Barbara Gowdy
B
ARBARA
G
OWDY
was born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1950. When she was four, her family moved to Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto that would come to inspire the settings for much of her fiction.
Gowdy considered a career as a pianist until she decided her talent was mediocre. While working as an editor at the publishing house Lester & Orpen, she found herself writing characters into her clients’ non-fiction and took this as her cue to start writing professionally.
Her first book,
Through the Green Valley
(a historical novel set in Ireland), came out in 1988; the following year she published
Falling Angels
to international critical acclaim. Her 1992 collection,
We So Seldom Look on Love,
was a finalist for the Trillium Award for Fiction. Four years later, the tide story from this collection was adapted into
Kissed,
a film directed by Lynne Stopkewich.
Falling Angels
was also adapted to film in 2003, with Esta Spalding as screenwriter.
Gowdy’s books, including three bestselling novels—
Mister Sandman
(1995),
The White Bone
(1998) and
The Romantic
(2003)—have been published in twenty-four countries. Gowdy has also had stories appear in a number of anthologies, including
Best American Short Stories, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English
and the
Penguin Anthology of Stories by Canadian Women.
Gowdy has been nominated repeatedly for many prestigious literary awards: four times for the Trillium Award and two times each
for the Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
The Romantic
earned her a Man Booker Prize nomination in 2003. In 1996, she was awarded the Marian Engel Award, which recognizes the complete body of work by a Canadian woman writer “in mid-career.” Nine years later, Ben Marcus praised Gowdy’s literary realism in
Harper’s Magazine,
singling her out as one of the few contemporary writers who has “pounded on the emotional possibilities of their mode, refusing to subscribe to worn-out techniques and storytelling methods.”
Visit the author online at www.barbaragowdy.ca
Barbara Gowdy has also appeared on television as a regular commentator on literary matters and has taught creative writing courses at Ryerson University. Her sixth novel,
Helpless,
will be published by HarperCollins in 2007.
She lives in Toronto.
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Barbara Gowdy received the prestigious Marian Engel Award in 1996, recognizing her contribution to Canadian literature.
We So Seldom Look on Love
Finalist for the Trillium Award
Mister Sandman
Finalist for the Trillium Award
Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Giller Prize
Named a
Times Literary Supplement
“Book of the Year”
The White Bone
Finalist for the Trillium Award
Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Giller Prize
Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
The Romantic
Nominated for the Man Booker Prize
Finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize
Finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book
Finalist for the Trillium Award
The following review o/Mister Sandman first appeared in The Washington Post on March 30,1997. It is written by American journalist and author of Geek Love, Katherine Dunn.
Some puritanical streak in many of us insists that art must be medicinal, glumly virtuous and difficult to swallow. Canadian Barbara Gowdy insolently explodes such constipated pretensions.
Mister Sandman,
her third novel, cocks a snoot at conventions, both moral and literary, and is so brilliantly crafted and flat-out fun to read that she makes jubilant sinners of us all.
Gowdy’s humour dwells not in one-liners, but in acute variations of tone and attitude. Her luminous, deceptively conversational style shuffles time frames and points of view so smoothly that her intricate narrative flows in molten simplicity. The deliberately mundane takes on magical qualities.
Gowdy’s topic in
Mister Sandman
is lies and the truth they are meant to conceal. The novel is a perfectly turned parable, but its characters are multidimensional human beings, convincingly drawn by a wry and knowing eye that sees all of their frail goofiness and loves them, not despite but because of their flaws. This refreshingly mature approach analyzes the function and form of deceit, recognizing that the first
and last victim of the lie is the liar and that, as in more public realms, the cover-up does more harm than the original crime.
Mister Sandman
is the story of the lying Canary clan, Doris and Gordon Canary and their three daughters. Gordon is the unassuming editor of gritty potboilers in a small publishing house. His talents are appreciated best by the hopeless, drunken writers whose stacks of unpublishable manuscripts are the footstools and end tables in the modest Canary home. Gordon loves his family “a great deal, protectively and sheepishly,” and he lies awkwardly and painfully to protect them from their own peccadilloes as well as his. “The truth,” he always says, “is just a version.” This maxim, distorted in the pleasantly bovine mind of his eldest daughter, Sonja, becomes “The truth is just aversion,” a heraldic motto for the entire factually challenged family.
Doris is a charming and versatile diva of prevarication. Wielding the skills of her failed acting career with a nimble imagination, the restless housewife creates a constantly evolving art form ranging from manipulative little fibs to grand-scenario whoppers. Lies are her tool for getting what she wants, from cash in a pinch to a shield from unpleasant consequences.
Marcy, the smart middle sister, has her own terrors and passions to disguise. If the eldest daughter, Sonja, is too simple to lie, she has secrets to nurture, and her contented misunderstanding of herself and everyone else forms a web of unreality more
impenetrable than the conscious fibbery of others.
Yet this is an enchantingly loving family. They lie tenderly to each other and eagerly believe each other’s lies. Only the youngest, Joan, never lies, if only because she was dropped on her head at birth and is mute. Depending on whose version one believes, she is brain-damaged or a supernatural reincarnation or a great mind choosing not to besmirch herself with the vile dangers of language. Whatever the case, she is utterly unlike any of the Canarys. She is bizarrely gifted and completely mysterious, a tiny, fastidious near-albino beauty in a dark, robustly homely brood. She is terrified of strangers, hypersensitive to light and sound. She spends her childhood hiding, reading and listening in a closet.
