Word Foxy

Margaret Sweatman’s Fox is a clever and engaging novel of love and politics set amidst the turmoil of Winnipeg’s 1919 General Strike. Though the setting is historical and the conflicts ideological, Fox has an appealing lyrical quality. This is achieved, in part, by Sweatman’s treatment of character, her collage technique and, above all, by her careful handling of language.

Sweatman focusses on the coming-out of two young South-End women, Eleanor and her cousin Mary, who have led parallel lives into early womanhood. The narrative opens with a toboggan party at Eleanor’s home on the Assiniboine River; her father’s “Men” have built a slide which runs down onto the river ice. This brief episode shows the ennui and complacency of the propertied class; more particularly, it shows Eleanor’s dissatisfaction with a life of purposeless ease. To put her story simply, Eleanor moves from the thick languor of her father’s home into her own small apartment downtown, into a life of social action and into a love affair with a strike leader, MacDougal. On the other hand, her cousin Mary prepares for marriage with a budding entrepreneur named Drinkwater, and life in a house built for the would-be couple by her father. Because the women are very similar in background, we do not have a stark contrast, but Sweatman presents Eleanor, more fully and sympathetically. Eleanor does not become a flaming radical, nor does MacDougal, but she does gradually involve herself in social actions so that her life begins to parallel MacDougal’s rather than Mary’s. What we see, then, is difference and growth, especially Eleanor’s growth; in this respect Fox can be seen as a novel of education.

Such a bald summary may suggest that the novel praises the middle class and a syrupy love-thy-neighbour morality, but it is much more than that. For one thing, as I have hinted, Sweatman clothes her people in their dwelling places, which in turn speak eloquently of personal and social values. MacDougal lives in a suite above his bookstore. When Mary goes to the cottage for a brief period, she invades her servant’s house to see what he has in his icebox. In the city, she invades her neighbours’ houses to snoop while they are away at their summer cottages. When the strike interrupts her life, Mary travels to the North End to find her housekeeper but is turned away, both by the cabbage smell of the house and by the people themselves. Drinkwater, for his part, builds and sells the properties which he thinks will be the future of the city, while Eleanor moves to a little apartment where she bangs her head on the ceiling. Details about the people, their houses and furniture create an intimate, almost sensuous atmosphere, as in this brief paragraph:

MacDougal doesn’t wear slippers; they are soft and too close to the ground. Sitting on the edge of his narrow iron-post bed, MacDougal unfolds last week’s [Labour] News on the ragrug and places his boots there. Good firm boots, and trousers, pressed, a clean white shirt.

The appeal is in the detail: suggestive, concrete, focussed.

Sweatman works on the premise that less is more, and individual chapters, usually no more than two or three pages, show her concern with voice and particularized detail. A collage works largely by juxtaposition and facilitates the ready interplay of multiple forces. The method also plays down linear continuity (and the concomitant temptations of a narrow historical realism), and plays up contrasts and quick narrative shifts. Sweatman makes full advantage of the possibilities of the form. She contrasts her South-End people with North-Enders and both with West-End people. Similarly, she shows how servants in the South have a different life from clerks and prostitutes in the North. In addition to making quick and dramatic shifts from one situation and life-style to another, Sweatman weaves in fragments from other works—newspapers, songs, racial jokes, political addresses. She reads these texts very carefully—that is, she listens to their sounds—and sometimes breaks them into poetic lines. These passages serve as suggestive and often lyrical reminders of the intellectual and social life which surrounds her characters. She plays lyric against narrative against document. The overall result is that Fox, like other genuine novels, gives us what D.H. Lawrence calls a “trembling instability of the balance.”

Since a collage comprises a series of discontinuous units, it necessarily stresses the beginnings and endings of those units, and showing over telling. The challenge for the writer, paradoxically, is to make openings which open and closings which resist closure. The challenge and pleasure for the reader is to make connections. In part, we create those connections by our foreknowledge of the strike “story.” We know that the strike did not usher in a dictatorship of the proletariat, nor did it lead to the dissolution of labour organizations. One consequence of this foreknowledge is that we are free to pay attention to characters and to language. Fox, for the most part, stands up to such careful scrutiny.

