When a great political movement takes place, it is not consciously led nor organised: the unconscious self in mankind breaks its way through the problem as an elephant breaks through a jungle. Finally … the whole political business goes to smash; and presently we have Ruins of Empires, New Zealanders sitting on a broken arch of London Bridge, and so forth. To that recurrent catastrophe we shall certainly come again unless we can have a Democracy of Supermen …
Preface to Man and Superman by G.B. Shaw
They studied film history with Josef Skvorecky. The knights of the Klan galloped to attend the Birth of a Nation, prescient battalions of workers in striped uniforms marched through the distorted streets of Metropolis, the little aeroplane circled through towering cities of cloud bearing the beloved leader to the ecstatic crowd. The students in lecture room 101 heard for the first time the superman’s rhetoric of blood and brotherhood translated from the usual stiff-legged comedy routine to a deadly poetic.
The vast army carries shovels as soon they will bear guns, they plant trees as soon they will plant bones. The mass is reduced to the individual.
Where are you from? calls the comic, the good joker.
From Kaiserstuhl! replies one honest worker.
From the Saar! replies another.
One people! One leader! One Reich! And it is so wonderfully filmed, so queasily seductive.
A pram bounces down the steps, a mother screams silently at the loss of her son, an army fights upon a frozen river.
Skvorecky was newly arrived from Prague and the winter that had followed that fine spring. He was puzzled at the students’ lack of understanding.
‘How can you not see that this is political allegory, not a recreation of history?’ he asked. Ivan the Terrible? The tyrant? The despot? Stalin? The children of a generous sample of western democracies nodded and noted it down. Ah yes, of course. Now that you point it out … Skvorecky stood at the lectern, tears in his eyes at their comfortable ignorance of irony.
Shakespeare was Clifford Leach, a brilliant and patient man, blessed with the gift of turning a student’s fumbling question into the subject for informative discourse. And Robertson Davies was Shaw. His tutorial style was the provocative debate: no essays, no end-of-year exam, just talk around a table. Students had been demanding an end to the old methods and old structures — so let them try the new.
A democracy of supermen, he muses. His voice is rich, his brows most definitely beetle. He regards the students seated around the table over half-frame glasses. ‘Do we agree?’ he says. ‘And if not, what would we propose as the ideal form of government?’
The students doodle knotted lines on their notepads. They cross-hatch all the capital letters in SUPERMAN. Assessment for the course is, however, based on the quality of their reply so finally they are all flushed out onto open ground.
‘Some form of socialism, I suppose,’ says Kate when it is her turn.
‘Indeed?’ says Robertson Davies. ‘And what might we mean by the term socialism?’ He gives the word a hollow beat. Kate feels herself step out onto an icy street with her back to the enemy.
‘Some form of government that guarantees equality of opportunity for all,’ she says. She can hear her voice rise at the end in the New Zealand fashion, signifying some lack of conviction, but it had worked for her, this socialism, so why should it not work for the world?
‘For the purpose of engendering universal happiness, I presume?’ says Robertson Davies. He has put a stone in the snowball. Kate can feel it coming. No matter how carefully she treads, the ball will land between her shoulderblades.
‘Well, that’s a lot to ask of any sys—’ she begins, but Davies is speaking. ‘A lifetime of happiness!’ he declaims, as if centre stage at the Old Vic. ‘No man could bear it! It would be hell on earth!’ Kate looks around the table. None of the other students will meet her eye. She is on her own, out here on slippery ground. She makes one final desperate appeal.
‘I just think there might, you know, be a chance that people might be happier, you know, that there’d be more kind of general happiness under a socialist government than any, you know, other kind of universal government I can think of, if you see what I mean …’ She has lost them. Lost the other students, not to mention the chance of an A — in this course anyway. She is rapidly sliding toward a B, maybe a C. Robertson Davies takes out a pocket watch and turns the little knob on its top rapidly back and forth. What socialism will look like when it takes its final form, he says, we do not know and cannot say.Do you know who said that, Mrs Dobbs?’ Kate shakes her head. He holds the watch to his ear to check its steady reliable tick. ‘Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov,’ he says. ‘Whom history remembers as Lenin.’
The ball lands. Ice slides down her collar.
As played by Robertson Davies, Shaw was no longer the iconoclast who had smashed the hole through which she had escaped religion. He boomed at her. He corrected her. He was becoming irritating.
