This is the last post for me for the evening...It's already after midnight, and I'm struggling to stay awake, but I really need to do this work, it's just a load off my shoulders that needs to happen, and I can't be buried under library fines forever...I need to write about Kildare Dobbs' Running to Paradise. This, like The Able McLaughlins that I just wrote about, was less than memorable. I had high hopes for this collection of short stories, hence one of the reasons why it was the first in my round of recent interlibrary loan requests that I made. Some dear friend of mine, please remind me in the not too distant future to NOT PUT ANYTHING ON LOAN REQUEST FOR AT LEAST A FEW MONTHS. I need to blow out some of the stuff in my house, and I'm actually really wanting to read some non-Pulitzer stuff at some point soon(Effigy and Alligator anyone???).

God, my head is screaming...I'm trying to remember, too, and not close my eyes.

Kildare Dobbs gets major bonus points for quoting Yeats at the beginning of his book, and one sees where he could have gotten the title of this collection of short stories that are loosely based around his life growing up as an Irish boy, who eventually moves to Canada.

"The wind is old and still at play
While I must hurry upon my way,
For I am running to Paradise;
Yet never have I lit on a friend
To take my fancy like the wind
That nobody can buy or bind:
And there the king is but as the beggar." (W.B. Yeats: 'Running to Paradise')

Dobbs's stories are interesting from an anecdotal standpoint, but not necessarily from a literary standpoint. Though, if we're going for completion of a canon here...I still don't really know why this was picked, actually. I did enjoy the stories for story's sake, like I enjoy going out with a friend for coffee and hearing about their week. Am I going to get a Governor General winning novel out of the excursion? Probably not. Stories of interesting merit were: "John's Castle" which was about a childhood friend of Kildare's who still maintains one of the only castles in one piece in county Carlow Ireland. It's all due to the butler, who with the help of his ladyship, allows the then fledgling IRA to store their weapons in the castle so that it won't be destroyed by them at a later date...Smart, very very smart. Also, "A Benediction of Bishops" is cute because it is about Dobbs as a boy, deciding that in order to be cool he has to collect something that is different. He decides to collect bishops, like they are baseball cards. The only thing is it's not like they make cards out of bishops...So, it's more like the stories he has of knowing the bishops that he can bring to the lunchroom table of his school...He becomes "bishop-watcher", and then a "serious episcopologist." It's a cute story, ending with him going fishing with two of the most famous, at the time, bishops in Ireland.:)

There are stories of when he is at sea, as a young man and there are stories of him when I is a young imperial bureaucrat in Africa, including stories of a black man who takes on one too many wives, and another of a bureaucrat not just a little obsessed with elephant hunting...There is a gem of a quote, though, at the end of "Melakia and Mwalim Joseph", though. Dobbs has to transfer Mwalim Joseph, a schoolteacher that is his friend, and also a polygamist, something there had been an effort to suppress in colonization, because of some trouble with the local tribal Chief's daughter.

"I had Mwalim Joseph transferred at once. The Chief's daughter chose to follow him, and within a few months he had replaced her. I have seldom felt such distress as I did when I said good-bye to Joseph at the railway station. With that wonderful fair-mindedness which all Africans seem to be born with, he took my hand and said, 'You are trying to do right, but you don't know enough about us.' It might have been a judgement of the whole colonial situation." (74)

The two stories that I perhaps loved the best, though, were in the Landed Immigrant section. One is called "Views of Venice" and here we're NOT talking about Italy. We're talking about ONTARIO, and small town neighbors who are convinced the others are out to get them, the two shopkeepers in town, each others only competition both think the other set fires in the town, a crime that according to the author "brought about the fall of Venice, and every man who spoke of it accused his particular enemy. The suspects had only one thing in common: they all sat in the front seat in church." (129) Then there were the female busybodies in the town who kept order as well, or "female vigilantes" as Dobbs calls them. The story that particularly stuck with me, though was the story called "Shocking Charge". It's because it's about homosexuality, something that is talked and written about very little in the prizes. Dobbs starts out by saying:

"A queer news item recently was the report that two Toronto men were found guilty of gross indecency after being accused of using electric shocking equipment for an unspecified act of homosexuality. What sort of charge they got out of it (other than criminal and electric) seems impossible to imagine.

Musing on this report, I find it hard to draw a moral. Perhaps it reflects the passion of North American men for gadgets. Or it may be a tribute to the Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission: Love Better Electrically. To the magistrate trying the case, however, it was the occasion for one of those scholarly asides that make law reports such interesting reading. He said that in Canada--and in this respect we differed from some other countries which he named--homosexuality was always regarded as a serious moral offence.

I wonder if the magistrate is right about this. (The courts, it must be said, are not the arbiters of morals and it is open to us to argue about them.) I have met Canadians who regard homosexuality as a joke, and others who think it a misfortune. I have also met many who believe firmly that Canadians are specially immune to it.

I can only go by my own experience." (134-135)

Dobbs goes on to explain what happens to him, in that he is cruised and picked up by a young gay man after only being in Canada for a few weeks. He is taken to a party where he quickly realizes that he is the only heterosexual there. He says:

"There is nothing that separates us so conclusively from our fellows as a difference in our pleasures. It is this, rather than any doctrinal debate, that exacerbates religious quarrels: between the celibate drunkard and the lecherous total abstainer there yawns an uncrossable gulf. We could forgive even Khrushchov his politics if only he did not prefer the backside of the moon to that of a can-can dancer.

Someone asked if I was gay. Since I was beginning by this time to feel decidedly gloomy, I answered truthfully that I was not.

Everyone in the room stopped talking and stared at me. It was not exactly a hostile look, but it has the effect of hostility. It was the sort of look a group of physicians give to a man the have consulted under the impression that he is a colleague, only to find that he is (a) a chiropractor, (b) an advocate of socialized medicine.

It came to me that the word 'gay' had special connotations of which I had not been aware.

Muttering thanks and apologies, I quickly left the party.

I tell this story not so much to show how widely and adventurously my life has ranged(that too, of course), as to make the point that homosexuality is as much at home in Canada as it is anywhere. The orgy I witnessed did not take place in Paris or London or Cairo but in the stuffiest quarter of what is supposed to be the stuffiest city in Canada. The people who took part in it were not the decadent Europeans or Asians but true-born Canadians. (I cannot remember their names and I shall regard with the gravest of suspicion any attempt by the Attorney-General of Ontario to approach me for them.) And if the Toronto magistrate was right when he said that homosexuality is always regarded in Canada as a serious moral offence, I am left wondering how effective all this viewing with alarm has been.

There is an alternative way of looking at it.

To an African tribe among whom I once lived, unnatural offences seemed not morally wrong but ridiculous. Perhaps it was just coincidence that such offences were almost unknown among them, those that did occur being practised for magical purposes. In the only case that came to my notice, the accused's plea brought howls of laughter from the tribesmen. He said, 'I was following the custom of the government officers.' Quickly entered as a plea of Not Guilty." (137-138)

In 1962 this book won the Governor General for fiction. It would be four years later that Margaret Laurence would win her first Governor General for A Jest of God, a book that definitely has lesbian undertones. I find it impressive that this story talks about homosexuality outright and doesn't necessarily condemn it. Hmmm...I'm too tired for much more interpretation at this point. I think that's enough for this book too, which came from Idaho...:)