exposure. Fredericton: Brunswick, 1978. 15–24. – ‘He Sees a Lot by Night.’ The Telegraph-Journal, 24 June 1978, 7. – Letter to David Adams Richards. 11 September 1980. David Adams Richards fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG L33, series B, box 3, file 10. Used with permission of Robert Gibbs, executor. – Letter to Raymond Fraser. 30 September 1976. Alden Nowlan fonds. University of Calgary Library Special Collections. #40.12.24.108. Used with permission of Robert Gibbs, executor. – ‘Letters Patent’ 1973. David Adams Richards fonds, Archives and Special Col-

Bibliography 337 lections, University of New Brunswick Libraries. MG L33, series E, box 28, file 2. Used with permission of Robert Gibbs, executor. – Various Persons Named Kevin O’Brien. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1973. – ‘Ypres: 1915.’ Alden Nowlan: Selected Poems, ed. Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier. Toronto: Anansi, 1996. 63–5. Nowlan, Michael O. ‘A Promising First.’ Review of The Coming of Winter. Atlantic Provinces Book Review (June 1975): 1. – ‘Atlantic Bookcase.’ Review of Road to the Stilt House. Atlantic Advocate 76, no. 3 (November 1985): 58. – Review of Dancers at Night. Atlantic Advocate 68, no. 11 (July 1978): 92. – Personal interview. 23 July 2004. Pacey, Desmond. ‘Cogswell Notes.’ Desmond Pacey fonds. Library and Archives Canada. MG30 D339, container 2, file 9. – ‘Stephen Leacock as Satirist.’ Desmond Pacey fonds. Library and Archives Canada. MG30 D339, container 28, file 5. Pennee, Donna. ‘Still More Social Realism: Richards’s Miramichi.’ Review of Nights Below Station Street. Essays on Canadian Writing 41 (Summer 1990): 41–5. ‘Poetic Apathy: Aquinian’s Answer.’ Aquinian 1, no. 46 (November 1971): 10, 14. Posesorski, Sherie. Review of Road to the Stilt House. Quill and Quire 51, no. 9 (September 1985): 80. Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1987 [1934]. – ‘Affirmations.’ Selected Prose: 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973. 374–77. – Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1970 [1916]. – Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970 [1938]. – ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris.’ Selected Prose: 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973. 21–43. – Selected Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907–41, ed. D.D. Paige. New York: New Directions, 1971 [1950]. Randolph, Mike. ‘Lines on the Water.’ Elm Street (September 2000): 98–104. Rapoport, Janis. ‘Deeply in Luxuriant Gloom.’ Review of The Coming of Winter. Globe and Mail, 5 October 1974, 34. ‘Registrar’s File (David Adams Richards).’ St Thomas University. Used with permission of David Adams Richards and Lawrence Batt, Registrar, St Thomas University. October 2003. Richards, David Adams. ‘A Rural Place.’ Dancers at Night. Ottawa: Oberon, 1978. 5–28. – ‘An Afternoon of the Mercury Month.’ One Step Inside. Chatham: self-published, 1970. 19–30. Used with permission of David Adams Richards.

338

Bibliography

– ‘An Old Woman.’ Small Heroics. Fredericton: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1972. 3. – ‘The Architectural Dead.’ One Step Inside. Chatham: self-published, 1970. 32. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. – ‘Barren Man.’ Small Heroics. Fredericton: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1972. 4. – Blood Ties. Ottawa: Oberon, 1976. – ‘Charlie.’ Floorboards 3 (February 1970): 13–14. – ‘Children.’ A Lad from Brantford and Other Essays. Fredericton: Broken Jaw, 1994. 16–21. – ‘The Child and the Boy.’ Atlantic Advocate 62, no. 4 (December 1971): 23, 46. – ‘The Collector.’ Small Heroics. Fredericton: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1972. 23–30. – The Coming of Winter. Ottawa: Oberon, 1974. – ‘Dancers at Night.’ Dancers at Night. Ottawa: Oberon, 1978. 132–49. – ‘Drinking.’ Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast, ed. Lorna Crazier and Patrick Lane. Vancouver: Greystone, 2001. 107–21. – ‘Dungarvon.’ Small Heroics. Fredericton: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1972. 8–17. – ‘The Dungarvan Whooper.’ Unpublished stage play. David Adams Richards fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG L33, series D, box 22, file 3. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. – ‘The Fire.’ The Fiddlehead 95 (Fall 1972): 92–109. Reprinted in Stories from Atlantic Canada, ed. Kent Thompson. Toronto: Macmillan, 1973. 134–55. – For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993. – The Friends of Meager Fortune. Toronto: Doubleday, 2006. – God Is: My Search for Faith in a Secular World. Toronto: Doubleday, 2009. – Hockey Dreams: Memories of a Man Who Couldn’t Play. Toronto: Doubleday, 1996. – ‘Husband and Wife Gratten (1927).’ Prism International 17, no. 2 (Fall 1978): 108–17. – I Have Seen My River. Unpublished poetry manuscript. September 1997. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. – ‘I Went to Meet Alden Nowlan.’ Globe and Mail, 21 June 2003, R1, R5. – ‘In This Age of Chess.’ Journal of Canadian Fiction 2, no. 1 (Winter 1973): 24–8. – ‘Just Singing Along.’ A Lad from Brantford and Other Essays. Fredericton: Broken Jaw, 1994. 29–31. – The Keeping of Gusties. Unpublished novel. David Adams Richards fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries,

