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The disinherited
The Disinherited , first published in 1974, is one of Matt Cohen's four novels that came to be known as the Salem quartet--stories set in the fictional town of Salem in eastern Ontario, somewhere north of Kingston in the rugged farmland and forest of the Canadian Shield. These are the novels that first brought Matt Cohen to national attention. As with his Governor General's Award-winning novel, Elizabeth and After , The Disinherited is a novel of love and the land and their impact on a family dynasty, of the gradual encroachment of the modern-day city and its developers, and of the family's struggle against the threat of disintegration.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
About the author
Matt Cohen
91 books10 followersMatt Cohen studied political economy at the University of Toronto, and taught political philosophy and religion at McMaster University in the late 1960s before publishing his first novel, Korsoniloff, in 1969.
His greatest popular success as a writer was his final novel, Elizabeth and After, which won the 1999 Governor General's Award for English-language Fiction only a few weeks before his death. He had been nominated twice previously, but had not won, in 1979 for The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone and in 1997 for Last Seen.
A founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada, he served on the executive board for many years and as president in 1986. During his presidency the Writer's Union was finally able to persuade the government of Canada to form a commission and establish a Public Lending Right program. He also served on the Toronto Arts Council as chair of the Literary Division and was able to obtain increased funding for writers. In recognition of this work he was awarded a Toronto Arts Award and the Harbourfront Prize.
Cohen died after a battle with lung cancer. A Canadian literary award, the Matt Cohen Prize - In Celebration of a Writing Life, is presented in Cohen's memory by the Writer's Trust of Canada.
He also published a number of children's books under the pseudonym Teddy Jam. Cohen's authorship of the Teddy Jam books was not revealed until after his death. The Fishing Summer was also nominated for a Governor General's Award for children's literature in 1997, making Cohen one of the few writers ever to be nominated for Governor General's Awards in two different categories in the same year.
A film adaptation of his 1990 novel Emotional Arithmetic has been produced by Triptych films starring Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne and Susan Sarandon. It was the closing Gala at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007.
His greatest popular success as a writer was his final novel, Elizabeth and After, which won the 1999 Governor General's Award for English-language Fiction only a few weeks before his death. He had been nominated twice previously, but had not won, in 1979 for The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone and in 1997 for Last Seen.
A founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada, he served on the executive board for many years and as president in 1986. During his presidency the Writer's Union was finally able to persuade the government of Canada to form a commission and establish a Public Lending Right program. He also served on the Toronto Arts Council as chair of the Literary Division and was able to obtain increased funding for writers. In recognition of this work he was awarded a Toronto Arts Award and the Harbourfront Prize.
Cohen died after a battle with lung cancer. A Canadian literary award, the Matt Cohen Prize - In Celebration of a Writing Life, is presented in Cohen's memory by the Writer's Trust of Canada.
He also published a number of children's books under the pseudonym Teddy Jam. Cohen's authorship of the Teddy Jam books was not revealed until after his death. The Fishing Summer was also nominated for a Governor General's Award for children's literature in 1997, making Cohen one of the few writers ever to be nominated for Governor General's Awards in two different categories in the same year.
A film adaptation of his 1990 novel Emotional Arithmetic has been produced by Triptych films starring Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Gabriel Byrne and Susan Sarandon. It was the closing Gala at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007.
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April 11, 2013
I read The Disinherited shortly after having finished Matt Cohen’s Last Seen. In both, we enter the suffering of a critically ill central character, but through much of the The Disinherited we remain and return there as Richard Thomas struggles to “decide” if he’ll live or die, or even if that decision is what’s required of him. Richard, the current patriarch of a farming family in southeastern Ontario, roams through the past, piecing together for us his and the Thomases’ brutish history. Theirs has been life eked out in a rural isolation that amplifies bitterness, betrayal, and resentment so they return and repeat, sometimes explosively, through generations. Ambitions toward something finer arise, from time to time; Richard’s father once sent him to university for a year so he would become a “gentleman,” and now Richard’s son, Erik, aspires to leave the land. But for Richard, the farm was his own “destiny,” and ought to be Erik’s.
This is a literary novel, as is Last Seen, but The Disinherited is by far the darker, unleavened by humour, fond indulgence of its characters, or glimmers of redemption. I recently read a comment (by Nick Hornby, I think) that certain kinds of literary fiction are “sludgy,” and while this is a gorgeously written book, I admit I was dragging my feet at several points in Richard’s rambles through time. None-the-less, I recovered and re-read the passages I’d been simply ploughing through. It wasn’t always easy going, though. The writing loops through events, not always chronologically or clearly. There were bits that I never did quite decode. On page 89 of my copy, Richard recalls helping his brother (Steven), and his father (Simon), to hitch the horses to the wagon so they can go to town, then riding with them to the end of the driveway. On page 90, Richard has arrived back at the farm and stands in the barn, “imagining that Simon and his father would never come back.” I just didn’t get this. Are we supposed to think that it was somehow Simon’s father, rather than Simon’s son (Steven) who was on the wagon with him?
As the title suggests, the long shadow of Oedipus – in both his mythic and Freudian forms – hovers over this tale, or maybe, more accurately, it’s the shadow of Shakespeare’s King Lear. In this family there’s much nasty sibling rivalry exacerbated by jealous fathers, not to mention several taboo sexual dalliances. And on one pivotal night, Richard even experiences a grand crescendo of a thunderstorm. (No eye gouging, however. Thankfully.) After Richard’s death, near the end of the book, a cultured and philosophically terminal cancer patient, one Mr. N. Zeller, who was Richard’s companion during the storm, tells Erik that “the play is over” – perhaps a reference to The Tempest? I tried to find some equivalence to Lear’s Fool in Nathan/Norman/whatever Zeller. But that didn’t seem to be quite it. Rather, I think, he plays an intermediary role in The Disinherited, perhaps a little like Francine does in Last Seen. Or perhaps Mr. Zeller is the Sphinx who asks the age-old riddle. Undoubtedly, I’ve bypassed connections and interpretations, due to the limits of my reading and education, that others would spot easily. But at the simple level of the story, Cohen tells us that Mr. Zeller reminds Richard of Simon, his father. And Erik “imagines that the poet and Mr. Zeller are somehow the same.”
This “poet,” in my view, is by far a more interesting character than Mr. Zeller. He’s an enigmatic figure, full of twisted delusions about nature, sex, God, and himself , some of which may have been rather au courant from the late 1800s up to World War I. The poet turns up during Richard’s grandfather’s era, claiming to be a distant relative from England and wreaking havoc on the fragile social structure of the farm and its small community of neighbours. He seems to echo the some of the qualities of an un-named and apparently emotionally-disturbed boy whom Richard’s adopted son, Brian, encounters during a period when he’s been shipped back to his negligent and abusive birth parents. Both “the boy” and “the poet” are of questionable background and represent a certain wild freedom, but ultimately, both are sacrificed to the damage they do to others. The destructive forces in The Disinherited appear most often to stem originally from intruders like these two. But the characters at the centre of the tale share equal responsibility. As the myth predicts, their efforts to evade their fate – often found in their reactions to the outsiders in their midst – lead them inextricably towards it.
So who are “the disinherited”? The novel initially seems to raise the question of inheritance in terms of whether the farm will turn out to be the birthright of Richard’s natural son, who doesn’t want it, or Brian, the adopted son, who’s a farmer at heart but not Richard’s choice. (Brian’s disadvantage isn’t solely his exclusion from the bloodline, but also the fact that he surely reminds Richard of Steven, his own unloved younger brother who refused to take sides in the wars between Richard and Simon, or of Frederick, his father’s deranged half-brother.) But as Richard’s drugged and fevered brain spools through his family history it appears that neither he, nor his ancestors, nor his children have ever been the natural heirs of their plot of earth, but have waged war with it, trying to tame the wilderness and force it into production. Like Brian, and like Frederick, Simon’s half-brother (and the offspring of Richard’s grandmother and the poet), they’re also interlopers, outsiders. For the poet, the struggle was to somehow manipulate this rough New World in which he’d found himself – perhaps through the words of the diary he left – into conforming to his tortured fantasy of heaven’s bounty: a dream of the ultimate inheritance. For Erik, of course, the struggle is one of resistance: how to escape the tyrannical bonds of his entitlement. And while the women in this story are essential to it, they’re sidelined – not, it appears, central players in this patriarchal drama of succession. The malaise of passed-on rage and a spirit of revenge are all that’s successfully transmitted from one generation to the next. But to benefit from an inheritance appears to be a congenital impossibility for all the characters.
Despite the book’s bleak portrayal of rural life, Erik’s apparent extrication from it feels strangely more like loss than liberation. He seems to have been detached, rather than set free, and it’s not clear that he’s moving toward anything in life that will seem better to him. His mother tells him that “a person your age needs a wife,” but he’s already let his city girlfriend walk out of his life without pursuing any kind of commitment. And two other women he’s attracted to are even more dislocated than he is, strange, wispy creatures who are either merely bohemians or permanent social outcasts. And Brian’s eventual emergence as heir apparent doesn’t bring Erik any relief. At Richard’s funeral, Erik erupts in anger at him.
