BOOK REVIEW : Canadian Pens Uneven Group of Short Stories

Stones by Timothy Findley (Delta Fiction; Paper, $9.95. 221 pages).

The strongest among these stories by the Canadian writer Timothy Findley cherish life with a kind of tough love--an affirmation in circumstances so extreme as to approach the grotesque, and even go beyond. Like a cyclist whose balance is surest when he goes fast, Findley’s writing is purest in extreme circumstances.

“Stones” is an uneven collection. A couple of the stories are morality tales, with a touch of the supernatural intruding, as if God were wagging his finger in smug disapproval. In “The Sky,” a self-indulgent businessman who suspects his wife of infidelity finds bits of the sky falling on him. In “Foxes,” a world-renowned expert on communication--could Marshall McLuhan be suggested?--loathes human contact. Struck upon seeing a series of ancient Japanese masks depicting a fox turning into a man, he finds his destiny by turning into a fox himself.

The supernatural--perhaps it is a waking nightmare--is evoked to better effect in “Dreams.” Two psychiatrists, married to each other, are taken over by their patients. He is unable to sleep at night; she, despite her concern over his insomnia, is unable to stay awake. She had been trying to stimulate and keep alive a dying autistic child. The child speaks two words to her as she is about to connect his feeding tube. “Don’t,” he says; and a moment later, “Goodby.”

The peace she discovers contrasts with her husband’s dreadful wakefulness. His patient is a dangerously violent schizophrenic. Despite his restraints, he is periodically found covered with blood. At the same time, the psychiatrist finds himself dreaming each night of seeing his patient tear another body to pieces. The patient has taken the blood from the doctor’s dreams; thus the doctor’s inability to sleep from then on. The story is vivid, garish; it is too chilly, though, to stir much emotion.

Two connected stories are related by a successful brother about an unsuccessful one. The latter has been unable to fasten onto anything, takes to drink and eventually starves himself to death.

The stories are lumpish, little besides the narrator’s tone of guilt and sorrow at not being able to help his brother. At the end, the narrator acknowledges his inability to tell a better story, and wishes he could write about breakdown as well as Conrad or Scott Fitzgerald. “Real life writes real bad,” he says. Which doesn’t help us with the story.

In “Bragg and Minna,” on the other hand, a grim story becomes an affecting one. The title characters were husband and wife, both of them writers.

Minna, now dead, was hungry, generous and spirited. She had a fierce sympathy for the sick and outcast; she wrote prolifically and fast. Bragg is fastidious, self-absorbed, and a painfully slow writer. He is also bisexual. When, nearing her 40s, Minna wants a baby, he refuses, arguing that because of her age and what he calls his “homosexual genes”--I’m not sure what that means--the baby would probably be deformed. Minna gets pregnant anyway; the child is born with half a brain and six fingers on each hand. She names her Stella--star--for the six-pointed hands. And, learning she has incurable cancer, flees to Australia. At the world’s other end she will find someone to love Stella when she dies, she tells Bragg.

All this is recalled by Bragg, returning with his male lover from Australia. There he has scattered Minna’s ashes on a high, rocky hill, as she’d requested; Stella is left behind with a kindly Australian couple. But even on the plane Bragg’s life is changed by what he saw on the hill. Facing a return to his narrow life in San Francisco, he thinks of the aboriginal drawing on one of the rocks.

It showed a child with two six-fingered hands and one leg much shorter than the other. The short leg rested upon a crude drawing of a stone. If your child is deformed, you put a stone under her short leg. Through the aboriginal drawing, Minna’s dead voice reaches him; he will go back for Stella. It is a startling, lovely image that lights up the painful story.

“Stones,” the final piece, begins as one more unremarkable story of a quiet childhood. The narrator grew up in prewar Toronto, son of a kind and affectionate florist. His father volunteered for the army, was promoted to captain, took part in the bloody raid on Dieppe. On the landing boat, he had frozen, jumped overboard and swam off to a destroyer, leaving his men to be killed.

What we get in the story is the child’s memory of the father, repatriated and utterly changed. “No one had said he may never be kind again. No one had said he will never sleep again without the aid of alcohol. No one had said he will try to kill your mother. No one had said you will not be sure it’s him when you see him. Yet all these things were true.”

In fact, he was destroyed. Shame wrecked him and made him drunk and violent. Finally, the good man underneath the crazed one emerged long enough for him to sign into a mental hospital, where he spent the rest of his life.

As a grown man, the narrator goes to the rocky beach at Dieppe to scatter his father’s ashes. Rock and ashes once more provide the healing image. “At last my father has come ashore,” he thinks. The grief in this story is pure and lyrical; it buoys up and transforms the bitter violence.