I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well

by Norman Levine

  God, full of compassion . . .

  The service culminates in the Jewish mourners’ prayer Kaddish.

  Pressured and most probably harassed by an emotional and recriminatory sister and an even more outspoken niece (a prickly and tenuous relationship I avoided in conversation, a relationship soured, so I gathered, by the shame of Norman’s lack of religious observance), suffering possibly from twinges of vestigial and filial guilt, suffering under the expectations of nephews, nieces, and cousins, from the assumptions of friends and acquaintances of his mother—and, as it later turned out, from sometime neighbours from Guigues Street, old school friends he scarcely remembered, members of the Golden Age Club, a doddery tailor from the Market and a seamed acquaintance from the Rideau Bakery, a cutter from Dworkin Furs, aged people unknown, pressured by the sheer machinery of the Jewish Community, Norman had returned to Ottawa to say Kaddish.

  This observance, this prayer, this ritual unveiling, was fraught also with emotions unmentioned. I had gathered over the years that some part of the motivation for Norman’s residence in England was a flight from his mother’s dominance, a dominance that he felt threatened his sexual ability with women, his sexual being. The story “A Father” suggests that Norman feared becoming his father, the nebbish whose role was to fetch soft drinks and make sandwiches for the players, the card-players with money, the players with power, his wife among them.

  “Let’s hear you, then,” said Myrna as we were sitting in the kitchen that first evening.

  She passed him a prayer book.

  Without looking at it, Norman briskly declaimed.

  יתגדל ויתקדש שמה רבא בעלמא די־ברא כרעותה. וימליך מלכותה בחייכון וביומיכון ובחיי דכל־בית ישראל בעגלא ובזמן קריב. ואמרו אמן.

  Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will.

  May he establish His Kingdom in your lifetime and during your days, and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen.

  “Go on,” she said.

  Norman frowned at the page.

  “Um . . .” he said.

  * * *

  Norman was telling me an anecdote typically full of relentless digression. I wasn’t following closely. Smoke from his cigarillo as he gestured. He raised his scotch.

  “This is very nice,” he said.

  “It’s only Ballantine’s,” I said.

  “No. I meant the glass. I like the weight of it.”

  What I was really thinking about was his boots. Not ankle boots but short or half-boots. Polished leather. In good repair. I was thinking how much “Englishness” he’d absorbed in his years there. He was always neatly dressed, dapper, formal almost. I was thinking that in England, still, shoes were perhaps the class indicator. A grubby suit or trousers held up with an old tie told little but shoes told nearly everything.

  When Norman became a pilot officer he was sent to Quebec City to take what he used to call “gentleman lessons.” In the short story “In Quebec City” he wrote: “We were instructed how to use knives and forks. How to make a toast. How to eat and drink properly. It was like going to finishing school.”

  (One cannot usually read fiction with any assumption that it is autobiographical. Norman’s stories, however, are unusual in that invention is not his real interest; a little judicious rearrangement is often as far as he’s prepared to go. Michael Winter told Natalee Caple in The Notebooks interview: “I asked Norman Levine this question. About why his protagonists are always writers. And he said he’s not interested in making things up. I feel the same.”

  Norman was a man of contradictions. He certainly never repudiated his Jewish identity but at the same time he resented some of the circumstances of his life. In the story “A Father” he describes a photo of his father taken in Warsaw.

  “There is a picture of my father that is still around the house in Ottawa. It shows a youngish, handsome man with a magnificent moustache, waxed ends; a fine head with black wavy hair and eyes that I know to be brown. That picture was taken in Warsaw. And to it belong the anecdotes: ‘Man about Town’; ‘Friend of writers and painters’ (‘Yes, I knew writers. I used to buy them meals.’); Owner of a shoe concern (‘You can always tell if the leather’s good by the way it creases.’); and ‘Smuggler’—I’d like to think it was of diamonds.

  I never knew that man.

  The person I got to know in Ottawa was in his early forties, a fruit peddler. Slightly built, bald, with a sardonic face.”

  A fruit peddler with “a heavy white horse with nicotine-coloured tufts, and a delicate slow walk.”

  James Atlas wrote in Bellow: A Biography:

  “For immigrant Jews, life in America, especially in the early years of their transplantation, was difficult, perplexing, even shameful. Aran [Saul Bellow’s father] was a proud man who—in his own estimation—had lost status. In Russia, he had considered himself a gentleman; in America, he was a labourer. Like his wife, he felt he’d come down in the world.”

  Norman felt much the same way and often talked about the French Canadians they lived amongst and did business with in the Market in those days. They were generally considered by the Jews, he used to say, as bumpkins, hopeless rubes.

  He concludes Canada Made Me with these words:

  “I wondered why I felt so bitter about Canada. After all, it was all part of a dream, an experiment that could not come off. It was foolish to believe that you can take the throwouts, the rejects, the human kickabouts from Europe and tell them: Here you have a second chance. Here you can start a new life. But no one ever mentioned the price one had to pay; how much of oneself you had to betray.”

  These words cost him dearly. McClelland and Stewart had taken 500 copies of the British edition published by Putnam. Jack McClelland, however, refused to put his name on the book, refused to issue the book under the McClelland and Stewart imprint. The 500 copies quickly sold out but Jack McClelland refused to import more.

  After the 500 copies were gone, Levine said, “I realized that Canadian publishing was closed to me.” He remained unpublished in Canada for the next seventeen years.

  * * *

  While he never wished to repudiate his Jewish identity—after all, it formed the subject matter of his life’s work—he was at times ambivalent. England, the RCAF, and officer status in the most glamorous branch of the Armed Forces offered him a more sophisticated and expansive life than the house on Guigues Street with a stable off the kitchen for Jim, the horse with “nicotine-coloured tufts.” For while Norman was the son of a rather ineffectual fruit peddler, a man whom life had brought low, he was also a pilot/navigator flying Lancasters out of Yorkshire over Germany, one of those the British affectionately and gratefully had called “the Brylcreem Boys.”

  After the war he entered McGill taking a B.A. in 1948 and an M.A. in 1949. He then returned to England where he dithered for a while at Kings College of London University beginning to write on Ezra Pound. (He once said to me that after hearing recordings of what Pound had been spewing he had no more stomach for the man. He did finish the thesis, however, and submitted it to T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber. He showed me Eliot’s courteous letter of rejection; Eliot observed that academic theses always seemed have trouble evolving into books of general interest.)

  That Levine had chosen Pound is of considerable significance given his subsequent intentions and inventions and the progression of his artistic career.

  Norman married a Gentile, lived in St. Ives for forty years, and had little contact with Jewish life or belief. In St. Ives, dependent on magazine payments, the vagaries of royalties, occasional school-mastering, Norman was chronically short of money and sometimes applied to Mordecai Richler in London for loans. Mordecai at the time was writing film scripts and was reas
onably flush. He told me that Norman would request loans of such sums as £53, 3s., 3d.—the exact food or heating bills he owed—and that these loans were always repaid.

  Other friends, too, used to worry about his financial straits. The painter Francis Bacon sometimes took care-packages down to St. Ives, food hampers and treats for the children. Once while Norman was thanking him profusely, Bacon, probably embarrassed by the gratitude, interrupted him saying, “I don’t come down here to see you. I come to fuck sailors.”

  But impoverished or not, Norman was fastidious about what he would or would not write. In Ottawa, years earlier, I was chatting to someone after a reading while waiting for Norman to finish up. He was talking to a man in a dark suit.

  “Who was that?”

  “It was the son—I think he said Bertram—the oldest son—do you know Loeb’s grocery store downtown?—he’s the son of Moses Loeb.”

  “A fan?”

  “Do you know,” said Norman in scandalized tone, “what he said to me? He wanted me to write the history of the store and the biography of the family.”

  “Hoo-hooo!” I said. “Pots of money there, Norman. You could set yourself up for ages.”

