An Aesthetic Underground
Page 6
Gale told me one day about a Montreal club she frequented called Tête de l’Art where she was going that evening. She suggested I join her.
As I walked into the club that night the compère was at the microphone introducing the band. “Messieurs, Mesdames,” he said and then turned and gestured at the pianist. “Orace Sil-vair!”
And Horace Silver it was, a blistering quintet with Blue Mitchell on trumpet and Junior Cook on tenor sax. It was the first time I’d heard hard bop. I was transfixed.
I ought to say something here about music in the sixties in Montreal because it was both burden and delight to me. It was, of course, a Golden Age, though I didn’t quite realize that at the time. There were three currents of music flowing through the city’s clubs at once. The first current was the blues/folk current or blues-packaged-as-folk.
This played at a tiny club on Victoria Avenue called the Finjan which was owned by an Israeli named Shimon Asch. Later, the same people would play at the Seven Steps on Stanley Street. There one could hear such performers as Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. I remember one night shortly before Christmas being in the Finjan with perhaps six other people in the audience listening to John Lee Hooker. I remember the evening vividly because he sang a song entitled “Black Snake Sucking on My Woman’s Tongue” and in the intermission had a screaming match on the phone with a woman in the States.
The second current flowed through the Esquire Show Bar. The Esquire featured weird rock bands like the Blue Men who all had their hair dyed blue but it also featured quite regularly the Chess label bands from Chicago. So it was nothing special to drop into the Esquire to hear Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf. Bo Diddley was always a delight because he was consciously a show with the two maracas girls in skin-tight gold lamé jumpsuits displaying lots of jolly cleavage.
Muddy Waters and Little Walter singing “Long Distance Call,” “Honey Bee,” and “Standing Around Crying” were already a transcendent experience.
Howlin’ Wolf was not as subtle as Muddy Waters but I think in the end he was a better bluesman. There was a ferocity about his band that left the listener seared. He had an almost sullen, glowering presence on stage, visibly impatient while others soloed, prowling with his harmonica, tense to be back in the fray. He never, ever gave the impression that this was just one more gig in a dirty, pissy-smelling bar. When he played, he played balls out.
His usual crew in Montreal was Willie Dixon on double bass, Jimmy Rogers and Hubert Sumlin on guitars, Otis Spann on piano, and usually Fred Below on drums. To have heard the band play “Little Red Rooster” and “Spoonful” is to have had the bar set very high for this kind of music.
I once took Alice Munro to hear Howlin’ Wolf and asked her afterwards what she’d thought. She said rather faintly, “I couldn’t have imagined it.”
The third current of music flowing through the city was jazz. First at the Tête de l’Art and later at the Casa Loma. At these clubs through the sixties I heard most of the jazz giants—Horace Silver, McCoy Tyner, Hank Jones, Sonny Rollins, Stitt, Monk, Dizzy, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Zoot Sims, Pepper Adams, Stan Getz, Cannonball Adderley, Art Blakey, the Basie band playing the Neal Hefti charts . . .
The list was endless.
All this was delightful but it was also nearly killing me as I had to be in school at 8 a.m.
When I came to draw on the experiences of that first year in Canada in my novel Going Down Slow I used as the book’s epigraph a line from a Howlin’ Wolf song: “The men don’t know what the little girls understand.” Gale certainly understood more than most; she was the oldest student I’ve ever encountered.
We had not been particularly discreet that year. Rather, we had been publicly frolicsome, frequenting restaurants, jazz clubs, and movies. My insouciance suddenly started to feel dangerous. What was that sound? Could that be the Presbyterian posse not far behind? I resigned from the School Board at the end of the year and got a job in another jurisdiction.
Sometime during that second year one of my students brought into class a flyer advertising a CBC short story writing competition designed to find and encourage New Canadian Writers. She must have left it on my desk and I must have inadvertently gathered it up along with a stack of exercise books I was taking home to correct over the weekend.
Something, probably everything cumulatively thus far in my life, prompted me to enter the competition. I spent the weekend writing my first short story. It was called “Early Morning Rabbits.”
It was a special kind of story that many writers write at the start of their careers. These stories are always about childhood and place. For some children some places are experienced as holy. For some writers, sights and sounds, these profound surfaces, survive pristine in memory into adulthood.
“Early Morning Rabbits” was about my young self on my uncle’s farm in Cumberland. It was to me a magical place. I knew every inch of Low Bracken Hall, the run of its drystone walls, its warrens, its woods, the stream that dropped pool by pool down from the tarn on the fells to join the beck in the valley bottom. Even the barn and my uncle’s workbench with its Gold Flake tins of wire, solder, washers, spark plugs, and split pins burned in memory. The grease gun for the tractor with chaff stuck to it . . .
Alice Munro has a couple of stories, “Images” and “Walker Brothers Cowboy” in Dance of the Happy Shades, which are precisely of this type. Mary Borsky’s shimmering evocation of Salt Prairie in Influence of the Moon contains such examples of the type as “Ice” and “World Fair.” In Clark Blaise’s Southern Stories “Broward Dowdy” is another gem. Their stories are achingly beautiful and sophisticated while “Early Morning Rabbits” was, I’m afraid, rather florid. I chose to include it in my first book, The Lady Who Sold Furniture, in 1970 but I had by then recognized this fruity quality and toned it down. I’d probably derived it in part from “The Peaches,” a story in Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
I sent this effort in to the CBC and was astonished when it won a prize. Two hundred dollars, as I recall. A base part of my mind calculated that I’d only need to write three a month to live like a lord. And indeed I began to scribble away.
I realized, however, that I knew very little about the genre. I had read Katherine Mansfield and Ernest Hemingway and Dylan Thomas and obviously Chekhov and Guy de Maupassant but the short story had not been taught as a form at school, and literature much past the end of the nineteenth century had not been encouraged at Bristol University. The attitude there, and a reasonable one, was that contemporary and recent writing was what one read for entertainment and as part of being a civilized person. The short story was perceived as being basically an American enthusiasm and therefore really beyond the purview of Britons.
I launched myself into an intensity of self-education. I read Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al, lapping up that vernacular. Followed by The Love Nest and How to Write Short Stories (With Samples). I read Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, which was brilliant, followed by several of his dreadful novels. I read, and was ravished by, Flannery O’Connor. Was overwhelmed by Eudora Welty and read and reread her. Tried to read Faulkner but couldn’t. Read in rapid succession Katherine Anne Porter, Caroline Gordon, John Updike, Grace Paley’s The Little Disturbances of Man. Returned to Dubliners. Meandered off into Saroyan, Joseph Mitchell, Nathanael West, Irwin Shaw, Peter Taylor . . .
What I was after, beyond the aesthetic experience itself, was to gain some idea of what possible shapes stories could take. I was also feeling out the shape of the tradition.
At the same time I was trying to acquaint myself with Canadian contributions to the form. This turned out to be simple. The only story writers at the time with published collections were Hugh Garner and Morley Callaghan. Both were touted within Canada as giants and both were unreadable, Garner because of his sentimentality and crudeness, Callaghan because his writing was flatly ludicrous.
Robert Weaver and William Toye wrote of Callaghan in The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature: “Today he is admired by most younger writers of fiction in Canada as their only true predecessor in this country . . .”
This judgement is hilariously wide of the mark. Most “younger writers of fiction” would tend to fall about laughing at a writer capable of perpetrating: “She stood on the corner of Bloor and Yonge, an impressive build of a woman, tall, stout, good-looking for 42, and watched the traffic signal.”
Although everything I was reading was new to me I had at the same time a sense that I was engaging with the past. Wonderful as Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green and Other Stories was, it had been published in 1941. I had a sense of John Updike as a near-contemporary and read with great pleasure and attention The Same Door and Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories but Updike was associated with the fabled New Yorker and moved in a world which was not the world of The Canadian Forum and Fiddlehead.
I had no sense of there being a great literary presence in Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver; there was no Canadian tradition or body of work I could hope to join. The country lacked what would be called today an “infrastructure”—the literary equivalent of roads, sewers, electric power, railroad tracks—and I’ve spent nearly all my life in Canada editing, writing, anthologizing, publishing, exhorting, teaching, and collecting in a probably vain attempt to help put the necessary infrastructure into place.
The smart writers did exactly the reverse; they positioned their work in England and the United States.
I had by now piles of stories and mounting piles of rejection slips. It is usual to submit stories to magazines singly; in desperation, I sent a bundle of sixteen to Prism International. I was astonished when they wrote back accepting eight. And they made a fuss about them, too, saying how the stories stood out from the general ruck of submissions. They were published in the Summer and Autumn issues of Prism International in 1964. The person instrumental in all this was Earle Birney.
When his Collected Poems came out years later he inscribed a copy for me and wrote: “To John Metcalf whose fiction I’ve admired and continued to read ever since he sent Jake Zilber and me a stack of his short stories which we were happy to publish in Prism International back in the sixties when that journal was still international.”
I reread those stories before writing this and found them, not surprisingly, to be no better than most juvenilia, though the themes that were to occupy me for so many years were already there. I reworked “Early Morning Rabbits” and I took some material from “Just Two Old Men” and used it in the novella “The Lady Who Sold Furniture.” The rest of the stories I’m happy are forgotten. I winced at the ghastly pretentiousness of the title I’d given to the group of stories: The Geography of Time. I can only beg that I was young. But I was pleased to note that George Johnston had a poem in that Summer issue; he is one of Canada’s finest poets and in The Cruising Auk wrote one of Canada’s most elegant books. Years later at the Porcupine’s Quill I had the honour of bringing out his collected poems, Endeared by Dark, which George, until I dissuaded him, had wanted to call From a Rhyming Brain.
