An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  Jim was very clever, funny, cynical, and stylish. He had been educated at a minor public school before university and affected a manner languid and rather snotty. He worked ambitiously to secure the most prestigious academic jobs and having secured them despised them. It became a pattern in Canada, the USA, and Australia. It added up in the long run to a peculiarly hollow life. The essence of the matter was, I think, that he believed in nothing and was bored. He died of cancer in Adelaide in 1999.

  But in 1962 Jim was a lifeline in Eastmill. We were the only two men in the establishment with any education. We were the only two men who could not have been described as brutal. We amused and entertained each other. We could talk of books, music, film, and painting as an antidote to Eastmill’s daily grind.

  Again, from “The Eastmill Reception Centre.”

  Every afternoon was given over to Sports and Activities.

  Cricket alternated, by Houses, with gardening. Gardening was worse than cricket. The garden extended for roughly two acres. On one day, forty boys attacked the earth with hoes. The next day forty boys smoothed the work of the hoes with rakes. On the day following, the hoes attacked again. Nothing was actually planted.

  The evening meals in the Staff Dining Room, served from huge aluminum utensils, were exactly like the school dinners of my childhood: unsavoury stews with glutinous dumplings, salads with wafers of cold roast beef with bits of string in them, jam tarts and Spotted Dick accompanied by an aluminum jug of lukewarm custard topped by a thickening skin.

  Uncle Arthur always ate in his apartment with the wife referred to as “Mrs. Arthur” but always appeared in time for coffee to inquire if we’d enjoyed what he always called our “comestibles.”

  Mr. Austyn, referred to by the boys as “Browner Austyn,” always said:

  May I trouble you for the condiments?

  Between the main course and dessert, Mr. Brotherton, often boisterously drunk, beat time with his spoon, singing, much to the distress of Mr. Austyn:

  Auntie Mary

  Had a canary

  Up the leg of her drawers.

  Mr. Grendle drizzled on about recidivists and the inevitability of his being dispatched in the metalwork shop. Mr. Hemmings, who drove a sports car, explained the internal-combustion engine. Mr. Austyn praised the give and take of sporting activity, the lessons of co-operation and joint endeavour, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards, Outward Bound, the beneficial moral results of pushing oneself to the limits of physical endurance.

  But conversation always reverted to pay scales, overtime rates, the necessity of making an example of this boy or that, of sorting out, gingering up, knocking the stuffing out of etc. this or that young lout who was trying it on, pushing his luck, just begging for it etc.

  When the Protestant School Board of Montreal recruiters placed advertisements in the local papers and conducted interviews in a Bristol hotel, Jim and I decided to sign on. We were both appalled by Eastmill, bored, restless. Montreal, we decided, could not be worse than being locked up with 160 dim, sad, smelly boys. And the pay compared with what we were getting at Eastmill seemed princely.

  The formalities were simple. We merely had to furnish evidence of sobriety and moral probity attested to by a minister of religion and the results of a Wassermann test proving that we were not riddled with pox or clap. I promptly wrote a sickening letter and signed it as the Vicar of St. Michael and All Hallows and some days later took my place in a long line of subdued Jamaicans at the Bristol Royal Infirmary’s VD Clinic. Two men in white lab coats were indulging in unseemly badinage with the clientele.

  When my turn came, the technician said, “Well, then, where have you been sticking it?”

  “I haven’t recently,” I said with some asperity, “been ‘sticking it’ anywhere. I’m not here for medical reasons. I only need a test because I’m emigrating.”

  He stared at me.

  Then he shouted, “Hey, George. Come over here and listen to this one.”

  During these years I’d been living in rooms rented from Robert Giddings, a university friend. He had found a small house secluded at the end of a laneway and had rented it immediately. He called this house Quagmire Lodge. Bob had had the misfortune of contracting polio at the age of eleven and was confined to a wheelchair but such was his vitality and enthusiasm that one tended to forget entirely that he was crippled.

  We shared a non-Leavisite passion for Dickens, Smollett, and Fielding, and Bob later in life went on to publish books on all three. This passion for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries meant that the house was festooned with late-state pulls of Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, Rake’s Progress, and Marriage à la Mode. These and the caricatures of Thomas Rowlandson were then fairly cheaply available. Bob’s other, slightly eccentric, passion was for German military marches. I would sometimes come home to find Bob wearing a German infantry helmet and rows of Wehrmacht medals, red in the face with the exertion of conducting records of the Berlin Military Police Band.

  I chose not to probe into this enthusiasm.

  We lost touch when I came to Canada but Bob phoned me last year around the time of David’s death and we caught up with each other’s doings. He had just retired from Bournemouth University which he claims has the distinction of being absolutely the worst university in the United Kingdom. He mentioned that he’d published an autobiography which was concerned with his life in schools and academe as a disabled person. He sent me a copy of You Should See Me in Pyjamas and I read with fascination of his childhood years in residential hospitals. And then I came to his years as an undergraduate at Bristol and was very surprised to read the following:

  One of the most entertaining characters I met at Bristol was my friend John Metcalf. He was a vicar’s son, but none the worse for that. Going around with John was a laugh and a nightmare at the same time as you never knew what was going to happen next. In those days there was a great working-class thing on the go, Richard Hoggart had only recently published The Uses of Literacy and among the vogue books were Room at the Top, A Kind of Loving, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. We went about completely Sillitoed most of the time. It was all donkey jackets, football, Anger and Centre 42 (with exhibitions of workers’ tools arranged in backgrounds by Feliks Topolski). John had a flat cap he called his Sou’Wesker. When we were not actually out banning bombs, or compelling the government to resign, or bringing the South African economy to its knees by refusing to eat their rotten old pineapple chunks, we were in pubs swilling the plebeian natural cider. One Friday, having achieved some sort of physical parity by encouraging friends to get paralytic, we left for home. John didn’t make it back to his flat. His flat-mate assumed that he had picked up some bird, and went to bed. He’d be home the next day. But he wasn’t. Nor the next day. No one saw him for two weeks. Then he suddenly reappeared. He’d fallen off the docks, landed in an open boat and finished up—penniless—in the Channel Islands where he’d had to get a job packing tomatoes to earn his fare back.

  One of his relatives gave him a pocket-sized radio as a birthday present. It never worked properly but by turning the volume up suddenly you could get a sound like a burst of applause in radio programmes. John always carried it with him to provide instant approbation for wit and repartee. He eventually became literary editor of Nonesuch and soon we were in hot water, which resulted in our being brought before one of the university’s most senior administrators.

  We wanted to publish John’s review of Lady Chatterley (just published unexpurgatedly by Penguin) in the university newspaper. The authorities had hit the ceiling. We were threatened with rustication, suspension and all the terrors of the earth. John stuck it out. The interview was, as they say, a stormy one. The authorities insisted that nothing should appear which might bring a blush to the cheek of a young person. Some of the short words used had, it seems, caused offence. We were interviewed by a man called Landless. In t
he course of this scene, without batting an eyelid, John called him Landslide, Landscape, Landgrave, Landlord, Landwehr, Landlubber and Landmine. The result was a compromise. The review appeared but contained such gems as “Lawrence overworks his vocabulary, especially the words —— and ——.”

  But his finest hour was on teaching practice. Taking a class for the Napoleonic wars he was interrupted by a boy who said: “We got one of they cannon things at home. Our dad’s in the Navy and they use them for warnings an’ that. I’ll bring it in tomorrow.” The next day the boy duly appeared, staggering under a weighty load. “I got it, sir! And all the gubbins that go with it. Okay if we fire it out the window?” To his everlasting credit, John decided to go and ask the headmaster first.

  The school was a vast modish glasshouse and after several long corridors and staircases John reached the headmaster’s office. He knocked on the door. “Come in!” As he entered there was a dull boom in the distance. “My God!” exclaimed the startled headmaster. “What on earth was that?”

  “That’s just what I came to see you about,” said John calmly.

