GUIDE TO GOOD READING

_ Creative talent shown in
Canadian author's first novel

CLAUDE WIDGEWOOD, the
protagonist of Chipmunk, a first
novel by Len Peterson just pub-
lished by McClelland and Stewart,
is a master artist of the bakery,
proud of the shape and flavor of
the cinamon buns that he makes
for his employer, Mrs. Cadenza.
A Torontonian, Claude is married
to the fat Faustina who bewilders
him with her fits of intense amo-
rousnéss, and he has no friends,
although he likes to think that
the wrestler, Mott Kilsoodski, is
his buddy. He believes in the
greatness of George Drew, the
divinity of free enterprise, and
the principles of the Toronto
Telegram. He hates Communists,
trade unions and _ intellectuals.
Being a member of a big brother
league, he takes a spasmodic in-

_ terest/in the welfare of Nick Ya-
kyuchuk, a “juvenile delinquent”
whose mother is a streetwalker.

The world of Claude Widge-
wood is safe, narrow, and seem-
ingly solid. But with the attempt
to set up a union at the bakeity,
stability evaporates, Claude is
afraid ‘that he will not get the
raise Mr. Cadenza has promised
him so often. And that is not all
that worries him.

His dormant sense of terror re-
vives as strange things (strange
to Claude) begin to happen. Faus-
tia loses the baby she hag been

carrying. Mott gets killed in a’

wrestling match. Nick’s mother

. Marries’ and moves to Sudbury.
Faustina herself takes ill and is
rushed to the hospital where she
dies. One more calamity occurs.
A’ super-efficient concern takes
over the bakery.”

Now everything that had mean-
ing to Claude is gone and so,
having lost the world he knew,
he decides to find himself a new
one. You might expect he would
become labor-conscious or join
Jehovah’s Witnesses, but instead
he enters the army.

As a soldier, he starts to think
of peace, and at a parade he
rushes frantically up to the colo-
nel, crying, “There mustn’t be a
war ... We gotta have peace!
We better ayoid another war.”
He is promptly marched off to
the guardhouse, where he vis
“locked up to await trial and
punishment.”

THERE IS no sense in deny-
ing that much of Chipmunk is
‘grotesque and incoherent, that its
transitions are badly managed,
that its tributary characters have
no intelligent motivation for their
behaviour, and that it raises large
problems which the author re-
fuses to solve. .

Peterson is not a disciplined
writer, yet. He jazzes up his
characters and distorts their
perspective (and ours), not for
valid artistic reasons, but to ob-
tain trick effects. 2

He also wanders about in tech-
nique. Thus, he can be natural-
istic in style, and tersely colorful
and evocative in description. But
he prefers to plunge us into a
nightmare of expressionism and

-

stream - of - consciousness, forms
that are intolerable unless hand-
led expertly. 4
This shifting back and forth
robs the story of a systematic
point of view, and forever vitiates
its tragi-comic impact. In part,
this is a fault of editing; Chip-
munk is at least 80 pages too
long. ‘
Neither does Peterson play fair
with his main characters. He
passes glibly over the conditions
of their present environment, lin-
gering instead on factors whicly
although they are important, do
not fill in the details of Claude
and Faustina as they are now, to-
day. He forces the reader to guess

and improvise, a carry-over of his -

radio-writing.

As a result, Faustina strikes us
as a circus-freak—a comic. foil
who gets out of control. But

Peterson (even though he denies

it in a foreword that might bet-
ter have been omitted) clearly
means her to be a symbolic -wife-
woman, whose inarticulate desires
and romantic notions bespeak the
awful frustration of her actual
life. f

The fact is that Chipmunk is
altogether too oblique in its story
development. Peterson may ar-
gue that this is deliberate. All
the same, if he re-1lzads Chip-
munk, he willitfind out that what
he leaves out his narrative is
often more pertinent than many
of the incidents that he so lovy-
ingly describes.

CLAUDE WIDGEWOOD him-
self is only a partially convincing
creation, but that he is convin-
cing at all proves that Peterson
is a creative writer. What Claude
does is often arresting; but why
he does it, and whether he is the
kind of person who would do such
things, are unanswered questions.

