sewn paper
e-mail the Author
Fiction
September 2002
96 pages
ISBN 0-88984-244-2
$16.95
The Stand-In
David HelwigDavid Helwig has written an engaging novella about a whimsical, opinionated and slightly embittered professor of humanities, now retired. The professor is asked, at the last minute, to fill in and deliver an important lecture series, replacing a famous friend and colleague who has suddenly died. The professor does agree but his impromptu talks - both amusing and reflective - combine memories of Paris, odd corners of art history, and the story of his own life with its links to Denman Tarrington, the deceased celebrity. As his talks continue, the professor's thoughts and ideas find their way into other possible worlds, following all the avenues through a house of mirrors.
`... one of the mirrors caught me and showed me myself. As I
looked, I thought about that old trick of exposition, found in
bad fiction, where the main character looks in the mirror and the
author is able to describe the long pale face....
A face that a woman,
in the grip of whatever madness, once called beautiful....
The mirror gives us an author's eye view of ourselves.'
(from Section Two)
`The reader of David Helwig's sly novella The Stand-In is cast as a
member of the audience for three meandering lectures on `The Music of
No Mind' delivered by the stand-in for a better-known colleague found
dead in his hotel room. Though the speaker rambles, we begin to
suspect there is method - and perhaps motive - in his unconventional
address. A teasingly complex book, The Stand-In combines the
intellectual playfulness of a postmodern novel with the high drama of
an old-fashioned who dunnit.'
- Kim Jernigan, The New Quarterly
`This is an extraordinary little book, though its appeal is likely to be
limited to those readers with both the literary background and the
patience to follow Helwig at his game. The lectures are almost
unbelievably haphazard, but their seemingly anarchic meanders are a
showcase for Helwig's dead-on sense of style, timing, and structure.
The Stand-In is fiercely funny, but its humour is delivered with a
bitter irony that could raise the hackles of a few sensitive scholarly
souls. Adventurous readers should not miss The Stand-In, but anyone
looking for fiction that is conventional in its structure or its pieties
should turn elsewhere.'
-- Jack Illingworth, amazon.ca
`David Helwig is one of Canada's most prolific novelist-poets. This challenging but rewarding novel
revolves around the themes of friendship, marriage, infidelity, and certain revenge. It is structured
as a series of three rambling lectures that are delivered by the stand-in for a better-known colleague
who was found dead in a hotel room a week earlier. The lectures themselves are essentially Chekhovian
in nature. The reader as audience ponders their ambiguities, trying to discern their method and motive.
Helwig's novel, a seamless blend of brittle postmodern analysis and old-fashioned whodunit,
is moody, suspenseful, and utterly compelling. Properly adapted,
it would make for an invigorating evening at the theatre.'
-- David Kemp, Canadian Book Review Annual
`The Stand-In is a comic gem, by turns mordant, witty and wise. It's a
delicious novel of friendship, marriage, infidelity, and sly revenge. But
it's also a fascinating meditation on irony, Dutch painting, mirrors, and the
self. Helwig is a master of thematic interweaving. His timing is impeccable.
One has the impression of a ferocious intelligence at play - the effect is
gorgeous, seductive and compelling.'
- Douglas Glover
`Helwig superbly explores complex philosophical ideas.
His style is engaging and informing, his sense of dialogue
extraordinary.'
- The Winnipeg Free Press
`Prince Edward Islander David Helwig is one of Canada's most unsung
writers, talent-wise. The Stand-In is not only a witty, eloquent and
satirical impromptu, but an artfully regulated romp about a retired
professor of humanities who turns a substitute lecture series into a
pungent airing of personal grievances and confidences.
The professor groups his lectures under the collective title of `The
Music Of No Mind,' then proceeds to extemporize on a wide range of
peculiar topics: from badminton, Dutch painting and nymphomania to
Ernest Thompson Seton.
Gradually we begin to suspect the professor is not as dithering as he
appears. Underlying his oblique references to persons, places and things
is a subtle yet damning reflection on capitalism's monolithic enterprise
of mediocrity and trivia. The professor concludes his lectures: `We are
all learning to be witty and untouched.
Helwig's The Stand-In is a triumph of comic exposition.'
- Len Gasparini, the Toronto Star
`David Helwig's The Stand-In is a witty, inventive, sometimes
disturbing excursion into the genre of the dramatic monologue,
that literary form perfected in poetry by Robert Browning, and
here equally successful in prose, in which a single speaker
addressing an unseen audience reveals more about himself than he
realizes or perhaps intended. The speaker in this case is a
retired university professor who has returned to the small
Canadian university, where he taught for many years, to deliver a
series of three memorial lectures. As he explains immediately, he
is there as a substitute speaker because the original guest
lecturer, Denman Tarrington, has died suddenly in New York. It
quickly transpires that Professor X, the stand-in (whose name we
never learn), was a colleague of Tarrington at the same
university, and what follows are not so much three lectures as
three virtuoso stream of consciousness outpourings of personal
reminiscence, to the frustration of the professor's audience and
the entertainment of the reader. Ironically, the title of the
lecture series is "The Music of No Mind," and if one were to seek
an analogy between this novella and a musical composition, the
choice would have to be Elgar's Enigma Variations, in which the
composer claimed there exists a hidden unheard but familiar
theme, the identification of which has baffled music scholars
ever since. What is important in Professor X's apparently
dithering extemporaneous digressions is not so much what is said
as what is unsaid or hinted at.'
- Prairie Fire
Photo by Judy Gaudet
While at Queen's University, Helwig did some informal teaching in Collin's Bay Penitentiary and subsequently wrote A Book About Billie with a former inmate.
Helwig has also served as literary manager of CBC Television Drama, working under John Hirsch, supervising the work of story editors and the department's relations with writers.
In 1980, he gave up teaching and became a full-time freelance writer. He has done a wide range of writing - fiction, poetry, essays - authoring more than twenty books. Helwig is also the founder and long-time editor of the Best Canadian Stories annual.
David Helwig lives on Prince Edward Island in the village of Eldon. He indulges his passion for vocal music by singing with choirs in Montreal, Kingston, and Charlottetown. He has appeared as bass soloist in Handel's Messiah, Bach's St Matthew Passion and Mozart's Requiem.