What I took from this book, however, wasn’t simple the eternal struggle of fathers and sons, but the tragedy of the land, of Canada having lost its chance to settle into a balanced stewardship with the sons and daughters of its aboriginal or immigrant inhabitants. Richard’s concern is perhaps less for his destiny than for that of his small piece of the earth. The Disinherited was written in the 1970s. Even then the homesteads that had carved themselves out of the forests a mere century ago were already starting to be threatened around their edges by the decline of family farming and the influx of tourists and holiday-makers. Back in 1970, when the environmental movement we know today was just beginning, there may have been some sense that these changes to the landscape were inevitable and possibly for the best. A real estate man has been sniffing around, trying to get Richard to sell part of his land for cottages, but Richard won’t bite. And when Erik and one of his girlfriends try to go swimming at the beach on the family’s property they’re interrupted by a couple in a motor boat who casually spill gasoline into the passage between the shore and the small island the Thomases also own. The threat is real but perhaps, at the time, it is felt more as a regret.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I know the Thomases’ part of the world well. I’ve even gazed out a hospital window in Kingston like Richard and Mr. Zeller and seen that same road, grassy strip, and lake, and I know those extravagant thunderstorms that roll in across Lake Ontario. To me, from today’s vantage point, the motorboat couple’s pollution of the Thomases’ water appears as an early stroke in the death by a thousand cuts that are slowly leading to the depradation of the rural and the wild, and thus to the home of all of us. There are critics who say that Can Lit (our pet name for Canadian literature) is overfull of paeans to nature, or to stories of desperation (and especially, desperate childhoods) spent in rural solitude – a prairie farm, an outport fishing village, and so on. I’m no fan of any Cold-Comfort-Farm depiction of country life with its exaggerated pall of gloom and doom, unless it has its tongue stuck squarely in its cheek. Nor, of course, do I buy the regressive “blood and soil” philosophy of fascist essentialism, nor the romantic, pastoral version of nature that “the poet” tries to imagine into existence. But those aren’t what The Disinherited is.
Throughout the book, although the human drama plays in the foreground, we’re seldom unaware of the seasons, the weather, the way the countryside looks, how it feels. Time and time again, the story itself takes a break and we’re re-oriented to the time of year, the fields and trees, their colours, shapes, textures. Indian summer, maple syrup time, the work associated with each time of year, the behaviours of wild birds and farm animals. When Richard gets up early at the beginning of the novel, feeling unwell, and goes for the walk during which his heart attack occurs, he goes out onto his land, observing the hayfields and “the full green smell of the trees and ferns” – even as his body is betraying him. His mind is full of memories and worries; images of a bull he once saw being felled by a matador intercut with recollections of the real estate man’s visit, and a fearful dream of dying without having made sure that the farm is in safe hands. To my mind, Richard Thomas, for all his many sins, is less a representative of a way of life that is no longer relevant than someone who foresaw a loss much greater than his own but knew that he was powerless to stop it. This story, sadly, is one that’s absolutely valid for us to claim as our own.
This is a literary novel, as is Last Seen, but The Disinherited is by far the darker, unleavened by humour, fond indulgence of its characters, or glimmers of redemption. I recently read a comment (by Nick Hornby, I think) that certain kinds of literary fiction are “sludgy,” and while this is a gorgeously written book, I admit I was dragging my feet at several points in Richard’s rambles through time. None-the-less, I recovered and re-read the passages I’d been simply ploughing through. It wasn’t always easy going, though. The writing loops through events, not always chronologically or clearly. There were bits that I never did quite decode. On page 89 of my copy, Richard recalls helping his brother (Steven), and his father (Simon), to hitch the horses to the wagon so they can go to town, then riding with them to the end of the driveway. On page 90, Richard has arrived back at the farm and stands in the barn, “imagining that Simon and his father would never come back.” I just didn’t get this. Are we supposed to think that it was somehow Simon’s father, rather than Simon’s son (Steven) who was on the wagon with him?
