The Age of Cities

by Brett Josef Grubisic

  The sudden bustle silenced the rain that had been loudly announcing its arrival through the ceiling.

  Ed returned with a stack of side plates and an oval platter strewn with crackers, a mound of cubed cheddar, and sliced pickles. Johnny distributed cocktails.

  “You weren’t exaggerating when you said you were hungry again. Now, let’s get back to your story,” said Dickie.

  “Alright, just give me a minute to fix these for us.” With toothpicks he stabbed cheese, then pickle, and settled the pairing on crackers. The men devoured their midnight snack.

  “Let me see, now. To be honest, what I remember the most was, um, he had an unusual smell. Reminded me of hay, but sweet too, like fresh grass. I’m not kidding. And soft hair the colour of honey. He was a talker, big plans for himself. One day he invited me to come into the barn.”

  “Where else!” Dickie snorted.

  “We stretched out on some hay bales and he told me that one day soon he was going to drive from sea to sea to sea. He wanted to make it to New Orleans eventually. It was right at sunset, and the light made him look like an angel.”

  “He was a couple years older than me, maybe twenty-one. I’d never given a thought to being anywhere but on the farm, so I have him to thank for that.”

  “Well?” Dickie asked.

  “Oh, right. He was telling me about surfing in California that day, and he said that a man could find paradise there. Then, just like that, he flipped open his overalls, pulled up his shirt, and played with himself with his eyes closed, talking about pretty girls in bikinis dancing at beach parties.”

  “What did you do, Ed?” Johnny asked.

  “I watched till he finished. I suppose that he expected me to grab him or help him out or something, but I was too timid.”

  “Hmmm. I don’t think that counts,” Dickie decided.

  “I concur,” Johnny said.

  “Oh, really? Then I have to skip forward a few more years. My first day here: the train station men’s room. It was nothing special, but, boy, at the time it was heaven. That old fellow knew a thing or two!”

  “Ah, yes, that terminus,” Johnny said. “A place, I’ve no doubt, where many a boy has become a man. Maybe some Indian tribe made it a place for a sacred fertility ritual centuries back. There’s got to be some reason for its popularity.”

  “Well, Johnny, it is the major departure and arrival point,” Ed said with no little sarcasm.

  Dickie stood up. “Another time, gentlemen.” He picked up the side plates. “At the risk of offending your tender sensibilities, I’m going to close up shop for the day. I have an engagement in the morning, unlike some of you.”

  Afterword (An Introduction)

  by A.X. Palios

  Then there is the catch: where does justification end and degeneracy begin? Society must condemn to protect. Permit even the intellectual homosexual a place of respect and the first bar is down. Then comes the next and the next until the sadist, the flagellist [sic], the criminally insane demand their places, and society ceases to exist. So I ask again: where is the line drawn? Where does degeneracy begin if not at the beginning of individual freedom in such matters?

  —James Barr, Quatrefoil (1950)

  Allowing same sex marriage will affect the society. New trends will be set which will not be desirable. Marriage benefits would have to be provided to them as well and a new air of freedom will be provided where all sorts of crazy behaviours might be expected, adaptation to which will be almost impossible.

  —Letter to the editor, National Post (2005)

  An enigmatic phenomenon with a rareness that rivals emeralds, the literary objet trouvé—whether the Dead Sea Scrolls or Heinrich Böll’s The Silent Angel—possesses a mystique borne of its very obscurity. Unearthed after being waylaid for eons in an arid cave or long forgotten in a trunk lodged in the attic of the author’s remote ancestor, the manuscript is radiant with the secrets its fragile pages have sequestered. “I hold great knowledge,” those pages whisper with the otherworldly gravitas of an ancient sibyl.

  In our era, it is virtually only the lost manuscripts of canonical artists (Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, for instance, or a newly recovered Beethoven symphonic score) that are judged publishable by the vested interests that guide university presses and commercial houses. The foregoing “novel” has an exceptional status, then, insofar as it appears with no pedigree, no oeuvre, and indeed no name appended to it at all. The work’s anonymity guarantees its status as sui generis. The manuscript can reveal nothing about the overall nature of the author’s work because, of course, it has no claimant. Thus, if the editor’s principal rationale for publishing a newfound manuscript relates to edification—its shedding further light on (and so ameliorating the fragmentary understanding of) the literary figure—and the marketer’s impetus stems from assurances of a secure audience (those interested in the literature as well as those entranced by the celebrity of the charismatic author), then there is no conventional justification for bringing under public scrutiny the never-told tale of fictional Mr. Winston Wilson, resident of fictional River Bend City, British Columbia, Canada.

