The Mountain and the Valley (48 page)

The sun-shadow passed swiftly through his mind. The translation was utter. It lasted and spread in him like the swimming exaltation of wine. (They had all read his book now. He felt that wave of pride and humbleness both, as they looked at him and thought: he understands everything …)

And looking down over the whole mountain in the softening air to the valley beneath, it was as when the last load of wood had left the log road for the smooth fields and you looked back and saw the stumps where the chain had caught, and the rock that had smashed the runner the noon when the going was best, and the place where the skid had broken and upset the sled … but this was the last load. There was nothing left on the road to go back for now. The sweating and straining and fearful caution as you eased the patched-up runner over the cradle hills, and the sharp watch on the sun that
threatened to take all the snow, were all of yesterday: made now a comradely kind of song.

He saw his own house in the valley, and tiny and far-off his grandmother come out on the porch.

She is old, he thought, and
she
sees everything so dimly. He had a sudden pang of guilt; because of that, and because of his sharp reply to her about his clothing.

I will ask her if she’s warm enough, he thought, the first thing when I go through the door. Then I’ll go over and tell her that’s the prettiest rug yet.

Everyone
seemed suddenly radiate with a neglected warmth, which waited only for his overture, to be released and glow.

I’ll go over and help Steve unload his wood, he thought. He’s as good a fellow as I know, Steve is … I’ll make the light shine kindly on him in the book. On all of them. I will tell them just as they are, but people will see that there is more to them than the side that shows. They’re rough in their speech and in their bodies, but when they’re sober they’re never thinking sly thoughts. They curse and they bla’guard, but it’s not really cursing and bla’guarding at all, it’s so thoughtless—there’s never any cast of chill or connivance about anything like that they do. None of it sticks to them. And when they do stop to think of anything they’ve done and are penitent, they’re hurt more keenly and inexpressibly in the penitence than the offended ever was by the deed. When each of their days is over, all its roughness is rubbed out when they quiet down to sleep, like the innocent erasure of a child’s sleep. They’re intricate as anyone else, but there’s no hardness about it. They’re the best people in the whole world.

He caught his breath. He felt like the warm crying of acquittal again. Even my mother and my father and all the
others who are gone will know somehow, somewhere, that I have given an absolving voice to all the hurts they gave themselves or each other—hurts that were caused only by the misreading of what they couldn’t express. They will see that anyone who must have loved them so well, to have known them so thoroughly, could never have denied them once, as sometimes they may have thought I did …

I will ask Chris to come live with us, and he’ll know that I forgave him long long ago. And Anna. How could I have ever thought that Anna and I could grow away from each other? (The morning of my first trip to the mountain, the Christmas tree, the blindman’s buff …) How proud she will be when she sees what I have done. (The skates …)

He could hear his voice saying to her on the phone, “What do you think, Anna—my book won the prize!” Then the line would be still, because they’d both be crying; then they’d both be laughing at each other crying … Oh, Anna, Anna …

And then he felt the beating of his heart.

And then the blackness swam in his head again. He waited for it to clear.

And then the blackness turned to grey and then to white: an absolute white, made of all the other colours but of no colour itself at all.

And then the snow began to fall.

Ellen’s rug was down to its last two concentric circles. She selected the rags for these very carefully. Scarlet. That was scarlet. That was the cloak David had worn the night someone laughed at his piece in the school play. She hooked in a rag of that.

Only one tiny circle remained. White. White … She picked up the scrap of fine white lace and made of it the last circle. She smiled.

“David,” she called, “the rug is done. Come see.”

He didn’t answer. She turned, but he wasn’t in the kitchen. Then she went to the door and called. There was no answer. She could see him nowhere.

“Where
is
that child?” she said. “You never know where that child is.”

The snow began falling all at once, but without hurry. Gathering dreamily and thick, high up; thickening until the sun was gone, and then drifting slowly downward, each of the great flakes moving soundlessly in all directions, even upward again sometimes as if in memory of a breeze, and then, finally, levelling off and finding the road or a tree or some part of the valley to lie on. Near at hand they fell lingeringly and separate, like tiny white feathers from a broken wing; but farther off they made a grey cohesive curtain in the air itself; and far far off downward, over the spruces and the valley, they made a solid sheet like the greyness of twilight, that thickened denser still until the valley was completely gone.

At first they lay detached, each of them as nothing on the trees and the road; and then they began to aggregate soundlessly, but like a sound gathering, until the spruces had warm white epaulettes, and beneath the great maples the ground was all white, and on the trackless road there were no tracks but now a white track could be made.

A train whistled beyond the valley. Then it thundered along the rails and was gone. Its smoke hung behind it and settled in the valley, and then slowly it disappeared too.

The snowflakes fell on David’s face and caught in his eyelashes and melted. They caught in the strands of hair that escaped beneath his thrown-back cap and melted. They
melted in the corners of his mouth. They clung to the wool of his jacket and the wool of his mittens without melting.

And then they clung, without melting, to his eyelashes and his hair. And then they did not melt on his eyelids or on his cheeks or in the corners of his mouth or anywhere on his face at all. And then they grew smoothly and exactly over him and over the fallen log that lay beside him until the two outlines were as one.

A partridge rose in the grey-laden air. Its heavy body moved straight upward for a minute, exactly. But David did not see that.

And then its grey body fell swiftly in one straight movement, as if burdened with the weight of its own flight: down, between the trees, down, swoopingly, directly, intensely, exactly down over the far side of the mountain.

