sewn paper
Stories
May 1996
128 pages
ISBN 0-88984-173-X
$12.95
The Box Social
and Other Stories
James Reaney
The Box Social & Other Stories gathers together nine of James Reaney's
short fictions written in the 40s and early 50s and never previously collected
in book form.
The collection takes its title from a short piece the author originally published
in the University College Undergrad and which provoked a
firestorm of eight
hundred angry letters from subscribers when it was republished nationally in
the New Liberty in the late 40s. It also thwarted the young author's designs
on the editorship of the Undergrad because of his clear moral unsuitability
for such an august position.
(This is doubtful, because the Undergrad eventually came to be edited, thirty years later,
by PQL publisher Tim Inkster.)
`The Box Social' is remarkable,
not only that it introduced the theme of date rape to Canadian literature some thirty
years before the phrase was coined, but also that it is told from Sylvia's point of
view, and yet again that it ends with one of the quietest lines of literary vitriol
imaginable ... ` ``I hated you so much,'' she said softly.'
If Alice Munro has put the sexually awakening female under glass in Lives of Girls and Women,
then The Box Social could just as easily have been titled Lives of Boys and Men.
In `The Bully', the brutality of what passes for etiquette in secondary school
is contrasted with the simpler life of the farm personified in Noreen who drops
grain in the shape of letters to feed her chickens -- `so that when the hens ate
the grain they were forced to spell out Noreen's initials or to form a cross and circle.
There were just enough hens to make this rather an interesting game. Sometimes, I know,
Noreen spelled out whole sentences in this way, a letter or two each night, and I often wondered
to whom she was writing up in the sky.'
`The Bully' was included in The New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories edited
by Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver.
The young Margaret Atwood first encountered `The Bully' as an undergraduate.
She read the story, oddly enough, in an anthology edited
by Robert Weaver, and the experience was apparently seminal to her own development
as a writer of fiction ...
`Strong in local atmosphere, which is not used however for the purposes of strict realism,
combining the comic with the pathetic, proceeding by an associative dream language,
resolving itself through image rather than through plot alone, it
offered us
a whole new way of looking at the possibilities of the world available to us. In its
methods it anticipates such writers as Gabriel Maria Marquez; I suppose if it appeared now
it would be dubbed Magic Realism. But anyone who has read Alice Munro,
Robertson Davies, Timothy Findley, Jane Urquhart, Marian Engel, Graeme Gibson
or Barbara Gowdy -- those writers placed together by critic Michael Hurley under the banner
`Southern Ontario Gothic' -- cannot help but feel that they all inhabit the same
literary landscape, and that it is one whose main features were defined
earlier by James Reaney.
`And so it is with me. Without `The Bully', my fiction
would have followed other paths. If there are such things as `key' reading experiences,
`The Bully' was certainly one of mine.' -- Margaret Atwood
`Sleigh Without Bells' is an early fictional use of the same local Biddulph
township history that would eventually be staged as Sticks & Stones, The St Nicholas Hotel
and Handcuffs -- the Donnelly trilogy that toured the country in 1975.
Northrop Frye has suggested that Reaney `has succeeded in bringing southern Ontario
[ surely one of the most inarticulate communities in human culture ] into a brilliant
imaginative focus.'
![[James Reaney]](reaney.jpg)
His work includes: The Red Heart, poems, 1949; A suit of Nettles, poems, 1958; Twelve Letters to a Small Town, poems, 1962; The Killdeer & Other Plays, drama, 1962; Colours in the Dark, drama, 1969; Collected Poems, 1972; Listen to the Wind, drama, 1972; The Donnellys, a trilogy of plays, 1974-75; Baldoon (with C.H. Gervais), 1976; The Boy With an R in His Hand, young adult, 1980; Take the Big Picture, young adult, 1986; Alice Through the Looking-Glass, stage adaptation, 1994.