He stood up.
So did I.
“You’d better sit. You’re only here for this summer so you’d better listen. I was like yourself twenty years back, perhaps better. I had first class honours, won prizes, had an offer to continue research in a San Francisco hospital. But I said to hell with them—”
He opened his arms indicating the untidy room.
“—they don’t make it easy for you to be a failure.”
Suddenly he seemed to lose interest in what he was saying, for he walked to the filing cabinet and from behind it took out an air rifle and a candle. He lit the candle and stood it up on top of the filing cabinet, in front of the crudely wrapped parcels. He broke his rifle and inserted a slug.
“Let’s see what kind of shot you are. Go against the far wall and put the flame out.”
The distance was about ten yards. I aimed. I missed. He made me try again. This time I hit the candle, knocking it down, but the wick still burned. He tried. His first shot either went through the flame, or very near it, for it flickered. The next one put it out. He returned the rifle to its place and offered me a cigarette.
“I know I’m tight, but it does not matter. What does any one person matter? They come into your world for a while then leave it just as quickly as they entered.”
He finished what was in his glass, poured more in, and drank it down.
“Don’t expect the men to like you. When they find out that you’ve been to university and have come here it’s like telling them that what they believe in is rotten. They work hard to save money so that their kids can go to university, get a degree, and not have to come to places like this. Then they see you here—”
The room was stuffy yet all the windows were shut. I was glad that he stopped talking, for I found the atmosphere in the room and the brandy had made me sleepy and I wondered how much longer he would go on before I could excuse myself and leave.
“Use your eyes and you can see a lot,” he said. “Everyone else who is here has not come by choice. The DPs are counting the days, marking them off on their calendars until they can get away to Toronto, Montreal, or Winnipeg. Those who work underground stay as long as the bonus makes it worthwhile, then they drift to some other place. A few scarecrows like Willie Hare and Old Harold hang on because the company ruined them as human beings. For fun the men play crap, smuggle hootch, and pin black lace panties on their walls that they get from the Soo.”
He stopped talking to drink and fill the glasses again.
“I suppose you’ll return to Montreal.” He burped and excused himself.
“I don’t want any of that kind of civilization. I’ve contracted out from all of them. I drink, and I write poetry.”
He tried to get more brandy out of the bottle but it was empty.
“Sometimes I go to the Soo. The last time, I took a case of Scotch, found myself a hotel room, locked the door, and I didn’t get out of bed as long as the Scotch lasted.”
He went over to his desk, unlocked a drawer, and brought out a leather folder. From it he took a piece of paper.
“I wrote this on my last blow.”
All your experiences:
Those bits.
Those pieces you carried away with you.
How long will they last?
At the undertaker she showed me the coffin.
“Oak the best wooden one
Won’t last you more than twenty-five years.
It falls away like paper.”
Those bits and pieces you carried away.
How long will they?
He stopped. For some reason he looked embarrassed. He went to his desk and returned the piece of paper to the leather folder.
“I’ve got a couple of hundred poems. Some day I’ll get them put into a nice book and send it to the dear old place with my compliments.”
The effort of reading seemed to sober him up for he threw the empty bottle into a large sack by his desk that had something soft in it, for there was no sound of the bottle hitting. He picked up his jacket.
“There’s no point staying in here.”
We went out and walked along the slope of the hill. The bell began to toll for lunch. Grass was burnt, and scattered were small patches of blueberry bushes. We walked on a narrow path sunk in the hard ground following the contour of the hill. I could see the tramline going down but we were too far away to hear the buckets creak, although the sound of the bell still reached us. The doctor walked in front.
“Fly in?”
“No. I took the train.”
“It only takes an hour to fly in.”
“The manager at the Soo told me pilots can’t find this lake easy.”
“There’s only one lake in the bush shaped like ours.”
We walked on. The sun was still hot. The bell tolled behind us. And I could now see a gull flying alongside the hill and a small piece of blue locked in the surrounding earth and rock growing larger below. The slope of the land entered the water and split the top quarter in two.
“What does she look like to you?” the doctor said.
I stood on a flat rock looking at the lake that I had come by on the bus yesterday.
“To me it’s more like a heart.”
He said this without waiting to hear what I might say.
SOUTH OF MONTREAL
Isee her now. In some kind of outer garment. Tugging at her lapels, as if it was falling off her shoulders. Her hair, a thin yellow-blond, piled on her head. She was short. A pale white skin. A largish nose. Talking elaborately, closing her eyes, exaggerating her gestures. She could have been an actress in some melodrama. Her name was Madame de Wyssmann. She was French Canadian, a widow, a Huguenot. She wanted her nephew Paul to be taught English so he could go to Loyola in the autumn. That’s how I came to Ile Aux Noix. I was to tutor Paul and two of his school friends—Jose and Mario—Guatemalans.
