The Wanton Troopers (26 page)

Put your hand there.

I love you, Mummy.

Say it again.

I love you, Mummy.

— Again.

I love you, Mummy.

What are yuh, eh? Nothin' but a wizzenin' little petticoat sucker,
eh?

Don't kill me, Daddy. Please don't kill me, Daddy.

Here's a cuckoo! There's a cuckoo!

There's a cuckaroo!

Here's a cuckoo! There's a cuckoo!

Here's a cuckaroo!

Saul has slain his thousands and Kevin-David his ten thousands.

Oh, please God.

Please.

Please, God.

Don't let Mummy leave me, God.

Don't let him say it again, God.

Don't make it so I have to fight him, God.

Make them stop, God.

I promise I won't ask you for anything else. I'll never ask you for anything again. Please God.

I'm gonna be a prophet a God.

Put your hand there.

Make me like David, O God. Like David and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and . . . like Jesus.

Do you ever dream about girls, Kevin? Do you ever dream about
doin' things with girls?

Sugar-baby. Sweetikins. Scamper.

I'm going away, Scampi. You' ll have to stay with your father for
a little while, but I' ll come back for you —

You should hear the music, Scampi! It makes you want to dance and dance and dance!

I am Kevin, the prophet of God.

I am Kevin, the prophet of God.

I am Kevin, the prophet of God.

Suddenly, Kevin knew what he had to do. The whirling galaxies of words and pictures that had been pouring through his mind vanished and were replaced by a great certainty and peace.

He knelt in the road, as he had done before, oblivious to the pellets that pelted his face.

“Oh God,” he prayed. “Show me a sign! Open up the heavens, O God, and show me a sign! Show me that I'm one of Thy mighty ones, a king and a prophet, O God! Show me that I don't have to be afraid. Show me that I'll never have to be afraid again. Show me your face in the sky, O God!”

He had closed his eyes during this prayer. Now tremulous but smiling, he opend them, lifted his head slowly and looked up at the sky . . .

Afterword

This novel was sent to one publisher, rejected, and put in a drawer. It found its way to the public sometime after Alden Nowlan's death in l983. It is a great novel — one written by a poet in his youth — and has a deep poetic sense. Poetry redeems its darker moments and enlivens its lighter. It is probably as good a first novel as most I've read, and better than most of the novels published anywhere the year it was rejected. So why was it rejected? And why didn't Nowlan, who fought whenever he had to, fight for it — and send it elsewhere? That is, did he believe the opinion of the editor who summarily dismissed it?

I doubt it. Nowlan knew more about literature than any editor did. He knew more about the novel, and that too is the secret. For this is a novel that stems from his youth, his growing up, his parents, and his village. It is a wonderful novel, filled with moments of unquestionable delight. Yet it also is a novel desperate with uncomfortable truths about his mother and father, his birth, and his solitude in the face of family and cultural violence. And I think this is why at least part of him might have been relieved by the rejection slip.

That long-ago rejection slip did Canadian literature and Alden Nowlan a great disservice, but no one in Toronto — or anywhere else — would know or care for almost thirty years. When I think of novels that have been dismissed in the century just past, I put this in the category of James Joyce's
Stephen Hero
, or Norman Maclean's
A River Runs Through It
, for the sheer blindness on which such decision making rests. In fact, I think
The Wanton Troopers
is a better novel then
Stephen Hero
— or what was managed to be saved of Joyce's manuscript — and, in many respects, as accomplished as
A River Runs Through It
.

The Wanton Troopers
was rejected because of what it was — frightening and brave, at times utterly brave. It is the hopeful journey of a small, tremendously gifted boy born into a poverty-stricken Maritime family back in the 1940s. And that might have been too real for the editor who looked at it to contemplate. Of course, that tells us more about the incompetence of the editor at reading than Nowlan's ability to write. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said in
Success
, “'Tis the good reader that makes the good book . . . the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.” Far too many editors know nothing of great books — or at least how to read them. For this book, beyond everything else, has a deep, deep, enduring love for all things living, and a deep moral reverence for humanity no matter what. And nothing tells us this more than the poetry that crowns it. In this one way, then,
The Wanton Troopers
is a holy book.

