Crackpot, page 46
After her mother’s death, Hoda leaves school to look after her father. She takes on her role as prostitute almost without realizing it. When the boys come over, a whole group of them, she takes them into her makeshift bedroom one after another. Danile in his blindness believes (or needs to believe) that his clever daughter is helping them with schoolwork. Hoda believes (and needs to believe) that it is only the taking of money that saves her actions from blame–after all, she and her father need the few coins so badly, and, also, sex for pleasure alone is something she thinks is not permissible outside marriage. Her ideas of conception are unusual. Brought up in isolation, with no real friends, and by a mother who died too soon and who always told her severely never to discuss such things with anyone, Hoda has had to figure it all out by herself. When a woman is married, the man is finally able to shoot enough matching parts to make a complete baby. As long as she goes with different men, she will not conceive. Here we have almost a parody, and a very touching one, of the crackpot/creation theme–the parts ultimately and hopefully come together to make the whole.
When Hoda becomes pregnant, her notions about biology, and her own amply larded body, conceal her condition from herself. The birth is dark with terror for her. When she realizes what is happening, her main thought is to conceal the situation from her father. The scenes in which Hoda, unobserved, leaves the newborn child at the Jewish Orphanage, along with a garbled note which gives rise to wild speculations in the community concerning the child’s royal origins (British, at that, for the Prince of Wales has visited Winnipeg an appropriate length of time before) are skilfully handled. The first could have slipped into melodrama and the second into slapstick. Adele Wiseman treads a very fine line here, as she does so often in this novel, and she does not take a false step. The tone is exactly right. We feel Hoda’s panic, her urgency to get the child out of the house before Danile finds out, and later, her terrible sense of loss, and her attempts to submerge the memory. The community’s response to what they mistakenly take to be the note’s central message, namely that a lovely Jewish girl has slept with the Prince and produced this foundling, is both maddening and hilariously funny–the cynicism, the disapproval, the hope for “an enormous breakthrough in civil rights,” the endless gossip and guesswork. This interweaving of the humorous and the bizarre with the frightening and the tragic is one of Adele Wiseman’s greatest talents, for of course life presents all of us with similar simultaneous juxtapositions; but to catch and hold those tones, together, in writing, is something that only an accomplished artist can do.
The clue to the uproar at the orphanage, and a restatement of some of the novel’s themes, are found in the note:
In her note, Hoda had pieced together, out of the confused shards of her dream and desire and the longings of her shattered childhood, the following: TAKE GOOD CARE. A PRINCE IN DISGUISE CAN MAKE A PIECE OF PRINCE, TO SAVE THE JEWS. HE’S PAID FOR.
The themes of crackpot/creation can be seen here again–the vessel which, broken, still contains the sparks of the Divine and the potentiality of wholeness. In this disjointed note we can see many fragments: Hoda’s shattering experiences of life; her dreams of love, and the prince in disguise; the “pieces” which would come together to make a child, a new life; perhaps the tales of a Prince of Peace, from her Christian teachers, combined with the sense of her own ancestry, gained from Danile, and hope in the coming of the Messiah, some final reconciliation of life’s discordant aspects. Ironically, all Hoda herself means by “HE’S PAID FOR” is a reference to Danile’s rich uncle, Nate, who has endowed the Jewish Orphanage but whose help to Danile and Hoda has been grudging and minimal, despite his emotional demands on them. Hoda feels that her child’s keep in the orphanage has been, so to speak, pre-paid. The community, of course, does not see this simple fact, as they never connect the child with her. The reader, too, can see other possibilities of meaning. He has indeed been paid for, by Hoda, through her years of labour and her solitary birth-labour.
The boy is named, appropriately enough, David Ben Zion. His nickname is Pipick because his navel protrudes, as Hoda tied the cord herself, imperfectly. Hoda tries to refrain from wondering and thinking about the boy, and sometimes she succeeds. Sometimes, however, she experiences feelings alien to her, the desire to scream aloud and to run and keep on running, the breaking up and the cracking of the basic human earthen pot, the skull, the brain, the psyche. But she never breaks up totally, not ever.
At this point it should be said that this novel, among very many other things, is at one level a political novel, in the broadest sense. It portrays a whole community, North Winnipeg, with its influx of immigrants at various points in its history, spanning the years from World War I to the end of World War II. We are shown, through Hoda’s eyes, the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, the political groups and union organizers, the factories and sweatshops of that era, the poverty and despair of the Depression of the 30s. None of these historical events, however, is presented in any didactic way. They are seen through individual experiences. We feel it all as though it were happening right now, and to us.
The narrative is in the third person, but the voice is usually that of Hoda, and her idiom and changing modes of thought are caught exactly. The use of language throughout the book is extraordinarily interesting. Hoda’s concepts when speaking with her father (in Yiddish, as we are meant to realize) and when speaking with her contemporaries (in English) are very different. We may speak what we are thinking, but the particular tongue in which we are speaking also determines and forms our thoughts. The lovely ambiguities, too, of the English language occur again and again. Danile, after the death of Rahel, is “wrapped in his darkness, rapping on his darkness, rapt and listening in his darkness for an explanation.”
