David Helwig (1938–2018)
Autor de Saltsea
Sobre El Autor
Born in Toronto in 1938, David Helwig attended the University of Toronto and the University of Liverpool. His first stories were published in Canadian Forum and The Montrealer while he was still an undergraduate. He then went on to teach at Queen's University. He worked in summer stock with the mostrar más Straw Hat Players, mostly as a business manager and technician, rubbing elbows with such actors as Gordon Pinsent, Jackie Burroughs and Timothy Findley. 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. mostrar menos
Series
Obras de David Helwig
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Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Nombre canónico
- Helwig, David
- Otros nombres
- Helwig, David Gordon
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1938-04-15
- Fecha de fallecimiento
- 2018-10-16
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- Canada
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Lugar de fallecimiento
- Montague, Prince Edward Island (King's County Hospital)
- Lugares de residencia
- Belfast, Prince Edward Island, Canada ( [1996])
Montréal, Québec, Canada (1992-1996)
Kingston, Ontario, Canada (1962-92)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada - Educación
- University of Toronto (B.A., 1960)
University of Liverpool (M.A., 1962) - Ocupaciones
- academic (Queen's University ∙ 1962 - 1974)
Literary manager (CBC Television's drama department, 1974 - 1976) - Relaciones
- Helwig, Maggie (daughter)
- Premios y honores
- Prince Edward Island's third Poet Laureate (2008 - 2009)
Matt Cohen Prize (2007)
Order of Canada - Biografía breve
- young David Helwig
David Helwig was born in Toronto in 1938 and lived there for most of his first ten years, then moved with his parents to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario where his father ran a small business repairing and refinishing furniture and buying and selling antiques. He attended the University of Toronto and the University of Liverpool. His first daughter was born in England and the second in Kingston where he taught at Queen's University. He published his first stories, in Canadian Forum and The Montrealer, while still an undergraduate. For two summers he worked in summer stock with the Straw Hat Players, mostly as a business manager and technician, working with such actors as Gordon Pinsent, Jackie Burroughs, William B. Davis and Timothy Findley.
While he taught at Queen's University, he did some informal teaching in Collins Bay Penitentiary and he wrote A Book about Billie with a former inmate. In 1974, John Hirsch hired him as literary manager of CBC television drama, and he spent two years in this position, supervising the work of story editors and the department's relations with writers. From 1976 to 1980, he taught part time at Queen's while doing a great deal of freelance work, and in 1980, he gave up teaching and became a full-time freelance writer.
Miembros
Reseñas
Dense and layered with obscurity, this is literally a tale told by a madman, the mind broken protagonist hopeful of returning to his radio position to produce a series on art forgery, returns to the question of what is the difference between original and forged art while immersed in the search for proof that documents he has found indicate that Charles I escaped execution. For me this was like being served Pastichio, a dish I can appreciate but not enjoy, too much bloody white sauce.
Real Rating: 4.25* of five
The Publisher Says: Dross stands on the precipice of sanity. One of his last lucid thoughts is that he knows he's going to tumble, shortly, into the abyss of madness. He is drugged by his past, haunted by his mother's madness, addicted to the memories of the woman who rejected him and later died in a hospital cancer ward. He does not know where she is buried.
Trapped in his personal history, Dross packs up his unwieldy body, takes a leave of absence from his work, and moves into his vacationing cousin's house in Niagara. Alone, mesmerized by log fires, Dross doubts if anything can keep him from insanity's beckoning flames.
There is an intruder, however, a knocking on his consciousness, a woman, a stranger with information about his cousin's house. She tells Dross she is a historical researcher and that the house had been razed in 1823 and was rebuilt on the original eighteenth century foundation. He explores the ancient basement one sleepless night. Through a hole in the wall Dross spies another room, deeper than the basement. Hidden there he finds an old book in a locked box, and in the book a secret. The owner was King Charles I who, according to history, was beheaded, but according to the cryptograms and notations in the margin, escaped his recorded fate and lived under another identity on the same foundation where Dross now stands. This is what Dross needs: One small thread of external thought to weave into a web large enough to catch him from his fall. The house in which he cannot sleep, the house in which he consumes too much brandy and too little food, has a history longer and more involved than his own.
Bolstered by a new obsession, Dross sets out to prove history wrong, and in this pursuit he, like Charles I, avoids his own fate.
