An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  The first quotation is the opening sentences of Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, the second the opening of Terry Griggs’s “Man with the Axe.”

  It is immediately obvious that the writers approach language in an entirely different spirit. Terry Griggs is specific, concentrated, wired, one might say, alive to every nuance. Listen to the pretty run of i-sounds in “a trickle of melt tickling her inner ear.” One can hear the sounds and see the nest of gleaming pebbles the drips have excavated.

  The problem with Mistry’s opening sentences is more complicated than the use of such almost archaic words as illumined and orisons. The very rhythms of the sentences are flat and conventional and such constructions as “the first light of morning” and “barely illumined the sky” are little more than formulas, counters shuffled into place.

  The use of the word orisons is injudicious. Orisons is not as neutral as prayers because it suggests prayers within the Christian tradition, suggests Catholic Europe. The only uses of the word I can remember in literature are in Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” and Hamlet to Ophelia: “Nymph, in thy orisons/Be all my sins remembered.” The scene is traditionally played with Ophelia reading from a missal.

  The use of the word call is inappropriate, call being associated with the distinctive cry of larger birds, rooks, say, or loons. Sparrows chirp. Or at least do something with an i in it.

  Consider now the following paragraph from Such a Long Journey:

  Besides, Crawford Market was a place he despised at the best of times. Unlike his father before him, who used to relish the trip and looked on it as a challenge: to venture boldly into the den of scoundrels, as he called it; then to badger and bargain with the shopkeepers, tease and mock them, their produce, their habits, but always preserving the correct tone that trod the narrow line between badinage and belligerence; and finally, to emerge unscathed and triumphant, banner held high, having got the better of the rogues. Unlike his father, who enjoyed this game, Gustad felt intimidated by Crawford Market.

  While there is probably an intention to suggest something of the father’s zest and vocabulary in this paragraph, we should not overlook the formulaic writing. Here now is the same paragraph with phrases and clauses which are formulas or close to it italicized and with the particularly British stylistic tic of pairing words indicated with brackets.

  Besides, Crawford Market was a place he despised at the best of times. Unlike his father before him, who used to relish the trip and looked on it as a challenge: to venture boldly into the den of scoundrels, as he called it: then to (badger and bargain) with the shopkeepers, (tease and mock) them, their produce, their habits, but always preserving the correct tone that trod the narrow line between (badinage and belligerence); and finally, to emerge (unscathed and triumphant), banner held high, having got the better of the rogues. Unlike his father, who enjoyed this game, Gustad felt intimidated by Crawford Market.

  I wish that this were a caricature of the father, deliberately employing a string of formulas and deliberately employing a faded diction to capture him, but what I suspect is Lego.

  Choosing stories, then, and editing.

  I am likely to enter a story in an arbitrary manner. I might read the first sentence first but am just as likely to read a paragraph at random. All that concerns me is to get a feel for the quality of the language—the Connolly prescription. When I start reading, I’m waiting for the writing to plug me into its current. I am more excited by a single spark of language than I am by reams of solid competence. A hash of a story, a veritable dog’s dinner, can interest me more than quires of competence if it’s touched by the fire of language.

  I was reading a story the other day by a beginning writer, perhaps the second story she has published. Within four sentences I knew she was a writer I wanted to read and keep an eye on.

  They call it a state of emergency. White dervishes scour Stephen-ville, the blue arm of the plough impotently slashes through the snow. In St. John’s where my mother is, the wires are frozen with sleet and the electricity is out. She’s in the plaid chair, I know, one emergency candle and a flashing drink of rye.

  The spark?

  Well, yes, of course—flashing.

  A LONG SENTENCE: THE OTTAWA YEARS

  While trudging along Bank Street in December one year in solidly frozen snow that would be there until April I heard rapping on a window and glanced up to see Richard Simmins sitting at a café table. I joined him for a coffee and we sat talking about books and writing. Richard, now dead too early, was important in what cultural life Ottawa affords.

  His first career was as a curator and he was responsible, among much else, for mounting the Regina Five exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in 1961 and then sending the show on its travels, giving many Canadians their first glimpse of abstract painting. One of the Regina Five was Ronald Bloore, a painter of great elegance and austerity. I regret to this day not buying a painting of Bloore’s called Byzantine Doors, a white-on-white painting from his Byzantine Light series, a painting I still sometimes see as I’m drifting off to sleep.

  Richard’s success in his curatorial career was accompanied, however, by increasingly self-destructive drinking which caused him to crash, losing his job and his marriage. Later he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and reconstituted himself as a bookseller. His shops, first on Bank, subsequently on Sparks, and finally on Dalhousie, were social centres for young writers, painters, and musicians. Richard had a great interest in my collecting and took pleasure in finding for me stubborn volumes.

  The teaching aspect of bookselling, the fathering and fostering, has been to an extent destroyed by the sale of books on the Internet. As Janet Inksetter of Annex Books in Toronto said to me recently, “I didn’t enter into this way of life to spend my days sitting in front of a screen.”

  I greatly enjoyed Richard and always dropped into his store to chat, to buy books, to listen to his elegant anecdotes. If he’d accumulated a clutch of my books, he’d say, “Would you mind signing these for stock?” And I used to write in all of them For Al Stock—with best wishes . . .

