In Rough Country (21 page)

Inevitably, Rand reaches the limit of his endurance, broken in spirit when he fails to complete a suicidal solo climb. Yet, even as he retreats in shame from the brotherhood of mountain climbers to an anonymous and posthumous life in Pensacola, Florida, he passes into legend:

Dusk
and
Last Night
are appropriate titles for Salter's slender collections of stories, that unfold with dreamlike fluidity in an atmosphere of shadows and indistinct forms, like watercolors in a dark palette. As Salter's novels are comprised of exquisite set pieces, often self-contained, so his short stories
suggest novellas or novels compressed into a few pages. Both
Dusk
and
Last Night
contain memorable stories in a classic vein, yet a number of others (“Am Strande von Tanger,” “The Cinema,” “Lost Sons,” “Via Negativa,” “The Destruction of the Goetheanum,” from
Dusk
; “Comet,” “Eyes of the Stars,” “Platinum,” “Arlington,” from
Last Night
) move so swiftly and disjointedly as to arouse expectation in the way of trailers for intriguing films that turn out to be the films themselves, abruptly truncated. It's as if the writer's imagination has leapt ahead of his capacity for, or interest in, the work of expression; an impatience with formal storytelling and chronological development:

Where narration is indirect and images are employed as a kind of emotional synecdoche, perspective tends to be coolly detached and retrospective, as in the great experimental European films of the mid-twentieth century, or the short fiction of Colette. This accounts for the protracted openings of a number of Salter's stories, their abrupt and sometimes disconcerting
leaps in time, sudden endings that bring the reader up short, like sudden steps in dreams, unforeseen:

And, in a swift and somewhat desultory summing-up of a poignant story of marital betrayal:

In
Dusk
there's a perplexing story titled “Akhnilo” that tracks in microscopic detail what seems to be the mental disintegration of a man about whom we know little (“Eddie Fenn was a carpenter though he'd gone to Dartmouth and majored in history…He had thinning hair and a shy smile. Not much to say.”), a feat of writerly obscurity that repeated readings can't decode. (In
Burning the Days
, Salter acknowledges having written a story about a man whose imagined life consumes his identity, about which Salter's wife says she couldn't “make head or tail of it.”) Enough material for a substantial novel is crammed into the seven small pages of “Arlington”: complicated marital relations, exotic locales, thumbnail sketches of characters, abrupt death:

Like the self-absorbed suburbanites of
Light Years
, the men and women of Salter's short fiction tend to be individuals of privilege, worldly and yet vulnerable to hurt; individuals who perceive of themselves as passionate, or deserving of passion, though, in fact, like the rare book dealer of “Bangkok,” who has moved on to a domestic life of routine contentment (“You can't have ecstasy daily”) they may have settled for “pretend” lives. Salter's most powerful stories tend to be about women
in extremis
, for whom all pretense has vanished, sometimes in a moment's revelation, sometimes in a protracted and horrific contemplation of mortality, as in “Twenty Minutes,” in
Dusk
, when a woman living alone, a divorcée, is thrown from her horse in a desolate area, lies broken and paralyzed waiting for someone to discover her as flashes of her life scroll past her:

The two most poignant stories in
Last Night
are about women who have been diagnosed with inoperable cancer: “Some Fun” reads like a dark episode of
Sex and the City
in which a woman can't share news of her impending death with her closest women friends, who are bent upon having a good time getting drunk as they exchange revelations about former husbands, but only with a stranger driving a taxi; in the harrowing “Last Night,” a terminally ill woman named Marit hopes to appropriate her death by making it into a ritual involving her husband, who will inject her with a lethal amount of morphine:

Marit, anticipating death, longs for “certain memories” to take with her, but only memories from childhood: “The rest
was a long novel so like your life; you were going through it without thinking and then one morning it ended: there were bloodstains.” But Marit's plan for an easeful death brings unexpected results for her, her husband, and her husband's appalled mistress.

