Islands in their nothingness are everything to us, the heart of our history and the home of the imagination.
Marian Engel, Introduction, The Islands of Canada
1. The Islands of Canada
Marian Engel, whose life was cut short by cancer when she was fifty-two, was an exact contemporary and close friend of Margaret Atwood. Fluently bilingual, Engel spent several years in Europe, and was well-versed in French and English literature: she was also intensely Canadian, her passion for that country and its people matched by a sharp awareness of how politics and economics shape and all-too-often deform human possibility. Primarily a novelist, she also produced the text for a coffee-table book, The Islands of Canada (1981) conveying the appearance, atmosphere and history of a geographical feature in which Canada is prodigiously rich.
J.A. Kraulis’s photographs for the volume are attractive and predictable, featuring brightly-painted fishing huts and boats: sails silhouetted against forested or mountainous shores; snow- or mist-shrouded rocks at water’s edge. Full page photos of wildflowers, fallen leaves, snake-rail fences—all of which could have been snapped on the mainland, seem drenched, thanks to Engel’s text, in what Lawrence Durrell termed “islomania,” that “affliction of spirit …[of those] who find islands somehow irresistible,” and who are filled with with “an indescribable intoxication” at the the mere thought that they are “on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea” (IC, 11). The most striking of Kraulis’s photographs are those of the Islanders themselves, their bodies and faces marked with determination and resourcefulness. Many of them are Native; others are recent urban emigrés, or the descendants of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century settlers. Whether craftspeople, homesteaders, fisherfolk, or boatbuilders; whether adults or children, their identifying characteristic is the fact of their being inhabitants of, rather than tourists on, their respective islands.
The Islands of Canada is arranged like a reverse-sandwich, its coloured photographs flanking text sketching the history, geography, and cultural peculiarities of twenty-three islands from coast to coast to coast of Canada. This textual black and white is, however, anything but bland bread: Engel is determined that her readers’ romance with islands shall be challenged by provocative and unavoidable realities. Recording the grim difficulties of pioneer life on the “tough …, isolated, rocky and wet” Queen Charlotte Islands off the B.C. Coast, she goes on to acknowledge the source of the squalor of these isolated islands:
I left wondering how the remaining Indians could stand us who brought them smallpox in return for otter cloaks, and exile to mission schools in return for their land.
The fact is, we like our artists and our Indians better dead; that way we get out of having to take the bitter with the sweet. (IC, 20)
The honesty is shocking: again and again, Engel subverts our expectations of the coffee-table ‘lite n’ brite.’ Thus in sketching the settlement patterns of British Columbia’s more southerly Gulf Islands, she cites the role Saltspring played as a terminus for the Underground Railway, and reminds us of those Japanese-Canadians, who, having “fished energetically, set up wonderful market gardens, and bec[o]me valued member of the communities on Mayne and Saltspring” islands (IC, 23), were forcibly interned during World War II in the Alberta interior, suffering permanent dispossession from the homes and businesses they had laboured to create. While insisting on the brutal consequences of history—the imposition of barbarous cultural norms and the wreaking of ecological havoc on so many of Canada’s islands—Engel emphasizes socio-cultural factors as well: “The dividing line between islanders and tourists,” she observes, “is the skin and the luggage: the nut-brown ones are carrying window panes, art supplies, boxes of beer . . . . The people who winter on the islands cross their fingers, hoping the city folk won’t drain the water table dry” (IC, 24).
This is not to imply that Engel’s narrative skimps on the delights of islands: she remembers an idyllic autumn spent with her children on the Gulf of St. Lawrence’s Magdalen islands, finding washed-up walrus teeth on the red- or white sand beaches; she fantasizes about buying a place on Canada’s most famous literary island: Prince Edward Island, of Anne of Green Fables fame. But her text for The Islands of Canada tilts continually between that “bliss” sparked when “the map in your mind and the earth meet” (IC, 25) and the desolate sobriety brought on by an informed awareness of the degradation of that earth and its inhabitants due to other maps of the mind—in particular, those dictated by economic imperatives. Or perhaps the best metaphor for the effect of her text is not that of the tilting seesaw, but rather, psychology’s classic emblems of ambiguity: the rabbit-into-duck, or wineglass-into-facing profiles. Perhaps the blur that results when one tries to see both at the same time is that “nothingness” which, in the epigraph with which this essay opens, Marian Engel attributes to islands.
