It’s only a coincidence that two big historical novels about the Canadian West in its formative decades – Guy Vanderhaeghe’s A Good Man and Marina Endicott’s The Little Shadows – should appear simultaneously in the fall of 2011. But the urge to compare and contrast is irresistible.
Where Vanderhaeghe delivers his now-expected complement of big skies and dusty trails, skillfully weaving overlooked Canadian content into the mythical history of the West, Endicott turns the myth upside down. Her West reveals itself through the artistic careers of three young sisters who flee an impoverished homestead in search of the security and refinement promised by the booming new cities – “modern, beautifully civilized places,” according to Endicott – that her girl heroes tour as vaudeville performers.
Where Vanderhaeghe’s hero and his tough-but-tender bride lope off to a happy home on the range, Endicott’s “Little Shadows” aspire to life with paved roads, streetcars and marble bathrooms – all of which become magically available to them as they mature from bare survivors into serious artists at the centre of a robust local culture.
Although she knew she wanted to present a counter-narrative to the dominant man’s-eye view of the Wild West, most everything else about her first historical novel came as a surprise to her, according to Endicott. Inspiration struck as she researched another, unrelated project in the archives of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum.
Looking for information on church history, “I kept finding photos of performers,” Endicott marvels, her surprise undimmed long after the discovery. “I hadn’t realized that vaudeville even existed in Canada,” she added, “and I became more and more fascinated with those photographs – particularly of young girls, and how young they were.”
Copies of some of those same photos are still pinned above the “extremely messy desk” at the Edmonton home office where Endicott, 53, wrote The Little Shadows. Their initial discovery marked the beginning of six years of research, which culminated in an intimately detailed, warmly inhabited portrait of a lost cultural heritage.
The urban angle was especially unexpected. “I certainly didn’t mean to do it,” the author said. “It just happened as I went to the places they would have gone and saw what they would have seen. Their move was very much away from the rural.”
Where Vanderhaeghe’s all-too-civilized, Toronto-born hero seeks a fresh start as a rancher on the uncorrupted prairie, Endicott’s trio is driven to artistic excellence in part by the fear “they will end up back on the farm with the chickens.”
Attempting a historical novel for the first time, Endicott was happy to be guided by such past masters as Vanderhaeghe and her friend Fred Stenson. “I admire both those men enormously,” she said. She read Vanderhaeghe’s writing on the craft and took to heart Stenson’s warning “not to let the research get too far ahead of the writing.”
“I remembered that ruefully many times,” she said.
But it was her attention to the distaff view that set Endicott’s project apart. “I wanted to look at the women in this book, particularly at young girls and what they would have been able to think in those days, how they could have thought about their lives and sexuality,” she said: girls “trampled and frightened and triumphant, shackled and ashamed, and also glorious.”.
“How lovely those girls are!”
The view Endicott sought to correct – the image of “all those women whose stories were written by men” – was promoted not by her contemporaries but by such classic novels as Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie – still the definitive account of women stage performers at the turn of the century.
“I wanted to write from Carrie’s perspective, to imagine what she might have imagined about herself, not as Dreiser imagined her – as a kind of mindless, selfless blow-up doll who is moved from place to place by men and is only really semi-conscious, not a thinking human being.”
That ambition was aided enormously by Endicott’s own background in the theatre, where she worked as an actor, director and dramaturge for years before beginning a second career writing novels. Her descriptions of life backstage on the vaudeville circuit are especially rich.
“The beauty of the backstage is something I took away with me when I left the theatre,” she said, especially the “dual view” it affords. “At the same time as you’re seeing the performance, you’re also seeing what’s going on behind the performers: the quiet, workmanlike machinery behind the glittery performances.”
In her previous novel, the Scotiabank Giller Prize-short-listed Good to a Fault, Endicott dramatized the struggle for moral betterment. “In The Little Shadows, I’m thinking about how we become better in art,” she said.
If it’s not the familiar stuff of the typical western, Endicott is not a typical westerner: Although born in Golden, B.C., she spent her formative years in Nova Scotia and Toronto, and worked as an actress in London before following her theatrical vocation to Saskatoon, where she worked with the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre. Today the mother of two teenagers, she lives in Edmonton with her husband, Peter Ormshaw, an RCMP intelligence analyst and published poet.
“I certainly am associated with the West, but I don’t really think of myself as a westerner,” Endicott said. “I still feel like a foreigner a little bit – a kind of outsider, an anthropologist.”
It is a stance that serves her well in The Little Shadows, creating a wholly original view of the opening of the West.
