Wilf Cude

Truth Slips In: Timothy Findley's Doors of Fiction

This is an essay about three recent books, strange and wonderful and also, perhaps just a little bit, about the strange and wonderful man who wrote them. The three books, first, since the priority of literary analysis must always be with the books: Inside Memory, Headhunter, and The Piano Man's Daughter, in order of their appearance. Inside Memory, as it is first in that order, will be first in this essay: revealing a good deal about the creation of fiction, it cannot help but further reveal something about the creator of fiction, in this case the greatly gifted Timothy Findley. And the most important revelation, disclosing as much about the author as the art, is that truth is ultimately the intimidating fundamental objective of any serious writer of fiction. Of fiction, please note, rather than history, or philosophy, or sociology. "Why must we always disguise the truth as fiction?" Findley asks in his workbook. His answer points up the inescapable reluctance of human beings to accept the full potential of their own reality in any other form. "Because truth slips in," he muses, "through whatever door it can find."1 This essay, then, concerns two doors of fiction, one swinging bleakly and terribly open to horror, the other nudged eccentrically yet sensitively ajar to hope - and a window of memoir partially undraped, shedding a subtle measure of illumination upon each.

The opening chapters of Inside Memory themselves suggest the two natures, opposites that are nonetheless also paradoxically united in human behavior, of these two doors. The first chapter, "Remembrance," is a soft and suitably elegiac meditation on the meaning of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month: on the meaning of Remembrance Day, which necessarily must focus attention on man's ghastly inhumanity to man, no matter how gently considered. The second chapter, "From Stage to Page," includes a wryly warm account of how the actress Ruth Gordon cautioned a youthful Timothy Findley against the despair that might attend such burdensome thoughts: "get up, stand up and laugh," she had exhorted him, by which she meant, he much later concluded, "that after darkness, something must be done about the need for light."(p. 19) Precisely so. And this is the advice, we should not be surprised to learn, that informs the entire Findley canon. Particularly the three most recent titles. Headhunters must be regarded, without any question, as the darkest, starkest, most frightening thing that this author has ever produced. But Inside Memory not only provides us with hints about the sources, factual and psychological, of this terrifying accomplishment: it also points us further ahead to the production of The Piano Man's Daughter. and that novel, narrated by one Charlie Kilworth, piano tuner with perfect pitch who is maimed ("emasculated. There is no nice way to say this"2) by a land-mine near Ortona, achieves with rare delicacy this most artistically demanding of spiritual tasks: following darkness with a poignant story that does indeed do something about the need for light.

Ruth Gordon's advice to her young friend was occasioned by her feeling, as Findley surmised, "that mine was a generation of depressed defeatists." Ruth certainly understood that "defeat and darkness existed," but she simply "refused their blandishments." Instead, she recommended laughter, not as an escape, but as an antidote. That prescription for mental health gave Findley, who was "twenty-three and loving it," much to ingest over the years to come. Granted, his generation did in fact have a peculiar and sad distinction: they were the ones whose childhood had been dislocated, crushed or seared by the Second World War. "Our fathers went to war," Findley recalls sombrely. "Our cities were bombed. And some of us went to Auschwitz. Our childhood ended with the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb." Darkness enough and to spare, upon mature consideration. "What darkened our moods - above all, I guess - " he continues, "was the vision we had been forced to endure of what people really do to one another - and, as children, we had been powerless to stop it."(p. 19) This affinity for the helpless and vulnerable, intensified by burning indignation about the injustice and viciousness of what may be inflicted upon them through human agency, supplies the main body of themes linking every novel Findley has written thus far. Hence, his novels are not mere creatures of the imagination alone, filaments of fancy to be set aside in the reader's mind from the historical realities we all must sooner or later confront. "Fiction is just disguised non-fiction," Farley Mowat once snorted, during a discussion of the two genres over his kitchen table.3 Inside Memory serves to demonstrate that, with the works of Timothy Findley in any event, Farley was undoubtedly bang on the money.

A quarter of a century ago, Findley visited the Northwest Territories and took a journey "down a great wide river, with dark forests crowding either side." Every so often, "these forests fell back to make way for the entrance of some other river which came pushing and panic-stricken out of the dark - tumbling helter-skelter over rocks and fallen trees, as if pursued by beasts and spirits - as if terrified by the darkness itself." This fierce immensity left a lasting impression on the artist. "And I thought" he marveled "-if the rivers are afraid - what should I be?" With that thought, a little later, came the first stirfings of a novel: "perhaps a short, incisive horror-story about the spirit of man broken by the spirit of nature - a sick ambitious man perhaps, and a wilderness unwilling to give up its sovereignty after his intrusion." The stirrings were in a sense thwarted, at least for a couple of decades, by a rather conventional happenstance: during a brief illness, Findley read Conrad's Heart of Darkness and decided immediately to abandon his own project. There was no touch of either 6 4 self-denigration or anger that the subject had been dealt with" motivating this decision; rather, Findley just acknowledged that "whatever I wanted to say had been so perfectly said." Responding only to a need to express his heartfelt appreciation of Conrad's brilliance, he toyed with the fantasy of publishing the ultimate slender volume: one page "between neat blue covers" offering two brief sentences. "In lieu of writing his own book, the would-be author respectfully draws your attention to Heart of Darkness by JosephConrad. Init,allthatthewould-beauthorwouldsay-issaid. The End."(p.157) But that was scarcely the end, at all.

