An Aesthetic Underground Read online

  A Literary Memoir

  John Metcalf

  Biblioasis

  Copyright © John Metcalf, 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Metcalf, John, 1938–, author

  An aesthetic underground / John Metcalf.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  isbn 978-1-927428-95-5 (pbk.). — isbn 978-1-927428-96-2 (epub)

  1. Metcalf, John, 1938–. 2. Canadian literature (English)—Publishing—Ontario—Erin. 3. Canadian literature (English)—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Porcupine’s Quill, Inc. 5. Editors—Canada—Biography. 6. Authors, Canadian (English)—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  z483.m48a3 2014 070.5092 c2014-904560-3

  c2014-904561-1

  Edited by Dan Wells

  Copy-edited by Jennifer Franssen

  Cover and text design by Gordon Robertson

  Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

  This book is for

  Ron and Kate

  Elizabeth and Ethan

  Dan and Chantal

  Every teaching institution will have its department of cultural studies, an ox not to be gored, and an aesthetic underground will flourish, restoring something of the romance of reading.

  — harold bloom, The Western Canon

  It seemed unto [Don Quixote] very requisite and behooveful . . . that he himself should become a knight-errant, and go throughout the world, with his horse and armour, to seek adventures, and practise in person all that he had read was used by knights of yore; revenging of all kinds of injuries, and offering himself to occasions and dangers, which, being once happily achieved, might gain him eternal renown.

  — cervantes, Don Quixote (Shelton’s translation, 1612)

  Did I not tell your worship they were windmills? and who could have thought otherwise, except such as had windmills in their head?

  — sancho panza to don quixote

  A VIGNETTE

  When i was fourteen and attending Beckenham Grammar School for Boys I began spending my Saturdays hanging around in the yard of the High Street auctioneer. Viewing took place from ten until noon and the auctions started at one and went on until four o’clock when the vans started backing in. Porters in green aprons manhandled sideboards and wardrobes and held aloft at the auctioneer’s “What am I bid?” the silver-plated coffee sets, the brass fire irons, the baize-lined canteens of cutlery with one fish knife missing.

  What attracted me was not the auction but the two coffin-sized boxes on trestles in the yard. These were crammed with the books, spines up, which accumulated from estate sales. They were priced at sixpence each. I stood by the boxes and tidied up the rows after people had rummaged. Customers soon assumed that I was employed to stand there and started giving me their sixpences. These I took into the office.

  The clerk in the office with his catalogues and lists of the lots was obviously suspicious of my motives and I’d often glance up to see him standing in his doorway, cigarette smoke curling into one eye, staring.

  Touching the books gave me profound pleasure. I became so familiar with them, with their bindings, decorations, and typefaces, that I played a game Saturday after Saturday, guessing at a glance a book’s probable date of publication. Mostly they were novels by the likes of William Harrison Ainsworth, Dornford Yates, Henry Rider Haggard, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Warwick Deeping, A. J. Cronin, Enid Bagnold, Ngaio Marsh, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Rafael Sabatini, Anthony Hope, Margery Allingham, and Hilaire Belloc—literary detritus specific to that time and place. But occasionally there were older books in pictorial boards or decorated cloth, my favourite among them the endless novels of G. A. Henty. I was also attracted to the short stories of W. W. Jacobs who was much admired, I later discovered, by P. G. Wodehouse. I was drawn to the work initially by the brilliance of Jacobs’ illustrator, his friend Will Owen. For years I reread Many Cargoes, Odd Craft, Sailors’ Knots, Captains All, and Short Cruises.

  After a couple of months the clerk grew tired of my constant interruptions to deposit coins in the old Player’s Navy Cut tin and told me to keep the tin outside and give him the money at the end of the afternoon.

  Some while later came the day when he suggested that I keep half a crown for myself. I somehow knew that accepting the money would change the relationship in a way I didn’t want, so, fighting my shyness, I wondered if instead I might have a couple of books every week. This request seemed to confirm him in his mild contempt of me and reassure him of my harmlessness.

  I wanted those Henty books. I didn’t necessarily want to read them, though I did read some. What I wanted was to own them. Not just three or four or ten. I wanted to own all of them. A few minutes at the public library told me there were more than eighty. And so the collection began to grow. Under Drake’s Flag, The Lion of the North, With the Allies in Pekin, With Clive in India, With Wolfe in Canada, True to the Old Flag . . .

  This vignette suggests four motifs which seem to have played themselves out all through my life. The first is books themselves. The second is collecting things. The third is a certain independence of mind and judgement illustrated in my indifference to the clerk’s contempt. The fourth is the almost magical inability to acquire money.

  THE CURATOR

  Many autobiographies of writers present a picture of a shy and lonely child delivered from solitude and unsympathetic surroundings by the power of the Word, the child’s mind captured, for example, by the illustrations in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs or struggling with the text of the only book in the house, Pilgrim’s Progress. Good examples of this typical experience are recorded in James Laver’s Museum Piece and in Jocelyn Brooke’s The Military Orchid.

