Man Descending

she shows it to her friends or even Benny I won’t care. They’ll laugh, of course, and perhaps even doubt my sanity, or ponder the pass I’ve come to – selling plates and writing dusters.

I’ve already chosen an epigraph to my book, from Kierkegaard’s Journals. It’s my apology to Victoria and my admission that she was right all along. A kind of absolution that may surprise her, and, I hope, touch her. You see, she always expected more of me.

Soren wrote: “What ability there is in an individual may be measured by the yardstick of how far there is between his understanding and his will. What a person can understand he must also be able to force himself to will. Between understanding and willing is where excuses and evasions have their being.”

Afterword

BY LEO MCKAY JR.

A very good book is a mystery and should remain a mystery no matter how many times we read it. This mysteriousness is part of the ineffability of all art and what makes it possible to re-approach freshly a familiar painting or a piece of music. That we never fully solve the mystery of a work of art enables that work to yield new insights and perspectives even after multiple revisits.

I’ve read Man Descending many times, and each time I’ve noticed some new detail, some previously overlooked gem of description. The full impact of the following sentence, for example, taken from “The Watcher,” escaped me until the most recent reading: “So I luxuriated in this steamy equatorial climate, tended by a doting mother as if I were a rare tropical orchid.” Aside from its succinct beauty in describing the character’s sickly childhood, the mix of hard and soft consonants makes the sentence itself patter and squish with moisture.

The tautly controlled poetry of the prose stands out to me now as never before. Notice the rhythm of the following paragraph, taken from later in the same story:

A thunderstorm was brewing. The sky was a stew of dark, swollen cloud and a strange apple-green light. The temperature stood in the mid-nineties, not a breath of breeze stirred, my skin crawled and my head pounded above my eyes and through the bridge of my nose. There wasn’t a thing to do except sit on the bottom step of the porch, keep from picking up a sliver in your ass, and scratch the dirt with a stick. My grandmother had put her hat on and driven into town on some unexplained business. Thompson and my aunt were upstairs in their bedroom, sunk in a stuporous, sweaty afternoon’s sleep.

There are many such paragraphs in this book, short sections that could stand on their own as poems, so electrifying are the images, so powerful the language.

Guy Vanderhaeghe notices startling details and renders them on the page so that they in turn startle the reader. “Poplar bluffs in the distance shook in the watery heat haze with a crazy light, crows whirled lazily in the sky like flakes of black ash rising from a fire” (“Reunion”).

These stories reveal Vanderhaeghe’s remarkable social eye. He takes note of how people interact, how they treat each other, how they view each other. In the following sentence, the protagonist of “The Expatriates’ Party” is visiting England and commenting on how he regards his hosts. “He was sorry to see the English look like the landlords of boarding-houses, possessors of a testy dignity, forced by straitened circumstances into a touchy hospitality.”

Interior realities are masterfully evinced here, too. Vanderhaeghe shines a white light into the souls of his characters, making them reveal their luminous selves when presented on the page. “Dieter lay on the chesterfield trying to stifle his tears. It was not an easy job because even the sound of Mrs. Hax unconcernedly clacking the breakfast dishes reminded him of her monstrous carelessness with everything. His plates, his feelings” (“Dancing Bear”). I challenge anyone to find a briefer, more elegant, more revealing description of any character in any book by any writer. There is writing as good as this, but none better.

Moments of great emotional and physical intensity are realized in Man Descending with a truth that rarely transfers so clearly and powerfully onto the printed page. Again and again and again in these stories, characters’ heads swim with realization or fear or disgust. People turn infirm or ill. Someone scrapes a knuckle, goes bodily numb, peels off and examines a piece of his or her own skin. And in these places, where lesser writers seldom bother to prod or when they do either blur the moment with inexact language or use it merely as a pivot point for plot, the visceral poetry of Vanderhaeghe’s prose transforms the banal into the sublime.

Ogle, in “A Taste for Perfection,” is slowly losing sensation in his extremities. In an attempt to revivify himself, he makes his way to the hospital’s physical therapy room, where he finds a basketball. As Ogle holds the ball, Vanderhaeghe tells us that “he relished the pebbly grain with his fingertips.” A brief moment of somatic contact described so aptly that in a single sentence we can feel that ball in our own hands, and in doing so enter into Ogle’s experience just long enough to understand the fullness of his desperation.

At the end of “Dancing Bear,” as Dieter is making his last grab at a measure of autonomy, Vanderhaeghe’s description is so perfect and complete that I always find myself struggling for air as I read the following passage, as though Dieter’s consciousness were closing in around me.

He tried to get up. He rose, trembling, swayed, felt the floor shift, and fell, striking his head on a chest of drawers. His mouth filled with something warm and salty. He could hear something moving in the house, and then the sound was lost in the tumult of the blood singing in his veins. His pulse beat dimly in his eyelids, his ears, his neck and fingertips.

He managed to struggle to his feet and beat his way into the roar of the shadows which slipped by like surf, and out into the hallway.

And then he saw a form in the muted light, patiently waiting. It was the bear.

“Bear?” he asked, shuffling forward, trailing his leg.

Vanderhaeghe’s vision in Man Descending is rich and encompassing. He shows us relationships between men and women, men and men, parents and children. He takes us where power meets vulnerability, where violence meets despair. All the gravity of the book is cheered by the half-light of humour. All the humour is tinged with sorrow. Man Descending gives us a lush, generous, fecund view of a complex, difficult, knuckle-barking, beautiful universe.

I began by saying that a very good book was a mystery. I’ll conclude by saying that great books, aside from being mysteries, reveal a mystery to us. A great book can transform the reader, transform the reader’s perception, transform the world. This is what reading Man Descending does for us. While our eyes are on the pages, we admire the book itself, its breadth, its insight, the mastery of its art. When we lift our eyes from the page, we see the planet as though for the first time. The sparkling particulars of creation are brought into shaper focus. We are given to wonder at the private cosmos of each person we see. We realize anew the endless possibilities of the world.

Guy Vanderhaeghe

GUY VANDERHAEGHE was born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, in 1951. He received his B.A. (1971) and his M.A. (1975) from the University of Saskatchewan and his B.Ed. (1978) from the University of Regina.

In his first volume of fiction, twelve stories gathered together under the title Man Descending (1982), Vanderhaeghe recounts the dilemmas and the humiliations of a variety of male characters, ranging in age from childhood to old age. The collection won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and went on to receive the Faber Prize in Great Britain. In his subsequent fiction, which includes two more collections of short stories and four novels, he has won further awards and acclaim, his recent novels being historical fiction of the west.

In addition to his fiction, Vanderhaeghe has also written two plays: I Had a Job I