  No trifling literary curiosity, though, this long-shrouded volume performs invaluable services. For the curious soul, it encourages questions about its very nature: “What is it, who wrote it, and why was it hidden away?” And its pages act as goads, urging a closer examination of the culture by which its author was enveloped. Uniquely positioned as a particularly talkative historical artifact, moreover, the manuscript also incites the inquisitive reader to grow introspective and to speculate about how extensively national culture has transformed and progressed over the last half-century. Or, indeed, the cynic with an awareness of the 1996 Republican-sponsored, Democratic President-authorized Defense of Marriage Act and recent distraught politicking in Canada about same-sex unions might hypothesize that this ostensible progress has in fact been sluggish, uncertain, and by no means assured.

  Though the manuscript bears witness to a discrete historical moment, that era is not so distant as to be unrecognizable. To my long-observant eyes—on the frigid November night that Winston Wilson is led into the “enchanted forest” of the manuscript, I was a nine-year-old innocent in Manchester; and such autobiographic candor here merely highlights the fact that I have endured several feast and famine decades of so-called gay liberation—these pages expose an archetypal conflicted authorial preoccupation that to a large degree results from rigid (if not wholly stifling) and profoundly intrusive social institutions. The narrative reflects the dilemma of a character whose emergent sexuality is an unwelcome surprise because its visibility will cause him profound distress, placing the newly criminalized man in direct opposition to the terra firma of his homeland. This protagonist quite understandably intuits that if chosen, his transition from comforting normalcy to the aberrant and completely unfamiliar fringe will be accompanied with great pain. The manuscript’s epilogues illustrate the conservatism of his eventual choice(s). Eerily, as a historical artifact, the manuscript appears to echo the story it tells, since the person who wrote what amounts to a gay Bildüngsroman either circulated it privately or else decided that circa 1959 Canadian society (or the Canadian publishing industry) was not hospitable to his perspective. Before proceeding with a tentative assessment of the revelations of this local if “lost” author, however, it seems appropriate to begin with the tale of its serendipitous discovery.

  At the beginning of the 2002 autumn semester, a former student [1] appeared at my office door holding an indigo plastic bag from The Gap; here, apparently, was the “find” about which he had sent me an email a few weeks earlier. Just returned to campus from his family’s home in the Fraser Valley’s suburban sprawl (where he had taken a summer job at an American retail giant located in some massive consumption/entertainment complex), his eagerness to bring in an object—one that he had promised me was “really cool”—beamed from his face. In his email of mid-August he had explained that while ex
ploring a collectibles shop, Tina’s Trash & Treasures, one afternoon, two peculiar volumes bound by elastic bands in the pell-mell piles of faded Tupperware, chipped porcelain figurines, and miscellaneous ersatz antiquities had caught his eye. He’d also said that he planned for me to wait until his return to campus before I could physically see what was so interesting about these mysterious publications. Since students commonly have an odd yet ardent belief that any book older than themselves is a relic worth its weight in gold, I presumed his treasure would be at best nothing other than a dusty first edition.

  Figure 1

  Junior Homemaking and

  Reeves Business College Guide to Beauty • Charm • Poise

  It was this prize that he had now carried across campus for my bibliophilic eyes to peruse. Removing the bulky material from the bag, he snapped off the elastic bands that kept the shape intact. He placed two hardcover books on my desk. They were mid-twentieth-century, kitschy tomes that would amuse, inspire, and appall feminists and scholars of gender: a high school Home Economics textbook titled Junior Homemaking, [2] and Reeves Business College Guide to Beauty • Charm • Poise, [3] the etiquette manual for a formerly august, now defunct institution in Lloydminster, Saskatchewan that promised to transform ill-mannered adolescent females into elegant young ladies. He opened the front cover of the textbook and slowly turned the preliminary pages. The volume did not contain the expected series of chapters, however. My student revealed a hollow core: a secretive or anxious soul had dedicated an afternoon to cutting out a cradle in which to rest a prized fetish object. One might easily imagine a penitentiary inmate or a privacy-obsessed teen proceeding with such a compulsive undertaking. Yet to our eyes, this cachette held nothing resembling contraband; it was tightly stacked with bundles of not even yellowed paper.

