“I would have liked to have met her,” another woman said. “We would have had so much in common—”
Well, not the Catholic faith, I gather; or not my grandmother’s hypocritical (they would say) devotion to it, I suspect; or not the saying of the rosary during those often-lonely Lenten hours. Not the moment when her adversaries tried to blow up her business. So then I assume she was speaking of other, more lofty things. And of course she was, and those lofty things were things she had learned.
Anyway, I suppose I could have told her my grandmother was not much of a joiner, and she was from the time of twenty-four an outcast—both things that weren’t (and still are not) at all fashionable with the civilly conscious university-bred young women and men I came to know in those years.
As I remember it many of them scrambled (and still do) to be included in a collective suffering where they were afforded all the outrage of the higher moral ground. There was often among them a huddling for safety, comfort and inclusion. In the literature the real truth about people—women and men—was often (though of course not always) clouded by picky and trendy leftist theory. Women cheeky and all knowing never subscribed to male proclamations, but had qualitatively different ones of their own. (That is why abortion is such a revelatory thing in some of these books and films written by nineties men about thirties women. My good God, any independent women of the thirties must have had one, or helped procure one, because their ethical base would have been in tune with women taking second-year social work in 1999. And if not, then they were not the real women—not the ones one would spend time with or write about.)
In fact most activists use theory as the means to transport themselves to a social advantage through a class disadvantage many of them have never suffered. The novels of many liberationists, women or men, attest to this. I remember that in the eighties and nineties many of these renegade young women (and men) not only took classes together but marched together—and then of course, when it became fashionable, exercised together, ran together. I am not so much of a curmudgeon. I am not saying anything against it. I am especially not saying that women should not have the same advantages as men. I am only saying that their rebellion was for all it’s worth a class-mindful—very class-mindful—rebellion, which did not and does not include any other class but the intellectual. And from my experience the intellectual class is no smarter or more certain of the world than any other.
It would not and really never did include my own mother-in-law, who born in poverty few of them could have imagined cleaned houses and scrubbed floors—not for an instant. And of course not only her—most of the women I admired would be disenfranchised by those who kept saying they themselves were disenfranchised. Still, my grandmother came from the same world as my mother-in-law; would have known her very well indeed.
However, more than a few women I knew in my years at university would have used my mother-in-law’s plight, and what is worse, insisted they had every right to use it—use her hitchhiking to and from work as an elderly woman—to promote their idea of inequality. But let me tell you, most of them I knew in 1987 would have been comfortable only with the women she served—whose floors she scrubbed and beds she made; and few of them would have stopped to give her a ride.
This intellectualization of a suffering not experienced allows us a certain carefully protected status.
For, unlike my grandmother, if it had cost the majority of these people too, too much, few of them would have had the courage to engage the world. Oh, some would and did. But here is a secret: most did not. Theirs was a collective ascendancy, and a protected radicalism. They were safe; and within the university structure they knew it. They knew they had entered hallways where the idea of blaming others for the ills of the world was grand theatre. They knew how to act bold and irreverent, caustic and in some ways shameful, and still be included at grad time. This in fact was their ascendancy.
In fact such an ascendancy was what was allowed from the mid-seventies on. And many women I knew back then gravitated easily to what was allowed. It was at times hallucinogenic how competent they were at mimicry and false outrage over any bump in their fairly privileged positions.
That is, many of them did not do what my grandmother did, and what so few women or men ever do: something independent enough to be not allowed. What I am saying is that within their set so many of them were terrified of what most people still are, and what independent—and they are few—women and men have always had to face, and that is disapproval. And many times severe disapproval.
It is also a condition vastly acceptable to pretend that the radicalism you hold is not in fashion when if it were not in fashion, you would never have joined to hold it.
So many of them were so offended over such inoffensive things that they like the princesses they were could feel the pea of offence twenty-five mattresses down.
In these university hallways I came up against a censure of Catholicism that even in the bitter rural, untrained backbiting between Protestants and Catholics I had not experienced before. Because it was intolerance intellectualized, and in so many ways just as bigoted. It was in effect a mutually accepted social devaluing of a whole group of people because of their creed, which would be frowned upon if it was any other persons or creed.
“This is the one thing we can lay into with gusto” their eyes seemed to say.
What was and at times still is so disturbing about so many young women and men in that time at university was that they believed that the dislike or even condemnation of ordinary things like kindness, family, children—or especially kindness toward men—was a disintegration of their core values. To me that is falseness anthropomorphized, yet poets and writers were invited into study halls to read and demonstrate this as boldly authentic.