If the book relied upon its poetry alone, then poetry alone would sanctify it. But its strength is greater than its poetry — for it is a book whose author understands humanity, character, and drama as well as most writers I have read. The human foible and false rebellion, the contrived bravery and final sadness of the father, Judd, make him as human as any of William Faulkner's men. The wondrous, self-interested delusion of Kevin's mother, Mary, gives her life the gift (yes gift) of tragedy. This is what the editor in some small office fifty years ago failed to see: the overflowing grace and human care of an artist determined to reveal at any cost those few elusive moments of tenderness among many terrifying hatreds — where Kevin is, like so many millions of solitary children, a scapegoat in a world he cannot control. No one was ever more careful to get it right, and to make it universal while doing so.

Nowlan was forever a major artist who needed to tell us not about his life so much as ours. And in the end, we celebrate this life he gives us as part of our own.

The Wanton Troopers
recounts the 1940s Maritimes with a richness of expression rarely — if ever — found, and almost never surpassed. It is a book that exposes to forgive, forgives in order to celebrate — and in the end, begs us all to love.

David Adams Richards
Bartibog Bridge, Miramichi
July 2009

About the Author

In his preface to Gregory Cook's biography of Alden Nowlan, American poet Robert Bly praises Nowlan as “the greatest Canadian poet of the twentieth century.”
¹
Whether the adversity that Nowlan faced during his childhood (fictionalized here in
The Wanton Troopers
) nourished or impeded his literary development is a matter for debate, but the story of his life is indeed an inspiring one of triumph over difficult circumstances.

Nowlan was born during the Great Depression in January of 1933 in the village of Stanley, Nova Scotia. He was the first child of fourteen-year-old Grace Reese and Freeman Nowlan, a marginally employed mill hand who was twice her age. Nowlan's sister, Harriet, was born almost three years later, in November of 1935. Beset by poverty and Freeman's alcoholism, the couple struggled to feed and clothe themselves and their children.

As a work of fiction,
The Wanton Troopers
conflates, transforms, and omits material from Nowlan's life to create the world of Kevin O'Brien; still, the novel can be read autobiographically. Lockhartville and the shack in which the O'Brien family lives was, for Nowlan, actually two modest homes in the adjoining communities of Stanley and Mosherville. Each of these homes lay under the powerful matriarchal rule of a grandmother: Grace's mother, Nora, and Freeman's mother, Emma, respectively. Both were strong, capable women who took care of Alden and Harriet when Grace went off to dances or Freeman went to work in the woods or disappeared on a drinking binge with his buddies.

Had their grandmothers lived, the children's lives might not have been so tragic. Of the two, Emma Nowlan most resembled Martha O'Brien of
The Wanton Troopers
. Although she was a pious, Bible-reading woman who eventually died of stomach cancer, Emma also earned notoriety as a village eccentric who amused children with her antics (which included impersonating a witch). She entertained adults with a talent for step-dancing — something the fictional Martha condemned. But it was Nora Reese who looked after the children the most up until the fall of 1939, when Alden started school.

By the time Nora died of Hodgkin's disease in the spring of 1940, Grace and Freeman's marriage had already broken up. Grace attempted to move the children in with her and her boyfriend but was blocked by Children's Aid, who assumed brief custody of Alden and Harriet until Freeman could move Emma into his house in Stanley. Once in the Stanley house, Emma took over as the children's principal caregiver. As her health deteriorated, she indulged young Alden by allowing him to stay home from school. He eventually quit after completing grade four.

By 1947, Grace's visits to Stanley-Mosherville had stopped, and Freeman's drinking had worsened. When Alden — by now housebound, depressed, and entirely devoted to reading books — fell ill, the Reese family forced Freeman to have Alden and Emma taken to the hospital in Windsor, Nova Scotia, where Emma died that summer. On the advice of doctors and with Freeman's consent, Alden was admitted to the Nova Scotia Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Dartmouth.

