by Lynn Coady
“Well, everybody calls you Larry here,” says Dad.
We talk for another hour and I tell them every single thing that happened during my week, which they are always content to hear for some reason. Dad tells me how a bunch of drunk teenagers showed up at the motel at one in the morning wanting to play a game of minigolf and he told them he kept a rifle behind the counter and made as if to reach for it and they ran like hell. (You better run! he hollered after them. This thing took the arse off a bear who was moving a damn sight quicker than you punks!) That was the highlight of his week, Dad says.
We hang up, and I’m in a good mood. I feel like going out in the sunshine and buying groceries or something—being productive, responsible. Then I make a mistake. I glance over at my typewriter, the empty page like bared teeth.
I hug the phone. I weave the cord back and forth between my fingers. The receiver clicks and clacks in its cradle.
Ring, ring.
“What.”
“Jim?”
“Who’s this.”
“It’s Lawrence.”
“Lawrence who?”
“… Larry.”
Rustling sounds. Blankets, cushions, chesterfields.
“Oh, Larry.” he sniffs. Snorts, really. “How’s it going?”
“… Good, Jim, good.” There’s a wailing in my brain like a disaster siren; it sounded the moment he answered the phone. Bad idea. Bad idea.
“What can I do for you, Larry?”
What are you bothering me for, Larry?
“Um, Jim. I’m just calling to see how you’re doing. See if everything’s okay.”
Cushions, blankets. “Oh, you are, are you?”
There’s something dead in his voice and it’s like I’m fighting to keep my Adam’s apple from plugging up my throat.
“Yes.”
“Now, why wouldn’t everything be just ducky, I wonder now?”
“How’s your cold?” I say very fast.
“What have you heard,” demands Jim.
“What have I heard?”
“What have you heard,” demands Jim.
“I—I heard there was some kind of problem with the department.”
“Some kind of problem,” Jim repeats slowly.
“Yes,” I say.
“Yes,” says Jim.
Jesus Christ, this is a waking nightmare.
“And so I was just calling,” I continue.
“Yes?” says Jim.
“… to see …”
“Yes, Larry?”
“… if there was anything I can do.” I hurl this last part out like I’m vomiting—with the same sense of helpless revulsion I had on Friday night outside the Stein. Wanting to get it out. Hating to get it out.
More chesterfield noises. Something being poured. A woman’s voice then, angry, faint, and urgent.
Who is it, for Christ’s sake?
Shh. It’s just a student.
Oh.
“Jim?” I say.
“Still here, Larry.”
“Listen, I shouldn’t have called. I’m sorry to bother you.”
“No, no, I appreciate it, Larry, I really do. Is there anything you can do—well, let me see. I don’t know, Larry, is there? What do you have in mind?”
“Jim … I don’t even understand what’s going on, I just wanted …”
“No, you don’t understand, do you. Well, I guess we can’t be much help to each other, because I’m afraid I don’t understand either. I don’t understand a fucking thing anymore.”
No one has spoken to me like this ever, in my life. I can feel my stomach contracting, pickling itself in acid. And then something even more terrifying happens. The chesterfield noises again, phone against fabric. A sound, a male sound like I’ve never heard before, a Jim sound, but not a word. A sob.
“Jim?” My eyes strain against their sockets. “Jim?”
“Fuck off, why don’t you!” The barky voice, not Jim anymore. It’s his wife.
“I’m sorry …”
“Why don’t you cocksuckers all just smarten up!”
And she hangs up.
I need to get away from the telephone. Also, I need to stop talking stream of consciousness to my parents every time they call. I need to keep stuff inside like a normal person. It has to fester inside me, that stuff, and get warped and stewish until it blurps out onto the page like tomato sauce splattering onto the white of a stovetop. That’s what poets do, real ones. Real poets are careful. They are circumspect. They don’t just call each other up in the middle of the afternoon to see if everything’s okay.
But he was crying.
I decide to lie on the floor again, catching my typewriter’s eye as I do. Finally something has wiped that smirk off its face.
4.
NOW IT’S WEDNESDAY and we sit in Jim’s seminar class staring into the void of the blackboard.
“He’s not coming,” says Claude.