Bibliography 339

– –

– –

–

–

–

–

–

– – – – – –

Fredericton. MG L33, series D, box 26, file 11. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. ‘Kopochus 1825.’ Dancers at Night. Ottawa: Oberon, 1978. 52–78. ‘La Roche.’ The Fiddlehead 132 (April 1982): 47–50. Reprinted as ‘Dane’ in Easterly: 60 Atlantic Writers, ed. Blaine E. Hatt. Toronto: Academic Press Canada, 1983. 141–5. ‘The Launch of Blood Ties (1976).’ The New Brunswick Reader (Supplement to The Telegraph-Journal), 10 July 1999, 8. Letter to Ed Carson. 5 August 1983. David Adams Richards fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG L33, series B, box 5, file 1. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. Letter to the Editor. 29 November 1985. Unpublished. David Adams Richards fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG L33, series B, box 5, file 1. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. Letter to Ernest Buckler. 2 December 1974. Ernest Buckler Papers. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. University of Toronto. MS Coll. 99, box 9. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. Letters to Michael Macklem. Oberon Press fonds. Queen’s University Archives. Locator #2094, box 2, file 10; Locator #2267, box 2, file 5; Locator #2322b, boxes 2 and 3, files 62 and 9; Locator #2322c, box 2, file 67; Locator #2322e, box 4, file 11. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. Letters to Raymond Fraser. Raymond Fraser fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG L28, series 1, subseries 1, box 2. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. ‘The Life of François Villon.’ Unpublished stage play. David Adams Richards fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG L33, series D, box 22, file 17. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. ‘The Lilliputian Looks Up.’ Unpublished poem. I Have Seen My River. 1997. 55. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. Lines on the Water: A Fisherman’s Life on the Miramichi. Toronto: Doubleday, 1998. Lives of Short Duration. Ottawa: Oberon, 1981. ‘Lockhartville and Kevin O’Brien.’ 1987. A Lad from Brantford and Other Essays. Fredericton: Broken Jaw, 1994. 36–42. Mercy among the Children. Toronto: Doubleday, 2000. ‘My Miramichi Trilogy.’ Published Proceedings (1998) of the 6th International Literature of Region and Nation Conference. UNBSJ. 2–7 August 1996. II:73–84.

340

Bibliography

– ‘My Old Newcastle.’ A Lad from Brantford and Other Essays. Fredericton: Broken Jaw, 1994. 13–15. – Nights below Station Street. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988. – ‘Northern New Brunswick – a Personal Reflection.’ UNB Perspectives (December 1983): 4. – ‘November 1977.’ Unpublished poem. I Have Seen My River. 1997. 34. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. – ‘Old Man’s Town.’ David Adams Richards fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG L33, series D, box 26, file 11. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. – ‘On the Death of a Woman.’ One Step Inside. Chatham: self-published, 1970. 31. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. – One Step Inside. Chatham: self-published, 1970. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. – ‘Our Magazines.’ A Lad from Brantford and Other Essays. Fredericton: Broken Jaw, 1994. 32–5. – Playing the Inside Out. The Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye Lecture, 2007. Fredericton: Goose Lane/Université de Moncton, 2008. – ‘The Promise.’ Antigonish Review 9 (Spring 1972): 47–51. – ‘Ramsey Taylor.’ Dancers at Night. Ottawa: Oberon, 1978. 29–51. – ‘Remembering My Evaluators While Packing to Leave Home.’ Special David Adams Richards Issue of Pottersfield Portfolio, ed. Tony Tremblay. 19, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 11–16. – River of the Brokenhearted. Toronto: Doubleday, 2003. – Road to the Stilt House. Ottawa: Oberon, 1985. – ‘Safe in the Arms.’ Dancers at Night. Ottawa: Oberon, 1978. 91–131. First printed in The Fiddlehead 113 (Spring 1977): 81–121. – ‘The School Yard.’ Unpublished poem. I Have Seen My River. 1997. 16. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. – ‘Self Knowledge.’ Unpublished poem. I Have Seen My River. 1997. 9. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. – Small Heroics. Fredericton: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1972. – ‘Small Heroics.’ Small Heroics. Fredericton: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1972. 6 – ‘Small Town.’ New Brunswick – 6 Views. Touring Exhibition. Fredericton: National Exhibition Centre, 1984. – ‘Smoking.’ A Lad from Brantford and Other Essays. Fredericton: Broken Jaw, 1994. 22–8. – ‘The Snake.’ One Step Inside. Chatham: self-published, 1970. 18. Used with permission of David Adams Richards.

Bibliography 341 – ‘“The Snake” Analysis.’ David Adams Richards fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG L33, series D, box 26, file 11. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. – ‘Stag Films, Teen Movies.’ A Lad from Brantford and Other Essays. Fredericton: Broken Jaw, 1994. 47–51. – ‘Then With Dagger.’ Small Heroics. Fredericton: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1972. 5. – ‘To The Ants.’ One Step Inside. Chatham: self-published, 1970. 9. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. – ‘Traditional.’ Small Heroics. Fredericton: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1972. 7. – ‘Travel.’ A Lad from Brantford and Other Essays. Fredericton: Broken Jaw, 1994. 102–6. – ‘The Turtle, the Handbook, the Dark Night Air.’ Nashwaak Review 3 (Winter 1996): 67–75. – ‘Visit to Vancouver.’ New Brunswick Reader (Supplement to The Telegraph-Journal), 3 December 1994, 11–13. – ‘The Way Out Is a Trap.’ UNB Perspectives (January 1985): 4. – ‘Water Carriers, Bones and Earls: The Life of François Villon.’ Unpublished stage play. David Adams Richards fonds. Archives and Special Collections, University of New Brunswick Libraries, Fredericton. MG L33, series D, box 22, file 17. Used with permission of David Adams Richards. – ‘We, Who Have Never Suffered.’ Dancers at Night. Ottawa: Oberon, 1978. 79–90. – ‘Wisdom, Charisma, and Compassion.’ Review of An Exchange of Gifts: Poems [by Alden Nowlan] New and Selected. The Telegraph-Journal, 27 July 1985, 32. – ‘Working Sevogle.’ Small Heroics. Fredericton: New Brunswick Chapbooks, 1972. 18–22. – Personal interviews. December 1996, January 1997, March 1997, April 1997, July 1999, August 2001, June 2002, August 2002, July 2003. Richards, Harry. Personal interviews. October 1999, August 2002. Richards, John. Personal interview. October 1999. Richardson, William. Personal interview. October 2007. Rigelhof, Terry F. ‘Mysticism on the Miramichi.’ Review of Nights Below Station Street. Atlantic Provinces Book Review 15, no. 3 (September–October 1988): 1. Robb, Nancy. ‘David Adams Richards: Universal Truths from Miramichi Roots.’ Quill and Quire (April 1988): 24–5. Roberts, Charles G.D. ‘Bliss Carman.’ Dalhousie Review 9 (March 1930): 409–17. ‘Royal Theatre to Open Soon.’ North Shore Leader, 9 November 1928, 1. Russell, Judith. ‘A Painful, Powerful Book.’ Review of Lives of Short Duration. Whig-Standard Magazine, 27 March 1982, 20.