This playful renunciation, clearly, was the initial hesitant step in the decades-long journey towards Headhunter. Findley's real obstacle at the time (though he could hardly have recognized it then) was that he had not sufficiently searched through the nature of what Kurtz might have glimpsed, teetering in fragility on the brink of death. What was it, exactly, that tore out the last whispering cry, what was the image, the vision ripping free that final fear-freighted gasp: "The horror! The horror!" Conrad doesn't tell us, but he gives us plenty of scope for our own imaginations to explore. And Findley's imagination, we have already noted, could meet even this enormous intellectual, spiritual and artistic challengein amultiplicity of ways. Thus, over the ensuing years, as Inside Memory documents, his imagination grappledtime and againwithvarious elements of this darkness. What might constitute "the horror" was close enough to Timothy Findley, as it was to Charlie Marlow, and as in truth it is to everyone today. It could be glimpsed even in early childhood, in what had been done to the shattered body of Findley's Uncle Tif, "who died at home" of injuries inflicted in the First Woild War. "He didn't die in the War, but because of it,"(p.6) Findley reports simply: and the subsequent pages of Inside Memory touch again and again on what that might mean. We encounter Ernest Thesiger ("Actor." Findley remembers. "Eccentric. Friend."), who had returned from Flanders in 1917 "with his hands so badly mangled it was thought they must soon be amputated," summarizing the battlefield in seven teffor-tinged eloquent little words: "The noise, my dear - and the people." (p.40) And we encounter Wilfred Lawson, another actor who "took to drink with cold deliberation," as relief from the pain of "a metal plate in his skull:" the plate allowed him to live after he had been "dreadfully wounded in the FirstWorld War," and the alcohol allowed him to function as an actor thereafter, since the only other alternative available was the unthinkable living death of morphine.(pp.48-9) And at last we encounter the crumbling veteran of World War Two whom Findley identifies only as a "gentle, industrious and friendly man who could not bear what had befallen him" at Amheim: the loss of a leg, and memories that left him "riding along the edge of a nervous breakdown."'(pp.67-8) Surely, in the name of God, all that was horror enough.

It was enough to eventually impel Findley into his third novel, The Wars: and there we are exposed to the numbing insight, shockingly rendered by this author, that warfare is one of the cruelest and most disgusting manifestations of sadistic homoeroticism. Warfare, this provocatively humane cry from the heart screams in protest, is - quite literally - rape. Of soldiers, by soldiers. Youths, little more than children, doing unspeakable things to the bodies of other youths. Rape. The book underscores this, hammers the perception home. Rape. At the center of Inside Memory, Findley recalls the kindly and well-intentioned pressure on him from his editor, his typist, and even Margaret Laurence to excise the rape scene from The Wars: the still-contentious and horrifically realized scene in the bathhouse behind the front lines, where Robert Ross is overwhelmed in the darkness and violated by his fellow soldiers. Editor, typist and Margaret Laurence are concerned, and with good reason, that the scene will get the book "banned by school boards and libraries:" and Findley, while conceding the validity of their concern, dwells upon his anguish over whether or not to comply. He considers at length the argument that the perception is "there already," but cannot bring himself to believe anything but that the scene is "intrinsic - deeply meshed in the fabric of the book as I first conceived it." Prompting his internal debate is Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, with tenor and baritone singing together the concluding lines from Wilfred Owen's poem recasting in modem military history the story of Abraham and Isaac. "Lay not thy hand upon the lad / Neither do anything to him," the Angel of God commands. "But the old man would not so - and slew his son / And half the seed of Europe, one by one." The message, thus doubly reinforced by genius, could never be misconstrued. "It was rape," Findley insisted. "Tbe scene stays."(pp. 150- 1) And he was right.

The cliché "a hard act to follow" has never been more appropriate than here. The Wars, as Findley's companion Bill Whitehead records in amazement, despite its almost devastating depiction of mindless carnage and ruthless exploitation, is beyond everything else a triumph of affirmation. "Dreadful things happened to Robert Ross, the hero," Whitehead asserts: "but still, the book did end up saying yes."(p. 136) Could this author do anything like that again? He did, again and again and again, his artistry forcing him even deeper into the darkness, always to reach beyond it in quest of doing something about the need for light. The memory of photographs of Dachau, taken by the American army photographer Ivan Moffat, first through the camp's gates when that unspeakable place was liberated, seared permanently into Findley's consciousness after he glimpsed them one evening in Hollywood, Califomia. "Nothing-not my nightmares, not the worst of my imagination, not the worst of my experience - had opened the door on the remotest possibility of what I saw that night," Findley recalls: "I was looking into hell - and hell was real." There, at the core of Tinseltown, Moffat's photographs in his hand, he had what he described as "akindof epiphany:"therealizationthat "we are all acollective hiding place for monsters."(pp.310-11) After completing The Wars, he returned to that realization directly, staring fixedly into the soul of Fascism in Famous Last Words, staring in almost mesmerized fascination through the eyes of Captain Freyberg and Lieutenant Quinn, American liberators haunted by their respective encounters with Dachau. And then again, he worked through that realization anew, giving us apocalypse as war crime in Not Wanted on the Voyage, recreating the wanton slaughter of innocents - animals and children - during fire and flood, portraying the God of Vengeance as truly and deservedly dead, represented in the end on earth by the patriarch Noah as Fascist egomaniac. And yet again, he reworked that realization from a most contemporary perspective, summoning up a remarkable counterpart of Ronald Reagan in the avuncular President Warner of The Telling of Lies, a superficially benign modem political presence who functions as even more threatening alter ego to the Japanese war criminal Colonel Norimitsu: the one countenancing a C.I.A. illegally funding dangerous medical experimentation with drugs on innocent psychological patients in Canada, the other commanding with stoic obduracy the execution of either prisoners or guards at an internment camp in Java. "No one is totally monstrous," Norimitsu tells the novel's heroine, Vanessa Van Home: "not even monsters." This is a dark truth Findley lets repeatedly slip in, through door after fictional door, across his entire canon.

But what, then, of doing something about the need for light? "Surely, if we can imagine Dachau," Findley remarked in a speech, "we can also imagine harmony."(p.315) For him, he recalls elsewhere, such imagining must involve the graceful and lovely memory of his parents, when he "saw them last together" in the garden of his home: the garden of the farmstead Stone Orchard, Cannington, in the spring of 1980. His parents were "seated on a wooden bench surrounded by peonies, delphiniums and cats and there was a split-rail fence behind them." They were trying to remember a poem, a fragment from Euripedes, which they recited together, concluding with these lines:

           .... And every seed
 Earth-engendered back to earth shall pass,
 And back to heaven the seeds of sky;
 Seeing all things into all may range
 And, sundering, show new shapes of change,
 But never that which is shall die.

His father had written the fragment out for him many years ago, and Findley had used the last line as the dominant epigraph for The Wars: but "now that Father is dead and his ashes scattered," he tells us quietly, the memory "gains in poignancy."(pp.258-9) Poignancy, yes - and harmony. "Never that which is shall die." This truth is glimpsed by the reader, looking through the eyes of Lieutenant Quinn in Famous Last Words, of Noah's wife Mrs. Noyes in Not Wanted on the Voyage, of Nessa Van Home in The Telling of Lies. In a world contaminated with horrors, Findley steadfastly contends, this one truth, too, is inescapable. "Never that which is shall die." And so his novels constantly return, however hesitantly on occasion, to the task of doing something about the need for light.

That said, it must nevertheless be conceded: reading from The Wars through to Headhunter can be a daunting trip down and down, spiralling deeper and deeper into darkness, straining more and more after the light. Coming at last to uneasy, almost hopeless, rest with none other than Joseph Conrad himself. The epigraph to Book One of Headhunter is both invitation and warning. "This also," Marlow said suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth." But the dark place we find ourselves visiting "on a winter's day, while a blizzard raged through the streets," is Toronto. Toronto, Ontario? Toronto The Good?!? But then again, why not? If the Congo, if London, England, then Why not Toronto? The contrast between the snow swirling down outside the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library and the steamy mists of Kurtz's jungle is one of temperature, not color: for both are, as Marlow said suddenly, blurting out invitation and warning, "dark places of the earth." And these geographically distant places are merged in an instant's reading, for us as readers as well as for the novel's central character, when in the opening paragraph Kurtz manifests himself among the "woven jungle of cotton trees and vines that passed for botanic atmospheres"4 in the Library. Kurtz, the Kurtz, Charlie Marlow's Kurtz, literally stepping from the pages of Conrad's novel, to stride purposefully past Lilah Kemp, retired librarian and schizophrenic spiritualist who had inadvertently called him forth, into the winter-dark streets of Toronto. "Kurtz, the harbinger of darkness. Kurtz, the horrormeister. Kurtz, the headhunter." Lilah tries to stop him, of course, to get him to go back into the book where he belongs. But she quickly realizes, as we do, that he is back in the book where he belongs. In this book, as well as Conrad's, limningoutfindley's all-Canadian visionof "thehor-ror." As that dark thought strikes home, it is hard for us to reflect that the darkest Canadian month is also the year's shortest. Out into the winter's storm goes Kurtz, with Lilah helpless to prevent his passing. Another patron of the Library looks up at the blast of snow and street noise as the door swings open and shut. "Be careful," he wams Lilah: "it's ajungle out there."(p.7)

