The Heavy Bear

  I WAS NO cavalier Buster Keaton when it came to money. I cared about it, I cared a great deal. Money was freedom, and freedom was . . . it wasn’t a fast car or a tropical holiday or an Italian villa in the Hollywood hills. “Whatever else poetry is freedom,” wrote Irving Layton. And freedom, then, must be poetry. One rises spirit-like out of the body of the other. There’s no escape, not really.

  I recalled one of my favourite works of short fiction, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” by the poet Delmore Schwartz. The story occurred to me just then, the way that sweet childhood flavour occurred to Proust’s narrator in In Search of Lost Time, except that my memory immediately released the curious wild stench of rotting salmon that I’d been smelling since the middle of the night. Proust put his mouth to a memory hidden in a madeleine, while I ignored the stench and pressed every intellectual and emotional substance of my being against a written text, the memory of a written text. Was that itself a kind of dream? If so, how was I responsible?

  Schwartz’s story is about a man who watches, on a screen in a movie theatre, the history of his parents’ courtship. It is Sherlock Jr., except darker, colder. Schwartz was a little boy when Keaton made his brilliant, out-of-body marvel – had the film influenced him?

  The story opens, “I think it is the year 1909. I feel as if I were in a moving-picture theatre.” The narrator then describes watching a scene from a silent film. After a few sudden jumps and flashes, the action begins. It is a specific June day in Brooklyn. The narrator sees his young father walking the streets, “once in a while coming to an avenue on which a streetcar skates and gnaws,” and jingling the coins in his pocket. This is interesting. Schwartz writes, “I feel . . . I am anonymous. I have forgotten myself: it is always so when one goes to a movie; it is, as they say, a drug.”

  Drugged, we watch the narrator’s father enter the house of his future in-laws, meet his future wife and take her on a date to Coney Island. All the while, we are given psychological insights into the characters of these two young people; both are playing a part dictated by their time and circumstances. As the date progresses, as the couple strolls along the boardwalk and gazes at the ocean, the narrator can’t bear the inevitability of their fate. He starts to cry, stands up and, stumbling over the feet of the other people in his row, goes to the men’s room. When he returns, the film’s still running, but several hours of screen time appear to have passed. His parents are dining at one of the best restaurants on the boardwalk, and suddenly, the narrator’s father proposes. The woman, who, remember, carries the possibility of the narrator deep inside her, sobbingly, joyously accepts. Now the story shifts to a fiercer, more heartbreaking gear. The narrator stands up in the theatre and shouts, “‘Don’t do it! . . . Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.’” The whole audience, annoyed, turns to look at the narrator. An usher appears, waving a flashlight. The old lady in the neighbouring seat tells the narrator to be quiet or else he’ll be put out. So the narrator shuts his eyes. But only briefly. He cannot stop watching the film, and, of course, neither can we, especially not after what he’s just shouted.

  The date continues. The couple has a photo taken in a photographer’s booth, and then they begin to argue about whether or not to go into a fortune teller’s booth. Finally, they enter. The fortune teller appears. The father says it’s all nonsense; he tugs the mother’s arm but she refuses to budge. Angry, the father strides out, leaving the mother stunned. Horrified, the narrator rises again and shouts, “‘What are they doing? Don’t they know what they are doing?’” This time, the usher not only appears, he seizes the narrator’s arm, begins to drag him out and says, “‘What are you doing? . . . . You can’t carry on like this, it is not right, you will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too much.’”

  There is no moustached villain to trail here, no lounge lizard and butler to outwit. Yet the story concludes with the same disappearance of illusion. The narrator is dragged “through the lobby of the theatre, into the cold light, [where he wakes up] into the bleak winter morning on my twenty-first birthday, the window-sill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.”

  It’s a terrifying story about tragic fate, and I felt it rush through me, the words and the images whirling, as if I was the theatre and the narrator, and the film was playing and the story being written inside me. It seemed that Schwartz’s fiction had stepped out of the body of Keaton’s movie. A cold wind gusted through the Second Cup. The magician bank was like a block of ice in my hands. Silent movies, streetcars, coins. At one point, the narrator’s parents even ride the horses on a carousel! But it’s the riders who are transparent – and yet the horror of the vision, the horror of all tragic vision, is what are we seeing when we see? I trembled in the sudden cold, and my shaking intensified when I heard the low growl and smelled the wild odour of my distant youth. But when I looked around the café, I saw only the day’s ordinary beings.