My Review: I like Wikipedia's "Recent Deaths" obituary aggregation feature. I learned of David Helwig's existence from it. Being a CanLit fancying Murrikun, I sallied forth to the Long Beach Library's ALIScat site and, after discovering there were several Helwig titles available, eenie-meenied Coming Through: Three Novellas. See my review for details of my appreciation for Author Helwig's writing. The title of this work amused me. The conceit of Charles I not losing his head on 30 January 1649 (370 years ago this week) appealed to me. This slim book appeared among the eight holds I needed to pick up at my local library a few days ago, before they were due to be returned to their originating branches. Faithless to common sense's proddings, I jumped it up the queue. I came home to eagerly begin reading the story at once.
I'm a hopalong reader, not ordinarily reading books...even short ones...in one go. A chapter here, a subheading there, is my habit. It's a means of lowering my Pearl-Rule rate from over half of all library books I pick up. This book, however, grabbed me and kept me reading, with interruptions for canoodling with my Young Gentleman Caller when he showed up to surprise me; I then was implored to make us some food in order to prevent his young body from wasting away. At least that's how he presented the situation to me, poor hungry lamb. Despite some dire flap copy (see above), which usually bodes ill for how I receive the book, I dove deep into the story before my starveling was all the way out my door (carrying a hunk of my homemade banana bread as insurance against recurrent malnourishment).
The Freeport library sent me a 1984 Beaufort Books edition, surely one of the last titles they published before pioneering indie book distributor Eric Kampmann's mothballing of the imprint after buying it. (Twenty-four years later Kampmann revived the imprint by publishing OJ Simpson's [If I Did It] amid much hullaballoo.)
It's a great pity to me that there are only remnant hardcover copies of The King's Evil still available. Bunim & Bannigan, Helwig's Canadian publishers, don't appear to have the rights to this title as they don't list it for sale. But I'm realistic enough to sense that most people with any interest in the quiet pleasures of a bereaved-but-bereft unhusband's descent from grief into madness will most likely do as I did. The library is, in some places anyway, still the best resource for unusual and out-of-the-way older books.
A greatly expanded TL;DR version of this review will go live on 26 January 2019 at my blog.… (más)
The Publisher Says: Dross stands on the precipice of sanity. One of his last lucid thoughts is that he knows he's going to tumble, shortly, into the abyss of madness. He is drugged by his past, haunted by his mother's madness, addicted to the memories of the woman who rejected him and later died in a hospital cancer ward. He does not know where she is buried.
Trapped in his personal history, Dross packs up his unwieldy body, takes a leave of absence from his work, and moves into his vacationing cousin's house in Niagara. Alone, mesmerized by log fires, Dross doubts if anything can keep him from insanity's beckoning flames.
There is an intruder, however, a knocking on his consciousness, a woman, a stranger with information about his cousin's house. She tells Dross she is a historical researcher and that the house had been razed in 1823 and was rebuilt on the original eighteenth century foundation. He explores the ancient basement one sleepless night. Through a hole in the wall Dross spies another room, deeper than the basement. Hidden there he finds an old book in a locked box, and in the book a secret. The owner was King Charles I who, according to history, was beheaded, but according to the cryptograms and notations in the margin, escaped his recorded fate and lived under another identity on the same foundation where Dross now stands. This is what Dross needs: One small thread of external thought to weave into a web large enough to catch him from his fall. The house in which he cannot sleep, the house in which he consumes too much brandy and too little food, has a history longer and more involved than his own.
Bolstered by a new obsession, Dross sets out to prove history wrong, and in this pursuit he, like Charles I, avoids his own fate.
My Review: I like Wikipedia's "Recent Deaths" obituary aggregation feature. I learned of David Helwig's existence from it. Being a CanLit fancying Murrikun, I sallied forth to the Long Beach Library's ALIScat site and, after discovering there were several Helwig titles available, eenie-meenied Coming Through: Three Novellas. See my review for details of my appreciation for Author Helwig's writing. The title of this work amused me. The conceit of Charles I not losing his head on 30 January 1649 (370 years ago this week) appealed to me. This slim book appeared among the eight holds I needed to pick up at my local library a few days ago, before they were due to be returned to their originating branches. Faithless to common sense's proddings, I jumped it up the queue. I came home to eagerly begin reading the story at once.
I'm a hopalong reader, not ordinarily reading books...even short ones...in one go. A chapter here, a subheading there, is my habit. It's a means of lowering my Pearl-Rule rate from over half of all library books I pick up. This book, however, grabbed me and kept me reading, with interruptions for canoodling with my Young Gentleman Caller when he showed up to surprise me; I then was implored to make us some food in order to prevent his young body from wasting away. At least that's how he presented the situation to me, poor hungry lamb. Despite some dire flap copy (see above), which usually bodes ill for how I receive the book, I dove deep into the story before my starveling was all the way out my door (carrying a hunk of my homemade banana bread as insurance against recurrent malnourishment).
