ONLY CONNECT: a MEMOIR by Beert Verstraete
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ONLY CONNECT A MEMOIR BEERT VERSTRAETE New Minas, Nova Scotia, Canada, 2016 2 2 3 ONLY CONNECT A MEMOIR 3 4 ONLY CONNECT: A MEMOIR By Beert Verstraete Copyright © 2016, Beert C. Verstraete New Minas, Nova Scotia, Canada, 2016 Copyright under the Berne Convention and the UCC Universal Copyright Convention. The conversations in these memoirs all come from the author’s recollections, though they are not written to represent word-for-word transcripts. Rather, the author has retold them in a way that evokes the feeling and meaning what was said, and in all instances, the essence of the dialogue is accurate. In that spirit, the author is pleased to offer these memoirs to his readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone. This memoir is set in Palatino Linotype. All rights reserved This memoir, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the author. Printed and bound in Canada 4 5 Dedicated to the memory of my parents, Christiaan Verstraete (1920-2003) and Cornelia Verstraete née van Dam (1918-1987) and of Scott John Taylor / Brian Dale Druet (1951-2009) 5 6 Content PREFACE 9 I – PRELUDES 15 The Journals, 1958-2016. I.1 Wallaceburg, ON, Mid-June 1958 16 I.2 Wallaceburg, End of August, 1958 20 I.3 Wallaceburg, End of August, 1959 25 I.4 Wallaceburg, End of June, 1960 28 I.5 Wallaceburg, Early September, 1963 30 I.6 Wallaceburg, End of August, 1964 39 I.7 Wallaceburg, Early September, 1968 43 I.8 Toronto, ON, Early September, 1970 50 I.9 Toronto, End of July, 1975 59 I.10 Toronto, Early June, 1976 78 I.11 Toronto, Mid-August, 1978 96 I.12 Wolfville, NS, Early September, 1980 107 I.13 Wolfville, Early January, 1984 121 I.14 New Minas, NS, Early September, 1988 132 I.15 New Minas, Early September, 1992 147 I.16 New Minas, Early February, 1995 157 6 7 I.17 New Minas, Mid-October, 1999 164 I.18 New Minas, December, 2005 173 I.19 New Westminster, BC, Mid-August, 2009 180 I.20 New Minas, Late January, 2016 183 II – SUMMA MEAE VITAE 189 The Sum of My Life (Essays) II.1 My Faith and Hope in Process 190 II.2 Sexuality: Mine and That of Others 197 II.3 Family, Marriage, and Friendship 204 II.4 Culture: Adaptation, Enrichment, and Transformation 221 II.5 A Professor of Classics in the Twentieth and 227 Twenty-First Centuries II.6 Matters of the Respublica 236 II. 7 Reflections on Poetry, with a Special Focus 243 on Male Homoerotic Poetry through the Ages: Part One II.8 Reflections on Poetry, with a Special Focus 265 on Male Homoerotic Poetry through the Ages: Part Two III – THE BEGINNINGS OF IT ALL IN HOLLAND, 1944-1958 301 III.1 Two Early Memories 302 III.2 Die Grote Kast (“That Big Closet”): 303 Rozemarinstraat, No.1 (1944-2005 7 8 III.3 Our Little House 310 at No. 62 Enkstraat, No.62 (1946-1954) III.4 Our House of Wide Open Fields and Skies 319 at No.95 Abel Tasmanstraat, (1954-1958) III.5 Zwolle, Rozemarinstraat, No.1, 334 late Friday evening, May 30, 1958) 8 9 PREFACE When I conceived the idea of writing my memoirs a few years ago, I flattered myself into thinking that the story of how the life of a fourteen-year old Dutch boy was transformed by his immigration to Canada would be of great interest to a fairly wide readership. In other words, I was looking forward to some form of commercial publication. However, the more I wrote the more realized that I was doing it most of al, if not entirely, for myself, that writing my memoirs was a labour of recovering memories of many decades of personal growth of which I was convinced the immigration had been the supreme catalyst. I was also beginning to admit to myself that these reclaimed memories were taking shape in a style of writing which had a distinct aspect of rawness to them. Not that the writing was particularly bad, and its rawness, by itself, should not have been an impediment to regular publication, but all the same it was not good enough for me. I had always been an avid reader of memoirs and autobiographies—of statesmen and politicians in particular—which, of course, carry with them an intrinsic value of interest, and some of which are also highly accomplished, in my judgment, as works of literature; here I am thinking in particular of Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, Charles de Gaulle, and Lester Pearson. As a student of Greek and Roman literature, I had already been familiar since my undergraduate years with the Meditations of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and the Confessions of the great Latin church father, St Augustine. Both of these, although