Flirt: The Interviews

by Lorna Jackson

  —Look over there: Jesus, that’s not a dog, that’s someone’s failed poem about a dog. Where are the legs? The neck? Look here: I’ve said that the problems Buddy Bolden has – you’re wondering most about him, right? – are the problems any artist has at some time. Uh-oh. The pretty redhead’s lost the beat with her pup; she’s right to pull out of the parade.

  —How to escape art? How to be both creativity’s slave and its master? Whether to choose madness as a way to restore order in the chaos of art?

  —Well, yeah, okay. And how an artist strives for originality – innovation – and meaningful work in a society that values formulaic coversinging, embellishment-heavy American Idols chosen over the phone by the screen-loving masses.

  —Whatever happened to a simple melody? Just sing it straight, my Lithuanian boyfriend used to gripe. More hot licks than a teenage nymphomaniac , he’d say.

  —How does a musician like Bolden, a man like him and with his appetites and the radical conversation he has with his mouth and music, with his hands and body, how does a player like Bolden survive in a time and place and landscape that rejects chaos and the improvisation that is its antidote. Art’s consumers are all about plot, you see, and Bolden was not able to connect the dots. Fame has a high cost.

  —Improv is anecdote?

  —Ant. i. Dote.

  —Tell me about Buddy Bolden. Describe his body, for example.

  —You’ve read the book.

  —Many times, and I’ve looked often at the band photo on the cover. So long and narrow, his hands fastidious on the horn even when posed. The smile: is that arrogance or flirting? He looks so great, so lean in those clothes.

  —I …

  —He is so erotic in the book, so unable to control passions. Both in love with women and contemptuous of them. In love with jazz and scornful of others who love it but want control. Wild about the street and also its victim. Able to disappear into sex and music but so powerless that both swallow him and refuse to spit him out. He is digested. So willing to be naked. So silent yet in love with words. I’d like to run my tongue over his abs, then his wrist.

  —I …

  —His conflict between form and shapelessness. His fragility and yet sinewy strength, like cat gut, or baling twine. He played the devil’s music and hymns at the same time, he didn’t choose: he merged them because, well, of course. And his falls into madness are erotic, linked to women and music’s siren, a pushing of the body and mind past their frontiers and finally a long, high note of surrender and a crossing over into the dark, the silence forever.

  —I …

  —You?

  —I … Listen. You shouldn’t see the book as a prototype for your own relationships to art or to men or to the street. Cos it’s not wise to have a crush on Buddy Bolden. Surely you deserve better, more tenderness, kinder men less concerned with their own reputation. A woman who loves the smell of a wet spaniel is entitled to romance that is not superficial or self-serving.

  —Actually … here: my notes say it’s you who loves the smell of a wet spaniel. My next suicide was landscape-induced. I left the city and headed up to a watery world and a long shoreline, to a husband, to musicians on the lam and living on boats at the breakwater. Thurber came, too, but would not venture to the beach across the road, would not slip her paws into the cold and whale-rich Johnstone Strait. The homesteading otters frightened her. When my new and short-term husband was home, she would quaver in her basket by the door. When he wasn’t, she would climb onto my lap, though she was too large to do so. I was nineteen and when new husband sailed to fish up north, I again fell for an older, more married man.

  —Well, the seventies allowed for this.

  —You think? I don’t. Betrayal is always about contravention, sadism, adolescence, carelessness. It’s always ugly and cowardly. The misery of others is never fine.

  —You were a teenager.

  —This time it was James Taylor on the turntable.

  —Which?

  —“Your Smiling Face.”

  —Irony?

  —Yup. And then the pills, champagne, turpentine and the scalpel on my wrists, the back of my hands, any visible vein but never quite deep enough. See?

  —Still, you have lovely hands. Working hands. Those are old scars now and the story they tell has moved aside for other, more unpredictable ones. I see the story of a garden in those hands, maybe the hint of guitar chords.

  —I was flown to a psychiatric ward down-island and told by the mayor who was also the doctor to stay put until I could be more service to the community. He may have meant this kindly. I took my guitar. I fell there, too, this time for a shrubby yet handsome older alcoholic from Port Alice who claimed he was there because his wife, when she didn’t find satisfaction with him, enjoyed an intimate relationship on the kitchen floor with their willing German shepherd. I kissed that man on the beach, truant from my room, the ward. The nurses were fed up with me. My doctor said, of course. It’s all about your father leaving you. More James Taylor in the afternoon as I began to come around to pleasantness: “Shower the People.” Some difficult chords. And soon, back to the city, to a band, the bars, the road.

  I can’t begin to tell you about my relationship with music and how it broke my heart. I believed I could be original, an innovator and instead played the Eagles and Creedence Clearwater Revival in every dive joint from Port Moody to Prince George for the better part of a decade. In my head, I heard the tone clusters and eight part chords of Benjamin Britten, I heard his War Requiem and da Vittoria’s clean melodies and gradual harmonies and wanted their complexity in the verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus of country music. Emmylou showed promise, but I was in the bars. My voice a broken record. The crowd an empty glass. My hands too small and inept on the night’s high strings.

  —You drank.

  —I did.

  —Christ, who wouldn’t?

  —And then that music died and me, too, just about. But it wasn’t jazz and I wasn’t a miracle so no one thought much about the misery of it: the music gone, Thurber left to live in another landscape, the men all old and stoned and hot for the next chick singer. It wasn’t jazz. It was tawdry and simplistic country, no room for improv’s antidote, no need for it really. So no one cared when I lost it and gave up.

  —Yeah, but here you are, what? Twenty years later? And you have a dog?

  —Yes.

  —And?

  —I have a dog, yes.

  —And?

  —The dog was his dog.

  —His?

  —Yes. The most recent, the fifteen-year his. The dog was his and then he found another woman – younger, happier, better breed, no art – and now it’s my dog, our daughter’s dog. He came to me and said, “I’m in a relationship with her. I want out.”

  —Like a dog at the door.

  —Yes, desperate to piss or for the ecstasy of chasing squirrels, maybe both.

  —Well. What are we whole or beautiful or good for but to be absolutely broken? to quote that wisest Webb. You’ll be whole again, maybe even broken if you’re lucky.

  —Our daughter plays horn, you see, trumpet. And her mouth is full of it, her hands automatic in their lust for her instrument. I see her smirk on stage as she flaunts the fedora and the rhythm and its partnering blues. I love that look. She goes to the bright side of the road and then hurtles back to the dark end of our street. Charlie Parker floats down the stairs from her room. His dog trembles with the sound of music. A dachshund.

  —Like E.B White.

  —Like Wayne Gretzky.

  —Still, a hound.

  —More terrier than hound. Separation anxiety, no road sense, angry at new lambs, dominant and hard on the cat. She tunnels under the covers at night and I wake with heat against the small of my back and believe he’s still beside me, silent as our last years together. At night I dream of Buddy Bolden’s form, his mouth. The weight of a hockey player’s kind hand on my wrist. My father laughing a
t a cocktail party and saying, “I’m back.” I dream of happy young men with scarred jaws and eyes who desire older women in the new sexual order and I wonder what it was about your first wife – you were nineteen and she was thirty-four – that drew you into her arms and kept you there for so long.

  —Great. The sporting breeds. The Irish setter looks tough to beat. Let’s stay for one more round. I’d like to see a film this afternoon. You can drop me downtown and I’ll find something.

  —Are you cold, Mr. Ondaatje, or is it just me?

  I Flirt with BENJAMIN BRITTEN

  —That’s the Pacific Ocean you can smell this evening. Will you stay in the wheelchair, Benjamin, or should we arrange a blanket and pillows on the grass?

  —Here will do nicely, in the lovely shade of your purple beech. You really do have some British aesthetics, my dear, at least in this garden. Still, I sense a certain toughness, a recent loss of innocence, reflected in the wildness of the field beyond the fence. Barbed wire next to boxwood, you see. Or perhaps I’m responding to the Canadian sensibility.

  —Your mother’s last name was Hockey.

  —Indeed. Edith Hockey. My mother was never a professional singer, only a keen amateur one with a sweet voice. I miss my mother.

  —You visited Canada once in the seventies and called it an extraordinary place and said North America was the locale of the future. Is it?

  —Certainly one was worried by a lack of culture, but back then there was terrific energy and vitality in the place. I seriously considered staying over here permanently. But that was eastern Canada. This place, your place is different. Lush and alive in a complex, natural way. When I was a child in England, our nanny would take us on walks to see how many more houses had fallen off the cliff in the next village. If it were too wet for a walk, we’d watch from the nursery window as a tug pulled a fleet of fishing smacks out to sea. Your home reminds me of there, of that. Across the field, would those be Douglas fir, right on your property?

  —Fir, yes. Western red cedar. There’s a scraggy balsam back there, and vine maples. Indian plum, salmonberries. So lush it drives me crazy; I dream the forest creeping nearer and taking my house. And earthquakes sending trees onto my head.

  —Those are fertile dreams, indeed, but they have little to do with trees, I can tell you that. Dreams are the artist’s workshop.

  —While you were in eastern Canada and thinking of staying, I was in high school in Vancouver and discovering how you could save my heart from breaking. My sister was dead, my parents were dark, I’d quit the volleyball team and grown bored with Grade 11 biology, with analyzing John Donne’s sonnets for symbols, with Christian boyfriends and married ones and the ones who played rugby like church. I was thin and tired, and the music of James Taylor or Glen Campbell or Gordon Lightfoot no longer seemed adequate to express my obsessions. Nice chords, some pretty lyrics, nuanced fingerpicking, helpful clichés, but something missing in a pop song.

  —A teenager likely requires bitonality – the harmonizing of two common chords simultaneously – to express the natural way of being young in a cruel world. Popular music cannot tolerate dissonance, it’s a pity but true. Were you at all suicidal? Of course you were, my dear girl, look at those lovely hands of yours. I myself loathed that abominable hole of artistic self-doubt – if you are original, well you are considered a lunatic and consequently become unpopular – but suicide is so cowardly, running away’s as bad. I decided I simply had got to stick it out. Wystan once wrote to me this: “If you are really to develop to your full stature, you will have, I think, to suffer and make others suffer, in ways which are totally strange to you at present, and against every conscious value that you have.” That is such uplifting advice, I think. But that was Wystan, the dear soul. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen I knew every note of Beethoven and Brahms.

  —That’s it. Adolescence is bitonality. Melisma. The enharmonic change. Our choirs were good, our director a genius and demanding. And in the clusters and scaffolds of your difficult and stunning notes required to push, say, A Ceremony of Carols to its purest form, I felt my brain and body come together for the first time. I entered a private and turgid room at the core of myself. Beauty. We made records, we festivalled. And at the end of high school, we travelled Europe to sing in churches and schools and to see where all of this beauty came from. And on day two we visited Aldeburgh where you were said to be ill – a return of the heart problems, the murmur from three months old – and we were young, Benjamin, but I knew what it meant to be near you and to express my thanks for all those notes, all that harmony with a million overtones that had saved me from myself. And we stayed in Stuttgart during the World Cup and Germany won that year, 1974, and the streets weren’t safe for teenagers from Canada. And we sang, one evening, in Matthew Church in Stuttgart, a town my father bombed in WWII just before Berlin and his own private and turgid room as a young man shot down and imprisoned. And a reporter wrote this about our performance:

  “The entire program with several very difficult compositions was presented from memory. The mixed choir sang first. The capacity to invest each respective style with the appropriate feeling was astonishing: delicate in sound and vitally inspired by the director. The girls’ choir impressively took up the second half, finishing with the crowning glory – ‘Missa Brevis in D’ of Benjamin Britten, ravishingly negotiated.”

  —The Germans said this? Oh, well done. Well done, indeed, my dear. Is that a varied thrush I hear?

  —Varied thrush.

  —Sounds like a harpsichord.

  —It was well done, and we were all so moved during that performance. We could feel it in our bodies, in our hearts. The church was dark and the soccer games were done, most of us had throat infections and homesickness, and we’d lunched in a German village that was mourning the loss of a local farmer’s son: his motorcycle crashed on cobbled streets. Sometime during that evening performance – during some bitonal moment – the whole lot of us grew up and into ourselves, into our voices, and became selves. Through your notes. Surely no other composer can say he did this for young people. You knew what you were giving to us, didn’t you? You intended it that way.

  —Oh, what’s this now!!

  —Greta.

  —Greta?! You have a dachshund named Greta?! Oh Oh Oh!

  —She’ll get down if you want. She’s really my ex-husband’s dog and she’s not well-trained.

  —Oh Oh Oh!

  —She shouldn’t do that. No kissy! Ask her to get down.

  —Not at all. Gilda was ours, Peter’s and mine. And another tiny one called Clytie. Your husband was homosexual I gather?

  —No, Benjamin. He just loved the breed.

  —But where had he encountered the breed?

  —I don’t know. Not with me.

  —No, you seem like spaniels.

  —Yes, I had springers.

  —Peter and I had one of those, too. I’m confused about your husband, I must say. There. Greta has settled. Sometimes they’re just looking for a warm sweater-vest to snuggle in. There is truly nothing like a small dog in one’s lap.

  —My husband, like you, wrote of Paul Bunyan. I wonder if you were taken, as he was, by a mythology so masculine and destructive. A man as big as a machine who plucks trees in the name of progress, who hangs out in a logging camp with a homosocial band of shirtless Swedes and whose best friend is an enormous blue ox. In your operetta, Paul gets married, okay, but he’s lousy at it and his wife leaves camp with their daughter. The whole thing is a little too Gilbert and Sullivan for me, but there are gorgeous moments. I’m thinking of “Bunyan’s Goodnight”:

  —Please. You won’t sing it. Greta sleeps.

  —No, okay, but Auden’s libretto: “Now let the complex spirit dissolve in the darkness where the actual and the possible are mysteriously exchanged. Dear children, trust the night and have faith in tomorrow that these hours of ambiguity and indecision may be also the hours of healing.” Those words set against y
our birdsong, the night birds, their minor and melancholic fade. I’m helped by that idea of night, the sound of that night.

  —Wystan is a most consoling poet. Speaking of birds, what is that delightful sound I keep hearing.

  —What sound?

  —That one, the birds, I think, chortling and muttering. It’s lovely, really, and I’d like to know what sort of bird makes that lovely sound. Over there, behind the hawthorn hedge. Hear it? Lovely, really.

  —Chickens.

  —No.

  —Yes, they’re very happy hens. They make that sound when they’re happy and when no hawks circle.

  —Really. How awfully fantastic. I envy chickens, you know.

  —Why is that?

  —Well, it’s quite a naughty reason, really.

  —Go ahead. I’m Canadian.

  —Because if they feel like doing it, they do it.

  —Those are hens, Benjamin, and they have no rooster. I believe only the rooster feels like doing it and will often not ask a hen’s permission, and he’ll do it so often and forcefully to whichever hen is proximate that the feathers are worn from her back and next morning she’s last one out of the coop hoping he’ll be too tired by the time she arrives. Lay an egg, beak a grub, flutter in dust: these are a hen’s pleasures.

  —I wonder: which instrument will I use to mimic that sound? Flutes would be too obvious. Something expressive of what you’ve just explained: the innocence and vulnerability …

  —Aren’t those the twin themes of all your work? Even the War Requiem?

  —Clarinets may be too goose-like. I’ve solved these problems before, you know, many times. It once took me several days walking in the chapel to find a way to make a noise like bath water running out. I once used china mugs hung on a length of string hit with a wooden spoon to suggest first raindrops falling on the ark. It’s almost like mathematics, is it not? Aeolian harp, perhaps, to express the way a hen’s feathers are layered and firm, yet delicate and soft. A nice C major for purity and simplicity.