“Gentle Sinners” by W.D. Valgardson

In reviewing Kristjana Gunnars’ Settlement Poems I, W.D. Valgardson says:

While reading these powerful poems, I thought that there are always those in a community who try to deal with the past by denying it. Rather than acknowledge the poverty, the hardships, the sorrow, the incredible cost their ancestors paid, these people refuse to hear about it. Such people do not realize what a terrible disservice they do their people. They steal from them the honour that is rightly theirs … This book of poems [sic] will help to give to those Icelandic settlers what is due them and guarantee that their sacrifices will be both recognized and honoured.

We find much the same rationale behind the subject and technique of Valgardson’s own first four books, the three collections of short stories: Bloodflowers (1973), God is Not a Fish Inspector (1975), Red Dust (1978) — all published by Oberon — and his volume of poems, In The Gutting Shed (1976) — published by Turnstone Press. All of these books rise out of “memories” through which Valgardson has effectively honoured the simple, the poor and the suffering in our rural past, especially in the interlake region of Manitoba. Appropriately, the first poem of In The Gutting Shed not only suggests individual sainthood for “Paul lsfeld: Fisherman”, it conceives of lsfeld as a symbol of his community. By telling the event, the author, like Paul, is beautifying the slain and transforming them into the sacrificed. The early books contain the bread of life.

Still, these books are stark, primeval, as pagan and ominous as the lake and life around Gimli for much of the year. Stories like “An Act of Mercy”, “In Manitoba” and “Celebration” indicate that Valgardson knows the region’s cruel justice. In “The Curse” a man actually condemns his innocent neighbour to death in order to retain his dignity and a harmonious relationship with his wife. A few stories, like “The Novice” reveal some hope in togetherness or love. Most often, though, man is like a small frantic bird beating tired wings. When he appears large and in control danger threatens:

The leaves of raspberry canes turn black
Overnight, cling to the furred stems like cold slugs.
In shadows under rough stone, the first traces
Of snow are hiding. Granite rocks grow beards
Of frost and brown cat tails with their tattered hats
Are a British army trapped by winter. On my webbed feet,
I test the ice, slide one snowshoe forward.
The smooth ice ripples and sighs.
Stretching over blood dribbled by the sun,
I am emperor of a new kingdom.
The ice bows and cries,
My every move is magnified.

When Valgardson describes beauty it is beauty that has stolen a few moments from death:

Geraniums descend in ragged lines;
Petals, drops of blood beneath spiked
Hawthorne trees. Piles high,
Cardinal blooms flame
Their own sun.
Shadows, silent within seed,
Release themselves, their long day come.
Proud blooms clot upon the compost.

And even when a character returns to religious faith, like Melissa in “Saved” the story ends with a sense of loss and inhibition. She is separated from her husband by the locks and laws of the Church.

Valgardson’s view of life is archetypal and strikes to the bone. It has been conditioned by the sacrifices demanded by the lake. As we see in a poem called “At the Beach” Valgardson implies that to be alive is to be in pain:

After the first of May, the rich come
In flowered dresses, chartreuse slacks,
Ripening the air with thick scent.
Never do they come in December,
Preferring to leave cottages vacant,
Blinds drawn on a lake rough with ice,
Trees shagged with winter, icicles
Alive with secret shadows. They relax
Where they don’t hear the whine
Of wind on ice ridges, wind moaning
Over banks of snow, a sound filling the land,
A sound even the deaf know. In their winter,
All days are green, warmed by artificial suns
Tanning blonde girls lounging in Spain.
For entertainment. they study matadors.
Only when frost splits the tree
Do they tense in their sleep
And cry, seeing blood on the sand.

If the rich experience less physical suffering than the poor, they are also less alive and in any case. “There is nothing to say/ Edges are everywhere” (“Val Playing”) and inevitably “Emptiness/ Drops from windows” (“Winter in Gimli”) Tomorrows hold only death for Valgardson’s characters: “We slip into death as silently as a razor’s cut.” If there is dignity—besides that provided by the teller—it is all the more valuable because of its rareness and because it comes from the character’s being defeated on his own terms. Thus in “God is Not a Fish Inspector”, despite the protests of his children and the fish inspector, Fusi Bergman continues to fish. In “The Burning”, rather than allow the fire department to use his house in fire practice, John Stepanovich himself sets fire to the place he built 50 years earlier for his sixteen-year-old bride. Valgardson understands that a home built with your own hands is not just a house.