Although Nowlan could not resist using his experience at the Nova Scotia Hospital as sensationalist fodder for some of his later stories and poems, his treatment there — according to family accounts — was beneficial for the intelligent but socially awkward teen. When he was discharged early in 1948, Alden returned to Freeman's house to work with his father in the woods and at the mill. He also bought a typewriter with his meagre pay and began to write short stories, poems, and articles for the local newspaper. A reporter, recognizing the young man's talent, helped Nowlan make contact with a weekly newspaper, the
Observer
, in Hartland, New Brunswick. He was hired, and at the age of nineteen, he left Stanley for good.

During his Hartland years, from 1952 to 1963, Nowlan became known nationally as a poet and short fiction writer, producing five collections of poetry and earning praise from such figures as Irving Layton and Robert Weaver. On the day before he moved from Hartland to Saint John, New Brunswick, Nowlan married Claudine Orser Meehan, a divorcee with a nine-year-old son, Johnnie.

Nowlan's new experiences in a larger city working for the
Telegraph-Journal
and
Evening Times-Globe
, the joys of family life, and the tribulations of a near-fatal bout with thyroid cancer were the subjects of his breakthrough poetry collection in 1967,
Bread, Wine and Salt
. Canada's literary community rallied around the promising but stricken poet, securing him a Canada Council grant. In 1968, Nowlan was named writer in residence at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, and that allowed him to quit full-time newspaper work and devote his time to writing.

Despite living with cancer, Nowlan became the centre of Fredericton's cultural life, producing six more collections of poetry and two short fiction collections, completing the novel
Various Persons Named Kevin O'Brien
, continuing his regular columns in newspapers and magazines, and even becoming a playwright with co-author Walter Learning. The university gave Nowlan a home at the edge of the campus, a location that reflected his role as a sometimes pugnacious and controversial mediator between artists, students, and professors.

Nowlan's prolific output was cut short on June 27, 1983, when he succumbed to respiratory failure. His legacy lives on in the many writers he influenced, in his posthumously published works (including
The Wanton Troopers
), and in his former residence on the UNB campus, which has been beautifully restored and renamed Alden Nowlan House in his honour.

Patrick Toner's interest in Alden Nowlan began in high school. He wrote his MA thesis at Carleton University on the religious and supernatural beliefs in Nowlan's poetry and, in 2000, a biography,
If I Could Turn and Meet Myself: The Life of Alden
Nowlan
.

1
Robert Bly, “The Nourishing Voice of Alden Nowlan,” preface to
One Heart, One Way: Alden Nowlan, A Writer's Life
by Gregory M. Cook (East Lawrencetown, NS: Pottersfield Press, 2003), 11.

An Interview with Alden Nowlan

JON PEDERSEN

For three days in 1982, I interviewed Alden Nowlan for the National Film Board of Canada film production
Alden
Nowlan: An Introduction
. The resulting half-hour film was completed in 1983, after Nowlan's death. The complete interview consists of approximately five hours of synchronized 16mm film shot by Kent Nason and full-track ¼" audiotape recorded by Art McKay, both of the National Film Board, Atlantic Region.

The following includes about half of the interview; a transcript of the complete interview is available from the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick or the Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick.

Jon Pedersen

All writers complain of the constraints and difficulties under which they work. Is it a painful and difficult process for you?

Alden Nowlan

Well, writing with me is almost an inevitable process. I'm a writer almost in the same sense that I have grey eyes. I would write poems even if no one read them, but I wouldn't write stories or plays or newspaper columns if no one read them, obviously. But I would be writing poems even if nobody read them.

JP
Is Fredericton a good environment for poets? Is poetry taken seriously?

AN
I suspect it is, but it really wouldn't have made a great deal of difference to me where I was, as long as the place where I was wasn't actively uncomfortable, so long as I wasn't in a situation which was painful or humiliating. I mean, I'm not really an active enough participant in the community of Fredericton, in a sense, that it makes any great difference to me that I live here, you see. I mean, partly because of my background, I'm not the sort of writer who needs to be associated with other writers in order to be creative.