This is a sombre novel in very many ways, and yet it is full of a surging and irrepressible humour. Hoda’s humour is to her a protection, an armour, but it is really felt and genuine, even though it sometimes has its darkly ironic side. There are marvellously funny scenes such as those in which Hoda turns up, brash and uninvited, at weddings, dancing with gusto despite her girth and nabbing a customer or two in the process.
Seldom does one find in a novel a character who is so alive and who is portrayed with such change and development as Hoda. As her understanding expands, she sees in retrospect what her early life was really like. She doesn’t pity herself in the present, but she is able to feel pity for that child she once was, the child without a childhood. And over the years, the thoughts of her son haunt her. Under Hoda’s jokey surface there is an area of darkness, the accumulation of years of bewildered pain and uncomprehended rejection.
Her final encounter with her son, who comes to her as a young man to a neighbourhood whore, is one of the most shattering scenes in contemporary fiction. If Hoda refuses the boy, he will either feel that he is unacceptable as a man, or he will have to be told who he is. Her choices are real, but they are narrow. What can she do to hurt him the least? This is Hoda’s greatest act of love and greatest moment of suffering. Until now, she has had something of Danile’s terrifying innocence, but not any more. She assumes here the dimensions of a truly tragic character, drawing into herself all the ancestral myths, all the strength and anguish of the centuries. She is even “denied that loss of responsibility in suffering, which is the gift of madness.” Yet to the outside world, as she realizes, she will always be crackpot Hoda.
She still, however, has her life to complete. Lazar presents himself, the Lazarus who has risen, literally, from the grave itself, who has climbed over the dead of his family and his village in war-torn Europe, and has survived. His hurt and his need finally match with Hoda’s, and the world may begin again.
In a wish-fulfilling or prophetic dream at the end of the novel, Hoda sees herself and her son and her people rising again, out of the holocaust that encompasses and is yet more than the Jewish holocaust–man’s inhumanity to man finally overcome. The nightmare element, however, and the bitterness are present here, too. Hoda, about to marry Lazar, cries out in sleep, “CONDOMS PRURIENCE INCESTRY,” an agonized comment on her own life as well as an ironically twisted version of Winnipeg’s motto–Commerce Prudence Industry.
But at last, in the dream, there is wholeness:
Hoda curtseyed deep, arose. With a magnanimous gesture she drew the magic circle around them, showing them all she knew. Soon, she promised extravagantly, in the ardour of her vision, they would all be stirring the muddy waters in the brimming pot together.
The shards, to continue to speak in the novel’s metaphor, are many in this culmination, and they finally come together and fuse in a complete vision. The allusions occur on many levels. The Indian name Winnipeg means “muddy waters.” In Hoda’s experience, the community in which she grew up, with its mixture of immigrant peoples of different backgrounds and different degrees of wealth and poverty, was indeed a milieu of muddy waters. But she dares to hope, to look forward to the time when “they would all be stirring the muddy waters in the brimming pot together.” In a wider sense, Hoda’s dream embraces a whole area of world myth, in which the “magic circle” may be seen as the unending cycle of life and death, and the “brimming pot” as the fullness of creation in all its forms. Hoda herself finally becomes an archetypal figure, the earth mother, the Wise Woman of the tribes. Her son David, forever lost to her and yet never lost, says of her in the dream, “She occupies her past; she inhabits her life.”
She does indeed. And as one of the greatest characters in our literature, she helps us more fully to occupy our own past and to inhabit our lives.
BY ADELE WISEMAN
BIOGRAPHY
Old Woman at Play (1978)
DRAMA
Testimonial Dinner (1974)
ESSAYS
Old Markets, New World [Drawings by Joe Rosenthal] (1964)
Memoirs of a Book Molesting Childhood and Other Essays (1987)
FICTION
The Sacrifice (1956)
Crackpot (1974)
THE AUTHOR
ADELE WISEMAN was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1928. She graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1949 and then, to support her commitment to writing, found employment as a social worker in England, a school teacher in Italy, and executive secretary to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.
In her first novel, The Sacrifice (1957), which won the Governor General’s Award, Wiseman recreates, through the lives of Jewish immigrants in a central Canadian city, the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. In Crackpot (1974), she tells the poignant tale of the irrepressible Hoda. All her writings bring into Canadian literature the culture and the tradition of her Jewish heritage.
In Old Woman at Play (1978), an illustrated account of her mother’s doll-making, Wiseman explores and meditates on artistic creativity.
Adele Wiseman died in Toronto, Ontario, in 1992.
Copyright © 1974 by Adele Wiseman
Afterword copyright © 1978 by McClelland and Stewart Limited
First New Canadian Library edition 1978.
This New Canadian Library edition 2008.
This book was first published in 1974 by McClelland and Stewart.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher–or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency–is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Wiseman, Adele, 1928–1992
Crackpot / Adele Wiseman; with an afterword by Margaret Laurence.
(New Canadian library)
First published: 1974.
eISBN: 978-0-7710-8885-8
I. Title. II. Series.
PS8545.I85C7 2008 C813'.54 C2007-906233-4
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com/NCL
v1.0
Adele Wiseman, Crackpot
