I closed the final page of this collection of short stories (a slim volume, doesn't take long to power through them) thinking that this was a curious choice to win the Giller Prize -- at first blush this wasn't my favourite Canadian book of the year; this wasn't even my favourite Canadian book of short stories of the year. This passage that I flagged early on persisted in sticking out in my mind:
Jane flops herself off Ned like a seal, grunting also like a seal. That's what she feels like at such times. All torso, no limbs. A long, tapering creature, new and primordial, like something pooped out of something else.If that isn't the strangest sex scene I've ever read, I don't know what is. My mind kept returning to, "Why 'pooped'?" What a bizarre choice of word, especially in a capital "L" Literary work -- and this brain worm wouldn't let me go. And the more it gnawed at me the more I wondered if that wasn't rather the point: So much of what happens in Hellgoing is off-kilter like that -- characters' actions were baffling and upsetting to me, they seemed baffling and upsetting to the characters, and the more I thought about it the more I thought, "Well, isn't that just like real life?"
In many of the stories (Wireless, Dogs In Clothes, Take This And Eat It, Clear Skies, The Natural Elements), the main characters appear to be doing fine, just going about their daily routines, but small complications (memories or new events) are subtly added until, in the final paragraphs, these characters are trapped, cornered, and lashing out, fighting back (if only in their own minds) against something the people around them don't recognise. As these stories ended, I was repeatedly taken aback -- where did that come from? It was frustrating at the time, but like I said, these stories linger, and now I'm left considering that twenty pages isn't really that long to get to know somebody -- maybe twenty years isn't that long to get to know somebody. Hellgoing features friends and colleagues and siblings and parents and spouses who have no clue what's going through the minds of the people that they think they know -- and isn't that just like real life?
I was most especially affected by the final story, Mr. Hope. It reminded me so much of my own childhood and relationships I had with elementary school teachers, it felt so truthful, that I wondered how closely it might have been based on Lynn Coady's own childhood. Considering that a character in Clear Skies suggests that there is little difference, in the end, between memoir and fiction, this parenthetical aside in Mr. Hope struck me as significant:
(I always seem to be telling stories about chain-link fences, it occurs to me now. Maybe they're a thing belonging to the implicit troublemakers of this world; children and prisoners trying to get out; would-be criminals trying to get in.)I could be reading too much into that, but coming as it did near the end of the collection, it felt like a note from the author instead of simply from the character, and it made me consider how so many of her characters felt fenced in; separated from the people around them. The book, and this story, ends on the line: There was a fence, and someone was against it. And isn't that just like real life?
The more I've thought about Hellgoing, and I can't stop thinking about it, the more stars it's earned, and in the end, somehow, it's because Coady used "pooped" in a sex scene, not despite it.
More on this Mr. Hope story: I also had a couple of elementary school teachers who played outsized roles in my early life, and I have to wonder, with political correctness and fear of false accusations of inappropriate behaviour, if there are any teachers who attempt to connect with their students on some deeper level any more.
When I was in grade 6 my teacher was Mr. K_______ (I certainly wouldn't want anyone to google and find his name attached to my musings here, blameless as he essentially is). And I adored him. My friends and I would have been 11 that year, and when Mr. K would have yard duty, we would walk around with him, jostling to see which of us would get to hold his hands, and the rest of us would link on; a daisy chain of admirers, probably too old to be holding a grown man's hand; I doubt any of us held our own Dad's hand in public any more. I don't want to give the wrong impression -- this wasn't a crush, he wasn't particularly young or good looking, but we all felt an avuncular goodness coming off of him and we all wanted to please him. In class that year, I seemed to have been given preferential treatment -- Mr. K named me the editor of the class newsletter (the only grade in which there was such a thing), I recorded the poem "Casey at the Bat" for the background of a class film of the same, and when a federal election was called and the class divided ourselves into our preferred political parties (I self-selected the Liberals, because that's how my parents voted), Mr. K asked me to join the NDP, declared me its leader (despite the parties being told to elect their own leaders) and he even took me to the local NDP office after school one day for literature and indoctrination, lol -- looking back, I'm pretty sure that would have been his own party and he was interested enough in my education to make sure I was set on the "right" path. There were probably a dozen other ways that I was anointed the pet that year, but these are the highlights.
One of the things that was great about Mr. K was that, along with the grade 8 teacher Mr. P_____, he would stay around for "after school sports" -- which was nearly always floor hockey in the gym. Any of the non-bussed kids could stay for it and my brothers and I would be there several times a week. And as an aside -- either that year or the next there was a floor hockey tournament against other schools and Mr. K was the coach, and of course, he made me the captain of the girls team. We played a pretty rough brand of hockey at after school sports -- the only place I had ever played the game -- and Mr. K called me Tiger (after Tiger Williams of the Leafs at the time). When we went to the tournament, I was nearly constantly off on penalties (slashing, checking) or ruined the scoring chances of my teammates by rushing offside -- it was horrible to be so bad at something I had thought I was so good at.
