The Age of Cities
Page 18
McPherson does eventually submit a list comprised of a “small group of writers who in various ways have expanded the Canadian consciousness of the self, and its relation to ideas, imagination, and events.” [12] That group includes Hugh MacLennan, Barry Callaghan, Gabrielle Roy, Robertson Davies, Sinclair Ross, Ethel Wilson, and Mordecai Richler. It is a minute canon of figures, we might add, whose representation of Canada (and whose influential contributions to “the Canadian consciousness of the self”) is stocked exclusively with heterosexual characters and predicaments. Tradition-minded literary vision aside, there is no doubting that the St. Laurent/Diefenbaker years were also a time of literary-cultural expansion, a fact made especially clear by the growth of literary journals—like Contact (1952), Tamarack Review (1956), Waterloo Review (1958), Canadian Literature (1959), Prism (1959), and Tish (1961). While Desmond Pacey’s essay in Literary History of Canada claims that this flourishing of Canadian magazines and journals “provided invaluable opportunities for young writers to try their wings,” he does not by and large disclose the nature of the literary production. [13] If journals were ideologically predisposed to valorize some representations while discouraging others (witness the construction of the “aggressively masculinist and heterosexist” Canadian poetic canon, [14] for example), then their flourishing would have been of negligible benefit to an author submitting a de trop representation of sexuality.
How then, we might ask, might a publisher have responded to the manuscript nestled inside Junior Homemaking? Again, of course, we can only speculate. Considering that the novel graphically depicts (for the times) a sexual encounter between two men, its being published would have been putting on public display an act both criminal—and one not decriminalized until 1969—and distasteful. And because Winston’s fateful sexual rendezvous would be arguably obscene, any interested publishing house would have understood its vulnerability to litigation. Furthermore, the very fact that the tradition of Canadian homosexual literature is a scant one even today (we might recall, too, that what is arguably the first Canadian lesbian novel was set in Nevada and authored by the American-born Jane Rule in 1964) [15] suggests that to his own detriment the writer was ahead of his time. As another point of comparison, we might also pay attention to a question privately posed in 1960 by E.M. Forster—at the time one of England’s most celebrated literary figures, the first president of the National Council for Civil Liberties, and the outspoken defender of the putative obscenity of Radclyffe Hall and D.H. Lawrence. On the cover page of his unpublished manuscript of Maurice, a novel begun in 1913 and “Dedicated to a Happier Year,” he wrote: “Publishable—but worth it?” The question was answered in the affirmative only after Maurice appeared in 1971, one year after Forster’s death. [16]
Canada was by no means exempt from the political acts of repression and tacit non-acknowledgement about which Forster elsewhere speaks. As the work of historians such as Tom Warner, Mary Louis Adams, and Gary Kinsmen have illustrated, the process of heterosexual normalization [17] was proceeding at full speed during the conservative post-War/Cold War period in Canada. Suffice it to say that the warning incorporated into a 1965 review of Rule’s romantic debut novel—“Desert of the Heart is not recommended to those who find sexual perversion an uncomfortable subject” [18] —speaks volumes. In addition, the visible, active, and politically engaged community that is now taken for granted simply did not exist fifty years ago. Warner observes that Canada’s first gay community organization did not form until 1964 (it was Vancouver’s Association for Social Knowledge; the University of Toronto Homophile Association emerged some five years later). He notes, too, that overall perception of gays and lesbians after the Second World War was “profoundly negative” with few exceptions; even the “more liberal view held that homosexuality was morally wrong, deviant and disgusting, [19] but could be managed via psychoanalysis or medical treatment.” [20] His overview is grim. And it is one that does not transform significantly until the emergence of gay liberation in the late 1960s. Warner concludes:
For gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, Canadian laws, institutions, and social structures, historically, imposed a system of social oppression. Homosexuals generally were seen and treated as criminal, sinful, sick, degenerate, furtive—members of an undesirable, almost subhuman, group against which acts of bigotry, discrimination, injustice, and violence were tolerated or even encouraged. [21]
If the manuscript is an alluring puzzle of a historical document, its aspirations as literature are clear and warrant attention as well. If a credible author (or even authorial intent) cannot ultimately be fathomed to any degree, the literary design of the pages cannot be doubted: with its allusions, leitmotifs, and very structure, the manuscript is not coy about exhibiting its thoroughgoing knowledge of the novelistic tradition.
Consider just one example. On the first sheaf alone—featuring an excerpt (and new translation [22]) from Book II of Virgil’s Georgics—we see that the author refers to Virgil’s poetic examination of agriculture and then modifies the fragment to meet his own needs. The implicit comparison of urban and rural reverberating through Virgil’s poem becomes an explicit one in the manuscript as the story’s questing (Aeneas-like?) protagonist makes his three round trips to the city. Yet more than merely incorporating Virgil’s conceit the author builds upon it, reshaping a classical model to meet his modern requirements. While Georgics utilizes the innate goodness that rural life fosters as a kind of role model for the poem’s urban (Roman) audience, then The Age of Cities retains a steadfast ambivalence; in juxtaposing the two modes of living, the author proclaims that their relationship is not symbiotic. Rather, they are contiguous and discrete social systems, each one valuable in its own right and not subject to overlap. For Winston Wilson, the “values” of the two—the city is associated with darkness, the unknown, artifice and disguise, carnality, fraternity, insincerity, play, homosexuality, spontaneity (and one kind of truth), while the country is linked to daylight, fertility, nature, family, tradition, routine and familiarity, heterosexuality, abundance, repression (and another kind of truth)—have each their particular allure and utility. The unresolved duality of his character, in fact, comes to rely on both social systems.
Moreover, if the steady flow of references to classical authors—Ovid, Lucretius, Virgil—and poets of the modern period (Browning, Hardy, Eliot and so on) suggests [23] an author with a professional investment in literature or else an enthusiastic amateur (who, like Winston Wilson’s touchstone Alexander Pope, has a fondness for the eternal symmetries of the classical poets), there is also the manuscript’s correspondence to the vernacular and thematic developments of Canadian literature to consider. The author did not incorporate classical motifs and allusions in order to detach his story from a specific localized setting and then look fondly backwards to the surety of a Golden Age. He eschews the hermetic “soundproof, windowless, air-conditioned, and bombproof” place that MacGillivray envisions as the national novelists’ favourite loitering spot, and sets the novel in specific geographical and socio-economic contexts. In truth, had the manuscript been published soon after it was finished, the novel (or its close attention to landscape and physical setting, in any case) would have found a secure placement in the critical work of Atwood (Survival) and Frye (“Conclusion,” Literary History of Canada) that famously defined a fundamental Canadian literary property as an ambivalent relationship with the hostile land.
Placed in relation to other Canadian literature of the period, the manuscript exhibits thematic and stylistic commonalities with established figures, including Robertson Davies, Hugh MacLennan, and, in particular, Vancouver’s Ethel Wilson. If the text itself positions the author as an adherent of a literary tradition that might look to W.H. Auden as its progenitor (in Canada, we might cite novelist David Watmough [b. 1926] and poet Daryl Hine [b. 1936] as Auden-inspired homosexual authors whose work fondly alludes to high cultural classical tradition), there is no overlooking that it shares qualities with
the contemporaneous Canadian literature. The work is predominantly realist, according easily with Adele Wiseman’s The Sacrifice (1956), Ethel Wilson’s The Swamp Angel (1954) or Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch that Ends the Night (1959). In its depiction of the small town we can see echoes of Sunshine Sketches of a Small Town (1912) as well as the critique of and pessimism about its narrowness as expressed, for instance, by Sinclair Ross’ As For Me and My House (1941). It is Robertson Davies’ Salterton Trilogy (1951-58), and its peculiar sincere affection for small town life (accompanied by a knowingness of its “cultural malnutrition” and the limitations which only a cosmopolitan city like London can remedy) to which a closer relationship might be considered at some future date. Though a questing narrator is a literary commonplace, Winston Wilson would keep good company equally with Maggie Lloyd of The Swamp Angel or any number of the beleaguered characters in the Salterton novels.
In hindsight, the decision to publish the manuscript came easily. Though there are sufficient aesthetic grounds to introduce the novel to contemporary readers, there are also broadly political ones. Whether a roman à clef or a conventionally Canadian realist account of social conditions circa 1959, the manuscript provides access to an invisible literary tradition and a virtually unknown subculture. One of the praiseworthy motivations of the pioneering essay collection Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (1989) is (as its title states directly) making visible that which has been denied and hidden away. Publication of The Age of Cities, then, supports that ongoing and pan-cultural enterprise.
In a sense, the manuscript lodged in Junior Homemaking performs a role often reserved for the conventional historical novel. As Helen Cam claims in her delightfully naïve 1965 pamphlet, the purpose of the “good” historical novel is to “fill in the lamentable hiatus of the historical record.” [24] Guided by diligent research and a heightened “imaginative sympathy” [25] the historical novelist cautiously invents probable scenes and conversations—ones that the ethics-bound empiricist historian cannot—and so makes manifest that which has been presumed forever lost. Pondering The Age of Cities might also incite a recollection of Sigmund Freud’s positivistic ease when confronted circa 1900 by the incomplete, indeed aborted, psychoanalysis of Ida Bauer. Publishing the sessions as “Fragment of An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1905), Freud compares his efforts to those of “those discoverers whose good fortune it is to bring to the light of day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity.” While the surety expressed when he states “I have restored what is missing” [26] cannot be fully felt for the sheaves (and their still missing author) hoarded away in Junior Homemaking, it is our good fortune to have a chance to encounter a publication that prises a passageway open to an altogether obscure moment of the past.
