I’VE DELIBERATELY written this book with the flimsiest of outlines, and without any prearranged conclusions I was consciously or even unconsciously massaging the narrative to lead to. I didn’t even hold a firm opinion about whether the lives of my two protagonists, Hartley Fawcett and Rita Surry, have anything profound to impart. So what did I find that is firm enough to put in a postscript as a conclusion?
Let me speak carefully: Hartley Fawcett and Rita Surry were fulfilled human beings who rarely worried about whether or not they were happy. They were engaged, busy, committed to near- and long-term goals that stayed pretty close to ground level. They were occasionally miserable, sure. But much more often they were cheerful and contented with their lot, sometimes unaccountably so in my mind. While they were alive, I had no idea how determined they’d been to do and get what they wanted, and how hard they’d worked at it. But for all that, they did not lead lives of epic proportion.
So let me argue their virtue in a slightly different context. We now live in a society—or rather, in loosely connected series of social, political, and cultural enclaves—atomized and reatomized by the unsleeping intrusions of mass media. Because we are so manipulated and our attentions so chronically interrupted, we are obsessed with making and maintaining connections; with social and economic networking; with accumulating and banking self-esteem, which we see as an acceptable substitute for human solidarities of different sorts. To this end we attempt to retribalize everything from the genome to our selection of tennis gear so we can get a leg-up on the next gang, and feel less lonely at the constant decay of our sense of connectedness with other people and things. We seek connections with our genetic ancestors, our ethnic forebears, we want intimacy with those who generations ago or last week were victimized along with us, and sometimes we seek amnesty from those we or our forebears have oppressed. Sometimes we and they, oppressed and oppressor, are one and the same.
Hartley Fawcett and Rita Surry experienced few of these things, but they had more singular ambitions for themselves than most people today. They undertook to build an entirely new world, and sometimes deliberately and sometimes indifferently, they turned their backs on everything that for us is regarded as the socially and psychologically acceptable means to achieve happiness.
That world they built, whether in the physical landscapes around me or inside my head—was stable and utterly safe. There was just the six of us, my parents, brother, my sisters, and me. In the summers, my maternal grandmother, Jessie, temporarily enlarged the family, and sometimes enriched it. The only other person I thought of as family was a man I knew only as “Uncle Willy,” who wasn’t a blood relative. He was a retired military officer who’d bonded with my parents while he was stationed in Prince George during the Second World War and afterward spent several weeks with us every second or third year until he died in the early 1960s.
There was a remarkable elasticity to this family that enabled it to weather the assaults of time and contingency. It could expand and contract without anxiety and without losing its integrity. Aunts, uncles, and cousins appeared from time to time, and were fed and bunked—then disappeared again without anyone quite thinking of them as family. Other people appeared and were accommodated, most of them young people—often immigrants—that my parents took under their wing. Some would become regulars for a year or two, others were more permanent. One family—the Tapps, an English mother and two sons who somehow landed up in the B.C. north after the war—had Christmas dinner with us for more than 20 years without anyone noticing the taps-and-faucets gag built into the family names. But really, it was the six of us that mattered, and I never looked beyond us, never felt the slightest sense of deprivation or isolation because I was not part of an extended family or ethnic group or even a religious denomination.
I think that the geographical—and cultural—isolation my parents deliberately chose was a powerful influence on their happiness, counterintuitive as that may seem. The distance they kept prevented the family demons from infecting their lives, and that of their children. It was their bulwark against the chaos of my mother’s family and the entropy my father’s family represented to him.
But there was more to it than intangibles. The distances kept away the mess, both in practical and psychological ways: the world where the generations before them and their own had butchered one another in wars and in ideological and racial pogroms and decades-long riots of authority. Because it was a frontier they lived on, hard work and enterprise could defend them against capricious men in corporate offices and stock markets. For a while, this was true.
My parents’ plan was a risky one: all of it was up to Rita Surry and Hartley Fawcett, and it was on them if they failed.
These days, the nuclear family gets a lot of criticism for its tyrannies, which are much if not always well documented. But given their family pathologies, the nuclear family is what Hartley Fawcett and Rita Surry chose to build with, and on balance, it worked. They tripped up on some day-to-daily stuff, and their one-to-one relationship was often miserable, but they made their family the core of their happiness, and it worked.
At the best of times, daily life tends to divorce people from the pursuit of happiness, and they weren’t immune to that. But it’s exactly here that the wilfulness of their overarching plan served them best. For most people of their generation, daily life was spent at wage labour tasks that held little interest beyond the paycheque, or in menial household stuff designed to keep boredom at bay. Those same things remain a factor today, although television and the half-assed interactivity of the Internet tend to keep us too addled with entertainment to notice that we’ve lost control of our lives in ways previous generations didn’t have to worry about.
The kind of rights-based individuality that emerged after the Second World War is a factor, too. It has offered the individual vastly enhanced self-esteem, but it has tended to disable tangible connections with the world and with the participatory collectivities that can make daily life meaningful—the state, the city, the apparatuses that educate children, the neighbourhood, even the family. The largely heedless pursuit of self-esteem tends to bond us instead to abstractions like ethnicity, politicized religion, social democracy, capitalism, and a host of other partisanships which mostly find expression in excluding others from our gang. More than it ever was, daily life is the arena of the irritable, the disagreeable, and the venal: all the things there are no excuses for, and none of which contribute a thing to the pursuit of happiness, individual or collective.
That Hartley Fawcett and Rita Surry were happier than most of their generation is a subjective judgment for which I’ve provided, I hope, adequate evidence.
More important, I think, is that they grew old in a world that had begun with them, and they died believing that there was a decent probability that what they had built would continue beyond them: so far, so good. At the very least, the baseless, groundless happiness I experience at being in the world is a proof that the world they created does travel on, immune to the miseries of daily life and the mess we’ve made of things. Of all the gifts they conferred on me, this barely tangible one often seems the most valuable. I have no guarantee that things will be alright, but it is built into my character that life is worth working at, even when it contradicts most of what I’ve learned.
Here in the twenty-first century, airborne acids eat the headstones and the monuments of what and who is dead and past, slowly erasing the carved names, including, eventually, those of my parents. That’s mortality: the way things are.
My mother, uninterested in monuments, wanted her ashes scattered over the hillside where she’d picked wild asparagus; no stone, no wasted plot of ground for her. If anyone wants to visit her now, they’ll have to go out in the world, to exactly the spot—and the kind of spot—where she liked the world best. My father, always lonely for company (or an audience to whom he could sell something), asked for a niche and a plaque in a mausoleum, albeit one with a view for the days when no one comes to visit and he’s bored with the silence of his neighbours. Few will visit his out-of-the-way spot, but no matter. He’ll live on inside the heads of everyone in his family for generations to come, even when they’ve ceased to know his name. I watched my daughter playing cards at the dining room table recently, and saw his hand move hers, and caught his sly grin on her face. Earlier that same evening, I’d found her humming as she dried the dinner dishes, and it was my mother’s voice I heard.
I think that’s all we get—that and the epic labour of living, and the laughter, and the mess. It’s enough.