But what did we talk about? Books, and plays, and roles in plays for the stage or on CBC television; and advances for a story not yet written, for the Tamarack Review; or the coming exhibition at the Isaacs, or the Dorothy Cameron, who took a chance with the paintings of Robert Markle, and had the Toronto Vice Squad close down the exhibition, to the rage of protests raging in the Toronto Telegram and the Toronto Star. And we talked about the best movie being shown at the Towne Cinema, down the street on Yonge, or at the few art cinemas dotting the city. And if it was Christmas, if Christmas was in the air, about parties: six artists to a case of beer, and two bottles of Chianti wine, and when we had drunk off all, we stuck a red candle into its mouth, as if to keep it silent and bear witness to our lasciviousness; six girlfriends and wives to match the number of artists; and a “mickey” of Canadian Club because it is Christmas; and Dylan Thomas in vinyl form, played on a blond Seabreeze record player, with a record arm changer that plunked down on the thirty-three-and-a-half with such a noise that you thought the record had cracked. You got the Seabreeze from Bay Bloor Radio, with a down payment of ten dollars, and a promise to pay, regularly, five dollars a month, from Sol, because Sol was an artist himself: more than a mean-spirited businessman. He wrote poetry. And if he liked you, he read it to you, while you stood thinking of your financial health and whether or not your monetary arrangement would be accepted. “Drop in anytime! Pass by. Even if you don’t have the installment …”
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
We would sit on the floor, in an artist’s studio, most parties had the floor as the best furniture, for not always was a bargain to be had at the Goodwill Store; but we sat, and leaned our backs against the wall, and listened to Dylan Thomas, and tried to imitate his voice and pitch and his swagger and his capacity for whiskey, and believed that we had his genius. Just as the six men, all painters, imagined that they had John Coltrane’s genius and Miles Davis’s genius and Philly Joe Jones’s genius, when they formed the Artists’ Jazz Bann, and played in many diverse tempos and keys, playing the new mad jazz of Ornette Coleman, who played deliberately off key, while they could not help the dissonant notes escaping from their horns and strings and skins and ivories, performing at Openings on Fridays, and in mixed-media concerts on Sunday afternoons, at the Isaacs Gallery; and in private homes, such as Bill and Betty Kilbourn’s mansion, in Rosedale. At one of these mixed media concerts, Bill Kilbourn read from Dante’s Inferno, and I, from Leroi Jones’s The System of Dante’s Hell; somebody joined the two ends of a piece of tape with Elastoplast, and we heard the same phrases for the three hours of the concert. I cannot remember whether it was a speech from Professor Kilbourn’s biography of the firebrand, Mackenzie King, or a chosen few chords from “A Love Supreme” by John Coltrane. So, the six merrie men of the Artists’ Jazz Band, all true and talented — with the paint brush, not necessarily with the drummer’s brushes for playing waltzes — and creating more noise in their artistic crescendos, which we all stomached, liked, and applauded as if we were listening to John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Miles Davis; and were not listening to Graham Coughtry, Gordon Rayner, Sadao “Nobbie” Watanabe, Robert Markle, and sidekicks, Harvey Cohen, an architect student at the university; and Dennis Burton, famous for his Garter Belt series.
These were halcyon days for Dennis Burton. He had just got a commission from Dr. Morton Shulman to paint a portrait of his beautiful wife, Mrs. Shulman. Dennis, who had recently befriended me, had invited me to his studio — whenever a painter invites an artist who is not a painter to his studio, this was an honour — in a second-floor apartment in Yorkville, at the corner of Yonge and Yorkville Avenue, across the parking lot from Pickering Farms — a place which sold the best meat, the best fruits, the best everything, before stores started coming on strong, as specialty shops, selling special “produce”: a place where more Mercedes-Benzes, Volvos, and BMWs were parked in the lot east of the Yorkville Public Library and the Yorkville Fire Station, more than at the Granite Club.… Dennis decided to paint the portrait, in a triptych. Things were good for Dennis. And to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, everything was good, everything was easy. Dennis was parading in an individual fashion parade, the moment May arrived each year, in a houndstooth, custom-made suit, probably from Lou Myles, or the House of Mann, both on Yonge Street. But it could have been bought from the advance he got on his commission to paint the beautiful Mrs. Shulman.
The German women, with their love of beer and cool jazz, to be followed by the Hungarians fleeing another kind of holocaust, but the majority of whom were convincing you that they were counts and czars and emperors and countesses, back home in Hungary, and who made the best beef stew to be served in Toronto, and called it by a European name, goulash; and then had the audacity to gouge their culinary and cultural identity into the thick wall of Toronto business and private landscape, by opening a restaurant on Bloor Street just west of Spadina Road, and call it The Goulash. We dined there. With a new appetite and a new taste of our taste buds that had been deadened for years by the roast beef cooked to a burn, and overcooked Brussels sprouts, overcooked carrots, and mashed potatoes flooded by brown gravy. And there was no hot sauce! We revelled in this new immigrant cuisine, in the same way as we devoured the blintzes, latkes, boiled braising beef of the Jewish restaurant on College near Spadina. The Bagel. Oh, these days of protests and posture. These days of immigrants who could not speak the same English, but together we dragged Toronto into the twentieth century on its belly, too filled, for too long with the fodder cooked by Anglo-Saxon culinary blandness. Free form in painting, free expression in dress, especially by the Germans and the Hungarians — the Italians, with their characteristic and cultural clannishness, and love of family, kept to themselves, in a cultural self-imposed segregation, and had not yet shared their risotto, their sliced ham (prosciutto), and their corn meal cou-cou, which they called polenta, a more sophisticated term than ours, but tasting not so good! — free expression, too, in opinion, and ideas and themes in their writing; free expression in love, and, I am told, in love-making.
In those days, in the Pilot Tavern, surrounded by all this talent, I tried my hand at writing stories, which I would send to Robert Weaver, to be broadcast either on one of his literary radio programmes at the CBC, or in the literary magazine of which he was editor, the Tamarack Review. One story I wrote in this new form, not new form, but perhaps more correct to be described as formless, was “When He Was Young and Free and He Used to Wear Silks,” from the book of the same name. Weaver did not buy it.
It was “inspired” not by women from Germany or Hungary who drank their beers at the Pilot Tavern with us, but by Enid, the sister of the actor Michael Sarrazin — was he a teetotaller? — a woman who wore hats and who loved hats, and who loved beer, and who loved artists, and who loved Hendy, or Henderson, a sculptor who had come up from the United States, and who was not in love with me. Meaning the hat-wearing woman. But I was in love with her — from this distance. I never spoke a word to her, in all the years I drank my ration of beer, sometimes in cash; sometimes on Bill’s credit. But once, on a cold afternoon, in early December, I met her walking up Bloor Street, in the direction of Holt Renfrew, where she said she was heading to buy a hat; and I told her I had been “inspired” by her to write the story. “And why didn’t you tell me?”
“That I had been inspired by you?”
“All those years?”
“You mean that I’ve been inspired by you?”
“No, stupid! That you were in love with me! My marriage was on the rocks all the time you were seeing me wearing my hats, and sitting in the Pilot, drinking beer. Was I drinking beer in those days?”
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She knew me well enough now, to be personal.
“Did you go to see They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? You should have told me …”
The night her movie-making brother got his first contract to be an actor in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, he entered the Pilot and sat with the painters, and held to his principle of drinklessness.
“You should have told me,” she said.
And I said:
In the lavishness of the soft lights, indications of detouring life that took out of his mind the concentration of things left to do still, as a man, before he could be an artist, lights that put into his mind instead a certain crawling intention which the fingers of his brain stretched towards one always single table embraced by a man and his wife who looked like his woman, her loyalty bending over the number of beers he poured against the side of her bottle he had forgotten to count, in those struggling days when the atmosphere was soft and silk and just as treacherous, in those days in the Pilot Tavern the spring and the summer and the fall were mixed into one chattering ambition of wanting to have meaning, a better object of meaning and of craving, better meaning than a beer bought on the credit of friendships and love by the tense young oppressed men and women who said they were oppressed and tense because they were artists and not because they were incapable, or burdened by the harsh sociology of no talent, segregated around smooth black tables from the rest of the walking men, and walking women outside the light of our pilot of the Snows; and had not opened or shut their minds to the meaning of their other lives; legs of artless girls touching this man’s in a hide and seek under the colour blind tables burdened by conversation and aspirations and promises of cheques and hopes and bedding and beer and bottles; in those days when he first saw her, and the only conversation she could invent was “haii!” because she was put on a pedestal by husbandry, and would beg his pardon without disclosing her eyes of red shots and blots and blood-shot liquor; the success of his mind and the woman’s mind in his legs burnt like the parts of the chicken he ate, he was free and young and he was wearing the silks of indecision and near-failure.
This opening to a short story, written in 1970, while I was teaching at Yale University, is the longest opening sentence I am guilty of having written. I always use my openings to compare them with three openings, Dylan Thomas’s in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”; Ian McEwan’s in Amsterdam; and Caryl Phillips’s in Crossing the River, which I quote here, respectively:
One Christmas was so much like another, in those days around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
Two former lovers of Molly Lane stood waiting outside the crematorium chapel with their backs to the February chill.
A desperate foolishness. The crops failed. I sold my children. I remember.
You walk in this quadrangle: from Asquith Avenue, straight across the road, and pass beside the First Floor Jazz Club, and, if it is daytime, the place will be closed, the downstairs where the music is played and sandwiches sold, smoked ham or smoked beef on rye bread; but upstairs, if you look carefully, through one of the large windows, you will see Mandel Sprachman, the architect, standing at his drafting board; and you have just enough time to look to the right, east to Yonge Street, with your eyes passing the sign board of a French restaurant, La Maison Doré, beside which is a Model T Ford, put there, unmoving and immovable, with no gas in it, and no engine, slaughtered, it seems, and plucked like one of the chickens the chef of the restaurant, who stands outside smoking and blowing his clouds into the cracked leather upholstery of the Model T, and thinking of transforming the chicken on his mind, into the gutless cleaned-out automobile. But you are not going toward Yonge Street. Not yet. You are passing through the “back,” an informal parking lot, heading to Bloor Street, where there used to be a street lamp, almost directly outside of Grand & Toy, who were located beside the subway entrance. I have just passed the coach house in which there is a theatre where Dora Mavor Moore has been teaching generations of men and women how to remember lines and postures, and Macbeth and Hamlet. “To be, or not to be. That is the question.” I wanted to be a professional actor, once. And I used to hang out with Norman Ettlinger on Prince Arthur Avenue, Number 27, as I boarded there, in the attic, or crow’s nest, if you please. I have never seen Dora Mavor Moore in person, only in the newspapers, or heard her on CBC. Norman Ettlinger is the person who told me I should take acting seriously, and play Othello; and I took him seriously, and applied for a place in the Actors’ Studio in New York, and was accepted, and chickened out, because I had cold feet: the first three months of my acting career, “playing I am an actor,” and getting principal parts, to play the role of a black butler, all of a sudden, parts vanished. And I spent three months without a call. Acting, and wanting to be an actor, was too precarious. I would see Barry Morse, Norman Campbell, Bruno Gerussi, an older actor, Christopher Plummer, who was the spitting image, even in voice, of Alec Guinness, but was not; and other actors such as Gordon Pinsent; and other actors who appeared in General Motors ninety-minute dramas, in plays in The Unforeseen Series; and at Stratford; and I saw them all in Norman Ettlinger’s kitchen, sitting round the round breakfast table, with the English marmalade bottles, and warm milk, and teapot with the tea cozy on, and half-used China teacups and saucers. Norman encouraged me to go to Stratford to see how it is really done, but I balked at the idea. I have never visited Stratford to see a play. In the sixty years I have lived here. I have never visited the Royal Ontario Museum. Nor the Science Centre — except to listen to jazz and hear Ted O’Reilly introduce Toronto musicians on Monday nights when there is jazz there.
But I am wandering from my quadrangle of habitation. I am going to Grand & Toy to buy the cheapest typing paper on which to write my novel: it is The Meeting Point I am working on, on a Noiseless Remington Rand. I am too poor to purchase, even on installment, an IBM Selectric. The Bay store is obviously not built yet, on the lot through which I am passing. I enter Grand & Toy, and the manager, a slim, tall man with his head shaven bald, looking as if he is undergoing treatment for cancer, but is not; he is just a man of class and style, ahead of his time, with a clean-shaven head and well-pressed trousers. He attends to me, all the time. In time, he is most considerate when one or two of my cheques, written in the best Christian uprighteousness, bounced. And in time, when time had cured that little indiscretion, he gave me a card with which to charge typewriter paper, carbon paper, typewriter ribbon — with the card I could still afford only the cotton ribbon, not the silk — and Liquid Paper, which looked like a vial that contains lady’s lipstick, and which reminded me of milk turning bad.
The door to Grand & Toy is a double door, with two vertical halves. With a horizontal bar made of aluminium, just above waist height, in each half of the door.
Habit tells me that the right hand half is open. It is always open when you push it. This afternoon I am in a hurry. My two daughters, Janice and Loretta, aged three and one, are in my care. My wife, Betty, a head nurse at the Toronto General Hospital, is on the day shift. I “mind” the children during the day, and I scratch out a few hours’ writing during that time, but am relieved from my duty during the night, beginning at four or five o’clock in the afternoon, when nurses on the day shift usually get off work. Before I slip out to get the typing paper, I ask my friend, next door, Gordon Peters, to listen for the children, in case of emergency …
It is not much more than one hundred yards from 46 Asquith to the door of Grand & Toy, and the children are in their playpens. And Gordon Peters is next door, listening through the paper-thin wall that joins my townhouse to his. I put the playpens on the floor, to prevent the children from wanting to climb out. Infants like to climb. Climb in and climb out of playpens. This afternoon I am in a good mood. My work is go
ing well. And I am broke. But I have the card that the bald-headed gentleman has entrusted me with. I want only typing paper. And Liquid Paper. And I know that the bars are there on the door I am about to enter, on the right side, and the door is unlocked. And I walk to the right-hand side, and am about to place my hand on the metal bar, and I do not feel a bar, and continue walking, into the store; and I stand for a foolish moment, looking at the bald-headed manager, and then I realize that something is wrong. The right hand half of the door was not unlocked. I had walked through a glass door. And my hand is bleeding. And the manager’s pate is shining more than usual. And he utters a strange admission. “You are the second person today to walk through this door.”
My writer’s mind is working fast. Lawsuit. Sue. Get as much money out of Grand & Toy, that I can purchase a brand-new IBM Selectric, red in colour, and with silk ribbon, and a built-in erasure. And be able to drink pure Scotch at the Pilot Tavern, and follow Dennis Burton and buy my suits at Lou Myles. And go to Ibiza, as all successful Toronto artists do, on the money they get from the Canada Council. Blood is coming from my left hand. And somebody says that dreadful word. “Concussion.” And I feel faint, and I am having a concussion. It is my first concussion. I do not know if I am playing the role of a man having a concussion, correctly. I should have gone to the Actors’ Studio. And before I know it, for I am having something — if not a concussion, something. “Take him to St. Mike’s, and see if he has a concussion.” And they do that. And I am attended to, immediately on arrival. And I think it is serious, that the concussion will kill me. And my left hand is stitched up, most unprofessionally, so that to this day there is a scar. The nun did not pull the skin back enough to cover the raw, bloodied wound. And my grey worsted trousers bought at the Crippled Civilians are torn, ironically, along the crease. In those days, I never wore a pair of trousers without first ironing them. The tear is about three inches. I cannot remember how I get to the Emergency of St. Michael’s Hospital. I cannot remember who takes me there. And I do not remember who drives me home. Perhaps the man with the shaven head. But I know that I do not return home with the typing paper and the Liquid Paper.
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