Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  “O God, even if You don’t exist, or exist and don’t give a damn, will You ever answer this question? Why, if I was born into a world that Stephanie showed me could be so lovely, born with such a furious instinct to live, love, and enjoy it, even perhaps to enjoy You, why did so many of us have to be born in a time when You simply closed Your door and locked us out?”

  It was at this point that Timothy’s climacteric begins, with him “talking, thinking, and acting, when I was flying as high as an astronaut but, unlike an astronaut, did not know who was in control of the module. I wish I could say that what ended this phase of my existence was some wonderful light on the road to a new Damascus, but I was much too modern for anything like that to happen to me. Esther Stahr once told me that I was so modern that I had already made myself obsolete.”

  THREE

  For the next few years Timothy was sure that he had it made, and most people would have agreed with him. He had become one of those movers and shakers who build up a dream, live in it, and believe in it, and the seventh decade of that century favored characters like him everywhere. When I was a boy I occasionally saw him in action and thought I knew him well. But what I saw was not a man at all, it was only an image and a voice on the screen of the universal box of the era, a habit in prime time, but one so addictive that for a country with a modest population he had an enormous audience spread out over six time zones from coast to coast with thousands of miles of empty forests, lakes, plains, and mountains in between.

  He called himself a television journalist, and the famous and the obscure passed through his studio in droves. The curious thing was that after the show was over, hardly anyone remembered anything anyone had said; they remembered only the impressions Timothy had been able to create. Of all the interviews I saw, there is only one I recall, and only a few seconds of that. Timothy had a famous scientist in his studio; I think he was called a Nobel Laureate. He looked about thirty years older than Timothy, and as usually happened when he had an older or more famous man in front of him, it was compulsive with Timothy to enter into a conspiracy with his unseen audience and insinuate that the older man was covering something up. As often he was.

  “Now, Dr. Anderson, you’ve been telling us how the world began and how brilliant it was of the scientists to be able to find it out.” He paused and deployed his most innocent smile. “But of course there were no scientists around when the world began.” Another pause, during which Timothy looked thoughtful and innocently sincere. “Now I have a question with which Science – I hope I’m not getting out of my league – may be more humanly involved.” Another pause. “How do you think the world will end?”

  The scientist measured him and answered, “In an armchair. Staring at electrical vibrations in boxes and listening to fools.”

  This must have been one of the very few occasions when a guest put Timothy down, for all the advantages were his. Editorial pundits and plain ordinary citizens never tired of Timothy. They ran out of adjectives in their efforts to nail him down – revolutionary, controversial, cheap, brilliant, vulgar, courageous, brash, sincere, abrasive, exhibitionist, irresponsible, fabulous – adjectives were running wild in those years and were quickly worn out into nothing. But to people with a grievance, and there were millions of them, Timothy for a time was a genuine culture hero, and he was probably accurate when he wrote that at the height of his popularity he could have had his choice of hundreds of different girls a night.

  Here is a tape I found with his own reflections on himself. He made it several years later after he had vanished from the media:

  “What happened was that I had unconsciously made myself one of the safety valves of the very System I was trying to destroy. I was far cheaper than policemen and torture chambers. For what did the System care what happened to its front men so long as nobody was able to change it? What could have been more to its advantage than to have individual human beings hated for what it was doing to everyone? So much the better for it if the public believed the System could be changed by changing its front men. The System was mindless, but it had the unerring instinct of the Law of Gravity. Even while millions of viewers detested me personally, not many of them missed my programs. They got too much of a bang watching me sandpaper the egos of politicians and big shots, me with the image of the People’s Champion giving it out that if nobody had the guts to rip those mechanical tooth-smiles off the front men’s faces and show up the wolves, foxes, spiders, and jellyfish underneath, this old curiosity shop they had the impertinence to call Our Free Way of Life might just as well close its doors with the final clang.”

  This was vintage Timothy, and even at this distance in time I can’t say he was entirely wrong. For during those very years when he and a few others were the most strident in their abuse of the politicians, the real power men, the unseen ones, were moving quietly in for the final takeover.

  A young Jewish girl called Esther Stahr was his coproducer on the show; indeed it was Esther who had made the show possible in the first place. He loved her, he feared her, and he usually went out of control when he lost her approval. She had been born in the Orthodox faith and her father was still a synagogue cantor and a tailor in a two-room shop on the Main with living quarters overhead. His three children were now self-supporting and urged him to let them help him move into a more comfortable district, but he told them he had worked here all his life and was too old to change his ways. He also told them that too many Jews had become too rich too fast for their own good. Timothy wrote that “Esther came naturally by that appalling Jewish conscience that makes more trouble for them than all their deals and politics put together,” and he was never sure when her conscience would spring out at himself. On her way through college she had lost her religion and replaced it with Marx, but she abandoned Marx after a few years in his company. “If that damned woman lived to be ninety,” Timothy wrote, “she would still be the righteous Jew. She would observe the High Holidays. She would search for the truth. She would make someone like me feel like a flea on a hot stove.”

