Forgive me. I should have read this 30 years ago when I first heard about it from my dearest and best lesbian friends. Sometimes, in the book world, when you are in it and living it and touching books everyday for all hours, folks tell you about books and you come up with a funny ideas in your head; that you will get around to it, that maybe somehow it’s not exactly the time for you, that it’ll come about when it lands in your hands. It sometimes is an arbitrary decision and doesn’t matter what the book is or how many copies you have come by or put in a customer’s hands.
This is what happened with me and Jane Rule. And finally on my birthday this year, a friend put a copy in my hands and said, read this.
So I did, as one does.
Here’s what’s interesting about the lore of this book: when I first heard about it from my lesbian crew they spoke of it reverently in the same breath as Desert of the Heart and This is Not For You as cannon lesbian fiction straight from Little Sisters, a bookstore subject to bombings, censorship, and lawsuits that went all the way to the supreme court. It is part of the “Little Sisters Classics” published by Arsenal Pulp Press in conjunction with Little Sisters with the aim to revive lost or out of print queer literature. It is fully entrenched in the history and queer community of Vancouver. However, The Young in One Another’s Arms is considered to be a bit of a departure from the lesbian themes of her first 2 books.* Not knowing this beforehand, when I started reading it, it took a very long time to be clear to me why exactly it is so emblematic to lesbians in Vancouver. But the interesting things was, the friends who gave it to me were not part of that crew and recommended it because they had picked their own copy up a at the bookstore on one of the Gulf Islands. I was intrigued by the magnetism of this novel in particular.
It’s not a hard read, but it is a pensive read; a true slow read, in a you-have-to-read-the-whole-paragraph kind of way. No skipping around to the “best bits” — you have to read the words to get the picture, and the picture is everything is this book.
Ruth went out and returned at any hour, more like an animal than a human resident. She had always liked the friendly street she lived on, lined with mountain ash, open to the sky, its large old houses either converted into suites or used like her own as boardinghouses. There was more sociable traffic than in neighborhoods to the west, still zoned for single-family dwellings. But it was a street too close to the center of this young city to stay that way. The concrete canyon walls must inevitably rise against the hope of trees and sky. From wilderness to this edge where she was, Ruth had been moving closer and closer to that center. Was there any use in backing off now? The houses she walked by were for living in, high-rise apartments for jumping off, but where else was there to go? On the beach that opened at the end of the street, Ruth sat on a great log, one of the many washed up from booms broken up in sudden storms (Chapter 2, p33)
Ruth is the protagonist of the book, a landlady of a rooming house in Kits (the cornerstone of hippy culture in Vancouver in the 60’s and 70’s), a mother who has lost her only child, a woman living with a disability from that accident, a tough cookie, a friend to all. Ruth is straight-shooting and kind, a friend and surrogate mother to all the young folk who find their way to her. She has a complicated relationship with her husband, Hal who no longer lives with her but shows up, unannounced from his job pushing roads through, when he feels like it and she never turns him away even if everyone thinks he treats her poorly and is a know-it-all braggart. One reason she keeps him close is because his mother, infirm and needing care, also lives with Ruth at the house. Clara and Ruth are bound together in a closeness much more permanent and generous than Ruth and her husband. The house, this story, is about found family and the slow evolution of love with time.
Jane Rule’s form and storyline might seem simple to some. There is no complex jumping back and forth in time or changes in viewpoint; it’s a linear novel told in the third person omniscient closest to Ruth and man, was that actually refreshing. Beautifully done. The tension in the novel comes from the characters actions and in turn the plot revolves around and peaks because of their reactions. The main outside force that the informs most of the action in the novel is the impending threat of the forced sale of the boarding house and the eviction of its occupants: the main characters of the novel.
The characters are all foils to one another: a charismatic and vibrant teacher/activist (Gladys), 2 U.S. draft dodgers and deserters (Tom/Arthur), a secretary looking for a sugar daddy (Joanie) a PHD student closeted lesbian (Mavis), a musician pothead (Stewart) a neurodivergent (I read autistic) loner who has been at the house the longest (Willard), and later in the book, a young black American man escaping the law (Boy/d). They all have one thing in common, they have cut ties or have been alienated from their past lives and have found solace and acceptance at Ruth’s.
What makes everything work so well in this novel is the guileless writing, the crafted sentences, the earnest dialogue: so satisfyingly cohesive to an attentive reader.
The best part of this book for me is Ruth herself, a beautiful whole person who knows she is flawed but can’t help but give love, first and foremost. But without Clara there kind of is no Ruth, really. Clara provides the answer to Ruth’s question, always gently pushing against Ruth’s first reactions with a sage response. A measured and loving chide.
The second half of this book is brutal with action and really reveals the themes and community and loss: as the house needs to be vacated, all the occupants start to break up to find other housing. Since Clara has moved into an assisted living home, Ruth decides that she and Willard need to find a place as soon as possible. He has been resistant to this change but she thinks she has finally convinced him and they soon move out. No one expects Willard’s last stand in the face of the demolition of the house and it predicates much of the ensuing regathering of the former occupants who realize they must continue to hold each other as closely as possible. They mostly, save Joanie and Stewart, succumb to Tom’s idyllic vision of a house and a cafe on a gulf island. Tom and Gladys (now together as a couple) convince them to move in and they are caught up in the familial joy they find in being together. There’s more drama and sadness but so much more hope and perseverance when they are all together. And that’s what this book in about to me, pushing through with hope to the ideal. It’ll never be perfect but to resist the drag of capitalist inevitability is to live without that compromise. And we have this book to help us remember that.
At one point at the beginning when Hal is in town for a visit and everyone is testy around the dinner table he says, “The house should have been torn down years ago[…] The whole neighbourhood should be highrises by now.”*
1977.
This book was published in 1977.
While I am not a person who supports “no tower” nimbism because it threatens a view or heaven forbid has supported below market housing or addiction or mental health services, I don’t thinking increasing density is the key to fixing our housing crisis.*
Vancouver’s neighbourhoods now almost 50 years later are still charming and vibrant: Kits, the West End, Mount Pleasant, Strathcona, Commercial Drive. No one can tell me resistance is futile.*
All of these things: the political resistance, the portrait of Vancouver life. Jane Rule’s legacy* as a lesbian writer, and above all, the focus on found family and how it can enrich your life’s journey; these things hold and keep this book in a revered intersectional place in Vancouver’s literary cannon. So glad it finally made its way into my receptive hands.
