Timothy Findley The Wars Lecture 1 PDF

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3230 Timothy Findley The Wars Lecture 1 In 1979 I was 28 and teaching at Memorial University of Newfoundland. A colleague of mine, about ten years older and the one cool guy in the department, came up to me with a novel. He said: “You have to read this. Canlit has finally made it.” The novel was The Wars. I read it and agreed. It was not Findley’s first novel but it was a major breakthrough in many ways, for him and for the literature. I think very highly of Surfacing but it does not have the delicacy and precision of The Wars, nor the emotion. To achieve this emotional intensity in such a complex novel is not easy but I always cry when I finish it and I have been teaching it at least every second year since I first read it. Findley was quite successful as an actor, including at Stratford, when he decided to become a writer. The success of The Wars made him famous and he was one of the ubiquitous figures of Canadian literature until his death in 2002. It is difficult to explain what might be called the Canlit club. In a very large sense, it no longer exists because Canadian literature has become too diffuse and diverse, which is no doubt a good thing. Its leader was probably Margaret Atwood and it included a variety of people, some we as readers would consider minor authors. But Findley was among the most prominent and no doubt the most prominent male. Most of those I would call the leaders were female. But Findley was gay. I don’t want to overstate the importance of this but I think it is relevant both to the significance of Findley in that writing community and to our reading of The Wars. Unlike Sinclair Ross, Findley was always very much out of the closet. Soon after The Wars was published a Canadian magazine wanted to feature him in a series called “A Day in the Life.” However, he was not willing to describe a typical day without including his partner, Bill Whitehead. The magazine said no so Findley did not participate. And yet he said, “I am not a gay writer but a writer who happens to be gay.” This might seem surprising in 2021 but Findley was afraid that his sexuality would be seen as a key to his writing. And in one sense he was right. As you will see in today’s and next week’s lecture, I consider certain aspects of sexuality to be central to my reading. But I must begin with the note that I have no doubt Findley did not like this interpretation. He and I were friends but after I first published a version of what would later become a chapter in my book on homosexuality in Canadian literature, Pink Snow, he became quite cool to me. You can take that as you will. The interpretation of literature is not controlled by the author. As I said earlier, the author writes the book and then releases it to the world and the world does with it what it will. But neither is the author’s interpretation unimportant. And I am not always following the author’s interpretation. But it is also far from the only interpretation. This is a novel that has attracted many analyses. There is even a York PhD dissertation completely devoted to this one

novel. Dagmar Novak’s Dubious Glory: The Two World Wars and the Canadian Novel points to the way the novel is structured as a romance: “In Northrop Frye’s description of the Hero’s ascent from the underworld, the chief elements are those of escape, remembrance, growing freedom, and the breaking away from enchantment"(143). As she points out, however, in The Wars this journey often seems ironic or even parodic. I would suggest that you should look at Dagmar’s book, to see a very different view from mine, although one with which I completely agree. Whether Findley would have liked it, I have no idea. The title of the novel suggests it is about all wars throughout all time and this is very much Findley’s intention. All is filtered through one person, Robert Ross. I don’t know how many of you recognize the name but Robert Ross was reputed to be Oscar Wilde’s first male lover. Whether or not this was the case, he was a Canadian and a Canadian who stood by Wilde during his incarceration. In other words he is a footnote of Canadian moral purpose and devotion in a much larger British and international story. Whether or not the sexuality fits the Robert Ross of The Wars, the character certainly does. Robert is the child of Thomas Ross, the head of Raymond/Ross Industries. This seems a thinly veiled reference to Massey-Harris, the company of which Findley’s grandfather was president. This suggests the background of both Findley and Ross. As the journalist B. K. Sandwell said, “Canada has no social classes, only the Masseys and the masses.” Think of, among other things, Massey Hall, Hart House and Canada’s first native-born Governor-General, Vincent Massey. Robert’s heritage is Findley’s. Findley’s knowledge of the war began with stories told by Findley’s uncle, known for his initials as Tif. That Findley was always known as Tiff seems revealing. But it is not Robert who tells the story. So who does? The novel begins with a tableau of the horse, a dog and Robert. There is no one watching but it is not just a photograph: it leads to an action. The possible source of this scene is given in the next section in a reference to these “occupants of memory.” These elderly people “look at you.” So the image is somehow constructed by you. Well who is “you?” In one sense it is not hard to decide, dear reader. But more than just being a reader “you” seem to be creating the story as you go. The novel is constructed as though you are meeting these elderly people, looking at documents and perhaps most important looking at photographs in order to manufacture a narrative. And this narrative is as true as any story we tell. If you recount an experience that happened to you twenty years ago you will include things that did not actually happen but that your memory convinces you are true. The way this integrates with Robert is suggested by a comment that Findley made to me. He said this is not at all a first person story, told by Robert Ross, but rather something like a dream produced as if dreamt by Robert Ross. Findley told me, “It is like when you have a dream and it is not quite from your eyes but rather as though from just behind your head, as though you just capture a glimpse of your ear as the action happens.” The novel depicts you at the archives:

“You hold your breath. As the past moves under your fingertips, part of it crumbles. Other parts, you know you’ll never find. This is what you have”(11). Second person narration is not easy. You are picking up this book in 2021, more than forty years after it was published. Lady Juliet says to “you:” “You had a war. Every generation has a war—except this one” (103). In other words, the “you” of the novel should be middle-aged in the late seventies, like Findley. Still, regardless of whether the assumptions can work in all details, if the novel works, “you” are involved as an imperative. The novel tells you what you are assembling, what you are experiencing. In 2021 “this one” generation is in a world of permanent war but not here, as in Afghanistan, Yemen and many other places. Does your generation’s version of “your war” leave you still able to read this as “you”? Some of you might have a relative who died in one of those wars. Some of you might have escaped the apparently permanent war in Syria. Part of the process is your construction of a narrative from photographs. Given my age it should not be a surprise that I have a number of photographs from this period—my grandfather died in the trenches in the First World War. If you Google the war, you will find many photographs that suggest both the heroic hope before the war and the terror of the trenches. As the novel tells you, “You begin at the archives with photographs” (11). The novel never explains how you have created the details of the various stories but in my reading the details seem to be produced by the dream-like narrative elicited by the photographs, such as the happy hope of heroic purposeful death when the novel states, “what this photograph is striving to say:” “I’ll faint away in glory hearing music and my name….I will have the Military Cross. He died for King and Country—fighting the war to end all wars”(49). The claim at the beginning of the First World War that it would be “the war to end all wars,” has proved far from true but ironically reasserts the title of the novel. The passage asserts that the photograph tries to aspire to The Death of General Wolfe. https://www.artsy.net/artwork/benjamin-west-the-death-of-general-wolfe1/download/benjamin-west-the-death-of-general-wolfe-1770.jpg Note the various “Canadian” elements to the painting. As the novel progresses we begin to see different views of this Canadian hero. First, Ord is reading the Henty book, With Wolfe at Quebec. We are beginning to see that the war hero is a boy’s story. Then the very British Barbara d’Orsey says to Robert that Wolfe “got your country for us. Robert said, No, ma’am. I think we got it for him. We? Barbara asked. Soldiers, said Robert”(108). The difference between the war hero and the soldier in the mire is becoming clear. The photographs are the primary building blocks of the story but with them go the interviews and minor elements such as the painting and the various references to literature, whether the Henty novels or the visit from “Mrs. Woolf”(149), presumably Virginia Woolf. A number of the famous writers mentioned were pacifists. What do you make of that? And Clausewitz on War, which Levitt claims might explain something:

“someone has to know what he’s doing” (89). The novel does not seem convinced. Instead the trajectory of the novel is very much a psychobiography of Robert as he pursues the same slow discovery as suggested by those brief comments on General Wolfe, from potential hero to naïve participant to the actual disaster of war. The chronology of the novel’s action follows this process. The first images in 1915 are of the happy family and the boys going off to war. But then it goes on to the interview with the nurse, Marian Turner. This seems disruptive but in a sense it reinforces that atmosphere of Robert as key, from many years later, and establishes the reason for your search through the archives. She makes the point that Robert was not what they think—whatever that is—but instead was a hero, another kind of hero. You begin to sense an enigma, something other than just a journey from the usual innocent boy going to war to the death of the usual hero. The process of heading off to war shows the defeat of various kinds of innocence, innocence that is often directly associated with being Canadian. As in so many texts, such as Surfacing, the essence of being Canadian is to be indigenous. Robert’s first hero is the marathon runner Tom Longboat. Then on the prairies, Regina seems to represent another kind of natural purity—very different from the frightening nature on the Saskatchewan prairie in As For Me and My House. This carries through the novel, as in the good yet frightened soldiers Regis (63) and Bates (117) but the dominant image of Regina is once again indigenous: “Passing through Regina, Robert saw a band of Indians…. One of the Indians sat on a horse.” (46) And as in Surfacing, the First Nations are either past or about to pass, remnants of history enabling the colonizers to learn. Think of these examples when we come to read Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. We saw the link between indigenization and nature in Surfacing but in The Wars the purity is not nature per se but animals. It begins with that horse in the opening tableau and continues throughout. Rowena, Robert’s hydrocephalic sister, represents permanent childhood, which seems innocent and good. Her rabbits are linked to that innocence and the expectation that Robert should kill them after her death seems to be the first horrible act of war. On the ship heading to Europe the next violence against animals is the treatment of the horses, from just putting them on the ship to the killing of one in the storm. The Battalion Sergeant Major knows what must be done but Robert’s incompetence and innocence make it impossible for him to do the job. This links him to Harris, who rather than the beginning of a soldier is a frail innocence in love with the animals of the sea. His dream of swimming (95) is like Robert running with the coyote. After Harris’s death Robert’s prayer is “sing with the whales” (107). With the exception of Robert the most important connection between human and animal is probably Rodwell. In the midst of war he protects animals. Robert recognizes the connection to Rowena. In other words, you need not be mentally handicapped or a child to see the necessity to maintain an innocent love of animals in

the face of the apparent necessities of adult life. We learn that Rodwell was an illustrator of children’s books. If you recall Surfacing you might note the idea that such an illustrator might have a key to some inner spirit. Rodwell dies because he could not face one more slaughter of an animal. He leaves a wonderful letter to his daughter, one that I still cannot read without crying: “I am alive in everything I touch. Touch these pages and you have me in your fingertips” (135). And in Rodwell’s sketchbook of the animals there is one animal-like portrait of Robert. The child is one with the animals and Robert is one with the animals. Robert’s final actions are one with the animals. In most discussions “like an animal” means less than human but in The Wars to be like an animal is to be more than human. The novel rejects the actions of the Battalion Sergeant Major. He is a good man whose humanity has been reduced to being a soldier and accepting the military view of the use of animals. It rejects Captain Leather much more. Look at the name, which is perhaps too symbolic but which suggests the military leadership. This is not the sergeant major, unable to be better, but the officer, who reduces everything to war, who cannot see the innocence or the animals. The actions of the military in war are a special kind of insanity, one not available to animals. Robert thinks of Leather: “If an animal had done this we would call it mad and shoot it”(178). I don’t have space here to discuss it but look at the many comments in the novel about madness. Just as one example, Mrs. Ross must leave the church and the warmongering bishop but as she sits in the snow she realizes she is being watched by a child: “she had to stand or else the child would think that she was mad—and the world had quite enough adults gone crazy as it was“ (54). We shall discuss many more issues next week but in a sense the message of The Wars is a simple one, clear from all the madness: animals and children are innocence and joy. Adults are insanity, and never more than in the wars....