1595 QQ cover Summer 2014 - 1 2014-05-28 2:40 PM Page 1

From Guernica to Chicago History as Seen by the Black Box SUMMER 2014 A CANADIAN REVIEW

Welcome to oue Nme umr   Summer Number Volume

Medic in the Arctic The A Lifetime Story Camera ISSN 0033-6041 Our Third Eye $6.50 1contents 2014-05-29 10:09 AM Page 162

THE THIRD EYE  Henri Cartier-Bresson The Eye of the Century   Vivian Maier A Genius in the Darkroom   New Zealand Home of the “Remarkables”    

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WRITING TRUTH TO POWER  Revolutionary Memoirs   .   Theatre of Revolution Conversations with George Luscombe     Being Cheap    1contents 2014-05-29 10:09 AM Page 163

THE ARTS  The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson’s Fabulous Fancy    The Denk Variations    Francis Bacon, Henry Moore Terror and Beauty    f

SUMMER ESCAPE  Fatima      How to Get There    f

POETRY  Five Poems 1contents 2014-05-29 10:09 AM Page 164

EDITOR SUBSCRIPTIONS Boris Castel Individuals: one year, >A?; QO and international, >AD. Two years, >BD; QO and international, >CD. ASSOCIATE EDITOR Steve Anderson Institutions: one year, >C?; QO and international, >D?. Two years, >FD; QO and international, >H?. LITERARY EDITOR Three years, >@?D; QO and international, >@AD. Joan Harcourt Single issues . ppd. EDITORIAL ASSISTANT CORRESPONDENCE AND SUBMISSIONS TO AND BUSINESS MANAGER Editor, Queen’s Quarterly, Queen’s University, Penny Roantree Kingston, Ontario TFU BVE GRAPHIC DESIGN Telephone E@B DBB-AEEF Larry Harris Fax E@B DBB-EGAA E-mail [email protected] PUBLISHERS Website www.queensu.ca/quarterly The Quarterly Committee Published four times a year, in March, June, September, of Queen’s University and December. Authorized as Publication Mail, Post EDITORIAL BOARD Office Department, Ottawa, and for payment of postage in Catherine R. Harland (Chair) cash. LOON ??BB-E?C@. Publication date: B? May A?@C. Helen Humphreys Copyright according to the Copyright Act W.O.I. @HF?, Mark Kingwell c.-S-B?, as amended. Copyright remains the property of Will Kymlicka the author. Georges Leroux Anna Porter The contents of Queen’s Quarterly are indexed in the Canadian Periodical Index, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents MLA International Bibliography, and Abstracts of English Studies. The editors and the editorial board of Queen’s Quarterly are grateful to the Canada Council for grants in support of the publication of the Quarterly. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Magazine Fund (CMF) for our publishing activities. Queen’s Quarterly is a member of Magazines Canada. The opinions expressed in this publication reflect the author’s views and not necessarily those of the editors. 1contents 2014-05-29 10:09 AM Page 165

FROMAUTHOR THE EDITOR

NRKNPKJ MQOP @D? years ago, photography has transformed our image- Imaking ability in the same way that the printing press expanded the horizons of knowledge four centuries earlier. Yet the primal aspect of our enchantment with the medium remains the search for the meaning hiding behind the Rorschach blot of the photographer’s intention. Today, most photographic work requires an audience for validation, acceptance, or notoriety. Henri Cartier-Bresson was immune to any search for fame. He remains a revolutionary in intent, a Zen Buddhist in belief, and an inspired artist in vocation. For Vivian Maier, fame never existed. Of the few people who knew her, no one would ever have imaged that such a genial artist hid behind her Mary Poppins image, and that her work would posthumously reach such international fame. Indeed, only a most secretive Vivian Maier could have taken a picture of her drying hat and raincoat and called it a self-portrait. Finally, with Diane Kelly we change the lens and forget about human nature, to focus on nature itself. We then discover, on a small patch of earth in the southern Pacific, how magnificent Mother Nature can be, when treated with respect by her children. 2bresson 2014-05-29 9:15 AM Page 166 2bresson 2014-05-29 9:15 AM Page 167

Henri Cartier- Bresson The Eye of the Century

A major exhibit of Henri Cartier-Bresson is being held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris until 6: June, focusing on the two stories of the artist, his life as a painter and as a photographer.

Whether as a witness of Gandhi’s India, a visitor to communist China or to Russia after Stalin, Henri Cartier-Bresson has never delivered a message, just a point of view on the way ordinary people become witnesses of history. During his long career, Cartier-Bresson only used one focal length – >5 mm, to be always close and among his fellow human beings. Born among the elite of the French bourgeoisie – the “Two Hundred Families” – Henri Cartier-Bresson developed early a powerful desire to revolt against all established orders. Pierre Assouline, one of his biographers, wrote “the beauty of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work is thus the product of absolute rebellion against ugliness – ethically and aes- thetically.” He fought the moral ugliness of his native bourgeoisie as well as the intellectual ugliness of his accepted académie. Inspired by his lycée philosophy teacher, Cartier-Bresson discovered at a young age the myth of the superiority of the Western world. On the mirror of his student room, one sentence was posted:

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“What is the origin of money?” This was a question to which he already had the answer. Leaving Europe to explore Africa as a young man, he would eventually travel the world, starting from Senegal and ending in Burma. Cartier-Bresson has amply explained his reasons for departing his native country: “To leave France and its monotheistic beliefs … truth is Buddhism, it is Taoism.” This is a belief he would declare even during the hardest years of his lifetime, a three-year internment as a prisoner of war. He escaped twice and was captured both times, finally succeeding on his third attempt. After the war, he returned to his old prison camp to shoot a film dedicated to the release and return of French prisoners, some of whom he recognized.

“We have to leave behind the myth of Cartier-Bresson’s ‘creative moment,’ ” says Clément Chéroux, the Centre Pompidou exhibit curator. “The whole vision of the creative instant has a reductive dimension. Cartier-Bresson normally made his choice among thousands of negatives on the contact sheets – and we also, as observers, tend to neglect his strong political leanings, close to the communists in 6>85, which of course had a powerful influence on his choice of themes.”

In the 6><5s, at the twilight of his life, Cartier-Bresson returned to his original love – drawing. Now the lines of photography became the marks of pencils – but, like the young photographer, the older Cartier- Bresson remained faithful to his motto:

One has to approach the subject like a hunter – fast, but always keeping a very sharp eye.

The hunter, the eye – the whole of Cartier-Bresson is there.

RIGHT: Écluse de Bougival, France, 6>:;

A man with bare arms looks through the door of his barge toward his wife, who carries a naked baby, while the grandmother smiles, looking at the baby, and the dog on the wharf looks with love in his eyes towards his master – everything converges between these glances and these smiles – it is the Holy Family without God, and we feel that the man, although we can’t see his face, is also smiling. To be able to capture such a harmony requires first of all to be able to carry it oneself. This is Cartier-Bresson. 2bresson 2014-05-29 9:15 AM Page 169 2bresson 2014-05-29 9:15 AM Page 170

Children Playing in Seville, Spain, 6>88

A perfect composition – a partially destroyed house lets you witness an impromptu playground. This picture reminds me of my own childhood in Spain, and I commune with the child who, in spite of his infirmity, wants to partake in the games. Yet the relations between all these 2bresson 2014-05-29 9:15 AM Page 171

players are complex – one of them wears the black armband of mourning, while his companion can’t control his laughter. These scenes, which let joy coexist with such misery and desolation, become more important than the form of the scene. CRISTINA GARCIA RODERO, Spanish writer 2bresson 2014-05-29 9:15 AM Page 172

Valencia, Spain, 6>88

In a light without shadow — likely the morning, a child with his head tilted seems to fall — and on his face, an expression of loss or ecstasy. 2bresson 2014-05-29 9:15 AM Page 173

This instant, which will never happen again, is registered in my memory forever. This unknown child struck by an unknown lightning – I will never forget him. Henri Cartier-Bresson has frozen him. SARA MOON, high school student 2bresson 2014-05-29 9:15 AM Page 174

Shanghai, China 6>9= 2bresson 2014-05-29 9:15 AM Page 175

A crowd desperately attempts to access a bank in order to purchase gold during the last few days of the Kuomintang regime. 2bresson 2014-05-29 9:15 AM Page 176

Henri Matisse in His Home, Vence, France, 6>99

In this photograph of Henri Matisse we feel the fragility of the old artist, and his sensitivity to the cold weather. Yet everybody seems happy here 2bresson 2014-05-29 9:15 AM Page 177

– even the birds, out of their cages. One can feel a harmony in this picture – no rush, no urgency; this is a picture which lets you breathe. Yes, that’s right, Cartier-Bresson lets people breathe. PHILIP BLENKINSOP 2bresson 2014-05-29 9:15 AM Page 178

Man and Child, Madrid, 6>88

We are all within the terrible glance of this man holding his child – we feel that there is unhappiness, likely madness or rage or sadness. This man communicates his glance to me. I feel that in his place I would look 2bresson 2014-05-29 9:15 AM Page 179

the same. I also feel a deep compassion. This is a universal picture, a picture for all time. We enter into the intimacy of a man like that – and remain deeply close to him. JEAN ROBERT DANTON, student at Louis Lumière Photography School 3maier 2014-05-29 9:17 AM Page 180

Self-portrait of Vivian Maier (2:37–311:), undated image. 3maier 2014-05-29 9:17 AM Page 181

Vivian Maier A Genius in the Darkroom

The Vivian Maier story is unique in the history of photography – the story of a genial photographer, unknown in her lifetime, with no family, no known companion, no friends, but showing proudly her worried face and slim body in hundreds of self-portraits.

The story starts with John Maloof, a young Chicago real estate agent searching through archival documentation on the old city of Chicago. In 3118 he buys, for a song, some old boxes containing photographic slides and equipment. Maloof knows nothing about photography but quickly develops the inkling that he has found something interesting. He begins to look for the artist behind this immense collection of dusty photographs and soon finds the name of the photographer – but too late. Vivian Maier has just died, in April 311:, at the age of 94. Maloof becomes intrigued and collects testimonies that uncover a mysterious life, the life of a woman born in New York in 2:37 to a French mother and an Austrian father. Having spent her early childhood in France, she would always speak with a distinctive French accent. To make a living, Vivian Maier became a governess, an occupation she would keep all her life, and it was with the final family for whom she worked, the Ginsbergs, that she would find her last

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refuge. The modesty of her income likely explains why, out of a collection of 231,111 negatives, she only developed about 5,111 photographs. Today Vivian Maier’s work is compared with the major figures of street photography: Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt, or Garry Winogrand. Several international exhibits have displayed her work. A documentary by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, Finding Vivian Maier, is garnering praise as it uncovers more of the story. Yet all personal testimonies describe the modest photographer as a solitary but determined soul. There is still a large part of Maier’s life story in shadow, but what is known will likely remain one of the most beauti- ful enigmas in the history of photography.

Man Being Dragged by Cops at Night, undated.


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LEFT Self-portrait, 2:71

PREVIOUS PAGES Man on Horse, 2:63 3maier 2014-05-29 9:17 AM Page 188

ABOVE Self-portrait, 2:6:

OPPOSITE Self-portrait, New York, 2:64 3maier 2014-05-29 9:17 AM Page 189 3maier 2014-05-29 9:17 AM Page 190

ABOVE Undated image, New York

OPPOSITE New York, February 2:66

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DIANE KELLY New Zealand: Home of the “Remarkables”

I visited New Zealand for the first time in the spring of 6457, drawn by reports of the awesome, diverse landscapes of the distant North and the South Islands lying in the southwest Pacific. New Zealand is a place of dramatic geographical features – vast mountain ranges formed by the movement of the two tectonic plates that run the length of the two islands, rugged fiord-indented coastlines, glacier-carved lakes, green rolling fields with grazing sheep, and verdant vineyards, a relatively new addition to the New Zealand landscape.

Some of the photographs feature a mountain range rising majestically over Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu. These mountains are called the Remarkables, apparently so named by the early settlers who were as amazed as I by the startling beauty of the range. Close by are the valleys and old beech forests where Peter Jackson shot scenes for his Lord of the Rings movies. In one photograph you will see the Chard Farm winery in the Otago area, which we approached via a very steep winding road. The wine we tasted made the white-knuckle trip worthwhile! I also included a

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photo of the beautiful gardens around Mudbrick Farm, an ele- gant winery on Waiheke Island near Auckland. My photographs of New Zealand pull me back to the actual experience of smelling the mist in the air and feeling the dampness on my skin, look- ing in amazement at the reflec- tion of the mountains in a pond on our way to Milford Sound, at the deep colours the clouds create on the surface of Lake Wakatipu (which is tinted a deep turquoise blue due to glacial silt suspended in its waters) – and tasting the Pinot Noir and New Zealand cheeses. There is currently much dis- cussion about how new tech- nology enables us to enter a virtual reality and virtual envi- ronments. But that can be a solitary, isolating experience. Far better to dive into the actual reality which has been captured in photographs, relive and share those real experiences.

