THERE CAN BE no doubt that Samuel Marchbanks is one of the choice and master spirits of this age. If there were such a volume as Who Really Ought To Be Who his entry would require several pages. The author of the Diary, the Table Talk and the never-sufficiently-to-be-praised Garland has probably said more on a wider variety of topics than any other philosopher of the past forty years, and it has been the happy inspiration of the publisher to bring out these three books in a single volume.
It was clear, however, that some editorial work was needed. Who, under the age of forty-five, can say with accuracy what a coal-fired furnace was, or what people meant when they spoke of “sending telegrams”? It is not that Marchbanks is trapped in a past age; he is for all time. But inevitably in our sadly rushing world there have been social changes that need to be clarified for recent generations. The question was: who should edit Marchbanks?
When I was approached, I accepted with alacrity. I would, I promised, equip the works of Marchbanks with what is called “a scholarly apparatus,” meaning that I would iron out all the difficulties, correct any errors of fact that might have crept into the original versions, explain the significance of any names that might be unfamiliar to modern readers, and generally act as a gentle headwaiter to Marchbanks’ splendid banquet.
It proved not to be as easy as I thought. Although he is the most accessible of philosophers, economists, political theorists and littérateurs for his readers, Marchbanks presents special problems for his editor, and I had not realized how much our long friendship and close physical resemblance—though I am substantially the smaller—would complicate an apparently straightforward editorial task.
MARCHBANKS IS ONE of the last of a breed of Canadians whose racial strains and mental habits derive from those Loyalists who came north to this country after the American Revolution of 1776. They were a cantankerous, resolute breed, superficially loyal to old manners and old trains of thought, but in fact determinedly individualistic. To think of Marchbanks himself as a Tory is absurd. He said to me, not long ago: “Canada at present has three political parties whom I think of as Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail. Flopsy and Mopsy are devoted to the banks and the industries; Cottontail claims to speak for the Workers, by which it seems to mean unionized persons intent on working the shortest negotiable hours for the highest negotiable rates of pay; as a man who has for forty-five years worked hours definable only by As Long As It Takes, and for the kind of pay available to literary men, I feel no kinship with Cottontail. Politically I am the leader and entire membership of the Marchbanks Humanist Party to which, in forty-five years, I have not attracted a single adherent. Why this should be so I cannot guess, but it makes me grieve for my country.”
Readers of the pages that follow will have no trouble in guessing why Marchbanks has no followers. He is a man of fiercely disputatious character and has few friends. Of these few I am the longest in duration and the most humble and submissive in nature. For these reasons—because I can put up with him—the publishers have asked me to edit Marchbanks, and I have consented. The result is in your hand.
I approached my task with misgiving. Marchbanks is an impetuous and inveterately inaccurate writer; correcting his innumerable errors and explaining his slapdash references and half-baked assumptions has been a tough job, even for one experienced in editorial work. Throughout his life Marchbanks has earned his living as a journalist and he has all the romantic disdain for fact that distinguishes his kind. He writes at full speed, never pausing for reflection or using one word when he can think of two. He is lucky to have me for an editor. But am I lucky to have him as a subject? Can you ask?
He is a man deeply resentful of criticism or restraint of any kind. If he needs a fact to support his argument, and cannot immediately find one, he makes it up. But—and this is what has made my task a burden—it is hard to be sure when he has given rein to his imagination. Time and again I have found his most improbable assertions strongly rooted in fact. The magpie mind reflected in his work is crammed with oddities which he can support by reference to some out-of-the-way book nobody else would think of reading, or some tattered yellow newspaper clipping that shows him to be right. He is an editor’s nightmare.
Nevertheless, I have done the job. The Notes I have added to Marchbanks’ text extend its interest very considerably. We editors are not the pallid hacks that Marchbanks thinks us.
WHEN MY WORK was nearly completed I decided to approach Marchbanks himself, and discuss the project with him. This in itself is unscholarly. When you are preparing a critical edition of a man’s work—a man who is not safely dead—it is unprofessional and dangerous to let him have any say in what you are doing, because he will want to put a finger in the pie. What you have made tidy, he will want to mess up. Nevertheless, knowing Marchbanks as I do, I was aware how dangerous it would be to let this book appear in print without his knowledge.
Perhaps I allowed vanity to guide me. I greatly admired that film Dinner With André, and I hoped I might provoke something similar, along the lines of A Drink With Marchbanks.
I sought him out, therefore. As I knew I would, I found him at five o’clock in the afternoon of a February day at one of his favourite ports of call, a tavern called The Crank and Schizoid, close by the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in the city of Toronto. Marchbanks likes to go there to eavesdrop on the professional gossip of the psychiatrists who frequent the place when their work-day (nine fifty-minute hours) is over. “Nothing leaks like a full shrink,” Marchbanks has often said, and he picks up a lot of information in the pub about persons highly placed in government and business. There he was, in a dark corner, and before him on the table was a glass of his favourite tipple, a lukewarm gin-and-acid-rain.
“You do not surprise me in the least,” he said, when I explained my visit. “I knew this would happen, and I knew the publishers would ask you to do the job. Not, as you presumptuously suppose, because of your reputation as a scholar, but because of the deep sympathy that has so long existed between us. You recall the old Victorian melodrama of The Corsican Brothers? No, of course you don’t. You never know anything that is of real significance. In that play the brothers are united by a psychic bond, in spite of superficial differences of character. When one of them is kicked by an enemy, the other is unable to sit down for several days: if the other is attracted by a woman, the first is moved—he knows not why—to send her a bouquet of flowers. You and I are like that, Davies. We are The Canadian Brothers. You, the academic, pussyfooting brother and I the dashing, romantic brother. It is as simple as that.”
I yearned to contradict him with passion. But no—I recognized the justice of what he had said. I did not glory in it, but I acknowledged it.
“Well—yes, Sam,” I said; “I suppose that’s about the size of it. But need you rub it in?”
“Who’s rubbing anything in?” he demanded. Facts are facts, and psychological facts are indisputable. But reflect: you and I, between us, have lived a remarkable, fully-realized life. I free and you trammelled. I clear-eyed and you blinkered by commonplace opinions. I intolerant of popular nonsense and you hoodwinked by everything you hear from politicians and self-styled experts. I daring to call my soul my own, and you yielding squatter’s rights in your soul to anybody who can brow-beat you. Singly, what are we? I have been called insufferable, and you are widely known to be self-destructively tolerant. But put us together, and what have you? Man, as Hamlet described him—noble in reason, infinite in faculty—the beauty of the world—the paragon of animals! We need one another, you and I. I can’t say I like it, but I am prepared to put up with it.”
“Are you saying that you are my alter ego?” said I, astonished at this generosity.
“No, I am not. I detest the term alter ego; it suggests some dreadful non-cholesterol cooking substance. We are, each to the other a Doppelgänger, if you know the term.”
“Aha,” said I, pleased to be on familiar ground, “then it might be said that, in Jungian terms, I am the real man, and you are my Shadow.” I was delighted to have found a point of view from which I could write a really satisfactory introduction to this book. But—
“Intolerable presumption,” shouted Marchbanks, thumping the table so loudly that several psychiatrists looked round. “I am the reality, the essential man, free, proud and undeluded by the hokum of the modern world; you are the Good Citizen, the Taxpayer, the Homebody, the Dupe and Donkey of Democracy, the creature who goes through life chained and blindfolded, to sink at last in his taxed coffin into his taxed grave, leaving his Reality—his Money, such as it is—to be devoured by the hyenas of the State. You move me to Biblical obloquy: I spurn you with my foot, I spew you out of my mouth, I blow you out of my nose, I—”
“Shut up, Sam,” I begged; “people are looking!”
Indeed they were. The barkeeper was muttering, “Keep it down, eh, you guys.”
“Of course people are looking,” said Marchbanks. “In this country people always look in amazement when anyone is moved by passion or simply by righteous indignation. For you to suggest that I am your Shadow—therein scholarly impertinence has surely found its masterpiece.”
“Then consider it this way,” said I; “let us call ourselves two sides of a coin.”
“Very well,” said he; “let the coin be a Canadian five-cent piece. I am the recto side, bearing the Royal Countenance and the inscription, “Ruler By God’s Grace”—the side that speaks of nobility of spirit and continuance of great traditions: you are the verso side, bearing the image of the beaver, symbolic of the Canadian Citizen—a dowdy rodent, most valuable to his country when skinned. That will do nicely.”
I sighed. “You are so contradictory, Sam,” I said. “You declare yourself to be the head of a one-man splinter party. What does that make you, if not an anarchist? Yet now you are equating yourself with royalty.”
“Well, what about it?” said he. “I see no contradiction. Of course I am an anarchist. What is an anarchist but a defier of settled power, a protester against all rule, a detector of flaws in every system, an element in society necessary if we are not to be trampled under the feet of a few hundred people who have won a TV popularity contest they call an election, and their masters and hidden manipulators—the Civil Service? Royalty, on the other hand, is the single check left in a democratic state against factions and gangs and the puppets they call their leaders. When, in my anguish as an overburdened citizen, I fling myself at the foot of the Throne, I am appealing to the one person in the realm whose destiny, like my own, is determined by a power no government can reach. I am Marchbanks, by the Grace of God.”
“I still don’t see where anarchy comes in,” said I.
“Oh, you are always whining for explanations! Have you no intuitive understanding of great issues? Can’t you see that it is rules and laws that make most of the social problems? Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail are all competing to devise systems of law to make us perfect citizens of a perfect state. They cannot grasp that morality and freedom are interwined. Have you never read the manifesto of the Marchbanks Humanist Party?
How does it begin?—
The more taboos and prohibitions there are in the world
The poorer the people will be.
The more sharp weapons the people have
The more troubled the state will be.
The more cunning and skill man possesses
The more vicious things will appear.
The more laws and orders are made prominent
The more thieves and robbers there will be.
And who wrote that, do you suppose?”
“You, I imagine.”
“No, you don’t imagine. That’s what’s wrong with you, and your kind; you don’t, and can’t imagine. Those words were written by the Chinese sage Lao Tzu in the sixth century B.C. And upon those principles, understood in modern terms, rests the program—or I had better call it a non-program—of my Humanist Party.”
SIGHING, I CALLED the bartender and ordered another large double straight malt. This encounter was going to be even worse than I had supposed.
“Let’s talk about your life,” I said. “Readers of our selection will expect some information about your life. Come on, Sam; were you really born in a place called Skunk’s Misery?”
“To doubt it is to doubt geography,” said he. “You will find it only on the largest maps, but if you enquire of the right people, in the right place, they will tell you where it is. The old homestead has sunk rather far into the swamp, I understand, but some relics of it are still there. The weekly paper, The Skunk’s Misery Trombone, on which I learned my craft; the barbershop where as a boy I had my ten-cent haircut, with the barber’s stomach, warm and maternal, lolled over me like a duvet. You behold in me the descendant—unworthy perhaps, but probably not—of pioneers and Loyalists. I am a WASP, and nothing of the derision that is nowadays directed at that ethnic group touches me.”
“But a WASP is a White Anglo-Saxon; you are always blowing about the purity of your Celtic descent.”
“You surely don’t suggest that I describe myself as a WC, do you? That would simply be playing into the hands of my detractors. No, no; for those loose thinkers who have no conception of a Celt, I must appear as a WASP.”
“Very well,” said I, “but was there nothing picturesque about your childhood. Surely you come from a broken home?”
“Not a crack to be found in it anywhere,” said he. “I toast my entire family and ancestry in this glass of gin-and-acid-rain, and if we are to go on talking you had better order me another.”
I motioned to the bartender. “Not coming from a broken home is rather a poor start for a Canadian writer. Perhaps you were a battered child? No? Well, we must do the best we can. Tell me that you endured crippling poverty.”
“Never missed a meal or wore a dirty shirt,” said he. “Of course I mingled a great deal with the poor. Still do. But you understand that I speak of the Poor in Spirit, many of whom are well placed in the world and winter in the South. Nevertheless, poor as church mice. No, let me amend that: poor as Rationalist Mice—terrible cases of Rationalist Rickets among their children.”
“Well, what about education? You had to struggle for it against uncomprehending elders? Lay on your stomach on cold winter nights, reading Homer by the dying fire on the cabin hearth?”
“All education is a struggle,” said Marchbanks. “I had to struggle against schools and universities, of course, in order to get time to educate myself, which I did magnificently.”
“Oh Sam,” said I, “how can you say that when I have spent weeks and months going through your stuff, correcting stupid errors and rooting out unwarrantable assumptions, and suppressing downright lies. Your education was a mess.”
“But a rich, fruity mess,” said he with a leer of disgusting self-satisfaction.
“Your struggle to get a start—the pain of rejections, the hours of walking the streets in cold weather, hugging your tattered manuscripts, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely—surely you had plenty of that.”
“Oh, plenty of the oppressor’s wrong and the proud man’s contumely, not to speak of the critic’s sneer and the broadcaster’s horse laugh. But I always had jobs. Employers fought over me. And I played fair with them, let me tell you. Worked like a dog—nay, a Trojan. Indeed on one occasion the Trojan government sent a deputation to study my methods, but they had to go home in defeat. The Trojans would never have stood for my concept of journalistic industry; they wanted a five-day week and statutory holidays, and I would have nothing to do with such shiftlessness. As for dogs—well, you know what I think about dogs.”
“You are a great discouragement to a biographer,” I said. “What about your private life? What about Sex?”
“Lower your voice,” said Marchbanks; “those shrinks at the bar have very big ears when anybody is talking about Sex.”
“You mean that at last I have struck pay-dirt? I am all agog.”
“You may say so. You can have no idea of the social prestige I enjoyed during the years when my Table Talk was being talked at all the best tables. For one thing, I was considered powerfully attractive by what we must no longer call the Fair Sex. You remember that irresistible fellow in De Maupassant’s story—”
“Do you mean Bel Ami? You mention him somewhere in your writings.”
“That’s the man. I was thought of as Bel Ami until the abrasive quality of my character changed it to Bon Ami. And of course hostesses wanted my opinion of their food. I was a celebrated gourmet. You understand what French perfume manufacturers mean by un grand nez—a chap who detects and judges the most delicate fragrances? In gourmet circles I was esteemed as un grand estomac. And it was during my Bel Ami period that I brought pedalezza to its finest perfection.”
“Pedalezza!” said I, rolling the word like a rich morsel over my tongue. “Pedalezza! O divine pedalezza—”
“Shh! You’re agog again,” said Marchbanks. “The shrinks are looking, and I don’t want to let them in on this yet. But when I choose to reveal everything, it will be discovered how generously I have benefited the profession of psychiatry, not to speak of the even greater profession of pornography. Yes, I devised a new form of Sex—not quite a perversion, but an elegant variation, which will go down in erotic history as Marchbanks’ Caprice. Though I prefer the term pedalezza.”
I sat down with my eyes fixed upon him, expectant. But Marchbanks was coy (a horrible sight) until I signalled to the bartender for refills. When the drinks came, he spoke.
“You have heard of carezza? Of course you have.”
“Erotic stimulation by tickling?” said I.
“Pedalezza is a variant, deriving something from frottage, that other delight of the refined sensualist, but managed with the feet.”
Even as he spoke I felt a very personal grasp upon my inner thigh, so unexpected that I leaped to my feet, looking fiercely around me for the offender.
“Calm down,” said Marchbanks. “That was a touch of pedalezza, and you may imagine how it would work on the more delicate sensibility of a woman. It is to that I owe my unrivalled social popularity.”
“Are you popular in society? I didn’t know,” said I, composing myself with the straight malt, for my nerves had been shaken.
“Society in the old sense is gone, utterly gone,” said he. “But in the era when my Table Talk was collected and set down, I was the delight of the Belle Époque. In great demand for dinner parties, because whenever I was present fascinating things happened. Sometimes faces were slapped, or people ran from the table shrieking. But more often a totally unforeseen geniality spread through the party—an almost Viennese wistful gallantry—and wholly unpredictable romances blossomed. Hostesses never really knew how it came about, but they quite rightly associated it with my presence. ‘Secure Marchbanks, and then build a table around him,’ was the way they put it. During the Winter Season I had to refuse scores of invitations, because like all Advanced Sex, pedalezza is physically demanding.”
“Come on,” I said, “you have raised my expectations and you can’t deny me now.”
“You must understand that pedalezza is not for everyone. The arthritic and people with Lower Back Pain are debarred from its practice, as of course are those who lack the power of keeping up an interesting converstation above the waist while occupied otherwise from the waist down. While I fascinated the ladies on my left and right with the conversation recorded in my Table Talk I was having a high old time with pedalezza under the table.”
“Come to the point,” said I.
