There Are Victories

By Charles Yale Harrison and Johanna Skibsrud

A historical portrait of one woman’s quest for happiness amid a lifetime of bad men.

There Are Victories is a proto-feminist, anti-Bildungsroman that explores the intersections of misogyny, class, religion, and prejudice within upper class Anglo-Montreal and New York City society before, during, and after WWI. Originally published in 1933, There Are Victories takes up the catastrophe of the home front and the ways in which the life—and happiness—of the novel’s protagonist, Ruth Courtney, is continually undermined by the bad behaviour of men. This new edition features a foreword by Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Invisible Publishing
• Release date: Dec 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781988784434

Charles Yale Harrison

Charles Yale Harrison (1898-1954) was an author, activist, and editor. Harrison born in Philadelphia and raised in a Jewish family in Montreal. He served in World War One, an experience that would influence much of his subsequent fiction. A dedicated fellow traveller, Harrison moved from Montreal to New York in the 1920s, where he worked on the staff of the Communist Party of America (CPUSA)-led magazine New Masses alongside outspoken literary critics of proletarian literature such as Mike Gold. He was also a founding member of one of a series of John Reed Clubs, established in 1929 in an attempt to create a large forum for leftist writers. Drawing on his own service in the First World War, he published Generals Die in Bed (1930), a scathingly anti-war novel about the horrors of trench warfare. The novel was well received, and was followed by the novels A Child is Born (1931), There are Victories (1933), Meet Me on the Barricades (1938), and Nobody’s Fool (1948). He also authored a biography of the American socialist lawyer Clarence Darrow (1931), and the self-help book Thank God For My Heart Attack (1949).

Book preview

THERE ARE VICTORIES

CHARLES YALE HARRISON

with a new introduction

by Johanna Skibsrud

Throwback | Invisible Publishing

Halifax & Picton

Introduction copyright © Johanna Skibsrud, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or, in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: There are victories / Charles Yale Harrison ;

with a new introduction by Johanna Skibsrud.

Names: Harrison, Charles Yale, 1898-1954, author. | Skibsrud, Johanna, 1980- writer of foreword.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190156708 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190156708 | ISBN 9781988784397 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988784434 (HTML)

Classification: LCC PS8515.A7896 T5 2019 | DDC C813/.52—dc23

Cover design by Megan Fildes

Hand-coded in Canada

Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Picton

www.invisiblepublishing.com

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

Ther-with Fortune seyde chek here!

And mate! in the myd point of the chekkere.

— CHAUCER, Death of Blanche

Introduction

by Johanna Skibsrud

Charles Yale Harrison’s There are Victories begins with an epigraph from Chaucer’s Death of Blanche: Ther-with Fortune seyde chek here! / And mate! in the myd point of the chekkere. This cryptic reference to one of Chaucer’s earliest poems provides several important clues to Harrison’s complex work, including the suggestion that it is the reader who must uncover the deeper meanings at play in the book—and take up the challenge that it ultimately poses of moving beyond the restrictions, narrative and otherwise, we take for granted.

Chaucer’s poem depicts the encounter between a poet and an anguished knight. The knight tells the poet that he has played a game of chess with chance and lost his queen. The poet at first understands the knight’s story literally and advises him not to distress himself over the outcome of a mere game. But as the poem progresses, the poet realizes that the metaphor the knight employs is a true expression both of the knight’s loss and the constraints of the system that produced that loss—a system the knight continues to participate in and uphold. Where the knight is unable to imagine a way out of that system, the poet is able to glimpse, from the outside, the tragic structure of the knight’s world. He is also able to communicate that tragic structure to the reader, to show us the way that the knight’s world (and our own) is constrained by the limitations of individual perspective and imagination.

Tragedy, as Simon Critchley tells us, is not necessarily about the outcome of a plot, but about predetermined limits of vision and action. The tragic world is defined by ambiguity, duplicity, uncertainty, and unknowability. Although the characters in Harrison’s novel want nothing more than the freedom to choose the direction of their lives, they are repeatedly checked by their own limited points of view, the cultural moment in which they lived, and profound imbalances of power, particularly pertaining to gender and economic disparities. There are no victories, as one character wisely cautions—and yet at the same time what Harrison offers us is a tale of awakening, and possibility.

