From the publisher
Born in 1950 in Newcastle, New Brunswick, David Adams Richards was the third of William and Margaret Richards’ six children. He found his calling at the age of fourteen, after reading Oliver Twist, and embarked on a life of extraordinary purpose, one which he says didn’t help his finances: “Sometimes … I thought it would be better if I were a plumber, but I wouldn’t be very good.”
At the age of twenty and after finishing his first novel, The Keeping of Gusties, Richards went in search of a community of writers. His quest ended when he met a group of academics at the University of New Brunswick. Richards would hitch-hike from his home in Newcastle to Fredericton every Tuesday night to meet with them and read from his work. The literary evenings were held on campus at McCourt Hall, in an outbuilding formally used to store ice. The group quickly became known as the Ice House Gang. There he received encouragement from established writers, including the late Alden Nowlan, whom he names as important influences along with Faulkner, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Emily Brontë. It was during his time with these writers that Richards wrote two-thirds of his second novel, The Coming of Winter, which was published by Oberon Press in 1974.
In 1971, Richards married Peggy McIntyre. They spent the first years of their marriage travelling throughout Canada, Europe and Australia. It was on these long sojourns away from the Mirimachi that Richards found he could write about the home he loved, regardless of where he lived. As he continued to write, Richards took postings as writer-in-residence at universities in New Brunswick, Ontario, Alberta and at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. In 1997, they moved to Toronto, where they still live with their sons John Thomas and Anton.
The Miramichi region has continued as the heart of Richards’ fiction throughout his career. As he explained in an interview with January Magazine, his connection to the area and to the rural lives of its inhabitants is central to his fiction, yet does not reflect a limited scope: “It’s very important, because the characters come from the soil. They’re like the trees, in a certain respect. They cling to that river and that soil, but as Jack Hodgins once said about my writing — which was one of the kindest things any writer has said about my writing — he said: ‘David, you aren’t writing about the Miramichi Valley, you’re writing about Campbell River where I come from. Because every character you talk about is a character I’ve met here in Campbell River.’ And that’s basically what I’m doing. Of course my people are Miramichi. Of course they come from the fabric and the soil of the Miramichi but if that was the only thing that was interesting about them, I wouldn’t bother writing about them.”
The relocation to Toronto was not without its difficulties, though. As Richards documented in the memoir Lines on the Water, he loves fly-fishing on the Miramichi River. Yet once he was no longer a resident, he was unable to get a fishing licence for the region. Thankfully, said Richards, the local government proclaimed him an “honorary Miramichier” — “So I can go fishing. It was very nice of them and very touching.” He has also written a non-fiction book on the place of hockey in the Canadian soul, called Hockey Dreams.
Richards has received numerous awards and prizes throughout his career. Most notably, he is one of few writers in the history of the Governor General's Award to win in both the fiction (Nights Below Station Street) and non-fiction (Lines on the Water) categories. In addition to these two wins, he was nominated for Road to the Stilt House (in 1985), For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (in 1993) and Mercy Among the Children (in 2000). Considered by many to be Richards’ most accomplished novel, Mercy was co-winner of the Giller Award in 2000, and was shortlisted for the Trillium Award and the Thomas Raddell award. It also won the Canadian Booksellers Association author of the year and fiction book of the year awards. Over the years, Richards has also won countless regional awards for his novels and was awarded the prestigious Canada-Australia Literary Prize in 1992.
Despite all of these successes, it was years before Richards made money at writing. He laughs at the sales of his early work: “For a long while if I sold 200 books, I’d be saying: Oh, great! And, you know, a $50 advance! That’s great. I only worked three years, I don’t know if I can spend $50.”
Also a screenwriter, Richards has adapted a number of his novels for the small screen. In 1990, he adapted his novel Nights Below Station Street, and in 1994 he penned the teleplay “Small Gifts,” for which he won his first Gemini. He won his second for his screen adaptation of For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down, and later co-wrote the screenplay for The Bay of Love and Sorrows, released as a feature film in 2002.
In addition to his twelve novels and two non-fiction books, Richards’ short stories and articles have been published in literary magazines and anthologies, plus he has two unpublished plays, The Dungarvan Whooper and Water Carriers, Bones and Earls: the Life of François Villon, and one unpublished novel, Donna. His literary papers were acquired in 1994 by the University of New Brunswick.
