Agnes Walsh is the author of In the Old Country of My Heart which she recorded for Rattling Books in 2003. Between October 31 and Nov 4 Walsh will be appearing in Iceland with traditional Newfoundland singer and narrator Anita Best.
SD (from “Dreaming Backwards: the Poetry of Agnes Walsh”):
What does all this mean? I always hear that question in the voice of the bewildered witness to a metaphysical gunfight in Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger. The gun “occurs” in the Slinger’s hand and with it he “describes” his opponent:
What does the foregoing mean?
I asked. Mean?
My gunslinger laughed
Mean?
Questioner, you got some strange
obsessions, you want to know
what something means after you’ve
seen it, after you’ve been there
or were you out during
that time?
The gunslinger is nothing if not hip. He’s a hip intellectual cowboy demi-god, so he isn’t going to be down on interpretation. I think the person who wrote him is saddling “I” with the common paralysis of a mind stormed with experience not immediately intelligible. Jesus, Slinger might say, is that all you can think to ask? That is the first thing you want to know? You can’t just go with it for a spell? You want a fucking paraphrase?
Well, it doesn’t really do to sneer at the uncomprehending, seeing that it’s you and I. And we do want to know. We’d rather understand than be hip. We might begin by improving the question. What’s going on in the above? Let’s ask that. It frees us right away to think about genre and technique.
First, a catalogue of the obvious -- which immediately changes the genre, from poem into story. “When I Married Halldór Laxness” looks like a poem (and Agnes thinks of it as such; prose poem -- no line breaks) because the narrative is so stark, but the piece has narration and dialogue and the bones of a plot. At the centre of the plot (so reduced as to be almost all centre) is a January-May pair of characters, first attracted but at odds, who move closer to each other in the course of the story. The time scheme is linear. It spans seven years of the relationship. After the first scene, we jump into the next night, then to the next week, then two years later, five years later. The final scene is the first one given in the present tense; that shift in tense reveals a present from which the rest of the (past tense) tale is retrospectively told.
The most dreamlike least developed aspect of narrative technique is setting. When the woman spills beer on the pant leg of a man, she presumably does it in a room. The room is in her house, presumably, since he’s the one who leaves. The phone, the doorbell, the door: these bare details also imply a house. Seven years later, a house (the same one?) is implied by its back yard. And that’s it. “Glacier is in Iceland” gives no clue as to where the house might be, since the woman has been fooled into thinking she can reach it from where she lives, which may be but is not identifiable as Newfoundland. (Glacier is not in Iceland, not on the map anyway -- though glaciers are; rather, it’s a fictional place in Laxness’s allegorical novel, Christianity in Glacier). Nor is the parenthesis (containing a scene from the aftermath of the 1929 Newfoundland tidal wave) locational, since that woman in the dislodged floating house has no obvious connection with the two characters. This two-sentence parenthetical unit has as much setting as the rest of the piece, however: a house, a bay, a town -- St. Lawrence near the tip of the Burin Peninsula.
The narrator is a young(ish?) woman involved in a strange, arbitrary relationship with an older man, perhaps even an aged man who yet has the potency to father children -- though in a manner comic and more of myth than biology (the third pregnancy is caused by a laugh). The story opens at a moment of crisis, of decision. Tension between the two characters is established by a bit of aggressive play with a glass of beer. He has most of the speech. She sighs once, but otherwise speaks only two words, “Yes” and “No.” Reticence aside, she is not passive. She is unapologetic about spilling beer on him; she decides immediately to “hang in this ether land,” though she knows the decision will cost her; she refuses to look at him when he commands her to. (He seems to be raising obstacles, testing her. Will your decision stand if you know in advance that I’ll mistreat you, and unpredictably?) Yet she is obsessed with him. She attempts to find the impossible rendezvous he appoints; she has a lover’s reaction to the gift of Aksel Sandemose books, matching her fingers to his prints on it. None of the riddling deters her; she doesn’t give up on him.
The turning point, the moment of mutual commitment, seems to come in the section beginning “two years later.” Two sentences carry the bones of a (marriage?) ceremony, perhaps involving a candle. There is a match in her trembling hand, and she may be lighting the candle that signals her readiness. (Only adjacency connects this candle with the one carried from window to window of the floating house.) Possibly she is now repeating the “Yes” she offered two years ago, though it would be stretching to identify readiness to “hang in this ether land” with readiness to marry. The adverb “shyly,” though strange modifying “crippled” (a verb here, usually a noun) suggests a change in him, a mellowing.
Five years later, the two of them are (still?) together, if we can go by the babies and his back yard chopping, signs of domestic arrangement. His conversation is as enigmatic as ever. Since he’s clearly the guy for her, she must absolutely love non sequitur. He still demands her attention, her gaze at least, and he reminds her (as the story flashes back) of a command that he now reveals to have been a joke: he lured her to a rendezvous that he made sure she couldn’t locate. Were those torn-out pages from a guide book or a novel? Is that “ether land” fiction? If I didn’t know Walsh to be a devoted reader of Halldór Laxness, would it occur to me to wonder if the marriage has to do with the relationship between fiction and a loving reader?
