THE HATCHET MAN — an original novel by PETER D. COURCHESNE B.A., The University of Western Ontario, 1962 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard: THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA May, 1965 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the author. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of V) ^fcyiM/ N The University of British Columbia, Vancouver 8, Canada Date ^\&A*^A^A^f.Hfc ii ABSTRACT The plot of The Hatchet Man is derived from The Canterbury Tales*. Each sub-section of the novel is intended to parallel Chaucer's narrative in detail and in theme. It is intended that much of the effect of the novel be dependent on the comparison that is invited with the content of Chaucer's Tales. Chaucer's integrating framework, the journey of the pilgrims to the shrine of Saint Thomas in Canterbury, is the source of a further parallel. The characters in The Hatchet Man travel to the shrine of abstract truth, institutionalized as the university. But, as with Chaucer, the stories themselves are the theme, not the pilgrimage. The particular provides the meaning; the general, the rationale. The attempt has been not so much to fragment the continuity of plot and style, but to avoid conglomerating it. The abstract depends on the particular in a more significant way than it could for the Christian Chaucer. The novel can end in "affirmations" rather than "retractions." Hugh Simon and his friends, unlike Chaucer's figures, do arrive at the shrine and find that the meaning of the particular overwhelms the abstract, that their Saviour hatchets the generalized whole and imparts to it the virtue of independent existence, a meaning derived from its own entity, not its interpretive value. THE HATCHET MAN Prologue —in that season It was September. Hugh Simon lay on his cot. He felt a longing to go that he would have felt in April. In April, so it runs, the earth is bathed and the roots are succoured by the rain, so He says, and the flower is engendered... as he too was when a boy and he watched the spring coming; the snow slump and slink away from the sun, making the house huff-puff swell and leaving a trickle of icicles and water fingers. Dog yellowed ice at the foot of telephone poles went overnight and last year's grass wilted and scented up and down the street, and if you burned it, drifted nostril longing as from some life you left ago come back to tell from far and large away. School out, all the family wished to pack and take the first soon train to summer camp where the whole world was, and they knew summer lasted easily as long as count up stars by night. It was storied and amazing to discover that clouds flew, but recalling now, the stories, like the clouds, were fragments... some goon once told him, some goon, mocking, that he perceived things as a primitive African tribe did, that, being shown a film, had no idea of its content, except they 2 remembered a chicken in the film that no one else had seen. The goon, maybe a teacher, had said Hugh concentrated on the incidental, on the periphery, and lost the continuity. He was embarrassed at it. Though there was none there in that torn, cloud engendered world, of: waking in morning birds wrinkling the air like the prickle of strawberry bushes and buzz the bees hornets and dragonflies as the odour of cheese-cloth logs oakum and as the squeak of the pump filling buckets in barefeet picking pinecones and driftwood for the fire and rowing back past Antoine's, an Indian with a goat that liked its horns picked, and a princess wife who organ wooed the midnight in their tarpaper attic kerosene hearth and bonfire shadows on the ceiling over his child bed and in the space between the world's words were envelopes of velvet It was spring and sun time always, and quite surprising to be told the summer lasted three months of the year, not ten. Tomorrow he would leave again, as birds do, inspired by incidentals, and though September, the only difference was it was not the liquor rain but beaked and skittering leaves that fell on his thin roof, and a breeze that did not frolic, but sifted slowly as the hour glass and slower with a chill that had no August toasted noses, and not the night air all of pouncing boughs and goblin shadows and swooping witches1 brooms. They are what make the season, Fall, and like the birds, because of them, he would leave tomorrow, heading south to London to study his strange craft of mixtures delicate and essences intangible— old warped limbed codger edged over his coddled pot and brew of swirling greens and browns, heady in the froth and gases of the formulae, hoping for the splendid residue, the pure and homo• geneous, the single, universal element. 3 —at harry's inn On Lakeshore Drive was Harry Wisdom's Lantern Inn inherited from his father. That evening he went there with Clarke Walters and Malcolm Brown, who they called Monk. They knew Harry from childhood years, and often went over to his place in evenings, after business slowed. Harry would turn on the *Uo Vacancy' sign and they would sit around the electric fireplace in the livingroom, drinking his beer. That room was like an institution. The walls were gothic, weighty and dark, with narrow windows blocked by ivy. A green rug said plush and only whisper. The chairs were arranged in a formal manner, as though for a meeting, and Harry's seat was prominent, like chairman. On the walls the lanterns made the room a silly sort of rosy, making visible, in the extremities, magnificent heaps of junk, altogether out of place: carvings, a toy cannon, a cutlass, a spinning wheel, and a phoney fur- covered fish, called ermine, supposedly because it inhabited cold depths. They hung with cobwebs and Hugh thought each was a vial capturing the voices of some dialogue of the past. The evening started, as usual, with Harry talking to the tourists, laughing functionally, and questioning about their children, their home towns, and their jobs. Clarke always had questions, wanting their opinions, his head making little curtsies, and his fingers, quick trips to his chin, Harry's eyebrows said 'Ahemi' with interest, when Clarke spoke. When Monk: had asked how they liked the fishing, beaches, restaurants, and things like that, he was finished and sat blowing spasms 4 into handkerchiefs, which he punctuated with "Ah, HellI" or "DirtyI Dirty 1" and winced his nose in the transition to guzzling his beer again. Hugh was kept busy answering questions, like yes indeed, yes his name was Simon, yes what he was doing, thinking 'what-uh-hey-huh-eh?1, until the tourists left. Harry took them to the door, good-nighting, thanking, if-you-need, with smiles, and returned to sit and contemplate the ceiling. His arms crossed on his chest, he then began to meditate aloud. It was by the way of calling the meeting to order. He began by reminiscing, in an oratorical manner, so that you knew he was leading up to something, and maybe it was that he thought the past was so much trivia, that It would serve to emphasize the glory of the present, in which his own position was most glorious, being the proprietor of The Lantern Inn. He began this night about the crooked shack they built when kids, with the words slopped on in paint, Private and Keep Out, and above these, The Sunset Hoods, because they lived near Sunset Park. They had stayed up playing Blackjack and Kings and Little Men all night, drinking pop from shot glasses, pretending it was whiskey. They stole corn from the neighbour's garden, cutting a hole in the chicken wire, with a path right from the fence through the deep grass to their shack door. They thought the neighbour would never know. They even stole the stove to cook his corn. What crooks'. Remember. The whole shack was built and furnished with stolen goods. They had all thought Monk would be a famous gangster. Clarke could run the fastest, really fast—he had turned out •so the way they thought he would. Harry had come to his peroration 5 and was leaning a little forward from the armchair. He was preparing to analyse their qualities and assess their future... But Hugh remembered his first girl friends, that he went with in those days, especially Jillian, so sweet, who bought him presents, phoned him, always smiling and cuddly, whose pants were so hot for him, and he too young to know, and he left her one night, in front of her friends, not saying good-night, because she liked the wrestling matches, and because her boobs were too small, never again getting a chance to speak to her, and she'd ended up married to some rat fink. Monk laughed.