Beauty & Sadness

by André Alexis

  I was right to come to Toronto, in that I found the literary society and life I was looking for. I was wrong, in that I gradually discovered that the last thing I truly want is “literary society,” and that the friendship of other writers can be a poisonous distraction. But, to deal with the good things first . . .

  I came to the city at what was, I now see, a very good time for writers. It was 1987. Canadian writers were held in some regard, the world over. Still writing were Mordecai Richler, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Michael Ondaatje, Robertson Davies, Al Purdy, Margaret Avison, Dennis Lee, Austin Clarke, bpNichol, The Four Horsemen, Timothy Findley, and even W. O. Mitchell. With the exception of Mavis Gallant, who lived in Paris and was a Montreal writer, all of them had some connection to Toronto.

  The smaller presses, like Coach House, Mercury, or Anansi, were active and publishing challenging and, sometimes, very good work. There were elegant chapbooks done by marginal writers, by interesting writers, by all manner of writers. McClelland & Stewart was run by Jack McClelland, a very odd man — or so it seemed from the outside — who was, sadly, the last of the interesting publishers, a man whose personality was an unavoidable aspect — for good or bad — of his publishing house. More than that: Canadians were interested in their own writers.

  My contemporaries, those who had just or would soon publish books that meant something to me, included Greg Hollingshead, Roo Borson, Don McKay, Nino Ricci, Linda Svendsen, Lynn Crosbie, Christian Bök, Shyam Selvadurai, Russell Smith, Michael Helm, Yann Martel . . . the list is long. And quite a number of these writers lived in or were connected to Toronto in some way as well. Toronto was flourishing.

  Here’s how my first book was published: I was working at Edwards Books and Art on Queen Street. My manager, Chris Mitchell, asked if I wanted to go with him to an open reading at Café May on Roncesvalles. Chris was going to read. He knew I was writing and he convinced me to come with him. Among the dozen or so reading that night, besides Chris and myself, were Michael Redhill, Russell Smith, and Eddy Yanovsky. I read a short piece, maybe two. People seemed appreciative. And that was that. My first public reading in Toronto.

  Some time later, I was walking along Bloor Street, not far from Book City, where I now worked, carrying with me four short stories I’d photocopied at Kinko’s. I had just stepped out of Kinko’s when Michael Redhill (who’d heard me at Café May) greeted me. We talked for a few minutes. He asked if what I had in my hand were stories. I said “yes.” He asked if he could read them, as he was on the editorial board at Coach House Press. I said “yes.” Not long afterward, Michael called to ask if I had any more stories, enough to make a collection. I said “yes,” though I didn’t have any. I wrote four more stories. Redhill submitted them to the editorial board of Coach House Press, where they were seconded by Lynn Crosbie and Leon Rooke (for both of whom I still feel undying gratitude).

  A year later, I held a copy of my first book, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, the original — still striking — cover done by Linda Watson, the woman with whom / for whom I’d come to Toronto.

  And that’s it.

  (I wonder if this story is possible, twenty-three years on? The publishing industry, which was at its most optimistic in the late eighties, has become almost entirely pessimistic. Decisions made by editors enthusiastic about manuscripts are, these days, second-guessed — or disallowed — by marketing departments. Young writers will, no doubt, have less trouble in these times than writers who carry around with them chequered publishing histories. Marketing departments depend on track records to make their assessments. A new writer represents unknown potential. So, perhaps times are still good for new voices. Twenty years on, mine is no longer a “new voice,” and I understand what it means to drag around the corpse of a previous book.)

  Looking over the list of my contemporaries (Greg Hollingshead, et al.), it occurs to me there are very few whom I have not met. Some of those encounters have enriched my creative and intellectual life. But after a while, meeting writers is a lot like meeting any kind of petitioner: dull, unless you’re really interested in their wares. And even then . . . Naturally, I’m not at all immune from this dullness. I don’t think myself more interesting than my peers. I am as they are. (Perhaps I’m more aware of our relative dullness because I’ve worked in the theatre, where there are actors. Actors are as sensitive as writers, but they’re almost all extroverts. So, they are good company, the way a happy, drunken man with a sharp stick is good company.)

  Worse, literary society — the world of grudges, launches, and festivals — is anti-literary in a surprising way. First, there is the petty gossip and the secret enmities. Here, it would be easy to point out the pettiness of others, but I’d like to admit to my own enmities. There are a number of my fellow writers whom I loathe.4 And, just so we understand each other, I’m not proud of my feelings. In fact, I’m dismayed to confront my dislikes, dismayed that I can feel loathing at all, now I’m in my fifties, a time by which, unless I was misinformed, I should have acquired at least some wisdom.5 What is anti-literary about the loathing I feel is that it keeps me, in one instance, at least, from reading work that is demonstrably good. Demonstrable by me, I mean, despite my dislike for the writer.

  The second “anti-literary” aspect of literary society is related to the first. When I came to Toronto, along with the desire to meet those I admired, I had a longing for exchange. I imagined there would be endless, public talk about literature, about Tolstoy, Beckett, Raymond Queneau. I imagined I would be introduced to worlds of work I had missed. I imagined that the level of common discourse would be higher than it was in Ottawa. This wasn’t the case, not at all. I have had interesting literary conversations with a handful of my contemporaries. (The number would be even smaller if I hadn’t had two long-term relationships with writers, Catherine Bush and K,6 both of whom are tremendously articulate.) As for the rest of my peers: we meet at launches, we say “hi,” and we part. Maybe, before parting, we talk about Richard Ford spitting on Colson Whitehead or Evelyn Lau writing about the sagging, sallow flesh of W. P. Kinsella. The interesting exchanges about language and art, if they happened at all, happened in other parts of the room, among other writers.

  On the other hand . . . why should one expect that people who’d spent their days writing and thinking would want to go out and talk about writing and thinking? The passion needed to talk about sentence structure in the work of Franz Kafka is something you tend to lose when you’re actually writing your own work, isn’t it? So, again, I was hopelessly naïve when I first came to the city and, perverse as it sounds, I hold my own naivety against Toronto itself, as if the city were responsible for my delusions.

  My Peers (and More)

  That previous section may make it seem as if I were bitter about my peers, as if most of what I’ve felt were dislike or disappointment. That’s not true, though. My peers have also, at times, given me exactly what I was hoping for: friendship centred on our mutual love for language and work.

  In any case, the intermingling of the personal and the literary has been almost unavoidable. By accident rather than design, most of my friends are or have been writers. And despite my disillusionment with the world around writing, despite my occasional desire to be something other than a writer, there are moments and encounters with my peers that have brought great solace and encouragement.

  1. Tarragon Theatre Playwrights Unit (1989–1990)

  The Playwrights Unit was created by Urjo Kareda, the artistic director of the Tarragon. It was, when I was invited to be a member, a weekly meeting of six would-be playwrights, writers Urjo thought talented or at least schoolable. We would sit around a long table and read work we had written. The object, though there was no great pressure to attain it, was to write a play in the year we spent together. Around the table with the members of the unit were Urjo himself (grossly overweight, quiet, slightly skeptical, perceptive, thoughtful, not
warm, a little forbidding but generous) and the Tarragon’s assistant artistic director Andy McKim (warm, open with his opinions, steeped in theatre practice, the one who made me feel as if I had a place, the one with whom I could talk about practical matters, the one who made me think I could be a playwright if I wanted). Also with us around the table were playwrights who were in residence at the Tarragon. In 1989, that included Don Hannah, Ken Garnhum, Joan MacLeod, and Daniel MacIvor, though MacIvor, it was rumoured, was unhappy at the Tarragon and we saw little of him.

  In 1989, the unit members included four men and two women. We were all around the same age, but we had very different sensibilities. As a result, I felt no competitive feelings at all. My closest friend in the unit, James O’Reilley, wrote things in a way that was much more emotionally raw than I could have. For that reason, he was probably the most influential on how I came to think about theatre. I had gone in thinking “Theatre” meant Samuel Beckett, inner experience made manifest. I also liked Pinter, Brecht, Wallace Shawn, and Arthur Kopit. O’Reilley wasn’t like any of them. His monologues were a matter of catching his anger, frustration, and sense of humour in a way that suited his own performance style.

  My most vivid memory of the 1989 Playwrights Unit has to do with helping O’Reilley memorize the lines of a play he’d written. He was living on Olive Avenue, I think it was. We had been accepted as part of the first — or was it the second? — Toronto Fringe Festival. We’d bought an hour’s time and both of us had written short plays. Mine was called Home. It was not good. (As far as I know, I’ve destroyed all copies of the script.) O’Reilley’s was called Rude Circus, a short monologue that would, with two other monologues, make up a play called Work. It was good, but he needed someone with whom to run lines. Walking in and around the Annex, O’Reilley speaking the lines of his play, me checking what he said against his script, was like sounding Toronto into a more solid existence. Those parts of the city where we walked exist within me accompanied by the sound — more than the words — of Rude Circus.

  The other vivid memory I have of the time is also associated with the Fringe. My poor play was acted by David Jansen and David Collins. And it was Jansen who explained to me the connection between his body and memory. For him, perhaps for many actors, the words come back when his body is in the “right” position. Having worked out the blocking with the director — in this case, Colin Taylor — he would know that this word or phrase was associated with his body being in this position or that. His body remembered words. This was a revelation for me, a writer, because words come out when I am sitting down or lying down, not particularly aware of my body. In fact, my body is, to an extent, though not completely, the thing from which my mind drifts, writing being a form of untethering. So, it was profound, for me, to see Jansen at work and understand that here words were in the process of a grounding, a coming back to the body, and that acting is like writing but in reverse.

  2. K

  I have been in love with two writers in my life: K and Catherine Bush. The relationships, both of which have ended, were affectionate, and for me their endings were traumatic. In this, they were, I think, like all long-term relationships.

  I am sometimes asked what it was like to live with — or go out with — other writers, the most common question being about influence: “Does your partner influence your work?” But it isn’t a simple matter of direct influence, though there is direct influence as well. Rather, the two of you form a kind of third writer or third literary consciousness, one whose likes and dislikes are broader than either of yours and whose ideas are sometimes more surprising. The consciousness that is this “third writer” has its own life and curiosity. So, I would say, yes, I was influenced by both Catherine and K, but the deeper, more lasting influence was from this “third writer” (“Cath-André,” in one case, “K-André” in the other) who went to places neither of us could go on his or her own.

  I met K at a party at Barry Callaghan’s home. I can’t remember much about the party. Austin Clarke — a man who has been unfailingly encouraging to me — was there. I didn’t speak much to anybody. And then Callaghan introduced me to someone he thought I should meet, a young writer. She was wearing a buckskin jacket and blue jeans. We talked, K and I, about small things. It was slightly awkward, I remember, until we talked about Banff. She had been there more recently than I, and in those days the writing colony at Banff was vibrant and interesting, a place where you could share intense literary moments with other writers or artists. (Some also shared sexual moments, of course. Something about Banff and the common pursuit of an art leads to a certain concupiscence, I guess. But the only time anyone tried to seduce me at Banff, I happened to be in love. The woman invited me back to her cabin in the Leighton Colony, brought out a bottle of champagne, and then grew progressively bored as I drank and droned on about the woman with whom I was infatuated.)

  Our memories of Banff kept us talking for a while, and then we drifted apart and somewhat avoided each other as we went into or out of Callaghan’s house. When it was late, too late to take a subway, K and I were in the kitchen together and I volunteered to walk with her, as our houses were in the same direction. We walked for an hour and a half, I guess, and talked about writing and ritual and the meaning of the sacred. We argued, actually, but the night wasn’t cold or the morning wasn’t cold and I felt, as we walked together, an intense closeness.

  A curiously prophetic detail: near the corner of Bloor and Christie, where we stopped to go on talking, a man was lying in a restaurant doorway. He asked us if we had cigarettes and then asked for a light. He then lay down on the pavement as if he were on a sofa and looked up at us as if we were his friends. He wanted to join our conversation, but he was clearly stoned and, besides, I was wary. On the night I’d met my previous partner, we were walking along Harbord when, near the Innes library, a man on a bicycle rode over to our side of the street and shouted at us “I fucking hate heterosexuals!” as he rode off. It was startling, and it’s hard not to take an incident like that as a portent of something or other. So, with K, near the corner of Bloor and Christie, I wanted to get away from the man as quickly as possible, worried as I was about what his interruption might presage.

  Unfortunately, he was the harbinger of an even bigger interruption. My novel Childhood was published just after K and I began seeing each other and it broke the spine of our relationship. Still, our first two years had an effect on how I thought about writing, on what I wanted to write. I knew more about literature than K did, but she knew more about psychology, and it was through her that I first learned about John Bowlby (his Attachment and Loss is a trilogy of books about how humans come to intimacy and how they deal with bereavement) and D. W. Winnicott (the psychologist who first theorized about “transitional objects”).

  Also, K wasn’t quite a poet, as yet. She’d written a novel and a collection of stories. But poetry was already on her horizon in a way that it was not on mine. I first read Don McKay’s Night Field at her house, and one evening we spent an hour together, lying in bed reading and rereading “Tulips” by Sylvia Plath, comparing it to a poem by Tess Gallagher which, after a couple of readings, ceased to seem like the real thing. “Tulips” was so clearly the stronger poem that we gave ourselves over to trying to understand how it worked: counting syllables, thinking about its repetitions of ee (“gently,” “sleep,” “me,” “breathe,” “baby,” etc.) and feeling where the poem turns strange for good with the line

  The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

  It was an hour during which we were like two children before a magic show whose trickery we imagined we could, together, sort out. In the end, Plath’s art isn’t circumscribable in an hour. But we were left with the pleasure of having made a voyage into the poem together.

  3. Catherine

  I can’t remember how Catherine and I met. Almost certainly, it was through her then-partner Nigel Hunt, another writer, a man I lik
e very much, especially since he helped me to walk back to the theatre, on my play’s (Lambton Kent) opening night, after I had been drinking.

  Long after Catherine and Nigel’s relationship had ended, I was invited by Catherine to give a reading in her class in Montreal. From that time on, we were friendly. Then, after a while, our friendship became intimacy.

  All of our time passed under the aegis of literature. It was perhaps significant that, during our first year together, we were invited to the Santa Maddalena Retreat for Writers and Botanists, a writers’ retreat run by Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte von Rezzori, the writer Gregor von Rezzori’s widow. We stayed on one floor of a thirteenth-century Tuscan tower, with Zadie Smith having the floor above us to herself (or to herself with bats). Catherine and I did nothing but write, eat, and, after suppers, talk with Zadie and Beatrice about Literature or Art.7

  After our time at Santa Maddalena, we spent a month in Positano in a home belonging to the friends of friends. We spent the month writing together. That is, in proximity. We would get up in the morning, go down the 122 steps to the beach, and swim in the Mediterranean. After that, breakfast. And after breakfast, we would write: Catherine in the living room (Claire’s Head), me at a table in the kitchen (Asylum). Once the writing day was over, when the sun had gone down, we would water the garden or explore Positano or read, with one of us eventually cooking supper.