(1977)
For at least three reasons, the publication of Timothy Findley’s novel The Wars is a major literary event. The first reason has to do with the state of the publishing industry in Canada. The book is published by Clarke, Irwin, which until recently existed primarily as a textbook publisher. When Clarke, Irwin did fiction, it was usually discreet fiction, and they did not promote it lavishly: their fruit-juice cocktail parties were a mild industry joke. Although their list contained such distinguished authors as Alden Nowlan, they were not the publishers that sprang to mind when you were recommending a fiction house. Yet here is Findley’s book—which is hardly discreet, containing as it does several unorthodox sexual incidents, including a homosexual gang rape—coming out with the sort of fanfare usually associated with McClelland & Stewart: posters, high praise from literary heavies, a promotional dinner at Toronto’s Park Plaza Hotel, and a cross-country tour for the author (who, with Findleyesque eccentricity, refuses to fly in airplanes; he’s going by car). The message is clear: Clarke, Irwin is making a bid for McClelland & Stewart territory, and they’re making it with fiction. The Canadian textbook industry, dealt a heavy blow by the phasing out of the required curricula, was given a finishing chop by the recent American drive into Canadian schools; and Canadian fiction, once published for prestige only, is in healthier financial shape than ever before. For Clarke, Irwin, Findley is both a gamble and an investment.
For writers, there’s another message here. The Wars is not Findley’s first novel, but very few Canadians have read the other two. Once, not so long ago, it was received wisdom that the proper way to publish a Canadian novel was to do it with an American house, whose agency would distribute it in Canada. But this was changing about the time Findley published his first book, The Last of the Crazy People. “Timothy Findley lives near Ontario, Canada,” the dust-jacket proclaimed, demonstrating an endearingly vague knowledge of Canadian geography. Although Findley’s second novel, The Butterfly Plague, did well enough in the States to be bought as a paperback, Findley remained virtually unknown in his own country. His books were simply not promoted, and they were not noticed by reviewers, who by that time were reviewing both major foreign books and books by Canadians published by Canadian houses. Books by Canadians published by foreign houses fell between two stools. The message again is clear: the most sensible way to publish a Canadian novel is to choose a Canadian publisher in Canada, an American one in the States, and an English one in England. Selling world rights to an American house does not work well for Canadians.
The second reson for the importance of The Wars is the light it casts on the state of reviewing in this country. Once —and this could surely be said, for instance, of the late Nathan Cohen —many reviewers were better than most of the Canadian material available to them for review. We were thus often treated to the spectacle of energetic and intelligent minds striving to make emperor’s clothes out of sows’ ears, or, conversely, turning themselves into irritable papershredders out of sheer frustration. Now the situation may have reversed itself. The newspaper most widely respected for its literary opinions is, without a doubt, The Globe and Mail; it is felt, perhaps erroneously, that, like The New York Times, its pronouncements can make or break a book financially. Yet some joker handing out the book reviews at the Globe thought it would be a ripping idea to get Donald Jack to review The Wars, presumably because both The Wars and Jack’s Bartholomew Bandy trilogy use The First World War as background for their stories. There’s nothing wrong with Jack —you can get many a wheezy chuckle from his accounts of complicated English bathrooms and harebrained pilots buzzing garden parties —but Jack is a humorist and The Wars is a tragic novel. Choosing this reviewer was like choosing Red Buttons to review Hamlet. Jack found The Wars “an unacceptable distortion,” presumably because so many men got killed in it and the author did not laugh. Some books judge their reviewers and this is a case in point. If this is the best our major literary newspaper can do, we need another major literary newspaper.
The third reason for the importance of The Wars is, of course, the thing itself. It’s an accomplished novel by a literary type that is fast becoming a rarity in Canada’s expanding book trade: a totally serious writer. At one time here you had to be a totally serious writer to be a writer at all, because you weren’t going to make any money anyway. Now there’s room for writers of all kinds, with suppliers of junk books making great headway. I’m not against this; if we’re going to have junk, and we are, it might as well be indigenous junk. But a distinction must be made between the writers of books and the writers of what Jack McClelland once called “koobs.” Timothy Findley writes books.