A note on the typeface and the double “Epi”:
One of the curious conditions of the manuscript was found in its concluding few pages. Labeled “Epi I Ap 65” and “Epi II Ap 65,” the two bundles represent two similar but distinct epilogues. The absence of the author here is especially confounding because it prevents a determination of the true nature of this double ending (that recalls the early postmodern innovation of John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman of 1969): was it designed as such, or did the author not have the time, ability, or inclination to complete the project by selecting one and discarding the other? As it stands, the suspended conclusion resounds provocatively.
The alternate endings are intriguing insofar as the two choices—resentment and subterfuge on the one hand and repression and willed “amnesia” on the other hand—in no way make a utopian projection into the future; in contrast to Forster’s novel with its author’s insistence upon a happy ending for his protagonist, [27] the anonymous author does not give the hero a like advantage. The author apparently could not reconcile the homosexual individual with traditional cultural formations. Cultural institutions and norms, in fact, while not oppressively phobic remain nonetheless rigidly heteronormative and unyielding to outside influences. The best that can be said is that an urban homosexual proto-culture (semi-visible at best: private residences, commercial establishments, a public park) exists and thrives in its marginal and miniscule niches.
Lastly, the manuscript featured a literary innovation that I have replicated in the present volume. Certain words or terms (such as “Malkin’s” or “Errol Flung!”) were differentiated from the handwriting, as though the author desired to imitate actual typography. Current typesetting technology with its myriad of fonts makes accommodation of this approach relatively simple.
— A.X.P. (Summer 2006)
References
Adams, Mary Louise. The Trouble With Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
Cam, Helen. Historical Novels. London: Historical Association, 1961.
Davies, Robertson. The Salterton Trilogy. Toronto: Penguin, 1986.
Fleishman, Avrom. The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.
Forster, E.M. Maurice. Toronto: Macmillan, 1971.
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977: 139–164.
Freud, Sigmund. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989: 172–238.
Kinsman, Gary. The Regulation of Desire: Homo and Hetero Sexualities. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1996.
McPherson, Hugo. “Fiction (1940–1960).” Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. 2nd Ed. Ed. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976: 205–233.
New, W.H. A History of Canadian Literature. London: Macmillan, 1989.
Pacey, Desmond. “The Writer and His Public (1920–1960).” Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. 2nd Ed. Ed. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976: 3–21.
Penta, A.C. “Review of Desert of the Heart.” Best Sellers 25. Sept 1, 1965: 222.
Putnam, Michael C.J. Virgil’s Poem of the Earth: Studies in the Georgics. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979.
Dickinson, Peter. Here is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Hastings, Tom. “Gay and Lesbian Writing.” Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Ed. W.H. New. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002: 418–422.
Warner, Tom. Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.
1. Gratitude must be expressed to “hexman35.” For reasons known only to himself, my former student wishes to be acknowledged by his Internet pseudonym.
2. It is a first edition, but the 1958 home economics textbook authored by Evelyn G. Jones and Helen A. Burnham (of the Denver Public Schools Department) and published by the J.B. Lippincott Company of Chicago, is neither rare nor of much market value. Likewise, the Reeves Business College Guide to Beauty • Charm • Poise (published by Milady Publications of New York City in 1955) possesses value only as a curio.
3. See the appendices for the contents of the second book. While the sheaves were written by the same hand and the story they relate involves three of the manuscript’s principle characters, the evidence that these pages are not meant as part of the narrative in the Junior Homemaking cachette is overwhelming. The fact that they were placed in a separate volume and have been characterized by the apparent author as “Obscenity” is already amply conclusive. Moreover, there are no scenes in The Age of Cities in which the protagonist Winston Wilson is absent. The pages found in Reeves Business College Guide to Beauty • Charm • Poise portray a scene that takes place once Winston has left the scene.
4. In search of a prompt from the text, I discovered the single circumstance of words circled in pencil, apparently by the author. In the manuscript
’s second chapter, “J[une 19]59,” Alberta envisions the Fraser delta “before the age of cities.” The final four words are heavily circled in the manuscript.
5. Then again, there is evidence to support another interpretation. There’s the uncharacteristic brevity of the work to consider as well as the absence of elements that typically accompany a realist narrative (a detailed history of incidents from the childhood and adolescence of the central characters, for example). While somewhat reminiscent of the conclusion of Nathanael West’s Hollywood exposé, The Day of the Locust (1939), the sudden appearance of “choppy” episodic scenes toward the close of the final chapter are suggestive of an incomplete (if near to being whole) novel.