It's a measure of James Salter's writerly gifts that one wishes each of his stories longer, as, at the somewhat premature conclusion of
Burning the Days
, one of the most engaging and beautifully composed memoirs of our time, one wishes the life, thus the art, extended:

Moral Disorder
by Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Introduction by Valerie Martin

B
ut what precisely is a “true story”?—one that reveals “truth,” or one that confirms the storyteller's identity? Can “truth” be an objective matter, when human subjectivities are involved? Or is truth merely—or supremely—a “story”? Through her long, energetic, and productive career Margaret Atwood has been as much an anatomist of “telling” as of “truth”: the daughter of an entomologist at the University of Toronto, with a master's degree in Victorian literature from
Harvard (1962), Atwood would seem to have an instinct for taxonomy; for the casting of a cold yet not unsympathetic eye upon the stratagems by which individuals present themselves to others in narratives devised to confirm their identities or, simply, like the desperate captive “handmaid” (i.e., sexual/breeder-slave) Offred of Atwood's most widely read novel, the dystopian
The Handmaid's Tale
, to survive. As Nell, the protagonist of the novel-in-linked-stories
Moral Disorder
thinks following the unexpected death of her husband's eccentric, troublesome ex-wife:

In a postmodernist sleight of hand in Atwood's elaborately constructed
Alias Grace
(1996), the reader is beguiled by numerous competing variants of a central story (based upon the sensational Kinnear-Montgomery murders in Richmond Hill, Ontario, in 1843) that can never be fully resolved, as in an intricately plotted puzzle. Near the end of the lengthy novel the former defense attorney for the alleged murderess Grace Marks, whose innocence has come to seem highly likely to the reader, casually undercuts our expectations by remarking:

Still later, after Grace Marks has been pardoned and released from the penitentiary, and has married a man out of her scandalous past, she finds that she must “tell him some story or other about being in the Penitentiary, or else the Lunatic asylum in Toronto…He listens to all of that like a child listening to a fairy tale, as if it is something wonderful, and then he begs me to tell him yet more.”

How like the author of such artful fictions, speaking of her role as storyteller! As Atwood acknowledged in a recent interview: “I'm one of the few literary writers who get lucky in their lifetimes.”
¹

 

Author of twenty volumes of prose fiction including most notably the novels
Surfacing
,
The Handmaid's Tale
,
Alias Grace
,
The Blind Assassin
, and
Oryx and Crake
, as well as thirteen volumes of poetry, six works of non-fiction, and six children's books, Margaret Atwood has an international reputation that differs considerably from her reputation in her native Canada, where she became, virtually overnight in 1972, at the age of thirty-one, the most celebrated/controversial Canadian writer of the era. Atwood's first novel, a feminist “anti-comedy” (Atwood's description) titled
The Edible Woman
, had appeared in 1969, to enthusiastic but limited press coverage, but Atwood was most known for her distinctive poetic voice in such early,
acclaimed volumes as
The Circle Game
(1966),
The Animals in That Country
(1967),
The Journals of Susanna Moodie
(1970),
Procedures for Underground
(1970), and
Power Politics
(1971) with its wonderfully terse, mordant prefatory lines:

Though Atwood's poetry has been overshadowed, perhaps inevitably, by her prose fiction, Atwood brings to her poetry the identical sharp, acerbic eye and ear, and the identical commingling of the tragic and the farcical, that have characterized her most ambitious fiction; her prevailing concerns (sexual politics, the endangered environment), foregrounded in the cautionary dystopias
The Handmaid's Tale
and
Oryx and Crake
(2003) are sounded decades before in such mordant, bleakly funny poems as “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy” (excerpted):

Curiously, and ironically, the book that in 1972 catapulted the young author to such unexpected celebrity has never been published in any country outside Canada: this is
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature
. (Now published in a revised edition by McClelland & Stewart,
Survival
was originally published by the small Toronto-based press House of Anansi as one in a series of “self-help guides” to help defray the costs of literary publishing.) Conceived as an “easy-access” book for the use of high school and college instructors of Canadian literature (a category that, in 1972, scarcely existed and was more likely to arouse derision than admiration),
Survival
is, as its subtitle indicates, not a survey of Canadian literature,
not an evaluation of distinctive Canadian texts, nor a compendium of histories and biographies, but a taxonomy outlining “a number of key patterns [intended to] function like the field markings in bird-books: they will help you distinguish this species from all others.” Atwood's methodology follows that of such influential critical theorists of the time as Leslie Fiedler, Perry Miller, and Northrop Frye whose student Atwood had been at the University of Toronto; her intention in
Survival
is to identify “a series of characteristics and leitmotifs, and a comparison of the varying treatments of them in different national and cultural environments.”

Immensely readable, entertaining, and insightful, a treasure trove for non-Canadian readers to whom such gifted Canadian poets and writers as Susanna Moodie, Margaret Avison, Margaret Laurence, Sheila Watson, Graeme Gibson, Jay Macpherson, E. J. Pratt, Tom Wayman, A. M. Klein, Anne Hébert, Gabrielle Roy, Marie-Claire Blais, Earle Birney, Sinclair Ross, Austin Clarke, W. O. Mitchell, and numerous others are likely not to be well known,
Survival
exudes a schoolgirl zest and playfulness rarely found in works of literary criticism, as unique in its way as D. H. Lawrence's brilliantly cranky
Studies in Classic American Literature
. In her opening chapter Atwood ventures the “sweeping generalization” that each country or culture has a single dominant symbol at its core, notably The Frontier (America), The Island (England), and Survival, or
la Survivance
(Canada):

Atwood divides her material into thematic categories that suggest an ambitious course syllabus: “Nature the Monster,” “Animal Victims,” “First People: Indians and Eskimos as Symbols,” “Ancestral Totems: Explorers, Settlers,” “The Casual Incident of Death: Futile Heroes, Unconvincing Martyrs and Other Bad Ends,” “Ice Women vs. Earth Mothers,” and, particularly appropriate in 1972 when sales of most Canadian literary novels and volumes of poetry were minuscule, “The Paralyzed Artist.” (Born in 1939, Margaret Atwood began her career like most Canadian writers of the era: traveling the vast country giving readings and toting cardboard boxes of her own books to sell afterward since there wasn't likely to be a bookstore to supply them.) That Canadian writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Carol Shields, and Atwood herself would one day acquire critical and commercial success outside Canada could not have been predicated in a culture in which the expression “World-famous in Canada” was always good for a laugh; and in which, in academic and literary circles, it was taken for granted that the work of Canadian writers did not constitute a “literature” since it was merely colonial, derivative, and third-rate. One can see how traditional academics
were roused to indignation by a “mere chit of a girl” not only venturing into their territory but approaching their subject with such panache and vernacular directness:

Much in
Survival
remains provocative and illuminating, as in Atwood's discussion of the paralysis of the artist lacking an audience (“He is blocked, he is like a man shouting to no one”) and in the chapter “Animal Victims” in which animal figures in the literatures of Britain, America, and Canada are compared:

Published in the same year as
Survival
, and seemingly written with the predominant themes of the “guide” to Canadian literature in mind, Atwood's lyric, quasi-mystical second novel
Surfacing
drew a good deal of attention, not all of it sympathetic. By the standards of Atwood's carefully researched, multi-layered and often multi-narrated later novels,
Surfacing
is a slighter work, at times almost parable-like, or diagrammatic, in its structure: the pilgrimage of an unnamed, wounded and self-deluded young woman narrator to enlightenment in a remote wilderness setting. In this paradigm of a feminist “quest” novel, Atwood's emotionally repressed narra
tor travels with her laconic lover and a singularly disagreeable married couple to a lakeside cabin in northern Quebec, where she'd come with her family as a child; the narrator's friends are filmmakers, but her purpose in journeying to the cabin is to search for her missing father, who seems to have vanished into the wilderness. In the course of this minutely introspective novel, in which the protagonist examines herself as one might examine a biological specimen, she comes to terms with her distorted and self-lacerating memories: the humiliation of a failed love affair, the trauma of an abortion. Journeying into northern Quebec would seem to mimic a journey into the heart of darkness if by “darkness” is meant the demons of the self, imagined as ghosts, as in a vision of her aborted fetus glimpsed in a dive into the lake: