Lögberg-Heimskringla - 06.11.1992, Blaðsíða 4

4 • Lögberg-Heimskringla • Föstudagur 6. nóvember 1992
person
he Botticelli Face ,
author W.D. Valgardson has
abandoned the remote
northem communíties of
eariy stories to embrace
loneliness ofurban angst.
By Sandra Martin
On a hot aftemoon in late sum-
mer, an hour before my sched-
uled interview with writer W.
D. Valgardson, I was wandering
around Victoria trying to chart a men-
tal map through his fiction, when I
turned a corner and there he was
mowing his front lawn. There wasn’t
much grass to cut, since the customary
summer drought had exceeded expec-
tations — not to mention the meagre
capacities of the local reservoirs. A
municipal exhortation imploring resi-
dents to water only once a week had
transformed lush Victoria into a patch-
work of yellow, frizzled grass and
droopy perennials. Even the ubiqui-
tous impatiens could muster little more
than a sulk.
The man pushing the antiquated
handpowered mower over the politi-
cally correct lawn had the weathered
paleness and scrawny build of a prairie
preacher. At first glimpse, he had an
appealing mildness, but steeped as I
was in his haunting, if often horrifying,
fictional world of abuse and alco-
holism, I knew his gentle demeanour
could be holding the lid on a history of
violence, fundamentalism, and repres-
sion. Having scouted the scene, I
drove away, hoping I hadn’t been spot-
ted.
Biil Valgardson’s early volumes of
stories, Bloodflowers, God Is Not a
Fish Inspector and Red Dust, pub-
lished in the middle seventies, are
snugly structured tales set in the
Icelandic community around Gimli,
Manitoba. Stark and poetic, the stories
are about bitter characters struggling to
survive each other and the brutal land-
scape they inhabit. The stories could
easily be modern versions of Norse
family sagas, transplanted to contem-
porary northern Manitoba. Gentle
Sinners, which won the Books in
Canada first novel award in 1980, is
the surreptitious, yet sweetly innocent,
romance of two brutalized children of
abusive families. Although Valgardson
subsequently wrote another collection
of stories — What Can ‘t Be Changed
Shouldn’t Be Moumed, in 1990, and a
slew of radio dramas, his fans have
waited a dozen years for his second
novel The Girl with the BotticeUi Face,
which has just been published by
Douglas and Maclntyre.
In Botticelli, Valgardson has aban-
doned the isolation of his remote
northern communities and settled
instead for urban angst. In doing so, hc
has exchanged retrospection for the
contemporary glare, the emptiness of
the physical landscape for the loneli-
ness of the crowd. For trees read high
rises: the alienation is the same.
The new novel opens in a soggy
Victoria in the middle a biblical-like
winter deluge. “The whole city is
takes new direction
W.D. Vatgardson says wríting is ’a way of meeting my own emotional needs.'
depressed,” Valgardson writes in the
persona of his protagonist Bob.
“Somebody told me he’s heard of an
entire apartment block on valium.” In
the ceaseless downpour, Bob shuffles
along beside a hoarding when he
hears the cursing and screaming of a
couple fighting in the construction pit
below him. It is Bob’s detested mar-
riage counsellor slugging it out with
his own wife. The counsellor begs for
help, Bob gives him back some of his
own medicine, offering sanctimonious
advice, while the counsellor claws his
Sisyphean way up the muddy slope of
the excavation. When the counsellor is
inches from the top, Bob puts his toe
gently on his therapist’s head and
gives him “a little nudge, not hard, not
unkind, just enough to throw him off
balance and start him sliding. “
After this richly ironic and comic
beginning, Botticelli relates the stories
of two troubled Iives: Bob, a writer on
the verge of a nervous breakdown who
is trying to escape the clutches of his
wife and the terrors of his past, and the
mysterious waitress with the Botticelli
face who works in the cafe where Bob
drinks his daily cappuccino. Bob is ten-
tatively in love with her, but is too crazy
and too timid to leave his wife or
declare his feelings. While he hesitates,
the waitress disappears, leaving the
hapless Bob literally searching for his
love and his psyche. The novel is rid-
dled with alienation and loneliness, all
of it heightened by Bob’s more than
uncanny likeness to his creator, and
Bob’s psychological purging of the
appalling and long-repressed abuse he
endured as a child. What on earth, any-
body might wonder has been going on
in Valgardson’s life, in the dozen years
since Gentle Sinners?
When I came back at the appointed
time, Valgardson met me at the door
of his rambling mock-Tudor house
and led me to a sunroom at the back,
where he had laid out a plate of dainty
cucumber sandwiches, perkily deco-
rated with cherry tomatoes. Instead of
tea, we had coffee — not cappuccino,
but strong and rich, nonetheless. In
conversation Valgardson is gentle and
open with an infectious shriek of
laughter. The son of an Icelandic fish-
erman, he was born in Winnipeg in
1939, but raised in Gimli. From the
beginning he was an oddity, the 'nerd
with the book; he grew up lonely
because he was different and as an
adult he’s chosen the loneliest of all
occupations: writing.
Valgardson was the first member of
his family to go to university. He
enrolled at United College in
Winnipeg in 1957. His grandparents
gave him free room and board, his
mother took a job to give him spend-
ing money, and he worked in a ware-
house to pay his tuition. “It took all of
us to put me through university,” he
says. On a whim he joined a creative
writing club during his second year.
From then on he was hooked. ‘To my
dying day,” he says, “I will say a little
prayer to Robert Halstead and Walter
Swayze, who on their own time
offered a creative writing workshop.
We met once a week and even now I
teach classes in much the same way.”
He has been living in Victoria since
1974. lured to the coast to teach in the
creative writing department that poet
Robin Skelton was building in the
Faculty of Fine Arts at the university.
Two years later novelist Dave Godfrey
signed on in a department that now
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