“Back to the Why”: Michael Winter Finds His Duende in Minister Without Portfolio

 

Michael Winter’s oeuvre has always been concerned with the tricky push-pull of conviction, of love and of loving: in One Last Good Look (1999), Gabriel English admits, “I was stalled, dumbfounded by the idea of grasping an ideology. I never held an argument from a principled position the way some of my friends did”; Rockwell Kent begins The Big Why (2004) confessing, “if I kept close to this woman a good life would accrue. But there is something about goodness—I associate it with acquiescence, and I’m repulsed by compromise.” However, his latest novel, Minister Without Portfolio (2013), reveals an artist not so much compromising, but rather revisiting and surrendering to the groove of former questions, letting the idea of perfection fall to the wayside by allowing the grace of recovery to eclipse the awkwardness of guilt, riffing on love and goodness like an accomplished craftsman.

The protagonist is Henry Hayward. I hesitate to describe him as a jack-of-all-trades, because there are times in the narrative when you might wonder what it is that this fellow knows at all; and then there are times when you wonder how it is that he knows so much. He is one of those men who seem to maintain sustenance by fumbling through things. Hayward is Winter’s most honest and accessible character, yet there is something absent about him, a kind of malaise or ennui that cannot be readily defined. Nevertheless, to attempt a firmer definition would be to miss the point. If Hayward’s character seems purposefully vacant, it’s to provide a space that allows one to read more cooperatively, to breathe and even exist with him and his social circle—and what is exceptionally delivered is the loyalty he has to his friends, his tribe, his “hundred people.” By allowing the space of familiarity to root, Winter establishes a gravity that allows for a constellation of eccentricities (in much the same manner that Jerry’s blandness both authorizes and bases the more dynamic personalities of Seinfeld). Hayward, while certainly not anybody’s favourite, is necessary. In short, you need customariness to throw the peculiar into relief. The novel begins with Hayward’s partner, Nora Power, telling him their relationship is over. Winter writes:

For three hours they talked it over and she told him how it was and he fled through the spectrum of emotions and they were both cleansed but she returned to what was not an ultimatum. I’m leaving you now can you please leave. But I love you, he said.

These are regular, decent people who mean well, people who are sensible enough to comprehend the kind of terrifying simplicity that is this: sometimes, things just do not work out. Hayward’s best friend, John Hynes, another wonderful character, pulls some strings and the two head for Afghanistan as tradesmen (the narrative never quite explains what it is that they do) so Hayward might get Nora out of his system. Seventeen pages into the story, Winter plunks these two friends down in Kabul, where Patrick “Tender” Morris, a fellow Newfoundlander they knew from trade school, presents them with two automatic pistols. Curiously, less than 30 pages later, we are back in Newfoundland. The terseness of this international spackle is a stumble in the story. Winter, always a concentrated stylist, appears to have some problems with the topicality of Afghanistan. His east coast prose fluctuates between long and winding firmness:

They would give him the high ground and he could really dig a good ditch for himself now and remain unshaven and unwashed and drink himself into a narrow hallway with no door at the end, he could do that and search for commiseration …

… and an underdeveloped quality to the sights and sounds of Afghanistan:

There was a blue hand-drawn sign telling you the tribes that were in camp.   Nearby a well that was just a pipe coming out of the ground. Several families with blue plastic containers … A brightly painted truck was covered in dust …

Quite simply, the novel would be improved by excluding such a foreign departure, precisely because such scenes feel borrowed and inaccurate due to their frugality. There is nothing particularly inspiring about a truck covered in dust. In my estimation, Winter forces Hayward’s Middle-Eastern remembrances: there are too many instances peppered throughout of a hill on the southern shore mirroring that of an Afghan hill, which Hayward cannot ever seem to remember the name of, and it is this inability to assign a value that does not translate well to the reader—for if Henry can only recall without much exactness, why should we care? Nearing the novel’s end, these recollections begin to infect the text with a frequency that, coupled with Hayward’s own nebulousness, becomes somewhat irritating. A front-end loader approaching Henry and Martha’s house rumbles with “the sound tanks make on roads in Afghanistan.” The briskness of such callbacks does not make them stimulating, and ultimately, the presence of such occurrences is akin to throwing topsoil upon a sieve, only to then have the chicken wire come down. The remaining majority of the novel is concerned with the emotional situation between Hayward and Martha Groves, a physiotherapist carrying Tender’s child, and the house Tender Morris meant to fix up had he survived Afghanistan. Winter is explicitly searching—and I would contend finding—his duende (from the Spanish phrase duen de casa—“the master of the house”), a concept established by García Lorca about a spirit who assists the artist’s perception regarding the limitations of their acumen, involving basically four elements: irrationality, earthiness, a heightened awareness of death, and a dash of the diabolical.[1] Winter is more attuned to these tenets than ever before. He allows honesty and truth to shine by adopting a style that surrenders to the groove of the plot. When Martha leaves Henry to the house so that she might visit a client, Winter writes:

It is complicated to love someone, he said to the house. As he loved Martha he also felt he was losing his love, for the person he loved was staining her own dignity by loving him … He set about beating apart a Canadian-maple solid wood coffee table but he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Of the little white pearl buttons on her shirt, it was a turquoise prairie shirt with pockets that buttoned down … No matter how much he implored her to be in control, she would take his feelings into account.

This passage exhibits the forging of a renewed authorial constitution, contending with, and putting to rest, the beliefs of a former system. In The Big Why, the vanity of Rockwell Kent revealed that love is not an end, but rather the engine by which one can come to meet oneself. Minister, by re-examining this idea, now proposes that love is a just and deserving end. The solutions Winter presents in Why, on par with Kent’s first-person control of the narrative, were true, but this truth was located within solipsism. To observe a writer recognize and temper previous extremes is supremely touching. By exposing the junctions of doubt and conviction, Minister recasts a ballot for love. It is of note that Winter’s use of colour essentially adheres to whites (there are numerous wedding parties) and orange (the zeal of sun and horses). And so, while he stumbles, his enthusiasm is to be admired. Even though he is clearly most at home writing about Newfoundland—Minister has it all: dories, whales, horses, wind, alcohol, hooks for hands—there is something not exactly regional, or more precisely, Newfoundland about Winter. The first section of The Big Why, “Beginnings: The Naked Man of Brigus,” uses a letter from Kent in June of 1914. He says of Newfoundland: “A man goes to sea here as one would depart from the earth for the moon of Jupiter”; in Minister, Henry does the same: “He was rowing away from the land and he saw where he lived … This is how astronauts feel, he thought, to look back from space.” From these similarities, one might extrapolate that these two novels are like cousins at a Thanksgiving buffet who have unknowingly flirted with the same woman, the same object of desire. Like Spain’s fervent, even fanatical, devotion to García Lorca, Canada should really make sure it protects this artist. Like most of the greats, imagine what Winter will be doing when he reaches 70. Minister, despite its faulty tension between specificity and the indistinct, is a novel that works slowly, a novel that sticks to its instincts, reminding the reader:

[w]e live individual lives with the consciousness of death and awareness of the past. But the most important part of that sentence is the individual part. Let yourself be humbled by the experiences people have been having for thousands of years. And speak of it.

By remaining faithful to the questions he confronted in The Big Why, Winter demonstrates that doubt is essential to both artists and their craft. Minister will likely convert a number of readers to raise his flag, and in this way, it is a quiet and humble addition to his oeuvre—a work that will find its own space in its own time in the plot of Canadian fiction.