Turvey by Earle Birney

First published: 1949; revised, 1976

Type of work: Satirical picaresque

Time of work: 1942-1945

Locale: Canada, England, Belgium, and the Netherlands

Principal Characters:

• Thomas Leadbeater (Tops) Turvey, a private in the Canadian army
• Gillis MacGillis (Mac) MacGillicuddy, his best friend
• Peggy, his English girlfriend

The Novel

From the moment of his induction into the Canadian army in June, 1942, until his triumphant scurry out of it in June, 1945, Private Thomas Lead-beater (Tops) Turvey’s life is determined by two forces: his desperate hope to join his best friend Gillis MacGillis (Mac) MacGillicuddy in the Kootenay Highlanders regiment, and the whimsy, accidents, and mistakes which govern an army apparently intent on frustrating his quest. Throughout interminable psychological interviews, postings, and escapades in Canada and later overseas in England, Belgium, and Holland, Turvey maintains his nearly maniacal good cheer and shaky innocence. By the end of World War Il, he emerges as a wounded but still active twenty-three-year-old combatant in the wars among and between classes, nations, and psyches.

Turvey was scarcely a naif when he first tried to join the air force and army in 1939. A child of the Depression, which struck western Canada particularly hard (Turvey is from British Columbia), he left school at sixteen to work as a chokerman, bucker, striker, scurfer, and pouncer. This variegated experience might suggest the picaro, or likable rogue of the episodic picaresque novel, but Turvey lacks the requisite shrewdness. His progress through military bureaucracy seems at first a paper chase; he is the victim of misrouted files, inept examiners, and dubious diagnoses. As a result, he serves variously as a security guard, infantry trainee, driver, waiter, night fireman, runner, batman, and potential officer. Patterning his aimless postings are three stays in the hospital: in Canada, after an accident in basic training; in Belgium with dysentery; and in England with diphtheria. Yet Turvey’s own guileless enthusiasm inevitably leads him into the arms of the Provost Corps: he is court-martialed for being Absent Without Leave, put on charge for drunkenly wandering into a mine field, and condemned to the euphemistically named Special Pioneer Detachment for machine-gunning his greatcoat (he thought it was a German paratrooper).

The other side of this reciprocating action is reflected in Turvey’s major and minor triumphs, from the optimism of his enlistment to the glee of his discharge, both in Toronto. His search for active service comes full circle, as the structure of the novel’s nineteen episodes makes clear. Turvey’s physical and psychological movement encompasses four phases. In Canada, his attempt to find Mac and the Kootenay Highlanders is the matrix for the first six alternating episodes: he enlists, then marks time; he undergoes basic training, then is hospitalized; he becomes a security guard, then is court-martialed. In England, the second phase, similar cycles hold for the next four episodes: he stumbles into a mined tank-testing field, then accidently comes across Mac, who introduces him to Peggy; he is thrown into the brig for disgracing himself (he mistook an officer’s room for the latrine), then performs brilliantly if eccentrically at an officer’s testing course.

The latter half of Turvey, set mainly in Belgium and Holland after the Allied forces’ landing at Normandy, centers on a darker side of Turvey’s own battles with and within the army. Although he is temporarily back again with Mac as they liberate Belgium (he sustains his first wound in action from an apple thrown too enthusiastically from a welcoming crowd), he is also exposed directly to Belgian collaborators and to the poverty and devastation in the countryside. Believing himself to be part of a secret mission, he discovers that he is actually the dupe of Canadian military black-marketeers. Sent for another psychological test near the sharp end of the front, Turvey learns that he is in fact in Germany, at the battalion lines of the Kootenay Highlanders, only to contract diphtheria and hear that Mac has been killed by artillery fire. Finally realizing that his quest for Mac has led him to the discovery of his own will, on being shipped back to England he proposes to Peggy. In the last episode, the army insists on repatriating him to Canada by hospital ship, but at the end Turvey has escaped both the army and the ghost of the Kootenay Highlanders. No longer “just a body,” Tops Turvey has landed right side up.

The Characters

In keeping with the conventions of the picaresque novel, Turvey is a realistic figure but at the same time a humorous re-creation of the author’s experience and those of hundreds of soldiers whom he interviewed during World War II. Earle Birney described his intentions plainly: “My central character was going to be a dumb backwoods private, an innocent born for trouble, a youth with the cheerfulness and reckless morale of a hero but with the intellectual and soldierly capacities of a farmyard duck.” Yet Turvey is far from static as he gradually recognizes his place in the machinery of war. Just as he has a nervous habit of grinning whenever he is anxious, so he carries with him an innate common sense to balance his gullibility; whether Turvey realizes his ironic stance, it is the principal vehicle for the satire which is the ground note of the novel.