“The point?”
“The Climax, as Dr. Kinsey calls it.”
“Ah, simplicity itself. I slipped off the elegant evening pump from my right or left foot—on a great night, I employed both—and stretching my silk-socked extremity beneath the table I would gently squeeze the thigh, or the sensitive area just above the knee, of a lady sitting on the other side of the table. This requires a prehensile quality of foot, which can be developed by picking up oranges from the floor for half an hour every day. The lady thus squeezed might squeak a little, but more often she blushed prettily and sometimes—if I were not quick—I would find that my foot was being given an answering squeeze. As a usual thing she showed a new warmth toward one or the other of her dinner partners, which pleasantly surprised him and gave me exquisite delight. I felt that I was playing the role of Fate in lives that needed a touch of fateful unpredictability.”
“And that was pedalezza?”
“It was. I wish I might say that it still is, but you will have observed that I walk with a slight limp. A lady whose virtue I had underestimated stabbed me in the foot with a silver fork. It was all I could do not to scream with pain, but the laws of pedalezza are rigorous, and I forbore.”
“But—allow me to ask—what was there in it for you, Sam?”
“I do not follow you”
“This pedalezza—the ladies never knew it was you?”
“But of course not! That was its ultimate refinement. Exquisite enjoyment wholly divorced from any personal involvement. What can Sex offer more?”
TIME WAS PASSING and, although Marchbanks was in full command of himself, repeated doubles of straight malt were beginning to tell on me. “How do you manage it, Sam?” said I enviously.
“One hopes to learn a few things with the passing of time. Although there is some inevitable waning of the physical powers, one hopes to compensate by the acquired wisdom, physical and intellectual, of the years. Geezerkraft, I have named it, and those psychiatrists you see at the bar have adopted my term. It has an agreeable German ring in their ears, and German, as you know, is the language of psychiatry—German with a Viennese accent. You would do well to acquire a little Geezerkraft yourself.”
I knew it, but I resented him knowing it. So I tried once more to assert the primacy of an editor over a mere author—to strike a blow in the age-old war of Critic and Creator.
“Jus’ one more thing about your book, ol’ man,” said I. “Too damn many big words. Who knows ’em, eh? I mean—jus’ for instance—that word Apophthegms. You see how hard it is to say—even I stumble over it. It’s a puffy sort of word. Won’t you change it?”
“Most certainly not. It is the fully appropriate word for some fully appropriate words. Indeed, that is what the word itself means. From Greek apo, meaning appropriate, and phthegm, meaning a gobbet neatly spat out. You should not try to restrict and shackle language, Davies. It is man’s greatest achievement, and the principal thing that has raised him to his supremacy over the other animals. Without language there could be no abstract thought, no history, no consciousness of past, present, or future. Language, indeed, is the noblest of Man’s inventions to meet the problem of Time. So don’t restrict language: rejoice in it. I am proud to think I speak the tongue that Milton spake.”
“You speak a tongue I don’t think anybody ever spake,” said I morosely. I was conscious of an imperative need. I rose and made my way to what I took to be the appropriate door and stumbled inside. What did I see but a lady psychiatrist whom I knew by sight, in a state of appropriate dishevelment! I was stricken, but she remained calm.
“If you wish to see me professionally, you should come to my office,” said she. “If, on the other hand, you wish to see me personally, this is hardly the place to begin.”
As I struggled to speak, Marchbanks, all bonhomie, burst through the door and seized my arm.
“Your pardon, doctor,” said he. “My patient eluded my vigilance for a moment. As you see, a simple Peeping Tom. No harm in him, as anyone of your profession will be aware.” He steered me back to neutral ground.
“And that will pay you out for that story I suppose you have printed about me,” he said.
“It is in the book. It is now history, or at least biography. Everything I could glean about you, I have put in my book.”
“You mean it is in my book,” said he. “You may play your role of editorial Meddlesome Mattie as you please, but it remains my book.”
“Ours?”
“Mine!”
And so I suppose it must be. This is Marchbanks’ book. But I have equipped it with copious notes that clarify certain difficulties, identify people Marchbanks assumed that everybody knows, and have dealt as best I can with problems arising in the memoirs of a man whose life has been flawed by ambiguity.
Here it is. I can do no more.
Saint David’s Day
1985