DIANE KELLY is a lawyer who lives in Kingston, Ontario. Although she still takes on legal assignments from time to time, she plans to spend her new-found extra time on community projects, her rusty Spanish, and travel.

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IMAGES, IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:

Towards the Head of Lake Wakatipu

Moeraki Boulders at Koekohe Beach on the Otago Coast

Akaroa

The Remarkables rising over Lake Wakatipu and Queenstown

The foothills of the Remarkables

The Mirror Lakes in the Eglinton Valley, part of a World Heritage Area in the southwest of the South Island

Chard Farm Winery in Otago

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KENNETH C. DEWAR Revolutionary Memoirs

The memoir tells the story of how the famous writer Victor Serge kept his revolutionary faith despite repeated confirmation that the Bolshevik Party leadership would not let individual liberty stand in the way of their ambitions. Eventually he found himself expelled from the party for his independent- mindedness, deported to Central Asia, and finally permitted to leave the USSR in /613, an outcast of the regime whose overthrow of the czarist autocracy he had so enthusiastically embraced …

QNU YQN WZXXRJU WN[VSZYRVU sputtered to an end in AIHI– WAIIA, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, it receded into the historical past, and Russia itself became an entirely different object of interest to Western observers. Instead of being seen as an enemy and rival – or a source of inspiration and support – it was seen, at first, as a laboratory of the transition from communist dictatorship to liberal (potentially) capitalism, then as a capitalist (sort of) dictatorship in the control of gangsters and former Communist Party apparatchiks. Now, in B@AD, as Vladimir Putin seeks to assert his authority over the inde- pendent state of Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, it threatens to assume enemy status once again. Before AIHI, the Revolution had existed in the historical present, its reverberating impact never far from contemporary politics and interna- tional relations. In historical terms, it reinforced the mystery that Russia had long presented to the West, giving rise to speculation about the unfathomable “Russian soul” and the unique melding of Eastern and

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Western traditions represented by the Russian Empire and its ruling dynasty, the Romanovs. No one talks of the “Russian soul” today. I was drawn to the drama and complexity of Russian history and culture as a university student in the AIF@s. In AIFH, I enrolled in the Dartmouth College summer Russian language program, which offered eight weeks of study and travel in the USSR, followed by a week or so of decompression in Western Europe. There was no similar program in Canada, but there were many in the US, the Americans being much more seriously interested in the Soviets, on the principle of “know thine enemy.” I found myself the lone Canadian in a large group of American students from programs that had combined resources in the interests of simplifying liaison with Leningrad University, where we all lived and studied, and with Soviet officialdom. I was known as Kanadyets, the Canadian. In the closing days of our stay, on our way home, we heard the news of the invasion of Czechoslovakia announced over a loudspeaker on a boat touring the Dnieper River in Kiev. The Prague Spring was over. Despite such actions, the persistence of “actually existing socialism” continued to influence politics in the West, helping to extend the ideolog- ical spectrum leftward, even if only a small minority of people on the left actively defended Soviet communism. Many more, if they did not defend it, chose not to attack it, focusing instead on US imperialism. It was difficult to attack both even-handedly, partly because attacking communism brought one into alignment with anti-communist liberals. The resurgence of Marxism on the left in the ’F@s only compounded the problem by requiring one to explain not only why one’s socialism was different from commu- nism, but why one’s Marxism was different from Marxism-Leninism. It was easier to deflect discussion, or to say nothing. So, at least, it seems to me, looking back. The problem faded away after AIHI–IA, along with the left end of the political spectrum itself, in its twentieth-century form.

\JX WNTRUMNM WNLNUYS] of the fascination of Russian history when I a friend recalled the impact of first reading Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary: "$!"–"$#" when it was published in an English translation in AIFC. Serge was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich in Brussels in AHI@, the son of Russian radical exiles. His father had participated in the terrorist People’s Will movement of the AHH@s and subsequently fled Russia. Serge followed in his father’s footsteps and became (in the words of Peter Sedgwick, the translator of his memoir) “an anarchist, a Bolshevik, a Trotskyist, a revisionist-Marxist and, on his own confession, a ‘personalist.’” As a result of his serial commitments, his life was even more peripatetic than that of his parents, and he died in Mexico in AIDG. His memoir was

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published in AIEA in French, the language in which he had taken his pseu- donym and written his numerous novels and political commentaries. The memoir’s reissue in B@AB, in the New York Review Books’ “Classics” series, suggests there are others besides me and my friend who have become interested again in Russian history. Besides the memoir’s intrinsic attraction as an intensely readable personal history, it offers some clues to the contin- uing influence of Soviet communism in the “short” twentieth century and a perspective on the Revolution that we are perhaps better able to appreciate now that the dust has settled on the ideological battles of the Cold War. It is also a reminder of the richness of Russian memoir literature. The main line of Serge’s personal story is his involvement in the revo- lutionary left from an early age. He spent five years in a French prison, starting in AIAB, for having taken His eyes were opened part in a bank robbery carried out by the anarchist Bonnot Gang. to the future even before With the onset of war in AIAD, he “he arrived, when he saw a and his comrades were certain, he news report that a leading tells us, that the Russian Empire – Bolshevik official, Grigory “with its hangmen, its pogroms, its finery, its famines, its Siberian Zinoviev, had condemned jails and ancient iniquity” – would the ‘false democratic never survive. News of the revolu- liberties demanded by tions of February and October AIAG was therefore welcome confirma- the counter-revolution.’ tion of their expectations, and in This was the ‘first shock’ late AIAH he was sent to Petrograd to him and the other as part of a prisoner exchange. His eyes were opened to the prisoners travelling future even before he arrived, with him …” when he saw a news report that a leading Bolshevik official, Grigory Zinoviev, had condemned the “false democratic liberties demanded by the counter-revolution.” This was the “first shock” to him and the other prisoners travelling with him, who all assumed that revolution and liberty actually went hand in hand. Nevertheless, Serge soon joined the Bolshevik Party and was given a job in the Communist International (Comintern). The memoir tells the story of how he kept his revolutionary faith despite repeated confirmation that the Bolshevik Party leadership would not let individual liberty stand in the way of their ambitions. Eventually he found himself expelled from the party for his independent-mindedness, deported to Central Asia, and finally permitted to leave the USSR in AICF,

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an outcast of the regime whose overthrow of the czarist autocracy he had so enthusiastically embraced.

U YQN LVZWXN VO QRX JM[NUYZWNX, he became acquainted with Ileading figures on the European radical left, while in the Soviet Union itself he was on close terms with Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and others. All of these men are sketched with a vividness that one more often finds in novels. Maxim Gorky, for example: “His frame, sturdily-built but anaemic, appeared essentially as a support for his head, an ordinary, Russian man- in-the-street’s head, bony and pitted, really almost ugly with its jutting cheek-bones, great thin-lipped mouth and professional smeller’s nose, broad and peaked.” A recurring motif of these depictions is the subsequent fate of the person described: so-and-so disappeared, or was deported to Kamchatka, or committed suicide in AICF or AICG. Serge had few illusions about the Soviet Union and claims to have been the first to describe it as a totalitarian state. At one point, he describes a show trial of working class youths accused of raping a young girl in a poor section of Leningrad (as it had become) in AIBF, and the grotesque ques- tions put to one of them by the presiding judge. Was he not aware of the “new culture” and “our wonderful Soviet morals”? “Never heard of ’em,” the boy replied. Perhaps he preferred “foreign bourgeois morals”? “Me, I’ve never been abroad.” But surely he read of them in foreign newspapers? No one he knew read even Soviet newspapers: “The Ligovka streets, that’s the only culture I know.” Visitors were also often blinded by ideology. One delegate to the Comintern Congress of AIB@ in Moscow commented complacently to Serge that “for a Marxist, the internal contradictions of the Russian Revolution were nothing to be surprised at.” Wilful ignorance goes some way to explaining the support, or non-opposition, of socialists abroad. Yet Serge himself was guilty of something similar, which was the impulse to reason his way past the horrors that he recognized before him to the underlying “necessity” of revolution. He was appalled by the brutal suppression of the Kronstadt Uprising of AIBA, when the sailors of the Kronstadt naval base, who had been critical in the Bolshevik seizure of power in October AIAG, mutinied against the new regime. Undecided at first about which side to support, Serge eventually declared himself for the party, even though the sailors sought the very democratic freedoms that he stood for himself. His judgment of the danger presented by the mutiny prevailed, which was that, in the circumstances of economic and social exhaustion, it would only lead to chaos and a dictatorship that did not even pretend to represent the proletariat.

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Reasoning such as this also helps to explain the position of external observers (as does the contention that permeates every page of Serge’s memoir, providing much of its driving force) that he and others of his gen- eration had the feeling of living at a turning point in history, when to turn one’s back on the revolution – even when before one’s eyes a totalitarian state was emerging – was to turn one’s back on history. To live life fully was to participate consciously in the forward movement of history.

NJMRUP QRX TNTVRW for the first time in the U]WK edition recalled Rfor me other Russian memoirs in which the personal history of the author is embedded in his time, and which communicate a similar sense of the movement of history. One of these is Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts, first published in segments in the AHE@s and AHF@s, trans- lated by Constance Garnett in AIBF, and released in an abridgement by the American liberal intellectual Dwight Macdonald in AIGC. Herzen was the well-educated son of a distinguished noble family, and his memoir is written in the easy, ironical manner of a highly cultured man of letters, in contrast to Serge’s rawness and immediacy. Like Serge, how- ever, he too was a revolutionary, an early socialist, and a leading member of the intelligentsia, the circle of Russian critics whose influence extended into Western Europe. His views and actions caused him to be imprisoned and exiled for four years on the borders of Siberia, and to leave Russia for good in AHDG, at the age of CE. He writes of his upbringing and his difficult relations with his father, and of his close friends and their intellectual debates, including the poet Nikolai Ogarëv, the critic Vissarion Belinsky, and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Over the entire story hangs the crush- ing of the Decembrist Revolt of AHBE and the inspiration he and others nev- ertheless found in its martyrs. Isaiah Berlin, Herzen’s greatest exponent in English, called his memoir a “literary masterpiece” comparable to the novels of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky. Two of its recurring themes are the arbitrariness of czarist rule and the absurdities of Russian bureaucracy during the reign of Nicholas I. “So terrible is the confusion, the brutality, the arbitrariness and the corruption of Russian justice,” he writes of his own arrest in AHCD, “and of the Russian police that a man of the humbler class who falls into the hands of the law is more afraid of the process of law itself than of any legal punishment.” The treatment of political prisoners, who were mostly upper class like himself, was bad enough, but nothing com- pared to the treatment of the poor, who, whatever their fate, had no valets to attend them, as Herzen’s attended him in his exile. In the

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Alexander Herzen (/5/0–/54.), like Serge, a revolutionary and socialist ... and a prisoner and exile. 5dewar 2014-05-29 10:20 AM Page 220

minor matters of everyday life, anything that required govern- ment action faced interminable delays as it was passed from one clerk to another, for no apparent reason. Herzen’s close observation of Russian society is accompanied by humane reflection on a wide range of subjects. In questions of life, art, and morals, he writes, a person is both investigator and participant, rarely able to erase the impact of family and culture. He believed that Russia needed to be open to Western influence if it was to reform itself, but this did not prevent him from having close relations with those who looked to Russian tradition (the “Slavophiles”), nor did it blind him to the problems of the West, where it seemed to him that life had been “reduced to a perpetual struggle for money.” Victor Serge would have had no trouble agreeing with him. Nadezhda Mandelstam lived the Russian Revolution more completely than Serge, though not as a party activist of any stripe. She spent her entire life (AHII–AIH@) in Russia and the Soviet Union. In AIBB, she married the poet Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested and sent into exile in AICD, not far from Perm, where Herzen spent the first part of his own exile. The cou- ple travelled together, and, like Herzen, were allowed to move to a centre where conditions were less harsh, but were prohibited from visiting a major city. After returning from exile, Osip – referred to throughout the memoir as “M.” – was arrested a second time in AICH and died in a transit camp near Vladivostok. Mandelstam learned of his death when she was summoned to a post office where a clerk handed her a package she had sent him, announcing, “The addressee is dead.” She made it her life’s work to preserve M.’s poems in the safest place she knew, her own memory, later transcribing them for publication. She began writing her memoir in the mid-AIF@s, following the Khrushchev “thaw.” It was subsequently translated into English by Max Hayward and given the title of Hope Against Hope (AIG@), a play on the Russian meaning of Nadezhda, “hope.” (A second volume, Hope Abandoned,

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was published in AIGD.) No faith in the necessity of revolution mitigated the relentless honesty and humanity of her bleak account of life in the USSR. “We lived among people who vanished into exile, labor camps or the other world,” she writes, “and also among those who sent them there.” Often the informers were known but could not be confronted or exposed, for fear of the consequences. The verb “to write” took on a new meaning. “They all write,” an old professor said of his graduate students; that is, they wrote reports for the secret police.

