Reflections on Patricia Blondal and A Candle to Light the Sun

I knew before starting to read A Candle to Light the Sun that the author, Patricia Blondal, had died of cancer a short time after learning the book would be published. As I read and loved the book thoughts of her death were never far away. There was a poignancy to the loss of such a great talent so young that made the reading an emotional experience. 

It felt an especially cruel irony to read that her husband, Harold Blondal, was a doctor specializing in cancer treatment.

 

Learning she spent three months apart from her family, while dying, to write the book left me wondering what I would do were I faced with a prognosis of but a few months to live. 

 

Her heart was clearly poured into the book. In an introduction to my edition of the book Patricia Demers quoted from a comment Blondal made to a reporter about her characters: 

 

“I sometimes lie in bed at night and hear them talking, see them walking and reacting, laughing and crying. After getting to know them so intimately it’s easy. They handle the plot.”

 

My favourite Saskatchewan novel is Who Has Seen the Wind by W.O. Mitchell. As with A Candle to Light the Sun it involves a boy growing up on the prairie in the desperate 1930’s. In both books the wind is a constant companion.

 

In A Candle to Light the Sun:

 

She had gone half a block before she realized how tired she was, how terribly tired, how strong the wind. Her eyes were full of dirt, the streets long gray cocoons of winding wind and soil, all the houses shut tight against the unnatural dark …… The two boys were wild with the torrent of the wind, filled with the immense surge of it as they ran along the rim of the valley. Below them, as if they were looking through smoked glass, they could see the long grass bending under the weight of the wind and far off the oaks plunging together in its fury.

 

Among those inspired by Blondal was Benjamin Herson, a rabbi in Malibu, California, who grew up in Manitoba. Herson had a vivid memory of seeing the beautiful Blondal in a hallway during university. In a Globe & Mail article in 2002 he said:

 

"There was a deep and electrifying communion, a wonderful magic moment of enchantment," he recalls. "I fell in love with that woman pure and simple and here I was the son of a rabbi, studying in a college sponsored by the United Church."

 

Shortly after Herson was diagnosed with tuberculosis and never saw Blondal again.

 

Almost 40 years later a student gave him a copy of A Candle to Light the Sun. Up to that moment he had not known she had written a book and died so young. He connected deeply with the book and wanted to honour her memory:

 

That question brought Herson back to Manitoba where he and Blondal had grown up in separate worlds. He bought a simple farmhouse outside Gimli, Man., a 10-minute walk from the shores of Lake Winnipeg, and in 2001 he worked with the Manitoba Writers Guild to inaugurate it as the Patricia Blondal Memorial Writers' Retreat. It contains Blondal's two posthumously published books, photos, a poem and a display about her, a modern kitchen, woodstove and guest rooms. Three established Manitoba writers have already sat down at its expansive desk for a quiet month each of wordsmithing.

 

And to think Herson fell in love with Blondal and felt this deep connection despite never having spoken to her. 

 

Blondal’s final words in A Candle to Light the Sun will remain long in my memory:

 

      Roselee put her arms around him, for it was time to mourn and mourning in
      Mouse Bluffs must be done in private, spoken gently against the tender green
      of the valley, lest the wind, hearing, should tear it to tatters against the great
      sky.

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Blondal, Patricia - (2016) - A Candle to Light the Sun and Patricia Blondal