Sweatman typically chooses moments of dramatic tension. An example from the second “chapter,” entitled “Eleanor’s Friends,” illustrates the point. The opening sentence begins in the middle of an action and also establishes a social world: “The party has moved inside, the ladies have been to the ladies’ room where noses have been blown and just a smidgen of powder applied.” This, we understand, is a world of restraint and decorum where powder and profile are just so. The ending for “Eleanor’s Friends” is similarly evocative. Drinkwater promises Eleanor that he will be a millionaire within a year. “And then I’m going to marry your cousin Mary, and I’m going to be happy happy happy and you know why? Because I will always leave the politics to my servants.” This passage characterizes Drinkwater as full of himself and given to dramatic posturing, it establishes his class consciousness and his membership in a moneyed class, and it announces political themes that are beginning to shape the novel. In addition, as we see in retrospect, Drinkwater shows himself to be more than a little disingenuous, for he becomes a very capable—and ruthless—organizer for the Committee of 1000 which aims to break the strike.

Sweatman’s chapter titles establish both contrast and continuity. Within the novel’s first six pages, we move from “Eleanor’s Party” to “Eleanor’s Friends” to “The Unlawful Assembly,” which deals with a meeting of labour leaders. The second and third chapters, though strongly contrasted, are linked by tonal continuity. The remark by Drinkwater about leaving politics to his servants finds a nice echo in the last sentence of the assembly chapter. The narrator reports that the assembled crowd cheers for the revolution, and then adds: “After that they try like hell to cable a message of congratulations to the Bolsheviki in Soviet Russia.” Both Drinkwater’s apolitical assertion and the political gestures of the labourites show enthusiasm and pride. But we know that pride cometh before a fall, and we know that subsequent events will leave both sides scarred.

“Fox,” to take the novel’s title, connotes sexuality, predation, deviousness, sly humour, and the novel has all these. The humour is wry, sometimes almost sarcastic: Mary’s father is a gentle, kindly man who made a fortune selling hogs in wartime and who bears the name “Sir Rodney Trotter.” Hogs we have, but no single individual is identified as a fox; rather, the fox image stands for the strike itself, or perhaps for love and politics in Winnipeg. In this respect, Sweatman’s title contrasts with Douglas Durkin’s The Magpie, his 1923 eponymous novel of love and politics during the strike. In some ways, Fox can be read as a female novelist’s answer to Durkin; certainly Sweatman’s nod to the earlier work invites such comparison. This intertextual reference to Winnipeg’s literary heritage further enriches Fox: the novel speaks of and to our time even as it dramatizes a past life.

The ending, as E.M. Forster has put it, is the inherent weakness of the novel as a genre. Characters, he tells us, “go dead” while the novelist labours to conclude the plot. Forster was speaking of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when novels had plots and characters, but his insight still holds true. Sweatman challenges this axiom, almost successfully, by giving us a multiple ending, as her formal organization requires. At one level, she offers a closing tableau in which MacDougal holds a dead boy in his arms and Eleanor waves her arms at the Mounties on horseback. This verges on a visual cliché, but the text moves quickly to an image of an elder clergyman, the Canon, for whom the city has become “quiet as a man with his hands up.” Then we have an italicized sentence without an end point, which suggests that a final vision emerges “Deep in the ruined gardens of the Canon’s mind.” Then blankness below the fragment perhaps speaks of his having reached oblivion, but Sweatman’s language and images here seem strained. The next page (and the book’s final section) is a “List of Illustrations,” comprising a series of brief passages on “photographs” numbered from 1 to 6. Once again, the documentary mode plays against the lyrical and the narrative. We have, in short, an open-ended text: you read the “photographs,” it seems to say, you make the image. In this way, Sweatman challenges the reader to re-think the canonized forms (the ruined gardens) of linear (single-voiced) realism.

Turnstone Press has carefully designed the book’s pages and wrapped them in a splendid cover, one of their very best. Fox deserves equally warm handling by readers. ♦

Birk Sproxton lives in Alberta and frequently contributes to Border Crossings on literature.

Fox by Margaret Sweatman Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1991 Paperback, 200 pp., $11.95