But what some Canadian books hide or attempt to hide is how it is fashionable today to poach independent thought then revise and straitjacket it to fit their schoolboy parameters. So in their books, women like my grandmother would toss the statue of the Virgin aside, and come to a more acceptable view of the world—that is, the view the writer wants her to have. They would be predictably ironic and bold (my word, they talk about sex), outrageous and irreverent. And predictable, as Laurence’s Hagar Shipley is predictable, is the word. In this way many writers still do what schoolboys have often done: silently dismiss my grandmother’s true humanity for a mirrored one, but look virtuous and emancipated whenever they address an audience about her emancipation.
“You see, that’s what women were really like back then.”
No, my son, they weren’t. They were far less a mimic and far greater a person. My grandmother never had the option to follow or the time to learn the prescribed rituals of independence. She never went out of her way to shock or be irreverent. She was too tough, and she had too much to do.
So if I take this as my argument, that the women (and men) who so easily attached the label “feminist” to themselves did what was allowed, I can elaborate just a bit, and say if it was allowed in the eighties, something else other than feminism was allowed in the twenties—and nine-tenths of them would have been compelled to only do what was allowed then, as well. They would have ridiculed my grandmother for working and laughed at Zelda Fitzgerald (if they had heard of her). There would be exceptions, of course, but the exceptions would be few—just as in any real world. Therefore most of them would have looked upon my grandmother as a fallen woman, and gossiped about her as such. Like those angry little girls she hired in good faith who let their boyfriends in the side door and set up mean little robberies of my father’s few pennies.
I suppose I got argumentative when many of the feminists I met back in the eighties kept telling me that my grandmother was a forerunner of themselves. They said this pleasantly, as if they had proven something that I should celebrate. And were disappointed when I did not.
“In what way was my grandmother like you?”
&
nbsp; “She was independent.”
“Like you?”
“Well, yes—like me.”
One particular woman I know had started in grade one, and went through high school, went to university until she became a civil servant, and spent her life at it. At all these points in her life she believed what she was told. She was a feminist in the age of feminism—how hopelessly brave is that.
My grandmother did not have those more affluent gifts. She was out of school in grade six, was a self-taught musician, married outside her faith, which was deemed scandalous, but remained a Catholic; was left a widow with three small children; ran a movie theatre, when it was considered disreputable for a woman to work (especially in a theatre); and at the age when that progressive young woman was told in her course on feminist theory she had been victimized, Janie, my grandmother, was dressing as a man at night and, armed with a large RCMP flashlight, left her children in the care of my five-year-old father and went out to protect her advertisement posters from being ripped up by boys her opposition hired. And she knocked more than one man cold, not because she disliked men—in fact she liked men a good deal—but she had to, to protect her signs. So the difference between these two lives is not a difference in degree—but there is a difference in kind, which is completely and forever dismissed by unwise people. This mistake allows a transference of moral justification from the workaday world of my grandmother toward the more accepted middle-class posture considered now to be the only fuel that ever sparked independent women.
I often felt some young women I knew in the eighties and nineties were filching from my grandmother, her dignity and independence, just like a drunk filches in a tavern by pretending to share the virtue and concern of other drinkers.
But examine this from another angle. Let us see my grandmother taking that same course in feminist theory—and staying as tough and independent as my grandmother was. No. It could not be done. That’s the secret—for in order to be tough there has to be a self-determining and self-autonomous side that allows for unique thought—and few things regulated in a classroom ever chart that course. That is what is so distressing about what is now considered independence, what is so untrue about it. That is why many of those young women reminded me of characters from Turgenev’s Virgin Soil and became the officious cookie cutter replicas of one another, determined never to smile as you passed by. For you were the enemy, the terrible masculine writer, even though all your life you loved women as much as they.
My grandmother’s tragedy has often been reduced to movie sound bites that my father ran in our theatre without knowing how close these came to poaching my grandmother’s life. From Norma Rae, to the sisterhood movies of Jane Fonda, to the self-glorifying Thelma and Louise (women can be violent; men are not allowed to be), they are in their easy summations of what virtue is, dogmatic and less free than one could imagine. Far less free than certain nuns I have met and liked.
And what is virtue finally for many of these liberation movies—it seems, at times, and many times, virtue is the disinclination to disagree with their new convention; the hesitation to take on falsehood if it comes from them; and the uncertainty of truth to remain truth, if truth disagrees with their censure, their disapproval and their own kind of misinformation. So in the end virtue becomes falsehood and untruth.
I have been told all my life that this is the way it was when men ran the world—a world of falsehood, contrivance and untruth.
I saw first-hand in my lifetime, most of the same things applied whenever women did.
