“Yes, his men carried all my belongings.”
“You should have said that downstairs.” He picked up the walkie-talkie and said, “That Bobbsey Twin was sent by Ginger. Why don’t you guys get your heads out of your arse holes?”
“Wow — sorry, man” came back as a static blast.
He talked on the phone for a minute and then turned to me and said, “I’m putting you into Ginger’s ashram.”
“I need my own bedroom,” I assured him.
“Don’t worry. There is only one ashram per floor. They’re gigantic. There are four double-occupancy rooms plus four singles. The bedrooms open onto a huge lounge, kitchen and bath.” I looked askance at him. He assured me, “You’ve got horsehoes up your arse. A mansion is yours for the taking, babycakes.”
I thought it sounded a bit too luxurious and so I asked, “What’s the rent?”
“We can figure it out later.” Then he added as an afterthought, “Not much.”
“Do you want the first and last month’s rent?”
“No, that messes up my books. I’ll get a hold of you when I’m sorted out here.” (Apparently he never sorted out his huge piles of papers or accounts, because I didn’t pay a cent the entire time I lived there.) “Anyway, I have to get the all-day breakfast and then go to bed so —” he paused, shook my hand and said, “we’re square.”
When I got to my ashram on the fourteenth floor, I tried to open the door but Mitzi and Mikvah began growling and attacking the door like Nazi attack dogs. Ginger’s assistant tied up the dogs and I entered. The inside of the door had lost most of its paint from dogs scratching at it and was completely pitted with bite marks. Ginger, who sat alone at the table working on some papers, welcomed me and said he had several flunkies “consolidating some product and clearing out some rooms.” The assistant gave Mikvah and Mitzi my red scarf to smell. I learned that professionally trained dogs need to familiarize themselves with your scent so they don’t go crazy when you come and go.
The living room was huge, and one whole wall was floor-to-ceiling windows facing west. They had curtains, but there must have been a small fire because half of them were burned and only their charred remains hung limply. The room had no furniture other than a large table in the middle that could seat at least fifteen people. I said to Ginger, “This place is gigantic. It must be almost a whole floor. Who else lives here besides you?”
“You,” he said without looking up.
I went and opened the double fridge to find some orange juice and dozens of rows of bottles with two small pills in each vial. “Is someone here a diabetic?” I asked.
No one even bothered to answer. I went down the hall and opened a door to find a room filled with solid bricks of hash piled to the ceiling. I opened another door and found bales of what looked like marijuana. And on it went. The ashram was large and must have been designed for communal living — nine to a dozen people could have lived there. I actually passed a little phone booth room that had all kinds of numbers written on the wall. Finally, after passing several doors, I found my two rooms. They were clearly meant as two separate living units with a shared bath between them. They were both bright and freshly cleaned. Each room had a built-in desk, ample built-in bookshelves, and picture windows across one whole wall, with a gorgeous view looking south onto the University of Toronto, which was less than a block away. I could see all the way down to Lake Ontario. I used one room as a bedroom and one as my own living room. I was so far away from the communal living room and kitchen that I couldn’t hear a thing that went on down there. My rooms and bath were luxurious compared to where I had been living. When retrieving my belongings in the hall, I passed two flunkies carrying scales, bags, tweezers and vials that had been emptied from my room. I unpacked my books and began my life in Rochdale.
CHAPTER 16
possessing coleridge
And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin
Is pride that apes humility.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Devil’s Thoughts”
I arrived late for the first day of my Coleridge class with Professor Coburn. That’s one way to make a stellar first impression. My alarm hadn’t rung since the electricity had been shut off in the entire Rochdale high-rise since midnight. It turned out that no one had paid the bill. Spencer, the superintendent of sorts, said he “forgot” and besides he was sick of Toronto Hydro’s “Big Brother tactics.” Even though I was horribly late, I still took the time to dress in the latest fashion, as dictated by the elusive Rick James.
