An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  four are hors de commerce and

  twenty-six are numbered and signed.

  This we did for every reading. We charged $25 for these limited editions. They cost about $100 to make, so adding that to the fee paid the reader brought the cost to $300. To break even we had to sell twelve. This never happened. Nor in nine years of operation at Magnum and at other venues did we attract a single student or professor from either of Ottawa’s universities.

  I stapled the Xeroxed sheets into blue card covers and gradually these expensive editions became known as “Blue Things.” Some Toronto dealers had standing orders for multiple copies but the audience in general was unable to see the significance of the severity of the limitation. I saw one of the early “Blue Things,” Leon Rooke’s story “Daddy Stump,” quoted in a rare book dealers’ catalogue recently at $225.

  To help in building the community and to publicize the readings and exhibitions we sent out a Xeroxed newsletter to a mailing list we were always building. Lise also listed the readings and exhibitions on the daily menus. We did this not merely as advertising but because we wanted to integrate literature and painting into daily life.

  The newsletters typically had notes on the writers by me, comments on the exhibitions by the painters themselves, Paula Black’s list of new and recommended books, and a recipe by Yoni—Fall Fruit Chutney, Barbecue Flank Steak Sandwich, Shrimp with Feta Cheese and Harissa . . . that last the beginnings of Yoni’s obsession with extremely hot peppers.

  The design and organization of the newsletter was taken over by Brenda Sharpe who, like all of us, donated her time and expertise to the enterprise.

  The Magnum Readings and Exhibitions Series started in April 1991 with a reading by me and an exhibition by Tony Calzetta. Since then we have heard Leon Rooke, Hugh Hood, Ray Smith, Dayv James-French, Terry Griggs, Diane Schoemperlen, Rohinton Mistry, Joan MacLeod, Douglas Glover, Irving Layton, Jane Urquhart, Mark Frutkin, Don Dickinson, Clark Blaise, Norman Levine, Carol Shields, Steven Heighton, Gael Turnbull, George Elliott Clarke, Matt Cohen, Audrey Thomas, Yann Martel, Isabel Huggan, John Mills, John Newlove, and the adorable Caroline Adderson.

  We hung exhibitions by Tony Calzetta, Andrea Bolley, David Bolduc, Alex Cameron, Richard Gorman, Gordon Rayner, Tony Urquhart, Peter Templeman, Blair Sharpe, Dieter Grund, Catherine Beaudette, and Clive D’Oliviera with a summer show of photographs of the readings by our “official” photographer, Micheline Rochette.

  Right from the start there seemed to be something magical about the series. The first audience was about a hundred strong and we never dipped lower than thirty-five. Magnum Book Store had a small café area at the rear where Yoni served lunch four days a week. Those walls as well as space in the bookstore proper were hung with paintings. And the kind of interaction that I’d dreamed of actually happened. While the first show was up—works on paper by Tony Calzetta—two women were having lunch in the Magnum café. When finished, they asked the waiter for the bill and one of them, pointing at the pictures, said, “And I’d like that one and she’ll take the pale pink one over there.”

  Perfect.

  Exactly the way pictures should be bought.

  Burt Heward, the Ottawa Citizen books editor, covered our activities faithfully in his Saturday column and Nancy Baele, the Citizen art critic, covered most of the shows. The CBC began to record the readings and interview the writers. Gradually we began to recognize the same faces in the audience and in the Opus Bistro afterwards. We began to put names to faces. We were beginning to grow into a community.

  Because we developed a core of regulars and because those regulars came to trust my taste I was able to present at Magnum writers who were not well-known—in some cases Porcupine’s Quill writers launching a first book—and give them the experience of a large and enthusiastic audience. I even dared to present five poets—Carol Shields, Irving Layton, Gael Turnbull, George Elliott Clarke, and John Newlove.

  There were some wonderful moments at the Magnum Readings but the most moving of the weekends was that on which we staged a party for Irving Layton’s eightieth birthday. The Porcupine’s Quill had just released Dance with Desire: The Love Poems of Irving Layton. The first copies arrived at Magnum the day before the party. I had commissioned Richard Gorman to do drawings for the book and Rick had come down from Toronto to celebrate the occasion.

  (While the book was in production I’d gone to Rick’s house to pick up the drawings. It was a surreal morning. Rick had been up all night drinking brandy and painting. He showed me around. Kitchen. A living room draped in sheet plastic used as a studio. Bedroom. Then he opened a door onto a room entirely bare. He made no comment. Lying on the floorboards were three very dead Christmas trees.)

  Lise had set up a big table in the bookstore café area and had festively set the table with a centrepiece of mimosa. Present were Rick Gorman, Fran Hill and friend, Doris Cowan, Ken Rockburn, Micheline Rochette, Randall Ware, Myrna and I, and, of course, Irving and his wife Anna.

  Ken Rockburn ran a CBC radio show called Medium Rare which featured music and interviews with writers and musicians. He asked if he might discreetly record the dinner conversation. He later broadcast an edited version on his program.

  I bought some hand-made paper and Myrna designed and printed special menus. We also contributed a couple of bottles of Veuve Clicquot to toast Irving and wish him many happy returns. What a splendid evening it was! What bits of it I remember. I’ve never dared listen to the tape.

  IN HONOUR OF IRVING LAYTON

  On the occasion of

  Irving Layton’s

  eightieth birthday

  and on the launching of

  Dance with Desire: The Love Poems of Irving Layton

  Saturday, March 7, 1993

  Split Pea Soup with Smoked Pork

  or

  Avocado Salad with Salmon Caviar

  (Konocti Fumé Blanc, Lake County, California 1989)

  Baked Lamb Rack with Rosemary Sauce

  or

  Gulf Shrimps with Roasted Red Peppers and Garlic

  (Vina Santa Rita Reserva, Maipo Valley, Chile 1988)

  Chocolate Terrine with Fresh Strawberries

  Ken Rockburn not only recorded conversation at the dinner but subsequently wrote a memoir. Here’s a brief excerpt from his 1995 book Medium Rare: Jamming with Culture:

  The evening began with a round of toasts to Layton, who, in turn raised his glass to his wife, Anna, for her “love, compassion and inspiration.” He then proposed a challenge to the table that would be responsible for the progress of the remainder of the evening; he asked each of us to recall some strange and wonderful story, something which had happened to us personally that we could not explain, some odd occurrence or, better still, some eerie event or coincidence which illustrated the mystery of life.

  “Because this is an unusual evening,” he said, “where writers and painters and sculptors are getting together. You know, what the hell is literature all about, what the hell is poetry all about if it isn’t about a defiance of reality? Reality smells, it stinks, unless it’s gotten ahold of by the artists who transmute it into something strange and wonderful. So I want strange stories that show the remarkable and the magical in all our lives. Those of us who are lucky enough to have a line to our childhood know it’s there.”

  As Layton spoke, his wife Anna, sitting beside him, would watch him carefully, picking up his napkin from the floor when it slid unnoticed from his lap, providing an appropriate word when one failed to come to him, or repeating in his ear the words of one of the other guests if Layton failed to hear. Her attention was unobtrusive and not in the least patronizing, which could easily have been the case for any other couple whose age difference was nearly fifty years . . .

  “I will soon be eighty . . .”

  “You are.” From Anna.

  “Anna is . . .” />
  Anna smiled. ‘Thirty-two.”

  “Thirty-two. I am Jewish—listen carefully, take it in—Anna is an Acadian, a Catholic. In other words, her cultural background is quite different from mine. The disparity in age is quite clear.”

  All eyes tried not to be on Anna.

  “I mean, eighty,” Layton shook his head. “A guy of eighty doesn’t even dream of an erection anymore, you know.”

  “Oh, Irving,” chided Metcalf, “stop telling these awful lies.”

  “Surely you dream?” I asked hopefully.

  “Irving,” offered Richard Gorman, “you won’t be eighty until you’re 110.”

  “God bless you for saying that,” said Layton. “But you would say, if you were a sociologist, that the chances of the two of us having a happy and successful and wonderful marriage that has endured for nearly ten years, would be very slim. Very few would be willing to bank their savings on anything like this.

  “Yet here are Anna and I, after ten years, as much in love, if not more, than we were at the beginning. And that’s what life is all about, that’s what poetry is all about, that’s what the poets are always talking about. They’re always trying to make people aware that there is magic about, the unpredictable, there’s chance and there’s beauty and there’s love.”

  More food came, more wine was consumed and more stories were told. Myrna Metcalf told of a strange encounter at the neolithic stone ring at Avebury, the dishevelled Richard Gorman told a wonderful tale about giving the Rideau River offerings of tobacco, in the Indian fashion, for allowing itself to be the subject of a mural he was painting, and how the ritual had attracted all manner of wildlife to the spot; the brooding boyfriend of Fran Hill told a story that seemed to involve drug use and that weird state of consciousness between sleep and wakefulness, though everyone was too drunk by that time to understand whatever it was he was trying to say.

  On Sunday, the scene at Magnum Books was pure Hollywood. People were lined up for a full block an hour before the reading was supposed to start. We had engaged the services of an off-duty policeman to handle the door and as the time ticked by we began to fear for public safety. The bookstore was jammed with bodies. Every chair was taken, people were sitting on the floor and standing three deep around the walls. Fervent Layton fans had come from as far away as Montreal and London.

  We estimated that we crowded in about 190 people and we turned away another 130 or so at the door, many of whom gathered outside singing very loudly: Happy birthday, dear Irving! Happy birthday to you! After the reading we sold more than one hundred books.

  I’d segregated Irving in the Opus Bistro so that he could sit down and rest himself and so that, at the appointed time, he could make a suitable entrance. Irving and Anna and Lise and I sat at the bar waiting. Irving sipped at a snifter of cognac. I numbered the Blue Things, passing them over one by one for Irving to sign. That finished, I glanced at my watch yet again. We all seemed to be feeling a little nervous, unnerved almost by the numbers. At eight o’clock we walked through the connecting passage into Magnum Books to face the heat and expectation of the crowd.

  I climbed onto the makeshift stage to introduce the evening.

  Phil Jenkins, Ottawa author and columnist for the Ottawa Citizen wrote about the reading as follows:

  “Give me a moment while I let the rum and Coke descend to my toes,” Irving Layton said, and the crowd at the poet’s informal eightieth birthday party at Magnum Books gave him the moment.

  And what a crowd it was. A sea of respect jammed into a space the size of a backyard swimming pool, with Layton down at the front on the springboard, waiting to dive into the poems of the new edition of Dance with Desire. (The original edition appeared in 1986. This one, a classy volume with swirling charcoal drawings of bodies in love by ex-Ottawa resident Richard Gorman, includes some extra poems chosen by John Metcalf.)

  “. . . I like to think I have joined the ranks of the great amorous poets; Ovid, Robbie Burns, John Donne,” Layton pronounced as the rum and Coke reached his toes. Then he began to read, and the room filled with poems tapped out on hip bones, saintly wantons, breast strokes, taxi horns honking for Marilyn, sonnets scribbled in taverns, religious nudges, favoured erogenous zones and civilized seductions—and laughter, our laughter, at the thrust of his wit and the rolling of his rhythms.

  He read for an hour, an act of stamina and gratitude that proved his love of performance and wish to please. He finished with a poem to his wife, I Take My Anna Everywhere, crossing the stage to stand before her and recite it like a suitor, The last two lines read:

  All the men who see her

  want to live their wrecked lives forever.

  There were flowers and a standing ovation for our hero of the horizontal. “I’m grateful for the moment,” Layton told us. Then, like a pub entertainer who is sure that the crowd is in love and ready for more, he took requests from the audience, six in all, that included a Bishop, an ode to his mother from whose speech cadence he claimed to get his “impeccable sense of rhythm,” and a long, throat-tiring account of his first trip to Paris.

  After the sixth there was a silence in which you could have heard a simile drop. “Perhaps we should stop here and move into the bar,” John Metcalf wondered. Layton agreed with that, looked out over the sea of respect and gave us this entirely suitable closing remark.

  “At 80, I’m in the prime of senility. All I worry about now is whether there will be anyone left to come to my funeral; whether my fly is up or down. And how the hell the world is going to get along without me.”

  L’ENVOI

  I crossed the bridge and started up the steep little hill to Leon Rooke’s house when I felt a deep stab of pain in my chest. I stood still looking back to the stream where a heron posed in the shallows. The pain stopped immediately and I went on my way to get of a couple of beers from Leon’s fridge for Tim and me. Indigestion? Two rather greasy pakoras I’d eaten earlier?

  It was September 1997, the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, the village dense with thousands of visitors. Every year Tim and Elke man a booth selling books and I always attend because the day is my annual “office day” with writers and publishers dropping by the booth to chat.

  The next day I took the bus from Guelph to Toronto and arrived early at Union Station. To pass some time I thought I’d walk to Nicholas Hoare’s bookstore on Front Street. Just outside the station that same pain, but agonizing, clamped me motionless. I could scarcely breathe. I managed to lean against the low wall, conscious only of legs and feet passing by.

  It was, of course, angina. I was sent to the hospital for a stress test and in December had an angiogram which revealed a ninety-five per cent blockage in one artery. The surgeon said that normally they’d have carried on and performed the required angioplasty then and there, but that budget restraints under the Harris government meant that I’d have to join a waiting list. I waited until April of the next year for the angioplasty. They inserted into the artery a piece of tubing called a stent. Learning this new word was the only pleasing aspect of the whole terrifying business. The peculiar horror of the operation is that one is conscious while it is going on. When the operation is over, the patient has to lie still in bed with a sack of sand compressing the incision into the femoral artery in the groin up which they have fed the surgical equivalent of a plumber’s snake.

  “If you feel anything wet or hot,” said the nurse, “press the alarm button. We’ll only have seconds.”

  All this struck me as not far removed from having your arm sawn off in the cockpit of a ship of the line and the stump cauterized in boiling pitch.

  For a while after the operation I felt tired and diminished. The anxiety of the eight months of waiting for the operation cost me sorely. Since then, life has been ruled by pills in the morning and pills in the evening. The sight of the Nitroglycerin Sublingual Spray is a daily reminder of mortality.
My real priorities were being nudged aside by electrocardiograms and fasting blood tests.

  Gradually, however, the world stopped contracting. The Press needed my attention. Canadian Notes and Queries needed stropping to a keener edge. Where in Canada, Michael Darling aside, could I find reviewers like Florence King whose review of Parachutes and Kisses by Erica Jong contained the sentence “Jong’s sow-in-heat prose style is impossible to quote in a newspaper . . .” Two new novellas seemed to be ripening in my mind. One of them involving the ancient mistress of a G. D. Roberts–like poet whose ashes she brings back to Fredericton for interment in the cathedral and who ends up winning a parcel of moose steaks at a darts shoot-out in the Legion Hall. A new book of critical essays was also bobbing about.

  But during this period of restricted action I was able to step back a pace or two from the daily onrush and hullabaloo of the Press and consider the profound changes in the literary scene since 1989 when I’d joined up with Tim and Elke. Rampant commercialization was making so much din that quieter voices were ignored or drowned out in the uproar. An aesthetic underground was never more necessary.

  Steven Heighton said to me recently, “Literature used to be about literature. Now it’s about money.”

  Money, and Prizes. Prizes proliferating. And along with them the manufacturing of celebrity by the manipulation of publicity budgets. Literature metamorphosing into Show Biz.

  Writers were once validated by what they wrote; now they seek validation from journalists and TV personalities. Who would wish to be sandwiched between a poodle trainer and a lighthouse keeper, enduring the unctuosities of a Peter Gzowski, a Pamela Wallin or a Peter Mansbridge? Who would wish to discuss le mot juste with Jan Wong, a journalist who in her youth embraced the aesthetic subtleties of Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Who would wish to be interviewed on Evan Solomon’s TV show Hot Type, an experience I would imagine like being slobbered on by an enthusiastic Labrador? How could writers be lured by siren songs so crummy? It is the shallowness that appals. Yet the celebrity manufactured by these nonentities is what many writers seem to crave; for many this mindless exposure is a component of “success.”