Audrey Thomas

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Contemporary Triangles

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SOURCE: "Contemporary Triangles," in Saturday Night, Vol. 97, No. 4, April, 1982, pp. 51-2.

[A commentator on the arts, Wachtel has worked as a writer, broadcaster, and host of radio programs produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. In addition, she has edited two works about domestic abuse against women and coauthored a study about the legal rights of women in Women and the Constitution (1991). In the following review of Real Mothers and Two in the Bush, and Other Stories, Wachtel perceives Thomas as a skilled recorder of the problems and dynamics of modern adult and family relationships. ]

For a while, it looked as if feminism had spawned so traumatic an awareness of the untenability of women's lives that they had to recoil from reality. Fictional heroines retreated into the neuroses of Margaret Laurence's The Fire-Dwellers, slipped into the madness of Margaret Atwood's Surfacing, or delved into the elaborately crazed, supernatural world of Doris Lessing. Though not as widely known, Audrey Thomas, too, took the path away from realism. She traced her protagonists' increasing dislocation through a loose trilogy—Songs My Mother Taught Me, Mrs. Blood, and Blown Figures—the latter two set in Africa, the source of the unconscious. Then gradually, in the stories that followed, Africa turned from a symbol into a setting, a landscape no longer quite so alive with danger. Moreover, her women sloughed off their housewives' agoraphobia and carried their search for themselves into the wider world—Mexico, Greece, and British Columbia. Their new-found independence often meant also divesting themselves of the men in their lives, a not always intended consequence.

"Where are all the strong men now that there are all these strong women?" asks a character in Audrey Thomas's newest and most accomplished collection of stories, Real Mothers. The collection takes up a subject—the failure of modern relationships—that has perhaps even supplanted love and romance as a preoccupation of our time. Thomas tackles it with an honesty and immediacy at once powerful and familiar.

Her characters, however great their need for independence, don't want to be alone. They require the physical and emotional presence of another person, a body in their bed, even if it's simply "the reassuring back of the puzzle who was her husband." Connection fails because ties between individuals are unequal. Increasingly, as women seize power, or come to assume it subtly from vain, weak men, relationships dissolve, or last only as long as the women maintain the charade of male dominance. "It's easier without a man... but is it better?"

In "Out in the Midday Sun," a professor seduces and runs off with his brilliant female students as a way of suppressing them. If, like the amaryllis, they somehow find new soil in which to flower again, this self-fulfilment is a betrayal, an infidelity that terminates the relationship. The professor is exposed and undone; he must seek a fresh admirer to con.

While women grope for a balance between independence and involvement, men have different expectations, preferring unqualified devotion. Like petty godlings, they are content with the form, insensitive to nuance. In "Galatea," the wife realizes that her marriage depends on her accepting the role of dabbler; she, however, chooses to stay and manipulate her (professor) husband rather than take herself seriously and thus become so threatening he'd be forced to leave.

If men live in self-delusion, they are spared the pain of self-knowledge. Only Thomas's women bleed. Men are more vulnerable now, she seems to be saying, but also more callous. In one of the book's slighter stories, "In the Bleak Mid-Winter," Johanna, one of two women in a ménage à trois, rebels against the self-centred male corner of the triangle. In taking up with a workman in the Greek hotel where the three are staying, she undermines her lover's pretensions. Then she silences his impotent anger with the reassurance: "It's all right, Patrick. I told them that you were my brother." Appearances are intact.

"Crossing the Rubicon" is a stylistically brilliant story in which the multiple narrative threads enable Thomas to underline women's ambivalence. A writer, to avoid having to work on a difficult story, is helping her daughter make Valentine treats. By thinking about "the woman in my story," she is able to give her a sense of determination and assurance that the author herself lacked. In the story within a story, the character parts from an encounter with an old lover, who has chosen to remain with his wife. The writer has the character end the encounter in style: "And she doesn't look back. In my story, that is. She doesn't look back in my story."

Thomas often introduces into the mix of these relationships the significant but frequently unacknowledged presence of a child. "Separated children" are the by-products of broken marriages; they form the apex of contemporary triangles—a woman, her lover, and her child. If the 1960s signified sexual awakening, and the 1970s was a period of sexual politics, then the 1980s just might be dominated by the politics of the family, with Audrey Thomas one of its most astute commentators. In her analysis, for a couple not to have children is a symptom of an inadequate relationship. Yet it later appears that the only prospering relationship is the one between parent and child, as portrayed in the most tender of these stories, "Natural History."

This relationship too can founder. In the title story, Marie-Anne, a middle child, comforts her mother when her father forsakes them for a young student of his. As in a Koren cartoon, the father tells Marie-Anne that her mother and he didn't "relate" anymore, that they lived as "vegetables." Marie-Anne is pained and confused; her past feels "as if someone had been telling her a continuous fairy story—or a long and beautiful lie." The closeness she enjoys with her mother is shattered by her mother's new lover, a nasty young man who resents his paramour's children. When the mother is unable to face the inexorable choice between lover and children, Marie-Anne must do it for her.

The impulse behind these stories is the same one which informed Thomas's first published prose, "If One Green Bottle . . . ", which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1965—a need to organize pain. Thomas doesn't shrink from depicting the dark side of life, yet her writing is infused with a zest for living—a sensuous appreciation of colours and tastes, curiosity, and a pleasure in simple, old-fashioned activities, like making cookies or walking on the beach. There's a recognition of the richness of small joys that cooler chroniclers of modern affairs, like Ann Beattie and Mavis Gallant, eschew.

"If One Green Bottle . . . " is the lead story in McClelland and Stewart's New Canadian Library Two in the Bush and Other Stories. A selection of five stories from Ten Green Bottles and eight from Ladies & Escorts, it makes Thomas's earlier stories accessible to a wider readership. And it highlights Thomas's current stylistic maturity. Real Mothers is Thomas at her most relaxed—but it is a carefully crafted casualness. Some of the earlier work seems, by comparison, skilful but slightly contrived, with a certain self-conscious quality of "good writing" enhanced by a show of erudition. Real Mothers gives us Audrey Thomas leaning over the kitchen table: a raconteur who seems to ramble until the strands suddenly draw together like a net. Elliptical, personal imagery has been replaced by anecdote, while the ear for dialogue, the fascination with language, foreign words and their origins, remain unchanged.

These two collections provide an opportunity to survey the range of her talents. Thomas ended her last novel, in which the literary rivalry between lovers destroyed the relationship, with the line, "And remember, the best revenge is writing well." Revenge is sweet—especially for the reader.

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Audrey Thomas: Ten Green Bottles, Ladies and Escorts

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Journies to the Interior: The African Stories of Audrey Thomas