What is this insular nothingness, and how can it co-exist with geography, history and imagination? Can it be expressed visually, or is it only language that can capture its paradox? And if the latter, is expository or imaginative prose best fitted for the task? To explore these questions, let us consider a novel Engel published five years before The Islands of Canada, a novel that is arguably Canada’s first work of erotic literature, or at least, the country’s first erotic novel to win a major literary award.
2. Bear
Coffee-table books, by their very name, perform functions beyond that of entertainment: meant to be openly displayed in the most public part of the home, they proclaim to visitors and family members alike the tastes, interests and values of the household. As one might suspect of a text imagining a sexual relationship between a woman and a large predatory mammal, Bear is not the kind of book to be left lying about on coffee tables. Nevertheless, its interests overlap to a considerable degree with those of The Islands of Canada—or at least, with Engel’s concern in that volume to tease out hidden or unacknowledged stories. Her treatment of St Joseph Island, near the northern Ontario town of Sault Ste Marie, is a case in point. If its geography is notable, nosing, as it does, into St Mary’s River at its northern end and extending, on its southeastern shores, into Lake Huron, one of those great ‘inland seas’ that make up North America’s Great Lakes, its history turns out to be notorious. Major William Kingdom Rains, who purchased St Joseph Island from the Crown in 1834,
had served in the British forces during the Napoleonic Wars, been stationed in Sicily, where he met Byron, married, and returned much decorated to his native Wales after peace was declared. Casting about for work … he got a job as one of the investigators in the preface to the trial of Queen Caroline, George IV’s scandalous wife, and developed a conjugal dislike of his own. His life was further complicated by the fact that his friend, Mad Jack Doubleday—a lawyer … imprisoned for debt—entrusted his two beautiful daughters … to him. Rather than see them go into service in a public house, which was their alternative, Rains took them both to be his mistresses, … [taking] the whole lot of his dependents … to Canada. (IC, 26)
Leaving his wife in York (now Toronto), Rains, his mistresses and their children—of whom there were eventually to be nineteen—decamped to St Joseph Island, undertook various business ventures, and eventually prospered.
Bear takes as its warp the scandalous life of Major Rains, here called Colonel Cary, the nineteenth-century owner of Cary’s Island, a thinly-disguised version of St Joseph Island. Yet Engel’s Colonel Cary is endowed not with sexual but rather bibliophilic prowess: while he does leave his lawful wife behind him in 1830s York, his life in the bush remains within the bounds of early-Victorian propriety. His chief pleasure, it seems, was the building of an extensive library, and the collection of facts as well as legends about the species ursus arctos, or the brown bear. But why did Engel leave out the juiciest aspect of Major Rains’s story, the plight of those two pretty, compliant and fecund sisters? I would argue that in so doing, Engel made room for that curious “nothingness” which she associates with islands, creating an empty space for the play of her heroine’s fantasies and desires, as well as the healing of her “gangrenous” soul. As one might expect from a writer immersed in that “Second Wave” feminism which informed such contemporaneous works as Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974) and Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing (1972), it is Engel’s heroine rather than any male or ursine hero who is endowed with erotic and imaginative agency.
But it’s not just the plot of Bear and its outrageous donnée that distinguish this novel; its setting on a remote island is equally important. Engel’s narrative takes its cues from the island and not the inland imagination, shocking its readers and, as she would repeat in The Islands of Canada, shipwrecking their expectations. Western civilization may boast, among its originary narratives, tales of humans copulating with animals: gods in the shape of swans, bulls, and even cuttlefish. Northern European culture may, as Engel makes clear, possess its fair share of fairy tales and legends connecting women and bears. The situation of a man juggling a wife and one or more mistresses has long been a subject for comedy: that of a woman loving neither a Teddy Boy nor a teddy bear, but fucking a mature brown bear smelling powerfully of “shit and musk” (B, 35) can still knock us for a loop. This is not, after all, the mere flouting of convention, but the breaking of primal taboo.
