Beautiful Scars: Steeltown Secrets, Mohawk Skywalkers and the Road Home

Every night I look
From star to star
Three thousand miles through these empty bars
And I end up sleeping
Out in my car
And the moon shines off my beautiful scars

– Blackie And The Rodeo Kings

I was at a tribute concert to Leonard Cohen in Toronto the other night – an evening of Canadian singers performing his songs, writers sharing personal anecdotes and reading Cohen's poetry – and one of the performers was Tom Wilson. Not only were his growling interpretations of some of Cohen's songs among the most entertaining of the evening, but when Wilson decided to share an anecdote of his own, I thought, “What a fascinating storyteller.” So I picked up his memoir. Beautiful Scars is Wilson's story of growing up on the poor side of Hamilton in the Sixties and Seventies, finding escape through drugs and music, hitting the peak of international success, and nearly losing everything through his own excess. It might have been just another rock 'n roll memoir, but throughout his entire story, there's a family secret that caused him pain growing up; a mystery that wasn't fully resolved until Wilson was in the process of writing this book. Again, I found him to be a fascinating – if slightly amateur – storyteller, and I found him to be so likeable and genuine that I was happy to have had this reading experience. 

We survive, and with those skills, and in that survival, we create art.

Tom Wilson's parents were older than the other kids' folks: His Dad, George, was a WWII RCAF airman who had been blinded during battle, and coming home disabled and addicted to morphine, he was a bitter and hard-drinking man; working at a government-funded concession stand for wounded veterans and collecting a small pension, George brought in just barely enough money to get by. Tom's mother, Bunny, would sit around the kitchen in her underwear and apron, only doing enough housekeeping to keep clear paths for her blind husband to navigate through the mess; spending her free time spying on the neighbours and shoplifting at the stores downtown. Despite obvious clues, Tom had no idea that his family was poor until the Christmas that his classroom's donation box for the “Needy” was delivered to his own home. Ouch. No matter how painful or personal the recollection about his parents, however, Wilson consistently keeps the tone conversational, but sometimes, a bit too crafted:

The most unthinkable stories she would save for supper time. She couldn't help herself. Tales of train wrecks, body parts, mob hits, Hiroshima, Kennedy's day in Dallas, priests and altar boys, shotgun suicides – all got thrown out across my plate of meatloaf and boiled potatoes, the bloody condiment to otherwise boring meals.

It's valid for a professional lyricist to salt his writing with metaphors, but I sometimes found it jarring – which made the writing feel a bit amateur, in an overwritten way – but not a fatal flaw for my enjoyment. I won't get into the rest of Wilson's story – I wouldn't want to ruin any of the mysteries – but I will note that I enjoyed all of the Southwestern Ontario references: from African Lion Safari to Call the Office, folks smoking Player's and drinking stubbies, driving to Port Dover or Tillsonburg – these are my stomping grounds and touchstones and I don't see them enough in print. I also want to note that not everyone who picks up a guitar or sits down to write a book is necessarily an artist, but Tom Wilson seems like the real deal: the way he writes about his processes for making music over the years (as a member of the Florida Razors, Junkhouse, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, and Lee Harvey Osmond) seems so integral to who he is that not only did I find him to be 100% authentic, but recognised that making art was probably the only way that Wilson could have survived a bizarre childhood and the ensuing years of addictions. Recently, Wilson has been spending some time touring with a group of successful Canadian artists, giving mentoring talks to those just starting out:

For an hour at a time I'd talk to green writers and artists about surviving in a world that does not need what they have to offer. It was an easy hour to kill. My entire life I'd been struggling to maintain my self-respect while doing whatever it was I wanted to do creatively, dodging depression and criticism and resisting the urge to find a closet to hang myself in...I'd start my lecture with a simple line, “If you don't have to do this, don't. If you don't have the burning desire to wake up and create something, if your life does not depend on it, then please stop. You'll end up wasting your time and the time of anyone who crosses paths with your creation.” I would look back into the eyes of my audience and see them thinking, “I can't believe I spent all this money to get lectured to by a guy who looks like he sleeps in his car.”

So, whether you're interested in a story of how art is forged in pain, a travelogue of Canada's most populous corridor, or a rock 'n roll memoir with limos, coke, and orgies (that's all in here too), Tom Wilson has a story to tell you, and he tells it well.

This is the same Leonard Cohen tribute concert I wrote about yesterday, and I have to admit that when Tom Wilson came out on the stage, I had no idea who he was (despite the Toronto crowd going nuts in the audience). He spoke and sang in a low growl, and despite him saying on his first entrance that he had been asked not to share any stories (which audience members protested, loudly), before a later song, he told the following story:

(Imagine the low growl of Wilson's voice): When I was a seventeen-year-old boy, I would drink underage in the Connaught Hotel in downtown Hamilton. Drunk and kicked out when the lights would come up, I'd often try to hitch a ride home with one of the taxi drivers who'd hang around outside, and there was this one woman taxi driver - a kickass thirty-seven-year-old who drove the nightshift in downtown Hamilton wearing men's clothes and a cap - and the first time she agreed to drive me home, she stopped at Gage Park along the way and we made love in the back seat of her taxi. If you are a seventeen-year-old boy, I would recommend you have an affair with a kickass thirty-seven-year-old taxi driver who takes the nightshift wearing men's clothes. Some nights she'd drive again to Gage Park, and some nights she'd park behind one of the brick factories overlooking the escarpment, and she taught me things in the back seat of that taxi, while her Leonard Cohen cassette played on the stereo. And I will also tell you that if you are a seventeen-year-old boy having an affair with a thirty-seven-year-old kickass nightshift taxi driver who wears men's clothes, you can have no better soundtrack than Leonard Cohen. (Pause.) I've recently thought about looking up that taxi driver again, seeing if she wanted to go for a drive. (Pause, shift the growl into a lower gear.) But it probably wouldn't be the same. (Because she'd be pushing eighty?) So this one goes out to the taxi driver, whose name I can't recall. 

And then he sang Leonard Cohen's Closing Time, the perfect tie-in. How could I not pick up his book after that? (Of course I was looking for the taxi driver in this book: she's there, and her story doesn't end at the Connaught Hotel or Gage Park. Wowzers.) Bonus: Here's a video of a younger, less growly, Tom Wilson with a Junkhouse hit -

Tunesday : So Long Marianne

So Long Marianne

Written and Performed by Leonard Cohen

Come over to the window, my little darling,
I'd like to try to read your palm.
I used to think I was some kind of Gypsy boy
Before I let you take me home.

Now so long, Marianne, it's time that we began
To laugh and cry and cry and laugh about it all again.

Well you know that I love to live with you,
But you make me forget so very much.
I forget to pray for the angels
And then the angels forget to pray for us.

Now so long, Marianne, it's time that we began...

We met when we were almost young
Deep in the green lilac park.
You held on to me like I was a crucifix,
As we went kneeling through the dark.

Oh so long, Marianne, it's time that we began...

Your letters they all say that you're beside me now.
Then why do I feel alone?
I'm standing on a ledge and your fine spider web
Is fastening my ankle to a stone.

Now so long, Marianne, it's time that we began...

For now I need your hidden love.
I'm cold as a new razor blade.
You left when I told you I was curious,
I never said that I was brave.

Oh so long, Marianne, it's time that we began...

Oh, you are really such a pretty one.
I see you've gone and changed your name again.
And just when I climbed this whole mountainside,
To wash my eyelids in the rain!

Oh so long, Marianne, it's time that we began...

Mallory and I went into Toronto last week because she had bought tickets to A Singer Must Die - a tribute to Leonard Cohen put on by the Art of Time Ensemble; featuring rotating performances by five Canadian singers, interspersed with writers telling personal anecdotes about meeting Cohen, or simply being inspired by him. What a fantastic show this made for! The whole family saw Steven Page when he toured with Art of Time a few years ago and Dave was super-excited to spot him outside the venue and get his ticket autographed. One of the songs they had worked up together for that album and tour was Cohen's A Singer Must Die, so Mal and I were unsurprised to see Page leading off the tribute night with that number. What a delight it was to see how each of the five singers (Page, Sarah Harmer, Sarah Slean, Tom Wilson, and Gregory Hoskins) interpreted and were moved by Cohen's music; it moved the audience as well. While they didn't actually perform So Long Marianne, I chose it just so I could share Steven Page's anecdote:

For the book launch of Leonard Cohen's poetry collection, Book of Longing in 2006, Indigo (the company I work for, making this the story that I liked best) asked the newly retired-from-performing Cohen if he would be willing to make an appearance at the big flagship store in downtown Toronto; sign some books and wave at the crowd. He agreed, and as the date moved closer, Indigo decided to make it more of an event by closing off the street and asking some local musicians, including Ron Sexsmith and Steven Page, if they would be interested in coming along and jamming a few Cohen songs. Turns out, they were interested. Very interested.

On the day of the event, Page jumped on the subway and made his way to the store, and when he got there, was shown to the storeroom. Inside, he found a circle of chairs and all of these local singers - presided over by Leonard Cohen - jamming and singing all the old songs. Page was super-excited and joined in. During a break, Page worked up the nerve to ask Cohen if he would sign some of the books he had brought along, and when Cohen smiled and said Sure, Page grabbed for the heavy bag jammed full of poetry that he had schlepped on the subway, and when Cohen saw what he was doing, he growled, "Not now." Page was chastened, but he told all this with the biggest grin on his face.

When they got out onto the stage, everyone had a ball singing the songs while Cohen watched and smiled. At some point, sensing an eagerness in him, the singers motioned for Cohen to join in if he liked, and as Page described it, "You can find the video on YouTube - I'm the joker with the enormous head grinning ear to ear as Leonard Cohen, supercool and dapper as hell, stands across from me and sings along. I could not believe I was singing with my lifelong hero, Leonard Cohen, and as we were standing there, me grinning like an idiot, Leonard Cohen was staring serenely at me, and it seemed to go straight to my soul: I could feel him approving of me; saying You're okay, you're okay, and I had this feeling of great calm until I suddenly realised - he's not sending me some zen message; he's staring at my lips trying to remember the words."

Okay, that got big laughs and prompted me to look for the YouTube video. And yes, Steven Page is the one with the huge head grinning ear to ear, but I was more impressed by Cohen's performance than the story had led me to expect; I appreciated the laugh though in the midst of a fairly serious show. Ultimately, this evening of story and song was a completely enjoyable and fitting tribute to a true Canadian legend.