“Bullshit,” I grunt. I am trying to be meaner these days, more brutal.
“I mean,” says Sherrie as if she has said something prior to this, “if he’s only on probation he could still be reinstated, couldn’t he?”
Claude leans forward in a rare display of energy. “If he’s been denied tenure, that’s it. He won’t be coming back after this year, he’ll go elsewhere. But it won’t look good for him to have been denied. Other universities will take it into consideration. They’ll wonder why.”
“I’m wondering why,” I say.
The door to the classroom shrieks open and Bryant Dekker shuffles in, hugging his briefcase across his torso as if it could protect him from bullets or wild dogs.
“Hi, everybody,” he coughs.
We stare at him.
“Professor Arsenault asked me to take over for him today—he’s not feeling well.”
In a wonderful, somehow pointed gesture of indifference, Claude raises his arm and looks down at his watch. He doesn’t need to do it, because a huge industrial clock hovers on the wall above Dekker’s head like a displaced halo. But thanks to Claude’s lead, we all think to gaze up and note that it’s forty-five minutes into class. Dekker turns to see as well, and then adopts a look like the raccoons my father used to corner in our shed.
“So,” he says. “So, uh. Whose stuff are we looking at today?” He puts his briefcase onto the table in front of him. He doesn’t bother to open it. “And would anyone have an extra copy?”
Nobody says anything. My hand goes up. Dekker looks at it.
“Lawrence?”
“We want to know what’s going on,” I say.
Silence as I fold my hands and Dekker takes a careful breath, deliberately prolonged.
“Yeah!” goes someone else. To my surprise, someone has sounded, “Yeah!” from behind me. And suddenly I feel a powerful boy.
Jim Arsenault has not been a departmental favourite since he was granted the usual four-year probationary appointment at this small but prestigious undergraduate institute. Nobody knows why Jim decided to come here. It is assumed he was being clamoured for after Blinding White started getting attention overseas. It is assumed that a Canadian poet with an unheard-of international reputation—who also happens to have picked up a master’s degree somewhere along the way—would be the dream of every English department in the country. It is assumed he deigned to settle here because he is a native New Brunswicker himself, and his poetry testifies to his reverence toward the land and its people.
But holy God, if it were me I would’ve killed to get out of these sticks.
Anyway, settle here he did, to the insane good fortune of us all. I knew where I was going to university by the time I finished grade 11—the year Jim arrived at Westcock. Otherwise I would never have given this place a second thought. It was founded by Methodists—precisely the breed of people Jim had said could go to H*ll. It’s in Timperly, a town with a population of scarcely three thousand, surrounded by nothing but tractors and marsh. The nearest metropolis is a twenty-five-minut
e drive across the border—Wethering, Nova Scotia. “Friendly as can be!” announces the highway sign. Population a teeming 4,052.
Right up until I heard about Jim coming to Westcock, my plan was to hie me off to Toronto, figuring that if someone like Jim Arsenault was living there “out of necessity,” this necessitated that Lawrence Campbell should live there too. I terrorized my parents by articulating this intention pretty much every day from the moment I discovered Even Less. It was Toronto or nowhere, I said to my parents, who have been off Prince Edward Island overnight maybe six times in their combined lives. There was nowhere else to go, I told them, nowhere else to be, nowhere else to write in this hinterland.
But Jim. So Jim came. He bought the house near Rock Point. He settled in with Moira. He gathered acolytes from all across Canada. He initiated the joint creative-writing honours for English students—the first such degree in the country. The department had no choice but to do it because there were so many students like me arriving, more interested in studying poetry with Jim than anything else. Enrolment skyrocketed. Dekker says it “went up,” but that has to be an understatement. It skyrocketed—how could it not? And the most amazing thing—or not so amazing, it turns out, if you know anything about what Dekker calls “departmental politics”—is that from the moment Jim showed up on the department’s doorstep, Doctor Sparrow has wanted nothing so dearly as an excuse to throw him off it.
I am extrapolating. Dekker didn’t come out and say it like that, but he did say that Jim has been “rubbing the administration the wrong way” since his arrival.
“Why?” we all want to know.
“Well,” says Dekker. He leans against the table now, seeming to have shed his armour. Dekker is far more at ease simply having a conversation than I’ve ever seen him teaching a class. He scratches his five-o’clock shadow, searching for the right words. “Jim,” he begins. “Well, Jim is a little eccentric.”
“Oh my God,” I shout over Claude, who is snickering. “That’s because he’s a genius!”
“Yeah!” goes the yeah-guy behind me.
Dekker looks us over for a moment. A second later, all his armour has been shrugged on again. He picks up his briefcase.
“People,” he says, seeming to apologize with the word, “I can’t go into it with you. Jim’s been told his tenure won’t be granted next year—that’s all I can say. I’ve seen the letter, and personally, I think it’s a travesty. I’ve written to Doctor Sparrow and the dean of Arts, and that’s all I’m in a position to do. It’s—” Dekker sighs into the crease of his briefcase. “It’s a genuine shame.”
“What if we wrote letters?” asks Sherrie.
Dekker places his briefcase down on the table again. “Um,” he says carefully. “It’s not like I’m instructing you to do that or anything, but if you feel strongly about this, I’d encourage you to follow your conscience.”
Claude speaks. He says one word. That word is this: “Please.”
We all look at him. The cheerful futility sloshing around in that one syllable infuriates me. We’re silenced by it, and Claude gazes at us, finishing his sentiment with apparent effort.
“A bunch of students write letters,” he drawls. “That will make a difference.”
I’ll show him, I decide.
The yeah-guy, it turns out, is Todd. I haven’t spoken to him before, but I’ve read and commented on his poetry, most of which is pretty bad. A lot of it rhymes. He can’t seem to wean himself from the idea that poetry has to rhyme, and as a result everything he brings to class—often about sex or industrial accidents—has a grotesque sing-songy quality. And as the coal fell on his head he thought of what his mother said work well: no matter what you do / the mine shall make a man of you.
But now I find that I like him. Todd is all flailing limbs and pissed-off energy, and it’s infectious. We huddle outside the classroom.
“This is a pile of crap,” says Todd.
“Fucking bullshit,” I say.
“A complete pile of shit,” says Todd. “Jim’s my only reason for being here, for fuck’s sake. I could have gone to Dalhousie.”
“Me too,” I say.
Todd ceases to flail for a moment. “You got accepted to Dalhousie?”
“No, I mean Jim’s my only reason for being here,” I clarify. “I would have gone to U of T.”
“Toronto, man? Really?” Todd looks dubious.
“Well, yeah,” I say, “You know, Where Else in Canada …”
“Yeah, but Upper Canada,” says Todd, and I blink. The only other person I know who refers to it as Upper Canada is my grandmother Lydia, the head of the Summerside Daughters of Temperance Society.
“Where Else in Canada …,” I begin again.
“It’s just so full of assholes,” says Todd. And then he rhymes off a list of names. Toronto poets—most of whom I’ve heard of but haven’t read, because Jim has identified them as “hucksters” for us. On the first day of our seminar he drew a line down the middle of the blackboard. On one side he wrote “Hucksters.” On the other side he wrote “The Real Thing.” There were a couple of Toronto poets on the “Real Thing” side—Greg Levine and S.M. Munroe—but mostly it was poets from the east coast, the west coast, the prairies—everywhere and anywhere but. He handed out the work of the Real Thing writers but said that to inflict the Hucksters on us would be contamination. I had been feeling cocky that day—the classroom is the only place it happens—and raised my hand. “What about ‘Know thy enemy’?” I said before Jim could even call on me. He smiled, overbite leering. “ ‘Smite thine enemy,’ “ he corrected. And smacked the blackboard for emphasis.
“Levine’s not bad,” I venture, interrupting Todd’s list.
“He’s not from there—he’s from Montreal originally,” says Todd. “Everyone thinks Toronto’s the place to go if you want to write. The hucksters have all the power in this country, and so they’re the ones who perpetuate it. We just buy into all that crap because we think we have no choice.”
“Yeah, but,” I say, “that’s the way it is.”
“It’s up to us to change the way it is,” Todd explains.
I enjoy how angry Todd seems about everything, how the whole world for him is like a scratchy tag on a sweater. We’re at the Stein, drinking and planning. It comes to light that Todd is like me—from the sticks. His home is somewhere nowhere on the south shore of Nova Scotia, but, he says, “I make no apologies.” This is new to me—I’ve been making apologies ever since I got here, if only to myself. Not Todd. Todd says he’s proud of his roots, his “cultural” background (Scottish, “a Smiley of the Port Duffrin Smileys”—I get the feeling he’s about to whip out a family crest), and what he calls his “working-class background.” Then Todd rants for a while at all the people who would tell him to be ashamed of his “working-class background.” I keep quiet because I would have been one of them an hour or so ago. I mean, this is university, isn’t it? Doctor Sparrow is a graduate of Oxford. He even has a tiny English accent, the gentlest of English accents, making him sound courtly and wise but at the same time inevitably debauched, like a Roman in one of those old movies, those old Bible epics. Even Dekker has some kind of accent—not exactly English, but close. Some kind of cross between German and English. Very faint. Very not-from-here. Our benefactor Horace Lee Grayson was—it’s undeniable—Atlantic Canadian gentry. He was a landowner from a long line of landowners, first in England and then in New Brunswick. Todd and I attend classes alongside people who appear to be from other planets—I don’t know how to explain it. How they talk, how they think. How they talk about what they think. I wave my arms and say things like Oh my God, that’s crazy! They come out with, I’m not sure I agree. And you know what? They win. They win when they say things like that. What I mean is they sit back and ponder and I wave my arms and proclaim and somehow by uttering the most flaccid words imaginable—I’m not sure I agree—simply by uttering them in that way, that way they have which depends as much on haircuts
and shoes as it does on words and ideas—somehow they win. It’s like they’ve won already.
It wasn’t until this year I started to understand the difference. The difference is this. It’s breeding, is what it is. Like show dogs.
In the middle of talking to Todd Smiley I take out my notebook.
“What are you doing?” Todd wants to know. His eyebrows don’t plunge like Jim’s.
Showdogs, I write.
“Idea for a poem.”
I look up. Todd is nodding, pleased.
After a couple of hours, Sherrie arrives with a letter she has drafted during her Victorian Novel lecture. She reads it to Todd and me, Todd yeah-ing and twitching the whole time. We edit and drink for another hour—it goes from three pages, to one, to two, and then finally to one and a half. “To Whom it May Concern,” we begin, deciding we’ll figure out the people to direct our complaint to later. Doctor Sparrow? The dean of Arts? The university president? Waldine Grayson, Horace Lee Grayson’s oldest living descendant, who still lives in his big white house above the marsh? We have no idea what we’re doing, really, but at the moment it doesn’t matter. We’re getting it out. Words fly like sparks. We astound one another with our angry eloquence.
Second year is so much better than first. I couldn’t get into a class with Jim last year—I had to take all the intro classes first—and therefore didn’t see the point of being here. I followed him around campus a bit, even went to his office and sweatily introduced myself. He was polite. He recommended some books, and said he’d look for me in his group next year, but he didn’t ask to see any of my poetry, and I couldn’t bring myself to thrust a few pages of it at him, as I’d been dreaming of doing (he glances down, disinterested at first; suddenly a gemlike turn of phrase catches his eye, dazzling him; he looks back up, slowly, awareness dawning, recognizing himself to be in the presence of …). It felt like I was still on the other side of the strait, waving and drowning. I couldn’t make him see me.
Plus I was lonely, to be honest. I thought I would never have any friends. I resigned myself to a life of poetic isolation and tried to feel okay about it because I knew lots of writers were misanthropes. Every once in a while, though, I’d think of the great literary friendships and get depressed. Beckett hanging out at Joyce’s house in Paris. Shelley tossing them back with Byron. Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Ginsberg and Burroughs. All the beats hung out together. Artists are supposed to hang out together. Often they have a clash of sensibilities or some kind of a pissy falling-out, but then they write about it and it’s immortalized for all time, whether they ever make up with each other or not. It doesn’t matter if they ever make up—the purpose of the friendship is to provide artistic fodder and rivalry and inspiration. Because writers are fiery and opinionated. You can’t expect them to put up with each other indefinitely.
