“Night Games” by Robert Currie

The writer is an irresistable theme for the writer. This preoccupation has a particular attraction for the story-teller, and in Canada especially the writer of short stories. Recent collections by Alice Munroe, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Sandra Birdsell, and now Robert Currie attest to the hold the writer’s early experience, moulded into a suite of like narratives, exercises over our fiction.

Currie’s collection concerns a young man, Steve Campbell, who lives, like the author, in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, where boys become men in a rough and sometimes painful manner. Steve’s life is traced from boyhood when he joins with friends in badgering neighbours (“Geranium!”) to maturity with its professional and marital puzzles (“Possibilities”). Some of the stories show Steve victimized by bullying friends, and the weaknesses that teenage flesh is heir to (“Guys Drinking”); others show the predicaments of growing up in the fifties, a time of beer and bobby socks, crinolines and condoms (“Victory Party”). In all the stories Steve is the partially innocent, often bemused, usually sensitive medium through which fifties’ mores, in their rural Saskatchewan manifestations, are registered.

Currie re-creates the atmosphere of the times well. He is effective in recalling the anxieties of the period, especially when he touches on the sensitive issues of sexual prowess and middle-class success. Something of the stuffiness, the stifling atmosphere of a period capable of producing the policy of Containment along with Hula-Hoops, Whiflle balls, and Fizzies comes through in this collection.

One thing these stories capture well is Steve’s puzzlement about sex. Alternating between ardour and repulsion, he remains true to a code in which women are mysterious and sacred objects. In “The Boat,” Steve’s feelings for Lola Gregory, a high-school sweetheart, are put to the test. At the opening of the story we discover that Lola is going out with Wall, one of Steve’s friends: “he had a kind of crush on her, though, and he didn’t like the way Wall treated her. Nor the things he said about her.” As the boys paddle down the Moose Jaw River, their feelings about Lola and about each other emerge; it becomes evident that the shared boat ride is a foil for the contrasting attitudes of the boys toward women, and by the story’s end, when Wall says, “Paddle back yourself, sucker, I’m pickin’ up Lola Gregory in fifteen minutes,” Steve’s despair makes a potent counterpoint to Wall’s cynicism.

These boys are products of the fifties. Wall is a blustering incipient bully who takes what he can get from girls in the back seats of Chevrolets and seethes sexual innuendo. In him Currie re-creates the ordinary lust and brutality of rural Saskatchewan, a mixture of good-old-boy ethics and the code of the barroom brawler. Steve looks more like the ordinary class nice-guy, who goes along with Wall’s pranks and parties, but stands back from their malevolent motives and soiled products in an attitude of envy tinged with horror.

Not that Steve is free of the worst aspects of fifties’ morality. In fact he is the agent of cruel repression in “The White Dress.” This story concerns the shameful double standard of the fifties which divided women into Good Girls and Bad Girls on the basis of their sexual availability. In it Steve sees a girl in a white dress, “the prettiest girl he had ever seen,” and begins immediately to pursue this grail of womanhood who he knows “would like somebody who was neat and clean and dressed up.” He wins her over. He dates her and feels the thrill of kissing her. But he is shocked by her sexual desires, and following their lovemaking, retreats into the language of debasement that characterized the time: “I didn’t think you were…well, the kind of girl who’d…”

This is the strongest of these dozen stories which proceed by memory and unfold a time and place at once charming and vicious. Currie piles up the days well, conscious as he is of their resonance and their need to be documented; sharing the fear of a boy trapped on a railroad trestle, the fury of obsessive love, the despair of relationships gone sour.

Not all of the stories are equally successful. Those which deal with Steve’s boyhood seem flawed by retrospective nostalgia for a simpler time of life when throwing tomatoes at the town crank’s house was Saturday fun. In “Geranium!” and “The Trouble With Sex” there seems too much emphasis on prepubescent silliness. The exclamation “Jeez” leaps out of these stories with appalling frequency.

Other lapses occur. Currie’s ear for the idioms of the times rings true, but much of the dialogue falls flat because it is simply recreated on the page, much as it might have occurred in the fluid stream of ordinary mundane living. Some of what is conveyed seems to lack texture, so that trees are never elms, oaks, or poplars, but merely trees, and the night seems always black. Occasionally the point of view bounces about in an unsettling way, especially in “From The Shadows,” the only story in the collection written from a perspective other than Steve’s. For the most part these are not serious flaws, but sometimes when they accumulate in one piece they neutralize a story that otherwise suggests engaging narrative possibilities.

In his first book, a collection of poems, Currie began the imaginative exploration of Moose Jaw’s South Hill, his own landscape. In “Night Games” he has extended the investigation into fiction. Steve Campbell embodies what Currie has learned about the place he grew up in and about himself, its horrors and its possibilities. Child of the fifties, imbued with its fear of sexuality but sustained by its cheerful confidence in the values of marriage, education and careers, Steve emerges from “Night Games” as an interesting and accurate gauge of that time. ■

Wayne Tefs regularly contributes book reviews to Arts Manitoba.