Joan is not the family shame, but their greatest treasure, the focus of their bewildered adoration. Each member of the family confides in her, pouring their secrets into her gorgeous silence. The father sprawls on the floor with his head in her closet confessing the tortures of his miserably decent soul. The mother, Doris, shares her merrily plotted evasions for the bill collectors and reads poetic tidbits from her lovers’ letters out loud. Dim, soft Sonja treats Joan to candy and whispers, while sharp Marcy claims she can read Joan’s mind and translate her desires. When Joan displays her astounding talents, the Canarys’ faith in her genius is joyously vindicated. When she starts work on her own creations, they struggle to help her, although they have no notion of what she
is doing or of how it will ultimately affect them all.
Around this familial nexus swirl the concealed individual lives. The lies become flags signalling what is most dear and most terrifying—and the biggest lies are to conceal sexual identity and extracurricular escapades. These are not evil people. The worst they do is deny what they fear in themselves, that inner life they fear will be rejected by their loved ones, or by society at large.
In her descriptions of these hidden passions, Gowdy’s lyric use of ordinary language takes on a sensuality so sympathetic that the reader is led inevitably to suspect that these propensities may not be the darker side of the Canary clan at all, but their radiant best.
—Reprinted by permission of the author
Doris creates a sob story so convincing on the TV program
Queen for a Day,
she trumps the other two contestants for the grand prize. This show aired for many years, first on the radio before becoming a hugely popular TV program. Learn more about it at:
www.classicthemes.c0m/50sTVThemes/themePages/queenForaDay.html
The only other contest Doris wins is ten rolls of toilet paper with a photo of her choice printed on it. Out of spite for never getting on
Name That Tune,
she has Bill Cullen’s photo printed on the rolls. If you’re having trouble visualizing Cullen, visit a website dedicated to him (with plenty of photos):
userdata.acd.net/ottinger/Cullen/
The first time Joan plays a piano, she mimics the hymn Grandma Gayler just finished playing, “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus.” To hear the hymn played on piano, you can download the file at:
www.hymnsite.com/lyrics/umh277.sht
Find the lyrics from the song “Mister Sandman” at:
www.ablyrics.com/lyrics_98634_Chordettes_Mr._Sandman.html
David Rayne, the experimental composer Gowdy creates for Joan to study, could be based on the prolific and highly influential avant-garde composer John Cage. A lengthy and fascinating biography of Cage and
his sound experiments can be found on this popular “Wiki” site:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_cage
Quill & Quire’s
profile on Barbara Gowdy, in which
Mister Sandman
and her other books are discussed, can be found at:
www.quiIlandquire.com/authors/profile.cfm?article_id=2564
Descant
cultural magazine devoted its entire Spring 2006 issue to Barbara Gowdy. For information on this issue, visit:
www.descant.on.ca/issues/d132.html
To receive updates on author events and new books by Barbara Gowdy, sign up today at
www.authortracker.ca.
When you die, and your earthly self begins turning into your disintegrated self, you radiate an intense current of energy. There is always energy given off when a thing turns into its opposite, when love, for instance, turns into hate. There are always sparks at those extreme points. But life turning into death is the most extreme of extreme points. So just after you die, the sparks are really stupendous. Really magical and explosive.
I’ve seen cadavers shining like stars. I’m the only person I’ve ever heard of who has. Almost everyone senses something, though, some vitality. That’s why you get resistance to the idea of cremation or organ donation. “I want to be in one piece,” people say. Even Matt, who claimed there was no soul and no afterlife, wrote a RS. in his suicide note that he be buried intact.
As if it would have made any difference to his energy emission. No matter what you do—slice open the flesh, dissect everything, burn everything—you’re in the path of a power way beyond your little interferences.
I grew up in a nice, normal, happy family outside a small town in New Jersey. My parents and my brother are still living there. My dad owned a flower store. Now my brother owns it. My brother is three years older than I am, a serious, remote man. But loyal. When I made the headlines he phoned to say that if I needed money for a lawyer, he would give it to me. I
was really touched. Especially as he was standing up to Carol, his wife. She got on the extension and screamed, “You’re sick! You should be put away!”
She’d been wanting to tell me that since we were thirteen years old.
I had an animal cemetery back then. Our house was beside a woods and we had three outdoor cats, great hunters who tended to leave their kills in one piece. Whenever I found a body, usually a mouse or a bird, I took it into my bedroom and hid it until midnight. I didn’t know anything about the ritual significance of the midnight hour. My burials took place then because that’s when I woke up. It no longer happens, but I was such a sensitive child that I think I must have been aroused by the energy given off as day clicked over into the dead of night and, simultaneously, as the dead of night clicked over into the next day.
In any case, I’d be wide awake. I’d get up and go to the bathroom to wrap the body in toilet paper. I felt compelled to be so careful, so respectful. I whispered a chant. At each step of the burial I chanted. “I shroud the body, shroud the body, shroud little sparrow with broken wing.” Or “I lower the body, lower the body…”And so on.
Climbing out the bathroom window was accompanied by: “I enter the night, enter the night…” At my cemetery I set the body down on a special flat rock and took my pyjamas off. I was behaving out of pure inclination. I dug up four or five graves and unwrapped the
animals from their shrouds. The rotting smell was crucial. So was the cool air. Normally I’d be so keyed up at this point that I’d burst into a dance.
I used to dance for dead men, too. Before I climbed on top of them, I’d dance all around the prep room. When I told Matt about this he said that I was shaking my personality out of my body so that the sensation of participating in the cadaver’s energy eruption would be intensified. “You’re trying to imitate the disintegration process,” he said.