(1979)
This is the third book of short stories by W. D. Valgardson. The first book is Blood/lowers, the second God Is Not a Fish Inspector. All are published by Oberon Press and all are worth having.
I’ll begin by getting a minor quibble out of the way. In the cover blurbs on the second and third books, Oberon makes a point of telling us how well the previous books have sold, what a large audience they have, or how many times they’ve been reprinted. If, say, Jack McClelland were to do this to an author, it would come across as decidedly crass, an attempt to make us feel we should purchase a book because other people have. And it’s a disservice to Valgardson. It makes him sound like a writer who’s deliberately pandering to some kind of cheesy popular taste, though in reality nothing could be further from the truth. “Uncompromising” means nothing if not Valgardson. “Unrelenting” might be even more accurate.
The blurb on Red Dust claims it’s “an even better book than its predecessors,” which is also a disservice. But a writer cannot be faulted for the understandable puff-mindedness of his publishers. Red Dust is equal to, not better than. Valgardson is one of those writers who seems to have sprung fully-formed from his own head, with, in his very first book, a well-developed view of his own universe and all the skills necessary to articulate it. If you place “Bloodflowers,” the first story in the first book, beside “Red Dust,” the last story in the latest book, who could choose between them? Both, in their realization of what they set out to do, are flawless.
It’s a critical fallacy of our times, derived perhaps from psychology or optimistic self-help books, that a writer should “grow,” “change,” or “develop.” This fallacy causes us to demand the same kind of behaviour from writers that we expect from children or radishes: “grow,” or there’s something wrong with you. But writers are not radishes. If you look at what most writers actually do, it resembles a theme with variations more than it does the popular notion of growth. Writers’ universes may become more elaborate, but they do not necessarily become essentially different. Popular culture, based on the marketing of novelties, teaches us that change is desirable in and for itself. Valgardson is its antithesis.
In Valgardsonland, which is an identifiable locale with its own weather and its own limited set of possibilities, the universe does not change. It hasn’t changed from the first book to the third, and why should it? It is not Valgardson’s prerogative to change it; he cannot change Fate, the heavy hand of which is everywhere at work. Valgardson does not appear to manipulate his characters or situations, though of course every author is doing that all the time. The illusion he creates is that of a meticulous chronicler of an implacably hostile and nasty world.
In Valgardsonland, as in the moral universe envisaged by John Stuart Mill, evil is widespread and powerful. Good exists in limited quantities, but in any clash between the two it will probably lose. The conditions existing between human beings are much like those pictured by E. J. Pratt under the sea: a mute struggle, a constant rending and tearing, a desperate and stubborn battle to survive and keep eating. In Valgardsonland, when it isn’t snowing—“snowing” is too soft a word for what it does there —it’s dusty and broiling. The physical surface over which characters move is pocked with traps: sandpits, snowdrifts, sinkholes, oceans, treacherous ice. Its animal life takes the form of things you shoot at, or, less agreeably, bears that tear out your guts and half-wild husky dogs. Domestic dogs, when they appear, are likely to have distemper or get hit by cars. This world is harsh even by the standards of Canadian fiction, which abounds in such unpleasantnesses, but in itself it is morally neutral. Though it looks a lot like Milton’s Hell, it isn’t out to get you, exactly, nor will you be able to avoid it if you’re good. Such a world does not demand goodness as the price of survival, merely knowledge, vigilance, and luck; and for some even these aren’t enough.
I don’t find this view unduly pessimistic. Though dramatic, and possibly influenced by Valgardson’s own Icelandic background, both cultural and literary, it’s accurate enough for people without much money who live in a harsh climate, and these are the kind of people Valgardson is best at writing about. The climate exposes them to danger, the lack of money removes the possibility of escape, which is probably why most of Valgardson’s characters behave like cornered rats. Like Alice Munro, Valgardson has totally discarded the pious Victorian concept of ennobling poverty. This is why, too, the most frequent deadly sin in Valgardson’s stories is not pride but greed: everyone’s hungry. In “Celebration,” in which a man locks a woman out in the snow to freeze and later causes the deaths of his two children, the initial fight is over a plate of fried potatoes. Compassion, insight, kindness, and what is usually thought of as love, are luxuries, Valgardson seems to say. His characters for the most part cannot afford them.
Middle-class characters, when Valgardson deals with them at all, are contrasted with his poorer types (one hesitates to say “working class, ” since a lot of Valgardson’s characters are below even this line: they don’t work). They’re shown up as ignorant of the forces that shape the lives of others, and because of this and their ability to effect change through money, destructive. They’re given to moralizing and abstraction, and beside the other characters, who are busy falling into the ocean, hanging themselves, or getting pregnant by unknown men, are made to seem weak and silly. They also have inner monologues, which the others don’t.
For instance, the first story in Red Dust, “Beyond Normal Requirements,” is about an English teacher who’s driving an Indian boy back to the reservation from boarding school to attend the funeral of his suicide brother. The teacher can’t understand the suicide, but wants to, and keeps digging away at the Indian: “his joy was to ferret out the motive.” The boy, on the other hand, isn’t interested in reasons, explanations, motives. He merely accepts facts. Indeed, many of Valgardson’s characters seem to act without anything identifiable as a “motive” at all. They do things because these are the sorts of things they do, and they don’t subsequently reflect. There’s the danger of a Rousseauesque sentimentality in this approach: the poor, the foreign, the native, as more elemental and basic and therefore more virtuous than other people. But Valgardson is so deft you hardly notice it, and his elementals are simply too unpleasant to slip very far over the brink into sentimentality.
There’s another motif which occurs often enough in Valgardson’s stories to deserve mention: the sacrifice. Sometimes the sacrifice is a death, or an assumed death; sometimes it’s something else, such as a rape. Most of the time the sacrifice is unintended by the victim: in “Bloodflowers,” a young man is kept prisoner by islanders who hope he’ll make the third in a superstitious cycle of three deaths; in “The Curse,” a woman is stoned by her community in the mistaken belief that she’s a witch who has caused a child’s illness; in “Red Dust,” a man allows his feebleminded niece to be brutally raped in exchange for a hunting dog he wants. Very occasionally, as in the story in which a farmer with an incurable illness kills himself so his wife won’t be left bankrupted by medical expenses, the sacrifice is deliberate, and this is about as close as Valgardson gets to any kind of redemptive human act.
Valgardson’s world is easy enough to label part by part, but harder to convey. Finally it is made with language. The technique —laconic, flat, but with breathtaking twists and plummets and sudden dark gaps in understanding that open like crevasses —is hard to fault. It does what it should. One could argue that there are other things to be done, and of course there are; but not, I suspect, by Valgardson. He’s staked out his territory, and now it exists.