“That’s a hell of a letter to send to me!”

The loud voice over the phone – angry, male, tremolo – had woken me from an afternoon nap, and whoever it was had not announced himself. As I mumbled “Who’s this?” into the receiver, I realized the caller was – had to be – Scott Symons, thirty-eight-year old enfant terrible of the Toronto literary scene circa 1971. He was shouting at me from the Bracebridge monastery to which he habitually retreated. I had written Scott a letter he didn’t like. And now there would be a price to pay because as Scott said – and this was not the only time he is reported to have said it – “no-one fucks with Scott Symons and gets away with it!”

I had met Scott Symons four years earlier when a mutual interest in Allen Ginsberg brought us both to Toronto’s Convocation Hall in 1967, the year of the nation’s Centennial and the legendary Summer of Love. Canada’s 100th year as a nation had a particularly liberating effect on the young, who experienced it as not only a watershed in the country’s history and outlook, but as a long-awaited national coming of age, the occasion marked by Expo 67, an extravagant World’s Fair in Montreal.

A cultural breakthrough begun in the early sixties with the emergence of a new crop of artists, writers and publishing houses, coincided with the rise of the hippie movement and the emergence of a national leader of a new sort – Pierre Elliot Trudeau. By 1967, Canada’s Flower Children were being uprooted, shaken loose and scattered across the nation, and the streets and cafés of Toronto’s Yorkville bohemia had become fertile ground for artists and restive youth from across the country. I was a twenty-two-year-old college student with a handful of verses published in two little magazines. One was called One; it was a discreet, rather obscure American periodical for homosexuals. The other was the once-staid Victoria College literary journal Acta Victoriana. Acta was published from a one-room cellar with an inconspicuous entrance half-hidden by a well-manicured lawn. It was a cut above the average college lit mag, being both attractive and readable. The student staff were an astonishingly talented – and handsome – lot and included three future Governor General’s Award Winners: David Gilmour, Greg Hollingshead and John Ayre, future biographer of Vic’s preeminent intellectual Northrop Frye. Next door at the theatre space, Ayre’s playwright friend Graham Jackson was causing a frisson of excitement. With his luminous eyes, luxuriant curls and a slight limp that gave him a Byronic swagger, Graham turned heads just by entering a room.

While the student writers edited Acta, Vic’s faculty included Frye himself and poets Dennis Lee, David Knight, Francis Sparshott and Frye’s disciple and rumoured paramour (there were whispers of a secret passage behind the bookshelves) the imperious Jay MacPherson. In her quarters, Dr. MacPherson presided over her own chilly poetry salon, dispensing literary formulae like castor oil.

The poems I published at Vic seem unexceptionable now but struck Canadian readers of the day as unusually daring. With titles like “The Moth Boy” and “The Skull,” they were openly gay in a way that had never been seen in CanLit. In high school I had explored books of a certain tendency, from Plato to Stephen Spender, but in the sixties, same-sex relationships were just beginning to peek out of the Canadian literary closet. An early breakthrough had come in 1964 when the British house of Secker & Warburg published The Desert of the Heart, a novel by the American-born Jane Rule. The first home-grown products came the following year. Edward Lacey’s mordant poetry chapbook The Forms of Loss became the first openly gay book published in Canada. And John Herbert’s riveting prison drama Fortune and Men’s Eyes was workshopped at Stratford. Considered far too shocking for Canadians, it failed to find a sponsor until 1967 when it opened off-Broadway and became an instant hit.

The year before the much-anticipated Centennial saw the appearance of a brilliant second novel by Leonard Cohen, anointed disciple of the messianic Irving Layton, the man who brought sex to Canada. Beautiful Losers had an important gay character, the mysterious soap-collecting separatist referred to only as F, a “hopped-up” radical who dies “in a padded cell, his brain rotted from too much dirty sex.” No role models here, but the sixties were nevertheless bringing rapid changes to Canada. By 1967, the country Frederick Philip Grove thirty years before had called “a non-conductor for any sort of intellectual current” was suddenly effecting cultural electricity. As one observer put it, “everyone’s sexuality was bouncing off the walls.” Even so, Toronto the Good was not ready for the explosive succès de scandal that followed.

Combat Journal for Place d’Armes: A Personal Narrative was released by Canada’s leading publishing house McClelland & Stewart at the beginning of 1967 as its author’s Centennial gift to the nation. It was in no way a conventional novel, in that it reclaimed the original meaning of the word novel – new. This was something new. The authentic, insistent voice of a delirious Tory renegade who can’t stop writing diaries. The “personal narrative” of Place d’Armes is an oddly complex journalistic montage. The original hardcover version was ingeniously designed by master printer Stan Bevington to resemble an old-fashioned notebook, complete with attached prints, postcards and fold-out maps – a time-travelling jacket, with big pockets.

Place d’Armes relates the story of a married, well-connected Torontonian named Hugh Anderson, whose life parallels that of his creator. Anderson, an authoritarian elitist in a love-hate relationship with his own class, country and background, rages against a Canadian culture he sees as denying both its British roots and its capacity for sensuous, and sensual, self-expression. Anderson is an avid hater whose targets range from Methodism and William Lyon Mackenzie to the new flag, Expo 67 and various passers-by on the street whose aesthetic sensibilities he longs to whip – literally – into shape.

Hugh Anderson’s escape from an emasculated culture he blames for having blocked, perhaps blighted, his power to love involves immersing himself in the life of Montreal’s historic Place d’Armes, and having sex with the young hustlers he meets there who “touch him in a way no-one has ever touched him in his own community,” presumably because he never made it down Yonge Street as far as the St. Charles Tavern. While recording this pilgrimage in his diary, Anderson is also at work on a novel about a character called Alexander, who is yet another authorial double. Or triple. Unusually for so personal a novelist, Symons writes always in the third person. His fictionalized journals involve a series of near-identical alter egos, each furiously writing about the next. One of them has a Governor General’s Award.

A brief excerpt from Combat Journal for Place d’Armes:

The gift of insite. That is my battle in La Place. The right to remain open… to see… to have insite. I must incite insite. And if it is necessary to incite homosexation to propitiate my long rejected insite, then it must be done. … If I cannot, then I am dead. But if I do I risk my sanity!…

Only this diary keeps me firmly in 3-D… when I am in flight from the disembodiment of 2-D or in pursuit of 4-D… 4-D – my unknown birthright, constrained into 3-D, and finally dissolved by 2-D (the proxy plenitude of the positivist priests… professorial, psychiatrical, professions).

It involves three different men, moralities, societies … visions. Each in irreparable conflict.

In 4-D body is imbedded… a world of love.

In 3-D body is detached… world of common-sense.

In 2-D body is dissolved… world of non-sense.

And the Canadian is exposed in a unique immediacy to all three at once. His American heritage is 2-D (the American dream); his British heritage is 3-D (Parliamentarian’s Club); his French-Catholic heritage is 4-D (Peasant Baroque!)… .

I become either Protean, or insane!

Though the “Personal Narrative” of Place d’Armes does include the tangled thread of a plot, its strength is in its spirited, all-out manhandling of the language. Rendered in five different typefaces, it is both playful and enraged (or self-indulgent, depending on your point of view), often overwrought, and sprinkled with odd barbarisms (“psychiatrical,” “parasite” as a verb), useful coinages (“homosentient”) and delicious McLuhanish puns like “the hermaphrobike,” who could well be a relative of the suicidal Danish Vibrator in Cohen’s Beautiful Losers. Its trajectory (Scott’s language, I mean, not the Danish Vibrator, who merely threw himself into the sea) occasionally soars heroically, only to turn abruptly on itself for yet another vitriolic but pointless – because endlessly repeated – confrontation with Canada, and with the reader. “Exposé 67.”

The book is full of abusive tantrums; as Mencken sagely observed, “the public likes to read abuse.” Symons harangues the reader in a fictional language suggestive of a series of experimental, sometimes discordant jazz riffs, many of which elide and mutate and instead of resolving, feverishly repeat, eventually disintegrating, or collapsing into themselves. The voice is strictly solo, but we are treated to some dazzling and spirited improvisations throughout the gig. It is Scott Symons’ – and Hugh Anderson’s – wild verbal probes that provide inspired comic relief to Place d’Armes, without which it would be intolerable, and probably unreadable.

Scott Symons and his protagonist were not the first Anglo-Saxons to slough off their past, heal their psychic wounds and warm their cockles by consorting with prostitutes in less Protestant climes. But Symons, award-winning journalist, Rosedale elitist, scion of the establishment, delivered his message from the sexual – and political – front lines in nearby French Canada. It was brave, personal, “homosentient,” and enormously angry, and English Canada was quite shaken by it. The fact that Symons was no stray dog but “the pedigreed son of a Rosedale bitch” made his barking-mad dash for freedom all the more unlikely, and unseemly. And shocking.

The dichotomy between Scott’s attitude and his background – and his ambivalence about both – were highlighted by the pair of contrasting author’s photos on the paperback edition of Place d’Armes. On the front cover Scott is dressed with casual ease in a duffle-coat and sneakers. On the back, a formal portrait by Ashley and Crippen has him brooding with hand on brow, wearing a cravat. These images were reflected by two matching, or rather unmatching, descriptive blurbs, one printed above the other. The first could only have been written by Scott, or someone channelling him: it emphasizes the Combat Journal as an all-out “assault” on its “target” – an urban environment in which nothing is what it purports to be. It concludes:

As (Hugh Anderson) discovers that these buildings are people, places, himself, multidimensioned, he loses his mind, becomes a figment of the imagination of La Place d’Armes, keeps encountering predatorial denizens, Blondebeestes, Royal Canadian Commissars, is saved only by an enactment which destroys his male maidenhead forever and relentlessly resurrected arraigns all Montreal before him – whip-bitch, federaste [Federaste or f deraste, a conflation of “f deraliste” and “p d raste,” was a coinage of Quebec separatists alluding to the alleged sexual proclivities of their federalist opponents, particularly Pierre Elliot Trudeau.], Exposé 67 – invulnerable accusation, then turns and plunges into La Place to complete his mission by giving Body and Blood.

Whew! And that was just the blurb!

This was Symons in full bandolier-bedecked combat fatigues. And there was more to come. Underneath, prominently placed but in smaller type, was set out a different set of credentials. A sober recital that could have been cribbed from Who’s Who paraded the insurgent’s august ancestors, his degrees from Cambridge and the Sorbonne, his National Newspaper Award, his prestigious curatorial positions, his visiting professorship, his consultancy at the Smithsonian. Curiously, no mention of that old standby of the respectable author: the wife. But clearly, Scott Symons wanted it known that he was not just any old rebel off the street, or la Place. He was somebody.

Specifically, he was the maternal grandson of the legendary William Perkins Bull, the wealthy Toronto eccentric known as “the Duke of Rosedale.” Bull, an oil and lumber baron, was an historian, naturalist and philanthropist, adviser to Prime Ministers Laurier and Borden, prominent Freemason, and personal attorney of department store magnate Timothy Eaton. He published an array of books said to have been written largely by his stable of researchers. His daughter, Scott’s mother, was known in Rosedale as “the Pink Lady,” not for her politics which were quite conventional, but for the powerful cocktails she served her guests.

Despite his establishment background, Symons proclaimed, “My heart is Quebecois!” Yet his novelistic view of his Montreal sexual experiences is as deeply ambiguous as the rest of his feelings. Hugh Anderson is seen as “hell-bent for heaven… sainting for sinhood…. To see La Place, to write my novel, to come alive, again, I must fall, utterly. To share my love, I must humiliate me… must grovel. Stand waist deep in the shit… and then sing.” This tormented view of sex, sin and sanctity is more Baudelaire/Genet than Whitman/Carpenter. The English poet Kenneth Hopkins quipped that Scott was “waist deep in the shit, crying Shit!”

Combat Journal for Place d’Armes records a series of encounters that often seem more martial, or more ceremonial, than amatory. The metaphor of the War of the Sexes is a common, indeed ancient one in heterosexual lore, but is surprisingly rare in gay discourse; there are almost no fights in gay bars. But Place d’Armes was precursor to a number of works published during the Gay Liberation period of the seventies. The Wild Boys, William Burroughs’ paean to post-pubescent anarchy, appeared in 1971, and John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw in 1977. The young men in The Wild Boys are runaways and castaways who employ bizarre weapons and whom society tries, and fails, to destroy; the young men in The Sexual Outlaw are depicted as urban front-line fighters, shock troops, in a sexual guerilla war against their own society. Their bodies are their weapons. The New York gay writer George Whitmore suggested the point of engaging in extreme sex was to be seen to do it “without flinching,” i.e. sex as defiance, a courageous proof of one’s masculinity.

Whitmore’s colleague Edmund White suggested that gay men should regard their venereal diseases as badges of honour, like combat medals in a revolutionary sexual war. Place d’Armes presented the first of a rising generation not of activists necessarily, but of combative sexual outlaws. What gave rise to them? John Rechy answered with one word: “Rage.”

At any rate, it seems evident the outraged, enraged and outrageous chief combat journalist of Place d’Armes may well be suffering from acute battle fatigue, not to say shell shock. He seems a man in precarious psychological equilibrium, perhaps in imminent danger of mental collapse. How the author is doing is less certain.

Canadian reviewers recognized the novel’s crotchety uniqueness, some taking a not unsympathetic view of its challenge to frosty, thawing Upper Canadian puritanism. But one particular review was to become notorious, and to help make Scott notorious: Robert Fulford’s column in the Toronto Star was entitled (presumably by a sub-editor) “A monster from Toronto.” It was judicious, insightful, and so devastating that Scott was still smarting from it over three decades later and an ocean away.

Fulford’s piece began: “The hero of Scott Symons’ first novel, Place d’Armes may well be the most repellent single figure in the recent history of Canadian writing.” Fulford describes Hugh Anderson as “a monster of snobbishness still wedded to an aesthetic view of life that can be called – depending on the degree of your benevolence – either aristocratic or fascist.” Symons, Fulford explains, is “writing a novel about a man who is writing a novel about a man who is writing a novel,” each of the novelists being more like Symons than the last. “This is nothing if not ingenious, and it works, but halfway through the book it grows tiresome.”

The column went on to describe the book as overwritten as well as overproduced, revealing “more ambition than talent…. The author makes each of his points half a dozen times, and they do not improve through repetition.” Place d’Armes was characterized as “a kind of higher journalism,” (This was the heyday of Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson). “When it departs from this, – when it tries to develop human insights, or tries to convey passion – it fails badly. The hero’s problem is that he cannot love; the author’s problem is that he can write neither with nor about love.”

Symons’ – and much of the reading public’s – reaction to the Star’s review focussed on its title. It was the fictional Hugh Anderson, of course, not his creator, who had been accused specifically of loveless monstrosity. But the title stuck. The Monster from Toronto was born. Symons was understandably upset, forgetting in his anger that 1) “All publicity is good publicity,” and 2) “If you dish it out, you should be able to take it.”

Fulford’s column was hardly the first time a Canadian author had been subjected to a journalistic savaging of his or her fictional creation. Three years previously, George Robertson had written in the pages of Canadian Literature that the central character of Margaret Laurence’s now-classic The Stone Angel, was “as unpleasant a heroine as one is likely to meet… proud, bitter, and vengeful… bloated… blind and selfish.” (George Robertson, “An Artist’s Progress,” Canadian Literature No. 21, Summer 1964.) Apparently no umbrage was taken on that occasion as Mrs. Laurence did not assume the characterization was necessarily aimed at her. Symons felt no such distance from his fictional clones. Thus Fulford’s verdict was understandably viewed as an unwarranted personal denunciation.

When I first met Scott, the furor over his debut novel was still breaking. Place d’Armes had been published in January. In February, the University College Literary & Athletic Society at the University of Toronto sponsored a controversial “psychedelic festival” called Perception ’67. This encompassed a variety of events including a series of visionary (or disorienting) “Mind Excursion Rooms” and a Saturday night “Happening” at Convocation Hall featuring the music group The Fugs and, as an opening act, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who read poems and chanted Buddhist hymns. Psychedelic guru Dr. Timothy Leary had also been invited but the federal government had barred him from entering the country, citing a conviction for “drug trafficking” (i.e. transporting marijuana across state lines). At the last minute, the University College Principal, Douglas LePan, announced a strict ban from all college properties of “users or advocates of the drug LSD.” “Recently,” Principal LePan explained, “a far from negligible number of our students had psychic breakdowns and had to withdraw and enter psychiatric wards.” Faced with such disturbing phenomena, LePan’s administrative instinct was to suppress, not encourage, discussion. LePan, an author and former diplomat, had been an aide to Lester Pearson. His war novel The Deserter scandalously won the 1964 Governor General’s Award over The Stone Angel. (LePan’s fear of bad publicity was seen in a new light when he came out of the closet in 1990 at the age of seventy-six.)

Even without Leary or an official panel on drugs, the mid-winter Happening was a success, with a number of Toronto luminaries in attendance, including Marshall McLuhan sporting a “third eye” in the form of a light-refracting disc strapped to his forehead. I didn’t see McLuhan but while engrossed in listening to Ginsberg, I became aware that the man I was staring at, sitting directly across the aisle from me, was someone I recognized as the author of a novel I had just read. I had picked up a copy of Combat Journal for Place d’Armes soon after it appeared, and admired its inventive language and unprecedented audacity. After the reading, I introduced myself, had a brief conversation with the author, and wandered off home to think about Ginsberg and Symons. Soon afterwards, Scott left the country in an exodus that was to become notorious.

Before Place d’Armes changed everything, Scott Symons was known in both English and French Canada as a prescient, award-winning journalist. His series – in French – forecasting the Quiet Revolution had won the National Newspaper Award. He was a respectably married man with close ties to the academic world, a pious Anglican who retreated from time to time to a provincial monastery to engage in fervent prayer. Those who knew him on a personal level frequently found him sharp, abrasive, and unpredictable – decidedly not a gentleman or what passed for gentleman among those Scott called (reverently, in a chat with the Queen Mother) “Your Majesty’s Royal Americans.” He was still a celebrated and eminently respectable figure when he received an invitation to speak to the students of a small private school near Bracebridge, Ontario. It was there that he met the strikingly handsome, seventeen-year-old John McConnell, the bright, alienated son of a prominent Toronto banker. This was the beginning of the odyssey frequently described since as “running away to Mexico with a teenage boy” – a notorious tandem flight that in fact never occurred. Later conversations with both Scott and John gave a more accurate, though no less extraordinary, story.

Scott was born on July 13, 1933. After graduating from Trinity College at the University of Toronto, he won a Commonwealth Fellowship to King’s College, Cambridge. From there he went to the Sorbonne. The woman he married at the age of twenty-five was, he often reminded people, the granddaughter of a leading bank president. The marriage had gotten off to a rocky start when Scott’s rudely provocative speech disrupted his own wedding, but it lasted for ten years and produced a son, born in Paris while Scott was working in the wine trade.

“So you could have been a French vintner, Scott,” I once remarked.

“Maybe I should have been. But while I was in France I met Julien Green.”

Julien Green was an American-born writer who lived in France and wrote in French. It was over dinner with Green and his younger lover (whom he later adopted) novelist Eric Jourdan, that Scott’s closet doors first became seriously unhinged. Green, as Scott put it, “introduced me to my gay factor” – not through any erotic suggestion but simply by his eyes going “right through me.” Photos of Green show him as an attractive man with a good-humoured smile. But Scott experienced Green’s gaze rather as E.M. Forster experienced a friendly pat on the bum delivered by the openly gay George Merrill at the cottage he shared with Whitman’s disciple Edward Carpenter. “It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas,” Forster recalled, “without involving any thought.” The frisson from that touch was the genesis of Forster’s classic gay novel Maurice.

Julien Green’s searching gaze apparently opened up long dormant feelings in Scott. According to Charles Taylor’s masterly essay in Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern, Scott, while a young student at Trinity College Schools in Port Hope, had contracted an affair with another boy – an affair that Scott broke off when, believing that “his body and his desires were dirty,” he “felt an overwhelming inner veto.” Later, Taylor wrote, “he would blame the school, his family and his society for compelling him to suppress his love.” Scott apparently came to see this repudiation as “decisive, and crippling.” He remained, in his own words, an “eternal thirteen; eternally the boy reaching out to touch but never being allowed to do so… except as Mommy and Authority permitted.” The penetrating look of a French novelist across a Parisian dining table had resurrected these awkward suppressed memories. Nevertheless, Scott and his young wife returned to Canada to live at her wealthy family’s Ontario farm, which they purchased with money from Symons’ family. And Scott wrote his acclaimed series of articles for La Presse on the coming political and social upheaval in Quebec.

“I was saying that Canada was going to explode,” Scott told me. “There was going to be a revolution. Trudeau and I became good friends through that. He was editing Cité Libre at the time…. We had a real symbiotic relationship that we were both aware had a sexual component. We were both aware that the other was homosentient. In those days, no-one said anything about homosexuality. Many of the guys at La Presse were gay but you certainly didn’t walk up to them and announce it. Of course I was married at the time.”

Scott’s establishment connections and a wide and discerning knowledge of Canadian antiques paved the way for him to become Curator of Canadiana at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, one of a number of positions from which he was dismissed for causing too many problems. About the same time, he told his wife about his growing attraction to men. “She said if you want to do that, you should do it.” So he left her in Ontario and headed for Montreal.

Those trips, and his voluminous journals, were, Scott said, his way of knowing himself and expressing himself. “Because you couldn’t talk about anything in my culture in those days. You couldn’t even talk about heterosexuality. Though the French Canadians were quite a bit looser than we were. But you couldn’t announce that you were into cocksucking. It would have ended everything. But I published Place d’Armes as my gift to Canada for the Centennial. And that led to the breakup of my marriage. We had no intention of separating. We adored each other,” he insisted. “But her parents were so nosey and determined to run her life. Her mother was noted for being a cruel woman.”

I reminded him that he had been having an affair with the young John McConnell. He recalled meeting John at Muskoka Lakes College, a private school “for kids whose parents couldn’t figure out what to do with them. They were a wealthy family. His father ran (Ontario Premier) John Robarts’ ad campaigns. I was on a retreat at the monastery in Bracebridge and was invited to give a talk at the school. After the talk, there was this beautiful boy with flaming red hair, standing in the hall, waiting for me.”

Though only seventeen at the time, John was tall and well-built and looked like a lumberjack, which he later briefly became.

“What did you say to him?” I asked.

“Every instinct told me he was profound trouble. I said ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’”

Scott’s answer surprised me. I too had met a beautiful, extraordinary seventeen year old – in a Yorkville sidewalk café – and had fallen in love with him. Law or no law, it would never have occurred to me to tell Richard Phelan “I don’t want to talk to you.” Scott had evidently been conflicted in ways that were foreign to me. But teenage boys can be willful, and John was not about to be brushed off so easily.

“He had set his sights on me,” said Scott, “and he was going to get me. But his parents sent him to a gilded cage in Nassau. I went to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico where I was hanging out with a group of painters including York Wilson and Leonard Brooks. He got a message to me. And I sent him a telegram saying ‘Take up your cock and walk.’ I remember sitting in the courtyard garden and there he was.”

John later confirmed Scott’s recollection. So, all later sensational accounts to the contrary, Scott Symons never did “run away to Mexico with a seventeen year old.” Nonetheless, John’s well-connected father set the police of three countries on the pair, posting a hefty reward for their arrest. When John heard about this, he contacted his sister, asking her to warn their parents that he would kill himself if Scott was jailed. Word soon came back that the reward had been rescinded and that John could pick up his passport at the Canadian embassy. The couple then re-entered Canada and fled “to grizzly country” on the Northern B.C. coast. After various adventures and misadventures there, including a stint at lumberjacking, they resurfaced in Toronto in 1970, where I ran into Scott again.

In the previous year, my long-standing efforts to start a gay organization at the University of Toronto had finally paid off. Whereas before, no-one had dared to come out of the closet, now in the wake of the Stonewall riots in New York and the Trudeau-sponsored decriminalization at home, the situation had suddenly changed. In November of 1969, the first official meeting of the University of Toronto Homophile Association launched what would become the Canadian Gay Liberation movement. When I learned that Canada’s best-known gay author was back in town and staying at the Norman Elder Museum and Gallery in Yorkville, I lost no time in dropping by to ask him to speak to the new group.

By then, Scott’s wife, considering herself abandoned, had divorced him, forbidden him ever to see his son again, and sold his property at auction. When I commiserated with Scott about his divorce, he placed the blame squarely upon his in-laws, seeing them as representing an implacably hostile Rosedale establishment of bland, powerful eunuchs and their cruel, unavailable wives. The fact that he had left his wife to live in distant parts with a teenaged lover did not seem to Scott to be grounds for divorce. “The vile cow, doesn’t she know how much I love her?”

By my next encounter with Scott, both of us had new books making their way to the store shelves. My poems in Acta had been spotted by Dennis Lee, who was about to launch a new publishing company, House of Anansi, with the novelist Dave Godfrey. Dennis asked me for a manuscript, and Anansi published Year of the Quiet Sun late in 1969. About the same time, Scott published his second book, an extraordinary production originally called The Smugly Fucklings, but after much persuasion released under the more sober title of Civic Square.

At 848 pages, Civic Square: An Original Manuscript by Scott Symons made Combat Journal for Place d’Armes seem concise and coherent. Neither Scott nor his publisher Jack McClelland had relished the daunting task of cutting the idiosyncratic – and ever-expanding – manuscript, and it was recognized that, uncut, it would be, as editor John Robert Colombo later put it, “unmarketable.” Scott gave his publishers the same permission he gave the surgeon who circumcised his son: “Just take a little bit.” The work was eventually issued in a small edition as a gestetnered typescript of unbound sheets stacked in a large, powder-blue box that simulated the trademark “Birks boxes” of the fashionable Toronto retailers. Each copy of the book was personalized by Scott with distinctive coloured glyphs of fiery, flaming phalli. It remains a controversial work to this day, having been judged (by Patrick Watson) as “extremely skilful” and (by Dennis Lee) as “very badly written.”