There’s a fallacy that “koobs” are entertaining and books are not. The Wars, among its other merits, is gripping reading. Findley has been an actor, a playright and a television script-writer (he worked on The National Dream, for instance), and this shows in the tightness, the drama and the visual quality of his writing. The story he is telling is perfect for Findley’s talents. It concerns Robert Ross, a young Canadian officer in the war, and a mysterious act he committed which crippled and blinded him and about which almost everyone who knows about it is unwilling to talk. Findley pieces his narrative together almost like a good television documentary, using vignettes, descriptions of old photographs, interviews with survivors now almost at the point of death themselves, objective commentary, and guesswork. He cuts the novel like a film, so that one taut scene follows another, with little filling or rumination.
What holds this pastiche together is a character Findley calls “you” a researcher who is attempting to reconstruct Ross’s action and to unravel its meaning. “You” might be the author, but it might be the reader as well; for, although the ostensible genre of The Wars is the war story, its method is that of the detective story. We are given clues, fragments out of which we must attempt to make a coherent whole. “People can only be found in what they do,” Findley says, and the reader must ponder and guess as the author moves from one quick glimpse to another.
Some reviewers have found the researcher, this so-called “device” of Findley’s, to be an extraneous gimmick. Some have also commented on the curious opaqueness of the central character. Robert Ross does, but he almost never says, and the things he does say are as banal as everyone’s letters home. None of them comes close to explaining how his extraordinary final act emerged from the personality of this quiet, self-effacing young man. In fact, Ross and the researcher are two halves of the same process. Ross is the thing observed, the researcher is the observer; and, by the end of the book, we feel that neither can fully exist without the other. The researcher, too, becomes multiple as he roams hospitals, interviews soldiers and old women, and scrabbles through piles of photographs that have all the awkwardness, familiarity and mystery of old snapshots. What do the war and Robert Ross mean, now they are finished and buried? Among other things, The Wars is about the function of memory and our persistence in time. The researcher is haunted and Robert Ross is the ghost, fixed in the mind at the moment of his fiery sacrifice and self-destruction.
Ross seems to me to be an essentially Canadian hero. Critics have compared The Wars to the work of Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, but surely a better comparison would be with Colin McDougall’s fine Canadian war novel, Execution. Ross is neither bloodthirsty nor much of a patriot. He gets sucked into the huge sinkhole of the trenches partly through a romantic image of death and glory and partly because he is running away from his stifling and suddenly insupportable family. His sister, a hydrocephalic, falls from her wheelchair and dies, and Robert’s mother insists that he shoot her pet rabbits. Because he can’t bear to kill the rabbits, Robert puts himself into a situation in which he has to kill horses, Germans, and, finally, some of his fellow soldiers. When he commits his last heroic act, no one can decide whether or not it is really heroic; and because this act is a protest against the death-force of the war, not an endorsement of it, he is court-martialled in absentia. Like those other recently-adopted Canadian heroes, Louis Riel and Norman Bethune, Ross is scorned and vilified by the society that produced him. Findley makes it clear that Ross is to the army what animals are to men, victims of a destructive and evil will to power.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word “Canadian,” as it is now fashionable to identify literary productions by region rather than by nation. It is often assumed that every region but Ontario has an authentic voice, just as it is assumed that every group but the Celts and Anglo-Saxons have loveable ethnic peculiarities and every city but Toronto has a soul. I sometimes wonder about Toronto, but there can be no doubt about the existence of a Southern Ontario literature, and The Wars is a distinguished addition to it. Although it is set, for the most part, in Europe, its sensibility is Southern Ontario Gothic, Rosedale variation. Findley is one of the few Canadian writers (Robertson Davies is another) who can write about the upper class of Upper Canada without making its members look like fatuous twerps. Although Ross’s ingrown-toenail family is grotesque, it is, in Findley’s hands, believable. As in his other books, he is especially good with female characters of the wisewoman-madwoman variety. Here, it is Mrs Ross, who keeps a flask in her muff when she goes to church, hates her relatives, and dominates her family through fits and scenes. The relationship between Mrs Ross and Robert is pathological, but it is the pathology of a society that is under scrutiny. “Control yourself,” Robert is told. Finally, he does.
The difference between a book and a koob may finally be that a koob is self-evident and a book is not. Although The Wars has an obvious appeal for those interested in the First World War—Findley did a lot of research on clothing styles, methods of shipping men and horses, trench warfare, gas attacks, firearms and the like —its ambiguities, hints and correspondences invite the sort of pattern-making that delights chronic readers. Few books are flawless, and Findley’s Achilles heel is a tendency to creep along the edge of sentimentality when it comes to our furry and feathered friends. But the starkness and power of its story overwhelms these weaker moments, and justifies, for once, the hyperbole on the jacket. This is a book that deserves and should get both a literary audience and a wide popular one.