The Stranger

I noticed then that everyone was waving and exchanging greetings and talking, as if they were in a club where people are glad to find themselves among others from the same world. This is how I explained to myself the strange impression I had of being odd man out, a kind of intruder.

According to a 1999 readers' poll in Le Monde, the French consider The Stranger to be the best book of the twentieth century. On its surface, it reads as a quite simple tale; but because of this apparent simplicity, it led me down a rabbithole of thought and criticism that obliged me to conclude: This novel is a perfect representation of author Albert Camus' philosophy of Absurdism, and I can't reasonably give it fewer than five stars for that reason. Yes, I objectively enjoyed the narrative in the moment, but the experience is necessarily elevated by the further research it prompts; which could only have been Camus' intent from the beginning. 

Aujourd'hui, maman est morte.

I want to start by noting the perils of translation. This opening line is considered one of the most compelling of all time, but as an article in The New Yorker explains, right from the beginning, its true sense was lost to the English reader. The first English translation, by Stuart Gilbert, was heavy on British usage and rendered this opening as, “Mother died today.” (Gilbert also translated the title “L'Etranger” as “The Outsider”.) The edition that I read was translated by American Matthew Ward, and he found “maman” to be too perfectly French to change, so he opens with, “Maman died today.” According to Ryan Bloom in The New Yorker, it's a further mistake to have changed the sentence contruction itself – because the main character, Meursault, often references the future, past, and present as part of his own philosophy – so it would be best translated as, “Today, maman died.” And that's just the first sentence! Further to the nuance of language lost in translation, this book was written by and about a Frenchman born and raised in colonial Algiers – a specific setting about which I had never read before – and despite the frequent references to sun and sea and unforgiving heat (and institutionalised racism against the Arab natives), it took further reading for me to really understand where the story was set. It's also significant that The Stranger was released in 1942 – when France was occupied by Germany and the Allied Forces were pouring into Africa – and despite needing to have the manuscript approved by a Nazi censor before its publication, Gerhard Heller, head of the German Propaganda-Staffel, found it to be “asocial” and “apolitical”; failing to recognise how the Nazi Occupation could be seen to be satirised by the second half of this book, Heller was apparently an enthusiastic supporter of its release. Oh, but to go back in time and read this book in its original language and historical moment! 

I'm not going to go over the plot, but here are some quotes that explicate the philosophy of Absurdism:

• Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.

• Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.

• For the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself – so like a brother, really – I felt I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.

Again, my five stars represent the entirety of my reading experience with The Stranger – which includes all that I researched elsewhere – and if another reader fails to find much of value within its covers today, that's a valid response as well. For me, this book filled in some holes in my reading journey, and I am enlarged by what it has added to my worldview.

The Stranger was the book that I bought while I was at Shakespeare And Company in Paris - what a perfectly fitting French souvenir it turned out to be.

Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren't Told

Readers will again experience the shock of recognition that comes from bumping up against thoughts and feelings that mirror their own. Other writers expose us to unfamiliar terrain, dark patches of brutality or misfortune that many of us may never experience personally. What is common to each of these accounts, though, is a journey to the heart of one woman's private experience that she wants – and needs – to tell others.

Editor Marjorie Anderson wrote the above in the Introduction to Dropped Threads 2 and it pretty much captures what makes this collection of essays different from the first volume in this series (Dropped Threads): while the first attempted to capture some underdiscussed but universal women's experiences, this volume is darker; more focussed on the negative. Writers outline sudden widowhood, divorce, domestic abuse and rape, failing to bond with a newborn, the heartbreak of infertility (and the helplessness of overfertility and requiring several abortions while your best friend remains barren). More than one woman rides the crest of second-wave feminism into lesbianism; more than one confronts a breast cancer diagnosis. Compared to the first collection, I had very few moments of personal connection to these experiences, but ultimately, I still felt privileged to read these women's truths; it's still a remarkable thing for the editors to have assembled all these stories in one volume.

It wouldn't feel appropriate to “evaluate” the narratives that were forged in these writers' most painful experiences, but I will note that I was interested by the number of them who fought to carve out a space in which to record their own truths (from Alison Wearing, who allowed herself to be overshadowed by her more famous author boyfriend until she broke free; to Carole Sabiston, who sold off everything to move with her toddler son to Spain and concentrate on her fibre art); so many of these women describe waiting for a few quiet hours while their children slept in order to work on their novels and art. A few random quotes that asked to be noted:


• What's incredible is that it almost bores me to write this. I have lived these thoughts so long that everything seems tedious. Redundant. Difficult to imagine as something you would even care to read. I don't want your pity. Everything I need to be here writing this is already mine; otherwise I would be dead. It's that simple. Pamela Mala Sinha in Hiding

• Now I stare at these words and wonder how I managed to pull them out without breaking apart. Recalled one by one, the scattered memories had always been manageable. Combined, they felt heavier and more lethal. Lisa Gregoire in Northern Lights and Darkness

•I was a spoiled, immature twenty-year-old and scared stiff something awful would happen to my child and everyone would blame me. Motherhood was the final exam; I hadn't studied and got caught cheating. C. J. Papoutsis in They Didn't Come With Instructions

• Anti-Semitism was the shard of glass in the pale custard of Toronto society. Michele Landsberg in Don't Say Anything


I would also like to note that many of these contributors are from generations before me, writing about “the patriarchy” in a way that feels dated (but as a time capsule of thought, still valuable). And I knew that I would find kneejerk anti-Americanism in Maude Barlow's contribution on travelling with an NGO to Iraq in 1991 (they have endured horrible deprivation under the U.S. embargo that has killed so many children and crippled the economy of their country) and was unsurprised to find it again in Sandra Beardsall's piece on travelling to the poorest corner of India (even as the West rained terror just over the northwestern horizon in the opening volleys of the Gulf War); contributions from only one political point-of-view seems to undermine the aim of universality. But, I suppose, that's the nature of collecting personal stories from thirty-five different women: there's an unevenness to the pieces that led to an unevenness in my enjoyment, but the experience was overwhelmingly positive; I'm not certain this is aimed at my enjoyment. There's truth here and I am a grateful witness.