When I arrived at Norm Elder’s Yorkville home and private museum, Scott was sitting on the single bed in his room. He made a gentlemanly pass at me, which I deflected. Scott concluded I must find him “intimidating;” as it happened, I just didn’t fancy him. When I moved the conversation to the subject of speaking engagements, Scott said he would be happy to speak to the UTHA and a date was set. We chatted a little about his background, his and his wife’s ancestors, and his boyhood at Trinity College Schools, which, knowing my English background, he informed me was “the Canadian Eton.”

“I went to Beal,” I said, with a certain emphasis. Scott looked at me in silence. Obviously he had never heard of Beal, which was not surprising as it was an undistinguished Ilford grammar school. He shifted his buttocks and emitted a loud and pungent fart and we sat silently, savouring the moment. Scott seemed quite at ease in Norman’s quarters, though he later confided that he “didn’t sleep comfortably” there because of the pet boa constrictors Norm kept down the hall.

Another young writer who visited Scott around that time was the Lancashire poet Michael Higgins, who was then living in Toronto. When he dropped in on Scott’s rooms, Michael was carrying a guidebook to the city of York which he showed Scott, seeing it as an alien but comparable locale to the Place d’Armes. “He snarled with contempt,” Michael recalled, “and (literally) threw the book at me, hitting my arm, and saying something along the lines of ‘I’ve been there before, one doesn’t need this!’” Michael left thinking Scott to be uncouth as well as over-rated. He never finished reading Place d’Armes.

Other meetings were more successful. Scott enjoyed brief liaisons with several UTHA members. The young gay activist Michael Pearl told Scott, after an erotic encounter, “You’re a cute old number!” Scott met more formally with our little gay organization more than once in the months that followed, sometimes accompanied by John McConnell. He spoke about their relationship, and about modern civilization’s rising competence and declining compassion. He felt Canada was an anaphrodisiac society with a crippling fear of tenderness. He found at the UTHA “a level of intimacy and honesty in discussion,” but felt that more should be said about “the nature of a good and deep and extended relationship between two guys – all the difficulties of being a homosentient person in this society.” He told the group how both he and John had come from wealthy Toronto homes and, “desperate for love and affection, had to knock down just about every barrier that exists in the Protestant society book to reach out and touch each other.” A favourite topic was “the amount of hate” existing not only in society in general but specifically in “the failure to touch” existing in the middle class marriage: what he called “the hate space.”

Scott celebrated “the guerilla warfare of the new sensibility,” comparing himself to Che Guevara, an insurgent bedecked with explosives. He found much to enjoy in the emerging gay world, but was shocked by the amount of hate he found there. What the gay world had not done successfully, he felt, was putting men “in touch with each other on a long-term basis very intimately very relaxedly.” He found – and I saw this as quite perceptive – that in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships, “you (often) turn onto somebody, and then when he or she gets close to you, cut him or her off. That was the control system.” Scott called this “the negative orgasm cycle.” He and John, he told us, were trying to overcome this unhappy situation, and it was “a long, hard trip… the big battle. And it’s a battle the whole of our society is in.”

By that point, Scott and John had spent some time living in a remote part of Newfoundland, thanks to the first of a series of cash subsidies organized by Scott’s friend and patron Charles Taylor, writer son of the millionaire horse breeder E.P. Taylor. (At one UTHA get-together Scott had proudly displayed on a tabletop a small stack of high-denomination banknotes, spread into a fan like a hand of playing cards.) The couple had been welcomed by the rural islanders and the motherly Ma Snook. Scott came to admire the locals’ “quick responses” and “eyes that look straight into you, as if probing your beauty… constantly alert and aware… fresh and clean inside themselves, like the sea on a calm sunny day.” And, he found, they were men and women “honest about their sex. There is none of the morbid division between their desires and their values… so true on the mainland…. They celebrate in their flesh, and it is beautiful.” Nevertheless, at least one woman-friend there was offended at what she presumed was Scott’s “seduction of a gracious, inexperienced young boy.” In fact, John had been sexually active with men for over a year prior to their meeting and had been earnestly looking for an older male partner.

At the UTHA, Scott and John both spoke eloquently, and Scott quickly began to attract a personal following from among the (mostly male) members. He readily agreed to be a speaker at one of the series of public lectures the Association was sponsoring on campus. So it was that on March 25, 1971, in the university’s Medical Auditorium, Scott gave a presentation advertised under the title “Canada, Orgasm and Us.”

The lecture drew a considerable crowd. Scott talked of his stay in “a falling down goat house about a hundred miles up the coast” from Vancouver, and his life in Newfoundland, “tougher in its climate… it has the wonderful addition of a people and a culture four centuries old.” He delighted the audience by declaiming the “Cocks are beautiful…. Cocks are Holy Rood” passage from the beginning of Civic Square. At one point, departing from his scripted remarks, he began to read a love letter, apparently delivered that very morning from John, who was still back in Trout River, Newfoundland. Scott then removed from the same envelope a nude photo of John which he held aloft and proceeded to circulate around the auditorium. As the lecture continued, the picture of the handsome, naked young man was passed, somewhat nervously, from hand to hand. I was sitting toward the front of the auditorium, on the aisle, and eventually the photo reached me, slightly soiled from having been dropped on the floor. The seats in front of me were empty, everyone was paying attention to Scott, and seeing no outstretched hand, I pocketed the photo to return it after the lecture. As it happened, Scott left quickly with a sizable entourage before I could reach him.

Though radical in some things, I was conservative in others. I had enjoyed hearing of Allen Ginsberg’s public disrobings (on being asked “What do you mean by naked?” he had taken his clothes off to demonstrate) but it seemed to me that nude photographs of one’s lover should be for private viewing or shared with a few close friends. Passing them through hundreds of sweaty fingers in a public stadium did not strike me as a great idea; displaying one’s own nakedness in public is one thing, displaying someone else’s, a quite different matter. I doubted it would help Scott’s reputation, and if he was going to be the mutinous messiah of the new Canadian gay movement, as was beginning to appear likely, I felt there might well be dangers ahead if he didn’t rethink this particular tactic.

As Scott had left for his monastery the morning after the lecture, I wrote him a brief letter suggesting he might want to rethink his approach. Before mailing the note, I thought I should seek a second opinion. I showed it to Paul Pearce, a level-headed member of the UTHA whose judgement I trusted. As he was equally skeptical of Scott’s public manner, the letter went in the post the next day, with John’s photo enclosed. A couple of days later, I awoke to Scott’s challenging voice from the cloister.

One of the duties and prerogatives of friendship is surely to warn of possible dangers ahead, to restrain, to urge caution and reflection. Just in case. This can cause problems, and Scott was not the first, or the last, acquaintance to excommunicate me. My letter on that occasion, if not impertinent, was certainly presumptuous, in that it was a letter that only a friend should write. I had presumed friendship where none really existed, and my little message must have sounded self-righteous, censorious, annoying. As his reaction to The Star’s review had shown, Scott was easily rattled when not taken at his own valuation.

By this point, Richard Phelan, the schoolboy I had met during the Summer of Love four years earlier was now a world-travelling student of Buddhism. He had returned to Toronto for a stretch and he and I were hanging out together, collaborating on a book to be illustrated with his drawings. Richard had met both Scott and John and though he may not have been at the “Orgasm” lecture, he certainly had heard about it. Richard was one of those people who never speak ill of anyone, and his only remark on the lecture was “There’s a difference between a ballet and a striptease!” But he could tell that Scott’s phone call had upset me more than I let on, and once Scott was back in town from his retreat, Rick arranged to visit Scott to see if he could smooth things over.

According to Rick, Scott had been in no mood for tea and tête à tête, pressing instead for a more carnal engagement, “All he wanted to do was have sex with me,” Richard said with a shrug and a smile. When he demurred, he was accused of having “forgotten how to celebrate,” which was Scott’s word for fuck. “You’ve been in the city too long!” Scott scolded, unaware of Rick’s recent wanderings in the far-flung holy places. Realizing his cause was hopeless, Richard gracefully retreated. And that was that. Scott seems never again to have talked to a gay group or associated himself with a gay cause. His brief career as a public spokesman for Gay Lib was over. The next time Scott and I spoke, well over thirty years had passed, Richard was dead, and Scott had returned from his long, self-imposed exile for the last time.

John left Scott in the summer of 1972, shortly after the publication of Heritage, Scott’s learned, idiosyncratic “furniture novel” (Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture, McClelland & Stewart, 1971). “We were in a sixteen foot trailer near Trout River Pond,” he told me years later. John, who had dropped out of Grade Twelve, had expressed his desire to get a university education. “Working in lumber camps and fisheries was fine for my youth but wouldn’t work for me as I aged. I needed to go back and complete my schooling and Scott could not abide that. He wanted me forever young and all for himself – including all of my future.” Also complicating things was John’s growing interest in homoerotic sadomasochism. John’s interests, both erotic and educational, Scott interpreted as rejection, and he responded with a series of verbal assaults.

“When I told Scott I was going to leave him,” John wrote, “he exploded into a rant and wouldn’t calm down. I told him I was going for a walk.” Scott followed John along the lakefront, tackled him, and attacked him, leaving him with a black eye. At that point, John realized he wanted to leave Scott but feared that “if I didn’t hold open the possibility of living together he would become violent again.” With talk of a trial separation, Scott left for Mexico, and the prospect of renewing his relationship with a woman both he and John had been involved with on a previous trip. “When Scott arrived in Mexico he found that the woman had already moved in with another man. That stirred him to make overtures about getting back together with me.”

Scott attributed John’s diminishing erotic interest to the pernicious influence of the “squares and smuglies,” John told me. “Nothing to do with his big belly.” John also began expressing an interest in exploring heterosexual relationships, partly as a way of blocking the possibility of Scott’s return. “I wanted to distance myself from him far enough,” he recalled, “to make impossible the resumption of our erotic relationship. Going straight served that function.” Scott, of course, saw the breakup in a different light, claiming that John had been attempting to kill him by murdering their love. He interpreted John’s interests not as the natural feelings and ambitions of an intelligent young man but instead as treachery and attempted homicide. He was persuaded to see a psychiatrist, who told him John was trying to exorcise his own demons (as it were) by projecting them onto Scott. In willing Scott’s death, he was absolving himself of the need to commit suicide; he had been exercising a kind of “psychic voodoo.” Scott’s journals of this period contain many mentions of psychic voodoo, black magic and sadomasochism. He was deeply troubled about his future – and his reputation. “I can’t stop him,” he wrote in his journal. “And a whole nation will applaud his honesty, his decency, and pay him well….”

After his split with Scott, I continued to see John from time to time until he graduated and left the country. I remember visiting him in his small, cozy apartment near High Park when he was a university student. He told me Scott had sometimes come to see him. On one occasion, after Scott had left, John noticed he had lifted a stack of photos of their time together. Recalling their final meeting, John remembered Scott had showed up “in full leather regalia, harness, boots, leather jacket and Master’s cap.” They talked briefly and were soon in bed together. Scott took his belt to John. Then, with John still naked on the bed, “Scott abruptly buckled up, suddenly exiting and leaving the apartment door wide open, screaming ‘Evil! Evil! Evil!’ as he strode down the hall.” John never saw Scott again. He started a new life in California, where he became a therapist and a prominent member of the gay leather community.

Scott now saw himself as “a murdered man.” By 1973, he had left Canada, recapitulating an earlier stay in Morocco by settling in a well-appointed compound in Essaouira, where he lived for most of the next three decades, leaving the hefty manuscript of his three-part novel Helmet of Flesh with Dennis Lee, who spent the next fourteen years shaping it into publishable form. Essaouira seems to have been a favourite spot for Canadian (and other) expatriates. Richard Phelan wrote to me from there in 1972, and in ’78, Edward Lacey was arrested for smoking hash in one of the local cafés, jailed for two months, and deported to Spain – an incident Scott regretted not knowing about until much later.

In 1977, Charles Taylor published his book Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern, a collection of sympathetic biographical sketches of Scott and five others who “followed a lonely path in search of a more sustaining vision than was offered by… Canadian society,” exploring other cultures and “traditions which modern Canada seeks to denigrate.” Taylor quotes Scott’s belief that “the Canadian Identity is evil. I am dedicated to the total destruction of the Canadian state.” What he anticipated as a replacement is not recorded.

That year, Scott published a lengthy article in a Canadian literary journal entitled “The Canadian Bestiary: Ongoing Literary Depravity” (West Coast Review, Vol. 11, No. 3). It is an extended personal reaction to Marion Engel’s 1976 novel Bear, an odd tale of an unhappy woman who, as Scott puts it, “seduces a poor, tatty bear.” Scott was evidently deeply offended by Engel’s mildly controversial novel, which confirmed and deepened his convictions about what he saw as the loathsome degeneration of English-Canadian culture. Writing the piece, he confided, his “two central feelings were scorn and outrage.”

After a page or so of nervous clowning around, “A Canadian Bestiary” developed into a slashing verbal assault on Bear and its author. Feeling the book had been praised for all the wrong reasons, Scott obviously enjoyed venting his indignation. His point was not so much that Bear was an overpraised and pretentious book, rather that its very publication and acceptance exemplified the nation’s smug, subcultural tawdriness, thus preventing the future publication of other, better books.

His swashbuckling assault having bloodied Ms. Engel and her Bear, Scott then mounted a scattershot attack on much of the rest of CanLit. By the end of his thirteen pages, he had savaged not only Ms. Engel (“common… culturally pretentious… with absolutely nothing to say”) and her Bear (“spiritual gangrene… a Faustian compact with the Devil”) but also Irving Layton (“a runt”), Robertson Davies (“Humbug!”), Mordecai Richler (“second rate”), Victor Coleman (“insidiously trivial”), Jacques Godbout (“a federaste”), literary immigrants (“born in Baghdad or Bongo Bongo”) and even the Symons-friendly Coach House Press (“ghoulish… psychedelic masochismo”), not to mention his old nemesis Robert Fulford (“Bobo Fullblown”).
In this extraordinary one-man uprising against CanLit, the only writers to emerge more or less unscathed are the two ageing doyennes Margaret Laurence and Marie-Claire Blais; Dennis Lee, then in the initial throes of sculpting Scott’s monumental Helmet of Flesh; and one or two lesser-known figures who are damned with faint praise. The essay finishes with a disdainful denunciation of “the literature of depravity and psychic deprivation,” and a ready prophecy that the next “with-it-lit” fad will be “sadomasochistic homosexuality!” which Symons characterizes, obscurely, as a “natural kick-back.”

Commissioning Scott to vent his opinions was like milking a rattlesnake; once you got his fangs in the jar, the venom just kept coming, and you were sure to have a saleable, if highly toxic, commodity. “A Canadian Bestiary” did cause a small stir. But Scott quickly returned to Essaouira, and I read nothing further by him until his Helmet of Flesh finally hit the shelves in 1986.

The first half of the novel is a mildly satirical, third-person narrative about a youngish Canadian – another Symons clone called York Mackenzie – who falls in with a dissolute group of travelling English expatriates in Morocco. In a vigorous extended passage at the centre of the novel, an ecstatic fire dance – “James sniffing the flames like wine… Flesh fused to flame in a single groaning dance” – culminates in what may or may not be a human sacrifice. A fever-ridden Mackenzie then recovers from his hallucinations in a private sanatorium. It becomes evident that York Mackenzie, like Hugh Anderson before him, is in a psychologically precarious state. Unfortunately, from then on, the story rather falls apart as the author doesn’t seem to know how to utilize the impact of his vivid central scene. One chapter, a flashback to his life with a lover called John in Newfoundland, is written mostly in Newfie dialect, which soon becomes annoying. At one point in the book, Mackenzie recalls being beaten up in a Yorkville alley on orders from John’s relatives – an event which the real John did not remember from their time together, remarking that back-alley beatings had never been his family’s style. Eventually, Mackenzie returns to Newfoundland, and to John, without much apparent enthusiasm.

Helmet of Flesh met with a varied reception. A careful blurb from Margaret Atwood described it as “significant and provocative… will be read and talked about for many years to come.” So discerning a connoisseur of humour as Dr. Northrop Frye professed to find it “funny.” Others were disappointed, judging it an unsuccessful amalgam of its editor’s jovial Boys’ Own adventure story approach and Scott’s inchoate ravings. Some Helmet readers were surprised to see Scott’s gracious acknowledgement of ongoing assistance from the Canada Council, the Toronto and Ontario Arts Councils, and an array of patrons, named and unnamed, including “businessmen and women, writers, media people, restauranteurs, civil servants and a Toronto bank” – an apparent contradiction of his frequent contention that he had been generally anathematized, blackballed, driven into exile.

Over the years, curious bits of Scott Symons lore filtered back to Canada. The would-be gay messiah was now said to disdain gays, the gay movement, and even Trudeau’s legalization of homosexuality. Symons claimed now to “hate Trudeau with a volcanic passion.” His sexual preferences, he maintained, in a conversation with David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen, had been “a mistake” and “a red herring.” What he really wanted, he said, was a “male revolution” against the “epistemological enormities” of feminism, the cruel Canadian women, with their “closed cunts.”

In 1990, a Toronto magazine, The Idler, published two of Scott’s essays. “Atwood-as-Icon” was a critique of the public reputation of Margaret Atwood. It made some telling observations, but was hampered by its author’s appearing to have read only one or two of Atwood’s works. “Mazo Was Murdered” was not so much a defence of the prolific, now underrated novelist Mazo de la Roche, as an attack on the detractors of her epic Jalna series and the Anglo-Canadian cultural tradition it represents. Both essays were included in Christopher Elson’s compendium Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons, which Gutter Press published in 1998. Shortly before the book appeared, Canadian filmmaker Nik Sheehan was putting the finishing touches on his documentary film about Scott. God’s Fool will stand with Charles Taylor’s essay as an authoritative documentation of Scott’s unique personality.

One old friend interviewed in the film remembers Scott and his wife attending an art gallery function, Scott playing the part of a snake charmer, with his wife as the snake. A former student remarks, “It was very important for him to believe that he loved women.” His protégé Donald Martin sees him as essentially a truth-teller, and an influential social force, while David Gilmour recalls the darker aspects of Scott’s self-promotion, and remembers his own incredulous youthful reaction to the massive, uncut Helmet of Flesh: “Where is the valium? Oh, this is the Valium!”

Scott himself declares that he is a spiritual African: “I love Morocco and the Moroccans love me… Je suis Zulu!” he adds with a chuckle. And he supplies an entirely fictional version of his long-ago meeting with John McConnell. The school hallway in Muskoka has now become a forest through which John rides with the wind in his hair, a romantic young Tartar on a galloping horse, confronting Scott in a scene reminiscent of Marlon Brando eyeing Robert Forster in John Huston’s 1967 homo-gothic Reflections in a Golden Eye. In Scott’s recapitulation, John teasingly calls him a big, black bear – not a tame bear like Ms. Engel’s mangy mascot, but a wild animal with impressive, horse-frightening power.

The Scott Symons that Nik Sheehan captures in his Moroccan redoubt appears to have lost much of his vitality, delivering many of his speeches while lying down. By the end of the film he seems bloated, desperate, and somehow unclean, his watchful eyes shifty and menacing as he wanders through his lonely compound ranting “How dare they!” to the walls, or making notebook entries in a deserted rooftop restaurant. One can’t help thinking of Big Daddy’s resonant line in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: “There’s an air of mendacity in this house!” Scott’s companion of almost twenty years, Aaron Klokeid, is seen briefly, but never speaks.

Regrettably absent from the large cast of commentators in God’s Fool is Charles Taylor, whose finances kept Scott in pocket and out of trouble for almost thirty years. In fact Taylor had been very ill, and died before the film was made. It was the unexpected demise of his true friend and patron at the age of sixty-three that brought down a slow curtain on Scott’s Moroccan sojourn. Early in 2000, Nik Sheehan, now back in Canada, received two long-distance calls from Morocco. The first was from the Canadian embassy in Rabat, informing him that Scott had been instructed to leave the country within twenty-four hours. The second was from an emotionally shattered Aaron Klokeid, now apparently “abandoned to his fate.”

Within a week, Scott was back in Toronto, with a colourful story to explain his sudden reversal of fortune. The mild-mannered Aaron, he confided to Nik Sheehan and others, had become “mixed up in a Thugee ritual murder cult involving international drug smugglers.” Scott’s personal investigations into this sinister conspiracy had so rattled the Moroccan authorities that, Scott’s connections to the King notwithstanding, he had seen fit to leave, turning over his “ranch” to the local villagers as a parting gift.

The word from Morocco was somewhat different. There it was maintained that Scott had used Charles Taylor’s final subsidy to have an additional turret added to the writing room of his large house. With the loss of his sole source of income, Scott’s many substantial debts to local businesses soon came due, and the government, anxious to avoid further unpleasantness, had issued an expulsion order. Aaron Klokeid, left to his own devices, was apparently bailed out by his Vancouver family.

By the time Scott arrived back in his birthplace, many of the principal players from the old days had quit the scene. After many years abroad, Edward Lacey had succumbed to a heart attack in a Toronto rooming house in 1995. Michael Higgins had returned to England. Richard Phelan and Michael Pearl had both died in the pandemic that devastated the North American gay community in the eighties and nineties. By the onset of the millennium, so many of my old friends had been lost to AIDS that I was not surprised to hear that John McConnell too was now said to be “very sick.”

Scott had arrived in Toronto with no money and in deteriorating health. He first sought shelter at Massey College where his old chum John Fraser was now Master, but, alas, they were “full up.” After a brief stay next door at Trinity, he prevailed on a succession of friends including Nik Sheehan and crime writer James Dubro. For a while he lived unobtrusively in the basement of a fraternity house before being ejected by the authorities. From there he decamped to what Dubro described as “flea-bag rooming houses” in Kensington Market. I caught up to him in 2001 at a literary get-together memorializing Edward Lacey. He seemed much mellowed and had apparently pardoned me for my act of lèse-majesté all those years before.

Scott spent his last years living at Leisure World, a crowded care home for the indigent infirm on St. George Street near the U. of T. Campus. In 2006 he shared dinner at my home in Toronto’s east end, and gave what was to be his last interview. After several heart attacks and the onset of Parkinson’s and diabetes, he was frail, a bit forgetful, and still eager to talk. Though much of the old bombast was gone, there were some new delusions (he believed the Prime Minister was his nephew). But he seemed a different creature from the desperate wreck captured at the end of God’s Fool. Nicer, and more tranquil.

He reminisced about his old publisher Jack McClelland, who, he said, had considered Scott “the most important writer in his stable,” but “I was kind of a peripatetic scandal and he wanted to protect himself.” I asked him about his relationship with John. He had fond memories of their time in Newfoundland, and was proud that he had been asked to “give the Christmas address at the Salvation Army Church.” His split with John, like his earlier split with his wife, he blamed wholly on parental malice: “They threatened to disinherit John and jail me,” he said, and had hired a psychiatrist to convince John “there was nothing significant in our relationship.” John’s mother, he emphasized, “was a cruel woman.” John, he told me, had wanted to get back together with Scott but had contracted AIDS and “died a horrible death.” Aaron Klokeid, he said, had been in Morocco on his honeymoon when they met. At that encounter, Scott had apparently played the role of Julien Green but in this case, the impressionable young man did not turn away from the older expatriate writer and take his bride back to Canada but stayed with him for two decades. Eventually, he said, Aaron was “seduced by the governor’s mistress.”

He much enjoyed his dinner with us, was gracious to my elderly mother, and posed for a few photos in the garden. Scott seemed in his last phase to shuck off many of the psychic burdens that had made him so angry. In spite of Leisure World’s painfully crowded conditions, he was cared for reasonably well there and had no problem fitting in with the other patients, who called him “the professor” (at least those who could speak). He continued to enjoy his cigarettes, and had at least one outing a week, attending regular Sunday services at St. Thomas’s Anglican Church nearby. All in all, he seemed if not content, at least resigned. I never heard him complain. Perhaps all those stays in the monastery rubbed off on the old Monster after all.

Not everything was sweetness and light of course. A publisher friend took him out one evening to dinner and drinks at a Bloor Street restaurant. When Pierre Trudeau’s name came up in conversation, Scott grew agitated, stopping all conversation in the room and turning diners’ heads by shouting “I fucked that Trudeau up the ass!” – an historic claim that, had it been true, we would surely have heard about before.

Shortly after our interview, I ran into an old Toronto friend of John’s, Ian Turner, who told me Scott had been misinformed: John McConnell was in fact alive and well, and living in San Diego! I was able to contact him by email and a few days later, paid a visit to Leisure World to give Scott the good news of his ex-lover’s resurrection.

John phoned Scott on Christmas Eve, 2006. Scott apparently expressed no regrets. (Regrets had never been his style.) The brief call, John told me, brought back “all his hyperbole, his exaggerated self-importance and his embellishment of fact to make himself look grand.” Yet their talk reminded him “how badly I had needed that kind of dominating, patriarchal presence when I was younger, and how little I felt ‘owned’ by my own father in an emotional sense.” He remained grateful for all the affection that Scott had given him which with time outweighed the acrimony, the abuse, the stolen photographs, and the black eye.