  When I looked back, Charles Sleep still held the little screen of his phone in front of me. I focused on it again, all sense of real time lost. Had minutes passed, or only seconds? Eternity breathed down my neck. And the breath smelled of woodsmoke and salmon spawn.

  “I think it could be an original,” he said. “You ought to take it to an expert.”

  An expert? Take what to an expert? Dreams, tragic visions – how do you take them anywhere? And besides, we’re all experts. Heavily, heavily, I fought my way back from art to life.

  “You work in the Enbridge Tower?”

  My question took him aback. He withdrew his phone, and nodded slowly.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, what sort of businesses are in there?” I didn’t expect – or even hope – for him to say, “There’s an antiques dealer who specializes in old toys,”but I also didn’t anticipate the blunt answer.

  “Just one.”

  My jaw must have dropped like the magician’s top hat onto the table.

  “It’s all Enbridge,” Charles Sleep explained dully. “It’s a big company.”

  “One?” I simply could not fathom the idea. One company occupied the whole tower, all . . .

  “Yep. All twenty floors. I’m on the eighteenth.”

  I almost blushed. Once again, I felt like an alien in the twenty-first century. Approaching fifty years old, and it had never even occurred to me that a single company could occupy an entire skyscraper.

  “But . . . but what does Enbridge do exactly?”

  It was as if I’d let all the air out of Fatty Arbuckle’s fame. Suddenly, I had given him his regular workday morning back; taken away his childhood of transparent horses and replaced it with management systems. It wasn’t even that Charles Sleep didn’t enjoy management work; he might have found it wholly rewarding. But this morning in the Second Cup had been a change, and change is always exhilarating.

  He cleared his throat as he slipped his phone back into his clothing. “Oil and gas. It’s Enbridge Pipelines. Resource extraction and transport.”

  I wanted to ask him, specifically, what his own job involved, but he no longer seemed as receptive to conversation. Besides, no matter what people did at Enbridge, there wouldn’t be as much variety as what humans had done at the Pantages Theatre. After all, another term for vaudeville is variety. Opera singers, magicians, acrobats, comedians, sword swallowers, tap dancers. A disorienting image flashed into my mind of all these vaudeville acts entering the Enbridge Tower, showing their passes to security and rising on the elevator to twenty storeys of little theatres. Maybe Delmore Schwartz would be waiting in one of them with a bag of popcorn. Maybe he would shout at Buster Keaton as he entered in his slap shoes, “‘What are you doing? Don’t you know you can’t do things like this, you can’t do whatever you want to do. . . . You will be sorry if you do not do what you should do.’” Maybe the shout was directed at me.

  Charles Sleep spoke softly, as if he did not wish to wake me up. “Please let
me know what you find out. I’m curious. My phone and email are on the card.”

  What should we do? That is a very large question, a question for philosophers and artists, but philosophers and artists are also workers who live in the world. In the world, what we should do is take the old toy bought off the homeless guy for ten bucks, sell it for several thousand and invest the difference in Enbridge shares. On the expectation that oil prices would rise again, creatures from the black lagoon. I’m not being facetious. The world is the world. Delmore Schwartz – did I mention? – was a manic-depressive schizophrenic who died penniless and forgotten, after great fame and success in his youth, in the hallway of a seedy hotel. No one claimed his body in the morgue for three days.

  Charles Sleep had turned and walked away. Without even thinking about it, I followed him, astonished all over again by his uncanny resemblance to Fatty Arbuckle. Both were large men who wore their pants belted high at the waist, as if to accentuate the surprising thinness of their lower halves, the almost balletic delicacy of their movements. I didn’t quite fall into step with Charles Sleep, the way Keaton as Sherlock Jr. fell into step, beautifully and hilariously, with the villain, but I was aware of the parallel. I was even more aware of the sudden lead-like heaviness of my own movement, which reminded me, in shocking succession, of two things: the first line of Delmore Schwartz’s most famous poem, “The heavy bear who goes with me,” and the heartbreaking fact that, when Keaton, at the age of forty-five, learned of his mother’s death, he walked the streets of Paris alone for five hours. Never mind genius: a man who loved his mother enough to walk in grief for five solid hours, carrying that heavy bear and all her lifetime of cubs on his back, is a man I respect and can relate to.