Harrison’s representation of the ambiguity, duplicity, uncertainty, and unknowability involved in Ruth Courtney’s quest for personal fulfillment allows us to see the way that the restrictions and possibilities of one woman’s life are dependent on a much larger connective web, which includes our own interpretive capacities. The partial—and fatally flawed—awakening that Harrison invents for his female character offers us an important glimpse into the limitations of Harrison’s own imagination, an imagination limited both by his own subjective experience and the moment in which he wrote. Some of these limitations are consciously probed by Harrison, as when Ruth’s lover Walter muses on the novel’s intrinsic reliance on prior models and cultural conventions: I wonder if anyone can see me from that hotel across the street. Strange, can’t describe a man’s body in a novel. It isn’t done. Now with the female body it’s different. All novelists do it. But the nearest most novelists come to undressing a hero in a love scene is to have him in his shirtsleeves.

Harrison is interested in exposing the metaphors and mythologies that invisibly construct the material realities of our everyday lives. He urges his characters, and through them, his readers, to think about what is and isn’t done—and why. The novel’s interest in transgression remains relevant today, not because of its content but because of its investment in questioning, and potentially overturning, the structures that continue to organize our sense of what a novel—and an individual life—can and can’t do.

Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, argues that the novel form gained in popularity in the 18th century due to changing economic and social conditions. A burgeoning middle class and rising literacy rates, as well as a corresponding interest in individual rights and freedoms, allowed the novel, with its emphasis on everyday events and the complexities of the human psyche, to flourish. Harrison draws attention to the ways we remain tragically blind to how individual freedoms bind us to one another and to misfortunes we can neither see, nor foresee. It’s easy to be radical, in other words—as Harrison writes—with plenty of bail money in the family.

Ruth’s journey is one of discovery and encounter and, though her personal freedom increases exponentially as the story progresses, she repeatedly runs up against the limits of her own life—uncovering the way in which personal choice is intrinsically connected to cultural conventions and ideologies. Although, for the most part, Ruth remains willfully ignorant of the connections between her personal and economic security and their social costs, Harrison asks his readers to attend closely to those relationships. Behind the wealth Ruth inherits from her Uncle, she sometimes supposes—as Harrison writes—that there were men and women working to produce this income, but the picture was romantically misty and rose colored. Harrison does not allow his readers to remain misty-eyed and emphasizes the limits of both individual perspective and empathetic response.

Repeatedly, throughout the novel, our heroine is told to close her eyes, as well as to live her own life. Despite these warnings, Ruth discovers that her own life is inextricably tied to the lives of others, that every choice she makes is contingent upon the choices and movements of others, and that her own (real and apparent) freedom is restricted by an overarching structure from which she can’t escape. There are Victories impels us to realize now, nearly a century later, that this constricting structure includes the novel itself. Ruth’s life and choices are inevitably delimited by the fact that they were dreamed up by a man living and writing in a specific place and at a very specific moment in time (Montreal and New York in the 1920s and 1930s). To read this novel today is to challenge ourselves to read past and through the lines imposed on Ruth, both by the fictional society that shaped her, and by her real-life author. It is to ask: Can we read past the structures imposed by a male author on his female character? Can we imagine for her another kind of freedom, and for the story another kind of end? Live your own life falls very flat, after all, when it is imagined as a radical removal from the lives and freedoms of others. Can we imagine a freedom that is simultaneously neither an exemption from commitment and relation, nor a mere acceptance of established systems and structures?

Toward the end of the novel, Ruth recalls the high hopes, the taut romanticism of her youth and understands herself to be the victim of an enormous fraud in which nearly all the forces of society and some of Nature seemed to have conspired against her. It is evident to the reader, however, that Ruth’s cruel fate has less to do with a conspiracy of nature, and more to do with all the forces of society and their constraints on the human imagination.

At one point, Walter listens to Ruth play the piano and is struck by the power of the music he hears, as well as by a premonition of danger. This was tragedy, he thinks as he listens, but not the tragedy of crawling mortals; this was sound, but surpassing in beauty the sounds of Nature herself. By contrast, Harrison’s novel is a tragedy very much of mortals. It is a story of mortality, of the way that our choices and ideals are structured by and rest upon human labor and the structural limits of our points of view. Harrison’s novel asks us to attend to the ways that its characters’ paths and relationships, their victories as well as their losses, are restricted by material circumstances and the particular moment in which they live. It asks us to recognize—like the poet from Chaucer’s story—the strength of the external forces that repeatedly check Ruth’s movements and thwart her capacity to live her [own] life. But it also encourages us to recognize that we are in fact an intrinsic part of the social structures governing our Fortune. If there are victories, they are won only when we are willing to read ourselves as part of the story; when we are able to glimpse (as we do with any good tragedy) just how much is at stake when we fail to acknowledge the essentially contingent nature of our lives.