In more ways than one. The extremely surrealistic atmosphere of that opening.chapter, at the outset almost defying us to willingly suspend our disbelief, is upon further inspection oddly quite successful. Lilah Kemp is every author's dream reader, a one-person audience so attuned to truth that she can actually bring literary characters to life. But in Findley's hands, the dream becomes nightmare, since Lilah's gift is largely involuntary. She has almost no control over the characters she conjures up from the pages of a book, which is how T. Rupert Kurtz is let loose upon Toronto. This is a chilling conceit, and Findley does his damnedest to scare us into fits with it. We can never be certain about Lilah's condition: she could be hallucinating, with the undeniable appearance of a Rupert Kurtz - a Dr. T. Rupert Kurtz -just something of a weird coincidence. After all, she is taking powerful medications to hold her illness in check: and we must occasionally ask, as the novel progresses, whether or not what Lilah sees is in reality what is happening in her increasingly darkened Toronto. Yet this question slowly loses its urgency as we follow Lilah's maneuvers to return Kurtz to where he belongs, since her Toronto is recognizably our Toronto, much though we may not want to acknowledge the fact: and there is sufficient reality about all that to glut ourselves, if reality is in truth what we seek. Start with The Parkin Institute of Psychiatric Research, a variant of the Makin Memorial Institute of Montreal in The Telling of Lies, itself a clone of the very historical psychiatric monstrosity presided over by the late Dr. Ewan Cameron of McGill, where very real patients suffered very terrible injuries at the hands of so-called medical researchers.5 The Parkin is a place of mutilation, physical, mental, spiritual: and here, under the direction of Dr. T. Rupert Kurtz, the shrink is literally the headhunter. We get the picture, and the pun is intended, from a hellish triptych called The Golden Chamber of the White Dogs which dominates the Institute's main entrance. Mutilated bodies, severed heads, a youth in tormented agony, various mysterious male figures involved in what appears to be the casual inflicting of horror: "Moonmen without their silver suits," Lilah thinks, on her first viewing of the work, "Leatherheads without their leather " (p.410) The triptych is Toronto as setting for the horror, visualized as even Conrad could not have seen it, writing before Auschwitz, Dachau, Hiroshima, Nagasaki - and the killing fields of Cambodia, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia.... Findley's version of the horror, conceived decades after The Wars, for a North America where Camille Paglia has transfigured the Marquis de Sade into a cult guru at the cutting edge of trendy sexuality.6

The true heart of darkness, the genuine jungle out there, the real source of all the wars, is human nature: as Kurtz acknowledges, studying The Golden Chamber ofthe White Dogs, the artistic statement most plainly articulating his own essence, "there was nothing in the whole wide world of madness that was not the property of sanity as well."(p.102) And so, in this vilest of experiences, with the artist Slade providing the picture, the Parkin provides the noise, my dear. But let's not forget the people. While they are of Toronto, Findley makes sure we understand they come via Conrad's Congo. The poisonous patchwork personality Slade, apologist for slaughter, clad in harlequin: forerunner for Kurtz, here as in the Congo.7 The business pilgrims, rushing "to the interior," seekers after the obscene decaying riches that Kurtz might gather for them: here, as in the Congo. "You kiss ass, you suck cock, you get fucked. You smile," one such pilgrim intones as commercial credo. "Success. N'est-ce pas? An' I can do it all in two official languages."(pp.34-6) The curious native tribes, Moonmen and Leatherheads, occasionally and almost innocently destroying intruders into their space: here, as in the Congo. Then there are the embellishments, the ornaments, of what we choose to call civilization. On the periphery, the roving D-Squads, clad in bright yellow, exterminating birds and cats and dogs, suspected carriers of the dreaded new AIDS-like plague stumusemia: animal apocalypse, perhaps only parodying what we have done to ourselves, and prefiguring what we might yet do.8 And at the heart, the very core of everything dark, there is the Club of Men: carefully restricted to a unique type, educated, wealthy, pseudo-aristocratic, with peculiarly distinct tastes - the sort of man who frequents posh feeding places like Arlequino's, the sort of man who would never believe the Johnsonian adjective of "clubable" might exclude himself. Yet, so fierce is the appetite of this sort, snuff pom is too mild for him: he must fasten on infinitely more stomach-chuming fare, the real tender thing, first the seduction and then the mutilation of young people. Children, actually. Mostly boys, but then a girl or two, sophisticated kiddies who dabble in drugs, invited along to share the fun: at the climatic meeting, a boy and a girl perform together, the son of one member present and the daughter of another. We must suffer through the pornographic prelude, though the raw details of the razor work are mercifully left to our imaginations. No, not even Conrad could have visualized this. But after all, his era had not been schooled in the refinements so lovingly explored by academics with the cultured discernment of thinkers like Dr. Camille Paglia.

