Rudy Wiebe: Collected Stories, 1955-2010

Reviewed by Richard Cumyn

Rudy Wiebe’s Collected Stories, 1955-2010 is a meticulously edited retrospective. The CanLit icon’s many accolades, prizes and publications, as well as a helpful chronology, are listed at the end of this substantial book. His fifty stories use as many different voices and techniques, it seems, as there are distinct pieces, grouped as they are under four headings, “Face to Face, Looking Northwest,” “So Much to Remember,” “Parallel Realities,” and “Now and Wherever.”

Woefully ignorant of Rudy Wiebe’s work, I approached this collection interested more in the development of the fiction writer—his influences over the decades and his fascinations of the moment—than in an editor’s thematic assemblage, and so I decided to read the stories chronologically, beginning with “Tudor King,” first published when the author was 21. Here we find the seeds of literary ambition, the occasional clunky expression and arcane word choice balanced by a laudable search for existential meaning. Already the focus of his life’s interest is in place: history as a vivid and urgent presence. The young writer is drawn predictably to grotesque detail and overstatement. The dialogue sounds chummy, suggesting Wiebe’s reading at the time, possibly Boys Own adventure stories, but on the whole the writing is solid. The precise recording eye is there in the “curving rift” of a snowdrift standing a few feet away from a buried cabin, and in the dignity, despite corporeal decrepitude, of its occupant, an old man who insists he is descended from royalty. The ending, though melodramatic, is the product of a big heart and a pair of arms trying to encircle humanity itself:

Something was breaking through his numbness, painful and wet, and he pushed his face against his brother’s cold, hard shoulder; as if he were already remembering his own fierce happiness at once having recognized the fleeting stuff of human majesty.

The opening of “Scrapbook” (1956) achieves a sophisticated confusion, as one would have emerging from a dream, but in this instance the sense is different. We’re told that 8-year-old Buddy, on waking to the sound of his dying sister’s screams and moans, “had felt something a long, long time, as if it stretched back without end into his slumber….” Again tackling the effect of a closely observed death on a child, this is a tighter, more convincing story than is “Tudor King,” the emotions arc truer. We become Bud in his delayed grief, with Wiebe avoiding the imposition of an adult’s sensibility on the boy, who, reflecting his time and milieu—a physically tough, mid-century, prairie life—still seems abler and more mature than kids his age today.

By 1963 and “Someday Soon, Before Tomorrow,” Rudy Wiebe is channelling John Steinbeck, the voice patriarchal in tone, occasionally obscure and even garbled as if shouting Lear-like into the wind. And like Steinbeck he takes an unequivocal political stance, pitting the individual against an unjust or incompetent system. In this case, farmers decide to break the law by digging up a road, to divert floodwater rather than wait for suspect municipal action to save their crops. As in the previous stories, a young boy is given a man’s task, here the operation of a tractor to haul out offending culverts. A reporter arrives to document the act of civil disobedience—the fifth estate as complicating element, disseminator of truth tipping the balance of power towards the little guy. Father and son walk home, their vehicles confiscated by the police, and the final image is of them laughing. It’s a triumphal note on which to conclude, though pat, too easy a resolution, perhaps, given the danger inherent in the encounter. Still, Wiebe’s narrative edge has become sharper, his dialogue more realistic as it gives voice to laconic men pushed beyond their natural limits of expression.

“All On Their Knees” (1964) takes the already uneasy relationship, seen in the previous story, between law and liberty, and adds the volatile ingredient of race. A white man saves the life of a near-frozen Chipewyan who, it turns out, is a fugitive from justice. When two RCMP officers arrive looking for the wanted man, the story ceases to be the simple account of a householder doing what he can to protect his guest. As in “Oolulik,” written the same year, Wiebe’s approach to the dichotomy of European colonizers and First Nations peoples avoids stereotyping. We do learn one indisputable fact from these two stories: when people are starving they do desperate things, including murder, and the application of alien (white) justice never successfully addresses inequality, the root cause of need. “Oolulik” is written with profound empathy in a muted, matter-of-fact style, making the story’s horror all the greater.

