There was no Governor General’s Award for The Lost Salt Gift of Blood.
Well, there was no Nobel Prize for Count Leo Tolstoy.
Like children in a tree house, we decide who is a member of our club and who is not. At first it is wonderful to be in the tree house—for we are the only four or five allowed. But sooner or later we see that the dimensions have enclosed us and the only way out is down. The real problem with this group is that some only have the talent to stay where they are.
But the powerful allure of the tree house cannot be underestimated. For it is here that any member can wield real power over better men and women, who are refused entrance in one way or another. And critics and literary committee members, who judge awards and give grants, have often and will always exercise blind power over the writer and the artist, who in the end will be seen to have been wiser and better.
That, as C. S. Lewis affirms, is the secret Boris discovers in War and Peace, where, because of connections, he is invited to a meeting with Prince Andrei while a decorated general is forced to wait outside. He plays it much to his own benefit: realizing that to be inside gives you power over others no matter your own worth or talent. Yet, what hundreds of men in the Politburo, who later died, discovered with Comrade Stalin was that the more of your soul you give up to get into the circle of power, the less there is of you once you gain entrance.
To be like-minded to the point where the ideas you wanted to express about your characters in your great novel or great symphony cannot now be expressed, for fear of harming your relationship with those you rely upon for security, is to carve away part of your being. I am only saying: be aware that if you rely upon others and comply with their determination or doctrine of truth, you will someday no longer have the qualities that protect you from mistaking what others demand from your art as artistic virtue. And slowly it will hamper you in deciding the artistic virtue of others.
The truth of so-called like-minded people and artistic virtue, whether in 1970 when I was a boy or today, becomes interchangeable. It is one and the same, and you will end up seeking what others do in order to belong, in order not to be singled out and scapegoated…so your work will not be bloodied and dismissed. Am I foolish enough to say this happens to everyone who joins in common theory? No, but this is the tendency.
There are two characters in Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle who epitomize this tendency. One is a writer, much applauded at the time by Stalin. In the Soviet Union, his novels are considered masterpieces. He has a large apartment and a good life for his wife and child. Only he knows he is not saying what is in his heart. Yet, each time he starts to write the “real novel,” the one he believes he is destined to write, he feels as if Stalin is standing behind him watching. So he begins to change his novel slightly each and every time. And each and every time he says, “My next novel will be the book where I tell the truth.”
The second is a character in the Lubyanka prison. He, along with other intellectuals, is asked to make a voice-deciphering machine in order to facilitate the arrest of a man the NKVD—People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs—knows has made a phone call in an attempt to warn an enemy of the state. The prisoner is a brilliant scientist and is able to make this machine to catch this man for Stalin, but there is one problem. He is free. How is this prisoner free? Because Stalin’s henchmen made a mistake—they took from him everything in his life he counted on and hoped for. Gone were his wife, children, house and job. Gone was his name and reputation. Now, standing before the warden in this prison, who needs a favour from him, it is he, not the warden, not the writer of the so-called masterpieces, not Stalin himself, who is free. This is a strange way to gain this kind of freedom. But it is the kind of freedom a writer should try to aspire to. It is every bit as hard as a drinker giving up his bottle in order to become free. There might be unimaginable dark nights of the soul.
You see, it is not whom the groups include as kindred spirits but whom they have excluded. Rarely have we failed to exclude someone who, as an artist, does not deserve to be excluded and, in fact, deserves more applause than most. To say this is not an unspoken tenet in popular culture is not to see how popular culture censors itself to the point where real truth is suspect, just as the truth Alden Nowlan gave us was largely suspect, while he was living, by many who now call him their “favourite poet.”
What many in the realm of our prominent literary social milieu sometimes fail to realize is that all great books are political and almost all political books fail to be great.
When I was a young man, I wore a name tag, and went to conferences, and became aware of this hidden exclusionary clause in some of the more notable literary figures present. And unfortunately, as I have briefly mentioned, the people they were excluding were also being blamed, in one way or another, for many of the modern social ills that they themselves wished to write about and unravel. The people who were held responsible I could call “rednecks.” I could call them “white trash.” I could call them (as one of my characters was called by one person on the CBC) “illiterate brawlers.” And I might, in a way, blame him and others. However, having grown up with people like this character, the one thing I did not have was a policy of singling them out for blame in order to exonerate myself or my intellectual class or ever to dismiss their humanity to do such.
Write what you must, but don’t try to reach the safe shore by jumping into waters you are unlikely to navigate. Don’t write about the rural world to please an urban sensibility if you come from rural Canada. Don’t ever tell people that what they want to hear is what they should hear—for the good of literature. To the extent that this has ever been done in Canadian literature, it is a tragedy.
“Whatever else, poetry is freedom,” Layton says, and we must hold to that come hell or high water.
