The Stand-In

by David Helwig

Helwig's narrator is a retired academic called to a remote university to deliver a series of lectures in place of an old friend recently deceased in unusual circumstances. The Stand-In is a simple transcript of these lectures—Helwig's readers must reconstruct this sophisticated tale of art, fame, and adultery through rambling anecdotes and flashes of critical tub-thumping.

128 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 31, 2002

About the author

David Helwig was a Canadian editor, essayist, memoirist, novelist, poet, short story writer and translator.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

IT IS DEATH brought me here, ladies and gentlemen. I am not the man you wanted, but Denman Tarrington, who had been invited to deliver this first set of Jakeson lectures, is no longer with us. A week ago he was found dead on a green tile floor in front of a mirror covered with steam in a hotel near Lincoln Centre. As a result of that—misadventure let us call it—your committee had to find a replacement with words at the ready and willing to come to a small Canadian campus in the depth of winter. I am told that a Famous Feminist declined. A Great Scholar pleaded illness. And so it went, until I walked into my apartment in Montreal one evening, after an absence of a few days, and the telephone rang…

Thus begins the first of three lectures that comprise this most unusual short novel.

No one likes to be second choice let alone third or fourth or whatever number declined or were unavailable before they decided to try a certain retired professor. Why the caller chose to part with that information we will never know but the news no doubt affected the tone of the three lectures the professor managed to cobble together in the time given to him, a measly three days.

He is old—obviously—and even at the best of time the old have a habit of saying what they think and to hell with the consequences. Since the original choice, Denman Tarrington, has died it’s not surprising he would spend some time talking about the man since they’d known each other for years and often played badminton together, alone and with their wives. The professor has no problems if not exactly speaking ill of the dead but at least calling it as he sees it:

I remember once meeting him in the corridor of Arminian Hall on his way to teach a class, when he stopped to explain to me how much he liked going in to lecture with the musk of a female student fresh in his beard. That was many years ago, of course, when teachers were allowed to treat their classes as a harem, although I’m not sure the Baptist elders on the Board of Governors ever gave their explicit approval. Still it was the way of the times and Tarrington was quick to sense possibilities. I imagine he was also quick to sense that the world had changed and he might have to stop.

Needless to say his forthrightness makes the school president and a number of his other former colleagues wince especially when he addresses them directly from the podium. Unsurprisingly not all find the time to attend all three lectures. The guy may be old but he’s far from senile; he rambles, yes, and digresses but eventually he finds his place again and makes his points although he doesn’t always make a point of making his point. I liked how Prairie Fire put it in their review:

[T]he title of the lecture series is ‘‘The Music of No Mind,’’ and if one were to seek an analogy between this novella and a musical composition, the choice would have to be Elgar’s Enigma Variations, in which the composer claimed there exists a hidden unheard but familiar theme, the identification of which has baffled music scholars ever since. What is important in Professor X’s apparently dithering extemporaneous digressions is not so much what is said as what is unsaid or hinted at.

Needless to say I read the book over three days; I would suggest that’s the best way, to treat it as three separate, and yet related (there is much overlap), lectures. The professor embodies the past and he’s well aware of it. His audience is the future and he picks on three female students in the second row and addresses much of what he has to say to them:

I have adopted you, all three, and […] I reflected that you are now the age we were in those days, and you are living out the savage intensities of those years. Two of you are perhaps a couple, and the other is the observer or is waiting for the cure of a vanished madness. It is possible that the three of you share intricate delights and jealousies or that I misread the fashions of the time, and one of you awaits a soldier home from the wars. Forgive my intrusion. There are those who say that passion is no longer fashionable among the young, that they do it and forget. Like the province of Quebec, je me souviens.

He’s not quite King Lear—sometimes he plays the fool—but there’s something there that the discerning few (his audience dwindles over time) recognise and that keeps the faithful (or at least the insatiably curious) coming back for more.

A charming book. The kind of thing you’d expect from Nicholson Baker. It does seem to have been overlooked and that’s a shame because this is something a bit different that actually works.

[Skot · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a sense my friend Steve and I were the only people who read this book, which made me sad, as I think it a very fine, original piece of writing--wickedly wry and surprising. The premise is that a man is asked to stand in to deliver an evening lecture series when his friend, whose shadow he's lived in for years, dies. This book is his lecture. I'm sorry it was so overlooked.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one didn't turn out quite as I expected. An academic is called to make a series of talks when a long-standing friend/rival drops dead. The talk contains lots of veiled (and perhaps not so veiled) allusions to his rivals stealing of not only his ideas but his spouse.

But it moves on to encompass the lecturer's theories on art.

Reminded me of Jeff Bursey's Verbatim in that we have a speaker not quite concealing his true feelings, although in Verbatim the information is from transcribed debates rather than a monologue

[Jim Puskas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Because the book consists entirely of a set of three wandering monologue representing three one-hour lectures delivered by an idiosyncratic speaker, this would be far better as an audio book or else read aloud for full effect. A narrator the likes of a Hal Holbrook would really do it justice. In the total absence of plot or notable time and place, the work relies completely on the personality of the speaker and his colorful language, craftily interweaving about a dozen themes. A mildly amusing diversion.