Peterson tends to think of
Claude as a dramatic individual
in his Own right. That will not,

hold, The man is a nonenity who .
f

cannot be personally dramatic. ,
What he can do is get involved
in dramatic situations. When,
however, Claude is rebuffing the
overtures to join the union, or
comparing his buns with those
made by his co-workers, or scan-
ning the newspapers avidly for
cold-war news, or hanging around
Mctt’s training quarters, then he
is a recognizable human being.~

Peterson is best when he shows
us Claude Widgewood in his day-
to-day activities; he conveys gra-
phically Claude’s unimaginative
mind, his pathetic insecurity, his
desperate desire to be one of the
gang. i

As long as he grapples with
germane, rather than contrived,
problems, Chipmunk is good
reading, and the dialogue has a
fine, flat authenticity of idiom.
Peterson tells a story worthy of
telling and he makes a commen-
dable. effort to tell it honestly.
That his main character should
be a worker (although not in a
constructive sense) indicates a
healthy grasp of the modern ma-~
terials of life and literature. And
Peterson affirms too the duty of ,
the artist, to record, interpret,
and, if possible, positively change
the social fabric of our day.

We hesitate to end this review
on a negative or capricious note,
but something must be said about
the thesis of the book. Appar-
ently is is Peterson’s belief that
the only people in the world who
really have a chance for survival ~
are the indeterminate ones; they
manage to stick it out while la-
bor and the bourgeoisie annihi-
late ;each other in vast battles.

If Peterson is really of this’
opinion then he ought to take a
refresher course at once in his-
tory and economics. The philo-
sophical naivete that mars Chip-
munk would suggest that, in
many ways, it is also the story of
an author in search of a theme.

N.C.

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Sources, its special flavor, and influenced his final melodies,
giving ‘them a Polish character,

_ new audacities.

_which he exploited. —

integral ornamentation really grew, and which made it physic-
ally. possible, might not have come for another generation. —

"seductive waltzes, technical studies and introspective preludes, |

JACK SCOTT ANSWERED
Chopin's. music reflect
Poland of the people —

_ AS THE PACIFIC TRIBUNE crilically noted in 1
October 21 issue, Jack Scott, V. ancouver Sun columnist, con

menting on the fact that Jacques Singer and the V. ancouve
Symph i

point, of Scott’s remarks was

Polish People’s Republic in honoring a man

who was, according to Scott, ‘a raving anti-Semite’’ and was

not without bearing on false and distorted charges of continuing —

anti-Semitism in Poland. The worth of Scott's view is effec-

ttvely established by this estimation of Chopin by a British
music critic, H. G. Sear. ° .

.
CHOPIN WAS A supreme artist, quite at the other end |
of the scale from your prime inventor of folk melodies. ay
Folk songs, so often born of words, are fashioned by
thousands of lips, only coming ~to final rest when they are
committed to paper, And then no one is sure how like they
are to the original. ty
But Chopin; no more and no less than another, was heir to
all this. A lively, impressionable boy, born and bred in Poland, |
though his father was French, he must have absorbed hundreds —
of such tunes, :
‘ Learning the piano, fingering the keys, he must have become
more and more aware of the melodic turns, the harmonic twists,
the rhythms which these tunes contained. 1)
If the spoken word was indeed the starting point of. folk
melody, as the best authorities say it was, then the Polish |
tongue gave Polish folk song, which was one of Chopin’s

o-

CHOPIN GREW UP to inherit, too, an ardent patriotism
for the country of his birth. Something exploded within him
when the armies of Czarist Russia stormed Warsaw. ;

He made wild insurrectionary notes in his journal.

feared God had turned Russian.
Ardently he wanted Poland’s national freedom.

It is generally accepted that the last of his first 12 piano ,
studies, known as_ the Revolutionary, poured from his tem=- ~
pestuous feeling at this very time. ! ’

Later, in Paris, where he settled for the rest of his too-
short life, his artistic services were always at the disposal of |

Poles in revolt against the tyrant.

Of course, before Chopin the musician truly became him- * |
self, he underwent other influences.

He was also heir to Bach and Mozart, Belin and
Schubert. :

He got his living in a world of social change. Aristocrat. if
by instinct, conservative by habit, he rubbed shoulders with
all sorts and conditions of men. — z e
And even the change he absorbed, expressing it in terms —
somewhat in’ advance of prevailing tastes. - tae
Tt is a fact that the mazurkas most popular in his day
were the mildest; the boldest now are accepted almost as a
commonplace. -

1

His audacities ‘are all assimilated; they had nourished —
ne

He

Ms
’

‘ot: ey 2
. ‘CHOPIN WAS NOT only heir to the great masters
but to the workmen. But for their patient labors his instrument, |
the piano, might not have developed in time the singing tones —

_ The repetitive action out of which his delicate system of
_It was Chopin who in fascinating ballades, portly polonaises, —

voiced the sonorities of the piano in the deepest, most poetical |

¢

‘

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sense of the word.—-H. G. SEAR.

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PACIFIC TRIBUNE — DECEMBER 2, 1949 — PAGE