The Bay of Love, Sorrows and Evaluators: David Adams Richards

Pottersfield Portfolio: New Writing from Canada and abroad, edited by Tony Tremblay.
Vol. 19, No. 1, Fall 1998. Special Issue on David Adams Richards. pbk. 127 pp, $8.00.

The Bay of Love and Sorrows: A Novel by David Adams Richards. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998. hard cover, 307 pp, $29.99.

In fall, 1997, the film adaptation of David Adams Richards' 1988 novel, Nights Below Station Street, premiered at the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax. Richards himself attended the event. Much of the film was shot, the closing credits revealed, in smalltown southern Ontario. As the audience filed out of the toney Park Lane Cinemas, Richards stood, rather uneasily, it seemed, by the exit doors. One member of the audience, probably referring to the shooting location, shouted across the crowd at Richards: "New Brunswick wasn't good enough forya, eh?" The sarcastic tone of this accusation brought a smile to Richards' face, but it was a smile tinged with sadness, and, at the risk of reading too much into the only glimpse I have ever had of Richards, what was perhaps a slightly hurt expression.

Despite the numerous awards (among them Governor Generals' awards) Richards has received for his writing, he has been no stranger to criticism, especially earlier in his literary career. The anonymous parting shot outside the Halifax movie theatre serves as a reminder of that. Ever since Richards' fictional world of rural New Brunswick was first delineated in The Coming of Winter in 1974, critics and reviewers have repeatedly used words such as "bleak," "dour" and "inarticulate" to describe Richards' characters and the worlds they inhabit. Richards is one of those writers whose work seems to generate a polarized readership. While some critics and reviewers see him as one of the truly great writers Canada has produced, others dismiss him as, well, dour or "too regional" or to quote a Halifax Herald reviewer of Richards' latest novel, The Bay of Love and Sorrows, "unremittingly bleak."

The twenty essays in Pottersfield Portfolio's special issue on, Richards, guest-edited by Tony Tremblay (also the joumat's final issue under the editorship of Ian Colford), by and large promote the view that Richards is atruly great writer who has too often been misunderstood. As such, the issue represents a kind of collective tribute to Richards and his work. Tremblay's editorial essay sets the tone, calling Richards "without a doubt the most admired and berated and misunderstood Canadian writer of the century" (9; Tremblay's emphases). Tremblay also refers to Richards as "our great moralist," comparing him to Morley Callaghan and, outside Canada, Kafka and Melville. Tremblay frames his dicussion with two claims: first, that "on the strength of our institutionalizing fervour, we have become "a culture of critics, openly hostile to artists" (6) and secondly, that "establishment critics," in their "rough handling" of Richards, "have sought to discredit him" (6). Richard's own essay, which follows Tremblay's editorial, corroborates this view. States Richards: "there is always manifest a realization, that it is still (and always will be) the evaluator's world" (15).

As suggested above, the "evaluators" in Tremblay's collection are largely sympathetic ones. The essays range from personal reminiscences of Richards to more academic discussions of his work, but even the latter maintain a fresh, conversational tone and high level of readability. The essays fall into three groups: biographical accounts of Richards; discussions of what one contributor calls the "demonization" of Richards; examinations of stylistic features and central themes and motifs in Richards' work. The contributions in all three areas are illuminating. The biographical essays, such as Wayne Curtis' detailed evocation of the Newcastle of Richards' youth, provide useful contextual information. R.M. Vaughan offers a hilarious account of an interview Richards gave him in 1992. Stan Atherton, one of Richards' professors at St. Thomas University, describes Richards' unflagging sense of his vocation, even as a young student. Wayne Johnston recounts the first time he heard Richards read, in 1983 at the University of New Brunswick; what struck Johnston was Richards' "unstinting, unqualified love for every one of his characters... [even though] it was not then fashionable to love your characters" (57).

Among those contributors who grapple with reasons why Richards' work has sometimes been subject to ambivalence or even hostility on the part of critics is Sheldon Currie's contention that "Richards' work will never be popular because he makes no concession to the general reader's inability to fathom a subtle sentence, nor does he cede an inch to fashion" (41). Richards' positioning as a "regional" writer seems to have been part of the equation, too, as Currie recognizes: "when somebody says someone is a regional writer it usually means the writer comes from the wrong region" (42). Other contributors engage with regionalism as well. Inge Sterrer-Hauzenberger's take on this issue is, I think, one of the more striking observations in the collection:

 Gradually I began to see what for me as
 an Austrian was difficult to understand:
 Canadian critics did not want to have a
 great writer from the Maritimes; they
 did not want great novels set on a wild
 river. Regional prejudice, character and
 class prejudice, and the obsession to put
 Richards' work into the safe category of
 "regionalism" inhibited critics and
 reviewers from discovering the serious
 work of a great artist, and this
 prejudice, thrust Richards' novels
 'outside' of the literary mainstream.
 (33-4; SterrerHauzenberger's emphases)

Herb Wyiie argues, in a similar vein, that reductive accounts of Richards' work (its "unremittingly bleak" quality, "inarticulate" characters) have caused readers to overlook the humour and verbal agility in his novels. Ted Colson counters the charge of "inarticulateness" by stating that Richards' "characters are not more inarticulate than people anywhere" (2 1). Alistair MacLeod suggests the antagonism towards Richards' writing that critics sometimes still exhibit (75-6) may arise from Richards' examination of characters who "live their lives on the so-called 'edge' - geographically, socially,culturally, andperhapseven linguistically" (76). Lawrence Mathews illustrates how postmodernist critics have "demonized" Richards, concluding, on the basis of this, that Richards' well-known "animosity towards academe is justified" (63).

Discussions of stylistic and thematic patterns in Richards' work include Margo Wheaton's essay on the complexity of characterization, Frances MacDonald's discussion of women characters, J. Russell Perkin's examination of religious motifs and Winnifred Bogaards' discussion of place in Richards' work.

These are insightful and sensitive critical discussions which should stimulate further investigations of Richards' work.

While Tremblay was putting together his collection of writing on David Adams Richards for Pottersfield Portfolio, Richards' ninth novel, The Bay of love and sorrows, appeared in print. Divided into five sections, The Bay of love and Sorrows is set in a New Brunswick community south of Bathurst on a bay called, on the map in the novel, simply "Bay." Though the novel spans approximately twenty years, the bulk of the story takes place during the summer of 1974. In the novel's fifth section, set twenty years later, the events of the summer of 1974 are revisited and their aftermath is delineated. Richards' narrative unfolds with the momentum and intricacy of the tragic plot. After a falling out between two friends farmer Tom Donnerel and charismatic Michael Skid, the son of a judge Donne,rel's naive and vain girlfriend, Karrie Smith, leaves him and gravitates towards what she perceives as the glamour of Skid and his circle. Unfortunately, Skid's "circle" that summer includes the criminal Everette Hutch and his minions. These minions include Everette's impoverished sister, Gail and her young son, and the equally impoverished sister and brother madonna and Silver Brassaurd. Hutch manages to pull those around him, including Skid and the hapless Karrie Smith, into a drug deal he is planning. The deal goes awry and layers of complications arise. The novel's plot is, in fact, quite elaborate; space precludes a detailed fleshing out of its many twists and turns, its collisions of worlds. One of the story's numerous threads reveals that, as Michael Skid and Karrie Smith discover, once you have crossed over into another world, it is not that easy to return to the world you left behind. For Karrie, who is murdered in the summer of 1974, it is impossible.

The Bay of Love and Sorrows contains the rich range of characterization indicative of Richards' fiction. The two women pursuing Michael Skid - Karrie Smith and Laura McNair (a lawer who comes from privilege but who is equally naïve) - form a striking pair of foil characters. Karrie is the tragic Cinderella; Michael, her prince, is not a prince at all but only a man who uses her and understands the consequences of his actions only when it is too late. Karrie's mean, selfish stepmother Dora could have stepped out of the pages of the Grimms. The two saintlike women, Madonna Brassaurd and Nora Battersoil, form anothercomplimentary pair. The ultimate tragic heroine of the novel is the aptly named Madonna who understands most deeply the truth of things and whose "desperate beautiful eyes see "a vision of her own human triumph and despair" (292). In her attempt to save others from the brutality of Everette Hutch, she sacrifices herself.- an act of heroism also indicative of Richards' writing.

What has always struck me about Richards' characters is. their interconnectedness to one another. One description of setting in the novel could stand as a metaphor for the connectedness in Richards' fictional world: "The sky was black over the bay, and the stars had started to come out, webbed together in many ways" (260). This description evokes the web of tragic inevitability portrayed in The Bay of Love and Sorrrows. Although Richards' characters are sometimes volatile and unpredictable, there isnevertheless akind of perfectorder, an internal logic, to the universe they inhabit. One person's actions in a community impact on another, or others, with a kind of absolute clarity.

Richards' latest novel is, among other things, a masterpiece of point of view. In showing us the events of the summer of 1974 through various perspectives - the 'criminal gaze', the naïve point of view and the perspectives of those who occupy the grey area between - Richards reminds us that the strongest novels reveal the jigsaw-like, relativistic nature of knowledge. Even the sleuth, Constable John Delano, who unravels many of the summer's events, works from his own subjective position. This exploration of subjective experience, argues Inge Sterrer Hauzenberger in Pottersfield Portfolio (34), is one of the central features of Richards' writing.

If the intricate web of character and plot and the artful shifts in point of view were not enough to recommend Richards' story, there is the darkly lush poetry of its setting. To cite a few examples, in November "the great bay had turned black and solid" (10). "The path to Brassaurds' never seemed to catch the light of the weak sun that filtered in strange dark sadness in Arron Brook's pools. Old deadwood and fallen leaves and parts of broken machinery lay along this trail, where the wind seemed to whisper. And halfway along the path was the old gravestone, half buried and mosseaten, of Guillaume Brassaurd" (I 1). "Gail was trying to save money to buy that shack at the end of a woodlot, that sat amongst the black spruce in the blazing summer heat, where no wind from the bay did reach" (49). "Wind blew over the field, blew snow over the paths, and down against the old crab-apple tree and over the graveyard on the left where Karrie's grave was already a sunken mound, against the brittle salt air" (21 0). Rarely does one encounter literary landscapes with such elegiac power. My response to the power of place in The Bay of Love and Sorrows resembled my response to James Joyce's description of snow in "The Dead" or the graveyard poetry of the eighteenth century. Sometimes heavily plotted novels are constructed at the expense of the poetry in language. This is not the case in Richards' latest novel. Sometimes stories of deceit, secrecy, and revenge leave heroism and love by the wayside. This is not the case, either. The numerous writers in Tremblay's collection who continually return to the essential humanity of Richards' stories are right on the mark, and The Bay of Love and Sorrows reflects Richards' continued concern for his characters and the broader human landscape they evoke with so much resonance.

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