  They rushed to the scene. In the classroom they found a large black circle on the wall, surrounded by an irregular pigmented mosaic of all the colours of the rainbow. The young cannoneer explained that they had decided it would be too dangerous to fire it out the window and to fire shells, so they had filled it with a box of coloured chalks and fired it at the classroom wall. Several windows had shattered. The whole episode caused quite a stir in our university department, but then great emphasis had been placed on the value of visual aids in those days. John went on to become a very successful teacher. Abroad.

  A TERRIFYING LEGACY

  Jim had charged me with securing us an apartment. He had flown from England to visit some friends in the States where he was busy philandering. I was limp and exhausted when the Cunard liner Carinthia docked in Montreal. I’d been throwing up for days; my stomach had first contracted in Liverpool when they’d switched on the engines.

  I walked from the docks to the YMCA. Montreal was a throb and an exotic blur. I was bemused by size, speed, noise. An English eye could hardly make sense of it. Skyscrapers, huge cars, signs in French, police with sunglasses, paunches, and unthinkable guns, not a chemist’s in sight but drugstores as in Raymond Chandler, crazed drivers, on Ste Catherine Street crushes of people seemingly from all over the world, neon signs, air conditioning, a sense everywhere of unimaginable affluence, shimmering heat, abominable beer . . .

  I soon found us an apartment on Lincoln at Guy and thought it palatial compared with student digs in Bristol. I was later to realize it was verging on slummy but couldn’t see that then.

  Jim bowled into town driving a vast and vulgar red car with white upholstery.

  August rolled into September and school started.

  I was teaching English at Rosemount High School in the city’s east end. I found out on the first day that I was also teaching Canadian history which was unfortunate for the students as I didn’t know any. After Bluebell and Eastmill, Rosemount was like a rest home. The students were polite, tolerant of the idea of learning, and mostly able to read. No one threatened me with a knife. It was refreshing.

  The England I’d just left was a homogeneous society and one simply didn’t come across many non-English people even at university. My most exotic racial experience at Bristol was sharing a room for a few weeks with Mrs. Bandaranaike’s nephew. So I was fascinated with classes of such disparate backgrounds—Italian, Greek, Lebanese, Latvian, Chinese . . . I suddenly had a great deal to learn.

  The students were pleasant and co-operative. The staff in the English department, however, were in the main gruesome. I wrote about them in an essay in my 1992 anthology The New Story Writers.

  The head of the English department was a faded lady of ghastly, dentured gentility who wrote poems and had published a volume of them at her own expense. I can see that little book in my mind’s eye even now; it was bound in nasty blue fabrikoid. One of the poems was called “Modern Menace” and warned the reader about the dangers of alcohol. My favourite lines ran:

  For ways we have against this Brute,

  If offered sherry, say, “Make mine Fruit!”

  Once a term she would correct a set of essays from each of my classes to discipline me and to show me how a seasoned professional did the job. All her corrections were neatly written in the margins in red ink. She once ringed in red in a student’s essay the sentence “My father just grunted” and wrote in the margin: “Only piggies grunt!!!”

  Even now, some thirty years later, I still remember the mind-numbing meetings of the department. One of the compulsory textbooks contained Hemingway’s story “After the Storm” and it baffled them. How could one teach it? What, Miss Perkins wanted to know, constituted a correct answer about it on the exam? Why couldn’t he say what he wanted to say? Exactly! Quite right. Get his point across. Whatever the point might be. What in God’s name, demanded Mr. Lumley, was it about. It was like watching frowning chimps trying to extract a peanut from a medicine bottle.

  Jim adjusted to life in Canada far more quickly than I did. The one area where I found it impossible to adjust was language. When people spoke of “a bunch of the guys” I had to repress chidings about flowers and bananas. The spelling gray for grey distressed me for years. It was decades before I could substitute aluminum for aluminium. But when I did submit to Canadian or American usage I felt like a ham actor.

  In my first Canadian spring one of the teachers said to me, “A bunch of the guys are going sugaring off. Want to come?” I gave him a very old-fashioned look.