Moon Tiger

She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing, simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.

As Claudia Hampton – the records do suggest she was someone, probably – lies in her hospital bed, waiting to succumb to the cancer that has stricken her in old age, she is suddenly seized by the project she should have tackled years earlier: a comprehensive history of the world and her own place in it. As a writer of popular histories, Claudia is a purist for historical fact; but as a lifelong researcher, she also understands that not only is history told by the victors, but that every “fact” is coloured by the person who remembers it; people exist only for as long as someone, somewhere, remembers them; and no one has ever really known her. Claudia decides to take a “kaleidoscopic approach” to her history – shake the tube and see what comes out – and while she does flit between details from the Jurassic to the World Wars and her own domestic past, her narrative more closely resembles the titular Moon Tiger, slowly spiralling down towards the glowing red eye at its centre; the glow of a brief affair that colours everything that came after for her. When Moon Tiger won the Booker in 1987, some reviewers dismissed it as “the housewife's choice”; I can happily claim that this housewife couldn't be more delighted to have discovered Penelope Lively's intelligent and moving story in 2018. 

I stood outside some concrete and plate-glass tower-block, picked a handful of eucalyptus leaves from a branch, crushed them in my hand, smelt, and tears came to my eyes. Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.

Moon Tiger examines the nature of memory and history and their relationship to “truth” (especially well done when Claudia is grilling an actor at a Pioneer Village or pointing out the flaws in the Hollywood adaptation of her own work), and I enjoyed every time that Lively would write a scene from Claudia's point-of-view and then immediately recast it from the POV of someone else in the scene – the differences would be subtle, but different nonetheless. As Claudia lies in her hospital bed, in and out of consciousness, we learn what she really thinks of the visitors who come to her bedside – and while Claudia is mentally stressing that none of these visitors know what pain glows red at her centre, these visitors are also thinking their own private thoughts; these familiars are ultimately unknown and unknowable to Claudia, as well. The format – with the slowly doled out details, the recasting of memory through changing POVs, the nonlinear narrative that drives towards a foreshadowed climax – is masterful and clever; hardly domestic chic lit. 

It might be easier if I believed in God, but I don't. All I can think, when I hear your voice, is that the past is true, which both appals and uplifts me. I need it; I need you, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, all of them. And I can only explain this need by extravagance: my history and the world's. Because unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

In addition to the big picture, Claudia lived a very interesting life: Her father died during WWI, leaving her and an older brother – an intimate fiefdom of two – to be raised by a stiff upper-lipped (but curiously oblivious) proper British Mum; Claudia joined the Press Corps during WWII and reported from Cairo (and the scenes of desert warfare and their human effects outshine anything from The English Patient); she had a postwar affair with an aristocratic dandy and kept the child that ensued to raise on her own; she gained fame and riches from her history books; and she spends her end days being dutifully visited by what family she has left. All of the historical details of this most fascinating of times were richly drawn; sprawling and intimate. Claudia herself is a great character: an alluring mix of intelligence and beauty, she has always considered herself better than those around her (equalled only by her beloved brother), and while she comes off as prickly and unlikeable (and especially cruel to her brother's dull wife), when we readers are shown what is hurting at her core, it leads to understanding (if not pity). 

This might have been a five star read for me if it didn't compare unfavourably to one of my favourite books (The Stone Angel, with a similar end-of-life history of an unlikeable old woman; but one which shook me emotionally to the core), but that's not to say that I didn't admire and enjoy Moon Tiger; this is an outstanding achievement deserving of its acclaim.

The Moon Tiger is almost entirely burned away now; its green spiral is mirrored by a grey ash spiral in the saucer. The shutters are striped with light; the world has turned again.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“When I am with her I am happy. Just happy.”

She nodded. She seemed to understand and I thought, really, for that second, that she would change her mind, that we would talk, that we would be on the same side of the glass wall. I waited.

She said, “Why be happy when you could be normal?”

Right from the first lines of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, I had to recognise that I was in the hands of a master storyteller: Everything about Jeanette Winterson's voice and craft are engaging, thoughtful, and wise. It doesn't hurt that in this, her memoir, Winterson has a wild story to tell – of an unstable adoptive mother and her weak-willed husband; of abuse and neglect and the sense of something missing that all adopted children (apparently) feel; of redemption through literature; of a final family rift when Winterson came out of the closet; a descent into madness and the love that pulled her out again – and I was fascinated on every page; wanted to mark too many passages as significant. The only Winterson I had read before was The Gap of Time – a retelling of The Winter's Tale in the Hogarth Shakespeare Series, which didn't impress me much (Winterson uses the phrase “Time is a gap” in this memoir, which I thought made it an extra significant personal philosophy for her, until I realised that she must have been writing these two books at about the same time) – and based on that one experience, I wasn't excited to pick her up again. After reading Why Be Happy, I am excited to read the fiction that was forged in this life.

I never believed that my parents loved me. I tried to love them but it didn't work. It has taken me a long time to learn how to love – both the giving and the receiving. I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value.

I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you?

I had no idea.
I thought that love was loss.
Why is the measure of love loss?

For the most part in this account, the author refers to her adoptive mother as “Mrs Winterson”, and that about says it all. The Wintersons were born-again Pentacostals who went to church daily, and despite her mother not adhering to all of her church's beliefs (she secretly smoked despite it being forbidden, she refused to believe in the resurrection of the body after the End Time), when she suspected Jeanette of having a girlfriend as a young teenager, Mrs W brought in the Church Elders to beat and starve and exorcise the demon out of her daughter. Jeanette was routinely locked out of the house at night as a little girl, her father was bullied into caning her for minor infractions, and her mother swore that the Devil himself led her to the wrong crib when she was choosing a baby to adopt. Jeanette was poor and hungry and always cold; but so was everyone else she knew in her workingclass suburb of Manchester. Despite being forbidden to read books outside of the Bible (and this despite Mrs W devouring murder mysteries), Jeanette developed a love of language that led her to attempting to read the entirety of her local library's collection of “English Literature A-Z”. Ultimately, it was poetry that pierced through to her soul.

When people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.

It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

The rest of Winterson's story is equally engaging – living in her car in order to keep attending school after her mother kicked her out; getting into Oxford; having her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, win awards and be adapted for television; enjoying a successful career under the shadow of something missing that ultimately breaks her mind and ruins her relationships; beginning the search for her birth mother – and throughout it all, she relates the facts of her life to the writing it inspired, as well as the literature that inspired her. This isn't a long book, but it contains an entire, remarkable life.

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become. Emily Dickinson barely left her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, but when we read 'My life stood – a loaded gun' we know we have met an imagination that will detonate life, not decorate it.

Why Be Happy detonates life, and I was enthralled on every page; these facts may not have been relevant to my own life, but I somehow met myself here. I'm certainly looking forward to reading Winterson's fiction.

Tunesday : I Want to Break Free

I Want to Break Free

(Deacon, J / May, B) Performed by Queen

I want to break free
I want to break free
I want to break free from your lies
You're so self satisfied I don't need you
I've got to break free
God knows, God knows I want to break free.

I've fallen in love
I've fallen in love for the first time
And this time I know it's for real
I've fallen in love, yeah
God knows, God knows I've fallen in love.

It's strange but it's true
I can't get over the way you love me like you do
But I have to be sure
When I walk out that door
Oh how I want to be free, baby
Oh how I want to be free,
Oh how I want to break free.

But life still goes on
I can't get used to, living without, living without,
Living without you by my side
I don't want to live alone, hey
God knows, got to make it on my own
So baby can't you see
I've got to break free.

I've got to break free
I want to break free, yeah
I want, I want, I want, I want to break free.

I want to take a minute and talk about Queen this week - a band that has grown in my esteem over the years. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, I pretty much thought of them as a novelty act. We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions was played at sporting events right from its release, and even if my friends and I did turn up the car radio to sing along if Bohemian Rhapsody came on, I obviously never thought of that as rock and roll, or even pop. And then when you add in the truly novelty-sounding songs - I Want to Ride My Bicycle, Fat Bottomed Girls, Radio Ga Ga - they felt easy to dismiss as non-serious. So, maybe it was because Queen was never really on my radar, but when Freddie Mercury ended up dying of AIDS and it came out publicly that he had been a gay man, I was actually surprised: having spent my life never wondering about who might be gay, I was just like, "Oh, okay, and the name 'Queen' - that must have gone right over my head. Cool." When I was looking up the lyrics for I Want to Break Free today, I noted the trivia that because the band appears in drag in this video, MTV refused to air it in the States at the time. Whaaaat? I never just sat around watching videos, so I can't be 100% sure that we were seeing this in Canada on our MuchMusic channel back then, but I'm so oblivious to what's gay and what's not gay that, even now, I don't really see the difference between Freddie Mercury wearing a dress and the guys from Monty Python having done the exact same thing. That's just standard British humour, innit? Ah, but we were so much more closeted back then, and I'll eventually get to the point of why I chose this song this week - other than it just being a great song (I said that Queen has grown on me).

Okay, so in my timeline, I left off with us buying the townhouse in Cambridge and ending our year of homelessness (Dave hates that I refer to us as having been homeless, but while we may not have actually been on the streets, we didn't have a home of our own, so...) Right from the start, Dave was willing to work long hours in order to prove himself a go-getter at Maple Leaf, and while I would have liked to have seen more of him, I was finally happy, settled into my own little center of domesticity (think Freddie Mercury running that vacuum). 

