Murder

by David Adams Richards

  Of them all, Keats was his favourite. Not the Keats of schoolbook misinformation, the wispy English Romantic, but the tough, life-loving, five-foot-four boxer and walker, glorious champion of the underdog, nicknamed “Junkets” by Leigh Hunt, writer of brilliant sonnets and odes who died forsaken by the public an age before. “The magnificent Red-haired Runt” Alden Nowlan called him. Nowlan shared more in common with him than he himself might have thought. Both early on were such bleak prospects and suffered illness, in silence, to almost the same degree.

  There is a picture of Nowlan taken when he is about thirteen—a runny nose, a malbuttoned checked woollen bush jacket, a desolate landscape behind him, a lonely gaze out at the camera toward some faraway place. A haunted sadness encompasses everything.

  From this picture it would seem amazing to some that he wrote at all—that he wrote poems, astonishing. But that he wrote many of the finest poems ever written by anyone in Canada—a country that in very many ways he loved and in many ways ignored him—miraculous.

  His first poems were traditional, but infused with great power and perception. Think of that ill-fed, skinny kid looking at the camera, with scared and haunted eyes, his jacket missing buttons and his clothes tattered, and then read those poems conceived in that childhood of beatings and tattered clothes, and written in youth.

  He went to the Saint John Telegraph-Journal in 1963 on the strength of his editorial ability, to Fredericton in 1968 on the strength of his poetic genius, as writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick, after he won the Governor General’s Award for a collection called Bread, Wine and Salt.

  In Fredericton came his golden age, or golden moment—the flourishing of his genius, of his temperament, the legend surrounding both his enormous talent and his drinking. His poetry continued to change, to become more analytical, observant and objective; a strong narrative voice emerged, psychologically penetrating, always sympathetic to its subject. He was trying in a way for pure poetry—which meant pure truth. As always, humanity is everywhere in his work—in his world you cannot exist without it.

  At his house on Windsor Street in Fredericton—called, of course, Windsor Castle—Nowlan entertained, met other writers and poets, started his pet projects and societies (the world was so utterly self-absorbed as round, why shouldn’t we claim it flat); it seemed to have still had purpose then. So many of his friends were descendants of Irish and Scottish clans who had fought the British at every turn—why not reclaim the throne, even if in exile in New Brunswick?

  He was interviewed about these claims by rather literal people who did not catch on to the seriousness of it all, or the joke. And Nowlan was a master of the understated in both.

  Like the seriousness accompanying the joke played on the world when he was given the task, as a young man, of measuring the Hartland Bridge, to reassert its claim as the longest covered bridge in existence. Nowlan measured it from one side of the Saint John River to the other and then, for good measure, he continued across the street, proceeding until he came to a stop at his desk in the Observer office. Walking backward all the way, he finished his measuring when he was able to sit down.

  And though he helped reassert the right to the throne for the descendants of Bonnie Prince Charlie, he was, in the end, no British hater—that was a small man’s part. Besides, he cared too much about British literature and tradition.

  Meeting Prince Charles in the 1970s, he commented that he liked his beard.

  “But my mom disapproves,” the Prince said.

  “Ah, Sir, what mom doesn’t?” Alden Nowlan offered.

  When meeting June Carter Cash, he said, “Miss Carter, I have long been of the opinion that you have the sexiest right knee in all of show business.”

  “Thank you very much for noticing,” Carter Cash said, and lifted her dress to show him the knee.

  His parties were filled with people from disparate walks of life, who had totally different opinions and political stripes, who might not speak to each other anywhere else. At Alden Nowlan’s they found safety. The premier could be there, and so, too, members of the Opposition; a single mother on welfare sitting beside a young corporate lawyer; sound poets adrift in the world, and young men with their daddies’ money; rural-bred soldiers from Gagetown sitting beside urban pacifists wearing peace beads, sharing cigarettes from the same pack. As Gorky said of Tolstoy, so someone might have said of Nowlan: “As long as this man lives no one will be an orphan.”

  Of course he could not live. That is always the secret.

  Someone once told me that Alden Nowlan only attracted youngsters, and that people his age were wary of him. Although he had a great many older friends, that is still true in part, but it was not Nowlan’s fault. The young sought him out, as the young must have sought out Emerson or Socrates. Why? It is simple. The young have to.

  He was comfortable with the young. They came to him because for many he was the first adult they had ever heard speak like an adult should speak. Many were would-be poets, and he was a mentor.

  Some his own age, especially from the university, were wary of him because, just like Beethoven with the nobility, he could not bow easily to those who had not come to knowledge within the harsh life-and-death parameters he himself had faced.

  But the young came. He never so much instructed them but listened to them. Perhaps, who knows, they were taken seriously for the very first time in their lives. It is literally true that there was a time his house was filled with people young enough to be his sons or daughters.

  I went down to meet Alden Nowlan, but the lights were out, and I did not want to wake him at the door. I turned my motorcycle around in the summer air, and shifted through the avenues of people already asleep.

  He did not know of this impromptu visit, and the next time I visited was one of my very last.