Bear opens in an unnamed city, with an archivist named Lou. We are never told very much about her past, though in characteristically compressed Engelian style we are informed as to her ancestors:
She was descended from a man who came over from the north of Ireland with a wife and ten children to join his brother in Ontario, who had nine children himself. In New York, where they were making their arrangements for the second stage of the journey, the eldest son went out to explore and disappeared. They hunted five days for him, had to leave without him, cried all the way to Canada. When they arrived months later at the brother’s, he said, ‘But where’s our Andrew?’ whereupon the paterfamilias went upstairs and laid down and died. Leaving his brother with two women and eighteen children. There was a certain mad toughness and a definite fear of New York in the family still (B, 88).
The basement office in which Lou works is a cross between a mole hole and a cave, and is part of a Historical Institute which is itself a cross between a desert island of cast-offs—“things people brought her because she would not throw them out, because it was her job to keep them”(B, 11)—and a midden manqué, clogged with valueless, brittle trivia:
a Christmas card from the trenches with a celluloid boot on it, a parchment poem to Chingacousy Township graced with a wreath of human hair, a signed photograph of the founder of a seed company long ago absorbed by a competitor (B, 12).
Lou’s task, as she sees it at the novel’s opening, is to “orde[r] fragments of other lives” (B, 83) and to “develop the dim negative” contained in such fragments into history (B, 14). A former newspaper woman, she’d become unsatisfied with the amount of truth involved in journalism, quitting that profession “to find a place for herself in the least parasitic of the narrative historical occupations”(B, 89). Ironically, she works against great odds in trying to produce a full and honest history of any pioneer life, since when families hand over documents to the Historical Institute, “any evidence that an ancestor had performed any acts other than working and praying was usually destroyed” (B, 14). Whatever the difficulties and frustrations of her job, Lou derives from it an “erudite seclusion” as well as “protection against the vulgarities of the world” (B, 19). That safe seclusion is exploded when a bequest is made to the Historical Institute of both Cary’s Island, and “Pennarth,” a seigneurial house containing a “large library of materials relevant to early settlement in the area”(B,13). And so, one day in mid-May, Lou sets forth to examine this fairy-tale bequest, in order to redeem, if not her lonely self, then at least her historian’s amour-propre, by saving an undeniably significant trove of archival matter from the rot of wilderness.
Any journey to an island will be an adventure, and this holds true for Engel’s Lou. Her journey is unusually complex: driving north from the city, she boards a car ferry; after a lengthy crossing she drives off onto one island where she takes a motel room for the night, and the next day reaches a marina on the banks of a river. This marina-cum-grocery store is run by middle-aged Homer Campbell, who might have stepped out of a photograph in The Islands of Canada: weather-beaten, seasoned, and piquantly articulate, he will be her contact with the outside world for the months she resides on Cary Island. Procuring her a motor boat, he accompanies her “up the reedy river-mouth” which peters out “into a stream further up” before they arrive at her destination, an island-within-an-island, and far more isolated than any map foretold. Her ‘neighbours’, who live at some distance from Pennarth, are Native: one Joe King, who runs a trapline in winter, and his aunt Lucy Leroy, who lives with a niece at another, smaller island. Though Lou will become aware, as the tourist season advances, of holidaymakers with their motorboats and firework displays, her seclusion will be far more extreme, though no less erudite, than what the Historical Institute had offered her.
Cary’s Island is no wilderness gothic: Lou is not frightened or dismayed but rather delighted by the thought of spending several months alone here. Enraptured by the beauty and strangeness of the natural world and its “magical forms” (B, 21) she is in ecstasies at Pennarth itself. The house, a classic Fowler’s octagon, is both spacious and light, and a mix of the sophisticated and the primitive. Its octagonal construction may be a tour de force, but the house contains no electricity or central heating; in lieu of a bathroom and running water there is an outdoor pump and a privy whose “seat-covers were old-fashioned enamel streetlight reflectors pinch-frilled like pie-edges” (B, 25). But the library, which occupies the entire top storey, contains volumes of Piranesi, Voltaire and Rousseau, Darwin and Goethe, de Maupassant and Byron. Whatever the “nothingness” of Cary’s Island may be, it is hardly cultural.