Which brings us smartly back to Dr. T. Rupert Kurtz, relaxing in his apartment with his "priceless" (p.81) ivory collection (most of the pieces African), or plying his trade in the Parkin Institute surrounded by the trappings of his intellectual dominion. Courtesy of his myriad unholy connections, to decadent society, to corrupt business, to the arcane govemmental/academic netherworld dispensinginstitutional grants, "Rupert Kurtz was God."(p.53) His psychiatric practice gave him unlimited access to soul-destroying chemical potions and furnished him with explicit knowledge of the Club of Men, an infernal combination which he twisted about for pleasure, profit and power.9 "Kurtz had known?" Charlie Marlow asks himself in stunned unbelief, venturing through files purloined from the Parkin, discovering the Club of Men and its bloody place in Kurtz's stygian scholarly empire. Yes, Charlie is in this novel as well, summoned out of that earlier Heart of Darkness by Lilah Kemp, conjured up to do something about the need for light. A visiting researcher at the Parkin, he slowly becomes enmeshed within the tangled ugly skein of perverted desires and vicious needs which Kurtz spun out of judiciously dispensed little yellow pills, seeing here as in the Congo what might most fittingly be described as the ultimate evil. "People do not kill their own children," Charlie thinks, brain racing frantically - much like our own, at this juncture - to reject what he is reading. "Jesus. People do not do that."(p.598) Regrettably, though, they do. Using a myriad disgusting methods. As indicated in this very real news item from the 31 October, 1994 issue of Time magazine. Police in St. Petersburg "are searching for clues in a series of slashings that have left one boy dead and three others disabled." The attacks, carried out by "a tall, fashionably dressed young man," involved the insertion of "a curved blade" in the victim's anus and subsequent disembowelment: "the motivations are sexual without question," the police report, "and the perpetrators are deeply psychologically disturbed."(p. 16) Camille Paglia would no doubt cite this as evidence of our genuine sexual nature. "You mean, they don't kill their own children the same way they don't screw their own children?" Charlie continues his internal interrogation. "Or was there something else you had in mind?" But no, Charlie had nothing else in mind. Except, crystallizing towards certainty, a new-found resolve that should mean as much to everyone else in our benighted world.10 "Do something.... Save the children."(p.598)

In this novel, that is the definitive breaking of the light. The development had been anticipated, however, by several preliminary touches. Most noteworthy is Findley's cameo appearance as a minor character. Charlie Marlow encounters him listed as a patient in the Parkin's files. "This fellow Findley," Marlow reads, is "a ranter" and "a writer." Intriguingly, "Marlow had never heard of him." Patient Findley seems obsessed with his professional role of "climbing down inside other people's lives to see if they're telling the truth or not;" and he stubbornly reiterates his discovery that "most of us are lying."(pp.202-3) A joke, n'est-cepas? Dare we laugh, even nervously? Yet this intrusion of history plays off nicely against an incident of almost perfect whimsy, when Lilah Kemp tells Charlie Marlow about Peter Rabbit's shoes. She had kept them as her "talisman," she explains, producing a pair of "awfully small" and "sort of old-fashioned" slippers, ever since she was "five years old:" and she is deeply mortified when Charlie is not convincing in masking his disbelief. He did hesitate for a moment, though, not because of "the impossible presence in this woman's life of a literary character," but because of "his own inner voice" taking him by surprise, "saying: yes - they do look like rabbit shoes...... But disbelief conquers, and Lilah reacts with "terrible vehemence," shouting: "Sometimes people tell the truth! Sometimes, people aren't lying!" Marlow, "sorry and exhausted," is left to reflect: "Kurtz was his master. Now this. Peter Rabbit's shoes." And we are left to re ect, now ain't that (to use the chapter's concluding words) "The truth."(pp.218-21) It is this lighter context that holds out some sense of hope throughout all the darkness. It brings us gratefully to Oliva Wylie Price's decision to have her child, the voice of the unborn resonating with a faint but powerful "Yes,"(p.602) countering if not nullifying the hideous affirmation at the Club of Men a few pages earlier. And Kurtz's fevered death comes shortly thereafter, his rambling whispering voice "itself an explorer lost in the wilderness to which its owner had led it," hissing about the horror as he dwindles towards damnation. "The future is a business proposition...... (p.614-15) Marlow walks away from the decay, soon to seek out Kurtz's intended. With her, in this novel as Conrad's, he lies about Kurtz's infamous last words. "This way," he reassures himself, "we write each other's lives - by means offictions. Sustaining fictions. Uplifting fictions. Lies." It is not a negative conclusion. "This way we point the way to darkness," he continues:"saying-come with me into the light."(p.622) We linger with Charlie a moment longer, savoring his determination to dismantle Kurtz's empire: and we finish with Lilah, clinging to Peter Rabbit's shoes, thinking: "It's only a book, they would say. That's all it is. A story. Just a story."(p.625)

Which brings us, finally, to The Piano Man's Daughter: the lightest and brightest major work, thus far, of Findley's often sombre canon. Not that there isn't tragedy here, too. There is, to say truly, what some might consider a more than ample supply. The piano man of the title is Tom Wyatt, an enchanting individual with a fine poet's name and a fine poet's way with words, with song: but he dies almost as soon as we meet him, trampled by bolting horses pulling a tramway car in the streets of Toronto, an end so mundane as to seem almost preposterous, "horrific and ridiculous,"(p.43) except that both incident and attendant sorrow are only too real. And his beautiful epileptic daughter Lily, born to Edith Yjlworth out of wedlock after Ede's one innocently passionate evening with Tom, herself dies in pathetic circumstances many years later: the victim of a fire at the Asylum for the Insane in Whitby, Ontario, a fire she might conceivably have set, she perishes "as she had lived, in a circle of strangers."(p.6) And Lily's death is prefigured throughout the work by the story of Ede's great-uncle, John Fagan, who "had the falling sickness" and who had visions of what "God wrote on the walls" and who burned himself and his parents to death by setting fire to their Dublin home.(p. 1 14) Were that not sufficient anguish, Lily's life is scarred by additional pain, repeatedly inflicted. Her favorite uncle Lizzie, " who always had about him the aura of "someone riding down to Camelot,"(p. 194) is stricken in early adulthood with a brain tumor and dies under the surgeon's knife on a kitchen table in an emergency operation. Her own early adulthood is marked by spells of almost otherworldy activity, and during one such spell her son Charlie is conceived: the father was "gone before I was born," Charlie much later recalls, with a tinge of bitterness, "an echo of Lily's own birth."(p.9) And her next (and last) suitor, the handsome, sensitive, imaginative and dashing Edward "Neddy" Harris, musician, dancer, singer, is killed at Mons, "where the War had begun:" killed senselessly and wastefully on "the eleventh day of the eleventh month at two minutes prior to the eleventh hour" - most cruelly, "the last Canadian to die in the War."(p.420) No wonder that Charlie Kilworth, who had taken his mother's maternal surname in lieu of the other he had never known, refuses at the novel's opening to consider having a child of his own. "No child of mine will ever sing Lily's song," he vows bleakly, as the Great Depression draws to its own fiery September close in 1939. "Once - for all its marvels was once too often."(p.9) Plenty of tragedy here, and no mistake.

Tragedy, yes: but not despair. The distinction is absolutely essential in order to fully appreciate the moral dimension of Findley's artistry. In the concluding pages of Inside Memory, he writes of "the last words in Doctor Johnson's journal: Against despair."12 Those two words summarize Findley's attitude towards "this experiment: life." He argues that "human beings can make the difference - consciously" by making choices: "choices - and a vow." There is no glib ease in this philosophy. "Nothing is harder, now in this present time, than staring down despair," he contends: "but stare it down we must." And doing so requires a proper sense of gratitude for life itself. "Be grateful, in your final hour, for life," Findley exhorts his audience. "Not for your life alone, but for the fact of life: for everything that is."(p.318) Nowhere in his canon is this gratitude more consistently and emphatically expressed than across the pages of The Piano Man's Daughter. Even as we mourn with the novel's characters the passing of such vital and extraordinary people as Uncle Lizzie and Neddy Harris, we rejoice that we have been privileged to know them at all. The terrible poignancy of their deaths, made more terrible by the almost staggering unreason behind each instance of the far-too-early and quite bizarre final summons, can serve only to accentuate the splendor of their existence. Uncle Lizzie at fifteen, sweeping his seven-year-old niece up in his arms and dancing with her the length of the assembly line at the Wyatt piano factory, the workmen applauding and cheering, Uncle Harry playing a newly finished piano and singing "Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde," Lily "transformed" by the event, Ede thinking "she had never seen the child so alive" and exclaiming to Eliza at the performance's end: "Mother! I'veneverbeensohappy! Never!"(p.128) NeddyHarris,onthe evening before his eighteenth birthday, the day he would enlist, arranging a fireworks display outside Number 84, mini-bangers, rockets, Catherine wheels blasting and flaring, "an affay of sparklers spelling out LILY KIIL WORTH," a concealed record player contributing "Keep the Home Fires Burning" to the pandemonium, and the next day's dawn revealing "a seeming fountain of helium balloons" attached to "every peak in the gabled roof' and a litter of small white feathers "adorning the wreckage of last night's display."(pp.407-8) These are two of Findley's most brilliant creations, and how could we ever forget them? They dance, they sparkle, they shine: they cannot be extinguished, their short lives enduring as bright beacons against despair. "Never that which is shall die."

Nor could we forget Lily, her name resonating tenderly from one of Christ's most life-enhancing observations. "Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." Amen. We most fondly recall Lily sitting with six-year-old Charlie in an almost-empty restaurant late one mid-winter night, noticing at the back of the room a man whose face had been seared nearly to obliteration by the flames of war, and then moving herself and Charlie to join him. Realizing he cannot speak, she reassures him that "everyone doesn't have to speak:" and then she reaches out to hold his hand, sitting there silently for half an hour, "telling him that he was not alone."(p. 146) The lesson lingers with Charlie all his life, finally and most mercifully weakening his resolve never to father a child. For Charlie's resolve was literally forged in fire, the flames that took great-uncle John and his parents, the all-too-hoffibly-similar flames that took Lily and "the others," the same flames that left Lily's wicker suitcase stained and smelling of smoke, "the scent being the same as a richly cured tobacco." But those flames could not efface what Lily called her "songs," tucked safely away in wickerwork: "artifacts, mementos, notebooks," lilting memories preserved "collected in a suitcase," each item having "its own voice." The novel follows Charlie piecing together the full story of his mother, for himself and for us, as he vows: "I will give her back her life."(pp. 10-12) And so he does, probing the meaning behind each of Lily's songs, tracing her history from fragment after fragment, reaching at last into the songs of another woman, the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, sent to him by Lily's old friend Eleanor Ormond - and thereby discovering the secrets of his own paternity. Emerging in this way from the process of narration, Lily lives most ardently and most completely when she tells Charlie, during their last meeting together, that he has an unborn daughter "out there waiting for you."(p.445) It is a thought that first chills him, especially after the events of the next day, the day of the Asylum fire, when "twenty inmates perished."(p.453) But the novel does not end there, with Lily's fiery finish. Somewhat like Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, she emerges from the furnace, moving beyond the shade of great-uncle John. In the chapter entitled "Coda," Charlie relates how he became reconciled with his estranged wife Alexandra, before he went overseas in 1942. And how, just before he was wounded, "altered - never to be the same," he learnedthatalexhadadaughter. BecauseCharlie,justbeforeleaving,had said "yes" to the unborn. The novel closes with Charlie, Alex and little Emma in the field where Lily was born, Emma holding "a large black ant" out to her father, the same sort of insect that had so fascinated her grandmother as a child. Charlie hears, at that instant, the lyrics of Lily's enduring, insistent song. "We were not - and we will never be alone."(pp.459-61)

"The writer comes back," Findley points out in Inside Memory. Elaborating upon Adele Wiseman's remark that "the writer goes down into the other world of hell for a few years and comes back up and tries to articulate the experience for everyone else," he develops his own statement of the artist's Orphean mission. "The main thing to remember is that the writer has a round-trip ticket." After descending into the depths, after staring down the darkest despair, "the writer comes back." It is the simple reality of surviving the horror, surviving somehow intact, surviving with integrity, that the writer conveys through artistry. "Hell can be survived," this strange and wonderful optimist insists: "and since everyone, at some point, goes through hell - this news is extremely valuable."(pp.181-2) Given Dachau, Hiroshima, Rwanda, OklahomaCity, Dunblane, the driving psychic need among us for this news is so great, it finally subverts all our damnablebarriers of custom, pride and self-interest-allowingtruthto slip in, through whatever door it can find. For that reason, the work of the serious artist must repay extensive scrutiny: and for that reason, too, the novels of Timothy Findley will endure.

Notes

1.Timothy Findley, Inside Memory: Pagesfrom a Writer's Notebook (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1990), p. 191. All further page references to this memoir will be given in parentheses in the text.

2. Timothy Findley, The Piano Man's Daughter (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1995), p.460. All further page references to this novel will be given in parentheses in the text.

