C I V I L I A N C O N F L I C T : S Y S T E M S O F W A R F A R E IN T I M O T H Y F I N D L E Y ’ S E A R L Y F I C T I O N LORRAINE M. YORK McMaster University All night long, Hooker Winslow’s eyes were open. Around the room, the first shadows of morning began to lift themselves out of the corners. . . . (The Last of the Crazy People 3) Every morning at seven o’clock Harper Dewey turned over and woke up. And every morning he would lie in his tumbled bed (for he slept without repose even at the age of eight) until it was seven-thirty, thinking his way back into his dreams. . . . (Dinner Along the Amazon 1) I t is no coincidence or quirk of fate that two of Timothy Findley’s early works, The Last of the Crazy People (1967) and the short story “Lemonade” (com posed mid~50s; publ. 1980) open with a “stand-to” at dawn. But here the soldier on his lonely vigil is a young child, and the war in which he participates is a domestic one. Nevertheless, these early tales of civilian conflict are war texts; many of the basic strategies and structures of military behaviour inform these works, and even particular wars serve as touchstones or intertexts within them. Indeed, in The Last of the Crazy People, Findley’s first novel, an entire nineteenth-century war serves as a complex hidden metaphor for the domestic skirmishes of the twentieth-century Winslow family: the American Civil War. Polarity and conflict have always fascinated Findley as a writer, and both are present in large measure in a very early story of his, “About Effie” (1956), a work which has nothing to do with war as we normally conceive of it. The story opens with a veritable domestic attack; young Neil enters his house in the midst of a raging thunderstorm and is immediately ambushed: “Right then I didn’t know what it was. It looked like a ghost, you know, and then it looked like a great big crazy overcoat, and it sort of fell at me” (Dinner Along the Amazon 83). The modulation here from the Gothic to the eerie but domestic — from “ghost” to “big gray overcoat” — prepares us for the discovery of the truly “domestic” nature of Neil’s attacker: it is the new maid, Effie. E n g lish Studies in C anada, x v, 3, September 1989 Neil is only the first of many Findley characters who are “attacked by the domestic.” The subject of the short story “War” (1957-58) is not military war at all, but rather the domestic warfare caused by a father’s decision to go to war. Neil retreats to the loft of the barn, from where he fires domestic missiles — golfballs, stones — at his father. But in Findley’s fictional world, stone-throwing and shooting are distinctly related. In “ Lemonade” Harper Dewey, mourning the withdrawal of his mother’s affection, hurls a stone through her window. And later, in The Wars (1977), we meet Eugene Taffler, who is a practised hand at firing missiles, both on and off the battlefield; Robert and Clifford Purchas see him throwing stones at bottles on the Alberta prairie. “All you get in this war,” he complains, “is one little David against another . . . Just a bunch of stone throwers” (35). Already we begin to see the system of interlocking images which forms the fictional wars of Timothy Findley. In human warfare, missiles are most often fired in order to obtain or to defend territory; indeed, the struggle for territory is endemic to war. This struggle, beginning as early as “Lemonade” and forming complex patterns of domestic invasion and retreat in The Last of the Crazy People and The Wars, is no less basic to Findley’s fictions. “Lemonade” opens with a careful obser vation of territorial rules; Harper must wait in the chair outside his mother’s room while she is awakened and refreshed by the maid Bertha...