Vignette stories reflect local area

When Joan Lane died in 2008 her family began the sad process of going through her things.

Among the things Lane had held onto in her life was a collection of her writings.

“I stumbled upon the stories in a box in the basement a couple of years ago,” explained son David Hull. “At first I was just surprised and curious – I had no idea that these stories still existed, or that there were so many of them.

“Later, I realized I had been sitting on my ankle bone on the concrete for 45-minutes, but hadn’t even noticed because I was so absorbed. That’s when I understood that this was good stuff.

“It was exciting, and a bit sad too. I wished I’d been able to say to her: ‘Hey, you were a really good writer.’”

The collection of stories would lead Hull to create the book You Call This Home and Other Stories. It was an effort he felt the stories deserved.

“I think her stories would have been good enough to publish in the late fifties or early sixties, and many of them are still strong enough to merit publication,” he said.

“So it’s partly a case of making amends for her own lack of confidence, and partly of sharing this young voice fifty years after the stories were written. The book may be nothing more than a curiosity in the greater scheme of things – but someone, some young writer full of ideas but self-doubt too, might stumble across it, and see herself in these tales. And the inspirational/cautionary note is: don’t give up – yet.”

So what does Hull think is the best aspect of the book?

“Two things – or three, the first being simply the quality of prose,” he said.

“It’s direct, clean, yet very musical too, and when it’s time to turn things to a higher emotional pitch, she can really let it rip. For a writer who was barely 20, the accomplishment and confidence of this voice is impressive.

“Another thing is the timelessness: this is a young woman’s book, and it’s full of the emotions and observations that a perceptive, dissatisfied young woman makes – about hypocrisy, about unjust restrictions, about a perceived lack of passion or imagination in the world around her. Yet we catch this woman when she is becoming realistic about life too. There are a lot of artists in the stories – painters, musicians, writers – who dream of a romantic life in Europe. The author shares these dreams but at the same time isn’t afraid to crush them on the page.

“Finally, there are fascinating glimpses of life in the prairies in that day and age. There’s a quietly devastating story about a mentally challenged young woman who works in a mail room, doesn’t understand the cruel teasing she suffers, goes to a movie with a friend: in other words, she is completely a part of her town. Her aging mother’s terror for the girl’s future is heartbreaking. In another story a very young girl resents her older sister for hogging all of their mother’s attention: the older sister has pneumonia, and it’s a touch and go, life and death situation for weeks. Because there’s no penicillin yet, just blood-letting and mustard by the crate-load for poultices and a 24 hour-a-day bedside vigil.

“But in other stories we leap ahead to the early fifties, and suddenly the well-to-do small town merchants are flying off to Italy for vacations and returning with tacky souvenirs. The young people dance to raucous music that their parents can’t stand and chatter away about new electronic gadgets that make no sense to their elders.

“We think the pace of change these days is remarkable, but the changes that came to the prairies – and rural Canada in general – in ten mid-century years were pretty overwhelming too.”

Hull said he was rarely given a glimpse into the motivation for the stories.

“She was very reluctant to talk about herself in general and about her writing in particular,” he said.

“When I confessed that I had started writing fiction, (yes, apparently the affliction can be inherited), she said: ‘Oh! I used to write. And I had some stories on the CBC.’

“But she clammed right up as though she’d said too much, and never really talked about it again. Part of this was that prairie or depression-era reticence.

“But I also imagine it was a painful topic: she must have regretted later in life that she’d stopped. She was very self-effacing and may not have believed that she was any good (just as with violin and ballet) – but eventually she must have wondered what else she might have written, and wondered whether she might have had a bit of success.

“Eventually, that is, she must have realized that she had shown real promise – which would have been a painful sort of admission.

“That said, her older sister (my aunt) read the book last year and said she felt like she was back in Warman and Melville and Yorkton while reading them. So the people and settings must have been drawn from the life around her.”

Lane was born in Warman in 1933.

“Her mother died when she was young, and she was essentially raised by her older sister – her father was kind and gentle but a little bewildered by his daughters,” explained Hull.

The family moved to Melville sometime in the late 1930s or early 40s.

Hull said his mother had a definite artistic streak.

“Music, ballet, and writing were her passions from an early age, and those were the careers she longed for – all of them,” he explained. “Before attending the University of Saskatchewan, she studied at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School, but decided she wasn’t quite good enough. She also decided she wouldn’t make it as a classical violinist, though she finished the highest level of Royal Conservatory and went on to private lessons with Murray Adaskin, who also taught Andrew Dawes, founder of the Orford String Quartet.”

But Lane would put her art on the backburner.

“Joan was a Saskatchewan girl, raised in the depression,” said Hull. “Dreams were one thing but the pragmatic and practical side won out: she got her Masters in Library Science at University of Toronto, then returned to a job at the Regina Library.

“A few years later, after marrying a reporter at the Leader-Post, she moved to Ottawa, and later to Owen Sound. She resumed her career as a reference librarian in the town’s library, where she worked right until her retirement.”

As a writer, did Lane have formal training?

Her son is not actually sure.

“Joan studied English at U of Saskatchewan,” he said. “I don’t think they had specific courses in creative writing in those days – though I could be wrong – but she had one professor who took a great interest in her writing. That was Edward McCourt, a well-known novelist at the time (his novel Music at the Close was long in print in the New Canadian Library).

“The early drafts of the stories in her book are full of comments and suggestions from McCourt. He encouraged her to submit to journals and to Robert Weaver’s Anthology, the CBC radio show where so many of the future stars of CanLit were discovered.

“But I’m sure she was writing much earlier than that. She had taught herself to read by age three and was a voracious reader to the very end. She endured Parkinson’s during her last decade, and was very stoic about it all – except when the tremors began to affect her vision.

That was the only time her stoicism waivered, because reading was the only thing she couldn’t bear to lose.”

So with the book in print does Hull have a favourite story among them?

“Tough one. I felt four or five of these were truly first-rate pieces,” he offered. “I guess the first and the last. Much of ‘The Winter I Composed Tchaikovsky’s Fifth’ is from the perspective of a five or six year old girl, and it has a climactic moment that makes you bite your lip to hold back laughter, as though this little girl was being naughty but heart-breaking right before your eyes. It’s wonderful writing: the narrator is too young to understand the events she describes, but the author makes it all perfectly clear without ever betraying her narrator.

“The final story, ‘You Call This Home,’ is an ambitious work – not perfect, but it has such a sweeping feel, moving from character to character as a couple hosts the final party at their stately home. So much is unsaid in the story (why is it the final party?), yet we feel the unspoken truths and the buried feelings.

“But the feelings burst out. Here, a woman observes the slightly younger man who has been flirting with her – and he thinks he’s been striking out: ‘Because no matter how far away we were, you and I, we could never shake the prairie dust, this puritan prairie dust which blows and blows and blinds us to all that is real and happy, and drives us back to our own safe, empty shells. You are young, but you were born tasting that dust, and although you may struggle and eventually escape, you will need someone else, you will do it without me.’”

So, are there more stories for a second book?

“I doubt it,” said Hull. “There were another half dozen that either weren’t finished or weren’t quite up to the standard of these ones. Then there is a thick sheaf of hand-written material, but my mother’s handwriting was like a code only she could decipher.”

Check out You Call This Home at www.dumagrad.com