342

Bibliography

Russo, Leonard. ‘Country Life in Maritimes.’ Review of The Coming of Winter. Victoria Times, 15 March 1975, 8. Savage, David. Personal interview. December 1999. Scherf, Kathleen. ‘David Adams Richards: “He Must Be a Social Realist Regionalist”’ [Interview]. Studies in Canadian Literature 15, no. 1 (1990): 154–70. Seaman, Andrew T. ‘All the Confusion of Their Lives.’ Review of Lives of Short Duration. Atlantic Provinces Book Review 9, no. 1 (March 1982): 4. – ‘Fiction in Atlantic Canada.’ Canadian Literature 68–9 (Spring–Summer 1976): 26–39. Shanahan, Doug. Personal interview. October 1999. Sherman, Joseph. Personal interviews. September 1999, July 2004. Silk, Ilkay. ‘Tuesday. Wednesday. Phillip.’ Special David Adams Richards Issue of Pottersfield Portfolio, ed. Tony Tremblay. 19, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 48–9. 16th Annual Report of The Canada Council, 1972–73. Ottawa: Canada Council, June 1973. Spettigue, Douglas. The Coming of Winter in Oberon Press’s 1974–75 Catalogue. Quoted in ‘First Novel Draws Favorable Response from Reviewer.’ Miramichi Press, 4 September 1974, 3. Sterrer-Hauzenberger, Ingeborg. ‘“Oigoa Sepoitit – You Are Beautiful”: Narrative Technique and Major Themes in Two Novels by David Adams Richards, Lives of Short Duration and Road to the Stilt House.’ MA thesis, Universität Wien, 1989. Stevens, Peter. ‘Two Gloomy Weeks Inside N.B.’ Review of The Coming of Winter. Windsor Star, 26 October 1974, 44. Stewart, Jim. Personal interview. June 2000. Sturgeon, Linda-Ann. ‘David Adams Richards: Loving Against the Odds.’ MA thesis, University of New Brunswick, 1987. Taylor, Michael. Review of Blood Ties. The Fiddlehead 111 (Fall 1976): 127–9. – Review of Lives of Short Duration. The Fiddlehead 135 (January 1983): 107–9. Thompson, Kent. Personal interview. June 2004. Thurston, Harry. ‘Canada Catches Up with David Richards – at Last.’ Atlantic Insight 4 (May 1982): 50–51. – ‘The Road Taken.’ Review of Road to the Stilt House. Books in Canada 14 (November 1985): 12, 14. Toner, Patrick. If I Could Turn and Meet Myself: The Life of Alden Nowlan. Fredericton: Goose Lane, 2000. Trethewey, Eric. ‘The Beginnings of a Literary Friendship.’ Special David Adams Richards Issue of Pottersfield Portfolio, ed. Tony Tremblay. 19, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 70–2. Tremblay, Tony, ed. David Adams Richards: Essays on His Works. Toronto: Guernica, 2005.

Bibliography 343 – ed. David Adams Richards. Special Issue. Pottersfield Portfolio 19, no. 1 (Fall 1998). – ‘An Interview with David Adams Richards.’ David Adams Richards: Essays on His Works. Toronto: Guernica, 2005. 26-44. Trilling, Lionel. ‘The Function of the Little Magazine.’ The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1940. 89–99. Trofimova, Elvira. ‘Ontario Author’s Book Popular with Soviet Readers.’ Soviet News and Views 22 (November 1985): 16. Tunney, Mark. ‘Hometown Gets Colder with Each New Book.’ The TelegraphJournal, 15 December 1982, 5. – ‘Richards’ Reception Overflows with Pride.’ The Telegraph-Journal, 10 April 1989, 19. Turbide, Diane. ‘A World in One Town.’ Maclean’s, 13 March 1989, 59. Tytell, John. Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano. New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1987. Underhill, Doug. ‘Richards Finished His Next Novel.’ Miramichi Leader, 15 November 1989, A9. – Personal interview. December 1999. – ‘Underhill notes [April 1971].’ December 1999. Used with permission of Doug Underhill. Urchin 1, no. 2 (Spring 1972). Vaughan, Richard M. ‘An Instinct for Life: David Adams Richards Discovered His Own Voice By Making His Own Mistakes.’ Books in Canada 22, no. 6 (September 1993): 15. Wachtel, Eleanor. ‘Prize and Prejudice.’ Books in Canada (March 1982): 9–13. Wallace, Bruce. Personal interview. November 1999. ‘Warning.’ North Shore Leader, 27 September 1929, 8. Watling, Doug. ‘To the Soul of N.B.’s North Shore.’ Review of Dancers at Night. Reprinted from ‘Books Now.’ North Shore Leader, 6 September 2005, B3. Werner, Hans. Review of Nights Below Station Street. Sunday Star (Toronto), 14 August 1988, A18. Wernick, Kathleen. ‘Excitement Down East.’ Review of Nights Below Station Street. Hamilton Spectator, 14 May 1988, E2. Whelan, Michael. The Great Miramichi Fire – 1825, The Polar Heroes, and Fourteen Other Poems. Chatham: Gazette Office, 1922. – Poems and Songs. Newcastle: W.C. Anslow, 1895. Wilbur, Richard. The Rise of French New Brunswick. Halifax: Formac, 1989. Williams, Guylaine. ‘David Adams Richards: Novelist Extraordinaire.’ The Brunswickan, 1 December 1989, 7. Williams, Tennessee. ‘Tennessee Williams, 1911–83.’ Harper American Literature,

