Lynn Coady’s “Dogs in Clothes,” which appeared in CNQ 85 and Caroline Adderson’s “Ellen-Celine, Celine-Ellen,” which appeared in CNQ 86, both made the cut along with six other works of fiction published in Canadian magazines this year.

Further congratulations go to the numerous other Biblioasis authors who were shortlisted for various National Magazine awards, including Patricia Young in both the “One of a Kind” and Poetry categories, Lorna Jackson in the Fiction category, Russell Smith in the Personal Journalism category, and Robyn Sarah in the Poetry category.

The winners will be announced at the National Magazine Awards Gala June 7th at the Carlu in Toronto. For more information, head over to magazine-awards.com.

Good luck to all our finalists!

When I was walking up the street
and the moon burned my hands
the baker’s daughter the owl would awaken
then I’d go out and call the Night

When I was wading down the river
the tanner had nowhere to sleep
her secret wounded me in the chest
then I’d go out and call the Night

When I was going up the stairs
and quails were tangled in my toes
and pulling a man by his hair
then I’d go out and call the Night

When I was going down the stairs
and roses were growing in the sink
waiting there for me to speak
then I’d go out and call the Night

And when I’d take to the street again
and iron grew from the ground
and any gratitude writhed in blood
then I’d go out and call the Night

Burgau to Ulm, Bundesland Bavaria

Two foxes hefted the remains of a pigeon,
within the shadow of an onion-domed steeple,
and from the train’s window, watching: you, me, no one,

mooning the winter through, wishing work to be done,
holding out for bits of money like most people—
like a fox hefting the remains of a pigeon

that had landed to rest its wings and lost everyone.
We’re there now, holding the scene, an example
in our heads, a window through which you, me, no one,

can view your childhood home, the thin, scrambled sun,
and the sickness that drives you to sleep. Our couple—
as two foxes heft the remains of a pigeon,

dragging and chomping bits of bird to fill their own,
the world just darker, colder—rest a little
within the train’s window. There’s you, me, and no one,

all failing to arrive on time at the station,
our lives framed against the February chill,
where two foxes heft the remains of a pigeon
while watching, as a train passes, you, me: no one.

Little Notes On Painting

Take a Spanish painter and put him in Paris. Take a Greek
painter and put him in Madrid. Take a Quebeçois painter
and put him in Paris, too, and a German and a couple
more Spaniards and also a Greek-born Italian. You wouldn’t
believe what I’m doing now. I’m up very late. I’m placing
an American painter in Albany and hoping school
will be cancelled tomorrow. There are fewer and fewer days
like this left; they fall like uses for wax paper. Don’t ever
mention abstract artists to my face or my books, my friend, for
who owns a house and has never been kissed in one? Right?
Take a Russian painter and put him in New York beside
a Mexican painter. I am two feet from the bed; the pillows
and blankets are swelling and rising towards the ceiling.
Take a Javanese painter and put him in Cairo.
The phone won’t ring anymore. I called a street artist
‘Picasso’ but thought better of it as all those women were
going down on him one at a time and bearing him children.
Take a little-known Nova Scotia folk painter and put her,
posthumously, in Cleveland or Skopjë. The mattress is filling
with honey and the box spring is humming like bees; my hand is
in my pyjama bottoms. I stop and say, it isn’t love
that makes you weak, to the night table or maybe the bed frame.
Take an Italian Futurist for example. Take a 19th century
Japanese print and slip it between the mattress and the box spring.
Take a pregnant painter by the hand. I’m home and touching
the unborn child of her easel. It would be nice for a night
if silence was the colour of water but it would be nicer
to sleep in the desert. Take a stolen Brueghel from
the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and bury it
on Easter Island. I arrange the sheets every morning
to resemble Mount Athos so that every night I sleep
on God’s arm. What did I say about abstraction?
Take a British painter from a home he’s not once ever loved
and ask him why he never paints the same thing. Take a moment
to join an art school, the aristocracy or merely buy
a beret. A photograph of a painter’s palette is no good to
anyone and the sky outside is nothing like Van Gogh.
I just wanted to say that the moon’s going down.
I remember every moment. Thank you.

I asked the receptionist why there weren’t any exhibits on display. “There hasn’t been anything going on here for more than a year and a half” she told me. “And there’s nothing planned that I’m aware of.”

Not that the space ever was much to ‘write home about’ – it’s never been widely promoted; in fact the miserable little postage stamp of a visitors parking lot serves, more than anything, as a disincentive to come to the place. Three pathetic little exhibition rooms, no parking – and no exhibits planned. This is the place that history holds in Canada’s national memory? This is ‘making our heritage known to Canadians’?

On New Year’s day 2008 during a photo op at Mario Annecchini’s 2001 Audio Video store Stephen Harper announced that his Conservative government was making good on its promise to cut the GST from seven to six to five per cent.

This move, known in political circles as an example of ‘Starving the beast,’ has, since its execution, cost the Federal government an estimated $11 billion in revenues per year. The ensuing ‘fiscal budget crisis’ has in turn given the Conservatives a laudable, responsible-sounding script with which to sell smaller government, and impose cuts to important federal institutions, in this case Library and Archives Canada.

The problem is that these cuts are crippling.

They are preventing LAC from fulfilling its mandate; its mandate to acquire and present the country’s documentary heritage, to make this heritage known to Canadians and other interested parties around the world, and to facilitate access to its collection of source materials.

Judging from recent budget cuts, the empty and inadequate exhibition space I witnessed, and the lack of public programming, it’s clear that the current government thinks little of Library and Archives Canada. Instead of the reverence that most civilized countries bestow on such institutions, our leaders treats it with disdain, doubtless believing that their behaviour will go unnoticed by a nation much more concerned with ‘jobs,’ the economy, and the Olympics; that cuts to LAC will exact minimal pain at the polls.

Perhaps they’re right. But the peril threatened by such ignorance is significant.

In almost every episode of his brilliant television series The Ascent of Money, historian Niall Ferguson is filmed in a library referring to a real manuscript or codex, an original business record or a centuries-old history book. With these source documents he corroborates and identifies sociological advancements and economic setbacks, innovations for the public good and corruption that has bankrupted entire countries. Old Ponzi schemes cooked up by people such as stock market originator John Law are compared to similar transgressions today, masterminded by the likes of Enron’s Ken Lay.

Naomi Wolf does similar work in her book The End of Democracy and the movie based on it, illustrating how encroachments made on civil liberties by the Nazis in 1930s Germany bare striking resemblance to those introduced in the name of fighting terrorism during the past decade by George Bush Jr.

These ideas and opinions could not have been formulated without access to original, verifiable source materials. Without these documents, ‘truths’ cannot be gotten at, lessons cannot be learned, comparisons cannot be made. At the same time, without knowledge of them, freedoms can be taken away. Democracy can be undermined. People can get shafted.

By shafting Library and Archives Canada and diminishing the role it plays, the Conservative government shafts all Canadians.

History helps us to understand present trends, and to avoid past mistakes. It provides a giant source of data from which we can study the collective human condition, learn about how our society works and understand why it changes. In the free, Western world, history serves as a reminder of the dangers that face democracy and open societies. Access to, and knowledge of history typically produces good, engaged citizens. It provides answers to questions about how and why national institutions emerge, what values are important and worth fighting for, and how changes to institutions and values can affect our lives. Studying and knowing about history encourages responsible public behaviour and creates informed voters enabling them to compare and evaluate past, present and future governments and leaders.

If, for example, more Canadians had known that minority governments have over the years been among the more productive in Canadian history (Pearson’s minority introduced universal health care, student loans, the Canada Pension Plan, the Order of Canada and the Maple Leaf), perhaps fewer of us would have listened to Stephen Harper’s plea during the last election for a majority government, the only way, he contended, he’d ever be able to get anything done in Ottawa.

Perhaps, if more had known that majority government in Canada is in many ways the same as a dictatorship, and that it fosters disdain not only for democracy but for the institution of Parliament and the role of the public sector, Library and Archives Canada wouldn’t be in the soup it’s in today.

Cutting funding for an institution that teaches us about history threatens what we take for granted. Nonchalance about rights and freedoms is a direct result of not knowing how important they are to us.

That acquisition and presentation of history is being neglected by the federal government is nothing new. What is new is the way in which the Conservative party is pointedly bleeding and mismanaging the institution responsible for this task, and how brazenly – or brilliantly, depending upon the colour of your tie – it is using public funds to finesse the historical record for partisan purposes.

Using public funds for partisan politics is, according to many, morally questionable. Some might call it undemocratic. Others, illegal. Should Ontario Premier Dalton McGinty’s signature and best wishes appear on the stubs of government welfare cheques and other support payments?

At the same time the Conservative government is cutting LAC, should it be funding War of 1812 celebrations? Will this, as Carleton University Prof Paul Litt suggests in a recent article for iPolitics, be succeeded seamlessly by First World War centenary commemorations? “Recall,” Litt writes,

that in 1984 Orwell’s Big Brother state was constantly at war to keep its own citizenry in line, and you can see the efficacy of this approach. The Harper nation requires cultural heritage only as a source of superficial symbols to propagandize its citizens and differentiate it from competitors in the global marketplace. For this a postmodern rhetoric in which image trumps substance is sufficient.
 Cuts to cultural institutions do more than just dismantle the machinery of the progressive state,” says Litt, “they bleed the substance of our nation, facilitating further decentralization of the federation. Welcome to a new type of country, a “Little Canada” with a public sphere devoid of any communal heritage beyond the branding needed to sell Canada to the world and the government to the electorate.

Just as the public won’t put up with Conservative party communications people writing the nightly news for Peter Mansbridge, so shouldn’t it object to the manipulation of history for partisan purposes?

With its focus on war, the Conservatives are diverting public money from an important independent institution and using it to bolster a political agenda.

If history is important, then so too are the source documents upon which it is based.

One of the reasons source documents are so important is that they can’t easily be changed without people knowing about it. It’s difficult to alter them, or erase them, without it being noticed. Digitized documents on the other hand are more easily revised or erased . . . and typically have short seven- to eight-year lifespans.

According to noted archivist Terry Cook, history and source documents also provide accountability. In order to successfully prove negligence or to sue the government, you need source evidence to prove your case. You must produce the record. With human rights violations, for example, in order to prove wrongdoing, you must show that your ancestors were wrong done by. Archival records are essential if mistreatment is to be proven in a court of law. They’re also essential to the prosecution of wrongdoing. For example, retired Navy Admiral John Poindexter lost his job as National Security Adviser under Ronald Reagan in the Iran-Contra scandal in part because of the existence of a memo he wrote approving of Oliver North’s lying to Congress.

Form affects meaning. When text is moved from the codex to the screen it changes. New methods of reading and types of devices change the conditions under which a text is received and understood. Historians when trying to make sense of the past must understand the meaning of a book; understand how it was read, what its relative value was to society. To forget this is to introduce the risk of a distorted interpretation of the past.

Source documents aid in the scholarly and popular telling of history. They’re important to the function of research: in the tracing of personal genealogy, for example, they provide proof of events having taken place, a physical connection with the past, and evidence of blood ties. Seeing an original handwritten letter or diary entry can at the same time satisfy an intellectual need and cause an emotional reaction.

That digitization will allow many more people access to LAC collections is beyond doubt. What is questionable is that it be undertaken at the expense of collecting and preserving essential historic source materials.

It’s more important to ensure that history is recorded and preserved – and that source materials are displayed in context and made available for research and study – than it is to go into a scanning frenzy.

If there’s a need to choose – and given the ‘fiscal crisis’ we’re in, it seems we must – then scanning should take a back seat to the acquisition of what’s historically important, to preservation and to the contextualized display of source materials. Only then, once these essential objectives have been accomplished, should we consider scanning. The opposite is now taking place.

A National Library should facilitate the study and understanding of material culture. Scanning is clerical work. Set up some technical agency, Scan Canada, or better yet – if this is what Mr. Harper wants – farm it out to the private sector, let them deal with this menial task, and let librarians and archivists do what they were trained to do.

There are four important tasks facing Library and Archives Canada: yes, to digitize important original documents so that the public can access them online; to develop a strategy to capture documentation representative of the explosion of digital activity currently taking place in Canada; to ensure that important source materials continue to be acquired and preserved; and to display in context and make accessible these source materials to Canadians so that they can see, experience and learn from them in person.

This last task is the most important, and it’s the one that gets no mention at all from Daniel J. Caron, Librarian and Archivist at Library and Archives Canada. Speaking to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, December 6, 2012, he said that “we are moving further away from the concept of a traditional institution, one that would serve as a stand-alone monolithic entity solely responsible for providing Canadians with access to documentary heritage.” Further on in his presentation he declared “we’re not in the museum business.”

No support for a strong comprehensive, central depository. No bold acquisition policy; no national, co-ordinated, innovative presentation programs. By neglecting the physical, Library and Archives and those leading it deny Canadians an important emotional, spiritual, and educational experience, and they weaken the nation.

Last year I launched www.literary tourist.com, a website that contains databases listing thousands of literary destinations, activities and events in Canada and around the world. One goal was to encourage book-lovers and others to get out from behind their computers and into, among other places, used/ antiquarian bookstores and rare book libraries – face-to-face with booksellers and librarians, admiring books, meeting and talking to experts. In short, the idea was and is to help people enjoy the pleasures that can be had from being out in the real world, interacting with actual people, encountering real books, engaging with live culture and experiencing genuine historical source materials.

Some of this sentiment is captured by Lawrence Lande, one of Canada’s all-time great book collectors in his Adventures in Collecting (a beautiful book designed by Robert R. Reid in 1975). Here he writes about the importance of source materials as they pertain to the process of learning about and understanding Canadian history. Addressing a room full of McGill University professors, he says

As a layman, I told them that if I were teaching Canadian history I would try to harness as much of the source material that I could lay my hands on which McGill possesses in her libraries and museums. For example, I would attempt to set up a room with furnishings from the time of Confederation in Canada, including the pictures on the walls and the journals of the day on the table. I would involve my students with the poetry and the literature that was read at the time and the popular music of the day; the clothing that was worn; the medical and social practices and the problems of the day, including alcoholism; and even the methods of transportation and so on . . . .
 Future librarians will be collectors, curators, custodians, and teachers. Because of their access to source material, they will have a knowledge of knowing how to set the stage for any period of history. They will be imaginative in their use of frequent displays of such material. They will have a much wider and continuing involvement with professor and student. They will understand that source material is a medium of communication that not only serves to expand one’s knowledge of the past, but contributes to an understanding of what motivates us today.

The Conservative government is playing games with Canadian history, and in so doing, cutting the legs out from under an essential player. Source materials are not being displayed these days by Library and Archives Canada. Digitization is the priority. This is far from ideal.

In the best Lawrence Lande world, all Canadians would pay attention to history and participate in its acquisition, preservation and presentation. In order to get there, we need government to reinforce the idea that history is important, not some play thing for incumbent parties to dress up using public funds and parade around in order to get re-elected. It’s a resource that must be curated for the good of the country, and kept as far away from politicians as possible.

We have certainly produced lengthy novels – all national literatures have. But the stereotypical long Canadian novel is either a historical work or a multi-generational family saga. Some books fall into an intermediary zone, not quite being about “history” but not quite set in the present-day. And some aren’t long . . . they just feel that way. But the work that gets produced in this country – or at least, sees the light of day – tends to have other goals than to capture contrasts in human experience based on age and social class while also presenting a coherent narrative with a strong plot.

Personally, this doesn’t bother me as a reader. I live overseas, and find myself doing a lot of reading without a Canadian connection. When I do have the opportunity to read a Canadian novel, I am rarely eager to extend a great deal of time on it. Long novels demand a lot of commitment. But there is a problem with this relative lack of long Canadian novels about contemporary life, and that problem has significance for the national culture, whether English, French or First Nations.

Living away from Canada teaches a person many things. One is the extraordinary hegemony of American culture. American culture is world culture in its English form. The Brits may put up a valiant fight in order to keep their finger in the virtual imperial pie, but they come in a distant second. One hears this on the radio and sees it in the movie theatres and the bookstores.

Ah, the bookstores. They are massive. There is a place on Edward Street in downtown Toronto called The World’s Biggest Bookstore. It is – in keeping with the tenor of the times – closing. But maybe that’s just as well from a legal perspective; in recent years, the way it advertised itself – the very name of the store – became questionable. It is impossible to believe it had anything near the quantity of books one finds in the downtown branches of Youngpoong or Kyobo Books in Seoul. In the Gwangwhamun branch of Kyobo, for example, one finds an English-language section that compares favourably with one of the best independent bookstores in Toronto, Book City. And there is an impressive German, Spanish and French section, too. There is even, in a hat-tip to Indigo’s current apparent direction, a large art supply, doohicky, and accessories section. But the books – the masses and masses of Korean books – are what dominate. And holding its own in a big corner of the bookstore are the titles in English . . . with over 90% of these being American.

From the point of view of an American writer, I suppose, the question is not how to compete with “world” culture so much as it is how to compete with one’s own culture. And so it is that in among the biographies of Steve Jobs, the thought pieces on China by “statesman” Henry Kissinger, the Stephanie Meyer progeny, the socio-spanky erotica, the CIA-critiquing/ CIA-venerating thrillers, are big fat literary novels by Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Pat Conroy, Russell Banks, Robert Stone, and so forth. By Canadians, one finds mid-sized works by Yann Martel, Gabrielle Roy, Michael Ondaatje, and Alice Munro. Internationally, our most successful writer in terms of scale and availability is Margaret Atwood.

Franzen is particularly well-liked by the well-read Americans I meet here. It is taken for granted that he is a major living writer. This is not a simple accident of the critical zeitgeist meeting with authorial good fortune; he intended to produce major work, if by length only. The Corrections is approximately 180,000 words. Freedom is not much shorter.

Canadians, too, have produced lengthy, deliberately “major” works. In recent years the most conspicuous of these has been Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. But Mistry’s oeuvre – while not historical in the strict sense – is certainly not about contemporary Canada. His writing is fine and engaging, and it is thematically significant. However, it has almost nothing to do with Canada. This might explain in part why Mistry is described in promotional material as one of “Canada’s most beloved writers” but there is little gut-level enthusiasm in this country for his work. It is not that he is being ignored; it is, rather, that he is ignoring.

The American impulse, on the other hand, is to engage with American culture. Franzen is interested in the now; a well-read American friend recently commented to me that he first came across Franzen in an article in Harper’s (later published in his collection How to Be Alone under the title “Why Bother?”). In this essay, Franzen decried the lack of socially engaged fiction – novels that tried (in Stephen Henighan’s phrase) to gobble up all of society and spit it out. In effect, Franzen was issuing a challenge to his own culture.

“And then, well,” my friend added, “he did it.”

Canadian authors have yet to do it. There is not yet one single-volume novel in the English CanLit canon that is about contemporary life and that has a word count approaching that of Franzen’s work. Yet this lack is recognized, and has been for some time: Hugh Hood recognized it – he wrote a multi-volume series about Canada entitled The New Age. It has largely been forgotten; my own sense is that it was the novel-as-series that watered down the impact of this work. Marie-Claire Blais has been working on a series of linked novels that range between social classes and sensibilities. Her most recent is Le Jeune Homme Sans Avenir (The Young Man Without a Future). However, here, too, I think that linking novels instead of writing one big one is, in some respects, a disadvantage. And then, there is the language barrier; an ongoing source of division in what we term CanLit. In English Canada, Michael Helm and Pasha Malla have published titles that move in the direction of lengthy social novels. The tendency of the reviews so far has been to criticize these novels for being too long. (They are not as long as Franzens’.) I say: go the other way. Outdo Franzen.

Whether Franzen occasionally overwrites or captures contemporary society as well as some of his peers are valid critical questions. Nevertheless, his body of work stands not only as an accomplishment but also as a challenge. This challenge has been articulated by Canadian writers – for example, Russell Smith has called for fiction that deals with the what might be termed the “Hyper of the Contemporary”: an age of sexual and technological overdrive. This impulse seems to be reflected in an ongoing campaign – among female writers more than male ones, with the exceptions, perhaps, of Smith and Matthew Firth – to push the explicit envelope and focus on the sexual: Tamara Faith Berger, Stacey May Fowles, Myrna Wallin and Anne Archet are all writing about sex with directness and lack of shame.

What is germane here is the interest in contemporary experience. Not that this is such a novelty in Canadian letters: Canada has always been rather less uptight than its self-lacerating rhetoric would have one believe, and decades previously there was transgressive work by Marian Engel, John Glassco, Michel Trembley, Evelyn Lau, Dany Laferriére, Ook Chung, Scott Symons and even (people tend to forget this) Margaret Laurence. If the complaint was that certain kinds of transgressive works on the topic of sexuality had been squelched by the conservatism (more accurately, the hybridized politically-correct-conservatism) of Canadian culture, that would be an interesting discussion. But to imply that Canadian letters has been too conservative in the past and now a hip generation of tell-all authors is revolutionizing this dowdy state of affairs does a disservice to Canadian literary history.

At the same time, work that is primarily sexual in its themes carries with it certain dangers: of emotional shallowness, of the narcissism of the unleashed id. Therefore, it is the social novel which can capture on the one hand the “hyper” of the sensuality-experiencing modern soul while at the same time placing that soul within a societal matrix in which it also suffers pain, loneliness, and the trials of making a living. In an article that Patricia Robertson wrote for CNQ, she criticized what she termed “literary realism” for failing to pay sufficient attention to working life. It’s a valid criticism, though I must say that I do not agree with Robertson that this is so much a failing of “realism” as it is the increasing careerism of some young writers who enter (to alter another phrase championed by Robertson) the slipstream of internationalized book deal-making, with its translation deals and movie options, and end up with both overnight fortunes and a stultified desire to keep improving themselves. As well, I have serious doubts that the genres she ends up calling for – those of fantasy and speculative fiction – will do much in the way of depicting the world of regular work: fantasy, above all, is a genre of battle; its primary protagonist-type is that of the warrior who will save the world. That’s labour, certainly, and of an impressively Herculean sort. But it’s not “work” the way we normally understand the term.

Still, a general challenge is made by Robertson, that we engage with the world as it is in its overwhelming entirety and increasingly apocalyptic complexity. Where writing the contemporary is concerned, in addition to Smith and Firth, there is a large number of writers who place their work in fully contemporary settings: Sean Dixon and Peter Darbyshire are two writers whose work I’m come across recently who do this, and there are many more. And cross-over writers like Ian Brown and Donna Lypchuk write vivid contemporary work with real vitality; they deserve attention, too, even though they do not fall within the category of literary fiction. Of course, the premiere chronicler of the present in Anglo CanLit is Douglas Coupland. But as Alex Good has written in these pages, Coupland is a writer of both strengths and limitations: he writes of the present but he has little range of sensibility. His characters tend to be young, upwardly mobile, witty, and rather childlike. Social fiction isn’t, it turns out, just about the Now. It’s also about the Various.

The above is not a call for social novels only; if Canadian writers end up producing more successful genre work (and this has been the case since Guy Gavriel Kay and Robert Sawyer, at least), more power to them. And if this country produces work that is sex-focused and maintains emotional authenticity and resists the received ideas of sex-as-ultimate-pleasure, then more power to this too. Finally, one type of novel that I happen to be particularly fond of – the graphic novel – is one that Canada is already at the forefront of: some of the best comics art of the past thirty years has been produced in English and French in this country.

All the same, the lack of lengthy one-volume social novels about contemporary life is a conspicuous one. It remains to be seen if that hole can be filled by a publishing business that has borrowed some of the worst practices of our neighbors to the south while simultaneously insisting it maintains its ideals and favours work based on its literary value, not just its (and its hip author’s) marketability. Not many writers will want to make the effort of producing a truly ambitious manuscript if they have the feeling it will just be rejected in a closed-minded, knee-jerk fashion by the publishing professionals who act as the filters of what gets into print. So, maybe this, then, should be the goal: Canada needs more work that will stand out internationally. If that work sometimes is genre work, well, that’s to the good. But above all, if it is to compete with the best of what is being published elsewhere, it will have to have many of the characteristics of a long social novel.

This is farcically schematic, but alas, not implausibly so. Any reader will recognize in its shuffleable tokens of personal and social distress a type of realism dominant on bestseller and awards lists. Properly massaged, such an outline could prove catnip to agents and editors. The novel’s prose will be present-tense lean, translator-friendly, with lyrical (poetic) highlights; it will deftly deploy brand names and period details; with its short scenes of drama and epiphany, in exotic locales, it will almost film itself.

Working title: Nuclei.

It could do well. Disciplined to internationalist style, with a cover blending a yearning soft-focus woman (nude or nearly) with lethal flooded ruins, it could garner far more “Fans” than pans.

What is wrong with it? Bogusness, in a word. Its engagement with the larger world is factitious, a way to make more marketable, by seeming to raise the stakes, the “tame stuff” of “domestic and domesticated fiction” that Patricia Robertson so eloquently decries in her recent essay “Against Domesticated Fiction, or the Need for Re-Enchantment.” With Air Miles and Wi-Fi, your personal quest – the “worship of self,” as Lydia Millet, quoted by Robertson, puts it – easily goes global. But it comes back just as easily, ready to deploy in the home bedroom and office the insights won abroad. Black Robe, Brian Moore’s page-turning 1985 novel set in seventeenth-century Quebec, jumps to mind here, because the Jesuit protagonist can’t and won’t go home, ever. His faith is a one-way ticket. Obedient to his “solemn vow,” he will stay for the rest of his life, far from comfort and his own culture, ministering to the sick and dying Hurons in a “vast, empty land.” (What a downer comes the first tweet, with glum emoticon.) In Nuclei, by contrast, though the canvas is big and turbulent, issue-fizzing, the main subject, the privileged perturbed self, hunkers impermeably compact and immobile. Selfbound is homebound in the strictest sense.

Now imagine another, starker constellation of shreds, less fashionable lately though making a comeback as all things do. Children stray into a dangerous forest where monsters await to eat them, some foolish or unlucky children get gobbled, a wary one or two escaping to tell the tale. Other magical figures, benevolent or malign, may intervene.

Fable, we call this one. Fairy tale. Again, the recognition is instant – and the tweets, pro or con, composed almost as quickly.

But categories, especially assured ones, are usually well worth questioning. In this case the question might be: How much of our so-called realism is actually a mash of comforting fairy tales, and, flipping the question around, how often is the so-called fairy tale really a species of the hardest realism?

Skeins of comforting fables surround us, masquerading as established facts. What makes the “searingly relevant” tale of Edward and Jasmine obnoxious and, to me, unreadable is its cozy assumption that Personal Growth and Socio-Political Engagement and First-World Privilege all make fine bedfellows, that while snuggling under a well-stitched quilt of prose you can seriously grapple with a bevy of Big Psyche, Big Idea, Big Issue, Big History. Without ever breaking stride, Nuclei can visit the glories and perils of science; gender and sexuality; corporate crimes; nuclear power and the environment; domestic evasions, the bliss of passion . . . right on out to the origins and fate of the universe. Rutherford’s atoms came from, and are going, somewhere. As are yours and mine.)

This is duvet realism. Helping you to think you are thinking about Big Things without ever challenging you to venture beyond the bed of comfy reassurance (disguised as radical inquiry) you are ensconced in.

It never brings a sword. Only the fun of play-swords and the peace of sweet, self-justified sleep. To disrupt such slumber would need what commerce forbids: the lacunae and deranging strangeness of dream. Estrangement is the passport of travel. If, as a physical or mental traveller, you encounter only what and whom you can readily “relate to,” what is “accessible,” you can be sure you have never left home.

Hard to leave? Oh yes. Hard as throwing back warm humid folds in the middle of the night and setting a tender foot on a cold, hard floor. You remember? There was a creepy forest with monsters, lost children, some eaten. Fairy tale – or straight realism? All children know beyond a doubt that in the forest of the world there are monsters who want to eat them. Small creatures can’t mistake these things. That is, you sense the demons in the forest, though because they are often shape-shifters, you may not be able to recognize them in time. So you tread lightly, listen for odd noises, and carry all the charms you can find – whether the forest is called Mount Cashel Orphanage or central Africa or a bungalow in Port Dalhousie, and whether the child-eaters disguise themselves as the Christian Brothers, Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, or a young married couple named Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo.

And these are only the most obviously gruesome ways in which the forest can gulp you down. Hospitals and shelters and streetcorners – almost anyplace, finally – will attest to the endless variety of more insidious gnawings. In fact, classic fairy tales dispense with topical markers altogether. They simply take for granted that there are witches and trolls who mean to bake and gobble us, but also talking frogs and fairy godmothers willing to save us. Real, messy (and meaningless) death; real salvation (after trials, usually at a price): reacquaint yourself with these supreme stakes and the quasi-enlightenments and exquisitely observed rapprochements of duvet realism can start to feel less like comfort and more like suffocation.

In life as in art, the real story is often just a fairy tale repeated so often it becomes a mantra, a sourceless soothing given, and the fairy tale may just be the real story no one wants to talk about.

I know it doesn’t do to get all strident and off-meds about this, and though it is probably too late in this trepanning to say so, I don’t think a slice of common experience – a breakup scene in a Starbucks, say – is a bad thing in a story, or unreal (it certainly happens every day), or somehow inauthentic or trivial (it is vital enough to those involved, which at some time or another includes a lot of us). I have served and enjoyed being served many such slices. Nor do I think the inclusion of a magical creature or event – a wizard, a vampire, flying, casting spells – automatically confers significance on a story. Far from it. It’s not what happens so much as it is the attitude towards what happens that is implied. Or maybe stance is a better word than attitude: what position is the character in relative to events, what stakes are involved? No risk, no reality is a law that all fantasy but the sheerest whimsy obeys. What makes Harry Potter so boring to anyone over the age of twelve – or at least I would have thought so, though Amazon rankings give me the lie – is that it is basically 4,178 pages (three times as long as War and Peace) of wish-fulfillment, mixed with very manageable troubles to texture the glide, ending in marriage, home ownership and parenthood.

As comfort food, this is a no-fail recipe. But as literature?

Realism can mean a hard look at difficult things; hard meaning honest and clear-eyed, not necessarily glum and despairing. It can also mean – and it means this worryingly often, I think – the snuggle-inducing, struggle-simulating duvet brand of Serious Fiction. The duvet is a padded stitching together of the safely near and the safely remote. Either familiar relationship problems tout court, or those problems piggybacked on historical disasters to give them stature. How We Got Together/Broke Up/Came To Ambiguous Terms, with atrocity background. Pretty? Hardly. But perhaps a little more real, like two half-realities holding hands: the little something that sort of happens here and now, and the big something that definitely happened there and then. Though can two half-lives ever make a whole? Isn’t a realism built up from spongy assumptions, coyly rebranded as tough insights, bound to be – to coin a term – enfabled?

And nothing is further removed from the fabulous real than enfabulous swaddling.

Fables, fairy tales: these can be cute whimsy, yes, and delightful as such. At their richest, though, their bubbling narrative streams constantly turn over hard mineral questions – who is friend? who foe? how must I live? what price change? – that duvet realism, for all its pre-dawn ruminating (latte in trembling hand), works to avoid.

Real fable confronts the actual: the enfabled real concocts, often with charming plausibility, ways to forget the actual exists.