We bought that townhouse because: 1) We could afford it and liked that it was freehold with no condo fees; 2) It was not only halfway between both of our parents' homes but also had easy access to the highway and Dave's commute; and 3) It was only a year old and felt fresh and new. It was in a string of four attached townhomes (in a small area with maybe a dozen of these fourplexes, spread between a main road and a cul-de-sac; we were on the main road), and we were in the second unit from the end. Facing the four, the neighbours to our left had the best spot - with a large corner lot - and then there was us, and then set back from us, the next two units were of a Cape Cod style with a nice dormer window upstairs of each. Looking at our unit, the single garage was nearly flush with the face of the building, so when you entered our front door, the first thing you saw was a long, narrow hallway that ran beside what was the garage to your left. At the end of the hallway was a small family room (we had room for a loveseat and arm chair, a side table [but no coffee table], and a very small cabinet that held a small TV and VCR), and in the area beside that was room enough for a table and four chairs, and that led onto a tiny, but perfectly adequate, kitchen. Leading off the eating area were patio doors, and this led to a fairly useless back yard. You stepped down onto maybe four paving stones, and that was all that was level out there. The lawn around this "patio" dropped sharply to the right, where it met the neighbour's wall (as those units were offset back from us), and just a few steps beyond the pavers, the yard became a steep hill that ran up to the first unit of the cul-de-sac (this grass was never fun to mow and I daydreamed of installing terraced gardens). At first the yard wasn't even fenced, but we eventually made this into a nice space.

Returning to the house, the main floor also had a small but perfectly adequate powder room, and while the laundry room was in the basement, that large open space was a perfect place for Kennedy's toys - her Little Tykes playhouse was kept down there until the yard was fenced - and eventually, Dave would finish this space to make a larger area for watching our big TV. The upstairs had the full size bathroom, and in addition to two rather tiny bedrooms at the back, the master sat over the garage at the front - making this the biggest room in the house, which on the one hand felt like a waste of space, but on the other, made for a small bit of luxury. Before we even moved in, I painted that upstairs bathroom a deep burgundy - after a year without a home of my own, I was avid to leave my mark somewhere. (I won't get into the psychology of my mother having painted the family room in her last house the same deep burgundy.) We eventually put a chair rail and a half-wall of wallpaper along that long hallway on the main floor in order to visually break it up, but besides eventually painting the second small bedroom for Mallory before she was born (the people who owned the place before us had also had a baby girl, so Kennedy's room was already a pretty purplish blue; we  added a ladybug border in there for her), I think that's all the decorating we did in that place; everything was still new and fresh and nice as it was.

And so to the neighbours: The far right unit was owned by another young family, but in the first few months we were there, the father died suddenly and the mother used the insurance settlement to buy a house nearer to where our own next house would be (the young baby in this family would eventually be in Kennedy's class at school, and very briefly, be her boyfriend and date for grade eight grad). Two lesbians then moved in - one rather butch and one who mowed their grass in a bikini - and they served as foster parents for a string of troubled kids; I remember coming home one day and seeing a teenaged girl sitting half-in and half-out of her dormer window; smoking, glaring at me defiantly. Next to them (and us) was an old woman who lived alone for most of the time we were there - until her grown son was released from a psych ward and moved in. He was a silent, brooding presence - always doing some kind of seemingly pointless home improvement project (he spent weeks sanding and puttying their essentially new garage door before repainting it the same colour) - and it made me uncomfortable when he would glare at little Kennedy if she tried to wave or say hi to him. He would contribute to my desire to eventually move away - and as we later learned that he started threatening some of the neighbours (threatened to kill the little dog in the yard up the back hill from us), I was glad to have moved when we did. And to our left was a lovely Newfie family that we enjoyed spending time with.

The husband, Carlton, was an odd duck - a fast-talking little guy who was equally proud of being able to drink a 2-4 of beer in one day and buying his jeans in the boys' department of Sears. The wife, Karen, was a true salt-of-the-earth big-hearted chatterbox, and her presence definitely made up for an odd husband. Their older son, Stephen, was a husky hockey-player who, it seemed incongruously, was a respectful and thoughtful conversationalist; very lovely with Kennedy. The younger son, Brent, was an outgoing and friendly little boy - and just a wee bit effeminate. When they first showed us around their house, Brent said that although his bedroom was decorated in a hockey theme, he had wanted it to have posters of boys doing gymnastics (this got an eyeroll from both his parents as he told us). Brent was naturally flexible - was always doing the splits and flips around his yard - but his parents wouldn't allow him to take gymnastics; made him sign up for hockey instead. Once when a friend of theirs was visiting and Brent went into the splits on the lawn, this man said, "I told that boy once that he could prance around here all he likes, but the first time I catch him sitting down to piss, I'll knock him into next week." Carlton laughed his butt off at this - as he sat on a lawnchair in his garage, working on his 2-4 - but I couldn't imagine allowing anyone to speak about a kid of mine that way in front of me; let alone in front of him. Brent was always welcome in our house - he was sweet with Kennedy, a nice kid to be around, and there was zero judgment from us no matter what he said he was interested in; it's hard to remember that even in 1996, so many people still had this homophobic mindset and we weren't uninterested in helping someone who needed a space to break free. (And thinking about those days made me remember the image of a mustachioed Freddie Mercury in a dress - the meeting of the obscurely gay with a routine domesticity - and that led to this week's song choice.)

Carlton was a carpenter at some factory in town, and he said to us once that if we did the labour to build a fence between our yards, he'd supply the lumber from one of his contacts. I mentioned that at some point to Dad, and once when we were out - probably in London with Dave's parents - Dad and Ken came by without our knowing they were planning to, and having towed up one of Dad's tractors, they drove around the perimeter of our yard, drilling out postholes. We came home to all these holes around the yard - following their best guess as to where the property lines might be - and I think it was a long weekend, so Dave went the next day to buy the posts and the concrete to set them in. Within a week, Carlton had a load of fenceboards and two-by-fours delivered to our tiny driveway, and the next weekend, we built the fence with my brothers' help. We also built a small deck that first summer - it seemed obvious to me that we could run one off to the right of the patio stones and secure it to the brick wall of our neighbour's unit - and that fixed the unlevel uselessness of our yard. Kennedy's playhouse, castle, sandbox (can't say my mother wasn't keen to buy her things) all found a flattish area before the hill on which to sit, and once Kennedy really started walking and running around, she loved climbing it and rolling back down again. Often when we'd have people over and be sitting out on the deck, Carlton would climb onto something in his back yard in order to stand above the fenceline and join in our conversation. He always joked that we should install a shelf right there for him on our side so he'd have a place to rest his beer - and he said that enough times that he might not actually have been joking; said it enough times that Dave despaired he would never get the hint that we actually didn't want him there.

One evening, when we were sitting on the deck with Ken and Lolo, the mentally unstable son from the other side was cutting up bricks - for a cobblestone patio? - with a chop saw for a couple of hours; intruding on us with the intermittent whine of the saw and clouds of brick dust (despite him bizarrely working under a blue plastic tarp, the dust was incessant). The sky went dark with night and we figured he must be about to pack it in soon, but as the chop and whine and dust continued unabated, Dave eventually lost his patience and went over to the fence, asking if maybe it wasn't time to call it a night. The man's face twisted up with rage and he spat out, "I could stop now, but then I'd have to start again at six tomorrow morning. Is that what you want?"

 "Yes!" we all replied. So he stopped. I don't recall being disturbed by any commotion the next morning; perhaps it was but a passing mania.

That's about all I wanted to write about this week, but I did want to record that I still think of Brent sometimes. I wonder if he did grow up to be gay, and if he found the family support he should have expected. I ran into Karen and Brent at the mall some years later (when they told me about the neighbour threatening the little dog), and he was shy with me, but I noted his pierced ears and wondered if that meant he was finding enough space to express himself. We've come a long way since 1996 - lightyears since 1986 when I had a good friend come out to me - and in ways, it all feels like a different world to me now. I was so proud of that little home, so happy to be a settled family unit; yet we'd only live in that townhouse for a couple of years before I wanted more.

The Maze at Windermere

Alice felt a duty toward (Windermere), toward its beauty and its perfection and toward her grandmother and her mother who had loved it too. Not just the house and the grounds, she said, but the history of the place. From when it was called Doubling Point, and the little farmhouse that had stood here during the Revolution with its rude dooryard and cowbells and sheep grazing out on the rocky point, and then the Gilded Age tearing everything down and putting up mansions all along the coast, and the tragedy of the original owners who had no sooner had the house built than the husband had died and left the wife with their two young children and a just-planted boxwood maze. They were in the house still, she said; could he feel them? And then they were back to that drunken night on the Point when he had been so dense (she said) and she so charming (she said) trying to get him to see and hear and smell the seventeenth century in the crooked streets and the little Quaker houses. But he could see now, couldn't he? He could hear and smell and feel now, couldn't he?

The Maze at Windermere is a book that seems to diminish the more I think about it; if I had had the time to write a review a couple of days ago when I first finished it, I just might have given it four stars. But despite having closed the covers with a satisfied feeling of fullness – I had found the writing delightful and engaging – I am now left with the sense that it hadn't really added up to much; once the delight faded, I'm left thinking on the book's flaws. Still and all, this is an imaginative romp with five timelines playing out in Newport, R.I., and with author Gregory Blake Smith's efforts to examine race and class and sexuality through a shifting lens of privilege and striving in the pursuit of happiness, it's certainly swinging for the fences. Consider this three and a half stars, rounded down (which might well have been rounded up two days ago).

The aquarelle he had made of that day – and which was now hanging in the library at Windermere – had been of the breakwater where they had had their lunch. He had used a good deal of yellow ochre that the day might appear golden, the breakwater jutting into the star-spangled water, and two figures – a man and a woman – out at the very end of the jetty, seated facing away from the viewer, the silver surf threatening to souse them, the distance and their postures making it impossible for the casual viewer to identify them – they were merely an emblematic couple – but that of course was the beauty of the gesture: she knew who it was who sat there in intimacy, in the exquisite gold of the moment.

The book opens in 2011 with a newly retired tennis pro who is giving lessons in Newport as he decides his future. The previous summer this Sandy Alison had crossed paths with the owners of the famous estate of Windermere, and as the current season progresses, he allows himself to be drawn into their world once more. The story then rewinds to the year 1896 – to the Gilded Age in which Windermere was first built – and this plotline focusses on Franklin Drexel; a society bon vivant and lapdog; an aging interloper to the world of the “400” who endeavors to ensnare a rich widow in order to remain in their circle. Flip to 1863 and Newport is on the Union side during the Civil War and we follow a young Henry James as he observes the summer tourists as inspiration for his writing; a blossoming friendship with an outspoken young woman will both serve as the basis for Daisy Miller and force young Henry to confront his own ideas of love and stability versus art and truth. Next is the year 1778, at the height of the Revolutionary War, and as Rhode Island is occupied by British soldiers, we follow Major Ballard as he attempts to seduce the beautiful sixteen-year-old daughter of a local Jewish merchant out of spite and mischief. The final timeline is set in 1692, when the area that will become Newport is inhabited by a community of Quakers. Prudence is fifteen and newly orphaned, and as winter approaches and she finds herself solely responsible for the care of the family home and her infant sister, she will need to navigate the good intentions of others in order to build the life she wants. It is the roguish Franklin who paints the picture referred to in the above quote – a watercolour he entitles “Lovers upon the Jetty”, which he presents to the rich widow in his sights – and at some point, each of these five storylines include a couple who walk out upon the breakwater; each becoming “emblematic”, even if their particulars couldn't be more different throughout the years. And it's this sense of time and lives repeating themselves that seemed both this book's point and its weakness; for what does that really mean?

“Have you not had that sensation?” she asked after a moment. “That your life has already been lived? That everyone's life has already been lived?”

The writing often feels self-aware and overt, with various characters over the years philosophising about lives repeating themselves. And specific details repeat themselves as well – a character in one timeline is wearing a green brocade gown, and so is one in the next; there are several Alices throughout the years and various timelines see mention of the phrases “the killer instinct” and abus de faiblesse (plus a dozen other examples). Prudence inherits a slave named Ashes in the 1600s (and has very forward-thinking ideas about whether or not it's hypocritical for Quakers to own other people; not that she's going to do anything about that), and in the present of 2011, the owner of Windermere allows an African-American friend named Aisha to live on the estate (and when it turns out Aisha might be manipulating the situation to her advantage, I think we're supposed to remember Ashes and think in terms of the long reach of cosmic justice and Reparations). Like, it's all so obvious what is going on: this isn't the mindbending Cloud Atlas or even, more subtly, The Hours. 

I liked that Smith wrote strong women into every storyline (even if they all needed outsiders to guard their interests), and while I appreciated the inclusion of the LGBT+ experience over the years, it could feel a little forced in the end.  And I have to applaud Smith's technique: I absolutely believed the differing voices in the different plotlines; I was completely swept away by the history and the evolving setting of Newport. It was this general enchantment with voice and technique that had me closing the covers of this book with satisfaction, but as with an Atlantic fog rolling over a craggy breakwater, once the atmosphere cleared, I was left dampened and cooled. Still enjoyable in the moment and worth my while.

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: Stories

 

Three Rules To Write By

Write naked. That means to write what you would never say.

Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can’t waste it.

Write in exile, as if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail.

Denis Johnson

Having died in 2017 of liver cancer, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden will be Denis Johnson's final release; a collection of five short stories, two of which were not previously published elsewhere. I loved this collection, but am having a hard time articulating why: Johnson's magic is certainly to be found in the words he uses – when poets also excel at prose, the results can be sublime – but his real expertise is in the pivots and transitions between the lines that suddenly illuminate a story like a spotlight from above. And to give a sense of what I mean by that, I'd need to excerpt an entire story – which, of course, I won't do – so you'll just need to pick this up and see for yourself.

I wonder if you're like me, if you collect and squirrel away in your soul certain odd moments when the Mystery winks at you.

This line seems to capture the link between these stories – they could all be called expositions of the moments when the Mystery winks at you; not necessarily all uncanny experiences, but those times when you glimpse behind the curtain nonetheless. Watching a grown woman cry as she's dared to kiss an amputee's leg stump; an inmate climbs and swings simian-like across the outside bars of unlocked cells; a man confesses to digging up a generations-old infant's grave in the dead of night: these are strange tales told matter-of-factly. These stories are full of death – suicide, lethal injection, the sudden heart attack and the drawn out cancer battle – and filled with the ways we separate ourselves from one another: the series of locked gates you must pass through to reach a remote ranch house; the obscene offer handed under the bathroom stall's partition; the death row visitor's room and the peepshow booth, both with telephone handsets and a wall of safety glass preventing skin-on-skin contact. There are throughlines here that seem to reveal what Johnson himself was contemplating in his final months.

I note that I've lived longer in the past, now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn't mind forgetting a lot more of it.

As for the particulars, this collection contains the title story, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, written from the POV of an “ad man”, it's a collection of odd stories from his life and career (just a lovely piece); The Starlight on Idaho is a series of letters written by a man in rehab who just might be going crazy from the Antabuse he's prescribed (this one was my favourite; it was unbelievable to me how a whole life was revealed through these ever-more-erratic ramblings); Strangler Bob is written by a man in a county lockup, surrounded by a variety of unusual characters (this was my least favourite, but as it might be a revisit to Johnson's most beloved character from Jesus' Son – which I have yet to read – it could be more meaningful to other readers); Triumph Over the Grave, wherein a writer recounts a story from the past and one from the present in which friends of his die (which is so self-aware as Johnson himself was dying that its final line left me stricken); and Doppelgänger, Poltergeist, from the POV of a poetry professor who mentors a more talented younger poet and becomes his confessor for mad deeds and beliefs. 

The Past just left. Its remnants, I claim, are mostly fiction.

Because so many of the narrators of these stories are writers themselves, it usually felt like Johnson himself was speaking to me. And because so many of these stories were about end-of-life experiences, and the unreliability of memory, and the writer's efforts to take lived experience and “put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light”, it felt personal and long-considered. This is masterful work and a fitting cap to a celebrated career.