“Because a fire was in my head” is a line from “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” a poem by the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats. Happily, Lynn Stegner makes good on her borrowing in this portrait of an amoral, redheaded woman vagabond who cuts a swath of psychic destruction from the prairies of Canada to the beaches of Northern California.
In “Because a Fire Was in My Head” (University of Nebraska Press, 286 pages, $24.95), young, pert and dimply Kate Riley is a descendant of Irish immigrants who settled on the vast and comfortless plains of Saskatchewan. Ashamed of the catalog pages she has to layer beneath her coat to stay warm but proud of the ringlets her doting barber father fashions for her, Kate is an archetypal daddy’s girl, much to her icy mother’s disgust. After Kate’s father dies in 1941, when Kate is 10, the grim battle between mother and daughter escalates as the young men of the hauntingly named village of Netherfield, including Kate’s older brothers, go off to war. Starved for love and joy, Kate often falls ill, or claims to be so, hoping for at least a little succor. And so a pattern is drawn: Whenever love, or even merely lust, is threatened or lost, sickness and disorder ensue — including feigned maladies and theatrical acts of self-injury.
A novel fully realized on every level, “Because a Fire Was in My Head” is a provocative literary work of weight and luster. It casts light on the timeless mysteries of the human psyche and on the paradoxes of a notoriously contrary epoch, namely, post-World War II North America.
One of the most daring and rewarding acts a novelist performs is to give voice to a morally suspect, even repugnant, main character, in this case a narcissist of epic self-regard. So deeply does Stegner peer into Kate Riley’s damaged heart that her protagonist’s helpless callousness and insatiable longing exert a powerful fascination. Kate’s first conquest is her father; her second is handsome and earthy Jan Larsen. But Jan’s adoration, precocious lovemaking and marriage proposal are not enough to keep curvy, green-eyed, red-haired Kate home on the prairie. At 17, she leaves him torn between hope and fear as she extracts herself from the clutches of her selfish, unloving mother (never imagining how much she is like her) and boards the train to Vancouver. Confident in her allure, Kate dreams of a job in a swanky office, and of glamorous clothes and love affairs with successful men. But the body she counts on for passage to more refined worlds betrays her.
After an unintended pregnancy, an off-the-books birth and brusque abandonment of her baby, Kate, in a moment of staggering blankness (she is as out of touch with her own feelings as she is oblivious to those of others), attempts suicide. Or does she? On the rebound, she calculatedly seduces and marries the much older wealthy owner of the hotel where she labored oh-so-briefly and miserably as a chambermaid. Kate doesn’t have to work anymore, but she revels in her new job at a bank, where Stegner describes her walking smartly in a tight skirt, “everything about her presence, her personal-kinesis utterly synchronized to the unstoppable beat of the times.”