As the title suggests, the long shadow of Oedipus – in both his mythic and Freudian forms – hovers over this tale, or maybe, more accurately, it’s the shadow of Shakespeare’s King Lear. In this family there’s much nasty sibling rivalry exacerbated by jealous fathers, not to mention several taboo sexual dalliances. And on one pivotal night, Richard even experiences a grand crescendo of a thunderstorm. (No eye gouging, however. Thankfully.) After Richard’s death, near the end of the book, a cultured and philosophically terminal cancer patient, one Mr. N. Zeller, who was Richard’s companion during the storm, tells Erik that “the play is over” – perhaps a reference to The Tempest? I tried to find some equivalence to Lear’s Fool in Nathan/Norman/whatever Zeller. But that didn’t seem to be quite it. Rather, I think, he plays an intermediary role in The Disinherited, perhaps a little like Francine does in Last Seen. Or perhaps Mr. Zeller is the Sphinx who asks the age-old riddle. Undoubtedly, I’ve bypassed connections and interpretations, due to the limits of my reading and education, that others would spot easily. But at the simple level of the story, Cohen tells us that Mr. Zeller reminds Richard of Simon, his father. And Erik “imagines that the poet and Mr. Zeller are somehow the same.”
This “poet,” in my view, is by far a more interesting character than Mr. Zeller. He’s an enigmatic figure, full of twisted delusions about nature, sex, God, and himself , some of which may have been rather au courant from the late 1800s up to World War I. The poet turns up during Richard’s grandfather’s era, claiming to be a distant relative from England and wreaking havoc on the fragile social structure of the farm and its small community of neighbours. He seems to echo the some of the qualities of an un-named and apparently emotionally-disturbed boy whom Richard’s adopted son, Brian, encounters during a period when he’s been shipped back to his negligent and abusive birth parents. Both “the boy” and “the poet” are of questionable background and represent a certain wild freedom, but ultimately, both are sacrificed to the damage they do to others. The destructive forces in The Disinherited appear most often to stem originally from intruders like these two. But the characters at the centre of the tale share equal responsibility. As the myth predicts, their efforts to evade their fate – often found in their reactions to the outsiders in their midst – lead them inextricably towards it.
So who are “the disinherited”? The novel initially seems to raise the question of inheritance in terms of whether the farm will turn out to be the birthright of Richard’s natural son, who doesn’t want it, or Brian, the adopted son, who’s a farmer at heart but not Richard’s choice. (Brian’s disadvantage isn’t solely his exclusion from the bloodline, but also the fact that he surely reminds Richard of Steven, his own unloved younger brother who refused to take sides in the wars between Richard and Simon, or of Frederick, his father’s deranged half-brother.) But as Richard’s drugged and fevered brain spools through his family history it appears that neither he, nor his ancestors, nor his children have ever been the natural heirs of their plot of earth, but have waged war with it, trying to tame the wilderness and force it into production. Like Brian, and like Frederick, Simon’s half-brother (and the offspring of Richard’s grandmother and the poet), they’re also interlopers, outsiders. For the poet, the struggle was to somehow manipulate this rough New World in which he’d found himself – perhaps through the words of the diary he left – into conforming to his tortured fantasy of heaven’s bounty: a dream of the ultimate inheritance. For Erik, of course, the struggle is one of resistance: how to escape the tyrannical bonds of his entitlement. And while the women in this story are essential to it, they’re sidelined – not, it appears, central players in this patriarchal drama of succession. The malaise of passed-on rage and a spirit of revenge are all that’s successfully transmitted from one generation to the next. But to benefit from an inheritance appears to be a congenital impossibility for all the characters.
Despite the book’s bleak portrayal of rural life, Erik’s apparent extrication from it feels strangely more like loss than liberation. He seems to have been detached, rather than set free, and it’s not clear that he’s moving toward anything in life that will seem better to him. His mother tells him that “a person your age needs a wife,” but he’s already let his city girlfriend walk out of his life without pursuing any kind of commitment. And two other women he’s attracted to are even more dislocated than he is, strange, wispy creatures who are either merely bohemians or permanent social outcasts. And Brian’s eventual emergence as heir apparent doesn’t bring Erik any relief. At Richard’s funeral, Erik erupts in anger at him.
What I took from this book, however, wasn’t simple the eternal struggle of fathers and sons, but the tragedy of the land, of Canada having lost its chance to settle into a balanced stewardship with the sons and daughters of its aboriginal or immigrant inhabitants. Richard’s concern is perhaps less for his destiny than for that of his small piece of the earth. The Disinherited was written in the 1970s. Even then the homesteads that had carved themselves out of the forests a mere century ago were already starting to be threatened around their edges by the decline of family farming and the influx of tourists and holiday-makers. Back in 1970, when the environmental movement we know today was just beginning, there may have been some sense that these changes to the landscape were inevitable and possibly for the best. A real estate man has been sniffing around, trying to get Richard to sell part of his land for cottages, but Richard won’t bite. And when Erik and one of his girlfriends try to go swimming at the beach on the family’s property they’re interrupted by a couple in a motor boat who casually spill gasoline into the passage between the shore and the small island the Thomases also own. The threat is real but perhaps, at the time, it is felt more as a regret.
