The children are both at the window, low enough for them to see me approaching up the short walk. In cases like this, you are not sure you want to see the damage done. Either to the house, or to themselves.
I open the door. I open the inside door. Peals of laughter and giggles as only small children can behave, greet me in the short hallway. They are both naked. Have unclipped the large safety pins on their diapers. Have climbed out of their playpens. And, as you would expect, need a bath.
“Lawsuit in their ass!” my Trinidadian friend screams in delight. He likes the law. He is not a lawyer. Not even a law student. He is a graduate in biology. But he dresses like a lawyer, in dark blue, pin-striped double-breasted suits with a tie of blue and white stripes, the colours of the University of Toronto; and a spotless white shirt with starch in the collar and the cuffs.
But he practises law. “I will defend you, free. Lawsuit in their ass, pappee!” And he pats his briefcase. It is a very expensive-looking leather briefcase.
If I had taken my constitutional with my two daughters, in the English perambulator, I would not have stopped at Grand & Toy, but would have walked between the two buildings, in the long lane going south still, and come out on a small street, Hayden, famous for two things: The Nut House. You get the best peanut brittle there. And if you turn east a little bit, a drinking establishment — frequented by the painter Kenneth Seager, who eats hamburger lathered in Heinz tomato ketchup, and chips every day; and who paints with thick colours the chapel attached to the Anglican Church of St. Paul’s on Bloor Street, near Jarvis — comes into view. In this drinking establishment, you can eat delicious hard-boiled eggs, cured in vinegar with onion. Small glass shakers containing salt are still placed on the plastic-covered tables. As you entered, you face two signs. MEN. LADIES & ESCORTS. Decency, propriety, and Christian-mindedness do not look kindly on women who sit in the same saloon as men, drinking hard liquor. Ladies and Escorts. But if you are wise, or tricky, you get your cashews, red-skin peanuts already shelled, and peanut brittle, before you go for your draught beer.
From here you go back to the west to Yonge Street and turn left, and walk as far as the bank at the corner of Charles and Yonge — now, like everything else, turned into a coffee shop! — to go to Coles Bookstore, to buy a book cheaper here than you can get it at Britnell’s bookstore, north of Bloor, north of the Pilot Tavern. You may go as far as the cinema, cross the street, past Charles Street, pass another cinema on the west side, come to Frank Stollery’s men’s store, overpriced even in the sixties; wait for the light to change; and change your mind and go into the tuck shop that is west of Stollery’s, that sells Erinmore Flake and Condor tobaccos, imported from London along with the Times, and other English magazines; and then you cross the street, and your eye sees the pilot in the Pilot’s sign of blinking lights, giving you half of the bodies of the patrons and waiters sitting at the long counter, cut in half; and you imagine that Gladstone must have been sitting at the same bar in the Pilot Tavern, dreaming over his beer, and watching the profiles and silhouettes, the left sides of beautiful women walking north on Yonge Street, in front of the picture window of the Pilot Tavern. And I make a mental note that the next time I enter the Pilot Tavern, I shall not sit with the riff-raff of artists, but at the bar, with the respectably employed, bank tellers, store clerks, managers of stationeries, even men who sell suits and ties and shirt and “monkey suits” and Aquascutum, and watch the walking women pass, and put them in a short story.
Anticipating “disciplinary measures” in response to my lateness at work as a stagehand, I must have contacted Robert Weaver, in my fear of being “measured” disciplinarily: and I must have shown him a poem or two before I had done sufficient revision, and could not help myself from showing them to him in such a raw form. I wanted to be a poet then. But Robert Weaver’s letter of rejection was so savage that it clogged the last remaining poetical veins in my body. Bob did not extend the same helping hand as Norman Ettlinger. But he was kinder in other ways.
I have just passed Cumberland Street — the nut-selling woman has her store near here, before she made so much money, and had to move to a larger place, on Hayden Street — and Harry. Oh, Harry. Of Harry’s Records and Books. The records Harry sold, mainly classics and blues, were special. He introduced me to Paul Robeson, singing “Ol’ Man River.” And he introduced me to Robeson’s politics, and to Robeson’s acting roles, especially his historic role as Othello. And his travels in Russia, and his persecution by the United States, his own country, by their withholding his passport. If you were to go to the bank on a Friday afternoon, do not stop at Harry’s Records and Books, do not even glance in his direction. Look instead to your left, and admire the books in the showcase at the Albert Britnell Book Shop. Mr. Britnell never put one of my books in his showcase, in all the time I lived on Asquith Avenue, passing his store, and looking in, but not venturing in, at least four times a day. He held this embargo on the two books I had written at this time, The Survivors of the Crossing and Amongst Thistles and Thorns, until just before he died. He apparently did not see eye to eye with the moderate praise that William French, books editor at the Globe and Mail, had given to my first two novels. It was only when William French, in giving greater praise to The Meeting Point, my third novel, was Mr. Britnell stirred from his lack of notice. But he had not been the only bookseller to embargo my books from their showcases. It happened again, years later, with my cookbook, Pig Tails ’n’ Breadfruit, being absent from the showcase of a bookseller, who specialized in cookbooks. Pig Tails ’n’ Breadfruit was shortlisted for the award of the Best Cookbook, in New York.
But Harry’s conversations, and his informal seminars, as he stood amongst the boxes made with three-ply wood, sawed and built with his own hands, in which the records were kept; and the shelves filled with books which he said he had brought back from New York in his car, having bought them at book sales; and he called the names of the giant bookselling firms, and I forgot their names immediately; and then he asked me if I wanted to go with him one of these days, to New York. Harry and his young, beautiful, intelligent wife, Verna. She must have been a German immigrant, too. She liked dogs. She walked with a dog that reached her to her waist. The hair of the dog, whose pedigree I would not know, since I hate dogs, was the same reddish-brown texture as hers. Now that I remember the colour of her hair, I think she must have been Irish. Verna liked Harry. And she liked dogs, as I have said. But I think she liked music better. Perhaps, it was she who taught Harry so much about classical music and classical blues. He introduced me to Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin. And he told me that Beethoven was black. And so was the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. “Two black giants!” Harry called them. Harry told me that one of the best modern composers of classical music was the African, Fela Sowande. “Never heard of Freedom Now Suite? Sell it to you. Give you a good price.” I could hear Verna playing her cello in the office at the back of the store. I would watch her playing her instrument, with her dog, the size of her animal-sized instrument, tight between her legs, and imagine the sensation that the echo … tremulo? … vibrato? … from the bow, was taking a toll on her legs. Verna’s legs were more beautiful than her hair. Verna and Harry. Harry liked William Faulkner. And Eugene O’Neill. And John Steinbeck. And Richard Wright. “Did you know he is a communist? Chased him out of the United States. Fled to France. The State Department did. Made him go and live in Paris.” Native Son. And, Crime and Punishment. Crime and Punishment drove me into a deep depression when I read it in two days. Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” even out of season, was my only balm. Dostoevsky and Russian Easter Overture were my diet. “Did you know that Billy Eckstein is a better singer than Frank Sinatra?” I had listened to Billy Eckstein back in Barbados; and I entered a singing competition at the Globe Cinema, near my school; and sang … some people who were witnesses on that historical Friday night, might say otherwise … “Blue Moon”; and I got to the end of the second line; and
then, all words and phrases and lyrics left my mind. I was more concerned with the slur Billy Eckstein always gave to the last word in each verse, than on remembering the lyrics. When the booing ended, and the missiles — large home-grown parched peanuts — smashed on to the stage; I was already walking through the pit, to bury my shame in a large glass of Mount Gay Rum and Coca-Cola …
We shall leave Harry. And Verna, with the animal of a cello between her legs, and stop listening to her notes flying out from its well-polished torso, just like her hair blows in the Yonge Street wind, in winter and in summer, when she takes the large business chequebook, and its larger cousin, the book in which entries are made, to the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, immediately south of the Pilot Tavern.
Let us leave Harry’s Records and Books, and pass to the Isaacs Gallery, through whose large picture windows you can see large paintings by Coughtry, and Raynor, and Markle. Dorothy Cameron could not take the hassle from the Vice Squad of the police; and she closed her gallery, whether immediately as a consequence, or because galleries weren’t making money. And leave the Isaacs Gallery; and leave the stairs that lead to an apartment on the third floor, where Jimmy plays the best rock and roll music, and some jazz, and some blues, and where he cooks you a three-course meal, specializing in fishes, where you have to call the name of a well-known person, an artist obviously, before you could get past the eye-opening, eye-balling, eye-peeping-hole door.
At the corner of Yonge and Yorkville, up to the second floor, lives Dennis Burton, busy now, painting in three copies, the face of, and some of the body of, Mrs. Morty Shulman. I have looked upon her beauty and upon Dennis’s genius with faces and bodies and garter belts that decorate women’s bodies. “She comes here, to sit.” Well, naturally. Where else would she come? Where else does she want to come? To get her portrait triplicated in oils? I wish I were a painter. I start to envy all painters I know, who drink with me in the Pilot Tavern. They live a better life than a writer. A poor painter is better than a poor writer. He has, at least, the luxury and the torment of, the luxury and the wealth of observation of a beautiful woman, painting her face, and her body, her breasts, if he is lucky, and her full nakedness if he can prove that he is lucky. But they tell me, painters I mean, that when you see a woman naked, and you rub your paint brushes over her delicious parts nothing happens in your jeans. It is like stone.
“Tell that to the Marines!”
Stand at the side door leading to Dennis’s studio, and you can see Pickering Farms, and the parked Mercedes-Benzes, Volvos, Cadillacs, and the BMWs; and you wish you were not a starving writer. But as you turn your back upon the T-bone steaks, the racks of lamb, the joints of pork roasts, and turn and walk on the west side of the street, you stop at the tuck shop and you buy a stick of chewing gum, wait for the traffic to become a trickle, and you enter the street on which you live. Asquith. In the short distance, on the south side, is the Bell Company, where beautiful black women and beautiful white women, the long-distance operators, come out, at all hours of the night, and get into taxis, to be driven to their doors; going home. Or, in the cars of men waiting like hawks, or piranhas, whose back seats are like moveable bedrooms. The Maison Doré is busy. You can smell onion soup. You can smell the onion soup every day. I have never eaten at the Maison Doré. I would have to complete and sell to Weaver a piece of an acceptable first draft of The Meeting Point to afford a cup of coffee there. There is no bride, none from the Bell Company, who has made a reservation to be married, and have her photograph taken by the photographer of the firm that is advertised in the small black Model T, which is forlorn at this time in the early afternoon back seat. I do not know what doré means in French.
Everything on this street is quiet. I can look over the roofs of the few houses along this street, and along Park Road, and see the top of Crown Life Insurance, from whom I rent Number 46. And I am glad that they cannot see me. The rent is due. A strange feature about this house: it has two floors only, for a townhouse in the middle of the city of Toronto. It has no garden, no front walk, and it has no backyard, only a space for three cars to park, which we rented out to Mr. Moriyama, the architect who would, in time, design the Toronto Reference Library, which now sits at the top of Asquith Avenue and Yonge Street. I always wondered, whether when he was trying to get his small car in the small space behind Number 46, he was thinking of the economy of space, and how space affects size and so on; and whether the ruminations of iron and steel and concrete were going through his mind? And I wondered whether his assistants, or partners, who also parked in the small space, were thinking of similar things? Or, only of the delicious-smelling onion soup of the Maison Doré, two doors to the west? The rent was due …
… and I have been remembering that in these days, I really wanted to be a poet. But Robert Weaver, in the firmness of his honesty, thought that my submission was so poor that it belied improvement through editing, even over years. He must have been sure of his prejudice, for he was publishing Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Earle Birney, the Montreal Group, including Irving Layton and Phyllis Webb and Leonard Cohen … Alice Munro’s short stories; and I venture to face the wrath of some, to say that Robert Weaver made Alice Munro!… Dean French of University College, Richard Outram, and Leonard Cohen, whom I consider to be the best poet in the country — before he considered himself a crooner and not a writer of sonnets. Of course, there were others whom Weaver published either in his CBC literary programmes, or in the Tamarack Review. There was this professor in the Department of English of the university, who wrote poems, who won the Governor General’s Literary Award one year. Fiction and poetry were, I think I am correct in saying this, in the same category. His winning the prize obliterated the chances of The Meeting Point, because it was said, by those who knew, that he was dying of cancer, “and therefore we feel he would not live long …”; and so on and so forth. I have the distinct opinion and I harbour my conviction, after all these years, that race colours the rules and regulations that govern the decisions of literary matters: prizes, promotion of your book, reviews, and acceptance. But in addition to this gentleman, Weaver published many more young poets in the 1960s, including Gwendolyn MacEwen and Miriam Waddington, a book of whose poems I bought this year, at the weekly book sale held in a small room, on the first floor of the Toronto Reference Library. And, browsing through this thin volume of poems, I remembered that when poetry was ripped untimely from my ambition, I fell upon writing plays in verse, as my saviour from complete extinction. Murder in the Cathedral was my favourite book when I was in the Sixth Form, back in Barbados; and when I tried to drown my disappointment at Weaver’s rejection, which said in gist — though not in jest — something like “You do not show that you have a grasp of poetic idiom, and I see no future in these poems, which I am returning to you.”
I do not know if he thought that I had a future in fiction. But I had told him, many times in the past twenty years, that he is responsible for Canada not having a great poet born in the West Indies, and that he should take the blame for this. Weaver took a deeper puff on his straight pipe, unfolded the yellow plastic tobacco pouch, forgot to take tobacco out to put into his pipe, re-folded the yellow plastic pouch, thick and bulky as if he were carrying a .38 revolver in the side pocket of his grey worsted sports jacket; and then he blew the smoke, into my face, not disrespectfully; and all the time, implying, and then suggesting, “Put that in your pipe, and smoke it, Clarke!”
And, standing in that small book store on the first floor of the library, the name of the playwright on whom I would base my plays, so far unwritten, appeared on the spine of a small book, not so small as Miriam Waddington’s, and I remembered the name of the playwright I wanted to be like, from when I first saw it on the spine of another book, in the Britnell bookstore, in a second edition, published in 1950. Christopher Fry. (There is an obituary in the Globe and Mail today, the 8th of July 2005, announcing that he died on the 30th of June 2005, at age ninety-seven; and a note that “in 19
39 he wrote a play called The Tower that was seen by Mr. Eliot, with whom his name was thereafter indissolubly linked. ‘I suppose, he had some influence on me,’ Mr. Fry once said, ‘but, to me, the names of Eliot and Fry always suggested a pair of famous photographers who were around at the time.’” Today is the first time I have seen his photograph, and the first time I knew of the literary relationship the two of them shared.) For two dollars, I bought the copy of The Lady’s Not for Burning: A Comedy. I wrote the first act of my play in verse, imitating the style and enough of the dramatic technique of my two “literary ancestors” to use Ralph Ellison’s term, that my small talent could apprehend at the time. T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry were beyond me. Weaver had assured me of this: not only in poetry, but also plays in verse. So, I consoled myself when I noticed that Christopher Fry’s name had the same cadence, and the same number of syllables as mine. And at this stage in the birth of my swaddling career as a playwright in verse, I clung, proving a literary ancestry that had nothing to do with literature, but to the significance of the similar cadences and the multisyllabic spelling of our two names; and I wrote my name, on the first pages of drafts of plays in verse, and just in cases, on a few poems, not as Austin Clarke. Or, Austin C. Clarke (which Heinemann, my British publishers, insisted I should use in deference to the more established career of a real poet, Austin Clarke of Dublin, Ireland). I became A.A. Chesterfield-Clarke. Written with the hyphen. The hyphen did not improve my poetry. And one day in disgust, tempered with a small bout of depression, I dug into my past, back to Barbados, in old papers that gave off a smell of neglect and of old age; and decided to try my hand at writing “common fiction,” as a friend of mine who writes “in the poetical consciousness,” told me to do.
'Membering Page 9