SOURCE: "Civilian Conflict: Systems of Warfare in Timothy Findley's Early Fiction," in English Studies in Canada, Vol. XV, No. 3, September, 1989, pp. 336-47.

[York is an educator. In the essay below, she delineates Findley's focus on war and conflict in The Last of the Crazy People, "Lemonade," and other early works.]

It is no coincidence or quirk of fate that two of Timothy Findley's early works, The Last of the Crazy People (1967) and the short story "Lemonade" (composed mid-50s; publ. 1980) open with a "stand-to" at dawn. But here the soldier on his lonely vigil is a young child, and the war in which he participates is a domestic one. Nevertheless, these early tales of civilian conflict are war texts; many of the basic strategies and structures of military behaviour inform these works, and even particular wars serve as touchstones or intertexts within them. Indeed, in The Last of the Crazy People, Findley's first novel, an entire nineteenth-century war serves as a complex hidden metaphor for the domestic skirmishes of the twentieth-century Winslow family: the American Civil War.

Polarity and conflict have always fascinated Findley as a writer, and both are present in large measure in a very early story of his, "About Effie" (1956), a work which has nothing to do with war as we normally conceive of it. The story opens with a veritable domestic attack; young Neil enters his house in the midst of a raging thunderstorm and is immediately ambushed: "Right then I didn't know what it was. It looked like a ghost, you know, and then it looked like a great big crazy overcoat, and it sort of fell at me" (Dinner Along the Amazon). The modulation here from the Gothic to the eerie but domestic—from "ghost" to "big gray overcoat"—prepares us for the discovery of the truly "domestic" nature of Neil's attacker: it is the new maid, Effie.

Neil is only the first of many Findley characters who are "attacked by the domestic." The subject of the short story "War" (1957–58) is not military war at all, but rather the domestic warfare caused by a father's decision to go to war. Neil retreats to the loft of the bam, from where he fires domestic missiles—golfballs, stones—at his father. But in Findley's fictional world, stone-throwing and shooting are distinctly related. In "Lemonade" Harper Dewey, mourning the withdrawal of his mother's affection, hurls a stone through her window. And later, in The Wars (1977), we meet Eugene Taffler, who is a practised hand at firing missiles, both on and off the battlefield; Robert and Clifford Purchas see him throwing stones at bottles on the Alberta prairie. "All you get in this war," he complains, "is one little David against another … Just a bunch of stone throwers." Already we begin to see the system of interlocking images which forms the fictional wars of Timothy Findley.

In human warfare, missiles are most often fired in order to obtain or to defend territory; indeed, the struggle for territory is endemic to war. This struggle, beginning as early as "Lemonade" and forming complex patterns of domestic invasion and retreat in The Last of the Crazy People and The Wars, is no less basic to Findley's fictions. "Lemonade" opens with a careful observation of territorial rules; Harper must wait in the chair outside his mother's room while she is awakened and refreshed by the maid Bertha Millroy. When Renalda Dewey's troubles burst upon the domestic scene, the carefully ordered procedure is upset. Renalda begins a strategic retreat from her son—strategic because it is designed to keep him in the dark about her alcoholism. The first stage of this retreat is the locking away of property—Renalda's locking of the highboy drawer so that Harper cannot ascertain how much jewellery she has sold to supply her alcoholic needs. This act—the first act of denial by his mother—has all the effect, for Harper, of a physical blow: "Gone. Everything was suddenly motionless. Never before had the key not been there." This act of removing the key is merely a prelude, however, to the locking away of a more valuable possession of the young child's: his mother. One morning Bertha suddenly announces that Harper is no longer allowed to see his mother in the mornings, "Upon which she fled, under the protection of shock, into the newly forbidden reaches of the upper floor." The quasi-military withdrawal of both natural and surrogate mothers represents a major retreat in domestic terms, leaving the stunned child alone to brood and to regroup his forces.

Muster his forces Harper does, and in response to the retreating actions of his mother and Bertha he tries, at first, to launch an offensive. The first hint of this advance comes in that crucial episode where Harper is locked out of the highboy drawer. As a form of compensation, he makes incursions into his mother's cosmetics, stirring her powder with his finger:

It came into his mind that his mother would know by this that he had been there, where he wasn't allowed: but it passed out again: he didn't care: she had locked him out, and he had found his way in, as the wind had found its way back in through the windows.