N[RN\RUP YQN TNTVRW in the New Yorker, the critic George Steiner Rwrote, “Nothing one can say will either communicate or affect the genius of this book. To pass judgment on it is almost insolence – even judgment that is merely celebration and homage” (December BF, AIG@). If memoirs are about bearing witness to one’s time, few better examples can be found than the three I’ve discussed here. Coming to the end of Mandelstam’s after reading the first two, one feels one has reached the pinnacle of the genre. At the same time, one is reminded that, during the times in which all three were written, an international community of political disposition and literary taste transcended the geopolitical divide between Russia and the West. I don’t think, in B@AD, that it exists any longer.

KENNETH C. DEWAR is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Mount Saint Vincent University.

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MICHAEL POSNER Theatre of Revolution The marginalized and the outsiders, the rebels and the martyrs, the dissidents and the dispossessed – these were Luscombe’s enduring focus …

n 1952, a young actor named George Luscombe – frustrated by the lack Iof creative opportunity in Canada – made a critical decision. He decided to transplant himself from the sterile, provincial wastelands of Ontario to the sweet oases of English-speaking theatre, Great Britain. After a brief period, he won a position – sight unseen – with a Welsh repertory company. The contract, sent by telegram, ordered him to report to Neyland, Wales, the same week and to open, the following night, in the lead role of a play called See How They Run. He would also be expected, it stipulated, to help with “fit up” – assembly of the set and props. On the train from London, he sat up all night memorizing the part. As Luscombe told a convocation of arts graduates at the University of Guelph in 1996 – he was receiving an honorary degree – his continental career could not have got off to a better start. “It could only go up from there.” Up, indeed, it did go. Luscombe ultimately spent the better part of six years in England and Europe, feasting at a groaning board catered by the likes of German playwright Bertolt Brecht, Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski, Hungarian dance master Rudolf von Laban and, perhaps most critically, British director Joan Littlewood. Luscombe was part of Theatre Workshop, her collectively inspired left-wing ensemble, for five years. All of these figures would play formative roles in the Luscombean vision that evolved.

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The Theatre Workshop production of Mother Courage and Her Children (3;77), showing Joan Littlewood as Mother Courage and George Luscombe as the recruiting sergeant. Photo by John Spinner, courtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archives Collection.

y the time he returned to Canada in 1958, Luscombe’s talent and Bconfidence had grown, and his theatrical convictions had con- gealed. He had no sooner landed than he attached himself to what became (echoing Littlewood) the first home of Workshop Productions – only later was the word “Toronto” appended – a company he would oversee for the next three, often turbulent, decades. Appropriately enough, it would signal its working-class roots by setting up its first stage, boasting less than 100 seats, in a factory basement. In myriad ways – as teacher, director, playwright, dramaturge, admin- istrator, social and political activist, and de facto godfather – Luscombe imprinted his mercurial sensibility on Toronto’s still nascent theatrical landscape. For many years, he was the primal force on the burgeoning local scene. Even when, in the 1970s, his work began to breed alternative offshoots – Tarragon Theatre, Factory Theatre Lab, Theatre Passe Muraille,

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and Necessary Angel, among them – he remained a dynamic and essential presence. A generation of actors, and not a few writers, were drawn to his orbit and profoundly influenced by his vision of a theatre that was direct, visceral, authentic, and politically engaged. As he said on more than one occasion, “I don’t train actors. I train citizens.” More than any other figure, said University of Guelph professor Alan Filewod, Luscombe “gave English Canada a theatrical voice and vocabulary.”

George Luscombe giving notes, early 3;82s. 6posner.ac 2014-05-28 2:57 PM Page 226

The poster for Chicago ’ (courtesy of the designer, Theo Dimson).

OPPOSITE: Chicago ’ (3;92): Yippies toss money onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The actors are (left to right) Mel Dixon, Diane Grant, Steven Bush, Ray Whelan, Calvin Butler, Rick McKenna, Peter Faulkner (on bench), and Jim Bearden (above).

While the photographers for most of these Toronto Workshop Productions images are unknown, it is likely that some of them were done by the great Robert van der Hilst. The photo on the cover of Conversations with George Luscombe is by James Lewcun.

teven Bush’s book is a series of one-on-one conversations con- Sducted at Luscombe’s Toronto home less than three years before his death in 1999; it comes with an audio cd of their chats – the better, Bush maintains, to capture the essence of Luscombe’s passion. There’s also an insightful preface by actor R.H. Thomson, as well as afterword tributes by Filewod and several others – the late Urjo Kareda (for whom Luscombe was simply “the Father”); Factory Theatre’s founding director Ken Gass; and Bush himself, a veteran actor, director, and lecturer at the University of Toronto. As an alumnus, Bush is ideally placed to supervise the excavation of Luscombe’s ideas. Shortly after he arrived in Toronto from the United States in 1969, he went to see a TWP production. He auditioned the next day, and was promptly cast as Abraham Lincoln in an anti-racism show, Mr. Bones. He spent the next few years in the company, as both actor and writer. For theatre historians, students, actors, and directors, Conversations constitutes what is likely the most exhaustive reconstruction of Luscombe’s exacting training methods and his views on what constituted genuine

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theatre, and how to achieve it. Bush delves deeply and knowledgeably into the director’s stage philosophy. Luscombe was averse to the kind of copycat British naturalism typically practised at the Stratford and Shaw festivals and at more commercial venues in Canada. He hated the idea of using live theatre to refashion what movies could do better. He fought – and fought is the correct verb – to create actor-centred, collectively driven works that were at once theatrical, opinionated, yet always rooted in emotional truth. At a time when most English-language theatregoers were content with polite colonial facsimiles of a foreign culture – Shaw, Wilde, O’Casey, Rattigan, Coward, and others – Luscombe insisted on presenting the world that Canadians actually confronted, rife with economic and political injus- tice. Sometimes, the offerings were metaphorical, as in Büchner’s Woyzeck, a work he staged three times, and sometimes they were stolen from the day’s headlines, as with Chicago ’+*, a play about the Vietnam war protests that ran for an entire year in Toronto and toured internationally. Luscombe’s anti-fascist animus was manifest even before his European sojourn. His family put down proletarian roots in Toronto’s east end, and

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Ten Lost Years (3;96–97 tour): Richard Payne appears to be doing a “slash” as (left to right) Grant Roll, François-Regis Klanfer, Peter Millard, and Ross Skene look on – or get out of the way.

his early affiliations, both in theatre and politics, were with the old Canadian Commonwealth Federation, predecessor of the modern New Democratic Party. At TWP, his anti-authoritarian default setting was most visibly on display in a social trilogy – Ten Lost Years, his 1974 adaptation of Barry Broadfoot’s oral history of the Great Depression; The Mac Paps (1979), about Canadian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War; and The Wobbly (1983), the name applied to the revolutionary International Workers of the World union. The marginalized and the outsiders, the rebels and the martyrs, the dis- sidents and the dispossessed – these were Luscombe’s enduring focus. Even when he staged the classics, he sought to make them relevant to modern times. Indeed, he occasionally chose to mount a work by Shakespeare or Aristophanes precisely when it was being performed by another, more conventional, Toronto theatre – to underscore the differences. Some readers might be tempted to fault Bush for what his book omits – descriptions of the human wreckage that Luscombe’s uncompromising approach left in his wake, more than occasionally. There is nothing here

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about his glaring deficiencies as an administrator, nor his various battles with TWP’s board of directors, the last of which eventually led to his dismissal, nor any examination of the explicit tension that frequently occurred when the company’s democratic ethos and collectivist urge were made to surrender to the will of the great leader. There are serious questions, too, about whether Luscombe’s rigorous training modalities were followed more in principle than in practice. Some of that ground, of course, has already been traversed in other books, notably in Michael McKinnie’s City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City (2007), in Neil Carson’s Harlequin in Hogtown (1995), and in Filewod’s Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada (1987). Moreover, as Bush makes clear in his own introduction, he is functioning here less as historian than as archivist, aiming to get as close as possible to documenting the precise method of Luscombe’s madness.

The Wobbly (3;:5): Maureen Webb in the air; behind her are (left to right) Peter Snell, Jo Ann Peritz, and Tom Butler; right foreground: James Kirchner. 6posner.ac 2014-05-28 2:57 PM Page 230

A theory-rich pastiche, that method blended Stanislavski’s purpose- driven precepts with von Laban’s elaborate physical choreography with Brecht’s brazen deconstruction of the fourth wall with Littlewood’s agit- prop proselytizing. Luscombe’s own quixotic theatricality added yet another dimension, a frothy stew of pantomime and soundscape and imaginative spectacle, with texts written effectively by committee. Playwrights were cordially invited to park their egos at the door, and many – among them Rick Salutin, Milton Acorn, and Jack Winter – often bristled. At times, particularly in the early chapters, the Luscombe-Bush dia- logue threatens to be overwhelmed by overly intellectualized musings on various topics – how actors ought to occupy theatrical Space; the formulaic template of eight so-called Effects (Float, Press, Thrust, and other precise movements) laid down originally by Laban and applied by his disciple, Jean Newlove, with whom Luscombe worked in England; and the sometimes murky exegesis of actor Objectives, play Units and Through- Lines. All of this will likely be of more interest to theatre professionals than general readers. But again, Bush is only being faithful to his role as documentarian. The unavoidable question that Conversations raises is this: if George Luscombe was so seminal a force, why is it that, forty years after his heyday, Canada’s mainstream commercial theatre remains fundamentally unal- tered? Yes, it’s true that Tarragon, Factory, Passe Muraille, and other com- panies have championed homegrown talent and more contemporary dramatic motifs. And at Canadian Stage, artistic director Matthew Jocelyn has taken up Luscombe’s tacit posthumous challenge and programmed seasons that are innovative, provocative, and refreshing. But at Shaw and Stratford, Canadian dramaturgical content still feels like tokenism. Most of the regional theatres continue to subsist largely on a bland diet of recycled and imported golden oldies, the Wildes and the Stoppards, the O’Neills and the Mamets. And the avowed mandate of Albert Schultz’s Soulpepper troupe – arguably the most successful new theatre entry in Canada in the last 25 years – is to restage the classics. Bush does not shy away from raising the issue frontally, asking his former mentor near the end, “Why haven’t we had more effect? Why isn’t Canadian theatre more politicized?” And, for once, the man who always had an answer has none. “There’s no sense of revolution in this country,” Luscombe finally observes. He then mentions the obvious exception – Quebec, where artists of all kinds have been somehow automatically absorbed into a vanguard that routinely challenges the status quo. The best known, Bush notes, is Robert Lepage, a crossover artist (theatre, opera, film) who has “managed to break the stranglehold of naturalism.”

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n spirit, if not de jure, Quebec is another country. The making of IEnglish Canada, Luscombe rightly counters, has been an exercise in accommodation. We compromise, therefore we are. Most of our artists – and most of the audiences – have been willingly co-opted. Given a choice between the safe and the daring, the country’s artistic directors tilt reflex- ively – and are rewarded for tilting – to the benign and the innocuous. Steven Bush’s important book reminds us that, for all his flaws, George Luscombe was ahead of his time, a theatrical outlier who searched for truth and remained true to himself.

Freelance writer and editor MICHAEL POSNER is a former senior reporter for the Globe and Mail.

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CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN Being Cheap

Cheapness should always be practised forthrightly with no excuses, like a proud vocation. Its benefits, for those of us who are not poor and have a choice, are too important to keep hidden. Words like “thrifty,” “frugal,” or “prudent” nowadays conjure up the austere, dutiful lives of ancestors we have no wish to imitate. But the point of being cheap is not to lay up a store in heaven, let alone to hoard money like a miser in a Dickens novel. Its real purpose is to provide opportunities for whatever you want most …

G CLL SIF SJMFVOQN PLCSJSTEFR that rattle through contem- Oporary speech like gravel in a tin can, “You get what you pay for” ranks among the most common and least accurate. Often used defensively by salesmen who know their goods are overpriced, it seems to recommend spending as much money as you possibly can on whatever it is you want or need at any given time. Otherwise you’re sure to end up with something inferior. Worse still, everyone will know you’re a cheapskate. Like the equally vacuous cliché that anything worth doing is worth doing well, everyone past childhood knows it’s not actually true. You very often don’t get what you pay for unless you’re simply paying for the prestige of having paid a lot. Cheaper is sometimes better; just check the ratings in Consumer Reports. Even when it’s merely good enough, cheaper has the unfailing virtue of costing less. Living cheaply represents a drastically underrated gain in freedom and opportunity for anyone who is not rich. Among many other benefits, it allows career cheapskates much greater scope for generosity. Conspicuous non-consumption has always been a precept in the world’s great religions. While Christ and the Buddha were certainly on to

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The rise of social something – what you don’t have media has made self- creates less clutter in a house or a life – the productivity of modern “consciousness about economies makes it possible to owning and doing the live comfortably on far less right stuff all the more money than most middle-class North Americans think. Call it the intense. In all too many generic lifestyle. For almost every cases the product itself expensive product or experience, serves only an insecure a range of cheaper equivalents is easy to find, many of them entirely vanity …” satisfactory. There is no need to be ascetic. To mention only everyday necessities, housing, transportation, food, and clothes all come in infinite gradations of status and utility, which are totally different criteria. In a post- industrial era cost is more often correlated with keeping up appearances than with usefulness.