What I am saying to the young writer is never fear that you, too, will be evaluated most harshly in your life for telling the truth. Know that the truth, not as others see it, but as you do, can only be told by you. And if you do it well enough, it not only sets you free but your characters, as well. It brings to the world myth and grace. The most important gift you can give the world is your right to write how you feel, not how others who seem to be more important tell you how you should feel. There are no guarantees if you do this, but there is no hope if you do not.
One thing: like Nowlan, Trethewey, Buckler and MacLeod, you will never have to play the inside out. If you attempt to tell the truth about your world—as only you see it, the compassionate truth that the world of the artist needs—you will almost certainly be an outsider sooner or later, and at times it will be much, much lonelier than the part of the outsider that is often glibly played within those special centres without either sacrifice or meaning.
2007
AUGUST 1955
LACE CURTAINS BLEW FORWARD IN THE HEAT OF THE SMALL bedroom, and I remember a kind of midsummer ennui—a word I did not know then, or for years after, but there it was nonetheless. Outside at the yard’s edge a fury of small hot dust storms blew up near the cracked, chalked sideway; where the girl next door, wearing her white ankle socks, had practised her hopscotch with a piece of heavy, blood-coloured glass, telling us of the great circus up the street and across the back fields and beyond the warehouses at the top of town. And so hearing this we went back into the house, to ask our mother’s permission.
It would be a giant coup if permission was granted, being this was a circus, and being my brother was five and I was four. Not that at this age we had not done things that would make parents wilt, but this was a circus, a carnie, a place where outsiders came and worked, and moreover took money from children, and our mother did not trust them. Also, it was in direct competition with our family theatre, which always ceased to run matinees during circus week because our seats would never be occupied. It seemed like a betrayal. That is, our theatre closed, the cement steps keeping time to blank glass doors, the h
eated bricks redundant and lost and stilled, while customers dressed for the evening, came and went on sidewalks, drifting along toward a foreign threat to our livelihood. Stillness, I suppose, was the word, our sheets proclaiming the place was now closed.
* * *
—
There was a stillness in our bungalow, too, that hot afternoon; the monotonous tick of the clock and the vague, indiscernible soundlessness of the town in the midst of listless August adding to this stillness. Within this was the kind of moment when the air itself conspires melancholy that you feel in closeness on your skin. There was the faint sound of jazz from the radio, the sweet and distant trumpets of cities we did not know, complemented slightly by the dripping of the kitchen tap.
It seemed as if no one at all was home.
But things had been like this for days because our father was working at the office and our mother was ill. She could get up for a while, but exhaustion would force her back to bed, and she lay in the room with the lace curtains billowing softly in midsummer, her beautiful chestnut hair on a pillow; lying on her side in her housedress as my brother approached. I suppose at that moment she was young enough to be my daughter now. Strange how time passes so easily—and remembering her hopes, tragically, so that moment and a thousand others have come and gone back into eternity; wherever that may be; poured outward moment by inevitable moment to a cosmos that might be best described by some movie still, a shadow along a wall, a face in a crowd passing by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Paris in 1960.
Her resolution was strong against it, but my brother’s resolution was stronger still. And knowing that we had been left alone that summer, that we had sat for hours on steps overlooking our driveway, or sat in our veranda where bric-a-brac collected dust, she relented—though my brother had to promise to keep my hand; that he was never to talk to strangers, and we had to come home in an hour. Besides this, we had to change our clothes. So she got up with not a little difficulty and went to the dresser to make sure we had clean pants and shirts, and socks.
There in our bedroom dark enough, with the curtains drawn to the conspiracy of afternoon heat, we had to put on clean, pressed shorts and shirts, and socks. Which seemed to me even then (if she was worried about kidnappers) slightly incongruous, for wasn’t she making us more attractive to them, whoever these kidnappers were? Well, that was her way—cleanliness, come what may.
Still it is as clear to me now as it was years ago, sitting on the bed to change my socks to go off to a circus that fifteen minutes before I had not known existed. A great adventure awaiting us as surely as all the other children who had been fortunate enough to go. And the vague feeling that this was not quite right, for it was permission granted because our mother was ill. And there was one more thing. When we came out to the kitchen, our mother confessed that she had no money. She kept looking through her purse nervously, but was unable to find a cent. She sat at our metallic kitchen table with a change purse in her hand, worried that now we might not be able to go; that our hopes had been dashed—and she knew something about the world of dashed hopes. This made her search more relentlessly.
Like ourselves I do not think she knew what circuses cost. But the secret was becoming revealed to me, then and there. I discovered by this search that I only wanted to go because my brother wished to. And our mother was trying to find some money so my brother could entertain me. All of this hidden desire, one for the other, seemed to dissipate into the flat, still air without a word being said.
Finally looking in the drawer beneath the phone book, she found a quarter.
And so cleaned and pressed, and with a quarter in my brother’s pocket, we started out the door.