  Richard, perhaps because of his curatorial past, was keenly interested in archives and urged me to start keeping a diary. He used to say, “Although you can’t think this yet, can’t see yourself in that way, you’re already a figure of historical importance. I can see that. Others can already see that. So what you must do is archive yourself.”

  I pass on this advice to writers younger than myself with whom I work. Most feel the attitude pretentious or immodest. I counter with an anecdote about sitting on a session of the National Archival Appraisal Board under the chairmanship of David Russell, ex-archivist for the Province of Ontario. We were evaluating that day the papers of John McCrae, author of “In Flanders Fields.”

  David, a man of vast erudition and geniality, said of the papers that there was a diary McCrae had kept (probably illegally) in the trenches and eight hundred letters, starting with letters McCrae had written at the age of seven and ending with letters written from the front in 1915. David said that in his many years of experience the mere existence of eight hundred letters was such a rare occurrence that he had few other instances against which to compare and measure.

  My younger writer friends—especially those editing magazines—must be accumulating correspondence which would put the McCrae numbers in the shade. It’s a pity to think that false modesty on the part of some is squandering the wholeness of our literary past.

  I was persuaded by Richard’s arguments and started keeping a diary; currently I’m writing in volume 33.

  One of Richard’s typically wry anecdotes was about receiving a phone call from a woman with books to sell. She lived some way out in the country and Richard probed a bit in order to decide if the trip was worth his while.

  What sort of books were they? Textbooks? National Geographic magazines? Readers’ Digest Condensed
Books? No, no, none of them. No, just books. All kinds. Then the clinching question.

  “How many,” asked Richard, “would you say there are?”

  A long considering silence.

  “Oh,” said the woman, “about a cord.”

  When we’d finished talking books that December morning we sat in companionable silence watching the plodpast of the scabbed and skanky panhandlers and derelicts making their way from Big Buds (Where Your Dollar Makes More Cents) to Tim Hortons Donuts. I was fidgeting with packets of Sweet’n’Low. It was too cold to snow. The coloured lights in the window of Radio Shack looked almost alluring.

  “Ottawa, John,” suddenly intoned Richard. “Ottawa lacks magic.”

  Trips to hospitals, dentists, grocery shopping, the cinema in Kingston, the ferrying of visitors to and from Brockville railway station—after five years Myrna felt she was turning into a chauffeur. She wanted to move back to a city where the children could walk to activities or take buses. She was also becoming bored with Delta. I, of course, retreated every day to write and edit, leaving her long days to fill after the children had clambered into the school bus.

  I had never learned to drive. In England for years after the war cars were not readily available. My father as a clergyman was allowed to own one for his pastoral visiting but the thought of letting a boy near it would never have entered his mind. A girlfriend at Bristol tried to teach me. There was but one lesson. The whole business I knew to be utterly beyond me. I drove into the back of a parked car. Myrna claims that I am so oblivious to cars that when someone asked what make of car we had I said, “It’s grey.”

  We decided that we were pretty much forced to remain in Ontario. Montreal would have been our first choice. Myrna was born there and spoke French from an early age. I had lived there for many years and thought it Canada’s most civilized city. But we did not want to place Danny and Rangidam in a situation where they would have to learn yet another language when their grip on English was uncertain. And Myrna was simmering with rage that the Parti Québécois had defined her as an allophone. PQ linguistic mumbo jumbo meaning that she wasn’t pure laine and wasn’t welcome.

  Toronto was impossible for both of us. Myrna has that old Montreal contempt for the place which stems from the days when Toronto was white-sliced and irredeemably hick. For me Toronto was impossible because it offered too many distractions, jazz, other writers, painters, bookstores. I had a need to be out of the swim.

  We pondered Kingston. I liked Sydenham Ward with its stylish limestone houses, felt refreshed by their age. But the rest of Kingston was slummy and then degenerated further into strips and malls. We also felt dubious about a city which lived on institutions—a university, the army, hospitals, prisons.

  “Imagine the parties!” said Myrna.

  And so we began to think about Ottawa. I had been to Ottawa in the winter of 1962 and found it frozenly hideous; it put me in mind of John Betjeman’s aesthetic plea, “Come, friendly bombs, and rain on Slough!”

  We made several forays in 1981 and on one of these found ourselves driving along the edge of a small park. I saw a For Sale sign outside a reasonably elegant three-storey Victorian house and said, “That’s the one for us!” We secured an appointment to look inside and the inside was very elegant indeed, having been refurbished by its owner whose profession was building and restoration.

  Myrna said that one couldn’t just . . . and forced us to look at a dreary succession of doomed structures. We returned to that first house and bought it, though Myrna was aghast at the price and predicted a future, not distant either, of ruin and penury. We sold the farm and fields in Delta, Myrna’s mother, Annie Mendelson, contributed generously, and I sold my manuscripts and correspondence to the Special Collections at the University of Calgary and contributed my mite.

  With three children in the house we had to decide how we were to live. I’ve found that most memoirs skate rather airily over such matters:

  . . . so we gathered the children and took ship the next week for Istanbul . . .