The Freeport library sent me a 1984 Beaufort Books edition, surely one of the last titles they published before pioneering indie book distributor Eric Kampmann's mothballing of the imprint after buying it. (Twenty-four years later Kampmann revived the imprint by publishing OJ Simpson's [If I Did It] amid much hullaballoo.)
It's a great pity to me that there are only remnant hardcover copies of The King's Evil still available. Bunim & Bannigan, Helwig's Canadian publishers, don't appear to have the rights to this title as they don't list it for sale. But I'm realistic enough to sense that most people with any interest in the quiet pleasures of a bereaved-but-bereft unhusband's descent from grief into madness will most likely do as I did. The library is, in some places anyway, still the best resource for unusual and out-of-the-way older books.
A greatly expanded TL;DR version of this review will go live on 26 January 2019 at my blog.… (más)
The Publisher Says: Writer David Helwig's place in Canadian Letters spans practically every realm, from novels, short fiction, poetry, and plays, to essays and reportage. Helwig is one of the generation of writers including Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje to achieve wide critical acclaim and popular following in Canada. Even so, Helwig remains virtually unknown in the United States. Bunim & Bannigan is pleased to present for the first time Coming Through, a unique collection of three tightly crafted novellas of remarkable variety and versatility. These wise, whimsical, and mordantly funny stories by an under-appreciated master writing in his favorite genre are sure to delight American readers.
My Review: I haunt Wikipedia. I like its "Recent Deaths" obituary aggregation feature. I learned of David Helwig's existence from it, and being a CanLit fancying Murrikun, I looked on my county library system's catalog to see what they had. This collection of three novellas made the cut.
I am not surprised Helwig is unknown in the US after reading them. These are excellent pieces, well made, but of the literary world's least popular area: The Quiet Room. There are no pyrotechnics here. Helwig committed the sin of being born male, so he had no natural constituency lobbying for him to receive attention as did fellow short-fiction mavens Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant. I knowingly commit literary heresy when I say this: He's every bit as talented and accomplished a storyteller as either of them.
These from The Man Who Finished Edwin Drood
This short work is a uniformly excellent telling of the wages of sin. We are all monads, singular and indivisible units of universal life, for when we are divided, we are destroyed. "Wicked Uncle" (and how quickly that self-description palled!) learns, re-learns, ultimately owns his wholeness as his wronged predecessor dies by him.
Proceeding to some more man-centered prose, I offer:
These are from The Music of No Mind
A story that's so deeply sad...a has-been, really a never-was old lecturer in art history delivers three hours of talk over three nights. He speaks about all his hobby-horses, including the rotter whose death got him the gig, who once upon a time stole his wife. Richly allusive, gorgeously pictorial, utterly incomprehensible to one unlearned in the culture of the midcentury & its roots in the Belle Epoque. It badly needs illustrations! The artworks referenced in it won't be familiar to any but those unusually informed about the visual arts.
Finally, these gems:
Chosen fromA Prayer for the Absent
It is the longest, and to my mind least successful, of the novellas. I wasn't a big fan of Carman Deshane or of Norma; they carry the story, so that's a problem. These two people are well-matched adversaries. Carman's heart is weak; Norma's body got away from her somehow. In the end, they find some end-of-life peace in their sparring. Kind of a modern All in the Family Archie and Edith. I found those two tiresome forty-plus years ago, and their constant bickering was one of the biggest things that shoved me away from regular TV watching for twenty-five years.… (más)
My Review: I haunt Wikipedia. I like its "Recent Deaths" obituary aggregation feature. I learned of David Helwig's existence from it, and being a CanLit fancying Murrikun, I looked on my county library system's catalog to see what they had. This collection of three novellas made the cut.
I am not surprised Helwig is unknown in the US after reading them. These are excellent pieces, well made, but of the literary world's least popular area: The Quiet Room. There are no pyrotechnics here. Helwig committed the sin of being born male, so he had no natural constituency lobbying for him to receive attention as did fellow short-fiction mavens Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant. I knowingly commit literary heresy when I say this: He's every bit as talented and accomplished a storyteller as either of them.
Perhaps I have never grown beyond my young days, when every attractive young girl was a promise of the paradise garden, when I expected so much, gladdened by an eyebrow, a nose, a hank of hair, a breast, falling in love twice a day, never satisfied.