  “It’s somebody’s story,” said the volume’s erstwhile guardian.

  My student explained that though he had dislodged the first few sheets and read them, he had left the rest of the artifact intact. Thank the gods for small mercies: he told me that when he is not rummaging like a scavenger through used goods shops, he’s an adherent of crime dramas on television—and on these programs the forensics teams are adamant that the crime scene be given a cordon sanitaire until after their investigation has terminated. Otherwise, he elaborated, “the evidence could become tainted.” I had been promoted to Textual Forensics Expert, I could see. An enthusiastic amateur hoping to solve the mystery of the book’s origin, he had diligently returned to the shop in order to quiz the proprietor. She was unhelpful, the student informed me. Her reply? Wearing a sheepish look, he recalled that the gravel-voiced merchant had been succinct to the point of bluntness: “Don’t ask me, honey. We get a shit-load of books in here every damned week.” Thus concluded one promising line of inquiry.

  Figure 2

  The Junior Homemaking cachette

  He left his untitled [4] “find” with me. The temptation to read the contents was not to be resisted. Yet before giving into that first bibliophilic impulse, I thought to be methodical; each one of the tightly-bound sheaves, accordingly, was labeled and catalogued. It was scarcely necessary. The obscure author who had placed the sheaves of papers inside must have been nothing if not cautious and precise. Each “page,” a piece of paper exactly 20.3 cm wide and 15.25 cm long (but folded in half lengthwise), was numbered and placed atop the next. With the exception of one untitled sheet inscribed with epigraph-like excerpts of poems by Virgil and Edgar Lee Masters, sections had been labeled “Prol S 58,” “A 59,” “J 59,” “O 59,” and so on, and then tied together with cotton twine and arranged by narrative chronology in the cachette. Every sentence, moreover, had been written with a soft lead pencil (all the better to correct errors?); the author had made use of just one side of each sheaf.

  Figure 3

  Manuscript page "Prol S 58"

  Unlike the famously haphazard collected poems of Emily Dickinson or the equally notorious illegible manuscripts of Charlotte Brontë, both the order and clarity of these manuscript pages presented no impediments; there was no ambiguity to be found, no word undecipherable, no sheaf improperly ordered. Transcription proceeded without incident. The flawless legibility hinted that this manuscript was less a work-in-progress than a completed draft. [5]

  Now that the manuscript had seen the light of day, the question of what to do with it arose as a matter of course. There was little appeal in keeping it stored away in my office as though it were mine alone to possess. The manuscript was in fact valuable as a revelatory historical document—its narrative pointedly set between the historically-veracious hanging of a homosexual murderer in spring and the death of a bisexual matinee idol in autumn—that provides certain access to a subjectivity and a subculture entirely invisible to the popular imagination. Furthermore, the manuscript’s cultural portrait both complicates and localizes the understanding of a bygone era grossly simplified and homogenized by influential American media images (from exercises in exclusively heterosexual nostalgia such as American Graffiti, Grease, and Happy Days to a trapped-in-amber syndicated series like Leave It to Beaver).

  Seeking the publication of an anonymous work was unusual, admittedly, but there were literary elements to it as well that recommended I introduce it to other readers. Yet, in assessing the merit of the volume for publication purposes, the question of authorship remained a troubling—and by no means trivial—detail. It seemed imperative to solve the mystery and reveal the source. Despite my best efforts, that quest was fruitless. No inner Hercule Poirot could I make manifest; evidence was sullen, revealing no secrets. Avenues proposed by colleagues proved unproductive as well.

  Necessity was in fact the mother of invention in this case, and for me inventiveness entailed contacting graphologists and text authenticators. This extraordinary—one might say desperate—measure reflected my native skepticism being overwhelmed by frustration. I did, incidentally, draw the line at a recommended “forensic psychic” who promises to reveal truth upon laying her hands on any artifact. While graphology has always shined like a dubious beacon of pseudo-science for me (like phrenologists, television psychics, and readers of tea leaves: a trap for the credulous), I decided nevertheless to send copies of the same two manuscript pages to a pair of respected graphologists, one in Ontario and the other in Oklahoma. [6] “What’s the harm?” I concluded, borrowing some of Winston Wilson’s late-blooming devil-may-care attitude.

  Regrettably, their results were mere sketches and, accordingly, inconclusive. Each employed their specialist’s vocabulary of inflated buckles, open loops, hooks, strokes, degree of connection, upstrokes, sloping t-bars, and line spacing, but their analyses could not supply much concrete data. The Canadian analyst, for instance, detected “literary leanings,” “pessimism,” “repression,” “consistency,” “desire for change,” and “caution” in the handwriting of the unknown author. From the same sample, the Oklahoman deduced “caution” and “repression.” She determined additional traits: “sarcasm,” “idiosyncrasy,” “narrow-mindedness,” and “indecisiveness.” The composite personality that results brings us nowhere close to a useful (or even coherent) profile. The best efforts of these experts could not ultimately coax the now schizoid but still ghostly author from “the other side.” Interestingly, both analysts ascertained that the writer was a left-handed male, and Ms. Winterbourne supplemented her assertion with a curious and terse notation: “May have issues about his masculinity.” The analysts of paper and ink could confirm that the text was produced between 1955 and 1965. The quality of the products was not exceptional. Their commonplace nature effectively prevented the extraction of any further information [7] that might reveal the absent author.

  If the mystery of authorship remains—permanently?—unresolved (or else we heed Michel Foucault’s warning that our quest for the inviolable origin of things is an understandable if wrong-headed and quite possibly foolhardy venture [8]), a secondary mystery is surely worth our consideration: why
had this manuscript been sequestered away? If it was autobiographical or a roman à clef, then it is sensible to assume that the author would not dare risk the public exposure (humiliation or retribution) that publication would be sure to bring. Another possibility, equally probable, is that a second copy of the manuscript was actually sent out for publication and subsequently rejected. Since publishers do not maintain records (or an archive) of rejected manuscripts, verification of any sort is not forthcoming yet again.

  Granting the complete absence of the author and knowledge about “his” social circumstances, it is intriguing to speculate further on the author’s historical predicament. A cursory overview of the Canadian literary infrastructure indicates that while there is undoubtedly such an animal today—a thriving one supported by government grants, televised awards ceremonies, arts festivals, university English departments, agents, and so forth—it was still fundamentally inchoate circa 1959 and, then as now, based largely in Toronto. Moreover, that miniscule publishing sector’s interest in the literary vanguard is undetectable. Seeing that an American author like William Burroughs was publishing such risqué works as Junkie, (1953) and Naked Lunch (1959) during the period, it does not seem reckless to contend that Canadian publishing house concerns invested heavily in conventional literary stock. In short, at mid-century (an age well before the foreign-owned multinational publishing conglomerates of today) Canada was no haven for the publication of a novice writer on the edge of the nation holding what would have amounted to a radically controversial perspective.

  Nor did publishers print as many titles as today. Surveying literary production between 1940 and 1960 in a 1965 essay, Hugo McPherson reports that some 370 literary novels were published in Canada during the period (a staggering 1.5 per month, in other words), the bulk of which, he states, “consist[ed] of domestic romances, often honest or earnest in intention, but abjectly imitative of the stereotypes of magazine fiction.” [9] McPherson complains that this Canadian fiction had all the hallmarks of provincialism since its choice of material was decidedly unworldly and apolitical. (Similarly, discussing the literature of social protest and social change during the same period, W.H. New [10] makes mention of novels and poems addressing voting rights, living wages, and labour unrest. The politics of gender, sexuality, and skin colour were to rear their heads a full decade later.) McPherson’s essay bluntly includes a long statement by one J.R. MacGillivray, whose unequivocal conclusion (in 1949) was that Canadian novelists have “no apparent awareness of ideas and events, but [live in] a perfect isolation from place and time.” MacGillivray then exposed his profound disappointment with a rhetorical question: “Where else is there the equal to that ivory tower, soundproof, windowless, air-conditioned, and bombproof, in which these novelists tap at their typewriters undisturbed by the falling heavens?” [11] If in general literature of the era was a parochial, apolitical, and timid family, we can surmise that it would not have welcomed a shameful cousin like Winston Wilson and his unrepentant homosexual comrades into its fold with open arms. It would seem likely that something as trifling as Alberta’s sympathetic response to Leo Mantha (the scandalous amour fou murderer, an inmate at the Fraser Valley’s Oakalla Prison Farm, and, on April 28, 1959, the last man put to death by hanging in British Columbia) might have prompted a censorious reply.