by John Metcalf
I felt increasingly isolated in a critical sense. The adulation of Robertson Davies can serve as a good example. I reviewed his relentlessly bad novel The Rebel Angels in 1981, pointing out that all the characters, young, old, male, and female, spoke in exactly the same voice. No one else seemed to consider this a flaw. A bleating chorus sounded Davies’s genius. Poor benighted Beverley Slopen, then a book columnist for the Toronto Star, chided my review for being “churlish,” a comment which suggests the gooey depths of media sycophancy. Much was made by the Canadian media of the fact that Anthony Burgess admired Davies; not one among them ever considered the possibility that Burgess as a novelist was possibly worse than Davies.
(Though I remain an admirer of Burgess’s Inside Mr. Enderby, one of his few books not hobbled by intellect.)
Years later I wrote of Davies: “Like the yokels at a medicine show the audience was awed by the gravity of mien, the silver splendour of the beard, the Edwardian knickerbockers.
“This had to be art.”
Of course, to describe someone as a curmudgeon or a gadfly is dismissive and a way of rejecting the criticism without addressing it. I felt driven to writing and editing critical work because Canadian literary judgements are usually fatuous. The Bumper Book, Carry On Bumping, What Is a Canadian Literature? and Volleys all appeared during the eighties, unleashed into a world where David Staines, the buffoonish dean of arts at the University of Ottawa and general editor of the New Canadian Library series, could state in print that Morley Callaghan was a better writer than Ernest Hemingway, a world which institutes its awards and prizes in the names of mediocre writers like Marian Engel and Matt Cohen, a world where increasingly only the winners of prizes are read.
In 1986 Macmillan published Adult Entertainment. It contains two novellas, “Polly Ongle” and “Travelling Northward,” and three short stories. I felt that I had been writing at full stretch and remain pleased with this book. Reviews were generally good. The book was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, though only because Norman Levine who was on the jury made himself awkward on its behalf; the other jurors were, he said, entirely dismissive.
I had at this time acquired David Colbert as an agent. David was aggressive, abrasive, rude, and arrogant which as long as I wasn’t on the receiving end I considered excellent traits in an agent. He managed to place Adult Entertainment with St. Martin’s Press in New York. The book was well received in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post and was selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the Notable Books of the Year.
However, the editor I was dealing with at St. Martin’s left to join another press about three weeks after the book came out. It was explained to me that in large houses in the States books are sponsored and nurtured by their editors. Without an editor to promote it a book simply withers on the vine. This is precisely what happened to Adult Entertainment. Despite being selected as a Notable Book it was remaindered within a year.
The novella “Travelling Northward” will, I hope, be the title novella in a new book of pieces about its protagonist Robert Forde. Forde is a novelist and quite a few people have assumed he’s an alter ego. There’s a germ of truth in that but these Forde stories are not autobiographical in the usual sense. I’ve been thinking about the shape of this book for years now and feel pleasantly alarmed that its constituent pieces are so untraditional. Several are concerned with the nature of the rupture that took place in our civilization after about 1950. Forde is puzzled. Something happened and he doesn’t know what it was. But it’s decidedly nothing good. The stories are composed through archipelagoes, as it were, of brooding imagery. The piece I’m working on now, “Ceazer Salad,” is a meditation recording a walk up Elgin Street to the Parliament Buildings. Travelling Northward is a book which is both daunting and alluring, daunting because it is unlike anything I’ve ever attempted before and alluring for exactly the same reason.
During these years that I was writing and editing books I was also collecting them. I was working on press collections—Contact, Oberon, and Anansi—and on the idea that had come to me in Bernard Halliday’s musty house in Leicester so many years earlier. Building a collection as opposed to simply haphazardly acquiring books is time-consuming; it is rather like conducting a ceaseless conversation. One is incessantly looking at books in stores, writing letters, talking to dealers, reading catalogues, attending book fairs, learning points and prices, overseeing standing orders, reading reviews, making the rounds—a buzz as of bees hangs over the whole enterprise.