  My own childhood was nothing like this. I cannot remember a time when I was not surrounded by books. My father, a Methodist minister, had a fairly large library, most of the volumes, to be sure, theological, but he also had most of the standard poets and first editions of the novels of Conrad and Hardy. Among the more “modern” poets, he owned Masefield, Housman, Chesterton, Belloc, Yeats, and Blunden.

  After he died and I was looking through what books my mother had not promptly donated to Oxfam, I was amazed to find Wilde’s De Profundis. I’d probably seen it when younger but thought it to be a work of theology.

  My mother read all the time. Her reading wasn’t literary. Her favourite material was historical novels and detective

  stories. These came from the Public Library, from Boots Library, and Timothy White’s Lending Library. The historical novels were of the Georgette Heyer variety, bodice rippers but “nice” bodice rippers, the detective stories by Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. I associate all these writers, whom I loathe, with the smell of bath salts and talc, doubtless an early memory of trips to Boots Chemists.

  These detective story writers seem to me, now, to mirror and perpetuate the nastiness of British class preoccupations. The super
intendent or the well-bred amateur sleuth was always assisted by the comically lower-class and utterly thick but throbbingly loyal sergeant or manservant. So it was in the 1930s, the Golden Age of detective fiction, with Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion and his “gent’s ’elp,” Magersfontein Lugg, and it still is seventy years later with Colin Dexter’s rather highbrow Inspector Morse and funny old Sergeant Lewis, dim but devoted as a Labrador.

  When I was a child I read quickly, usually taking about two hours to finish a book. On wet days I read my ration of library books in one gulp and often returned in the evening for three more. On the other hand, I was eleven before I could tell time. I can still see the tears of exasperation and rage starting in my mother’s eyes as she moved the cardboard hands on the cardboard face and asked me what time it was if the little hand was on one and the big hand was on nine. She might as well have been talking to me in a foreign language.

  Oddly enough, all this reading did not mean that I was “bookish”; quite the reverse was true. School always baffled me. I’d like to pretend that I was so brilliant I was bored by school. But that isn’t true. I was baffled. The only subjects in which I did well were English and history. English because I did it automatically. When it came to grammar and parsing, I had no idea of what people were talking about. It took lessons in Latin years later to drive home what was meant by “adjective” and “adverb.” History fascinated me because I felt lapped in it. Lord Macaulay said that history must be “burnt into the imagination before it can be received by the reason,” and it was certainly seared into mine. Long barrows, dolmens, hill forts, standing stones—all sang to me of where I had come from and who I was.

  I passed what was called the eleven-plus exam—an instrument for sorting out grammar school hopefuls from secondary modern fodder—only because my mother drilled me in sums and suchlike.

  It quickly became apparent that if I were ever to do anything at all in life it would be on the “arts” side of affairs, though any prospects whatsoever seemed more than doubtful. At thirteen I was declared ineducable in math and I stopped taking the subject altogether. The fact that my math teacher that year was abnormally small and looked like a Japanese sniper as drawn in American comics and drove home his points with the rung of a chair may have had something to do with it. But not much. The truth is that numbers cause a pain in my forehead.

  It’s interesting that if I’d been educated in Canada I’d never have reached university because I’d never have passed the requirements in math. In England it was permissible to replace math by a science. Physics and chemistry were as incomprehensible to me as math. Math, I could see, did somehow relate to life; there were all those problems about how much wallpaper you’d need to paper a room eighty-three feet long with eight dormer windows. But physics! As far as I could see all it involved was lowering weights on bits of string into calibrated tubes of water to see how much overflowed. I couldn’t understand why anyone would wish to know that. Chemistry was a touch more entertaining because of the fire and smoke but I never seemed able to grasp the motives for these activities.

  Physics and chemistry, then, being incomprehensible, left only biology. I spent most of my free time—alone but not lonely—watching animals, hunting for snakes, searching for fossils, and fishing in the Avon and Stour. I could have taken the biology teacher to the one locality in Hampshire where smooth snakes were to be found, where bee orchids grew, where the lampreys gathered, where there were the sets, earths and holts of badgers, foxes, and otters, but all this, I quickly realized, was nothing to do with biology. Biology was copying diagrams.

  School ground on towards my fourteenth year. I did badly in everything except English and history. Even my toast-rack in woodwork took two years and about three hundred feet of lumber.

  The English teaching I received between the ages of twelve and fourteen was, I realize now, superb. Our only activities were précis, paraphrase, exercises in comprehension, and essay writing. In other words, we were drilled in logic, in the steel structure of the language. Literature was dealt with in the following way: each term we were given a list of twelve novels to read at home. This meant that in a school year we read a minimum of thirty-six novels. At the end of each term we were given a test cunningly designed to reveal if we had in fact read them.

  “With whom did Jim Davis shelter after the fight with the revenue officers?”

