William Connor, University of Alberta
At the close of Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace,[1] the middle novel in David Adams Richards’s second trilogy, Adele Walsh stops by the grave of the novel’s central character and reads the marker: “Ivan Basterache—A Man—1957–1979.” Brief though it is, this epitaph effectively sums up Ivan’s character. Although his essential nobility is to some extent obscured by his rough manner and coarse language, Ivan demonstrates qualities traditionally associated with heroic manhood: He is courageous, resolute in following his conscience, and always ready to put the needs of others who lack his strength and ability ahead of his personal well-being. Unfortunately for Ivan, these qualities are less valued in the social setting of his day—a fictionalized version of Richards’s native Newcastle, New Brunswick—than they would have been in that same area in an older, simpler time. In Evening Snow local society is dominated by cliques, and most of the characters, in the interest of belonging, are eager to conform to whatever fad or concern appears to be ascendant at a given moment. Individualism tends to be resented, and a person like Ivan who is ethical in a common-sense way runs the risk of being excluded by one camp as having a “puritanical, brutal strain” even as he is dismissed by another for failing to appreciate its “hidden world where certain ethics” are “at war” (13). Set apart from the dominant groups, Ivan is lied about, threatened, beaten up, and, in effect, ostracized from the community, all in the name of social justice. Through an extended period of what amounts to persecution, he remains faithful to his nobler instincts, and, in the end, his refusal to abandon a horse left stranded in a forest fire by his less responsible father costs him his life.
Heroism of the kind Ivan demonstrates—its characteristics and consequences—is of central concern in the second trilogy, whichbegins with Nights Below Station Street,[2] for which Richards won the Governor General’s Award for fiction, and which concludes withFor Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down.[3] While the plots of these three novels are not closely related, the recurrence of secondary characters who represent the social evolution of the town over two decades and the concern with the heroic potential of rough, uneducated characters unify the trilogy. Each of the novels focuses on an unconventional male hero, the other two being Joe Walsh in Nights and Jerry Bines in Wounded. While the trilogy includes estimable women, it explores the idea of heroism most fully as it is demonstrated in these men. Joe, Ivan, and Jerry have much in common—in their backgrounds, in their ideas about what is right and important, and in their relationships with local society in change. These common elements represent the conception of heroism that shapes Richards’s fiction.
Nights takes place in the early 1970s in a social milieu characterized by receptiveness to fads and a general movement toward permissiveness. Its central action is Joe’s struggle in middle age to give up drinking and find work that his injured back will allow him to do. Joe has relied so heavily on alcohol and on his prodigious strength that he finds reshaping his life without them a difficult, painful struggle. Evening Snow takes place toward the end of the seventies. To the general trendiness that characterized the social background in Nights has been added a doctrinaire concern with liberal reform. In Nights, the faddists were often pretentious but, in effect, little more than bad influences on Joe. In Evening Snow, they are better organized, more powerful, more self-righteous, and more coercive. Ivan and Cindi, teenage friends of Joe’s daughter Adele in Nights, have been married for two years when meddling acquaintances, with little concern for either truth or Cindi’s welfare, make Ivan the target of their affected concern about family violence. Though still in his twenties in Wounded, Jerry Bines is a man with a past he cannot live down. After serving time in prison, he has tried to reform, but, as the main action of the novel takes place in the late 1980s, he remains a feared criminal in the eyes of the community. In Wounded, the rumors, gossip, and lies that were a social force in Evening Snow become the main narrative device, and the real Jerry Bines remains partially hidden behind a reputation created by people who in some cases barely know him. Following a personal code of right and wrong that few in his home town can appreciate, Jerry assumes responsibility for protecting the community in which he has become an outsider from escaped convict Gary Percy Rils.
