An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  God only knows what he is up to tonight

  making his way to eternity, through destiny

  manufacturing chaos into rhythms

  and all the while observing himself

  wrapped for fifty years in the cold dark cloak

  of fate, and making poetry of his doubts.

  How splendid, how pregnant, all his poetry,

  and not composed of vegetable peels, either.

  How important it makes him in our eyes.

  Though we are in a land of loonies, we can feel

  that he has done us all good in his fifty years

  and we hope he will have many more to do us good.

  It has been a long, dear association

  making the alien recognizable

  in ourselves—and why should it ever end?

  Think of that, John, if you can bear it, tonight.

  When John got wind of the publication and the proposed party he said that he would leave town on the proposed date and berated me bitterly when I gave him a copy of the tribute, complaining that I had lumbered him with the unwanted task of having to write thank-you letters to all the contributors.

  Over the years after Fredericton our paths crossed continually. John wrote a book called The Green Plain which he dedicated to me. Together we published a book called Dreams Surround Us. He moved back to Toronto and then after some years moved back west to Nelson, B.C., where he taught at a community college. Letters were sporadic. Then I heard that the college had closed and that he was without work. Soon after this I heard that he was in a hospital there.

  Late one night the phone rang and the ghost of John’s voice whispered, “You’ve got to get me out of here. You’ve got to get me a job.” He’d been hospitalized because of his drinking, apparently, and the doctors had given him six months to live if he continued.

  At the time Myrna was working for the Commissioner of Official Languages doing mystic things with computers. Her immediate boss was Pierre de Blois, a bon vivant and bon viveur. She persuaded Pierre that the Commissioner really needed an English-language editor for the department’s unspeakably dreary magazine, Language and Society. We looked up and copied out reams of quotations about John from literary guides and encyclopedias and Myrna wrote up a magisterial CV.

  We felt forced to say to Pierre that there was a tiny problem, that John had been known from time to time to, well, tipple. Pierre made a Gallic gesture and uttered a French equivalent of Pshaw! An interview was arranged. I went out to the airport at midday to meet the plane. John was, inevitably, inebriated. I got him home and into the shower. Made him eat scrambled eggs and toast, phoned Pierre and got the interview delayed for two and a half hours. I walked him down to Pierre’s office. By this time he was running with sweat and was so nervous he was scarcely able to speak. The difficulty of the interview, I understand, was compounded by the fact that the interviewer was a weird Englishman so shy and withdrawn he could scarcely speak in public. Pierre, typically, solved this problem by asking the questions and then answering them.

  John emerged from this strange non-interview with the job secured and at a considerable salary and dined with us every night for a month until Myrna found him an apartment which he later complained about because he said the garage it faced was ugly.

  Myrna kept her eye on him and if he arrived squiffy in the morning she and a friend would take his arms and march him back into the elevator again and send him home in a cab.

  Soon he burst forth in beautifully cut Harry Rosen suits and was obnoxious. He would phone me at odd hours and say, “Let’s go out and cause some serious trouble!” Walking home from the post office one day with my mail I saw him on the street and holding up the letter said, “Hey, John, I’m in Who’s Who.” He said, “Who isn’t?” John checking his stride and glancing back at the panhandler sitting with his kerchiefed dog with its one eye a spooky milk-blue and saying, “No, but I would be willing to assist you financially by killing your dog.” Asking him on another occasion for the loan of twenty dollars which he begrudgingly withdrew from his fat wallet saying, as if in moral disapproval, “Why don’t you find a fucking job, Metcalf.”

  In 1993 I had the honour of helping John put together a new Selected Poems. Porcupine’s Quill published this volume as Apology for Absence: Selected Poems 1962–1992. We launched the book at a reading series I was running at Magnum Book Store. It was a delight to hear John reading with tight passion such classic poems as “Samuel Hearne in Wintertime,” “The Pride,” “Doukhobor,” and “Ride Off Any Horizon.”

  I concluded my introduction of him to the Magnum audience by quoting from a review written by Robin Skelton ten years or more earlier of John’s preceding selected poems, The Fat Man.

  Skelton wrote:

  The poetry itself is enormously well crafted, subtly controlled in tone, and richly various in style, even while remaining consistent to what emerges as an overall purpose to portray the human tragedy with an economy and elegance that succeed in making the whole book a tribute to courage and a statement of the awesome spiritual strength of man.

  This Selected Poems, omitting as it does many of the poems of pure reportage and of whimsy which lessened the impact of some of the separate collections, is one of the most impressive to have been published in the English-speaking world in the last twenty years.

  “What,” I asked rhetorically, “would Skelton say of this even more splendid selection?”

  Newlove rose, walked to the lectern, nodded acknowledgement to me, and said in his habitual sardonic manner: “The last time I saw Skelton was at a party in Victoria and he was wearing a colander on his head with feathers taped to it. However . . .”

  Recently, after sporadic illness and a long period of sobriety and quiescence, John erupted again. His wife, Susan, was in Vancouver visiting their daughter and he phoned asking me to buy him a bottle of vodka and bring it to his house. He said he was too sick to go out. I debated about this for a while but decided I’d go and urge him to sober up before Susan returned. When he opened the door I could see he was shaking, sweating. I gave him the vodka and urged him to drink just enough to straighten himself out and then go to sleep. He asked me to unscrew the top of the bottle. Then he asked me to pour a shot into a glass. Then he asked me to hold the glass to his lips. The shaking became less violent, and after a few more sips, stopped. I delivered my speech sternly and turned to leave.

  He smiled at me.

  He said, “I can feel it singing in my blood.”

  “Go to bed,” I said, “you horrible old bugger.”

  In the summer of 2001 Susan phoned us to say that John was in hospital. He had suffered a major stroke. Myrna immediately sent white orchids to his hospital room. When I walked in he was strapped into a wheelchair. All of his right side was dead. He could not speak. He looked at the orchids, then at me, and nudged with his left hand as if to say: you, you. I talked to him for a while, not really knowing what I was saying, until sorrow silenced me and I sat holding his hand and stroking his hair, taking liberties with his dignity for which in earlier years he’d have tried to knock me down.

  RESURRECTION

  When the term ended in Fredericton I went back to Montreal to look for work. In Fredericton I’d had the daily company and friendship of Doug Rollins. In Montreal I was alone and my depression fed on itself in the silent apartment and grew more intense and convoluted. Gale had renounced the lesbian life and, taking Elizabeth with her, had decamped to New York where she lived, serially, with members of Dave Liebman’s jazz band.

  I managed to get two part-time jobs teaching at Loyola and Vanier CEGEPs. It took all my energy to work and to hold myself together sufficiently to see Elizabeth and look after her in the holidays. During these two years I spent a lot of time with Ray Smith and I doubt I would have survived without his wonderful kindness and concern.

  I knew
that I was becoming seriously ill but couldn’t see beyond where I was. I suffered suffocating dreams. I woke some mornings to find tears running down my face. I felt incessant grief. I leaked tears. I could feel myself becoming more and more emotionally frail. My weight had dropped to under 120 pounds.

  I decided that I had to get help and I was sufficiently deranged that I sought the services of a psychiatrist. I drew on these experiences in my novella “Girl in Gingham.” Again fiction is more vivid that fact. My protagonist in the novella is an antiques appraiser called Peter who is divorced and is persuaded by a friend to avail himself of the services of a dating service called CompuMate.

  The woman situation had started at the same time he’d stopped seeing Dr. Trevore, when he’d realized that he was boring himself; when he’d realized that his erstwhile wife, his son, and he had been reduced to characters in a soap opera which was broadcast every two weeks from Trevore’s sound-proofed studio.

  And which character was he?

  He was the man whom ladies helped in laundromats. He was the man who dined on frozen pies. Whose sink was full of dishes. He was the man in the raincoat who wept in late-night bars.