In a tale so curtailed, little becomes much. Climax and dénouement require a single sentence. “Gentle laugh,” added to “shyly,” suggests either that he has mellowed or that all his earlier threats were a front to discourage too easy involvement in an inappropriate and bumpy relationship. A few facts can be established about the story, then, but I’ve had to be very tentative and ask a lot of questions. There are further questions: Abstract and Zero? These are likely names for babies neither in real life (with apologies to Zero Mostel) nor in any fiction with pretensions to realism. The names do frame the whole gamut of alphabet, A to Z, and they might tease certain minds towards philosophy and mathematics. Didymus? The Greek name (‘twin’) of St. Thomas, the doubter who needed and received physical evidence of Christ’s resurrection. “Under my fingernails?” Some things will have to be left hanging in the ether. But then I don’t expect the piece to mean piecemeal. The whole thing is dreamlike, riddling, nonsensical. It teeters on an edge between the ominous and the humorous. In it there is this sense of an independent woman prepared to sacrifice something in order to remain in a (metaphorical) land presided over by an unintelligible but compelling man with the almost godlike power of creating life by laughing.
*
If the foregoing has any use it’s to show that conventional literary analysis will get us somewhere with “When I Married Halldór Laxness.” The terms that work best were shaped to discuss fiction, which means either that what I first took to be a poem should be reclassified as a story or that, at a certain degree of truncation, story becomes poem.
All that’s missing from what I’ve said so far is everything, the spirit of the piece. Or am I nearing it with my hunch that the dreamlike story is a transmutation of Agnes’s relationship with Laxness’s books? That impregnating laugh, for instance: mythic, yes, and with the feel of heroic Laxnessian hyperbole. From The Atom Station: “And Geiri of Midhouses laughed -- that laugh that would suffice to build a cathedral, even on the summit of Mount Hekla.”
One of Mario’s Ruoppolo’s questions for Pablo Neruda is left unanswered in the film, Il Postino: “The whole world is a metaphor for something else?” Neruda takes the question seriously, but he wants to sleep on it and I can see why. Life in the film moves on and the question never comes up again. I wonder if a similar question should be asked of “When I Married Halldór Laxness,” since it’s both compelling and enigmatic from one end to the other: is the poem a metaphor for something else in its entirety? I think there’s a roundabout way of answering by way of material that might even have been presented first except that it fell beyond the reach of unaided interpretation. Only when my own thinking and researching is exhausted would I consider asking the writer anything about her text. I don’t want any approach foreclosed by deference to the writer. A critic in the pocket of a writer is a puppet or a parrot -- though a critic with nothing to offer the writer should find some other line of work. But it would be silly to ignore unsolicited aid, information provoked merely by praising “When I Married Halldór Laxness” to Agnes Walsh. What came out had nothing to do with Laxness; it was about the courtship of the Sam B. to whom she dedicated the poem.
So the mild eroticism of “When I Married Halldór Laxness” owes as much to the person of Sam Bambrick as to anything in Laxness’s books. Maybe the birch billets do too, not being Icelandic. “Chunks of firewood in Newfoundland are junks, unless they happen to be birch junks, when they become billets” (Harold Horwood, quoted in Dictionary of Newfoundland English). Before the piece could be written, there had to be another marriage or merging of two affections: Sam Bambrick and Halldór Laxness. Whatever Laxness and his books contributed to the writing, Sam lent his attention, his body past its prime and perhaps a single Newfoundland word. Knowing this only confirms something unsurprising: the poem is an invention.
Another conversation with Agnes, this time about Laxness’ The Atom Station (which I read on her recommendation) produced another stray fact -- First Point is in Placentia. I intended to exhaust Laxness’ novels searching for First Point and was both relieved and disappointed when the location was handed to me. Never mind. Knowing it and knowing what to do with it are two different things. The first thing that comes to mind (besides more Newfoundland content) is the outrage to logic in the challenge to coordinate an actual place in one country with a fictional place in another. The poem/story is built on such wonderful outrages, so that’s nothing new. What is new is the thought, if we step away from the literal, that readers do leap easily from life to fiction, and do it all the time. Fixed in this country, we tour that one; from any actual place we travel widely in the realms of gold. Placentia, Newfoundland meets Glacier, Iceland, as Agnes Walsh meets Halldór Laxness (and Laxness meets Sam Bambrick), and they all mingle agreeably in a reader. I may have been on to something, suspecting that the piece is (indirectly) about reading, a homage to fiction so strong as to invade one’s very life. What more potent salute to life-changing writing than a writing-in-return that dissolves the boundary between life and literature, superimposing one on the other? I’m still asking, but I’ve thought my way around to a good question: is the meaning of the piece this delighted and delightful doubling -- as life and literature impossibly and decisively occupy the same dream?
(to be continued)
