Читать книгу Combat Journal for Place d'Armes - Scott Symons - Страница 13

THE DAY BEFORE ONE

“La Place d’Armes is the heart of Montreal, metropolis of Canada. No visitor to the city can afford to miss this remarkable square where the modern and the historic meet in splendour and harmony. Walk out to the centre of La Place — and stand under the great statue to Maisonneuve, founder of the city, in 1642. On the north side of La Place stands the Head Office of the Bank of Montreal … popularly known as ‘My Bank’ to over two million Canadians. On the west side is the Head Office of the Banque Canadienne nationale. The largest financial institutions of English and French Canada respectively: side by side, tower by tower. Yet facing these two ultramodern skyscrapers, on the south side of the square, sits the Presbytery and Church of Notre Dame. This Church is traditionally known simply as “The Parish,” the pride of the Sulpician Order who once held all Montreal in fief. The rough stone Presbytery dates from the days of Louis XIV, while the Church, which was completed by 1830, is the earliest example of the Gothic Revival Style in Canada. It is considered one of the finest in America. The lavish interior of the Church, copied from La Sainte Chapelle in Paris, is one of the sights of the city. It is appropriate that the Church is faced not only by the modern Bank of Montreal tower, but also by the old Bank building with its classic pediment and dome, dating from 1847. To the east the square is fitly completed by two handsome stone skyscrapers; the Providence Life Building which will remind you of New York in the Roaring Twenties, and beside it an excellent example of the famed brownstone architecture of the High Victorian Period.

In effect La Place d’Armes is a summary of the entire city. Because to the north and west of it rises the mountain with its new city of commerce and cultures. The Queen Elizabeth Hotel, the most up-to-date in Canada; La Place Ville Marie, the largest shopping and office complex in the nation; and La Place des Arts, symbol of the vibrant artistic life born of the meeting of French and English civilizations in the New World — these are only a few blocks away. While to the south and east of the square lie the great international harbour of Montreal, and the historic Old Quarter, with its unique ensemble of Georgian stone buildings. If you want to wander these curving streets, in a matter of minutes you will be in la rue St. Paul with its modern boutiques and art stores, its antique shops, with the magnificent Georgian Bonsecours Market, once the Parliament of Canada, and Notre Dame de Bonsecours Church dating from the eighteenth century. Fine restaurants will cater to the appetite your stroll whets. Afterwards you can visit the French Baroque City Hall, or the Chateau de Ramezay Museum, once home of the Governors of Montreal; see the first monument in the world to Nelson, or wander along St. James Street, and enjoy the great Victorian palaces of commerce. Don’t forget to stroll down to the harbour (only one block south from St. Paul Street) to the great grain elevators and freightyards. To the west stands the Harbour Commission Building, a handsome Victorian fantasy, to the east the Jacques Cartier bridge, while just out of sight is the Ile Ste-Hélène, site of Canada’s International Exhibition — Expo 67.

La Place d’Armes — heart of Montreal, old and new. La Place d’Armes — heart of Canada!”

Thus Hugh Anderson tried to imagine how a tourist blurb of La Place d’Armes might read. He sketched it out in full — and then gave up; it revulsed him. Partly because he couldn’t really bring himself to do it well, and partly because he could imagine it only too well. He decided to concentrate instead upon his own memory of La Place d’Armes … trying to recall it as he had known it during the four years he had worked within a block of it, on St. James Street. He remembered the domed Bank of Montreal Building well. Then he had to admit he had never been in it. No, he reflected, not once … only in the new section. It was virtually the same for the Church of Notre Dame. It had always stood there, as some magnificent Gothic scenario — a fine backdrop for prestige office buildings. Like having the façade from Westminster Abbey, or Notre Dame de Paris, dropped into La Place as guarantee of quality: Episcopal Approval — an Imprimatur for La Place. But he had never been in it … oh he had visited in it — once, maybe twice — and he always told friends who were visiting Montreal that it was a “must.” But he himself had never been to a service there. He had meant to go that Christmas, to the Midnight Mass …, but he had gone skiing instead. Odious recollection … (besides — the snow went soft). And he couldn’t remember anything precise about the Church inside, save that sensation of Olde Golde everywhere … the Sainte Chapelle bloated beyond belief. As to the rest — well, the new buildings of the New Montreal hadn’t been built: La Banque provinciale, La Place Ville Marie, La Place des Arts. He had only heard about them. And he had to admit that he never, not once!, strolled the Old Quarter. Oh, he had visited the Chateau de Ramezay once by accident; it was a hailstorm. As for the rest … he really only knew about them through history textbooks, by implication.

With that he stopped, acutely self-conscious, embarrassed … turned around to see if anyone was looking at him, at his smug self-assertive ignorance.

No one was looking. He laughed small consolation: how the hell could anyone see what he was thinking anyway? His guilt was a private matter. But he had to face the truth: all he really knew about La Place d’Armes and its entourage was what he could have put into a bad tourist blurb. He was victim of the very thing he mocked! To save further discomfit he turned his mind to the job at hand, unwilling to resolve the contradictions already becoming apparent.

The assignment he decided in fact was simple: a short novel on La Place d’Armes in Montreal. He knew exactly what it was that he wanted to do with it. Namely present La Place as a centre of life and vitality in the Montreal metropolis. It was La Place that would, of course, be the Hero. Of that he was certain … the novel would grow out of that fact. All he had to do was live La Place and he would end with what he needed — a novel that glowed with love, with his own love of his community, his nation, his people. A novel that glowed with love in a world whose final and last faith seemed grounded in hate. He wanted to share that love, and to show that only by that love do people live, really live. With any luck the essential experience would be achieved in a fortnight, perhaps less. In either case he would be home by Christmas. He planned to arrive in Montreal on December the first.

He thought again of La Place … yes, it was ideal: a historic square, perhaps the most historic in North America, or in the New World for that matter. Three-and-a-half centuries of history ending in 1967 as the heart of a giant empire — Canada — and the site of the first International Exhibition that had ever received world sanction in the New World. No — decidedly there was no other square to equal it … and he counted off the competitors — Boston, Boston Common, the Liberty Route, the birth of the American Dream and all that. Well, Boston had gone dead. And so had the Amurrican Dream for that matter — (his facile inherited contempt of the Americans — the mere Americans — was all contained in that slurred pronunciation “Amurrican”) Or New York — Times Square, for example. Centre of the World. What about that? Somehow it didn’t do. It didn’t have a heart, or a soul, or something … something was wrongside-up about it. If nothing else his novel would prove that, by contrast. That left Philadelphia — which had been displaced by New York — and Washington. Same argument all over again for these then. And for Chicago, the Second City. Or San Francisco — excellent also-ran. What about Mexico City? Surely it was a contender. Well he didn’t know Mexico City — so it was easy to rule out. That left only his own city, Toronto, with its claim to be the “fastest growing city in North America.” Which meant the fastest growing “white city” in the world. Perhaps that was what was wrong with Toronto!

Nor could he find any heart to Toronto … no central Place … unless one took the new City Hall and its monolithic Phillips Square. Anyway, La Place d’Armes had a two-century headstart on that … and any sense of dimension in time in Toronto was about to be extinguished by the destruction of the Old City Hall which gave all the conviction and perspective to the New — torn down to make room for a department store. Well that told the whole story. He grimaced. No, it was Montreal’s Place d’Armes all the way. He felt relieved, and settled back in his seat aboard the Rapido — “fastest commuter train in the world … 360 miles in 4 hrs. and 59 minutes!” For a moment his own smugness conjugated with this triumphant smugness of the train and taking out his little black notebook he began to make his Novel Notes — some for the Novel, but some for himself. The latter would, naturally, be the best — after all he wouldn’t be able to present the complete truth in the Novel. So it was important to have complete notes for his own private edification. A kind of private revenge against the restrictions of the Novel itself — a sort of intimacy. The intimate privilege of the first person.

“… spent the weekend skiing — a sort of final outing before Montreal. Left Mary & the two children to return with friends to Toronto. She is in good spirits & can handle the home easily enough till I’m back…. It all makes good sense. Ran into Jackson on the daytrain from Collingwood … haven’t seen him for two years. We exchanged supercilities last time — each politely contemptuous of the other — he of my publishing house respectability; I of his success in the mass media — a televisionary … mass mediocrity! Now we sat together like old buddies, confessing our faults … the vacuity of the media (Toynbee is right — TV is “the lion that whimpered!”) & the constipation of the business world. As though each of us had seen through ourselves in these last two years. And come out divested — & afraid. Things have changed. Everything has changed — absolutely. The very nature of reality has changed. Maybe that’s why I let Jackson quiz me overtly…. Jackson —“well, you’re a square in revolt. We’re all squares in

this country … I’m a square. But I still don’t

understand you.

You didn’t need to get fired. Your training was unique.

Experience with that Montreal publishing firm. A book of excellent critical essays on Canadian culture. A Governor General’s award. A powerful family name, a beautiful wife — & you say, two kids. Bilingual.& an appointment at the University of Toronto for special lectures. You were made, man. & we needed you. You didn’t need to capitulate….”

I laugh, and remember his public criticism of my essays.

“I can’t explain it. But I know what I’m doing. I simply know I had to demission — had to leave. I suppose it was the very fact that I felt I was a ‘made man’ — that all I had to do was become president of my company, & then die … or rather die, & then become president of the company. But much more important than that is the feeling that I’ve been unmade … that the events of the past few years in Canada have been systematically destroying me, my culture. I have slowly been eliminated — all my faiths…. Take the new flag (one floats by out the train window) — that is as good a symbol as any of the dissolution I feel. Every time I look at that frigging Maple Leaf I dissolve. I simply cease to exist. It’s not a question of patriotism — my family’s been tangled up with the New World for over two centuries now. It’s a question of reality. Take just the visual fact of the flag. It’s a non-flag…. I can’t explain it.”

And then they were at the Toronto Union Station. Jackson was gone … wishing him well. He was perplexed by their conversation — the complete frankness of it. It made him uneasy. Not because it was frank, but because it implied more to the novel than the novel he had planned. But he didn’t realize that yet.

He appraised the station … a splendid thermal bath. It was in the best style of the period: monumental Roman Classic. And at the same time he regretted its predecessor for which his grandfather had been an architect … it had been that brownstone Romanesque that Richardson had made famous — full of rough brawn. And inside the station he flinched at the juxtaposition of this muted thermal bath style, like some great banking house, and the constrained jazz of the new billboardings now around the wall. — The ads were representative, he mused, of the new Toronto: a pair of TV personalities “invited” you flagrantly to “Listen Here” — standing at ease in their red waistcoats and their glasses that made them look relaxed middle-class intelligent. Respectable hicks he decided. Or high-class jerks. It didn’t much matter. In either case they didn’t belong in the station. Not in this station, his station. Which meant that one day the station would be pulled down. But he didn’t dare admit that either. Another billboard boasted the “brightest paper in town” that it boosted. Beside it a forty-foot guarantee of medical insurance. Lastly a cigarette sanctioned by a wholesome lass in tartan. Yes — it was a good cross-section of Toronto-town. Add only the stationwagon perched comfortably over the stairwell — “Canadian built — for quality,” and you had the complete picture. The only difference between the Canadian and American stationwagon being that the Canadian had less chrome and cost more. All of this, and the conversation with Jackson, hackled him. He walked over to the ticket booth. Last time he had taken the CPR. This time he would take the “Rapido,” the “National” line.

“… the ticket booth is the same old bronzed respectable — like a bank wicket, but jazzed over now with a fay red-white-blue decor of posters. The attendants the same — a sort of cheap felt blazer, Minute-Man blue with red trims. Look like gas station attendants on a Labour Day parade … that’s it — the new Guild of All-Canadians. And they are descendants of the Amurrican Minute Men — same narrow folk culture that produced the car-spangled banner. It’s the colours … those folk hues. This is just a mutation of the same: part Rotary Club cheeriness, part cheerleader razzummatazz, part modern electronix.Christ I hate it: the Canadettes! Preview of 1984. Bless damned Orwell! Just time for a snack in the York Pioneer Room … ”

He settled in and looked it over … quickly discredited it as part of the new Canadian kick for their cottage pine past. Simply a comfortable Canadian variation of the American Abe Lincoln myth. It made posthumous peasants out of all their ancestors. He couldn’t take much of that. He enjoyed peasants; but he didn’t like retroactive peasanthood as a national patriotic pastime. There was something sick in it … an inverted snobbery. The fact was that the “log cabin legend” simply didn’t belong in Canada … it really belonged only to that initial, and belated, American yeoman tradition in Southwestern Ontario — Grit Ontario … Canadian equivalent of the New England Myth that still implicitly dominates Amurrican thought. The thought that Canada, at this late date would be subjected to a pirated and aborted American puritan legend depressed him. And he fled.

“… I thought of touring the new City Hall. Haven’t yet. A good idea now … after all if this New Canada is real and right I’m as much a tourist in Canada now as anyone else. & I can see the Old City Hall at the same time. But didn’t have the courage…. The exposure would rob me of the energy I need for Montreal.”

Suddenly the real magnitude of what he was doing and of what was being done to him shook him. He hadn’t as yet completely allowed himself to know. But every now and then he had a deep realization of what he was really doing — some deep tissue of him opened and he shook from stem to gudgeon. The only thing he could do now was to see someone: people still fortified him. He phoned Beatrice Ellis — he had kept in touch with her these past difficult months. She had edited his book of essays. Had done a sensitive job — and she had told him then (that was four years ago) that he had something much more important to say, that he wouldn’t get away merely with his essays. There was just time for a cup of tea together (it wasn’t a “drink” — that was what happened in novels; and he smiled.) Beatrice had “died” a few months ago, heart failure, under an oxygen tent — and then been revived and come back to tell about it. She would know. He tried — between the lines — to tell her what he was really doing … tried to tell her that he knew that the novel was for real. He wanted to tell her of the hara-kiri explicit in it. But it was hard to acknowledge fear to someone who has already died and come back. That strengthened him again. And at 4:45 p.m. he was on board the Rapido …

“the Rapido! the very name pillages me of more blood. Part of the mediocre anonymity of the New Nation. An evasion of identity. An abstraction. Might as well call it the ‘Quickie’ — the Cdn Quickie.

But that would be too American. At least the CPR has the guts to be the Chateau Champlain … or the Royal York. Well — the new name matches the new ticket booth matches the new Canadettes in the booth matches the Respectable Hick matches the New Flag matches the new entry to the train itself … from the main floor of the thermal bathroom. I got a new respect for that great arched Roman Bath as I saw in contrast the board-and-batten triumphal arch all of eight feet tall through which we went to the train. Red-white-blue archlet — not the old colours, grim old colours, full of gristle and gut, but these new candy-floss colours. (Oh, Christ, even the colours of my community are undergoing a change of life — are being gelded!) At the arch entry a professional greeter welcomes us in. Rolls out the cheap red carpet for all of us members of the new lower middle-class Canadian royalty. Pathetic.Plush for the people.

Why can’t I be proud of it? I should be. It is clean, competent, fresh, proper. It even has this mitigated concern for majesty — the plush carpet, the stage-set entry, the self-effacing CN impresario to grimace us at entryway … I suppose because it makes me by definition part of these New Canadettes. A sort of post-graduated folk-yeoman-king…. Hell — why should I be proud of it? This isn’t what my people spent two centuries here for! Even if I wanted I have no right to be proud of it!

Dumped my bags on the rack between cars #3012 and 3011 … & slump into a seat — lucky got one by a window, facing forwards (dislike riding backwards). Ten minutes to go … catch up on my Notes.

… 4:45 p.m., sharp, the station moves away from us … leaving me exposed sudden to the body of my city … out the back corner of my eye that becalmed Beaux-Arts bulk, rising like a series of improved Buckingham Palaces piled atop each other — the Royal York, could only be she

the long slit unended of Yonge Street — like all our streets — dissolved only by infinity

with that wedding-cake turn-of-the-century prestige bank at the lower left-hand corner — Front Street corner: a kind of gaudy bodyguard for the longeststreetintheworldthatisYongestreet ending only in our Ontario Lake District. Bank of Montreal, at that!

with its back square upon me, the squat cube of our beer baron’s art centre: O’Keefe

overtopping all these, the soft-nosed phallicity of Bank of Commerce — circumspect, uncircumcised — 32 stories of Canadian self-satisfaction

the new National Trust tower, well below

& below again, prickly up these closed commercial shops, the spired incisions of the old City of Churches — Saints James & Michael &Metropole

&, last link with the old city, Osgoode aside, St-Lawrence-Market- where-Jenny-Lind-sang

pinched by the Victorian gabling from Jarvis Street East … even gables in Toronto are Presbyterian spinsters’ eyes on my wayward trainside

Gooderham ’n Worts stone distillery — 1832: THERE is the REAL HOY culture … Honest Ontario Yeoman — Hoyman — none of this nostalgic log cabin cult … but cubic yards of squared stonework — behind it, the high windows and gratuitous lantern of Tuscan Revival blocks (if only they would repaint these!)

a minute, a panorama of 2 centuries passed … to the free flowing muck of the Don River — where Founding-Governor Simcoe’s wife fished for fresh salmon! What could she think now of this shit-sluice?

Anal canal for 2 million congested citizens! And all the valleyside of it superways with some guilty pretence at parkland

squat huddle of houses … one, two, five, seven minutes … the Emancipated Methodist Culture of Canada! … Cdn squatters — our national smugliness — small, stolid bungalows; unlike anything in the Yewnited States — smaller, thicker, squalider. Someday we’ll clear the land of these affluent slums — in revenge for the lost White Pine we cleared first to house them….

a trickle of land … apologetic almost — extinct landscape!

redbrick belfry & white cornicings cuddle me kinetic to the land for spring — of course: the Church at Dunbarton — rural Ontario Ecclesiological — as specifically Ontario as the French-Cdn parish church is Québec … want to shout the news out to the traincar … but am silenced by the sight of she-man opposite me

glut of bungalettes again — more modern now

the Ugliest City in Ontario — easy laureate: Oshawa — cartown

Queen Anne’s Lace, Milkweed pod, St. John’s Wort … all the sun flushed earthenware of Ontario winter garden of the open fields (want to shout — “do you see these? — look — our winter garden …” but the eyes in front of me are deaf) — snow-pocked field furrows … sudden woodland shimmers bronze of wintered beechleaves

at horizon spruce palisade (sharp eyes, like those spinster gables!) alerts me to the orchard that must arrive & cedar hedge, overgrown, and hip-rooved bulky barn, stone root house, & same stone foundations to the blockhouse home red-and-white brick trimmed that completes this Chateau-fort of our HOYman. Massive, impenetrable, us! Nowhere else in our wide bloody world but Ontario … Southern Ontario: Home — damn it, and blessings

more bungalows distress the site — unworthy, unworthy — God — UNWORTHY offspring

Spiresides — Port Hope … & on the knoll behind, overlording the factories beneath its notice almost but not quite, Cdn Eton (for better and for worse) — Trinity College School — vestige of the disestablished upper Canadian Anglican Genteel State (but choose your enemy then — this … or the bungalettes! Sweet choice.)

that impasse resolves sudden with the grace notes in conscientiously squared lines between the great cubed fieldstones that amass an eternal yeoman stone Georgian home — Canadian Fabergé, these stone houses: cameos out of rich stone-sown earth to clear those near generations thrust abruptly by now to be restituted in only a retroactive nostalgia for tourists and the New Nation: as though killed for a better Resurrection. Each one still a gem — legacy rebuking the preflab culture around it … Cobourg … & now the dark.

How well I know this route — our Ontario Front, Niagara to Montreal — 500 miles of us. Ontario Foundation line, and front door to our estate of ½ a million square miles. In each town, village, still, a relative a memory, an echo of community lost under bulldozer … Cobourg — with its magniloquent Court House — New England Meeting House interior compounded with British Raj stonework exterior. Ontario!

Belleville & Trenton … where the stonework changes from fieldstone to limestoniness … from freckles to garrison grey. & the Trent waterway debouches from Georgian Bay into Lake Ontario. Where Champlain canoed (idiot adventurer!) four centuries ago to found our empire. Outside the window, in that dark, all my entrails rolling under us now —

the great slice of limestone into Kingston, that grey canyon cut by the highway down into the valley of the old capital town of the Canadas — Kingston … where I walked that afternoon in November — to have the pleasure of seeing that unsung Ontario Trinity … St.Andrew’s Presbytery — the best of Ontario stonework; Elizabeth Cottage — the loveliest Walter Scott gothic; & (aptly Anglican) Okill’s Folly — the most splendiferous Regency manor — now the residence of the Principal of Queen’s Univ … all within a few hundred yards of each other — & was as joyous as if I had walked from La Place de la Concorde to the Louvre to La Sainte Chapelle; & had wanted to take a whip to the passers-by who didn’t make obeisance to these splendours.& why not — infraction against beauty is a crime against the state!

Of course the Penitentiary … Child’s King Arthur come ironically true, with its busy turrets … & the Military College (dare one still call it “Royal” — because that too will go soon enough — we’ll rechristen it the Federal Military College … surreptitiously! — and then by Order-in-Council)

the old #2 route thence to Ganonoque’s Golden Apple — laden with stonehouses and flowers spurting out of stone roadcut canyons …. & that day, it was February 28, when my wife & I sunbathed on the front porch of the deserted summer cottage, over the Thousand Islands, after returning from Amurrica — laughing at the legend of the frozen North (the look on the mongrel dog’s face, & then his master’s, when he saw us there!) The Ontario Front … Giant sentinel Mulleins stalking the land still in dried khaki above the white field beds. I know just where the climax oak and the hickory start again, near Kingston

… Oh, out that window is all of me underfoot. Out that window is inside me, always. That can’t be taken away. Can it? & now it is dark … I can see the Macdonald-Cartier “Highway” (damn the official term “Freeway” — it sounds like some boxtop prize … or, closer to the truth, a come-on to the Yank tourists) and its load of cattle-cars … all bypassing this Front, happily for the Front, unhappily for them … because suddenly the people that made the land disappear, under the asphalt and the speedometer.

The lights of the great Du Pont factory outside Brockville — and I pray that our lakeside won’t become like that of the American lakefront or Toronto … a shambles of hotdoggeral and gimcrap, and factories:because Lake Ontario may be the American back door, but it is our front door. Our garden. Then Upper Canada Village … which warns me that our history is now under glass … or under the St. Lawrence Seaway — and that this is but a sop to our vestigial historic consciences.After all, the Village is under the supervision of the provincial tourist department! QED. Goddam it.

So — I have a nostalgia. For my land, and its people. I’m a romantic. A sin in this era of belated Canadian positivism. I cry “too little for the sensibility,” when all our intellectuals moan “too little for their minds.” Too bad! I love my land. & damn their dry eyes. Detesticulate.

The home in Iroquois, where we were received for lunch … bad 1920’s Art Nouveau with a painting of an Irish setter on velvet over the fireplace — & the look on the man’s face, he was from the West, when I told him there was no sound in our East like the prairie meadowlark … I thought he was going to kiss me … but he got me another drink instead, unasked & we loved each other across the ages. &then quarrelled over politics. But meadowlark still sang.

Oh, yes, goddam it — I love my land … & I love my people. Still.Unpardonable crime in this age of “cool culture” & commissions. Or is it simply untenable fidelity? The latter has it, of course. So, I’ll love, &go under, hating those who so conscientiously kill my love …

Abruptly I am grilled … a cold sear of bright grilling me — grilling my flesh all bloodless bright red — Hate: of a sudden hate has me, has won … carries me off bodiless in triumph. Jerk me forward to catch this rape in the act, before too late — before I dissolve before I detonate. Make notes, ward off the evil eye now. What happened? What in this Hell happened? Go back & piece the evidence together. First — Where am I? & then sink back as I see … the train had stopped, lurched my eyes back into the traincar … Back in? No! — out: train swallowed me out of my land, smothered me away from my earth … dispersed me under the grill of neonessent light, those candy floss red seats — at once compressing and atomizing me. Anteus bereft … Christ — in a hot sweat I need a pee. & heave me into the aisle, into — “Hello Hugh — you look as though you need a tonic” — I look up to find the soft laughing eyes of Jack Greg … we speed to the bar-car.Thank God it’s him … someone I can want to see. Fellow publishing house man. Feverish in delight I leech him of the blood the Rapido has just haemorrhaged out of me … squandered. & over a martini I don’t want we giggle indecorously about the Great Auk the Royal Ontario Museum has just acquired (both bird-watchers!) Positively clenching the padded seats with our buttockry …

“God knows that’s what the museum needed — a Great Auk!— the one thing all museums need, and lack … ” and I catch Greg’s lilting gawkwardness out my eye-corner in a feline complicity of joy … we both mould the seat pads in an accredited squirm of delight, harvesting their Great Auk.

Greg — “It was bought from Vassar College” — a burst of sweet gigglement again.

Me — “God — our provincial Auk came from Vassar!”

Greg — “What’s more, it was Audubon’s Great Auk.”

That is too much — we eye each other openly, as silent upon our peak … More laughter. & then the Great Auk has done its service. Has bound us as one flesh, refurbished — & can be discarded, like any dildo.I stop — suddenly aware how nearly the laughter has consummated my self-expenditure. So close to depleting my entire reserve of credulity now, of faith, of available energy. Suddenly wary — I nurse my last ounce of resistance. Look around at the bar-car. At this new world of plausible plush. I’ll have to be careful.

Joined by two of Greg’s friends … an Englit don & wife from the University of Toronto. A typical Englit combination — the wife has a beard, bass voice, & three testicles. She is a TV producer when she isn’t producing hubby. He is a falsetto — visually if not audibly; as slight as his wife is muscle-bound, no beard because no chin to carry one … I bethink me of the Great Auk again … Thank God for the Great Auk — after all, the provincial museum is part of the provincial university — it can do yeoman service therein. Audubon’s Great Auk, bought from the girls of Vassar …. It will just be sufficient.

Jabberwocky for half-an-hour, as I keep withholding me from the decor of the bar-car … And then the Englits are leaving … wife carrying hubbie off by the scruff of his neck. Mrs. doesn’t like being in a “beer hall.” Incredible — but so … But who am I to laugh — because I can’t stand the place either, although for different reasons … Try to put my finger on it now — just what is it that this decor is doing to me (because I cannot hide from me that it is doing something with me, or trying) … again — all I can say is compression, into a small space, & at the same time danger of detonation. A strange kind of ambivalent pressure. For the moment all I can do is hold me together, hold me at qui vive in face of it.

Dinner with Greg … roast beef (almost rare enough to be rare), green peas (wizened), and roast potatoes (sullen) — “The Parliamentarian’s Special” quoth the menu! God — the Cdn Nemesis … A half bottle of Beaujolais scarcely masks it . . Greg laughs — “it’s just a variation on Air Canada’s performance — airborne buses. One and the same thing. You know — this train is really a set piece … it establishes the kind of citizen it wants.” I know instantly that Greg is right …. know exactly what he is saying. “You mean the people are for the car, and not the car for the people — it is the people who have to ‘live up to the car,’ grow into it — a car made, not to suit the people, but people being remade to suit the new Canadacar.”

Greg’s right. His perception mates my own — “if these are Canadians remade to suit the traincars, the Club Car we passed through getting here, that’s the car for the people who service the People.The car for the Canadians who are remaking Canadians: the New Canadian Club for the People’s Commissars … with its red carpet, black leatherette chairs, & the pictures at one end by W. H. Bartlett, circa 1830, for the permanent English-Canadian Victorian Romantic, & at the other by one of the young French-Canadian revolutionnaires, bought with his third consecutive Canada Council grant. The Club car is the Club of our New Establishment.” Greg laughs again, at my flinch — “You’ve got it — this train is a very precise political platform … it’s the travel arm of the Third Adam.”

“I don’t understand you there.”

Greg: “… the new Cdn Man — the Uprooted Cdn; we used to be part of the First Adam … the continuous civilization of the Western World. That was our role in the New World. The Americans left us that legacy when they became the Second Adam after 1776 and all that. Well, these jokers (Greg jerked his head to embrace the diner) belong to the Cdn Grit Liberal Culture … whether they know it or not. They’ve uprooted, to rule. Their implicit claim is to be the Third Adam. But they’re officially ‘modest’ — so no one says it. They just understudy the role!”

I laugh — Greg, like me is a hopeless Tory … and I know that, like me, he voted NDP last time: Tory Radical. Our Toryism is our culture as Canadians … not our politics. I look behind Greg — there is a beaut! Cdn Male: age 46?, navy blue suiting, waistcoat (no handkerchief), unobtrusive glasses, solid … with a face of precast putty.His conversation is alas all too clear — I don’t overhear it; I’m overrun by its calm assertion: “… they don’t put enough force into their speeches, not enough guts — I ghost write for the Minister of Finance — he’s uninspired … ” I can’t believe it — can’t believe this man criticizing dullness; it’s self-contradictory. For a moment my whole personality focuses again, all the legions called home by concentrate of contempt.For an instant I am whole again — alive from toe-tit to occiput. My whole being accuses these sterilettes. And then I feel the danger of exspenditure again. Pull in my horn; I’ll need it later — in emergency.“But this train IS an emergency … it is THE emergency, integral part of it….” Greg looks surprised at this outburst. “Oh I’m just talking aloud — I’ll subside in a minute.” But Greg is looking at me with a large understanding, & I blurt on, “this train is as dangerous, as lethal in its own right as any boxcar translating political deviates to Siberia.Its tactics are more subtle — but they come to the same thing: absolute elimination, corporate destruction.” Here Greg looks mystified & I stop … & am vulnerable again, to dispersal.

After dinner, back to the bar-car … alone. I don’t know why. I guess I need a drink. A brandy. Ask mischievously for a Marc de Bourgogne.There never is any, of course. I always ask just to reassure me there isn’t any …. Only one place in English Canada where I have had a good Marc. A free seat by the window — my partner in crime discovers himself readily to me … after all, we are fellow inmates, accomplices of the Rapido (there is still something furtive about the bar-car).

“My name’s Jack Emery — second year Law, Dalhousie …. live in Willowdale … I like hockey and theatre. What do you do?” I flinch … it is the “what do you do?” that hurts. Always “what are you?”Never “who?”. In all my years in Toronto no one ever asked me “who”— except “who’s what.” People are expendable in English Canada; everyone is only a person “ex officio.” & now, of course I’m no longer anything. Except a deserter … no — better than that — because I have my purpose: I’m a demissionary. God, here is this law student, already firmly entrenched in the English Canada Heresy — ex officio humanism! It’s a form of agnosticism. But what chance has he, the betrayal has been made for him, at birth, by his community. We offer each other a drink and discuss the new cabinet changes.

Student — “Canadians think too much about themselves.”

Says it with diffident self-satisfaction — like a Christian who has just confessed his Fault, & is now fresh armed with a proud Penance. &that done he unthinking opens up a little … that is, his eyes open into mine more … I nearly fall into the unexpected aperture … but even as I totter bar-car catches me & I withdraw in time. I can’t afford to fall anywhere in these surroundings, because I have no control. Draw back, vetoed again. Stammer something — “we may think too much about ourselves, but we never feel for ourselves.” That ends the exchange. The best that can be achieved now is a slowly distending propriety — a kind of improved impasse.

He returned to his own car. And waiting to get off wrote his notes with what care he could muster, testing the muted vulgarity of the Rapido. He had to acknowledge to himself that this train did set the taste-pace for its clientele. The clientele being those, like himself, in the coach — the Permanent Commoners … Improved Commoners now, he supposed. And the administrators, the taste-makers, being those in the Club Car. The new élite. The new Canadian Priesthood. Secular Order! The enemy within. The new ultramontanism — with Ottawa as Rome. He’d have to start his own English-Canadian “Quiet Revolution” — against this new Canadian Church … he, the anti-clerical Loyalist.

The man who shared his seat returned from a later dinner. Young — perhaps 30. Black suit, but with small cuffs. Hair close cropped — but not chopped … sat silently down, careful not to intrude his eyes upon anyone. Started reading: only the chapter head was visible … “how to handle a conference.” Hugh sank in consternation: “God, the army is everywhere.” He went back to his notation … scribbling furious — “the national government has become our Tastemaker — and the Taste it is setting is disastrous indication of the New Man it is concocting by default….”

By the time he had finished they were in Montreal. Everyone was filing out. Everyone, that is, except a young man three seats forward who stood up, dressed himself with confident placidity, while conscientiously allowing the others to exit. How was it possible, Hugh pondered, to be so correctly condescending as this man was? And then — as he watched the performance, mesmerized — he knew that the youth reminded him of someone. Whom? He stared … the boy must be twenty-five, hair kempt by comb (not brushed, of course), grey coat unobtrusively tweeded, suit implacably pressed. Standing with his body held carefully at arm’s length … from what? Hugh didn’t know. Not yet. The man was obviously a model, for himself — but of what? Bells rang in his ears … the youth put on his white scarf, his gloves. And then it all came to Hugh with a rush — the face from the picture on the wall of the United Church Sunday School near Collingwood, the skiing village … that was it: this youth was a Blondbeast for Jesus … the completed Canadian Methodist! Roundhead with Honours! A variation of the man who had just shared his seat … and who had looked like (Hugh realized it now), those ads for Canadian Army recruitment: those earnest faces — firm (not forceful), clean cut (but not chiselled), accessible (but not frank). Hugh watched amazed at this performance. Surely there was a flaw somewhere. No — there was none. The young man helped a lady with her bag, carefully withdrawing from her extracted thanks. It was painfully embarrassing to Hugh. God — the kid is going through all the right motions … like someone from Whitby Ladies’ College — the complete Methodist Husband for the completed Methodist Lady. Everything was right about it. For a moment he thought that the only solution was prayer — real prayer. And then as the All-Canadian Good Boy carried himself firmly down the aisle (no organ playing — none could: the Kid would see to that!) Hugh felt an insufferable urge that he didn’t define … he couldn’t; he was in situ now — Montreal.

The station clamoured around him — he gazed into the noise, displaced suddenly … so different from Toronto, from the great thermal Roman Imperial Bath of Toronto Union … wherein no one talked — except the Highclass Hicks of Listen Hear on the billboardings … who yapped at the Permanent Commoners convening to their traintimes. These Hep Hicks — “everyone’s chum,” the pert alert Torontonian…. Well, here in Montreal, it was decisively and disconcertingly different. The station engulfed him now, and he weaved his way through the crowd — “the best-dressed peasants in the world,” he thought, as he warped and woofed his way to his baggage. And the best-behaved. And then he realized that while they were a crowd incoherent around him, engulfing him, yet they were no more than in comparable space in the Toronto station. But the whole experience was utterly different. He gazed around the station — it looked rather like a well-organized sequence of American wayside kiosks. There was a percentage of that, and a percentage of shopping centre, and a percentage of “better buy British” to it all. Around the ceiling, an immensely squalid frieze depicting Canada, apparently, because underneath it the words of “O Canada.” “Better buy Canadian … better belong to Canadian Club” — that was the subterranean message … “because Big Brother is encouraging you.” There was that — and the seethe of sound that was a seethe of people. Hugh was too tired to understand all of it now. He caught a cab to a three-buck tourist home near the station … run by a French couple from Provence — and battened himself down for the night. And as he locked his door and undressed the fissure opened him again and he realized where he was … remembered again, in deeper measure, why he was there. The train ride had in part veiled it all for him even as it exposed him to it. Had veiled his novel, just as his novel seemed to veil his real purpose. A process of interlocking amnesias. Well, now he couldn’t forget. Because he was within striking distance of La Place d’Armes. His rapid breathing as he lay abed informed him that his heart was racing. He reached into his brief case for his book — Boswell’s Life of Johnson … somehow he had never read it through. Ridiculous gap … so he had brought it along. And his hand fell on his Brief Biography. Why had he brought that? His curriculum vitae? What in truth was he doing in Montreal?

Brief Biography

Hugh Robert Anderson … born 1931 … Toronto … second son of Colonel and Mrs. … 117 Crescent Drive … Upper Canada College, Trinity College in the University of Toronto (History and Modern Languages — French and Russian), St. John’s College, Oxon., P.P.E. (of course!) … Four years with Montreal CBC special features (documentary), six years with the House of Johnson,Toronto, in charge of publications on Canadian history and literature … lecturer at the University of Toronto … author of Essays in Canadian Taste: a Study in the Relationship of the Arts and Politics from 1812 to 1914. Hobbies: bird-watching, Canadiana, conversation …

It was an impeccable cursus honorum canadensis. Completed by a wife, (Mary Joan, only daughter of Professor and Mrs. J. A. Robins) and two children, suitably divided between the sexes. In five years he would have been the effective head of the House of Johnson, Canada’s most respected and progressive publishing house. He was perfectly bilingual (four years in Montreal had seen to that) and thoroughly respected by French and English Canadian editors and authors.

Hugh eyed the biography quizzically, incredulously … almost as though he were hiring this man. He was suspicious: it was too good to be decent. Something was wrong somewhere. Then he remembered — it was him. Hugh Robert Anderson. He closed his eyes — the sweat stung in them. The thunder was his heart. It must all be a bad dream…. He farted, and the bland musk of debilitated Parliamentarian’s beef (almost rare) assured him that it was for real. He thought of the Rapido-ride down. It had been at once curiously flat, yet riddled with pitfalls. Now he was in Montreal. And he was there on schedule. He looked at his watch … after midnight … so it was already December 1 — the first day of his Adventure. That was as planned.

It was indeed for real. It was he, Hugh Robert Anderson who had been fired two months ago — conscientiously fired. It was he who had, quite casually, at lunch one day, finally ensured his firing. Lunch with the President of the House of Johnson … Richard Johnson, C.M.G., F.R.S.C., LL.D., Q.C. (he had the order wrong — but he could never remember this mutation from the Canadian Debrett’s listing really — it was so much easier to have a title, and be done with it — and not this subterranean alphabetic dignitarianism.) The lunch was at the York Club … ensconced in all those magnificent Italian Renaissance Revival Victorian carvings. Johnson was asking pointedly, “Why do you think we missed that contract with the university, Anderson?” And precisely between a bite of Camembert, that was still, alas chalky (the York Club should have known better — and for a horrible moment Anderson had also wondered if the carvings on the wall were merely plaster) and the happifying recollection that only the York Club served a Marc de Bourgogne, Hugh replied quite spontaneously, almost affectionately, “Because you’ve got no balls, Sir.” It had been so incredibly simple. He himself had heard this reply with interest and incredulity. Then, for one ghastly instant, Hugh thought that he had been wrong, that Johnson DID have balls, at least ONE ball … and that he was going to stab him, Hugh Anderson, with his steak knife. Hugh even hoped that this was so. It would have restored his faith. He waited, expectant virgin, for the thrust — and once again he even believed that the carvings on the walls were indeed wood. And then he was deceived. The cheese, the carvings, and Johnson, were all putty. The contortion of Johnson’s face that Hugh had taken for genuine militant rage (Johnson had been a brigadier), was merely that kind of tumescence that precedes tears. And the president’s only achievement had been to control his tears. Hugh looked up after a moment. Everything was in order again. The whole incident had simply blown over. But Johnson’s eyes had gone that bald greyblue … eyes from which one bounced with the false spring of tired broadloom … eyes that looked neither out nor in — the look of a defeated man who still wields power. A month later Hugh was caught out on a technicality. He received a letter from the president inviting his resignation. He didn’t even bother replying.

It was rather sad. He even liked Johnson. But once he was sure that Johnson had no balls, and was inordinately resentful of anyone who did, then the die was cast….

A truck squealed against the curb outside his window. Hugh’s flesh shrieked. He was outrageously alive now. Every pore audited the street sounds. He knew that he would get no sleep. What was worse a fever had set in … all the old signs of strain in him — fatigue, fever, sore throat. He dosed himself with cold pills, aspirins, and settled down to sleep on his fakir’s bed of goosepimples. He was still hopeful that he could accomplish his assignment … could place the Place d’Armes and thus his novel. If he could just rest a bit, shake off this damned flu bug.