Lou turns out to be as brave as she is bookish, for her “kingdom” of Pennarth—meaning ‘bear’s head’ in Welsh—offers more than the well-stocked library of a nineteenth-century gentleman. In lieu of a madwoman in the attic, it contains a bear chained in the Colonel’s original and now-decaying log house. All the Masters of Pennarth, Lou learns, have kept bears, from the first Colonel, in imitation of Lord Byron, to the last, an eccentric Mistress rather than a Master, whose death has effectively orphaned her ursine companion.
“A bear,” Engel’s heroine observes, “is more an island than a man”(B, 60). But what does she mean by this, and why is she granted this insight so early on? Before setting eyes and nose on the creature she is convinced of its benevolence and delights in its oddity: “the idea of a bear struck her as joyfully Elizabethan and exotic” (B, 29). She refuses to anthropomorphize the bear by, for example, giving him a name, yet cannot help seeing him in human—and cross-gendered—terms. Slumped in the cabin, it appears “stupid and defeated” with “a scruff like a widow’s hump” (B, 35). In an elaborate metaphor, Engel describes the bear as “a middle-aged woman defeated to the point of being daft, who had sat night after night waiting for her husband so long that time had ceased to exist and there was only waiting” (B, 36). Yet what strikes her most forcefully about this animal when she first encounters him is not his filthy, matted fur, or his small, piggish-looking eyes, but his possession of huge, “non-retractable claws” (B, 60), an attribute that will come back to haunt her towards the end of her stay on Cary’s island. If a bear is an island, it must surely possess an element of nothingness. Perhaps this is to be found in the constant to and fro between Lou’s insistence on the bear’s benevolence and the reader’s recognition—boosted by Homer’s warnings—of the extreme danger it poses? (One of the powerful tropes of Canadian wilderness lore is the serious possibility of hikers being attacked and killed by bears, as Parks Canada’s website attests.)
At first, all Lou wants is simply to “manage” the bear (B, 36)—the equivalent, one might think, of trying to own an island by the simple feat of purchasing it. From slips of paper which fall from between the leaves of the first Colonel Cary’s books, Lou derives a fund of information about how to make use of bears, though she rejects out of hand the Kamchatkan custom of fashioning snow masks and windows from the animal’s gut, and scythes from its sharpened shoulder blades. In fact, word-of-mouth advice given by old Lucy Leroy proves far more useful to Lou in dealing with the bear: take your morning shit with him, Lucy says, and he’ll accept you as a friend. And so, by thinking not of the Bear as a human, but of herself as an animal, Lou copes with her unusual companion, taking him on his chain for a swim, and currying him afterwards. Gradually, she feels confident enough to let—and keep—him off his chain. Soon he wanders into the house, where he seems to feel at home, climbing the stairs to where she’s working in the Colonel’s library. Just as gradually and unstoppably, Lou’s feelings about the bear grow and change. She comes to take an undiluted delight in his company—far greater than she has ever known with a man. One evening the bear comes to sit at her feet in the library where, under a portrait of the first Colonel Cary, she sips whiskey while reading a biography of that ultra-snob and onetime-military man, Beau Brummell; exploring the bear’s coat with her bare feet she is suddenly “exquisitely happy”:
Worlds changed. Two men in scarlet uniforms, two men who had lived well: neither rich or highly well born, both, she was sure, in the end, ruined. She felt victorious over them; she felt sure she was their inheritor: a woman rubbing her foot in the thick back pelt of a bear was more than they could have imagined.
More too, than a military victory: splendour. (B, 57)
Just who is Engel’s Lou? Scarcely an Everywoman, and hardly a standard-issue heroine, being neither young, innocent or bubble-brained: “inconsolably lonely” (B, 92), she has spent the past five years becoming “as old as the yellowed papers she spent her days unfolding”(B, 19) and increasingly unsatisfied “that this was how the only life she had been offered should be lived” (B, 20). In one sense she is a cross between a “plodding” mole who’d been “intended for an antelope” (B, 12) and a princess immured in a shabby castle, woken by a long-dead pioneer-prince who, unlike the bear in the fairy-tale, keeps his furred skin on when he claims her for his own. In another sense, Lou is the existentialist-par-excellence, whose surrender to islomania prompts an inner, “awful, anarchic voice” (B, 83) to ask herself such questions as “Is a life that can now be considered an absence a life?” (B, 19), and, more radically, “Who the hell do you think you are, attempting to be alive?” (B, 83).