Details
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Title
The Friends of Meager Fortune
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Author
David Adams Richards
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Binding
Hardcover
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Edition
First edition
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Pages
366
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Volumes
1
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Language
ENG
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Publisher
Doubleday Canada, Toronto
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Date
September 19, 2006
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ISBN
9780385660945 / 0385660944
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Dewey Decimal Code
813.54
Excerpt
ONE
I had to walk up the back way, through a wall of dark winter nettles, to see the ferocious old house from this vantage point. A black night and snow falling, the four turrets rising into the fleeing clouds above me. A house already ninety years old and with more history than most in town.
His name was Will Jameson.
His family was in lumber, or was Lumber, and because of his father’s death he left school when just a boy and took over the reins of the industry when he was not yet sixteen. He would wake at dawn, and deal with men, sitting in offices in his rustic suit or out on a cruise walking twenty miles on snowshoes, be in camp for supper and direct men twice as old as he.
By the time he was seventeen he was known as the great Will Jameson of the great Bartibog – an appendage as whimsical as it was grandiose, and some say self-imposed.
As a child I saw the map of the large region he owned – dots for his camps, and Xs for his saws. I saw his picture at the end of the hallway – under the cold moon that played on the chairs and tables covered in white sheets, the shadow of his young, ever youthful face; an idea that he had not quite escaped the games of childhood before he needed gamesmanship.
If we Canadians are called hewers of wood and drawers of water, and balk, young Will Jameson did not mind this assumption, did not mind the crass biblical analogy, or perhaps did not know or care it was one, and leapt toward it in youthful pride, as through a burning ring. The strength of all moneyed families is their ignorance of or indifference to chaff. And it was this indifference to jealousy and spite that created the destiny Jameson believed in (never minding the Jamesian insult toward it), which made him prosperous, at a place near the end of the world.
When he was about to be born his mother went on the bay and stayed with the Micmac man Paul Francis and his wife. She lived there five months while her husband, Byron Jameson, was working as an ordinary axman in the camps, through a winter and spring.
In local legend the wife of Paul Francis was said to have the gift of prophecy when inspired by drink, and when Mary Jameson insisted her fortune be read with a pack of playing cards, she was told that her first-born would be a powerful man and have much respect – but his brother would be even greater, yet destroy the legacy by rashness, and the Jameson dynasty not go beyond that second boy.
Mrs. Francis warned that the prophecy would not be heeded, and therefore happen. It would happen in a senseless way, but of such a route as to look ordinary. Therefore the reading became instead of fun or games a very solemn reading that dark spring night, long ago, as the Francis woman sat in her chair rocking from one side to the other, and looking at the cards through half-closed eyelids.
“Then there is a choice,” Mary Jameson said, still trying to make light of its weight.
“If wrong action is avoided – but be careful to know what wrong action is.”
“In work?”
“In life,” said Mrs. Francis, picking the cards up and placing them away in a motion that attested to her qualifications.
Mary Jameson had the boy christened Will, and had Paul and Joanna Francis as his godparents. During the baptism, the sun which had not shone all day began to do so, through the stained glass. Mary decided she would keep this prophecy to herself. But she told her husband, who as the youngster grew became more affluent, and spoiled solemnity by speaking of the prophecy as a joke.
Soon the prophecy was known by others, and over time translated in a variety of ways.
It was true Mary forgot about it until the second boy, Owen, was born, so sickly he almost died.
She forgot about it again, until her husband was killed in a simple, almost absurd accident on the Gum Creek Road, coming out to inspect his mill on a rain-soaked day in April.
Mary thinking that it was a strange way for her husband to be taken from her. She almost a grandmother’s age with two small boys. Worse, she had asked her husband to come out on that spring day–frightened that he would take to the drive and be injured, and he was killed by a fall on a road.
Mary and her brother Buckler took over the mill until Will came into his own, which was soon enough, and seemingly too soon for his competition.
***
It is a common misconception that people are as bright as their knowledge. Will Jameson was a boy far brighter than what he knew, which is an ordinary problem in a country like ours, partly in bondage to winter, where snow is a great blessing on the land. His father had started with nothing but a crippled roan horse – and Will now had camps and horses and men, and a sawmill he had to take care of.