Norman Levine’s stories stay with you after you close the book.2 In 1980, interviewer Wayne Grady suggested that Levine’s stories were like line drawings rather than whole canvasses, with “a touch here and there to suggest the whole picture.” Levine replied, “You don’t have to eat the whole cow to know what steak tastes like…. I like to remove all the other lines and just leave the right one.”3 His style is deceptively simple; his stories are often ironic and complex. John Metcalf observes, “Levine refuses to explain or interpret his scenes for us, requiring us, in a sense, to compose the story for ourselves.”4

An expatriate Canadian living in England, Levine reworked the people and memories in his life as stories. He told Alan Twigg that Chekhov taught him that “plot wasn’t that important, providing you could tell enough about a character. And since I don’t use plot I have to use other ways of stitching it together. Often I sense a connection between different human situations – in different places, in different times.”5 Levine’s start as a writer while studying at McGill University from 1946 to 1949 has never been examined. Likewise, little attention has been given to his use of McGill and his McGill friends in his later writing. Drawing on sources in McGill’s University Archives and its Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections Division, Part I of this article traces Levine’s writing at McGill while Part II looks at “factual” and “fictional” texts from his stories, nonfiction and interviews to examine his nostalgic, critical memories of student life and to suggest how autobiographically he worked.6 Not meant to be a whole canvas, this article is a line drawing of Levine from a McGill angle.

Levine (1923-2005) grew up in Ottawa in an orthodox Jewish home, the son of a fruit seller, Moses Levine, and Annie Levine. He left school at age 16, clerked in a government office, enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) in 1942 and was stationed in England in 1944 and 1945. On his return, he attended McGill, earning his B.A.in 1948 and his M.A. in 1949. Later he would say McGill had been fun but too easy and that he had betrayed his working class, Jewish roots there. In 1969, he belittled his student writing: “At McGill, I had some flying war-poems, full of bad alliteration, published in the McGill Daily. And for a year I edited Forge, the university’s literary magazine.”7 He told David McDonald in 1975: “While I was at McGill I was beginning to be interested in writing verse and I did some poems that were published in a chapbook by the Ryerson Press. Terrible lot of poems!”8 In addition to writing poetry and editing Forge,9 he drafted a novel, The Angled Road (published in 1952), wrote a master’s thesis on Ezra Pound, and won a fellowship in 1949 which returned him to England, his heart’s desire.

Writers’ early efforts do not diminish their mature work. Interesting in their own right, they reveal influences and foretell later development: in Levine’s case, his signature fusion of autobiography and fiction. Levine’s writing at McGill was autobiographical from the start, inspired by his wartime flying. For the next fifty years, most of his stories would be told in the first person with narrators or protagonists who were Canadian-born, had flown for the RCAF, attended McGill, moved to England and were writers. The narrators resemble Levine so closely; the stories seem so uninvented and personal, that readers wonder if they are reading fiction or autobiography. In 1983, he explained: “Altogether the stories form a kind of autobiography. But….it is autobiography written as fiction.”10 In what follows, the distinction between Levine himself and the narrators of his stories will be observed as strictly as possible. That said, Levine and his narrators were remarkably consistent where McGill is concerned.

Part I: McGill Student, 1946-1949

Returned veteran

Levine went overseas in April 1944 and flew on bombing raids in the Lancasters of No. 429 Squadron RCAF over Germany in March and April 1945.11 “I was the bomb-aimer and second pilot. I dropped the bombs. And sometimes took over the controls on the way back.”12 Days after arriving at McGill, in January 1946, Levine published a poem in the student McGill Daily about a day raid over Leipzig on April 16, 1945. It began: “Destructive demons driving down…. Bottled bastards burning.”13 Mildly, he said in 1975: “But towards the end of the War, I got very disillusioned with the whole business. I more than particularly didn’t like Hitler, but I didn’t think there was any point in dropping bombs.”14 The RCAF gentrified its flyers. In his nonfictional travelogue Canada Made Me (1958) Levine recalled, “We were instructed how to use our knives and forks; how to make a toast; how to eat and drink properly.”15 His story “In Quebec City” repeated how the flyers “were instructed how to use knives and forks.… How to eat and drink properly. It was like going to finishing school.”16 He enjoyed his time in England; once back in Canada he longed to return. As he recalled in an article in 1960:

In England I found myself being attended to by a series of batmen, all old enough to be my father. We ate in a fine mess. A string quartet played for us while we had our Sunday dinner. And on the wall above us was the Rokeby Venus. We lived well. We had lots of money to spend. The uniform gave us admission to all sorts of places.17

One of the most striking things about Levine’s writing is how similar his fictional and his nonfictional voices are and how he repeated things in nearly the same words in fiction, articles and interviews, especially when they were not too many years apart. He describes the same RCAF experience in a story, “The English Girl” (1964):

I was attended by a series of batmen, all old enough to be my father. We ate in a fine mess. A string quartet played for us while we had our Sunday dinner. We lived well. We had lots of money to spend. The uniform gave us admission to all sorts of places.18

For the story, he dropped the Rokeby Venus; otherwise the fiction and nonfiction texts are virtually the same.19 Phrases once used stuck in his mind. He repeated himself as few writers dared. He saw no reason to rewrite the same memory just because one was presented as nonfiction and the other as fiction.

At war’s end Levine went on a short course to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he discovered psychology, economics, and political science, and became left wing.20 “There a lecturer gave me a thin wartime production of Pound’s Selected Poems. It was the first modern verse I had read.”21 Here are the germs of his free verse, his master’s thesis on Pound, and his longing for a Cambridge degree. Back in Ottawa by fall 1945, he took courses at Carleton College and then drifted to university, paid for under the Veterans Act. He recalled: “I decided to go to university – mainly to postpone the decision of what to do.”22 The narrator of “The English Girl” said: “Going to university was just a means of filling in a few years until one could, somehow, return to England.”23 The protagonist of The Angled Road tells his uncle:

Going to university is not going to provide me with a better job. I am going to university because I think I should like my old self to die, completely. I know that going to university is not only to get me away from home, but it will help me in placing the many things that I have done and thought and read in the past years in the right perspective.24

In The Angled Road, begun in 1946-1947, Levine’s narrator seemed happy to cut his roots and discover himself at university, not suspecting it would be the waste of time and the self-betrayal his author would lament later. Why choose McGill? Levine wrote in Canada Made Me (1958): “There is (as Scott Fitzgerald has said about a New England education) in Canada that respect for ‘a McGill education’ which is the ruin of all provincial places, which drains them yearly of all their most promising young men and women.”25 In “Why I am an Expatriate” (1960), he remembered “as a child fruit-peddling with my father, crossing over the small bridge by Lansdowne Park and seeing – when the wagon came up to the rise – the Redmen playing rugby in the stadium. It was only a glimpse, but long enough to decide me on McGill.”26 Applying to McGill in 1945, Levine played up his previous education creatively, filling in whatever grades came into his head, abetted by a kindly Registrar’s office which did not check up. “Since then I have always nourished a soft spot for the academic when it deals with human nature,” he noted gratefully in 1960 but added that it meant he could not take McGill and the honours he won seriously. In 1966, he repeated to an interviewer how gullible the University had been, noting “after that he could never take McGill very seriously.” In 1970, the protagonist of From a Seaside Town relates the same deception: “After that it was hard to take McGill seriously.”27

Post-war funding opened Canadian, American and British universities to war veterans. Levine arrived at McGill in January 1946 with hundreds of other veterans. Aged 22, his looks changed little with age. Cary Fagan met him around 1980: “I was struck by what a handsome man Norman Levine was; short but debonair, and with a more European than Canadian air about him.”28 The vets enjoyed prestige, admired by co-eds and by professors too old to have fought. At a class reunion, Levine’s character Gordon Rideau says he had a good time at McGill. “And I was just old enough to know it…. I think what made us different from the other years was because we were all returning veterans. And it was difficult to pretend we were college kids straight from high school….”29 Students fresh from high school felt the same difference. Leonard Ashley, who arrived at age 16, about the same time as Levine, and wrote humour for the McGill Daily, recalls: “Though I was a teenager as an undergraduate, many of my class of ‘49 were much older, back from World War II and more grown up than usual for their age as well, more serious. These were the people who forced the college to give up frosh beanies and be more serious.”30

Writing at McGill, 1946-1949: McGill Daily, Forge, “Angled Road”

Levine sketched later-1940s student life in Canada Made Me: “One had to make a name for oneself. There was the playing field, the political clubs, the student council, the literary magazine, the Daily.” Levine chose the literary magazine (Forge) and the McGill Daily and made a name for himself. He found life easy: “It was a gay, irresponsible time with few real worries. The going was good. One soon got the hang of the examinations. There were the weekends in the Laurentians; the parties; the dances; the binges; the crap games.” Different sets played differently. Intellectuals wrote; many students just had fun; Levine did both. “We went to drink at the ‘Shrine’ [the Café Andre] or the ‘Berkley’ [Berkeley Hotel, more elegant]. The ‘Shrine’ was round the corner from the Union. You could only drink beer, and if hungry have a steak. It used to be full of students who didn’t belong; who took Modern Poetry courses; who worked on the Daily.” The Berkeley attracted “the fraternity and the sorority crowd, the young alumni, debs, ex-debs, rakes and college boys on the make.”31 The social round was football at Molson Stadium, night life at the Samovar and Rockhead’s Paradise, fraternity parties, proms, formals, Red and White Revues, culminating in spring with a week of parties, dancing, drinking, stags, and the Convocation Ball.

Levine majored in English; his courses ranged from Anglo-Saxon to modern poetry.32 Most important for him, creative writing bloomed at McGill in the late 1940s. McGill’s English Department gave writing courses, and the literary magazine Forge (1938-1967) and the McGill Daily (1911-present) published student verse, stories and essays. Levine’s mentor was Professor Harold Files (1895-1982), who came to McGill in 1923 fresh from three Harvard degrees, chaired English from 1947 to 1952, and retired in 1964. In addition to 17th- and 18th-century English literature and the English novel, Files had taught creative writing since the mid-1920s. He tutored student writers, helped them publish, and advised Forge.33 By 1948, just after he became chairman and at his initiative, the English Department began to offer the option of writing a novel (or collection of poems or stories) instead of a thesis for the master’s degree.34 A few students had already written novels but not for credit as M.A. theses. The star was Files’s former student Constance Beresford-Howe. She won the Dodd, Mead Intercollegiate Literary Fellowship Prize in 1945 for The Unreasoning Heart (published 1946), and published two more novels by 1949. By 1948 she was teaching composition at McGill.35 She recalled Files in 1991 as a mild New Englander who “was not a flamboyant lecturer, but he illustrated with every quiet word, every modestly proffered line of speculation, what a first-rate humanist scholar is.”36 Files coached Levine’s start as a writer, as Levine’s letters and dedication to him of The Angled Road attest. Be brief, even mysterious, and avoid ideology, Files told his budding writers. The novel must not be hijacked for didactic or socio-political ends; it must serve art not education or social therapy. Files would have despised most of today’s big, significant novels about gender or ethnicity issues, family trauma, and other worthy topics. His teaching notes rail against “the humanitarian novel of social significance:”

Nowadays we have every conceivable kind of axe being ground – race problems, high finance, religion, psycho-analysis etc. and the result is that fiction divides sharply into the kind with a Message and the kind for escape, like Forever Amber. All too few write …an artistically integrated and polished piece of work…. Suggestiveness is a virtue which cannot be overestimated. Nothing delights and intrigues the reader more than to feel that there is more to a character or situation or to a line of dialogue than he is being told…. Leave them speculating…. Shun sentimentalism like the plague…. Contrariwise; don’t adopt the popular pose of grim realism. The garbage school… is a reaction from the syrupy sweetness-and-light group…. Realism in fiction is any recognizable part of human experience, without any one feature of it exaggerated out of proportion and at the expense of other features…. To achieve this realism is the aim of every writer who is not a satirist or a breast-beater in some cause.37

Levine’s stories would fulfill all Files’s criteria. They achieved a balanced realism, did not breast-beat, teach or preach, and were suggestive, leaving readers feeling that there was more than they were being told.

Levine started out as a poet. McGill-based poets who had modernized Canadian poetry since the 1920s included Frank Scott, A.J. M. Smith and Leo Kennedy and by the 1940s Patrick Anderson, A.M. Klein, Louis Dudek, and Irving Layton.38 In a modest way, Levine belongs to this modernist tradition. Within days of arriving at McGill, he began to publish free verse in the Daily, some possibly written before he came to McGill. Most of his poems drew on his war experience. His first was “Ode to a flier,” a vortex of the flying experience without narrative details. His next, “Fraternization,” portrays a parched earth with dirty cities flooded with rain; “Sheffield” a bombed city; “Leipzig, April 16, 1945” a bombing raid. The poems observed flying and destruction in the contemporary way without invoking heroism or patriotism. In Canada Made Me, Levine thought back to his bombing missions and the feeling of distance “that released us from being involved with the violence below when we dropped the bombs. All we worried about over the target was first ourselves, then getting a good picture, an aiming point. One was taught indifference as a game.”39 He also wrote a few whimsical poems such as “The Grey Cat” and “Saturday Night.” His poems in the McGill Daily, with first lines, dates and signatures are listed in the Appendix, as are his other works written at McGill. Poetry probably sharpened his prose. Lawrence Mathews suggests that “Levine’s preoccupation with style may be in part explained by the fact that he began as a poet” and that while his poetry was imitative, Levine also learned “that poetry can be discovered in precise observation of the ordinary.”40 Levine’s narrators do that. In “By a Frozen River,” the narrator, holed up in northern Ontario, went for walks after breakfast and then wrote down “whatever things I happened to notice,” such as “the way trees creak in the cold.”41

In February 1946, Levine wrote short articles for the Daily on music and existentialism. Jascha Heifetz was in Montreal and talked to Levine about classical music in popular culture, declaring: “The long haired musician is on his way out.” Musicians now must be in touch with the masses. The war had benefited music – he had made the troops he had played for discover Schubert and Rimsky-Korsakov. He also had played popular music and had sugar-coated the classics by adding swing. He predicted the new medium of television would never replace concert halls. Levine provoked Heifetz to say he enjoyed poetry – Byronic poetry.42 In a piece on Sartre’s influence, Levine described existentialism as “a movement that is at present appealing to French University Students, youthful eccentric Bohemians, intellectuals and long-haired caricatures.” He speculated that “perhaps it is the tonic so necessary for youth in war-torn frustrated Europe, helping them to find a rational vindication for individual life and creative effort.”43

In the fall of 1946 Levine became poetry editor of Forge. The editors-in-chief for 1944, 1945 and 1946 had been women but men, veterans, took over Forge’s post-war boards and as contributors. Not until 1950 would a woman regain the editorship. Forge usually came out once in spring; however, the editor for 1947, Alan Heuser, a veteran, brought out two issues. Promoting the Winter 1947 issue in the Daily, Levine declared Forge was “not a vehicle for the popularization of the theory that Art is for Art’s Sake – rather it is a reflection of creative writing by McGill students.” He enthused that many of the 200 submissions had been by veterans: “The majority of servicemen have been recently exposed to vivid, emotional experiences; but they see them, some for the first time, as writers, and it is not the experience that is important but what they have done with their experiences.”44 His emphasis on how experience was used, rather than the experience itself, foreshadowed his own approach to fiction.45 Proudly he noted that “poetry is well and ably represented.” Levine signed two contributions. “Prologue” was a poetic prose meditation on an unnamed city which “lived in the rain.” The poem “It was a Dull Day” evoked London’s war damage: “I walked through Whitechapel in silence / Houses I once remembered were gone.” The issue had two poems, “Circles” and “Myssium” signed “W.A. Neville.” This was an anagram for A.N. Levine.46 Later Levine submitted “Myssium” for McGill’s 1947 Chester Macnaghten Prize for Creative Writing and published it in a chapbook in 1948 under his own name. As poetry editor, Levine may have feared four contributions by himself might look excessive.47

Daily reviewer Karine Collin agreed that the war stories and poems were strong: “They are cold, hard, entirely factual accounts, written by returned servicemen, and are by far the best writing done at McGill in the last four years.” She singled out “Myssium” by “Neville” and Levine’s “It Was a Dull Day”: “These selections show a tremendous contrast to the soft, despondent prose and poetry that students were writing a few years ago.” She assessed Levine’s “Prologue” less kindly: “When a poet writes prose, there is a tendency to making it too lush and too ornamental.” But “Myssium” was “a beautiful haunting piece, a poem about death that is not morbid, not sad, not hopeless…. It has a catching rhythm that is in the lines and in the construction of the poem. At first one notices only the allegory, then the hardness appears, the inevitable coldness that comes with utter truth.”48 “Myssium” blended modernist narrative, vaguely classical and anthropological allusions, images of bleached bones and clay rattles, and the inevitable airman. It began:

A picker of stones am I,

Smith by name; and watch empty eyes

Come to me bearing glass beads from Egypt,

Wood carvings from New Guinea.49

In April 1947 the Spring issue of Forge carried what was probably Levine’s first published story, “Our Life Is To Be Envied.”50 Drawn from his novel in progress, “The Angled Road,” its hazy impressionistic style was far from his mature terseness. It starts: “I was flying indifferently past finger-printed clouds when I noticed a pall of suspended smoke and dirt rise to form a thick canopy of artificial grey.” He liked this line enough to keep it in the published Angled Road but it typifies what he later deplored in his McGill writing.51 The flyer is on a bombing mission. The moment of bombing gets lost in a description of a rainstorm around the plane as Levine made a point about airmen’s detachment and distraction from their deadly tasks – the bombing was one detail among many, including getting back alive. The flyer muses on recent memories including italicized love-making in terms of rolling sea and a new person created out of a double unity [less lushly described in the printed Angled Road]. He thinks too about a recent course at King’s College, Cambridge, dining at high table, and hearing madrigals sung from punts on the Cam [in real life, Levine’s course came after his flying ended].

After his strong contributions of 1947, Levine became editor-in-chief of the single issue of Forge 1948.52 Veterans dominated this issue even more than they had the 1947 issues; they wrote 13 of the 16 contributions. Only two writers were women. Files, as advisor to Forge, wrote an editorial in the Daily praising Forge for encouraging students from all faculties to write, noting “if there is anything to be gained from our next crop of Canadian writers, it should be showing itself in such ventures as The Forge.”53 How hard this Harvard Bostonian worked for Canadian literature! Eight contributors were studying English literature but the others came from law, medicine, graduate nursing, science, sociology, biochemistry, and philosophy-political science. One contributor had poetry and a story, six had poems, four gave stories and five wrote essays. A Daily staffer identified only as B.S. [Betty Sinclair?]54 interviewed Forge’s board, noting that “the guiding spirit of this year’s Forge is Norman Levine” and that Levine’s enthusiasm about the issue seemed justified. Levine praised the veterans’ preponderance as he had in 1947: “Norm thinks it significant, however, that thirteen out of the sixteen contributors are student-veterans and that their greater maturity is reflected in the style and subject matter they treat.” He also thought “all writers have to be poets at heart.” Bill Eccles, author of an essay on the historical novel, disagreed, while Christopher Wanklyn, who contributed a story about a mysterious Mexican girl, defended “the place of poetry as a distinct art.” Pat Johnston, the board’s only woman, declared a critical attitude “was the necessary prelude to any writing.” Biochemist Denis Giblin contended that writing “need not be a major occupation.” A decade before C.P. Snow warned against the lack of communication between the “Two Cultures” of science and the humanities, the board optimistically claimed that “science and art are not incompatible.”55

Contributors Leo Ciceri, W.D. MacCallan, Wanklyn, and others read Forge’s poems over the radio.56 Later radio would benefit Levine and other writers through Robert Weaver’s commissions for stories for his CBC program, Anthology. As early as February 1949, Weaver asked Levine if he or other McGill writers might be interested in submitting stories for broadcasts. Levine later credited the CBC commissions with keeping him from starving. In 2004, Weaver told Elaine Kalman Naves that the first Anthology program had carried poetry by Levine and a story by Mordecai Richler. He recalled dealing with both men over the years: Richler was brash and charming; “Norman was not as easy. Norman could be easily offended.” And Richler would tease Levine.57

Levine contributed only two poems to the 1948 issue of Forge. One focused on the war: “A Dead Airman Speaks.” It begins: “Imagine a high-heeled morning / A night with holes in her stockings.”58 Thirty years later Levine looked back at his other poem, “Autumn”: “I wasn’t interested in meaning so much as in the sound of the words going.”

The leaves blew trains’ departures and the sheaves

Blushed a colour the trees never dreamed of. Speechless

Blackbirds taste the day – smudge-birds.

“I mean, it was just sounds. Then I wrote a novel.”59 Daily reviewer Peggy Goodin (M.A. 1949) found Forge obscure, thereby setting off a controversy. Before arriving at McGill, she had already published a novel, Clementine [1946], which was being made into a film, Mickey. She was writing another, Take Care of My Little Girl, as her M.A. thesis in Files’s program. Criticizing American college sorority snobbery, it would be a best-seller and be bought by Hollywood for $30,000 to make a film starring Jeanne Crain.60 Goodin’s focus on story and social themes and her popular appeal clashed with the abstract, stylistic concerns of the Forge set. She declared most contributions lacked “substance, discipline and clarity.” She left Levine unscathed – he had a charmed life at McGill: “If it were not for Editor Norman Levine, Forge’s poetry would be sadly inept.” She found “A Dead Airman Speaks” and “Autumn” skilful: “He builds concrete, palpable images to embody concrete, communicable ideas.” But even Levine lacked “sufficiently important themes.”61 By 1948 war writing had begun to bore critics, although Hollywood thrived on war movies – and westerns – well into the 1960s.

Forge looked cliquish with its dominance by veterans under Heuser and Levine. Moreover, all 1947 and 1948 board members published themselves in the issues they edited. Satirizing this, a little multilith pamphlet called Whisper, dated December 12, 1948 (when Levine was no longer on Forge’s board), pretended to interview “Mr. Latrine,” editor of “Gorge.” Latrine admitted that 99.44 percent of “Gorge” was written by himself or his staff. The remaining fraction was by friends or written under assumed names (by then Levine had been unveiled as “Neville,” the author of “Myssium”).62 Perhaps stung by Whisper or other critics, the 1949 Forge board strongly reacted against self-publishing. Only one board member was published and “the editors decided that if any member of the board wanted to submit a story or a poem, they must do so under an assumed name to avoid any possibility of prejudice in their favour and to assure impartial judgement.”63 Obviously Heuser, Levine and the prolific veterans had aroused opposition. By 1949 their self-absorbed reign at Forge was ending but they had made the journal tough and modernist.

While editing Forge, Levine worked on the manuscript that would become the novel The Angled Road. It was inspired by his life in Ottawa and England through 1945. He recalled in 1969 how Files tutored him:

Every second Saturday morning I would go into his office and show him a chapter or part of a chapter. Often I wrote it the night before. And he would go over it, sometimes correcting the grammar of a sentence. Sometimes suggesting parts to leave out…. I am unable to read The Angled Road today. But at the time Files’ encouragement was vital. He helped to build up confidence on the shakiest of foundations.64

Levine was also helped by Professor Algy Noad (1898-1952) who, like Files, had taught at McGill since the 1920s. Noad had written A Canadian Handbook of English (1932) that stressed exactness of expression and had exercises to shorten wordy sentences.65 Levine inscribed a copy of his Myssium chapbook thanking Noad “for much encouragement & direction.”66

Until school, his first language had been Yiddish. Levine’s travel writer protagonist of From a Seaside Town owes his clean prose to having learned English as a second language: “I have a small vocabulary. No long words.”67 In 2001, Levine recalled a Bar Mitzvah gift, a Pentateuch with Hebrew and Wycliffe’s English on facing pages; he had often read the English text for its style.68 Levine sent “The Angled Road” to the Dodd, Mead college fiction competition in 1947 and 1948 but did not win. A typescript draft of it, ca. 1948, held in the Rare Books Division of the McGill Libraries was Levine’s winning entry for McGill’s Macnaghten Prize in 1948.69 While the draft differs from the book published in 1952, they share the same autobiographical themes: family tensions, flying, romances in England, alienation on returning to Canada, and leaving home to attend an unnamed university. There is no description of student life.

The McGill typescript of “The Angled Road” has a telling passage, underlined but eliminated from the published book, in which the protagonist, who wants to write, challenges himself about both his Proustean/Joycean style and his subject matter and settings. Most revealing, he asks himself why he does not write about Canada and Montreal. He replies that doing so would make him self-conscious; Canada lacks the traditions, stability, myths and culture to inspire his writing. His sense of values makes him seek out the old world. Yet he admits how badly he wants to describe Montreal and indeed the beauty of McGill as one enters the campus at the Roddick Gates.70 It sounds like a conversation he might have had with Files or his future self. It summarizes his dilemma vividly and foretells how he later solved it – by writing about what he knew. If his writing at McGill served no other purpose, it made him realize his predicament: could he turn his own experiences and background into fiction? In 1975, Levine called The Angled Road “a terrible novel,” which had reflected his reading of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Proust.71 After its publication, he stopped dressing up his style and characters: “And the first book to come out after that was Canada Made Me. My writing begins with that book.”72 Most of the texts referring to McGill cited here date from the 1950s through the 1970s, before his leanest writing, of which Cynthia Flood observed: “To strip out all that plugs up prose: this is Levine’s aim.”73 And Levine declared: “the leaner the language the more ambiguous it becomes and the more suggestive.”74 But he kept the more conventional stories we are looking at here in his canon as their numerous reprinting attests.

Graduation, Algoma mine, & back to McGill, 1948-1949

Levine graduated B.A. on May 26, 1948 with first class honours in English Language and Literature, winning the Peterson Memorial Prize in Literature and the Macnaghten Prize, both for creative writing.75 He recalled graduation in Canada Made Me; parties, renting gowns, forgettable speeches, honorary degree presentations, and roll call to pick up degrees. “You picked up the red cartridge cases with the sheepskin inside in Latin. And there was the garden party on the other side underneath the trees…. girls in summer dresses and large hats and families taking pictures by the ‘Three Bares’ [a fountain held up by three Herculean marble nudes].” Levine’s description of the 1948 ceremonies was fairly accurate (perhaps he had kept his programme). The physical education students indeed went up first, as he related, although an honorary degree was not given to “a head from another university” but (closely enough) to W.E. Gallie, former medical Dean from Toronto. Levine recalled “the guest speaker, the chief of the Boy Scouts, got up and gave a speech; I cannot remember a thing he said.” [An LL.D did indeed go to Lord Rowallan, Chief Scout of the Empire, who gave the main address.] Afterwards, cocktail parties, smuggling bottles into the ball in the Currie Gym, chaperons leaving at midnight, lights darkened, couples necking, “girls and boys whose fathers owned entire villages and towns in Northern Ontario and Quebec were getting quickly plastered.”76

Levine had decided to do a master’s degree. He worked in the summer of 1948 at Algoma Ore Properties in Ontario (Helen Mine, Wawa77) on the surface, not as a miner, and cleared over $400.78 He was struck by the grim landscape and the workers, many recruited from Europe, hoping for better lives. Three letters to Files record Levine’s passage from the student of 1948 to the expatriate writer of 1950.79 In the first, Levine reported to Files from the mine in July 1948 that Cambridge had not yet replied to his application and that he had revised and submitted “The Angled Road” to Dodd, Mead’s contest as he had in 1947. They had found it improved, ranked it highly; again he had not won. One judge, “E.B.W.” [E.B. White?], reported that Levine was sensitive and promising but his technique confusing; the novel’s war content should not be held against it since the war had shaped young writers.80 Another judge, “A.T.K.,” noting the conflict between the protagonist’s drab life in Canada and his sensitivity, declared the work accomplished but sometimes unsympathetic, with too much art for art’s sake. A.T.K. accurately predicted Levine would achieve a high standard although his market might be limited.81 In 1949 May Ebbitt (later Cutler), reporting in the McGill News on the success of Files’s writing program, noted that Dodd, Mead had called Levine’s “the best written novel we have received from a student” but had declined to publish it, fearing there was no longer a market for war novels.82

Most intriguing, Levine told Files he had started a second novel. Its characters [all men] would represent his generation’s conflicting ideals as they faced the possibility of another war: an immigrant from Poland to Canada, who becomes fascist; an agnostic science student; an [Anglican] theology student; and, probably closest to Levine’s viewpoint, an introspective artist who rejects religion and lives for the present. Adopting the technique of John Dos Passos in USA, Levine planned to follow one character a while, then another. He would treat them objectively and keep himself out of the book [!]. With echoes from fairy tales and the Bible, the novel would end with a prose-poetry monologue. While this unfinished novel was a false start and the direct opposite of his future, autobiographically oriented writing, it probably got another imitative form out of his system – the Great American Novel.83

Presumably Cambridge refused him for he returned to McGill for 1948-1949 to write his M.A. thesis under Files. At this point he probably contemplated an academic career combined with writing. A master’s degree would increase his chances for further graduate work in England and a university post. He proposed an M.A. thesis on the controversial American poet Ezra Pound, then confined to an asylum, to analyse Pound’s poetry psychologically and technically. He cited Pound’s innovative approaches to art and culture, and his influence on Auden and Eliot. He found Pound puzzling and paradoxical; he was intrigued too by Pound’s self-imposed exile from America, ending in his being judged innocent of treason by reason of insanity.84 Planning to leave Canada soon, Levine may have seen something of himself in Pound. In 1969 he wrote that “one of the conditions of my being a writer is of living in exile” – exile in Canada as the son of orthodox Jewish parents, at McGill as “the poor boy among the rich,” and in England as a Canadian.85 Levine told David McDonald in 1975, “I did Pound deliberately because he was in the loony bin…. I’ve always been attracted to all kinds of people that society frowns upon.”86 Titled “Ezra Pound and the Sense of the Past,” the thesis (M.A. McGill, 1949) shows Levine’s early thinking about loss of values and identity. It opens:

In an age faced with the prospect of disintegration the course which the individual artist takes depends on his personality and background. He can escape from this age by embracing religion, writing imaginary voyages into the future, or else, look back to what has already happened. The poet who finds little of value in his age is faced with the problem of identification.87

Levine knew about imaginary voyages from Professor Noad and had his own identifications to work out, as a Jew, Canadian, ex-RCAF flyer, and successful McGill student. He argued that Pound’s poetry had one thread throughout; “the sense of the past,” which he had pursued as an escape, while science and scepticism killed off the old beliefs people had shared. He examined Pound’s “retreat” to the past by looking at his personality in tandem with his writing, especially the autobiographical poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) in which Pound dissected his past life and the emptiness of modern society. As he noted in his thesis, Pound (like Eliot) personified the poet-scholar – the career Levine was preparing himself for.88 Later, Levine planned to continue his study of disintegration and the decay of values in a thesis on Hardy, Lawrence, and Eliot that he proposed to University of London in 1949. He would develop these themes in Canada Made Me, tracing the erosion of the values of his parents and other immigrants, in mining camps and universities, musing that “human relationships had become nothing more than a series of brief encounters. In wartime one accepted that…. Now one didn’t even have a war to justify one’s values or decisions.” He envied Graham Greene’s characters who had “an established order of values” to rebel against. “One still clung to a morality but without the faith that ruled it. One was like a chicken running around without its head. All that was left was the personal…. One was condemned to feed on personal experience.”89

In fall 1948 Levine’s Myssium: a new book of verse was published in the Ryerson Chapbook series. Six of its nine poems originally appeared in Forge or the Daily.90 B.S. [Betty Sinclair?], who had admired Levine’s edition of Forge, reviewed it favorably in the McGill Daily in October 1948, quoting a poem that had a bomb explosion: “…a sheet of red flame. This would surely delight Ezra Pound himself.” B.S. observed that Levine used his war experiences and “eschews regular verse forms and writes in patterned free verse, eminently suited to his subjects.”91

Levine returned to the Daily as Features Editor for the issue of November 10, 1948. More important, he edited an ambitious revival of the McGill Daily Literary Supplement which appeared on March 17, 1949. The original Literary Supplement (1924-1925), edited by A.J.M. Smith (B.Sc.[Arts] 1925, M.A. 1926), had published poetry, reviews and other work by himself, F.R. Scott (B.C.L. 1927) and other students before it was succeeded by the McGill Fortnightly.92 Since starting in 1938, Forge had become the main vehicle of McGill’s student writing. Levine wrote only the editorial of the revived 1949 Literary Supplement. In it, he praised Forge for serving undergraduate writing but found it strange that McGill lacked the kind of literary journals put out at Toronto, Dalhousie and Queen’s, which published staff and graduate students. Such a more broadly based publication would reach a wider public than the student based Forge and present the University’s “fund of intellectual diversity.”93 (It would also provide a continued editing forum for Levine now that he was a graduate student.) Levine’s issue leaned heavily towards staff; nine of the ten contributors were McGill department heads, professors or lecturers. He thanked his 1948 Forge writers Giblin, MacCallan and Heuser and also Patrick Anderson, a lecturer, “who submitted poems but owing to lack of space cannot be included in this issue” – although he included Anderson’s prose piece, “Alphabet of prejudice” with brief essays for letters A through M (G-is for Girls; M-is Montreal, etc.).94 One cannot help wondering about the reactions of his former Forge colleagues.

