by John Metcalf
I must confess that these days I’m very far this side idolatry. That holds true of many other writers whose work I’ve liked. I think I had a longing for the work to be better than it was.
“With the passing of time,” Bill Hoffer used to say, “we stand the more clearly revealed.”
The poem “Palomino Stallion,” though it dates from 1974, can reasonably represent what Alden was writing in the early books.
Though the barn is so warm
that the oats in his manger,
the straw in his bed
seem to give off smoke—
though the wind is so cold,
the snow in the pasture
so deep he’d fall down
and freeze in an hour—
the eleven-month-old
palomino stallion
has gone almost crazy
fighting and pleading
to be let out.
The early poems seemed at the time to possess a spontaneity which was refreshing. The volumes I’m referring to are The Rose and the Puritan, A Darkness in the Earth, The Things Which Are, Under the Ice, and Wind in a Rocky Country. But what seemed spontaneous then strikes me now as lax, lacking tension, insufficiently wrought.
The simplicity and charm would later coarsen into folksiness and sentimentality. In fact, this decline began with Bread, Wine, and Salt which was awarded the Governor General’s Award in 1967. The later poetry became far too prosy and he gave in to the desire to be warm, wise, and “philosophical.” Cracker-barrel philosophy, I’m afraid, and at the end of that road lies the Reader’s Digest.
The early poems remind me strongly of certain poems by D. H. Lawrence and Raymond Knister, brief arpeggios which, as Kingsley Amis might have said, do not resonate enough. Nowadays I’d trade reams of Nowlan for just one stanza by the ineffable Eric Ormsby.
Alden once wrote to me: “If there comes a time when truck drivers read poetry, mine will be the poetry they’ll read.”
And I’m afraid that might well be his work’s epitaph.
The term ground on. Eager students with manuscripts did not appear. In the endless hours, I wrote some short stories, “The Strange Aberration of Mr. Ken Smythe,” “The Practice of the Craft,” “The Years in Exile”—collected with others, and published in 1975 in a volume called The Teeth of My Father.
During that year I also helped to found the Writers’ Union of Canada. I chaired a committee made up of Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Fred Bodsworth, and Timothy Findley which was responsible for drawing up the criteria for membership. There was a deep split from the very beginning between those who wanted a union and those who wanted something close to the idea of an academy. Everyone, however, feared that the proposed union might become merely another cozy, mushy version of the Canadian Authors’ Association and any accommodation seemed worth avoiding that fate; the chasm between those who were frankly elitist and those who were unionist was papered over. We compromised eventually by making membership dependent on having published a trade book (i.e., a non-textbook) with a non-vanity press. Acceptance or rejection of an application for membership, however, lay with the Membership Committee.
I loved the euphoria of the first meetings, the sense of community, but the Union grew larger and its ranks filled with people who had published genuine trade books but what books: cookbooks, bizarre litcrit, kiddylit, how-to, Saskatchewan on $5 a day. The union soon bulged with people I’d never heard of and didn’t want to know. Pierre Berton even tried to bully the membership into closed-shop politics.
I served on the national executive of the Union for its first three years but quit in umbrage over Graeme Gibson’s proposal that the Union supervise the putting together of a series of anthologies for school use. I had nothing against missionary work, but I argued that if this were done the contents of the anthologies would seem to have Union imprimatur, that it would seem as if the Union were saying, “This is Canadian literature.” My other strong objection was that the anthologies were thematic in structure. Producing a book called, say, The Immigrant Experience reduced the stories and poems in it to mere illustrations of sociology and history. In other words, I felt that the thematic approach to literature was anti-literary.
Irving Layton once wrote to me in a letter about the publication of some of his poems, “. . . there’s lotsa love in you John, and that puts us roaring and clattering on the twin rails of glory.” And, indeed, glory has always been my desired destination.
Poor Irving! He himself has been effaced by Alzheimer’s, he’s been abandoned by his publishers, largely forgotten by the public, his books entirely out of print except for the Porcupine’s Quill version of Dance with Desire. Not much glory there, Irving, old love.
Accomplishment and glory need their rewards and in the arguments leading up to the founding of the Union, Kent Thompson and I had a vision of the institution’s headquarters, a large stone mansion in Ottawa or Toronto, a somnolent library—literature, history, reference, with a sprinkling of erotica—log fires, deep leather chairs. A silver handbell which, when rung, brought forth Scrotum, the wrinkled old retainer, with his silver salver. Thinly sliced caraway cake and fino sherry in the mornings. Or oloroso if you must. Hot canapés in the afternoon. Savouries in the evening featuring the Gentlemen’s Relish, Patum Peperium.
I found my favourite clubland story in A. D. Peters’s autobiography. He was Evelyn Waugh’s literary agent. Peters’s club was closing for refurbishment and its members were farmed out to other clubs for the duration. When the club re-opened, A. D. Peters and another man were standing at the urinal having a pee and gazing round at all the glittering brass, the gleaming porcelain, the roseate copper tubing. Peters’s companion said to him: “Makes the old cock look a bit shabby, doesn’t it?”
Memo to Kent: We’ll have to get Scrotum a green baize apron to wear while polishing the silver and I also feel quite strongly that we ought to force the shifty old sod to iron the daily newspapers as well. Would white gloves be going too far?
Our visions of elitist pleasures soon paled into the boring realities of rules of procedure, contract clauses, royalty rates, kill fees. “Glory” didn’t get a look-in. And then, year after year descending into the bile of “gender,” “race,” “appropriation of voice,” “women of colour.” Most good writers left this snakepit or simply did not attend. It was not an appropriate context for the women who’d written “Labour Day Dinner” and “Speck’s Idea” or for the men who’d written “A Small Piece of Blue” and “A North American Education.”
In more recent years the Union has generated the moral fervour of a revival meeting. Their righteous antics delight. The Union news-letter presented this unintentionally hilarious account of the activities of one of their earnest and doleful Committees.
On February 1, Ontario writers and the National Council wined and dined with members of the Racial Minority Writers’ Committee, at 21 McGill Street. Jill Humphries, TWUC’s Ontario Co-ordinator, and Jillian Dagg, the Ontario Rep, had arranged for a very nice dinner, good wine (a bit expensive), and had managed to attract a record number of people (76) to the event. It was a good evening.
But can you imagine? A women’s club, a club of well-to-do women, preserves, in two corners of the auditorium/banquet hall, gilded plaster sculptures of children carrying baskets of fruit on their heads. Not just any children, no, little black children, little slaves.
Neither Jill nor Jillian had inspected the hall prior to the dinner, nor could they have suspected the presence of imperialist or colonialist works of art there. I must admit that I myself perceived the statues only after the salad . . .
After the meal, I gathered my courage, went to their table and asked them how they felt about these objectionable objects. They were angry, of course, outraged. No, they said, such things cannot even be sold to an antique store or some place like it, “they must be destroyed!�
�� A copy of this letter will go to the McGill Club and I hope its Board of Directors will do away with all mementos of shameful times. I did not inspect the place from top to bottom, but who knows, there may be more such things in other nooks and crannies.
How marvellously relaxing it must be to have a mind so basic!
The choice of Union over Academy was an inevitably Canadian choice. Leftish rather than rightish, fair and aboveboard rather than snooty, no nasty or disturbing judgements needing to be made. The Union reflected the politics of Graeme Gibson and Margaret Atwood and their set; they’ve always believed in organizing and melding literature and institutions and directing them towards nationalist ends.
One of that year’s few pleasures in Fredericton was meeting John Newlove. He came to UNB to give a public reading and I was keenly interested to attend. I knew the poetry he’d already published and was reading his current work as we were both appearing in the same magazines. He loomed large on my horizon. I loved the tone of his writing.
I produced a version of our meeting as the opening paragraphs of a story called “The Teeth of My Father.”
Adrift one afternoon on a tide of beer and nostalgia in the River Room of the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel in Fredericton, my friend and I traded stories of our dead fathers. We drank until the bar began to fill for Happy Hour. He told me how his father had employed him every Saturday and how every Saturday evening before being allowed out his father had forced him into a game of poker to recover the day’s wages. We drank until the free cheese, olives, and melba toast were wheeled away at six. I told him of my father’s teeth; he, of his father’s three-and-a-half-year disappearance for a drink. I, of my father and the loose box; he, of his father’s contempt of court charge. I, of my father and the consequences of the VD pamphlet. We drank until shortly before his evening flight to Halifax was due.
It was Cyril Connolly, I believe, who said that drinking is a low form of creativity. A perceptive remark. Drinking also prompts my memory. Walking home on wilful legs in the cold night air, my drunkenness unlocked the smells and textures of the receding past, recalling incident and anecdote I had not thought to tell in the bar’s warm comfort. Lurching up Forest Hill, I remembered my father’s tobacco growing, and worse, its curing, our cinema outing; the afternoon he felled the kitchen; the tubular steel incident. And it was on Forest Hill, although I’d often told the story of his teeth, that I realized for the first time how genuinely and entirely eccentric my father had been.
(I have decided to tell the truth. My stories in the River Room were not purely nostalgic; they were calculated to be funny and entertain my friend. My friend was more an acquaintance, a man I admired and wanted to impress. And “wilful legs” was plagiarized from Dylan Thomas.)
I dedicated this story to Alice Munro. She dedicated one to me called “Home” which appeared in New Canadian Stories 1974. This was because we’d been talking to each other about what “autobiography” in fiction meant. Alice felt it nearly impossible emotionally to write about her mother. I think she felt also that to write about an experience was in some way to betray it. We were both experimenting with the idea of commenting on the story within the story—as I do in the bracketed paragraph above. We were attempting to make the stories more “real” or “truthful” by “confessing” to their artificiality.
In later years I came to believe that there is no such thing as autobiography. There are arrangements of words on a page. There is rhetoric. We are not recording; we are creating. I was charmed by a statement I read recently by Quebec abstractionist Claude Tousignant. He wrote: “What I advocate is the notion of paintings as beings, not representations.” It immediately struck me that the finest stories are also “beings” rather than “representations,” magical worlds wrought by language.
