I AM NOT sure what I was expecting next from Matt Cohen, but The Disinherited was certainly not it. I thought Matt, like most young writers, would draw on his own experience, that the novel would feature people like Matt and his friends, the women who had loved him, or whom he loved, the people who had inhabited the student/teacher/activist world of Toronto. Instead, The Disinherited belonged to a group of people so remote from Toronto, so far from downtown that I found it strange that they could exist in Matt’s world.
They had sprung whole, he told me, from some part of him he hadn’t known existed, as if the Thomas family and their friends and acquaintances had arrived fully alive, very demanding, as if all he had to do was to record their well-lived lives. It was as if he and his characters had been living in parallel universes, each unknown to the other. Most days, he thought, their world was far more convincing than his own. Take Richard Thomas, for example. He was as solid as an oak, sprung from the hard soil of Ontario’s farmland, north of Kingston, where even now a man can barely eke out sustenance for a family, a man in love with an indifferent land. Or his passionate wife, Miranda, who harboured family secrets and hopes. I had imagined that the character Eric might have carried some of Matt’s own dreams and sense of estrangement, but as Matt gave me pieces of the manuscript, I realized he too had sprung whole from Matt’s imagination.
After The Disinherited, we published two more Kingston novels. Already then I was curious about Katherine Malone, Matt’s sexiest heroine. But it would be years before Matt decided to come back to her and write The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone.
“She wasn’t ready to tell me her story,” Matt explained. Or she hadn’t lived it yet.
Matt and I became friends through the Salem manuscripts. It was a gradual process, and I don’t know when we closed the distance between author and editor. I remember long walks, drinks in the Holiday Inn’s bar, Matt’s arriving at our home with a bag full of manuscripts and his playing tennis with Julian in Georgian Bay and failing to mention that he had once been an Ontario junior tennis champion.
Around 1978 I suggested a children’s story and he came up with a most unusual one, The Leaves of Louise, an unfunny precursor to his series of funny children’s books using the pseudonym Teddy Jam. They were all published by his partner Patsy Aldana’s imprint, Groundwood.
Although Matt’s books garnered some critical success, a few even appearing on bestseller lists, they did not become bestsellers. And the positive reviews were always accompanied by nasty attacks on Matt’s prose style, his characters, his storytelling. A few critics surprisingly launched almost personal attacks on everything Matt felt was important in his writing.
I didn’t succeed in talking Mordecai Richler into selecting one of Matt’s books for the Book of the Month Club when Mordecai was a judge. As far as I could tell, he had never even read an entire Matt Cohen manuscript. But my tenacity impressed him sufficiently that we would go for drinks—usually at the Park Plaza Roof Lounge—though not even four or five Macallans could soften his heart.
When Matt and Mordecai finally met, they had nothing to talk about. They stood, largely in silence, ignoring each other.
Matt continued to write, though the books didn’t make him a living. Nor, as Matt argued, did they change anyone’s life, as philosopher George Grant had changed his. Matt was his own harshest critic.
To make ends meet, he ghosted other people’s books. There were several of these strange partnerships, but the one I remember best is the autobiography of the young woman who may or may not have accidentally killed the Hollywood actor John Belushi. While suffering great pangs of grief over her ruined life and his death, she decided Matt would be her salvation, the man who would listen and forgive everything. “A kind of priest,” Matt said, after a long night of listening and trying not to fall asleep. “I can’t imagine how those guys do it. Priests. Day after day.” He thought perhaps the fact that priests were encouraged to forget made it easier for them.
* * *
BECAUSE I WAS a European with the burden of the Holocaust in my mind, because we had now known each other long enough for me to ask, I had wanted Matt to tell me about growing up Jewish in this part of the world. He had never talked about being Jewish. His fiction didn’t relate to his Jewish experience. His fictional people were farmer folk, Irish, Scots, English. His last book, Typing, a Life in 26 Keys, begins with this: “A Jew is a person in exile from nowhere. Or maybe that’s a myth I like to believe because the truth is too oppressive.” All four of his grandparents had escaped Russian pogroms, and all their children had been eager to escape the immigrant experience.
“Besides, with a name like Cohen,” he once told me, “you don’t have to advertise that you’re a Jew. Only an idiot would miss the fact. And no, I haven’t been escaping, I have been what I am.” He didn’t want to be a Jewish writer. He was simply a writer.
Matt had been planning to write a book about Joseph Roth, the Austrian Jewish writer dead since 1939, but he hadn’t decided yet whether it would be a novel or a fictional biography, an inquiry into Roth’s death. Though he had not been brought up to be Jewish, he felt a deep kinship with Roth based on their shared values as Jewish intellectuals. I know I was looking forward to reading more of the manuscript. It would have been a great book for Matt.
The Spanish Doctor opened another door for Matt, another set of imagined people to write about, and many brilliant books followed. Some of his best writing, I think, is in Elizabeth and After, published by Knopf. It won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1999, just a few weeks before he died.
There is this wonderful passage Dennis Lee read at a memorial for Matt:
Mysteries begin with the body but sometimes the mystery is not death but love. There is so much to love. Cats. Bits of dust caught in the light. Colours. Unexpected waterfalls. And of course: the body. Warm skin on cool sheets. The blood’s night hum. Summer heat seeping through damp moss. The raw smell of an oak tree opened in winter. A long-missed voice over the telephone. So much to love that life should be made out of loving, so many ways of loving that all stories should be love stories. This one is about a man and a woman.
For Matt, that special love was Patsy Aldana, and for the children they shared, including the ones she brought with her into their marriage.
The last time that I saw him we laughed more than we cried, shared memories, asked questions of each other we would not have asked before. As Matt said, when you are dying, nothing is personal. When we said goodbye, I told him I was sure he was going to live. I thought it was what he wanted to hear. Now, I’m not so sure.