very different in format and style from each other, are certainly memoirs in that they are characterized by intense reflection by the authors on their respective lives, while at same time they are also classics of philosophical and spiritual writing. More recently, I also became interested in the memoirs and autobiographies of writers, artists, and entertainers (especially movie actors), going as far back in time as the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. I must have read many dozens of them over the years. However, it was my reading of three of these during the past eighteen months when I was working on my memoirs that finally impelled me towards a more objective assessment of my own writing. They are Dirk Bogarde's A Postilion Struck by Lightning (published in 1977 and the first of a series of autobiographical works), James Merrill's A Different Person: A Memoir (published in 1993), and most recently, Michael Bawtree's As Far as I remember (published in 2015, with two more volumes to follow). Bogarde is remembered as one of the greatest British film actors of the postwar decades from the forties to the nineties, and Merrill as one as the outstanding American poets of the same generation. Michael Bawtree is a former colleague of mine, retired like myself 9 10 from Acadia University, where he directed the program of theatre studies for many years, and enjoys an international reputation as a director, producer, teacher, and author in the world of theatre. My admiration of these three works of high literary merit have clinched my decision not to aim for publication through a well established publishing company but to arrange for a private printing, with copies to be presented gratis to family and friends. Given the fact that, due to problems with my vision, the minutely careful typing required for the production of texts which are to become academic books and papers has become too slow and laborious for me, I have decided to move away from this kind of writing altogether. What I envisage at this point is to start writing a series of essays on contemporary topics under the rubric of religion, society, and culture; here I will almost certainly draw on ideas I have already touched upon in my memoirs, especially in Part II. These will be informal writings which, I hope, will capture somewhat the spirit of Michel Montaigne's Essais and Blaise Pascal's Pensées of which I have been fond since my undergraduate years, and these should be, at this stage of my life, a labour of love for me in both their conception and execution so that, once more probably, I will end up doing this primarily for my own pleasure, not driven by any preoccupation with publication. Well before I started writing early in 2015, I felt very strongly that my memoirs should start with my immigration to Canada in 1958, for I regarded this—as I still do— as the most decisive step in my growth and development towards what I was able to say about myself well over half a century later across the whole breadth of my person. Equally important, I decided that I should cast Part I, called “Preludes,” which was to take up by far the largest portion of my memoirs, in the form of a fictitious journal: fictitious because I kept no such thing during all these many years and decades. The first entry has me in mid-June 1958, some days after my and family's arrival in Wallaceburg, looking back at our grand journey from Zwolle, the Netherlands, to our destination in Canada. After this, there are only nineteen more entries. In each entry I record the vivid recollections, impressions, thoughts, and feelings I am carrying away from the period—months, years, a few times even several years—in my life I am looking back at. Entry no. 20 covers the final period, from 2009, the year in which my former long-time partner Scott took his own life, to the end-point early in 2015, when I began to write my memoirs. Thus, Part I, as it progresses through the successive entries, registers each step, to the extent I have been able, through intensely focused retrospection and introspection, to reconstruct it in the place it occupies in the course of my overall growth and development, from being a fourteen year old youngster to my 10 11 present status as a senior in his early seventies. You can see that the reader will derive a very different 'feel' from this journal-like personal narrative than will be had from a personal story as laid out in a more conventional memoir where the author looks back at his or her life from the perspective of the present, with all its accumulated insights and wisdoms.