344

Bibliography

vol. 2, 2nd ed., ed. Donald McQuade et al. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. 1538–87. Wishart, John. ‘MHS Studies Novel of the Miramichi … and Meets the Author.’ Times and Transcript, 31 December 1977, 2. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Notebooks: 1914–16. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Woodcock, George. ‘Fires in Winter.’ Review of Lives of Short Duration. Books in Canada (March 1982): 13–14. – The Meeting of Time and Space: Regionalism in Canadian Literature. Edmonton: NeWest Institute for Western Canadian Studies, 1981. – ‘Too Often to the Well.’ Review of Nights Below Station Street. Event 18, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 129–31. Wright, Ester Clark. The Miramichi: A Study of the New Brunswick River and the People Who Settled Along It. Sackville: Tribune, 1944. Wyile, Herb. ‘Laughs in the Desperate Hour.’ David Adams Richards: Essays on His Works, ed. Tony Tremblay. Toronto: Guernica, 2005. 106–15. Yeats, William Butler. ‘The Second Coming’ (1924). Later Poems. London: Macmillan, 1989. 346–47.

Illustration Credits

Archives and Special Collections, Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick: Peggy and David Richards in 1978; David Adams Richards receiving Alden Nowlan Award David Adams Richards: Richard Adams; David Adams Richards as a young writer Mary Jane Richards: Mina Pratt; Mary Jane ‘Janie’ Richards; William Richards; Margaret Jane Adams and Bill Richards; David Adams Richards’s brothers and sisters 1967; David Adams Richards at 4½

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Acadians, 5–6, 60, 105, 207, 287 Acorn, Milton, 215, 252 Adams, George Hudson, 19, 21 Adams, Margaret Jane (David Richards’s mother), 23, 34–5, 40, 43, 44, 57, 72–3, 92, 208–9, 257, 260, 271 Adams, Richard, 20, 21–2, 257 Agee, James, and Walker Evans, 265, 269–70, 279 Aitken, Max (Lord Beaverbrook), 8, 12, 15, 16, 72, 164, 324 alcohol/alcoholism, 44, 73, 76, 84, 112, 146, 156–7, 160, 161, 164, 165, 189, 192–3, 195, 196–8, 199, 201–4, 207, 210–11, 213–16, 224, 238, 245, 250–5, 288–9, 305, 308–9 Anderson, Benedict, 249 Aquin, Hubert, 62 Armstrong, Chris, xi, 319 Atherton, Stan, 155 Atwood, Margaret, 179, 240, 302, 320 Bailey, A.G., 1, 72, 128, 260, 324 Baker, Peter, 76, 77, 82, 102–3, 123, 214

Balzac, Honoré de, 77, 224 Bartlett, Brian, 128, 129, 131–2, 141, 144, 158, 178 Batt, Larry, 155 Baudelaire, Charles, 224 Bauer, Bill, 128, 131, 158, 191, 262, 263, 304 Bauer, Nancy, 128, 130, 148, 158, 201–2, 217, 218, 239, 260, 305 Bemrose, John, 248 Bentley, Allen, 109–13, 155, 169, 181–2 Bergeron, George, 274, 296 Black, Glenn, 76, 77, 214 Black Horse Tavern, 120, 203, 213–15, 293, 305 Boishébert, Charles, 5–6 Boxill, Anthony, 207 boxing, 120, 264, 323 Brennan, Anthony, 155, 307 Brewster, Elizabeth, 128, 158 Brown, E.K., 295 Bruce, Charles, 159, 162, 249, 324 Buckler, Ernest, 152, 154, 155, 159, 162, 177–80, 200, 208, 219, 324 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 241 Butler, David, 140, 204

348

Index

Cadogan, Elda, 164, 165, 200–1, 239 Callaghan, Morley, 132, 162, 178, 240 Campobello Island, 150–1 Camus, Albert, 267–9, 278, 314 Canadian International Paper Company (CIP), 19, 22, 23 Carson, Ed, 261, 262 catholicism, x, xii, 8–10, 16–17, 24, 27, 30, 33, 35–6, 52–61, 79, 86, 98, 104–5, 107–9, 110–11, 118, 123, 133, 135–6, 145, 175–6, 187, 224, 235–6, 237, 245, 246, 253, 256, 257, 267, 279–80, 285, 288–90, 293, 306–7, 314–16, 317. See also Congregation of Notre Dame; St Mary’s Convent Cela, Camilo José, 268–9 characters, 70–1, 88–9, 93–4, 99, 109, 126, 136, 157, 160, 162, 165–6, 170–2, 175, 182–3, 184–6, 188–9, 195, 215, 217–18, 219, 301, 316–17, 318 Chatham, 5, 6, 7, 9–11, 16, 33, 39, 60, 76, 78, 105, 223. See also Newcastle Chesterton, G.K., 290 children/childhood, 45, 48–9, 67–9, 71, 87 class, x, 10, 22, 24, 28, 30, 37, 45, 48–9, 64, 67, 70, 75, 80, 94, 95–6, 104–5, 108, 114, 115, 131, 132, 133, 146, 162, 171, 187–8, 191, 198, 206, 207–8, 210, 213, 214, 220–1, 246, 260, 269–70, 283, 293–4, 295, 296–7, 310–11, 315–16, 319, 324 Claus, Jo Anne, 162, 180 Cogswell, Fred, ix, 72, 128, 132, 133–4, 139, 150, 159, 201, 205, 206, 211, 217, 239, 243, 244, 282, 283–4, 296, 297, 305, 320, 322, 323