The gauntlet has been thrown down; Harper is determined to make incursions into enemy territory whenever and wherever possible in order to win back the spoils of his mother's affection. Surveying his mother's room during her absence, he "vehemently" stakes his claim: "I've got to get back in here … I've got to get back in this room."

But as all military strategists know, a well-executed and determined defence may easily rebuff or wear away a formidable attack. Renalda's retreats are both artful and absolute. On one occasion, she charms Harper with conversation ("You have a nice day with Bertha, dear"—the very commodity which Harper craves—while she positions herself for a swift escape: the car engine "gave a roar. 'Mother.' She was—'Good-bye!'—Gone." As for so many of Findley's female characters—Jessie Winslow in The Last of the Crazy People, Mrs. Ross in The Wars—the family home becomes the final stage for Renalda's retreat; she locks herself alone in her room to suffer the miseries of her condition.

Confronted by such a determined retreat on his mother's part, Harper finally hits upon another strategy: to retreat himself, in order to draw his mother out of her self-imposed exile. In this spirit, he formulates the plan of sleeping overnight in Miss Kennedy's tree. "I had to," he explains to Bertha, "I want her to notice." Unfortunately, a strategic retreat can only be effective when the other party takes note of that retreat. This is where Harper's plan fails; Renalda is too busy making her own retreat from life—staying out all night—to notice her son's absence. One retreat may be strategic; two are utterly useless.

Faced with this preliminary defeat, Harper must once again cast about for a workable strategy. He opts this time for an offensive action, but one which is not well suited to his problem: selling his mother's liquor at his lemonade bazaar. Findley clothes his description of Harper's preparations in appropriate military language: he has "commandeered" several frosted bottles from his mother's favourite hiding place (strategically leaving the partially emptied one behind in order to delay his mother's discovery of his act). "Everything," we hear, "seemed at his command." Explaining his "cover" activity—selling lemonade—to Bertha, he claims that it's merely a diversion" from his problems. A diversion, indeed, but in a military as well as a recreational sense.

Harper does engineer a truce of sorts, but not with his mother. The neighbourhood children and the supposed "witch," Miss Kennedy, fueling the effect of the liquor-laced lemonade, begin to form a companionable, if somewhat tipsy, group. A tearful Harper, unable to bring about any such reconciliation with his mother, resorts to open hostilities: he throws a stone through her window. "She was holding it in her hand when they found her," Findley's narrator informs us, and this linking of the stone and Renalda's act of shooting herself with the Colt revolver draws the images of stone and gun together once more. Harper has become a warlike David, a thrower of stones, but Renalda has made her ultimate retreat in suicide, and it is an irreversible one.

..…

If "Lemonade" ends with the ultimate domestic retreat, The Last of the Crazy People ends with the ultimate act of domestic attack: murder. One senses that in the novel Findley has confronted what he could not bear to confront in the short story: that domestic war may end in a harmful act of aggression which is, if not entirely justifiable, surely understandable. (He confronts a similar possibility in his sixth novel. The Telling of Lies [1986].) Hooker Winslow carries to their logical extreme the stone-throwing impulses of both Harper Dewey and Neil from "War," but here, the stones have been transformed into their military equivalents, bullets.

However, the difference between the systems of war found in "Lemonade" and The Last of the Crazy People is one of complexity as well as degree. "Lemonade" is a blueprint of domestic war; The Last of the Crazy People is Findley's first attempt to create a multi-dimensional model from that blueprint. One indication of this growing complexity is the first appearance in his fiction of the famous war theorist, Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), whose treatise On War (1832) finds its way onto Gilbert Winslow's bookshelf, just as it will later find its way into Levitt's knapsack in the trenches of France in The Wars. Findley's inclusion of a theorist of war in his fictional world is a tantalizing clue to his readers that the domestic struggles in that fiction are to be understood in relation to the larger theoretical framework of war.

It is true that one sees in The Last of the Crazy People basically the same territorial squabble as in "Lemonade"—the retreat of the mother—but in the novel Findley enlarges upon and varies the sorts of stratagems used to halt that retreat. In the short story, we are presented only with Harper's battle against this maternal manoeuvre, but here, the greater scope of the novel form allows Findley to depict and compare several family members' idiosyncratic means of waging war. Nicholas Winslow's part in the territorial wars of his family is essentially passive; gazing at the bedroom door which his wife Jessie has closed against him and the family, he thinks, "This is my room. Why shouldn't I go in there?"—the simple childlike response which we see in Harper Dewey when he is confronted by the occupied territory of his mother's room. Yet Nicholas lacks the childlike exuberance which would allow him to carry this thought into action; throughout the novel he appears a jaded man, aged before his time. Even the thought of breaking down Jessie's door is alien ground to him: "The thought trespassed in his mind, just as he wished that he could be strong enough to trespass beyond the door. But he didn't."

His elder son, Gilbert, on the other hand, represents that thought of trespass put into action with a vengeance. Gilbert is, by temperament and by design, a trespasser. He trespasses on the family's rigid code of silence by getting drunk and inviting conflict to come out into the open. He trespasses in the same way on society's code of silence; faced with the accusation that he has gotten Mr. Parker's daughter pregnant, he breaks in on a highly stylized social ritual—a society ball—to ask, "Will you openly accuse me?" It comes as no surprise, then, that Gilbert's major strategy in the family's territorial battles should be frontal attack. He trespasses beyond the door which even Jessie's husband dares not open: "MOTHER?… Are you going to come down?… Or am I going to come up?… You aren't really sick, you know…. What are you going to do about it?" In Clausewitz's terms, Gilbert chooses one of the three ways of wearing out the enemy, "invasion": "the occupation of the enemy's territory, not with a view to keeping it, but in order to levy contributions upon it, or to devastate it." But, as Clausewitz himself warns, the defeat of the enemy is not the immediate objective of such a manoeuvre; it is, rather, "to do him damage in a general way." This is, in effect, the key to the failure of Gilbert's offensive; it does not bring Jessica to any new resolution as much as it puts her even more solidly on the defensive, and her retreat becomes an outright rejection: "I will not go … on … giving … birth … to you … and to Hooker … and to that … god … damned … baby … day … after … bloody … day … for the rest of my LIFE!… I hate you!" Inflicting "general harm" on an already mentally unbalanced woman is, Gilbert discovers too late, a serious strategical blunder.

If Gilbert represents the option of invasion and Nicholas the passive stance, or what Clausewitz calls "the wearing out of the enemy," there do not seem to be many strategical options left open for Hooker. Indeed, Gilbert and Nicholas, taken together, represent the two forces which are at war within Harper Dewey in "Lemonade": the desire to attack and the desire to retreat. In The Last of the Crazy People, therefore, Findley allows himself to study what is the most likely condition of a young child caught up in domestic war:

the absence of strategy altogether. In the early stages of the novel, Hooker seems almost as determined to avoid Jessie as Gilbert is to confront her. Carrying home his straight-A report card, he vows "not [to] even ask for her." As the novel progresses, he is repeatedly cast in the role of the observer of other family members' strategic moves. He inadvertently witnesses his father's attempt to talk to Jessie at her door and when Gilbert is storming his mother's bastion, Harper remains the alert but passive pair of eyes and ears; he climbs onto the maid Iris's lap and awaits the passing of the verbal storm.

Hooker is most obviously and poignantly the onlooker, bereft of strategy, during the family's most organized and concerted campaign to defeat Jessie's illness: their birthday party for her. Each of the family's presents to Jessie reflects a private campaign to lure her downstairs and into the family for good. Gilbert gives her stockings which are, as Gilbert announces in his frontal-attack manner, "to wear downstairs." Rosetta's gift of bath beads and lipstick is a more veiled appeal to Jessie to reassume her old mask—the mask of traditional femininity. Appropriately, Jessie, with the intuition which often attends the deeply disturbed, "unmasks" the hidden symbolism of Rosetta's gift; she turns these icons of passive womanhood into symbols of phallic intent. "'It reminds me'," she says of the lipstick, "'of something.' Working the dial at its base, raising and lowering the small red tongue of colouring. 'Isn't it funny,' she said, and smiled directly at Nicholas." If the family is going to wage a war of symbolism, Jessie is prepared to fight back with the same weapons.

Nicholas's gift of the nightgown, the "bride's nightie," as Jessie puts it, is the last straw; it provokes in her the same counter-attack which she had earlier been forced to make against Gilbert: "I hate you for this." But Hooker's gift is to be distinguished from this long line of artificial products; he gives Jessie a robin's egg which he naively hopes will hatch a bird. In Hooker, therefore, we see one who is without artifice or guile; he is capable of hatching neither bird nor plot.

Unlike Harper Dewey in "Lemonade," who is continually casting about for workable stratagems, Hooker Winslow is devoid of stratagems until his final decisive act—taking the Colt revolver from the Harris home and using it against his family. His direct fall into what Clausewitz calls absolute war thus sets him apart from his strategic-minded family, and Findley, by having the family Hotspur, Gilbert, remove himself from the scene by committing suicide, focuses on Hooker's act. That such an act—the destruction of human beings—could result from even an absence of strategy is shocking proof of the immense power for destructiveness hidden and unacknowledged in our civilian wars.

..…

What we begin to see in The Last of the Crazy People, then, is a greater willingness on Findley's part to have various family members and their interactions embody the dynamics of war. Herein lies the three-dimensionality of the novel in contrast to "Lemonade," where we see an elementary conflict: mother retreats, child schemes, retreats, and finally advances. Here all the members of the Winslow family have, as we have seen, wars to wage, and they must be considered both as individuals and as part of a complex dynamic of domestic war. As Findley once reflected [in Graeme Gibson's Eleven Canadian Novelists] on The Last of the Crazy People, "ultimately I realised that one of the things that I had said in that book had something to do with this impasse, and that the Winslow family, as individuals and collectively, represented a lot of values and things that must go."

This new emphasis on the dynamics of family interaction finds several outlets in the novel, most explicitly in the increased use of war terminology to describe domestic conditions (a phenomenon witnessed only briefly in "Lemonade," when Harper "commandeers" his mother's liquor). Here Findley begins a practise which reaches its heights in The Wars—the use of war similes. At one point in a crucial domestic clash, we are told that "Nicholas spoke as he might have if he had been asked, 'Do you know Adolf Hitler?'" After the inquest into Gilbert's suicide, Nicholas is again metaphorically clothed in the terminology of war; his cigarette box "cellophane crunkled tike machine-gun fire." Incidentally, the latter simile was singled out for criticism by an early reviewer of the novel, George Bowering, who [in Canadian Forum 48 (1968)] christened it "inaccurate." But given the aura of emotional warfare which pervades the Winslow household, such a detail is not simply accurate or inaccurate (similes seldom are), but evocative and apposite. Such a detail highlights the oppressive silences and neuroses of that household, wherein even an ordinary act may take on hostile overtones.

What the simile does linguistically—drawing together two realms of experience often thought quite separate—Findley does symbolically in his first novel as well. Gilbert's bookshelf, filled with the books whose titles he has Hooker read aloud, serves as a type of microcosm or mise en abyme of this juxtaposition of two realms—war and domesticity. Byron, Shelley, Arnold and Keats share shelfspace with "Chums '38 … Chums '39 … Chums '40 … Chums '41 … Airplanes of the Future …" and, of course, Clausewitz, whose name Hooker ironically domesticates in translation: "Closets—." The most telling sign, though, that Gilbert is living in an inner world torn between aesthetic pleasures and wartime disillusion is the presence on his shelves of the following titles: "Tender is the Night … The Great Gatsby … Tales of the Jazz Age … The Far Side of Paradise … The Disenchanted … This Side of Paradise …" and, most ironically, "The Crack Up." As a Fitzgeraldian aesthete disillusioned by a decrepit post-war society, Gilbert finds himself, in the words of one of his older literary mentors, "wandering between two worlds / One lost, the other powerless to be born." This image of intellectual stillbirth—the social equivalent of Jessica Winslow's stillborn child—adds an extra degree of complexity to the wars of The Last of the Crazy People. It also foreshadows the fervent cultural concerns of later novels such as Famous Last Words and The Butterfly Plague, wherein Findley examines in greater detail twentieth-century culture under siege.

..…

Hooker, though no strategist, is by no means unschooled in the ways of war. Several wars are mentioned by family members throughout the novel; Rosetta likens the beleaguered family to "the Jews at Auschwitz," and Gilbert, Iris and Hooker engage in a conversation about political assassinations, including the one which touched off the First World War. But the war which sheds the most light on the family struggles in The Last of the Crazy People is not a war between nations, but a civil war. the American Civil War (1861–65). It has become by now a critical commonplace that Findley's first novel was influenced by the writers of the American South; critics of the novel have busied themselves tracing the presence of Faulkner, Welty, or McCullers. But the South inhabits The Last of the Crazy People in a much more complex political and textual sense; the war between North and South is a hidden intertext, a war whose details bear in subtle and penetrating ways on the war within a single family unit.

Though Findley has set his novel in Canada, he deliberately invokes the conflict between North and South, between blacks and whites, throughout the work. Hooker upsets the maid Iris by asking why she calls herself Miss Iris Browne on the telephone when anyone would know that she is speaking because, as Hooker puts it, "You speak Negro." Iris senses that she faces not one opponent in this racial war, but two: "You get it from that Gilbert. Sometimes I could take him and hit him so hard he'd split down the middle, he makes me so mad. Where does he think we live—the States?"

Canadian this story certainly is, as Iris and other telling details such as the evening Toronto paper received by the Winslows remind us. Yet the constant invocation of the United States and racial tensions is present in the novel for a purpose. Later, we meet another black maid, Alberta Perkins, who, her Canadian first name notwithstanding, is closely associated with the South and slavery. Speaking of her present task in the Harris household—going to the dogcatcher's to rescue the family pet—she exclaims, "Time was … the dogs chased us!" Significantly, it is Alberta who prophesies that Hooker will run away from home, almost as though she recognizes a state of slavery when she sees it, in whatever form. Domestic slavery here finds its historical counterpart—the slavery of the blacks in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century America—and even Iris's threat of splitting Gilbert down the middle begins to take on ominous historical overtones.

The actual references to the Civil War in the novel are sparing, but they set up a framework of historical reference within which the reader may forge some intriguing connections. The war surfaces as a topic of conversation in the aforementioned discussion about political assassination; John Wilkes Booth, according to Gilbert, "wanted to divide the nation over Mr. Lincoln's war." Thus the concept of division itself becomes multiplied, subdivided: aiming to divide a nation over a war which quite literally divided a nation.

Division is the central motif of one of the most famous statements to have come out of the Civil War period, and it is a statement rich in implications for Findley's novel. "A house divided against itself cannot stand," Lincoln declared on June 16, 1858. One could imagine no better epigraph for The Last of the Crazy People than this pronouncement, with its determined juxtaposition of military and domestic war. One even hears echoes of its apocalyptic message in the conversation between Iris and Gilbert about the Civil War:

"Now Iris," he said, "I'm reading Lee's Lieutenants. And you know what? I've been thinking. If the South—"

… "The South of what?" said Iris with practiced stupidity. And something else that Hooker could not quite put his finger on. A practiced something else.

It was always the same, every day, now, in the closed-up house. Two people talking, and the rest all silent.

Findley does more here than to evoke a sense of the Winslow house divided; he also introduces an important intertext to his novel: Douglas Southall Freeman's three-volume study of the Confederate war in the East, Lee's Lieutenants (1942–44). In his work Freeman delves into the characters and propensities of the men who worked under Robert E. Lee's command, and what results is as much a work of psychological scrutiny as of military analysis. Lee's lieutenants, taken as a whole, form the military equivalent of a bickering family, full of jealousies and animosities. "In the hearts of Lee's subordinates," Freeman writes, "were all the explosive qualities that existed elsewhere." How appropriate that Gilbert should read and keep on his telltale bookshelf a work which studies military relationships much as a family therapist might study a domestic unit.

Once one is willing to make this connection between the two divided houses of the United States in 1861 and the Winslow family in 1964, other remarkable parallels surface. Jessica's withdrawal into the hermitage of her bedroom is tantamount to a secession from the family state and, as Daniel Webster realized one hundred years before, "There can be no such thing as a peaceable secession." The attempts of the other family members to lure her back into their lives (by buying her birthday gifts, for example) find their historical counterparts in the efforts of politicians such as Daniel Webster and Henry Clay in 1850 to placate the South and keep the Union intact. In both instances, lure and compromises fail, and family members settle the conflict by picking up a gun. As an observer of the Civil War, Mrs. Mary Chestnut from South Carolina wrote, in characteristically domestic terms, "we are divorced, North from South, because we have hated each other so."