  He was watching Peter Ustinov’s documentary on Russia: “ ’Lo, Davy,” he said, and got up to turn the television off.

  “No, Alden,” I said, not wanting to disturb his program. “Please leave it on.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “If Peter Ustinov is on TV and David Adams Richards enters the room—off goes the television.” And he made that great jerking motion with his arms.

  I sat down. He was silent a long moment. Then he looked over at me and, with a kind of cherub-like smile, shyly added, “Mind you, Davy, if David Adams Richards was on television and Peter Ustinov walked in—well then, what I mean to say is, well, you know—the TV just might go off, too.”

  At the last of his life he was left alone, as old friends departed for other places and lives changed. The great court was over and often he sat in his den in solitude.

  Some made excuses, saying he was difficult and his best days were over. Noble of them…to be entertained by him on his best days.

  And he—well, he was still writing great poems, about the martyrdom of Bobby Sands, about going to a “school for the retarded” to speak to children, or summing up Boswell’s two-hundred-thousand-word biography of his old friend Sam Johnson.

  I have often wondered what Canada gave Alden Nowlan. I have never come up with a satisfactory answer.

  In his great poem Ypres: 1915, he asked, in a curious way, if he even had a country—and more subtly, though never spoken, if Canada of today deserved the bravery of those kids fighting along the line, the first time the Germans used gas.

  As I say, I do not know what Canada really gave him; but I know in my heart and soul what he gave it. He was the greatest poet of his generation, one of the few truly great literary figures this country has produced. But so like his literary hero Junkets, he always made an awkward bow.

  I went down to visit Alden Nowlan, on that summer night long ago. Who knows, maybe to thank him. But it was too late, the curtains were drawn, and the lights were out.

  He took a heart attack at his home on June 11, 1983, and, putting on old
and tattered clothes that he would know from the days of his youth, walked unaided to the ambulance, just as he long ago told God he would do for Him—die with courage.

  He slipped into a coma from which he never recovered, and died June 27, 1983, at the age of fifty Two years younger than I am now.

  2003

  THE ALCOHOLIC VISION

  IN UNDER THE VOLCANO, MALCOLM LOWRY’S PRODIGIOUS HERO, Geoffrey Firmin, drinking himself to death in Mexico on the Day of the Dead in 1938, has, as you may expect, memories of his past. They come to him in the form of spectres, “imaginary parties arriving,” as he says; and his name is “repeated with scorn.”

  “Familiars” follow him about his garden as he searches under the sunflowers for hidden bottles, admonishing him for his wasted life. Memories also of those superior people who think they know the fault or the trick in what he says, when there is nothing but innocence.

  Lowry’s great creation—Geoffrey Firmin’s ghosts and admonishing “familiars”—seem to be these kind of fellows. And so, too, were Firmin’s ex-wife and half-brother on that fateful, atrophied day, so long ago in time, yet a moment in our imaginations.

  Perhaps that’s what intrigued me about Lowry’s book. It is not so much that Firmin remembers ghosts as they present themselves to him, out of the blue, and bid him good-day. But before they bid him goodbye, they allow him to remember how casual is the damning of his spirit.

  Lowry knew what it was like to be a convenient target: belittled as a child, terrified of sex, laughed at as an adult, deemed a failure by the literary world he loved, ousted from friends, betrayed by others, alone with self-contempt, he ran from ghosts most of his life, from city to city, bar to bar, friend to friend, leaving in his wake from England to New York to Mexico, to Dollarton, British Columbia, what he considered, as did everyone else, the sludge of inadequacy and failure.

  Until finally in Canada in the 1940s he penned his masterpiece.

  Before he ever got to write it, he was committed to an alcoholics ward in New York and lost his first great love somewhere along the way because he was too shy to kiss her.

  * * *

  —

  Before he got to BC, Malcolm lived a life of drunken terror in Mexico. People on pleasure boats would see this lone figure swimming three miles from shore in the Gulf of Mexico’s shark-infested water, his head bobbing up and down: “Trying, you see, to rid myself of old dad’s spies,” Malcolm would say happily when asked what in God’s name he was doing swimming alone so far from land. His dad had him on an allowance from the estate, something like Poe’s stepfather, and like Poe’s stepfather, was suspicious his son was a useless weakling and wasting his life.

  * * *

  —

  Here we have it, then: a weak-willed man on an allowance from pa, and about to write of the tragedy of all the world. Better in the end than Brendan Behan or Henry Miller, or Faulkner or Hemingway. More compassionate about both men and women than most of what passes for compassion today. As great, in my mind, as the two great figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Hardy and Joyce. Exclusively tragic and exclusively alone. Alone and self-conscious to the point of self-betrayal. Smirked at by authority both in police headquarters and publishing houses.

  * * *

  —

  Would those who have literature catalogued into who can write what approve? An allowance from a rich, if self-righteous, father supposedly means a soft boy. A father who could afford to indulge him to an apprenticeship with Conrad Aiken? But Lowry came from a different age, an age that hadn’t yet completed the tunnel vision about literary roles. Without being as determined as he was to overcome what he did, he might have settled into the role of literary gadfly, or English buffoon, or as one of those happy, exuberant men who is always welcome at a literary dinner party with the exceedingly wholesome writing wife of a tenured eccentric professor, because he knows the stories that have to be told to keep people entertained.