Cohen, Leonard, 98, 116, 161 Colson, Ted, 207, 247, 256 Congregation of Notre Dame (CND), 16, 52–8. See also catholic Connor, William, 135, 160, 167, 175 Conrad, Joseph, 23–4, 72 Conway, Don, 127, 140 Cook, Greg, 179 Cormier, Louis, 141 Cort, John, 6, 8 Costello, Ralph, 261 Crane, Stephen, 73, 240 Cunard, Joseph and Henry, 7, 11, 12, 26 curling, 76, 95–6, 239 Currie, Sheldon, 172, 318 Curtis, Wayne, 4, 13–14 Dalhousie, New Brunswick, 23, 34, 100 Dante, 271–2, 279, 282, 289, 298 Davey, Frank, 108, 224, 311 Davidson, William, 6, 8, 9, 60 Denys de Fronsac, Nicholas and Richard, 5, 16 Dickens, Charles, 66–71, 75, 84, 85, 87, 91, 99, 101, 107, 132, 140, 165, 183, 192, 228–9, 245, 270, 325 Doiron, Don, 87 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, xi, 87, 109–12, 165, 181, 183, 223, 228–9, 241, 267–8, 278, 282, 307, 314 Doyle, James, 282, 294 drinking. See alcohol Dudek, Louis, 132, 139 Duffy, Dennis, 207, 208 Durelle, Yvon, 120, 244, 264. See also boxing Dyer, Klay, 282 Dylan, Bob, 88, 98–9, 116, 183

Index 349

Eisenstein, Sergei, 169–70 Eliot, T.S., 117, 146, 237, 250 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 187 Empress Theatre (Newcastle), 27–8. See also motion picture industry Engel, Marian, 199–200, 211 Equal Opportunity Reform, 78–9, 104 Escuminac Disaster, 94, 265, 285 Faulkner, William, 114, 132, 157, 181–3, 186, 190, 206, 208, 215, 223, 238, 250, 261, 270, 278, 297, 306 Ferrari, Leo, 106–7, 111, 131, 143 Fetherling, Douglas, 182, 299 film industry. See motion picture industry fishing. See salmon fishing Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 157, 247 Floorboards, 114, 131–2. See also St Thomas University Fraser, James A., 6, 10, 11 Fraser, Raymond, 157, 162, 192–3, 197, 199, 204, 208, 252, 323 Fredericton, New Brunswick, 104–5, 127, 137–8, 209, 262–3, 299–300, 302–3, 323, 324 French, William, 140, 170, 248, 261, 294–6, 318 Frye, Northrop, xi, 109, 249–50, 287 Gardner, John, 144, 165–6 Gibbs, Bob, 128, 129, 131, 145, 159, 217, 262–3, 292, 305, 323 Gilmour, Rankin & Co., 11 Girard, René, 314–16 Glover, Douglas, 42–3, 70, 189, 194, 316, 317 Glover, Fred, 77, 82, 121–2, 205–6

Goldie, Terry, 311, 318–19 Governor General’s Award, 244, 248, 298, 302, 318, 320–1 Grant, George, 287, 290 Haig-Brown, Roderick, 249, 256 Hamilton, W.D., 6, 14 Harcourt, Joan, 162 Hardy, Thomas, 175, 181, 234, 250 Harkins, John, 16 Harkins Academy, 16, 52, 58, 62, 63–5, 78–81, 82–5, 87, 95 Hatfield, Richard, 150 Hazel, Fred, 248 Helwig, David, 148, 152, 162, 239, 240, 243, 244 Hemingway, Ernest, 178, 205, 255, 258 Heward, Burt, 295, 296 Hickey, Rev. R.M., 72 hockey, 47, 58, 76, 95–6, 105, 197, 218, 241 Hoddinott, D.F., 16 Hodgins, Jack, 132, 197, 201, 249 Hunt, Russell, 160–1, 162, 305 hunting, 256–7, 285–6. See also salmon fishing Ice House Gang (McCord Hall), 116, 127–31, 133, 136, 138–9, 141–3, 145, 147, 148, 158, 170, 177, 189, 191, 198, 202, 262 Irish, 8–10, 24, 27, 37, 105, 151, 197, 207, 217, 223, 235. See also Scots James, William C., 295, 296 Jameson, Fredric, 230, 232 Johnson, Pauline, 15 Johnston, Wayne, 263, 302 Jong, Erica, 179

350

Index

Joyce, James, 85, 95, 114, 173, 223, 228–9, 270 Keats, John, 116, 186, 264 Keefer, Janice Kulyk, 170, 217, 237, 250, 305, 319, 320 Kennedy, Richard, 114, 155 Kenny, Giles, 76, 82, 121, 123, 214 Kingston, Fr Louis, 106 Knowles, Richard Paul, 237, 259 Laforgue, Jules, 224 Lane, Patrick, 228, 247–8, 296 Laroque, Emmerson, 45, 76, 259–60 Laurence, Margaret, 161, 166–7, 249 Lawrence, D.H., 90, 91, 250 Levine, George, 173 liberalism (enlightened/bourgeois/ feminist), 115, 190–1, 197, 198, 204, 207, 211, 220–1, 236, 244, 267, 270, 273, 275–8, 282–8, 289–90, 292–4, 300–1, 302, 308–11, 319, 323. See also power Livesay, Dorothy, 127, 139, 202 London, Jack, 213, 240, 251, 255 Lonergan, Bernard, 306–7, 310 Lowry, Malcolm, 213, 216, 223, 226, 238, 245, 251, 270, 306 Loyalists, 8, 104, 138 Lukacs, Georg, 232, 235 MacCaulay, Elizabeth Newcomb, 19 MacDonald, Michael, 163, 223 Macklem, Michael and Nicholas. See Oberon Press MacLean, Rick, 322 MacLennan, Hugh, 18, 132, 159, 161, 162, 245, 324 MacLeod, Alistair, 9, 208, 323 Macmillan, Carrie, 296, 297, 312