Initially, Turvey appears to be a simple victim of circumstances, usually reflected physically (he fractures his ankle in basic training because of a mistake by a literal-minded sergeant; a night orderly absently paints him with the wrong potion to prevent venereal disease). Yet after he is fired at by a fellow recruit, he is easily persuaded to hitchhike to Buffalo, New York, to spend the weekend illegally with two women. Turvey can and will cope with his newly disciplined life but always with his own logic, which invariably gets him into further trouble. Never passive in response to the powers which dictate his three years in the army, Turvey increasingly manages to turn military follies, however well-intentioned, to his own ends, however dimly perceived.

Mac is both the object of Turvey’s almost romantic quest for action and the catalyst for his progress. Birney was well aware that in turning Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) upside down (topsy-turvey, as it were) by making Sancho Panza the hero, he also had to invent a Quixote. Mac, then, is very much a secondary character despite his influence on his sidekick. The reader first meets him as a corporal in London during an air raid, where he saves Turvey from a Provost Corps sergeant and retrieves Turvey’s lost false teeth. The regiment has been disbanded, but for Turvey its insignia will remain a symbol of his connection with Mac and their freewheeling life in Canada. A con man with the clipped speech of a Noel Coward stage protagonist, Mac, now a sergeant, engineers Turvey’s transfer to his own unit, and an officers’ training course. Mac becomes a lieutenant, and Turvey his batman-driver in Europe. That Mac should be killed while Turvey is hospitalized dramatically emphasizes the difference between a quest, focused on the object of a journey, and an odyssey, concerned with the journey itself. Thus, Mac in Turvey’s odyssey is a necessary figure, although incidental to the challenges on the way.

Mac introduces Turvey to Peggy, an equally incidental figure, but it is Peggy who will replace Mac as a resolution of Turvey’s life. His dreams have been of winning the Victoria Cross or, more practically, of opening a bar on the Alaska Highway or becoming a railway engineer. Plump and charming, Peggy presents him with a lucky rabbit’s foot and then disappears from the narrative until Turvey is returned to England. Their courtship is limited to brief encounters while Turvey is hospitalized, but he conquers his shyness enough to propose marriage just before he is shipped back to Canada. Marriage is the most satisfying conclusion to many comic forms, and one assumes that Turvey will be successful in completing his odyssey and quest with Peggy; luck will conquer fate, ironically, if Turvey wills it.

An essential aspect of Birney’s humor, moreover, depends on the myriad other characters who appear—some briefly, some for several pages—long enough for their foibles to mark the scope of Turvey’s career. Birney is highly adept at reproducing many of Canada’s accents, from the maritimes to Victoria, the prairies, and Quebec, as well as the more obvious British variants. Each almost inadvertently reveals class biases as they shape attitudes to the war, and hence to the nature of war itself.

Critical Context

Widely regarded as Canada’s finest poet writing in English, Birney has upset many critics and readers with his novels. Turvey was popular, winning the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, relatively large sales, and acclaim in an improbable stag~ version as a musical. It has been in print constantly and remains a major work about Canadian experience during World War II. Down the Long Table (1955) is a more highly political examination of the Depression and the oppressive atmosphere of the 1950’s.

The first edition of Turvey, appropriately enough, raised some controversy about its rich language, which had to be muted until a revised edition appeared in 1976. Direct as the language is, however, contemporary readers might well suspect that Turvey is subversive more because of its implications than because of its diction. The essence of Birney’s wry and occasionally outrageous humor is his view of society. For an earlier socially conscious generation, the distinction might have been expressed as one between Stalinist and Trotskyist attitudes to literature. It is well-known that until 1940, Birney was for several years a committed Trotskyist; thereafter, he began writing some of the most striking poems of his career, leading to numerous honors, including two Governor-General’s Medals. Turvey is an integral part of that complex time during Canada’s political evolution: a tract for the times, an engaging entertainment, and a serious exploration both affirming and indicting Canada and Canadians. The survivors of his satire are the women and men who lasted as Turvey did: battered, lighthearted, and with their dignity whole.

Bibliography

Aichinger, Peter. Earle Birney, 1979.

Davey, Frank. Earle Birney, 1971.

MacKendrick, Louis K. “Gleewords and Old Discretions: Birney’s Benefictions,” in Perspectives on Earle Birney, 1981.

Nesbitt, Bruce, ed. Earle Birney, 1974.

Robillard, Richard. Earle Birney, 1971.