  That office, and he in it, that psychiatrist’s office with its scuffed medical magazines and pieces of varnished driftwood on the waiting room’s occasional tables was the stuff of comic novels, skits, the weekly fodder of stand-up comedians.

  In the centre of Trevore’s desk sat a large, misshapen thing. The rim was squashed in four places indicating that it was probably an ashtray. On its side, Trevore’s name was spelled out in spastic white slip. Peter had imagined it a grateful gift from the therapy ward of a loony bin.

  It presided over their conversations.

  How about exercise? Are you exercising?

  No, not much.

  How about squash?

  I don’t know how to play.

  I play myself. Squash. I play on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. In the evenings.

  Following one such session he had gone home, opened the bathroom cabinet, regarded the pill bottles which had accumulated over the months. He had taken them all out and stood them on the tank above the toilet. He arranged them into four rows. In the first row he placed the Valium. In the second, the Stelazine. In the third, the Tofranil. In the fourth, the Mareline.

  Uncapping the bottles, he tipped the tablets rank by rank into the toilet bowl. Red fell upon yellow, blue fell on red, tranquillizing, antidepressant psychotherapeutic agents fell, swirled and sifted onto agents for the relief of anxiety, emotional disorders, and nausea.

  The results had suggested to him the droppings of a Walt Disney rabbit.

  Some nattily turned cadences there. Is this autobiography? No, as I always insist, it’s art.

  Though it is more or less what did happen to me.

  Except that “Dr. Trevore,” a pallid man who wore a tie with horseshoes on it, also tried out on me, if I recall aright, Elavil, Norpramine, Manerix, and Nardil. All of which I washed down with beer or Scotch and none of which seemed to have the slightest effect.

  One day I simply stopped leaking. During this darkness I had been unable to value anything. Suddenly I was back in the world again, possibly not a ray of sunshine but able to imagine a future.

  My literary life meanwhile had not been particularly productive. After The Lady Who Sold Furniture appeared I had moved from Clarke Irwin to what was considered the Canadian publisher, McClelland and Stewart, for the publication of Going Down Slow. The book appeared, was well reviewed, then disappeared. This was in 1972. My editor was Anna Porter (then Anna Szigethy). I had certain expectations of a publisher. I thought that editors should keep in touch with their writers. Should be solicitous. Should be aware of intentions and of work-in-progress. Should be concerned about the shape of a writer’s career. I certainly had none of this from Jack McClelland. He concerned himself only with the writers of his own age such as Mordecai Richler and Farley Mowat. As far as I can recall I had no contact with Anna Szigethy for about a year after Going Down Slow came out. I wanted to be in a relationship and that need for support has guided me all these years later in my conduct at the Porcupine’s Quill.

  There’s been an effort lately to posit Jack McClelland as the conscious founder of Canadian literature. He certainly did a great deal but his taste in literature was perhaps not as keenly honed as is suggested in James King’s biography Jack. No one could deny that Jack McClelland was an ardent nationalist, and a great publicist and impresario. I’ve always enjoyed the story of his publicizing Sylvia Fraser’s The Emperor’s Virgin in 1980. On a blustery day, Sylvia Fraser in a shimmering dress, two centurions carrying books, and Jack in a toga paraded down Bloor Street. An onlooker was alleged to have said: “There goes Jack McClelland—only one sheet to the wind.”

  No one could deny that he built the careers of Berton, Mowat, Richler, Layton, Cohen, and Margaret Laurence. But he also published a much longer list of potboilers by such worthies as Richard Rohmer and Adrienne Clarkson. And some of the reputations he built are sagging badly; the best Margaret Laurence titles seem to me to be The Tomorrow-Tamer and A Jest of God. I cannot reread The Stone Angel or The Diviners. He published far more non-fiction than fiction, popular political and sociological titles which quickly mulched down to become leafmould. His lasting legacy was the New Canadian Library series.