MacNutt, W.S., 6 MacSween, Rev. R.J., 132, 149 Maillet, Antonine, 321, 324 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 224, 228–9, 230 Manny, Louise, 7, 13, 15, 72 Marcel, Gabriel, 107–9, 183, 224, 287, 290 Marston, Benjamin, 8, 206 Martin, Rev. George W., 103–4, 115 Matamajaw Salmon Club, 19, 22. See also salmon fishing Matapédia River, 18–19, 20, 22, 23, 257 Mathews, Lawrence, xi, 94, 260, 296, 307, 317–18 McClelland, Jack, 258 McClelland and Stewart, 258, 261, 304–5 McCord Hall. See Ice House Gang McCoombs, Robert, 77, 82 McDonald, Larry, 295, 297 McGowan, Hughie and Willie, 25, 34, 76, 253 McGowan, Mary Jane (‘Janie,’ David Richards’s paternal grandmother), 24–31, 34, 37–8, 39, 44, 76, 139, 164, 181, 213, 253 McGowan, Owen, 24, 139 McGrath, Peter (‘Mud’), 257 McIntyre, Margaret (‘Peggy,’ David Richards’s wife), 85–7, 100, 101, 116, 118, 122–3, 125, 138, 151, 153, 155, 181, 192, 197–8, 203, 204, 210, 211, 212, 216, 239, 242, 243, 251–2, 255, 260, 262, 266, 285, 287–8, 303, 324 McKay, Don, 117 McKay, Ian, x, 282, 296, 297, 319 McKenna, Frank, 220, 321, 322–3 McLaughlin, Vince, 29, 31–2, 34, 253

Index 351 McLuhan, Elsie, 15 McLuhan, Marshall, 83, 107, 228–9 Mechanics’ Institute, 16 Metcalf, John, 128, 141, 163, 204, 247, 261 Michaels, Oleg, 162 Midway Drive–In (Bushville), 30, 65, 212, 213. See also motion picture industry Mi’kmaq, 4–5, 8 Miller, Henry, xii, 89, 290 Mills, John, 173 Milner, Phil, 261 Miramichi; history, xii, 4–17, 151, 195, 204, 206–7, 220, 225–6, 238; Fighting Election of 1843, 11; Fire of 1825, 6, 7, 12, 14, 184, 207, 298; Folksong Festival, 15, 265, 325; river, 3–4, 9, 33, 177, 187, 190, 317; sportsmen/sports, 13, 221. See also Newcastle; Chatham Mizruchi, Ephriam, 222 Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 166, 181, 323 Morley, Patricia, 248 Moss, John, 248, 295 motion picture industry, 25–30, 37, 43–4, 57, 65–6, 74–5, 244, 283. See also talkies Mulroney, Brian, 284–5 Murdoch, Rev. B.J., 72 music, 96, 98–9 Newcastle, 5, 6, 7, 9–11, 15, 24, 25, 28, 32–4, 39, 44, 59–60, 65, 70, 71, 74–5, 79, 119–20, 157, 164, 166, 187, 195–6, 202–3, 210, 211, 213, 223, 229, 286, 303, 321–2, 324, 325. See also The Rocks; Chatham; Miramichi

Newman, Robert (‘Trapper’), 76–7, 103, 119, 121–2, 196, 214, 215, 251–3, 323 Norma Epstein Prize, 147, 155, 156 Nowlan, Alden, 39, 72, 102, 106, 113, 128, 132, 138–46, 147, 150–1, 152–3, 156–7, 159, 162, 167–8, 176, 177–8, 179, 180, 182, 191, 201, 202, 205, 211, 213–14, 233, 237, 240, 241, 250, 259, 260–1, 262–3, 266, 276, 292–3, 300–1, 304, 305, 314, 321, 323–4 Nowlan, John, 196, 260, 266 Nowlan, Michael O., 167, 180, 208, 297 Oberon Press, 147–8, 149, 150, 151, 152–4, 156, 158–9, 160–1, 170, 179, 192, 199, 200, 202, 204, 212, 217, 218, 237, 238, 239–40, 241–4, 258, 261, 263, 290–2, 304, 305 O’Connor, Flannery, 114, 250 Old Manse Library, 15, 51, 77, 95, 180, 245 Opera House (Newcastle), 24–6, 30, 234. See also motion picture industry Orwell, George, 113, 287 Pacey, Desmond, 127, 129, 132, 139, 150, 260, 322, 325 Pacey, Michael, 128, 129, 131–2 Pagan Palace, 120–1 Parkin, George, 84 Parks, Richard (‘Beep’), 76, 82, 121–2, 214, 215 Pedersen, Jon, 266, 292, 299–300 Pierce, James A., 6, 16 Pittman, Al, 132, 141, 143, 156