3. Farley is an impassioned advocate of what he calls "subjective non-fiction," a genre he has commanded for many years. In his analysis of the nature of fiction, which he offered me over a cup of tea in the kitchen of his Cape Breton home, he nonetheless hit upon precisely the reason people do (and should) read novels: truth will slip in, as Findley argued, through any door it can find.

4. Timothy Findley, Headhunter (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1994),p.3. All further page references to this novel will be given in parentheses in the text.

5. See my review article on The Telling of Lies in The Antigonish Review (No. 68, Winter, 1987). And see also Allan Fotheringham's regular column in the 19 January, 1987 issue of Maclean's magazine, delineating Cameron's involvement with the CIA-funded research into "psychic driving" at McGill.

6. Paglia's devotion to the Marquis is evident throughout her first and much acclaimed venture into academic sensationalism, Sexual Personae (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). "The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) is a great writer and philosopher whose absence from university curricula illustrates the timidity and hypocrisy of the liberal humanities," she contends in one typical panegyric. "No education in the western tradition is complete without Sade. He must be confronted, in all his ugliness. Properly read, he is funny."(p.235)

7.The showing of Slade's viciously perverse art is also an occasion for the voicing of neo-Nazi propaganda. "I think that Julian Slade is the Mengele of art,"Griffin Price, aristocratic industrialist, casually observes to Kurtz. "It intrigues mejust to imagine what he will imagine next to improve the human race." Nothing if not persistent, he smilingly repeats the thought. "Wouldn't you agree, Rupert?" he asks. "The human race needs another Mengele to bring it up to date."(pp. 86-7) Here, by way of Auschwitz, we have an updated - and historically chilling -version of whatconrad's Kurtz scrawled across the final pages of hisjoumal: "Exterminate all the brutes!"

8. In the D-Squads, we have Findley's variation on Conrad's French man-of-war off the coast of Africa, mindlessly and aimlessly lobbing 6-inch shells into the jungle, ostensibly to destroy a camp of native "enemies," while "the men in that lonely ship were dying of fever at the rate of three a day." Charlie Marlow comments dryly that "there was a touch of insanity in the proceedings, a sense of lugubrious drollery inthe sight," all of which he attributes to "the merry dance of death and trade."

9. For those reluctant to believe that scholarly researchers could be seduced into the unprofessional pursuit of pleasure, profit and power, the report of H.W. Arthurs et al, Integriiy in Scholarship: A Report to Concordia University (April, 1994) might prove instructive. Commissioned to analyze the climate of professional ethics at Concordia after Dr. Valery Fabrikant gunned down four faculty colleagues, Arthurs (a former President of York University) and his two co-investigators exposed with some dismay "practices ... which are inconsistent not only with high standards of academic behaviour, but also with explicit University policies and with generally accepted standards of honesty and integrity." Iteniizing such obvious misconduct as the intimidation and victimization of students and junior faculty, the near-fraudulent manipulation of research funds, and the systematic recourse to questionable outside contracts, the Arthurs Commission concluded malpractice of this sort was engendered by "the almost inescapable pathology of the surrounding research culture, of systems of scholarly assessment, research funding and industry-university-govemment cooperation," a malign development in scholarship which "if not universal" is "certainly widespread."(pp.3-4)

10. Charlie's resolve is all the more meaningful, and all the more distanced from fiction, after the comprehension-paralyzing massacre of a kindergarten teacher and sixteen children, all between the ages of five and six, at Dunblane, Scotland, oh Wednesday, 13 March, 1996. The murderer, Thomas Hamilton, a former scout master driven by whispered rumors he had sexually molested minors, turned his gun on himself after becoming the Pied Piper from Hell.

11. Findley's assignment of a distinctly feminine nickname to this charming male character is a flourish of gentle humor with variations elsewhere. We puzzle over the origin of "Lizzie," rejecting the obvious "Elizabeth" or "Eliza," and give up until we happen across the good Irish name "Lisgard" - which is also the name oflizzie's father. Somewhat similarly, in Inside Memory, we learn of Thornton Wilder's impatience with his protege's nickname of "Tiff'. "What would you call me if my name was Tiffany?" Findley once challenged him. "Fiffany," came the answer. "And that was that."(p.14)

12. Johnson's last journal entry has nestled in this author's memory for a long time. At the conclusion of my first interview with him, shrewdly recalling my casual admission that I had done my master's thesis on Samuel Johnson, he inscribed my copy of The Wars in this manner. "To Wilfred - A Johnsonian - Against despair. From Tiff, at Antigonish, 1982." The words "Against despair" are underscored twice. The book, a yellowing and battered Penguin, is one of my most cherished possessions.

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