I

The Mother Superior slept badly that night. Shortly after midnight she dressed and wandered through the long, dimly lit corridors, looking into doorways, nodding to the sisters on duty. Outside of the dormitory of les petites she paused, listening. From behind the heavy oak Gothic door she heard the slender cry of a weeping child and the soothing undertones of Sister Theresa as she comforted the little one. Soon the frightened sobbing of the child subsided and when all was quiet she entered the large, airy dormitory. Near the door, under a crucifix, Sister Theresa sat reading a prayer book. She rose.

Reverend Mother, the Sister murmured respectfully. She lowered her eyes and observed with deep satisfaction the sweeping fold of her dress as it broke over her high arching instep.

Who was the frightened one? the Mother Superior asked. She wrinkled her seventy-year-old face as she smiled gently.

The new little girl—Ruth Courtney.

Ah, the Mother Superior said with sympathetic understanding, nodding her head slowly.

She sat up screaming, Sister Theresa went on, and nearly wakened the others.

Did she call for anyone?

She sat up in a cold sweat, God comfort her, and called for her mother.

Ah, the Mother Superior said again.

It is the second time this week. It was worse when she first came. It is a month now.

And how did you console her, Sister Theresa?

I ran quickly to her bedside and put my arms around her. Then when she was frightened no longer I pointed to the image of the Blessèd Virgin and told her that She watches after all the children of men. I patted her hand saying that no harm could come to her as long as the Holy Mother of God looked down upon her.

And then?

She looked up blinking in the light of the candle, smiled, and was soon asleep.

The Mother Superior closed her eyes and prayed: Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope—to thee do we cry, poor banished daughters of Eve.

The two women stood in silence for a moment and then the older one went on: We must be patient and gentle with her; she has had a very unhappy few years—may the most prudent Virgin protect her. The child’s mother recently married for the second time. The stepfather—well, at any rate the young one, it seems, was in the way. Be sure and tell me from time to time how she gets along.

The Mother Superior moved silently to the bed on which little five-year-old Ruth Courtney lay sleeping. The girl’s disheveled mass of bright auburn hair sprawled on her pillow; her face was drawn even in sleep and her delicate nostrils were distended somewhat, like those of a startled pure­blooded filly. As the reverend mother looked on in reposeful silence, the girl’s face grew placid and soon there appeared the faintest trace of a smile. The woman blessed herself and, nodding to Sister Theresa, left the dormitory and continued her rounds of the convent.

II

It was now three years since Mrs. Throop placed her daughter, Ruth, in the gnarled and tired hands of the Mother Superior of the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Montreal. At first she had protested, she wanted the girl at home, but Major Throop was an intolerant man and he soon had his way.

Three short childhood years! An endless procession of swift, joyous days. Who would have thought that the stone-fenced gray buildings of the convent could conceal so much happiness from the curious eyes of non-believing passers-by? Or is it that the simple happiness of children is to be found everywhere: in a cloistered convent, a squalid slum dwelling (where adults moil and suffer but where children laugh and play in happy ignorance), or in the dull, stuffy atmosphere of the home of a merchant or stock trader?

Ruth no longer awoke in the night and called for her mother. In the quiet routine of the convent she was happy. Her companions were girls of her station in life; the daughters of wealthy merchants, brokers, government officials. The convent day was short, crowded with lessons, devotion and games. And there was Sister Constance who taught drawing and coached the girls in the social graces:

Now you curtsey and say ‘how d’you do.’ No, no, not so, but with your lips like this. See! Sister Constance tightened her lips primly and said: Stewed prunes and prisms—how d’you dew. The girls laughed and after class went about saying stewed prunes and prisms to each other.

There was painting in water colors: ochre sunsets and schooners sailing on green and purple seas, brigantines painted in such a fashion as to drive a marine engineer to despair—pictures which the girls’ parents proudly hung on walls for envious relatives to see. Nor was the art of music forgotten:

Who can tell me who the three B’s of music are?

A fluttering of hands and a timid, stammering girl rises to her feet:

Bach—

A long pause followed by the breathless, ill-suppressed excitement of the girls who know.

Finally: Beethoven—

Another pause and the gentle prompting of the Sister:

Come, come! Bach and Beethoven. And who else?

The Sister calls upon another girl and the answer is triumphantly given.

Brahms, that’s right, the Sister says. Papa Brahms he was called. There are amused smiles from the girls as the Sister continues: A fatherly gentleman he was—you may see his picture in the library. He is seated at the piano and has a very important beard.

Later in the afternoon there were piano lessons by Sister Espérance who had short, firm fingers and who played divinely and could have been a famous virtuoso. All the girls were extremely sorry for her, for it was a well-known fact that she could, if she had so desired, be playing at His Majesty’s Theatre on Guy Street in a yellow evening gown with officers and gentlemen at her feet. They felt very proud of their music teacher, looking upon her lessons as a simple, devout gift laid at the feet of God. But the most romantic figure at the convent, in the eyes of the girls, was the Mother Superior herself. She, so the story ran, was once loved by an English lord who was, naturally, a Protestant. He would have taken her to his castle in England but he insisted that she renounce her faith and accept his. This, of course, she had refused to do—and here she was!