  * * *

  —

  Of all the roles to play, buffoon is the easiest role in which to challenge the contempt of others, but the most difficult to escape from self-contempt.

  In the end, however, Lowry’s work, written isolated and alone, was as noble as the spirit of mankind. And he suffered dearly for it for thirty years.

  He finally managed to write one of the four or five greatest books of the century. Under the Volcano is a book that is a map of our century’s soul. As dark a book as you would ever want and hilariously funny (but those who want easy jokes or need to read a funny book to see humour won’t get it and of course don’t deserve to), and perhaps one of the very few great books about alcoholics. Certainly the greatest one. After you read Lowry, so much other writing about booze is as flat as dishwater and as conniving as a snitch.

  * * *

  —

  Lowry, when he was down, was a panhandler, yes. A mooch when it came to booze and pills and anything else he could get into his mouth to take him away from where he was. A man who was terrified because he was isolated in his talent and vision, yet forever brave. He was incredibly strong—he knocked out a horse with one punch—yet insecurity made him a painful blubberer. A paranoid who had good reason to be. A man who found it hard to look at women without blushing. Yet a man who loved women dearly. The first time he met his second wife, Margerie, at a bus stop in Los Angeles, he put his arms about her and hugged her for over an hour. Margerie was there through thick and thin. Sometimes when he was working, he would look over a paragraph he had just written and say, “Margerie, could you please come here and tell me what in hell it is I mean by this?” Loners are such because they are forced to be, not by temperament alone, but on occasion by talent. The crowd doesn’t want them or need them, and in one way or another bullies them out. Lowry’s success in literature was as remarkable as Disraeli’s in politics. Nothing was in his favour except genius.

  * * *

  —

  Lowry had to convince himself to keep at it. Here, being suicidal is not a weakness so much as a bedrock foundation. As Seneca knew, thoughts of suicide make a comfort in dire times. Seneca had to deal with Nero, Lowry with literary obscurity. Both were damned in their own time.

  On one occasion, Lowry lay in bed for three days without energy to eat or speak or drink after the book was rejected for the third time. And then with Margerie encouraging him, he went back to work on his manuscript once more. It’s what kept him alive. He must have remembered his promise even though the world had given up on him. The promise of youth, when people recognized his genius before he had written a word.

  When he was twenty-two, Lowry told eighteen-year-old Dylan Thomas that someday he, Malcolm Lowry, would write a great novel, one that would outlast Melville’s Moby Dick. When he met Dylan Thomas years later in Vancouver, Dylan was getting all the attention as the world-famous drunken poet.

  Lowry took to sulking and being moody and not answering questions and finally to breaking some of the light bulbs.

  As much as I love Thomas, Old Malc—the “good-night disgrace,” as Conrad Aiken sadly said to him—was the far greater writer. It’s just that no one needed to care that he was. The twists and turns it took for him to produce his masterpiece are unknown.

  He once complained to his New York agent that there were only two people in Canada who knew what in hell it was he was doing. As Douglas Day has said, that probably wasn’t true. When the publisher in New York was hesitant to publish the book, after Lowry had worked on it for nine years, Lowry wrote perhaps the greatest defence a writer has ever given his own work. It was finally published in 1947 and acclaimed as one of the great works of the century. The Globe in Toronto called it “turgid.”

  It might be fitting that our “national newspaper” so disparaged a book in such a provincial way. And what could Lowry do, now that he was finally an overnight success? He could only try to find a bar
, get drunk and hide.

  What do you do when you write one of the great books of the century? The publisher waits for an encore, but it doesn’t happen. By 1954 Malcolm was frantically writing his publisher from Italy, telling them he wanted all the copies they had sold of Under the Volcano back because he now knew more about alcoholism than ever before.

  He still had moments where he wrote wonderful lines, a few really good poems, even nearly great poems; a story called “Forest Path to the Spring” is also very good. But he spent his last years running with Margerie by his side, back to wherever it was he could find shelter.

  Once, he was put into an alcoholic rehabilitation program and given an aversion addiction treatment during which he was left in a room and allowed only alcohol. Most drunks lasted about three days. After fourteen days of drinking nothing but gin, Lowry was still going strong and felt, he said, “As fit as a fiddle.” They finally had to haul him out. He confessed to Margerie he’d been so thirsty in treatment that he drank his own urine.

  Finally he went to Ripe, England. And there he lived, drank little and endured the howling smiles of the well-gossiped, stodgy, pedestrian, flatulent high-school English teachers and rugby boys who had no idea who was in their presence. He would hide in the bushes and grin at them as they passed. But then, what would it ever matter, for finally a writer’s work, if it’s good enough, belongs to the stars.

  And then in 1957 he died. Gin and pills and Margerie running out of the house because he had threatened her, coming back the next morning and finding him.

  “Malc is gone,” she said to the landlady.