ICRJNH CGSFQ cleverly advertised brand names, the latest smart- Cphone or most fashionable shoes, pedigreed vegetables and exor- bitant coffee confections, is a doubly self-defeating form of bondage. Not only are you literally in debt to status symbols, the net effect is to reveal a lack of self-assurance rather than superior taste or even affluence. The rise of social media has made self-consciousness about owning and doing the right stuff all the more intense. In all too many cases the product itself serves only an insecure vanity; no one needs it at all. I once read an inter- view in a style magazine with a man who declared he would be ashamed to use Visa or MasterCard in a fine restaurant. For such occasions he needed an American Express card with a high annual fee. Carrying the fetish of supposedly exclusive symbols even to the logistics of paying for other symbols reduces the whole edifice of self-display to absurdity. It goes without saying that there are exceptions. If your child has deli- cate feet or an eye disease, the best shoes and ophthalmology should be top priorities. Education is worth some expense, though the highest-priced institutions are not necessarily the best. Someone who hopes to make part- ner in a corporate law firm will not shop at Walmart for a professional wardrobe. The world is also full of expensive emergencies. But in most of adult life, searching for bargains and bargaining whenever possible should never be considered beneath anyone’s dignity. Within certain limits, gall is a valuable quality. Getting your money’s worth is not only admirable but frequently entertaining.

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The man or woman who auto- matically pays the asking price for a car or a vacation rental is excessively timid, or else making large sacrifices to an illusion of gentility. People who are not slaves to the garment industry buy winter clothes in the spring and summer clothes in the fall. Frozen fish is sometimes better than fresh. Several domestic mass- market beers are perfectly drink- able. Nobody needs a Rolex. To be called cheap is a compliment, even if usually unintended.

JKF CLMORS FUFQWDOEW in Lthe modern world, I began conscious life with a desire to own the infinity of things that looked good to me, starting with expen- sive toys and progressing through Keds sneakers to books and records to exotic cars that never ran very well. (My early adulthood passed before electronic devices became a conspicuous form of consumption.) But I came by my present attitude towards expendi- ture honestly and can even boast of being a third-generation cheap- skate. My parents grew up during the Great Depression and learned to scrimp early in life. Once mar- ried, they never quite got the hang of birth control and soon found themselves raising four children on a single pitiful salary. I was the eldest. Other than presents from sympathetic grandparents, most of my unfashionable clothes came 7clausen.ac 2014-05-28 2:58 PM Page 237

from a second-hand store opti- mistically named Next to New. My one consolation was that I got to wear them before my brothers did. We were the last family in our neighbourhood to acquire practi- cally every new thing. My parents finally bought a television only because their offspring were never home. As a child and teenager I rebelled against this enforced frugality, especially after our family began to prosper. By my early twenties, though, I learned to appreciate the advantages of making a little pocket money go as far as possible. Those advantages never cease to impress me despite the fact that, after two close calls, I’ve been fortunate enough never to be unemployed. One of my chief mentors in cheap hedonism was my strong- willed maternal grandmother, who began life in France as an enfant trouvé and came to Quebec as a tutor in her early twenties. She found her way into literary and artistic circles and married an American writer, also an immi- grant from Europe, who soon hit it big with one book. But neither his success nor their marriage lasted long. A cascade of unpaid bills fol- lowed by her husband’s infidelity broke up my grandmother’s fam- ily. After leaving him in disgust, she settled in remote Ithaca, New York. There, she reasoned, her three children could continue to live at home when they reached college age and attend Cornell 7clausen.ac 2014-05-28 2:58 PM Page 238

University for almost nothing. (In those days the land-grant colleges of that Ivy League institution charged no tuition at all.) It was the most far-sighted plan I’ve ever heard of by an impoverished single mother and proved completely successful in spite of Depression and war. Once her children were all grown up, she moved to Washington, DC, and turned the cheap way of life into an art form. There she enjoyed some of the city’s better restaurants and was never at a loss for concerts, art galleries, or international cinema, although her income as a French teacher was extremely modest. She had become one of those independent souls who move comfortably through life with a minimum of luggage, spent modestly on basic needs, and never paid more for anything because of the status it conferred. As a Frenchwoman in America, so far as she was concerned she had all the status she needed. In her last years she lived surprisingly well on little She had become one of more than a pittance from Social those independent souls Security, inhabiting a succession of basement apartments in hand- “who move comfortably some neighbourhoods. She trav- through life with a elled widely and, despite her minimum of luggage, somewhat cynical attitude to life, had a great many friends. spent modestly on basic When I was a college student needs, and never paid during the ?BA>s I spent the spring more for anything of my junior year on a foreign- study program in London. After it because of the status ended I wanted to see more of it conferred.” Europe, but my father thought I should come home and take up my regular summer job. With three more children to educate, he was understandably still anxious about money. My grandmother was the one who made it possible for me to spend the summer touring Britain and the Continent. Without being asked, she mailed me a cheque for =@>>, an extravagant amount given her slim resources. That gift supported me with- out hardship for three entire months of travelling by bicycle, hitchhiking, occasionally taking trains, staying in dozens of youth hostels or cheap hotels from Edinburgh to Nîmes, Geneva, Baden-Baden, and Paris. I know this claim sounds extreme even to readers old enough to remember Arthur Frommer’s guidebook Europe on Five Dollars a Day, but it was one of the best experiences of my life. Not until years later did I realize it also represented a perfect demonstration from grandparent to grandchild that a confident, imaginative parsimony need not be the enemy of pleasure but in fact could supply the means for it. It also illustrated the

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wisdom of the advice (now almost another cliché) to spend money not on things but on experiences, assuming one already has the things one really needs.

IFCPNFRR should always be prac- Ctised forthrightly with no excuses, like a proud vocation. Its benefits, for those of us who are not poor and have a choice, are too important to keep hidden. Words like “thrifty,” “frugal,” or “prudent” nowadays conjure up the austere, dutiful lives of ances- tors we have no wish to imitate. But the point of being cheap is not to lay up a store in heaven, let alone to hoard money like a miser in a Dickens novel. Its real purpose is to provide opportunities for whatever you want most, whether that means a season ticket to the opera, a motorcycle, or a freighter voyage through the Far East. If your foremost ambition is giving money away to children or grandchildren, to friends, to charity, being a cheapskate makes that all the more possible as well. And finally, of course, the less money you need, the less you have to work – a supreme advantage for those who value leisure above everything else.

CHRISTOPHER CLAUSEN, a long-time con- tributor to Queen’s Quarterly, is the author of My Life with President Kennedy and other books.

Grenoble, France – one of many roads open to those who remember what is important in life. IMAGE: S. ANDERSON IMAGE: S. ANDERSON 7clausen.ac 2014-05-282:58PMPage241 8marshall.ac 2014-05-28 2:59 PM Page 242 8marshall.ac 2014-05-28 2:59 PM Page 243

LEE MARSHALL Wes Anderson’s Fabulous Fancy

Whimsical, elaborate, and winding, there’s no mistaking a Wes Anderson film. Fans of his work are more like acolytes; they revere Anderson with a religious fervour. For these addicts, watching an Anderson is like journeying to a familiar yet surprising fantasy where the scenery is colourful and overflowing with infinitesimal detail. Followers love that the director-writer-producer sprinkles his fables with intricacies and works with a repetitive, rotating cast of actors. The sets, the costumes, and even the dialogue drip with a meticulous style that is often dateless and always quaint. It’s exactly these twee things that naysayers criticize: the director’s work is loved and hated for the same reasons. But finding an Andercynic isn’t easy these days, not since the release of The Grand Budapest Hotel.

R ^X\ NPXYQ Wes Anderson, then his eighth feature is your new Ifavourite movie. If you’re not a fanatic, then the tragicomedy will con- vince you to join the cult. As popular with movie critics as it is with audi- ences, the film made a record-breaking ELFF,FFF on opening weekend playing in only four theatres. That’s the most lucrative limited live-action debut since Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master in HFGH. Quintessential Anderson, yet darker and deeper than anything he has made before, Budapest is the first real Oscar prospect out this year.

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Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) is concierge of one of the grandest hotels ever to be rendered on the screen. 8marshall.ac 2014-05-28 2:59 PM Page 245

W [TQ UVNSUWNY^ European country IZubrowka, in the time between wars, the Grand Budapest Hotel is as fictionally renowned as it is fabulously pink. Flamboyant Gustave H (Ralph Fiennes) is concierge and consort to female clientele who frequent the hotel – the older, richer, and blonder, the better. The death of his favourite lover, octogenarian Madame D (unrec- ognizably weathered Tilda Swinton), sends Gustave and protégé lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori) to pay their respects at her estate. Gustave inherits the famous painting called Boy with Apple – much to the chagrin of the dowager’s covetous relatives. Uncertainty over the benefici- ary of Madame D’s will incites villainous son Dmitri (Adrien Brody) to plague Gustave, but chutzpah, dumb luck, and the friendship of Zero deliver the concierge from danger (if not from the impending war). That’s one layer of the film, anyway. Budapest is actually a story inside of a book inside of a movie. It begins in present-day Zubrowka when a young girl visits a monument to The Author with a little book that displays the pink hotel on its cover. The film arrives in the office of The Author (Tom Wilkinson), who narrates directly to the camera and transports the audience back to GMKL, when he was a Young Writer (Jude Law) at the hotel, meeting its owner, the melancholic Mr Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham), formerly lobby boy of that once grand establishment. The adven- tures of Gustave and Zero are the core of Budapest; GMKL makes the mantle, and the present day forms a crust around Anderson’s newest world. It’s a story about storytelling, specifically writing. Anderson co-wrote the story with Hugo Guinness, but they were inspired by the work of Austrian author Stefan Zweig. In the film, The Author says, “Once the public knows that you’re a writer, they bring the characters and events to you.” The public didn’t bring Zweig to Anderson, but the director did happen across a shrine to the

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author when he was wandering around the Luxembourg Garden in Paris. The shrine in the beginning of Budapest has an uncanny, bespecta- cled resemblance to the one in the garden. Zweig is the foundation (for a character and the film), but Anderson is an author in his own right. The screenplay sounds like a novel being read aloud – it’s even divided into chapters by fancy title cards. Using slightly awkward syntax, eschewing slang, and avoiding overt cultural or political references, Anderson creates a funny script with an adorable, almost timeless, formality. Narrated in turn by The Author, The Author at a younger age, and a grown- up Zero, Budapest has the poetry-loving Gustave, reciting stanzas at staff dinners, at the centre of its literary mechanism.

\Z[N]Q (Ralph Fiennes) is a dandy from Ga bygone era when good manners had power. If he isn’t improvising flowery verses or taking rich old women to bed, Gustave is spritzing his signature scent, L’air de Panache, in the corri- dors. Of course, the duties of concierge also keep him busy. Fiennes’ perfect comedic timing ele- vates Gustave from charming to charismatic. It was the actor’s first time working with Anderson, but you can’t tell that from watching the film. Fiennes is a dynamo, snapping from fragile to ferocious, tender to tenacious, faster than he can exclaim, “Keep your hands off my lobby boy!” He is the most brilliant and complex actor in Budapest, the diamond cut with the most facets. Fiennes shines the brightest, but he is not the only star in the film. Budapest is encrusted with celebrities (and Anderson veterans) like Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, and Owen Wilson, who deliver lines in distinctive deadpan. Critics say that Anderson’s fastidiousness is his downfall, that the fussiness of his vision restricts his actors. They see his films as Fabergé eggs, beautiful but manufactured and empty. In some of Anderson’s

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Edward Norton is one of the many stars to lend their talents to this project – and Wes Anderson fans will be treated to the usual abundance of hilarious affectations and priceless lines. 8marshall.ac 2014-05-28 2:59 PM Page 248

previous work, I admit, at times the acting sounds too controlled. In Budapest, regulated vocalization doesn’t detract from the storytelling. In fact, that unadorned acting is a necessary complement to the decorative set and over-the-top plot. Newcomers Tony Revolori, who plays Zero, and Saoirse Ronan, as Zero’s girlfriend Agatha, are particularly honest and subtle.