T
he way in to
The Mountain and the Valley
is, of course, through the Prologue – through those first sentences that compress and foreshadow so much. The opening sentence spans the whole of David Canaan’s life, “all his thirty years” spent in Entremont. The second introduces “the log road that went to the top of the mountain,” the way that David will take on this, the last day of his life. Following paragraphs design the setting for us: North and South Mountain, the river, the highway, the valley, wide but “shut … in completely.” The seventh paragraph begins the process of representing the present hour, detail by detail, establishing a rhythm that, page by page, will cumulatively turn the narrative into a prose poem, musical in its large design and in its parts.

The Prologue’s title, “The Rug,” draws attention to a feature both of the large narrative design and of the local music. And in the Prologue, Ellen the rugmaker, as keeper of the family’s memories, as designer, assumes her roles. The narrator tells us what she sees, looking at her work, her history: “The pattern of the rug was not intricate. It had a wide dark border, then a target pattern of circles radiating from the
centre of the canvas.” Ellen will complete her rug in the Epilogue, not at the border, but at the “radiating” white centre, which is there already in the design and from which the outer circles take their form and place as much as from “the dark border” where she began. She will complete the rug at the moment when David will reach the top of the mountain, when his consciousness transcends its limits as the totality of human experience appears to break in upon it. In his illumination, and in hers, is all the completion that Buckler’s narrative seems to expect of art – and of life.

Though the simple lines and taut frames suggest a rigidity in the large design, Ellen and her rug music will return again and again in the novel as a kind of release. In the Prologue, the rug music asserts its character: “Red … Red … Yes, that was red. That was a tablecloth. The neighbours had given it to Joseph and Martha …” Ellen’s scraps and the memories they evoke here stand for the lives of the characters and for crucial events in those lives, which will be fully lived out in the chapters to follow. The broken lines of Ellen’s thoughts contrast with the closed lines of her rug. They represent the rich, resonating details that will play throughout the novel against its analytical bent, its linearity, its formal symmetry – its dark border.

The progress of David Canaan’s life will appear by the end of the Epilogue to be as inevitable as is the progress of Ellen’s rug, but the substance of his and his family’s lives will be as variegated as Ellen’s rags. So what may seem at first to be an arbitrary and obvious formalism lodged in a single large metaphor turns out to be more organically musical in the way Buckler works it out.

One may ask, given the novel’s richness of imagery and closeness of engagement, why Buckler felt any need for a large
enclosing design. One could argue from its very pervasiveness that the design must have grown with the quotidian details rather than constitute an imposition upon them. Formal containment within the surrounding frame perhaps mirrors a view of life as appearing free when it is experienced moment by moment but, seen as a whole, evidently circumscribed. In other words, Buckler designs paradox into his novel, a paradox that is most apparent in the climactic mountaintop scene – the implosion that occurs in David’s consciousness when the lid is about to shut on it and on the novel.

One may also want to link the formal design to the period when the novel was written. The years after World War II, the late 1940s and early 1950s, brought to some writers – a whole generation of British and American poets, for instance – a need to forsake free and open forms for tighter, more traditional ones. The need may have been partly a response to the unsettling effects of the War; it may have reflected a distrust of revolutions and brave new experiments. For some of these writers, tighter forms meant closer irony, reflecting moods of sadness, emptiness, and bitterness following on the strident slogans and unspeakable horrors. For other writers, as they looked back, the pre-War period began to be seen as a relatively innocent and stable time, for which formal order seems an appropriate counterpart. And in still other instances, as in the poems of Dylan Thomas, formal designs acted as “containers” in both senses of the word, of impulses, dark and light, that could scarcely be contained. Buckler’s very use of strict formal design, therefore, invites the reader to appreciate the tensions of a whole historical moment as well as of one individual’s life.

In a poem-novel, care in shaping individual sentences, paragraphs, and chapters inevitably extends to care for the
total design. I think it significant, however, that for his third book,
Ox Bells and Fireflies
, written in the 1960s, Buckler found an open form, totally unlike the design of
The Mountain and the Valley
, even though he drew his matter and imagery from the same sources and used them again to suggest how rootlessness and isolation had displaced connectedness to family and community, and to the earth itself.

An important means of ordering any narrative is the voice. Buckler uses a narrator whose omniscience, in the sense of his knowing things that his characters do not know, at times becomes explicit, though he never presides with the overt cosmic irony of a Hardy narrator. Illusions of distance between narrative voice and the consciousness being depicted vary constantly. For instance, at times an analytical voice predominates, often attempting close definitions of indefinable relationships. Here it describes David’s role among his peers: “It wasn’t brotherly liking, but a kind of narcissism. He seemed forever, by the twist of essentiality he gave to whatever they said or did, to be disclosing and illuminating a part of themselves they’d never recognized before.”

Another voice not attached to a particular character depicts diurnal and seasonal events in passages (and sometimes whole chapters) that compose short prose poems within the larger structure. Such is Chapter
VII
, which begins, “In the country the day is the determinant. The work, the thoughts, the feelings, to match it, follow.” The impersonal voice often modulates to one more involved with a particular character’s responses. One mark of this modulation is a shift to second person – “You awoke again, all at once. The instant thought that another day had something ready for you made a really physical ticking in your heart.” The shift impersonalizes and generalizes, while at the same time it draws the reader in to a
close complicity with the presiding voice and so with the consciousness being depicted.

In the second part of Chapter
VII
, David’s thoughts filter seasonal events as he ceaselessly rehearses his lines for the school play: “He thought of them when Chris was dropping seed potatoes, aligning the odd one that tumbled out of place, with his foot; pressing it into the soft brooch-coils of manure automatically.” The play of “the words” against physical phenomena builds through the rest of the chapter. Between it and the climax and anti-climax, which occur in Chapter
X
, the pure idyll of the Christmas chapters suspends yet sustains the excitement. David’s apotheosis, the height toward which these chapters and Part One as a whole have been building, comes during the play: