by Lynn Coady
Praise for Lynn Coady’s
mean boy
“Coady explores the sometimes uneasy relationship between art and academia … with a polish and razor-sharp wit that takes no prisoners.… Mean Boy is guaranteed to garner attention at this year’s major book awards. If somehow you’ve missed Coady’s earlier work, start right now with this one.”
—Calgary Herald
“A wonderful portrait of a university town and university life, from the high jinks of students intent on accumulating experience to the pontifical evasions and suggestions of well-meaning professors.… Coady’s portrayal of the jealous tenuousness of friendship, the in-fighting and fierce competitions of the literary world is daring and brilliant.… Coady’s skill as a parodist and prose writer far surpasses poetic pretension. Mean Boy is a tour de force.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Mean Boy is above all a solid and comical page-turner.”
—NOW Magazine (Toronto)
“Mean Boy is a wonderfully savage rip on the world of academia where professor-poets backstab, students write puerile poetry … and tenure is granted or denied by succinctly portrayed stuffed shirts. If you have ever taken a creative writing course, you will alternately laugh, cry and blush. For those of you not conversant with the bad boys of poetry, hang on and simply enjoy.”
—The Sun Times (Owen Sound)
“This is a brilliant book, a probing and often hilarious satire of the pretensions of university life and the elitist posturing of poetic genius.”
—Books in Canada
“Superb … both central characters are utterly memorable and, well, hilarious. A coming-of-age novel, Mean Boy will make you laugh.… [Coady] is a storyteller with a wry comic sense and a wonderfully satirical touch.”
—Edmonton Journal
“You don’t have to be a creative writer to in order to appreciate Coady’s skill as a humorist.… [Her] writing is tight and fast-paced, and she depicts the dynamics among her characters … with a sure hand.… An unflinching writer … Coady has created yet another impressive work of fiction.”
—Toronto Star
“Catchy and imaginative, harrowing, yet richly humourous, a rewarding piece of fiction from one of Canada’s most original writers.”
—The London Free Press
“A pitch-perfect comedy of manners.”
—Quill & Quire
ALSO BY LYNN COADY
Saints of Big Harbour
Play the Monster Blind
Strange Heaven
Victory Meat (editor)
Copyright © 2006 Lynn Coady
Anchor Canada edition 2007
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Coady, Lynn, 1970–
Mean boy / Lynn Coady.
eISBN: 978-0-385-67237-5
I. Title.
PS8555.O23M42 2007 C813’.54 C2006-904624-7
Cover design: Kelly Hill
Published in Canada by
Anchor Canada, a division of
Random House of Canada Limited
Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.randomhouse.ca
v3.1
for Charles
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1 - if you throw the ball, it just gets him more excited
Chapter 2 - it’s not healthy to be dwelling on that sort of thing
Chapter 3 - rustlingleaves
Chapter 4 - we seethe and writhe
Chapter 5 - i came here looking for you
Acknowledgments
About the Author
to be possessed or
abandoned by a god
is not in the language
JOHN THOMPSON
1
if you throw the ball,
it just gets him more excited
I.
HE SAT ON HIS DESK, positioned in front of this enormous window with the sunlight streaming all around his outline. I could barely look at him without going blind. He saw me squinting and shading my eyes and squeezing them shut when they started watering, but he didn’t move, or close the curtain. He had a little teapot on the desk beside him and he kept picking it up and listening to it. He told me my poem should have a dead person in it.
“Maybe a murder or something,” he said, “to make it more exciting.”
I didn’t know what to say so I talked about what was in the poem already. I said I thought that maybe it was a little wordy, that I hadn’t figured out how to distill my ideas yet. I figured he could speak to this—none of his poems are any more than ten lines long, and half the time each line has no more than three or four words in it. He just sat there listening to his teapot as I rambled away, carefully using words like distill and cumbersome.
“I think maybe it’s a little cumbersome?”
Everything I said went up in a question. I sounded like I was still in high school. I knew I had to learn how to stop talking like that, especially around this guy, but it got worse when I was nervous.
“No, no, it’s not cumbersome. It just needs something to happen. Nothing happens in it. There’s nothing wrong with a lot of words—I like words.”
“But your poems are so …” I wanted a really perfect word for this. Terse. Brief. Scant. Scant? Scant was good. But did it have any negative connotations? Would he think I meant insubstantial?
“… short,” I said, before the silence could thicken.
“Those are my poems,” he said. “And my poems are great. I’m trying to learn not to insist that other writers write poems like mine. In fact I prefer that they don’t. Listen to this for a minute.” I thought maybe he was going to recite something, but instead he extended the little teapot so that I was compelled to get up out of my chair and come toward him.
I listened. It was full of tea. I could feel the heat radiating toward my cheek. It was making a buzzing sound, sort of like a horsefly.
“Hm,” I said.
“It’s buzzing,” he said. “Why do you suppose it does that?”
“I think maybe air is trapped in there or something.”
“Well, it’s weird,” said Jim Arsenault, the greatest living poet of our time.
I sit obsessing on this, fingers poised over my typewriter keys. Every time I blink, the silhouette of Jim outlined against his sun-filled window flashes inside my head, like it’s been burned into my corneas. I hear him saying, Well, it’s weird. I hear him saying everything but what I wanted to hear about my poetry. I hear more exciting, which means not exciting. It’s hard to come up with something new, hearing that. It seems like it might be easier—more fun, more inspiring too, somehow—to tear the page from my typewriter’s grip, slowly, without releasing the catch, so that it kind of shrieks as if in drawn-out pain.
I have a poem called “Poem Poem” taped to the window above my typewriter—by Milton Acorn, who is my hero because he is an unschooled genius who, like me, is from Prince Edward Island. The poem is about the good days and the bad days of writing poetry. The first stanza talks about a good day, how Poems broke from the white dam of my teeth. / I sang truth, the word I was … Heart and fist thumped together, it says, a line I love.
> Then the second stanza describes the poem “I write today,” how it “grins” at him while I chop it like a mean boy / And whittles my spine. It is truth, says Acorn with regard to this poem, the word I am not.
That’s the poem. I look at it when I’m feeling lonely, and when I feel like a moron—a not exciting moron—for sitting in front of my typewriter thinking I’m a poet. Sometimes I love it, though—some days are as different from one another as the two stanzas of the poem. That’s why I have it up there. Sometimes, even if I’m not writing, just the feel of being alone in my apartment in front of the typewriter is enough. I take off my shirt. I can see myself, I can see what I look like sitting here wearing nothing but jeans and glasses, me and my pale teenage limbs. I look like a poet. I know that I do. I believe in it, those days.
I, I’ll type. And that will be enough.
Then there are the other days, when nothing is enough. The poem grins. It grins because it knows it is a terrible poem. It grins in embarrassment. It grins in pity. It grins in superiority. I may be a terrible poem, it grins, but at least I have one comfort. At least I’m not a terrible poet. At least I’m not the guy who sat in front of a typewriter for two hours coming up with the likes of me.
A girl named Sherrie is busy reading her work for Jim and the rest of us—mostly for Jim. I am busy being made uncomfortable by it. It’s all about desire and sex, but there is nothing arousing going on in the least. I expected to not like it because it would be sentimental, but that isn’t the problem. It’s just Sherrie standing up there with her yellow curls going everywhere like a doll or a crazed cheerleader, semi-whispering about “folds in flesh” and “shimmering” this and “shuddering” that—it makes me queasy. It’s only our second class, for God’s sake. Meeting, Jim wants us to call it.
Jim doesn’t seem to mind Sherrie’s stuff. He stands with the same demeanour he has whenever anybody reads. He leans slightly against his desk, stares at the ground, and folds his arms way back behind his head, so that his elbows stick out on either side of it like huge animal ears, a rabbit-man. He’ll stand that way for as long as twenty minutes sometimes, depending on whatever anyone’s reading. There is a guy named Claude from Moncton who writes villanelles. These villanelles go on forever sometimes, and Jim will just stand there all contorted until the very last line.
Sherrie gushes the last line of her poem, which is actually about gushing in one way or another. I don’t know whether to take it literally or not. Probably I shouldn’t. It’s a metaphorical orgasm. I will say that if asked to comment—I will remark upon the “metaphorical orgasm” at the end. Will I say that I liked it or not? Maybe neither. Better to be noncommittal. I was intrigued. I was intrigued by the metaphorical orgasm in the last line. I thought perhaps it was a little too clichéd, however. No, I can’t say clichéd. A little too … apropos.
Jim sighs and unwinds his arms from his head. Claude says, “Hmm,” because that’s what he says after everybody’s poem. A couple of people echo the noise. It’s a good, safe noise to make.
Sherrie looks flushed. Her hands were shaking when she was reading. It’s kind of an awful thing to do to people, make them read their poems out loud.
Jim says, “Comments?” and I jump at this, because I have a feeling Claude might have clued in on the metaphorical orgasm as well.
“I liked the orgasm,” I say.
Jim smiles at me. Sherrie’s mouth falls open, her blue eyes expand.
“Pardon, Larry?”
“The metaphorical orgasm, I mean. At the end.”
“That’s usually where you’d find it,” quips Claude. I look to Jim for help.
Jim smiles wider. “You liked that, did you?”
“No,” I say quickly. There is a distinct shift in Sherrie’s posture at this. “I was intrigued by it, is what I meant to say. I found it intriguing.”
“Why?” says Jim.
Oh my God. Why. Why.
I shrug.
That’s no good, I can’t just shrug, I’m not in high school.
I say, “Well, you know, just within the context of the rest of the poem. I thought it was kind of … well, on the one hand, I guess it was inevitable …?” There goes my voice again, upward, questioning, looking directly at Jim for validation.
“Was it?” says Jim.
“Well,” I grin and spread my hands, armpits like a swamp. “I’m no doctor, but …” Somebody cuts me off, and I’m glad, until I realize that it’s Claude.
“Isn’t that a bit if a … masculine viewpoint?”
Oh, I can’t believe it. I had hoped to regroup and regain my composure while everyone else weighed in, but there’s no way he’s getting away with that.
“I would argue that it’s merely archetypal?” I hear myself say. A salient, insightful retort, utterly destroyed by the question mark at the end. I’m disgusted with everything that question mark gives away. Approve me, agree with me.
“What about the other hand?” asks Jim, looking at me.
“What?” What in God’s name is he talking about?
“You said, on the one hand, it’s inevitable …,” he prompts, “before Claude interrupted you.”
Vindication! I glance over to see if Claude is hanging his head in shame, but he doesn’t seem fazed. He never speaks with question marks, not even when he’s asking questions. It’s because of that Acadian accent of his—he punctuates everything with certainty.
“Larry?” says Jim.
I introduced myself to him as Lawrence. I sign all my poems Lawrence. He has never called me anything but Larry.
“On the one hand, it’s inevitable,” I say, carefully modulating my speech and trying to remember my original point. Clichéd. No. Apropos. Apropos! I sit up.
“But on the other hand …” I deepen my voice. “I think maybe it’s a little too inevitable, if you catch my meaning … This is why I didn’t appreciate Claude’s ‘particularly masculine’ comment—I didn’t think that was apropos, because he didn’t let me finish my point.”
Oh goddamnit. I start to sweat again, having jumped the gun and sabotaged my entire argument. “On the other hand,” I push on, “it’s so inevitable as to be … a little too … clichéd.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Sherrie’s posture shift again. I’m afraid to look at her.
“I think that’s a little harsh,” remarks Claude.
“Hm,” says Jim, nodding.
Students have been known to hang themselves at Westcock University. The stairwell in the English Department has been a preferred spot for decades.
Everybody waits in pure, frozen silence while Jim nods away and twists back into his rabbit-ears position, like he’s giving himself antennae. We all know it’s his thinking posture. It seems like if you stuck a pin in Sherrie, she would pop like a balloon right now.
After this particular eternity he lowers his arms. “I like,” he begins. Yes, yes? Everyone seems to grow an inch taller in their seats. The metaphorical orgasm? The non-metaphorical orgasm? My poem’s better than Sherrie’s? Me better than Claude?
“Alfred Hitchcock movies,” says Jim.
And he spends the rest of the meeting telling us all about North by Northwest. After ten minutes or so, Sherrie realizes she may as well sit back down.
But I can’t hang myself in the stairwell, it’s been done. Done to death. Me being derivative again, like with my writing. Everyone in the program knows about the first to do it, the inaugural suicide. A lit major hung herself just outside the department doors—one of the first women students the college had admitted. She’d been expelled, for reading “pornography.” John Donne, to be specific. Probably that one about the sun—the “saucy wretch”—coming in through the window and waking up him and his girlfriend. Hot stuff.
I always thought it was so great, so literary, the story of the hanging. There is a plaque in the corridor describing it. I love this about my university, this Gothic little history it has, so European, people killing themselves o
ver poetry.
I’m reading in the lounge—I also love the English Department lounge, big and oaken, with creaking wooden floors—musty with the past. The English Department is on the top floor of the Humanities building, the oldest building on campus. The chairs themselves belong in a museum—you should see them. Plush, balding velvet. Leather-bound books laid on the sturdy oak table. Coffee-cup rings, scratches, graffiti dating from the turn of the century. I could live here. I could die here.
The one nod to the present is a high-tech automatic coffee machine placed discreetly in the corner atop an Edwardian end table. I lounge around reading and smelling the stale coffee for hours, soaking everything up, caffeine stench and history, hoping—let’s be honest—Jim might lope by, happen to glance in, smile his recognition—Ah. Lawrence.
If it sounds pathetic, it is not. I came here for him, after all. He is practically the only great poet I know of who’s alive. In this country, I mean. He’s the only one to learn from—and he’s here, for God’s sake, in the same town, school, department as me. Sometimes I can’t believe it. It’s like being able to call up Shakespeare on the phone.
I get light-headed thinking about it—with joy, and the conviction of my unbelievable luck, and, let’s face it, a real sense of predestination. Because something like this can’t be an accident, can it? Poetic genius Jim Arsenault arriving on one side of the Northumberland Strait, poetic aspirant Lawrence Campbell growing up on the other? This is the stars in alignment.
And on this day, the thing I’ve been waiting for happens—if not quite how I have imagined. I hear noises down the hall. The echoes in this place, it’s obscene. You imagine people must have never raised their voices above a whisper around the turn of the century. It’s as if the acoustics were deliberately engineered to keep you hushed.
Jim shouts, Arsenault! Which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe he’s writing in his office. But he’s never in his office—you’re lucky to catch him there even during posted hours.
… goddamn Arsenault!
I envision him shouting into a mirror, overwrought with his latest effort, suffused with self-loathing, disgusted by the certainty of his own inadequacy to the sacred task of poetry. Oh, Jim, I know. Come talk to me. We’re of one heart, you and I.