Swann

by Carol Shields

  The Circuitous Introduction

  The world claps its hands for the intellectual nomad: the Icelandic scholar in Cuba, patiently translating his sagas into Spanish, or the Quaker lesbian traveller in Peru with her backpack and her flute and her notebook full of compassionate poems, or the young barmaid in Dubrovnik with a degree in physics who serves rum cocktails with a monologue that dilutes and reconstitutes the seven languages she speaks, or the French existentialist in his Irish cottage, contemplating local flora and folktales and extracting from them a message that will soon convert hundreds, or at least a handful, to a simplified, nourishing vision of the oneness of things. We love these wanderers for their brilliance, their adaptive colouring, their many tongues and tricks of courage; but chiefly we love them for the innocence and joy with which they burrow into the very world so many of us have given up on.

  Retired newspaper editor Frederic Cruzzi of Grenoble, Casablanca, Manchester, and Kingston, Ontario, aged eighty, is such a one—equally at home grafting an apple tree or poaching a salmon or reading a page of Urdu poetry or writing one of his newspaper columns on the diabolism of modern technology. Recently he has come out against the telephone. Vile instrument of slander and babble. Rude interrupter of lamp-lit evenings. Purring flatterer, canny imposter, silky lover, sly mendicant, cunning messenger of unwelcome news, of debts, of dinner parties. “We are dialling our way direct to an early death,” says the outspoken octogenarian Cruzzi, who has a weakness for alliteration. Buzzed, bashed, kept on hold. Welded to copper wire, bonded to slippery plastic. Recorded, pre-empted, insulted, seduced, and finally, ultimate injury, presented with a bill as long as your femur.

  Sitting in an upstairs bedroom of a hundred-year-old house (limestone, creepers) in Kingston, Ontario, F. Cruzzi, who has risen at half-past seven, is typing his weekly column on a 1950 Underwood, a large, muscular office model, solid and unmusical. He leans over the keys, heated to a fine frenzy. By now, although he fiercely believes people must compromise with the history they are born into, he is persuaded by the crescendo of his own history that telephones must go. What a sight he is, surrounded by his hundreds and hundreds of books, with that sail of white hair, that turkey neck, those bobbling shoulders, the stub of a pencil gripped between his strong old teeth. He has a hard humorous face and oaken hands. Down beneath his wine-dark dressing gown his spindly old-man legs poke out, and his long narrow yellowed feet slap away at the dusty floor. A ladder of sunlight climbs his sleeve, reaches the triangularity of bushy eye sockets. Wham goes the carriage, plink-plunk go the keys. It’s a wonder steam isn’t pouring out of his ancient orifices, a wonder his heart doesn’t give way. Sorry, wrong number—O execrable telephone pole, despicable wire and vulgar coin box. The wound the world inflicts on itself is tinged by automatic answering machines. The barbarous disembodied yoking of human voices, the chattering, battering, shattering of pure air. Desecration. Shame. Gossip in the treetops, alarm in the night.

  One paragraph to go and he’ll have his five hundred words for this week.

  His dressing-gown gapes, revealing shrunken testicles and penis. His foot keeps time. A delicate web gathers at the left side of his mouth. He has come to the last sentence, the final word.

  He chooses it with care. As always.

  Frederic Cruzzi: A Few of his Friends

  Frederic Cruzzi of Kingston, Ontario, former newspaper editor, journalist, traveller, atheist, lover of women and poetry, tender son of gentle parents, scholar, immigrant, gardener, socialist, husband, and father—he is also a man who can be said to have been lucky in friendship. His friendships, he sometimes thinks, are all he has to forestall the pursuing chaos of old age. They give him interludes of calm as well as moments of exhilaration and reverence. Now and then he recalls the slightly overwrought words of a nineteenth-century Indian poet describing friends:

  Jewels of uncertain colour

  Flowers of evasive scent

  Stars of shifting distance

  And hands that hesitate never

  The opaque ironies of the poet appeal to Cruzzi, since they emphasize the steadiness of friendship and reject the current jejune notion of soul-baring and abandonment of self. There’s something devouringly selfish, he believes, about the wish to know someone “through and through.”