N[OTUWS Budapest will make you hungry, and you’ll eat with Wyour eyes. At Mendl’s bakery, Agatha assembles a delectable little cream-filled and glazed choux pastry tower called the Courtesan au Chocolat. It’s Gustave’s preferred indulgence and is generally considered “out of this world.” If that doesn’t satisfy you, feast on the hotel, which appears like a layer cake rising tier after pink tier in the powdered sugar- dusted mountains. (It’s modelled after the real Grandhotel Pupp but represented through a miniature façade.) Budapest itself is the largest confection up for consumption. Like the story within a story, Anderson nestles visual treats inside each other like edible matryoshka dolls. Fans of Wes Anderson are (perhaps unknowingly) equal fans of the cin- ematography of Robert Yeoman. Yeoman has worked on all of Anderson’s live-action films. The cinematography in an Anderson is distinguished by wide shots of epic tableaux, perfect symmetry, and extreme close-ups. Throughout Budapest, in particular during tête-à-têtes, Yeoman breaks the GLF-degree rule of filmmaking, which says that the camera shouldn’t cross an imaginary axis that connects two conversing characters. The cam- era jumps rebelliously back and forth between characters’ literal views and examines their exchanges from both sides of the axis. This makes for a dizzying feeling that gives the dialogue momentum. The camera also takes a peek from unexpected vantages, like the bird’s-eye view through the hole in a truck roof, the inside of an open casket, or an examination of the minute detail revealed by a magnifying glass. Camerawork gives conversation speed, but the plot is propelled forward by physical movement and travelling. Gustave and Zero take a train, sled down a mountain, and make a long march through Madame D’s enormous estate. There is bicycle riding, a desperate dash up the stairs, and a comi- cally complicated escape from prison. Although there is a lot of motion in the film, characters move in calculated, choreographed synchronicity, like dancers in an ornate music box. The actors manoeuvre in straight lines, approaching the camera, running away, or walking across the screen at parallel and perpendicular angles to the shot, never slanting at a diagonal. A funicular to the hotel and a cable car up to a monastery provide the only oblique motion in the film. Yeoman’s camera, too, moves in straight lines, whip-panning where I imagine exclamation marks punctuate the script.

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Eager lobby boy Zero (Tony Revolori, second from left), has much to learn from veteran concierge Gustave, here attending to the many needs of Madame D (a wonderfully wizened Tilda Swinton).

The visual experience of Budapest changes with the passing of time. Each of the three timelines – pre-war, GMKL, and present day – has a different screen size. The majority of the film, between wars, is shot in a photographic J:I aspect ratio, like the first silent films. That almost square screen gives the hotel a more impressive height. The subsequent timelines have increasingly larger screens to match the ages they capture: GMKL is presented with a wider screen, and the brief modern- day vignette has the widest. Colour is another way that Anderson conveys passing time and even mood. The film doesn’t have the same grainy yellow filter that is typical of an Anderson – Budapest is sharper and more saturated from the outset. The hotel is bursting with colour in its heyday – pink exterior, purple uniforms, and red carpets. But the colour fades as the war approaches. For Zero’s brief recollection of wartime, the film turns black and white. Like

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Zero, the hotel never recovers from the war; in GMKL, it is as decrepit beige, orange, and sickly pale blue as Zero is sad. Budapest is a comedy about loyalty, nostalgia, and loneliness. The strongest bond in the film is the lobby boy’s undying loyalty to Gustave. First Gustave evaluates Zero as the equivalent of his name – zero experi- ence, education, or family, he’s a refugee from another imaginary country – but a shared esteem for the hotel connects the pair. Zero explains why he wants to work there: “Who wouldn’t want to be a lobby boy at the Grand Budapest Hotel? It’s an institution.” Zero appropriates Gustave’s vanity, drawing a thin moustache over his lip with a pencil every morning, and his penchant for poetry. On one occasion, Gustave lashes out at Zero, apologizing almost immediately and profusely “on behalf of the hotel.” But Zero is completely devoted to Gustave and appears to be the concierge’s only true friend (although he does belong to a secret brother- hood of hoteliers called the Society of the Crossed Keys). Loyalty is rewarded in Budapest, and Gustave leaves everything to Zero, including the hotel that he inherited from Madame D. Zero’s love for Agatha is the only other link in the film that really deserves any discussion. It is as immediate and constant as the lobby boy’s devotion to his mentor, but it’s not as central to the plot. Agatha is the duo’s surprise sugar-coated saviour, baking secret items into desserts for Gustave and discovering a confidential document in the back of a painting. Gustave is the spirit of the hotel, but Zero keeps it open for the memory of Agatha. Budapest is about nostalgia. Zero thinks back on the concierge and remarks, “I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it. But I will say he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvellous grace.” This line reminds me of a quote from another film about writing: Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, wherein a modern-day man finds himself in the roaring twenties, an era he idealizes, meeting Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, Stein, and Dali. A lovely woman turns his idea of nostalgia upside down by saying, “I’m from the ’HFs, and I’m telling you the golden age is la Belle Époque.” Everyone is guilty of romanticizing the illusion of a time where they don’t belong. It is this insistent nostalgia that fails Gustave in the end – not every conflict can be corrected with elegance and politeness. The film is imbued with loss for a time that never really existed and marked by a long list of deaths preceding the war. At its essence, Budapest is a memoir about loneliness concealed within loneliness, told by The Author and Moustafa, who are drawn together by their identical aloneness. The relationships in Budapest are unforgettable but ephemeral. Even the legendary hotel deteriorates, its clientele dwindling to a small number that is “without exception solitary.” The only thing that remains is a mild sadness, a shrine to The Author and his words on a page.

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WPQYZXW SYN_QZ the edges of darkness – murder, war, decay – but A the film is still lit with his bright glow. Budapest is funny and deliciously bittersweet. It’s somewhere I’m happy to go. That’s what all Anderson films provide: passage to a fanciful place that exceeds our own.

LEE MARSHALL is film reviewer for Queen’s Quarterly.

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ERIC FRIESEN The Denk Variations

There was a time when just playing the piano was enough. Maybe it still is for a few titans, an Argerich or a Kissin. But artists like Glenn Gould, Daniel Barenboim, and Alfred Brendel have offered another model of musician: the public intellectual, the cultural engager who connects with other arts, the commentator, the activist, even the entertainer. In this second decade of the twenty-first century the 00-year-old American pianist Jeremy Denk has answered that broader call, but entirely in his own way.

W’V JMMR I JIRRMU ZMIU, to put it mildly, for Jeremy Denk. Last ISeptember he was named a MacArthur Fellow (often referred to as the “genius award”), and the same month Nonesuch released his recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which quickly shot to the top of the Billboard Classical charts. In March of this year, he was awarded the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize and was named an Artistic Partner of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. His comic opera The Classical Style (with composer Steven Stucky) will premiere this summer at the Ojai Music Festival and in Berkeley, California. And he has signed a book contract with Random House for a memoir, expanding his essay “Every Good Boy Does Fine” which appeared in the April ECDF issue of the New Yorker. All of this in addition to his busy performance schedule playing recitals, guesting with major orchestras, and touring with chamber music partners Joshua Bell and Steven Isserlis.

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Unlike Gould or Brendel, however, Jeremy Denk is the most approach- able and almost lovable genius you would ever meet. He is a boyish GG, with short, greying hair, a soft, light tenor voice, and an impish manner that looks ironically and bemusedly at his life and the classical music world he inhabits. He’s like the slightly nerdy boy-next-door whom you kind of take for granted until one day you find he is the toast of cultural America. Speaking by phone from his apartment in New York, Denk sips coffee as we talk and answers my questions with patience, humour, and an elo- quence that is so casual and effortless, his words flit by like a fluttering of spring finches, and I have to focus very hard to catch them.

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USYPRN XT, first in New Jersey and then in New Mexico, Jeremy Gsays, “the story goes that I asked for piano lessons. There was a spinet in the house; I was pretty obsessive about certain records, we had a kind of ‘DCC Great Hits of Classical Music’ album, and I have a vivid mem- ory of sitting by the stereo and playing it over and over again, so I was attracted to music pretty intensely, and I think it was also my teachers who said that I needed some extracurricular stimulation, otherwise I was going to drive them insane.” Did he already have a sense of his wider vocation at an early age? “I was a bit of a do-everything kid, a little bit of an over- achiever … in New Jersey I was put into an accelerated program … and then when I got to New Mexico I was many grades ahead of normal school. I had a very strong relationship to my English teachers, took IT English for a lot of years. I was obsessed with maths and science, reading, and piano was always a kind of an issue to fit in practice time …” From New Mexico, Jeremy took this eclectic and restless pursuit of so many things to Oberlin College, signing up for a double major in music and chemistry. He even managed to fit in a “secret English minor,” as he laughingly describes it, taking as many English electives as he could, drawn to one particular professor “whom I really loved and who expressed some beautiful truths about the way literature works and who turned me on to all kinds of books I found really inspiring.” He pauses and then concludes, “I was young and just scattered, I had all these interests. I went to Oberlin because I didn’t want to foreclose on any of them.” By his sophomore year, however, Jeremy began foreclosing on chem- istry. “My immersion in music was getting deeper and more profound. People were excited about my playing, and I could feel reasonably confi- dent about pursuing music. And I had this chemistry lab partner who really got on my nerves, a wonderful individual, but there was one day I remember watching him as he was meticulously making sure every t was crossed and every i was dotted for the lab report, and I just knew that that was everything I didn’t want to do.” He also gives credit to his chemistry advisor who had been to a concert of Jeremy’s and said if he played that well he should devote himself to the piano. “So even he steered me in that direction, which was very generous of him.” In his senior year at Oberlin, Jeremy heard a recital by the Hungarian pianist György Sebok, who was teaching at Indiana University, and played for Sebok at a master class. It was a fateful encounter that Denk writes about very eloquently in “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” and led him to study with Sebok at Indiana. Jeremy describes in detail his very first lesson with the Hungarian legend: “The aim of that first lesson, I later realized, was to ennoble the art of practicing. You were not practicing ‘phrasing’ – you were drawing like Michelangelo, or seducing like Don

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Juan. Sebok said many times that you don’t teach piano playing at lessons; you teach how to practice – the daily rite of discovery that is how learning really happens.” From there, Jeremy moved to New York to study at Julliard and to begin establishing himself as a professional pianist. Long before he was showered with honours and the cash that goes with them, he was strug- gling to make ends meet. His delightful sense of humour comes out in a piece he wrote for the New Yorker called “Piano Man,” in which he describes being saved from financial ruin by winning third prize in a London piano competition.

Years of grad-school indulgences (liquor, Chinese take-out, kitchen appliances) had left me with a Visa bill of forty-five hundred dollars, and I was able to erase it in a flash. All that remained of my glorious prize, of all those months of practicing, was a photograph of Princess Diana handing me my award onstage at Royal Festival Hall, which I faxed to everyone I knew. At the time, my hair resembled hers.

In his thirties, Jeremy found his writing voice, starting his celebrated blog Think Denk (jeremydenk.net/blog), subtitled ironically, the glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist. Not content with gushing about every concert performance or conductor relationship and effusively thanking every presenter as if they were Carnegie Hall, as so many artist blogs so boringly do, Jeremy writes revealingly and humorously about the quotidian life of a self-employed classical pianist, with all its insecurities and calamities, minor and major. Instead of having a paid jester whisper into his ear, like kings of old, to counter all the adulation, Jeremy has an inner court jester that does it for him. When the Library of Congress writes to tell him they’ve selected his website for their historic collection of internet materials, he quotes several witty emails received from friends, and then the one from his mother, whose response is a simple two words: “Sounds impressive.” Son Jeremy’s inner jester voice concludes: “which is a miraculously concise piece of parental ambiguous screw-with-your-accomplishments genius! Just two words! ‘Impressive’ or even ‘Wow’ would have supportively sufficed, but the addition of the unassuming word ‘sounds’ carries the deliciously unavoidable implication of it being much, much less impressive than the word impressive would suggest.” Another part of his cool twenty-first-century profile is the inclusion of video liner notes on \]\ for his Bach Goldbergs [\. Wearing a simple open-collared purple shirt, he takes us through the Goldbergs, keeping it smart, casual, fun, and welcoming, as if he were doing it just for you in

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your own living room. The video was the suggestion of Robert Hurwitz, the president of Nonesuch Records, and at first Jeremy demurred.

I was a little bit reluctant because I don’t love talking to the camera, but I had all these essays I had worked on, and it’s so much easier to sit at the piano and weave in the commentary with musical demonstrations, and Bob was really after that kind of fireside chat kind of atmosphere. I had to have a friend come and stand in front of me so I could imagine I was talking to someone sort of casually rather than talking to an entire camera crew of probably slightly dubious musical knowledgeability.

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More seriously, he continues:

There are some basics I cover in that video, but there are also the beauties that I find in [the Goldbergs] which I was happy to get down on the video. What makes the theme so wonderfully bittersweet, and why is it so beloved, and what are the specific musical techniques that happen, and what makes this particular piece taste different from any other? And the element of the games and the sense of play …

As for the response he’s had to the video, Jeremy says he’s had a fair amount: “My friend Nico Muhly, the composer, wrote me to say how much he enjoyed it. Apparently [he laughs] Paul Simon has a copy of it too. That sort of rocked my world!” His latest project is the comic opera The Classical Style, inspired by Charles Rosen’s seminal book on the birth of the era of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. But that’s where the comparison ends. From the sounds of it, it’s more of a madcap opera than just comic. Jeremy explains:

… to the extent that it has a plot, it’s about the birth of the classical style, the flourishing of it, and the death of it. And I always thought that some of the main characters of the opera would have to be the tonic, the dominant, and the subdominant harmonies. Basically I’ve weaved together three plots: one involves Charles narrating the story; another is Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven in heaven confronting their ennui and finding themselves out of date and having to go and find Charles to recover their mojo; and the third is about the tonic, the dominant, and the subdominant, their codependent love triangle of harmony. Obviously it’s very silly and hopefully very fun and educational. And there’s also a lot of modelling on Don Giovanni.

