Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2000
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 3, Summer 2000, pp. 211-24.
Abstract
In his essay "Sinclair Ross in Letters and Conversation," David Stouck recounts Ross's humble reactions to the array of criticism given to his first and most famous novel, As For Me and My House:
"You understand the [Bendeys] perhaps better than I do, or at least did when I was writing. For when I was writing I was participating and when you participate you often don't understand or see. More was coming I suppose than I knew." In this same vein he has often remarked that critical articles about the novel amaze him-discuss ions of Chopin and George Sand, of Dante, El Greco, or Michelangelo's Pieta, because he had no conscious intention of making them part of the design of his book.1
That the articles Stouck and Ross refer to deal chiefly with the diaristic novel's immersion in and reference to the artistic worlds of painting and music should come as no surprise to those familiar with the text, for it is a novel about art and artists. As For Me And My House holds a position in the Canadian literary canon similar to the fiction of American Great Plains authors O. E. Rolvaag or Frederick Manfred with its realistic and threatening portrayal of prairie life. Dick Harrison, in his seminal work Unnamed Country, even places the novel in the forefront of Canadian prairie fiction because "Ross's narrator, Mrs. Bendey, expresses so well the reactive, defensive function of the imagination confronting the prairie."2
As Ross states, much has been written on his deliberate use of artists or painters in the novel, and criticism has often singularly treated El Greco, Chopin, or Michelangelo. I would like to suggest an even greater deliberateness on the part of the author in choosing a variety of composers (Chopin, Debussy, Liszt and Beethoven) and painters (Gauguin, Romney, El Greco, and Gainsborough) who cross artistic boundaries, demonstrating in their art affinities toward music and painting. As these intersections are explored, we discover further to what extent Ross was "participating" in the construction of his text, violating the Emersonian advice not to pay homage to the European muses, and looking with Eastern eyes. Harrison defines this exclusively Canadian mindset when discussing the nineteenth century prairie traveler, Sir William F. Butler. At a loss for metaphors to define his experiences, he "draw[s] from the old culture the familar seascape which would have been part of the experience of most of his intended British readership"3-an image that recurs in the works of Cather, Rolvaag, Richter, Ross, Stegner, and Kroetsch, to name a few. With the musical and artistic references in As For Me and My House, we discover Ross engaging in a similar looking back at the old culture, looking back with Eastern eyes as a way to broaden his audience, make the prairie experience more accessible, and make his Saskatchewan novel part of the larger Canadian- and therefore, European-canon. Through this process of assimilating European painting and music traditions with the Great Plains experience, Ross gives his readers a text whose richness and depth of meaning increases, and his readership discovers an author who knew and cared about art and music so well that he could choose appropriately artists, musicians, and compositions without actually consciously "choosing."
The criticism that discusses Mrs. and Philip Bentley's roles as artists invariably centers on the conflict or lack of cohesiveness in their relationship, interpreting their artistic gifts not as interlocking, complementary, or reciprocating, but as incompatible and dissonant as their marriage. Harrison, for example, isolates Philip as "the artist about whom we are most concerned"; "sketches and paintings" serve as an "anti-journal" to Mrs. Bentley's text, "contradict[ing] her point of view"; while "the artfulness of writing" is veiled in the novel since "generally speaking diaries are not considered art." Mrs. Bentley often is depicted as the undedicated "dilettante" contrary to Philip's committed artist.4
But if these critics insist on investing one character with greater artistic talent, with creating an artistic hierarchy in which Philip is privileged, at least Barbara Godard acknowledges the differences in the couple's artistic views: "Mrs. Bentley embraces an expressive theory of art, wherein she stresses the artist's bond with his public; Philip advocates formalism, wherein art refers only to itself."5 And while she admits, quoting Maurice Beebe, an artistic "scale of values" in which "the composer would rate higher than the performer, the original painter higher than the engraver or copyist," nevertheless, "art has been the keystone of the Bentleys' marriage . . . the metaphor of harmony is thus linked with both marriage and artistic themes."6 Rarely does Godard actually center on Mrs. Bentley's art; reference is made to her piano playing, and she dominates the narrative, but Philip stands as the primary artist, and so Godard chooses to focus primarily on the connections to El Greco, Gauguin, Gainsborough, and Romney. It is not until we read Frances Kaye's perceptive analysis of Sand and Chopin as models for the Bentleys that we discover an interpretation of the novel that indeed "emphasizes Mrs. Bentley's abilities both as an artist in her own right, and as a successful and benevolent, if not always comprehending, guardian of her husband Philip's artistry."7 If Godard and Kaye help in uncovering some of the complex artistic patterns in As For Me and My House, they do so, in my opinion, by completing half the circle-at best creating a whole when considering the two interpretations together.
Comments
Copyright 2000 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln