Tim Bowling, The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird

"Unwired and unrepentant, I sit in my biological frame and write in longhand the stories and poems that I hope will transcend the limitations of my private self, trust to the old connections between the single imagination and the collective heart...." (p11)

The evening that I wrote the first draft of this post, longhand of course, I'd been fishing for lake trout on Great Slave Lake, with members of my extended family. I wish I could say that I've come away from that experience better equipped to deal with Tim Bowling's The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird, since commercial fishing figures prominently in so many of its essays, but in the end, it comes down still to pure grappling.

It's two books, The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird, and I think that readers would be justified in preferring (maybe even much preferring) one section over the other. There would've been no clean alternative to this book's publisher, Wolsak & Wynn, but oh, do I wish there had been a way to generate two books: more shorter essays on diverse topics to round out the first half (which could've kept this book's title), and more context to sustain the longer second half and its much longer separate component pieces. The second half, in my mind, deserved to stand alone as a suite of linked essays, rather than showing up after a grab-bag of nine essays whose writing had spanned about a decade.

But publishing, of course, doesn't work like that.

And publishing in Canada is a stranger business even than in most other countries.

And authors can't always be persuaded.

There's gorgeous writing in Tim Bowling's The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird: Essays on the Common and Extraordinary, and it's a book to dwell on and dwell in. I can't imagine it having been published in another form that would've been truthful to its recalcitrant, unrepentant author, but each half might have found more readers.

Or not, because what do I know, and would Tim Bowling have even permitted that?

Part One: A Miscellany

The short essays that make up the first part of The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird aren't linked thematically, exactly, in that they seem to represent much of a decade's worth of short essays, and yet in their content, Bowling is doggedly, patiently consistent with his themes. In short, these are essays of solitude, aging and/or maturity, and place, and essays about how these things interlock to form the temporal hinge that presence represents between memory and an impenetrable future.

These themes form the water Bowling has been fishing these last 30 years, since the end of his family's productive time in commercial fishing. His insights, by now, are honed and finely shaped, truly the work of a mature artist at the peak of his powers, and most of the book's first part is therefore a joy to travel with.

In the preface, Bowling quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote, "We don't fall in love with a story; we fall in love with a voice" (p1). I want to agree, both these writers having skills so far beyond reproach, but in fact I don't know what other story Bowling would tell, nor what his voice would do with another story. Voice and story are enmeshed with Bowling, in ways that I can't easily articulate (if at all) and to an extent that I can't see in many other writers. I love Bowling's voice, true, I confess it, but he has built this voice purposefully to ring the changes on this one rich, broad, intensely singular story of a live lived and left behind in the Fraser River salmon fishing town of Ladner, BC.

As he puts it in the fiercely questioning "On Handwriting and Nationhood," Bowling's "literary expressions speak out of a particular geographic location whose distance from power renders it voiceless to that power" (p32). Out of these materials, he's trying to shape a voice that might at least be recognizable to power as voice, even it achieves nothing else. Or more punishingly, in his hockey essay "Initiation," Bowling asserts simply, "I'm fifty-five years old. The comforting lies don't always comfort" (p21). Or in "On Literary Success and Growing Old," where Bowling confronts the different task and prospect faced by the mature artist, unlike the younger one: "Age ... requires a different master, or a least a more exacting and impatient one. There simply isn't time to waste; if the work is to matter to others, now it must be the truest work of all, and damn the consequences" (p46).

If the work is to matter to others.

Simply, the last two essays of this first part moved me more than I can say, and kept bringing me up short. I don't know how another reader will find them, but let me say that I'm also nearing my fifty-fifth birthday, I'm also often without comfort, and these essays are at times written with a precision fine enough to steal your breath.

Part Two: The Hermit's Smoke

The book's second part, an extended record of extended meditation on solitude and self-isolation organized around Alf Harley, a man from Bowling's boyhood in Ladner, represents something else entirely.

Opening with a short essay about Harley himself that would've fit nicely into the book's first part, mostly on the subject of coming to understand death, and then ending with a coda-like "Afterword" that represents Bowling's declaration of future artistic intent, the section mainly comprises two very long essays. The first long essay follows Bowling through an Edmonton winter, where has lived for nearly three decades now, during which Bowling mostly gives up sleeping in favour of solitary midnight rambles in the snow, his wife and teenaged children in their beds at home. Bowling courts isolation in this essay, wondering at its seeming appeal to others while constantly acting to enhance its appeal to him. The second long essay centres on Bowling's decision to isolate himself (temporarily) on Alf Harley's island in the Fraser River, and the consequences both psychic and artistic of that decision.

Taken together, the whole second part represents a brutally self-eviscerating reflection on Bowling's desire for isolation, in spite of his connections and obligations to family, students, readers, and others: "I wasn't losing my grip on reality, but I was losing my interest in it" (p152), Bowling admits. Because he is an intellectual and a reader, Bowling grounds his self-analysis amidst a thicket of digressions, but at bottom his task is a painful and necessary one: "I wanted to know what I could protect of a self and a time that were dying" (p159).

If this was to be the truest work of all, and damn the consequences (as quoted above), then Bowling needed to burn more words on this part-book than any editor would likely want to accept without coercion. At nearly 200 pages, the four texts making up the "Hermit's Smoke" second part of The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird could easily have grown into a book of their own, and a weaker, less self-assured author than Bowling might've followed that path. But Bowling wants these pieces instead to form just part of this book, which is itself just one part of his growing body of overlapping, eddying, accumulating work: it's just that he realized during the writing that he "would have to work very hard not to present a half-truth for the sake of rhetoric" (p239). And for it to avoid being presented as a half-truth, perhaps paradoxically it would have to be presented as half a book, to avoid being taken as something self-contained.

Do I wish I could read more of Bowling's short essays, collected in a book that's committed to that shorter form? Yes: absolutely.

But I can't imagine him not persisting through the long "Hermit's Smoke" section in pursuit of truth, and not fixedly compelling a reluctant editor to accept tacking this coherence onto a catalogue of shorter essays on various topics.

And I can't imagine BC literature at its finest without Tim Bowling.

The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird was an enthralling, astonishing read, and I'm already recognizing that I'll keep returning to these essays for a long time. It's a perfect match, too, to his recent novel The Marvels of Youth, that I've already described via blog as having "instantly become one of my favourite novels." A remarkable pair, truly.