352

Index

Poe, Edgar Allan, 70, 72–3, 157, 224, 226, 247 Pound, Ezra, 80, 144, 145, 168–70, 173, 182, 223 power/social power and violence, 50, 59, 67–8, 74–5, 90–1, 94, 98–9, 107–9, 113, 124–5, 207–8, 221–2, 226, 231, 233–4, 248, 260, 269, 277–8, 288, 308, 309–16. See also liberalism Pratt, Mina, 20–2, 31, 209 Presbyterian Church/Presbyterianism, 18–19, 20, 23, 36, 38, 60. See also Scots Purdy, Al, x Pushkin, Alexander, 87, 169 Rankin, Alexander, 7, 12, 26 Rapoport, Janis, 160, 174–5, 295 realism (social/psychological), x, 67–70, 136, 149, 164–5, 166–8, 169–70, 171, 173, 176, 182–3, 200, 240–1, 259, 270, 319. See also Dickens; Symbolists region/place, 84, 88–9, 93, 99, 119– 20, 133–4, 136, 139–40, 146, 147, 149, 151, 157, 162, 163–4, 166, 170, 171, 173–4, 187–90, 238, 249–50, 256, 257, 261–2, 265, 273, 317, 319, 321, 322, 323. See also regionalism regionalism, xi, xii, 136, 147, 157, 162–4, 166, 202, 243, 249–50, 301, 319 Restigouche River, 4, 18–19 Rhinelander, Anthony, 240 Richards, Bill (David Richards’s father), 23, 27, 31–8, 43–4, 56, 57, 61, 72–3, 79, 99–101, 164, 195–6, 212, 234, 253, 322, 324 Richards, David Adams: ancestry, 17–38; birth, 40; disability, xi,

40–3, 72, 81, 95, 112, 139; home/ parents, 50–1, 56, 72, 73, 79, 112, 115, 203, 209; siblings, 40, 43, 56, 63, 87, 118, 256; childhood, xi, 20, 40–51 (See also The Rocks); youth, 15, 63, 47; adolescence, 71–2, 73–5; schooling/teachers/ education, 16, 51–5, 59, 62–5, 66, 72–3, 78–82, 82–5, 87, 94, 95, 101, 131, 146, 155–6, 161, 175, 196, 203, 290, 301–2 (see also St Mary’s School; Harkins Academy; St Thomas University); friends, 65–6, 74, 75–8, 82, 101, 120–2, 203, 323; writer’s sensibility/apprenticeship, 41–2, 51, 66, 69, 71, 73–4, 85, 86, 88–94, 116, 119, 129, 130–1, 157, 180, 183; marriage, 123, 125; aesthetic theory/poetics, 89, 91, 93–4, 108–9, 110–12, 118, 124, 126, 135–6, 144, 168–70, 172–3, 182–3, 191, 198–9, 206, 207, 217, 219, 221–3, 224, 226–9, 230, 232–3, 270, 279–80, 297, 306–7, 308, 313, 318; works: ‘A Rural Place,’ 204–5; Adele (See Nights); ‘An Afternoon of the Mercury Month,’ 62, 87–8, 116, 152, 164, 246; ‘An Old Woman,’ 134; ‘The Architectural Dead,’ 116–17, 174; ‘Barren Man,’ 134; ‘Between Us,’ 116; Blood Ties, 4, 41–2, 59, 80, 81, 113, 130, 151, 156, 173, 175, 177, 181–92, 195, 198, 199–203, 206, 212, 219, 222, 223, 225, 232, 238, 247, 261, 270, 291, 298, 304, 309, 314, 320; ‘Charlie,’ 69, 114–15, 116; ‘The Child and the Boy,’ 123–5; ‘Children,’ 68; ‘The Collector,’

Index 353 133–4, 275; Dancers, 48, 197, 204–8, 212; ‘Dancers at Night,’ 206, 260; ‘Drinking,’ 196, 245, 251–2; ‘The Dungarvan Whooper,’ 78, 192, 193–5, 246; ‘Dungarvon,’ 129, 149–50; Evening Snow, 108, 136, 173, 285, 313, 314, 316, 324; ‘The Fire,’ 133; God Is, 61, 82, 95, 216, 237, 255; Gusties, 49, 50, 65, 72–3, 81, 109, 119, 122–3, 126–7, 129, 133, 136, 137, 157; Hockey Dreams, 31, 45, 46, 47–8, 49–50, 64–5, 96, 100, 120, 260, 303; Home for the Seasons, 101, 126; Hope, 279, 316; ‘Husband and Wife Gratten,’ 217, 239; I Have Seen My River, 61; ‘In This Age of Chess,’ 51, 74, 137, 149–50, 180, 210; ‘Just Singing Along,’ 38; ‘Kopochus 1825,’ 206–7; ‘La Roche,’ 259–60; ‘The Launch of Blood Ties,’ 202–3; ‘The Lilliputian Looks Up,’ 86; Lines, 4, 21, 22, 40, 46, 49, 50, 60, 94, 99–100, 257–8, 259; Lives, 9, 36, 38, 45, 48, 188, 190, 196, 197, 198, 202, 206–7, 208, 209, 210, 215, 216–39, 241–4, 247–50, 251, 255, 256, 258, 259, 261, 263, 266, 270, 271, 273–4, 279, 281, 283, 290, 293–4, 298, 299, 307, 309; ‘Lockhartville and Kevin O’Brien,’ 300–1; Meager Fortune, 20, 39, 186, 211, 306, 309, 310, 313, 324; Mercy, 187, 188, 306, 313, 316; ‘My Miramichi Trilogy,’ 183, 191, 198, 200, 221; ‘My Old Newcastle,’ 56; Nights, 40, 48, 80, 108–9, 173, 187, 207, 254, 281, 290, 304–24, 325; ‘Northern