I am writing about the summer of 1947. I had just finished third year at McGill when I went down to the placement bureau to get fixed up with a job for the summer months. Madame de Wyssmann’s letter giving me detailed instructions on how to get to Ile Aux Noix was written in the largest copperplate I had seen.
On Saturday I left Montreal, by bus, over the light green bridge. And soon we were on a straight highway that led to the United States border. The countryside was uninteresting. Flat fields to the river that went parallel to the highway, with a few stilt cottages along the bank. The river had overflowed in the spring, and the receding water left reeds wrapped around the fence posts and around the trunks of the few trees.
I got off the bus by a telegraph pole that had a sign, Riverside Hotel, pointing down a dirt track to the river. Further along the highway was the white church steeple where the village began. Across the road, this fine row of poplars, a nice lawn, and a large stone house with white trimmings.
“You had no trouble getting here?”
“No Madame. Your instructions were exact.”
“Would you like some coffee? This is Madame.”
She introduced me to a gentle old woman in a brown print dress. She had bow legs and a small moustache. She spoke a few sharp words of French to her.
“Oui, Madame,” the old woman said and went to the kitchen. It could have been the voice of a young child.
My room was the small room on the first floor. The staircase was wide and wooden and it went up to a large tapestry on the wall showing a battlefield. There were shelves of books, mostly Balzac, and old National Geographic magazines. It was a fine house, cool in the middle of the summer, high ceilings, with highly polished wooden floors. Downstairs, the dining room was filled with Japanese screens and other stage props.
“They were given to me by Tyrone Power Senior,” Madame de Wyssmann said at lunch. “He and his wife had a cottage next to us by the river. I taught young T
yrone Power how to drive a car. We had fine times—but the interesting people who were here are gone.”
Her nephew Paul wore glasses and had straight blond hair that he combed back. He was tall but flabby. The two Guatemalans were quite different. Jose had brownish skin, curly dark hair. Until he met me he thought everyone in the world was a Catholic. Mario was smaller, white skin, sharp features. He mispronounced ham and jam at the breakfast table. They both laughed and smiled a lot.
On the second day, after breakfast, when they had gone to the village to collect the mail, Madame de Wyssmann came up to me.
“Sir,” she said. “Look what I have found in his bed.”
She gave me a rubber doll. It was a miniature nude woman about seven inches long. “What am I to do?”
“Boys are boys,” I said.
“It’s all he thinks about. He’s got this little DP in St. John’s. A little prostitute.” She closed her eyes and spat out the word. “He thinks of nothing else.” Then she said something in French that I didn’t understand. “I was married. But we slept in different rooms. He had to knock if he wanted to come in.”
“Were you married long?”
“Six months,” she said. “He was a lawyer. Much older. I came straight from the convent.”
At the end of the first week I realized why I was here. It wasn’t only to get her nephew into Loyola. Madame de Wyssmann believed that English meant refinement, and French Canadian was coarse and provincial. I was expected to help her nephew make the change.
Lessons meant reading from Vanity Fair (it was the only English book she had on her shelves) and giving them words from my Pocket Oxford Dictionary. We had spelling classes. We had reading classes. We talked in English. Sometimes it was on the grass around the stone house with the poplars overhead. And I would hear Madame de Wyssmann playing Chopin on the piano. More often I would go with the boys down the dirt path to the river, and there, from a garage, take out one of the three boats: the sailboat, the canoe, the dinghy. And we’d go up and down and across the Richelieu River while they read or spoke English.
I liked the river. There were red and black buoys in the middle to mark the channel. But weeds had claimed most of it. And sometimes the boat got so tangled in them that it came to a stop. Towards dusk, swallows would come over the water. And the beeches, the mountain ash, looked very pretty along the shore.
One Saturday afternoon, when there were no lessons, Paul and Jose and Mario came back to the stone house with a large white bird. They said they found it in a field by the river. It couldn’t fly. Paul carried it very gently in his arms. Outside the kitchen door he tied its long thin legs to a fence post with a leather strap, then pulled it by the neck until it stretched fully out, its whole length parallel to the ground, the wings hanging lifelessly by its sides. Jose came out of the kitchen with a knife and gave it to Paul, and Paul began to saw away at the neck. The wings began to beat the air. They were large wings. They made a swooshing sound and sent the dust on the ground moving. All the time he was fiddling away at the neck, the bird was stretched out as in flight, the wings beating powerfully, until he cut through.
At next day’s lesson, in the sailboat, I had Paul alone. In the middle of reading Thackeray he said, “I am French. Why should I try to be like the English?”
“It doesn’t hurt to know another language,” I said, not very convincingly.
But it was the end of that lesson. After that, Paul went through the motions. He was too polite for any more outbursts. But with his aunt, even when I was there, he spoke French. When she said, “Paul. Speak English,” he just smiled.
