This is an earlier version (a prequel, if you will) of Various Persons Named Kevin O’Brien; as a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; a coming-of-age novel, or Künstlerroman. Nowlan‘s raw talent fashioned a compelling narrative about a childhood marred by abject poverty; but infused with an indwelling spirit and the heightened language of Biblical prophecy. The novel was previously published by Goose Lane Editions, in 1988, from a manuscript written in 1961. The present text is accompanied by an Afterword; a biographical note by Patrick Toner, one of Nowlan’s biographers; and An Interview with Alden Nowlan, in 1982, by Jon Pedersen. This is a Reader’s Edition, suitable for students, scholars, and generally interested but motivated readers.
The book title, gleamed from poet Andrew Marvell, does not do justice to its contents and may have rendered it commercially inadequate. Compare the novel A Jest of God, 1974, by Margaret Laurence, on a school teacher, (a role played by Paul Newman’s wife, Joanne Woodward), for the film re-titled “Rachel, Rachel.” Nowlan reveals, “The first time Margaret Laurence and I met, she kissed me and she said, “I always kiss members of my tribe.” (p. 275)
Alden Nowlan has a recurring motif of monsters in his poetry and fiction, culminating in the drama of Frankenstein, coauthored with Walter Learning (Toronto: Clarke Irwin, 1973). The psychological and psychosexual underpinnings are for others to analyze. Kevin is the product of monsters. His father’s body smells of sweat, tobacco, sawdust, and leather. Yet, it caused Kevin to associate him with “the sharp, good odour of ploughed earth, the aroma of onions and of horse droppings.” (p. 113) Indeed, “The man’s body was adamant, impenetrable like rocky earth.” Compare The Stone Angel, 1974, by Margaret Laurence, in which such imagery prevails.
Kevin intuits a comparison with the yielding, creek-water body of his mother, who is no match for her husband’s spousal assault. Kevin ponders on how man was created from the dust of this earth and that woman had been made from man’s bone. Yet he doubts his familial Christian faith, wondering if this could be a mistake, and his second-guessing extends to the Old Testament narrative of Creation.
Surely, his father had been created from stone, chiseled from a bolder like those that stood in the west pasture. (p. 113) and his mother-his mother had sprung from water risen from the white foam. See: Sandro Bottechelli’s iconic painting “Venus Rising”, a visualization rapt with imagery which is seminal, oceanic, tumescent.
The reader learns that Kevin’s inveterate study of the Bible “altered the very geography of his world.” (p. 159) He is willingly transported into a secret world (of the psychiatric hospital). There is the Old Testament jealous vengeful God. Kevin compares himself to Abraham, called to sacrifice his only son Isaac, but soon Kevin is Isaac himself, before being transliterated into the New Testament Christ, debased and crucified.
The King James Version of the Bible has served many authors with rich, multi-layered, symbolic materials. Kevin is steeped in Christian thinking, due to his grandmother’s influence, discovering a modicum of comfort from the exemplum of David and Goliath, when attempting to deal with his peer group of scapegoats and daredevilism, in grade VI. Along the road to Damascus, he experiences a series of epiphanies; ultimately, seeking surrender, in womb-like confined space.
His inquisitors questioning him appear to be taken, in part, from his stay in a psychiatric institution in Dartmouth at the Nova Scotia Hospital, from which he was released in 1948. He was subsequently hired to write for the Observer, at the age of nineteen.
The display of Kevin, repeatedly pleading for his life and to be spared from further abuse, is melded to wanton violence, against a cow, house cat, women and small children. The technique of stream-of-consciousness is an effective device. “Men spoke of breaking horses, but, in realty, a horse was never wholly broken until it was killed.” (p. 138)
“There were two kinds of fear. There was daytime fear—his fear of his father and of all strong, unpitying daytime things—and there was nighttime fear, the queasy horror he felt when he imagined a creature in a black cloak creeping toward his bed under cover of the wailing darkness.” (p. 133)
What remains forged in the brain are: his father rage when he was drunken and abusive; the self-loathing of the young, callow protagonist; whose mother Mary painstakingly composes letters to imaginary correspondents; and there is just a glimmer of hope in his girl Nancy.
This is an account of the author as a young man, a poet like William Blake, whose writings were attempts at expressing Biblical revelations, before encountering poetry at the age of eleven or twelve. As Nowlan himself argues, he progressed to having his first chapbook of poems reviewed by Northrop Frye. Nevertheless, he cultivated the fantasy of having written a best-selling horror novel, like The Shining.
Ironically enough, he did not make a movie (but he did complete a play, in which he did this one better.) In Chapter Thirteen, a man’s body is fashioned, much like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the gothic darkness there “[m]ight have been the shadows of vampires and werewolves.” There might be vampires in the Lockhartville Cemetery.” Facing a vampire, Kevin’s lips “might be paralyzed with fear!” In the best tradition of folklore, “Only silver bullets could kill them.” A vampire cannot be seen in a mirror. Kevin avoids looking into a mirror of a reflecting window.
Inevitably, Kevin is interrupted, in this reverie, by his mother. While he may foreswear a closer view of himself, he does project and reflect his home, household, family members.
Was one of these monsters even now placing hairy palms against the inside of a coffin lid? Was something with red, dripping fangs even now crouching under the window.
In spite of himself, he found his eyes turning toward the window. No! He did not wish to look! But his head moved with a will of its own. [He feels possessed] In another second he would be looking at the glass and then he would see—. “What in hell’s the matter with yuh, Kev?” (p. 114)
With this “accomplished” novel, Nowlan is placed in the same category as James Joyce, Norman Maclean, and Ralph Waldo Emerson by David Adams Richards, who was once described by Nowlan as “a brilliant young New Brunswick-based novelist.” (“An Interview with Alden Nowlan”, by Jon Pedersen, p. 266)
Nowlan revealed that his natural reflex was to conceal what he was working on, when someone came into the room, because writing was “a very private thing to me.” (p. 263)
The reader is left to speculate what may have come to pass if Nowlan had rallied his courage and sent his manuscript to more than one publisher. This arises from Richards who defends the novel as “accomplished” after its rejection by an unnamed Toronto book editor who dismissed it.
Other resources will be Patrick Toner’s If I could turn and meet myself: the life of Alden Nowlan (Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2000); The Alden Nowlan Papers (University of Calgary Press, 1992); and “Lockhartville and Kevin O’Brien 1987 Response to the staging of drama based on the fiction of Alden Nowlan—in A Lad from Brantford and Other Essays, by David Adams Richards (Fredericton: Broken Jaw Press, 1994), pp. 36-42.