Common features in the backgrounds of the three central characters emphasize the idea that heroism is more a matter of individual potential than a product of social conditioning. Joe, Ivan, and Jerry all have absent or ineffective parents and unstable childhoods, and all leave school early. Joe has “grown up in poverty” (N 72). He starts working at fourteen and drinking to excess almost as quickly: “It was in his nature to drink, and he had to drink—he wouldn’t be himself if he didn’t” (N 59). Joe says that his “parents were never married” (N 35); in his daughter Adele’s words, he “had no real parents at all” (N 35). The failures of Ivan’s parents are explored more fully. His mother abandons her family for a wealthier man, goes to live “next door to all her children,” and refuses to speak to them when they meet on the sidewalk (N 148). Insecure, habitually dishonest, and childishly irresponsible, Ivan’s father takes his two younger daughters to live with his own elderly parents while Ivan is left fending for himself from the time he is in his mid-teens. The significance of “A Man” on Ivan’s marker is emphasized throughout Evening Snow by the contrasting immaturity of his father, who in all respects but the physical remains very much a boy. Jerry’s mother dies when he is a small child and, after a year or two with his Uncle Joe Walsh’s family, he returns to his father, a delayed casualty of the Korean War, who is not only mentally unbalanced but a suicidal drinker as well. The narrative strategy ofWounded leaves the extent of Digger Bines’s mistreatment of Jerry in some doubt, but there is no doubt that Jerry’s childhood is violent and unsettled and that he grows up under the influence of a terrible role model. All three central characters by necessity become self-reliant when little more than children.
In the absence of conventional social conditioning, Joe, Ivan, and Jerry all develop personal notions of right and wrong, in which taking responsibility, both for other people and their own actions, plays an important part. Although they bear the emotional scars of their difficult childhoods, they refuse to use their backgrounds as an excuse for their failures. In marked contrast to their parents, they are all concerned with the well-being of friends, neighbors, and, especially, family members. More than anything else, it is his consciousness of his duty to his family that allows Joe to conquer his alcoholism. Joe’s relationship with his own parents is merely suggested, but it is made clear that Ivan and Jerry suffer more from parental irresponsibility than might otherwise be the case because they remain loyal to their parents and refuse to blame them. As a teenager, Ivan “adored his mother. The whole idea that a mother could do no wrong ... was a matter not to be argued about” (N 148). He “felt responsible, not only for his father, but for his two sisters—Valerie, who was eleven, and Margaret, sixteen” (ES 22). And while his father constantly gets him into trouble and shows no sense of loyalty toward him, Ivan, whose heart characteristically overrules his head, can “forgive him almost everything” because of his “marvelously sad eyes” (ES 24). Jerry also refuses to blame his father, who, he explains, “had a bad head on him” and “sometimes couldn’t help what he did” (W 35). Although Jerry shows little regard for either the law or social proprieties, his sense of the more fundamental human responsibility for family is strong enough that, at some risk to his own life, he remains with his half-mad father taking care of him as he drinks himself to death.
In view of the skepticism these and other Richards novels show about the potential of social agencies to improve individual lives, it is particularly significant that caring for family and children is treated as an innate rather than a learned response in these characters. Not only do Joe, Ivan, and Jerry develop this sense of responsibility without training or role models; they retain it in spite of the negative examples of their parents. Evident throughout the trilogy, the superiority of intuitive goodness over socially prescribed forms of goodness is perhaps most explicit in Wounded where university-trained Vera Pillar serves as a foil to the almost illiterate Jerry in various exchanges. These exchanges repeatedly stress the soundness of Jerry’s instinctive decency as compared with the theoretical views on human behavior of Vera, whose profound lack of self-knowledge is at times funny but ultimately very sad. When, for example, Jerry recalls going to live with his father after discovering him dead drunk in the street and stopping to protect him, Vera tries to lead him to attribute his actions to a perceived burden of obligation. “Bines did not understand these questions. ‘Obligated—no—not so much. He was my father’” (W 35). Similarly, the contrast between Vera’s bitter quarrel with her husband over her proposal to change their daughter’s name to hers and Jerry’s initiation of a similar change so that his son will not be harmed by his bad reputation suggests that Jerry has grown through experience to a level of unselfishness unattainable through formal education. Richards’s novels are often seen as being cynical and pessimistic because they deal extensively with society’s failures; however, this view ignores their compensatory belief in the innate capacity for kindness and generosity in individuals. Beneath the bleak social realism for which he has most often been praised, Richards’s novels are essentially affirmative in their treatment of human nature.
