The Face Before the Mask

Reviewed by Jamie Dopp, Victoria, British Columbia (The Fiddlehead, Winter 2009, issue 238)

The Face Before the Mask

Night Work, by Randall Maggs

Reviewed by Jamie Dopp

One of the enduring subjects in literature is the highly successful person, usually a man, whose suspect morality or inner demons (or both) lead to his destruction. Think Dr. Faustus, the Great Gatsby, and Citizen Kane - among many others. Figures such as these speak to recurring human anxieties about success. Does success always involve moral and personal compromise? Is there behind every successful person some kind of Faustian bargain?

In Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems, Randall Maggs examines questions similar to these as part of a poetic exploration of the life and career of Terry Sawchuk. Terry Sawchuk was one of the greatest players in NHL history and, perhaps, the greatest goaltender of all time. He won four Stanley Cups, four Vezina trophies, and was the goaltender of record in some of the most famous games ever played, including the deciding game of the Finals in which the Toronto Maple Leafs won their last Stanley Cup in 1967. But Sawchuk was also one of hockey's great enigmas: hypercompetitive, moody, troubled, with the kind of unpredictable temper that made other players sometimes keep clear of him. He played much of his career battling one injury or another, partly as a result of his style and partly as a result of the vulnerability of goaltenders in the old Original Six era, and this, along with the usual pressures of being a professional athlete, contributed to bouts of drinking and depression - and may have played a role in his mysterious death at the age of forty while a member of the New York Rangers.

Night Work offers a multilayered portrait of Sawchuk alongside a meditation on hockey itself during what is often thought as its Golden Age. The collection exploits Maggs's strengths as a poet (a carefully crafted, unpretentious but intelligent style evident in earlier work like Timely Departures) as well as his own longstanding relationship to the game. The result is a book that offers insight into some of the most famous episodes in hockey history while adding new and sometimes surprising details.

The short opening section, "The Question that He Frames," establishes the importance of questioning throughout Night Work. In "Neither Rhyme Nor Reason," the persona visits Red Storey and hears from him about an incident in which Sawchuk, before a game, asked the strangest question. The question operates as a narrative hook for later poems. It appears again in "Night Time" and "Big Dogs 1" and is only revealed in its entirety in "Big Dogs 2." Significantly, the exact wording of the question only further emphasizes the ongoing mystery of Sawchuk. That Storey is haunted by the question and wants to talk about it in such detail so many years later, makes him, in many ways, a stand-in for the ideal reader of this book.

The sections that follow combine a roughly chronological treatment of events in Sawchuk's life with poems that have a more mythic quality. Some of the poems about Sawchuk are in a third-person, historical mode, others are told from the point of view of characters remembering Sawchuk, and still others zero in to imagine events from Sawchuk's own point of view. The result is a kind of wide-angle/close-up effect, in which the mystery of what made Sawchuk tick is examined sometimes from a broader historical or social perspective and sometimes from a more interior, psychological perspective. One of the things I most liked about the "Kings and Little Ones" section, which contains poems about Sawchuk's Ukrainian-Canadian upbringing in Winnipeg, is the way it avoids any simplistic answers about the origins of Sawchuk's personality, but instead deftly offers a series of glimpses into Sawchuk's childhood in which a boyish love of the game is hinted at as well as reasons for the profound competitiveness to follow.

Poems with a more mythic quality tend to explore the nature of hockey itself, especially during the so-called Golden Age, or the specific challenges of being a goaltender at a time when equipment for goaltenders was inferior (thin pads, no masks). Many of these poems resonate with broader existential issues. Perhaps my favourite section along these lines was "Two Goalies Go Fishing in the Dark," which focuses on events that happened when the 1956 Boston Bruins were sent on an exhibition tour of Newfoundland. Poems like "Sins of Recognition," "Fair Trade," and "Nothing But Moonlight Here" offer nuanced meditations on the give and take that occurred during the tour between the local players and the NHL stars. The tour is portrayed as an example of the economic vulnerability of the players at this time (they are sent, with minimal pay, after they missed the NHL playoffs that year) but also as part of a larger journey in which the meanings of the game and the meanings of human existence are complexly intertwined. As "Solid Ground" says about Newfoundland, "This was a country that could show you things, / but you had to be in a decent mood, / and looking."

The different layers in Night Work come together in the central image pattern evoked by the title. There are recurring references to "night" and "dark" throughout the collection. "Night work" is used to hint at the conditions of labour of the early NHLers in the pre-union days of paltry rights and low pay; the echo of "shift work" (and parallels to Sawchuk's father's own factory work) is not accidental. "Night work" also hints at the relationship between hockey and other entertainment spectacles, events that take place under the lights in arenas and theatres, generally at night, for the amusement of the paying customers, and the odd combination of all-absorbing immediacy and unreality that characterizes such spectacles. There is also something in the image about how the game's work can tap into the darkness in a player, how there is a connection between the game and those deep regions of desire and insecurity in which our human demons dwell.

"Night work" also gestures towards the work of memory and poetry that Night Work itself undertakes. There is a subtle connection here to the evocative power of black and white photography, how "In the old films, the ice looks more like winter, / the boards were boards and clear" ("Neither Rhyme nor Reason"). Many hockey fans will argue that hockey was somehow more "real" during the black and white, Original Six era. Night Work, with its portrayal of working conditions for players of the time, offers a critique of this nostalgia, though not an outright disavowal.

Most importantly, the image pattern emphasizes that the work of trying to understand that a figure like Sawchuk is itself a "night work" - a work of the shadows, the hidden places, the unconscious - those regions at the heart of poetry. This is why Night Work offers many brilliant clues but no simple answers to the mystery of Terry Sawchuk. The text offers a profound meditation on the questions raised by such a successful and tormented player but leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. There is no "Rosebud" moment in this text.

A mark of the openness of Night Work is the way it does not try to solve the mystery of Sawchuk's death on the day of his drinking with Ron Stewart. Instead the book opens with the autopsy description of the scars on Sawchuk's body and closes with the famous Look magazine photograph by Mark Bauman of Sawchuk's face. Closing with the photograph (in black and white, of course) is itself most telling. Bauman's close-up seems to summarize so much: the risks of being a goaltender, the toughness required by the game, Sawchuk's own particular determination (you can see the notorious steely-eyed gaze). In a way, the photograph shows Sawchuk's history literally written on his body, the scars like the sutures drawn on Gerry Cheevers' famous goalie mask, except that here, in the era before the mask, the scars are directly on the skin. Or are they? In fact, as Maggs himself pointed out in an earlier published excerpt of Night Work, the stitches on this iconic photograph were "added by an artist to show the extent of Sawchuk's facial injuries over the course of his career." This act of touching up is very much like the act of poetry that characterizes this collection, which, like the best of poetry, "touches up" its subject in the service of a truth that is simultaneously more intense and more elusive.

Jamie Dopp
Victoria, British Columbia