New Brunswick – a Personal Reflection,’ 264–5; ‘November 1977,’ 209; ‘Old Man’s Town,’ 89, 152, 182; ‘On the Death of a Woman,’ 91–3, 99, 116; One Step Inside, 116, 117–18, 174; ‘Our Magazines,’ 38; Phillip (see Tuesday/Wednesday); Playing the Inside Out, 130, 191, 309; ‘The Promise,’ 132; ‘Ramsey Taylor,’ 197, 205–6; ‘Remembering My Evaluators,’ 86, 102, 125, 138, 159; River, 18, 28–9, 31, 32, 44, 58, 66, 75, 95, 97, 100, 123, 131, 210, 216, 299, 303, 306; ‘Safe in the Arms,’ 207–8, 238; ‘The School Yard,’ 59; Small Gifts, 292; Small Heroics, 129, 133–6, 275; ‘Small Heroics,’ 133, 134; ‘Small Town,’ 264–6, 269; ‘Smoking,’ 49; ‘The Snake,’ 90–1, 116; ‘Stag Films, Teen Movies,’ 215; Stilt House, 190, 255, 259, 268–9, 270, 271–84, 288–90, 292, 294–8, 300–1, 303, 309, 313, 320, 321; ‘To The Ants,’ 116, 117–18; ‘The Turtle, The Handbook,’ 31, 41, 70, 236; ‘Then With Dagger,’ 133, 135; ‘Time Has Come,’ 116; ‘Traditional,’ 133, 134–5; ‘Travel,’ 119; Tuesday/Wednesday, 266, 299–300; ‘Villon,’ 245–7, 259, 279; ‘Visit,’ 196; ‘The Way Out Is a Trap,’ 293–4; ‘We, Who Have Never Suffered,’ 3, 206, 209; Winter, 81, 103, 125, 126–7, 130, 136, 137–8, 147–50, 151, 152–4, 157, 158, 159–76, 181, 182–3, 184, 188–9, 198, 202, 208, 212, 223, 239, 240–1, 244, 247,

354

Index

258, 261, 281, 292, 298; ‘Wisdom, Charisma, and Compassion,’ 292–3; ‘Working Sevogle,’ 129, 133; Wounded, 10, 45, 68–9, 80, 97, 100, 108, 113, 119, 136, 173, 187, 254, 266, 276, 307, 313, 314, 316 Richards, Harry, xiii, 27, 32–3, 53, 56, 85 Richards, I.A., 169–70 Richards, John, 148 Richards, William Sr (David Richards’s paternal grandfather), 23–6, 84, 209 Rigelhof, T.F., 307, 318 Rimbaud, Arthur, xii, 63, 94, 145, 224, 238 Ritchie’s Wharf, 47 Robb, Nancy, x, 304 Roberts, Charles G.D., 84, 104, 159, 260 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 312 Royal Theatre (Newcastle), 29–30, 52. See also motion picture industry Russell, Judith, 248, 249 salmon fishing, 19–20, 21–3, 256–8, 285–6 Savage, David, 257 Scots, 8, 18, 20, 37, 207, 223, 287. See also Irish Seaman, Andrew, 166, 204, 216, 222–3 Shanahan, Doug, 82–5, 94, 103, 109, 115–16 Sherman, Joe, 128, 158, 181, 202 Sillarsville, 18, 19, 21, 36, 38 Sillitoe, Alan, 245 Snowball, J.B., 7, 12 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 241

Souster, Raymond, 128, 139, 146, 147, 152 Soviet State Publishing Agency, 239–41 Spain, 118–19, 192–3, 268. See also travel Spettigue, Douglas, 154 St Mary’s Convent/School, 16, 52–5, 59–60 St Thomas College (Chatham), 16, 53, 82, 284 St Thomas University, 83, 87, 103, 104–6, 113–14, 115, 131–2, 133, 155–6, 159, 182, 192, 262, 306–7 Sterrer-Hauzenberger, Inge, 234, 275 Stevens, Peter, 160 Stewart, Jim, 143, 202, 260 Strax, Norman, 97 Symbolists, 223–4, 228–9, 238, 245, 270 Synge, John, 223, 250 talkies, 28–30 Taylor, Michael, 199, 228 The Rocks, 44–50, 56, 75–6, 77–8, 120, 166. See also Newcastle Theriault, Cpl J.N., 35 Thomas, Dylan, 84–5, 87–8, 94, 95, 98, 99, 116, 129, 146, 155, 157, 183, 214, 247 Thompson, Kent, 123, 127–8, 130, 141–2, 147–8, 152, 153, 158, 159, 191, 205, 243, 262 Thorpe, Michael, 239 Thurston, Harry, 164, 247, 248, 294, 296, 297 Tolstoy, Leo, 87, 132, 146, 232, 233, 236, 241, 259, 300, 306–7, 309, 311 travel, 119, 192–3, 196–7, 272, 302 Trethewey, Eric, 128, 263–4, 266–7

Index 355 Trilling, Lionel, 172 Trofimova, Elvira, 240 Trudeau, Pierre, E., 284, 287 Tunney, Mark, 323 Turbide, Diane, 318 Underhill, Doug, 82, 87, 115, 118, 323, 325 University of New Brunswick, 104–5, 116, 127–8, 138, 139–42, 178, 262–6, 271, 301–2. See also Fredericton Urchin, 132 Uptown Theatre (Newcastle), 30, 65, 213. See also motion picture industry Verlaine, Paul, 224 Victoria, British Columbia, 196–8 Villon, François, 87, 95, 202, 234, 245–7

Wallace, Bruce (‘The Moose’), 214, 215, 323 Weber, Max, 170 Whelan, Michael, 14–15, 72, 93, 164, 193, 324 Wilbur, Richard, 287 Williams, Guylaine, x Williams, Tennessee, 112–13, 140, 157, 183, 247, 263, 300 Williams, William Carlos, 238, 250 Wilson, James R., 7, 13 Windsor Castle. See Nowlan, Alden Woodcock, George, 249, 259, 318 writer-in-residence, 245, 262–6, 271, 302–4 Wyile, Herb, xi, 282, 319 Yeats, W.B., 9, 112, 146, 223, 228, 250 Zanes, John, 202