  It was in the late sixties that the small press movement was beginning to gather steam. The House of Anansi started in 1967. Oberon Press in 1966. I was attracted by the intimacy and the energy. I thought at the time that Oberon was going to become a Canadian version of the Hogarth Press in England. I wrote to Anna Szigethy, resigning as a McClelland and Stewart author, and contracted to publish with Oberon Press. Anna was both surprised and alarmed. Alarmed, apparently, at the possibility of further defections. Matt Cohen always used to say that he owed all the fuss M&S made of him to my letter of resignation.

  In 1975 Oberon published the story collection The Teeth of My Father. The cover was a photograph of me with Elizabeth taken by Sam Tata. This was printed in teeth-gritting yellow and lime; a second printing appeared in a more pleasing plum colour.

  Nineteen seventy-five turned out to be a momentous year for reasons other than literary. I got married again. Some romances are described as whirlwind; this one was more like a tornado. In December of 1974, at a dinner party, I met Myrna Teitelbaum. Christmas intervened and I was busy with Elizabeth. I phoned Myrna after Elizabeth had gone back to New York and a mere two months later Myrna and I were married by a protonotary in St. Jean, Quebec, in a civil ceremony not much of which I remember, except that Myrna had to agree to accompany me if my work took me out of the province and I had to agree that I would refrain from beating her.

  We have remained immersed in each other ever since.

  INCREASINGLY BAD VIBES

  I cringe when people describe themselves as “educators.” What pomposity it bespeaks! By 1975 I was going distinctly off education. The feel-good, feel-happy duo of Emmett Hall and Lloyd Dennis, authors of Aims and Objectives for Education in Ontario, a report tabled in 1968, together poisoned the Ontario school system and spread the taint of “child-centred” education throughout Canada. The Hall-Dennis Report, as it was called, almost immediately reduced English and history to elective subjects. Mix in with this short-sighted barbarism the fads and fashions rolling in from the States—drugs, brown rice, guitars, I Ching, flower power, Zen, primal screams, vibrators, identity crises, You’re Tremendous, I’m Terrific, boring goddamn people finding themselves all over the damn place . . . this tidal wave of sloppy thinking and sloppy feeling left teachers facing students who rejected traditional bodies of knowledge as authoritarian intrusions on their rights and who were innocent of grammar, history, geography, literature, music, architecture, and painting, students who were, increasingly, far out.

  This general morass is now dignified a
s “the counterculture”; I’m always surprised to see in catalogues the extremely high prices still commanded by sawdust books by such genuinely unlikeable writers as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Richard Brautigan.

  The sixties and early seventies were a sorry time.

  My job at Loyola involved sharing an office with the new writer-in-residence, Al Purdy. Al wasn’t actually in residence. He commuted from Ameliasburg. This involved him in early morning train rides during which he felt it necessary to fortify himself against the cold. By the time he arrived at Loyola he was usually fortified to the gills, cheerful but sleepy. He solved this problem by having a collapsible cot moved into our office and locking the door.

  He surfaced at midday. He’d boom and bellow about in the English department office for a while, groping unfortunate secretaries and filching letterhead and then he’d phone a nearby grocery store to get a case of beer delivered. A pizza would follow and soon he’d have the place comfortable with a fug of cigar smoke. His cigars were rank, plastic tipped and dipped in port.

  Al’s classes in creative writing mainly involved listening to records of Under Milk Wood and Cyril Cusack’s renderings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, recitations rather too fluttery for my taste.

  On some afternoons I’d be further excluded from my office, facing a locked door while on the collapsible cot he plumbed the depths of one of the female department members.

  With the advent of spring and the retreat of the snow under our office window, beer bottles began to surface, more and more every day as the sun gained strength, until they lay revealed on the playing field like corpses after a mighty battle.

  I assigned during the second term an essay on Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners. One numbed sophomore wrote a deranged screed comparing the novel with a song by Elton John. Naturally, I failed him. He complained to the English department. The Chair, in his wisdom, ordered me to justify my actions before three department members. This I declined to do.