Vital Signs Read online

  Cape Breton is

  the Thought-Control

  Centre of Canada

  RAY SMITH

  A Night at the Opera

  RAY SMITH

  Going Down Slow

  JOHN METCALF

  Century

  RAY SMITH

  Quickening

  TERRY GRIGGS

  Moody Food

  RAY ROBERTSON

  Alphabet

  KATHY PAGE

  Lunar Attractions

  CLARK BLAISE

  An Aesthetic Underground

  JOHN METCALF

  Lord Nelson Tavern

  RAY SMITH

  Heroes

  RAY ROBERTSON

  A History of Forgetting

  CAROLINE ADDERSON

  The Camera Always Lies

  HUGH HOOD

  Canada Made Me

  NORMAN LEVINE

  Vital Signs (a reSet Original)

  JOHN METCALF

  VITAL SIGNS

  JOHN METCALF

  BIBLIOASIS

  Copyright © John Metcalf, 2016

  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–

  [Novellas]

  Vital signs : collected novellas / John Metcalf.

  (reSet books)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77196-052-6 (paperback). — ISBN 978-1-77196-053-3 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  ps8576.e83v5 2016 c813’.54 c2015-907398-7

  c2015-907399-5

  Readied for the press by Daniel Wells

  Copy-edited by Emily Donaldson

  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.

  Introductionxi

  Private Parts1

  The Lady Who Sold Furniture75

  Girl in Gingham177

  Polly Ongle243

  Forde Abroad315

  METCALF

  THE NOVELLAIST

  by Jeet Heer

  For lovers of well-wrought fiction, a small community that always has to huddle together to fend off extinction, John Metcalf is known as a short-story writer and man of letters. The two facets of his achievement are inextricable, since he’s not only written such classic stories as “The Years in Exile” and “Single Gents Only” but has also been tireless in championing the short story as a form with its own special properties and excellence.

  Through the dozens of anthologies he’s edited, through his eloquent and forceful critical advocacy, and most especially through his mentoring and editing of scores of short-story writers ranging from Caroline Adderson to Stephen Heighton to Kathleen Winter, Metcalf has done more than anyone to make the short story the defining Canadian literary genre, a form both innovative and worthy of an international readership. Like his peers Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and Clark Blaise, Metcalf has written stories that will be read as long as humanity cherishes prose narrative. But he is also articulate about why the short story is the perfect laboratory for narrative experiment, the form where the immemorial human need to tell tales can be fused with the most advanced techniques of linguistic inventiveness.

  To see John Metcalf simply as a short-story writer, however, is to sell him short; to define his best work, you have to resort to an awkward nonce word: novellaist.

  The novella is Metcalf’s métier, the form where his fiction-making facility finds its fullest fruition. This book, gathering together his entire output in the form, is essential for appreciating not just how fine a writer Metcalf can be but also how alert he is to the possibilities of literary form, finding, as he does, in the boundaries of the novella, an ample field for his various gifts—verbal precision, comic performance, narrative juxtaposition—not just to flourish but to create a beautiful completeness, the way the flowers in a well-tended garden exist not in isolation but in the service of the whole.

  The novella is a betwixt-and-between form, sitting halfway between the novel and the short story. Novels have long been the most popular narrative vessel, engaging readers in an extended immersive experience. But the pleasures novels offer, more often than not, come at a price. Henry James’s indictment of the Victorian triple-decker as “large, loose baggy monsters” applies, alas, to all but the finest novels. Masterpieces aside, the novel’s cardinal sin is that its narrative length leads to verbal slackness, longueurs, loss of focus. It’s a rare novel that earns every word it uses.

  Conversely, as Metcalf has taught us, the strength of the short story is that it can be perfect, just as poems can be perfect. In a great story, every paragraph, every sentence, every phrase, every word, exists for a reason. Yet the short story’s very shortness can also be problematic, depriving it of the expansiveness and amplitude of the novel, the novel’s ability to encompass multiple perspectives and the interplay of tones.

  For Metcalf, the novella provides the best of both worlds: the linguistic exactness of the story and the broad canvas of the novel. As he wrote in his 2003 memoir An Aesthetic Underground, “The novella form fascinated me because it could be tightly controlled—page by page—as a short story could, yet at the same time was expansive enough to allow for theatrical effects. Individual scenes could be built with lyric intensity and then juxtaposed with broad comedy. Broad comedy could be tempered to become intensely moving. Writing novellas was a particularly joyful kind of playing.”

  The novella has had few masters. Among the classic writers, there is Melville and Conrad. More recently, and much closer to Metcalf’s own writing practices, Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, two “short-story writers” whose peak work was done in the novella form. Munro and Metcalf have been reading each others’ work for decades, and the literary scholars of the future will find a rich topic in studying how their careers cross-fertilized. In particular, one of Metcalf’s innovations in “Private Parts”—the unreliable narrator who is aware of his own unreliability—might well have informed Munro’s masterful “Meneseteung.” But more broadly, Metcalf and Munro have both given us a new kind of novella—not the extended “tale” of Melville and Conrad but something closer to a condensed novel, a work that is polyphonic in the way of the best novels but with a short-story-like tautness.