He had learned to take tobacco: and when he was assur’d he would die, he desir’d they would give him a pipe in his mouth, ready lighted; that they did: and the executioner came, and first cut off his members, and threw them into the fire; and after that with an ill-favoured knife, they cut off his ears and his nose, and burn’d them; he still smoked on, as if nothing had touch’d him; then they hack’d off one of his arms, and still he bore up, and held his pipe; but at the cutting off the other arm, his head sunk, and his pipe dropped and he gave up the ghost.
Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
‘Aphra Behn,’ said her MA supervisor. His wife wrote a regular column for the Globe and Mail on the history of food: one part history, the other good old-fashioned gourmandise. Tonight, for dinner, they were making pasta. It was taking hours. First the special gluten flour, then the eggs, then the repeated stretching of the dough through a silver mangle they had bought in Florence on their last visit to Italy. He poured Kate another glass of some aperitif that tasted of artichokes and removed all the plaque from her teeth. It was also making her rather drunk. ‘Seventeenth century,’ he said. Strands of tagliatelle emerged from the machine. They were all rather drunk, in fact. Kate hung some tagliatelli across the backs of a couple of kitchen chairs. The room had become a cat’s cradle of pasta. They were becoming trapped in a web of pasta. For afters they were going to have a medieval cheesecake, flavoured with elderflowers. ‘I think you’ll like her,’ said her supervisor. ‘“The Admirable Astrea”. She’s quirky. Look her up. She’s in the library.’
And there she was, the next morning, occupying half a metre of shelving in a distant corner of the stacks. Kate was feeling slightly bilious from pasta and cheesecake at 1am, but Aphra Behn did indeed look quirky and not in the least astral. She was rather solid, with a determined chin. The only biography was brief and filled with surmise. She might have gone to Surinam, she might have spied for the English in Holland. She had certainly written a lot of plays and short stories featuring libidinous nuns and dashing rogues. Kate had never heard of her before but she liked the look of that dimpled chin. Here was someone who had not composed elegant verse at the escritoire of some country estate, but scribbled hard for her life in the scrum that was Grub Street.
Kate chose Oroonoko for her essay topic — an account, supposedly an eye-witness account of an uprising by slaves in South America. There was a good deal of feathered prose about it, but forcing it forward was an unflinching documentary sense of outrage. A woman with a chin like that could very likely have travelled so far, and returned to write for the first time of the savagery that underpinned the Palladian elegance of the country estates and the enlightened debate within the city. Her presence there in the far corner of the stacks hinted at a different version of literary history than the one Kate had encountered so far. She was the tiny bayonet tip that hinted at a forgotten, buried army.
I am not so credulous as to believe that it has been coincidence that has been responsible for the disappearance of more than one hundred good women novelists before Jane Austen in favour of five men (Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett and Sterne) … In the face of the verdict of the men of letters it is my contention that women were the mothers of the novel and that any other version of its origin is but a myth of male creation.
Mothers of the Novel by Dale Spender
BA. MA. PhD.
Why not collect the set?
It was all part of that great gift, The Opportunity. And when it came to choosing a topic for a PhD, Eliot was the man. He was big: a rock-like eminence on the literary landscape. He was a set text and books about him occupied several shelves at the centre of the stacks. He was serious. He had most likely been born in a three-piece suit and suckled uttering Greek tags.
Prologue. Doris and Dusty.
Parodos. Arrival of Wauchope, Horsfall, Klipstein, Krumpacker.
Kate began work on a manuscript outline for one of Eliot’s unfinished works, Sweeney Agonistes. The outline was rough: a couple of sheets of notepaper with pencil scribblings. She liked that, just as she preferred sketches, or the cartoons for paintings. The red outlines that lay underneath all those layers of laquer and polish were so much more satisfying than perfection and completion. She liked the jagged hint of the writer at work, the second thoughts, the scratchings out. It was like stripping away the wallpaper surface and finding a rougher, more expressive pattern underneath.
Agon. Sweeney monologues.
Parabasis. Chorus ‘The Terrors of the Night’
For two years Kate examined these scraps of notepaper, just as others around her were examining Icelandic love poems, or the political speeches of MacKenzie King or a saint’s life as it was recorded by various medieval monks.
Scene. Entrance of Mrs Porter. Debate with Sweeney. Murder of Mrs Porter.
She loved the jazzy coalescence of the dialogue Eliot had completed before a sudden conversion to High Anglicanism rendered him certain and boring. She loved the way the play scooped up contemporary anthropological speculation about the rituals that lay at the roots of drama: the ancient death rituals and the celebration of human frailty that lay behind tragedy, all the way through from Antigone to Bonnie and Clyde. Or the fertility rituals that lay perhaps behind the romantic preoccupations of comedy. She loved the daffy romanticism of Cornford and Frazer and the other anthropologists and their visions of orgiastic coupling in Arcadian woods, the sacrifice, the crack of the symbolic egg, the imagery of rebirth, the sacred marriage of the goddess and the god newly restored to youth and vigour. She loved the passion with which people adopted such visions, as the twentieth century came thundering down on them with nerve gas and aerial bombardment. She loved the fact that these scraps of play had been written just at that point when the most primitive instincts of aggression ran slap bang into sophisticated chemical and mechanical technologies in that great culling from the flock of all those young men who were most energetic, most idealistic, most likely to smash down the palace gates and cause trouble. She loved the way these scraps of notepaper bobbed about on the Zeitgeist like a little paper boat.
I knew a man once did a girl in …
But stripping away the wallpaper also exposed patches of damp rot. The same man who was capable of this sour, syncopated brilliance was also capable of sniggering doggerel of the King Bollo and his big black queen/With a bum as big as a soup tureen variety. It was like coming upon the great man stripped of his suit and discovering him in only his underpants and his underpants were saggy with loose grey elastic and had holes in the crutch. She examined his photograph in the rotund biographies and saw him standing next to that pale wraith of a wife who appeared to float a foot or two from the ground and who emanated such pure misery that it was difficult not to suspect him of some private failing. But T. S. Eliot was her topic and she could not afford at that moment to doubt him. She had to persist in adding another stone to his sizeable cenotaph.
Germaine: My God! My God! My stamps! There’s nothing left! Nothing! Nothing! My beautiful new home! My lovely furniture! Gone! My stamps! My stamps!
Germaine falls to her knees beside the chair picking up the stamps remaining. We hear all the others outside singing O Canada. A rain of stamps falls slowly from the ceiling.
Les Belles Soeurs by Michel Tremblay
They travelled down to Washington for Nixon’s anti-inaugural, hurtling down the freeway jammed in the back of a rattling Chevrolet driven by Kevin, who was planning to volunteer at one of the paramedic stations. The minute they crossed the border they were in a familiar movie. The radio played ‘American Pie’ and they sang along as the Chevrolet passed through the scenery that had accompanied movies as long as they could remember. Sky-scraper cities, black neighbourhoods, farms with post-and-rail fencing and white barns.
The White House was a few blocks from the flat where they were staying with one of Kevin’s friends. They marched up Pennsylvania Avenue, and the chanting belonged here, truly, for the first time. They were taking part in the original rather than its distant imitation. That night, Kate got up from their mattress on the floor of the friend’s flat. The room was high-ceilinged and decorated with exquisite Georgian plasterwork abruptly interrupted by flimsy subdividing walls. The windows were generously proportioned to let in rational amounts of light. The air beyond the panes crawled with sirens, strange cries, a sudden burst of furious shouting like the barking of wild dogs. Elegant Doric columns ornamented its porch, but the vestibule stank of piss and when Kate switched on the light in the kitchen the walls shimmered with the nutbrown bodies of cockroaches scrambling for cover. It was curiously beautiful, this shining wall, the whisper of dry carapaces.
In the morning the bathroom on the landing was locked from the inside.
‘Shit!’ said Kevin’s friend. ‘Another of those fuckers.’ He hammered at the door. There was some vague movement behind the polished oak, like something dragging itself with infinite pain across the floor.
‘Get the fuck outta my bathroom!’ yelled the friend.
Silence.
‘Get the fuck out, shithead, or I’m calling the cops this time, you hear?’
There was a muttering from behind the door, a fumbling at the latch. The door opened slowly. A young man knelt on the floor, rubber still twisted around his arm, his eyes rolled back to the white.
‘’S cool,’ he muttered, dragging himself up the icy face of the bath. ‘’S cool.’
He swayed in the doorway, like a sick cat whose fur was matted and its tail filthy and its eye dropped from one socket, then stumbled somehow back down the stairwell holding tight to the sinuous curves of the maplewood banister.
‘You guys watch your feet when you take a shower,’ said the friend, making a quick examination of the bathroom. ‘Could be needles or sump’n. I’ll make some coffee.’
And that, too, felt familiar, like something they had seen on TV.