At Pennarth, Lou is doubly islanded: a resident on Cary’s Island, she becomes increasingly obsessed with that island-upon-the-island, a bear. Thus she becomes a special kind of islomaniac, one driven to grapple with the nothingness integral to islands—in this case, a nothingness rendered palpable by her estrangement from the work that has hitherto defined her. Becoming more and more involved with the bear, she puts less and less faith in her library work:
What was the use of all these cards and details and orderings? In the beginning they had seemed beautiful. Capable of making a order of their own, capable of being in the end filed and sorted so that she could find a structure, plumb a secret. Now, they filled her with guilt; …[t]hey were a heresy against the real truth. (B, 83)
One by one, Lou’s “Somethings” disappear. History and historical method are nullified, as are both the European concept of nature that reached its apogee in rural romanticism, and the feisty Canadian waltz with wilderness. Trying to put in a vegetable garden, Lou goes down to defeat:
she was trying to decide to regard the black flies as a good symptom of the liveliness of the North, a sign that nature will never capitulate, that man is red in tooth and claw but there is something that cannot be controlled by him, when a critter no large than a fruitfly tore a hunk out of her shin through her trousers. Her leg streamed blood. She went inside. (B, 71-2)
Literature, in the form of Shelley, Keats and Byron, also goes by the board, and less estimable Kulturträgers, like Beau Brummell, are literally relegated to the basement, just like the trunks of once-fashionable clothes worn by the last of the Colonel Carys—a maverick lady-turned-trapper. As for human contact and connection, what little Lou has experienced of them back in the city is assessed, now, as worse than nothing: weekly copulation with the Director of the Historical Institute, a one night stand with a stranger picked up on a street, and an affair with “a man of elegance and charm, [who] loved her as long as the socks were folded and she was at his disposal on demand: when the food was exquisite and she was not menstruating….” (B, 118).
Having cleared the cultural and historical decks on her island, Lou embraces the resultant “nothingness” by embarking on a tour de force of erotic imagining and a radical reinvention of love itself. Ironically, this project is initiated, even validated, in European cultural terms. “What the hell did Byron do with his bear?” Lou begins to wonder (B, 93). For all his erotic liberality, he probably didn’t attempt to have sex with it, the reader may decide, but rather, satisfied himself with trailing the bear behind him when he walked the streets of Cambridge. Lou, living not in a densely-populated university town, but on a remote and underpopulated island, is, however, free to go far beyond the mad, bad Lord. On one of the evenings when the bear climbs up to the library where she’s working, she masturbates beside him. A few nights later, she breaks out of her emotional bell jar, and solicits him as an active partner: the results are, on a sensual level at least, phenomenal:
The tongue that was muscular but also capable of lengthening itself like an eel found all her secret places. And like no human being she had ever known it persevered in her pleasure. When she came, she whimpered, and the bear licked away her tears. (B,93)
What keeps Lou hooked, however, is the unpredictability of her partner’s attentions:
Sometimes the bear half-ripped her skin with his efficient tongue, sometimes he became distracted. She had to cajole and persuade him. She put honey on herself and whispered to him, but once the honey was gone he wandered off, farting and too soon satisfied. (B, 115)
For all his lack of romantic panache, the bear does turn out to be the perfect sexual partner: “…what she disliked in men was not their eroticism, but their assumption that women had none. Which left women with nothing to be but housemaids” (B, 112). “As long as she made her stool beside him in the morning, he was ready whenever she spread her legs to him. He was rough and tender, assiduous, patient, infinitely, it seemed to her, kind” (B, 119). Examining her conscience vis a vis this “clean passion,” Lou realizes that she feels not delinquent or evil, but simply loved by a fellow creature who is “wise and accepting,” and who occasionally makes her feel “that he was God” (B, 118). Lou may take the lead in their encounters, dancing with him to music from the radio; playing “seal games” as they swim together, taking him berrying in the woods, but she is also able to abase herself before her love for him, a love she feels “with such an extravagance that the rest of the world had turned into a tight meaningless knot, except for the landscape, which remained outside them, neutral, having its own orgasms of summer weather (B, 117).” Loving him as she does, she feels compelled to offer herself to him in terms equally extravagant:
I am only a human woman. Tear my thin skin with your clattering claws. I am frail. It is simple for you. Claw out my heart, a grub under a stump. Tear off my head, my bear. (B, 120)
Yet just at the moment when she has travelled as far from her former self and her human pride as to have become, effectively, nothing, she conceives the hubristic desire to mate with the bear, “almost believing that he could impregnate her with the twin heroes that would save her tribe” (B,121.) When once and once only, at the very end of their idyll, the bear has an erection, he puts Lou’s ambitions into cruel perspective; when she turns her back to him and invites him to mount her, he swipes at her back with his claws and rips open the skin as if he were chastising “a decadent little city tart” (B, 133). Betrayed and humiliated, she seeks out a human lover, the companionable-enough, but far less-than-Byronic Homer, whose advances she’d previously rejected. But all that this reversion to the norm produces is a comprehension of how the bear, first by taking her as a lover, and then by rejecting her as a mate, has given her the chance to be truly reborn. Lying clothed and close beside the bear all night, his claw marks still burning her skin,
She felt pain, but it was a dear, sweet pain that belonged not to mental suffering, but to the earth. She smelled moss and clean northern flowers. Her skin was silk and the air around her was velvet. The pebbles in the night water gleamed with a beauty that was their own value, not a jeweller’s. (B, 137)
Something of the bear has passed into her, something that allows her to
feel in her pores and the taste of her own mouth that she knew what the world was for. She felt not that she was at last human, but that she was at last clean. Clean and simple and proud. (B, 137)
Healed of her her all-too-human guilt, purified and strengthened, she prepares to leave the island, but not to return to her old job and her joyless copulations with the Director. She has disowned the very purpose for which she was sent to Cary’s Island: far from longing to preserve the house and library she has reached a point at which she can see it not as a symbol but merely as a structure that will decay and subside, smashed by vandals and rifled by thieves (B, 137). And so, still in search of “some tie between longing and desire and the achievable” (B, 91), she leaves, in pursuit of “hope and change” (B, 92). As for the bear, he is taken away by Joe King, the Indian, into the care of hundred-year-old Lucy Leroy: though Engel never makes overt mention of Native mythology in her novel, a hint of the healing, medicinal powers, the strength and wisdom attributed to the bear in North American Indian culture, emerges in the mention of Lucy’s long, mysterious conversations with the bear on Cary’s Island.
*
The obvious thing about islands, which one tends to forget once one has landed on them, is that they are water-creatures (B, 47).
In an interview, Marian Engel described Bear as “almost an empty novel…. People bring their own content to it. And they make it what they want it to be.” Is this emptiness a consequence of the insular “nothingness” which the novel attempts to create? Doesn’t the kitsch description of that rebirth Lou experiences—all velvet night and silken skin—strike a warning, if not a false note, given the novel’s critique of traditional romance? And what of the emancipatory whimper with which the novel ends, in refusing its healed heroine any more promising future than a perpetual see-saw between what she most desires and what she can manage to achieve?
Though islands are water-creatures, their human inhabitants, whether transient or permanent, are creatures of the earth. Islands as magical and isolated as Lou’s may offer us the chance to remake ourselves through experience impossible on the mainland. But once we leave those islands for terra firma, we return to the latter’s norms and prejudices. When Lou—and the bear himself—leave Cary’s Island, have the possibilities their connection has revealed been cancelled out, as if they’d never been? Or is the end result the kind of pregnant ‘nothingness’ created by the play of rival images and outlines, of fictive as well as ‘real-life’ possibilities? If so, then pregnant nothingness is vastly to be preferred to that “Nothing!” with which a very different novel, Joseph Conrad’s Victory, ends: the “Nothing!” of violent death, and the extinction of love, trust and hope on the island of Samburan.
Islands in their nothingness are everything to us, the heart of our history and the home of the imagination.