Three years have passed since the afternoon when Ruth, accompanied by her mother, came to the convent and now the girl sits before the piano struggling with a two-hand arpeggio in a Mozart sonata. Three years in which there is scarce time to think of a prim and hard-mouthed mother.

III

One Spring day Bishop Villeneuve of Montreal visited the Convent of the Sacred Heart. He was a middle-aged, tall, ascetic man who was dressed in a fine broadcloth cassock faced with rich satin. The Bishop moved with grace and aristocratic poise; the power and vastness of the Church was evidenced in his every movement. To the Mother Superior he said: There is a little girl here—the daughter of a Mrs. Throop, a very devout woman. The child’s name is Courtney—Ruth Courtney.

Later in the day Ruth was presented to His Grace. She lowered her eyes as she curtseyed; looking sedate and prim in her black frock and thin, starched, white collar. As the late afternoon sunlight flooded the somber reception room the Bishop said: I see your mother quite often, my child. Are you well? Are you happy here? You should be, you know. What message shall I give her?

I—I am quite well, Your Grace.

Yes, yes, the Bishop said in an abstracted manner as though he had not heard what the child had said. He had many responsibilities: churches, charities, property. This was a routine visit. He looked up suddenly and observed Ruth’s pallid beauty offset by the mass of her luxuriant auburn hair.

—The girl is beautiful, too beautiful, the Bishop thought. It is sometimes a curse of God …

He leaned forward, patted her hand, remarking:

You must pray to the Blessèd Virgin to guide you through life, to make your heart pure. Life is full of many temptations. Do you understand? For a moment his voice was soft and then it changed and became hard and inflexible. Do you understand?

Yes, Your Grace.

That night in the dormitory, the figure of the Virgin Mary seemed less motherly, more distant and abstracted, like the Bishop who supervised many charities and was greatly concerned with God’s work here on earth. In the guttering candle-light it seemed as if the Mother of God herself looked at her with tight, compressed, practical lips—like the Bishop.

IV

If one wandered carelessly through the heart of Montreal, round the Hotel de Ville, across the asphalted Champ de Mars (at that time resounding to the tramping feet of soldiers training for the war against the Boers), up narrow Notre Dame Street, along St. Antoine Street with its machine shops and huge warehouses, back along St. James Street lined with banks and newspaper offices, one came sooner or later to Place d’Armes. To the east and west of the square stood large brown office buildings which housed the musty offices of Queen’s Counsellors, barristers and notaries. In the center of the plaza stood a bronze figure of Maisonneuve, holding the royal flag of France aloft to the indifferent gaze of hurrying passers-by. To the north of the square stood the squat, threatening Bank of Montreal building with its stone columns of marbled viridescence which stood guard like sentries before the temple of commerce. On the other side of the square, facing the bank, stood the gray, gothic Notre Dame Cathedral, ancient and discolored by the intruding but nevertheless welcome smoke of industry. The imposing cruciformed building dwarfed the flag-bearing Maisonneuve to minute importance; the contrast was symbolical of the towering power of the Church as compared to the puny strength of individual man. At the foot of the church passed Notre Dame Street, dark with dingy office buildings and smaller storehouses, hundred-year-old buildings which here and there housed a sweet-sour-smelling saloon.

One Sunday morning in her eighth year Ruth and a host of girls from the convent came to the cathedral for holy communion. It was a proud day for Mrs. Throop. She wore an all-embracing fluttering dress, a short military jacket, a tightly fitting bonnet and long white kid gloves. Major Throop, twisting and tugging at his drooping mustache, stood beside his wife near the holy water stoup watching the company of devout Pleiades march sedately into the cathedral. The girls shimmered in white silken dresses, their faces were covered with long veils and each head was crowned with a wreath of fleur-de-lis.

Inside the cathedral the Bishop himself administered the blessed sacrament. Mrs. Throop looked upon the scene in reverent wonder. She recalled the day of her own communion and soon found herself weeping. She daintily tapped each eye with a sad gesture of philosophical resignation.

—I am now nearly thirty-five. Heavens, how time flies! Now it is communion, soon it will be marriage …

The intonations of the Bishop’s Latin (desecrated by his French-Canadian accent) brought to Mrs. Throop’s mind a schoolgirl joke. She tried to dismiss the thought, but without avail. Tempus is always fugiting, she said to herself. She smiled and then remembered that levity in church was