Canada was not a movie, though it was fast becoming one. Kate sat in theatres among audiences seeing rural Quebec on screen for the first time, or the wide empty streets of Sudbury. In the dark the audience squirmed with sweaty embarrassment, sensing the most minute inauthenticity, as actors struggled with the business of being themselves rather than theatrical Regency swells or Southern belles. In the dark the audience watched their country become something more than a momentary reference to meet legal distribution requirements. The coffin was carried across a snowy field they recognised from somewhere north of Montreal, the uncle was like their uncle and the recognition was both painful and amusing, like the faint hysteria at a family funeral when your very own Uncle Bill or Auntie Eileen, having consumed one drink too many, insists upon grabbing the microphone and standing centre stage to sing ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’.
I hadn’t reminded my father of the game. I was afraid he’d show up and embarrass me. Twelve years old, and ashamed of my old man. Ashamed of his dialect, his dirty overalls, his bruised fingers with the fingernails lined with dirt, his teeth yellow as old ivory. Most of all, his lunch-pail, that symbol of the working man …
Of the Fields Lately by David French
Each week Kate wrote reviews for the student newspaper. Two plays a week, from bleacher seats erected in the echoing machine rooms of former factories, from warehouses and railway sheds and rooms above electrical stores off Yonge Street. Plays in English and plays with the vinegar tang of joual. Plays based on interviews with Ontario farmers or nineteenth-century feuds between Irish settlers, plays featuring Quebecois transvestites and Newfoundlanders, plays satirising Canadian government policy, or improvised comedy, or versions of that play that was being written in various settings and various languages everywhere in that decade: the play about the working-class boy or girl who leaves home and goes to the city to take up their Opportunity, and the guilt and love and anger that erupt when the boy or girl returns.
The writers reached for big bleak moments. Their sets had taps that squirted real water in lovingly recreated rural kitchens, or they opted for symbolic simplicity: eight panels of perspex to create the walls of offices or hotel rooms, a row of lanterns marking the road lines of Ontario. Buying a ticket to these productions came with no guarantee. No foreknowledge of the text, no preconceptions. Audiences cringed or walked out loudly before half-time announcing, ‘Pack of bushers!’ before slamming the door. But when the actors and the playwrights and the technical crew and the designer got it right, the audience laughed — that startled laughter at something so familiar that it had not previously been considered worthy of comment. They went quiet and still and attentive, drawn into the wonderful intimate ritual of let’s pretend.
Kate sat scribbling notes in the half-dark while a young man wearing nothing but a green ribbon around his penis sang soulfully to thirty people assembled in a former soap factory on a cold winter night. The seats were wooden benches and they were hard and a distinct draught cut the backs of her knees and she loved the risk they were all taking: of embarrassment, boredom, failure, probably pneumonia. All on the chance of witnessing something new and true. The naval ensign had been replaced by a maple leaf but it still felt like something glued on, as if the country were still getting its tongue around a new anthem. Expo had closed and its buildings stood empty: flimsy futuristic domes and towers of perspex and ply waiting to be filled with something.
There were novels, too, where she found the places she had glimpsed from the back seat of a car on the way to Georgian Bay or from the train. The books took her around to the back door and let her into the place where passions seethed around scrubbed kitchen tables and that faint sour smell was the smell of a dishrag in a bucket. These places were recognisably the places her friends here had left when they rode away on the bus from the shores of Lake Huron or some rail stop out west toward the towers of the shining city. They reminded her of the place she had left herself. The post office might not be built of stone, but it occupied the same prominence on the main street; the general store might not be the Farmers’ Co-op, but it had the same socks and racks of shirts. And the people were familiar: the couple glimpsed parked up in a car, ‘though they had no business to be there’, the man who told jokes but said nothing of what he thought or felt, the chorus of neighbours who watched and gossipped. Their speech had a different rhythm, but in the frugal silence between the words Kate detected an echo of home.
She began to exist in two worlds: one was the customary literary world, the common room inhabited by Shaw, Eliot, Cornford and a pachyderm tribe of important men. The other was the Canadian world of small rural towns, bare yards and high-ceilinged kitchens. People laughed in that world in a way that no one ever laughed in the common room. The grand men were clever, but their room was classical and cold. The Canadian world was composed of scraps of speech woven like the scraps that had been once an uncle’s good trousers or a child’s frock into a serviceable rag-rug, something to be placed before the fire, somewhere you could stand and warm your feet. It was waxed linoleum, scrubbed oil cloth. Kate opened the door to this room and took a good look around.