When we came outside, the heat hit us full force. There was no one on the street, or on any of the interconnected streets beyond. It was silent and hot. The girl had gone, her hopscotch over, her blood-coloured piece of glass like a burnt pebble.
Viewed from above, like all children are—from the air above our heads, we were solitary on a long, bent, broken street, with houses and yards, and gardens and fences.
* * *
—
I followed my brother, as he tugged my hand. Up toward the circus we went, beyond the field where they played ball, beyond the tension wires and the new telephone poles, beyond the houses my grandmother once built—beyond the lane leading off to the station, and the creosote poles lying by the railway tracks. And we kept going, beyond the warehouse, with stingers grown up its sides, where winos sat and called to us. Then turning along the path so we would not be seen by the Hurleys—who were my brother’s enemies; he thinking I did not realize this—and then toward the smell of grease and fries, and litter, and tents, the sound of barkers and the sound of static, somehow obscenely happy music.
It cost a quarter to get in, and the lady, severe in her red kerchief, told us this—the heat making her more unwilling to relent. It seemed in fact to me that she was more than delighted to tell us. Where was she from, with her grey leathery skin? And where was her next stop? Another town a little way away, with the same children searching for a quarter?
We started home along the side path, my brother still holding my hand. Then at the Tilt-A-Whirl motors he ducked under the rope, and we were in. We came to the rides, and found out that rides cost a quarter apiece.
“You can go on one,” I said to my brother at the merry-go-round.
“No,” he said. “We will find a ride we can go on together.”
But we could not find such a ride—nothing at all. Every ticket was a quarter. So after an hour we were standing in the middle of the grounds, he still clutching my hand.
“You go on a ride,” I said, feeling I was holding him back, and at any other time he would not be guilty.
Yet he was determined not to. And I began to realize why. He was under obligation because our mother was ill. This is when my heart went out to him.
“No—we will get two candy apples,” he said. And we went to the candy apple stand.
“We can only have one,” he said.
“Well, we will share it,” I said.
But he did not want to do that. In a kind of taciturn fury—a furnace of anger on a hot day—he stared at the adults around him as if they were betrayers of innocence, as if in his hope they had betrayed not only him but his mother and me.
I am sure he did not think of it like that, but I am just as sure this is what he thought it was. Somewhere in his heart a pact of some kind, between small children and the outside world, had been broken—and he would not break his pact with me, even though he was the one who had thought of the circus, and I wanted him to. He stood off to the side a resolute little man, holding my hand, with a determined and subtle valour.
“I don’t want anything anyway,” I said.
“We will keep the quarter for later—and go downtown,” he said.
“There is lots of stuff we can get downtown.”
We turned toward home.
Our mother was anxiously looking out the window as we trudged back down the street hand in hand, a brother who on another occasion had thrown me in horseplay over his head and busted my collarbone. We told our mother nothing of these events, as trifling as they seemed.
I have long given up the notion that our disappointment was anyone’s fault—at the little circus or anywhere else. Still I will not give up the notion of a child’s bravery and love in a moment so fleeting it goes for the most part unrecognized, unless you are a child at heart yourself.
SCAPEGOATS
THE FIGHTING OF BULLIES HAS ALWAYS INTERESTED ME. FIRST because I knew so many of them, and second because at times they were uncharacteristic in their approach. Or I might clarify this by saying that society has different ways to enable and reward intimidation that in essence it needs in order to remain a society. The idea of bullies being thugs and punks has a rather one-dimensional application. Not many of us think
of sophisticates or academics as bullies. Yet most of them have had some leaning toward it—if not they would never have fit in. They may or may not have been geeks in high school—but they had their eye on the prize, and so often the prize was to become safe and snug, and accepted.
It is really the need to fit in that creates the bully. That is why they can often be seen as a parcel standing around and gawking at one who is alone.
In the university common rooms where I sat in the early eighties, the idea of fitting in was essential for those seeking tenure, and so the idea of holding predetermined opinions that may disagree with the opinions of those chairs who had the authority to offer you a job became very brave or very foolhardy. So, often people suppressed what they thought or how they felt, in order to maintain a decorum that was wholly or partly false. Falsehood is recognized as a lack of virtue, so I believe universities become institutions without virtue, teaching generations of young adults. Compliant students catch on to this, and succumb in various degrees—sometimes giving up their own ideas and ideals and opting instead for the sophist’s mantra that all is open to question. Therefore one does not have to suffer unduly for holding any value if all is open to question, for the value you hold is open to question, as well. And therefore it can become very tedious to others if you proclaim it too much.
This is what I discovered to be the endemic sophistry at the university level. Yes, all is open to question—except university cant and bullying and sophistry. If you question that, you become the outsider in the great union of freethinking men and women who often quibble for years over a chair or position.
* * *
Murder Page 13