Gale and I were still going out together but we seemed to be quarrelling rather pointlessly. I think looking back that we were both unsure of what we wanted next. Gale was also under pressure from her parents. They were Lebanese Canadian and seemed to my WASP stolidity excitable and volatile. I had been to their apartment for meals on various occasions and the evenings passed in uproar and cacophony which seemed friendly in intent. But her parents blew hot and cold. Her father would from time to time work himself up into tirades about the nasty anatomical things he was going to do to me with his bare hands while her mother would leave block-lettered notices in the fridge reading: NONE OF THIS GOOD FOOD FOR GALE.
At the end of term I was having a beer at a neighbourhood bar and fell into conversation with a man at the next stool. His name was Meunier, from Alberta, visiting family. He, too, was a teacher, principal of a high school. While in Montreal he was going to run some ads to secure a teacher of English. Several glasses of beer later, seduced by the high salary, I signed on the dotted line. I think that I was unconsciously simply putting some distance between me and a situation about which I wasn’t decided.
This impulsive and rash act landed me the following September in Cold Lake, Alberta, honorary second lieutenant at the Cold Lake RCAF base. The base itself was featureless, a bland suburb set down in the wilderness. The nearest patch of civilian civilization—the only patch—was about three miles away. It was called Grand Centre. Grand Centre comprised three or four houses, a trading post that exchanged little wooden kegs of nails and the like for pelts, a laundromat, an RCMP lock-up, and a tiny Chinese restaurant that offered Canadian-Chinese food in red gooey sauce.
The contiguous Indian reserve with its abandoned cars and tumbledown hovels patched with sheet tin was a persuasive argument for assimilation.
The long winter began. Teachers drove to school from the barracks, plugged their cars into block heaters, and left the engines running all day. The cold was beyond description or belief.
I spent most of the year playing billiards and darts and going slowly stir-crazy. One was not supposed to win at darts or billiards if playing against an officer senior in rank; it was not done; it was considered bad form; I became unpopular.
The Wing Commander suggested I get my hair cut. My hair was, apparently, setting a bad example.
To whom and of what?
Did I not respect the feelings of the mess?
Not so’s you’d notice.
Had I no respect for his rank?
Not a jot. Not a tittle.
Midmorning every day a Thunderbird fighter flew to the base in Comox, British Columbia, to pick up salmon for lunch.
Every day at lunchtime the Americans landed to refuel; they were flying the H-bomb around the world.
For lunch they ate the four-bean salad and the salmon.
Some people used to drive to Grand Centre to wave at the train.
Others watched the clothes tumbling in the laundromat.
Some drove to Grand Centre to eat toast at the Canadian-Chinese restaurant.
I was writing to Gale almost daily and phoning her as I could. Her letters became increasingly important to me. I was still worried about the amount of dope she smoked; she was still impatient with my “square” disapproval. I was irritated by her vocabulary, the shit she scored, the smoke she toked. Little did I know that it was soon to become a lingua franca. I remained irritated by her contempt for a university education; she was concerned that I might become an academic. She wanted me always to be “free.” Never, she begged me, become boring. The gathering of rosebuds while she might was her general plan of action.
When the snow and ice reluctantly disappeared to be replaced by mud and mosquitoes and my servitude ended, I returned to Montreal, and Gale and I, despite the tensions between us, were married in a rather hugger-mugger fashion by a United Church cleric who obviously regarded the union with reservations but needed the money.
After a few days we left for England where we intended to stay. For a year at least we were going to live on the money I’d saved at Cold Lake. I was going to write. We went to Bristol and stayed for a while with David Hirschmann and his wife, Jill, while looking for a flat. Gale seemed to have difficulties distinguishing between pounds and dollars and kept coming home with dismaying “bargains.” I was also improvident, buying at an auction one day a Victorian chaise longue and a Regency mirror six feet high with gilded columns and capitals and gadroon beading. The end of the money was in sight.
I got a job teaching English in a Catholic comprehensive school which served a nearby hous
ing estate. It was a grim employment. The school was staffed by teachers whose main qualification was their faith, rural Irishwomen who as they sipped their orange-coloured tea in the common room would say into the silence, apropos of God knows what, “And a blessing it is, a blessing it is.”
The principal was saintly and ineffectual. When it was reported to him that the children had again poured their free milk into the grand piano, he murmured, “We live in an imperfect world.”
The school was openly violent. Classes were searched for knives. Mr. Murphy, the deputy head, kept a cane down the leg of his trousers and would draw it like a sword, cutting at the legs and hunched backs of troublemakers. A boy in one of my “slow learner” classes set fire in his desk to a Bible and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare which my predecessor had used as a remedial text. The female school-leaving class flatly refused to work, claiming that they attended only “for the cooking.” After lunch, police cars and a Black Maria returned the apprehended shoplifters.
My decision to go to Canada for the first time in 1962 had been made without much thought. Neither Jim nor I at the time had any idea of leaving England permanently. We were simply bored and looking for new experience. My life was split between a decaying past which exercised a great power over me and a present which was unbearable and stretched ahead like a life sentence. Even then, I suspected that it was dangerous to live for the past and I knew I had to get out of England and escape from its dream. Joyce Cary’s novel To Be a Pilgrim, a volume in The Horse’s Mouth trilogy, brilliantly portrays a man in thrall to that dream of Englishness.