I tore into class wearing my pink long-underwear top, purple fringed vest and bell-bottom pants made out of an old faded kilim carpet. (Fashion tip: never buy carpet pants unless you want to itch, boil, have trouble bending to sit and have a kilim imprint on your rear end.) On top of my long blond hair, I wore a red felt mushroom hat.
An old woman in a grey boiled-wool suit, like the kind worn by the Von Trapp family, looked up at me and said, “The undergraduate office is down the hall,” and continued talking.
“Sorry for interrupting, but where is Professor Coburn? I have to find his class; I’m late.”
The old lady said, “I am Professor Coburn and I was, until this moment, conducting a graduate seminar.”
“You’re Professor Coburn?” I can’t believe I used that insulting tone. Why hadn’t I thought for even a moment before I spoke? It never occurred to me that Professor Coburn was a woman. Recovering far too late, I added, “Oh, then I’m in the right place.” I had to walk to the back of the small seminar room to find a chair. I tried to hold my beaded fringes so they wouldn’t jingle. As I glanced around the room, I saw less than a dozen people. Every male wore a sports jacket and most wore ties. There were only two women. One looked British and wore a navy blue polyester suit and spectator pumps. Her entire ensemble, mouse-coloured hair and pasty skin made her look remarkably like a female Salvation Army worker. The other was a striking Indian woman who screamed Brahmin. She wore a saffron-coloured sari wrapped around a fitted, short crimson shirt. Her thick black hair was pulled back in a bun, and she displayed a large red dusty dot on her forehead. This was not yet the age of multiculturalism, and I suddenly realized that these top students had come from all over the world and all wanted the one job of working on the famous notebooks.
This had not been an auspicious beginning. I couldn’t believe I had adopted Rick James’s view of Canadian fashion. He was outlandish even compared to Jimi Hendrix. While I was ruminating on how misled I’d been, I looked up and noticed the class members glancing at me with poorly camouflaged disdain. No one spoke and you could hear the heat going off and then on. Finally, Professor Coburn said, “Now that you have graced us with your presence, perhaps you would like to introduce yourself. Am I to presume that the woman who has burst upon us is Miss McClure?”
I nodded.
“I have already passed around the sign-up sheet for seminar topics. I am afraid that your choices will be limited. Each lecture will be delivered to the class for the duration of the two and a half hours.” I had no choice but to sign up for Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare at Oxford. How boring was that? No wonder no one chose it.
As Professor Coburn continued her lecture, I slumped in my seat realizing I’d made a cockup of my first impression and there was no second chance. I gazed out the window at the red and yellow carousel of leaves and watched the normal students casually and quietly amble across Queen’s Park to Victoria College. They had not flown through a window in England or worn a clown suit to graduate school and insulted the teacher. Crash landing first impressions seemed to be my specialty.
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As the months crawled by, I began to get the lay of the land. I had thought I was going to be pretty sharp, having memorized most of Coleridge’s poetry and having a sense of what he was trying to say. Slowly it dawned on me that knowing the poetry was under
graduate jejune pap. Everyone in the class had accomplished that. This was a research degree and the poetry of Coleridge was never mentioned. It was about researching every arcane fact and exploring every stray whim that Coleridge ever had. You sourced all of his literary antecedents and figured out how Coleridge’s poetic alchemy turned the philosophical ideas into poetry. Hours were spent on Coleridge’s distinction between imagination and fancy. We also had to know and fully understand his strange autobiography, Biographia Literaria, which was more of a group of philosophical essays than it was autobiography. We had to know all the philosophy of Kant, Fichte and particularly Schelling, whose work Coleridge had translated from German. This was not at all what I’d bargained for, but I quickly realized that I had better switch gears from poetry to research while simultaneously sweeping up after the mess I’d made with my dreadful first impression.
The University of Toronto was not at all like Oxford. There I’d felt really liked by all, despite my eccentricities and occasional spats. At Trinity I was just thought of as American and “out there.” Plus, I’d had some original things to say and that had gained me some respect. The men at Oxford were not academically competitive with me — they were helpful. They had already competed and won. They’d made it to Oxford, the top of the intellectual heap, and they could afford to be generous to an American woman. Despite our personal differences, they were unfailingly helpful and devoted hours to teaching me what I didn’t know. Even grouchy Marcus would drop everything to help me with what I needed. I really couldn’t have managed without their help.
I could tell that the same was not true here. I could smell the competition the second I walked into the room. There were several problems at the University of Toronto. The first was the program itself. According to Kathleen Coburn, you had only one option as a Coleridge scholar: you must annotate the Coleridge notebooks, which was her life’s work and would be the life’s work of whoever took over when she joined Coleridge in the sky — which from the looks of her was not far off. (Looking back on it, she was the same age then that I am now.) To me, annotation felt tedious and took the originality out of scholarship. The students were reduced to providing footnotes. We were not to talk of the ideas, but to delineate the minutiae. Professor Coburn had been at this for thirty years. She’d picked the carcass clean of all intellectual meat. Even the carrion was long gone. We were left with Coleridge’s shiny skeleton.
We also had to take dry research courses like Bibliography. This was before the personal computer, so we had to have library research skills. I was faced with writing a paper on delineating original watermarks.
The curriculum problems were nothing compared to the students. They fell into several camps. Some had gone to Ivy League American schools or top European universities like Heidelberg or the Sorbonne. Either they hadn’t done well and had to be shipped off to Canada for a lesser degree, or they were ambitious and wanted to get in on the Coleridge notebook gravy train. In any case, they were vipers.
Then there were the true lovers of everything Victorian who feigned an inability to function in the twentieth century since their sensibilities rested in the nineteenth. They were the ones who donned antiquated hats, like the Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, or replicated the Keatsian tubercular wan look, complete with wire-rimmed glasses, large scarf, Irish tweed cap and an oversized sweater for the bitterly cold Canadian weather.
The Toronto-born Mr. Thomas Benchman, known as Toady after my first conversation with him, spoke in a phony English accent and, to top his foppery, wore a black cape and carried a walking stick. Whenever we went to plays or talks together as a class, he would always sit next to the professor; then he would turn to the rest of us at intermission and say, “Chaps, may I stand you mead?” Mr. Benchman was the reason no one should take the psycho out of sycophant.
There was a third intellectual conundrum, which made the boring annotation, and even the class of vipers, pale; Professor Coburn was in love with, or obsessed by, Coleridge. I now understood why she had gone to his former home for tea and befriended the odd couple. She had been courting Coleridge. She would not tolerate anything negative said about the man or his work. If you did, she would say absolutely nothing, but her jaw would set and her eyes would narrow. She would look away as though you had done something socially verboten. If you said something neutral or positive, she would answer with delight.
It was easy to say nothing bad about Coleridge’s work; after all he was a poetic genius. It was quite a bit harder to be truthful, yet worshipful, about the man, who was an opium addict and an alcoholic. He did most of his best work in his twenties and forever after rested on his laurels and sponged off others. Dorothy Wordsworth, William’s sister and a “close” friend to Coleridge, summed up his love life best when she said he was a terrible lover who suffered from gynecomastia (enlarged male breasts) and erectile dysfunction. She referred to Coleridge as “one whose realm is not that of the land twixt the sheets.”
As the year wore on, the piddling annotating, the class of vipers and the obsessive, possessed professor were giving me battle fatigue. Yet I couldn’t drop out. I had a dying father and a mother who needed taking care of. I needed an academic job, and this one would be a plum. We were the Baby Boom generation. Thousands of us wanted to have academic jobs. I read in The Grad News (an oxymoron if there ever was one) that there were enough Ph.D. graduates from Harvard every year to fill all the vacancies in English literature in North America. If I didn’t take over the notebooks, what was I going to be — a freelance Coleridge consultant?