That the heroic goodness of Joe, Ivan, and Jerry is both innate and tenacious is emphasized by its emerging in spite of adverse social conditions and their early mistakes in life. Given their backgrounds, it is all but inevitable that they all exhibit antisocial behavior early in life, and, partly in consequence of this behavior, they become outsiders, looked down on by respectable circles within the community. Not only does Joe drink too much, but he also loses control of himself when he does. He is repeatedly described as being embarrassed and uncomfortable with his wife Rita’s more fashionable friends, and when he finally commits himself to giving up drinking, his isolation becomes even more complete: “Every night Joe remained an outsider to the one thing he had in common with other men, a capacity and willingness to drink” (N 124). In his mid-teens in Nights Ivan is wild and involved in petty crime. In Evening Snow, he has matured but is still “always a loner” (ES 26). To more conventionally respectable, middle-class characters, he appears “as if he had come out of another world entirely” (ES 71). In The Wounded, Jerry has served four terms in prison by the time he is in his early twenties. Having returned to a town that has “grown up” in his absence and become “another town” (W 3), he “spends all his time alone” (W 11) and is said to belong to “an age” that is “being swept away and replaced by a new age” (W 161). Being outsiders has obvious practical disadvantages for these characters, but it also offers one important benefit: it frees them to think for themselves, an opportunity that fuller integration in society denies many characters in the trilogy.
The idea of an older culture in conflict with a newer set of ideas brought into the area through university education and mass media is central in the second trilogy, and, as outsiders lacking formal education, the three central characters are linked to the indigenous culture. All three shy away from the sorts of superficial relationships that pass for friendship among many of the minor characters and prefer to retreat from the town, where they are outsiders, to the woods, where they are more at home. This affinity for the wilderness points to their connection with the more primitive, more traditional life in the Miramichi Region, where lumbering has always been the primary industry and where, not long ago, hunting and fishing were important sources of food. In traditional local society people relied more on neighbors for assistance than on social institutions, and, although they are outsiders, Joe, Ivan, and Jerry all show an old-fashioned willingness to help anyone in need. In a town where social concern is more a source of power and self-aggrandizement than benevolence, however, their quiet generosity goes barely noticed, and they find few defenders when they are singled out as safe targets by groups confident that they have “the court of world opinion on their side” (ES 52).
While Joe, Ivan, and Jerry possess the strength and courage to defend themselves against the sort of direct, physical aggression they might have faced in a frontier society, their guilelessness makes them vulnerable to the kind of verbal abuse they face in their own time. Joe is depicted as almost childlike in his dealings with his wife’s circle of acquaintances, and when, for example, his wife blacks her eye falling against a washing machine, he becomes, without any means of defense, a wife-beater in the gossip of the day (N 157-58). Similarly, Ivan is unaware that people use “words like shotgun blasts in the dark” (ES 13), and when Cindi injures herself during an epileptic seizure, he cannot escape blame. When Vera Pillar twists Jerry’s life story in her dogmatic tract entitled The Victims of Patriarchy (and Its Inevitable Social Results), only at the end does he suspect that he is “being used for something much more complex than he ever realized” (W 183). It is, of course, ironic that these characters become the victims of groups that use as their primary justification their professed concern for victims.
Given their limitations and misfortunes, it would be easy to view these characters as anti-heroes, victims in a society they can neither understand nor hope to change for the better. However, this would involve judging them according to standards treated critically both within the trilogy and elsewhere in Richards’s work. “It’s always been a prick in my side,” Richards has said, “that I’ve been recognized as a social realist or a writer who writes about social things.”[4] He has stated variously that he is “continually striving to show the underlying intentions behind surface action”[5] and to get at “the things of the heart.”[6] Nights, Evening Snow, and Wounded are essentially stories of personal growth; society, however effectively realized, is secondary. While the central characters face many external difficulties, their basic achievement consists of overcoming their own fears and weaknesses in order to realize their heroic potential.