But to return to John Newlove.
In centuries past itinerant craftsmen travelled from mill to mill seeking work recutting the blunted patterns of grooves on the faces of the millstones. Over the years tiny slivers of metal worked their way into the men’s hands, causing blue and black ridges and worms beneath the skin. Millers wanted experienced men and so used to say to the masons, “Hold out your hands and show me your metal.” If one wanted to see John Newlove’s metal one would need an MRI machine.
One ankle is held together by a metal pin, the ankle broken during a drunken fight in the kitchen of Al Purdy’s house in Ameliasburg. Newlove claims that Purdy dropped on him, or threw at him, a water cooler. His thigh is held together by a large pin which was put in after a severe fall off a bar stool in Regina. One knee contains metal acquired after he fell down over a small drain in Peter Milroy’s front garden after having been thrown out of the house for attempting to kick down the door of Peter’s wine cellar. The scars are multiple. It seems that all John’s life has been an effort to outrun sorrow and melancholy, the darkness everywhere in human life that weighs upon him. Many of his early poems are about hitchhiking; he’s always been on the road escaping from and travelling to.
Every muddy road I walk along
I am the man who knows all about Jesus
but doesn’t believe. My fat ass
trudges on. I am so weary. Lord;
beer is my muse, my music.
John’s drunken exploits are legion. Everyone, it seems, has Newlove stories. Newlove biting strangers at parties; Newlove putting his false teeth in a stranger’s beer glass; Newlove awaking in an abandoned lot in the back of a taxi, his body heaped with empty cans of Newcastle Brown Ale. Newlove flying back to Nelson and getting off the plane drunk in Castlereagh instead of Castlegar and summoning a taxi to drive him 175 miles through the midnight Kootenay mountains. Newlove ordering vodka after vodka with the stern command: “No fruit or vegetable matter.”
My most preposterous Newlove story concerns a bookstore in Toronto which was called About Books. It was on Queen Street West and was run by the antiquarian dealer Larry Wallrich. John and I had stopped in there one morning and Larry and I soon got deeply involved in some Robert Graves limited editions. Larry also brought out some prized Graves manuscript written in fountain pen on flimsy blue sheets of what looked like airmail paper. The poems were from Fairies and Fusiliers and probably dated from 1916 or 1917. Larry described to me the difficult research to identify the poems, difficult because Graves had suppressed the volume.
Newlove, bored with all this antiquarian chit-chat, wandered off and returned half an hour or so later with a bottle of vodka, a carton of orange juice, and three Styrofoam cups. He seemed slightly unsteady. He pulled up a chair and asked us if we wanted a drink. Both Larry and I said that it seemed a little early. The inevitable occurred. Wrestling to open the carton, he knocked over the vodka. It gouted onto the manuscript sheets and instantly the ink began to blur and fuzz. Larry and I were so shocked neither of us said anything. We just stared. John started looking shifty, then cowed, gazing up at us like a dog expecting a smack. Then, as we stared at him, he reached out and peeled off two or three sodden pages and in an act of expiation stuffed them into his mouth, chewing and painfully swallowing.
And that was in the morning.
In the afternoon, I got him back to the Royal York Hotel where I was staying. This involved John on his hands and knees in taxis, his mistakenly urinating into the clothes closet, his lying on my bed to sleep, my attempting to remove some of his clothes so he’d be more comfortable, his accusations that I was molesting him homosexually, his attempts to hit me. In the end I got so cross I gave him a good clout in the head and he went to sleep.
But—obviously—there was another John. Those who loved him and his poetry knew that the pain that enveloped and consumed him was real. We knew him as a soft-spoken gentleman, a technician in sophisticated verse, a voracious reader of history, a curator of anecdotes, a collector of Victorian travel books, a hoarder of ancient Syrian pottery and Athenian silver tetradrachmas.
Concerning Stars, Flo
wers, Love, Etc.
Make it easier, they say, make it easier. Tell
me something I already know, about stars or flowers or,
or happiness. I am happy sometimes, though
not right now, specially. Things are not going
too good right now. But you should try
to cheer people up, they say. There is
a good side to life, though
not right now, specially. Though the stars
continue to shine in some places and the flowers
continue to bloom in some places
and people do not starve in some places
and people are not killed in some places
and there are no wars in some places
and there are no slaves in some places
and in some places people love each other,
they say. Though I don’t know where. They say,
I don’t want to be sad. Help me not to know.
For John’s fiftieth birthday I gathered together and printed up poems people had written in tribute. Using a line from one of his poems I called the pamphlet “Everyone Leans, Each on Each Other: Words for John Newlove on the Occasion of His Fiftieth Birthday.” George Johnston, now lost to Alzheimer’s, one of the most important poets Canada has ever produced though almost entirely unknown, wrote one of his renowned occasional poems which gorgeously captures his feelings for John and speaks for all John’s friends.
A Palimpsest for John Newlove’s Fiftieth Birthday Party
Everyone is wise. John Newlove is
a master in his versifying and he
knows things he cannot explain to the others,
though he tries as hard as he can anyways.