Scott and John spoke several more times, Scott still unapologetic, still urging John to return because “we owe it to ourselves.” He remained estranged from his wife and son, and the rest of his family seldom visited, though he did have at least one dinner with his brother Tom. Scott said his brother admitted: “You were right.” He didn’t mean about everything of course, but specifically about the recognition of gay people in Canada, the public acknowledgement of our humanity, our mortality.

Scott’s Anglican funeral service at St. Thomas’s was accompanied by clouds of frankincense and every rite in the book – entirely appropriate, one parishioner remarked, as Scott was convinced he would be with the saints. At the Massey College reception afterwards, old friends and acquaintances reminisced. One woman recalled being in grade seven with Scott and going to a party with him and another child. Scott, she said, played the accordion at the time. He painted the other kids’ faces and had them jump about all evening, telling them “I’ll be the organ grinder and you can be the monkeys!” I related the old classmate’s story to John in San Diego. He replied that “it is as good a metaphor of Scott’s life as any. In both his life and his writing he portrayed others by painting a false face on them, and then had them dance to his tune, calling them monkeys, which is how they appeared to him.”

What drew me to Scott Symons in the first place? He and I were both idiosyncratic writers going our own way, both speaking and naming the Love that Dare Not, writing about what Scott called “homosentience” in the then-thawing emotional climate of the True North. More than that, both of us fell head over heels in love with spectacularly beautiful, quite unusual seventeen-year-olds who strolled, or strode, into our arms. But Scott was bound to his native Canada in ways that I, as an immigrant, could not be. Scott could never put Rosedale behind him, or the Pink Lady, or his betrayal of boyhood love. Rather, they remained the centre of a psychic world in which he was “eternally thirteen,” eternally being told his cock was dirty.

Rating writers is a futile academic exercise. We have no idea how the future will judge our contemporaries. All we know is that we would almost certainly be surprised. Many of the best-known Canadian authors are, though entirely worthy of respect, nonetheless just a tad on the boring side. Scott, on the other hand, was a literary high roller with an utterly unique voice. His name is high on the alternate list with Émile Nelligan, Emily Carr, Grey Owl, Brion Gysin, Juan Butler, bp Nichol, Albert Collignon, bill bissett, Norman Elder, Thomson Highway, Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite…. What a roster! Self-starters and visionaries all.

Canadians of course, had seen something like Scott’s bombastic mythologising before, in the robust figure of Irving Layton. But through all Layton’s boasts – including his claim to have been born circumcised, the sure sign of a messiah – we could see, or thought we could see, the twinkle in the poet’s eye. Scott was every bit as megalomaniacal as Layton, but those black, beady little eyes did not twinkle. Indeed, they seemed (until near the end) not so much searching as accusatory, inquisitorial, confrontational. As for his chequered career (or rather careers, as he had several), Jack McClelland stated it as simply as anyone: “The problem as we see it is that (Scott’s) lack of discipline is killing him both as a man and as a writer.” His towering ambition attempted the well-nigh impossible: to be the exalted ruler and the insurgent rebel, the hierophant and the heretic, at the same time – a precarious double act attempted by many, Wilde, Mayakovsky, Capote and Mapplethorpe among them. Most came to grief.

Such artists belong to a class of human beings the French call les monstres sacrés – Sacred Monsters. They are compulsively, often prolifically creative creatures, utterly self-absorbed, confident of their own charismatic genius, oblivious to the feelings of others, uncaring or unaware about the effects of their own words or actions. They can be bombastic and demanding. They are often profligate with money, sex, drugs, travel, religion: with them, it is all or nothing. At their most monstrous, they can be paranoid, bullying, “a must to avoid.”

Picasso, Hemingway, Frederick Rolfe “Baron Corvo,” Aleister Crowley and Ayn Rand are remembered as classic Sacred Monsters of their century. Scott Symons was surely of their number, which is why Robert Fulford’s mot juste drew blood. Of his fellow Monsters, it may be the dreaded Rolfe whom Scott most resembles – in his not quite definable talent, his enormous sense of entitlement, his unerring capacity for self-sabotage.

The English writer Daniel Farson had the dubious privilege of knowing more than a few such Monsters, including Francis Bacon and Brendan Behan, and in his book Sacred Monsters (Bloomsbury, 1988) he succinctly summed them all up: “They may be difficult, temperamental, occasionally treacherous, frequently drunk, usually unpredictable; this is their price for making life more interesting for the rest of us. They are worth the trouble.”

Scott Symons certainly made peoples’ lives more interesting, for better or worse. He was a unique writer. And at a signal time in the country’s history, he presented us with a reminder that there are many Canadas, not all of them yet mapped. He was the féderaste par excellence. He was no saint. But he may well be with them – in one capacity or another.

fingertip. I later played it safer, seeking
corners that were curved or bevel, the better
to deflect attack, embraces and attention.

My predilection now is for the deckled
indents of a homemade page, fibre-flecked
and textured like a slept-in bed dented

from the press of its residents, a set
of lovers well fitted to each other’s
folding flaws, growing more attached each week

as they fade and sag and grey together.

DOE
To our eyes, she escaped
the sheer scarp’s face,
minced across pebbles,
high-stepped over stones,
dainty dame, down to the wet

rocks, where in a graceful
squat, she pissed: a silhouette
shudder, unaware of our presence,
tail a slight swish; against
the backdrop of the Basin’s

sun-struck escutcheon,
a motive blot, then
a breeze traitored our scents
and she bolted, that flash
of white tail a beacon.

OUT
Out with the garbage, the fag ends, the clutter
Out with the eaten, the worn down, the odd
Out with the beaten, the shuffle and sputter
Of words half unspoken and feet poorly shod

Out with the photos, the journals, the clippings
Out with the fucked-up, the fucked-out, the dead
Out with the drivel, the dribble and drippings
Out with the starving and out with the fed

Out with the baby, the bathtub, the water
Out with the lambkin and out with the kid
Out with the innocent, out with the slaughter
Out with the bum, the rummy, the skid

Out with the shit-stained, the ruined, the wasted
Out with the shot and the clubbed and the shivved
Out with the pinned-up, the plastered, the pasted
Out with the landfill of a life half-lived

WATER WORKS
Forty-some paces into the Gulf
you’ll find the work of forty-odd years:
rings of rock that once cased cottage wells
where dwellers drew fresh water, sunk now
in the salt swell and swum around
by fishes. We get smaller year by
year. The breaks we build to brake our shrinkage—
riprap and seawalls, baskets of stone—
only make things worse: they make the patient
ocean more resourceful. Gone Panmure
Island’s marram-anchored dunes. Gone the wharves
of Basin Head. Gone the elephant-
shaped rock whose feet we shod in concrete
to keep him for the tourists.

Our first awards ceremony was a modest affair in the upstairs of a dusty Toronto bar. In the five years since we’ve come a long way. This year’s awards were hosted by Actor/Director Don McKeller in the shiny new Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall and was a pretty slick affair for a comic book award. Still, let’s not get too swell-headed, what with the hand-to-mouth nature of these sort of ventures, we might very well be back in that dusty bar before too long!

What follows is the speech with which I opened that first awards ceremony.

When the idea of a new Canadian award for cartooning came along there were really only two names that immediately presented themselves as possible namesakes: Jimmie Frise and Doug Wright. I’m not entirely sure why Frise lost out. I don’t recall any debate on the matter. Hands down it was Wright. It’s just possible that Wright is more a part of our world than Frise. Frise was born in the nineteenth century and was dead by 1948. He is simply a more distant figure. Whatever the reasoning, it’s no slight to either man. They were both enormously talented. They were the twin pillars of Canada’s cartooning history before 1980.

Still, I’d venture a guess that neither name is overly familiar to many of you here tonight. Canada has a short memory for its own creative people. That’s why I’ve been asked to come up here and give some information about Doug Wright to those of you who may not know of him or his work.To prepare this talk I dug out all the material I had on Mr. Wright. Twenty years of painfully difficult collecting. It’s been an uphill battle to find his work. Nothing remains in print. Very few book collections were even printed to begin with. Each individual strip had to be found in magazines gleaned from yard sales and church basements and goodwills. Magazine dealers don’t carry many of these magazines. Nor do comic shops. Each strip found was a triumph. Anyhow, I looked through all this stuff. I even looked through a box of strips lent to me by Mr. Wright’s widow, Phyllis. It was there, in that box of fading newsprint that I came across a single yellowed sheet of typewritten copy. An artist’s bio, obviously typed out by Wright himself. Possibly to include with submissions. Or maybe to hand out to the press. Here’s what he wrote:

Doug Wright was born in England and arrived in Canada at the age of twenty-one with a sister and mother, who longed to see him become a doctor. Stationed at Rivers, Manitoba, during the war, he became a cartoonist by accident when fellow air force recruits began laughing at his doodlings.

A cartoon strip, ‘Doug Wright’s Family,’ based on doings in his own household and the neighbourhood and a cartoon depicting the average man’s preoccupation with potholes, taxes and other mundane problems, were published in Canada and syndicated all around the globe. One doesn’t find politicians and public figures in Wright’s work, but in the sense that this artist deals with the dilemma of people in a troubled society, he is ‘political.’

Like many successful cartoonists, doing both editorial and comic art, Doug Wright began as a “ghost,” helping the late Jimy Frise with the strip Juniper Junction, then stepped out to try several features of his own.
‘The thing about this profession is, it’s creative and rewarding,’ says Wright. ‘After all, in what other line, if a taxi driver cuts me off, could I get even with him in a drawing?’

Like most cartoonists, when forced to sit down and write about themselves and their work, Wright seems to have missed the point entirely. He didn’t get to the heart of it at all. He’s just trying to sound professional here. Businesslike. He even ends it with a joke like a good business speech. He brings up the political stuff to sound serious. If anything, he sounds a bit embarrassed. I even think he cribbed the middle part from John Muir’s introduction to Wright’s collection of Spectator cartoons. Even the typing looks pained with it’s careful borders and many whited-out errors. Doug left out all the poetry.

But, since Wright started with the dry stuff, I’ll start with the dry stuff.

Wright was born in 1917 in England. His father died in the war before Doug even met him. Doug came to Canada at the age of twenty-one to work as a commercial artist for the Sun Life Assurance Co. When the Second World War came along he joined the RCAF and that’s where he had his first cartoons published in a variety of little military magazines. The positive attention by those airmen changed his life. He was now a cartoonist. After the war he went to New York to try and break in but lucky for Canada they sent him back home to get some experience.

In 1949 he started a little strip about a toddler for the Montreal Standard Magazine. A contest named the kid “Nipper” – a name Wright never cared much for. In 1967 he switched magazines and changed the strip’s name to “Doug Wright’s Family.” Wright married Phyllis Sanford in 1952 and over the next eight years they had three children. Three boys who would supply him with all the raw material he would need to churn out a weekly strip for over thirty years.

Back in 1948 he had also taken over Jimmy Frise‘s strip “Juniper Junction” when Jimmy died. He drew this strip in the Family Herald magazine up until 1968 when the magazine folded. On top of these two strips he drew large single panel cartoons for the Montreal Star and later the Hamilton Spectator. And lots of illustrations too. Complicated illustrations with scores of figures and highly detailed backgrounds. He tried to syndicate two other strips during these years as well. That didn’t pan out. Still, besides “Doug Wright’s Family,” he managed to have a least one cartoon feature (sometimes more) running in the daily newspapers from 1966 to around 1972.

So you can see – Wright was a hard worker. A real professional. He slaved his life away in that studio as all real cartoonists do. A lot of time alone at the drawing table. A lot of time spent in your own head. But don’t let that be his whole epitaph. There is a lot about him that appears between the lines of that bio. I don’t know about the real stuff. I never knew the man himself. But I know the work and there is some poetry in the work.

From all I know about the man, Wright was humble and not given much to pretensions – so I’m sure he’d shudder at any mention of poetry in connection to his work. Still, for a comic strip without any words he did manage to get quite a bit of poetry in there. A kind of poem to suburbia or to the middle-class lifestyle.
Even though by the time I was reading the strip it was titled “Doug Wright’s Family,” it was never known as anything but “Nipper” in my house. I remember wondering why my mother called it this, but oddly, I never asked. I just took her word for it. His name was Nipper. Both the magazines the strip had appeared in were newspaper supplements. They came with the weekend paper. A huge section of the Canadian public read the strip. These magazines were predominantly middlebrow in content and were pretty reflective of Canadian culture of the time. They had articles on hockey players and the Queen, Madame Benoit’s recipes and lots of ads for curling sweaters and Kraft cheeses. Like all magazines of the time they liked to have a cartoon in the back to give the reader something to chuckle at. Something wholesome and family friendly. If they had picked anyone else to do it – someone less talented and dedicated than Wright – then the strip would probably have been forgettable. The fact that we are here tonight shows that something in the strip turned out to be memorable. A lot of people do fondly remember the strip. But, like Wright’s son Ken once said to me: “Forty is the dividing line. Over forty and they remember. Under forty and they don’t.”

There is some truth to that. However, even those over forty often misremember the strip. Often it is recalled as a sort of Canadian “Family Circus.” This irritates me. Wright’s work had none of the flavour of that south-of-the-border baby strip. In fact, his view of childhood was remarkably matter of fact. Downright unsentimental. Rather than showing childhood as precious he tended to focus on the petty conflicts between children. There was a lot of minor bullying in the strip. Nipper and his unnamed little brother were constantly at each other. Wright wasn’t looking back with rose-coloured glasses; he was looking outside his window for something real. This probably says a lot about Wright. It certainly shows he never would have made it as an American gag-a-day newspaper cartoonist.

It was a pantomime strip, told only with pictures. This is a fact that people often forget. That’s a real testament to his story telling skills. The strips were so well executed that you didn’t notice the lack of words. The most recognizable feature of the comic was the two distinctive bald heads of the boys. In the 1950s Wright had designed their round heads to emulate the buzz-cuts that were popular at the time. However, by the 1970s the boys stood out oddly among their longhaired friends. Younger readers always asked: “Why are those kids bald?” I’ve read that Wright would have liked to have updated his boys – to give them long 70’s hair – but he knew that his readers would be perplexed by the change. Thank goodness, he resisted. Now they can be assured of entry in that pantheon of inexplicably bald cartoon children: the Yellow Kid, Henry, Barnaby, Sluggo, and of course, good ol’ Charlie Brown.

For the first few years of the strip, Wright’s drawing was rather minimalist – primarily focused on the figures. Backgrounds in the strip were sparse, often nonexistent. However by the late ’50s his work had flourished. His interest turned to those backgrounds and now they were richly detailed. This love of detail was always there in his illustrations yet strangely, not so much in his cartoons. It was in this late ’50s period that his amazing abilities as a draftsman came to the fore. He often spent an entire day working out the complex settings for his cartoons in the Montreal Star and, later, the Hamilton Spectator. This attention to detail eventually found it’s way into the comic strips. I guess he couldn’t help it – he clearly loved that kind of drawing and couldn’t resist pouring that enthusiasm into the comic. The panels became masterfully crafted examples of deep space and careful observation. In one memorable panel he drew a large complicated vista of a strip mall, the parking lot, the street behind the parking lot and finally the hills beyond – all of which perfectly captured the essence of just such a mid-twentieth-century location. Looking at this drawing is practically the same as visiting the place. As his backgrounds grew in complexity so did their “sense of exactness.” The environment of the strip was, undoubtedly, his own house, his own neighbourhood and his own town. Wright was drawing the very world that I grew up in – the south-western Ontario of the sixties and seventies. Every carefully rendered detail is perfectly familiar to me: the ranch-style homes, the school yards, the corner stores – even the little things like the screen doors.

Wright’s cartoons are like a catalogue of the period: the clothes, the hairstyles, the furnishings, the streets, and especially the cars. Wright obviously loved cars. He lavished special care in the drawing of them. He rendered them with both utter authenticity and a kind of vital inner life. They jumped off the page. Every kind of vehicle was lovingly drawn. Go-karts, race cars, station wagons, muscle cars, fire engines – even the garbage trucks. The boys themselves were always tooling around in their famous hot-rod pedal cars. A lot of the cartoonists of the mid-twentieth century were fascinated by the machines of progress, but usually this manifested itself in a love of airplanes. Wright is the only one I know who picked the automobile. It’s no surprise that when Wright took over Frise’s “Juniper Junction” the focus of the strip rapidly narrowed from that of the various residents of the little town to just that of the town’s garage and it’s mechanics.

Earlier I used the term “sense of exactness” to describe Wright’s drawings. That sense was never more acute than in his drawings of the post-war suburban environment. They evoke the very experience of being there. I can think of nothing else, not even photographs, that brings that world of my childhood back to me with such deeply felt longing. As I peer into his strips I see the essence of an era that no longer exists. The last breath of the early twentieth century mixing with the new world that is to come.

On occasion, Wright would focus his great rendering skills on a small poetic moment of everyday life such as a snowy winter morning or a dusky evening of fireworks or a sudden sun shower. These images never drew undue attention to themselves. They never slowed the strips down. Still, if you stopped and took the time to take them in you would feel their subtle beauty. This brings up another of Wright’s gifts – his wonderful ability to draw weather. He’s one of the very few cartoonists who can actually make you feel the temperature drop a few degrees in a comic strip. His sensitivity to weather and the seasons was as integral to his work as his famous interest in detail.

Sometimes it seems as if the comic was as much about place and atmosphere as it was about the family. But, of course, the family was the actual content of the strips. On the surface “Doug Wright’s Family” seems to be a series of domestic gags but it doesn’t seem right to label his work a gag-strip because he never seems to have really aimed for the big laugh. It was more observational, more slice of life. Wright’s work played the chords of familiarity. He let you in on the small events that you would recognize from your own family life.

Don’t get me wrong, the strip was humourous, but it was a quiet humour. I mean, it certainly started out as a typical gag-strip, aiming for the usual laughs. For the first ten years of the strip I think you could fairly place it in the same category as Hank Ketcham’s “Dennis the Menace.” But it outgrew that material. By 1960 Wright had begun to focus on what I call “the small incident.” His weekly strip would feature the boys involved in some minor, usually mundane, everyday situation. Fighting over the TV channel or giving their guinea pig a ride on a skateboard. The event was small and the payoff was usually nothing more than a chuckle or a smile for the reader. It certainly wasn’t about the belly laugh. Each of these little situations, hundreds of them over the years, was played perfectly deadpan. It was a simple record of the duties, quibbles, irritations and pleasures of family life.

Once a year the magazine would give him an entire page of full colour for a Christmas strip. Even these strips were never sentimental. They tended to stress the petty greed of childhood. Or perhaps social embarrassment. Or other less typical Christmas themes. For someone like myself, who tends toward sentimentality, I have always been impressed by Wright’s ability to steer clear of this minefield – especially in a kid-focused strip. I have heard it said that having children of your own puts an end to any ideas of romanticized childhood.

As the ’60s and ’70s passed Wright watched the societal changes with a bemused attitude. Even though ostensibly he was the father in the strip, Wright the artist always seemed to be an observer – uninvolved, detached. He never seemed genuinely bothered by the changes in society – if anything he continued to find humour in them. He delighted in gently mocking the youth culture of the times. Especially in his big single panels for the Hamilton Spectator or his “Max & Mini” cartoons. In his comic strip the work became more and more focused on tiny events. The amusement of blowing up a balloon or of getting stuck in a tree. Whether the cat should be in or out of the house.

In the very late seventies his work began to dry up. He began to recycle old jokes that he’d used way back in the fifties. Sadly, these were drawn with less vigor and skill and they compare badly with the earlier ones. I had wondered about this decline when I first studied those cartoons, but I ‘ve since learned that he suffered a small stroke around this time. Being a cartoonist myself, I can understand that imposing dread of the work looming. There is always some deadline coming down the pipeline – ideas needed now. He must have felt his abilities slipping away from him. His great drawing powers weakening.

And the drawings are weaker at the very end. I think I can imagine some of that disappointment he must have felt, sitting in that studio. That man who had so prided himself on his amazing creative abilities. And so the strip came to an end in 1980. Wright retired it. I can only guess at his thoughts and feelings on the matter. He’d drawn it for thirty-two years. As always, truth is stranger than fiction. On the day that the last strip appeared in print, Doug Wright had the big stroke that closed off that amazing drawing ability forever. Wright was dead within three years.

And since then, like so many artists who worked in the popular press, his name has grown more dim with the passing of time. He’s in danger of being forgotten. That’s what brings us here tonight. Yes – these awards were created to honour the cartoonists of today but I’m hoping that The Wright Award will help to bring men like Doug Wright back into our consciousness again. Artists like Jimmy Frise, Walter Ball, James Simpkins, Albert Chartier, Peter Whalley, George Feyer. These men were the hard working cartoonists of Canada’s past. They stayed in Canada and published in the magazines and newspapers of their time. Canada’s publishing industry was small and they had to struggle to make a living but they were hard workers and their work changed the pop-culture landscape of our country. They were part of a generation that defined a newer machine-age Canadian identity.

I know these men never thought of themselves collectively. They were each individual commercial artists working alone. They probably didn’t think of themselves as cartoonists with a big “C.” If anything they probably identified with the newspapermen, art directors and publishers they worked with. Still, I’d like to bring them into the fold – to welcome them in after their long years in the wilderness. I’m hoping that Doug Wright would’ve been happy to see that, all these years later, his work lives on and that young artists, who weren’t even born during his lifetime, will know his name.

Sharon McCartney writes about relationships, almost always in terms of loss, and her first book’s epigraph from Frost (“Here are your waters and your watering place/ Drink and be whole again beyond confusion”) is an articulation of her method. The book begins by tracing a genealogy of knowing, with the poet describing herself as a fetus, a something that is “nothing yet.” This is the first poem, and the McCartney persona has yet to be established, but she caps it with what will become a signature move, using the final lines to give the poem a lift, a terse what-for, with her Mother’s reflection on the local conditions: “It’s unnatural, she thinks, all this growth/ and no rain.” It’s impossible not to think that McCartney the poet is having her mother think of her as being unnatural. This is the first relationship in the book: what begins as “nothing” becomes a strange pairing.

The next poem, “My Mother’s Face,” introduces loss as McCartney’s major subject. Her sick sister’s brain cancer is introduced as a triangulating influence on her mother’s attention. McCartney is “too young to be told/ my sister will die” but she is aware enough to “know something’s wrong when I smell it,/ the breath of ash/ on the oven’s tongue.” And so the dominant dynamics of McCartney’s family life are established: the father is peripheral and the mother, rendered as a creature of domesticity, in terms of a vacuum cleaner and socks, will forever be grieving a child – a circumstance referred to as a “grim marriage.” McCartney’s family poetry is totemic: it offers up the mother and the father as sad, grievous creatures. The father is distant, unreliable; the mother is locked into a kind of perpetual terror. McCartney gets to the heart of knowing her mother and herself when she writes in “Nickels in a Cup” that “I was only 20 but I believed/ I was old enough to walk away…/ thoughtless, gleeful as a mother/ who’s never lost a daughter,/ who doesn’t know how a woman can hate a body and hurt/ so much she won’t say it…” Here McCartney is simultaneously expressing the cheerless selfishness of her younger self while also acknowledging that her mother was deeply wounded by the death of her daughter and that there was integrity to the mother’s bearing of that pain. McCartney may have been twenty then, but the crafter of this poem knows better.

Which brings me to the question of confessional ethics. A certain Mommy Dearest anti-ethic often lurks behind a book of this sort, painting others as culpable and the poet as blameless victim. McCartney is far too honest, and complicated, for that. She writes in “Niagara, 1968” that she
hate[s] the scene we’ve become—

silver rails sparkling

with spray, my mother

on her knees—and the people

who stare, women in bright

slacks, mortified children,

together in a way we will

never be.

McCartney confesses to what would be typical in that situation, a resentment of her lot, the artful use of the word “mortified” being a sly reference to the death in all of us, the death of the “scene” being transferred to all the other children. It cannot be forgotten – McCartney will not let us forget, because it is central to knowing her as a poet – that she was a typical child faced with unfairness. There are other moments of vulnerability, as when McCartney’s poetic self whispers “fuck you” to her dying sister or when McCartney writes in “I’m Outside on the Bricks” with regards to that flailing, incontinent sister that “I would/ feel sorry for someone if this/ were unusual.” McCartney is no saint and gets at a truth of human nature: a willingness to respond to minor impositions, while desiring to avoid greater ones that require a duty, a duty which would distort her life.

The ur-moment in the collection comes when McCartney’s mother in “Yellow Sun Dress” does home physiotherapy on her dying daughter’s limbs and looks at the quailing healthy daughter and asks her “What, after all,/ do I want?” This is the essential utterance of McCartney’s poetry: McCartney with her failings as daughter, unable or unwilling to accommodate the bully death, the perfect “after all” a commonplace elevated to the most significant piece of conversation in the book. After what? After being healthy, after being able to live, but also after coming through with a dying sister, after knowing things that no child should ever come to know so soon. After wanting rebellion, and choosing rebellion against her own unique circumstances. “After all” are two words that carry much freight, effortlessly conveyed.

In what will come to be more fully developed in Against, “Halfway Up The Coast, I Phone My Mother” marks McCartney’s first use of sex in her poetry and it is interesting to note how it is linked with pain. McCartney writes that she is “testing the curve of muscle,/ testicles dark and tender,/ penis rising as inevitably as pain.” Thus even sex is knowing, Janus-faced, and it says something psychologically about this mature poet whose first rendering of sex in verse is not in terms of joy, but rather hurt. She ends the poem with “Already, I am closer,” meaning that she is not only closer to her lover with this knowledge but also closer to truth.

But then, ah, to love. The dedicatee of Under the Abdominal Wall was her husband Mark Jarman. In “Jarman Motors” she addresses him poetically, enamoured and headlong, writing “Everyone I meet has your name” in the first-line admission that is typical of the lovestruck, seeing the lover in the fated everything and the fated everyone. She then ominously forecasts later in the poem “It’s like dreaming about someone/ who’s dead.” Which means that McCartney in her first love poem links the totality of love with the cosmos of impermanence. This is a link that is fundamental for understanding what matters for her as a poet. And it will not be the last such linkage: her later, more powerful collection Against is a post-mortem of this same relationship. It is eerie that the poet-self’s pessimism was a kind of wish-fulfillment, that love first ventured in this early poem as obsessive became finite and somewhat elapsed in what must have been the poetic equivalent of calling her shot. Here is that ruthlessness again, that path to self-knowledge. It’s the kind of confessional poem that might cause trouble in real life, that might trouble the husband and kids. McCartney is blunt and direct about her own longing and desire (“We fucked like collaborators”) that, in turn, cannot help but seem doomed. It would be almost transgressive if the central character in the poem weren’t herself complicit, if there weren’t blame allocated to both parties. “Lower Muscatine” is a brutal poem, a poem that renders two people as separate as they can be. Poems like these always have consequences. Even the kids are held hostage: a new mother in a poem of the same name with details of childbirth can’t know her child without also knowing that she is now gravid and “craving… the person/ she was before she became/ someone she can’t understand/ without bleeding.” The title poem of Under The Abdominal Wall is about the birth of her son, a surgical procedure, and one might expect that McCartney is just being tough, describing the suture and the invasion first in order to write something in the second half about the beautiful bond with her son. McCartney indeed does write of breastfeeding, but in an enigmatic and rugged way that refuses to offer a pat, warm-n-fuzzy ending. The mother and son instead are “climbing each other,/ like pines treading the timberline, growing/ into gravel and edges.” This is complicated, McCartney is saying, and it will grow more complicated. And yet the love articulated here is fiercer for all that, and demonstrated over several more poems that occupy the central portion of the book and bring us to the family circle: McCartney understands her mother better through her own near-death experience in giving birth.

For most, the rubric of low-risk obstetrics applies: the majority of mothers could give birth on their own without intervention. But for McCartney, her past informs her present; for her, family will never be easy. It is another instance of destiny. McCartney clearly needed to make sense of her experience: ten poems, none of them repetitive, deal with the same event of giving birth, the final poem of the series still blood-soaked but because of the grimness able to give voice to what endures in the final few lines: “it was like coming home,/ like crossing the sill,/ dazed, bleeding,/ longing for the joy/ of arrival.”

Like a good novelist, McCartney plots her collection. We begin with motherhood and death, we move to motherhood tinged with the possibility of death, and then we move to the death of McCartney’s own mother in “Dying, My Mother.” In a delirium the mother thinks she has just given birth in what, if true as anecdote, must have been a kind of hell for the poet. And we must remember the mother who earlier in the book looked at the child and asked “What, after all, do I want,” for the tables are turned in this poem and “Now, she stares/ at me, convinced that I, at least, will tell her/ how she lost that dark/ bundle that purpled/ her legs.” The “after all” finds its apotheosis in this “at least”; McCartney isn’t just caring for her mother, she is once again in the position of having to articulate the history of her own pain and leverage it against the love she has for this person.

Karenin Sings the Blues

If I have mostly dwelt on theme and content thus far, it is because McCartney was still becoming a poet in her first collection: she was turning to first principles, reifying what mattered to her, and getting those things straight was the focus. Under The Abdominal Wall could be thought of as a thematically rich meditation on what it means to lose as a woman, remarkable for its wisdom if not notable for its means. It is in Karenin Sings the Blues that McCartney hits her stride poetically with a longer line and majestic enjambment, trading her earlier stark, harsh terseness for more fluent dexterity, more playful word combinations, a greater flair and showmanship. The words are assembled in iterative waves of phrases. McCartney gives herself more time and room to say a thing, allowing herself the credentials of what Hopkins has called the “in-earnestness of speech,” a style of careening image, still shocking in its primacy but more certain of itself, as in “Frou-Frou, After Vronsky’s ‘Awkward Movement’ at the Last Obstacle of the Steeplechase Breaks Her Back”:

One minute, I’m devouring the course,

flinging fine clods of crescent-shaped

turf up the snouts of the clods who can’t

touch me. The next, his ass down hard

on my spine and I’m shattered, a hammer

to my skull, intact but scattered, shards,

crystals in the shape of a horse.

Stand back and pay attention! the poet is saying. Note the assonance of the first line’s “devouring” and “course,” the heavy, Hughesian consonants of the remainder, the internal rhyme of “shattered” and “scattered,” the end rhyme of “hard” and “shards,” and sundry slant rhymes and alliterations. McCartney pokes her head up out of her relationships and considers the pleasure-seeking audience without sacrificing her trademark kernelized wisdom (bourbon can be as “dark as dismay”) but this wisdom is embedded and is not the sole point of the poetry. Every poem is an expert ventriloquism that lets the poet try on new, fancy clothes.

Consider “Anna’s Morphine,” a poem about an inanimate object (which will become her dominant method in The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder):

I am the fat tongue unlocking her lips,

booted knee scything her snug thighs,

gloved finger that orbits her pursed nipple,

breath on her nape, engine, engendering—

We’re in the realm of the sexual straightaway: the unlocking of lips, the snug thighs, etc. But the “engine” of the poem is the language: the long vowel sounds, the chiming of “lips” with “orbits” and “nipple.” This is a technique of concision, of poetic certainty: the poet has become fascinated with pulse, with kinesis.
But to content for a moment. Though over half of this book is an apocryphal treatment of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the first poem establishes McCartney’s usual pessimistic formula: “If there is a rule of the cosmos,/ it is disappointment, disillusion.” In another poem the Countess Vronsky is made to say “childbirth is the wound that never heals” and in another Kitty calls marriage a “footpath that narrows and wanders” but ultimately “devolves.” McCartney lets the mask slip a little when one of her characters states, “We are more than our bodies. We must be./ If not, what is the purpose of pain?” This is not a moral rhetorical question, a wish that there be some kind of purpose to our instruction; it is, quite simply, a scream. And it’s these feelings that McCartney never loses sight of. In “Seryozha, Anna Karenina’s Son, Many Years Later” McCartney crafts an elegant elegy that could only, I think, have been written by an actual mother. Not a mother who hopes that she has made a mark on her child, that she will be remembered after her death, but a mother who grieves that her child will always be bereft, that the loss of the mother will always be paramount and defining for the child. Seryozha’s is a palpable ache initially beaten into shape by physical detail:

I thought I spotted her in every shuttered

carriage, behind every purple veil, each

solitary figure strolling the colonnades,

her soft round arms in buttoned sleeves…

McCartney is honouring the source text here: by mentioning early Anna’s arms, she invokes the “bare exquisite aristocratic elbow” of Pushkin’s eldest daughter said to have inspired the character in Tolstoy’s mind. The child then recalls how he was told of his mother’s death, and through the grim tutelage of his father he learns

… it was easier

not to look for her….

I called this growing up,

but the truth is I was diminishing.

This is the son who has his mother permanently imprinted, doomed in looking for her (by his disapproving father, and by caretaking a ghost) and doomed in trying to live without her. He is existentially betwixt, and frames his loss in personal terms: his allegiance is somehow not enough of an allegiance. The poem concludes with another of McCartney’s screams, this time a twisting of Wordsworth coming in Seryozha’s self-conception: “The child is father to the fool.” This is not a self-denunciation, not an angry pronouncement; it is an admission of inadequacy, a resignation to doom. It would be far easier for Seryozha to rebel; but as is typical with McCartney, he is inextricably bound. This is the poem of one who has looked on a child and wondered what will be.

The Anna Karenina poems are the best poems of this book. After, Karenin McCartney returns to the fraught realm of motherhood, seemingly never able to know a thing well enough. In “What My Mother Considers Essential” McCartney excoriates herself first (“I move to Seattle, get drunk,/ get pregnant, get an abortion…) and then articulates her mother’s misunderstanding (“When I marry a man she once feared/ and hated, a man she once insisted/ would rape and rob”), but concludes the poem on the plane of domesticity, the only real way of approximating her mother, who doesn’t attend the wedding (this is the classic McCartney family messaging system) but who “sends me a set of stainless steel pots/ and a Teflon baking kit,/ wants to be sure I’m prepared.” What one appreciates in McCartney is not just the eschewal of the holier-than-thou in her self-exposure, but her lack of bitterness in what must have been a cataclysm in her life. These emphatically are not arguments, but rather circular journeys (the poem begins with a little girl practising domesticity, and ends with a woman thrust into it) that orbit her. To return to style for a moment, the formal sophistication McCartney acquired in her Anna Karenina take-offs reverts a little to the shorter-lined, less breathless methodicalness of Under The Abdominal Wall.

The third section of the book, “Persuasion,” again returns to the most formative relationship in McCartney’s life, the one with her mother, but filtered through an Austen prism. There are classic pronouncements (“Did/ she really think happiness could be that easy[?]”) and references to marriage as “a conclusion as final, as boring, as death” that establish the McCartney abacus of human relationships, their recourse to pain. But there is also an admission in “My Mother’s Dresser” that her mother represents a kind of nostalgia, not that pain is welcome but that resolve is. What might have first found its expression in adolescent rebellion – a shouted NO! – has ultimately come round to understanding, as an adult daughter ponders the personal effects of her mother. It would have been much easier for this poet – and there would consequently have been far fewer poems – if she could have merely rejected her mother, but her mother’s acceptance of the worst of circumstances – divorce, dead child – kindles the poet’s wonder. In “Sorry,” the last poem of the collection, she writes “When my mother tried to tell me she was dying,/ tried to shuffle off the frail morphine blanket,/ hallucinations, opiate-induced out-of-the-body/ travels, to reach me, I failed to understand… ” This time it is the longstanding indemnification that finds its ultimate expression as regret in this poem, this exquisite technique of culpability.

The risk of the latter two sections of Karenin is the courting of repetition, the possible overdevelopment of the themes that made Under the Abdominal Wall riveting and formative; but McCartney developed so much as a poet in the intervening period that revisiting these subjects is more like a tentative celebration. The difference is one of apprehending poetic adolescence: the subjects of the first book were hers, but not yet her own, and raw emotional power came to be distilled over time into little devastations, into elegant verbal uppercuts. The family poems that showed promise have here become a deliverance.

The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“[W]hat human inquiry indeed boils down to is the animate interrogating the inanimate. Small wonder that the results are inconclusive…”
—Joseph Brodsky

With her ability to channel characters from literature and jack them up in dizzying exposition, it probably seemed logical for McCartney to do the same with the beloved Little House books from her childhood. But Tolstoy is a much better literary trampoline than Wilder, and even the Karenin poems occupied only a section of a book. There is a creative exhaustion to The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder, a drawn-out, nth-degree sense that the poems started as ideas because they could be done. Though Love Song contains many good poems (“Mary’s Eyes” and “Blackbird in the Corn” particularly stand out), it is minor McCartney, her only dissatisfying outing, borne of a good idea that could not be sustained.

The Little House world is a stand-in for poems about an idyllic childhood that McCartney never had. The first poem is titled “Ma” and this character, rooted in domesticity, is smothered in self-denial. The second poem is about a dead child and a grieving mother. Though there is the same verbal momentum as Karenin McCartney proves that her earlier achievements were no fluke – there is no immediate personal drama. Opting for the dramatization of the personalities of inanimate objects further compounds the difficulty. Only so much can be written about actual characters in the Little House books, forcing McCartney to excavate the inanimate (thirty-two out of a collection of fifty-three poems are odes to objects, and only so much can be made of their collective lament of not being put to good use). It is hard to care for a procession of objects like “Pa’s Big Green Book,” “Uncle George’s Bugle,” or “Ma’s Green Delaine Dress.” In fact the latter poem is uncharacteristically restrained in its staidness. The mystery of the prior two collections, about how a mother can repudiate what makes her human and the effect this repudiation has on her daughter, gets downgraded into the language of the mother’s poverty – a mother who in Karenin would never say the words “love” or “cancer” even though those were the two most powerful forces in her life. It is the daughter, however, who turned out to be the poet, best at ameliorating her fundamental aloneness by relentlessly and painfully connecting her loves. McCartney attempts to infuse life into the poems, as opposed to her more successful and familiar strategy of letting the poems into the life. This backs her into abstraction, grasping at aliveness, as in “Ma’s Rocker,” a poem which finally gives up: “An emptiness carved into me, not/ vacancy, but capacity, designed to hold.” It is hard to think of the rocking chair as truly sentient if it is rendered so imprecisely and with such frantically faux-profound gesturing. Another example of bathos comes in “Churn” which concludes:

The problem is never how to remember,

but how to forget, to transform rawness,

pain, eternal confusion into something

more appetizing, resolve, reconciliation,

the realization that softens winter’s stark

brown loaf, unpalatable potatoes.

The problem is how to write at once abstractly and well. One can try to tether a concept (like remembrance or forgetfulness) with an actual physical entity (odd that this is a poem about an object) but to cram so many concepts into one stanza (nine by my count in six lines) is to overload and ultimately topple the performance into meaning just about anything the reader could want it to mean. Usually McCartney sanctifies the word “pain” in her poems; she almost never misuses it, except here.

But objectification is not the only problem with Love Song. When McCartney does deal with people, her usual strength, the results can be cringe-inducing. Take the title poem, which should bear more scrutiny than, say, a clearly humourous poem about “Pa’s Penis.” McCartney has always had sex as a chief concern in her writing. But the decision to make over Laura Ingalls Wilder as a lesbian in the title poem strikes me as a transgression of the source text. If a writer stays true to her influences, then those influences will see her clear; this poem just perverts the Little House legend unnecessarily. It begins:

Let us go then, Lena and I, on black ponies,

half-wild, bareback, like straddling locomotives,

surging across the prairie steppe, Cossacks,

Fourth of July stunt riders, skirts up,

worsted drawers damp, dappled with horse sweat.

So there is the echo of Eliot’s sexually frustrated Prufrock in the first line that later invokes the sexual symbol of horses and then browbeats us with suggestive imagery like “bareback” and “skirts up” and “drawers damp.” This first stanza sops. But we move from mere suggestion to the travesty of outright enactment:

… Lena comforts, strokes

my forehead same as Ma, asks do I know

what men do to women? Yes, of course.

But do I know how the man lifts the woman’s

muslin shift, like this? Yes Lena. How he

touches her, here, kisses her breasts, nipples,

how tender he is, his tongue? Yes Lena.

At about this moment I think of fidelity to the source material, of the monstrous injection of sex in what was originally a family-rated tale. “Pa’s Penis” is fair game as a poem because it is playful, and because Pa’s heterosexuality is not bent; but this poem is not just impudence, it’s not fair, nor is it earned. Laura Ingalls Wilder is not a central character in this collection despite the title; the poem projects lesbianism on her as the poet’s wet dream. It is more like a Little House girl-on-girl period-porno than a poem. The final affront is an attempt to capture orgasm in the poem’s closing lines:

… I will always remember

how you tasted of granite, of lightning

and thunder, a fiddle string humming.

There should be no such thing as a money shot in verse, unless one wants a Bad Sex award to be created for the poetry category. To insinuate lesbianism into the Little House saga at the last moment, in the last poem, fails as an “update” because so little work has been done to develop the possibility earlier in the book.

Against

McCartney is always coming full circle. Her first book was dedicated to her husband; her last book is about her husband. Against (full disclosure: a book I edited) is a feminine update on Meredith’s Modern Love. It is about what was foretold in Under The Abdominal Wall: the end of the affair, the post-mortem on doomed attachment. The first poem, “Decaf,” admits that something is “ungraspably awry,” that there is “pain” in the poet’s “skull.” The poem then moves on to outright doom: “I thought the end was coming, no way to stop it.” So far, so expected – but then McCartney turns the sense on its ear, speaking of “redemption,” of the “surgeon glancing up/ from the chart, saying no, we were wrong, it’s nothing after all.” This might have been enough distance to cover, McCartney could have ended here on the hopeful note, but instead she fuses both senses, and both are true in the closing line of the poem – when poets are at their most conscious: “the blade bites deeper, and realizing you are married to him.” This poem admits defeat, admits that defeat will always be felt in terms of pain, and this awareness informs the rest of the collection.

McCartney cares less about extrication from a disaster than preserving the memory of what was once a great love. For all her emotional morbidity, McCartney doesn’t favour pain over love. No, her great redemption is the blade behind that pain, that deeper bite. In a later poem she is abject: “Weakness, weakness, how impossible/ it is to will oneself into or out of love.” But even so overcome by emotion she can’t help but commemorate the feeling, again in the fully conscious and quailing last lines of “Remains of the Day”:

… Because, at the end,

nothing will remain but that, watching you

leave, almost unable to breathe, my body

a gutted mansion, galleries stripped, barren.

This is another scream, a scream of abandonment, a still shot of a loving woman utterly rent by failure. Not for nothing does this poet – for whom motherhood has been the chief subject – close the poem with what must have been the hardest epithet of all.

If anything, the longer line introduced in Karenin is often drawn out into a drawl in Against, it’s finessed and sussed and allowed to tumble. The style is meant to reflect a compendium of event and emotion, the two being inseparable. Consider “Against Skinny-Dipping”:

… then it dies, the good feeling,

the talk turning to getting naked, what a lark it will be, relentless,

revisiting wheres and whens, beaches, baths. I hate this. Can’t

undress for anyone, every disaster torched on my body in scars.

So fucked to be that. I see what’s ahead, a mixed-up weekend

of hurt, every mild sorrow tumbled at my feet like sour clothing,

looking away while three pale immortals mount the surf.

Because this is a collection of retrospect, where events are found to resonate in memory (the poem is here-and-now, but McCartney has already experienced the end of the affair), the lines themselves must possess a sense of time. McCartney is paradoxically rushing to express something that happened long ago. The poems are comma-rich crammings, with multiple collisions and pauses for breath. But Against also has variety. McCartney can be precise, as in “A Relationship,” short enough to be quoted in its entirety:

Though the old cat both fears and detests

the dog, she wants the warmth of the room.

The dog curled beside me, the rest of the house

unheated. She hooks a claw under the door,

then thins herself to slip through the crack.

Pauses on the rug beside the bed, staring

at us, alarmed. If the dog moves,

she jumps, imagines he means harm.

But he’s just preparing to leave.

Cats are “feminine,” and this one is even referred to as a “she.” The dog is a “he.” This is a poem of wariness, of alarm, embodied in the behaviour of the cat. But the dog isn’t just incidental to the cat’s distress, nor is the cat hysterical; it’s the fact that the dog will leave that is the actual harm. Obvious parallels to the human principals of Against aside, here we have stylistically a rather spare, unadorned description of a domestic scene. So McCartney can be in free-associative agony, but she can also be possessed of cold appraisal.

Like many breakups, hers was stuttering. In “After Little Italy” there’s not quite reconciliation, rather persistent need: “You’re/ a little bewildered; first, I want out, then, I want sex. Forget/ what I said.” Or in “Against Sanitation,” another carnal plea, the speaker wants her husband not to clean himself after a hockey game: “… don’t rinse it away, come home to me with your ignominious/ arm-pits, your skunky rancor, truculence, your love of violence and/ force, your putrid, decaying-from-the-inside leather-of-the-glove stench/ of your fingers as they enter me…” And in “Impending Death of the Cat,” a near-perfect sonnet, it appears the decision to end the marriage has not been made yet, but like the terminal illness of the cat, it looms. Despite the recourse to words like “food” and “shit” and “vomit” there’s still that bundle of longing and grace in perhaps the most devastating reversal of a couplet I’ve seen: “And yet, remark her purr, her carriage,/ how capably she embodies the state of our marriage.” It is this gift, this ability to cherish, that keeps McCartney ethically clean: this is not a First-Wives-Club enumeration of grievances (in one poem she concludes that there is “no blame to shed but my own”) but rather a reclamation effort, a deep-sea salvage. Whole poems can be devoted to the simple moments when people connect, when they know each other carnally and existentially, as in “Lady Ashley”:

What stays with me now is not his ardor,

his matador’s grip, but the laughter when

he paused, inside me at last, and we locked

eyes, focussed—oh it’s you!— like the moment

when you unwrap a gift…

Irving Layton once wrote that poets are always on the tightrope between sex and death, but that major poets dance on the rope whereas the minor poets tentatively just make it across. A poem like “Dorothy” about sex with the Tin Man (Forget the heart, I tell him. What you’ve got is way better) demonstrates McCartney’s jazz hands. McCartney’s death in this collection is metaphorical, but her sex is present and realized and without it there would be no credible counterpoint. Whereas Love Song is a compendium of objects protesting that they have feelings, Against is replete with wounded human feelings that find salvation in their welcome remembrance. McCartney utters her retrospective post-marriage ethos in “Against Form”:

my mother’s subtracted

future laid out for her at twenty, a floral arrangement,

funereal tones deepening as it dried. Anything

but that.

Which is basically saying that she got what she wanted, that rebellion against her mother was a proxy way of adopting her mother’s definition. By aligning herself “against,” she merely becomes an inverse of her mother – one could switch the numerator and denominator and have the same being; she is not different. Later in the poem she chooses “pain,” that word again, as a way to “see what befalls.” McCartney’s mother did her poet-daughter the supreme favour: she bid her to feel, to feel it all, and these feelings are what give McCartney’s poems a beating heart. The title is ironic: McCartney clearly isn’t against form, she’s just desperately trying to be against type. And it is certainly ironic amidst this torrent that her most emotionally controlled poem – paradoxically one of the most affecting – is a geometric construction. Here’s the opening of “Against Parallelism”:

The sadness, two vectors, equidistant,

soldiering along side-by-side, in tandem,

but separate. The most microscopic gap

equals an abyss, unbridgeable. Why

doesn’t one or the other veer off?

Change course? End it?

They’ll never meet—

This is the tragedy of incompatibility, all the more remarkable because McCartney is a poet of connectivity. This poem of separateness is the starkest kind of devastation, recalling Marvell’s “The Definition of Love” and its lines

As lines, so love’s oblique, may well

Themselves in every angle greet :

But ours, so truly parallel,

Though infinite, can never meet.

This allusion leads to the more emotion-inflected ecapitulation of “Sixteen Years Ago”: “Ridiculous, wasn’t it,/ to think I could bank on love?” But the rejoinder is that she sought it out, in fact couldn’t have done anything else. It is perhaps fallacious to introduce the concept of poetic destiny, to pontificate about a poet and what they were meant to say, but McCartney was in many respects made. She draws us in through knowingness, which for her is a mirror of self-awareness. It is good that love has never made her feel safe, that it was a levy and not a boon, because it is human nature to appreciate more the things we pay for. Even though the results may be too costly, there is always the matter of the search for a decision, the ability of the poet to take solace from choice, or, as she says in “Against Marriage”: “craving… a pain that belongs to no one but me.” This is a line that foreshadows a later poem’s realization that there is no use in “trying to love/ what he loved so that he would love me more./ And that/ not working.” McCartney’s grief is invited to the table of poetry, the discomfiture of her art becoming ours.

“Dazzling…” —The Globe and Mail

“Swedish crime fiction, like the country itself, has both class and a social conscience. It was only a matter of time before it produced its own War and Peace…” —The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

“This novel is almost impossible to put down.”
—Times Colonist (Victoria, B.C.)

“A rip-roaring serial killer adventure.”
—Mail on Sunday (U.K.)

“The ballyhoo is fully justified…”
—The Times (London)

The following quotation is taken from the book’s climactic scene. Blomkvist, the hero, has been captured by the Villain, Martin Vanger, serial killer. Blomkvist is manacled in the theatre of operations in the basement and is about to be buggered before the slicing and dicing proper begin. The Heroine, Salander, has climbed into the house and on her way down to the basement has armed herself with a golf club. She swings and breaks the Villain’s collarbone.

‘Do you like pain, creep?’ Salander said.

Her voice was as rough as sandpaper. As long as Blomkvist lived, he would never forget her face as she went on the attack. Her teeth were bared like a beast of prey. Her eyes were glittering, black as coal. She moved with the lightning speed of a tarantula and seemed totally focused on her prey as she swung the club again….

Oi vey!

“[A]n utterly fresh political and journalistic thriller that is also intimate and moral. In spite of its dark unearthings Steig Larsson has written a feast of a book, with central characters you will not forget.”
—Michael Ondaatje

It sure does make you think, don’t it?
—John Metcalf

I taped separate interviews with two founders of Coach House Press, Stan Bevington and Victor Coleman, in Toronto on September 25, 1998, and June 27, 2001, respectively. The interviews took place in the small complex of red-brick buildings dating from 1870 which houses Bevington’s printing business and the renamed (as of 1997) Coach House Books. The press in its various incarnations has been there since 1968.
Fittingly for a publisher that stressed close collaboration between visual artists and writers, the two interviews are interwoven here, documentary-film fashion, expressing different angles on Coach House’s tangled history. We hear the viewpoints of Bevington the designer/printer and Coleman the poet/editor, with interpolations from a third speaker who happened to be present on the first occasion – their longtime collaborator, designer Rick/Simon. Topics in the resulting “conversation” are arranged more or less chronologically.

The original Coach House Press consisted of a loose network of volunteers who shared similar aesthetic concerns and pursued a highly fluid publishing process. They favoured artistic spontaneity and innovation, a mix of artisanal design and new printing technologies, and an approach described by sometime Coach House editor Frank Davey as “subversive, mischievous, interrogative, or defiant toward various artistic, prosodic, theatrical, political, sexual, bureaucratic, or narrative conventions.” Among the press’s books in the early years was poetry by Coleman, bpNichol, George Bowering, Michael Ondaatje, Daphne Marlatt, David McFadden, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg, fiction by Matt Cohen, Gail Scott and Nicole Brossard, and graphic fiction by Martin Vaughn-James.

The history is complex. For readers interested in the warring visions of Coach House Press and the power struggles that resulted, Davey’s journal Open Letter (9th Series, Number 8, Spring 1997) is devoted entirely to the subject. For our purposes here, it’s necessary to summarize several phases of that history, since the following conversation touches on all of them:

1965: Founding of Coach House Press by Stan Bevington, Wayne Clifford and Dennis Reid.

1966-75: Period of Victor Coleman’s role as the press’s “official/unofficial editor,” in the words of sometime Coach House editor bpNichol.

1975-88: Era of the volunteer editorial board, a shifting group of writers and designers including Bevington, Davey, Nichol, Rick/Simon, McFadden, Ondaatje, Linda Davey, Christopher Dewdney, Robert Wallace, David Young, Sarah Sheard and others too numerous to mention. Editors had a degree of freedom to place manuscripts of their choice on the Coach House list. Coleman rejoined the group in 1984 after a nine-year hiatus.

1988-92: Formal separation between Coach House’s publishing program and Bevington’s printing business, which until then had supported the press financially. The split was recommended by Valerie Frith, a former Literature Officer of the Ontario Arts Council. Introduction of an increasing degree of professional management and specialization. Expansion of the editorial board. Hiring of Margaret McClintock, another former Ontario Arts Council officer, as the press’s full-time paid publisher.

1992-96: Incorporation of Coach House Press as a for-profit business, receiving sales and distribution services through McClelland & Stewart. A bank-loan guarantee is obtained from the Ontario government. Book sales rise from $100,000 to nearly $500,000. In 1996 the Ontario loan guarantee program for book publishers is terminated by the Harris government, and the board of directors winds up Coach House Press. Much of the backlist is sold off to other publishers.

1997 – : Bevington, along with Coleman, Rick/Simon and others, reinvents the press under the imprint Coach House Books. They release titles online, as well as in CD and paper editions, and engage younger staff, including poet Darren Wershler-Henry and novelist Alana Wilcox, to direct and manage the press. Coach House Books continues today as a thriving, award-winning literary imprint.

The press houses a warren of offices on the renamed bpNichol Lane, tucked in behind the grey high-rise that was once Rochdale College. Reminders of Coach House history are everywhere. On the ground floor is an old Challenge Gordon platen press, an early acquisition of Bevington’s that remains the press’s logo. Our conversations happened on the upper floor, at the scarred wooden table that Bevington (or Wayne Clifford – nobody’s quite sure) hammered together in 1965. On the ochre and orange walls are wonderful photographs of Coach House people from the late ’60s, all of them in beards and jeans, posed formally by the front door.
A final note: Bevington’s observations about online publishing may seem unremarkable today, but it’s worth remembering they were made eleven years ago – another indication of his career-long presence at the leading edge of publishing technology.

Roy MacSkimming: Coach House originated in your printing and design work. How did you get into designing books?

Stan Bevington: I got the most influential book of my early career from Mel Hurtig [then an Edmonton bookseller] – The Spice-Box of Earth by Leonard Cohen. This was before I printed flags.

Rick/Simon: You have to see this flag on the antenna of Stan’s sports car, whipping through Yorkville.

MacSkimming: [looking at a photograph of Bevington in his Austin Healey Sprite] Is this a ’60s artifact?

Bevington: Yep. That’s at the time we were printing Canadian flags. I printed early versions of the Canadian flag before the final version was officially approved. The two bars on the sides symbolized ocean to ocean – two blue bars. So we tediously printed these flags in two colours. Damn! Twice the printing! And then they adopted the single-colour flag. The big factories moved in and made it in their own way, but before the new design was officially adopted there were thousands of dollars to be made.

That was my first enterpreneurialization. I was a hippie in Yorkville who saw that first proposal, went home and overnight silkscreened a whole bunch of flags. I went out on the street and they all sold, and I went home and made some more. Then I hired friends and seamstresses – it was completely entrepreneurial. That’s my marketing experience. On the street with flags. After sales of the proposed flag faded a little bit, people kept asking for the design with nine beavers pissing on a frog. Sure, okay, we had ’em. I had a fistful of flags, a variety to keep the market happy, and then the big guys came in and took over. It’s classic.
MacSkimming: So you were the complete hands-on flag publisher. You printed them and you sold them.
Bevington: There’s one copy in the Archives in Ottawa. We saw it when they put that display together [“New Wave Canada: Coach House Press and the Small Press Movement in English Canada in the 1960s,” an exhibition at Library and Archives Canada, 1997]. Just previous to that, though, the most influential book for me was done by McClelland & Stewart. Frank Newfeld designed Spice Box of Earth. I was very influenced by it.

I had a summer job at a small-town newspaper in Edson, Alberta. Then after I finished high school, I went to Fairview, Alberta and worked for a newspaper there. I learned linotype. At that time I had this book in my hand, and I could see that craft-wise it was an accomplishment. The book itself said it was the result of paper being donated and Frank scrounging good type and putting it all together as an experiment, and, sure enough, it worked.

So when I came to Toronto and went briefly to U of T in Fine Arts and then at Ontario College of Art, I met Will Rueter [later a designer at University of Toronto Press] and we got talking about printing. And Will encouraged me, and Dennis Reid [later a curator at the Ontario Art Gallery] encouraged me, and during the summer after my stint at OCA is when the flags happened. Silkscreening flags was something you could do with no capital investment. Then while I was selling flags, a guy I knew came up to me on the street and said, “Hi, I’ve got a printing press.” And I bought the press – that’s our logo. I bought it with the proceeds from selling flags.

MacSkimming: And you still have that press.

Bevington: Yeah! So, silkscreening was part of our first publication, Man in a Window by Wayne Clifford. Wayne just happened to be a friend of Dennis Reid’s. We’d all been at U of T. Michael Ondaatje was there, David Cronenberg was there. It was a great year. We all knew one another at the time and had lunch in the cafeteria together. I was very fortunate to be connected with good people early on.

After publishing Man in a Window we went to the Village Bookstore, and Marty Avhenus bought copies and paid for them on the spot, and it was like a Friday payday. You finish the work, go and sell them, and party. That Saturday Earle Birney came in and saw the book and was impressed. When you look at it there’s a little bit of similarity to Spice Box. Just some design considerations. Earle invited me to a literary soiree at his house in Rosedale and that’s when I first heard Victor Coleman read. I invited Victor to be involved with the books on the basis of Earle Birney’s introduction.

MacSkimming: When I first met you, it was at Earle Birney’s place. This was after that soiree where you met Victor. You and Dennis Reid were there, and I was a boy editor at Clarke, Irwin. Some of my poems had been in New Wave Canada [1966 Contact Press anthology of young Canadian poets, edited by Raymond Souster] – I’m not sure if it had come out yet.

Bevington: Well, we actually finished printing New Wave Canada. Curiously, the printer who was doing it didn’t quite finish it, so in our first shop at Dundas and Bathurst we printed the last few signatures and perhaps the cover. Bill Toye [editor at Oxford University Press] designed the type and the cover because Victor was working at Oxford at the time. So it was a marvelous turning point. Ray Souster from Contact Press let Victor edit the book and gather all the new young writers together. Toye was involved, we were involved in printing it, so it was a really nice focal point.

MacSkimming: When you decided to get Victor involved, he was doing production at Oxford. Were you drawn to him more as a poet, as somebody who could perform editorial functions, or as a production person?

Bevington: We put him to work typesetting. I taught him how to run the linotype machine, not knowing he couldn’t drive a car. He had to learn how to set linotype, and that acted as an editorial filter – if he couldn’t linotype it, it didn’t get published. So that put a slight damper on his exuberance. He did a number of books with hands-on linotype.

The existence of linotype in our shop just a few months after getting the platen press was part of building a production facility based on my experience of working at a newspaper. The small-town newspaper as a community centre was in my mind: how the newspaper was a production facility for the community. The newspaper went on the press on Wednesdays, and Thursdays it was on the street, and Fridays you did commercial printing. Did all kinds of things. Those little print shops always did the odd book too, because they had all the equipment to do it. So I had models of the equipment to gather and the way to do it.

I was fascinated by the photo-offset available at the time. I had done silkscreen and photo silkscreen, so I understood photography. I’d learned a lot about photography with an old wooden camera I used to make printing plates for pictures. So that mix and match of technology worked right from the beginning of our press. We had a linotype machine and a hand letterpress, then we bought a small photo-offset press. We were able to put real-looking type into nice pictures and started doing books – photo-offset illustration and letterpress type. With that production facility, we were able to crank out quite a variety of books.

***

MacSkimming: Victor, how do you remember starting with Coach House?

Victor Coleman: It was late fall ’64. Earle Birney had a series of soirees, inviting all the young poets and the movers and shakers. So yeah, that’s how I met Stan, and he said, Come on over and check it out. I was working at OUP and I’d got fairly disgruntled, so I asked Stan if he’d teach me how to run the linotype machine. I learned the basics in a couple of months and was able to edit the manuscripts that Wayne had
solicited.

MacSkimming: So Wayne was in effect the first Coach House editor.

Coleman: That’s right. He left before the books were even close to being in production, so I took over the editorial job. Wayne had just told people to send him manuscripts. I had to, sort of, shape them. I’d done similar things for Contact Press because I was a neighbour of Ray Souster’s, and that’s how New Wave Canada came about. Essentially I told Ray, There’s all these great young writers, and you’re not going to be able to do books by them – it looks like you’re going to stop publishing anyway. Peter Miller [one of Souster’s partners in Contact] had pretty much soured on the project. Louis Dudek [the other partner] was so Westmount-centric that if anything came from the west coast, he just figured it wasn’t really worth it. So I was editor ex-officio with Contact.

MacSkimming: And you were also working at Oxford. How had that come about?

Coleman: It starts with being Ken Thomson’s office boy when I was seventeen, and then I was a copy boy at The Toronto Star until I was twenty-one. Souster and Bob Fulford [then the Star‘s books columnist] helped me get the job at Oxford because the Star summarily dumped its copy boys when they turned twenty-one. Souster called Fulford and said, There’s a young poet that just got dumped by the Star. Fulford called Bill Toye up at Oxford, and I went out for an interview. Bill thought I would be a good person to have around, but I think he was thinking I would be a good person to have around in about five years….

MacSkimming: You did production there.

Coleman: I was assistant production manager when I left.

MacSkimming: How long did you stay?

Coleman: A little over a year.

MacSkimming: Was it a good place to learn?

Coleman: Oh, absolutely. Bill Toye was a mentor, for sure. Wonderful guy. Ivon Owen was the publisher, Bill was the editor-in-chief. They both figured they’d struck gold because I was willing to work for them. What they didn’t know was that I was spending my weekends in Buffalo and Detroit doing a lot of acid and marijuana and nitrous oxide etc., hanging out with Charles Olson, that kind of thing. So it wasn’t a good fit. What can I say? But Bill was extremely helpful. Taught me a lot. And we actually worked on the Canadian dictionary. They were just starting it. And of course it just came out, what, two years ago. That gives you an idea of how long it took to do that sucker.

But I was also working with Souster gathering stuff for New Wave Canada while working at Oxford. And I was printing issues of my magazine Is. The first few issues were printed in a little in-house print shop at Oxford by – I can’t remember the name of the printer, but he was quite happy to earn a few extra bucks doing these small editions after hours.

MacSkimming: Did you get to do any editing at Oxford?

Coleman: No. But because I was working with Souster on New Wave Canada, at one point I brought in the manuscript and Bill said, What are you doing? And I said, Oh, I’m working with Souster on this anthology of young writers. He said, Oh, I’d be curious to see it. So later A.J.M. Smith was up doing his last Oxford anthology, Modern Canadian Verse. He was working on it when I brought in the manuscript for New Wave Canada. And it didn’t actually happen this way, but the apocryphal story I tell is that A.J.M. Smith ran out of Toye’s office screaming, Stop the presses! Stop the presses! And added four of the New Wave poets to his anthology [William Hawkins, Robert Hogg, George Jonas and Michael Ondaatje].

MacSkimming: Did you see Coach House as, in any direct sense, an inheritor of Contact’s role?

Coleman: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I mean, one of the first books we did was a George Bowering, who’d been published by Contact – Bowering’s Baseball. But I also saw Coach House as being a really new, fresh, innovative voice. So the Bowering book is in the shape of a pennant. And Stan was totally into that, because his whole reason for wanting to do books was to do innovative design, play around with colours and papers and different kinds of bindings. Also because we were all sort of hippies, and there was that counterculture, even under the counterculture, if you will. So subversion was big. Consequently, the Canada Council didn’t look at us very kindly at first: Who were these guys?

***

MacSkimming: Stan, you mentioned starting out in the first coach house at Dundas and Bathurst. I understand it was facing demolition in ’68 and you moved here.

Bevington: Dennis Lee saved us from slum clearance at Dundas and Bathurst and invited us to Rochdale [Lee was one of the prime movers behind Rochdale College]. And we got to this coach house with Dennis’s help. When we got here we were able to expand a little bit. We bought a bigger offset press, and got in our bigger copy camera, and chugged along in a similar way for a number of years until we suddenly bought a whole set of binding equipment all at once.

MacSkimming: Did Dennis Lee propose some symbiosis between Coach House and Rochdale? Or between you and Rochdale? Were you going to be the house printer or anything like that?

Bevington: All that. And later we had a brief period of ‘amalgamation’ with the House of Anansi [where Lee was a partner]. We were to be the production facility and they were to be the distribution facility, so we moved a lot of our books over to their basement on Spadina. It didn’t matter who did what. They scooped Michael Ondaatje’s Collected Works of Billy the Kid. We made the typesetting and did production work on that book and they did the publishing. So that was the transition book.

Rick/Simon: There was a joint catalogue in there between Coach House and Anansi. We designed it and they just were appalled.

Bevington: We had some playfulness. It was a time when a choice between doing drugs or working included both, to me and to people who worked here. It was appalling for many, many people to think you could do both.

Rick/Simon: We contradicted the work ethic. That show at the National Library and Archives was really an eye opener for us. We were seriously taking drugs and into the Rochdale experience, but when we saw how much stuff we were turning out at that period, we were doing forty or fifty books a year, plus all this ephemeral printing, and so the idea of the drug-addled hippie who was useless was really proven false.

Bevington: Even we were really impressed when we looked at all this stuff. It’s a whole lot of work when you think of the techniques we had to do it. We were workaholics!

Rick/Simon: One of the interesting things looking back is that, for me, there’s this little portion of me that’s pretty lazy. And our research and development methods and our way of working meant that, being lazy, and also looking critically at the way the process worked, we would take out any pieces that weren’t needed. And so we’d take out all these things the industry considered as standard. So Victor’s sitting at the linotype machine and he’s editing text as he’s cleaning the machine – taking out all of those stages in the middle when we’re making proofs. Rather than taking, for example, the galley proofs and putting them in a camera and re-photographing them, which causes the image to deteriorate through generation loss, we started just taking the proof pages and contact-printing them directly onto the film we were going to make the plates with. So all the way along, we’ve used our knowledge of the entire production process, not just a section of the process, but the entire process, to humanize it and also optimize it in a way that made it work fast and easy.

MacSkimming: That’s so different from conventional book publishing, which is very compartmentalized. The editor doesn’t know what the designer knows, and the designer doesn’t know what the production manager knows, and the publicity people and the sales people, and they’re all living in different worlds, yet they’re part of the same process of making books. You guys collapsed it all.

***

Coleman: The Rochdale people asked Stan if he wanted to be the college printer. They showed him these buildings, which were tumbledown and basically needed to be gutted, although you can still see some of the original structure. And it was an interesting deal. They said if he was willing to commit himself, he would get the space for the equivalent of parking charges. So whatever parking would cost for this amount of space is what Stan had to pay on a monthly basis. God knows how much that amounted to, but the fact that he still has that arrangement is pretty good. Meanwhile Stan had to actually build the infrastructure of the place.

MacSkimming: And do printing for Rochdale.

Coleman: We decided if we’re actually going to do this and have a business, a good printing business, we should find a couple of used Heidelberg presses and move them in here, which is where they are now. They’re the same presses that were here then.

MacSkimming: We’re talking ’68.

Coleman: Late ’68, November, I think. Rochdale opened in the spring of ’68, and it wasn’t finished. Stan couldn’t get to his apartment by the elevator until after we moved in. He was on the eighteenth floor, so he had really well-developed calves at that point!

MacSkimming: Matt Cohen had a place there too.

Coleman: Matt had a place there. I don’t know that Dennis actually lived there. I don’t think so. Judy Merrill was there.

MacSkimming: Dennis had a house on Brunswick.

Coleman: I lived at Rochdale for two years and there was a lot of stuff happening. Coach House got a lot of printing jobs although not as many as expected. We did the annual Rochdale calendar. That was always a psychedelic experience. So it was a lot of weirdness. A lot of people, a lot of straight people would come and observe, and the question always was, Well, how do you get anything done? But as you can see, if you go back to the early production, there was a fair amount being done.

MacSkimming: Being young helped.

Coleman: Being young helped. But the thing is that we encouraged people who weren’t employees to utilize the facility. So a lot of ephemera got done by outside hands.

MacSkimming: And meanwhile Stan was getting printing jobs from other publishers.

Coleman: He did some for McClelland & Stewart. He did Place D’Armes by Scott Symons. We did some of Anansi’s books. And that got parlayed into other publishers coming to us. Eventually U of T periodicals would come to us. Harald Bohne [then Assistant Director of University of Toronto Press] was an early supporter of Coach House.

The constant ethic of Coach House is that we encourage people and help them do as much as they can for themselves and that kind of thing. Whereas if you go to some cut-and-dried printer, it’s like, Gimme the files and get out of here.

MacSkimming: There were some clashes with Dennis Lee at Rochdale, I gather. Different philosophies at work.

Coleman: I can remember being at a meeting with Dennis and Judy Merrill where they had put their heads together and proposed a Paris Review-style periodical. And I just laughed out loud. I said, Come on, look at your constituency, what are you talking about? I mean, Gerry Gilbert, when he was visiting, put up a sign in one of the elevators that said: “This elevator is a magazine.” And for the next month or so, people would stick up poems and drawings and stuff like that. It was kind of nice. That was what Rochdale was all about. It wasn’t about being the Paris Review. So yeah, people who had really grandiose plans were sorely disappointed with the way Rochdale went. But in that Dream Tower book about Rochdale, Sarah Spinks said that Coach House was the only part of Rochdale that was actually functioning as a progressive educational project. We were running printing workshops and binding workshops and creative writing workshops, so there was a constant flow of activity through Coach House.

MacSkimming: Did that happen in here or over at the Rochdale building?

Coleman: Mostly here.

MacSkimming: It’s interesting the way Coach House and Anansi had authors in common, and you lived about four blocks away from each other, yet in each case there was a very different ethos at work.

Coleman: We did one joint catalogue. I don’t know whether we’ve even got a copy anymore. We were doing their printing, we were publishing some of their authors, namely Matt [Cohen] and Michael [Ondaatje]. Or they were publishing some of our authors, depending on how you looked at it. We were less possessive of our authors than Dennis and company. So we decided to do a joint catalogue. We did it like an Ace double novel, you could flip it over and read from either end. And their side of the catalogue was very straightforward – you know, the standard hype and stuff like that. You opened up our side and where the standard hype should be, the first quote was, “You call this a book?” And it carried on like that. We were just way too goofy for Dennis.

MacSkimming: There was just the one joint catalogue, then.

Coleman: Yeah, that was it. After that he wouldn’t associate with us anymore.

MacSkimming: The idea was to do joint fulfilment too, wasn’t it? Weren’t the books shipped out together?

Coleman: Yeah, that was the idea. But that got the kibosh as well.

***

MacSkimming: What about the evolution of the editorial board, post-Victor?

Bevington: In the ’70s Victor and I had an argument about technology and computers vs. writers and
performance art. Victor’s interests at that time were more towards what was happening in performance art. In a multimedia way, he was having more fun, while I was struggling with the issue of computerized typesetting. We had a split and he went away. I remember a tearful scene with bpNichol and others about the press going under, and bp said, “Well, why don’t some of the senior authors who have been associated with the press form an editorial board? Victor’s gone, we’ll do it!”

MacSkimming: So it was bp’s idea.

Bevington: Yep. He and Frank Davey and Michael Ondaatje formed the core of the board. We published a broadside saying “Coach announces new team,” and we were up and running. That began the tradition of our editorial meetings. We usually met once a month, and a consensus kind of deal was reached where each editor was allowed to propose two books per year. And they did all their work on a volunteer basis. Then they started swapping publishing slots – Well, I haven’t done my book this year, so you can have it. It turned out that Frank Davey had a lot of books, and some of them he didn’t write, but we published them anyway.

Through the board we determined we’d like to use the new typesetting technology on novels and translations of French-Canadian fiction. It was an interaction between editorial and production. Grants took care of the editorial and typesetting costs. That got us doing Nicole Brossard and many of the books in the French translation series. The board also decided to go more thoroughly into a play-publishing program and invited a theatre expert, Martin Kinch [then artistic director of Toronto Free Theatre]. So that was another interaction between editorial and technology. The Farm Show was our first drama publication, and it was typeset using yellow paper tape. I’ll never forget the reams of tape and keeping track of old and new tape and the correction patches. We’ve kept that book in print. It’s one of the few books where our goodwill with the author has meant we’ve done three or four printings over the years.

Plays were a very solid kind of publishing venture, perhaps our most reliable. They sold in class sets or production sets, and people bought them in bulk without a big discount. So they were a good deal.

MacSkimming: Another example of how not publishing in the conventional way can often be more cost-efficient.

Bevington: So we went from the mid-’70s through the ’80s with the delightful voluntary editorial board. David Young [novelist and playwright] came on, and he brought along Sarah Sheard, and they became a very dominant feature of the editorial group. Sarah’s friendship with Margaret Atwood caused us to publish her book, Murder in the Dark. Sarah’s article [in Toronto Life, April 1997] describes how we shared our lives over many years, and then our lives changed. It contains a very astute kind of understanding of how we all had done what we had wanted in publishing at that stage.

***

MacSkimming: There’s a reference in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature [Second Edition] to a parting of the ways between you and Stan way back in 1975, I think it was. What was going on around that?

Coleman: Well, the parting of the ways had to do with me being a Luddite, basically, because now Stan was thinking, It’s time to switch over to computers.

MacSkimming: You wrote in the Coach House issue of Open Letter that the linotype machine had become your alchemy, a way of turning lead into gold by setting type.

Coleman: And I had raised funding – this is what this funding was going to be used for, I’d told the people who gave us the money. I went out west for my annual summer visit and came back and Stan had appropriated the funds to invest in some computer equipment. And at that point, I was kind of tired of the grind, and Coach House was getting to the point where we were getting a lot of unsolicited stuff from people whose sense of self-importance was, possibly, overriding their better judgment. They had to have a Coach House book. I’d go to the Western Front in Vancouver and sit down for dinner and some idiot would start pitching a book at me. I wasn’t there for that.

Think about visual art and video and performance art and that kind of thing, because I had very broad interests. I had already associated myself with A Space [an artist-run space in Toronto]. And so when I got back, and this thing happened, I said to Stan, Well, you know, fuck you. I don’t want to be associated with this. I just didn’t have much foresight. At the same time, I was approached by the people running A Space to take over. So that’s really, essentially, what happened. I went from Coach House to A Space.

MacSkimming: At that point, did you become part of the editorial collective?

Coleman: No. But at A Space we started doing book launches for Coach House, just celebrations of the publication of the book, a party, you know. Anansi started doing it as well. So A Space became a literary centre. You look at Greg Gatenby’s book about authors in Toronto and you look up me – he lists all of the writers who read at A Space, and it’s an extremely impressive list.

MacSkimming: Bob Creeley would be in there, because I remember going to hear him.

Coleman: Ed Dorn is in there too. Jonathan Williams. So the contacts I’d established beginning when I was at Oxford –those people in Buffalo and Detroit and New York City and San Francisco and in England – kept coming, and I could actually provide a live forum for them, which I found much more satisfying than being cooped up here dealing with manuscripts.

So the association with Coach House remained throughout, but I didn’t want to be on the editorial board. Then I was asked to come on the board by David Young and Michael Ondaatje sometime in 1984, I think. They both said to me that the press seemed moribund. Basically, they were saying Help! Because I still had that kind of loose-cannon-with-vision cachet.

MacSkimming: They wanted that energy and your sense of connectedness with the writers.

Coleman: So I came back on board in ’84. Put about six or eight books through the press over a period of three years, I guess. Then there was the McClintock period.

***

Bevington: You know, in the early days we were a writers’ and artists’ press, and we attracted authors because we didn’t get involved with restrictive author contracts. Anansi was a lot tighter on contracts, and Oberon Press and Talon Books were a lot tighter on contracts. Consequently, we got some very good authors. Then there was a time when the writers on the editorial board, in defining what Coach House was, decided it was a writer’s press. Just a writer’s press. And authors on the board and running the publishing operation saw book designers and illustrators as people they should hire. That’s a big split from our early beginnings when it was an artists’ and writers’ press. Artists and writers were split. The writers wrote artists out of the picture. Then the writers ran the publishing house the way all other publishing houses were run.

MacSkimming: When do you date that from?

Bevington: In the late ’80s. Valerie Frith came on and did a really interesting management review. She did a report to the editorial board on what some of the options were for moving ahead. At that time everyone was very concerned because, although we seemed to have a great body of talent – and we did! The editorial board was fabulous – there didn’t seem to be enough churning out of sales. The new idea was to find a way to generate sales in bulk and make some major changes. The changes were made and the goose was killed.

MacSkimming: So it was Valerie’s study that led to the press taking the form it did under Margaret McClintock. Margaret acted on that basis?

Rick/Simon: One of the historical problems that we’ve seen all along with the Literary Press Group and the publishers’ associations is that there are large publishers, there are small publishers, and there’s nobody in the middle. It seems to be the dead zone. And Stan has always realized that going through that dead zone is something that isn’t very healthy. People in the industry go to association meetings and encourage each other to go to that dead zone. And we always look at it and go, No! That’ll kill you! Don’t do it! You just wonder why that happens, why someone would think that becoming a mid-sized Canadian publisher was the place to go, because there aren’t any. None that survive.

MacSkimming: Maybe there can be a malignant type of growth. When is it healthy for a small press to cease being small?

Bevington: There’s lots of options. There’s the Canadian model of using the grant-funded small presses to act as a farm team to the bigger publishers. That’s the reality that we have to work with. In discussions amongst the old editorial board, that concept was discouraged. It was kind of a two-faced attitude: authors were getting their best books done by the big publishers while being editors on our editorial board and wondering why we weren’t being more “successful.”

That’s a Canadian reality, the farm-team approach. It’s very different from the European system, where more authors stay with little presses, and the little presses contract out to bigger publishers.

MacSkimming: God knows, a lot of the writers who started with Coach House, and also with Anansi, are now with the multinationals.

Bevington: I am so proud of having helped those authors get their work in print. When I look at authors like Anne Michaels, her book couldn’t have existed if it wasn’t for the foundation of the books that other authors we worked with had written. It’s so fabulous that we actually built a Canadian literature that has a strong international presence.

MacSkimming: But it wouldn’t have happened without the small presses. And it’s still happening with the small presses. People don’t see the R&D and creative risk-taking that took place. So it was the editorial board’s idea to bring in Val Frith and get a kind of outsider’s object analysis of the way the press was operating?

Bevington: Find a way of people gracefully retiring and being replaced by other people. And perhaps Sarah Sheard’s point of view – that the right people didn’t want to retire. Stuff like that was fraught with complexity in interpersonal relationships.

MacSkimming: Who would Sarah have liked to see retire, do you suspect?

Bevington: Everybody who’d ever written anything for Open Letter. There was a feeling that Coach House should break through into the mid-zone. And then of course in ’88, bpNichol died. He was a stabilizing influence for the small-press idea – for the hands-on approach – for the real folk. For all the really lovingly good things that we had done. We lost him, and from Victor’s point of view, Coach House was the invention of bp, and it was a loss that you can now see in a very tangible way. Coach House would not have had a public bankruptcy if bp was alive. There’s lots of things that relate to bp’s sensibility of staying at a real humane level. So now we can dig in again and try to live up to some of those aspirations.

Rick/Simon: Now that we’re here on bpNichol Lane. There was a dedication and naming ceremony. One of bp’s poems is carved right into the street.

Bevington: So the loss of bp had a dramatic impact on our editorial direction. The professionalism that replaced his sense of humaneness was just a wave that carried stuff along. Artists were written out of the credo. The imperatives of economics and sales became tangible.

MacSkimming: What’s the significance of the fact that both Valerie Frith and Margaret McClintock came out of the Ontario Arts Council?

Bevington: We’re unabashed money-grubbers for grants. Well, you understand Grant Land by getting to know the people who run it. But you were on the grant-giving side enough to see the effectiveness of the money we got in relation to what other publishers got. My opinion was always that we were Robin Hooding in both directions. When the college kids came here to get their literary magazines printed, they were sure to get a good deal ’cause we got grants. And when we filled out our grant forms, we were sure that we were producing good product for the grant money. So there’s a symbiosis there that I think you can’t split.

MacSkimming: I’m wondering whether Valerie and Margaret brought a value system into Coach House that was, in a way, alien to your ecosystem – the idea that the proportion of grants to your total revenues was simply too high. This is a public-policy issue: what percentage of a publisher’s revenues should be grants? And isn’t it incumbent upon the publisher to increase sales, so that grants shrink as a proportion of the total? I mean, that’s the mindset. Literary officers in grant-giving bodies, of which I’ve been one, are under pressure to justify their grants by saying, Look, the publishers’ sales are growing, they’re using the money to become more effective in the marketplace. Well, you don’t believe that. But that’s what people want you to say, especially the politicians.

Bevington: That’s because there was a lack of an alternative model. You’re hampered because you have an economic model, a financial-statement model that has a balance sheet, that has a performance compared to last year. Neither of those things apply to the arts. The model that we needed in the arts world was grants based on success with awards. And at the time that the publishing grants were being created, there wasn’t the same scope of literary awards that exists today. There was only sales to measure success. The sales component should never have gone into the grant-giving. They should have been giving grants based on a multiple factor of winning literary awards. Again it was the wordsmiths who called publishing a “cultural industry” – and then you get industrial models. That mess of words caused thinking to really get contorted. A grant should be for producing one copy – that’s all anyone ever sees – and no reporting on sales, no connection to press run. That’s culture.

MacSkimming: I’m sure both Valerie and Margaret were under the kind of pressure I was describing, which was to live according to the world of the financial statement, and they probably imported that kind of thinking into Coach House.

Bevington: In retrospect, how can you evaluate Anne Michaels’s The Weight of Oranges [published by Coach House Press] compared to her international sales now? Anne Michaels has been a spectacular success. The trivial amount of grant money that made her feel encouraged to write and went into The Weight of Oranges – what an investment! And you have to assume that over a publisher’s whole list.

I think Oberon is a more classic case of the publisher who produced a continuum of books with a few sparklers, and the sparkles might be too sparse, but they include Field of Dreams and other books that became movies. That wouldn’t have been possible unless Oberon was taking the risk of publishing twenty titles a year. So you give grants for the whole variety of a publisher’s list, and a few good things will come out of it.

Coach House was sporadic and wilder in the risks of what we produced, and how our publishing interacted with the creative work of the authors. Oberon is very hands-off – just make the book – whereas we certainly were involved in performance events within the manufacture of the book.

MacSkimming: So there was probably relatively minimal contact at Oberon between the publisher and the author, whereas you have the authors actually coming in here?

Bevington: Exactly. And those two extremes can’t be reconciled by a uniform grant administration.
I think you’re onto a very interesting area of talking about how the existence of grants influenced how we ran our business. The Councils required us to make at least five hundred copies of a book, which used up a lot of money, knowing that we were only going to sell two hundred. And then when we compared, through knowing the author, what the sales of their books were when they went to McClelland & Stewart vs. when they went to us, we saw they were kind of similar. And so we didn’t feel bad about not being able to sell more poetry. We knew we were giving our books into the hands of the market by alternate means, but there wasn’t an ever-expanding market for poetry.

Rick/Simon: And when the Canada Council began accumulating its own sales figures from publishers in different genres, they found that M&S wasn’t really significantly better at selling fiction or poetry on average than a literary press.

MacSkimming: How did these things factor into the demise of the original Coach House?

Bevington: Well, there’s that whole issue of Open Letter. It has discussions of the subject, and a variety of points of view on what happened and why the transition occurred, and there’s not much that I can really add to it.

MacSkimming: Is there a particular version of events in Open Letter that you would adhere to, or support, or say is substantially the way you see it? I mean, is Frank Davey’s essay pretty accurate as far as you’re concerned?

Bevington: The part that seems to me missing is an understanding of the completely dramatic change in technology that occurred at the same time. Authors used to come to me as a printer because I could make things look printed. That is, I could convert them from typewriter to print, to finely typeset print. And that was a major, major, reason why authors dealt with Coach House. Other small publishers during the ’60s didn’t have access to typesetting, so they didn’t give the authority of real print.

Then along came the Golfball typewriters – the IBM/Whole Earth Catalogue era of having things look sort of typeset. Anansi came in at that stage and did their books in that way. Then in the ’80s, along came desktop computers and laser printers, so that not only an author but a publisher had no reason to use a printer for the typesetting and preparation work. So that made the whole process of getting a book ready for press very different.

Our printshop has always offered a full service and done the whole thing and played with the technology in all directions. It was seen by Coach House authors and editors at that time as being expensive. And of course when you went to a big printer, the kinds of printers that McClelland & Stewart was using, and all the other publishers, their print-only price was cheaper than our whole package. So there was a little bit of economics there. Buying printing from the McClelland & Stewart sort of printers seemed to be a good thing. But it was dependent on choosing books that had a higher sale, so that you could get a lower unit cost per copy. You had to choose titles with print runs above three thousand.

So that was the first break with the tradition of Coach House – going to a cheaper unit cost in order to get sales and distribution. Then, deciding that Coach House’s problem was bad distribution, so hire distributors, hire professional managers. Things just grew, so that the distinctive advantage that Coach House Press once enjoyed became less and less, and Coach House became a branch plant for McClelland & Stewart.
The final straw, as far as I was concerned, was the decision to let McClelland & Stewart do distribution. And then the decision that the books shouldn’t be printed here. So the split actually occurred in gradual stages, and the final event of bankruptcy didn’t happen here. Everything was somewhere else.

MacSkimming: People tell me the bankruptcy needn’t have happened. That Coach House could have been maintained as a business – maybe under different ownership.

Bevington: To be very direct, I offered an amount of money [to buy the press] that was reasonable. But I didn’t offer to continue employing Margie McLintock. And Margaret didn’t officially do a legal bankruptcy. She did a publicity event. There’s no legal document. That adds to the whole confusion.

Rick/Simon: The sad part of that is that a lot of our authors’ books that were still in print, that were at American distributors, got pulped.

Bevington: I had a meeting with Avie Bennett [then owner of McClelland & Stewart], and asked if I could have the inventory that was left in their warehouse. But it was lost on the computer, until finally it was pulped. So there seems to have been a sort of a conspiracy to make Coach House go bankrupt. It didn’t legally, officially happen. They pulped the books. I mean, people thought that some of the obscure authors wouldn’t sell in however many years, so they should be pulped. They shouldn’t be taking up inventory.

We were sad at that event, and we finished our grieving period, and we got along with our new work. We’ll never, never outlive the publicity that was gained with the death of Coach House and the bankruptcy. Everyone knows about that.

MacSkimming: But everyone doesn’t know about the resurrection. Is that what you’re saying?

Bevington: Now it feels a lot like before the bankruptcy, when no one really knew about Coach House. So we’re back to a clean slate.

MacSkimming: And with all the freedom that implies, too, to recreate the idea of the book.

***

MacSkimming: What led to Margaret McClintock coming to Coach House, in your view?

Coleman: David Young, who was the president of the new-style Coach House, approached her because Val Frith had done some Coach House work, and she had been in the same position as Margaret at the OAC. And so Margaret came on, and it was only a matter of time. They went for more capital, I think, at some point. They went to Jim Polk, who was running this program at the Ontario Ministry of Culture that was started under Bob Rae, basically….

MacSkimming: The Ontario Publishing Centre.

Coleman: And so there were loan guarantees and stuff like that happening. Ill-advised. David Young would go to the bank manager, and Margaret Atwood would go along with him, and the bank manager would do this [bowing in an act of obeisance]….

I think they really meant well. I don’t know about McClintock. But they were way too dependent on her vision which, as far as I’m concerned, was non-existent. God knows, Coach House books were actually getting across the border into some independent bookshop in Lubbock, Texas, but of course they were never paid for.

MacSkimming: And M&S was handling Canadian sales and distribution?

Coleman: Stewart House [then owned by M&S] was doing it. My last gasp at Coach House was the first Stewart House sales meeting they held here. I came with my new girlfriend, Alice. At that point I had just hooked up with her. I was feeling fairly frisky, feeling good. And so we came over to check out this late-afternoon sales meeting. [Margaret] Atwood got up on the picnic table outside and gave a little speech in which she talked a bit about the history of Coach House and said, you know, Back in the ’60s when their little logo said “Printed in Canada on Canadian Paper by Mindless Acid Freaks,” and everybody guffawed politely. Then the sales people talked. I don’t know whether Doug Gibson [M&S publisher] was there or not. You know, big deal. The whole thing just smacked of branch-plant takeover. Where is Conrad Black when we need him, kind of thing. So Alice and I, in the middle of it all, looked at one another and said, Let’s get out of here. We walked over to the Uptown Theatre to see Dick Tracy. After that I really didn’t want to have anything to do with Coach House.

***

MacSkimming: Everybody is happy Coach House is a publisher again. Could you tell me, Stan, what happened after that moment in ’96 when the announcement came that Coach House Press, as it was then, was closing?

Bevington: It was an occasion for reinvention, and the reinvention I had been considering for a number of years was online publishing. We were able to start with a clean slate and do what still seems to me exactly the right thing. That is, save the computer files that authors are working with and make them available.

Not that I want to get into an either/or discussion about computer and books. My assumption is that people need to be able to index books in their own ways, borrow them from a library and spot read. All the kinds of searching that can’t be done on paper need to be available. In fact, I will go so far as to say that in the future, a book won’t be considered published unless it’s on the web. A slip of paper is going to be an antique object. And you see how the web is picking up great libraries, digitizing them and making them available. So it looks like an amazing opportunity for us in the small-press world to be doing things directly to capture the original book.

It points to the possibility of a no-man’s land: books that aren’t in the canon of great literature, and books that aren’t done by small presses. That mid-zone probably won’t get digitized and will probably disappear. So we’re working real hard to keep our authors who have been involved with and around the web.

MacSkimming: When you put their books on the web, have they gone through an editorial process first?

Bevington: Definitely. Usually what we do is get the files ready for the printed book, because that’s the hardest job, the most valuable in terms of information. The font sizes and subtle distinctions are there. Then we dumb it down and put it on the web and let it sit for a little while until it’s time to print the book, and then we print it. And that seems to me very in keeping with the Coach House tradition of using each medium and playing with the media a little bit, but having really good original Canadian author content.
It does remind us of early days at Coach House where the authors cross-fertilized each other. Darren Wershler-Henry has done a book called Nicholodeon. It’s a pseudo-academic kind of book growing out of the work of bpNichol. It coincides with our determination to put all of bp’s Martyrology online and keep it all in print. Which is moving along nicely. Books one and two are online now. This answers the issues of availability in a way that was never possible when we were in a print-only era. It’s a really, really interesting era now. The crossover period.

Rick/Simon: The really nice availability question it answers is the big overheads publishers have trying to get their books out there. The web is offering us places where people are seeing the books who would never, ever have seen them. We’ve never been able to send a salesman to places that now see our books. And people from those places are tipping the authors online, even if they’re not buying the books.

MacSkimming: It’s such a leap from where the original Coach House was. You had relatively limited distribution. I remember listening to Victor talk as if that was a virtue, if not a necessity, because there were only certain people in any case who would have any interest in Coach House books, and they would somehow seek them out.

Rick/Simon: It’s still the same philosophy of realizing there’s a small niche of people who may be interested in these books, but now we have access to that niche all over the world.

Bevington: We’re in a time where the model of what we think of as a book has shuffled. Let me explain. There is a pool of books that Coach House printed out in the world. They’re in print. Now you can go to the web and find where the used copies are. You can go and find if there’s copies of any of the early Coach House books at a rare book dealer and where it’s located. You can look at that catalogue, that inventory of books that are available, and see how it fluctuates and moves around. That’s a facility that wasn’t available in the paper-only world. So we’ve put books in the worldwide public lending library that happens to go through some commerce. And that’s a really interesting achievement.

I think Frank Davey was the first to say it’s important for Coach House to make books and put them into the public record. And now we have, at any one time, two or three hundred copies of the older books we’ve printed that are out there. We know. And that’s probably enough for current readers. When the people who are using them now are finished with them, they’ll go to rare book dealers and they’ll get moved around again because of the web. That’s a completely different situation than when the problem was distribution. Distribution isn’t a problem now.

MacSkimming: I remember you guys talking about a variation on this issue in 1981, when I worked at the Applebaum-Hébert Committee on federal cultural policy. The most interesting publishing brief we received was yours. Your basic argument was, as I recall, for publishing on demand, printing on demand. In future, people would be able to get the book in a bookstore in printout form.

Bevington: But at that time we were all in the headspace of assuming that the book was the final object and the only way that serious words were transmitted. You had to have it on paper. And now we’re in a transitional period where people are reading computer manuals and instruction manuals online and getting information that used to be in the print-only world. So that’s a transformation. And when you see our website, and you see the liveliness of some of the poets, you’ll see that paper couldn’t accommodate what they’re writing. So they’re able to communicate in ways that are indigenous to the new media. I think it’s a terrific time.

MacSkimming: But clearly you haven’t abandoned paper.

Bevington: It’s an and/also argument. We won’t get involved in the either/or argument. This is why I think it’s so strange that no other publisher has picked it up. We find we can make limited-edition fetish objects, we can make a cheap paperback, and we can give it away on the web, and people will still buy the expensive one. They’ll complain about the price, but they’ll buy it. Conventional marketing wisdom doesn’t seem to be in place anymore.

MacSkimming: Is this because they’ve encountered the book on the web?

Bevington: And they want the real thing! The web has been the most terrific advertising source for us. Just terrific.

Rick/Simon: It’s always been part of Stan’s philosophy, and generally what happens here, that whatever technology is available gets used, but the old technology is never really discarded. In fact, if you walk around here, you’ll see there are machines that are a hundred years old. This CD – which is a record of our website – has an imprint on the non-business side of the disk, and it was printed by Stan on the Gordon press. The pressmark press.

Bevington: It says, “Letter press in the traditional manner.”

MacSkimming: Right on the disk.

Bevington: Right on the disk.

Rick/Simon: A hundred-year-old device is printing onto this very modern media. So we’re not interested in getting rid of the old stuff. It’s a kind of idea that this country doesn’t do as well as other cultures. Like in Japan, two hundred years ago and tomorrow are next door to each other in the stalls, but here generally people want to do what Stan’s talking about – an either/or. We can have the modern, or we can have the ye-olde-crafte sort of thing. But those things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. They can all exist. This CD is a little example of having these things all at once.

Bevington: So we’ve archived what was on our website during the first year of the reincarnation of Coach House and made that available as an object. This CD-ROM is selling nicely at Chapters to people who don’t want to spend time wired up to the web or don’t have access. It’s got school and library potential. Librarians will love it.

MacSkimming: The CD-ROM that Stan and Rick are talking about reads Resurrection: Coach House Books 1997. www.chbooks.com. So the bookstores are stocking this.

Bevington: It’s in Chapters. This is the curious thing about Canadian publishing now. Years ago we used to complain that small presses couldn’t get into the chain stores. Now there’s no problem. You’ve got your book in Chapters, it’s published. The distributor as middleman isn’t necessary. You just deal with Chapters. The reality is they get the books out there, put them on bookshelves, put them in front of people.

MacSkimming: What about the independents? Are you selling to them too?

Bevington: We’re selling directly to them. But the independents have, from what I can see, been very careful to focus on certain specialty areas in order to compete with the megastores. So it doesn’t seem that we’re morally obligated to….

MacSkimming: On the back of the CD it lists the first year’s output of the new incarnation, Coach House Books.

Bevington: So fourteen books. This is in the best of the private-press tradition of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press and all the good Americans. It has a component of what a private press would do. Except it lives up to my assumption that private presses should publish living authors. That’s been a point for me in publishing right from the very beginning. We should apply private-press craft to publishing living Canadian authors.

MacSkimming: Do you think of Coach House in its new incarnation as a private press? Is that a term you’d use, or are you just talking about the private-press traditions that Coach House works within?

Bevington: We’re borderline. A private press traditionally is the work of a very few people, and most of the objects are done with binding considerations. Mostly fetish binding. But our attitude has always been to try and produce catalysts. If one person’s life is affected by one copy of a book that we’ve made, it’s enough. It’s a big thing.

***

MacSkimming: With you and Stan working together again, you obviously still have a very friendly collegial relationship.

Coleman: Yes. That never stopped. I was very pissed off at him at that one point, but when you work with somebody for that long, how can you not?

MacSkimming: It’s kind of a creative marriage. It goes through its cycles, ups and downs.

Coleman: That’s right. That’s very much what it was like. So when the announcement was made that the fall list for Coach House Press in 1996 was not going to happen – we’d heard rumours of it – Darren’s book Nicholodeon, which was an homage to bpNichol, was on that list. Stan said to me, Is there anything on the fall list that you want to do? And there was only one book and it was Darren’s. So we got the ball rolling. I took regular trips to Ottawa, talking to Sue Stewart [granting officer at the Canada Council], who was extremely gracious and helpful, but the folks who took over from her were not as sympathetic, I don’t think. I anticipated getting some kind of fast track to Roch Carrier [then Director of the Canada Council], but….

MacSkimming: On the basis of having done Coach House in the past.

Coleman: Yeah. But of course, why split the pie up any more than necessary?

MacSkimming: So how did you guys get funded?

Coleman: The first block grant came in last year, 2000. We’ve been going since ’97.
Stan put cash into it, which eventually he’d like to get back.

MacSkimming: You were back, at that point, to the old collaboration. You were the editor and he was the designer/printer and technical guy.

Coleman: That’s right. And Rick, who had been freelancing up until ’95, I think, for about ten years, working on his own. He used the facilities here every once in a while. But then I think they put their heads together and said to me, Why don’t you come and work here. And that’s worked out really well.

I approached Darren to say that we’d like to do Nicholodeon as the first Coach House Books book. I explained to him that we were going to be doing online publishing simultaneously – the first full publisher. Not just print but also on the web. And the idea was that we were going to do a new book and an old book every other month in the first year. And then depending on the funding, keep that up, you know, exponential growth, that kind of thing.

So when you look at the first two years of Coach House Books, which are both on disk, the first disk has fourteen books on it, and half of those are backlist titles. We approached all the authors and said, Do you want to stay with us? And many didn’t. A lot of people who’d come in during the McClintock era would have been much better off going with Louise Dennys or Anansi. That was what Margaret’s Coach House was aiming for. I used to call it Lester & Orpen Dennys II.

MacSkimming: Did you keep up that rate of production of a new book and an old book every other month?

Coleman: I couldn’t quite pull that off, no. We were close, pretty close. Darren finally said, Yes, I’ll do the book with you. And he’s happy he did, because Margaret was going to cut a lot of corners. We were able to do pockets and inserts and shit like that, so it looks like an old Coach House book from the late twentieth century. And then Darren, of course, brought some of his cronies in.

MacSkimming: He’s now the editor?

Coleman: Yeah. And Alana Wilcox is the fiction editor. Mercury Press published her first novel earlier this year. And Damien Lopez, who ran a small press called Finger Printing Inc. Darren is working in the forefront of, sort of, digital writing. It’s not just text online, it’s more than that. So we’ll see. More of that coming from Coach House in the future.

MacSkimming: It’s amazing, the metamorphoses within and around Coach House, and how the impulse carries on.

Coleman: It’s still very central to a lot of people’s concerns. People have gotten older, but every six months now, Brick magazine comes in and does its production here. They basically just take over the press for two days. Michael [Ondaatje] and Linda [Spalding] and Michael Redhill will come. Gord Robertson [a former Coach House designer] does the design. That association remains. Any time you see Michael Ondaatje’s picture in the newspaper, you’ll see some evidence of that press downstairs behind him. Whenever he does an interview, he comes here and does it. Has pictures taken here. So he has a very strong association with Coach House.

MacSkimming: Why do you suppose he does interviews here?

Coleman: It’s some kind of a spiritual thing, you know….

MacSkimming: Maybe it reminds him of who he is. So is the Literary Press Group handling sales and distribution for Coach House Books now?

Coleman: Yeah.

MacSkimming: Well, maybe that will be a good thing for revenues. You don’t think so?

Coleman: Well, you know, it’s a slippery slope. I essentially disassociated myself from that. It’s started up again: “Make sure that it’s happening. Get a hip young editor who’s serious about it.”

MacSkimming: Meaning Darren.

Coleman: Yeah, and Alana and Damien, who’s doing the website. They’ve got their own agenda, nothing to do with the kind of thing I want to publish. I’m still living in the ’60s and want to do books and issue pennants and stuff like that. But they’re very serious professionals. And so I think it’s a very slippery slope. I think they’re going to end up, you know, conventional, because otherwise they won’t survive. So that’s fine.

MacSkimming: What’s your involvement now? Éminence grise?

Coleman: I’m pretty much éminence grise.

The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen

Gwendolyn MacEwen

(ed. Meaghan Strimas)

Exile Editions, 2007

356 pages, $32.95

Gwendolyn MacEwen was born in Toronto in 1941 to a mother who spent much of her life in and out of mental health institutions and a father who died young from alcoholism. She dropped out of high school – to study on her own terms – and eventually taught herself Arabic, Hebrew and Greek. (It’s worth noting, if only to appreciate the symmetry, that she later wound up with corresponding lovers for each language.) As a young woman in the early sixties, she earned a reputation as a precocious regular at Toronto’s legendary Bohemian Café, where she wowed Margaret Atwood and other early CanLit luminaries with her powerful readings – and where she also met Milton Acorn. Their brief marriage, lived out mainly in a rough little cottage on Ward’s Island in Toronto Harbour, was seen by many as a “beauty and the beast” match. MacEwen visited Israel and Egypt in a time when a woman journeying alone in the Middle East was rare and when neither country was particularly tourist friendly. Throughout her life, she moved from apartment to apartment, travelled the city by bicycle, and survived on little money. Like her father before her, she struggled with alcoholism, an addiction that led to her premature death at forty-six.

Due in part to Rosemary Sullivan’s 1995 biography, Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen, these facts are widely known. It is difficult to read, or revisit, MacEwen’s work without having the experience coloured by them, a truth that becomes immediately apparent upon picking up The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen, edited by Meaghan Strimas. This edition updates Guernica’s selected from the early nineties, two pocket-sized books that I carried about with me for months when I first discovered MacEwen’s poetry. These thorough volumes plainly confronted her difficult life, both by direct reference to its details in their introductions and by what their cover portraits revealed. On Volume One the young MacEwen looks out from the half-light, bold and promising; on Volume Two her face, in profile, is puffy. She appears older than her years. The new Selected is far too fat and tall to fit in a pocket, and avoids any mention of the challenges that beset MacEwen in her personal life. Nonetheless, it, too, must contend with the Plathesque aura that shadows her career.

Here is a hint of what I mean. In a review of the new Selected in the Globe and Mail, Judith Fitzgerald (identified in her bio as a close friend of the poet’s in her final decade) introduces MacEwen’s literary accomplishments as follows: “Unimaginably wounded by grief (dolor), passion (furor), and hardship (labor), heart-broken beyond belief, inexplicably abandoned by those who called her friend, MacEwen still somehow managed to stay the writerly course… always mindful of her place in the holy acts of destruction and creation…” Indeed, we are told, she “sears” pages, “miraculously reshapes them after the fashion of the phoenix,” and remains true to “the long charred night of the ashen soul.”

Reading Fitzgerald’s review brings to mind Brent Wood’s essay, “From the Rising Fire to Afterworlds: The Visionary Circle in the Poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen,” published in Canadian Poetry in 2000. Woods, like Fitzgerald, unabashedly reads the painful circumstances of MacEwen’s life between the lines of her poetry, so much so that he even describes one particular poem as her “plea to be freed of the intensity of life, a plea that probably led her to alcohol.” He equates her with “psychedelic experimentalists,” mystics and shamans. He calls her a “visionary-healer” who “transcends the limitations of time’s arrow.”

Had I read Wood’s analysis before ever encountering MacEwen’s poetry, I might never have picked it up. I wonder whether other potential readers have been similarly turned off. Her current status suggests as much. MacEwen, people will tell you, was never a great poet. She was “mystical” and overwrought. Recently a friend and colleague whose judgment I respect declared that MacEwen wrote a few memorable lyrics, but that our sustained interest in her has more to do with her dramatic life story than with anything of value in her work.

Such indictments lead to a fundamental question about Strimas’s edition. Not merely: do we need another MacEwen selected to improve upon those we had? But: do we need one at all? What was there that is worth bringing back into the light?

To a point, current doubts about MacEwen – and the kind of cloudy, indulgent reading that trigger them – begin in the aura she herself projected, and in the symbols and tropes upon which she chose to hang her exotic scarves. She performed her poetry (by heart) wearing long, velvety dresses, her eyes outlined in black kohl. As a youth, she avidly studied the Hebrew and Gnostic mystics, and incorporated ideas from these belief systems into her writing. She had a thing for mysterious beings such as magicians and escape artists, who turn up frequently in her poems, as do prophetic children, “cosmic” objects, alchemy, princes, gods and kings. Her lines often unearth “terrible” and “unspeakable” things. In her earlier work especially, but even in some of her very last poems, a high-minded pretentiousness, tinged with an otherworldly air, rears. Some of her stuff was just plain bad. A good portion of her travel poetry following her trip to Jerusalem, which appeared in her GG award-winning collection The Shadow Maker, reads like the worst sort of banal, earnest, “I was here, look what I saw” reportage. The solemnity and grandeur in the voice she adopts, its descent from on high, can (especially in high doses) come across as precious and even naive.

In my early twenties I ate this stuff up; now it grates. But I would say the same about a certain amount of Leonard Cohen (her contemporary) and Irving Layton (who served as a mentor in some fashion to them both). MacEwen and Layton carried on a correspondence that is quoted generously in Sullivan’s biography. York University scholar Branko Gorjup, in the introduction to The Last Hieroglyph, his bilingual Italian-English MacEwen selected published in 1997, places her squarely in the wake of Layton’s neo-romantic modernist camp (where also sat Klein and Avison), among the poets coming up behind them, notably Cohen and Ondaatje. Her use of myth, he writes, aligns her with the older set; and her obsessive gaze into the past, along with what Tom Marshall has called an “alchemical search for the divine in the mundane,” with the younger.

I would link them another way too. MacEwen’s “motorcycle Icarus” in her “Poem Improvised Around a First Line” is a guy who might still seduce you post-high school, but not much beyond. He’s “black and leathery and lean” and “cannot distinguish between sex and nicotine.” His parting (pick-up) lines are: “O Baby, what hell to be Greek in this country/ without wings, but burning anyway.” There’s a bravado here that reminds me of Layton’s poem that begins, “The day you came naked to Paris” – a poem that also contains “a blaze of pubic hair” and “my Love, my Darling” and people who “became the atmosphere around them” (a cheap line above which he was well capable of rising). And then there’s Cohen. Take “Celebration,” in response to which a friend of mine once grimaced and exclaimed – not at all in the way the guy in the poem would have hoped – “Oh, Leonard.” Shall I quote? “When you kneel below me/ and in both your hands/ hold my manhood like a sceptre.” In the next stanza we encounter the sceptre’s “amber jewels.” Then dancing Roman girls. Before you know it, Samson is falling from the roof.

They set off the cringe-o-meter now, but these poems were all written and published in a time when they would have felt daring to write, and to read. We’re talking mid-century, very Catholic Quebec for the guys; and, in MacEwen’s case, the stiffly Protestant, early-sixties Toronto, where for her to write “each cloth is slander to your skin and/ nakedness itself is silk across your rising sex” (“Poem,” Breakfast for Barbarians), was to tear away the loin cloth well ahead of the northern migration of women’s lib. In his introduction to the 1962 anthology Love Where the Nights are Long – which includes both his and Cohen’s poems quoted here, and which came out the year before Barbarians – Layton seemed to call MacEwen’s “Poem” into being: “I have sought mainly for those extreme statements of surrender – for that is, after all, what love is all about: when the ego forgets its strategies of protection or retreat and men and women stand naked, revealed in all their clotheless glory.”

The parallels between MacEwen and Cohen especially, once you start to notice them, pop up suddenly all over, like tulips in spring. The voices are equally brash and often confrontational. They both regularly employ repetition, an incantatory rhythm, and a colloquial diction laid over a formal syntax and deliberate lineation. They plead and command, and call toward some presence or reality beyond the “I.” MacEwen, in “You Cannot Do This,” (also from Barbarians): “You cannot do this to them, these are my people;/ I am not speaking of poetry, I am not speaking of art./ You cannot do this to them, these are my people./ You cannot hack away the horizon in front of their eyes.” Now Cohen, in what seems almost an uncanny prequel: “The poems don’t love us anymore/ they don’t want to love us/ they don’t want to be poems/ Do not summon us, they say/ we cannot help you any longer.”

And consider these two side-by-side. First, from MacEwen’s “The Children are Laughing,” one of her most hypnotic compositions, later to be dubbed a “fugue” in the anthology In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poetry (Polestar, 2005):

It is Monday and the children are laughing

The children are laughing; they believe they are princes

They wear no shoes; they believe they are princes

And their filthy kingdom heaves up behind them

Place that against the opening of Cohen’s “Sky”:

The great ones pass

they pass without touching

they pass without looking

each in his joy

each in his fire

Of one another

they have no need

they have the deepest need

The great ones pass

Recorded in some multiple sky

Inlaid in some endless laughter

they pass

We could do this all night. And it wouldn’t be just a fun party game. It becomes tough, after awhile, not to see them as yin and yang. Is it the old sexist double-standard that has us dismissing MacEwen as way too celestial and melodramatic, while lauding Cohen as deep and daring and lusty? Or just luck – in that he lived long enough to grow up? (Or should I say “old?”) They shared not only tone and technique but a sort of “macro” sensibility. Kingdoms and gods and ancients populate their respective collections, as well as the close-up history that shadowed their own youths. Allow me one more comparison. In MacEwen’s “The Left Hand and Hiroshima,” the narrator appears “four-fingered and garbed/ in a broken gardener’s glove” and declares: “only because my poems are lies do they earn the right/ to be true, like the lie of that left hand at night/ in the cockpit of a sad plane trailing God in its wake.” In Flowers for Hitler, Cohen’s alter ego similarly spreads, and accepts, the blame. The poem “What I’m Doing Here” begins: “I do not know if the world has lied/ I have lied” and continues apace with conspiracy and torture and hate before closing with “I wait/ for each one of you to confess.”

Against the grain of the rising Canadian (even North American) “confessional” lyric, these two Canucks were instead building new myths, both of them: baldly and boldly (and sometimes badly). It’s MacEwen who sets this down, still in her twenties, in her introduction to Barbarians:

These poems arise out of a willful hunger, a deep involvement with self and world, a belief that to live consciously is holy, while merely to exist is sacrilege. The barbarian, living close to his original appetites, has not lost the capacity for joy…. I should like to think these poems have a certain value for what I term their essential ‘optimism,’ as opposed to much of the terribly cynical and ‘cool’ poetry written today. I write to communicate joy, mystery, passion… not the joy that naively exists without knowledge of pain, but that joy which arises out of and conquers pain. I want to construct a myth.

It is hubristic and youthful but in some way wonderful that MacEwen gave us this manifesto. Its resistance to the rise of the cool ironic stance is at one with the sentiments in Latyon’s Love intro, quoted above, and absolutely particular to her time. I am inclined to forgive her its excess – and those I have found when revisiting her poems – in the same way we have all tended to forgive Cohen: because, like him, she meant it. She delivered. Gorjup paraphrases critic Frank Davey in the introduction to his MacEwen selected, asserting that she has, “more than any other writer, restored the value of mythology to Canadian poetry by demonstrating that it is not merely a system by which one escapes worldly events, but instead a way to better comprehend our sensual and Heraclitean world.” Put more plainly, when she got it, she got it. She broke through walls. She left rubble in her wake.

Some of the most realized, most memorable, and most read-aloud-worthy poems I know remain McEwen’s. At the top of the list: “Breakfast for Barbarians” (“my friends, my sweet barbarians/ there is that hunger which is not for food –/ but an eye at the navel turns the appetite/ round”); “Dark Pines Under Water” (“You dream in the green of your time,/ Your memory is a row of sinking pines.”); and “The Discovery” (“I tell you her uncovering takes years,/ takes centuries, and when you find her naked/ look again”). These might well be the three lyrics my friend was referring to when he mentioned a “handful” of fine MacEwens. They’re stand-outs, no question. But there are many he missed. I bring forward, as one example, “The Breakfast,” from The Rising Fire, an early foray into what would become, for her, a fundamental instrument and metaphor: the first meal of the day. Here is its second stanza:

a breakfast hysteria; perhaps you have felt it,

the weight of the food you eat, the end of the meal coming

before you lift the spoon; or eat only apples

to improvise an eden. or forget the end takes place

in each step of your function.

This poem, moving as it does from “hysteria” through the breakfast room to Eden to the blessing of forgetting – then that sinister nothingness taking form in the solid, heavy rhythm of “each step of your function” – frightened me at twenty-two, when I first read it (incidentally the same age MacEwen was when it was published). It also brought an inexpressible relief. Note the three intangibles (hysteria, Eden, forgetting) interspersed with the spoon and the apples and the steps. Myth in reality. Weight in air. The inevitable known (the daily meal) containing the inevitable unknown (our end). By embedding the scary ungraspables within the particulars of this basic morning ritual, MacEwen cuts down their power: we can touch them after all. They’re simply cutlery and fruit, our own selves moving. But this sleight of hand, which she mastered young and never stopped employing, simultaneously renders our ultimate fate more sinister and insidious. It’s not somewhere vaguely off in the future. It’s here – and here and here. It might pounce into consciousness while we’re reaching for a spoon.

The enigmatic boy (or man) – or, as Atwood has termed it, the “male muse” – is another vehicle MacEwen repeatedly employs for her vigorous and unsettling explorations. In “Generation Cometh” he “grows beneath your heels/ and the city for him is easy he/ knows it from below.” He later becomes “The Magician,” “Manzini: Escape Artist,” “The Winemaker,” even “Archie Belaney” – but most memorably Lawrence of Arabia, in what has been described by some as MacEwen’s most powerful sequence, The T.E. Lawrence Poems. Published as a complete volume in 1982, this collection shows MacEwen moving past her early manifesto to “construct” a myth, into a project far more interesting and complex: now she’s engaged in mythmaking over top deconstruction of a myth. She brings us a fictional Lawrence engaged in confronting his own fabrication and re-fabrication of himself. In the opening poem, “Water,” we are immediately given a taste of the slipperiness of identity, which will prove Lawrence’s bugaboo:

… In France it tasted

Of Crusaders’ breastplates, swords and tunnels of rings

On ladies’ fingers.

In the springs of Lebanon water had

No colour, and was therefore all colours,

outside of Damascus

It disguised itself as snow and let itself be chopped

And spooned onto the stunned red grapes of summer.

For years I have defended water, even though I am told there are other drinks.

Water will never lie to you, even when it insinuates itself

Into someone else’s territory. Water has style.

Water has no conscience and no shame; water

thrives on water, is self-quenching.

The particulars of Lawrence’s reality are informed not just by MacEwen’s reading of his memoir and her trips to the Middle East, but by a lifetime of autodidactic studies in history, philosophy, poetry, religion and language, including her mastery of Arabic – all of which permeates the writing rather than bogs it down. Combined with the poems’ physicality, her immersion in Lawrence’s world grounds the mythological aura in which the voice is cloaked, just as, all those years before in “The Breakfast,” she set death down atop a spoon.

When MacEwen published the T.E. Lawrence Poems with Mosaic Press in 1982, we were well into the era of the primarily personal, formless Canadian lyric – the light domestic, the mildly nationalistic kitchen and garden poems so many of us grew up reading (and replicating). Meanwhile, MacEwen was forging a borderless, timeless poetics. She was global before “globalism.” She treated the portage or the northern lake with exactly the same attention and reverence (and raised eyebrow) as she did the Middle East, or people and places from ancient times, or, say, the Loch Ness Monster. She stood alone in other ways, too. She lived through the rise of feminism, and saw her contemporaries (Atwood especially, with that wicked irony) employ the pen to critique the status quo. But MacEwen had never felt compelled to meet the societal expectations placed on women, and so didn’t rail against them. Instead, she operated under a precociously post-feminist disregard for the battle of the sexes that remains refreshing.

Lawrence’s fraught journey, though well worth taking, isn’t on offer in Exile’s new Selected. Strimas truncates her selection from the Lawrence poems to just a handful, a selection as slim as those that appear in anthologies, giving us no sense of the ambition and accomplishment of the undertaking. Strimas either missed the value in the Lawrence poems, or sacrificed them to make room for the scrapbook of photos, news clippings and letters at the back. (Or the “Questions for Discussion and Essays,” which, sadly, reminded me why most people leave high school fearing poetry.) But without any word from Strimas, neither forward nor introduction – nor even a tiny bio that might provide some clue to her perspective – we are left to speculate.

This lack of context is maddening. The new MacEwen seems designed as a compendium for teachers, a sampler, and it is not without its merits. The book touts itself as the first chronological selection of MacEwen’s work in every genre. We get her best-known lyrics; her mesmerizing “Nine Arcana of the King;” and the long, fabulous “Helen,” MacEwen’s translation with her second husband Nikos Tsingos of Yannos Ritsos’ famous piece, in which Helen of Troy speaks out before she dies. (This poem bears revisiting now not just for its force but as an interesting contrast to Atwood’s recent re-imagining of Homer’s Odyssey in The Penelopiad.) The book also contains many poems from MacEwen’s last collection, Afterworlds, which read as a farewell and a reckoning. In addition are intriguing excerpts of fiction and memoir (the latter, in particular, setting down useful context for some of her poetry); and her excellent verse play Terror and Erebus (about the Franklin expedition). But compiling all this stuff in the order in which it was written doesn’t on its own make the publication of this collection a “signal event in North America’s cultural efflorescence,” as Fitzgerald effused in her Globe review. The book’s sections are grouped in such a way that it is not always clear which selection belongs to which original text (where previous knowledge couldn’t help me I was forced to refer to other collections). I was dismayed to find frequent typos. Works of art and photographs, many of them depicting MacEwen, function as intriguing dividers, but none of them appears with any attribution or credit line, an omission that had me flipping pages up and down, convinced I’d missed some hidden footnotes. Regarding the fiction, it is possible that we have been mistaken in accrediting more importance to MacEwen’s poetry, but the brief excerpts here are not enough to make the case. After reading the entire volume, I’m left puzzling over how exactly Strimas reads MacEwen’s trajectory, and what she was attempting to redress, if anything.

All of this undermines any sense of the “definitive” for which this collection might have aimed, and makes for a book that is far less meticulously made than each of the pieces of writing contained within. A reissue of those old Guernicas would have served as well, or better. What we could have used was a strong critical essay casting a contemporary eye on MacEwen, an effort to properly place her in the Canadian canon once and for all. Instead, we’re treated to a brief intro by Rosemary Sullivan that is essentially a severely truncated reprise of what she’s written in the past, though without any mention this time of MacEwen’s alcoholism or family tragedies. This leads me to suspect Strimas was tackling one of the problems I’ve mentioned – the overshadowing of MacEwen’s work by her life – but since these facts are so well known, it seems like a head-in-the-sand approach to reality. It’s too late to pretend this stuff away.
It’s possible some of these choices were made with the context of the classroom in mind, clearly one hoped-for home for this book. Such prudence might make sense; and MacEwen, reportedly fiercely private, might even have appreciated it. But her artistic methods – myth-building and all – indeed her entire poetic philosophy, has always seemed to me less an attempt to escape reality than to bring it on, full-force. In 1986, the year before she died, she took the post of writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. She reportedly used to tell students that they were better off failing than treading carefully. She encouraged swagger. As Sullivan reports, MacEwen’s complaint about contemporary poetry was that it “tended to be an exploration of pain, a kind of dwelling on one’s wounds and scars.” She also once complained in a letter to Layton: “The art of directly experiencing one’s poems is unknown in this city – the art of verifying what one has had the gall to write. Introspection itself should be a passionate thing, being sponsored from the outside.” She put this another way in her poem “Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear”:

You suspect this is a posture or an act.

I am sorry to tell you it is not an act.

You actually think I care if this

Poem gets off the ground or not. Well

I don’t care if this poem gets off the ground or not

And neither should you.

All I have ever cared about

And all you should ever care about

Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page.

MacEwen never apologized for wielding the pen; she never belittled its importance. She wasn’t afraid of words like “beautiful” and “bloody,” and she generally got away with using them. She was bold enough to risk being misunderstood. Since her death in 1987, our little literary-nation-that-could has birthed truckloads of competent lyricists, some of them fine, really fine. But revisiting MacEwen leaves me wondering whether a flatness now reigns, a middling ambition. I see all these meticulous, thoughtful, accomplished writers neatly pressing words into the page as though decorating a cake. I think of the ubiquity of that peculiar, heavily comma-spliced “poetic” syntax. Do we have more careful literary personae being composed in this age than ambitious works? Where, I ask myself, are our new MacEwens? Is any one of us prepared to trip over our own hubris and fall down hard? When MacEwen writes, “All you should ever care about/ Is what happens when you lift your eyes from this page,” it is pure irony (as opposed to that safe, cool stance we’ve come to love). It is the voice from within the poem telling us to look up – and we do.

The Mountain Clinic is tagged as a novel, though both at first glance and after close reading Harold Hoefle’s book reads more like a wanting collection of linked stories. Going Dutch is usually an amicable decision, but inevitably there will arise some disagreement over who foots how much of the bill. When a book is assured and self-contained such an argument becomes flimsy. As Mary Swan put it to me, sheepishly and exhaustedly, when I pressed her if The Boys in the Trees was either a novel or a book of short stories (a question I suspect she was forced to field often during all that Giller fuss): “Can’t it just be a book?” A simple plea, but one with which readers and critics seem increasingly dissatisfied. Hackles get up and we strive ardently to delineate: to keep fiction and non-fiction in their respective camps, to prevent poetry and prose from chumming around too heartily, and to occlude any funny business between the novel and the short story collection. But when a book works – like, say, when Coming Through Slaughter works, and when Go Down, Moses works, and when [insert whichever recent is-it-fiction-or-non-fiction? publication you think works] works – then I couldn’t care less about the form, so beguiled am I by this book, by this fully-functional, self-reliant, world-encapsulating thing. That said, a story can also borrow an inch and run a mile by associating itself with a genre, can fall back on or feed from those true and tried elements inherent to and indicative of the form, and come out an exceptional novel or collection of stories. While a lot works in The Mountain Clinic, what doesn’t work has much to do with this generic kerfuffle, with this awkward divvying-up of the bill.

Walter Schwende is a first-generation Canadian, born to parents who came separately from postwar Austria, met in Toronto’s Edelweiss Club, and finally settled in Scarborough. His father’s “proud achievement” is F.S. Windows, Ltd., a framing business opened in early 1965 and $60,000 in the red by the summer of ’66. After not coming home from work one night, the police find Franz Schwende’s car on a street near Lake Ontario, and though the dredged lake yields no body, he is assumed drowned. Seven years old when his father ankles, Walter himself beats it after finishing university: hitching to Vancouver, where he lives in a building with two recently divorced Czech immigrants, taking a security job “up north” at an asbestos mine on the verge of losing its labour to cheap South American work, and eventually popping up at a Nicaraguan communist coffee farm under constant threat by the Reagan-supported Contras. In each environ Walter takes a position at the feet of an older father-surrogate, a man who shows him how little he knows about life while providing him with a new sample to dip his moral litmus strip into. Somewhere between his youthful bouts of diarrhea in Central America and his 37th birthday – a decade-or-so period of narrative lacunae over which he does not visit or phone his mother enough – Walter becomes a teacher and finally settles in Montreal – sort of. His father’s leaving all those years ago dislodged something in Walter, so that he will never be satisfied being still, always preferring “to be between places.” Thirty years after his father’s disappearance, Walter – now the same age as his father was when he fled and slavishly obsessed with ordering the facts and possibilities of the events surrounding the disappearance into a cogent whole – travels to Austria to celebrate his Opa’s 100th birthday, and there discovers the true fate of Franz Schwende – sort of.

At its best, The Mountain Clinic is an unapologetic pageant of how, as one of the asbestos miners puts it to Walter, “the world just wants to fuck you.” Each of the six stories/chapters in the book reveals a new position life can take to stick it to a man. Anton and Jan, the two Czechs Walter befriends in Vancouver, claim to exemplify the male immigrant’s experience: they carry their wives from oppression to freedom in Canada, but are reduced to the level of naive children by the new world. Inevitably, their wives leave them for more accomplished immigrants. In the mining town of Clayton, Walter meets Bren O’Hearne, a dubious acquaintance who shows him that “behind almost everyone you see there’s a broken marriage, a broken country, a crime, a drug or drinking problem.” Ernesto, who made a living burying people – his children among them – before coming to the coffee farm, explains to that “fucking idiot” (Walter) that the reason no one else swims in his favorite secluded lake is because there are freshwater sharks there, figuratively and literally. Each harsh truth serves to partly explain why his father might have felt the need to flee: the burdens of a man, or the burdens of a German in Canada, or both. It’s as a frank tally of life’s merciless polings, witnessed but not experienced by a young Walter – the “kind of Western guy Lenin called ‘useful idiot’” – and as the search for some respite from this unmitigated fucking that The Mountain Clinic excels. But when it comes to organizing and presenting its findings, the book finally falters.

Where the novel becomes sloppy is in its frame of a mature Walter in Montreal spelunking this vast cavity created by his father. The loss of anyone, explains Walter, will open up a hollow in those they left behind, and “the hollow must be filled. Quickly. The person left behind will fill it with anything: memories strong and weak, guesses, rumours, other people’s stories. He can substitute what he wants to recall for what he can’t or for whatever happened that he didn’t like. Or that embarrassed him. All that matters is filling the hole.” At his desk he tries to see through the blacked-out lines of a police Occurrence Report and glean meaning from poses in old photos: tropes that come close to being mawkish, means that feel overly familiar. This egregious talk of hole-filling and reassembly – this hiccupping restatement of the novel’s thesis in the first and final chapters – undermines the subtlety of those middle chapters that so exactly resemble short stories, where Walter’s father glimmers in the narrative’s periphery instead of filling the frame like some bratty kid at a birthday party. Practically speaking, Walter talking about what he wants to do is so much less useful than Walter actually doing it. In these instances it feels as if Hoelfe is talking about the book he wants to write instead of just writing it. What results is the underlying tension of The Mountain Clinic: Walter Schwende’s intentions, as Narrator, are novelistic, while Hoelfe’s means of telling the stories, as Author, resemble most closely the aspirations of short fiction.

Who Do You Think You Are? keeps coming to mind: one of those “books” that work, where the major events of Rose’s life occur between the stories. Her father’s death, her divorce – the events on which a novel would tend to dwell and tirelessly explore – are fully felt, but not exploited. What the short story can do better than any form is romance the effects of life without having to belabour the causes. What Hoelfe does by cobbling together a novel from short stories is apply a narrative trajectory to the whole that the parts do not support. The threads of Walter’s itinerant experiences in Vancouver, Clayton, and Nicaragua make for fine short stories, but as chapters they shunt and hobble their way toward the end, animals forced into labour they were not meant for. And, for the book’s resiliency as a novel, that decade or more gap between Nicaragua and Austria seriously retards the emotional and technical momentum of the story. Finally, when the problem raised by the novel-structure comes to be resolved – that is, when the holes get filled, when Walter either finds or invents answers to the whys of his father’s actions – the truth about Franz Schwende falls flat, regardless of whether it’s a satisfying or unsatisfying answer for Walter, as there hasn’t been a sufficient or convincing enough preparation for it.

“The point I’m getting at,” to let Clark Blaise say it better than I can manage, “is the essential short story gesture, as opposed to the novel’s. We are not in the business of establishing any of the whys… The story traces what lingers after the whirlwind, after the fracture. Or before it. We’re not in the business of establishing the reasons… why things happen. They’ve already happened.”

A Week of This
Nathan Whitlock
ECW Press, 2008
264 pages, $26.95

Nathan Whitlock’s first novel, A Week of This (A Novel in Seven Days), is one of those book-books I was talking about. One of those books that work. I’m reluctant to put a stamp of sui generis on the thing, but at the same time don’t know what other books to shelve it with. Summing it up is difficult, as it so aligns itself with the detestation Flannery O’Connor always expressed when pressed to describe her stories: if you can encapsulate your story in just a few lines then there would have been no need to write it. As the title suggests, A Week of This is a week of this: 254 pages of sorting through the abstract “this” of life. Life that is not bombastic, or careening, or dramatic, but which is also all of that.

Dunbridge is that grey Southern Ontario town north of Toronto that most Canadian readers will know from either reading about in its endless and not always monotonous renderings in our literature, or from having driven through or lived in it themselves. A town where “only the pawn shops near the old movie theatre… and the dollar stores [are] thriving – the mall and the new Wal-Mart having sucked everything else out to the highway.” A town which, like so many of its inhabitants, may once have aspired towards some use, some nobler function, some success, but which over time has settled into just being there.

Nearly-middle-aged married couple Amanda and Patrick live in the house Patrick grew up in. Amanda is determined they remodel it into something that is solely theirs – “to chew through the layers of used-up life deposited everywhere by Patrick and his parents in their four decades of living in the place” – but they aren’t getting anywhere as most of their energy is drained into their jobs and most of their money is sunk into Patrick’s floundering sports store. Aside from a crazy mother and checked-out father, the only people in Amanda’s life are her husband, her brother Ken, and her stepbrother Marcus. Marcus hasn’t got it together enough to keep a plant alive but is dipping his toe in a relationship with a young single mother anyway, and Ken, who is “not quite fully retarded, but unable to get his brain moving sometimes,” keeps busy with grunt work at the Giant Tiger store while striving towards self-sufficiency. Having moved from Toronto halfway through high school, Amanda is different from these other characters in that she knows a life outside of Dunbridge, a more engaged, less constraining, less dun life; as with someone who has lost the use of their legs halfway through life compared to one who had been born that way and knows no other way of living, her lot seems all the more insufferable.

Over the seven days little of note happens: the week Whitlock chooses to show us is as humdrum as any other, lived out by characters who all suffer from a “willful paralysis.” Amanda has a run-in with her nutbar mother during a visit to Toronto; the mall with Patrick’s sports store in it floods; Marcus is confronted by the father of his girlfriend’s baby; Ken gets flack for taking too long in the tub from his equally slow roommates; Patrick and Amanda have sex one and a quarter times. That’s about all – not to give too much away. Essentially, A Week of This is a book about nothing, though not in the quirky, overly analytical way that stories about nothing became in the wake of Seinfeld. It is a chronicle of all that which we would never think to record: the vast, overwhelming nada of Hemingway. Amanda “used to feel as though every minute that went by left its mark on her, cut her as it ticked over, but now it was as though days and weeks were just a muddy flow. It didn’t seem to matter what she did – throw herself into some job or just stand there letting it go by – nothing left its mark anymore. She was all scar tissue, like one of those thousand-year-old whales that wash up on a beach to rot.” This world is not fucking anyone, in that violent, abusive, rapacious sense of The Mountain Clinic, but rather there is an overall feeling of being mistreated, misused, made to feel dirty, and taken advantage of in the supposedly consensual congresses and intercourse of living.

Besides the form (which we will get to), it is Whitlock’s devotion to the banal that is praiseworthy – a devotion more often found in American literature than in Canada. For a first book it evinces a profound trust of both his subjects and his readers; some might call this Whitlock’s “voice,” but I’d simply like to call it remarkable writing. Here there is a sturdy investment in the vague and inarticulate signals of life, an exploration of the nagging and the nettling felt by all of his characters, a feeling they all share but can’t quite put their fingers on. Whitlock’s real triumph is that as author he never puts his finger on it either. A constant trap of overly-realistic fiction is the author’s need to go out of her way explaining things: exposing the complexities of the seemingly simple only to simplify them again, to raise the low unreasonably high. Whitlock, instead of explaining, presents.

It’s nearly impossible to explain how technically accomplished, nuanced, fully-felt, and flat-out-fine a book A Week of This is without having praise sound laborious and monotonous. Whitlock’s prose is unassuming but never boring, stripped of any flourishes that would alienate his characters from the voice describing them. The action almost always takes place in the present and Whitlock rarely relies on exposition to justify the movements and choices people make. His images are tactile and telluric, dialing the reader immediately into the experiences of his subjects: a visit from his stepsister leaves Marcus feeling “as if he’d had his hair violently combed the wrong way,” Patrick’s stifled temper is “nothing more than a sick animal inside him that snapped impotently when roused.” The accomplishment of suburb writing is in making us re-notice all that which we have learned to ignore and take for granted, in the way a punch to the stomach makes you pay attention to every single breath. In the end, the only way I can think to describe A Week of This is as a 254-page short story. It looks like a novel, walks like a novel, but it quacks like a short story.

To return to Blaise’s point about the essential gesture of a short story, A Week of This never attempts to ask, let alone answer, why. There are tangible circumstances that have brought the characters to where they are – dead or crazy parents, too much drug use in their youth, poor investments, laziness – but none of them is able to investigate seriously why they are where they are, as they have no concrete notion of where exactly that place is. For an epigram Whitlock chooses a line from Howard’s End: “Actual life is full of false clues and signposts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes.” A Week of This is a book with no significant conflict, about people without specific wants, that somehow still manages to work.

The modern short story has achieved the ability to suggest without defining, to show without explaining, to transmit – the way poetry has always done in spades – some fundamental truth that can hardly be articulated but is acutely felt, so that as a reader you are aware that something essential has been passed on to you, but God help you to say exactly what. “The novel is exhaustive by nature,” points out Steven Millhauser (in his essay “The Ambition of the Short Story,”) “but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the novel, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The short story by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains.” Whitlock understands the futility of the novel’s ambition in a way that Hoelfe doesn’t, and manages to braid that futility of form with the futility of his subject. He uses this exhaustive nature of the novel as a means of cementing the reality of his characters and of Dunbridge, filling all that sprawling novel-wide space with intimate detail that finally becomes live flesh animated by the gestures and specific vagaries of a short story. And what results is not a short story and not a novel, but “just” a book.

Eds. Lynn Coady, Heather O’Neill,
Neil Smith

McClelland & Stewart, 2008

213 pages. $17.99.

The relationship between the Journey Prize Anthology and its parade of nominees is devoutly mutualist; the anthology offers young writers a safe and tasteful home and the writers, in turn, provide an exceptionally bright and cheerful welcome mat to lure the passing reader. And who wouldn’t love the invitation to the boisterous little party going on inside, audible for miles around? Two of the three jurors for the 2008 Journey Prize had stories featured in past editions, and this volume’s first ten pages, as well as its jacket, collect enthusiastic statements exclusively from past nominees. Elyse Friedman, quoted on the book’s back cover, calls the anthology that featured her in 2003 “one of the best showcases for short fiction in Canada.” Alissa York, who won the $10,000 prize in 1999, describes the Journey Prize Anthology as “a national tradition of literary discovery.” And Yann Martel, in the feistiest and most provocative statement of them all, declares that “for young writers, it’s the Journey Prize or nothing.”

I suppose short story writers – artists that 2008 jurist Neil Smith calls “The Burned Children of Canada” – simply cannot afford to be humble. They are advocates for themselves and each other, giving their collected work its velocity, and this kind of loyal enthusiasm must certainly pay off in terms of public interest. But after a while such frenetic praise, built to magnificent heights, begins to cast a shadow over the work itself. It’s hard not to become suspicious.

Indeed, after having carefully read the collection, I now scan the table of contents with an uneasy sense of amnesia – what was that one about again? – which makes me dubious of all those fantastic claims.
They are good stories, even those that slid away from me after I had read them. But many are not great stories. Their resilience – their potential for sticking to a reader’s bones and nourishing the imagination far beyond the last paragraph – is often limited, muting the tell-a-friend-immediately sort of impact that the book’s packaging promises.

A good-but-not-great example from the collection is Scott Randall’s “The Gifted Class.” First, its satisfactions: the story is told from the unique perspective of several precocious children, who solve advanced math problems, build geometric shapes from cereal boxes, and discuss the texture of the gelatine in their Fruit Roll Ups (“finer than salt but not as fine as talcum powder”). Their hungry young minds can almost, but not quite, intellectualize the deteriorating adult relationships they see around them. When the story’s central character, second-grader Belman Oz, considers a pair of anthropomorphic punctuation marks holding hands on the classroom wall, he wonders “if they were really a couple or if they just dated casually.” These recurrent collisions between a gifted child’s categorized understanding of the world and the complexity of romance give the story traction and humour.

Unfortunately, much of that traction is worn away by the story’s frequent detours into banal reports of the class’s routines. When Belman and two peers are required to tell an anecdote to the class, Randall stalls the story’s momentum by reproducing each child’s effort (the first tells a long story of wounding his finger while an infant; the second, a cute tale about visiting an organic farm).

Belman tells the classical Greek tale of Orpheus searching for his dead wife, which could potentially illuminate Belman’s relationship with his enigmatic father, a classical studies college instructor, but the clutter of the other children’s stories crowds out this opportunity. If Randall wanted to have readers experience the routine boredom of a classroom, he could achieve that without sacrificing precious real estate in a form already so jealous of its limited space. For that reason, the story reads like a draft, in which a compelling central theme is beginning to emerge, still buried in the inessential.

A similar sense of over-saturation encumbers Naomi K. Lewis’s story, “The Guiding Light.” G. Virginia Morgan is a severe and confident self-help guru preparing to lead a seminar in Tucson while a journalist tags reverently along, hungry for enlightenment. Within this story are moments of deeply satisfying tactility: the perilous heat of the desert where Morgan wanders without any protection or direction; the relief of cold water gulped from a sports bottle; the nostalgia of tasting a long-forgotten food. Morgan herself is an intriguing creation: a brain injury from falling down a set of stairs estranged her from her previous life and inspired her book The Willing Amnesiac, which established her self-help empire. There’s powerful vulnerability in her character, and constant, tantalizing hints that she is about to do something more wild and unexpected than walk through the desert without a sun hat – though she never does.

The journalist, too, never travels far into the unexpected, often reflecting on her testosterone-heavy family and her disappointing writing career, without taking compelling steps to reverse any of it. The pages and pages of conversation between the two women feel heavy and didactic, though jurist Lynn Coady praises the story for being the refreshing antithesis of fashionable, “pyrotechnic” innovation in writing; she says that, within its “understated language” and “total eschewal of quirk” is a story of familiar quotidian banality ignited by “deepening unease and, yes, mystery.” I agree, but I feel that the banality of it plays too heavily, and the mystery, where the story’s real venom is stored, plays too lightly.

Perhaps at the heart of this anthology is a conflict threatening many juried collections; where consensus is necessary, it is possible that the most provocative stories (in terms of style, approach, and perspective as often as subject) polarize the jury, and the stories left in the middle, pleasing all, are ultimately sent out on stage. I struggle with this notion, though, because there is nothing placating or particularly “safe” about these selections, as a whole. Opposing the unhurried, meditative style of Lewis’s piece, for example, is Mike Christie’s “Goodbye Porkpie Hat.” The absolute outrageousness of this story is its chief pleasure, and if the same jury agreed to select both this piece and “The Guiding Light,” then they can hardly be accused of accommodating a modest middle ground.

In Christie’s piece, Henry, a cocaine addict living in a cell-like apartment near Oppenheimer Park in East Vancouver, meets the reincarnation of J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, who wants to sample cocaine “in the spirit of scholarly inquiry.” The two men stagger through their neighbourhood on this scientific quest. “Oppie” becomes increasingly belligerent and lost to himself, finally ditching Henry to join another gaggle of junkies, his parting words drawing interesting parallels between his new quest for drugs and his historical one for nuclear armament:

Crack may not be the panacea, but… I refuse to stop. Not now, not when I feel like I’m so close to a breakthrough… To be frank, I think the world in which I shall live in from now on will be a pretty restless and tormented place.

Certain fringe characters, like the forgettable man who harasses Henry in an alley where he huddles with his drug high early in the story, seem invented only as puppets to expose the wretchedness of Henry’s life. Other characters, though, are brought to life with impressive deftness despite an economy of language, such as a nameless woman who attaches herself to their duo:

At the skid-row country and western karaoke bar, it’s me, Oppie, and the woman who told her boyfriend not to break my collarbone, our beer glasses hydroplaning around a small, slick table. She is wearing Oppie’s porkpie hat in the way some women flirtatiously grab and wear men’s hats, perching it on top of her hair like she is balancing it there, her neck stiffened, hoping the novelty of it will promote a new appreciation of what’s beneath.

Moments like this, of characters parachuted into repellent situations and left to grope their way free, provide the most memorable scenes of the anthology. In Oscar Martens’ “Breaking on the Wheel,” a tyrannical father attempts to boost business at his failing country gas station by advertising a “FUN FARE,” its only attraction an unreliable Ferris wheel on which his daughter is forced to ride for hours each day in all weather. Her manic smile, ratcheted to “high voltage” to attract customers (only one boy accepts a ride, and is crying before it’s over), is deliciously unsettling throughout the story. The piece’s ending, though rather abrupt, manages to twin the story’s sinister atmosphere with a very fragile possibility of hope when a social worker arrives to investigate:

Sharon does not like the way farms have a range of lethal weapons at hand… But mostly, Sharon does not like the way her vision is obscured by the screen door, as she looks into the dark room behind it, straining to see what’s there.

Saleema Nawaz’s “My Three Girls” opens with an equally disturbing image, made all the more horrifying by its irreconcilable contrasts:

There is a photo of me and Kathleen in the rec room with Maggie, our dead baby sister. She is slumped in a car seat, swaddled in a pink flannel blanket, eyes and mouth sutured shut, every crease downturned with the heaviness of death. Kathleen and I are posed to either side, legs outstretched, hips pressed into the orange carpet.

This story, which ultimately won the Journey Prize, achieves quite a lot in just a few pages. A family tries to cope with the loss of a baby daughter, and the surviving girls of that opening photograph eventually have babies of their own before one of them is struck down by cancer. The story is full of moments of exquisite, understated pain, as when the girls’ “dry-eyed and harried” father explains that the baby girl’s death, caused not by accident but by an inevitable birth defect, was “something closer to a disappointment than a devastation.”

But some of the characterisation in the story is just too obvious to satisfy, particularly regarding the family matriarch. The final line of the story is especially overdone: “I sometimes see my mother walking from room to room, her face sagging in grief, looking like a lost little girl.” A sagging face, that hazy reference to loss – this pattern of writing grief is too vague and commonplace to stir a sincere emotional response in the reader, which is especially disappointing since the mother’s anguish is demonstrated so effectively earlier in the story, as when she meets her baby granddaughter:

Like a reluctant Lazarus, my mother is drawing closer and closer to Hannah bit by bit. She grabs a handful of potato peels and steps toward the garbage can to the right of the table. On her way, I see her shoot a glance at the baby, her pupils dilating until her brown eyes are suffused in black.

I understand why Nawaz’s story earned her the top prize; she writes well, carefully selecting moments from decades of family history to inject a novel’s worth of pain and endurance into just a few pages. I’m glad Canada has such a prestigious prize to honour her accomplishment. Nonetheless, the self-congratulatory bumph of the book’s back cover and opening pages still fills me with unease. No question, there are some very respectable stories collected here. I only wish the collection’s overall impact was more memorable, more consistently outstanding, to justify all the hype.

These are, of course, speculations fueled by the rich suggestion of Leon Rooke’s naming, of his own god-playing in the world that he and Tony Calzetta have created. To be sure, there are readable clues as to the kind of guy god is and my advice would be not to cross him. In the opening story, which Calzetta has realized in the form of a pop up book sculpture, he comes across as a extortionist, subtly reminding us that tithing twice as much as expected just might help us avoid walking into open graves. He’s also quite prepared to leave the status quo as it is, rendering those who are without still without. This god is heavily into cost reduction and profit maximization, no matter the price. He acts like a capricious finance minister, and dreams like a gangster.

God brackets the book; if he’s a somnambulant enforcer in the beginning, near the end he’s a letch, the hoary old leader of a group of confused disciples, chasing after a young girl and insinuating that he might withhold immortality if his physical needs are not administered to. He is also a prankster: when he can’t turn tricks with an innocent, he will play tricks on his unsuspecting creation. We are his flies and he is a wanton adult boy who has refused to grow up. He most certainly uses us for his sport.
I’m pleased to say that Leon Rooke and Tony Calzetta do too, in the most delightfully intelligent way. Their collaboration was made with heaven and hell equally in mind; it is full of madnesses and deceptions, serendipities and generosities; it smells of sulphur and vanilla. (Did I mention that it exudes the brightness of Mondrian’s palette?) It is riddled with foibles and rampant with felix culpas. It is worth saying, over and over again, that their having worked together was a most fortunate fall into the world of the livre d’artiste.

I think of Rooke and Calzetta as the Brother Grim and the Brother Grin. In their drawn and written incarnations, these fabulous fictions put on the degree of perversity and exuberance necessary to their telling. They are full of knowing innocence and an elusive jouissance. They occupy the terrain of the fairy tale, the allegory and the folk tale, all literary forms of deceptive simplicity.

The collaboration was a tidy one; Calzetta’s drawings were, at his own admission, “preparatory sketches,” notes to himself that simply delineated ideas for larger paintings – a shape might suggest a rock or a tree, a few undulating lines could be water, mountains, or the tracing of an uncertain sky.
For his part, the drawings would usually say something to Rooke from the outset. “There was the immediate suggestion and then I seemed to have found a rhythm that made it very easy to create the story around the drawings, to extend them and make forays into the hinterlands.”

Oftentimes, that hinterland exploration engaged a single image that Rooke would put to unusual purposes. A floating striped shape becomes the hand of god in the title story; in the next story a pair of pillars reminds him of bank architecture, wherein an overblown and cynical bank president addresses his minions; a shape with four points hovers above a prickly landscape and is transformed into the “four-tittied bitch of a Scots girl” who is “gallopeding on a grey pony around and around the castle walls.” In this story, Ms. Smith attempts to explain to her husband why she has spent the night in the nightgown of another man. The explanation has something to do with being “among our olives,” her admirably economical euphemism for the consumption of prodigious numbers of gin martinis.

This narrative is a perfect example of the improbable connections Rooke makes once his story starts rolling; you hear in Ms. Smith a character who could congenially inhabit a comic version of a Robert Browning dramatic monologue; the Scots girl is an ethnic variation on Lady Godiva; and Rooke discovers the wonderful word “gallopeding,” which initially he thought he had invented, in the letters of Virginia Woolf. It is a word he employs to his heart’s content. To borrow a phrase from another writer who gave language a run for its money, there are more things here than are dreamt of in most philosophies. “It’s the way language works,” Rooke says, “it suggests a story in the odd tumble of words.”

Let me offer a more complete example of how he springboards into narrative from the simple drawings that Calzetta has made available. At the outset, it is important to realize that Tony’s style of drawing is not in any way unknowing; the simplicity of his line and shape occupy a tradition that includes the quirky edginess of late Philip Guston, the nervous vibrations of Keith Haring, and the overall casualness of the cartoon. In the drawing for The Scroll of Civilization (I am providing only the abbreviated title), Calzetta sets a tube-like shape across a shaft that rises up from the water. It could be a thimble; it could be a finger; it could be just a form. This is a world governed by Could-be. So the central object is a piece of architecture; it is a sculptural object; it is an instrument of maritime navigation.

What Rooke does is layer meanings onto the horizontal shape: in his telling it is the scroll of civilization, transformed initially into a rusted periscope and then into a metonymic ship, the periscope of which allows us to see land and to discover a safe navigation. What the scroll carries is itself, the inscribed representation of civilization, which is transported to the uninhabited isle. This is the story of The Tempest and the myth of Atlantis rolled into one small discursive fragment, and it all develops out of a single, uncomplicated drawing.

The Scroll of Civilization, Son of Scroll, Daughter of Son of Scroll (Photo by Gabrielle de Montmollin)

The story itself is a fable, an elaborate narrative of society’s indifference to the artist. The Scroll of Civilization is full of fine conceits and pleasing literary contours. The name of the painter is Exubrio; his wife (herself a sculptor whose art is reviled and who is reduced to cleaning toilet bowls) is called Denuncia Francesca Illuminati Luminesa. Her naming is a splendid redundancy; self-consciously overripe, commensurate with the story she inhabits. She is drugged to prevent her from attacking her stubborn husband who has decided to throw his life’s work into the sea. The story has a courtly frame with a decidedly contemporary twist and an economical sense of the colloquial. (Their daughter, the lovely Cherise, has been punching her dearest friends “in the chops” as an angry response to her parent’s lack of recognition). In the midst of this hand-wringing and domestic melodrama, we get the elegant line as the sleeping potion embraces the potentially murderous Denuncia. The potion “compelled her pulse at that moment to slow, her head to nod, her breath to leap as a gazelle summoned to lazy dream.” Rooke channels Andrew Marvel and faintly complains on the little death of his own fawn-like creature.

Calzetta came to appreciate that it would be difficult to do illustrations for Rooke’s writing. “I thought it would work better the opposite way because I knew he liked my work and that he would have fun with it.” When he read the stories Rooke had written in response to his drawings (they were “quite strange”) he realized the initial collaboration he’d had in mind wasn’t going to do justice to the text. As Rooke had done in the writing, Calzetta began sampling his own repertoire of influences. He looked to a Whitney Museum catalogue of Red Grooms’s work from the seventies; he lifted the pure colour scheme that Jim Dine had used in designing the Catalogue Raisonné for his photographic work (the four volume set published by Steidl in 2003 was called The Photographs, So Far); he scrutinized pop-up books. The project began to generate its own sense of complexity. “It definitely had a mind of its own,” he recalls. “At one point I couldn’t get a handle on it, it just kept changing. It was like being in a car and not being able to steer it.”

Calzetta stayed in the driver’s seat and now the vehicle hums along. He also changed roles inside the process, moving from driver to engineer and mechanic. He began to re-work his original drawings in response to Rooke’s extrapolated readings. The title drawing is a revealing example of the reciprocal dialogue that has operated from word to image and not only from image to word. (There was an equivalent dialogue moving from image to image in the conversation between Calzetta and master printer Dieter Grund from Presswerk who translated Tony’s drawings into the etchings and woodcuts that are so resolutely tipped into the folios). In the word-to-image exchange between writer and painter, Calzetta took the original pencil sketch for How God Talks in His Sleep and transformed it into a book sculpture which includes components from a number of the drawings and which locates the title drawing in the centre of the pop up space. The sculpture’s brilliant collage and origami form changes the simple graphite values of the sketch into a rich interplay of primary colours. At the top of the re-worked drawing is the yellow-handed arm of god, sporting a black and white striped pattern that Picasso could have worn on a Mediterranean beach, or that a convict could be wearing in jail. Given the character of the god we have encountered in the stories, the safest bet is on the latter. And if Picasso gets removed from the visual space, then Matisse finds his rightful spot in the radiant colours and lyrical shapes that Calzetta has orchestrated in this miniature cut-out world.

The Ravening Beasts at Fairy Godfather House (Photo by Gabrielle de Montmollin)

The collaboration between painter and writer comes together most forcefully in their shared theatricality. Rooke finds in Calzetta’s work a predisposition towards the dramatic, and a defining structure that often takes the form of a proscenium stage. This tendency perfectly suits Rooke’s own sense of theatre and the way he develops his characters. They write themselves into existence and they interact in accordance with the kind of character they are. They are most apparent in The Ravening Beasts at Fairy Godfather House, a drawing in which a trio of sail-topped pillars (or dunce-like pillars – you can take your pick) seem to be doing a standup routine inside a space flanked by stage curtains. Calzetta draws the stage and Rooke gathers together the ensemble company to perform there. His cast is a clutch of the slandered and the exonerated, the latter group including buxom peasant girls and black musicians who have sold their souls, women who have kissed frogs, soufflé chefs, “those who polish our steeples in the dead of winter,” and “my lover who warmly says goodnight to me every morning.” They’re like figures from a reverse elimination dance and their play ends when the ravenous beasts venture into the nocturnal landscape, spurred on by the hissing of oleander bushes, the panting of mongrels and the sight of “bleached skulls hanging from boughs bent by all that came before our society was formed.”

What a fabulous vision: dystopic, generative, monstrous and mutable. Leon Rooke and Tony Calzetta have made something unique inside the frame of their combined word pictures. They are at once director, actor, set designer, writer and painter. They have made the stage, and have given it form and language. As I say it, the whole enterprise sounds godly.