A great splash of roses...with that self-satisfied air that florist's roses always have, cosmetic abundance, the cryogenic look of a movie star after a successful facelift.
These from The Man Who Finished Edwin Drood
This short work is a uniformly excellent telling of the wages of sin. We are all monads, singular and indivisible units of universal life, for when we are divided, we are destroyed. "Wicked Uncle" (and how quickly that self-description palled!) learns, re-learns, ultimately owns his wholeness as his wronged predecessor dies by him.
Proceeding to some more man-centered prose, I offer:
Now the necktie is growing more unusual...to see three striped ones in this audience is odd almost to the point of that one might consider it ominous. ... Three strips of stripes from the drunken brush of God.
...{L}ife, as we all know, is not a story at all. It is the music of no mind.
I expect that the striped ties will return for the end of the last lecture, as they were here for the beginning of the first. Their pattern of presence and departure is unreadable, but all truth is unreadable until it is the heap of dead facts we call history.
These are from The Music of No Mind
A story that's so deeply sad...a has-been, really a never-was old lecturer in art history delivers three hours of talk over three nights. He speaks about all his hobby-horses, including the rotter whose death got him the gig, who once upon a time stole his wife. Richly allusive, gorgeously pictorial, utterly incomprehensible to one unlearned in the culture of the midcentury & its roots in the Belle Epoque. It badly needs illustrations! The artworks referenced in it won't be familiar to any but those unusually informed about the visual arts.
Finally, these gems:
Moods, the weather of heart and soul.
A vain, foolish man, but weren't they all? Open their zippers and their brains fall out.
Chosen fromA Prayer for the Absent
It is the longest, and to my mind least successful, of the novellas. I wasn't a big fan of Carman Deshane or of Norma; they carry the story, so that's a problem. These two people are well-matched adversaries. Carman's heart is weak; Norma's body got away from her somehow. In the end, they find some end-of-life peace in their sparring. Kind of a modern All in the Family Archie and Edith. I found those two tiresome forty-plus years ago, and their constant bickering was one of the biggest things that shoved me away from regular TV watching for twenty-five years.… (más)
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Estadísticas
- Obras
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- Miembros
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- Popularidad
- #107,332
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Or is he? A young woman enters his life, one of his students. Spoiled, wealthy, a neighbor of the family his parents once served. Ada stirs up memories Walter would rather forget. As they become involved in a passionate yet destructive affair, another side to Walter begins to emerge. A more dangerous side.
Through the characters and situations in The Only Son, David Helwig explores the way power is exercised—socially, politically, and sexually. This is an impressive new novel from an author recognized for his dramatic, finely polished writing.
My Review: Tedious Walter, bastard son of rich, married roué-cum-rapist James Randall, does his daddy proud by raping a college girlfriend he "loves;" marries his childhood friend Eunice not long after, has a limp and dishraggy marriage to her and finds out as she lies dying of cancer that Randall raped her too; then gets it all back when he marries second wife, Wild Child Ada. She rapes him. Symbolically, anyway: she stabs him in a drug-fuelled frenzy. Then she leaves his philosophy-professor sad ass with her drug dealer, participates in the murder of a cop in Arizona (a world away in every sense from lawful, manicured Toronto), goes to jail, and Walter shrugs his harness back on to teach undergrads what he knows about Philosophy.
Fast forward one jail sentence. Ada shows back up, he lets her into his house, and they fall back into an easy friends-with benefits relationship while they figure out how to separate, better to say disentangle, their emotionless lives. Walter confronts rapist Randall's dying wife to see if she'll admit he got Walter's mom pregnant. Ada confronts her incestuous brother Michael, not to accuse or vilify him, but to get back together with him; he slings her out on her ear.
Walter gets nothing from senile Mrs. Rapist, I mean Randall. Ada gets some money from Walter so she can skedaddle. Fin.
Stodge through and through. In 1984, the year this was published, it was old hat; now it's older hat, without the lustre (see? I misspelled it like the Canadians do! I'm so cosmopolitan) of being retro. Blah, flavorless, not to be avoided but not to be hunted down, and not the way I want to remember the dead-almost-a-year Author Helwig. I think my library system has at least one more book by him, and please Kalliope (Muse of Epic Poetry, close as the Greeks came to what we call novels) let it be better than this thing was.
I like these lines, though:
That's the last thing Author Helwig says in this book. He saved the best for last...?… (más)