I was buying books locally from Rhys Knott, Patrick McGahern, and David Dorken and from the Toronto dealers Janet Inksetter, David Mason, Steven Temple, Richard Shuh and Linda Woolley, Nelson Ball, and Nicky Drumbolis. I was also buying books from Ken Lopez in Massachusetts and from dealers in New Jersey and Boston. In England I was buying books from Dalian Books, Ulysses Book Store, David Rees, and Ian McKelvie, among others.
I bought Alice Munro translations from Germany, Finland, Sweden, France, Holland, Spain, and Denmark and chased down her advance proofs and editions in England and the States. When you increase this sort of effort to twelve authors it becomes something of a chore.
Last year Myrna and I and my daughter-in-law Kate Fildes and her mother, Isabel, finished a mammoth cataloguing of all this material which we entitled rather grandiosely, The Short Story in Canada: Books from the Library of John and Myrna Metcalf. We catalogued 5,192 items. The Rare Books and Special Collections Division of McGill University Libraries has expressed interest in acquiring the collection.
It was also during the early eighties that live jazz came back into my life. The Château Laurier had a “pub” in its inner depths called the Cock and Lion and some entirely misguided manager decided on a jazz policy for the hotel. This policy held for two years or more. I shudder to think how much money they must have lost. On some nights there were as few as six people in the bar, on other nights the room bulged with noisy mobs from conventions. Every week a new band took the stage, playing louder and louder to drown out the braying of conventioneering proctologists.
I remember an ancient Bud Freeman steadying himself against the side of the piano, giving a slight bow, and introducing himself by saying, “I’m very glad to be here tonight. At my age I’m glad to be anywhere.” I remember taking Laurel Massé out for lunch, a brilliant bouncy singer from Chicago who used to sing with the Manhattan Transfer before jazz claimed her utterly. Mose Allison singing “Parchman Farm.” Scott Hamilton and Warren Vaché, Chet Baker, Canadian friends P. J. Perry from Winnipeg and Dave Turner from Montreal. Zoot Sims sitting on a kitchen chair playing with a breathy, lyric intensity; we didn’t know then that he was dying of cancer. The list of great musicians went on and on and late nights again took their toll.
Zoot Sims—and this anecdote catches the flavour of the man—was once on a CBC show with Oscar Peterson and Oscar pompously said, “Tell me, Zoot. What is the future of the saxophone?” Zoot studied his battered old horn and said, “Well, I’m thinking of having it replated.”
After the first set one night I bought a drink for and was chatting with Robert Rodney Chudnick, better known as Red Rodney, Charlie Parker’s trumpet player. He joined Parker in 1949 and stayed with the band until 1952; he told me that when they were travelling he was always ordered to carry Parker’s suitcase. He also talked about his heroin addiction, an addiction he’d sought so that he too by “crossing over the line” might play with Parker’s endless invention.
I remember thinking at the time: I am talking to a man who played with Bird. As with many things in my life I couldn’t get over how strange it was, strange that a little boy who’d grown up using the Elizabethan thee and thou in a stronghold of clog-wearing primitive Methodists in Yorkshire should be drinking Scotch in what my scholarly brother still refers to as the “New World” with a pioneer bop trumpet player.
Quite unlike life in the manse.
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bsp; The writing life is necessarily solitary and needs a firm discipline. The occasional day spent working with other people or simply in conversation comes as a treat in itself. I always look forward to days at the Archives evaluating literary material for tax credit. There is something pleasantly collegial about working with David Russell and, say, Peter Harcourt and John Moldenhaur.
There is also the coarse, snoopy pleasure of reading people’s letters and diaries. It is a condition of this kind of work, though, that one’s lips have to remain sealed, which is a pity because some of the gossip is of high grade. The huge archive of the Colbert Agency was an eye-popper as we studied the royalty statements of about half the writers in Canada. We were all fascinated by the chatty archive of John “Buffy” Glassco, author of Memoirs of Montparnasse, and author also of Contes en Crinoline, Fetish Girl, The English Governess, and The Temple of Pederasty. His remarks concerning Margaret Atwood were of peculiar interest.