Wiebe rounded out the 1960s with three stories revealing his influences at the time and his interest in narrative experimentation. “Millstone for the Sun’s Day” (1965) is a lesser imitation of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” with that precursor’s same ominous increase in tension from a mood of quotidian innocence to one of terror. “Did Jesus Laugh?” (1969) is a first-person narrative of a psychopathic killer in an Edmonton of the future, a city of 700,000 with endless high-rise apartments lining the North Saskatchewan River. We hear something of manic Charles Manson in his voice as he tries to set us straight about the New Testament: “That’s everybody’s mistake about Jesus. Like hanging stones around your neck and into the sea with you, down down, or calling a woman that isn’t a Jew like him a dog…”  Though he mumbles truth through a mask of insanity, his hold on our attention is tentative.

More effective is “Bluecoats on the Sacred Hill of the Wild Peas” (1969), about an Alberta family visiting the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Dad is the General Custer buff, I’m guessing a stand-in for Wiebe, who understands that his fascination with the Wild West might not be everybody’s (i.e., his wife and children’s) cup of tea. Interspersed through the narrative are sections from a newspaper account detailing the delayed crowning, due to the first manned moon-landing, of Miss Frontier in the annual Cheyenne, Wyoming Frontier Days celebration. Wiebe arranges the pieces of the newspaper story in reverse order, creating a puzzling effect until the very end. The entire story manages to be both informative and subversive, casting a critical light on a modern sensibility that reduces experience to something secondhand and trivial, a quick dash around a makeshift cemetery, for example, or an improvised Sioux moon dance during a beauty contest.

“Where is the Voice Coming From?” (1970) is the title story of Wiebe’s first published collection. With a nod to Borges, not overtly but in the execution of the piece, the author delivers a postmodern, “objective” account (i.e., a clinical investigation of evidence) of the death of Almighty Voice, an escaped Cree prisoner who killed at least four Northwest Mounted Police officers in 1897. What’s interesting is that the imposed form fails to contain the vitality of the tale, the narrative growing gradually less coldly descriptive and more emotionally charged until it culminates in an impassioned evocation of Almighty Voice’s death cry.

With that sound in his ears, perhaps, Wiebe appears to have spent the next decade concentrating his short fiction to a single outcome, the production of a sprawling tapestry encompassing many historical accounts of the opening of the Canadian Northwest: the Riel Rebellion; bloody skirmishes between the Plains Cree and the Blackfoot; the hunt for Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River; the experience of American settlers lured north by free land; the German-Canadian experience; and the Hillcrest mine disaster of June 19, 1914, to name but a few. A series of nine short pieces written between 1978 and 1979 are anecdotal sketches. Taken individually these fragments don’t amount to much, but as part of Wiebe’s greater mosaic they contribute to a remarkably varied and vibrant history, as if the author were writing catalogue copy for a grand and dynamic exhibition. Alternatively, to read the fiction writer at the height of his powers, see “An Indication of Burning,” (1979), an inspired and crisply dramatized encounter between a poet / university professor and the subject he wants to write about (but which has little regard for him), a small rural Alberta town.

Through the 1980s, 1990s and into this century, we see the author increasingly unconcerned with arbitrary divisions between Rudy Wiebe, resident of Edmonton and professor at the University of Alberta, and the narrative persona of the same name. These later works have lost some of the gangly limberness of the youthful artist eagerly trying out all the available apparatus in the literary gym. Because the young don’t know yet that they can fail and in so many different ways, they tend to soar, often producing their most daring work. Replacing that fearless cub is the eminence who has mastered many styles, inhabited many characters, and chronicled much of prairie history. The writing has grown assured, authoritative and learned but at the same time less able to surprise.

Is it fair to collect a writer’s every published story in a single volume, especially if it reveals such disparity of accomplishment over the course of a long career? The answer depends on who’s reading. Unlike John Cheever before the publication of his own Collected Stories, Rudy Wiebe has no qualms about presenting it all, including “Predestined,” a derivative piece of juvenilia for which he apologizes. Literary scholars and biographers will welcome the convenience of such a complete resource as this book. Devotees of the short-story form might want to wait for the publication of a leaner, best-of selection.