Hooker Winslow's obsession with assassination may also owe something to the Civil War aura of the novel and, more specifically, to the John Brown legend. Brown, the fanatical anti-Slavery activist from Kansas, murdered five men from the pro-slavery South who had moved into Kansas, men who, according to some sources, may themselves have been escaping from the social system of the South rather than trying to perpetuate it in Kansas. After these murders and before his abortive attempt to seize Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859, Brown located his operations in Canada. There he and his cohorts drew up a provisional constitution for the United States as well as a plan for "violent emancipation." The term suits precisely the final acts of Hooker Winslow; his father, shot, is described as "thrown back into violent stillness," a stillness which Hooker by now associates with emancipation from all care. One last detail which draws Brown's campaign for "violent emancipation" even closer to Hooker's is his madness. There was evidence of madness in the maternal line of the Brown family, and Brown had a sibling and a son who went mad. The similarity to Hooker's condition as "the last of the crazy people" is all too evident.

The mention of Harper's Ferry touches off other connections between this violent emancipator and the characters who people Findley's fictions. Harper Dewey's Christian name recalls the government arsenal which Brown tried to seize (an apt connection, given Harper's own seizure of his mother's alcoholic arsenal). His surname is militaristic as well; Commodore George Dewey was the commander of the American naval forces in the Spanish American War, whose rallying cry, "Full speed ahead—damn the torpedoes," has become household parlance.

Hooker himself bears a name which is rich in Civil War associations. The family name, "Winslow," recalls the well-known artist who sketched troops during the Civil War: Winslow Homer. But the name "Hooker" carries even more in the way of Civil War associations. General Joseph ("Fighting Joe") Hooker was one of the leading generals on the Union side, but one with a bizarre history. He commanded the Army of the Potomac from 1863 until the eve of Gettysburg, and his physical demeanour was somewhat reminiscent of Hooker's ("curling blond hair … a complexion 'as delicate and silken as a woman's'"). General Hooker's plan, like the Winslows', was one of luring—drawing General Lee out of what military historian Robert Leckie has called his "fortified defenses," a term admirably suited to Jessie Winslow's condition. The perplexing part of Hooker's career arose at Chancellorsville, where he had Lee's forces outnumbered, outflanked—and suddenly retreated, for reasons which still remain somewhat mysterious today. Findley, though, may well have read the account of Hooker's failure which appears in Freeman's Lee's Lieutenants, and one of the main reasons postulated there for Hooker's mistake is faulty communications—in short, the wires and signal stations crossed up. Furthermore, Freeman reports, Hooker may have believed rumours to the effect that Lee did not have sufficient numbers to do battle. These problems are precisely those faced by Hooker Winslow on his domestic battlefield in The Last of the Crazy People. He believes that the Parker family really will hold a shotgun to Gilbert's head when he hears Rosetta using this figure of speech, and he believes Alberta Perkins when she tells him that Armageddon is near and that the only "answer to per-di-tion … is merciful death." Hooker, like his Civil War namesake, is a warrior in a field where messages are unclear and threatening. Faced with such a situation, he can only trust what he hears and resort to merciful death as a means of saving life.

This conclusion, startling though it is to many readers of The Last of the Crazy People, is the only outcome possible in the world of domestic warfare which Timothy Findley has created. By setting the young children of his early fiction—from Neil in "War" and "About Effie" to Harper in "Lemonade" and Hooker in The Last of the Crazy People—in domestic situations which become increasingly warlike and increasingly complex in their approximations to war, Findley finally arrives at the point where metaphorical and literal wars intersect—the point where the stones thrown by Neil and Harper become the shots fired by Hooker. It is this moment of intersection, of embarking on our own private and domestic civil wars that both fascinates and terrifies Timothy Findley—"The moment," as Lincoln said of his civil war, "when I felt that slavery must die that the nation might live."

This is the same moment of intersection which Findley's Robert Ross will witness in The Wars; Robert, too, eventually decides that "slavery must die" when he disobeys his commander and attempts to set the horses free. That novel, which appeared a full decade after The Last of the Crazy People, and which heralded, for many Canadian readers, the arrival of an exciting new maker of fictions, is less a beginning than a culmination of the civilian wars which Timothy Findley had already charted in his early fiction. Retreating mothers, stone-throwers and divided houses do indeed make a return appearance ten years later; Timothy Findley, we discover, has been writing "the wars" all along.