National Post (National Edition)
‘ROOTED IN A PARTICULAR TIME’
Guy Vanderhaeghe returns to his writing roots with new short stories
Esterhazy (pop. 2,467) sits in the southeastern corner of Saskatchewan. It’s a pretty typical Prairie town with a main street and a flour mill that has been made a national historic site. It’s also the place where Guy Vanderhaeghe became a literary omnivore.
“When I was a kid I didn’t grow up in a bookish household. I grew up in a small town with a tiny library, so I read everything. It didn’t matter what it was. I can remember going to the drugstore in Esterhazy — it had one of those paperback racks that you spin around — and picking up John Updike’s Rabbit Run. I know why I bought it. It was described as being about an exhigh school basketball player. And I took it home and the book had all this explicit sex.
“I’m 16. I didn’t know about Updike, it was just a novel in the rack. The next time, I’d buy a James Bond novel.”
Of such beginnings a Governor General’s award has come along with brilliant novels such as The English
man’s Boy and The Last Crossing. But more than that, Vanderhaeghe is rooted deeply in his Prairie home. His heritage was brought home when his father died on March 28.
“I went to the graveyard in Esterhazy where my grandparents, great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents are buried. I can’t imagine not being in Saskatchewan. I was educated in the province, I have lived virtually all my life here.”
Vanderhaeghe, 64, has returned to his writing roots in his latest book, a short-story collection called Daddy Lenin and Other Stories. His first published book was a collection of short stories called Man
Descending, published in 1982. “I had three or four stories that had been published in magazines, which took me halfway to a collection. But I think with age there is an urgency to return to your roots.”
When he started writing, it was difficult to get a book published, he said, adding that it can be daunting to embark on a novel.
“That was part of it,” he said. But also “Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant were huge figures at the time. Clarke Blaise was publishing short stories; a lot of the literary models were short-story writers. And I have always liked the form.”
It was always at the back of his mind that he would return to the short story.
“I also needed a bit of a breather after having written three historical novels about the West that had taken a lot of research and a lot of emotional investment.”
As someone who also teaches creative writing, Vanderhaeghe thinks deeply about the various forms of fiction.
“I’ve always had the feeling that a short story is not simply a short novel. I have always felt that the short story shared more with poetry. I think you often hope that within a short story the puzzle with the narrative snaps into focus with the last paragraph. It should crystallize everything that has taken place in the story.
“Nadine Gordimer [the South African writer] said the short story was a firefly in the night. I have always thought of the novel as a river; most people can imagine a novel continuing after the last chapter concludes. I am less inclined to imagine that with the short story.”
In his new collection, the stories present various stories of men in different stages of life. The very first one is called
Jimi Hendrix and it deals with an episode in the life of a teenager in the late 1960s.
“For someone of my age, Hendrix was a huge figure,” Vanderhaeghe says. “You have this icon who presides over the story and this young kid, he’s wishing to be all the things he’s never going to be. He’s wishing to be black, he’s wishing to be a wild man and so he hangs out with people he shouldn’t be hanging out with.”
And that leads to a strange encounter with a deranged elderly man in a place that is almost as strange as anything that the teenager could imagine. The story is vivid and true. It resonates for anyone who might have tried to be “cool for all the foolish reasons one can imagine.”
Vanderhaeghe acknowledges that writers of fiction draw upon memory. “Did this hap- pen, no. I could imagine, any day in my life in that summer, something like that could have happened. Looking back on my life I can say, ‘OK, I knew guys who could have been those guys and on occasion we got up to some pretty strange s--t’. It just wasn’t this particular strange s--t.
“When I rely on the past, I try to make sense of what may have been senseless. That’s the roots of that story. My greatest hope is to be able to universalize the particular, following Aristotle that the universe grows out of the particular.”
A young male today should be able to relate to the “strange hormonal lack of a centre that seems to almost adhere to every adolescent,” Vanderhaeghe says.
In the end, the story is about a youth who has had an experience that has not only frightened him, but also has given him a picture of what life might be like, he says. The final, equally unsettling, story in the collection, Daddy Lenin, is about a man at the other end of life’s journey, who is looking back on an unsatisfying life of many regrets and who, by chance, comes across a professor he once revered.
“That story is rooted in a particular time. When I went to university, I encountered a number of charismatic professors who did not have any of the limits on their actions that professors nowadays do.
“What I wondered about was someone who looked back at one moment that was the happiest and most successful time in his life. He felt he had been chosen, picked by one of those charismatic professors who was the coolest guy on campus.”
After meeting the prof, named Daddy Lenin because of his visage, the protagonist recalls his student self. And he realizes his life has gone badly wrong. His wife, whom he condescended to, is a successful real estate agent and she is ruling the roost at home. Vanderhaeghe believes that women get a second chance later in life to make up for lost ground, while men skate along, growing more defeated over time.
“You can’t have lived 60 years without having regrets, I can’t imagine living life without regret. The difference is how you deal with those regrets.”
Daddy Lenin also represents a particular kind of educator, one Vanderhaeghe, the teacher, has little time for. “Part of this is self-reflection [that] I go through as a teacher. You are up in front of a classroom because somebody thinks you know more than the people you are teaching. But how far do you take that? How much freedom do you allow students? How much do you stay out of their heads?
“The really dangerous teacher is the one who insists on living in everybody’s head, rent-free. They don’t want to draw things out of their students, they want to make sure the student is a clone of them. That’s part of what is behind that story. It is also about how often we don’t distrust charisma. Self-questioning is an obsession with me.”
Perhaps that’s because Vanderhaeghe himself was never a happy student.
“I find systems onerous. I rebelled against what I thought was stupid authoritarianism. Now, when I walk into my classroom, I say first: ‘Unfortunately I have to mark you because the university requires it. I will take it seriously,’ then, I say: ‘In this class, which is run as a seminar, 80% of the responsibility for its success rests with you.’ ”
Vanderhaeghe teaches at St. Thomas More College, which is affiliated with the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. Save for a short time at the University of Ottawa as a writer in residence, Vanderhaeghe has lived in Saskatchewan all his life. At the U of O, he tackled his first-ever creative-writing teaching assignment.
“I’d never taken a creativewriting class and had never taught one. So I tried to remember how I taught myself to write and I did that by trying to figure out why I liked stories I liked.”
His students lead him to “remember optimism and the excitement of making something because stories are made by the imagination.”
You can’t have lived 60 years
without having regrets