W hat do you say when everything has been said? How about: It won’t be the same. We’ll miss him. He was creative, extravagantly generous, humane, unique. What more?
What more? I said to Tiff—figuratively, as I am not yet a truly crazy person out of one of his books. Tiff gave one of those big smoke-filled laughs of his and said, What about the animals?
Well, yes. There were always animals, in the life and in the work. Cats, a lot of those. At Stone Orchard, his farm, a cathouse full. Dogs, sometimes. Birds, occasionally. A bear once. The entire menagerie, in Not Wanted on the Voyage. And a whole slew of rabbits.
What’s this thing you had about Peter Rabbit? I said to Tiff. You did manage to get him in a lot. It wasn’t just whimsy, was it? You knew he wasn’t a cuddly stuffed toy or a kiddie’s milk mug, although you collected those. It’s a dark story when you come to think of it. But what was it with you and him, precisely? You even chose him as your banned book, once.
Peter Rabbit, Tiff pronounced, in that voice that was always his voice— although he was known to do some wicked imitations of, for instance, me—Peter Rabbit, he pronounced, was Oscar Wilde backward.
He must have meant the Oscar who said, I live in fear of not being misunderstood. That, in an age in which being gay was not only a dangerous thing to be but also a crime, as it was when Tiff was young.
And a lot of his work revolves around that—being misunderstood, and also not being misunderstood, which could be even worse. And the fear of both. What to disguise, what to reveal, when to lie and when to blurt, what are the consequences of each? But though this fear is omnipresent in Tiff’s writing, it’s most often shown in a social context—the context of other people. Being different and going your own way can shatter the family, which sometimes rejects you but sometimes takes you back.
In the very early novel The Last of the Crazy People, the young boy bumps off every single one of his relatives, which is one solution. In The Wars, the boy shatters the family not only by going off to war but also through a forbidden act; then he escapes into permanent wounded mind-lessness. In Pilgrim, the boy-man is a mute in a lunatic asylum. (Being mute—being voiceless—having your voice taken away—being unable to speak, or to speak out—these motifs recur.) However, in the last novel, Spadework, the family is shattered by the defection of its husband/father, who falls in love with a man; but then it accepts the shatterer back, and integrates him again into the social group.
This is the Peter Rabbit solution; and in the days of Tiff’s adolescence, when gay people were so frequently shunned by their relations and gay-bashing was official state policy, how difficult it was to achieve, and therefore how desired. It’s the wounds of youth that leave the deepest scars.
Consider how the Peter Rabbit story goes. Peter’s father is dead. Peter is the sole son in a family consisting of a widow and three conventionally well-behaved daughters. Mother Rabbit issues a taboo—no Mr. McGregor’s garden for Peter, no forbidden fruits and especially vegetables, no great big dangerous man with huge boots and a rake with a very, very long handle.
But Peter promptly violates this taboo. In doing so, he runs the risk of devastating the precarious Rabbit family even farther. Off he goes to do the forbidden thing, involving, in his case, lettuces. He comes to grief, and like Oscar Wilde is found out and pursued and incarcerated—not in Reading Jail, but in a watering pot. However, he makes a dash for it, and although by now he’s feeling quite ill, he manages to get back to the safety and warmth of his family, where he is cared for and given camomile tea and tucked into bed. And I have to say that nobody has written about the comforting pleasures of clean, fresh, crisp pajamas better than Tiff.
In so many of Tiff’s books, the character feels like (and sometimes actually is) a small, helpless animal on the run, excluded by definition, ill or blind, lacerated in body or heart, seeking a place of shelter where he will no longer be alone but part of a loving group; no longer an I, but an us.
So, there’s my interpretation, I said to Tiff. You always wanted more academic literary criticism of your work. D’you buy it?
Not bad about Peter, he said. Though a little overdone about the rake. But you’ve missed something about animals in general.
What’s that? I said. Apart from the simple fact that you were fond of them.
They can’t talk, he said. They are allowed no voices. We don’t listen. They live in fear of being misunderstood. They are so often . . . excluded. They are at our mercy. And we have had the unmitigated gall to proclaim that they have no souls!
So, are there any rabbits in Heaven? I said. Now that you’re in a position to know. Not to mention cats.
I demanded them, said Tiff. It wouldn’t have been Heaven without them.
1. On the occasion of the Timothy Findley Memorial Evening, Convocation Hall, University of Toronto, September 29, 2002.