  Literary forms are constraints that liberate: they push a writer to discipline language and narrative to maximum effect. Just as Shakespeare’s language bloomed in the rule-bound enclosure of the sonnet, the novella has been an enabling form for Metcalf, allowing him to hone his craft at both a micro and macro level.

  The micro level is language itself, the macro level the shape of the unfolding story. For Metcalf, steeped in high modernism, fiction isn’t only a matter of le mot juste, but of language at the even more molecular level of syllable and punctuation. To be a true Metcalf reader you have to savour what he does with commas and italics, as well as with words. Here is a typical Metcalf paragraph from “Polly Ongle”:

  It was Happy Hour in the ba
r on the main floor of the Chateau Laurier. People drifting in were pantomiming distress and amazement as they eased out of sodden raincoats or used the edge of their hands to wipe rain from eyebrows and foreheads. Men were seating themselves gingerly and loosening from their knees the cling of damp cloth; women were being casually dangerous with umbrellas. Necks were being mopped with handkerchiefs; spectacles were being polished with bar napkins.

  This is a typical Metcalf paragraph, not one with particularly heightened language or a set-piece. Yet attend to how much craft there is even in a paragraph devoted to simple stage setting.

  There’s the puckish play of the adjectives: “gingerly” is carefully placed after “men were seating themselves” so as to mimic the very movement being described. “Casually dangerous” is impishly oxymoronic.

  There’s the texture of the words themselves. The phrase “loosening from their knees the cling of damp cloth” has a nice dance between the “n” and “m” sounds with the hard-c sound of “cling” and “cloth” which, to my ears, evokes the distant clang of cutlery heard at a restaurant. The “i” in “cling” and the “a” and “p” in “damp” capture in sound the lifting of damp cloth away from skin.

  There’s the delicious evocativeness of the diction: “pantomiming,” “sodden,” and “mopped” all sharpening our perception.

  Finally, the use of the semi-colon in the last two sentences gives an orderly shape. The semi-colons serve as a scale, suggesting a balanced symmetry of nouns and actions on either side (“men” balanced with “women” and “necks” balanced with “spectacles,” for example). “Men” and “Women” are the camera in the middle shot; “necks” and “spectacles” are the camera in the close-up. The close-up intensifies what is seen—the realness of the rainstorm they have escaped.

  What this random paragraph of everyday Metcalf shows is that even when being casual he is hyper-alert; demands that we pay as much attention to his language as he has devoted to its writing.

  The Metcalf who writes with microscopic exactness is easier to analyze than the macro Metcalf who gives equal care to how he structures his narratives. To talk about structure is to talk, in part, about plot. And Metcalf is very careful in these stories to surprise his readers; surprises that only the most knavish critic would spoil.

  In lieu of summarizing Metcalf’s plots, I will offer a few suggestions with regard to how readers might best appreciate their structures. In reading, and especially in rereading these novellas, pay attention to shifts in tone and repetition of events and characters. The tonal variety of the novella is one of the chief reasons Metcalf finds the form so empowering. He can be incredibly funny, creating characters and scenes that rival those of his heroes Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse. But in all these novellas, antic scenes of merriment and mischief are juxtaposed with and enriched by other scenes that are more somber, ruminative, and inward, that display Wordsworthian “Intimations of Immortality” seen in the beauty of the natural world.

  His ability to contrast moods speaks to Metcalf’s deepest feelings about what it is to be alive. Alice Munro once wrote, “John Metcalf often comes as close to the baffling, painful comedy of human experience as a writer can get.” The inherent contradiction of “painful comedy” is acute: for Metcalf life is both a comedy and a tragedy. The novella allows him to show both sides of the equation.

  It’s when he’s dealing with intimacy that Metcalf is at his most painfully comedic. Indeed, all of these novellas are about coupling: the way men and women come together and separate, the loneliness that causes us to seek the warmth of another person’s flesh, and the loss caused by distance and separation.

  John Metcalf is one of the finest writers of our time and these novellas are his finest work.

  PRIVATE PARTS

  A Memoir

  PART ONE

  One of my earliest sexual memories, more vivid and perhaps more important than any subsequent sexual memory, is of my Uncle Fred and the idiot. I must have been then six or seven years old, evacuated to my Uncle Fred’s farm in what was then called Cumberland to escape the bombing of the Yorkshire industrial town in which my father worked. Auntie Lizzie even then seemed strange to me. She had what people called a “nutcracker” face, a nose and chin that threatened to meet, and the chin barbed with bristles. The countless farm cats fled under sofa and settle to escape her harsh caress. Her voice was so dreadful it could arrest the agricultural activities of men two and a half fields away. I learned years later that it was to escape Aunt Lizzie that my Uncle Fred trudged daily to the top field where he sat for hours smoking his pipe in a hen hut. It was there that they found him face-down dead in the litter and hen shit.

  Looking back now to those childhood times, I see their faces wrinkled and seamed, Uncle Fred always in corduroy worn smooth, Aunt Lizzie in faded pinafores and laceless, clopping shoes, her hands permanently reddened, the pair of them like illustrations in a history of rural life. They are, in later memory, like the crabbed, spiky drawings of Edward Ardizzone.