Any appraisal is, in fact, something of a fiction. We collude in saying that ten boxes of paper are “worth,” say, $40,000. William Hoffer wrote in his essay “Cheap Sons of Bitches: Memoirs of the Book Trade”:
As is the case in so many areas of Canadian cultural life, there is no genuine market for most Canadian literature. As a member of the National Archival Appraisal Board, I am constantly forced to consider the “technical” value of collections of manuscripts, while at the same time fully aware that were the material to be auctioned, it would bring nothing. Similarly, the pricing of Canadian first editions has been somewhat technical. Both booksellers and book buyers have eventually “assigned” value to particular books.
It was this hollowness at the centre, this central lie, that drove us to the Tanks campaign.
By 1993 Myrna had had enough of the civil service. The lively people she had worked for earlier, like Pierre de Blois, had left, and people with little, correct minds had risen to positions of power. Poor John Newlove whom they’d earlier been able to protect was now nagged and threatened by a senior manager, exquisitely dim in the manner of CNN’s Connie Chung, for such infractions—despite John’s explanation of its etymology—as permitting the use of the word niggardly. Such was the atmosphere Myrna fled.
Our son Ron had finished high school and had turned his hand to a variety of jobs, settling on the restaurant business and becoming the general manager of Dunn’s Famous Smoked Meat restaurant in the Ottawa market. After some time, the owner, Stanley Devine, sent him to Toronto to open a branch of Dunn’s on Adelaide Street. He oversaw this with great success and we were very proud of him. After a period of illness in Toronto he returned to Ottawa intent on opening his own restaurant. Myrna and he went into partnership and on November 11, 1993, opened the Elgin Street Diner. Our younger son, Dan, works there as well.
Myrna said that selling hamburgers was intellectually more interesting than working in the public service.
The restaurant is open twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Breakfast is served twenty-four hours a day. The restaurant employs thirty-five staff. The food is simple “diner food,” club sandwiches, burgers, fries, milkshakes, but is of high quality. The poutine has been voted the best in Ottawa and has been discussed by poutine lovers on the CBC; I have seen this dish on numerous occasions, but nothing could tempt me.
During the daytime the Elgin Street Diner, under Myrna’s control, or under Ron’s wife, Kate Fildes, is a family and neighbourhood hangout. Small children demand Myrna’s presence and tell her long tales of their daily doings; she gives her most favoured ones dollops of ice cream. Old people, too, who are lonely and bored confide in her and she makes them feel valued and at home. Even the mildly crazed are cared for; one old lady asked daily for a table for six, the other five, her nonexistent family, being on their way. Myrna solved this by seating her at a table for one and saying, “They always take a little while to get here so I’ll put you here for now and move you when they arrive.” Myrna at work is a display of natural goodness.
The overnight shift is an entirely different scene and my son Ron rides herd on it. When the bars close, the Diner fills to capacity and pulsates with noisy, inebriated energy and stays that way for hours. People congregate there from all over the city. Over the years, the Diner has become an Ottawa institution.
The Diner’s business has increased every year and some part of this is owing to the cheerful service of the staff and the patient talents of Jason Hughes, the Diner’s chef.
Myrna, Ron, and Kate are kind enough to let me use the Diner as an unofficial “office” to entertain visiting authors. It is an office distinguished by walls hung with blow-ups of Sam Tata photographs, sadly the only permanent exhibition of his work in Canada.
On the rare days when driblets of money arrived in the mail I’d be tempted to go out for lunch and nearly always went to Chez Jean-Pierre on Somerset Street. The restaurant was owned and run by Jean-Pierre Muller from Strasbourg who had been the chef at the American embassy but had quit, saying he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life making hamburgers. I knew whenever I went that Charles Ritchie would likely be there.
I’d read and enjoyed his diaries, particularly Storm Signals, which covers the war years in London. I’d first met him when having breakfast and a brood in a café on Elgin Street. I’d finished reading the Globe and Mail and as I passed his table said, “Mr. Ritchie. Would you care for the Globe and Mail?” He looked up in patrician horror and said, “Good God, no!”
We got to know each other quite well and he would sit drinking cognac in Chez Jean-Pierre spinning out anecdotes about Vincent and Alice Massey, Mike Pearson, Elizabeth Bowen, Mackenzie King whom he loathed, and John Diefenbaker, whom he’d loathed even more. He described Diefenbaker as “a congenital liar” and King as “neurasthenic.” This increasingly gaunt and frail man who’d been ambassador to Washington and high commissioner to the United Kingdom told me that for twenty years he’d tried to write fiction but couldn’t and that that failure had induced in him a permanent melancholy. Aesthetic standards, he used to say, are the only standards worth upholding. Life’s most rewarding activities, he claimed, were gossip and sexual intercourse. Family life, he said, made him long for the brothel.
By about 3 p.m. he’d be close to legless, though faultlessly weaving stories still, and Jean-Pierre, who was fond of him, would drive him the short distance home to his apartment.
If I bumped into him on the street I’d always stop to chat and ask whether he was working on a new diary.
“Oh,” he’d say, “one needs to scribble away at something if only to stop oneself getting into the sherry at 10 a.m.”
He stopped me on Elgin Street one January morning in 1987 and told me that someone had given him a copy of Adult Entertainment for Christmas.
“What a long, bleak day I’d been expecting,” he said, “the insufferable dreariness of festivity, but you saved Christmas for me. What lovely writing! I chortled.”
Another of the pleasures of Ottawa was escaping from the place and during the eighties I travelled on Canada’s behalf and on behalf of PEN International to academic conferences in Germany, France, Italy, and Yugoslavia.
I was sitting at my desk one morning when the phone rang. The caller identified himself as Guy Gervais of the cultural section of External Affairs.
“Would you,” he said, “be prepared to go to teach about Canadian literature for two months in Milan?”
I said that I’d be very interested indeed but before I could give him a firm answer I’d have to consult my wife. I said I’d call him back. I called Myrna at Official Languages and she was agreeable and thought she could wangle some time off to join me for part of the stint.
“Mr. Gervais?”
“Yes.”
“This is John Metcalf.”
There was a silence.
“I’m returning your call of this morning. About Milan.”
“M
ilan?”
“The teaching job. I spoke to my wife and she’s agreeable.”
The silence stretched and became uncomfortable.
“Who did you say that you are?”
“John Metcalf. We spoke earlier. This morning.”
Another silence.
“Oh, my God!” he said. “I thought you were W. O. Mitchell.”
This is how I ended up in Bologna, sent there as a consolation prize.
Mark Twain was once asked on his return from Europe what he had thought of Rome.
“Rome . . .” he said to his wife. “Was that the place we saw the yellow dog?”
I’m afraid I’m a very Twainish tourist and much of what follows is quirky, idiosyncratic, and unreliable. I do make efforts to see the Cathedral, the Gallery, and the Castle but my attention is more usually on the doorlatch than the door.
The first of these travels was in 1984 when I went to Munich and Grainau in Bavaria to give a paper entitled “The Curate’s Egg.” It was principally an illustration of Morley Callaghan’s manifold ineptitudes and a celebration of Hemingway’s felicities. As I left the lecture hall I heard a little martinet from Vienna, his Polish-sounding surname a concatenation of consonants, sputtering to his cronies, “He was lecturing us! He dared to lecture us!”
Following the lecture I was sitting having a drink with Professor Dr. Walter Pache of the University of Trier when we were approached by my Ottawa neighbour Richard Tait. He asked if he might join us and I said with a cold rage of which I hadn’t thought myself capable, “I can’t physically prevent you but I’d rather you didn’t.”
Richard lived four doors away from us. He was an anglophile diplomat very much in the Charles Ritchie mould. He had been Canada’s ambassador to the European Union in Brussels and on his return to Ottawa had been placed in charge of cultural matters in External Affairs. He was bitter about this as Culture was a resounding demotion. He claimed the department was simply a dumping ground for the eccentric and mentally ill. He said one of his male employees came to work every day on a tricycle dressed in pieces of what looked like eighteenth-century French military uniform and put in eight solid hours of knitting.