The major protagonist of Valgardson’s newest work, the novel Gentle Sinners, clearly resembles characters like Fusi Bergman and John Stepanovich. Eric too rebels against conditions imposed on him by others or by life, and in defeat preserves his own sense of dignity. But Eric goes through a series of defeats during the narrative. Once he places a rifle in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Fortunately, Uncle Sigfus had removed the bolt and the death is only symbolic. On the level of story he will return to his fanatically religious parents, but only if allowed to stay the remainder of the summer with Uncle Sigfus, and only after having freed his lover Melissa from her imprisonment by the Tree family. And so, at the end, having been rebaptised and reclothed twice, a different person, he boards the bus for home. An important change has taken place. Until now obsessed with the past and driven by the need to murder his parents as revenge for their self-righteous cruelty, he comes to terms with himself and begins to seek the future.

The novel is the story of Eric’s quest for identity. In the opening chapter he rejects his Christian name Bobby and is renamed Eric by Sigfus. However, it takes him the entire novel to grow into the name. Part of that change shows in Bobby’s increasing association with water, a traditional symbol of new life and of the unconscious. By the end of Gentle Sinners the water images begin to pile up as they do at the end of Kroetsch’s The Words of My Roaring (1966) and Audrey Thomas’ Blown Figures (1974). Bobby’s journey, begun on dry land, ends with him as “Eric” and surrounded by water. It is raining; the bridge has been destroyed by the storm and he must cross the river to reach his bus. Melissa is even weeping in symbolic sympathy with nature.

The scenes in Gentle Sinners are clearly more complicated than those in the short stories. In fact, Valgardson’s narrative technique has changed. Whereas the short stories — perhaps even the poems — derive from realism , the novel has moved beyond. Like his main character, Valgardson has progressed far beyond memory (and one of its literary styles, realism) to exploration.

On the other hand, he has not abandoned the resolve to portray the region he loves so well. There are numerous examples of Valgardson’s attempts to render the detail of life north of Winnipeg. We receive intricate and for the most part accurate descriptions of indigenous life — catching wild bees, cutting grass with a scythe, building a chicken coop. Nor has Valgardson lost his ability to provide sensitive, lyrical descriptions of the region:

To the west the sky was the colour of fireweed. Clouds which earlier had been a greyish white were now suffused with pink and purple. A sudden breeze sprang up, heralding the moon which lifted itself from the lake and sat just over the water, pale and soft as a yellow plum. Above, clouds gathered together, not quite shutting out the sky for, here and there, reflected light showed through the gaps. Then, as though its work for the night was done, the wind faded.

In one of the most enjoyable sections in the book Eric, Sigfus and his brother-in-law Sam drag-net for fish at night. Unfortunately, Valgardson’s performance here is a bit marred. Drag-netting is usually done by bringing the net up onto shore; fish are not nearly so easy to catch bare-handed, nor wood-ticks so easy to kill on a stone as his account would suggest. It is also surprising to find in the novel rural Manitobans referring to “Jackfish” as “Northern Pike”, “soft drinks” as “soda”, or to discover the posts for a chicken coop set so close together. (An old Ukrainian farmer informs me that four feet is too close. Sigfus, Sam and Eric are not, after all, building a stockade.) Viewed from the vantage point of realism the book has a significant defect: the time frame is very much in doubt. The hitch-hikers of the opening chapter obviously come out of the late sixties or seventies. The same might be said of the price of beans at the Chinese cafe. Yet the water pump scene and the use of Garlic as a necklace to prevent disease — among other details — suggest a much earlier time.