  Only people like actors and painters who live desperately seem to remember early struggles. Montreal lives for me in memories of Brunswick sardines and day-old kaiser rolls marked down at Cantor’s Bakery. Annabel Lyon told me recently that she does like real food but eats tofu “for economic reasons.”

  I was brought up to believe that in marriages men supported women. I felt that any other arrangement was unmanly. How, then, Myrna wanted to know, was I going to proceed? We could scarcely rely on grants. We could scarcely uproot three children every year as I travelled to take up writer-in-residence posts in the Yukon or Winnipeg. Royalties on fiction would barely buy the children shoes. Getting a job teaching would stop me from writing.

  Myrna proposed that I carried on doing what I did best, contributing where I could, while she would get a job to support us. After much angst and travail we fell into the pattern she proposed. Myrna proposed this because it was a practical solution to a problem but she also believes passionately in the importance of literature and has a luminous spirit. Everything I’ve been able to achieve in literary life is her gift to me—and to writing in Canada in general—and I am grateful to her daily.

  John Mills, in biblical mode, describes such an arrangement as living “in the sweat of one’s frau,” referring to God’s words to Adam on expelling him from Eden, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.”

  The Ottawa years stretched ahead. How right Richard Simmins was when he said Ottawa lacked magic. It is clean. It is green. It is the country’s capital and contains such national institutions as the Archives, the hideous, ever-leaking National Library, and the National Gallery, yet it remains little more than a small Victorian town, the integrity of its architecture desecrated by brutal highrises and apartment buildings. The residents seem blind to this vandalism and to the telephone poles that line the streets and the wires festooned above; I almost reeled one day when Councillor Diane Holmes said to me that she thought Elgin Street one of the most beautiful streets in the world. Elgin Street! One of Ottawa’s few virtues for me is that while I’m locked away for hours every day I know I’m not missing a thing. I regard the place as a backwater backdrop.

  It is difficult for an autobiographer to make writing sound interesting. There is only so much any reader can take of “so the next day he again got up at 6 a.m., shovelled in the cornflakes, and then sat at his desk for another seven hours writing with his Pilot Fineliner on yellow pads of ruled paper.” I’m going to let the reader assume that this is precisely what happened most days and I’ll talk of other things.

  Dull as Ottawa was our personal lives were far from dull and we were soon to be placed under almost unbearable stress. Rangidam, free of the fear of attack by monkeys, began to behave with increasing abandon. She wandered off and offered herself up to strangers for adoption. She stole bicycles. She shoplifted. She stole other children’s lunches. She stole and sold her older brother’s clothes. She stole money from the parents of playmates, on one occasion plundering a single father’s considerable savings towards Christmas. She turned into an implacable liar and showed no remorse.

  Myrna and I were endlessly worried about her but all the lies and larceny were but the hors d’oeuvres. As puberty set in she started claiming that men had exposed themselves or attacked her in parking lots, in a cinema, in a public park. The police were a little puzzled because the people she described were so vividly distinguished—red hair and massive facial scars, for example—that they’d have been found or identified quickly. But weren’t.

  Then came a call from the police. Rangi had told other children at school that her brothers had raped her. Myrna and I knew that this was arrant nonsense, such nonsense, indeed, that before the arrival of the police Myrna laughed it off, saying that it was nice to think of something the three of them did together.

  The police team arrived at the house with the
ir carrying-case of articulated sex dolls and began an interrogation of the children—a decidedly uncomical evening. They concluded eventually that the story was not true.

  These troubles did not end and we became adept at dealing with social workers and Children’s Aid, though Myrna learned the language far more quickly than I did. I would argue and remonstrate and achieve nothing; Myrna, smarter than I, simply adopted a dopey expression and said, “I don’t think I’m comfortable with that.”

  “Comfortable!”

  Rangidam remained incorrigible and was eventually sent by Children’s Aid to a group home which attempted to treat her. The two rather strange ladies who ran the home tried to inculcate discipline, restraint, and affection by making each child responsible for the care of a pet. In Rangi’s case no results were discernible. Long before this—utterly desperate—I had had her examined by a psychologist who had concluded that she had been so badly damaged in her years in India that she was simply not capable of many ordinary human emotions.

  All this was grindingly sad and the grief did not subside for years. One night three or four years after these events we received a call from the Major Crimes Squad in Vancouver asking if we had a daughter of East Indian descent. Could we fax a photo? They had a corpse.

  The corpse turned out not to be Rangidam and she continued to wander lost in a world of petty crime, prostitution, drug-dealing and addiction, a world she inhabits still.

  But life had to go on. Otherwise we’d all have been driven broodingly mad. Between 1981 and 1990 I wrote and edited more than twenty books. The first book I wrote in the new house was Kicking Against the Pricks, a collection of essays about literary life in Canada. This book was important not for its sales or popularity but because it cemented my reputation amongst media hacks as being a “curmudgeon” or a “gadfly,” epithets bestowed on anyone who disagrees with ignorant, tasteless mainstream opinions about literature in Canada. The book also seemed to render me persona non grata with universities coast to coast.