SYLVIA FRASER HAUNTS these pages and will, no doubt, continue to be part of my story for as long as my story lasts. She is a novelist, a journalist, an activist and, as June Callwood was, an occasional ghostwriter.
After our honeymoon in Barbados, Sylvia and Russell shared two more magical holidays with us, one in Bermuda, where we hired scooters, explored small, hard-to-find beaches and the Fourways Inn, and one in Haiti, where we stayed far above the Tonton Macoute–infested city and woke to birdsong.I
Jack’s insistence that M&S authors take part in over-the-top publicity gambits reached insane proportions when it came to the 1980 launch of Sylvia’s The Emperor’s Virgin. Jack and Sylvia donned togas with gold-leaf crowns and attempted to ride in a kind of gilded chariot drawn by two surprised horses down Yonge Street to the launch party, where she was to be attended by scantily clad young men posing as slaves. Jack was in his element as the emperor, but Sylvia was supremely uncomfortable and exceptionally cold. The whole affair had been meticulously planned by Peter Taylor to coincide with the Ides of March, a dangerous time in Shakespeare’s Rome and an unpredictable one in Toronto. A snowstorm put an end to the chariot ride, and my intrepid friends completed the journey on foot.II
I had been an early reader of The Candy Factory, a book that, like The Emperor’s Virgin, is still disturbing in its intensity. I sent Sylvia long, detailed memos about its structure, characters, and symbolism, and we spent long nights drinking chocolate liqueur while discussing every aspect of the manuscript.III When he was presenting it at the M&S sales conference, Jack talked about Sylvia’s heightened sensibility. Her perceptions of reality and of the inner lives of people were sharp, exacting, searingly honest.
Berlin Solstice, her fifth novel, was another dark, compelling book set in the grimmest days of the Third Reich. The violence in this novel, perhaps more than in her previous books, foreshadows what she was finally forced to face about the violence in her own childhood. Her perfect marriage would become one of the victims of her desperate struggle to confront that evil.
“I rarely use the word ‘brilliant.’ I use it now, with respect, about this novel,” wrote Margaret Laurence. “I’d give my left tit to have written Berlin Solstice,” wrote Irving Layton in July 1984: “having a sharp eye for selecting the apt metaphor and revealing detail, she keeps her prose elegant, crisp, and energetic. . . . Even the dullest and the most self-complacent philistine will find it impossible not to be moved.”
It was on one of those preternaturally bright days well known to people who live in or near the Rockies that Sylvia found out her father was dying. We were at the students’ pay phone, a very public spot under one of the Banff Centre’s buildings. Her mother had just told her the news. It was as if the bottom had fallen out of Sylvia’s world. She was shaking and gagging and unable to talk. I thought at first that it was the shock of a parent’s dying, but it wasn’t. It was the horror of her slowly dawning recognition that her father had abused her as a very young child. It would take some years before she fully confronted that truth. As she describes the experience in My Father’s House: A Memoir of Incest and of Healing, “When my father died, he came alive for me. A door opened, like a hole cut in the air. It yawned before me, offering release . . .” For Sylvia, it was the beginning of a journey that would reveal the source of her nightmares and allow her long-buried child-self to emerge and reveal itself. She had buried this “other self” deep in her subconscious so she could live a near-normal life.
In 1984, having disposed of her worldly possessions, she moved to California for two years to write My Father’s House. The full impact of her remembering the sexual abuse that had devastated her childhood was such that Sylvia had to disappear for some months to try to deal with the pain. But she always stayed in touch and I always knew where she was and, mostly, what was happening in her life. The memoir is, like all of Sylvia’s books, unflinchingly honest, horrifying in its details. Since publication in 1987, the book has become a classic. It is taught in some university courses and remains enormously helpful for others who have endured childhood abuse.
A magazine profile once described Sylvia as “intrepid.” She has travelled down the dark passages of her own past. She also travelled alone into Egypt, India, and South America. She was the first person I knew who had tried ayahuasca—not once but eight times—in the Amazon jungle under the guidance of a shaman. She had gone on this journey of psychic exploration to discover something about the universe and maybe to draw its healing power to herself. As usual, Sylvia abjured all notions of safety. She prefers to fly without a safety net. One Sylvia Fraser book, The Rope in the Water: A Pilgrimage to India, tends to find itself on my bedside table and I still dip into it to remind myself that there may be some magic left in our industrialized world.
We meet and talk often and, as with all friendships, there are usually some quite banal things to talk about, things like future dinners or movies we both wish to see or wish we hadn’t seen, but I know that under her cheerful good humour, there is a depth of knowledge and understanding of human nature that I can draw on, if I need to. Sometimes, with a close friend, it is easy to forget what attracted you to them in the first place. With Sylvia, that’s never been an issue. That’s why I remind myself never to take her for granted.
I. It is hard to imagine such an idyllic holiday now, after the devastating earthquake and seeing photos my daughter Catherine brought back from her reporting about the catastrophe for the Toronto Star.
II. I know Sylvia hates this story and the way it keeps reappearing online, but I just couldn’t resist.
III. There is a five-page memo to Sylvia from me, dated May 29, 1974, in the M&S fonds at McMaster University.