In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I know the Thomases’ part of the world well. I’ve even gazed out a hospital window in Kingston like Richard and Mr. Zeller and seen that same road, grassy strip, and lake, and I know those extravagant thunderstorms that roll in across Lake Ontario. To me, from today’s vantage point, the motorboat couple’s pollution of the Thomases’ water appears as an early stroke in the death by a thousand cuts that are slowly leading to the depradation of the rural and the wild, and thus to the home of all of us. There are critics who say that Can Lit (our pet name for Canadian literature) is overfull of paeans to nature, or to stories of desperation (and especially, desperate childhoods) spent in rural solitude – a prairie farm, an outport fishing village, and so on. I’m no fan of any Cold-Comfort-Farm depiction of country life with its exaggerated pall of gloom and doom, unless it has its tongue stuck squarely in its cheek. Nor, of course, do I buy the regressive “blood and soil” philosophy of fascist essentialism, nor the romantic, pastoral version of nature that “the poet” tries to imagine into existence. But those aren’t what The Disinherited is.
Throughout the book, although the human drama plays in the foreground, we’re seldom unaware of the seasons, the weather, the way the countryside looks, how it feels. Time and time again, the story itself takes a break and we’re re-oriented to the time of year, the fields and trees, their colours, shapes, textures. Indian summer, maple syrup time, the work associated with each time of year, the behaviours of wild birds and farm animals. When Richard gets up early at the beginning of the novel, feeling unwell, and goes for the walk during which his heart attack occurs, he goes out onto his land, observing the hayfields and “the full green smell of the trees and ferns” – even as his body is betraying him. His mind is full of memories and worries; images of a bull he once saw being felled by a matador intercut with recollections of the real estate man’s visit, and a fearful dream of dying without having made sure that the farm is in safe hands. To my mind, Richard Thomas, for all his many sins, is less a representative of a way of life that is no longer relevant than someone who foresaw a loss much greater than his own but knew that he was powerless to stop it. This story, sadly, is one that’s absolutely valid for us to claim as our own.
July 19, 2021
A richly told novel about mortality, legacy, and family grievance. This is my second novel by Cohen, and I’m surprised at how under-read he seems to be these days – this is perceptive, moving, confident writing, and often quite poetic.
The opening chapter, told from the point of view of Richard Thomas, a tough, elderly farmer suffering a stroke, was downright harrowing – and to my mind the strongest chapters are those that describe Richard’s decent into worsening health at the hospital. The descriptions of physical deterioration, despite what we think of Richard, are very moving. Cohen tells his stories with both great sensitivity and an unflinching honesty – a balancing act that I find particularly impressive. He recognizes poverty for what it is. He doesn't judge, but wants us to do better. He is moved by our struggles, but regrets the ways in which our struggling scars the land.
Some elements do feel like a product of their time: the women in the novel all tend to be defined by their roles as either mother figures or sexual partners. However (and I hope this does not reveal a weakness on my part), given both Cohen’s obvious sensitivity as a writer and the fully formed and autonomous women I have encountered in his later writing, I’m inclined here not to dwell on this too much.
The opening chapter, told from the point of view of Richard Thomas, a tough, elderly farmer suffering a stroke, was downright harrowing – and to my mind the strongest chapters are those that describe Richard’s decent into worsening health at the hospital. The descriptions of physical deterioration, despite what we think of Richard, are very moving. Cohen tells his stories with both great sensitivity and an unflinching honesty – a balancing act that I find particularly impressive. He recognizes poverty for what it is. He doesn't judge, but wants us to do better. He is moved by our struggles, but regrets the ways in which our struggling scars the land.
Some elements do feel like a product of their time: the women in the novel all tend to be defined by their roles as either mother figures or sexual partners. However (and I hope this does not reveal a weakness on my part), given both Cohen’s obvious sensitivity as a writer and the fully formed and autonomous women I have encountered in his later writing, I’m inclined here not to dwell on this too much.
May 26, 2021
This was my second read of Matt Cohen, and I thought it would be interesting to read about farm life north of Kingston, and it was, sort of. The story was focused around the death of the father, and went back into all of his not so great history. Often times there were too many words and too much over analysis, and in the end I couldn't see how any of it mattered.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews