by John Metcalf
Richard administered a fund used to buy paintings and prints for External Affairs and for Canadian embassies around the world. I interested him in Tony Calzetta’s work. Richard had a good eye and owned some lovely bowls (hmmm!) which I always admired when visiting. Tony had left the Pollock Gallery and now was exhibiting at Mira Godard’s, probably the most prestigious gallery in Toronto at that time.
I arranged to meet Richard in Toronto and I took him to meet Tony and look at the studio. He was enormously enthusiastic and told Tony that he’d buy some drawings and quite probably three canvases. He also promised Tony, guaranteed Tony, a show at the Canadian gallery in New York, the 49th Parallel, a state-owned gallery designed to spotlight Canadian art and artists.
Richard and I arranged to meet the next morning at Mira Godard’s and look at Tony’s new exhibition together. The canvases were large, vibrant, gorgeous in their colours. Myrna and I recently donated one of the paintings from this series, Advance Machine Romance, to the University of Toronto Art Centre.
While Richard and I were looking, I was chatting to him about the difficulties of Tony’s life as an artist, the struggle to make ends meet, the wasting of his time in having to do drywall and construction work. I told him about an exhibition at Mira Godard’s, a first exhibition for a young painter from New York, where the canvases were priced at $12,000, when a Canadian painter at mid-career would be charging $5,000 or less. I told him that Tony, because so original, found it difficult to get support, that he’d just been turned down again for a Canada Council grant.
“Turned down!” said Richard. “I wasn’t told this. I can’t . . .”
He waved his hand about the gallery.
“This is a professional judgement.”
He shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry but he’s forfeited official credibility.”
On the floor above Tony’s show there was an exhibition on of watercolour landscapes by Dorothy Knowles of Saskatchewan. The paintings were competent, inoffensive, irrelevant. Richard, I learned subsequently, returned to the gallery and bought the entire show.
In Grainau I was still angry with this paltry man and over the years the incident has not receded. It has become emblematic for me of the danger of the state and its bureaucracy. Its relationship with art is usually capricious and always contagious.
Another German expedition took in Trier, Bonn, and Siegen in Westphalia. In Siegen I was teaching for Professor Dr. Christian Thomson, a most unlikely academic, jovial and with a vast appetite for visual arts. He decided that he would make a film of me to exercise his students and for fun resolved to shoot it in the large house, now a gallery and museum, where Sir Peter Paul Rubens was born in 1577. The “Sir” was conferred by Charles I of England in return for a decorated ceiling. The film is in my archives at the University of Calgary.
Christian took a party of us to the house when it was officially closed and proceeded to set up lights and tripods and all the paraphernalia of film-making. One of his students knocked over a heavy light stand which crashed into the wall near a painting. There were no audible alarms or sounds of sirens but within two minutes the grounds filled with uniformed police in jeeplike vehicles and armed with machine guns. Shouting from a window, Christian negotiated our surrender.
The following year Christian was guest editing an issue of a Swiss magazine which was to explore the scope of Canadian painting and sculpture. He came over to stay with us and I took him to Toronto to meet various painters and look round the galleries. He was quickly drawn to the work of Medrie McPhee. I had also arranged a lunch with John Bentley Mays who was then the Globe and Mail art critic. Mays was aggressive and awkward. The first thing he said was, “Why would anyone want to write about Canadian art? There is no Canadian art worth writing about.”
He went on to say that he had never owned a painting, that he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to. He was rude to the waiter. He was dismissive towards Christian. He was wearing a shiny grey suit, possibly silk, and on his lapel he sported a diamanté brooch which was a portrait of a crowned Queen Elizabeth II. I was faintly embarrassed.
In 1987 I represented Canada, along with Michael Ignatieff, at the PEN International Conference which was held at Lake Bled. In a novella entitled “Forde Abroad” I used this Slovenian excursion as a backdrop but instead of Bled called my resort Splad. In the real Bled is the summer palace of ex-King Peter; Cecil Parrott, who translated The Good Soldier Svejk for Penguin, was as a young man tutor to the two Crown Princes there. I often think of Svejk explaining to the Lieutenant that the cat died “after inadvertently eating a tin of shoe polish.”
The conference was steamy with politics and there were endless hintings about separation and an independent Slovenian state. Wild Macedonians orated. Montenegrins emoted. Han Suyin drifted about conferring. Every word was freighted. There was much talk of the Role of the Artist. I didn’t really grasp much of what was going on.
Subsequently I gave lectures in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Sarajevo, and Skopje in Macedonia. Belgrade was hideous with Soviet concrete. I remember thinking during the recent war that if anywhere had to be bombed Belgrade wasn’t much of a loss.
The Hotel Moskva, in which I stayed, was vast and almost completely empty. The menu in the dining room offered a dish called Butter Tart with Chicken Pluck. I was curious but settled for a salad and some Kashkaval cheese, a favourite of Myrna’s grandfather. A notice in my room offered to launder my “nightshirst.”
In Belgrade I saw a gang of middle-aged women working on road repair with picks and shovels, a sight that made me peculiarly uncomfortable. I dabbled my hand in the Danube. I was filmed by a TV crew walking along the bank of the Sava River and discoursing. There is nothing like a TV camera for transforming even a sage into an immediate horse’s ass.
In Sarajevo I of course went to see the footprint painted on the pavement where the assassin had stood to shoot the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife on June 28, 1914. More interesting than the rather bland architecture of the Austro-Hungarian nineteenth century were the Muslim alleys, markets, and mosques. Visiting dignitaries always bring the gift of a carpet to the main mosque and the carpets are spread on top of each other so that to kneel on them one has to mount the pile on a stepladder.
I stayed at the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, which was shelled into ruins in the recent war. The university professors of English, all trained in the USA, nearly all seemed to have second jobs to make ends meet. Journals and books were too expensive for them to buy and the university library lagged behind by years. The Holiday Inn had been built for the Winter Olympics some years earlier. Patches of wasteland had been turned into little flower gardens while the Olympics were on but as soon as anything flowered it was picked and was on sale in the market the next morning; the authorities were forced to station soldiers overnight at every garden plot. Nearly everything about Bosnia and Herzegovina struck me as wilted and run-down, an imitation of a Western country, their Westernness merely an inheritance from the Austro-Hungarian imperium and all of it marking time until it relapsed into a more vital Muslim chaos.
Chaos increased the farther south one went. In Skopje in Macedonia my hotel room door had had a hole in it repaired by hammering over the hole a piece of tin. This crude repair seemed to suggest much about the social fabric.
These junkets to foreign countries continued with Greek temples in Agrigento, crusader castles, Roman amphitheatres in Syracuse and Taormina where Leon Rooke and I took to the stage and orated to throat-pulsing lizards warming themselves on the ancient stone.
Rome I remember not for a yellow dog but for a toilet. In a ramshackle hotel near the end of the Via della Croce, a hotel warmly commended by Leon and Connie Rooke, the toilet stood in a tiled room which sloped to a central drain. When flushed, the water circulated in an unsteady oval and, against the laws of nature, rose terrifyingly up the toilet
bowl until it reached the rim and hurled turds onto the floor.
Strasbourg I remember chiefly because Carol Shields launched into a feminist harangue claiming that I was a misogynist and deliberately excluded female writers from anthologies and from the list of the Porcupine’s Quill. What provoked this harpy act I have no idea; I had to struggle to hold on to the fact that she had written Various Miracles. Ray Smith was so appalled that he later wrote her a strong letter of protest.
Ray and Myrna and I months before the conference had made a reservation at Le Crocodil. Ray, I remember, ordered canard pressé. I consulted the Jeeves-like sommelier about Alsatian wines and he said in a snooty manner, “What a pleasure it is, monsieur, not to be serving Coca-Cola to Japanese businessmen.”
But of all these junkets Bologna was the best. I had initially agreed to go for two months but then decided that that was too long and cut the time to one month. Guy Gervais, bless him, again mismanaged and the cheque I received in Bologna, sent from Rome, was not for four weeks but for eight. I had so much money I literally could not spend it. Cashing the cheque was a vastly comic performance which started with one teller but swelled to a shouting, gesticulating mob of about twenty employees casting doubt on the cheque’s authenticity because it had been issued in Rome by, as the manager described them, “southern monkeys.”
The department of foreign literary studies was housed in a large and beautiful palazzo. One approached along arcaded streets with barrel-vaulted ceilings which were so beautiful that the simple act of walking under them made one feel positively regal.
The department di Lingue e Letterature Straniere itself was another matter. Its Canadian operations doubtless owed their existence to large sums of Canadian government money. I am not saying that its activities were fraudulent but I would say that the department seemed to accept theses in large numbers from students I would have thought not quite prepared for the task at hand.
On my first day there I gave a lecture about Canadian literature to roughly thirty-five students, a lecture which lasted about one and a half hours. Afterwards I asked why the entire class was female. I was told that literature wasn’t important enough to lead to a well-paying job and that therefore it was not a suitable subject for men. I also asked why there had been no questions. The answer to that was twofold; they didn’t ask questions, said Professor Giovanna Capone, firstly, because they’d been taught not to and, secondly, because they were probably embarrassed to attempt English in public.
After this first heroic lecture everyone seemed to think I’d performed sterling service and should take the rest of the month to recover; I was urged to travel to Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice to take in the sights.
Myrna came to join me halfway through and I was achingly lonely for her by then and met her at the railway station with roses and took her back to the Albergo Centrale where our shutters opened onto a sea of waving red roof tiles.
We went to Florence where we did all the touristy things. But more than the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace I remember a twenty-year-old Meursault we were served in the Enoteca Restaurant preceding the menu dégustation.
In Venice we ate on the terrace of the Hotel Danieli overlooking the Grand Canal and at its far side the great Palladian church of S. Giorgio Maggiore, a building so perfect, so elegant it moved me nearly to tears. Our waiter at the Danieli was a memorable disgrace, goosing the busboy, and preening intolerably. When I asked him for pepper he brought a mill which ground white pepper. I asked him if he had black and he said, “Oh, eat it up merry christmas!”
My other vivid memory of Venice was of the pavements and squares fouled with spittle, phlegm, and mucus.
Although I loved roaming the streets of the old city of Bologna and visiting its many churches and although I spent time seeking out paintings and prints by the Bolognese painter Giorgio Morandi, our driving interest was in food. The Italians call Bologna “Fat City” because of the wonderful restaurants and because of the rich produce of Emilia Romagna. Myrna and I, gastronomic rubes, were eager to taste everything and we started eating three full meals a day, something we do not ordinarily do.
We had to try genuine mortadella, the original bologna. And the sweet prosciutto from Palma and the salty prosciutto from the Chianti wine region and the acorn-fed prosciutto of San Daniele. We nibbled on Parmigiano-Reggiano. I discovered mâche. Myrna became a devotee of olive oil.
We applied ourselves to melanzane al forno. We put to the test risotto alla milanese. We tackled fagioli in stufa and torta di funghi. We made inroads on insalata di gamberi alla menta and pollo al limoni. We attacked the ossobuca alle cipolle. We gorged on the richness of polenta con mascarpone e tartufi.
One evening towards the end of our stay we were sitting in yet another serious restaurant. We were the only customers. The waiter was attentive and charming. We discovered that he had until recently been working in a family restaurant in England. We chatted about Soho and life in London. He ardently supported Tottenham Hotspurs. He brought us an apéritif of Campari and suggested that we start with a very fine, very delicate quadrucci in brodo.
We studied the menu. I tried to decide between quaglie con uva and coniglio ripieno, quail and rabbit. Myrna decided on a shrimp salad with diced cold potatoes and mayonnaise.
The soup was delicious. But filling. The broth, the waiter told us, was made from the dark meat of an entire turkey. It took us some time to finish. My apéritif sat in front of me. I sipped some mineral water. When our waiter returned and set before us rabbit and shrimps I knew that it was the end.
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t eat this.”
“I’ve been taking senna pods,” said Myrna. “It’s been five days.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I just can’t.”
“But we’ll hurt his feelings,” Myrna said, “and he’s been so kind.”
“Even a mouthful,” I said, “and I know I’d be sick.”
We sat for a few minutes and when the waiter went through the bat doors into the kitchen Myrna took the rabbit and the red peppers and the shrimps and potatoes and radicchio and mayonnaise and scraped them into her handbag which she closed with a click.
AN AESTHETIC UNDERGROUND
In november 1988, Professor J. R. (Tim) Struthers staged a conference at the University of Guelph to celebrate my fiftieth birthday. To my considerable embarrassment he called the conference “Coming of Age: John Metcalf and the Canadian Short Story.” Papers were presented. Lectures were delivered. And in the evenings writers read. Among the writers present were Leon Rooke, Keath Fraser, Hugh Hood, Alice Munro, Clark Blaise, Kent Thompson, Ray Smith, Jane Urquhart, Doug Glover, and Dayv James-French.
On the final day of the conference, Myrna and Alice Munro, restive in this academic environment, retreated to the faculty club to absorb dry martinis. Connie Rooke was to drive us out later to her house in Eden Mills for a final party. She had a list of errands to run before we headed to Eden Mills and among them was to pick up some boxes of empañadas she was going to serve at the party—empañadas being Latin American pasties or turnovers stuffed with ground meats or vegetables and spiced with hot peppers. Connie was rather flustered with all she had to do and kept remarking that whatever we did we mustn’t forget to pick up the empañadas. She stopped in a shopping mall and walked off out of sight. Into the silence in the car Alice said in a puzzled and slightly querulous voice, “Who are the Empañadas?”
But it was not at that splendid party that I first drifted into contact with the Porcupine’s Quill. That had happened two evenings earlier at a conference dinner at the Bookshelf Café in Guelph. I found myself seated at the same table as Tim and Elke Inkster, the Porcupine’s Quill owners. We were soon discussing the idea of reprinting important Canadian books. What prestigious publishing this would be! As the wine bottles emptied, the vision took on greater clarity. It rose before us, shining. I would select and edit
these volumes with John Newlove, whom I would recruit as soon as I returned to Ottawa, and they would sell not only to the General Reader in bookstores but to students in universities and colleges all over Canada, thereby preserving our literary heritage and bringing into the Porcupine’s Quill coffers vast sums of money.
It seemed to us foolproof.
We decided to call these reprints the Sherbrooke Street Series.
In the fall of 1993, I wrote for the PQ catalogue:
Sherbrooke Street in Montreal has many memories for Tim Inkster, John Newlove, and for me. Tim went to high school at Loyola of Montreal on Sherbrooke Street and I taught at the college for several years. John Newlove and I have both been writers-in-residence there. We all have a vision of Sherbrooke Street as it used to be, the elegant and dignified grey stone houses, the stately trees . . . It was at one time the Champs-Elysées, as it were, of Montreal.
Now the street has fallen prey to developers and has been vandalized by urban planners, the Van Horne mansion wrecked illegally, the heritage streetscape desecrated with brutal concrete, the trees all felled.
Something of the same thing has been happening to our literature. The past is being forgotten; books are slipping out-of-print and out of mind. The outlines of our literary history seem to be blurring; careers seem to be sliding into general oblivion.
The Sherbrooke Street series is our way of attempting to save the vision. We are reprinting and keeping in print important books from our literary past. We cannot have a literature unless the books are available to readers and are being read; we cannot have a future unless we are securely anchored in a past. We are, St. Augustine reminded us, what we remember. Sherbrooke Street asserts the importance of what we have achieved and is our small gesture of faith in the excellence of what will evolve.