The heavy bear who went with me sat cowed and compliant on the cement, like a collared creature from the Elizabethan age who no longer rose to the bait. I blinked and blinked, willing the image away. But it wouldn't go – and somehow I knew I had added one more ghostly companion to my day, one more sensory overload, a heavy bear who, quite naturally, smelled of forest fires and rotting salmon. I decided to name him Delmore.I picked up The Heavy Bear because it featured on a couple of “must read new Canadian books of the summer” lists, so I knew nothing more than that going in. As it turns out, this is a Joycean/Woolfian walk-about-town-over-the-course-of-one-day story, and as author Tim Bowling's eponymous narrator, Tim Bowling, is walking about Edmonton – a city I know and feel great nostalgia for – I'm having trouble deciding whether this is, indeed, a very good book, or whether I was just an ideal reader. Either way, while it may not have broad appeal, The Heavy Bear certainly appealed to me.
For most of my life, I had been a son with a son's approach to the world. Then I had been a father to my own children. Now I had come to the border of a strange, new land, and, with the grizzle on my cheeks heavier, I had to find my way home.As the story begins, Bowling is unable to sleep the night before a new semester of school begins: As a published poet, he has been hired as an English lecturer at Grant MacEwan University (a school I attended myself, back when it was still a community college), and while much is made of the sacrifice of his time that could better be spent creating art, Bowling has a family and bills to pay. Even so, he is antsy about teaching: A shy middle-aged man with some talent for language is still a shy middle-aged man, and meeting humans for the shy is the same as it is for a coyote or a spider: a matter of no inconsiderable anxiety. Giving up on sleep, Bowling watches some of his favourite old Buster Keaton movies and then decides to go downtown, get a coffee, and start walking off his angst. Perhaps it's due to lack of sleep, but eventually, Bowling is joined by both the silent ghost of Buster Keaton himself (who reacts to events throughout the day with his famously deadpan bewilderment) and the garrulous spirit of American poet Delmore Schwartz, who assumes the form of a “heavy bear”; as in one of Schwartz's most famous poems. After failure-to-connect interactions with both a homeless man and an oil executive (can't get away from either in Edmonton), Bowling then meets one of his prospective students – Chelsea: a forceful and lively young woman – and her energy begins to propel the plot into zany (slapstick?) territory – involving a lemon yellow Pinto, a valuable toy, a foul-mouth metalhead, and a Capuchin monkey – that eventually descends into tragedy. But the plot isn't really the point.
There is something thoroughly original about this daredevil mime in the porkpie hat and slapshoes, and yet my childhood self recognizes him immediately as a kindred spirit. The world happens to him, and much merriment ensues, but he himself doesn't laugh; he doesn't even smile. Deep down in every child is an absolute sympathy for Buster Keaton's deadpan face, perhaps, again, because children intuit the real reason for it: that in the world as grown-ups construct it and know it, we are all outcasts.Throughout The Heavy Bear, Bowling inserts much biographical information about Buster Keaton (and to a lesser extent, Delmore Schwartz). And as the character of Tim Bowling is approaching the age of fifty (a number I am currently staring down as well), he identifies with these earlier artists and their late-mid-life-onward career trajectories. (And as it is remarked that there is a physical resemblance between Keaton and Bowling's dead father – and as the bear-form of Schwartz smells of salmon and Bowling's father had been a salmon fisherman – and as both Keaton and Schwartz had lost their own fathers by mid-life, these ghostly companions seem to serve as both father substitutes and fellow fatherless travellers for the sleep-deprived peregrinating poet). As Bowling worries over the meaning of life and the role of art in an increasingly disconnected/consumerist world, he can at least conclude that Keaton and Schwartz left permanent legacies behind them; as he might expect to, as well.
Seize the day? Yes. But some days are warm flesh, and some days are bone. We have to seize under all conditions. Go gentle on yourself, for the world will make no such effort.I was once waiting in an orderly queue as a bus was pulling up outside the downtown branch of the Edmonton public library, when suddenly, a man, perhaps homeless, whom I had never seen before, stepped in front of me and punched me, hard, in the shoulder before glaring at me with homicidal hatred and then stomping off. Stunned, I boarded the bus and tried to hold back tears – not just because I felt assaulted, but because all of my fellow bus-riders had pointedly looked away; as though, perhaps, I had deserved that punch and it was none of their business. How could I not have been the ideal reader for this book?
Weird, but I started reading this book yesterday, right after having written here about my decision to start attending Grant MacEwan back in 1993; I felt like the ideal reader right from the start. Not only does Bowling make fun of the southern Ontario accent - from which I presumably suffer, having lived in southern Ontario both before and after my 13 years in Alberta - but he also references The Beatles and Planet of the Apes, and really oddly for me, The Doors and People Are Strange - the song I used when writing about my trip back to Edmonton last year. Yes, yes, I suffer from adolescent-level solipsism, but in this case, I primarily enjoyed reading a book that shared references that are meaningful to me.