  Whenever I think of them, words come to my mind of whose meanings I am not exactly sure, haunting words like “fustian” and “coulter,” “stoup” and “flitch,” words redolent of another age. It seems scarcely possible that as submarines cruised beneath the seas and tanks ground forward over the rubble of Europe, as Dresden burned and Hiroshima melted, my Uncle Fred and his day labourers were leading in the cornfields with scythes, stooking sheaves, and the women bringing dinner down to the field in cloth-covered baskets and bearing the earthenware pitchers of beer over the stubble. It is a scene that Brueghel painted.

  Uncle Fred’s farm lay in the lush dairy land of the Eden valley from which rose the wild and endless fells whose lower slopes were grazed by sheep but whose heights climbed to thinning bracken, boulders, bare rock, and the circling hawks.

  That farm and farmyard enchanted me, the cathedral gloom of the vast barn where the silent tractor stood, its wheels nearly as high as my head, machines with spikes and tines and gleaming discs, the workbench with old biscuit tins with pretty ladies on the lids—tins full of nuts and bolts, washers, nails, screws, staples, cotter pins, fuses, spark plugs, coils of special wire. I would rummage there for hours, bend things in the vice, pound nails. The feedshed, too, was gloomy but a warm gloom, rich with the smells of meal and bran, metal scoops in the rolled-down sacks, rolled down like Aunt Lizzie’s lisle stockings, crusted paddles for stirring the mash.

  I thought that lisle stockings, a word I’d heard Aunt Lizzie say, were somehow connected with Golden Syrup, a green and gold tin with a lion lying down on it and lots of flies buzzing around the lion and on the tin it said Tate and Lyle’s Golden Syrup: “Hold your noise!” my Uncle often said when I spoke at table asking questions, so I did not ask but I thought that stockings and syrup had some obvious connection that everyone understood in that world where bombs were falling and my father was being brave.

  And I promised myself that when they’d finished evacuating me, I would go back to the bomb world where you could watch the soldiers marching, and when I was there I would understand everything.

  I loved my Uncle Fred but I was frightened of him too. He killed things and didn’t care and he sometimes bellowed and slapped my head. He called Gyp, the one-eyed collie, “Bugger-Lugs” and when the cows leaned against him as he was milking, the milk rin . . . rin . . . rin in the pail, he called them “whoring buggers” and sometimes he did very long shouts when they kicked the pail over, shouts that always started “You would, would you, you shitarse! Get over you cockstruck twat, you . . .” I tried to learn them and practised them in bed.

  But I was confused by this, too, because he never said interesting things near Auntie Lizzie, bad things, and he was a Methodist laypreacher, and on Sundays would put on a suit and shirt and tie, which on him looked as preposterous as a dress and hat looked on Aunt Lizzie, and conducted fervent services for small congregat
ions in the parlours of neighbour farms.

  When he was in a good mood, when he’d got the tractor mended, or the vet had been and it wasn’t mastitis, he always used to sing the same song very loudly and sometimes he sang it over and over and sometimes he just hummed most of it but burst out with single lines of words.

  From the oppressive power of sin

  My struggling spirit free;

  Perfect righteousness bring in,

  Unspotted purity;

  Then with a final heave on the wrench, a final twist of the screwdriver, or the last bash on the shackle pin, he’d stand back and bellow,

  Speak, and all this war shall cease,

  And sin shall give its raging o’er:

  Love me freely, seal my peace,

  And bid me sin no more.

  But he frightened me also, because his jokes and tricks were rough and sometimes painful. He it was who always squirted me with milk when stripping the cows, who urged me to touch electric fences, who advised me to wash paint off my face with petrol drawn from the tractor so that I had to be taken to the doctor for ointment, who put salt instead of sugar on my porridge, who encouraged me to pick up the body of a fox he’d shot so that I stank for a week of its musk and suffered daily scrubbings in the tin tub in front of the fire with Aunt Lizzie’s emery wash cloths.

  Uncle Fred employed an idiot, the son of a widow woman who lived in the village. The idiot’s name was Bobby. I was frightened of him because of his potato face, and I could never understand anything he said. Uncle Fred employed him, I realize now, more from charity than for his usefulness. Mucking out the stables and balancing the wheelbarrow on its perilous trip to the midden took him all the day.

  Bobby stank. He never changed his clothes. He always wore the same boots, green cord trousers, leggings, and khaki battledress top, on which his mother had stitched all the buttons, crests, badges, and ribbons that the Italian prisoners of war who worked on my Uncle’s and neighbouring farms had given him. They had taught him to march up and down the yard with his pitchfork on his shoulder like a rifle and he liked to do that more than mucking-out and when Uncle Fred saw him he’d yell, “Get out of that, you girt softie! Get down the barn, you daft lummox!” and then he’d yell, “Move yourself, bollock-brains!” but the funny thing was that he called him all the same things when he was pleased with him, when the barn was finished early or he hadn’t tipped over the wheelbarrow in the yard.