An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  “Girl in Gingham” was madly theatrical and I much enjoyed staging the scenes and pacing them effectively. It was interesting to move from fast to slow, from action to meditation, working the emotional weights of sections against each other until it all flowed into the final scene in the restaurant. The other novella, “Private Parts: A Memoir,” was by its pseudo-memoir form inherently less given to dramatic scenes. I concentrated more on achieving a tone for the novella. I remain pleased with both pieces.

  While we certainly enjoyed the peace of the country and its beauty we both found that a little peace could go a long way. It was alarming to find ourselves discussing as a topic of some fascination the passage of the snowplough and we often longed for conversation that Delta could not supply.

  Paul Theroux published a novel in 1974 called The Black House about a recently retired man called Munday who buys an old house in a Devonshire village. He and his wife are staying at the village pub, kept by Mr. Flack, until their furniture is delivered. Here is a scene in the pub one evening.

  The men grew audible again, they coughed with force, one inhaled snuff deeply from the knuckles on the back of his hand, another smoked a rolled twisted cigarette, and the drawling was renewed: the price of apples, the cost of living, a lunatic in the next village, reckless drivers, a pair of vicious dogs Hosmer said should be put down. (“And I know how to do it.”)

  “You could write a book about this place,” said Mr. Flack, who took Munday’s silence for attention.

  “Me?” said Munday.

  “Anyone who knew how,” said Mr. Flack.

  Munday’s laughter was harsh; the four men stared at him. He waited until they began another private conversation—this one about a dead badger—before he went up to his room.

  I laughed out loud when I first read this. Whether Devon or Delta, it catches exactly and mordantly the scope and tenor of village conversation.

  —this one about a dead badger—

  To counter dead badgerdom we had throngs of visitors who came to stay for weekends, John Mills, Jack David, Ray Smith, Leon and Connie Rooke, Harry Hill, Douglas Rollins, Jim Gaite, Kent Thompson, Robert Lecker—and Hugh Hood would drop over from nearby Charleston Lake and Matt Cohen from his retreat in Verona.

  Whenever Geoff Hancock, editor of Canadian Fiction Magazine, came to stay we spent boozy afternoons listening to the lesser Chicago luminaries. It was our own King Biscuit Time show listening to records by Magic Sam, Johnny Shines, Son House, Jimmy Rodgers, Roosevelt Sykes, Elmore James, Robert Nighthawk, Otis Rush, and Shakey Walter Horton.

  On one occasion, the living room seemed to be becoming hazy with smoke.

  “The ducks!” yelled Myrna.

  She ran into the kitchen.

  “It’s not too bad,” she called. “I’ll baste the burned bits with orange juice. It’s only Geoff Hancock.”

  After the fall of Saigon in 1975 we were following newspaper reports of the plight of refugees. By 1977 we were reading increasingly of boats full of refugees being attacked on the high seas by pirates and fired upon by government vessels. All this heartlessness reminded Myrna vividly of the Jews in the thirties being rejected by port after port, country after country, Canada among them, and sailing on to their deaths. She resolved that we must help.

  Myrna has family connections to Naomi Bronstein who was working with orphans in Saigon in 1975. Through her we knew of Sandra Simpson, the founder of Families for Children, who was running orphanages in Vietnam and Cambodia. She also ran orphanages in Bangladesh, India, and, later, Somalia. Myrna phoned Sandra in Toronto and offered help. This was at the precise moment that Ontario was dithering about initiating the Unaccompanied Indo-Chinese Minor Refugee Program. With Sandra’s help we agreed to sponsor and became the guardians of two children who were in a Malaysian refugee camp at Pilau Bidong.

  The bureaucratic foot-dragging and obfuscation were bewildering. Myrna wrote to all levels of government up to and including Flora MacDonald and Pierre Trudeau. She wrote to Employment and Immigration Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services, the Secretary of State for External Affairs, the Ministry of the Attorney General, the Office of the Official Guardian . . . Eventually we ended up with a brother and sister, Duong Le Binh, a girl of sixteen, and Duong Gia Phu, a boy of ten.