Heroism is a state of being that has little to do with the status acknowledged by society, and the heroic goodness of the central characters is defined more by the motives than the consequences of their actions. Viewed from this perspective, Joe’s story becomes not simply a struggle with unemployment, addiction to alcohol, and stresses on his family, but a private, inner battle with the guilt and insecurity that have contributed to his problems. In the end, Joe is inwardly a stronger person, more at peace with himself and so better able to take care of his family and to help others through his continuing involvement in Alcoholics Anonymous. Ivan, who is almost saintly in his generosity, has fewer failings to overcome. His victory consists of remaining true to his generous impulses in spite of the bad influence of those around him and the pressure placed on him to become less noble than he by nature is. Throughout his fatal struggle to save the horse, Ivan tries to convince himself to leave, but he simply cannot bring himself to act contrary to his heroic nature. The horse has little economic value. Ivan is not responsible for its misfortune. No one will thank or praise him if he succeeds in saving it. But in the fictional world of Evening Snow such considerations matter very little; in effect, the absence of any practical advantage for Ivan emphasizes the selflessness of his actions.
Similarly, while Jerry’s death at the hands of Rils accomplishes very little in that Rils’s eventual capture seems almost incidental and no one else in the novel fully understands that he is attempting to protect people in the town from his old associate, his death is not futile. While many will suspect his motives and dismiss his death as the final sordid episode in a violent, criminal life, the reader knows that it is the culmination of a series of acts of atonement growing out of his acceptance of responsibility for his past mistakes. In these novels, heroic acts are defined not by their consequences but by the quality of mind out of which they grow—by unselfishness of an individual’s motives.
In view of the priority given inward experience over external efficacy, it may seem oddly irrelevant that Joe, Ivan, and Jerry are courageous and capable fighters. However, maintaining one’s independence while growing up without support in a hostile, threatening environment requires bravery. These characters have been tested and have learned not to be intimidated, and it is their bravery much more than their ability as fighters that is important. In Richards’s words, “people who make courageous decisions about life and about themselves generally have physical courage, because if they don’t, they cannot have moral courage.”[7]The essential requirement for heroics is not physical toughness but mental toughness, a readiness to stand up for what seems right regardless of the consequences. It is worth noting also, since Richards’s novels have often been seen as overly concerned with violence, that Joe, Ivan, and Jerry are far less violent during the present action of their novels than they have been in the past. To a large extent, they have outgrown violence, but they have not outgrown courage.
In summary, the common elements in the second trilogy suggest a different view of Richards’s fictional world than the usual critical emphasis on his treatment of Miramichi society. The nobility of the central characters shows that underlying Richards’s social criticism is a compensating belief in the potential goodness of individuals, particularly those who resist the influence of imported cultural values. This goodness grows out of a sound intuitive sense of fairness and responsibility, and it draws on the moral and physical courage required for independent action. While the heroes of the second trilogy show little regard for society’s formal and informal codes of behavior, they are more generous and kind than conventionally proper characters. Despite their social awkwardness, they are characteristically sensitive to the feelings of other people, and notwithstanding the exterior hardness that the circumstances of their lives have forced on them, they retain an almost childlike innocence. The idealistic undercurrent represented by these characters need not qualify Richards’s much praised achievement in representing Miramichi society in his fiction, but it does constitute an important and largely ignored dimension in his work.
NOTES
[1] David Adams Richards, Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990) 226. All references are to this edition
and are cited parenthetically in the text after the abbreviation ES.
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[2] David Adams Richards, Nights Below Station Street (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 1988). All references are to this edition and are
cited parenthetically in the text after the abbreviation N.
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[3] David Adams Richards, For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1993). All references are to this edition and
are cited parenthetically in the text after the abbreviation W.
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[4] Andrew Garrod, Speaking for Myself: Canadian Writers in
Interview (St. John’s, Nfld: Breakwater, 1986) 211.
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[5] Kathleen Scherf, “David
Adams Richards: ‘He Must Be a Social Realist Regionalist’,“ Studies in Canadian Literature 15.1
(1990): 168.
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[6] Linda-Ann Sturgeon, “David
Adams Richards: Loving Against the Odds,” MA Thesis, University of New
Brunswick, 1987, 235.
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[7] Don Conway,
“Courage and Compassion: An Interview with David Adams Richards,” Educational Services 6.1 (1984): 5.
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