  As I followed Charles Sleep along Jasper Avenue towards the old Pantages Theatre that was now a skyscraper housing a single oil and gas company, I vowed to call my ninety-year-old mother as soon as possible. Before my five solid hours of walking and bearing, which would probably not occur in Paris, I needed to do as much living as I could. The wet and heavy and tattered fur of my mid-life sensibility would, one way or another, be shed or skinned, but the pumping, psychological placenta that binds us to the body – no, the bodies, for the father is there, too – of the life that gave us life has a much different existence. Fatty Arbuckle, I recalled, lost both his parents as a child, when his father abandoned him and his mother died. I heard the sound of gumboots sloshing through starlight and tears. And the sound, as sound did to the great silent comedians, caused me to lose my way. Or, rather, caused me to lose Charles Sleep in the commuting crowd.

  It was just as well, since I had no idea why I was trailing him. Perhaps I wanted something magical to happen; perhaps I wanted to wind up on the handlebars of a motorcycle speeding wildly through the streets of 1924. Instead, I stopped dead on an avenue of the new millennium, clutching my perhaps valuable magician bank and my transparent horse, and pondered my next move. I didn’t need a watch to tell me what time it was; it was fast approaching the time to address the future, the future in the form of thirty pairs of blinking teenaged eyes. They opened before me, then, an audience in a small theatre, poised between silence and sound, waiting for my pratfall, waiting to see how I would handle this straitjacket they would likely one day, in one form or another, inherit. I had stopped dead, except I wasn’t dead.

  The heavy bear who went with me sat cowed and compliant on the cement, like a collared creature from the Elizabethan age who no longer rose to the bait. I blinked and blinked, willing the image away. But it wouldn’t go – and somehow I knew I had added one more ghostly companion to my day, one more sensory overload, a heavy bear who, quite naturally, smelled of forest fires and rotting salmon. I decided to name him Delmore.

  “It’s about time, too,” the suddenly visible animal snarled. “You’d think a poet could take a hint. Maybe you’re not much of a poet.” He reared up on his hind legs and pushed his snout into my face. His breath was the smell of my hometown fishing canneries combined with a hobo’s wet woollen socks. “Besides, my mother named me, not you, boychick. She gave me this ridiculous name, so don’t you go claiming that dubious honour.”

  “What’s so ridiculous about it?” I took a step back as he dropped onto all fours with a grunt.

  “Delmore Schwartz? What kind of name is Delmore for a Jew? You’re a Gentile. And your name’s a hundred proof Gentile. What the hell’s mine? A bad marriage, that’s what. Like my parents’ marriage. Why do you think I wrote that story you love so much? Why do you think I made up characters with names like Shenandoah Fish?”

  I had no useful response, mostly because I was so taken aback by the immediate intimacy of this new relationship. It already seemed as powerful as the intimacy I shared with Keaton’s ghost. And Delmore Schwartz, after all, had published a book called Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems. Even more to the point, Delmore Schwartz had taught at several universities, and he had never felt entirely in his element there. In fact, he survived in the way that Keaton himself survived – he tried to enjoy the comedy in his situation, at least until mental illness deprived him of his gifts. Once, in class, a female student had misread T. S. Eliot’s line from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Shall I part my hair behind?”as “Shall I part my bare behind?” Well, even the most philosophical, existential, woe-laden man has to get a chuckle out of that!

  Once again, the walking commuters flowed past me. And once again, I commanded only a mild and glancing notice. The difference, in a city, between a distracted man with toys standing on a busy street and that same man sitting in a café is oddly considerable. It’s as if we just don’t believe that a lunatic or a derelict will sit calmly down to drink a coffee. If he does, it will probably be at a McDonald’s or a Tim Hortons, not a Second Cup – lunatics aren’t sensible enough to drink coffee, and derelicts can’t afford a second cup, not unless they find and sell a magician bank worth seven thousand dollars.