  We had explained to Ron why we were doing this but he was difficult to win over. He said, “But I like being an only child.” The whole situation was difficult for both him and Elizabeth.

  Le Binh and Gia Phu spoke Vietnamese and Cantonese. They spoke no English. Communication was difficult. They did not seem to understand why they were with us. We decided that we needed someone who spoke English and Cantonese to explain matters to them. Fortunately we had a friend, Jack Chiang, originally from Taiwan, who was the photography editor at the Kingston Whig-Standard. Jack drove up from Kingston and took the two of them out in his car. They were gone for about two hours.

  “Well,” said Jack, “I’d get rid of them if I were you. I’ve never met such weird kids in my life.”

  He explained that they were Chinese and had lived in the Cholon sector of Saigon. The extended family had lived together in a compound almost entirely cut off from the world. Their father was a weaver. Number One Uncle was the one who “go outside,” who dealt with the outside world. Jack was groping to explain exactly what we were dealing with.

  “It’s like they came from China two or three hundred years ago and they still think and speak like people did then. Yes, that’s it. They’re like, you know, those German guys that wear black suits in the States, Mennonites. They’re like Amish. That’s what they’re like. Weird.”

  Both children were obviously unhappy and obviously missing their parents painfully. They learned English slowly. We had decided that the essence of the matter was that, for their own sakes and for their future, we had to integrate them as soon as we could. We started with names. Le Binh we decided to call Lee, Gia Phu, we changed to Jim.

  We sent them to school hoping that they’d pick up some English there and we persevered at home with looking through magazines and naming objects in photographs, with endless repetitions of words and phrases. Progress was painful. Lee referred to the fridge as the wish-wish and after an outing to Ottawa called the Parliament Buildings the bi how meaning “big house.”

  Attempts to interest them in matters Canadian fell flat. The entire household ate with chopsticks and Myrna bought the Chinese ingredients that Lee wanted—ingredients for kou-tien, lopchong, bok choy, mustard greens, light and dark soy, fish sauce, noodles. If Myrna made a Western dish, Lee would push it around with chopsticks exclaiming in disgust, “What this!”

  Lee and Jim gradually learned some halting English and we tried all the time to engage them in conversation. Sitting with Lee one evening looking at magazine photos and attempting to build vocabulary I came upon a photo of a model.

  “Isn’t she beautiful, Lee?”

  “I no like it,” said Lee, “round eye.”

  It was difficult to understand how they saw us and how they understood Canada. It was fairly obvious that they thought the Chinese way of conducting oneself was the only way. The word ethnocentrism only hints at how rigid they were. They behaved towards us as though they were house guests and made little attempt to join in any family activities. They sometimes said things so revealing that they were, so to speak, a glimpse into the abyss. One day in 1979 Lee came home from school and said, “Trudeau, he gone.”

  “That’s right, Lee.”

  “What happen he now?”

  “Well,” I said, about to launch into the idea of political parties, but she interrupted me with an expression of inquiry and drew a finger across her throat in a slitting gesture.

  So much for civics.

  Our neighbour gave Jim a green John Deere tractor cap. Lee snatched it from his head, saying, “Chinese boy no wear gr
een hat.” Furor developed. More floods of tears.

  “Jack,” I said on the phone, “what should I know about green hats?”

  He listened and then explained that wearing a green hat was in ancient Chinese tradition the mark of a cuckold.

  “What did I tell you?” said Jack. “Sincerely weird.”

  We were somewhat discouraged by the lack of progress but we took part in another campaign to bring five young men to Canada from the Southeast Asian camps. This organization was called the Rideau Committee to Save the Boat People. Five area families volunteered homes for them but we had to raise $10,000 to be held in trust to satisfy government sponsorship requirements.

  In 1980 we also arranged for St. Xavier’s Church in Brockville to sponsor our children’s two uncles and two aunts still in Pilau Bidong Camp. Lee and Jim were much cheered to be able to spend time with them. The four of them, tiny people, lived in an apartment the church provided which they provisioned with huge sacks of rice.