It had been the nicest summer I ever had in Canada. I had gone out fishing by myself, trolling for pike. I had gone out with old Lacosse (he did errands for Madame de Wyssmann). He taught me how to spear carp at night using a light. And I had gone with him in his old Ford when he collected the mail from the tin letter-boxes stuck crookedly to the wooden posts of the farms, and also on Saturday afternoons when he went for frogs. He had a sack and a stick. And he would knock the frogs and put them into the sack, then sell them to a Montreal restaurant. One afternoon, late in August, the frogs began to leave the fields by the river and move to the higher ground. But they had to get across the highway. The cars killed most of them. There were thousands of dead frogs lying on the highway for the next few days.
In the first week in September the trees had started to change colours. The swallows flew lower over the river. And splashes of red settled slowly on the reeds by the shore. The nights were cold. One day the radio said snow was expected. Jose and Mario were excited. They had never seen snow. They wanted to stay up all night. So we all did. The moon was large and orange. It was cold. But no snow fell.
Next day it was time to go away. I thanked Madame de Wyssmann. I said I enjoyed the summer. Old Madam brought me some coffee. Paul and Mario and Jose shook my hand. Then we went outside and stood by the spot where Paul had killed the bird waiting for the bus to come.
“What are you going to do?” Madame de Wyssmann asked.
I said I would finish university. Then go somewhere. Where, I didn’t know.
“You are young,” she said. “You still have your ambitions.”
A CANADIAN UPBRINGING
When people ask me why did I leave Canada and go over to England, the answer I give depends on the kind of person who is doing the asking.
If it is someone of my own generation, at some party, I tell them it was because of the attractive English girl who sat beside me at college and took the same courses as I did, and who was going back when she graduated. If it is someone like my bank manager, I say it was because of the five-thousand-dollar fellowship I got for postgraduate study. The only condition being that I had to do it at some British university. And if the question comes from an editor, I tell him that at that time I had just written a first novel and my Canadian publisher (to be), having read the manuscript, said that I would have to go to New York or London to get it published, then he would look after the Canadian market.
All of these have something of the truth about them. But what was behind them, and which I could not admit at the time, was the work of Alexander Marsden.
I had never heard of Marsden until I went to McGill. In my second year, Graham Pollack, one of the English professors—poor Graham, he’s dead now. No one, apart from the handful of students who took his courses, gave him much credit for the range of his reading, nor understood the kind of humility he brought into the classroom. He lectured, in a weak voice, on utopias throughout the ages, on science fiction, and on comparative literature, wiping away with a large white handkerchief the sweat that broke out on his forehead.
His office, which he shared with an assistant professor, was swamped with his books. Not only were they around the walls, but in piles on the floor. And it was from one of these piles that he pulled out A Canadian Upbringing by Alexander Marsden.
“I think you might enjoy this,” he said, blowing off the dust.
I began to read it late that night—in that large basement room on the corner of Guy and Sherbrooke that I rented from the Dean of Christ Church Cathedral. And when I finished the last page I was far too excited and disturbed to go to sleep.
It’s a small book, 112 pages. It was published in England in 1939. The first half deals with Marsden’s growing up in Montreal, the rest with a trip he made across the country in the early thirties: by riding freight cars, by bus, hitchhiking, and walking.
What first disturbed me was the shock that one gets when, without warning, you come across a new talent. But I was also disturbed by something else.
Although I was brought up in Ottawa—and Ottawa has, compared to Montreal, a small Jewish community—the kind of upbringing I had wasn’t much different from the one Marsden describes in Montreal. He pinned down that warm, lively, ghetto atmosphere—the strong family and religious ties—as well
as its prejudices and limitations. And when, at the end of the book, Marsden decides to leave Canada for England, not because he wants to deny his background but because he feels the need to accept a wider view of life, I knew that was the way I would go as well.
From Professor Pollack I found out what I could about Marsden, which was very little. Marsden had gone over to England in the late thirties, and as far as Pollack knew he had never come back.
I graduated that summer and set out for London with my five-thousand-dollar fellowship, the English girl, the manuscript of my novel, and the well-marked copy of A Canadian Upbringing.
In London I soon discovered that I didn’t care for the academic. And I dropped it. The attractive English girl went over to Paris and on the cross-Channel boat met an Englishman. And they married.
But I did get my novel accepted by an English publisher. And with this I decided to try and make, like Marsden, some kind of literary career over here.
I also tried to track down Marsden’s whereabouts. But the publisher of A Canadian Upbringing was out of business, and it was only a chance remark by the librarian at Canada House that put me on his trail. She didn’t know who he was, and had never heard of the book. But she remembered his name.
“I send him batches of Canadian papers,” she said, and pulled out a card from a file that had “Alexander Marsden” on top, and below, a series of crossed-out addresses. The last one she had was: The Little Owls, Mousehole, near Penzance, Cornwall.
I copied it into my address book and there the matter rested.
Until this summer. One of my short stories was bought up for a film, and with the money from that I bought myself a small English car, rented a cottage in Mousehole, and took my wife and kids for our first holiday in Cornwall.
I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well, and Other Stories Page 5