  “Truth!” he used to shout at the poor girl. “Who wants it when he can get magic? This medium of ours is pure magic and if it tries to be anything else, it bombs. Oh sure, one of your boys made it, but if I ever had Jesus Christ on our show I’d abort the Sermon on the Mount and turn him into a Freedom Fighter.” To this she replied, “One of our boys made Barabbas, too.” And his reply to this was, “One of your boys has made everything. You name anything at all and one of them has made it.”

  Timothy wrote and talked much about the nature of our city in its last pre-Metro days:

  “Could any city have been so self-intoxicated? Those were the years when at last the French people exploded. Along with our world championships in hockey and bank robberies, our dream politics and Expo 67, our new-found art that not even the painters themselves could understand, drugs, sex, pornography, Mafia, American corporations and dwindling British survivals, demonstrations, riots, bombings, debt-merchandising, growth disease, and madness, I really believe there was something more and bigger than all this in Montreal. For underneath the surface of this electronically wired Cleopatra whore of a town, its sky arctic blue when the wind came down clean from the north but otherwise reeking of sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and all the subtler perfumes of technology – underneath all of this was a primordial life-wish of uncanny power as the memory-traces imprinted on the collective subconscious of a people who had been taught they were history’s outcasts, victims for three centuries of some of history’s most adroit con men, were suddenly activated and they claimed the right to be themselves no matter what themselves turned out to be.

  “They called it revolution and perhaps that was what it was, though it was like no other revolution I ever read about in a history book. I loved it. I adored the excitement of it. I was sure that omnipotent youth was with me. Protests into demonstrations into riots and bombings, with drugs and sex playing a thunderous obbligato – after the dull correct
ness of our earlier years, how wonderful it all seemed. But it was not until the kidnappings began that the city felt the true horror-fear that grabs a man’s throat when he looks up from his armchair and sees an ape’s face pressed against the window pane staring at him.

  “Most people recognized the ape instantly. I didn’t, and that’s why I ignited this story.”

  Again, vintage Timothy.

  FOUR

  On a fine October morning Timothy flew down to Washington with his cameraman, and in the afternoon they flew home with a videotape made in a huge and very peculiar building.

  A Major General Eli Sprott had agreed to give Timothy an interview because he was the son of Colonel Greg Wellfleet. Timothy did not mention to his father that he had used his name to obtain this interview; had he done so, his father would have been on the phone to the General within five minutes, for General Sprott and Colonel Greg Wellfleet were very special friends “because they had shared a grand climacteric when they met and shook hands on a battlefield carpeted with Nazi dead (so the communiqué put it) after American and Canadian troops had closed the Falaise Gap during the Second World War. When the war was over they kept up their friendship, Sprott fishing for salmon with Father along the Moisie River, Father shooting wild birds with Sprott in North Carolina, their big memory the war, the war the best years of their lives, all those great anecdotes about what the master-sergeant said to General Patton, or how the private from a Newfoundland outport was promoted to corporal because he had farted loud and clear while Monty was strutting past on an inspection. Two old soldiers who never died. Two old soldiers who refused to fade away. Two old soldiers who had never grown up.”

  Now the massed maples of the Adirondacks nineteen thousand feet below the aircraft were scarlet with autumn and Timothy was tense, excited, proud of himself, and badly wanting a woman to set her seal on his experience. He needed sleep but his brain refused to rest. He was so wound up in those days that it never rested at all, sleep being merely a spell of unconsciousness. He knew about the kidnappings in the city but he had little interest in them. Had he not come from the Pentagon, the first Canadian journalist in five years to have come out of that place with a live, taped interview?

  Réjean Roy, his cameraman, was in the aisle seat beside him reading a magazine called Sports Illustrated and in profile his sickle jaw reminded Timothy of the prow of an obsolete British cruiser, the photograph of which still hung in the downstairs lavatory of one of his great-uncles who once had served in her. Réjean’s lean face was well seamed with hockey scars and there was a permanent dent in his right cheekbone. He was so engrossed in his magazine that he did not look up when Timothy asked him what he really thought of General Sprott.

  “Okay I guess, you know, far as he goes, like when I was a kid I used to cut the grass for a guy like him down in Knowlton.”

  “Ah, but the difference is that General Sprott cuts his own grass.”

  “It says here Fergy’s gonna hang up his skates. That could mean we’re outa the playoffs again.”

  “To hell with the playoffs. Who cares about those bloody playoffs?”

  “Calvaire, everyone cares about them.”

  Réjean went on reading his magazine while Timothy pondered how to save the interview from what Sprott had done to it. Here, he thought, was a really quiet American. His aide was a Major Peabody and the sergeant who had conducted him into the General’s presence wore a name plate identifying him as Prouty.

  “Yes,” said Sprott when Timothy asked him if everyone in his section was a New Englander, “this little corner is known locally as the Wasps’ Nest.”

  Nobody’s fool, thought Timothy, not in the Pentagon or anywhere else. The General’s rimless glasses glinted when the light caught them, there was the smallest hint of chicken skin about his windpipe, but the rest of him was taut, lean, and hard. “Handball at 1730 hours, Lootenant?” “Yes, sir! Handball at 1730 hours.”

  Not even Timothy could imagine Sprott doing anything consciously dishonorable and he decided that this must be the focal point of his treatment of the tape. An hour with Sprott had given him the idea that the truly horrifying thing about the Pentagon was that men like Sprott inhabited it, which meant that it was just another modern office complex where competent salaried men, fewer of them slit-mouthed than you would find in any ordinary megalopolitan highrise, went to work every day from nine to five.

  While Réjean was setting up his camera, Sprott had conversed in a low-keyed New England twang “with plenty of those clean cusswords American career officers pepper their conversation with to con people into thinking they’re just boys like everyone else.” Sprott looked so much like an intelligent version of Calvin Coolidge that Timothy opened the interview by mentioning the fact and asking if there was a family connection.

  A canny look appeared on Sprott’s lean face. “After I turned fifty a sizable number of people have asked me that very question, Mr. Wellfleet. May I call you Timmie?”

  “Well,” said Timothy with his best smile, “is there?”

  “Could be.”

  “And how long have you served in the Pentagon, sir?”

  “Twenty-two years. Mostly in. Sometimes lucky enough to get out.”

  “Out in Viet Nam, perhaps?”

  “No.”

  “Korea?”

  “Yes.”

  “A better war than Nam?”

  “Hell, Timmie, you know as well as I do no war’s a good war.”

  “So you would say your business here is to prevent war?”

  “Right.”

  That was how it started, and Timothy knew that if he was going to get anything out of Sprott he would have to work for it. He would also have to be careful how he went about it, for he had the idea that Sprott had decided to have his fun with him. Already his eyes had taken in the character of the office: the usual filing cabinets and maps, the family pictures including three little children who had been identified as granddaughters, Karsh’s photograph of General Eisenhower with “To Eli from Ike” written in the bottom right-hand corner, the stuffed salmon mounted on a plain maple plaque with the information beneath it that it had been killed on the Moisie River on June 12, 1961, and had weighed out at fortythree and a half pounds.

  Now in the plane on the way home he was recalling the General’s flat, honest voice parrying his questions. Yes, Viet Nam was a problem all right, but mostly a political one. The wrong war in the wrong place? General Ridgeway was on the record as having said that once, yes. And would you agree? The mean fact about any war, Timmie, is that it’s always the aggressor who picks the place to fight it. But didn’t the United States pick Viet Nam? If you can believe that, you can believe anything. Suppose I do believe it? Then I’d be under the obligation of remarking that you’d be in the company of round about seventy percent of your profession. Are you suggesting, sir, that we journalists will believe anything? No, I just gave you a figure, give or take one or two percent either way. Yes, that was an interesting question but he could not answer it because it touched on classified information. Important classified information? Hard to say, but could be. Timothy tried another question, the General said it was an excellent one and he’d be happy to answer it in detail, which gave Timothy the signal that it was a very bad question because the General talked to it for seven minutes. Now in the aircraft, remembering how the old boy had played with him, suddenly Timothy saw a way “to make this dud interview more lethally informative to my kind of audience than if he had given me the entire battle order of the American Army in Southeast Asia.”

  He nudged Réjean and said in French, “Once we’ve put some clothes onto that dummy of a tape it can be out-of-this-world wonderful.”

  Réjean nodded without lifting his eyes from the magazine. “The Alouettes could be the surprise of the year,” he said in English. “They could go all the way.”

  “Listen, Réjean, I hate to do this to you but I want that tape for the weekend. As it stands now it would stink o
ut any living room inside of two minutes. So this is what we’re going to do. First, we play the General straight off the tape all the way through. No cuts. No splices in the sound track. Just take it as it is. You panned his office once. Okay, I want the pan repeated in the middle and once more in the end. Jacques can look after that. But I want a lot more. So can you go to Toronto tonight? Tomorrow at the latest?”

  “Why do I have to go to Toronto?”

  “Because that’s where nearly all the stuff is that I want. The basis of the show will be Sprott himself, but I want his face off the screen for at least three-quarters of the playing time. But I want his voice and my voice on the sound track all the time. Now, instead of his face, this is what I want you guys to do. You and Jacques can splice in clips of what we went down to Washington for, which wasn’t Sprott but Viet Nam and what it’s really all about. So I want corpses, gunships manned by clean-limbed American boys, burning babies, screaming women fading into a lab with short-haired scientists in white coats, fade out into the circular face of a Dow Chemical executive, LBJ quoting Deuteronomy when he began the damned thing. Nixon in, Nixon out – flicker flicker and an over-voice saying, ‘The greatest President since L. B. Johnson,’ G.I.s lying around stoned, prisoners being murdered, students setting fire to college buildings and cops beating them up – all this I want while underneath Sprott keeps twanging along like Old Man River, and this will be the message – that Viet Nam’s not a war at all but a colossal corporate-conglomerate enterprise.”

  “How am I going to remember all that?” said Réjean.

  “You don’t have to. In Toronto you go to Jim Cuddiford – he’s a smart Englishman and a friend of mine. I’ll call him up and tell him what I want.”