  For Norman, being an artist was a priestly vocation. His face took on an expression of pain and distaste as if he’d been accosted in a public lavatory.

  I winced inwardly.

  “So what did you say?”

  In a low voice, he said, “I told him that that isn’t the sort of writing I do.”

  Myrna was becoming frustrated by our sitting around drinking scotch and smoking cigarillos and yakking. Myrna wanted to get him organized. As a boy in Ottawa, Norman would probably have spoken English mainly, perhaps a few words of Polish. What Hebrew he would have learned for his bar mitzvah would have been learned by rote and doubtless swiftly forgotten.

  (He claimed that, growing up, his main language had been Yiddish. In Robert H. Michel’s excellent CNQ article, Levine is credited with claiming that “Until school, his first language had been Yiddish.” What is meant by the word “school”? He left school at sixteen and worked as a clerk in a government office so he must have been working in English as his French, to the best of my knowledge, was non-existent. “School,” therefore, must mean primary school and the years at home subsequent to that. “Until school” seems to imply up to the age of Grade One—five or six years old. Yet when Myrna spoke to him using words and phrases of “kitchen” Yiddish it was obvious he had no idea of what she was saying.

  Another odd contradiction.

  (There is much about Norman that suggests there were several of him, that “Norman Levine” was a shifting invention.)

  Myrna was still trying to get him through the first line of the second verse, the response of the congregation.

  יהא שמה רבא מברך לעלם ולעלמי עלמיא:

  May His great Name be blessed for ever and ever.

  “Now, Norman,” she said. “The first part—May His great Name—sounds like this:

  Y’hei sh’mei rabbaw . . .

  Now, can you repeat that?”

  “Y’hei . . .” he said.

  “sh’mei rabbaw,” she repeated.

  Norman was not an apt pupil.

  “Again.”

  The unveiling was but three days away.

  * * *

  I am not at my best before or during breakfast. I am civil and dutiful but not exactly affable. After sleep, I like to re-enter the world quietly and in silence, preferably while reading the newspaper in which I have no particular interest. These days I find myself doing little more than mentally copy-editing it and supplying for the words which spell-checking had accepted the words actually intended.

  Norman, on the other hand, chattered; sometimes positively gibbered. The phrase “stream of consciousness” might have been invented to describe his unending flow. He was inexhaustible with tiny enthusiasms. The tartness of homemade marmalade, that Apostle spoon beside the dish of marmalade, hallmarks on silver, hallmarks in general, “there has to be a leopard’s head on it,” bread in France, Poilâne bread, croissants, “you must have French butter in the croissants because it has a higher fat content,” the patina on the pewter wine-measure on the mantelpiece, the thumb-piece on the wine-measure handle and lid a pair of acorns, acorns as feed for pigs that produced an extra-delicious ham that Anne bought in Andernos-les-Bains, “It comes from Spain.”

  Moira Dale, companion of his last years, said to me in Yorkshire years later, “Everything’s a little excitement to him. He’s like a child.”

  On the third day of his visit, I got up early, went out and bought croissants for breakfast on Elgin Street—not Parisian, unfortunately, but Japanese from Boko Bakery. Then I bought two copies of the Globe and Mail.

  Andernos-les-Bloody Bains, I thought, in the bloody Bassan.

  When Norman came downstairs, I said, “Thought you’d like the paper,” and returned to reading mine.

  Moments later, in a move I had not foreseen, he started to read from his aloud.

  There was in those days a small column headed Nota Bene.

  After some rustling, he suddenly said, “Not a beeny! What does that mean!”

  I glanced up to see if he were attempting ponderous humour.

  It seemed he wasn’t.

  I was astounded.

  Although Norman had two degrees in English and then had done further degree work at Kings College, he never made any reference to matters which such an academic background would have made entirely familiar, the daily furniture of the mind. Not only that, I cannot remember his ever talking about books at all. He never asked me about my own writing, never chatted about any of the young writers I was publishing at the Porcupine’s Quill.