With my seminar date approaching, I set to researching Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare at Oxford in 1818, but I found that most of the lectures had not been preserved. (How would I fill my two and a half hours?) I had to rely on the reactions of the critics and collections of letters, diaries, etc., which gave their mostly negative opinions of the lectures. He was so drunk or high or both on the nights of the lectures, he didn’t stay on topic. In his sixth lecture he was, by advertisement, to speak of Romeo and Juliet and “Shakespeare’s females.” Although the audience came to see him on four separate occasions to hear Coleridge on Romeo and Juliet, he never got around to it. According to diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, “unhappily some demon whispered the name of Lancaster in his ear: and we had in one evening an attack on the poor Quaker, a defence of boarding school flogging, a parallel between the ages of Elizabeth and Charles, a defence of what is untruly called unpoetic language, an account of the different languages of Europe, and a vindication of Shakspere against the imputation of grossness!!!” Why the audience came again after three of these misfires, I have no idea. The question remained for me — how was I to write a paper on Shakespeare’s lectures when they weren’t ever on Shakespeare? After struggling with the topic for weeks, I finally decided that I wasn’t even in the running for the academic position. There were people in the class who were far more intellectually and temperamentally suited for the job. After this revelation, I felt freed to simply write a three-hour paper including the entire original diary reports, but needed more, so I filled in the missing lectures and their content from my own imagination. I wrote as though I were Coleridge, drunk and stoned, writing about Shakespeare. I had the whole vernacular down pat because I lived at Rochdale with stoned people who always had excuses for not doing anything. I could mimic that and then add a Coleridgean nineteenth-century spin.
I gave my lecture in a deadpan manner, as though it were perfectly academic. No one laughed or said one word during the performance. At the conclusion of my lecture, or one-woman comedy show, Professor Coburn looked at me as though she had never seen me before and said, “That was extremely entertaining, and it included all of Coleridge on Shakespeare, and what was most laudable is it was done in the true spirit of Coleridge.”
In my mind, there was one person in the class who was most suited to take over the notebooks. It was the Indian woman, Deepti Mukherjee. She had obvio
usly had a broad education and was as conversant in philosophy as she was in literature. She reminded me of many of the students I’d met at Oxford who knew how to tie ideas together from several disciplines and create a textured intellectual landscape. She could command a room with her intellectual sophistication and her magnificent saris and kohl-outlined eyes. The other amazing thing about her was she had a small child in India whom she’d left with her husband and his family. I had never heard of anyone doing that and getting away with it. She was a Commonwealth Scholar who clearly was not fooling around.
I thought it was obvious she was next in line to get the professorship. She had given up her husband, country and child for it. However, she had one flaw, which was in her case fatal. She thought she could offer a serious criticism of Coleridge and get away with it. In her presentation, she pointed out Coleridge had misunderstood Kant and that Coleridge’s theory of the creative imagination was built on that misunderstanding. Toady was thrilled when she’d criticized Coleridge. During the class break, he leaned over to me and whispered, “Poor Deepti. Stick a fork in her. She’s done like dinner.”
When she’d finished her talk, Professor Coburn didn’t look at her but beyond her out the window into Queen’s Park, where the pigeons were despoiling a historical statue, and said as she packed up her papers, “Mrs. Mukherjee, thank you for your occasional nuggets of clarity.”
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In October Professor Coburn had our entire class of Coleridgean wannabes up to her farm in Uxbridge, a rural community outside of Toronto. Seeing that farm for the first time left an indelible imprint on my mind. I had never known a woman who lived alone, who’d never been married, who was a scholar and self-supporting. She had a working farm with animals and hay and tractor-driving farmers who followed her detailed instructions. She’d made a huge library and office with a view of all the horses, wheat fields and trees then fiery with fall colours. I saw for the first time what my life could be like if I were a scholar living alone. It looked marvellous to control my own destiny, ride horses, have my own home that I designed but that was historically tied to the landscape, and have a life’s project that I could create and enjoy.
Coming Ashore Page 22