  Of course, by now many of his friends have been taken from him by death: his brother Hilaire, dead at twenty in a climbing accident; Herve Villeneuve, friend from his student days in Grenoble, a suicide at forty-six; Professor Nicholas Guincourt, a colleague of his father, who gave him the gift of the English language: Sami Salah, his Moroccan cousin who travelled with him for a year in the Far East and was later killed in a hotel fire in Cleveland, Ohio; Tante Maleka, his giggling, indulgent Casablanca aunt, a prodigious smoker of cigarettes who worried about bronchitis but died instead of measles; Max Robinson, literary editor of the Manchester Guardian in the thirties, a man of bountiful imagination and easy tears; and Max’s wife, May, contemplative, spiritual, alluring; Estelle Berger, Jungian therapist, whose plangent voice still visits Cruzzi in dreams; Glen Forrestal of Ottawa, tonsured sybaritic physician, essayist and poet, sanguine sipper of whisky sodas; Monkey La Rue of Kingston, naturalist, fisherman, skier, composer; Barney Ouilette, also of Kingston, amateur painter and brilliant mathematician (despite the tide of vodka between his ears), and many many more, but of all of these dead friends Cruzzi misses most his wife, Hildë, who in fifty years sometimes exasperated him but never once gave him a moment of boredom.

  It’s true that Cruzzi is at an age when he can count more friends among the dead than the living, but he is still a man who lives in the midst of friendship. More and more, to be sure, he seeks solitude, is out of sorts, is impatient with confidences, feels put upon, feels weary and oddly restless; but he cannot imagine a life in which friendship is not the largest part.

  He is slightly in awe of those who manage their lives without friends and wonders where these unfortunates find their strength. In all of Mary Swann’s poems, for instance, the word friend is found only once, and even then it is used reflexively and all but buried in a metaphor, pointing, he believes, to a terrifying ellipsis.

  Like a cup on the shelf

  That’s no longer here

  Like the friend of myself

  Who’s drowned in the mirror

  The hour is murdered, the moment is lost,

  And everything counted except for the cost.

  Those things that kept Mrs. Swann friendless—fear, crippling shyness, isolation, drudgery—are as foreign to Frederic Cruzzi as such bodily afflictions as impetigo or beriberi. His life has always been organized, and is still organized, so that he is in the midst of people who possess “hands that hesitate never.”

  Bridget Riordan is one of those friends, even though he has seen her infrequently during the last forty years. Seductive, rangy, managerial, she is master of all the arts of love and all the modes of loving. Only recently retired from the theatre, she lives in a London flat furnished with airy furniture and heavy paintings, and writes endless letters to friends, including Cruzzi—letters full of wit, skepticism, memory, gossip, tact, and cheerful lewdness.

  Cruzzi also counts among his friends a man named Bud McWilliam, former linotype operator on the Kingston Banner, a man who loves guns, hunting dogs, machinery, hearty food, and speculative conversation. (Some physical provision or deficiency—Cruzzi doesn’t know which—has separated Bud McWilliam from the need for women, but he is able, nevertheless, to cackle at the paradoxes his life has held up.) Nowadays he’s more or less confined to bed,and he welcomes Cruzzi’s weekly visits. A number of operations have left him with a gnarly larynx and a throat full of scar tissue, but he steadfastly refuses to indulge in the quavering warble of the aged. His struggle to overcome his bodily infirmities strikes Cruzzi as heroic, and he has often been tempted to remark on it. Last week their discussion centred on the emergence of certain sprightly neologisms in the popular press, the week before on the r
efraction of light.

  He loves, has always loved, Pauline Ouilette. Her passion for perfume, pedicures, and expensive underwear gives an impression of frivolity that is false. Sometimes when the two of them sit talking, usually in Pauline’s pink and grey sunporch, Cruzzi shuts his eyes for an instant and breathes in, along with her fragrance, the skirted merriment of her voice, the way her vowels tumble out, an engaging spill of music forming little hillocks that signal the beginning of laughter. If Pauline should see him close his eyes, she would never be offended or suspect boredom. She is fully conscious of her powers, appreciates the importance of good food, knows that books, particularly fiction, form a valuable core of experience, and believes she can trust Cruzzi absolutely to understand and follow the intricacies of her observations.

  He wonders sometimes how he would manage without Dennis and Caroline Cooper-Beckman, who live with their three children in the brick house across the street from him. Dennis, aged forty, brings him clippings from obscure journals, fresh raspberries, and iconoclastic views on universities and governments. Caroline, thirty-five, brings the terrible sincerity of her social concerns and a slightly skewed sexual ambivalence that suggests faint, flirtatious arcs of possibility and stirs in Cruzzi memories of buried passion. He would do anything for Dennis and Caroline, and they for him.

  Mimi Russell, otherwise known as Sister Mary Francis, has won Cruzzi’s heart. Not yet fifty, not yet out of a long childhood, she is breezy and articulate and in love with English literature. She can recite most of Keats by heart (except for “Endymion,” which she considers a piece of kitsch). In literature she sniffs a kind of godly oxygen that binds one human being to the next and shortens the distance we must travel to discover that our most private perceptions are universally felt. In this, Cruzzi believes, she is right. (They lunch together weekly and speak often on the phone, or did until Cruzzi’s phone was disconnected.) Mimi Russell’s biography of Laura Jane Oldfeld, the nineteenth-century Ontario pioneer, is impeccable; also lively and suffused with a rare amiability. When Mary Swann’s biographer, Morton Jimroy, visited Kingston a year or so ago, Cruzzi arranged a dinner so the two of them might meet and talk shop; never had such sweetness met such sourness. (Cruzzi supposes the sad, sour, spluttery Jimroy will be in attendance at the Swann symposium and mentally braces himself.)

  Simone Cruzzi is Frederic Cruzzi’s daughter-in-law, not that he attaches that clumsy title to so slim, so blonde, so vivacious a woman. She lives in Montreal, has a neat, organized face and dresses snappily. Often she comes down to Kingston for the weekend, and between visits she writes Cruzzi fond little notes on company stationery. For a number of years she has worked as a travel agent and tour guide, and she is forever setting off for Salzburg or Beijing or Oslo with her “little chicks” in tow. From these distant points on the globe she mails Cruzzi postcards crowded with stamps (which he pretends he collects). The messages scrawled on the back are always in animated counterpoint to the scenes—sunsets, fountains—displayed on the front. She almost never alludes to her husband, Armand (only son of Hildë and Frederic Cruzzi) who died of a brain tumour at the age of thirty-six.

  There is also Frank Hurley who owns Hurley and Sons, Funeral Directors, of Kingston. In his nether-world Frank embalms bodies and sells coffins sheathed in bronze and lined with satin. Otherwise he scours the countryside on foot (five miles is nothing) for wild flowers and grasses. His need to observe and classify operates like a busy little buzz-saw in his brain, and it is partly for this ever-humming busyness that Cruzzi loves him. He has no humour, but is prodigiously kind and something of a metaphysician. Human society, he says to Cruzzi in his soft burr, is distinguished by four manifestations: the existence of tools, the presence of art, a respect for the dead, and a compulsion to give names to natural phenomena. At eighty-four he is Cruzzi’s brother in old age.

  And one more: Tom Halpenny, who now edits the Banner. He is an American by birth and education, is forty-four years old, speaks in a loud voice, sometimes of matters he knows nothing about. He has a quacky laugh, yawns in public, wears a black T-shirt and a gold chain around his neck, and is famous for his explosive farts, manifested most recently while he was addressing the Ontario Bay Jaycees at their annual fall banquet. Two wives have left him. Of his four children, only one is still in touch. His hair, what remains of it, hangs raggedly on the ears. Laziness, or perhaps the withdrawal of love, has caused his shoulders to slope. His roots are in the old New Left which means they are nowhere. New England puritanism runs through him like a scam of coal. He worships Cruzzi, adored Hildë, thinks Kingston is heaven and the Banner the banner of heaven.

  At least once a month Tom Halpenny tries to bully Cruzzi into writing his life story. “Before it’s too late,” he goads wickedly.

  Today, a Tuesday in early November, the two of them are eating lunch in Kingston’s Old Firehall Restaurant. Cruzzi is part way through a plain omelette, sipping his Perrier, wishing it were wine, and refusing to be bullied. Tom Halpenny, who has just savaged a nine-dollar lobster salad, is gulping cold milk. From the bottom drawer of cleverness he produces what he considers the ultimate argument, which is that an unrecorded life is a selfish life.

  Cruzzi shakes his head at this piece of foolishness but says nothing. (Bad enough to be wobbly and squint-sided at his age, but to be encumbered with garrulousness too!) The truth is that except for those of Orwell and Pritchett, autobiography is a form that offends him. The cosy cherishing of self is only part of the problem. There is the inevitable lack of perspective, not to mention hideous evasions, settlings of scores, awesome preciosity, and the appalling melted fat of rumination, barrels of it, boatloads. Most of the people in the world, he tells Halpenny, could write their autobiographies in one line.

  “Ha!” Tom shouts, spraying milk. “Impossible.”

  “One sentence then,” Cruzzi concedes.

  “Jesus, God,” Tom breathes. “The cynicism, the cheap cynicism. You of all people. I don’t believe it. And you a humanist.”

  “Ex-humanist.”

  “Since when ex?”

  “Since …” Cruzzi looks evasively to the ceiling.

  “You honestly can sit there and tell me that a whole human life can be boiled down to one shitty little fucking sentence?”

  “How about one long sentence then?” Cruzzi suggests slyly.

  Frederic Cruzzi: His (Unwritten) One-Sentence Autobiography

  Frederic Georges Cruzzi was born eighty years ago in the French city of Grenoble, the second son of happily mismatched parents (Mohammed Cruzzi, formerly of Casablanca, a professor of middle eastern languages, and Monique Roche Cruzzi, a shy, pretty, musically able woman), and in that exquisite mountain-ringed city, now bitterly contaminated by the chlorine industry, the young Cruzzi was educated, formally and informally, by exposure to languages and to the arts—though not to science—and to people who were for the most part kind, following which he spent a number of years travelling and testing the shock of strangeness in such places as Morocco (a second home to him), Turkey, India, Japan, and the United States (the world being in those days, before the invention of work visas and inflation, more accessible, more welcoming) and acquiring along the way a taste for women and for literature and supporting himself by becoming a journalist, a profession that was continually carrying him to unlikely places, one of them being, ironically, the French town of Gap, not far from his home city of Grenoble, where he happened to meet at a small supper party a young student by the name of Hildë Joubert, a rather large-boned girl with straight yellow hair parted in the middle, who had grown up in the hamlet of La Motte-en-Champsaur (where her father kept goats) and who was possessed of a shining face in which Cruzzi glimpsed the promise of his future happiness, though it took him a week before he found the courage to declare his love—in the museum at Gap, as it happened, standing before a hideous oil painting, even then peeling away from its frame, depicting Prometheus being fawned upon by a dozen lardy maidens—after which the two
of them lived for some years in England, Hildë finishing her dissertation on the poet Rilke, and Cruzzi working on the staff of a newspaper in the city of Manchester, where they bought a semi-detached suburban house (Didsbury) with a garden and fruit trees, produced a baby son, Armand, and decided one midsummer night when the English sky glowed lavender in the west and seemed to beckon, that they would emigrate to Canada (where they naively believed they might keep a foothold on the French language), an excellent choice, as it turned out, since a newspaper in the small (population: 50,000) lakeside city of Kingston (King’s town; the name promised history) was at that time looking for a new managing editor, a position offering that extremely rare combination of independence and security, and which Cruzzi—despite his socialism—was to enjoy for more than three decades, though the death of Armand came near to breaking his heart, and would have if he hadn’t had his work at the paper to occupy him, as well as a small literary venture, the Peregrine Press, which he and Hildë launched in order that they might print the work of a number of new Canadian poets who had come to their attention. Mary Swann of Nadeau Township being perhaps the most singular, a poet that Hildë found endearingly “rough” in technique, but as fine a poet in her way as the great Rilke—a rather extravagant comparison, but one with which Cruzzi partly concurred, though both he and Hildë kept their estimation to themselves for reasons they avoided mentioning even to each other, and that Cruzzi, now eighty years old, must carry alone.

  * * *

  Frederic Cruzzi: Some Recent Invitations and Replies

  September 5

  Dear Editor Cruzzi:

  Once again it’s the fall of the year and we of the Ontario Bay Jaycees are getting together for our annual blast-off banquet. September 30 is the big day, and as usual we’re going all out for a great evening. It is my special privilege to invite you to be this year’s banquet speaker, and we hope you’ll do us the honours. What we usually appreciate by way of a talk is something short and snappy and full of humour. Fifteen minutes is the absolute maximum. We’ve found that after turkey and trimmings nobody’s in the mood for deep thoughts. Rumour has it your after-dinner speeches are a barrel of laughs and appreciated by one and all. Your own meal will of course be gratis. Hoping you will reply soon due to the fact that we have to get our program to the printers pronto.