  The following books were on those lists and suggest the general flavour of the reading: Jim Davis, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, King Solomon’s Mines, The History of Mr. Polly, A Tale of Two Cities, Tarka the Otter, Oliver Twist, Allan Quartermain, Kim, David Copperfield, Three Men in a Boat, Prester John, The Thirty-nine Steps, Rodney Stone, The White Company, The Cloister and the Hearth, Rookwood, etc.

  All good stuff for boys and entertaining. The idea of discussing such things as plot and characterization would never have occurred to my teachers.

  And a damn good thing too.

  (I suspect that nowadays these books would be considered far too difficult in syntax and vocabulary and entirely lacking in relevance. I prefer them, however, to the books with titles like Jennifer’s First Period tailored to the supposed interests of adolescents.)

  This, then, was my “official” life until I was fourteen.

  But I have another set of memories covering the same years which I realize now, groping back, are the really important ones.

  They are disjointed.

  Very early, being with my father in Foyle’s. He is searching along the bottom rows of second-hand tomes in theology. We are in a basement, in a canyon of books. Our hands are glazed black with that peculiar kind of muck that grows on old books. My father has bought me a book to keep me quiet as he roots and rummages. It is Struwwelpeter with the horrifying illustration of the leaping man cutting off the child’s thumb. Afterwards, we have tea in a Lyon’s Corner House.

  Another memory of my father, a man I wish I’d known. He was a distant figure, not given to conversation, eccentric. He silenced quarrels between my brother and me by a prim clearing of his throat. As he was a Methodist minister, he was relatively impoverished. Money was never thrown around. It was, in fact, pinched. On a rare summer holiday in Swanage we were walking past a junk shop. In the window hung a blown-up, varnished blowfish, a prickly globe of wonder. In we went. The fish was two shillings and sixpence. My father bought it for me. He also bought me some bound folio volumes of an illustrated magazine which formed a history of the First World War. And, as we were about to leave, he pointed out the sword of a swordfish and suggested that it was, if not rare, then at least unusual, and precisely the sort of thing that, if passed up, would remain a source of regret forever after.

  This was not condescension on his part nor, I suspect, a desire to please a small boy. He was never “nice” in that way. It was a seriously held opinion.

  Later, a collection of Superman and Combat comics, real American ones with glossy covers, not the dowdy British reproductions. These desirables were the stakes in games of marbles and nearest-to-the-wall with cigarette cards.

  Later, still, Boy’s Own Paper, all kept in severe order by volume and number.

  Collecting, then. My father collected obscure books on theological matters. My brother collected coins—a harmless hobby which led eventually to his becoming Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room at the Ashmolean Museum. His bibliography lists over two hundred publications and his reputation is international.

  When he was eleven and I was six my parents gave him an unused room for a museum. It had been a pantry. He filled it with coins, fossils, mineral specimens, pottery shards, a hair from an elephant’s tail, a clay oil lamp from Palestine, medals, a Prussian dragoon’s sword, an embroidered Chinese slipper. He charged Hd admission. He also put out a weekly newspaper printed in purple on a gelatine pad. This too cost Hd. One copy of one issue remains. The newspaper was called The Curator.

  When h
e retired from the Ashmolean in 1998 he gave a speech at a farewell lunch and said in part: “We try to share our knowledge and our enthusiasm generously and freely, with undergraduates, with graduates, with our museum colleagues in this country and elsewhere, with amateur collectors, with the public at large, with children . . .

  “In a clamant world, we need to know what we stand for, we need to be always ready to share our values, while insisting on the disciplines of exact learning and rigorous argument, and serenity of judgement.”

  The word clamant suggests him exquisitely.

  All sorts of antiques and curios were cheaper when I was a boy and far more readily available than now. I had small collections of swords and pistols. At about the age of ten I had acquired, by swapping, a “horse pistol”—a battered percussion cap job—and a bullet mould. I began an obsessive manufacture of lead bullets in the kitchen using one of my mother’s saucepans. I have scars on my hands to this day from molten lead. I cycled all the way from Southbourne to Ringwood to buy a tin of percussion caps from a compliant gunsmith. But the powder defeated me; I couldn’t get the mixture right.

  My passion for bullet making led me into crime. I was apprehended removing lengths of lead plumbing that were still attached to houses.

  My brother grew copper sulphate crystals in pie dishes and mineral gardens under waterglass in casseroles.

  My father steeped his vile home-grown tobacco in other kitchen utensils and “cooked” it in the oven.

  My mother bewailed the state of her pots and pans and, I suspect, suffered something close to a breakdown as the house filled with coins, books, snakes, nature specimens, hedgehogs, ammonites, belemnites, trilobites, caterpillars, butterflies, setting-boards, nets, killing jars, stone-age hand axes, slow worms, green-throated sand lizards, Observer Books of Trees, Wild Flowers, Birds, Reptiles . . . volume after volume in the British Naturalist series, owl pellets, fishing tackle, seething tins of gentles, hypodermic syringes, and cloudy jars of formaldehyde containing newts, leeches, ticks, internal organs.