  Jim was of particular concern to us. He was passive and sat about the house staring into space with his mouth open. Myrna came into the kitchen one night after getting the

  two boys bathed and into bed and she said, “You know, that Jim . . .”

  “Ummh?”

  “Well, he’s the first ten-year-old I’ve met with B.O. And,” she added, “a moustache.”

  We grilled Lee on the matter and she confessed that everyone had lied about Jim’s age because the fee to escape Vietnam was less for younger children. It was also believed in the camps that the younger children were the easier it was for them to be accepted into Canadian and American families. Jim, it turned out, was thirteen. He became something of a project for Myrna. She does tend to get the bit between her teeth. And Jim’s teeth became an obsession. All his teeth were pitted with black holes and were rotten. His upper teeth were splintered into spikes and fangs. Nothing was salvable. Myrna took him to our local dentist who said he needed complete top dentures. Myrna took him at the appointed time but the dentist said she couldn’t do the work that day because her assistant was off sick. Myrna, not to be baulked, said, “Show me what to do and I’ll be your assistant.” And, fearsome woman that she is, she indeed operated the water and the suction while the wreckage of Jim’s teeth was removed.

  During these months Myrna and I had been talking about adopting a child. Myrna was becoming increasingly interested in Families for Children and increasingly interested in Sandra Simpson. Sandra and her husband, Lloyd, were unlikely do-gooders. Sandra is a woman of great compassion and little sentimentality. She has a raucous sense of humour. Her own family is vast, being made up of all the adoption breakdowns and of children difficult to place. At one time she had well over twenty children in the house, including the crippled, the autistic, and the blind. While looking after this alarming brood Sandra was running orphanages, raising money constantly, and dealing with the bureaucracies of three and four governments at a time as she arranged international adoptions. It all seemed to an outside eye to be endless chaos—but it somehow worked.

  Sandra’s main aim was not international adoption but in-country care in the orphanages. It was amazing to watch this woman bend people to her will. When she opened an orphanage in Mogadishu, Myrna helped to gather supplies in Ottawa which were shipped to join everything being stored at Sandra’s Montreal house. Myrna drove a forklift truck in Cohen’s Demolition warehouse gathering up military cots. Sandra had secured a Canadian Forces Hercules by sweet-talking the minister of defence at a social function. When it came time to ship everything to Trenton, a truck of soldiers showed up at the house ordered there by the commander of a local army base who was enjoying the attentions of another Families for Children volunteer.

  “Mrs. Simpson!” said the officer in charge of loading at Trenton, a testy man who obviously disapproved of civilian meddling, “You’ve subverted the Canadian Air Force to your ends and now I see you’ve turned your attention to the Army.”

  We phoned Sandra and she told us that she had two children in India that she wanted to place. The children were in the Families for Children orphanage in Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu State. The grim address was: Behind the Blind Institute on Chemical Road.

  Sandra sent us photographs of a boy, Manikem, aged nine, and Rangidam, a girl aged seven.

  I showed the photographs to Lee and Jim.

  “What for they come?” said Jim.

  Lee frowned at the photographs.

  “India people same thing monkey,” she said.

  So in 1980 there were six children in the house. Rangi spoke Tamil. Manikem, whose name we changed to Daniel, spoke Malayalam. And then my mother and her friend arrived from England to add to this menagerie. My mother and I have had a relationship which might be described as “troubled.” Now in her hundredth year, she recently told me that the happiest day of her entire life was when I was accepted into a pre-kindergarten group at the age of three.

  “The relief,” she said, “at getting rid of you, you can’t imagine.” The state between us ever since might best be described as a state of truce. I have written a version of this relationship in my novella “Private Parts.” The underlying tensions reveal themselves in oblique emotional outbursts. One day in this summer visit I noticed she was getting moody and suggested we go for a walk. Tears started running down her cheeks. She burst out with a pronouncement I’ve been trying to think of a response to for twenty years.