He left school because of his father’s death, and said leaving school was the least thing he ever regretted.
“Holding him is like holding a current itself,” Old Estabrook said of the young man.
Yet his mother, Mary, warned him, he had his faults, could be cruel or uncaring, and laughed at his mother’s sentiment and superstition. These traits came gradually. That is, he believed, because it was what society believed, what his father had believed, that a stiff presence at church service was what constituted good behavior, and jokes were meant to be manly and told in private. He thought, even at seventeen, of children as a woman’s responsibility and a man’s ignorance of the offspring showed a healthy character
Media reviews
A GLOBE & MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2006
“The Friends of Meager Fortune is a stark and unforgettable portrait of the war between humility and pride. This novel paints the shadows of a vanished past with magnificently hewn poetry.” — The Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, jury comments
“In his depiction of this lost industry, woodsmen standing at the threshold of their occupation’s disappearance, David Adams Richards shows himself to be as powerful a writer as any you can name. . . . The heart of The Friends of Meager Fortune is joyful, a celebratory requiem. . . . The poetry of this magnificently hewn story reveals that pity and woe can be recovered with well-wrought words. The Friends of Meager Fortune is dazzling, melancholy and mesmerizing.” —The Globe and Mail
“You know you are in the hands of a master storyteller when you begin a new novel by award-winning author, David Adams Richards. . . . Richards is an expert at building and maintaining suspense — an early prophecy, numerous betrayals, a murder, a mysterious disappearance, questionable paternity, and a dramatic fire. All contribute to providing a compelling reality. . . . The reader shares the sense of greatness of man and beast and the accompanying sense of loss with their demise.” —The Daily Gleaner (Fredericton)
“The Friends of Meager Fortune is much more than a book noting the intimacies and actualities of the great logging traditions of our shared past. . . . Richards’s storytelling abilities allow him to superimpose upon that past the enormous foibles of human nature. . . . His is a book of a town, of a dynasty; a book of epic proportion. . . . The Friends of Meager Fortune is an excellent portrayal of the shallow pettiness of a society on the brink of change… The Friends of Meager Fortune only cements [Richards’s] name as an author unafraid to paint our history and supposed civility in the glaringcolours of a raw and often unwieldy humanity.” — Edmonton Journal
“A Steinbeck of a book. . . . One of the most remarkable achievements of this book is the delicate juggling of epic and intimate events.” —Calgary Herald
“Given his ear for a catchy phrase, Richards might easily have become a balladeer instead of a novelist…. There’s nothing meager about the (sic) Richards gift for storytelling. This sturdily crafted novel, on the long list for the Giller Prize, brings an obscure page of Canadian history to breathtaking, vivid life.” — The Gazette (Montreal)
“The Friends of Meager Fortune is both a profoundly moving account of the honourable few and a damning indictment of the famished many who ‘fill up their souls with the trinkets of life, instead of with life itself.’” — Guelph Mercury
“Life on the mountain is gritty and believable. The beer caps pounded into the cabin door, the precious photos pinned above bunks, horses with names like Miss Maggie Wade, teamsters mounted on loads of giant logs, racing down to (sic) the icy path to the river — all are unforgettable.” —Winnipeg Free Press
“After reading David Adams Richards' The Friends of Meager Fortune, I thank goodness I was born today…. As in many other Richards novels the lives of everyday people are elevated to a place of meaning, seen from the eye of an educated narrator who artfully creates a story of compelling inevitability.” — Toronto Star
“The world of The Friends of Meager Fortune is one of themes writ large, of good and evil, of honour and betrayal, of compassion and cruelty. It is classic storytelling, something too often missing from contemporary writing, a lack which we only fully recognize when startled by a novel of such range and daring as this.” — Ottawa Citizen
“For 30 years, Richards has been writing deeply moving stories set in northern New Brunswick with the kind of moral intensity that Thomas Hardy brought to Dorset. …That long, emotional investment gives his story the luster of legend, complete with prophesies of doom, a chorus of fickle townspeople ready to praise or pounce, and feats of physical labor so brutal you can't help but feel bruised just to read about them. … You'd have to go back to Steinbeck's farmers, Hurston's turpentine workers or Melville's whalers to find the kind of reverence Richards conveys for hard physical labor. … It's the kind of fearsome silence only the most powerful novels can leave.” —The Washington Post