  The problem with these people as teachers was that they were not very well educated, remained incurious, didn’t read, had no love of what they taught. They were simply doing a job. They were plonkingly ordinary and they inevitably turned out ordinary students who inevitably went on to swell Canada’s dullness.

  In 1972 I published a novel called Going Down Slow which drew on my experience of Rosemount High School. The novel’s protagonist, David, is having an affair with a student, Susan. The following lavatorial scene which declines and deflates into one-line paragraphs and silences suggests, I hope, the emotional and intellectual desolation of that school.

  He looked out over the white-painted glass on the bottom part of the high window. It was snowing again, light flakes drifting. The air was yellow with the gloom of a storm. Goal-posts stuck black out of the snow-covered playing field. Just below in the yard, three men in overcoats were standing around Mr. Cherton’s new Sting Ray. Mr. Davidson. Mr. Monpetit. The flow of water gurgled back into silence.

  David mounted the stand and stood in the middle of the three stalls. He unzipped his trousers. Rubber footsteps squelched in the cloakroom. The swing-door banged open and Hubnichuk came in. They nodded. Hubnichuk was wearing a shabby blue track-suit.

  He mounted the stand to David’s left. Standing back, he pulled down the elastic front of his trousers. He cradled his organ in the palm of his hand; it was like a three-pound eye-roast. Suddenly, he emitted a tight high-pitched fart, a sound surprising in so large a man.

  Footsteps.

  Mr. Weinbaum came in.

  “So this is where the nobs hang out!” he said.

  “Some of them STICK OUT from time to time!” said Hubnichuk.

  Their voices echoed.

  Mr. Weinbaum mounted the stand and stood in front of the stall to David’s right.

  “If you shake it more than twice,” he said, “you’re playing with it.”

  Water from the copper nozzle rilled down the porcelain.

  There was a silence.

  David studied the manufacturer’s ornate cartouche.

  The Victory and Sanitary Porcelain Company.

  Inside the curlicued scroll, a wreathed allegorical figure.

  Victory?

  Sa
nitation?

  Mr. Weinbaum shifted, sighed.

  “I got the best battery in Canada for $18.00,” he said.

  If “David” was having an affair in Going Down Slow with “Susan,” John was having an affair with a student called Gale Courey. Gale was not in any of my classes but I’d noticed her in the halls not only because of her lushness but because she was always carrying jazz records. We talked together about jazz.

  I had been a jazz fan since the age of twelve and during my Beckenham years had gone regularly to the London club at 100 Oxford Street where Britain’s top traditional bands played—Humphrey Lyttleton, Chris Barber, and Alex Welsh. I had a large record collection of the classic material—King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Johnny Dodds. I had a particular liking for Morton’s trumpet players, Bubber Miley and Ward Pinkett. Tommy Ladnier, too. I also owned all the usual blues singers—Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Bertha Chippie Hill—but came early to the heterodox judgement that it was hard to better Morton singing “I’m the Win’ing Boy” or Jack Teagarden shlurping and mushmouthing his way through “Stars Fell on Alabama.”

  England and Europe were far more receptive to the traditional jazz revival than were the States and we enthusiastically bought all the recordings. Someone—was it Lomax?—found Bunk Johnson in the parish of New Iberia and bought him teeth and in New Orleans Sharkey Bonano, Papa Celestin, George Lewis, Paul Barbarin, and Percy Humphrey recreated bands to play the old music. Much of this music came out on a label called Good Time Jazz and a good time it certainly was. I saw the last of it in 1963 in New Orleans. I wrote about that visit in my novella “Private Parts.”

  I drove to New Orleans through the increasing depression of the southern States, illusions, delusions lost each day with every human contact, until I reached the fabled Quarter, and sat close to tears listening to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band—a group of octogenarians which as I entered was trying to play “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble”; the solos ran out of breath, the drummer was palsied, the bass player rheumy and vacant. The audience of young Germans and Frenchmen was hushed and respectful. Between tunes, a man with a wooden leg tap-danced. I knew that if they tackled “High Society” and the clarinetist attempted Alphonse Picou’s solo, he’d drop dead in cardiac arrest; the butcher had cut them down and something shining in me with them.