  “I could die happily,” she said, “if only you had some decent furniture.”

  Rangidam stayed close to the house and close to Myrna and told us later when she had learned some English that she was frightened of the monkeys catching her. Rangi also spoke of running away from home in India and of a mother who had put her feet in the cooking fire. She had been living on the street before someone had taken her to the orphanage. Danny’s situation had been more stable. His father had died in an accident and his mother had remarried. Her new husband did not accept Danny and his mother had taken him to the orphanage to protect him. Because he’d had some experience of a family he was better able to adjust than Rangi.

  In 1980 ECW Press published my novel General Ludd. I had had a difficult time writing it and the book fell into two parts. I had intended it to be a lighthearted comedy; there was a hiatus in the writing of it and the last half became increasingly bleak. It is not a good novel. It isn’t even an adequate one. I seriously considered withdrawing it before publication but then, in weakness, let it go forward. It received glowing reviews. John Moss in his A Reader’s Guide to the Canadian Novel wrote: “General Ludd is probably the finest comic novel ever published in Canada. Going Down Slow earned Metcalf fair consideration as a writer in the tradition of Richler, Davies, Leacock, and Haliburton. With General Ludd, he follows comfortably in the wake of Cervantes, or Fielding, or Trollope, or Waugh at his very best.”

  Such preposterous bombast over such an obviously botched attempt at a novel is why I despair of criticism in Canada. Keath Fraser got closer to the mark when he said to me that the book founders under its freight of ideas.

  Lee and Jim were making it increasingly clear that they were happy only when they were with their aunts and uncles. They began to spend more time in Brockville. Myrna and I were also feeling considerable stress as Lee was falling to bits emotionally. These tensions were not Lee and Jim’s fault. They were worried about their parents and wanted only to be reunited. It was probably misguided of us to expect any emotional return from them but it is difficult to live with people who refuse to connect with you.

  Lee and Jim decided that they wanted to live in Brockville with their aunts and uncles. They made this move and subsequently managed to get their parents and two younger siblings out of Vietnam. The whole family was reunited and they all live in Toronto now. Both Lee and Jim are married and with children of their own.

  Myrna and I and Ron, Rangi, and Dan moved to Ottawa to be
gin the Long Sentence.

  AN EAGER EYE

  Professor henry beissel, head of the Creative Writing Department at Concordia, phoned me in 1981 inviting me to Montreal as writer-in-residence. I came to an arrangement with the department whereby I would stay in Montreal a couple of nights a week. At the time of my arrival Henry was away on tour in Germany reading his poetry. Sitting in my office one afternoon I heard his familiar accent in the corridor. I went to say hello and there he stood positively effulgent in a white linen suit and a swishy silk-lined cape.

  “How went your tour?”

  He considered the question and then said quite unselfconsciously, “They loved me.”

  I was pleased to be in Montreal, not only for the income and as a respite from my children but because I was able to spend a lot of time with Elizabeth Lang at her store on Greene Avenue in Westmount. Elizabeth let me examine and handle all her African masks and figures and made me free of her stockroom, pleased to teach me in the way Bernard Halliday had been.

  Grey bun and Birkenstocks but with an almost girlish enthusiasm for art and commerce. I can see the two of us now in the intricate dance of purchase.

  “Look at the lines,” she’d murmur, as I ran my hands hopelessly over the horns of a chi wara, the antelope mask worn caplike by the Bambara tribe, the dancer’s face and body hidden under cascades of raffia.

  “So powerful,” she’d murmur.

  “Yes, but, Elizabeth, I’ve read that they were last danced—in the fields, I mean—in 1934. So there’s no way . . .”

  “But who’s to say exactly,” she’d say, “what ‘genuine’ means? What’s genuine is what it says to you.”

  “But if it wasn’t used for their own ritual purposes . . .”

  “You’ve been reading books again by Americans. Rules! Rules! Who approaches Art with rules?”