I ask him about reports that the plot has Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven playing Scrabble in heaven. “In the opening scene in heaven, I wanted to capture the ennui of canonization, this whole ‘classical music is dead’ busi- ness. I wanted a witty and melancholic way of expressing that. Working out what they would play in Scrabble was one of the most fun parts of it.” (Note: Beethoven makes the word Weltanschauung for a triple word score of DHF points. For all the fun, however, Jeremy adds that the opera also has a lot of tenderness, and it ends on a melancholy note.) I ask him if he were to print a business card with one word on it to describe himself professionally, what would that word be? “I don’t like using one word to describe anything, as you can probably tell,” he says laughing. “I’m not good at coming up with a good mission statement. Why,

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why not an essay or a paragraph? It all derives from an interaction with music.” He gently bats away my attempts to compare him to others. When I mention the name Glenn Gould as a kind of model for someone like him, he seems momentarily intrigued by the comparison. “Glenn Gould is an interesting case, and there is some connection to some of the things I like to do. He had an interesting wit and, of course, an unbelievable mind, but …” he laughs and says, “I’m not pretending to be a latter-day Glenn Gould or anything. It’s hard for me to talk about that because I don’t like to invoke any … there are obviously pieces I’ve drawn from all kinds of people: writers, composers, films, a certain Daily Show element to what I do – in opera there are some elements of vaudeville.”

KSRKQXLM PR WOM MRL that Jeremy Denk is simply Denkian, or I certainly in the process of becoming so. An American original. A welcome spirit, giving new life to the world of classical music.

ERIC FRIESEN is a broadcaster and writer specializing in the arts. He writes regularly on music for Queen’s Quarterly.

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IMAGE COURTESY OF THE JOHN D. & CATHERINE T. MACARTHUR FOUNDATION. 9friesen.ac 2014-05-28 3:00 PM Page 261

ON. 10bacon.ac 2014-05-28 4:44 PM Page 262

Francis Bacon Henry Moore Terror and Beauty at the art Gallery of Ontario

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ALLISON MACDUFFEE

One artist worked in a london studio, its door streaked with multicoloured paint. amidst an apparently chaotic clutter of books, photographs, and art materials, he had just enough space to paint. the other artist worked in the english countryside. shelves housed small sculptures alongside bones, roots, and shells. there he could examine a bird’s breastbone and carve in plaster.

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OUW[ `VVWO (BIJI–BJIG) KUN _WKUMRX \KMVU (BJAJ–BJJC) are Hin dialogue in the exhibition Francis Bacon, Henry Moore: Terror and Beauty, at the Art Gallery of Ontario from April F to July CA. Although co-organized with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Toronto showing, with well over BAA works, has a different emphasis. At Oxford, curators Richard Calvocoressi and Martin Harrison emphasized Moore’s and Bacon’s art-historical sources. At the AGO, curator Dan Adler, Associate Professor of Art History at York University, focuses on the human figure and historical traumas. “The artists’ works are paired to create a dialogue showing their shared awareness of human suffering and mortality that is also a testament to human strength and resilience.” In their origins and personalities, the two artists were almost polar opposites. Henry Moore was the son of a Yorkshire coal miner; after serving in the First World War, he studied at the Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Moore was a husband and father, a leading citizen serving on boards and committees. Francis Bacon, born in Dublin of English parents, had an upper-middle-class upbringing; he claimed to have no formal art training. He was openly gay, and his friends and lovers included criminals as well as well-known artists and writers. World War RR sets the scene for the opening of the exhibition. While the war was important for both artists, this room mainly focuses on Moore’s drawings and sculptures, accompanied by the documentary photographs of Bill Brandt. The Blitz killed thousands and demolished much of London. Many Londoners fled to the Underground stations to escape nightly raids. Moore’s Shelter Drawings responded to these conditions. Moore recalled that he sought refuge in BJEA in one such shelter. “I saw hundreds of Henry Moore Reclining Figures stretched along the platforms. I was fascinated, visually. I went back again and again.” As an official war artist, he produced Shelter Drawings whose monumentality contrasts with Brandt’s flashbulb-lit images. Moore’s Sleeping Positions (BJEA–EB) represents a variety of restless sleepers. Each is given her own space rather than being packed closely together as in the actual shelters. Moore’s Shelter Drawings were influenced by his pre-war sculptures of reclining figures, and these drawings in turn affected his later sculptures. The exhibition juxtaposes a postwar Moore Reclining Figure (BJFB) with the Shelter Drawings. The tense, active pose of the sculpted figure closely resembles the woman at the lower left of Sleeping Positions. However, the sculpture is more unnerving, with the figure’s truncated legs and birdlike head. Moore wrote in BJFH, “There is one quality I find in all the artists I admire most – men like Masaccio, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne. I mean a disturbing element, a distortion ...”

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Henry moore Sleeping Positions 1940–41 the Henry moore Foundation 10bacon.ac 2014-05-28 4:44 PM Page 266

Henry moore Reclining Figure 1951 10bacon.ac 2014-05-28 4:44 PM Page 267

art Gallery of Ontario, courtesy Craig Boyko, aGO 10bacon.ac 2014-05-28 4:44 PM Page 268

aBOve: OppOsite: Francis Bacon Henry moore Second Version of Triptych   Three Fates 1988 1941 tate modern, london royal pavilion and museums, Brighton & Hove

QO XOMVUN WVVT examines distortions and crucifixions in the Twork of both Moore and Bacon. The key work is Bacon’s Second Version of Triptych +-,, (BJII), in which he recreates and enlarges his own painting of BJEE. Significantly, the first version, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (c. BJEE), was painted during the final, intense phase of the war and had established Bacon’s reputation. In this complex work, Bacon creates strange, humanoid figures whom he identifies in two ways: as the Furies – the Greek Goddesses of vengeance – and also as the mourners at the base of a crucifixion (exhibition wall panel). The visceral effect of the figures is overwhelming: they are truncated, eyeless, their necks unnaturally long, their mouths screaming or grimacing. Bacon’s obsession with the image of a screaming mouth came partly from view- ing stills of Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin. His wartime volunteer work with the Air Raid Precautions, during which he was

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required to pull the injured and the dead from bombed houses, affected him deeply. Psychiatrist Allan Peterkin observes that often no words exist for the modern and postmodern experience of trauma: Bacon’s triptych is like a wordless scream (exhibition audio guide). Moore’s wartime drawing Three Fates (BJEB) shows his contrasting approach to war. The Three Fates, as described by Plato, are female deities who spin, measure, and finally cut the thread of each person’s life. Moore provides not a literal representation of the Fates but rather an almost mundane image of three women in a shelter, one holding a baby, one knitting, and one sitting quietly. Scholar Francis Warner finds Moore’s choice of subject suitable: “Every one of us knew that, with each present raid, the length of our lives was being measured, and no one could know whose thread of life Atropos would have severed by morning.” 10bacon.ac 2014-05-28 4:44 PM Page 270

Francis Bacon Study for Portrait VI 1953 the minneapolis institute of arts 10bacon.ac 2014-05-28 4:44 PM Page 271

Henry moore Helmet Head and Shoulders, 1952 tate modern, london

Portraits – but of an unconventional style – are a feature of the third room. Bacon was haunted by the BGFA portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velázquez, which he knew only from reproductions. He often returned to the theme; one example is Study for Portrait VI (BJFD). Bacon has enclosed the pope with gold lines; he looks caged, suspicious, on trial. While the pope’s garments have a gorgeous sheen, his face, with its open mouth, is slightly blurred – speaking or screaming? Unlike Bacon, Moore was not a portraitist, but he created a series of helmet heads that, according to the AGO, “suggest ideas about threat, apprehension, vulnerability and protection,” as in Helmet Head and Shoulders (BJFC). Moore explored the idea of an outer protection to an inner form. Given that a helmet is meant to protect from harm, Moore’s World War I service, where he was gassed, probably made this subject compelling for him.

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Francis Bacon Study for Portrait on Folding Bed 1963 tate Britain, london 10bacon.ac 2014-05-28 4:44 PM Page 273

ZSUOWKLRSRY[ KUN WOXRSROUMO make up the theme of the final Vroom. With his Falling Warrior (BJFG–FH), Moore creates a figure who is horizontal but not yet vanquished. Moore explained, “I wanted a figure that was still alive ... that act of falling and the shield became a support for the warrior emphasizing the dramatic moment that precedes death.” The context for this figure was the postwar nuclear threat; Moore would become a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (]a^) in BJFI. The figure’s vulnerability, looking towards the sky, suggests that human strength is no match for modern war technology. As Mark Kingwell points out, “everything that is strong in the human body is also weak.” Bacon’s Study for Portrait on Folding Bed (BJGD) also suggests the vulnerability of flesh, but here vulnerability is coupled with resistance. A man sits facing us confrontationally. An explosion of black tar-like paint covers his lower torso, while black paint also drips down the canvas below, suggesting bodily fluids. We sense that something violent or catastrophic has happened. With the Moore Falling Warrior one can infer a sequence of events, but Bacon’s paint defaces legibility. At this point Bacon and Moore seem furthest removed from one another in their responses to violence and bodily breakdown.

During my childhood, I lived through the revolutionary Irish movement, Sinn Fein and the wars, Hiroshima, Hitler and the death camps and daily violence that I’ve experienced all my life. And after all that they want me to paint bunches of pink flowers ... PWKUMRX LKMVU

Everything in the world of form is understood through our own bodies. QOUW[ TVVWO

Francis Bacon, Henry Moore: Terror and Beauty conveys a strong cura- torial vision. Visual evidence and statements by both artists support the thesis that Moore and Bacon were profoundly affected by living through the traumatic events of their times, especially the two world wars. Dan Adler’s unconventional pairing of paintings with sculptures is effective. The wall labels are informative, and the audio guide provides a rich variety of thoughtful observations, from the vantage points of art history, social history, philosophy, and psychology.

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QRX RX YQO PRWXY – long overdue – exhibition of Bacon’s work in TCanada. And, although Torontonians may assume that they already know “their” Henry Moore, thanks to the permanent presence of the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre at the AGO, this show will dislodge pre- conceptions. Francis Bacon, Henry Moore: Terror and Beauty re-enlivens the Moore collection, bringing a new sense of context to his work.

ALLISON MACDUFFEE is an art historian and freelance writer who lives in toronto. she has taught art History at Queen’s university and the university of toronto, among other institutions. Her specialty is nineteenth-century French art. 10bacon.ac 2014-05-28 4:44 PM Page 275

Henry moore Falling Warrior 1956–57 tate modern, london

all Francis Bacon images: ©estate of Francis Bacon/sODraC (2013). all Henry moore images: ©the Henry moore Foundation, DaCs/sODraC (2013). portraits of the artists by Bill Brandt; ©the Bill Brandt archive, london; courtesy of edwynn Houk Gallery, new york/Zürich. 11finucan 2014-05-28 3:02 PM Page 276

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALCMENE STATHOUKOS 11finucan 2014-05-28 3:02 PM Page 277

STEPHEN FINUCAN Fatima

JCGIKF the Fitzgerald of The Crack-up, the Fitzgerald of The Last ITycoon and The Pat Hobby Stories: that faded colour, washed-out and frayed at the cuff, his heart winding down. Imagine that Fitzgerald and you will know the Jerome Briggs I found twenty years later. This wasn’t the case at first glance, of course. At first glance I took in only the brown herringbone suit, the navy raw-silk tie, the plain-toe bluchers – Alden’s by the look of them, in Ravello cordovan. And the pro- file, too, that goes without saying. From across the room it retained its youthfulness. From across the room, he was the Jerome Briggs of memory, the light of our own brief Jazz Age. I like to think that during our university days we were borne on the same currents. I would see him at poetry readings and author visits, at the Jazz Goes to College concert series performances held in the MND dining hall; I remember him speaking with Holly Cole after her trio had finished play- ing: Jerome, his girlfriend Helen, and Holly Cole drinking beer out of paper cups and all looking as if they belonged someplace else, someplace more remarkable – the Deux Magots, the Café de Flore. The summer between third and fourth year, a friend of mine, who was also a friend of his, looked after his apartment for a few weeks: a second- floor Hunter Street walk-up with high ceilings, grooved hardwood, and great tall windows – and books, so many books: Camus and Gide, Joyce and Henry James; Beerbohm, Dreiser, Mann; Proust and Apollinaire; Borges and Burroughs and both the Bowles; the collected works of Samuel Beckett, Nabokov’s Pnin and Pale Fire; and on the arm of a chair, with a luggage tag marking its place, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn. Even his furniture – rescued, like most everyone else’s, from second-hand shops – seemed something more: a mix of teak and leather, cast-off Danish mod- ern and Mission. And on the walls actual photographs – framed pictures taken by Jerome himself, or by Helen; pictures of Jerome and Helen, snapped in cities and on shores, she with her sideways smile and bobbed haircut, Zelda to his Scott.