  Thinking of this, I realized that he had probably never read such writers as Anthony Powell, Kingsley Amis, Beryl Bainbridge, Muriel Spark, and such . . . and almost certainly not Eudora Welty, Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, and, say, Ann Beattie.

  (The only literary comment I recall his ever making concerned Mordecai Richler’s comment on Margaret Laurence. When she was living near London and beginning to publish—This Side Jordan, The Tomorrow-Tamer, The Stone Angel—Norman asked Mordecai what this new writer was like. Replied Mordecai, “An innocent.”)

  In contradiction to the Norman Levine who chattered was the very unchildlike Norman Levine who spoke not at all. When I began to think about Nota Bene and his literary absence, as it were, I came to the conclusion that he had cut himself off from contemporary literature in a quite deliberate way. He lived in St. Ives, a remote and difficult part of England to get to. Mordecai Richler had chosen London (and, earlier, Paris), London and casual journalism, and film scripts. Norman had turned his back on such worldly frivolity. He had lived—implacably was the only word—to create, at whatever cost, what he was creating. This endeavour consumed him. He did not concern himself with the artistic aspirations and achievements of others. What mattered to him was to perfect—implacably—his version of high modernism.

  * * *

  Myrna was losing patience.

  “But Norman,” she said, “when you arrived you rattled off the opening without even looking at the book.”

  “I got it from a book that had that verse in Roman alphabet . . .”

  “Well, I’m going to have to do the same thing,” she said. “There’s simply no time. Transliterate, I mean.”

  “My sister sent it,” he said. “Judaism in Family Life it was called.”

  “Hardly kosher, is it?” I said. “Transliterating.”

  She gave me a look.

  “But actually he’s got a point, Norman. The rabbi’s ultra orthodox.”

  “Severe,” I said. “Intolerant. Suits in need of dry cleaning. Unwordly.”

  “Be,” said Myrna, “ultra discreet.”

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sp; “Cunning,” I said. “Monstrous secrecy!”

  “Roger!” said Norman.

  That evening she rummaged in the junk drawer at the end of the bookcase and found her silver propelling pencil and a Staedtler eraser and settled to work. I watched her. Half-listening to Norman’s account of a dinner party in Toronto at which Elizabeth Smart appeared with a shopping bag containing full bottles of gin, scotch and vodka in case the hostess’s provision proved meagre and some sad detail about her offering later in the shared taxi to suck Norman’s thumb, I watched the fall of Myrna’s hair, watched light glinting on the silver pencil.

  We had bought the pencil at Antiques on High, an arcade of tiny boutiques in a building on The High in Oxford. I had bought myself a silver letter opener. The pencil was Edwardian from the look of it, very slim, elegant, at a guess originally nestled next to the spine of a leather-bound diary or address book. The knob at the end was quatrefoil; it was always the archaic usage knop that came to mind. At my brother’s house we’d polished the pencil and letter opener with Goddard’s Silver Polish.

  Short weeks later after we’d returned to Canada, my mother died; she had been nearing one hundred and five. That morning of the pencil-buying we had been to see her in the nursing home.

  Her hands gripped the arms of the wheelchair.

  With eyes rendered sightless by macular degeneration she gazed down the bedroom’s length.

  Tapping the back of her hand, the orderly said, “Here your son.”

  I stooped towards the useless hearing aid.

  “John? Is that you, John?”

  I squeezed her hand.

  “I have bad news,” she said. “Your brother is a wanted man.”

  “Really?”

  “He is being hunted by the police. He beat Dorothy for her behaviour. On her posterior. When she visited me, she was unable to sit down.”

  “Really!”

  “I am sorry to tell you that Dorothy gave birth last night to a child not your brother’s.”

  “Good heavens!”

  My brother is an internationally famous numismatist and historian of matters medieval with vast expertise also in Anglo-Saxon and Viking coinage and trade routes. His most recent work had been three volumes on the White Bezants and Deniers of the Frankish Kingdom of Guy de Lusignan in Cyprus. Now retired, he had been for many years the Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room of the Ashmolean museum. He and Dorothy were in their seventies.