By the time I was in grade 8, my older brother was off at high school and a confirmed juvenile delinquent. My home life was chaos -- the screaming, fighting, crying was daily, and Ken couldn't help himself but get deeper and deeper into trouble. This was also the year I had Mr. P as my teacher: a total jerk -- the kind of man who had no trouble cracking a hockey stick across my younger brother's back because he just didn't like him and knowing in those days that there were no consequences for doing it. I remember once we were doing a lesson in Morphographs -- a unit that taught spelling rules by breaking English words into their roots and suffixes/prefixes and was really a great way to learn to spell our crazy language -- and Mr. P had us open our duotangs to whatever page and, reading from his huge teacher's binder, gave us the instructions for the lesson, and his instructions were obviously wrong. Refusing to do it improperly, I started to fill in the blanks correctly and within a couple of minutes, Mr. P walked up behind me and brought that huge binder down on the top of my head with a crack, asking me if I was stupid or just defiant. It was all I could do to not cry as I pointed out his error, and with a frown, he told the class to do the lesson the proper way but warned me that I had to start listening better to directions. No apology, and of course, no consequences for being a jerk -- he knew I'd be too humiliated to tell my parents what happened (and who knows what they could have/would have done about it if I did).
Another thing that happened near the end of grade 8 that would illustrate what kind of man Mr. P was: A girl named Eileen had an autograph book -- which a lot of the kids had since we didn't have yearbooks for our friends to sign -- and Eileen encouraged people to write naughty things in it. I don't think I had got around to writing in it (I know I didn't write anything bad in it anyway) when Mr. P, who wasn't asked to write in it and shouldn't have had any right to look through it when it wasn't passed around in class, somehow got his hands on the book, and as a lesson to all of us, started reading from it. With anger and disgust he spat out swear words and dirty poems at us from the front of the class, being sure to attach the name of whatever perverted child sitting next to us had penned it. Eileen was horrified, as much for the kids who wrote in the book as she was for herself, and she sat through the whole thing with her hands wrapped around her head on her desk. What right did he have? How could a teacher get away with that?
As it happened, Mr. K was our history teacher for grade 8 and for that one period we had the saintly instead of the beastly. Looking back even now, I have no idea what kind of an effect the chaos at home was having on my performance at school -- I was still an A student -- but one day Mr. K asked to have a private meeting with me in the library. I sat down and with great embarrassment he explained that he didn't think I was acting like myself anymore, I didn't appear to be engaged in my schoolwork, and he wanted to know if everything was okay at home and was there anything he could do for me. He could not have been nicer and even at the time I could see that his concern came from a good place but my back went up and I thought, "Who are you to make any judgements about what my home life is like? Where do you get off?" So, as much as I could have used an ally, as much as I was desperate for just exactly what Mr. K was offering, I just shrugged and mumbled something about not liking history. He didn't look satisfied but I didn't really leave the door open for further conversation and that was that.
Two more short stories to tie it all together: Once as I was leaving the grade 8 portable, Mr. P and I were the only ones standing on the little landing outside the door and with great spite he said, "Did you know that you're just surly? Do you know what surly even means?"
I couldn't have defined "surly", but I had a sense of it and had no idea where the attack was coming from. I'm sure I just shrugged and walked away. I may even have sneered at him to own the accusation.
Another time as I was leaving the grade 8 portable, Mr. P and Mr. K were both standing on the little landing as I passed and Mr. P said, "She's got bedroom eyes, don't you think?" And as I raised my head, Mr. K just smiled.
I also couldn't have defined "bedroom eyes", but I had a sense of it and I felt a huge betrayal that Mr. K didn't come to my defence. I knew that it was something that shouldn't have been said about me, let alone in front of me, but I also felt powerless -- Mr. P knew I wouldn't repeat it and he smirked as I brushed by. On reflection, I also felt shame, as though I had been doing something provocative and inappropriate on purpose.
The next year was my first year of high school and Mr. K also transferred there as a history teacher. He was no longer the popular guy with the trail of girls hanging off of him; he was a little fish in a big pond; his clothes not quite right or nice enough. If I had never had any dealings with him in grade 8, I might have been delighted to have seen him in the halls, might have felt pained at his apparent geekiness that I was only then recognising, but that passing remark -- the bedroom eyes -- killed everything I felt for him. I wasn't even mad at him -- this man who had been so important to me just 3 years earlier pretty much didn't exist for me anymore.
So, back to the book: I do identify with the characters in the short story Mr. Hope -- there certainly was a time in my life when I had relationships with my teachers that went beyond schoolwork; they have loomed over me, moulding me, throughout all these years. I wonder if my own kids have had experiences like this -- I'm inclined to think that kids today aren't shamed by their teachers any more; that they would be outraged enough to tell me if something upset them. I also think, to my regret, that it's unlikely any male teacher today would let a bunch of 11 year old girls hold his hands, as innocent as it all was.
My brothers and I have talked many times about the jerk, Mr. P, and I suppose living well is the best revenge since all three of us have happy and productive lives -- certainly not what he must have expected for us. And while I whole-heartedly agree that I would join my brothers in dancing on Mr. P's grave if we found it (he's likely dead -- he had grey in his beard forty years ago), I am always amazed that they think Mr. K was a jerk, too. "But no!" I protest. "Mr. K was the best!" I want to remember him always as the grade 6 Mr. K who selected me for special projects, not the grade 8 Mr. K who let me down.
And as a final, final aside: A quick google search says that Mr. K is now in the education department of a university. Moulding the minds of the next generation of teachers. Interesting.