Levine rounded up a unique spectrum of professorial thinking. The Supplement concentrated on criticism and intellectual issues. Notably, it had no poems or fiction (perhaps to avoid competing with Forge). Levine maintained, however, his concern with modern verse by including essays on poetry and the writing process. The contributors examined literacy, the stultifying influence of the British and French past, the threat posed by American comics and movies to Canadian literature, and the intellectual facing totalitarianism. German chairman Willem Graff wrote on Rilke, French chairman Jean Launay on existentialism. The lone student, S. Lamb (B.A. 1949), wrote on “Metaphysical poetry and the Moderns.” Two of Gordon Webber’s “Design” paintings, 1948-1950, gave abstract counterpoints to the texts. Files and Noad, probably the teachers (along, perhaps, with Anderson and Klein) who influenced Levine the most were among four contributors from the English Department. In “The writer in our society,” Files observed that creative writers rarely espoused the rules of truthfulness followed by scientists and philosophers, and so were criticized for being irresponsible. Yet the artist-writer often “shares in the general quest for truth in his time; or is the most memorable voice of that quest.”95 Files’s views may have encouraged Levine’s quest for truth in fiction. Similarly Noad may have nudged Levine towards personal and autobiographical writing. Noad’s article was an apologia for his research and teaching interests in diaries, autobiographies, memoirs and correspondence. No one could know an age without knowing “its individual self-revelations; hence an excellent case might be made in justification of such reading as a means to an end, a direct path into the consciousness of nations, culture, or historical period.” He gave examples from St. Augustine to Pepys of writings which let us into peoples’ lives. Unlike novelists and poets, the diarist and letter writer never knows how his story will end. Noad pointed out the “irrevocability of the word once written,” which anyone reading his own old letters will feel and the “inexhaustible variety and perpetually-renewed delight” of personal writing, which rivalled anything novelists or playwrights could dream up, and constantly reminded the reader of “the homely details of everyday life.”96 This sounded like a challenge to fiction writers. Levine’s own story-memoirs, full of homely details, might intrigue some future Noad.

Return to England and the end of academia, 1949-1950

Just as the Supplement came out, Levine won a Beaver Club fellowship. These sent Canadian ex-servicemen to British universities, and were worth up to 500 pounds a year, renewable for a second year. The Montreal press noted that Levine hoped to attend University of London or Cambridge.97 (He would be accepted by King’s College, University of London). He received his McGill M.A. on May 30, 1949 and would be denied England no longer. With his master’s degree, the Supplement, and the fellowship, he was launched on an academic path. Better yet, he was on his way to being a writer: Jack McClelland agreed to market “The Angled Road” in Canada if Levine could find a London publisher. And like the narrator of “The English Girl,” Levine assumed his English girlfriend at McGill would return to England soon.98 In the story “A Canadian Upbringing” (1968), Levine’s narrator said he used to vary his reasons for going to England according to who asked. So he would tell an editor that his Canadian publisher had advised it. Or he would tell someone at a party “it was because of the attractive English girl who sat beside me at college and took the same courses I did, and who was going back when she graduated.”99 He gave similar reasons for going to England in “Why I am an Expatriate”- because of the English girl and his happy memories as an officer, when for the first time he had been “living” not “marking time.”100

He left McGill and Canada with few regrets. In retrospect at least, Levine felt he had forced himself to fit into McGill’s academic and social mould, while there was “another man within me that’s angry with me.” As he stated in “Why I am an Expatriate;”

By the time I left McGill I was pretty confused. Things seemed so far to have fallen into my lap, as long as I continued to play this game – which was, for me, just a series of pretences. The postponement of any decision, which I got by going to university, was now up. The choice I had to make was either to continue the way I had, and it seemed all too easy and attractive to do so – or else try to come to terms. I didn’t think I could do this in Canada, where I would always feel a sense of betrayal….. I had by this time also realized that all I wanted to do was write. And I knew that this would be easier, at the beginning, away from home.101

Levine did not define betrayal but it partly involved his adaptation to McGill where he set aside his working class, Jewish roots. He told John Richmond in 1970 that he had written Canada Made Me “as a tribute to a generation of Canadians whose children were forced, by economic or other circumstances, to deny the old country values of their parents.”102 He never fully spelled out what these lost values were or what his own were, except for truthfulness in writing – “One of the things a writer finds out is that you don’t lie.”103 More cosmically, he reclaimed his Jewish background in Canada Made Me. He quoted a letter from a friend in Israel, which praised the Jewish families of their old “near-slum” Ottawa neighbourhood: husbands did not beat their wives or get drunk like their gentile neighbours. The friend recalled “the patriarchal set-up of our tight-knit Jewish family pattern, the religion, festival, synagogue which emphasized our apartness, gave us our values.” Revisiting Ottawa in 1956, Levine enjoyed traditional Sabbath services and “the wonderful food smells of a Friday night.” And in Montreal he enjoyed the Jewish neighbourhoods and food stores but recoiled from an innovative, Americanized reform service at Temple Emmanuel in Westmount: “The whole service was a parody…Gone was the richness of the Hebrew chants, the loudness, the cantor stammering over the ritual… One could believe in that.”104

That was Levine by the mid-1950s. At McGill he and his narrators had not yet come to terms with their backgrounds. The narrator of From a Seaside Town (1970) had avoided “any Jews on the campus who stuck together and went to the Hillel Club,” although he had enjoyed going a Jewish restaurant “for gefilte fish, helzel, lutkas, and to watch the others eat.”105 In a 1969 memoir Levine declared:

At McGill I was running away from being a Jew. It sounds silly now… I made up so many identities. It all depended on who I was with. This helped to give my life there a dangerous edge. But it was to prove near fatal to the writing. For at the time I was writing The Angled Road. And in it I cut out the fact that my characters were Jewish. And by doing this, a whole dimension is missing; I made them smaller than they should have been.106

He told David McDonald in 1975 that he had reacted against Canada and his orthodox Jewish background by marrying an English woman and moving to an isolated part of England “and then I found there that I felt very Canadian and very Jewish…. I think you’re a writer first, and you’re a Jew, a Protestant, a Catholic, a Canadian afterwards.”107

Levine wrote to Files in September 1949, just before starting at King’s College, London (noting that Cambridge had turned him down).108 His McGill friends Christopher Wanklyn and Leo Ciceri are also studying in England; Levine has spent the past summer in St. Ives, Cornwall, swimming, writing and getting to know the fishermen and artist colony there. [This visit was fateful for Levine would settle there for much of the next thirty years and have painter friends. Critics would say he wrote with a painter’s eye.109] He has written stories, poetry and book reviews, is revising “The Angled Road,” and plans to work on a new novel [it is not clear if it is the same one he started at the mine]. England has declined; the English envy Americans and copy their speech the way Canadians do that of the British. Culture and arts do well because of government support. He has thought a lot about Canada and now sees it more clearly. He sent Faber and Faber his thesis on Pound. T.S. Eliot as one of the publisher’s chiefs wrote back praising the work but warning that it was hard to turn a thesis into a readable book and that the scope should expand to cover all the Cantos.110 [Levine enjoyed this letter from a poet who had influenced him and was one of the writers he planned to study in his proposed London thesis on the decay of absolute values. Much later he used an Eliot letter in the story “We All Begin in a Little Magazine.” The Levine-like narrator meets a Levine-like poet “in his late fifties, short and stocky and wearing a shabby raincoat.” The poet wistfully hopes to publish something. “’I had a letter from T.S. Eliot,’ he said. ‘I kept it all these years. But I sold it last month to Texas for fifty dollars,’ he says proudly. ‘My daughter was getting married. And I had to get her a present.’”111 Whether or not Levine himself kept a letter from Eliot, he would sell the University of Texas the manuscript of Canada Made Me after it had been refused as a gift by the McGill Library in 1959.112]

In February 1950 Levine writes Files again, comparing King’s unfavorably to McGill. He praises McGill’s library and McGill Professor Joyce Hemlow who taught Anglo-Saxon as well as anyone at King’s, while no one taught modern poetry like Anderson and Klein. King’s has no campus, just a nondescript building next to a pub. [Fifty years later, he had mellowed: “I liked King’s because it was in the Strand and there was a pub, Mooney’s by its entrance.”113] He finds most King’s students and lecturers dull, except for Professor Geoffrey Bullough, who is supposed to supervise his thesis on “The Decay of Absolute Values in Modern Society as Shown in the Chief Works of Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot.” Ominously, Levine is not yet confirmed in the Ph.D. Program as his McGill M.A. is not held equivalent to London’s. He is still revising “Angled Road.” His academic and creative work go well together, to the profit of his second novel. He now sees how provincial Canada is but is getting involved in projects of Canadians in London. He has met many London writers; they are either university graduates inspired by Eliot and Pound or non-grads concerned with social questions [soon to become the Angry Young Men]. Levine cares for neither group. He reports poet Kathleen Raine told him that creativity was low because all the men were homosexuals while the women produced the poetry and novels.114 Levine hinted at his new life in his poem “Letter from England” (1950); “Then London and the cocktail parties, / And the clever young men and the clever young women.”115 Later he came to admire the Angry Young Men; they did not play along with middle class values but wrote “about what they knew” – their working class backgrounds. His essay “A Letter from England” (1958) would praise the Labour government’s welfare state and the exciting writing being done by writers from English-speaking countries outside England.116

Apparently Levine could not get into the King’s Ph.D program unless he took more courses or a second master’s degree. So in 1950 he got the admirably flexible Beaver Club Fellowship officials to let him drop his academic course and spend his second year of funding to write.117 Besides revising his novel, he published poetry about Cornwall and analysed his own style in “Portrait of a Poet”: “The Poets do not like my ‘technique’ / The ‘other people’ hate its plainness.” Heine or Villon might have approved but now there was

No one except Pound.

And he is safe in a hospital,

In some other country.118

Pound stayed on his mind. Levine combined scholarship and writing at McGill but once he gave up doctoral studies in London he disowned academia. Already critical of McGill by his Canada Made Me tour in 1956, he declared in 1960 that when he had left Montreal (in 1949) he knew he had “no great interest in the academic. It was, mainly, just the means of getting me over.”119 The narrator of “A Canadian Upbringing” (1968) recalled, “In London I soon discovered that I didn’t care for the academic.”120 And Levine said in 1970, “The academic tries to separate literature from life. My job, and I think any writer’s job, is to weld them.”121 The blocking of his doctoral hopes at University of London and, perhaps, the end of his McGill romance may have provoked some of his hindsight disillusionment with McGill. But the Beaver Club funding worked out well. It got him back to England, let him discard academia for writing, and discover Cornwall and London’s literary life. A little money in time does all.

Part II: McGill in retrospect

Critical memories

Levine often mentioned McGill in his stories, poems, articles, and interviews. Most references were brief but in Canada Made Me (1958) and the story “The English Girl” (1964) Levine portrayed the University in strikingly similar terms, recalling parties, restaurants, dances, romance, and friends. In “The English Girl,” he reduced what could have made a nostalgic novel to a few evocative pages. But Levine and his story narrators also looked back at McGill with edgy regret and a sense of [mainly self-] betrayal, lamenting how easy and what a waste of time McGill had been. Levine noted:

At university I was in my element – mainly because I could not take it seriously. I graduated with two degrees, first class honours, various prizes, a scholarship, and the five thousand dollar fellowship. Even at the end, I was unable to take any of this seriously because I considered all along that my presence there was something in the nature of a fraud.122

He seldom mentioned McGill without saying he could not take McGill seriously. Worse, he concluded that McGill had given him a false start as a writer. Presumably he did not include Files’s help with the basics. In “A Writer’s Story,” the narrator has an M.A., had edited the literary magazine at university, has recently married (as Levine had in 1952), lives in Cornwall, has a novel about to come out, and is trying to write but does not know what to write about. “That’s the trouble with going to university, I thought. I didn’t have to try hard enough. The results for a little effort were too immediate and too great. You think you’re a writer because those at university say so and make a fuss.”123 In the same vein, Levine said that as a writer he had had to ‘’uneducate” himself, as an antidote to university.124

He sold stories but was hard up in the 1950s and 1960s. When the travel-writer protagonist of From a Seaside Town (1970) passes through suburbs on the train from Ottawa to Montreal, he looks at the comfortable houses, envying men living there. “Why can’t I settle for this? Why isolate myself in a cut-off seaside town in England that I don’t even like?” Later, back in Cornwall, trying to think of what to write to make money, he muses, “Perhaps I’m in the wrong job. I could have been a professor in some provincial university in Canada.” He would have an office, secretary, colleagues to talk to, students, regular pay, and coffee at the faculty club. “How I wish I was part of a community.”125 Levine had lost interest in the academic by 1951 and his fictional alter ego was playing “what if” but the story hints that Levine sometimes thought of the scholar’s road started at McGill. He might have turned out like his fellow Forge editor, Alan Heuser, who also won prizes and wrote an M.A. at McGill but unlike Levine did a doctorate and taught in McGill’s English Department from 1954 to 1992. Professors earned more than writers. Poverty was Levine’s frequent theme, sometimes played as satire. In the story “I’ll Bring You Back Something Nice” [1968], his protagonist, a McGill graduate living in Cornwall with a wife, children, and overdue bills, borrows money from his McGill classmates at a tenth anniversary reunion in London. They are embarrassed but we suspect he is not. The story’s narrator and the real Levine, who tries to borrow money in Canada Made Me but is given a suit instead, both poke fun at the “successful” classmates who have money they should be relieved of.126

Levine visited Canada in 1954, described in his “Autobiographical Essay” (2001), and not to be confused with his 1956 Canada Made Me visit. Files took him to the McGill Faculty Club for lunch. They ran into the head of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Levine, who could be a good promoter, persuaded him to put on an exhibition of his St. Ives painter friends. Back in England, he started using a map to inspire stories set in Canada. He got advances from London publisher Putnam and Jack McClelland in Toronto to go across Canada from March to June 1956 to write the travel book Canada Made Me.127 Published in 1958, it had many McGill references, although of course its chief interest was as a melancholy, original critique of Canada as Levine mused on his past and present. It recreates dialogue and reads like the fiction-which-reads-like-nonfiction of his stories. While accepted by most critics (and here) on Levine’s terms as nonfiction,128 in at least one instance, as John Metcalfe points out, it invents a character, a noseless woman. Inspired by a real woman in England, Levine had used her as a character in his story “A Piece of Blue” (ca. 1955-1956) about a McGill student working, as he had, at Algoma Mines. When Levine revisited the mine on the Canada Made Me trip, he pulled the noseless woman from his story into his nonfictional travelogue. Citing this, Metcalf observes: “Clearly, Levine is driven more, by the ‘pressure of writing the story’ than he is by the obligation to transcribe ‘reality.’”129 Far less important, Levine may have transposed the timing of his meeting with “P,” mentioned below. Fictionalizing real-life people and events has always been accepted; inventing incidents in memoirs has not. One suspects that Canada Made Me very occasionally may have improved life into art.

Levine confronted his past in some of the places he revisited, especially the mine, Ottawa, Montreal, and McGill. He knew it would be harder to write about places where he had lived than those he was seeing for the first time and could describe impressionistically – where there was nothing to feel any loss about or “to destroy, or to betray.”130 Ira Nadel saw the book as more autobiography than travel book and Levine as “the autobiographer as survivor…. His 1956 return is not to find the country but himself.”131 Critics complained Canada Made Me focused on Canada’s down and outs. Levine admitted he preferred the poor side of town – perhaps reacting against the prosperous milieu he knew at McGill. Some Canadian booksellers treated the book like pornography. In December 1958, William Weintraub (B.A., McGill, 1947) wrote to Mordecai Richler that the book “will certainly cause some panics around this smiling, beautiful country,” and that the owner of Classics Books in Montreal tried to talk him out of buying it. Weintraub found the writing “really excellent – fine descriptive passages – but he certainly did find a lot of sordid stuff, bleak towns, vapid people.” 132 Richler agreed, reviewing it in the same tone for the London Sunday Times: “It’s a sour, wilfully sordid book, evoking many scenes brilliantly, and far better than any other book I’ve ever read about Canada.”133

Lawrence Mathews called the Levine of Canada Made Me “the stereotypical Angry Young Man.”134 The book criticized mining camps, the sleazy new rich and the nervous old WASP rich, and McGill, which represented “wealth, snobbery, privilege.” Yet Levine liked the campus with its old grey stone buildings, “the stone tomb of James McGill. And the ghinko tree…A piece of country stuck right in the centre of Montreal” where “in the autumn at a five o’clock lecture you can hear the ship’s horns from the river.” To the west “sweeping upwards with the contour of the mountain, are the fine houses, the Presbyterian churches, the wealth of Westmount. East: the drab sour-smelling boarding-houses; the shabby apartments; one soon came to poverty.”135 The charming campus aside, he resented what he had come to see as the conformity and mediocrity McGill had offered and imposed:

I walked away from McGill with little nostalgia. It was one of those times when, looking back, one can see at what expense the good times were had. At its best it was ‘borrowed time’…. If you wanted to keep on the same way, you could, it was made all too easy. One had without knowing it joined ‘the organization.’ And in those four years it did its work. It sandpapered the personal rough edges while it continued to dangle a carrot in front, as long as one toed the line.136

He said the same things not long after in “Why I am an Expatriate,” quoted earlier. T.D. MacLulich suggests that “Levine sees McGill as little more than an arena for social snobbery and social opportunism.”137 Except for his sketches of friends such as the “English Girl,” “P,” “M,” and “Victor,” Levine painted the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant students as superficial, materialistic and fearful for their status, anticipating Mordecai Richler’s raspy treatment of them in Joshua Then and Now (1980). In Canada Made Me, Levine insisted repeatedly on the conformity demanded from students and the similarity of their upper middle class backgrounds. Students from other backgrounds quickly learned to copy. The students “were all much of a sameness. Not only have they inherited money but Puritanism and guilt as well.” Doomed to dull futures, they lived their best moments at McGill: “I remember W. chartering an airplane to fly him for a weekend with a girl he wanted to see in New York…R. staking the borrowed car he drove up in, on a throw of the dice at a fraternity crap game….the end of an all-night party with the girls in evening dresses and bare feet playing against the boys in a game of softball on the lawn.” Their student years were their last gasp of freedom. They would enter the prisons of their fathers’ professions. They would be worse off than their parents, have less authority, be ashamed of being Canadian, and copy the British or Americans. They had their country cottages and the Junior League. “But they felt inferior to their parents’ achievements, they looked ashamed most of the time as if they carried with them a family guilt, that they could not tell anyone, that was eating away from the inside.”138

From memories to memoir and fiction: friends, professors, rooms

In 1993 Levine wrote that he was often asked how autobiographical his work was: “Which is very difficult to explain. (It is not as autobiographical as it reads.) And does it matter?”139 Michelle Gadpaille cites Levine distinguishing between autobiography and fiction: “Levine says: ‘Life once lived, the way you remember it is fiction.’”140 Critics have focused on the mixture of autobiography and invention found in most of Levine’s stories.141 Summing up his career in 2001, Levine noted that while friends appeared in his stories, once he started writing he expected the story to change: “And while writing this essay, I realize why this autobiographical material becomes more interesting as a short story or novel. Because only in fiction can I make connections. Between the personal and [something that wasn’t there] something larger.”142 He ended one story: “It is hard to write – or live for that matter – without hurting someone.”143 In “Class of 1949,” the narrator says, “People are very generous. They let you into their lives. So you don’t want to hurt them by what you write. In any case I write about people I like or have liked. And only about people I know.”144 Similarly, Levine told David McDonald in 1975 that he would tell people “what I think is the truth by saying I only write about people I like. I try to tell them that you take bits and pieces from all different people to make up one character, and that you invent and make up things because of the technical necessities that go into it.”145

But in the case of several McGill friends seen below, he took more than bits and pieces and not from different people. The originals once detected confirm that Levine started from real people but with the caveat that Levine and his narrators were not identical and that the real people became fictional characters once the story got going. Yet Levine kept his story characters far closer to the people who inspired them than do most fiction writers. Conventionally, he disguised individuals in his stories and in Canada Made Me with name changes or initials. However he was so relentlessly truthful that the details he gave about “M,” “P,” “Victor,” and the “English Girl” allow them to be identified by sifting at length through student directories, yearbooks and other publications. Naming them is unnecessary and following Levine’s lead they are not identified here nor their privacy invaded if some are still living [except for Leo Ciceri, the original of “Len Mason” in “Class of 1949,” who died in 1970]. On the other hand, the identities of Professors Files and Noad, both long dead, are given because of their importance as Levine’s teachers and to show that they match “The Professor” of Canada Made Me and Graham Pollack in “A Canadian Upbringing.” To understand the situation of the unhappy Professor and Levine’s relation to him, one needs to know he is Files; to appreciate the vignette of Pollock, lecturing on Utopias, one should know he is based on Noad, whose lectures on Utopias Levine would have heard.146

Levine’s earliest story using some McGill background, “A Small Piece of Blue,” (ca. 1955-56), has interested critics looking at how Levine transformed his own experience into fiction.147 The protagonist is a McGill student working at the Algoma, Ontario mine site as Levine did in summer 1948. Levine had told Files that life at the mine was isolated, dull, and had changed how he looked at working. After the glamour of the RCAF and McGill, he discovered bleakness and dejected wage slaves. The story was written just before the nonfictional recollections in Canada Made Me; they shared several similar texts and both criticize McGill. For the story, Levine invented the key character of the camp doctor, a middle-aged, disillusioned McGill graduate who has rejected the successful world McGill represents, writes poetry, and drinks. Levine later analysed how he had developed the story: starting from wanting to write about his experience, remembering “disconnected memories,” and then creating the doctor “in order to make the story work.”148 The student admired the doctor’s refusal to follow the McGill path to success. They agreed McGill had been fun but a waste of time; that it instilled conformity and social graces not learning, intuition or individuality. T.D. MacLulich found that the doctor’s – and Levine’s – hostility to McGill “sounds exaggerated” and that the doctor may feel ashamed he did not live up to the ideals of his McGill education. Pointing to inconsistencies in the way Levine handled the mine episode in the “factual” Canada Made Me and in the story, MacLulich argued that Levine did not simply tell the truth in his fiction (as he claimed) but like most writers “has selected and arranged his materials to achieve the desired effect.” He also suggested that Levine transposed his disillusionment with Canada in 1956 to the student who had not yet been disillusioned in the story’s time of 1948.149 MacLulich nearly convinces us, yet Levine probably had begun to be disillusioned as early as 1948. The narrator of his 1948 draft of “The Angled Road,” cited earlier, could not force himself to write about Canada and already sounded not only disillusioned but alienated.

Canada Made Me portrayed Professor Files and four classmates: P, M, the English Girl, and through a quoted letter, the classmate he would call Victor in “Class of 1949.” Victor and the English Girl also appeared in stories; Professor Noad and classmate Leo Ciceri only in stories. Levine said he dropped the authorial commenting most writers make within their narratives in his later writing150 but in Canada Made Me and the stories and interviews cited here he occasionally comments, mildly, regretfully, and pityingly. He often refers to loss of values and betrayals – by himself, his protagonists and his characters. In particular, Levine saw P, and his narrator saw Victor, as having failed their early creative promise. Levine was hard on himself and on his writer-protagonists – they too had their failures – but we feel that at least they stayed the course as writers.

We will look at the five student friends first, then the two professors, as they appear in stories and Canada Made Me. The first student is P, re-encountered on the Canada Made Me tour. Levine stated that when he first arrived in Montreal in March 1956, he stayed over just one night (at Mordecai Richler’s mother’s rooming house) before flying to Ottawa the next afternoon. On the day of his flight, he ran into P, whose identity is traceable through Levine’s usual trail of truthful details. His first term at McGill, Levine had shared a room with P in a boarding house. They wrote poetry, studied late for exams kept awake on Benzedrine, and drank at the Shrine. Now they have a brandy at the Press Club in the Mount Royal Hotel and talk about what they have done since graduation. P “had joined the CBC, had put on weight, married, three children, a small house in a suburb, a small car.” P had succumbed to security. They no longer have much in common. Levine recalls how they had talked as students: “The worries, the ambitions, the lies, the things one loved, one hated, one feared, that one confided… and now we had nothing to say to each other.” P had written poetry at McGill; now he said “I don’t even read poetry today.” Levine recalled good things about P. “He was never a phoney. At a time when those who came to McGill after the war, without money or family influence, and ruthlessly began to charm, to sell themselves, P never quite fitted in.” P would have gladly been an academic “with his slippers, the pipe, the glass of beer, the fire going, and books on all the walls: an insignificant lecturer in some provincial university in the States.” However, P had lacked the high marks and support from his professors that he would have needed to win a fellowship and go on for higher degrees. Their talk dried up: “Both of us were reminders of something we had betrayed in our selves. Or perhaps one had merely become faithful to a new set of experiences.”151 On March 12, 1956, Brian Moore wrote William Weintraub that he had just met in the Press Club “with Norman Levine, who is staying here at the home of Mort’s mother and who emplanes for Ottawa tonight – I hope. He was full of questions, suggestions, etc.”152 [Moore bears no resemblance to P and did not attend McGill.] Maybe Levine remembered things incorrectly or maybe he actually met both P and Moore at the Press Club the day he left for Ottawa. Truth, rearranged truth or improved, invented truth? Does one risk making too much of such discrepancies?

On his return to Montreal, Levine visits M, a classmate he likes who belongs to “the Anglo-Scottish elite.” Her apartment building overlooks McGill (it was the only high building overlooking the grounds then). He studied for exams with her there and remembered looking down and watching nannies pushing prams on campus; he had used the prams in a poem of 1951, “Letter from McGill University.”153 M’s first memory is of being wheeled on campus by her nanny. Her father, distinguished in his profession, has died recently, his funeral honored by McGill. “M is short, attractive, with a round Dutch-like face that makes her look like a schoolgirl. She looks astonishingly young for thirty.” Her graduation photo in Old McGill matches Levine’s description. They had sat together in English classes, passed notes in lectures. She has been engaged three times but is looking for “somebody that’s going somewhere, that I can push.” She tells him about their classmates; T committed suicide, J is high up in aluminum, lives in London and has acquired “an immaculate English accent,” someone else races cars.154 Here, they sound a bit like the McGill hearties in London celebrating their class’s tenth anniversary in “I’ll Bring You Back Something Nice.”

In “Class of 1949” (1974), the narrator, who as usual closely resembles Levine, writes about his friendship with “Victor,” who closely resembles a real-life friend of Levine’s at McGill. Victor had introduced the narrator to elegant houses, filled with paintings, first editions and butlers: “When Victor came in his car to pick me up for dinner with his parents and saw the basement room I had by the boiler on Dorchester next to the railway tracks, he put it down to some eccentricity on my part.”155 The narrator and Victor both moved to England and spent the summer of 1949 writing in St. Ives, Cornwall. [In Canada Made Me, Levine describes sharing a cottage and writing that summer of 1949 with “another Canadian.”]156 They later shared London digs. The narrator, like Levine, planned a thesis on “The Decay of Absolute Values in Modern Society.” Victor, like his real-life original, moved to Morocco. In about 1974 Victor visits the narrator in Cornwall accompanied by a young Moroccan man. The narrator recalls Victor used to like girls in their McGill days. Victor confesses to being a dilettante. As with P, it emerges that they have little in common anymore. Victor once wanted to write. The narrator remembers the novel Victor had begun: “The characters were lifeless.” In the unpublished passage of “The Angled Road” cited earlier, Levine’s narrator had criticized himself for not writing about what he knew. Levine’s stories thrive on role changing and projecting, and the narrator of “Class of 1949” scolds Victor the way the narrator of “The Angled Road” MS had scolded himself. “I asked him [Victor] why he didn’t write about people he knew. About his family, about Montreal, his private school, McGill. He said he didn’t want anything to do with Canada or anything connected with it…. And how can you be a writer if you reject your past? Seeing Victor, I can see the person I was.” Indeed, Victor is a sort of bad twin to Levine’s narrator. Victor’s rejection of his roots is uncomfortably close to that of Levine and a few of his narrators. It might even be speculated that Victor’s abandoned lifeless novel may have been an allusion to Levine’s second, unknown novel mentioned to Files in 1948-1949. Yet Victor’s free, wandering, single life is enviable. Levine’s narrator only travels “back to Canada – to keep in touch with the past.” And he stays uninvolved in Cornwall because he wants to hang on to his past.157 The story sums up Levine’s own expatriate tensions and those of his characters such as Victor and Alexander Marsden, who is mentioned below. Like “The English Girl,” the story is foreshadowed in Canada Made Me, in which Levine quotes from “a letter from Morocco.” The unnamed writer matches Victor. Replying to Levine’s question why he left Canada, he says initially it had been for a change; he had planned to return. He has nothing against Canada, although the climate is atrocious and Canadians touting Canada put him to sleep. He likes learning new languages and customs and escaping Canada’s “dreary” borrowed Anglo-Scotch culture. Now he prefers Morocco [as many wandering Anglos had in real life and literature]. Canada stands for his childhood which now revolts him.158

“Class of 1949” also glimpses Levine’s classmate, Len Mason, based on Leo Ciceri (B.A. 1948) who became a distinguished actor and died in a car crash in 1970. At McGill, Ciceri had acted, written on Canadian theatre for Levine’s 1948 Forge, and read Forge’s poetry over the radio. The narrator asks Victor:

And remember Len Mason? One time the three of us were walking along Sherbrooke Street after a late lecture. It was winter. Lots of snow on the ground. We told him we were going to be writers. And he said he was going to be an actor. So we said we would write plays for him. Len did become an actor. He acted in Canada and over here and in the States. He was killed two years ago while driving a car on a highway.159

Levine remembered “The English Girl” best; he published her story in 1964.160 The narrator, a McGill graduate closely resembling Levine, looks back fifteen years after his romance ended. Reviewers disagree over whether Levine portrayed women convincingly but the English girl’s quiet charm and wit come through.161 She was based on a real-life student whose father was dead, whose mother moved to Canada because she disliked post-war England, who lived in McGill’s Royal Victoria College, took English, and was a year or two behind the narrator (and Levine) at McGill. In real life and the story, they were a match. Both longed for England. She evoked hunt balls and decaying manors [not the Tudorbethan replicas Levine saw in Westmount]. Her picture in the Old McGills matches the narrator’s description: “She was tall, a longish face, dark eyes, a nice smile, black unruly hair. She hadn’t made many friends at university. Others thought her quiet, reserved. They put it down to her being English. I found this all very attractive.” The story’s narrator was a “pro-Britisher…. So it was no accident that I was attracted to the English girl.” Moreover, she was interesting in herself, not just because she was English: “I think she changed me as much as anyone is changed by another person.” 162 The real-life girl may have helped spark Levine’s writing. As Levine said to David McDonald: “I began to write a novel as an undergraduate, I think to please a girl and myself.”163 Levine recreates the same activities in “The English Girl” that he described in Canada Made Me – including going to Montreal’s colorful restaurants. The narrator and the English girl would lunch at Ben’s on smoked meat, Pauze’s on oysters, Slitkin and Slotkin on steak or go to Chicken Charlie’s. Supper spots were the Lasalle Hotel, Mother Martin’s, Chinatown and the Bucharest. They would meet under the Arts Building’s clock. She decorated his room and gave him her childhood copy of Winnie the Pooh. They skied at Mount Tremblant and nearly capsized a boat at Ile Aux Noix, where the narrator, like Levine, had worked as a family tutor in 1947 (also described in the story “South of Montreal”). The narrator made sure she did not meet his family. They assumed their lives would be together in England; the narrator applied for a fellowship “to make that possible.”164

More traditional than his later stories (Maupassant, Maugham, and Irwin Shaw would not have faulted it), “The English Girl” is Levine at his most honest and confessional with a sense of lost past. It must be his closest fusion of fiction and autobiography. Here is part of the real-life version in Canada Made Me:

Listening with her to the Messiah. Then back into the thick snow. The cups of coffee and crumpets in the “Honey Dew.” The early morning meetings for breakfast. She waited for me underneath the clock in the Arts building after the last lecture. Then the meal out, the Saturday night film, and at Christmas ski-ing at Mont Tremblant. Her mother, a widow, had brought her to Montreal after the war, after Labour had come into office…. She told me about an old house in Suffolk with earwigs coming out of the taps, of her nannie, of hunt balls, of being presented at Court.165

She had brought her childhood icons from England; she was homesick for Ivor Novello.166

The fictional “English Girl” and the factual Canada Made Me share the same details: their breakfasts at the Honey Dew restaurant; her waiting for him under the Arts Building clock; her mother being a widow who moved to Montreal because she disliked postwar England; Christmas skiing at Mont-Tremblant; her copy of Winnie the Pooh; memories of hunt balls; her staying up all night to hear the broadcast of Princess Elizabeth’s marriage; and covering up her absence from Royal Victoria College to go to a hotel after Levine and his narrator’s graduation ceremony and celebrations.167 The closest link between story and memoir are the descriptions of dawn in their hotel room, where they heard clanging plumbing and a man walking around whom they dubbed the hotel detective. Blue dawn came through the window, birds sang, “And we stood there watching, touched by some understanding that this was the end of something.” This sentence and the ten brief, preceding sentences describing the hotel scene are identical in both the “nonfictional” Canada Made Me and the “fictional” story “The English Girl,” except for an adjective.168 We read one passage as a memoir, the other as a story, but cannot help comparing them. Fiction or autobiography… perhaps we are meant to ask whether it matters.

The narrator, like Levine, left for England in June 1949. The English girl of the story [and real life] stayed to finish her B.A. at McGill. The story girl wrote often, then less often once fall 1949 term began. Then she wrote she had met someone. The narrator sat in a pub: “And felt my world had been shattered.”169 With this stark line, the story becomes more intense, more confessional than the “nonfictional” narrative in Canada Made Me. Introducing a reprint of “The English Girl” in 1989, Levine wrote that he thought of his stories “as tributes to people and to places that have meant something to me.”170 Similarly, in 1993, he observed that he would get news of people, think of his connection with them, and write a story “as a kind of tribute” and that “The English Girl” had developed that way.171 The story itself ended this way: the narrator has kept a letter he received from the English girl, a year before the story was written and fifteen years after they broke up. She had heard something by him broadcast and “wanted to know what I was doing after all these years.” She and her husband “were just off for a winter cruise to see the temples at Abu Simbel before they are flooded.”

In spring 1951 Levine published a poem, “Letter from McGill University,” which was his first summing up of McGill. He calls up the same scenes he later sketched in Canada Made Me and “The English Girl” – skiing up north, harbour sounds, a place where “we listened / And always believed that the best was yet to come.” And McGill’s campus, with the Roddick Gates, ginkgo tree, and tomb of James McGill: “The children fat as pigeons watched through prams…The late-leave girl kissed surely in the bushes…. Underneath the trees sitting sometimes alone, We dreamt we were rebels.” His use of “we” probably includes both his classmates and the English girl.

So were we a year, carried for four years

As a wave starting from somewhere in the water

Pushing its way towards land. We rose

For a time, hanging there, alone as a racer

With shoulders forward, breaking into colours

Crashing to land. Then hushed to a white stillness.172

And in 1952 he married a different English girl, Margaret Payne, with whom he had three daughters.

Levine wrote about his professors: Files in Canada Made Me and Noad, glancingly, in a story with an expatriate theme. From 1921 to 1951, Noad taught comparative literature, mainly of the 17th and 18th centuries and studied diaries and autobiographies. His archive at McGill has notes for a book on Utopias and imaginary voyages he never wrote.173 Levine’s story “A Canadian Upbringing” (1968) has a fictional pre-incarnation of a Levine-like writer called Alexander Marsden, who had written a book called A Canadian Upbringing [obviously a stand-in for Canada Made Me] in the 1930s and ended up poor and obscure in Cornwall. The Levine-like Marsden is visited by a young Levine-like narrator. Noad’s tangential part is as the model for “Graham Pollack” a McGill English professor then dead [Noad died in 1953]. Pollack’s office was piled with books; he had given the narrator a copy of Marsden’s book.

I had never heard of Marsden until I went to McGill. In my second year, Graham Pollack, one of the English professors – poor Graham, he’s dead now [sic]. No one, apart from the handful of students who took his courses, gave him much credit for the range of his reading, nor understood the kind of humility he brought into the classroom. He lectured, in a weak voice, on Utopias throughout the ages; on Science fiction; and on Comparative Literature. Wiping away with a large handkerchief the sweat that broke out on his forehead.174

The narrator reads “A Canadian Upbringing” at one sitting and decides Marsden had left Canada not to deny his background but [more respectably] to expand his world view. He realizes he will do the same. In Marsden and the narrator, Levine creates not his usual one but two alter egos.

Canada Made Me has a depressing portrait of “The Professor,” another of the defeated people Levine met on his trip. Unnamed, he matches Harold Files. While Levine acknowledged Files’s help elsewhere, here he risked hurting feelings. He lunched in 1956 with “my former English professor” at the McGill Faculty Club. Some background may explain why he [Files] may have seemed defeated. The “professor” complained about departmental quarrels. He had been chairman but not for long, forced out in favour of someone from overseas. Files chaired English from 1947 to 1952 (a respectable but not long term). The overseas displacer matches George Duthie, who had come to McGill from Edinburgh in 1947 and was chairman from 1952 to December 1954, when he suddenly left to teach at Aberdeen. At McGill, Duthie was the Molson Professor of English and issued a book, Shakespeare, in 1951.175 He outshined Files as the “publish or perish” era took hold. Files published no books; his students’ writings and careers and his course notes are his monument. In the McGill News of Spring 1951, just before he became chairman, Duthie reined in Files’s novel-as-M.A. thesis program with subtle aggression:

It should be emphasized strongly that the English Department is not anxious that M.A. work in Creative Writing should be developed at the expense of critical or historical research. Those members of the Department’s staff who are directly concerned with Creative Writing are very clear about that…. The innovation is in no way a threat to our tradition of critical and historical scholarship.176

Duthie was still chairman when Levine lunched with Files at the Faculty Club in 1954, described in his “Autobiographical Essay,” but had been gone a year and a half by their 1956 lunch, described in Canada Made Me with Levine’s comment below. Perhaps Files still brooded in 1956 or Levine may have transposed Files’s frustrations from 1954 to 1956. As the professor “described a tale of deceit, suspicion, betrayal; and his complete innocence of this sort of thing,” Levine thought:

What could one say? That the world never was the way you said it was. You never bothered, or had to bother, to see what it was like. You received your ‘experience’ of human nature on the cheap side, through literature. And it served you well as long as you were a junior, lecturing, with enough money. But you became a power; and there were others after power even though you were not… He looked beaten, washed out. We could talk no more about writing as we used to. All he could talk about was what had happened to him.177

He wanted sympathy, so Levine listened, wondering at his naïve outrage. “I remember how he analysed the subtleties of human relationships as he found it in the ‘set books’; but now that he was faced with his own, he was at a complete loss.” That Files’s book learning left him defenceless must have helped to confirm Levine’s contempt for academia. Levine recorded Files at a bad moment (as he did a number of his characters, real and fictional); we hardly recognize the buoyant champion of creative writing at McGill.

Levine lived in at least five places during his McGill years.178 Not surprisingly for a writer so focused on place, atmosphere and real-life details, he described three of them in his stories. In Canada Made Me he recalled sharing a room with P in 1946, east of McGill, in “a dismal, sour-smelling house in Prince Arthur Street run by an untidy ginger-haired woman, a Catholic with a wastrel of a son, on whom she doted, who had the habit of urinating in the kitchen sink whenever he found the toilet occupied.” The occupants were students: Sy, sleeping with his physiotherapist; fat Edith seeking a rich husband, and a girl they helped to visit an abortionist.179 The second room Levine described in Canada Made Me was in the basement of a house (now handsomely restored) at 4274 Dorchester Boulevard, two miles southwest of McGill, where he lived ca. 1947-1948, while he edited Forge.

It was down wooden steps in the basement by the boiler. A narrow room, large enough for the plain iron bed and a chair. A tiny window by the ceiling just cleared the level of the ground and let in fresh air, the smoke from the passing trains, grit on the pillow, the walls, the skin. The small light was on all the time. One enjoyed this gesture of protest, for you knew you had control over it and could end it whenever you wanted. One’s friends were invited down. They drove up in their father’s cars and had a good look.180

He described the room the same way in “Why I am an Expatriate” and in the story “Class of 1949” [in which Victor drove up in his car and put the room down to eccentricity]. The “gesture” of living in the basement let him play at poverty while he enjoyed the upper middle-class world of his friends M, Victor and the English girl: “It was on the whole very pleasant. I found myself going to magnificent houses.”181 He recalled in Canada Made Me how he saved peanuts to eat at the end of the month when his veteran’s cheque ran out; the narrator of one of his stories did the same.182 His M.A. year, 1948-1949, Levine moved to what he felt was a better basement at 1617 Sherbrooke St. – the house of the Anglican Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, which had an ornate facade and an English atmosphere inside.183 This time it was a gesture of confidence, to be nearer the English girl. She lived in McGill’s chateau-like Royal Victoria College, also on Sherbrooke St., fifteen minutes’ walk east. The room rented from the Dean was the scene of two similar book readings, one “fictional,” one “real.” In the story “A Canadian Upbringing,” the narrator took the book of that title to his basement room, where “when I read the last page, I was far too excited and disturbed to go to sleep.”184 Very similarly, in a nonfiction article, “The Girl in the Drugstore,” Levine recalled taking a copy of Faulkner’s Sound and Fury to the same basement room, finishing it and being too excited to sleep. In this case, Levine’s nonfictional version of an incident is more dramatic than his story: he went for a walk and inside a drugstore a young woman crossed herself when she saw him. Decades later, Levine remembered little of Faulkner’s book but could not forget the girl and her gesture. “Later, I was to find out in writing that this is the way things emerge.”185

*****

Levine had a good time at McGill in all his roles: writer, editor, honours student, veteran, man about town, friend of the British girl, cellar dweller and peanut hoarder. He won literary and social success. Soon he rejected both successes as betraying his roots and giving his writing a false start which he had to unlearn; he may have seen his romance and graduate studies as wrong turns as well. He found his destiny in England – as a writer turning his life into stories, not the professor he had been if unlucky. Nostalgic and critical, he said the same things in practically the same words about McGill for fifty years, in both fiction and nonfiction – he had enjoyed McGill but could not take it seriously and had betrayed his values there. McGill let him get imitation out of his system. He got McGill out of his system by writing the vignettes of student life seen here, with their melancholic glimpses of remembered love and of classmates eroded by time, failure, and lack of values and staying power. His use of McGill friends as the starting point for his story characters Victor, the English Girl, Graham Pollack, and Len Mason confirms what he said about how he wrote; he started with real people and then the story and connections took over. Like every student, he got good and false starts at university. McGill launched him, praised and prized him. McGill did not make him but gave him writing experience, story characters and a good target.

Appendix
1. Levine’s writings at McGill University in: McGill Daily, The Forge, manuscript, and Myssium
(Punctuations of poetry first lines, where they existed, are shown as they were in first publication.)

1.1. Levine’s poems in the McGill Daily, 1946-1948.
Date
Title / followed by First Line / and Author’s Signature or Attribution
11 Jan. 1946
“Ode to a Flier.” / I saw Night / A.N.L.
15 Jan. 1946
“Fraternization.” / The Earth was still thirsty / A.N. Levine. A variant text of same title was published in McGill Daily, 19 Dec. 1946.
18 Jan. 1946
“Sheffield.” / Smoke / A.N.L.
22 Jan. 1946
“Leipzig, April 16, 1945.” / Destructive demons driving down / A.N.L. [Includes a 2nd part sub-headed: “Crews report for briefing 2300 hours.”] Reprinted in McGill Daily, 6 Oct. 1948.
18 Feb. 1946
“Take-off.” / Clipped wings dragging chains of smoke / A.N.L.
28 Feb. 1946
“Saturday Night.” / A cat screamed / A.N.L.
25 July 1946
“Dusk.” / The smoke leaves the womb. / A.N.L.
25 July 1946
“Poem.” / Time measures life’s spider netting. / Unattributed, this verse appeared just beneath “Dusk” and presumably is by Levine.
3 Oct. 1946
“The Grey Cat.” / The grey cat lay beside the fire / A.N.L.
6 Nov. 1946
“It was a Dull Day.” / It was a dull day. / A.N.L. Reprinted in Forge, Winter 1947.
5 Dec. 1946
“Pastel in Snow.” / Cold Cotton. / A.N.L.
19 Dec. 1946
“Fraternization.” / The Earth was still thirsty / A.N. Levine. Variant text of same title published in McGill Daily, 15 Jan. 1946.
22 Jan. 1947
“1947.” / The days of blowing smoke rings. / A.N.L.
6 Oct. 1948
“Leipzig, April 16, 1945.” / Destructive demons driving down / A.N.L. [Includes a 2nd part sub-headed: “Crews report for briefing 2300 hours.”] Reprinted, first published in McGill Daily, 22 Jan. 1946.
1 Dec. 1948
“A Dead Airman Speaks.” / Imagine a high-heeled morning / N. Levine. Reprinted from Forge, Spring 1948.

1.2. Levine’s articles in the McGill Daily, 1946-1949
Date
Title and Author’s Signature / Attribution
4 Feb. 1946
“The Daily Meets Jascha Heifitz.” / Norman Levine.
20 Feb. 1946
“’Sketches:’ Jean-Paul Sartre.” / A.N.L.
17 Mar. 1949
“Editorial,” McGill Daily Literary Supplement, 17 Mar. 1949. / A.N.L.  (Levine was the editor of this issue.)

1.3. Levine’s poems and stories in The Forge, 1946-1949
Date
Title / followed by First Line / and Author’s Signature or Attribution
Winter 1947
“Prologue.” [Story] / The clouds extended across the sky in tangled webs. / Norman Levine.
Winter 1947
“It was a Dull Day.” / “It was a dull day” Norman Levine. First printed in McGill Daily, 6 Nov. 1946.
Winter 1947
“Myssium.” / A picker of stones am I / “W.A. Neville” [pseudonym for Norman Levine].
Winter 1947
“Circles.” / Design your cheeks with curved lines / “W.A. Neville” [pseudonym for Norman Levine].
Spring 1947
“Our life is to be envied.” [Story] / Norman Levine. Opens with verse, first line: “soiled animal skin.” First prose line: “I was flying indifferently past finger-printed clouds…” A typescript noted below (in 1.4), same title, is in entries for the Macnaghten Prize, 1947. [Similar to part of the typescript of “The Angled Road.”]
Spring 1948
“Autumn.” / The leaves blew trains’ departures and the sheaves / Blushed a colour the trees never dreamed of. / A. Norman Levine.
Spring 1948
“A Dead Airman Speaks.” / Imagine a high-heeled morning / A. Norman Levine.

1.4. Levine’s manuscript poems and prose at McGill Libraries, Rare Books and Special Collections Division.
The Library retained Macnaghten Prize entries which won or which received honorable mention: McGill University Calendar, 1948-1949, 518-519. It is not clear which ranking was given to Levine’s 1947 entries. According to the Programme, McGill University Annual Convocation, 1948, he won in 1948.
Date
Title / followed by First Line / and Author’s Signature or Attribution, with McGill Rare Books and Special Collections Division catalogue reference.
1947
“Myssium.” / A picker of stones am I / Albert Norman Levine, B.A. III.  PS8235 C6C45 1947 folio. Submitted for the Macnaghten Competition.
1947
“Our Life Is To Be Envied”. / Opens with verse, first line: “soiled animal skin.” First prose line: “I was flying indifferently past finger-printed clouds…” Albert Norman Levine, B.A. III. [Similar to part of typescript of “The Angled Road”.] PS8235 C6 C45 1947 folio. Submitted for the Macnaghten Competition.
1948
“The Angled Road” (MS. of novel). Albert Norman Levine, B.A. IV. PS8235 C6 C45 1948 folio. Winner of the Macnaghten Competition; published in 1952 after major changes. An earlier version (not held) was completed in 1947 and submitted for the Dodd, Mead Intercollegiate Literary Fellowship Prize (for novels) as was this one.

1.5. Levine’s poems published in Myssium, 1948, 8 pages, 250 copies, The Ryerson Poetry Chapbooks, Toronto 1948.
Poems marked with an asterix (*) were first published in The Forge or the McGill Daily. Punctuation occasionally varied from the original publication.
Date
Title / and where first published.
1948
“Myssium.”* Forge, Winter, 1947, by W.A. Neville, pseud.
1948
“Autumn.”* Forge, Spring 1948.
1948
“A Dead Airman Speaks.”* Forge, Spring 1948.
1947
“It Was A Dull Day”* Forge, Winter 1947.
1948
“Our Life Is To Be Envied.” This is a poem, not the prose piece of the same title published in Forge and in typescript in McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections Division.
1948
“The Green Was A Fresh Yellow Green.” First line: The green was a fresh yellow green
1946
“Fraternization.”* McGill Daily, 15 Jan. 1946, variant 19 Dec. 1946
1948
“I Am Captain Up Above.” First line: Dress quietly
1947
“The Days Of Blowing Smoke Rings.”* Variant of “1947,” McGill Daily, 22 Jan. 1947.

2. Published fiction and travel memoir by Levine referring to McGill University
These are works, listed alphabetically by title, with passages about McGill or in which protagonists or characters are McGill students, graduates or professors. Most references to McGill are brief. Works making substantial use of McGill characters or events are marked with an asterix (*). The list may not be complete and is based on Levine’s published story collections. Many of Levine’s stories were collected more than once. Dates of first publication are given in brackets where specified (which was rarely) in the various collections. For convenience, two or three collections are given for most stories. There are three large collections of Levine’s stories (which include most McGill-related ones): Champagne Barn, Penguin, 1984 (23 stories); By a Frozen River: the short stories of Norman Levine, foreword by John Metcalf, L&OD, Key Porter Books, Toronto, 2000 (reprints 18 of the stories in Champagne Barn and adds 8 others) and The Ability to Forget: short stories, foreword by A. Alexis, L&OD, Key Porter Books, Toronto, 2003 (15 stories, none of which appear in By a Frozen River; 2 were in Champagne Barn).

Works cited
“Because of the War,” 82: Best Canadian Short Stories, ed. John Metcalf and Leon Rooke, Oberon Press, Toronto, 1982; Something Happened Here, Viking, Toronto, 1991.
“By the Richelieu,” I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well, Macmillan, Toronto, 1971; Champagne Barn, Penguin, 1984. First titled and collected as “The Cocks Are Crowing” [1959], One Way Ticket, Martin Secker and Warburg, 1961.
“A Canadian Upbringing: a short story by Norman Levine,” The Montrealer, April 1968, vol. 42, no. 4; I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well and other stories, Macmillan, Toronto, 1971; Champagne Barn, Penguin, 1984; By a Frozen River, Key Porter Books, Toronto, 2000.
*”A Small Piece of Blue” [1956], One Way Ticket, Martin Secker and Warburg, London, 1961; McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1961; By a Frozen River, Key Porter Books, Toronto, 2000.
*”Class of 1949,” Thin Ice, Deneau and Greenberg, Ottawa 1980; Champagne Barn, Penguin, 1984; By a Frozen River, Key Porter Books, Toronto, 2000. First published as “Class of 1948,” Queen’s Quarterly, Autumn 1974, vol. 81, no.3.
*”Class of 1948.” Generally published as “Class of 1949.” See above.
*Canada Made Me, Putnam and Company, Ltd., London & McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1958. Reprinted by Deneau and Greenberg, Ottawa, 1979 and 1982; and by the Porcupine’s Quill Press, 1993.
“The Cocks Are Crowing” [1959]. See “By the Richelieu” above.
*”The English Girl” [British Vogue, March 1964]; I Don’t Want To Know Anyone Too Well, Macmillan, Toronto, 1971; Champagne Barn, Penguin, 1984; Montreal Mon Amour, ed. Michael Benazon, Deneau, Toronto, 1989.
“Gifts,” Something Happened Here, Viking, Toronto, 1991; The Ability to Forget, Key Porter Books, Toronto, 2003.
*”I’ll Bring You Back Something Nice”[1968], Canadian Winter’s Tales, ed. Norman Levine, Macmillan, Toronto, 1968; published (as a self-contained story) as chapter 7:”A Trip to London,” in From a Seaside Town, Macmillan, Toronto, 1970; By a Frozen River, Key Porter Books, Toronto, 2000.
“The Lesson” [1960], One Way Ticket, Martin Secker & Warburg, London, 1961 and McClelland and Stewart, London, 1961.
“South of Montreal,” I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well, Macmillan, Toronto, 1971; Champagne Barn, Penguin, 1984; By a Frozen River, Key Porter Books, Toronto, 2000.
“We all Begin in a Little Magazine” [1971] Thin Ice, Deneau and Greenberg, Ottawa, 1980; Champagne Barn, Penguin, 1984; By a Frozen River, Key Porter Books, Toronto, 2000.
“Why Do You Live So Far Away?” [1965], Selected Stories, Oberon, Ottawa, ca. 1975; Champagne Barn, Penguin, 1984. Published with three added paragraphs as chapter 8 of From a Seaside Town, Macmillan, Toronto, 1970.
“A Writer’s Story,” Thin Ice, Deneau and Greenberg, Ottawa, 1980; Champagne Barn, Penguin, 1984; By a Frozen River, Key Porter Books, Toronto, 2000.

Acknowledgements
This article originally appeared in Fontanus: from the Collections of McGill University, vol. XII, 2010. I owe much to writings by Levine critics, especially Lawrence Mathews, John Metcalf and T.D. MacLulich and to Levine’s interviewers, especially David McDonald, and of course to Levine’s fiction, travel memoir and published comments about his own writing. Any misinterpretations are mine. Together with Levine’s writings and interviews and publications by critics, the holdings at McGill University, particularly student publications, provided a surplus of information for the purposes of this article. My research, done mainly in 2006, owes much to the reference assistance of Gordon Burr, Archivist, of the McGill University Archives and to staff members David Poliak, Bruce Dolphin, and Jean-Marc Tremblay. Thanks also are due the staff of the Rare Books and Special Collections Division, McGill Libraries, including Richard Virr, Gary Tynski, Donald Hogan, and Raynald Lepage; and to Ann Marie Holland and Kendall Wallis, McGill Libraries; Amy Buckland and Joel Natanblut of the McGill Libraries ePublishing services; John Hobbins, Lonnie Weatherby, Christopher Lyons and Peter McNally of Fontanus; the staffs of Westmount Public Library; the Atwater Library and Computer Centre, Westmount; and Barbara McPherson, Archives of the Diocese of Montreal. Various sources were supplied by Carol Wiens, Head, Library, Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital. Leonard Ashley, Patience Wheatley Wanklyn and William Weintraub kindly shared memories of McGill in the 1940s.

Endnotes
1 Interview [31 Oct. 1975] by David McDonald: “Simplicity and Sophistication: a Conversation with Norman Levine,” Queen’s Quarterly, Summer, 1976, vol. 83, no. 2, 230. Levine’s narrator had the same good time in “I’ll Bring You Back Something Nice,” Canadian Winter’s Tales, ed. Norman Levine, Macmillan, Toronto, 1968; reprinted in Levine, Champagne Barn, Penguin, 1984, 94.
2 He has been acclaimed by writers and critics yet the recent Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007) left him out. See John Metcalf, “Thinking About Penguins,” Canadian Notes & Queries, no. 74, 2008.
3 Wayne Grady, Interview with Norman Levine, Books in Canada, Feb. 1980, vol. 9, no. 2, 24.
4 John Metcalf, Shut Up He Explained: a Literary Memoir, Vol. II, Biblioasis, Emeryville, Ontario, 2007, 362.
5 Alan Twigg, “Norman Levine,” Strong Voices: Conversations with Fifty Canadian Authors, Harbour Publishing, Madeira Park, B.C., 1988, 175.
6 In my title, “Fiction” refers to Levine’s stories; “Faction” to literary genres which mix fact and fiction (for example, introducing real-life characters into fiction or presenting nonfiction in the style of a novel) and, to add a twist, to allude to Levine’s frequent use of similar texts in both his fiction and nonfiction; and “Autobiography” to Levine’s articles and interviews about his writing and life as well as his use of his own experiences in his fiction. This article joins my others on McGill’s portrayal in fiction and memoir: “Floreat Plutoria: Satirical Fiction about McGill,” Fontanus, IX (1996);”The Gates of McGill: an Unpublished Novel of the 1920s by Dink Carroll,” Fontanus, XI (2003) and “Adversity Vanquished: Memoirs of a McGill Medical Student, Harold W. Trott, 1918-1924,” Fontanus, XII.
7 Norman Levine, “The Girl in the Drugstore” [memoir], The Sixties: Writers and Writing of the Decade, ed. George Woodcock, University of British Columbia Publications Centre, Vancouver, 1969, 50.
8 McDonald: “Simplicity and Sophistication,” 219.
9 Generally called Forge, the official title was The Forge.
10 Levine, Introduction, Champagne Barn, Penguin,1984, xv. Susan Patrick, Review of Champagne Barn (1984), Canadian Book Review Annual, 1984, 270-271, underlines Levine’s autobiographical point, noting that the stories are grouped into 4 stages of Levine’s life [youth in Ottawa; RCAF and McGill; struggling writer in England; and recognition].
11 Biographical details are found in Levine, “Why I am an Expatriate,” Canadian Literature, Summer 1960, no. 5, 49-54; “An Autobiographical Essay,” Canadian Notes & Queries, 2001, no. 60, 7-19, and other articles and interviews cited in this article.
12 Levine, “Autobiographical Essay,” 8.
13 Levine, “Leipzig, April 16, 1945,” McGill Daily, 22 Jan. 1946. He may have written some poems before going to McGill. And he refers to writing a short story about a hangman and to imitating a novel he found, set in Vienna, while he was at high school: “The Girl in the Drugstore,” 49; “Why I am an Expatriate,” 52.
14 McDonald: “Simplicity and Sophistication,” 218; Levine, “Autobiographical Essay,” 8-9.
15 Levine, Canada Made Me [Putnam & Co., London, 1958], Deneau and Greenberg, Ottawa, 1979, 237. All references are to D&G, 1979, which has the same pagination as the 1958 edition. This reprint and later ones (D&G, 1982 and Porcupine’s Quill, 1993) have made the scarce 1958 work available. Two paragraphs in the 1958 edition were omitted in the later editions; they do not affect the McGill-related texts discussed here but their significance is argued by Randall Martin, “Norman Levine’s Canada Made Me,” Canadian Literature, Spring 1996, vol. 148, 200-203.
16 Levine, “In Quebec City,” I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well and Other Stories, 1971, Macmillan, Toronto, 1971, 7.
17 Levine, “Why I am an Expatriate,” 51.
18 Levine, “The English Girl” [1964], collected in Champagne Barn, Penguin, 1984, 50-51.
19 He had kept the Rokeby Venus (by Valasquez) in his description of the mess hall in The Angled Road (Werner Laurie, London, 1952 and McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1952), 59.
20 McDonald, “Simplicity and Sophistication,” 218.
21 Levine, “The Girl in the Drugstore,” 50.
22 Levine, “Why I am an Expatriate,” 52.
23 Levine, “The English Girl,” Champagne Barn, 51.
24 Levine, Angled Road, 150.
25 Levine, Canada Made Me, 220.
26 Levine, “Why I am an Expatriate,” 52. Levine may have meant Canadian football not rugby. The protagonist of Dink Carroll’s autobiographical novel about McGill in the 1920s also chose McGill because he admired its football team: Robert Michel, “The Gates of McGill,” Fontanus, XI, 2003, 16.
27 Levine, “Why I am an Expatriate,” 52-53; Margaret Flannery, “Wrong Way Immigrants,” The Montrealer, Oct. 1966, vol. 40, no. 10, 19; Levine, From a Seaside Town, Macmillan, Toronto, 1970, 43-44.
28 Cary Fagan, “On Not Collecting Norman Levine,” Canadian Notes & Queries, no. 60, 2001, 4.
29 Levine, “I’ll Bring You Back Something Nice,” Champagne Barn, 94. First published separately as the story “I’ll Bring You Back Something Nice,” ca. 1968, the story was used as Chapter 7 (“A Trip to London,”) in Levine’s novel From a Seaside Town. Likewise, the novel’s Chapter 8 (no title), minus its first three paragraphs, also appeared as the story “Why Do You Live So Far Away?”
30 Letter, Leonard R.N. Ashley (B.A. 1949, M.A. 1950) to Robert Michel, 23 Sept. 2006.
31 Levine, Canada Made Me, 222-223.
32 Referred to in Levine’s letter to Files from London, Feb. 1950, discussed later.
33 According to the McGill University Calendar, in 1947-1948 Files taught English Composition (advanced); The English Novel, Richardson to the Present; American and Canadian Literature (with A.M. Klein); and offered graduate seminars on mystical and other religious literature in English in the late 17th and the 18th centuries, and Literary Criticism, and Special Studies in 18th century literature.
34 A shelf-read of McGill M.A. theses in the McGill library stacks turned up the following early M.A. thesis-novels: C. W. Gowdey, “Thirty Days Hath September: a novel,” 1948; Mary M.M. Geggie, “Inhabit the Garden,” 1949; Peggy Goodin, “Take Care of My Little Girl,” 1949; Helen R. Leavitt, “Threshold” 1949. Others soon followed, such as May Ebbitt (Cutler), “The Walls of Sense: a novel,” 1951. The University Calendar first announced the thesis-novel option in the 1949-1950 session, though it was available by 1948. On Files and the creative writing program, see Files, “Sometimes I Am Proud,” McGill Daily, 1 Dec. 1948, 2, 4; May Ebbitt, “Professor Trains Student Authors,” The Standard (Montreal), 26 March 1949, 4; Dusty Vineberg, “Of Trying Not To Let Civilization Down,” The Montreal Star, 9 May 1964, 4.
35 Nora Magid [B.A. 1946], “The Daily Meets Constance Beresford Howe,” McGill Daily, 18 Jan. 1946, 2.
36 Constance Beresford-Howe, “Stages in an Education,” McGill: a Celebration, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 1991, 92. With a Ph.D from Brown University in 1949, she taught at McGill into the late 1960s. She recalled: “In those postwar years, McGill was full of ex-servicemen completing their education on government grants. Many of my creative writing students were men my age or older, and this naturally led to a number of romantic complications very bothersome to all concerned.” Ibid., 96.
37 Harold Files Fonds, McGill University Archives (MUA), MG 1037, C7, lecture notes, no date. The Archives acquired the papers (as Accession 289) soon after Files left McGill in 1964, from the English Department, where they had been mingled with the papers (MUA, MG 1063) of Professor Algy S. Noad (B.A., M.A., McGill). Files’s papers include professional and personal correspondence and teaching notes as well as records relating to his administrative duties as Chairman, 1947-1952, and service on committees. Files supplied background on these records in a letter to University Archivist John Andreassen, 28 Oct. 1970: MG 1037, C1 (Acc. 1127/1).
38 The McGill Movement: A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, and Leo Kennedy, ed. Peter Stevens, Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1969. The best study of poets around McGill in Levine’s time is Brian Trehearne, The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1999. On Montreal’s and McGill’s role in modern poetry, see Leon Edel, “Literary Revolution: the Montreal Group,” in E.A. Collard, The McGill You Knew, Longman Canada, 1975; Louis Dudek, “The Montreal Poets,” Forge, Feb. 1957, 3-6; and David McKnight, “An Annotated Bibliography of English Canadian Little Magazines: 1940-1980,” M.A. thesis, Concordia University, 1992, 16.
39 Levine, Canada Made Me, 70.
40 Lawrence Mathews, “Norman Levine,” in Robert Lecker, Jack David, Ellen Quigley, eds., Canadian Writers and their works, Fiction Series, Volume Eight, ECW Press, Toronto, 1989, 95-96.
41 Levine, “By a Frozen River,” Champagne Barn, 155.
42 Levine, “The Daily Meets Jascha Heifetz,” McGill Daily, 4 Feb. 1946, 2. Levine free-lanced; he was not a regular Daily staffer. He also wrote a few book reviews for the local press.
43 A.N.L. [Norman Levine], “Sketches: Jean-Paul Sartre,” McGill Daily, 20 Feb. 1946, 2.
44 A.N.L. [Norman Levine],”The Forge,” McGill Daily, 29 Jan. 1947, 2.
45 He told David McDonald, (“Simplicity and Sophistication,” 218): “I don’t think you need to have a wide experience. I think if you can go deeply into the experience you have you can dig up all the things you need:”
46 Forge, Winter 1947, 3, 13-14, 23. (No W.A. Neville appears in student directories).
47 Incidentally, Levine varied the way he signed his McGill publications: A.N.L., A.N. Levine, N. Levine, Norman Levine, and A. Norman Levine – this may reflect a search for identity but more likely a whimsical inconsistency. The Appendix lists Levine’s works at McGill as he signed them.
48 Karine Collin, “New School of Writing in This Year’s ‘Forge,’” 6 Feb. 1947, 2. Collin does not appear in the 1946-47 Directory of Students or the Directories of Graduates.
49 Forge, Winter, 1947, 13.
50 Forge, Spring, 1947, 8-12. The McGill Library stamped it as received on 17 April 1947. It appeared too late to be reviewed in the McGill Daily, which had ended publication for the term.
51 Levine, Angled Road, 54. He dropped the adjective “artificial” in the book. The story’s rainy bombing raid is similar to that published in Angled Road.
52 This March 1948 issue was on larger paper, had 51 pages of text plus advertisements at the end, and cost 50 cents instead of the previous year’s 25 cents (in 1949 the price dropped back to 25 cents).
53 Harold Files, “New Writing Forges Ahead,” McGill Daily, 4 Mar. 1948, 2.
54 Daily writers often signed only their initials. B.S. is probably Betty Sinclair who is listed as Features Chief Staff Writer on the Daily masthead, 4 Mar. 1948. She reviewed Forge 1949 in the McGill Daily,14 Mar. 1949, 2.
55 B.S., “The Daily Meets an Editorial Board; Finds Forge Lively If Controversial,” McGill Daily, 4 March 1948, 2. Johnston’s M.A. thesis (1948) was on “Aspects of the treatment of time in some modern English novelists.” Levine’s thesis had a similar time aspect: “Ezra Pound and the sense of the past;” perhaps they influenced each other. The University Archives and the McGill Libraries have paper and microfilm runs of the McGill Daily and paper copies of Forge.
56 The McGill Daily announced the broadcasts in its issues of 2 and 3 Mar. 1948.
57 Levine, “Autobiographical essay,” 13; Elaine Kalman Naves, Robert Weaver: Godfather of Canadian Literature, Véhicule Press, Montreal, 2007, 35-36 (reprints letter from Weaver), 67-68 (on Levine, Richler). Levine, Champagne Barn, vii, acknowledged that 18 of the 23 stories had been broadcast on Anthology and that most had been commissioned.
58 Forge, 1948, 27-28.
59 Grady, Interview with Norman Levine, 24-25. Levine included “Autumn” in Myssium, Ryerson Poetry Chapbook 131, Toronto, 1948 and The Tight-rope Walker, The Totem Press, London, 1950.
60 Peggy Goodin, “Take Care of My Little Girl,” M.A. Thesis, McGill University, 1949; same title, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1950; same title, 20th Century Fox, Jean Negulesco, Director, 1951. The $30,000 figure is from Dusty Vineberg’s account of Files’s retirement, “Trying Not to Let Civilization Down,” McGill News, June, 1964, vol.45, no. 3, 14.
61 Peggy Goodin, “Independent Critic Looks for Discipline in Forge – Calls for Literary Revolution,” McGill Daily, 4 Mar. 1948, 2. Answered by W.D. MacCallan, “Reply to Forge Critique,” McGill Daily, 5 March 1948, 2; replied to by Peggy Goodin, “Open Letter to Mr. MacCallan,” McGill Daily, 8 Mar. 1948, 2.
62 A copy of Whisper is in the L.R.N. Ashley Fonds, McGill University Archives, MG 4216, C2, file 26. Ashley published humor while at McGill; perhaps the presence of Whisper in his papers is not wholly coincidental. Whisper also spoofed the McGill Daily and Montreal Mayor Houde.
63 R. Gravina, “McGill’s Magazine,” McGill Daily, 14 Mar. 1949, 2.
64 Levine, “The Girl in the Drug Store,” 50-51.
65 Algy Smillie Noad, A Canadian Handbook of English, Toronto, 1932, see 20-21.
66 Copy in the McGill Libraries: PS 8523 E89M97 1948. Noad’s papers (MUA, MG 1063, at present are partly mixed with those of Harold Files (MUA, MG 1037).
67 Levine, From a Seaside Town, 146.
68 Levine, “Autobiographical essay,” 7. John Wycliffe and others translated the Old and New Testaments from Latin into English in the 1380s and 1390s. Levine learned English at school after the age of five: Lawrence Mathews, “Norman Levine,” Canadian Writers and their Works, vol. 8, 83.
69 Levine, “The Angled Road” (novel), typescript, 247 leaves. Submitted for the Macnaghten Competion. McGill Libraries, Rare Books and Special Collections Division: PS8235 C6 C45 1948 folio. Two prizes were usually awarded, one worth $50, the other $25. The prize (no ranking mentioned) was credited to Levine in the McGill Annual Convocation Programme, May 1948. Other Macnaghten winners have gone on to literary careers; the best known is probably Leonard Cohen, who won in 1955. Levine took his title from Emily Dickinson’s poem “Experience is the Angled Road.”
70 “The Angled Road,” typescript, McGill Libraries Rare Books and Special Collections Division, 183-184.
71 McDonald, “Simplicity and Sophistication,” 220.
72 Levine, “The Girl in the Drug Store,” 52.
73 Cynthia Flood, “All the Heart Is in the Things,” Canadian Notes & Queries, no. 60, 2001, 6.
74 Levine, “Autobiographical essay,” 18.
75 Programme, McGill University Annual Convocation, 1948, 38. The prizes Levine won are described in McGill University, Calendar for the Session 1947-1948, 517, 523.
76 Levine, Canada Made Me, 224-225; the same comment about the Chief Scout is in “Class of 1949,” Thin Ice, Ottawa, 1980, 15.
77 Levine, “Autobiographical essay,” 12.
78 Levine, Canada Made Me, 83.
79 Harold Files Fonds, McGill University Archives (MUA), MG 1037. Containers (C) 8 & 10 contain Files’s correspondence with students and others, ca. 1947-1952, some broken into narrower date ranges, mixed with other matters. Most letters, like those from Levine, are in general files, not under individual names. Files apparently made no carbon copies of his letters to Levine.
80 Letter, Levine to Files, 17 July 1948, Harold Files Fonds, MUA, MG 1037, C8, Correspondence, ca. 1948-1950. It is tempting to guess that “E.B.W.” was E.B. White although I found no connection between him and Dodd, Mead.
81 Ibid.
82 May Ebbitt, “Young McGill Writers: Course on the Novel Established and Conducted by Dr. Files Sets Encouraging Note,” McGill News, Autumn, 1949, vol. 31, no. 1. In 1951 Ebbitt received the M.A. for her interesting MS. novel “The Walls of Sense.”
83 Letter, Levine to Files, 17 July 1948, Harold Files Fonds, MUA, MG 1037, C8, Correspondence, ca. 1948-1950.
84 [Norman Levine] Outline of Proposed Thesis on Ezra Pound, 1 page, no date, ca. summer 1948, Harold Files Fonds, MG 1037, C8, Correspondence with graduate students, ca. 1948-1950.
85 Levine, “The Girl in the Drugstore,” 52.
86 McDonald: “Simplicity and Sophistication,” 219.
87 [Albert Norman] Levine, “Ezra Pound and the Sense of the Past,” McGill University, M.A. Thesis, April 1949 (typescript, 172 pp. and 12 pp. notes), 4. Copies are in the McGill Libraries.
88 Ibid, 5, 170-172. Coincidentally, Pound’s son Omar would receive an M.A. from McGill in 1958.
89 Levine, Canada Made Me, 105.
90 “Myssium,” “It Was A Dull Day,” “Autumn,” and “A Dead Airman Speaks.” in Forge; and “Fraternization,” and “The Days Of Blowing Smoke Rings” (the latter a variant of 1947) in the McGill Daily.
91 B.S., “Myssium. A New Book of Verse. By Albert Norman Levine,” McGill Daily, 15 Oct. 1948, 2.
92 Discussed by Brian Trehearne, Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Kingston and Montreal, 1989, 261-269.
93 McGill had lost its early lead: McGill University Magazine, edited by Charles E. Moyse, 1901-1906, succeeded by University Magazine, edited by McGill’s Sir Andrew Macphail, 1907-1920, issued by a committee for McGill, Toronto, and Dalhousie.
94 McGill Daily Literary Supplement, 17 Mar. 1949, 1. The Supplement was a 7 column per page, 4 page news sheet.
95 Harold Files, “The writer in our society,” McGill Daily Literary Supplement, 17 March 1949, 3.
96 Algy Noad, “The literature of personality,” McGill Daily Literary Supplement, 17 March 1949, 3.
97 Montreal Daily Star, 21 Mar. 1949: “Air Force Vet Awarded $5,000 Beaver Club Scholarship;” Montreal Gazette, 21 Mar. 1949: “Beaver Club Awards for 1949 Announced.” Both stories had photographs of Levine. The figure of Can. $5,000 appears to be an estimated equivalent of a two year award of 500 pounds per year.
98 McDonald, “Simplicity and Sophistication,” 219-220; “The English Girl,” Champagne Barn, 52.
99 Levine, “A Canadian Upbringing,” The Montrealer, April, 1968, vol. 42, no. 4, 42; republished in Champagne Barn, 55. In this story he adds that the English girl later married an Englishman she met on the cross-channel boat to France: Champagne Barn, 57.
100 Levine, “Why I am an Expatriate,” 49, 51.
101 Ibid. 53.
102 John Richmond, “A little bit of expatriatism goes a long way” [title used both for Richmond’s interview and a review of From a Seaside Town by Alan Heuser], Montreal Star, 26 Sept. 1970, 16.
103 McDonald, “Simplicity and Sophistication,” 225.
104 Levine, Canada Made Me, 48-50, 216-219
105 Levine, From a Seaside Town, 44.
106 Levine, “The Girl in the Drug Store,” 52.
107 McDonald, “Simplicity and Sophistication,” 228.
108 Letters, Levine to Files, 24 Sept. 1949; Levine to Files, 1 Feb. 1950, Harold Files Fonds, MUA, MG 1037, C10, Correspondence 1949-1950.
109 He described the Montreal shoreline as looking like a landscape by L.S. Lowry: Canada Made Me, 266.
110 Letter, Levine to Files, 24 Sept. 1949, Harold Files Fonds, MUA, MG 1037, C10, Correspondence, 1949-1950.
111 Levine, “We All Begin in a Little Magazine,” Thin Ice, Deneau and Greenberg, Ottawa, 1980, 45. The story is analysed by George Slobodzian, “On First Reading Levine,” Canadian Notes & Queries, no. 60, 2001, 25.
112 According to Metcalfe, Shut Up He Explained, 41, Levine, insulted, had a dealer sell it to the University of Texas at Austin.
113 Levine, “Autobiographical Essay,” 11.
114 Letter, Levine to Files, 1 Feb. 1950, Harold Files Fonds, MUA, MG 1037, C10, Correspondence, 1949-1950.
115 Levine, “Letter from England” [poem], The Tight-Rope Walker, The Totem Press, London, 1950, 29.
116 Levine, “A Letter from England,” The Tamarack Review, Summer, 1958, issue 8, 42. Not to be confused with the similarly titled poem.
117 Levine, “Autobiographical Essay,” 11.
118 Levine, “Portrait of a Poet,” Poetry Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 4, Winter 1951-1952, 127. Cornwall poems include “The Fishing Village,” Poetry Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 3, Autumn 1951; “Crabbing,” Poetry Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 2, Summer 1952.
119 Levine, “Why I am an Expatriate,” 49.
120 Levine, “A Canadian Upbringing,” Champagne Barn, 57.
121 Richmond, “A little bit of expatriatism goes a long way,” Montreal Star, 26 Sept. 1970, 16.
122 Levine, “Why I am an Expatriate,” 52.
123 Levine, “A Writer’s Story,” Thin Ice, Deneau and Greenberg, Ottawa, 1980; Champagne Barn, Penguin, 1984; 124 in latter edition.
124 McDonald, “Simplicity and Sophistication,” 224.
125 Levine, From a Seaside Town, 149-150, 215.
126 “I’ll Bring You Back Something Nice,” in Canadian Winter’s Tales and Champagne Barn. He appreciated the suit and got loans from friends: Canada Made Me, 230, 256.
127 Levine, “Autobiographical Essay,” 12. Levine saw the resulting traveling art exhibition in Edmonton in 1956: Canada Made Me, 135.
128 He listed it as a “Travel Memoir” in his “Autobiographical Essay,” 19.
129 Metcalf, Shut Up He Explained, 239. The woman appears in Canada Made Me, 67. The mine also appears, rather obscurely, in The Angled Road, 137-140, beginning : “Mine needs men…”
130 Levine, Canada Made Me, 49.
131 Ira Bruce Nadel, “’Canada Made Me’ and Canadian Autobiography,” Canadian Literature, Summer 1984, no. 101, 70-73.
132 William Weintraub, Getting Started: a memoir of the 1950s with letters from Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant and Brian Moore, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 2001: letter, Weintraub to Richler, 9 Dec. 1958, 222-223.
133 Mordecai Richler, “Canadian Candour,” review of Canada Made Me, Sunday Times (London), 8 Feb. 1959, 16. Jack McClelland disliked the book and only took 500 copies to distribute in Canada.
134 Mathews, “Norman Levine,” Canadian Writers and their Works, vol. 8, 99.
135 Levine, Canada Made Me, 221.
136 Ibid. 225.
137 T.D. MacLulich, “’You Don’t Lie’: Reflections on Norman Levine,” Writers in Aspic, ed. John Metcalf, Véhicule Press, Montreal, 1988, 34-35, referring to Canada Made Me and the story “A Small Piece of Blue.”
138 Quotations are from Levine, Canada Made Me, 234-235.
139 Levine, “Sometimes it works,” How Stories Mean, ed. John Metcalf and J.R. Struthers, The Porcupine’s Quill, Erin, Ontario, 1993, 219.
140 Michelle Gadpaille, The Canadian Short Story, Oxford University Press, Toronto, 1988, 100.
141 On issues of truth and autobiography in Levine’s fiction, see T.D. MacLulich, “’You Don’t Lie’: Reflections on Norman Levine” and Lawrence Mathews, “Levine’s Realism: A Reply to T.D. MacLulich,” both in Writers in Aspic.
142 Levine, “Autobiographical essay,” 13, 18.
143 Mathews, “Norman Levine,” Canadian Writers and their works, vol. 8, 113-114, citing the story “The Man with the Notebook.”
144 Levine, “Class of 1949” in Thin Ice, 27 and Champagne Barn, 144. First published as “The Class of 1948” in 1974.
145 Mcdonald, “Simplicity and Sophistication,” 226.
146 Levine left fewer clues about other McGill students he mentioned and no identities have been attempted here for Bob and Ian, who went to the mine with Levine in 1948 nor for K, one of the wealthiest students at McGill, nor Hector B, a diplomat, all referred to in Canada Made Me, 77-78, 235, 276. Nor for “Archie Carter,” a McGill friend of the narrator of “Because of the War,” 82: Best Canadian Stories, ed. John Metcalf and Leon Rooke, Oberon Press, 1982, 57-73. A friend from Levine’s teens in Ottawa is called Archie in Canada Made Me, 53.
147 Levine, “A Small Piece of Blue,” One Way Ticket, Martin Secker and Warburg, London, 1961.
148 Levine, quoted in Metcalf, Shut Up He Explained, 238-9.
149 See MacLulich, “’You Don’t Lie’: Reflections on Norman Levine,” 29, as well as Lawrence Mathews, “Levine’s Realism: A Reply to T.D. MacLulich,” Writers in Aspic.
150 Levine, “Sometimes it works,” 215-219.
151 Levine, Canada Made Me, 34-35.
152 Letter, Moore to Weintraub, 12 March [1956], Weintraub, Getting Started, 166-167. Moore goadingly quoted Levine’s remark to him that Weintraub “was a nice fellow but no get up and go,” which Weintraub humorously and convincingly rebuts in his commentary.
153 Levine, “Letter from McGill University,” Poetry Quarterly, Spring 1951, 32-33.
154 Levine, Canada Made Me, 233-234. The same apartment and campus view is recalled by the narrator of “Class of 1949.”
155 Levine, “Class of 1949,” Thin Ice, 14. First published as “Class of 1948,” Queen’s Quarterly Autumn 1974, vol. 81, no. 3, 377-389. The 1948/1949 ambiguity may stem from Levine’s having received degrees in both years. The story concludes with a reminder from the McGill Graduates’ Society that it was the 25th anniversary of the narrator’s class.
156 Levine, Canada Made Me, 149-150.
157 Levine, “Class of 1949,” Thin Ice, 22, 29.
158 Levine, Canada Made Me, 43-44.
159 Levine, “Class of 1949,” Thin Ice, 20.
160 Collected in I Don’t Want To Know Anyone Too Well, Macmillan, Toronto, 1971; Champagne Barn, Penguin, 1984; and Montreal Mon Amour, ed. Michael Benazon, Deneau, Toronto, 1989. According to Benazon, 77, 289, first published in British Vogue, March 1964 (in a series “First Encounters with the Opposite Sex”). The citations here are from Champagne Barn, 49-54.
161 Alan Heuser found protagonist Joseph Grand’s wife lacked vitality: review of From a Seaside Town, Montreal Star, 26 Sept. 1970, 16; Lawrence Mathews convincingly rebuts this: “Norman Levine,” Canadian Writers and their Works, ed. Lecker et al., vol. 8, 107-108.
162 Quotations are from “The English Girl,” Champagne Barn, 49-54.
163 McDonald, “Simplicity and Sophistication,” 219.
164 Levine, “The English Girl,” Champagne Barn, 50-53. Ben’s lasted until 2006; the Bucharest was still around in the late 1960s, popular with students, a full course meal at $1.24. Lively descriptions of Montreal’s restaurants in Levine’s student days are in William Weintraub, City Unique: Montreal Days and Nights in the 1940s and ‘50s, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1996, 130-135.
165 Levine, Canada Made Me, 264.
166 Ibid.
167 “The English Girl,” Champagne Barn, 49-54 and Canada Made Me, 224-225, 264.
168 Levine, “The English Girl,” Champagne Barn, 53; Canada Made Me, 225. As for the different adjectives: in the “English Girl,” the bird singing is “clear,” in Canada Made Me, it is “distinct and loud.” Levine received degrees in 1948 and 1949 and left for England in 1949; the 1949 celebration seems likelier in this context, given the couple’s sense of something ending.
169 Levine, “The English Girl,” Champagne Barn, 54. In “A Canadian Upbringing,” Champagne Barn, 57, there is a brief (fictional) reference to the English girl who has married an Englishman she met on the channel boat to France.
170 Levine’s introductory note to “The English Girl” in Montreal Mon Amour, ed. Michael Benazon, Deneau, Toronto, 1989, 77.
171 Levine, “Sometimes it works,” How Stories Mean, 216-217.
172 Levine, “Letter from McGill University,” 32-33.
173 T.H.M.[Tommy Matthews], “Algy Noad: a personal tribute,” McGill News, Spring 1953, vol. 34, no. 2, 54. Besides A Canadian Handbook of English (1932), Noad published, with C.H. Atto, Expression through prose (1938). Noad’s work is referred to in Larry Capelovitch, “Behind the Scenes in the English Department” McGill Daily, 5 Dec. 1949, 2. Algy Noad Fonds, MUA, MG 1063.
174 Levine, “A Canadian Upbringing,” Champagne Barn, 55-56.
175 See David L. Thomson, “How not to Leave McGill,” McGill News, Spring 1955, vol. 36, no. 2, 15, describing Duthie’s rush to catch trains and ships when he left Montreal. The McGill Committee on Research gave a grant towards Duthie’s book: Shakespeare, Hutchinson’s University Library, London, 1951, acknowledged in the foreword.
176 George I. Duthie, “Graduate Studies at McGill,” McGill News, Spring 1951, vol 32, no 3, 7. McGill continued to emphasize critical scholarship and, after Files left in 1964, McGill’s creative writing program was soon rivaled, some would say surpassed, by a strong creative writing program offered by Montreal’s Sir George Williams University, now Concordia University.
177 Levine, Canada Made Me, 226.
178 According to Canada Made Me, 34, Levine’s first room was on Prince Arthur St. (greystone row houses built before 1900, decrepit by the 1940s, more recently renovated). His address is not listed in the McGill University Directory of Students for the year 1945-1946 as he did not arrive until Jan. 1946. By the Directory for the year 1946-1947, he is listed at 4022 Oxford St., Montreal (in the more suburban N.D.G. district). The Directory for 1947-1948 gives his address as 4274 Dorchester W., Westmount (just west of downtown Montreal). He described it in Canada Made Me, and “Why I am an Expatriate.” Another address, possibly ca. 1948 is on the typescript of “The Angled Road:” 4003 Oxford St. (N.D.G., Montreal). Levine did not describe the Oxford St. rooms. The Directory for 1948-1949 gives Levine’s address as 1617 Sherbrooke West, Montreal. He described it in “The English Girl,” and refers to it in Canada Made Me, 258. Levine’s home address was 363 Murray St., Ottawa (since demolished).
179 Levine, Canada Made Me, 34-36, 212-213.
180 Ibid, 212.
181 Levine, “Why I am an Expatriate,” 53.
182 Levine, Canada Made Me, 141; From a Seaside Town, 82.
183 Levine, “The English Girl,” Champagne Barn, 51. The Dean from 1944 to 1952 was Kenneth Charles Evans, afterwards (Anglican) Bishop of Ontario.
184 Levine, “A Canadian Upbringing,” Champagne Barn, 56. It is possible but less likely that the room described was that at 4274 Dorchester West.
185 Levine, “The Girl in the Drugstore,” 50.

INT. TRAIN COMPARTMENT – DAY. The door opens and a Gestapo agent enters. He glances at the identity cards offered by a pair of SS officers. Not of interest, not on his list. In total there are 76 escaped prisoners from Stalag Luft III and Hitler has ordered a nation-wide manhunt, ein Grossfahndung. The Gestapo agent moves forward and then stops when he comes face to face with the actors Richard Attenborough and Gordon Jackson, escaped POWs disguised as businessmen on the Berlin-Breslau train. There is something about them. He studies their papers closely and questions them in German and in French. He hands the props back, and moves through the doors into the coach ahead.

The train slows down as it swings into the turn of a steep gradient. At 2:14:34 run time, the Gestapo agent finds the actor David McCallum seated alone and flips through his passbook. McCallum is cast as Flight Lieutenant Ashley-Pitt, better known as Dispersal to his POW buddies. The ensuing brief exchange between the Gestapo agent and Ashley-Pitt does not match James Clavell’s draft screenplay of April 26, 1962; it was improvised or it followed the ‘final’ shooting script, of which there were more than seven in circulation on the set during the making of the movie.

GESTAPO (standing):

Die Reise fur deine firma?

ASHLEY-PITT (seated):

Ja. Fur mein Gescheft.

GESTAPO:

Danke.

ASHLEY-PITT:

Danke.

Are you traveling for your company? Yes, for my business. Thank you. The Gestapo man exits the coach and the door slides shut behind him and that’s the last an English audience sees of this actor alive. He’s had perhaps a minute on-screen in one of the most watched war movies of all time. Yet as a bit player he is uncredited for the role. In fact, soon after the film was made, he disappeared completely. Shortly after his star flickered, he died, aged 32, from a drug overdose in Hamburg. Watched by millions yet almost completely unknown. And there’s a further irony. He was a refugee from Nazi Germany, partly Jewish and the son of one of Germany’s most famous left-wing actors, playing a Gestapo agent, a role reprised on thousands of television repeats.

In fact, watching television is how I came to know of my uncle Michael. Alive but not living, stranded in the no man’s land of a motion picture. His character was staged and scripted, but I was spellbound – Michael was convincing. Fedora and trench coat. Elegant. Blond. His smooth transitions. His lively walk, his coat unbuttoned, his fashion the casual flair of some fresh-as-the-breeze fascist. This image, I now understand, years later, is counterfeit, a convenient archetype, manufactured by the American film director John Sturges and his sidekick Bert Hendrickson in Costume Design and Wardrobe. But it is him, close enough to the real thing. So what to call him? Historicized, a transatlantic blond, thespian? Father’s cousin. My uncle once removed? The family used Michi. As in, Michi broke Mama’s heart.

2010. Bavariafilmstadt, Munich

I stand at the box office, outside the museum opposite the active studios, under a grey but clearing sky.

“Morgen. I have a question.”

“Welcome.” A young man is working the window.

“Inside the museum . . .”

“Yes?”

“Is there an installation from The Great Escape?”

“Nein. But Das Boot you can see.” His two female co-workers are momentarily intrigued by their first visitor of the morning, a foreigner and not a Facebook friend.

“Aber keinmal Great Escape?” I leverage the little German I know.

“Das Boot is more modern.” His co-workers join, reinforcements, to have a closer look.

“Yes, I know . . . But . . .” And then I divulge the keynotes of my visit to all three – why I have come so early on a weekday morning to disturb their social media quiet time. The Great Escape was a Hollywood blockbuster. A member of my family had a small role in it. Unfortunately, he died young, in Hamburg, a long time ago.

“We’re sorry,” the woman in a black pullover has an open, friendly face. Oval-shaped, and plump freckled cheeks. She gazes at her female counterpart who has cropped and dyed spiky hair. Then inquires, “What was his name?”

“Michael Paryla.”

After exchanged and bewildered glances:

“We don’t know him.”

“He is buried in Waldfriedhof Cemetery.” I offer a local reference, this might make him real.

“That is near to this place.” The black pulli is onside, but her female colleague has moved away, gone into a small office. Looking for clues in the laptop or cell.

“The prison camp scenes were filmed here in 1962.” I decide to push the film angle, after all.

“Yes, we know.” The young man takes over. His tone is poised between passive and aggressive.

“The tunnel scenes were filmed inside.” I point to the studio buildings and sound stages behind the metal fence surrounding the film city. For a moment, I consider telling them about Wally Floody, a Canadian like me and former mining engineer and prisoner of Stalag Luft III. Floody was a wartime Spitfire pilot. He was hired as a technical advisor on the film set. Charles Bronson’s character Tunnel King is partly based on Wally Floody. But never mind.

“It’s too bad,” the young man reflects. “But no one knows the history of ‘this’ place.” He shakes his head.

I have travelled a long way to be told exactly what I expected to be told. I’d done my homework in Canada. I had learned about Das Boot from Das Google. But that didn’t stop me from coming here, accepting an unwilling audience, holding out for a surprise. I have three at the window again, crowded inside the box office, which reminds me that the Mirisch Brothers released The Great Escape in an era when the POW film genre had already become trapped by its own success. Prisoner escape stories conveniently supplied a reliable narrative and dramatic vector, but during the postwar decade there had been a glut of POW films, most of them based on bestselling memoirs like Paul Brickhill’s. But instead of lecturing them on a topic about which I’m far from an expert, I tell my gatekeepers a little more about Michael and his part in the movie. I point in the vague direction of the Waldfriedhof Cemetery and acknowledge his grave is that way. Are they at all interested? Over there, he is buried under the tall trees in a mossy cemetery, I might say, since I know this from a letter Michael’s father Karl Paryla penned on April 21, 1967. I could spout verbatim from the private correspondences – the poignant documents written in the days after Michael’s death – I’m a very curious customer as it is.

“Why don’t you visit his grave?” The man suggests. “It’s too bad, but there is nothing inside about the movie and there is no archivist here, no film historian.”

As for the past, they are it. Not one born before 1990.

“I found a web page,” I say, “made by an American. It pinpoints a football field near the studio lot, bordering the forest, where the model prison camp might have been.”

“Yes, we know about this, a man was here from America last year. He asked many questions like you and made this web page, probably. But he really didn’t know what he was talking about. He was ‘just like you,’” the young man informs me, which means the American was guessing.

“Are you sure there is not a film historian on site?”

“Too bad, but no. We are sorry.”

I sigh good-naturedly but at the same time show my disappointment. How can they not be better organized, they’re Germans. Nonetheless, they have apologized for a situation out of their control.

“Over there by the train tracks,” spiky hair points, “is a film institute but it is only educational and for teachers and students.” She slides her hands into her pant pockets. “They won’t know your film there, either.”

“We are it for knowledge,” says the young man. “Your film was years ago. There is no consciousness of the film here, which is too bad, and not good.”

He holds up his palms, and backs away from the window. More denial than asked for. Still, I won’t shoot.

“Thank you for your help.”

I walk along the road bordering the studio lots and the forest. He said ‘your film’. But he meant mine. Michael was given a minute on the train, to play Gestapo opposite Richard Attenborough and Gordon Jackson and David McCallum and James Garner et al. My film? His or mine, the film is old hat. Das Boot is what the people are served today. WWII U-boats. The Battle of the Atlantic. Visitors demand entry to the claustrophobic world of a submarine crew, never mind the shenanigans and the soiled underground of a group of allied prisoners of war. There is a guided tour in English at 1 PM. The cost is 11 Euros. I have no interest in the professionalism of these submariners, thirty-thousand of which perished undersea. I won’t go in.

I’m here to find out more about the other movie, and to follow as closely as I can in Michael’s footsteps. But I’m finding that it’s not an easy task. Like the type of prisoner who was brought to Stalag Luft III, Michael was a serial escapist. Beginning in 1935, when he escaped from the womb, in Vienna, disguised as happiness itself, in the eyes of his mother Eva, and his father, Karl.

About a kilometre from the box office I find the football pitch. No sign of Stalag Luft III here though. The field is unremarkable: white goalposts and bald spots in the grass where play is heaviest. Office workers in short sleeves and dress pants, from a neighbouring low-rise are out kicking a ball during an early lunch hour. I stand by the touchline and take photographs in the direction of the forest, then a couple more from the opposite side, facing the studio lot and high fence along its boundary.

If not exactly here, then somewhere close, the director John Sturges began filming in summer 1962. In order to build a complete replica of Stalag Luft III, the film crew sought and received permission from the German Minister of the Interior to fell a considerable number of trees in the Grunewald, bordering the studio’s back lot, on the agreement they replant the trees two to one when the shooting was done. In all, it took six weeks to build a replica of the original camp, and then another four months to shoot the movie, which wouldn’t have been filmed in Germany if Sturges had not run into a labour dispute with the Screen Extras Guild back in California. The film would use a large number of extras, almost 600. Even with a four-million-dollar budget and his mind already set on a site in the San Gabriel Mountains – a two-hour drive from Hollywood – Sturges took the entire shoot abroad. In nearby Munich, the American crew found German actors for important secondary roles. They picked up a pile of extras, as well. Enter Michael, stage right.

Standing by the side of the football pitch, I remember reading about the deforestation efforts of the film crew and thinking about how this mimicked the labour of the actual Russian POWs who, in 1942, were sent out on a work detail to cut down trees beyond the Vorlager, the forecamp bordering the North Compound of Luft III. The trees in question would have been gaunt Silesian pines native to forests in the northeast, altogether different from the ones in the Grunewald. Early in the movie, there is a goofy set-piece in which a number of escape-happy Hollywood POWs hide in wagons laden with cut branches, but are found out at the perimeter fence by pitchfork-yielding Goons.

Correction. It was not out here that filming began in 1962, but inside the sound stages. That spring and early summer in Bavaria the weather was foul. Rainstorms would not let up. Sturges had wanted to shoot his movie chronologically, starting with the opening scene: the POWs’ arrival at camp by a convoy of covered trucks. He even brought in flamethrower trucks to bake the mud and dry out the studio lot. But one day, early in June, Sturges called for a meeting of cast and crew. No more time to waste. He had given up filming exteriors. The crew would begin filming in the middle of the picture. Indoors, to the sound stages they went, and began with the tunnels. Next, the scenes inside the barracks. Actors James Garner and Donald Pleasance were given their calls.

Less than fifteen minutes later, I’m headed back to my friends in the box office, shouldering my laptop, smoking a cigarette for effect. Michael was a smoker. Prisoners often are. The computer hard drive is crammed with research notes, and multiple drafts of my book so far. The Last Escape was the original working title of The Great Escape. Maybe that’s the title I’ll use.

“What about the train station?” I throw this out, offhandedly. They must know the routine from the American who came before me.

“Yes,” black pulli admits. “The other guy, he too talked about a train station.”

“Is it near here?” I’m thinking of the scene where Michael arrives by motorcade to Neustadt Station and then proceeds to board the Hollywood gravy train. From what I have read, it was filmed in the vicinity.

“It might be Pullach,” the man ventures.

“Not Geiselgasteig?” Geiselgasteig is referenced all the time – in books and documentaries about the film – but the Germans wouldn’t know the place if they were standing on it. Maybe it’s my pronunciation.

The two women turn and enter the small back office. Cue the water bottles. Cut to black pulli mouthing my mangling of ‘Geiselgasteig’. The spiky blonde is sucking a pencil.

“Pullach. You must take the S-Bahn two stops in the direction of Munich and then cross by foot over the Isar on Grossehesseler Brucke and then you will walk several kilometres, yes, through the forest. Once in Pullach ask for directions to the train station. They have a very old one, it could what you are looking for.”

I go. But before leaving I ask my friends at the box office if I may take a photograph of all three, together?

“Why of us?” Humbled and suspicious, modestly or falsely incredulous.

“To help my memory,” I say (knowing real faces don’t stand a chance when it comes to writing them up). “Your faces will help me remember details from this day and this place.”

From there, I walk to the S-Bahn stop and then wait by the tracks breathing a mixture of tar and creosote fumes. It’s not yet noon. The day is warming up.

The train arrives and I step on. It is only a seven-minute ride to Grossehesseler. I ring the bell and get off and begin walking, crossing back over the tracks, following signs to the Brucke. The streets are quiet and the houses of Grossehesseler – half-timbered palaces, fenced and gated – are monstrosities. All of FC Bayern must be shacked up here in the south of Munich, and who knows perhaps a number War Criminals as well. But where the hell is the bridge?

The signposts and hand-painted directions have led me deep into a residential neighbourhood. I do realize that I must cross the Isar to reach Pullach, but I can’t find the bridge, nor any sliver of the river. I’m hot and lost on a fruitless search for a station that’s probably not the one I want anyway.

After twenty minutes of wandering and wondering and getting lost, I spot a gardener over the fence, raking leaves.

“Bitte, Helf. Eine Frage?” My throat is dry and my voice sounds hoarse, and very weak. I’ve not had the chance to talk much the last couple of days, discounting internal monologues and my brief chat with the box office crowd, and the timbre of my voice sounds pathetic. My speech has the ring of ‘Bite elf, I’m a fag?’ nowhere close to ‘Please, help me, I have a question’.

Michael lived in Munich from 1956 until his death ten years later. In the first months after arriving from Canada he stayed with his aunt, Irene, and worked odd jobs while he pursued a career in the theatre. Little by little, after a hard beginning, he found his way.

Finding work in the theatre often meant travelling and taking a temporary residence in Bremen or Berlin or Hamburg. But he loved Munich, above all. Bavaria’s cultural centre, the Bohemian atmosphere, Biergartens covered in gravel and shaded by chestnut trees. These things are pervasive even today. Eventually, he bought property, but no one in my family is able to tell me where it was. In one of his letters, Karl complains to Eva that Michael lived in a large house and like a bourgeois, and that this bothered him greatly – bothered Karl – because Karl was a communist. Michael is buried not far from here – four stops beyond the Bavariafilmstadt – in Waldfriedhof Cemetery. Karl describes Michael’s grave in some detail, but nowhere does he mention the irony that his son, a refugee from Nazism who plays a Gestapo on a train in The Great Escape, is buried in a cemetery not five kilometres from the film studio, where a substantial part of the movie was made in 1962. It makes perfect sense to me now that I am walking the streets that Michael’s house could have or would have been nearby, perhaps even in this very suburb. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? Why else would Michael have been buried far to the south of Munich, unless he and his Frau Margaret had been living in the vicinity. This proximity to the studios would have eased him into an audition for the film. I keep walking and as I am connecting the dots and making my own dots, randomly I have begun taking photos of houses, of Michael’s houses. I am getting close. It would make sense that Michael resided within shouting distance of his grave and the film studio, or maybe, maybe I am looking at things backwards.

The groundskeeper comes to the gate, opens it, and steps onto the street.

I repeat, “Bite this elf, I’m a fag.”

This gets us nowhere. I try English, then my best French. In the day of the escape, RAF Officers were multilingual. The first escapees sent out the tunnel were selected because they spoke German fluently. But forget that – no use, the gardener is Romanian, and a foreigner like me. For passport, he shows me his hands, calloused palms and fingers, the international sign of the worker.

I unlatch my shoulder bag and pry out my notebook and a pen. I make a drawing and then begin block lettering B-R-U-C-K-E. But the gardener is distracted by the white slab of my laptop, which is peaking from my bag. MacBook, international sign of the knowledge worker aristocracy. Isn’t the answer in there? He seems to be saying, staring hard. Why not use that?

Momentarily, he points down the street, sends me off on my way. His trailing voice, Links, rechts, links, rechts, right, left, right, left.

After crossing the bridge it is still five kilometres to Pullach through the forest. Links und rechts and around I go for over an hour and a half. The sun is blazing and the ground is afire with red and yellow leaves. Cyclists rush past, and old women chatting and marching briskly overtake me on the path. The forest is well-tended, the earth track swept, and I keep coming upon the same piece of river and railway tracks, as if I might be walking in a circle, but no, here is the edge of a town, which must be Pullach.

On a street corner, I hail a man passing on his bicycle. As he comes to a stop, a boy slides off the front handlebars.

“Can you help me?” I ask in English, skipping the elf routine.

His son stands aside and the man partially dismounts, holding steady the front and back wheel.

“Yes, I hope so,” says he. He speaks German, French and English, and everything else besides.

I explain what I am looking for: I describe Neustadt in the film and ask the way to Pullach Station.

“Pullach Station is that way,” he points straight down the road. “But you do not want Pullach. Let me see your film.” He gestures to my laptop. “Let me see the station in there.”

This man has time and opinions. No problem. It takes me several minutes to turn on my computer and cue the movie. Meanwhile, he asks where I am from. Canada. When I answer, the boy studies his father’s face to verify if Canada is a good place. I gather it is, as the boy cracks a smile even as his father is explaining “his situation,” that they have no car and he has six children. He is always on the tram, the man tells me, for transportation, and therefore he is familiar with almost every station south of Munich.

“Where are you from?” I ask, suspecting he is Roma.

“Hungary.”

“I have been to Budapest. I went in – ”

“Yes.” He interrupts. He knows all about my visit to Budapest in 1989 and then to Berlin, to see The Wall come down. It’s boring to have Westerners paint impressions of the Eastern Block. He doesn’t have interest in the fictions travelers take to heart. I’ve been chastened. “Germany looks nice on the surface,” he offers, “and everything works well here, but it’s not the case.” He’s seen most of the country. “Hier ist Schlecht. You understand? Here it is bad, unpalatable. Especially the schools,” he says. “I must fight the government to put my children in the right schools.”

“That’s bad,” I mutter to him and his boy. Meanwhile, we are getting seated just as naturally and comfortably as you can, on a patch of grass between the paved sidewalk and a residential fence to view a WWII action film.

Prim pedestrians move on. Nobody is curious about us, evidently. I start the movie and the gypsy and his son watch intently as Michael steps out of the Mercedes at Neustadt Station. Trench coat, fedora, handsome devil.

“There.” The father points. “See: two tracks and the station shelter with the tile roof. This is not Pullach. This is not even Munich.”

He does not remark on Michael. He hasn’t noticed him.

“You won’t find that station here in the south, even the landscape is wrong.”

I tell him that I have read many articles about the making of the movie and almost all of them mention Geiselgasteig, which apparently is nearby, as the area where the old train station is located.

“No.” He doesn’t think so. “It’s not the case.”

To make certain he is not mistaken, I play the movie segment once more. The boy takes an interest at least. How many action movies has he watched like this, I wonder. Laptop, sitting in the grass, the bicycle on its side: we might have invented the green drive-in theatre right here. Not many is my guess. Movie stars, potentially, are ordinary people to him. Like Michael is to me. The boy’s curiosity is physical. I watch him as he watches Michael arrive from Breslau à la mode in a Mercedes 540K cabriolet. I wish I could show him the scene on the train where Michael actually has some lines. It occurs at 2:14:07.

Instead, I narrate more about my family, how they originally came from Breslau, Silesia, and how in Michael’s case family history and film history shadow each other. And although I get the sense neither are listening carefully – not the boy, certainly not his father – I feel it’s important they learn a little more than what meets the eye. It’s important to me, anyway. I’m beginning to ease into our family’s exodus story set in 1935, when the boy’s father notices something, a placard on the station house at Neustadt.

“Look there.”

I pause the film.

“Unnotige Reisen, verlangen der Krieg.” He shakes his head. “It’s nothing.”

At Pullach station, I wait with a handful of commuters for the train to Munich.

It’s propaganda. Unnecessary travel lengthens the war.

A voice familiar.
“

Is that . . .”

“It’s Norman.”

“Christ, Norman!”

Peering at the pulsing numerals.

“It’s 4:13, Norman. It’s dark.”

“I’m in the Bassan.”

“The what?”

“It’s my mother’s unveiling.”

“What! What do you mean Bassan? What do you mean ‘unveiling’?”

“Well, that’s it, you see . . . And I was wondering . . .”
Such tentative and wistful probes in other years came from Toronto, then France, then Yorkshire; a couple of weeks later Norman was ensconced with us in Ottawa as he usually was when visiting his mother. The ‘Bassan’ – though why he couldn’t have just named the town in the ‘Bassan’ that he was calling from, I’d have recognized Andernos-les-Bains from our letters—
4:13 a.m.
the ‘Bassan’ turned out to be the Bassin d’Arcachon, the bay on the Garonne to the south of Bordeaux.
The mysterious ‘unveiling’ turned out to be the central reason for his visit.
It is the Ashkenazi custom after a burial and the erection of a tombstone that there is held within a year a service of commemoration, a formal dedication, as it were, of the grave. The unveiling, often an ‘unveiling’ merely symbolic, is the removal of a veil, cloth, or even a handkerchief from the tombstone by a designated family member.
The service itself is conducted by a rabbi and a cantor. It involves first the recitation of Psalms, most commonly chosen from among Psalms 1, 23, 24, and 103:
Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful . . .
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters . . .
Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart . . .
Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name . . .
The Psalms are followed by the eulogy which is delivered by the rabbi. The veil is then removed. The cantor then sings the prayer El Malei rachamim . . .
God, full of compassion . . .
The service culminates in the Jewish mourners’ prayer, Kaddish.
Pressured and most probably harassed by an emotional and recriminatory sister and an even more outspoken niece (a prickly and tenuous relationship I avoided in conversation, a relationship soured, so I gathered, by the shame of Norman’s lack of observance), suffering possibly from twinges of vestigial and filial guilt, suffering under the expectations of nephews, nieces, and cousins, from the assumptions of friends and acquaintances of his mother – and, as it later turned out, from sometime neighbours from Guigues Street, old school friends he scarcely remembered, members of the Golden Age Club, a doddery tailor from the Market and a seamed acquaintance from the Rideau Bakery, a cutter from Dworkin Furs, aged people unknown, pressured by the sheer machinery of the Jewish Community, Norman had returned to Ottawa to say Kaddish.
This prayer, this ritual unveiling, was fraught also with emotions unmentioned. I had gathered over the years that some part of the motivation for Norman’s residence in England was a flight from his mother’s dominance, a dominance that he felt threatened his sexual ability with women, his sexual being. The story “A Father” suggests that Norman feared becoming his father, the nebbish whose role was to fetch soft drinks and make sandwiches for the players, the card-players with money, the players with power, his wife among them.
“Let’s hear you, then,” said Myrna as we were sitting in the kitchen that first evening.
She passed him a prayer book.
Without looking at it, Norman briskly declaimed.

Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will.
May he establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during  your days, and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen.
“Go on,” she said.
Norman frowned at the page.
“Um . . .” he said.
Norman was telling me an anecdote typically full of relentless digression. I wasn’t following closely. Smoke from his cigarillo as he gestured. He raised his scotch.
“This is very nice,” he said.
“It’s only Ballantine’s,” I said.
“No. I meant the glass. I like the weight of it.”
What I was really thinking about was his boots. Not ankle boots but short of half-boots. Polished leather. In good repair. I was thinking how much “Englishness” he’d absorbed in his years there. He was always neatly dressed, dapper, formal almost. I was thinking that in England, still, shoes were perhaps the class indicator. A grubby suit or trousers held up with an old tie told little but shoes told nearly everything.
When Norman became a pilot officer he was sent to Quebec City to take what he used to call “gentleman lessons.” In the short story “In Quebec City” he wrote: “We were instructed how to use knives and forks. How to make a toast. How to eat and drink properly. It was like going to finishing school.”
(One cannot usually read fiction with any assumption that it is autobiographical. Norman’s stories, however, are unusual in that invention is not his real interest; a little judicious rearrangement is often as far as he’s prepared to go. Michael Winter told Natalee Caple in The Notebooks interview:
“I asked Norman Levine this question. About why his protagonists are always writers. And he said he’s not interested in making things up. I feel the same.”)
Norman was a man of contradictions. He certainly never repudiated his Jewish identity but at the same time he resented some of the circumstances of his life. In the story “A Father” he describes a photo of his father taken in Warsaw.
There is a picture of my father that is still around the house in Ottawa. It shows a youngish, handsome man with a magnificent moustache, waxed ends; a fine head with black wavy hair, and eyes that I know to be brown. That picture was taken in Warsaw. And to it belong the anecdotes: ‘Man about Town,’ ‘Friend of writers and painters’ (‘Yes, I knew writers. I used to buy them meals’), ‘Owner of a shoe concern’ (‘You can always tell if the leather’s good by the way it creases’). And ‘Smuggler’ – I’d like to think it was of diamonds.
 I never knew that man.
 The person I got to know in Ottawa was in his early forties, a fruit peddler. Slightly built, bald, with a sardonic face.
A fruit peddler with “a heavy white horse with nicotine-coloured tufts, and a delicate slow walk.”
James Atlas wrote in Bellow: A Biography:
For immigrant Jews, life in America, especially in the early years of their transplantation, was difficult, perplexing, even shameful. Abram [Saul Bellow’s father] was a proud man who – in his own estimation – had lost status. In Russia, he had considered himself a gentleman; in America, he was a labourer. Like his wife, he felt he’d come down in the world.
Norman felt much the same way and often talked about the French Canadians they lived amongst and did business with in the Market in those days. They were generally considered by the Jews, he used to say, as bumpkins, hopeless rubes.
He concludes Canada Made Me with these words:
I wondered why I felt so bitter about Canada. After all, it was all part of a dream, an experiment that could not come off. It was foolish to believe that you can take the throwouts, the rejects, the human kickabouts from Europe and tell them: Here you have a second chance. Here you can start a new life. But no one ever mentioned the price one had to pay; how much of oneself you had to betray.
Those words cost him dearly. McClelland and Stewart had taken 500 copies of the British edition published by Putnam. Jack McClelland, however, refused to put his name on the book, refused to issue the book under the McClelland and Stewart imprint. The 500 copies quickly sold out but Jack McClelland refused to import more. After the 500 copies were gone Levine said, “I realized that Canadian publishing was closed to me.” He remained unpublished in Canada for the next seventeen years.
While he never wished to repudiate his Jewish identity – after all, it formed the subject matter of his life’s work – he was at times ambivalent. England, the RCAF, and officer status in the most glamorous branch of the Armed Forces offered him a more sophisticated and expansive life than the house on Guigues Street with a stable off the kitchen for Jim, the horse with “nicotine-coloured tufts.” For while Norman was the son of a rather ineffectual fruit peddler, a man whom life had brought low, he was also a pilot/navigator flying Lancasters out of Yorkshire over Germany, one of those the British affectionately and gratefully had called “the Brylcreem Boys.”
After the war he entered McGill taking a B.A. in 1948 and an M.A. in 1949. He then returned to England where he dithered for a while at King’s College of London University beginning to write on Ezra Pound. (He once said to me that after hearing recordings of what Pound had been spewing he had no more stomach for the man. He did finish the thesis, however, and submitted it to T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber. He showed me Eliot’s courteous letter of rejection; Eliot observed that academic theses always seemed to have trouble evolving into books of general interest.)
That Levine had chosen Pound is of considerable significance given his subsequent intentions and the progression of his artistic career.
Norman married a Gentile, lived in St. Ives for forty years, and had little contact with Jewish life or belief. In St. Ives, dependent on magazine payments, the vagaries of royalties, occasional school-mastering, Norman was chronically short of money and sometimes applied to Mordecai Richler in London for loans. Mordecai at the time was writing film scripts and was reasonably flush. He told me that Norman would request loans of such sums as £57, 3s. 3d – the exact food or heating bills he owed – and that these loans were always repaid.
Other friends, too, used to worry about his financial straits. The painter Francis Bacon sometimes took care-packages down to St. Ives, food hampers and treats for the children. Once while Norman was thanking him profusely, Bacon, probably embarrassed by the gratitude, interrupted him saying, “I don’t come down here to see you. I come to fuck sailors.”
But impoverished or not, Norman was fastidious about what he would or would not write. In Ottawa, years earlier, I was chatting to someone after a reading while waiting for Norman to finish up. He was talking to a man in a dark suit.
“Who was that?”
“It was the son – I think he said Bertram – the oldest son – do you know Loeb’s grocery store downtown? – he’s the son of Moses Loeb.”
“A fan?”
“Do you know,” said Norman in scandalized tone, “what he said to me? He wanted me to write the history of the store and the biography of the family.”
“Hoo-hooo!” I said. “Pots of money there, Norman. You could set yourself up for ages.”
For Norman being an artist was a priestly vocation. His face took on an expression of pain and distaste as if he’d been accosted in a public lavatory.
I winced inwardly.
“So what did you say?”
In a low voice, he said, “I told him that that isn’t the sort of writing I do.”
Myrna, meanwhile, was becoming frustrated by our sitting around drinking scotch and smoking cigarillos and yakking. Myrna wanted to get him organized. As a boy in Ottawa, Norman would probably have spoken English mainly, perhaps a few words of Polish. What Hebrew he would have learned for his bar mitzvah would have been learned by rote and doubtless swiftly forgotten.
(He claimed that, growing up, his main language had been Yiddish. In Robert H. Michel’s excellent article in this issue of CNQ Levine is credited with claiming that “Until school, his first language had been Yiddish.” What is meant by the word “school”? He left school at sixteen and worked as a clerk in a government office so he must have been working in English as his French, to the best of my knowledge, was non-existent. “School,” therefore, must mean primary school and years at home subsequent to that. Yet when Myrna spoke to him using words and phrases of ‘kitchen’ Yiddish it was obvious he had no idea of what she was saying.
Another odd contradiction.
There is much about Norman that suggests there were several of him, that “Norman Levine” was a shifting invention.)
Myrna was still trying to get him through the first line of the second verse, the response of the congregation and minyan.

May his great Name be blessed for ever and ever.
“Now, Norman,” she said. “The first part – May his great Name – sounds like this:
Y’hei sh’mei rabbaw . . .
Now, can you repeat that?”
“Y’hei . . .” he said.
“sh’mei rabbaw” she repeated.
Norman was not an apt pupil.
“Again.”
The unveiling was but three days away.
Iam not at my best before or during breakfast. I am civil and dutiful but not exactly affable. After sleep, I like to re-enter the world quietly and in silence, preferably while reading the newspaper in which I have no particular interest. These days I find myself doing little more than mentally copy-editing it and supplying for the words which spell-checking had accepted the words actually intended.
Norman, on the other hand, chattered; sometimes positively gibbered. The phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ might have been invented to describe his unending flow. He was inexhaustible with tiny enthusiasms. The tartness of homemade marmalade, that Apostle spoon beside the dish of marmalade, hallmarks, ‘there has to be a leopard’s head on it,’ bread in France, Poilâne bread, croissants, ‘you must have French butter in the croissants because it has a higher fat content,’ the patina on the pewter wine-measure on the mantelpiece, the thumb-piece on the wine-measure handle a pair of acorns, acorns as feed for pigs that produced an extra-delicious ham that Anne bought in Andernos-les-Bains, ‘it comes from Spain . . .’
Moira Dale, companion of his last years, said to me in Yorkshire years later, “Everything’s a little excitement to him. He’s like a child.”
On the third day of his visit, I got up early, went out and bought croissants for breakfast on Elgin Street – not Parisian, unfortunately, but Japanese from Boko Bakery. Then I bought two copies of the Globe and Mail.
Andernos-les-Bloody-Bains, I thought, in the bloody Bassan.
When Norman came downstairs, I said, “Thought you’d like the paper,” and returned to reading mine.
Moments later, in a move I had not foreseen, he started to read from his aloud.
There was in those days a small column headed Nota Bene.
After some rustling, he suddenly said, “Not a beeny! What does that mean!”
I glanced up to see if he were attempting ponderous humour.
It seemed he wasn’t.
I was astounded.
Although Norman had two degrees in English and then had done further degree work at King’s College, he never made any reference to matters which such an academic background would have made entirely familiar, the daily furniture of the mind. Not only that, I cannot remember his ever talking about books at all. He never asked me about my own writing, never chatted about any of the young writers I was publishing at the Porcupine’s Quill.
Thinking of this, I realized that he had probably never read such writers as Anthony Powell, Kingsley Amis, Beryl Bainbridge, Muriel Spark, and such . . . and almost certainly not Eudora Welty, Richard Yates, Raymond Carver, and, say, Ann Beattie.
In contradiction to the Norman Levine who chattered was the very unchildlike Norman Levine who spoke not at all. When I began to think about Nota Bene and his literary absence, as it were, I came to the conclusion that he had cut himself off from contemporary literature in a quite deliberate way. He lived in St. Ives, a remote and difficult part of England to get to. Mordecai Richler had chosen London (and, earlier, Paris), London and casual journalism, and film scripts. Norman had turned his back on such worldly frivolity. He had lived – implacably was the only word – to create at whatever cost what he was creating. This endeavour consumed him. He did not concern himself with the artistic aspirations and achievements of others. What mattered to him was to perfect – implacably – his version of high modernism.
Myrna was losing patience.
“But Norman,” she said, “when you arrived you rattled off the opening without even looking at the book.”
“I got it from a book that had that verse in Roman alphabet . . .”
“Well, I’m going to have to do the same thing,” she said. “There’s simply no time. Transliterate, I mean.”
“My sister sent it,” he said. “Judaism in Family Life it was called.”
“Hardly kosher, is it?” I said. “Transliterating.”
She gave me a look.
“But actually he’s got a point, Norman. The rabbi’s orthodox.”
“Severe,” I said. “Intolerant. Suits in need of dry cleaning. Unworldly.”
“Be,” said Myrna, “ultra discreet.”
“Cunning,” I said. “Monstrous secrecy!”
“Roger!” said Norman.
That evening she rummaged in the junk drawer at the end of the bookcase and found her silver propelling pencil and a Staedtler eraser and settled to work. I watched her. Half-listening to Norman’s account of a dinner party in Toronto at which Elizabeth Smart appeared with a shopping bag containing full bottles of gin, scotch, and vodka in case the hostess’s provision proved meagre and some sad detail about her offering later in the shared taxi to suck Norman’s thumb, I watched the fall of Myrna’s hair, watched light glinting on the silver pencil.
We had bought the pencil at Antiques on High, an arcade of tiny boutiques in a building on The High in Oxford. I had bought myself a silver letter opener. The pencil was Edwardian from the look of it, very slim, elegant, at a guess originally nestled next to the spine of a leather-bound diary or address book. The knob at the end was quatrefoil; it was always the archaic usage Knoþ that came to mind. At my brother’s house, we’d polished the pencil and letter opener with Goddard’s Silver Polish.
Short weeks later after we’d returned to Canada, my mother died; she had been nearing one hundred and five. That morning of the pencil-buying we had been to see her in the nursing home.
Her hands gripped the arms of the wheelchair.
With eyes rendered sightless by macular degeneration she gazed down the bedroom’s length.
Tapping the back of her hand, the orderly said, “Here your son.”
I stooped towards the useless hearing aid.
“John? Is that you, John?”
I squeezed her hand.
“I have bad news,” she said. “Your brother is a wanted man.”
“Really?”
“He is being hunted by the police. He beat Dorothy for her behavior. On her posterior. When she visited me, she was unable to sit down.”
“Really!”
“I am sorry to tell you that Dorothy gave birth last night to a child not your brother’s.”
“Good heavens!”
My brother is an internationally famous numismatist and historian of matters medieval with vast expertise also in Anglo-Saxon and Viking coinage and trade routes. His most recent work had been three volumes on the White Bezants and Deniers of the Frankish kingdom of Guy de Lusignan in Cyprus. Now retired, he had been for many years the Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room of the Ashmolean Museum. He and Dorothy were in their seventies.
“And now both are dead.”
“Surely not!”
“She was walking along the verge on that M-road with the baby in her arms when they were struck by a lorry. I washed the bodies, of course, and laid them out in Lime Street Methodist Church and sat in vigil all night. But your poor brother!”
The story as it progressed grew more vivid. I was becoming hoarse with shouting denials into her hearing aid. Filipino staff were gawking through the open doorway. Myrna was pulling faces. A soul some doors away was wailing repeatedly: I wish to go home! Summon a taxi! Summon a taxi!
“This afternoon,” I bellowed, “we’re going to walk in the grounds at Blenheim. You know! Capability Brown and . . . oh, fuck!”
“John!” said Myrna.
“A sandwich?” said my mother.
She lifted her face in the vague direction of mine.
“Well, I am surprised!”
In The White Horse I sat in silence drinking a double gin and tonic and watching a man playing a slot machine. Light flickered through decorative numbers on the machine’s plastic body. On a central boss:
CASH
£70.00
CASH
Into the wooden trough the occasional PLUNK PLUNK of one-pound coins.
Suddenly a burst of lights.
A trumpet fanfare.
A robotic voice.
WIN WIN WIN
When he returned from his sister’s the next afternoon he was uncharacteristically agitated.
“She gave them to the Salvation Army,” he said, coming in.
“Pardon?”
“My mother. Two Bernard Leach mugs I sent her. My sister says she gave them to the Salvation Army! And she drove her there!”
“Well, perhaps,” I said, “she – they – didn’t know,  you know, what they were.”
“His early stoneware,” he said.
“Oh, dear . . .”
“Have you been,” he said, “to this Kanata?”
I nodded.
“The Salvation Army!”
Later, when he’d calmed down a bit, he said, “But at least I’ve saved these.”
“Who is it?”
“Well, it’s not Alfred Wallis but it’s another St. Ives – how would you say – a naïf . . .”
He passed me the two small framed paintings from the carrier bag. They were behind dusty glass, about thirteen and a half inches by ten, thereabouts.
“My sister had put them in the cupboard under the sink in the kitchen.”
Ships, a harbour, a breakwater. The other a ship under full sail.
I looked at them and then tilted the glass. They were on paper. On pimpled paper something like wallpaper. Crude reproductions.
“I think, Norman, I think these are possibly reproductions.”
“What!”
“Maybe cut from a magazine or . . .”
He took it from my hands.
He stared at it.
I said, “It’s maybe – difficult to see – some sort of photogravure.”
“But I was sure . . .”
“Well there’s a framer down on Elgin. He’ll take the back off for you. Tell him you’re staying with me.”
I watched him walking across the park with the carrier bag.
Another odd contradiction.
Norman had spent all those years in St. Ives living among the painters there – painters in their early years largely unappreciated, in their later years honoured and shown internationally, their importance eventually given national and international imprimatur in the form of a St. Ives gallery of their work in the Tate Britain.
Norman was in and out of the studios looking at the work of Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Bryan Wynter, and Roger Hilton and on some evenings a beer or two and conversation in The Sloop.
(Few people in Canada know that Levine arranged the tour in Canada in 1955-56 of the exhibition Six Painters from Cornwall and wrote the accompanying catalogue.)
In an essay entitled “Sometimes It Works” Levine wrote: “Another thing I got from the painters was the need for immediacy. When they finished a painting they wanted me to see it in their studio. And there it was. At a glance. Through the eyes. Onto the nervous system. I remember thinking: how could I get this immediacy in writing? And I remember Peter Lanyon telling me, in his studio, that all that mattered was the work.
‘You take something from life. Make something from it. Then you give it back into life.’”
In certain ways, if we don’t push the analogy too far, Levine was the literary counterpart of the painters. His mature work is marked by its fragmentation, unorthodox grammar, and denial of cadence, Pound’s influence reverberating on and on.
Cynthia Flood wrote: “To strip out all that plugs up prose: that is Levine’s aim. Articles, linking verbs, clause-breeding relative pronouns, wordy modifiers – dangerous. They draw attention to themselves. Worse, they smother energy. Readers, rolling along the shiny habitual rails of subject and predicate, enter the familiar sentence-tunnel knowing when the verb will arrive and the terminal light appear. We read to an expected end. That habit Levine wants to break. We are to look. Outside the train.”
The front doorbell rang.
Norman handed me the carrier bag.
In the kitchen, I held up a glass.
He nodded.
Was it on this Unveiling visit or an earlier one? Certainly while he was living in France. In unreliable memory for dates, it was an earlier visit. His marriage to Anne Sarginson was unravelling. He talked rather haltingly about the situation; Norman never wore his heart upon his sleeve.
He showed me two Peter Lanyon sketches, pencil, a few strokes in India ink, a dash of watercolour. They’d been torn from a wirebound pad. He was going to try to sell them in London on his way back to France. Lanyon had given them to him in the late fifties.
“When you know the paintings,” I said, “these, well if you know Cross Country or Offshore, say, or Silent Coast . . .”
“She used to be proud of being married to a Jew,” he said. “Once we were on a train and she was talking to the conductor and she said, ‘Nous sommes juif.’”
I nodded.
“She thought it was romantic being a writer, being a Jew, being married to a writer,” he said, “but there was only the pension . . .”
I nodded again.
“Now she holds it against me. The money.”
I sighed.
He fell silent.
“So now she’s denied me . . .”
He made a sudden dismissive gesture; the confidences had ended; the silence was uncomfortable.
“So,” he said, sliding the sketches back into the manila envelope. “This is what I’m forced to.”
Years later than these events Myrna and I were pottering about in London near where Clifford Street meets New Bond Street. We’d just bought a Liberian Dan-Ngere Poro Society mask from the Gordon Reece Gallery. Further down Clifford Street I saw a gallery with a Peter Lanyon painting in the window.
Behind a black glass desk sat a young woman with haughty tits.
“The Lanyon?” she repeated.
She consulted a Lucite binder.
“Fifty-four thousand pounds,” she said.
“Good Lord!”
“Plus,” she said, “VAT.”
“Just put everything in this garbage bag,” said Myrna. “I’ll sort it out later. No, not the maps. We’re bound to get lost.”
MapArt’s Ontario Road Atlas. Rand McNally Canada Inc.’s Ottawa Hull.
Norman stood keeping the spare tire balanced upright with his right-hand fingertips.
“Do you want the vacuum cleaner?”
“No. Get that vacuum-gun-thing. That’ll do.”
Myrna’s plan was to turn in the old car and pick up the newly leased one before the ceremony. She’d completed all the forms and the credit-check bumph days before.
The dealership was glass and chrome and brushed steel. On the forecourt on an inclined plinth shaped like a wing or a spearhead they’d posed a glittering car. Myrna was talking to a generic golf-player in an Italian-cut suit. I riffled through a display of fat brochures. Over at the counter, smiles, ballpoint pens. I’d never learned to drive, never gave any thought to cars. Air freshener permeated. Rummaging in her purse. I found myself wondering how much the colour separations for the brochure would have cost. Thought of telling Norman the Frankie Howerd monologue line about visiting a pneumatic travel agent I’ve come to look at your brochures – pause – yer tours, but humour often seemed to pass Norman by.
The only funny story of Norman’s I could think of, and that not exactly a thigh-slapper, was “My Karsh Picture.” And following from this somehow, I found myself thinking about Norman’s poetry collections, Myssium, The Tight-Rope Walker, I Walk by the Harbour and how generally awful they were. As was the poetry of Katherine Mansfield; as was the poetry of Ernest Hemingway; as was the poetry of James Joyce – four stellar prose writers who simply couldn’t write a line that lived.
Odd.
“Pardon?”
“He’s just changing over the plates,” said Myrna, leading us onto the forecourt.
“Oh, smell the smell,” said Norman, “the new-leather smell.”
“They spray it on,” said Myrna.
“Does it handle differently?” I asked.
“Heavier,” she said.
She was finicking with the rearview mirror.
“We’re far too early,” she said. “Let’s loop round and take Norman to Cedarview.”
“Oh, look, Norman! Canada geese! Hundreds of the buggers.”
Picking and gleaning in the stubble.
“The yellow corn stalks and then the black. Their necks,” he said. “The black. It’s just like those flowers, isn’t it? And their heads.”
“Pardon?”
“The geese are like the black bit in the middle.”
“Ahhh . . .”
“Do you know the ones I mean?”
“Well I’m not entirely . . .”
“Anne,” he said, “now Anne knows the names of all the flowers and all the trees and even the birds in the Bassan but it’s the people. I’m more interested in the people. There was an old waitress . . .”
“Here we are,” said Myrna. “Now cast your eye over this lot, Norman.”
Cedarview was like a park-cum-golf course, an enclave giving the impression of ‘gated community’ though there were no gates. It was a bloated subdivision studded with grossly vulgar travesties of architecture. Monster Homes on Mown Monster Lots. Spire, turret, widow’s walk, portico, pilaster, columns crowned with Corinthian capitals, entablature and architrave, protruding air-conditioning units, lead-latticed windows, integral four-car garages beside the front doors.
“But this is awful!” said Norman.
“Oh, sod it!” said Myrna as the car lurched through a water-filled pothole.
“But funny,” I said.
“Bloody mud on my car!” said Myrna.
“You know,” I said, “it was Betjeman who was the first . . .”
“Do you know what Betjeman’s famous for?” said Norman. “His teeth. His teeth were green.”
“I was going to say,” I said, “the first to find bad buildings funny.”
The car wash was a sway-back clapboard structure listing under the Scotch pines at the end of the disintegrating concrete pad. A sandwich board on the edge of the ditch bore an arrow pointing inwards and the words OPEN and McLEODS FRIES.
“It’ll only take a minute or two,” said Myrna.
She read the instructions and pressed the green button.
Advertisements on tin for Coca-Cola.
‘Collectibles.’
I was just pointing out Millais’s rusting Bubbles on an advertisement for Pears Soap when the car checked and rending metal screamed. Her side-view mirror had somehow engaged with projecting angle iron. She turned the ignition on again and lowered the window; the mirror dangled on wires. She tried to close the window but something had buckled leaving a three-inch gap along the top.
As the brushes spun nearer, I said, “Cover the gap! Use the Rand McNally! Now! Open it to the middle and jam it . . .”
“There’s no need to shout.”
“I am NOT shouting!”
“I don’t know what’s got into you!”
I was trying to read through the steam.
I shoved her over towards the window, pointing to the small uncovered gap.
“USE THE OTHER MAP AS WELL!”
“Rude!”
Rivulets of water, drops, chasing up and off the windscreen.
I tried not to think of mirror on threads as eyeball on cheek.
Ignoring her ‘finer-feelings-offended’ face.
Jab-jabbing with my forefinger towards the notice.
“Hotfuckingwax!”
“Are you my Uncle Norman?”
“No,” I said, “that’s Norman over there talking to that lady.”
“I’ve got new gloves.”
He held out both fists. Difficult to tell how old he was. What, eighteen, maybe twenty? He’d been dollied up in a suit and a floral tie and a three-quarter-length dressy overcoat.
“And there’s a secret. Inside they’re stuffed with rabbit.”
He turned back the wrists to show me. I stroked the fur lining with a fingertip.
“Very nice,” I said. “That makes them very special.”
A solemn nodding.
A to-do amongst the ladies around Norman’s sister. We drifted over.
“Are you his uncle?”
Norman shook his head. His mouth shaped words but no sound came out. Shook his head again and spread his hands in a denial of responsibility, culpability, connection to this cemetery, these people.
“So what’s going on?”
“It’s the grave,” said Norman. “No one can remember where it was.”
“. . . definitely this row.”
“. . . in line with that tree . . .”
“. . . more with that gate. That’s what I remember.”
“I know!” said Norman. “Perhaps she’s buried under Gurwitz. Annie Gurwitz!”
“All these years,” said one of the ladies, “I thought it was spelled ‘Gur-evich.’ Shows you what I know!”
“You’d know it was Levine,” said Norman’s niece, “if you’d made the effort to attend.”
“It wasn’t a question of effort,” said Norman. “I was in France and . . .”
“Or contributed,” she added, “to the cost of the stone.”
“I was in France,” said Norman, “and I hadn’t the wherewithal to come to Canada.”
“‘Wherewithal,’” sneered his niece.
I touched Myrna’s arm and we moved away.
Norman’s sister was holding at her thigh a loosely-gathered blue and white homemade banner-thing emblazoned with the Star of David. Satiny-looking. It hung by big wooden curtain rings along a gold-painted rod. For the unveiling, I assumed. She was holding it by the rod. That, and the angle against her thigh, I thought for a second of a muleta.
A crow raucous on a dead branch. I stood looking at the top edges of tombstones. Many were crowded with pebbles. This, too, was an Ashkenazi folk-custom. It was a sight that always moved me, a custom simple and heartfelt and un-undertakerly.
Myrna started humming the tune.
“Please, Myrna.”
It was Shir ha’palmach, one of the Palmach marching songs.
From Mettulah to the Negev
From the sea to the desert
All young men to arms . . .
Once she’d started, the tune, half-sensed, would be there all day like the linger of spearmint on the air or Juicy Fruit; intermittently the words would erupt.
“Please.”
People visiting graves – wives, husbands, children, friends – left the pebbles, pebbles picked up from the walkways.
The pebbles say
I hold you in my mind always.
Do you remember . . . ?
I love you.
I looked up at the commotion as the mourners fanned out along the gravel paths in search of the grave.
Weiman    Michaels    Federman
Kaell    Weiss    Charny
Fishman    Perel    Wise
Miller    Katzman    Kaplan
Stein    Zichermann    Lipshitz
“Do you want to help, Robert?” said one of the ladies. “Help find Annie’s headstone?”
He nodded and trailed behind them.
We trailed behind the three of them.
People began hurrying from headstone to headstone. Mild hysteria seemed to be setting in. Robert started scurrying along the paths, stooped at random headstones, pumped his arm in the air in the manner of athletes on TV.
“Go, Annie!” he shouted. “Annie, go!”
Each of his discoveries proved a disappointment.
“Robert!” called one of the ladies. “This is a cemetery! You have to show some respect!”
His face turned bright red.
He stopped and deliberately hung back, then with his coat sleeve swept the pebbles from the top of the headstone.
“Fuckin’ A,” shouted Robert sweeping off other pebbles.
Horchberg    Rosenfeld
Jacobson
Passman
“Bernice! Bernice!”
Stopped sweeping with his filthy sleeve.
Stood weighing a pebble.
“Bernice! He’s swearing and throwing stones at us!”
Bernice – his mother? surely too old? – hurried over. Robert retreated behind a headstone.
“Here!” said Bernice, pointing at the path at her feet.
The smack across his face sounded vicious.
He sat on the path moaning and weeping.
“Annie,” he sobbed, “Annie.”
He pulled at the knot of his tie.
“Over here,” waved an old man with a walker. “Right the way down here!”
An immediate drift began.
“There’s rabbi,” someone said.
The cantor, I assumed, and the rabbi, tsetses, a sweat-stained fedora.
Robert sat on the path and cried more or less silently and continued burying his floral tie with gravel.
The rabbi flanked by Norman on one side and the cantor on the other faced the semi-circle of mourners.
“It’s Psalm 24,” whispered Myrna.
The Star of David banner-thing stirred in the breeze.
The yarmulke was causing me great anxiety; the bloody thing was always sliding off the back of my head and I cursed myself for forgetting to bring hairgrips.
Hairgrips. I found myself thinking that the words I inhabit, that inhabit me, would be unknown now to the young. Kirby grips they’d been called in my boyhood and youth, bronze-coloured, six on a card, and in America, bobby pins . . .
“Now it’s Psalm 103.”
The rabbi then delivered a lame eulogy mentioning Annie Gurwitz’s activities and many friends at the Golden Age Club, her knitting, her green thumb, her renown at euchre and casino, her kindness to fellow-residents at the Retirement Home—
who among us having partaken of her bounty will ever forget her cholent, her brisket like a dream . . .
Then the contentious niece unveiled the headstone, wrinkling upwards the banner-thing.
Following this, the cantor sang El Malei rachamim
God, full of compassion . . .
the Moorish cadences plangent.
It was with the recitation of Kaddish that the day became indelible in memory. Only film could have captured the full pleasures of the proceedings. And perhaps only one actor/director could have created the flow of movements and moods. The film is black and white. The actor/director (d. 1982) is Jacques Tati. The template for my film is that homage to Buster Keaton, Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953).
The scene from Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot that Norman’s unveiling brought to mind was Monsieur Hulot changing a tire. Lower down the hill, a funeral is taking place. Monsieur Hulot’s inner tube bowls away from him, he madly chasing. The tube, picking up sticky leaves as it goes, wheels into the funeral proceedings. An officious mourner, thinking it a wreath, hangs it on the cross above the grave where, hissing audibly during the obsequies, it steadily deflates.
My inadequate film would open with a high dolly shot – the grave, the semicircle of mourners – tracking down onto the cantor, Norman, the rabbi . . .
The cantor fell silent . . .
The rabbi looked up at the gravel sounds as the minyan grouped themselves in front of the other mourners. He raised his prayer book an inch or so above his waist like a baton, turned slightly and inclined his head towards Norman. Then rabbi, Norman, cantor, and the minyan launched into Kaddish.
Norman’s voice was distinct because humdrum; he had no knowledge of cadence, modulation, inflection, the pleasures I thought of as ‘the twiddly bits’; I resolved to look up – what would you call it? prosody? psalmody?
“. . . and say, Amen,” proclaimed Norman belatedly.
Myrna squeezed my hand making her ’Ere-we-go! face as they moved into the next line.
The rabbi was looking at Norman.
Pecking glances.
Muffled mercifully by the staggered recitations of the doddery minyan, Norman stumbled on.
rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb
Then the rabbi – puzzled? unhappy? – moved closer and was blatantly trying to look over Norman’s shoulder at Norman’s prayer book; Norman shielded it with humped shoulder and edged away. The rabbi followed. The cantor followed the rabbi. With each of the trio’s advances, the minyan and the mourners drew away, giving them space.
I found the morning’s events deliciously funny and satisfying but had Jacques Tati been filming, the sequence would have had exquisite pacing and the inevitability of a piece of extremely expensive machinery at work and would have been imbued with feelings that would have haunted one for years.
Tati made only five feature films in his career. Following Jour de fête came the three great ‘Hulot’ films, Les Vacances, Mon Oncle, and Trafic. The Oxford Dictionary of Biography refers to Tati as “internationally known as a comic actor”; the Penguin Encyclopedia describes him as “the greatest film comedian of the postwar period” while the Concord Encyclopedia describes the ‘Hulot’ films as “comic film masterpieces”; producers and investors came to hate him for his money-squandering pursuit of perfection.
I imagined Tati filming this scene as a kind of dance, a dance with the formality almost of a pavane, with the minyan and mourners something like a chorus of urban Jewish versions of Silence, Shallow, Shadow, Doll, and Feeble.
rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb
At last, at last, it came to an end.
“. . . and say, Amen.”
Cantor, Norman, and rabbi had performed more than half a circuit of the grave.

Har gow!

Shu mai!
Ginger squid!
The girls pushed the carts of dim sum along the aisles; we’d caught the tail end of lunch at the Yangtze.
The waitress clunked down three bottles of Tsingtao.
“It’s pronounced something like ‘Ching-dow.’”
“It smells,” said Norman, “just like apples!”
“It’s Chinese but the brewmasters are German.”
“Oh, then,” said Norman, “Prosit!”
Fry noodles!
Sticky rice!
The sticky-rice packages always gave me a quiet pleasure, the colour of the leaves, the fact that they were leaves – banana? – the yellow raffia that tied the solidity of the green packages.
“The yellow with the black in the middle,” said Norman, “there’s a song . . .”
“Pardon?”
I glanced at Myrna.
Perhaps catching the glance, he said, “The Canada geese.”
“What do you mean?”
“It has a banjo in it.”
Chopsticks and shrimp arrested mid-air, I stared.
“You mean,” said Myrna, “that the Canada geese in the corn field remind you of a flower that’s yellow with a black centre and there’s a song with the name of a flower in it – and a banjo.”
Norman nodded encouragingly as she made each point.
Setting down her glass of Tsingtao, she sang
Oh, Susannah,
Oh don’t you cry for me
For I come from Alabama
With a banjo on my knee.
“How do you know that!”
“We used to sing it at Camp when we were kids.”
“Black-eyed Susans,” I said.
“Rudbeckia,” said Myrna.
Norman beamed.
“Isn’t it all,” spreading his arms expansively, “isn’t it all jolly.”

But in the myopic way of local media, the host or producer always wanted the small talk to be about the city. What was happening in the city. The police fences going up and latest restrictions announced. Something on the car radio this morning about no flying kites downtown. Kites would be banned the week of the convention, the radio announced, deadpan. Sam had leaned forward to hear better but Marco was not a morning person. His eyes were closed and his cheek vibrated against the passenger’s side window.

I live in Washington, he yawned when Sam exclaimed about the kites. There’s police everywhere. You get used to it.

But people are allowed to fly kites in America, said Sam.

Not since 9/11, said Marco.

He was renowned for what they called his “dry wit.” It surprised people, when they met him, because his writing wasn’t dry. His writing was wet. It flowed with emotion and swelled with profundity and was boundless in its erudition according to the press kit on the seat between them. Sam didn’t laugh at Marco’s remark, however, because his dryness in conversation entailed that he didn’t drop any of the usual hints of this is a joke; laugh with me, won’t you? – didn’t attempt to catch her eye, or smirk. Or, as Sam might have done, sound a giddy little snort.

Yesterday she learned to smile in a neutral sort of way at everything Marco said on the off-chance he was making a crack of some kind and she hadn’t caught it. It was safe. She hit upon the strategy not long after picking him up at the airport and used it to great effect at the reception that evening – she used it with everybody, not just Marco. It was a handy trick. She blank-smiled not only the luminaries who came out to greet Marco – flashy silver-hairs in colourful scarves (the men) whose names she understood she was supposed to recognize the moment they were enunciated at her – but even the blousy female editor who intimidated her and the philanthropist CEO who was always so courtly and drunk.

There was something about smiling in a neutral way at people that sort of impressed them, she discovered. I give you nothing, it told them, which they liked. It made them notice her, whereas in the past, whenever she attempted some bland, quippy remark, they all but tried to rest their drinks on her head.

For Samantha was short.

She settled in behind the glass with the producer and technicians and checked her phone and found a text from her brother sitting there.

At hospital. Pre-op stuff.

She poked back: Ok! xoxo

The host had asked Marco to talk about whatever for a moment or two; what he had for breakfast, for example, so that the technician could get his levels. I don’t eat breakfast, Marco was saying. Mornings make me sick.

Just anything, urged the host.

Sam had heard this before from the radio people. Radio people didn’t get it because they were so used to talking – filling the airwaves on command. But it was dumb to ask the guest to talk about whatever. Guests needed specifics. The concept ‘whatever’ ballooned in their minds, which accordingly went blank.

Then she saw her brother had sent the text three hours ago and realized she’d had her phone muted since the night before and thanked god Marco wasn’t a morning person and hadn’t been calling at 6 a.m. wanting a power smoothie or something.

She texted her brother again: So updates?

Marco had his headset on and the levels were good and now he was saying: We desire. It’s what humans do. We want to open doors, tear at packages, hammer piggy banks, rip bodices. It’s an essential force and an essentially destructive force. We have to reconcile ourselves.

The light was low in the studio; it was an artificial environment, meant to fake a feeling of end-of-day serenity, as if outside birds were peeping wearily and lawns were perspiring dew.

She watched Marco on the other side of the glass, saying versions of other things he had already said that morning. Eventually his words coagulated into a mellifluous white noise and for something to do she texted Marie.

Marco in a gorilla cage.

It was the idea of sticking him in an artificial environment. Marco peeling bamboo as the popcorn-eating masses gawked. Explaining to them in gorilla sign language: We desire.

Although a voiceless Marco clearly would be not the same sort of Marco at all.

Mar-Koko, she texted next. Sam often texted stream-of-consciousness to Marie.

I’d take him in any kind of cage, replied Marie, who was always insisting upon her thing for older men. Sam had come to find this boring about her.

This is what it means to be fallen creatures, Marco was saying. In the biblical sense.

It was the fourth time she’d heard him make this statement and she still didn’t understand what it meant. The phrase wheeled around in her head, clanging, like a pot-lid dropped and spinning across a kitchen floor.

You want to know him biblically, she texted Marie.

Then her brother wrote: He went into OR hour ago.

She texted: Agh! Tx! xoxo

Ew, wrote back Marie. Evangel-lovin’. Give it up for JC.

It was a short interview because it was live and live segments always had to be short, Sam had observed, to keep people from tiring out and saying something stupid on the air. Marco was coming to the end and then they would go for lunch. Sam texted Marie: The bible is very dirty. Compendium of sin. A very dirty and vicious place.

Marco had removed his headset and was shaking hands with the host.

Sign me up, said Marie.

The blousy editor was meeting them at something called an Izakaya restaurant, which had just opened up around the corner from the office. She and Marco were late, however, because the route Sam planned on taking had been blocked off by a police fence.

But this is right in the middle of downtown, complained Marco, scrutinizing the chain-link and concrete beyond. It doesn’t make any sense.

I guess there’s going to be, like, said Sam, who didn’t really know what she was talking about, a security zone or something.

But people will still need to get from point A to point B during the convention, said Marco. Are they planning to evacuate downtown?

Finally he was showing an interest in what was going on in the city and the only person there to explain it was Sam, who had only started paying attention that morning when she heard about the kites.

She gave a neutral smile. Ideally, she said, that’s probably what they’d like to do. Evaporate.

As she said it, she realized she’d meant to say ‘evacuate’. But Marco didn’t notice.

People get in the way, he agreed.

They were fifteen minutes late and when they arrived the entire restaurant staff yelled something at them in Japanese, startling Sam quite a bit. She looked around in a panic, but everybody, after yelling, just went back to cooking and chopping and waitressing as if nothing had happened. The editor was seated at the far end of the restaurant, gesturing with both hands, her gauzy sleeves billowing like sails.

Don’t tell me, she said, brushing cheeks with Marco. Police fences.

Just everywhere, said Marco.

Well don’t worry, said the editor. The service here is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Sam? When is Marco’s next appointment?

Sam already had her phone in her hand. Still on the table, no news, her brother had written.

Not until two, she said.

Lots of time, said the editor.

Sam leaned back as the editor leaned forward to ask Marco how his morning interviews had gone. She went to put her phone down beside her place setting, but the moment it touched the tablecloth it lit up with another text.

It was nice to see you last night.

So she yanked it back up and read it again. She typed: You suck, texting me, and stuffed the phone in her purse.

It’s ok, Sam, if you need to keep your phone out, the editor told her, glancing over. Which was a way of saying, Shouldn’t you keep your phone out? Because to be in constant contact was Sam’s job. She gave a neutral smile and placed the phone beside her chopsticks. Sam could feel her ears producing a heat that would soon make her entire face look boiled.

She wanted to text Marie about it. Marco and the editor were leaning toward one another in order to hear and be heard over all the restaurant noise. Both of them had their hands resting on the edge of the table. It was like they were preparing to play the mirror game.

Marco was saying: The idea that we are in the way. In the way of nature, like Sartre said. Perhaps that’s what it is to exist.

And is it a bad thing, necessarily, said the editor.

But the problem is, we treat everything else that way.

So who’s in the way?

The more important question is, who gets to decide?

When they hugged the night before at the reception. And the side of her head was warm against his breastbone, her ear squashed against him as if to ask, You in there? Anybody home? And it was longer than it should have been, the hug, yes, full of heat. And Natalie was there who was his wife. And then they just got on with the evening, making the rounds and paying attention to other people and not to one another as they had long agreed to do.

Which is why it sucked of him to text her.

Excuse me, said Sam, and left for the bathroom.

Very dirty and vicious place, was the last thing she had written to Marie.

Ugh, she texted now.

What, wrote Marie.

Alex, wrote Sam.

Yikes, wrote Marie. Is he there?

Texted.

Ignore it. Delete message.

You know you are a good person, added Marie a moment later.

Her brother wrote, About halfway through and all is well so far. One end of bypass connected. They are now sizing the new tissue valve. Sam could picture him hunched on some bench in some waiting room, taking forever to peck out the message with his slow, enormous man-thumbs. There were ten years between them. He hadn’t exited the womb with a cellphone in hand the way she did. Texting was like breathing for Sam, or blinking her eyes whereas for her brother it was exactly like poking away at infinitesimal buttons on a tiny little machine. It was like trying to thread a series of needles just to tell a person something.

The staff yelled at them again as they left the restaurant – even louder than when she and Marco had arrived. Sam had been thinking about her brother’s giant thumbs and also Alex’s hands and how she held one of her hands up against his one time and remarked how the size of women’s hands compared to men’s seemed like a deliberate, cosmic humiliation because when you really looked at them, when you compared and contrasted, women’s hands were downright puny. So she had been looking at her hand around her phone as they left the restaurant thinking that it – her hand closed around an object – sort of resembled a big white grub or a giant scallop and the staff hollering scared her even worse this time.

Why do they do that, Sam wanted to know.

Marco looked over at her – made a point of looking over at her, which was actually kind of touching. He hadn’t really looked at her since they met the day before, even when he was telling her something.

Then she realized the editor had looked over at her too. It had to do with the way her question sounded – higher-pitched than it probably should have been, drawing attention to itself.

They’re just saying good-bye to us, sweetie, said Marco in the tender voice he used for interviews.

Sam realized she didn’t know if she had eaten anything.

Outside on the sidewalk they were swarmed by young women in white shorts and yoga tops who were trying to give them hot sauce.

Want some hot sauce? They said. Free hot sauce!

Marco took one and handed it to Sam, who put it in her purse.

Hot sauce? Another of the girls said to Sam.

I just took some, Sam told her.

Have some more, insisted the girl. She was overtanned and grinning away, making a point of meeting Sam’s eye as if they were flirting with one another. She’d been told to do this, Sam realized, had probably been staring into the eyes and grinning into the faces of countless strangers all day long. The girl was on autopilot.

So Sam accepted another bottle as Marco and the editor brushed-cheeks goodbye. As the editor pulled away, a girl tried to give her hot sauce.

No, no, said the editor, moving down the sidewalk. Sam admired the easy way she held up her hand – easy, yet with authority – that is the way you use a hand, thought Sam – stopping the girl mid-proffer.

But Marco accepted the hot sauce on the editor’s behalf, and handed this one to Sam as well.

Moments after they’d disentangled themselves from the girls in white, Sam looked back to see a young policeman approaching the group. The girls fluttered whitely to intercept him like seagulls expecting to be fed.

Put the sauce away, girls, she heard the young cop say before she and Marco rounded the corner.

No kites and no sauce, Sam remarked as they approached the car.

Pardon? Said Marco.

She shouldn’t have said it out loud. It was the kind of thing she would have texted to Marie.

That cop, said Sam. He made the girls put away their sauce.

Well thank god for that, said Marco.

There was just one more interview and then Marco was allowed to go back to the hotel for a nap or whatever he wanted to do before meeting up with everyone at the restaurant.

I hate when they make you have dinner before giving a talk, he told Sam when they were back in the car.

Sam herself was looking forward to the dinner because the restaurant was new and the fish was supposed to be insanely fresh and even the drinks would be paid for. That showed how impressive Marco was.

Best seafood in town, she told him.

Marco blinked his great, sad eyes. His eyes were so large, he seemed to blink in slow motion.

Those eyes, Marie had texted the day before.

I think he’s gay, though, Sam told her. He doesn’t give off any heat.

But you can’t stuff yourself with seafood and then talk about the human soul, said Marco.

No? said Sam.

And the other thing, said Marco, is I won’t be able to drink. Sorry to whine; I know I’m whining – but it’s good to be a bit of a brat between interviews; to misbehave before I have to be all gracious and wise. I just like a glass of wine with meals.

You can’t have a glass of wine before the talk?

I don’t like to – no. Marco was gazing up at the building before them. Weren’t we just here this morning?

That was live, Sam told him. This is taped. It’ll be more in-depth, too, like a couple of hours give or take.

The police are out front now, observed Marco, noticing cruisers all along the street. They’re going to fence off the broadcasters. Smart move.

Sam gave a neutral smile.

Her phone had been vibrating intermittently in her purse like some tiny panicked creature and the technician frowned at her for taking it out because the three bottles of hot sauce made such a racket when she did. There’s no microphone in here, Sam wanted to bark at him. Radioland can’t hear my sauce. So keep your frowns to yourself.

There was a text from Marie wanting to know Did you text him back? And a text from Alex saying Where are you living these days? Which was a way of asking if she still had a roommate. Because all Alex ever had to say to her was a form of the question: Where can we fuck? Or else: When can we fuck? Or the statement: I assume we will be fucking shortly. Which was usually correct. And as she was pondering these questions and statements a message popped up from her brother which read: Procedure complete now undergoing post-maintenance testing.

The interviewer was a woman this time, a woman with one of the best voices on the radio, a voice like nougat. She did not look at all like she sounded, which shouldn’t have bothered Sam, she knew, but which did. The interviewer, who sounded like a sexy professor on the radio, looked like somebody’s mad aunt in real life. She wore velour pants covered in cat hair and pink Crocs. Sam never thought of being middle-aged – she tried not to – because it made her weepy, which in turn made her feel guilty. She knew she, herself, could easily give in to velour and Crocs, she knew how happy she might one day be made by cats, she knew how simple it would be to let go, to have wrinkles appear on her face and say: Oh well – to hell with it then. She could do it in a heartbeat; she could give up on youth like it was nothing. It was the easy way out, like a gun was, kind of. Terrifying in the same way.

So she didn’t think about it.

Marie kept texting in an effort to be a good friend. She was texting: Remember you are blameless. And a couple of minutes after that: You made no promises or vows to anybody. And then: No one expects anything of you.

Sitting in the booth with the technician, Sam just wanted to close her eyes and visualize the sexy professor as the interviewer spoke, but her phone kept jumping and the interviewer kept asking Marco questions and Marco kept saying things like: We live in torment at our own carnivorous nature. We are divided beings. We are shaped to feed upon our fellow creatures, just as they are shaped to feed one another. We tie ourselves in knots to avoid the reality. We keep our butchers in the back room, where we don’t have to view their work. We treat the people who feed us like pariahs. We don’t want to know. We are ashamed. We can’t abide the sin. We dress our dogs in clothes, like us. To convince ourselves we are confreres.

When you say sin – began the nougat-voiced interviewer.

Sin! Interrupted Marco. And you’ve hit on it exactly. It is the first sin, the ultimate sin. Historically, in religious terms, we’ve supposed that sin was sex, but sex is just the smallest part of it. The real anguish resides in our break with the animals. We don’t want to harm them; yet we’re made to harm them. This is why they are innocent and we can never be. We can never be. This is what it is to be human – to be human is to be fallen.

I’m not sure I get it, confessed the interviewer.

Sam, however – shifting forward, hot sauce chattering away in her purse – Sam got it.

Back on the sidewalk, three policemen stood together watching them walk past.

Hello, said one to Sam.

Good afternoon, said Marco as Sam stalked past all four of them.

He asked to use her phone in the car, and then had to ask how to use it, and Sam wondered if he was one of those people who held up cellphone usage as an example of how the world was going to hell and vowed to never succumb, unlike the brainless masses, to such foolishness. Like the courtly CEO where Sam worked who had never not had secretaries to make all his phone calls anyway. She tried not to stare at Marco while he spoke to whomever he was speaking to, but wasn’t succeeding. She just gave in and stared at him. She was getting the feeling that everything Marco said – be it to interviewers or the editor or the party on the other end of the phone – was the same thing. That is, was part of one long, unspooling thought that never ended, that had no paragraph breaks, that refused to naturally conclude, as in polite conversation. And nobody asked him to give it a rest, nobody ever said, Yeah, ok, Marco, but we are talking about going to the beach now. Nobody broke in to ask what he wanted on his pizza.

Or if they did, Marco did not let himself get sidetracked.

Marco was saying, Don’t give him that. Lovey, don’t give him that. I know he wants it, but don’t give him that. It’s bad for him. No, it’s up to you. You are the one in charge and it is bad for him. Don’t argue with me lovey, this is your responsibility. No, no, no. Ok? No. No no no.

Now Marco was noticing how Sam was neglecting to pretend not to listen to him. She was driving, but she kept looking over at every other word.

I hope that was ok, said Marco when he was finished, holding the phone out to Sam. It was on my calling card.

Can you just stick it in my purse, please?

Marco opened her purse.

Look at all your hot sauce! he exclaimed.

She dropped Marco off after battling the traffic and negotiating countless new detours, and so only had an hour until she picked him up again. So Sam walked to the back of the hotel where there was a park with benches for people to sit and watch the ferries chug back and forth across the lake.

She brought Marco’s book along, thinking she would finally start to read it as she was supposed to have weeks ago. But knowing, in her traffic-maddened state, she probably wouldn’t.

She found a free bench and texted Marie.

Someone is messing with me. Someone is rattling my cage.

Then Alex wrote, as if in response, I thought I’d go to the Marco thing tonight.

He was one of those men who didn’t wear deodorant and somehow got away with it. Or maybe he wore some kind of natural deodorant that didn’t really mask his sweat. The point was, Sam could always smell him. It was not a bad smell; it was just entirely him; his bodily self-announcement. It was his presence; fulminating beneath his skin and emerging from his pores. You knew when he was there, and when he had been there.

When it was there, that smell, her uterus would contract with sudden violence. Like it was hurling itself against Sam’s abdomen in mute, uterine frenzy.

At the next bench, a man was seducing a woman and Sam could hear the occasional low-voiced inanity. I am the kind of person, he was saying to the woman, who is very aware of his energy.

A policeman on an actual horse appeared out of nowhere and clopped his way past Sam, claustrophobically close, a liquid wall of chestnut haunch.

This world brings entities together so they can feel joy, the man on the bench was saying.

The cop on the horse slowed its clop as he approached the couple. He was wearing a helmet, which Sam thought made good sense. It struck her that probably everyone who rode horses should wear helmets. Because who knew what a horse might do?

A text from her brother read: Unfortunately it looks like – before Sam stopped reading it and put her phone away.

She picked up Marco’s book and opened the first page. The cop was murmuring something to the man – the seducer – and what the cop was saying was making the man surprised. The seducer started speaking in high-pitched exclamations. But Sam was doing her best to read Marco’s introduction and not to notice what was going on around her.

She ordered one glass of red wine and one glass of white and carried them across the room to Marco. Then she had to stand there a while and wait for him to distinguish and differentiate Sam’s expectant presence from all the other expectant presences that had clustered around him after his talk.

Eventually his eyes did a tour of the circle of faces. Sam! He greeted.

Red or white? She mouthed.

Very kind, said Marco, allowing his soupy brown eyes to pour appreciation into hers. He reached for the white.

Sam blank-smiled and brought the red to her own lips, holding his eye as she receded from the cluster. Marco, looking stymied, watched her go. He was paying extra attention now because of the way she had behaved in the car and in the restaurant. She hadn’t said much. But she’d said enough to let him know her feelings toward him were taking on a purplish tinge of the unprofessional.

Sam, called Marco before she had completely receded from the circle. You don’t have to disappear.

The members of Marco’s conversational klatch were now gazing like cows back and forth between Marco and Sam with a total lack of interest. Waiting brainlessly for the exchange to be over.

I’m not going anywhere, Sam assured Marco.

She turned and walked directly into Alex’s looming chest. Her wine sloshed and some of it splattered to the floor, but somehow didn’t get anywhere on him, which was so typical. The smell – like fresh pelt – hit her hard. She craned her neck to peer up at him and her uterus shook itself awake like a dog.

Clumsy, said Alex, whose one-note mode of flirtation had always been personal insult. She understood then the whole affair had been about efficiency. This was how you sinned and took your punishment all at once.

He smiled down at Sam, allowing his smell to settle all around her.

What? Sam said.

What? said Alex back.

Here was yet another easy way out – like stepping off a cliff. Sam cleared her throat in order to be heard.

“When can we fuck?” she said.

Alex’s eyes actually bulged and he hunched forward, abruptly telescoping his height in a way that appeared spastic and involuntary. Whoa, whoa, whoa! He whispered, furious. If he had been carrying some kind of sack around with him, he might have thrown it over Sam’s head.

She turned away from him to check her phone, ignoring the howls from her lower abdomen. There was another text from her brother, starting Did you – so she put it away and moved toward the bar.

Marco is an animal, she had texted Marie during the talk. She’d been thinking he had eyes like moose: puzzled and stupid and bulgy. And his silky curls shining under the spotlight made her think of the poodle she had growing up; a poodle named Arfer. Do tell! Marie wrote back. Marie had her own interpretation of everything. Transmitting her thoughts to Marie was like cutting the string off a kite, allowing the wind to yank it around in any and every direction; relinquishing ownership.

And after they arrived at the dinner, the blowsy editor had approached her and said, Sam, I was trying to get in touch with you for the last hour to drop off something for Marco but I wasn’t able to get through on your phone.

And Sam, who had her ringer turned off since the moment on the park bench with the police-horse clopping past, stared at the editor’s swelling jowls and told her, My father was having his heart taken out. And that was all she had to say, the editor didn’t even let her finish. The editor’s jowls drooped another couple centimetres – she was almost not middle-aged anymore, Sam abruptly realized; the editor was almost actually old – and she terrified Sam by lurching forward and holding Sam in her billowy arms a moment.

It was very late in the evening when Marco sought her out. He had made it clear all day he wanted to be rested for the flight tomorrow morning. Don’t let me linger too long, he instructed. And for the love of god, don’t let me drink too much. Two, three glasses of wine. Don’t let anyone put a glass of scotch in front of me, or I’m toast. I can’t handle the jet lag the next day – at my age it’s just crippling.

And Sam had ignored him for most of the night.

He found her at a table drinking with a couple of interns from another house. He had to lean past her chair and insert himself into the frothy, college-girl conversation, which was mostly gossip about older – but not too much older – colleagues where they worked. I think it’s time to go, said Marco sounding as if he was the one minding Sam instead of the other way around. She got up without a word – busily draining her drink as she stood – and followed him to the parking lot.

I shouldn’t drive, I am completely shitfaced, explained Sam. But how about I call you a cab.

She grabbed her phone and saw there was a voicemail from her brother.

Actually, she told Marco, it’s pretty easy to flag one down.

He gazed down the street. The hotel sign was blazing in the distance like a signal fire. It might be nice to walk, he said.

Oh they’d kill me if I let you walk home by yourself.

Then, Sam, said Marco. Please don’t let me walk home by myself.

They walked. Sam hobbled along for a moment, taking off her high heels, and went from being about even with Marco’s armpits to meeting him at mid-chest. Now she was at nipple height. Psychic text to Marie – hey Marie: nipple height.

I want to say, Marco told her once Sam had worked her shoes off. I appreciate your care these past couple of days. I’m sorry if I ever seemed distant at all.

Oh – distant, repeated Sam.

These junkets, continued Marco, they actually require a great deal of energy and concentration for me. I’m an introvert by nature. To be chauffeured around, speaking into microphones, getting up in front of crowds – it’s wearing. I feel I have to conserve energy at every spare moment.

Uh-huh, said Sam.

Marco turned his liquid eyes toward the looming hotel sign, which didn’t seem to be getting much bigger as they advanced. I’m saying if I was rude to you at any point. Or inconsiderate.

Sam waited. But Marco had stopped talking. He was just stopping there. He wasn’t even going to finish the sentence.

Rude, repeated Sam.

Or inconsiderate. Of your feelings.

Sam sounded a giddy little snort.

Then I apologize, finished Marco at last, frowning like invisible fingers were actually pulling at his face; like it was painful, but he was helpless not to do it.

Sam noticed they were walking along a police fence. She fell against it briefly just to feel the metal and hear it jangle.

There is insult, Marco, said Sam. Insult is no problem. I am insulted every day, by all sorts of people, because that is what it is to be short. That is what it is to be human, as you would say – ha ha. There is insult, and then of course there is full-scale attack.

Attack, repeated Marco.

I shouldn’t say full-scale attack, no. I should say covert attack. Which is secret and dirty and vicious. And cowardly.

You think I, said Marco.

Sam’s phone jumped in her purse, nuzzling away at her thigh through the leather.

It’s all couched, Sam shrieked, piercing the night with the chipmunky, short-woman’s voice she acquired whenever she became upset. She jerked a little when she shrieked, bouncing against the fence again and causing the three bottles of hot sauce, which she still hadn’t taken out of her purse, to clack together like bones. Now Marco looked like he wanted to throw his hands over his ears. You sit there, said Sam, on the other side of the glass, accusing me while pretending I’m not there.

Not at all, said Marco, blinking his great eyes as rapidly as someone with such big eyes was capable.

And I started reading your book. I know I was supposed to read it before now, but I didn’t. But I started just today, once I realized what you were doing. And I just can’t believe it Marco.

Something wet and warm fell into her cleavage. Sam knew it was her own saliva. She was drooling. She was drooling she was so angry.

Can’t believe what? Marco pleaded, sounding distant and terror-struck.

He’d never imagined, perhaps, that Sam would ever settle down to thinking long enough to put it all together. He never dreamed she’d hold her ground, let alone come rampaging at him through the fences in full revolt.

Dear Kenneth,

Perhaps you don’t remember me, and if not I will understand. It was a long time ago. More than half a century. Who could imagine time passing so quickly?

I lived in a beach house near Lund. We used to go out clamming together. Does that ring a bell now?

You rolled up your pants and I said you had ‘city feet,’ because you made such a fuss about walking over barnacles.

I saw your name in a column in The Vancouver Sun. It said you were retiring after a long and esteemed career at the bar. Not having had much of an esteemed career myself, at first I thought you had been a bartender. Then I saw you’d been on the Board of Weyerhaeuser Paper, which is a far cry from slinging drinks!

I read your name and I saw you clear as life, bounding through the heather. That was how I always pictured you, when you weren’t with me. Bounding up that mountain near where you came from in England, a book of poetry in your pocket. Then the memories flooded back, just like it was yesterday. The butter clams we dug up, and how a bucket of them went rotten on my porch and gave off an awful smell. How big the stars were that summer. Who could forget that? Us lying on the beach on my tartan blanket, a million stars overhead, so many of which turned out to have names. Beetlejuice was a name I remember – how about that! I still can’t believe any scientist in his right mind would name a star Beetlejuice.

I suppose I ought to fill you in on my present circumstances. When Frank retired we moved to Victoria. He died three years ago. He said he had a funny feeling in his left arm above the elbow. I said: “Funny ha-ha, or funny peculiar?” I didn’t want to be callous, but those were the last words I spoke to him. He sat in the shade of the house to do the crossword and had a heart attack.

Kenneth Farraday, I do not expect you to get this letter, let alone answer it. But if you do, I’ll let you know this. That summer was the happiest time of my life. I am at the Ogilvie Care Home for Seniors, if you ever find yourself ‘crossing the seas’ to Victoria.

Sincerely,

Priscilla King

Kenneth looked up from the letter. Outside his study window the lawn sloped to a border of rhododendrons with gnarled, rain-slick branches. His pride and joy. That was what Deirdre, his wife, called the rhododendrons: ‘Kenneth’s pride and joy,’ suggesting a simpleness in him, he supposed, as well as misplaced priorities. In June they flamed orange and scarlet, but now they were covered in sticky buds. Beyond the hedges and cedars of the British Properties he could see the suspension rigging of the Lions Gate Bridge, and beyond that, the city’s bony cliff faces.

He could hear Deirdre and his eldest daughter Jennifer having coffee in the kitchen. Jennifer had come to pick up their grandson after a morning with his grandmother, and the two women were murmuring about his likes and dislikes, his fussiness, his learning disability. Kenneth found his grandson difficult to be around, and blamed Jennifer for having cut his hair in bangs that emphasized his oddness.

“He’s peculiar enough,” Kenneth had muttered to Deirdre before Jennifer arrived, as the boy slurped milk out of his saucer. “Must he also have a peculiar haircut?”

Deirdre had shot him a look from under dark eyebrows, a look of frustration verging on fury. Verging on hatred. In menopause she had gotten used to speaking her mind with a blunt force that had shocked him, and the habit had not left her, a decade and a half later.

“He’s your grandson.” She moved her mouth hard. “Show some compassion.”

“It is with great compassion that I have pointed out his unfortunate haircut.” Kenneth had picked up his tray of tea and taken it to the study with the mail, leaving Deirdre with her chalkboard of tasks, machine messages from the Georgia Strait Alliance, and her simmering pot of oso buco.

I saw you, clear as life, bounding up that mountain.

He must have told her about Urra Moor, and the image had somehow lodged in her brain, a sliver he carried too, almost painful to draw out now: running up Urra Moor in the morning, birds scattering out of the gorse, a mule deer watching his scramble. How the blood had raced through his hands and arms and shoulders. He had found a stick and waved it, infatuated with the surge of blood through his body.

Funny that she – Priscilla King – had held onto this memory of a place she had never seen, while Deirdre did not even know the name Urra Moor, though he may have told her about it when he was courting her. He remembered Deirdre descending the stairs of the Vancouver Club in a lemon chiffon dress and gloves. Her father had been an important member. When Kenneth drove her home that night, he had parked at Spanish Banks and pulled up the hem of her dress, stiff as a ballerina’s costume, and touched her knee, then the birthmark high on her left thigh. Perhaps, after that bout of rumpled thrusting, they had lit cigarettes and he had told her about Urra Moor. But he doubted it.

Priscilla King’s handwriting was neatly formed, the s’s like small sails, the g’s and y’s curled neatly beneath each line.

I saw you clear as life.

How odd of her to write to him. The gambit of a lonely widow. Pathetic. And what book of poetry was she referring to? He had taken a couple of classes in English and Philosophy while getting his degree in forestry, before he hunkered down and focused on law. He couldn’t recall carrying a poetry book in his pocket. What a poseur he must have been!

But now he could not stay still. He put on his rubber boots, slid open the glass door and crossed the lawn to the border of rhododendron, where he snapped away twigs, then fetched a box of bonemeal from the shed, scattering handfuls among the moss.

Kenneth had met Priscilla King the summer he worked in Lund, which was the farthest town you could drive north to from Vancouver, along the coastal road: past Howe Sound, Gibson’s, Jarvis Inlet. By day Kenneth had worked in the bush with three other forestry students, Hungarian refugees who had escaped to British Columbia. Together, they measured stream heights, analysed sediment, bushwhacked trails. He remembered lying in his bunk in the afternoon listening to them play cards. The creosote smell of the cabin, the slap of cards as he traced a knot hole with his forefinger, thinking of Priscilla. It must have been a Sunday because he still remembered the anticipation in his stomach waiting for Frank to be gone, back onto his boat. Then Kenneth would wander down the beach, around three coves, to her cabin with its tarpaper roof. Always look for the warning: if she had hung a red towel on the porch rail, a rock weighing it down, then Frank was there.

She was Frank’s wife, a fisherman’s wife, another man’s woman, and this, for Kenneth, was like an aphrodisiac: to taste, to eat of her flesh, to dive into her, to beat himself against her bones, knowing she was another man’s wife, made him flush with desire as he lay on that bunk, surrounded by the smell of socks. When she moaned, he thought: I made her moan more than Frank. When she thrashed, he thought: Can Frank do that? He was stealing her, having his way illicitly. He even remembered whispering Frank’s wife as he kissed her, noticing how she flinched. That, too, was erotic, to hurt her ever so gently. He had been young: affecting any woman had felt exhilarating and dangerous.

Only a year before, he had left North Yorkshire. Mother and Father. Tea at the rectory. He had roamed across Canada feeling like a black sheep, the bad youngest son, though in fact he was the only son, with two doting sisters, Dodie and Kitty. He had a notion about himself, which had to do with pouring himself into the Canadian vastness, submerging himself beneath massive, breathing conifers. After one lice-infested season in a logging camp near Squamish, he had amended his plans, writing to his father for money, enrolling in the University of BC’s new forestry department. That was why he was in Lund with three Hungarians who drank dark beer and called to each other in their bunks at night, leaving Kenneth to speculate on the salty crack in Priscilla’s ass.

Even now (under the rhododendron’s waxy leaves) he remembered the fish scales on her tanned shoulders, tiny, reflective and sharp. The sand in her hair. She had been a kind of beach relic, aged, scaly, sandy. She had shown him places to lick – inner ear, belly button – and every time, because he was young and cocky, it had felt like conquest. Only once, after they had collected clams, he had lain on top of her on the tartan blanket, surprised to feel tears at the corners of his eyes. Gratitude? Relief? Pent up chemical exuberance?

He did not answer Priscilla King’s letter.

Instead he waited for a month, and then he lied to Deirdre, telling her he would be lunching with the Weyerhaeuser advisory committee, then going to the club. She would not be home until late; she had her Georgia Strait Alliance board meeting. Then Kenneth took the ferry to Victoria.

He found a seat by the window, placing his coat and scarf on the seat beside him. They passed the tip of a Gulf island, a red-painted government wharf. Sights like this must have been part of Priscilla’s life, for years and years, as she and Frank returned from fishing on his seiner. And now a voice began to intone, a rocking cadence beneath the engine’s hum:

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the Holy City of Byzantium.

And then, almost like his father’s voice, it was so fever sharp:

A man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing and louder sing
For every tatter in his mortal dress—

Where had these voices been? Gone, that was all.

Clamming: you place your socks inside your shoes and put them on a rock above the high-tide mark. She looks at your feet, which have never seen a day’s sun, and she says, “Time to toughen those tootsies, Kenneth.”

And you say: “Alliteration, Priscilla.”

She smiles radiantly, exposing an incisor inexpertly filled with silver.

“You don’t know what alliteration is, do you Priscilla?”

She walks down the beach, not caring.

You call: “Priscilla prances precisely over provocative pebbles,” and she turns and you know you will lie on top of her tonight, her in all her perplexity and supplicant moaning, her womanly needs.

Come on, Kenneth. I’m going to teach you to catch clams.

I thought they just lay in their shells, and you scooped them up.

After the clamming, he’d gone for a night swim then come up the beach, wrapped in a towel. She was on the blanket, crying. He threw himself down beside her.

“Prissy. You’re a mess.”

“Maybe I’ll kill myself,” she said, conversationally. “I have pills. The doctor gave them to me.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Maybe I am.” She lit a cigarette, blew smoke toward the scrim of stars. “You leave. You go to your university. I stay.”

He kissed the salty tears from her temple, feeling both sorry for her and distanced, in another land, walking among other people, discussing Plato and Locke, discussing Milton. After that summer, for years, if he saw a seiner crossing the Strait, the words Frank’s wife would sound in his head, a taste of sex in the setting sun – and that was it.

He stood outside the Ogilvie Care Home for Seniors, a concrete building of pallid mauve, like cold skin. The glass doors slid open as a nurse wheeled a man into the sunlight. The man clutched a cane, the end propped on the chair’s footrest. He wore leather slippers like Kenneth’s slippers at home. The doors closed, muffled by a thousand brushes hidden in the door sockets. From down by the seawall a child’s voice rose: I want a bagel, I want a bagel, I want a bagel! A seaplane scudded across the bay. Kenneth stepped on the automatic door rug, and the doors hissed open, withdrawing into their hairy keeps.

The lobby tiles had been buffed to a mirror-like brilliance, reflecting the penumbra of Kenneth’s white hair. By the window a cleaning woman patiently ministered to a collection of tropical plants, caressing a dampened paper towel over each broad leaf. Solitary figures in wheelchairs had been stranded here and there, deployed, Kenneth thought, like chess pieces. He shivered as he made his way to the check-in desk. The nurse looked up, visible pores on her nose. A crucifix dangled between her large breasts. Lebanese, she might be, or Spanish.

“Is there a Priscilla King here?”

“Who’s visiting?”

“A friend.”

The nurse glanced at his tweed coat, now over his arm, his sweater vest and tie, then typed on a key pad and checked the computer screen. “She’s had a fall. She’s upstairs now. Room 319. Come.” A single word, as though to a child. Kenneth followed her buttocks down the corridor to the elevator. They went up to the third floor, which had walls the colour of a pool, long-legged insects reflected in wobbly patterns through glass. He heard the sigh of recirculating air.

The nurse paused before a door, knocked on it briskly, and then pushed it open.

“Prissy, you’ve got a friend to see you.” She held the door. Kenneth entered.

Two women were parked in parallel beds. The woman in the far bed had frizzy hair around her ears, but the top of her head was bald like one of the three stooges. Moe? Curly? Kenneth had never known which stooge was which.

The woman in the second, closer, bed was Priscilla.

She shifted her head with a single heavy motion and fixed Kenneth with her gaze. She was over eighty – her hair had turned white, her face had weathered, lines deepening, cheeks sinking, sultry lips cracking – but she was still Priscilla, and he felt an urge to say, You haven’t changed, because she hadn’t, not really. The years on Frank’s boat had merely crystallized her, like a piece of candied ginger.

Kenneth advanced to the bedside. “Hello, Priscilla,” he said softly. “I’m Kenneth Farraday.”

“Who?” She squinted at him.

“It’s me. Kenneth. You wrote me a letter.”

She took out her hearing aid, gave him a complicit smile, flicked the plastic sound piece, and then replaced it in her ear. “I dropped the damned thing in the maple syrup this morning,” she said. “Now, come again: who did you say you were? Because I want you to know one thing, I pay my taxes.” She turned to her companion in the next bed to share this piece of drollery, but the other woman had fallen asleep. Priscilla went through the elaborate head motion, and again fixed her gaze on Kenneth. She had caught hold of the edge of the bed sheet.

“You wrote to me,” he said.

“Now why would I do that?”

He found himself blushing. “I knew you a long time ago. I’m Kenneth, Priscilla.”

A pause. A beat. He watched the message pass in through the syrup-covered hearing aid, along the crotchety synapses, and into the pupils of Priscilla’s eyes.

In the lobby a woman in a wheelchair raised a clawed hand to waylay him in his passage across the sea of tiles, but Kenneth kept moving, through the sliding doors, past the hideous fuchsia hanging in their baskets, along the seawall. Women laughed behind him. Two native women lay on the grass eating fried chicken from a paper bucket. Let them. What did he care?

He found a bench, sat, and looked at his watch. The back of his hand was drained of colour. He had two hours until his ferry left the harbour. If he went now, he could wash his hands in the bathroom of the Empress Hotel, then eat curry at the Bengal Lounge, before driving back to the ferry. But he stayed where he was.

After Kenneth had said his name, Priscilla had searched his face, just as though she were digging in the sand, scrabbling with her fingers, clawing to see one vestige, one aspect of the Kenneth she had known, before settling again on his pupils.

“You see. It’s me.”

She made a sound like youch, or ouch. “You can’t be.”

He answered before he could help himself, “Why can’t I be?”

“You’re nothing like him.”

“I’m older. We’re older.”

She looked from his face to his hands, then shook her head, angrily. “You remind me of an egg.” Oh, the look on her face as she said those words, a kind of practical malevolence, as though she knew exactly what she was doing. At that moment the nurse bustled in to give Priscilla a pill. She told Kenneth he could sit and he sat. When the nurse was gone, he spoke again.

“I got your letter. I thought I’d pay you a visit.”

“You did, did you?”

“You invited me.”

“I gave the letter to the nurse. I didn’t think she had mailed it.”

“Well, she did.”

Sunshine attached itself to the slats of the blinds, lighting each edge to brilliance. When he glanced back, Priscilla was looking at him with fascinated disgust. And why? What warranted this reaction? He smelled of aftershave, no doubt, and he was elderly (though not as old as she was), and he had on a sweater vest and a finely cut jacket, and a scarf, a hat with a small feather in the ribbon. He had assigned functions to certain pockets of his tweed coat. She said: “Do you miss him?”

“Who?”

“Kenneth.”

Now he was angry.

She said, “I miss him.”

“Who do you miss, Priscilla?”

She paused, and then gave him a crafty smirk. “Frank,” she said.

He sat for another minute, and then he told her he must go. As he opened the door, he heard her say to the woman in the next bed, “That’s a real cock-of-the block. A puffed up bird, that one.”

Kenneth looked out at the bay. Buildings rippled and broke in the water.

How long before Priscilla forgot that he had visited – before the boy, Kenneth, returned to her? The reader of poetry. The leaper of gorse bushes. A sleep, a wakening, and then he’d be back. In fact, Kenneth-the-boy might have slipped from the room a second before Kenneth arrived, and danced back the second he left – slipping through the side door as old cock-of-the-block took his hat and departed. Fury prickled Kenneth’s back. The old bird. The old, dried-up bird with her brittle bones, hoary toes, cracked skin. Why should she have such access to his boyhood self when Kenneth himself had nothing?

He got up and walked to the parking lot. No curry this time. He would drive to the ferry, and he would never cross the Strait again. Priscilla had had her revenge. The great karmic wheel of time (something Deirdre believed in) had spun round and now she, Priscilla, had come out on top. One part of her mind was addled as all get out, there was no question of that, but another part, using senility as a cover, had slithered across the floor, crafty as a snake, and lashed out.

Do you miss him?

His car went over the ramp with a thump, into the belly of the boat. Getting out of his car he found himself face to face with a teenage boy holding a dog on a leash. “Get that thing away from me,” Kenneth said. Upstairs he found a seat by the window. Children on the deck were playing at being blown back, coats like sails. Behind him a Punjabi family ate spiced rice and fried meat from plastic containers. Bracelets jingled as the mother took out food.

Outside one of the children had a red coat, the same shade as the towel that Priscilla used to set on the porch railing, a rock weighing it down. Priscilla who now lay in bed like a dried-up bird. He pictured red pubic hair beneath the hospital gown, a softened belly, bones so frail you could break them just by lying on top of her. And the look on her face – the spite and satisfaction as she had insulted him. He stood and walked down the aisle, past the ferry take-out restaurant. Something was moving in him. Something old. Something strange.

From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.

Oh Prissy, he almost moaned. You got me good. You got me by the short and curlies this time. But here he stopped short, making a woman behind him spill her coffee. She scowled as she passed him, but he shook his head, because it had come to him. The solution, that was all. The very solution to his problem.

He would return, that was the nub of it. Lying to Deirdre, lying and sneaking, driving to the ferry, crossing the Holy Sea on his mission. And such a mission it was. And who could say, who could slice it fine enough to say, if it was a mission of contrition or revenge? He would come back every month – that was all – just as Priscilla’s coddled brain made its final round of adjustments, closing out the strange old man, replacing him with the boy.

“It’s me,” he will say.

Hat. Overcoat. Gloves. Cravat. Umbrella.

“It’s me,” he will positively purr.

She will turn her head with that rolling gesture. “Who?” Mouth puckered in fear.

“Kenneth.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

Priscilla will edge back, grasping the blanket, ringing, if strength allows, for the nurse. (“Isn’t it sweet,” the nurse will say, “how he comes back each month to visit?”) Then he will meet Priscilla’s eyes, forcing her to see him, prying open her mind to expose those hard-to-get-at spots that hold the other Kenneth, sucking them out like buttery clam meat.