Perhaps, however, such problems are not merely the result of the author’s carelessness or of his inexperience with a longer, more sophisticated narrative form, but of his exploration of that form under the influence of the Post-Modernism of such writers as Michael Ondaatje, Audrey Thomas, Jack Hodgins and especially Robert Kroetsch, with his emphasis on the affinity between the critical act and the creative act. Though Valgardson often loses control, nowhere is he so self-conscious as a writer as in Gentle Sinners. Indeed, at times the use of image seems obtrusive and unnecessary. Valgardson’s shaping hand becomes far too apparent. The following description of Eric’s washing (i.e. death, baptism, naming, glorification) is far too heavy with symbolic implication:

When he bowed his head, he saw that there was a round hole cut in the platform. The unpainted boards were filled with innumberable cracks, and each crack had been worn smooth. Directly below, there was a nest of smooth stones, each one the size of a hardball. The stones, thick with rust, were the colour of dried blood. In that moment, he thought of kings and queens, prisoners of war, criminals, all forced to kneel, the backs of their necks naked, vulnerable, the sword descending. Before he could move, his uncle said with an assurance that implied he renamed people everyday, “We’ll call you Eric.” He swept the handle down. The metal parts clashed like cymbals and cold water struck the body with such suddenness that he gasped.

On other occasions, too many details are provided. We do need to know that schizoid Larry’s father died of a heart attack, but not that it was in “a Winnipeg beer parlour while watching a stripper”. Such a detail in the narrative is truly Kroetschean. The time structure of Gentle Sinners is also more complicated than even that of Valgardson’s longest short stories and more difficult to pin down than in most realist novels.

In this novel the realistic details stand in some tension to the narrative as a realm of literary possibilities. Thus, not only does Valgardson make disruptive use of the flashback, but he amplifies the narrative by motifs from the world of fantasy, a method he has used in only one other story, “Granite Point” in God is Not a Fish Inspector. In that story nursery rhymes are juxtaposed with the bitterness of a major protagonist’s life and yet, at the same time, have a curious applicability to her predicament. In the novel, however, the world of fantasy is used not merely as image or for purposes of contrast; it is made part of the narrative structure itself, much in the manner that fairy tales like “The Little Mermaid” are used by Audrey Thomas in Blown Figures.

In Gentle Sinners the story of “Rumplestiltskin” is retold and reformed in terms of Valgardson’s time and space. The effect is that both of the latter, not to mention the fairytale itself, are blurred somewhat. The spinning wheel and the room full of straw are present in Valgardson’s version. But the threatened queen or princess is merged with the promised baby and is associated with another fairy tale character, the cruel step-relative (in this case a brother with ringworm). Playing with the fact that at the end of the Grimm tale the enraged Rumplestiltskin tore himself in half, Valgardson has split the dwarf into two characters: Big Tree and Little Tree. If there is a prince here, he exists only because of Valgardson’s imagery. The name Eric and the author’s description of his hair make the former a Viking hero with a “helmet of beaten bronze”. Even the liberating naming of Rumplestiltskin is present in the novel, but it takes place in a manner appropriate to the region. Big Tree’s secret name is apparently “Alphonse” and it is uttered not by the Queen, but by the prince’s brave and wise advisors, Sigfus and Same. The naming in Gentle Sinners signals the Trees’ loss of power and the freedom of the captive princess so necessary to the continuation of life.

Integrated into such a narrative we also discover mythical patterns. One reviewer has already identified one of the parts of Faulkner’s especially local and modern mythology: that of Yoknapatawpha County. The stable scene close to the end of Gentle Sinners recalls Faulkner’s Sanctuary. But behind Valgardson’s novel is a story we much more legitimately can call mythic. Eric is obviously a Ulysses figure. He not only bears the name of a famous Viking sailor, lives in Sigfus’ boat-like house and quests for home; he also encounters a Cyclops figure in Big Tree — and perhaps in Larry as well. The presence of the cave, the crossing of the river, the escape from the barn into a boat while “Big Tree was rising from the river like some great beast” and the subsequent comparison of Larry to a “superhuman” about to “raise a gigantic boulder … and crash it down upon the boat,” all have antecedents in the story of Ulysses’ escape from the cave of the Cyclops. However, there are obvious differences between Eric and Ulysses. Valgardson, like Kroetsch in The Studhorse Man (1976), has taken the Ulysses story and reversed its pattern so that it becomes a dry land quest in search of water. At the end of Gentle Sinners, surrounded by water, Eric is at the heart of the mystery ready to accept the consequences of his journey.