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On my only visit to the apartment – I’d accompanied my friend when he went to water the peace lilies and arrowheads that lined the sills – I stole a DE from the shelf above the component stereo. I slipped it into my satchel while my friend was filling the watering can in the kitchen sink. Chet Baker’s Grey December: that haunting trumpet, that plaintive voice singing “Someone to Watch Over Me.” And who, through the years, I wondered, had watched over Jerome Briggs? It certainly wasn’t whatever angel was perched on his shoulder during our time in Peterborough; nor was it that other angel, Helen, because poor Helen – poor, sweet, sideways smiling Helen – was dead. Drowned. Lost in the surf on an empty beach near the village of Fatima on les Îles de la Madeleine. That was the summer after graduation. She was twenty-two years old. I talked to her once, a meandering conversation about Hemingway – we were in the same American Lit class and had just finished up a tutorial on A Moveable Feast. A few of us kept the discussion going over stale pints at The Jolly Hangman. People slowly drifted away until it was only Helen and I left. That was when she told me that she thought it was Hemingway’s finest work. A two hundred and fifty page suicide note, she called it, which made it truer than anything else he’d written: “Because there was no longer any need to impress.” Shortly thereafter Jerome Briggs arrived and stood at the end of the table. He smiled at me and waited for Helen to gather her things. Then they left. There’d been no body to bury or to burn. The currents are treacherous in that part of the gulf; fishing boats out of Cap-aux-Meules and Havre- Aubert assisted a Coast Guard search, but poor Helen was washed to sea. At the memorial service narcissus and carnations overflowed the dais and there was a photograph of her at Niagara Falls, leaning far out over the rail- ing, watching the rushing water. Jerome was inconsolable. There were, as there always are, rumours – an argument beforehand some said, others something about a woman with dreadlocks and a ring in her lip – but none were credible. Nor, to my mind, was Jerome’s grief. I remember there being something in the way that he’d stood at the end of the table that night at the Hangman, something in the way that he’d smiled. Perhaps I had fallen in love with Helen – or maybe I’d just convinced myself over the years that I had done. On occasion, she loomed in my mind, and more than once I mused over what might have happened had we the chance to meet in our later lives. But these were thoughts from a different time; I didn’t think them much anymore. Besides, the fact of the matter was that back then it was Jerome Briggs that I found the more intriguing. Back then he’d been the Fitzgerald of This Side of Paradise, the Fitzgerald of The Beautiful and Damned – the Gatsby

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Fitzgerald. The famous ?B@A studio portrait that graced the stiff covers of all those ungainly Scribner’s Library editions might as well have been his own: the flawless complexion, patrician nose, fine blond hair slightly longer on top and cut short at the neck. What was I to do? A twenty-year-old student of literature, how could I not have been enthralled by him? Especially as my own looks, even then, leant towards Auden – and not the young Auden, the Auden of Berlin or school- master Auden, but the sodden, nicotine-stained, amphetamine-racked Auden, the ugly apple doll Auden. The truth of it was simple: Jerome Briggs was blessed and I hated him for it – so much so that when I’d first heard of Helen’s death, a part of me actually delighted in the undoing of his charmed life. To my shame, I’ll admit – the notion of that cold, dark water.

HFOF RFNF PHF PHLQGHPO that came to me when I saw him Tstanding by the bar, talking to a young man I vaguely recognized as some assistant in the marketing department of the publishing house that was hosting the evening. Seeing him again, I felt the years wash away: it was as if I were standing once more in the MND dining hall watching him be remarkable. It didn’t matter that I had made a success of myself, didn’t matter that I ran a literary agency that bore my name, or that the party that night was to celebrate the launch of a book by one of my better-known clients – a renowned poet-novelist who’d written a mildly scandalous exposé of another renowned poet-novelist. It didn’t matter either that the private members’ club – a stylish set of rooms that occupied the top three

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floors of a renovated commercial building in downtown Toronto – was a club to which I belonged, a club that my connections made available to the publisher. Just his being there had the effect of making everything I’d done seem somehow less. And so I avoided him. Early on, when he appeared intent on catching my eye, I looked away. Later, after my poet-novelist had finished his reading, and I saw him hovering close by, I feigned a private conversation. But then, as the night wore on and I lost sight of him and thought perhaps that he’d gone, I felt strangely dispirited, as if I had foolishly allowed some opportunity to pass me by. Close to midnight, I managed to steal a moment to myself and slipped out onto the rooftop patio. With the city behind me, I stood at the sliding glass doors that looked back into the members’ lounge: it was like watching an aquarium of expensive fish flitting amongst the exotic coral of Boerner sofas and Finn Juhl chairs. I presumed I was alone, but there was a couple sitting at a nearby table. They were huddled under a bamboo umbrella, amid a collection of wine bottles and sputtering candles. The man was Jerome Briggs. He said, “Join us, if you like.” When I sat down, the woman – her name was Mariette – complimented the party in a singsong voice that was French, but French from where I couldn’t be certain: she was young, with pale eyes and swelling cheek- bones and skin the colour of café-crème. She emptied the dregs of a bottle of Malbec into three glasses, and then excused herself to find more wine. “Very beautiful,” I said, after she’d gone. Jerome Briggs agreed, and added: “I imagine she tastes of spices.”

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Then he smiled at me – that same smile from so long ago. Only it wasn’t. In the uneven candlelight I could see now what I had not seen earlier, what I had avoided by avoiding him: he had the swollen face of a drunk. Up close like this, his features blurred, became indistinct; he looked more a semblance of the man than the man himself: a fleeting memory barely grasped. “You recognize me,” he said. “I thought you would.” Then he said that it seemed as if I had done quite well for myself, and I offered that the same might be said of him. He told me that he was a lawyer and that he did work with the government. “Consulting, mostly. Advising on policy and what have you.” I said that it sounded like the sort of job that could keep a man in Alden’s of every shade. He frowned at this, and then went on to tell me that there was every likelihood of an appointment some- where down the line, to Divisional Court he hoped. “Family Law bores me.” He was trying to impress. But rather than congratulate him, I told him that I didn’t think she was coming back, and when he asked me whom I meant, I said: “Mariette.” He nodded. “I’ll find her again.” This he offered easily, offhandedly, as if he were unconcerned. And I knew then that he would indeed find her again, and that just as easily and just as offhandedly he would take her home and make love to her – and that he would call it that, too: making love – and I suddenly felt myself the ugly apple doll again. He talked more after that – some anecdote about politicians and shameful expenses; it was crude and predictable, though I can’t remember exactly how the story played itself out. I can’t remember because the whole while he spoke I was thinking of Helen: what had she tasted like? Part of me considered asking him – I wanted to hear him say that she’d also tasted of spices. I wanted to hear him say this because at that point all my imag- ination could conjure was brine. When he finished talking, I told him that I really did have to get back to the party, made some excuse about needing to keep my poet-novelist away from the open bar. But when I stood to leave, he put out a hand to stop me. “Please – ” he said. The lazy confidence left his voice then, and everything that followed was rushed and apologetic. The reason that he had come, he said – he’d wheedled an invitation from an arts council acquaintance – was actually to see me. There was something in his voice, a quivering. I got the sense that he was about to offer up some intimate revelation, or perhaps share some secret grief. He said that he knew I would understand – that I would be, as he put it, sympathetic. “We’ve all got our stories to tell,” he said. And he had a story to tell, too. He’d written it down, in fact, made it into a book and wanted to know would I read it: tell him what I thought, and maybe

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more, if there was more to be done. I looked at him closely then – it was like looking at a broken clock: his inner workings had loosened, the gears and escapement were worn out; the time he marked was time long passed. Then I imagined him dressed in the same herringbone suit, the same blue tie and expensive shoes, standing in the living room of a modestly stylish apartment, leaning against the fireplace mantle, a drink in his hand and his face gone ghostly pale as the first, unmistakable pains of the coronary that would kill him gripped his chest. Would he call out? I wondered. And if so, to whom? To Helen, perhaps? Certainly not to Mariette. Or maybe he would just slump quietly to the floor. Before I left him there, alone with the guttering candles and emptied wine bottles, I gave him my card and told him that I would do what I could.

week later the manuscript A arrived at my office, care- fully wrapped in brown paper, both his name and mine neatly printed on the front. I handed it off to one of my younger associates. It was a few days before she reported back. There was, she said, very lit- tle about it that was original and even less that was saleable. “Set in some place called the Magdalen Islands. Wherever that is?” I told her that les Îles de la Madeleine – a collection of lesser islands linked by long sand dunes that formed a small archipelago in the Gulf of St Lawrence – were some five hours by ferry northeast of Prince Edward Island. I added that, curiously, every year the prevailing winds caused the entire archipelago to shift several centimetres farther out to sea. My associate seemed less than impressed by this, so I asked her instead about the girl in the story and was told that she came off as rather plain: nothing to stir any real passion. Though there was, she said, a nice bit about her crooked smile.

STEPHEN FINUCAN is the author of the story collections Happy Pilgrims and Foreigners, and the novel The Fallen. He lives with his wife and daughter in Toronto.

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JUDY SMITH

How to Get There (I) The Changeling

KH QSXFKLF MLVHG in a ticky-tacky house in South Vancouver, did Ther readings at a Formica kitchen table and began each morning by hanging upside down. She was BA years old with shocking white hair, pale blue eyes and an avalanche of love. I wanted to be her. She saw that I was a nurse and in pain and advised me to soak in some ozone rays by the ocean.

I’m sitting on a log. Here comes a big boat, right toward me. Just before it hits the beach, it grows tracks like a tank and crawls up to a stranded boat. Out jumps a woman, ties a rope to the boat, and hauls it out of there. That night, [Z[ news does a special report on her. The boat is a hover- craft and she’s a nurse, works for the Coast Guard, rescues stranded boats and sick people up and down the coast. I will be her. The next morning, I call the Coast Guard. To join them, you need to join the armed forces. No way. You also need an ]\Y ticket. What’s that? Industrial First Aid. You get it through Workers’ Compensation Board. I call ^[Z. ]\Y attendants work in industry. They have a class starting next week. I sign up.

I get the highest mark in class, but this is =DC? and there are no jobs for women in industry. ]\Y attendants also work in mills and factories. Women don’t. Women aren’t strong enough. We don’t have the skills. Coveralls don’t fit us. Men and women can’t work together. They don’t have separate locker rooms. One company in Calgary is hiring ]\Y attendants for the oil field. I apply.

Ten days later, I get a phone call from Calgary. Could I come for an inter- view? Come prepared to go to work for two weeks. This is January. Do you have any winter clothes?

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I have a nice, warm fur coat. He laughs. We’ll outfit you here. I arrive a few days later, enter his office prepared for an interview. Oh, good. You’re here. We have an H>S course starting right now. You’ll need that.

Two days later, I am driving a @ @ truck with a newly reconditioned motor x up to Cold Lake. It’s bitterly cold and storming, but I am outfitted with an arctic parka from Work Warehouse and steel-toed boots. I get stuck behind a rig on the move and don’t dare pass because I can’t see anything but snow. I keep plowing along.

How to Get There (II) Anyhow But Train

EX, you’re starting from Vancouver. You get to Calgary, usually by Sair. Sometimes you might drive to Calgary in order to attend the Stampede or visit with a cousin, but usually you fly there on a B@B. Unless you’re working within driving distance from Calgary – Cold Lake, for example – you’re only there long enough to transfer planes to Edmonton. You’ll need to make sure your luggage is transferred too; you don’t need to lose it at this stage and certainly don’t want your Martin D>C guitar left in the baggage claims area for all to see and anyone to pick up where it shouldn’t have been unloaded in the first place … So you go on to Edmonton and land at either the International or Municipal airport, depending on how you’re flying out the next day. Don’t worry – you’ll be told all this in advance and your ticket will be waiting for you at the airport, but just so you know: If you go to the International Airport, you’ll take a shuttle bus to the Nisku Inn. They have a place to store your heavy baggage overnight; that airport doesn’t. If you go to the Municipal Airport, you can store your luggage there and walk over to the Edmonton Inn. The hotels are expecting you; you don’t have to do anything; however it’s important to know this because you need to know how to organize your luggage; you don’t want to be hauling around a heavy duffle bag which you don’t need and which will surely strain the best of backs. The next day, you fly north to Peace River or Norman Wells or Inuvik or Tuktoyaktuk. You will fly by regular routes, by a private Esso or Shell plane.

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If you go to Peace River you will be picked up by a crew van and driven to the site or fly there in a @-seater Cessna. If you go to Norman Wells you will be driven to the site in a @ @ truck on an ice road across the Mackenzie x River. If you go to Inuvik, you will fly to the site by helicopter, sometimes a Sikorsky carrying =D passengers. If you’re working offshore from Tuk you will get there by helicopter or boat; in either case, you will be expected to wear cold-water survival gear, a head-to-toe bright orange waterproof coverall that also acts as a life preserver with boots and gloves to match. This outfit, to my knowledge, has not yet won any fashion awards.

Travelling from Vancouver to anywhere will take two or three days. By the time you get there, you will be a different person in a different country.

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How to Get There (III) Don’t That Road Look Rough and Rocky BHIPRH XPU JP EOXWKHRH, you should know where you’re going. There are no maps. Not many people have been there before, and those that have haven’t made the kind of map you can read. The people who live there are comfortable, thank you very much. They have no desire and no need to leave home. Their way is the only way. They have had no need to examine themselves from the inside or out. And so it is up to you, the seasoned traveller, to adjust to their territory. You will need to be very, very careful. You are only one person, after all: you might not like it there, but you’re not going to change anything – at least, not today. You want to walk softly, invisibly if you can. But of course you can’t. Of course you will create a disturbance. Still, you need to disap- pear as much as possible, and that is what you will do these two days of travelling. Like an apparition slowly fading, you remove yourself until you are only the clothes that make you.

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You begin on your plane, although there is no need to hide here. You are at home, in the familiar: this crowd, the costumes, the perfume and pleasantries. You are, perhaps, also going to a convention in Ottawa, or giving a lecture in Calgary. Maybe today you are a famous poet going on a book tour. What does this nerd know of poetry except astonishment? And so, you can withdraw, appearing illusive, mysterious, intriguing. You don’t want to speak to him anyway. You want to say goodbye to home, and your lover, and your old self. You want to feel the surge of the engines on take- off, that sudden penetration: you want something that endures. You will need to carry your parka, but you can hide its company crest, or not. Maybe this time you are a tough woman who works on the rigs in steel-toed boots, jeans and parka with the ambulance crest. Maybe you want to tell stories, or let them imagine stories, about scraping bodies off rig floors, or worse. Everybody is an ambulance chaser. Up here, you can be anybody. You can even be yourself.

In Edmonton, you will begin to disappear. The motel room is generic: you settle into a routine of wake-up calls, room service, movies. Did you bring a skin lotion? It is so dry in Alberta. You’ll need at least two drinks from the vending machine for the night. The water is not fit for drinking. You eat your lonely dinner and watch a movie. If you choose to read, make it light: a mystery, a magazine. You see no one. This is your time to shut down. You see, where you are going, emotions are not acceptable. You must not exhibit any form of sexuality or spirituality. The word “feel” or its derivatives is not part of the language. Before the morning comes, you must be wearing a new face: a face that tells nothing of who you used to be. You are no longer.

On the domestic flight from Edmonton to Inuvik, there are perhaps twenty other women, with children or not. Everyone is a Northerner. Dressed in Inuit parkas and armed with parcels and prints and cameras, they are agog with excitement, returning from shopping at the West Edmonton Mall, or a winter vacation in the Bahamas. If you travel on this flight you might relax, read a book, eat breakfast at your leisure, and sleep away the three or four hours north. However, if you fly by company plane – Esso, Shell, BP – you will imme- diately enter that other world. At the BP terminal, there are over ><< men waiting to board, dressed in worn work clothes, sporting the world’s worst hangovers and smoking cig- arettes to stock up on nicotine for the long flight ahead. You are the only woman. Nevertheless, you and everyone else must be wearing survival gear: woolen underwear, arctic parka, boots, and ski pants. In your pocket

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you must have a warm scarf, mitts and a balaclava. Your luggage and per- son are searched for booze and drugs. You use your status as a woman to avoid a personal search; you pack a box of tampons on top of your duffle bag to stop them from rifling through your luggage. Did I mention duffle bags? They don’t allow hard luggage on those planes. They say they can hit a person on the head and cause severe dam- age. In the duffle bag, you pack your carton of cigarettes within a thick sweater: they will soon become a commodity, like gold. However, at the Esso hangar, the pilots wear crisp uniforms and address you as “ma’am.” They say words like “please,” carry your luggage for you, and give you the best seat on the plane. The plane is equipped with soft reclining swivel seats. The co-pilot dispenses coffee and muffins as he advises you about flight time, safety procedures, and amenities. You are an honoured guest on their plane. You are The Esso Nurse. The Shell plane, on the other hand, is a working person’s transport. The pilots wear worn, orange coveralls. A hint that the plane might be taking off is when the waiting room empties. If you’re the last to board, you get

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the jump seat at the back, a metal slab in front of the luggage. There is no coffee served because there is no bathroom, and it’s a three-hour flight. The co-pilot tells us to fasten our seat belts and read the safety manual if we can find it, and we can’t. There is an understanding – probably a correct one – that if the plane crashes there will be no survivors, so there’s no point in a safety manual. It is invariably cold in the plane: ice covers the small, round windows, and before long your feet are freezing. You need survival gear in order to survive in this plane. By this time you will have given up on speech except when it’s neces- sary. If you’re lucky, most are sleeping off hangovers. You yourself sleep, or pretend to, as much as you can. You don’t want to drool or snore: they are all staring at you, without looking at you for a second. You are invisible, but only to yourself. You can read, if you like: medics are assumed to be more literate than most. But don’t write, not even to do a crossword puzzle. That would be going too far. Have you never been in a helicopter? Pretend that you have. Are you excited, nervous? Don’t show it. Follow the crowd. And take everything you can get. Some remember that you are a lady, and this can take you a long way. It will give you the front seat in the cab; it will give you a boost into the truck or helicopter; sometimes it will give you relief from carrying your luggage, but don’t expect it. Don’t expect anything. From Edmonton to your destination you will grow a new face. It is a face of somebody important: the medic. It is the face of someone who needs nothing from anybody. If there’s a sudden change in plans, you go with it. You do whatever is required of you, something or nothing; you nod your head and say nothing; you are the pillar of flexibility. You are saving all your strength for when it is needed.

HRKEQS XPU KEG WEOTHG E SLNQMH STPRX. You wanted logic, Pmaybe, or the shortest route between two points. It doesn’t work that way, and this will be the hardest part of your job: to stay awake and alert for the next two or three weeks, to allow your body to bend around each twist in the road. So when you’re sitting in the Lloydminster Airport, there are a few things to understand. One thing is, the language is different. “Airport,” for example, has become a small shed in the middle of a whiteout blizzard. Given these conditions, it’s not a good idea to agree to rent a car with the guy sitting next to you and drive to Calgary. True, he’s bushed: he’s been working three months straight and this is his one weekend off before going back and doing it all over again, but that’s his agenda, not yours. You might

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point out to him that you can’t see the runway; you can’t see anything past the windows of this shack. And cold? The plane has been towed into one of the hangars to thaw out. You’ve already boarded the plane once, and watched one propeller turn slowly once around; the other one didn’t budge, frozen solid after only ten minutes of refuelling. No, it’s not a good idea to drive in this weather, and the thought of spending the night in this shack with twenty sweating male bodies is not a bad one, considering the alternative. You wait. Nothing has changed, but the pilot says we are ready to go now. By this time, you will have been almost acclimatized and such things are almost commonplace. You are being flown in a whiteout by a crazy bush pilot and find yourself thinking: that drunk over there will be the first to die when we crash, unless his blood is DD percent proof. And that Indian? He who is supposed to save us? He will be the next to go, dressed in a light jacket and running shoes. We have no food, nothing to drink. You yourself have been up all night working and stand no more chance of survival than the next person.

O TKET STETH you come out of the whiteout into the roller-coaster ride Idown to the Calgary Airport, closed for the first time in history, and now, and finally, you have arrived: staring straight ahead at your death and almost accepting it.

JUDY SMITH was a medic in the oil industry in northern alberta and the northwest territories from 1983 to 1989. her creative non-fiction book, Native Blood: Nursing on the Reservations (oberon, 1994) was based on her years of being an outpost nurse on remote Indian reserves. her short prose pieces have been published in various literary magazines, including “sabotage on the rigs,” printed in Queen’s Quarterly in 1998.

IMAGES BY THE AUTHOR f

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SYLVIA ADAMS On Being Dickens

That long ago we hadn’t met Kerouac on the road and Virginia Woolf was persona non grata a bad influence on the girls maybe; Henry James bored us who ever heard of Bellow and James Joyce hadn’t reached high school yet not ours anyway – if we’d seen his photo we’d have guessed a door-to-door Fuller Brush man. We knew Shakespeare of course and Hardy and best of all Dickens – every year we starved with Oliver or yearned in cobwebs with Miss Havisham or admired Sydney Carton’s far, far better thing though not sure he made the right choice – wasn’t it more important to be alive?

And the year we languished in debtor’s prison with I-forget-who when the teacher ordered us to write a one-paragraph-no-longer-than-a-page character sketch my grade ten mind conjured an old woman twig arms fingers gnarled – what did I know of clichés – stumps of teeth tattered cloak flapping so Dickensian Mr Hunter pronounced it top of the class, though the heading, “Grandma,” dismayed him.

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Me too but he ordered a title. Grandma wasn’t at all like that: she made thicker gravy than anyone and Christmas pudding that even I would eat and she wore a church-worthy hat with a strident plume and reveled in family gossip. The only connection between her and Dickens was that she was alive before he was dead.

Then I read somewhere that he cheated on his wife – poor soul ten children – with her own sister too a thing as rare I was sure as being the greatest writer in the world and I saw that for all his fictitious angst and empathy he couldn’t keep it together in his own home.

And I wasn’t sure any more that I could be the world’s greatest writer or even squeeze out a novelette and I drifted on to Camus and The Plague and there was Joseph Grand endlessly rewriting his opening sentence never getting any further. School ending I took a job at the supermarket and fitted right in got stuck there loading bins with pallid chickens and veal oozing pinkly thinking about becoming a vegetarian.

SYLVIA ADAMS is the author of a novel, two poetry collections, and a children’s book in verse. Recent awards include the Canadian Authors Association National Capital Region poetry contest (/-.0) and Aesthetica magazine’s first prize for poetry in both /-./ and /-.0. Her work has appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies.

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DAVID DAY The Letter

As I write, the twilight fades

Now the sound of rain in the dark The furniture is listening There are no stars. No tears I am reduced to sand

I loved you I gave you all, held nothing back But you must understand I knew about your betrayal before you did

Call it second sight, if you wish But I knew what would come

The other morning when just after dawn I brought you flowers from our garden And you smiled at me bright and lovely I could see where a strange man would soon be lying beside you

Know that I loved you As no other could

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Please understand that I had no option Your infidelity was imminent

As you read this Do not become alarmed The poison is slow, but quite painless I could not bear to make you suffer

I leave this letter at your bedside And retire to my study where I will pace out this evening until all is done

Then I will fill the house with the sound of slow, sad music

DAVID DAY is a Canadian author of over forty books of poetry, ecology, history, fantasy, mythology, and fiction. His books have been translated into twenty languages. His most recent publication is Nevermore: A Book of Hours (Quattro Books).

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MICHAEL HALL CN Tower

like a companion digging his paddle in to the sky into the clouds hour after hour day after day week after forgotten week burning months turning into seasons we watch the ripples that the planes make

and for a while he is the guy beside you reaching forward straining against the current of the stars, streets gridded out below like songs, trains trundling out of the nation’s distances a companion when cold nights begin to rest like snow on our shoulders

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he is the guy behind you looking for a past

then he becomes just a guy standing on the shore of a lake drifting with morning mist who feels the curve of the sky under his feet his head resting lightly on the light

MICHAEL HALL’s poems have been published in journals in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. During a teaching exchange in /-.-, he lived in St Marys, Ontario, and the CN Tower became the first ever landscape feature that his two young daughters came to recognize in the world. He lives in Dunedin, New Zealand.

POETRY  13springpoetry.adhh 2014-05-28 3:05 PM Page 302

DAWNELL HARRISON The furies

you roam the house with your fantastical

furies agitating the dogs normal decorum.

in the desolate light of your ashen eyes,

red lava runs in your mind’s eye tearing down

each plush forest with a ruin known

only by volcanoes. you stalk like a lion,

meditating as the cold night begins.

last summer’s poppies are all imbedded in ice –

frost polishes the hole of my pain.

 QUEEN’S QUARTERLY ./.// (SUMMER /-.1) IMAGE: PENNY ROANTREE 13springpoetry.adhh 2014-05-28 3:05 PM Page 303

DAWNELL HARRISON’s work has been published in over /-- periodicals. Her books include Voyager, The fire behind my eyes, The maverick posse, and The love death. IMAGE: PENNY ROANTREE 13springpoetry.adhh 2014-05-28 3:05 PM Page 304

W.M. HERRING Homestead

Everyone knew this lake-bottom clay once cleared of boreal spruce was only good for hay, but latecomer Poles sharpened by lean times ocean sickness sooty lumbering trains coveted the southwest aspect for a house, frost-sheltered patch below the bank for garden. They snared snowshoe hare for winter stew, built a pale and wire fence to keep cow in and coyotes out.

Those immigrants long dead, the grandchildren do not farm. Only field turned meadow, that bent lilac bush, the broken cabin roof beams resting on stone hearth remember. PHOTO: JONATHAN REMPEL,  (PRINCE GEORGE, BC).

 QUEEN’S QUARTERLY ./.// (SUMMER /-.1) 13springpoetry.adhh 2014-05-28 3:05 PM Page 305

W.M. HERRING lives on rural property in north-central British Columbia, where she muses best during frequent cross-country walks. Her work has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Christian Century, the Literary Review of Canada, the Nashwaak Review, the Prairie Journal, and other periodicals and anthologies. PHOTO: JONATHAN REMPEL,  (PRINCE GEORGE, BC).