  The thought warmed me and cooled me at once, the way money does. My possible astonishing good fortune collided with my nagging sense of morality that would insist upon finding the balloonatic and sharing the windfall. So much of life turned on the taps of two temperatures simultaneously, as if we must constantly wash our souls with our faces. As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

  Delmore, lumbering along at my side, grumbled, “Don’t remind me. I always meant to write a book on Fitzgerald. My problem was that I held about six opposed projects in my mind at the same time and could hardly function at all. I was still a genius, though. The Great Gadfly.” He chuckled at the witticism, or at least he made whatever sound a bear makes when it’s amused.

  As for me, I stood at the crossroads of that Fitzgerald intelligence sign, exactly where Buster Keaton stood in the early 1930s at MGM, when it became obvious that the glory days of his creativity were behind him, that he could not push through the wardrobe into Narnia ever again. For nearly two years he lost the ability to function, as the opposing freedom of the past overwhelmed the cold, systemic present. He drank, and drank hard. He describes this period bluntly and briefly in his autobiography, in a chapter entitled “The Chapter I Hate to Write,” as the worst two years of his life. During this period, Keaton spent time straitjacketed in an asylum and ended up marrying the private nurse who had been assigned to look after him. The marriage was a disaster, with the best thing about it being that it didn’t last long. That second wife, as so often happens to people who become footnotes in the lives of the famous, suffered a tragic and mysterious fate: she was committed herself on several occasions, and eventually just vanished, never to be heard of again, one of the millions of humans for whom there is no clear final chapter.

  Which of these commuters walking by, I wondered, would suffer the tragic fate of Mae Scriven, Buster Keaton’s second wife? I shook the thought off, an
d returned to what was left of practicalities.

  There were still hours to go before my first class, a class I knew I couldn’t teach. At eleven, I planned to be on a streetcar heading south with Delmore, Buster’s ghost and my Dumpster-bin treasure. Yet I had not lost all sense of responsibility. I decided to go to campus, to my classroom, and write in big bold letters on the chalkboard (which is no longer chalk), CLASS CANCELLED TODAY. Then . . . well, what then? Unlike Keaton, I had no team of gag men to help me plot my next feature move, no technical whiz like Fred Gabourie who, after Sherlock Jr., announced with breathless excitement to Buster that he’d just found a huge ocean liner that they could buy and use as a prop (the result was The Navigator, one of Keaton’s greatest films). I had an imaginary bear who wept, a silent film ghost who remained true to silence, and my own sense of reality, which might either have been slipping away or speeding straight at me like an express train, depending on how you define reality. One fact was clear enough: the more I taught, the less I would write. And if I did not write, what would keep me out of a straitjacket? Yet what I wanted to write didn’t pay me enough to support a family of five. I couldn’t expect street people to go on supplying me with vintage treasures four or five times a year, nor could I take a management position up on the eighteenth floor of the Enbridge Tower with Charles Sleep.

  Oh, but that was only equivocation. I knew well enough what the real trouble was: I had reached the age when, everywhere I looked, I saw the tears in things. I also knew well enough what the passing, practical world would say: “Get a grip, pal, you hardly have problems – you have a job, shelter, enough to eat, a loving family. You’re damned lucky.” These were the same people who belonged to Keaton’s fan club, the Damfinos, and who insisted, again and again, that Keaton’s story wasn’t tragic. They had no idea. None. If you’re an artist like Keaton who had, for over a decade, complete artistic freedom and commercial success, anything that comes after, no matter how pleasant to the ordinary world, feels like failure. From 1997 to 2010, I worked full-time as a literary author, produced twelve books and supported my family. Now I needed to teach more and more to survive. I thought of Delmore Schwartz, and then I thought of the ferociously practical Robert Frost. Very likely the most celebrated and successful American poet of all time, a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, who even read a poem at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, Frost didn’t achieve any kind of success until he was into his forties. Perhaps that’s why he had such a calculating attitude towards fame and money, an attitude that Keaton did not have as a young man but very much developed as the decades put him through the financial wringer. Frost’s attitude comes across powerfully in “Provide, Provide,” a poem that might very well have been written with the whole silent film era in mind, a poem that refers to a former “picture pride of Hollywood” who falls to the lowly condition of a cleaning lady. “No memory of having starred,” Frost writes, “Atones for later disregard / Or keeps the end from being hard.”