According to Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folk Tale, the pattern of the fairy and folk tale with its chronological time sequence is a fixed, orderly one. Such reversals and distortions, then, of a fixed, traditional pattern can only introduce chaos into the novel. Frank Kermode’s comments when speaking of the relationship between fiction and myth would seem to validate such a conclusion:

Fictions can degenerate into myths when they are not consciously held to be fictive … Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions conditional assent. Myths make sense in terms of a lost order of time, illud tempus as Eliade calls it; fictions, if successful, make sense of the here and now, hoc tempus.

In Gentle Sinners traditional patterns have been deconstructed and reinvented into fiction. What we have is a world much closer to that of Post-Modernist such as Kroetsch, Hodgins, Ondaatje and Audrey Thomas, a world of shifting possibilities, with system and clear definition. The following rather well-done description of the town of Eddyville is only one of many such passages in the novel:

Eric slouched down the empty street. The sky was white as bone. Every house had its blinds drawn against the sun. Beneath the fierce white light, every scrap of paper, every broken bit of glass was exposed by its reflection. The streets themselves, askew, curving and looping like tangled string, created a sense of confusion. Caragana, their stems as thin as whips, overhung the sidewalks, grew in every direction, engulfed fences, their boards weathered black, their north sides blooming with orange algae, little more than collapsing ruins. It was, he felt, as if the town was disintegrating before his eyes and how, even before the destruction was complete, the grass and hedges were consuming what remained.

The properties of Sigfus, Larry and of the Trees are similarly chaotic in appearance.

The kinds of characters and Valgardson’s methods of defining them in Gentle Sinners differ from those in his earlier work. Grotesque characters such as Zeke, Annie — who has no nose — the Trees, the old men in front of the pool room, or the sex-crazed widow with a mustache seem to have bolted straight from The Studhorse Man. The blurring and deliberate mixing of characters discoverable in so many Post-Modernist writers is also present. Eric is connected to Sigfus, Larry and Melissa by image and incident in a manner similar to that in which Bolden mirrors Pickett, Webb and Bellocq in Coming Through Slaughter (1976) or Hazard mirrors Demeter in The Studhorse Man. Even the Post-Modernist fascination with naming is present. Many of the characters in the novel are renamed. Paul Kaminski was once “Texas Slim”, Bobby grows into the fiction of “Eric”, Big Tree is deflated to” Alphonse” and the sex-crazed widow becomes “Rosemarie” and then “Rosalind” as Larry develops her fictional personality. Characters in this novel are constantly revising their visions of themselves. The shift in names signals the shifting vision.

Because Modernist and Post-Modernist novels disrupt the traditional narrative structure with such things as flashbacks, gaps or reversals in chronology, and the use of fairy-tale or mythic characters and patterns, both have been subject to the criticism of incoherence — this despite the adhesive provided by imagery or voice in the them. Gentle Sinners does not disrupt chronological time nearly as much as Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Joyce’s Ulysses or even Hodgins’ The Invention of the World. It does not use myth or fairy-tale as much as Kroetsch’s The Words Of My Roaring or Thomas’ Blown Figures. Nevertheless, it does not hang together well. As a result, neither the story of Larry’s family background, the bee hunting episode, nor the net-dragging story are adequately connected to the story of Eric’s initiation into adulthood. The reason may be that there are too many images and that they are inadequately integrated into the narrative pattern. Finally, Gentle Sinners is more an arrangement of episodes than an episodic novel. Perhaps Valgardson has not entirely made the leap from the short story to a more sophisticated and unwieldy narrative form. But he does seem to be battling against an earlier narrative style and body of characters that he had exhausted, an earlier place and time that was more real and less literary. He seems almost to have freed himself from the inhibitions of memory and to have begun a voyage of discovery. ■

Daniel S. Lenoski is a Winnipeg writer and editor. He edited The Canadian Journal of Irish studies.