2005
REFLECTIONS FROM THE POOLS
A LETTER TO ANTON: I HAVE TAKEN A TRIP WITH YOUR MOM down the Bartibog River after trout. It is in the late spring and the water is high. I could write about this, I suppose, and tell you how we found a small run below a pool called Toomey’s Quarry, where as my green butt butterfly went across the water and disappeared, a trout came up and grabbed it and a bear appeared just above us, watching. I had to play that fish with an audience I was hoping did not disapprove. That was long ago, thirty-eight years ago now, and that is one of the few things I remember about that particular trip, except the wind came up and it was colder as the day went on, and the rocks burdened us so much Peg said she would never run Bartibog again. She had packed a little lunch, and had brought napkins and white wine and wore a nice hat. Was it that trip or another where I cut my leg? No, Anton, that was another trip, the day I had walked down the long hill to Aggens Pool on the lower part of Bartibog River and fell on a glass bottle that lay off to the side of the pathway I walked. Aggens Pool, which the boys all called (and the girls, too) Maggie Aggens Hole. I tore the sleeve from my shirt and wrapped my leg up, and continued on.
There is a song about Maggie Aggens Hole that comes from the age of your mom’s uncles. It is sung to the Johnny Horton tune “The Battle of New Orleans.” These were boys who lived and died along the Bartibog River and grew up to be as grand as any men you might meet. One who came back shell-shocked from Italy (that horrendous forgotten part of the Second World War) and saved money so he could pay for his own funeral because Veteran Affairs would not; that is, they cut his pension, and he was left alone and broke. Oh yes, it seems to me that’s a part of fishing rivers, as well, for he haunted the rivers of my youth that I, too, remember as part of my past, a past drifting away like a solitary fisherman poling a Nor-West canoe down the Miramichi River at twilight.
Some nights you would see him walking home after dark, a string of trout from those hidden leafed-over pools deep in the Bartibog wood. In Bartibog I met the first real true fishermen. And went to Aggens Pool many times alone. It is one of the most beautiful trout pools in the whole Miramichi Valley, and here’s a secret: it doesn’t always produce, but when it does there are magnificent moments, clandestine, for in some way all great fishing is a secretive act—an act between you and God. Don’t laugh at your old man, Anton, for when the fish takes, you will know I tell the truth. There are brook-run sea trout weighing upward of five or six pounds, and salmon migrate there in the fall; move upriver under the leaves turning golden in the frost, and lie silent in the cold water of Kennan or Green Brook Pool, or any of the other pools that have formed our Bartibog River. Eagles will soar in the blue sky, the feathers at the tips of their wings moving just slightly in the currents of air far, far above us. If it is early enough in the day, the sun will light off the ice-covered boulders and seem like fire through the alders, the wind will only blow a little and you might see a buck in rut against the morning slopes, or a bear meandering away into its den for winter. Anton, I know you might think that autumn is a strange time to fish, but when the sun does its job and warms those boulders, the fish begin to move and a bright patterned fly will work. I have seen men take a fishing rod, some butt bugs and flies and, packing a shotgun in their canoe, pole down the river from the Bailey bridge that crosses the river near the highway, to Green Brook Pool, and onward to Kennan and Toomey’s Quarry, watching for partridge on the wooded slopes, for salmon moving up the winding rocky river just at dusk.
I fell out of the canoe that day with Peg, that day in springtime so long ago I look upon us as children now. You see, it was growing late and I had managed to take a few trout, and Peg had picked a bag of fiddleheads on the warm riverbanks at midday, moving from patch to patch through the spring grass, like women have done for hundreds of years. Later we moved downriver with the sun in our eyes. I began to look around her to see how the water was bundling to rapids below us. Night was coming on, and we had another four miles to our old car.
“Where is it?” I finally said.
“Where is what?” Peg asked.
“You know, that rock.”
“What rock—everywhere I look I see rocks—there is not a place on the whole Bartibog River I don’t see rocks.”
So I stood in the stern, to see where the hidden boulder was, that boulder just below the gravel-pit pool—everyone
who has ever been in a canoe will know the one I mean. But when I stood, I saw, alas, we were right upon it. Son, I went flying into the air over your mom’s head and into the water, with a kind of embarrassing kersplash. Shadows played across the water in the late day, and I had to take off my clothes and dry them out on the rocks of the riverbank.
There is a poem by the great Newfoundland romantic bard Al Pittman called “Once When I was Drowning.”
I almost drowned trying to cross the Northwest Miramichi River later that same June. I went down in my chest waders just above Little River Pool, a magnificent pool on the main Northwest Miramichi where I took a twelve-pound salmon in late June that year. The water was still high at that crossing and I felt my legs go out from under me when I became tangled up in rapids. I tried desperately to keep my balance, but you know me on my feet—I had no luck. Down I went in my chest waders. The pressure from water rushing into my waders caused my body to turn in complete circles under the water, my feet bobbing. But I shoved my arms against the river bottom and managed to right myself, and then swim across to the shore, my waders weighing an extra seventy pounds and my rod in my left hand. (I was alone at the time and this was an incident I was not going to tell anyone, but it is something that has happened to so many of us that not telling you seems silly; besides, I am not bothered by my own silliness anymore.) I took off my waders, walked down to the little river pool and on my fourth cast hooked a grilse. But the fish jumped three times and spit the hook.
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