Winter in Montreal in 1927. Student life at McGill University had depressed me to a point where I could not go on. I was learning nothing; the curriculum was designed at best to equip me as a professor destined to lead others in due course on the same round of lifeless facts. I was only seventeen and had the sense of throwing my time and my youth into a void.
When I told my father I refused to attend college any longer (I was then in my third year) and had decided to write poetry, he said I was a great disappointment to him and my mother, I was ungrateful and lacking in manliness and could go to work; he would allow me to keep on living at home. After a few minutes’ thought I decided to leave both home and college at the same time and live with my friend Graeme Taylor.
My real problem was a combination of precocity, impatience, and inability to take in anything more from books. I already existed in a climate of restlessness, scorn, frequent ecstasy and occasional despair. Graeme had however combined a taste for literature with an ambition to make money out of it. For the rest, we were united by comradeship, a despisal of everything represented by the business world, the city of Montreal and the Canadian scene, and a desire to get away. God knows what would have happened to us if we had relaxed our hold on these simple principles.
We took a run-down apartment on Metcalfe Street and found work in the Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada. In our spare time I threw myself into composing surrealist poetry, and he continued planning the great Canadian novel. But it was on a dream of Paris that our ideas were vaguely but powerfully concentrated. This kept us going; without it we could not have faced the daily routine of rising at eight o’clock every morning, bathing in a small gritty bathtub, dressing without any attention to the niceties and stumbling down the icy street to an honest day’s work.
Our office pay was barely enough to live on. But the situation was soon improved by two of our college friends, Pratt and Petersham. Hearing we had taken an apartment downtown, one evening they put on their dark tubular overcoats and bowler hats and visited us with a proposal to pay ten dollars a month each for the privilege of taking women there one night a week, from nine o’clock till one in the morning.
The extra twenty dollars was a help, and it was no hardship keeping away from the apartment until late on Wednesday and Saturday nights; moreover, it soon turned out that Petersham was not using the place (his night was Wednesday), though he continued to pay. But a few more friends heard of the arrangement and applied for the same facilities. The apartment was warm, quiet, safe, fairly clean and had a private street-entrance. We were soon taking in seventy dollars a month, which covered the rent.
The difficulty was that I now had to compose my poetry in the early hours of the morning, and arrived at the Sun Life only half awake. By ten o’clock I would finish my morning work of posting up the five-and ten-cent weekly premiums for burial insurance paid by Chinese labourers in Hong Kong, and then go and bed down in one of the toilets in the basement, where I made myself a little nest in my ankle-length raccoon coat. After two months I was summoned to the departmental head’s office and told to ask for more work as soon as I had finished my allotment, and, if there was none, at least to keep sitting decently at my desk. The prospect was so depressing that I gave my two weeks’ notice to the personnel department the same day.
We were thus once more in financial straits, and to make peace with my father I called on him at the family mansion a week later. He suggested I return home, go back to McGill, and by hard work make up the few months I had lost.
Once again I had to refuse. I had had enough of university life. I was more than ever determined to be a poet.
I had known for a long time what a disappointment I was to my parents. My father had always wanted me to take up law: he pictured me in the robes of a judge. My mother, for her part, would have liked me to enter the church: she saw me as a bishop. These images, and all that went with them, now struck me with such renewed horror that I was able to stand my ground, which I began to realize was stronger than I had thought.
‘I hear you and your friend Taylor are running something very close to a house of ill-fame on Metcalfe Street,’ said my father. ‘Colonel Bird-lime, of McGill’s Department of Extramural Affairs, tells me it’s common knowledge. I hear the same thing at the club.’
‘Well, we take in a little rent.’
He was silent for a minute, stroking his great cleft chin. ‘You’re still set on a literary career?’
When I said I was, he offered me an allowance of a hundred dollars a month if I would live more discreetly.
It was more than I had expected. The way to Paris was now open. But it was a harder matter to persuade Graeme to come along. He said he didn’t want to sponge on me.
‘No, but I’ve been thinking of your cousin Jane’s husband in the Canadian National Railways. He might get us a free ride to Europe on a Merchant Marine freighter. That’s as good as three hundred dollars.’
‘True.’
For the next two weeks we waited, sitting quietly in grimy downtown offices while the strings were being pulled—slinking from one government building to another, adroitly passed from one civil-service hand to another. At last Graeme received a note: we were to sail in three days’ time on the Canadian Traveller, a government cargo-boat of 950 tons leaving Saint John, New Brunswick, on the 4th of February and taking us to Antwerp. Graeme was given a free passage and I was to pay a nominal fare of fifty dollars.
Graeme had a supplemental examination for his Bachelor of Arts degree to take at McGill the next day. But our news was so apocalyptic that he went into Scott’s on St Catherine Street and bought himself a wide-brimmed black Bohemian hat.
Paris! We made it after all. This is where I’m writing now, only three months after leaving Montreal. It’s a spring night in the rue Broca, and there’s moonlight on the unfinished abandoned statues in the yard outside this big studio we moved into last week. The smell of some flowering shrub is coming in through the long window, and there’s a bird singing somewhere in the walled garden of the Ursuline Convent at the corner of the rue de la Santé. Down here in the Glaciére quarter we’re not so close to Montparnasse as we were, but it’s better than that hot little room in the Hôtel Jules-César around the corner from the Dôme and the Dingo. And so quiet. For the first time I can feel the movement of my thoughts, the pulse of my youth—as you’re supposed to at eighteen. I’m lucky to be here, in this city that I love more and more every day. What do I mean to do with my youth, my life? Why, I’m going to enjoy myself.
Here, as Eliot’s girl says, you feel free. This is something Paris does to one, God knows how. I mean to write, of course—but not too much. Literature isn’t so important as life, and I’ve made my choice. I’ve already abandoned surrealism and decided to write my memoirs—not a journal but a record of my life written in chapters, like one of George Moore’s books—to impose a narrative form on everything that has happened since we left Montreal last February ...
It’s getting late now, the bird in the convent has stopped singing, and there is a faint rosy-grey tinge in the sky. Soon
Apollo’s upward rising fire
Will make each eastern cloud a silvery pyre.
Graeme, in his sky-blue pyjamas, lies humped up in bed, his face stares at me, crushed sideways in the pillow. He is sleepy, and has been waiting for me to turn off the gas and go to bed. As I begin writing again, his voice startles me in the silence.
‘I just saw you in a dream—as an old man with whiskers, writing...’
We spent our last night in Montreal going from one bar to another and ended up in a night-club called The Venetian Gardens, where I saw Pratt and Petersham. While Graeme was dancing unsteadily with one of the bar-girls they came up and sat with me.
‘I hear you’re both pushing off for the Continent tomorrow,’ said Pratt. ‘How does that affect our little agreement?’
‘The rent’s paid for two weeks. You can have the place all the time now if you like.’
They exchanged a look.
‘White of you, old man,’ said Pratt.
‘We don’t wish to take advantage,’ said Petersham. ‘What’s it worth?’
‘Say thirty dollars.’
With an almost co-ordinated movement they reached for their wallets.
‘As of tomorrow night,’ said Petersham.
‘White of you, old man,’ said Pratt.
For the rest of the night I drank a great deal too much champagne.
Later, in the fusty over-heated apartment, I lay in bed not daring to close my eyes lest things should start whirling around. Graeme was snoring, apparently with no thought for his examination a few hours away, as I left the room and went down the hall to the W.C., where I vomited. Staggering back to the bedroom I heard a violent knocking and kicking on the street door and my name being hallooed nervously from outside.
I opened the door and Bertie Ballard, a fat little lecher who was one of our sub-lessors, rushed in with a woman in a red hat at his heels, bringing a cold blast of wind with him. He was buttoned up in his enormous silver raccoon coat, and his serious circular face, above the upstanding fur collar, resembled a hen sitting on its nest. He began explaining in a whisper why he had called at five o’clock in the morning.
‘But it’s not even your night.’
‘I know. But don’t turn me down for God’s sake, everywhere else is closed. I’ve been working on this all last week. We won’t be long.’
I opened the door of the bedroom and he bundled the woman in ahead of him. She was hiding her face, but I thought I recognized the cashier from an all-night restaurant.
Waking late the next morning I found the apartment beautifully empty. I shaved and dressed with care, hardly able to believe it was my last day in Montreal. Then the landlady arrived.
‘I was thinking,’ she said in her polite but barbed manner, her eyes shooting around the room, ‘I should have something extra for the filthy state you’ve got this place into. I never had a tenant who did like you and all the other gentlemen does.’
‘Yes, yes, Mrs Casey,’ I said, wanting to get her out of the room on such a beautiful morning. ‘I’ll settle everything in full when the time comes.’
I went out. The loveliness of the late morning was dazzling. The snow, the blue air, the creaking underfoot of the hard-packed sidewalk—everything is so hard and gem-like at eleven o’clock in Canada! Three blocks away, I thought, the day was curling its edges around the granite walls of the Sun Life Assurance Company, while inside the men and women were all busy denying their dark gods. It was a solemn thought to consider that only sheer luck had snatched me from among them.
I walked along St Catherine Street on the way to the McGill Union, with groups of shop-girls passing on the early lunch-hour in their little cloche hats, closely wrapped coats and flapping overshoes, and the young men in form-fitting overcoats and bell-bottomed trousers. I waited for Graeme on the steps of the Union, not wanting to see any of my former classmates and answer questions. Soon I saw him trudging down the campus, and in front, almost hiding him, the immense figure of Sir Arthur Currie, principal of the university, holder of a dozen honorary degrees and ex-war lord of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. What a poor figure Graeme, in his long green frieze overcoat and black hat, cut behind this white-spatted symbol of the army, attired like the editor of Vanity Fair!
Graeme didn’t yet know whether he had passed his examination. ‘It’s a toss-up,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the news in Paris. Now we’ve just got time for a good lunch and to pack and catch the train.’
We had gathered more possessions than we thought. When everything was stowed we found we would need three taxis to take us to the station. Soon the room was filled with taxi-drivers who fought among themselves over who should take the lighter trunks. To the smallest, who was left with my wardrobe trunk to carry out, I gave my new snow-boots which I would need no longer.
I was surprised that Mrs Casey had not darted up from her cellar as soon as the trunks started moving out. For once she was caught napping. She only appeared when everything was loaded, and came out on the icy steps, dancing up and down with rage and trying to shout above the roar of the taxis; silently consigning her to Pratt and Petersham I gave the signal to move off. As there was no room inside the taxis, Graeme and I had to stand on the running-boards of the leading one and so had a fine view of St Catherine Street, all lit up, as our little fleet of cars bumped and skidded over the streetcar tracks on the way to Bonaventure Station.
Almost until the very moment of boarding the train I was sick with a reasonless anxiety. I could still hardly believe in our luck, and all the time the baggage was being checked and our tickets visaed I kept imagining some disaster would still keep us in Canada. Only when we were marching along the echoing wooden station-platform behind the porters, our arms full of canes, rugs and overcoats, under the great wooden roof that covered the lines of tracks and with the engines shooting off soot and steam all around, did I relax and embrace my first clear moment of exaltation as we walked alongside the train bound for the Port of Saint John.