Finding Again the World 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

  Lord Nelson Tavern

  RAY SMITH

  The Iconoclast’s Journal

  TERRY GRIGGS

  Heroes

  RAY ROBERTSON

  An Aesthetic Underground

  JOHN METCALF

  A History of Forgetting

  CAROLINE ADDERSON

  The Camera Always Lies

  HUGH HOOD

  Canada Made Me

  NORMAN LEVINE

  Vital Signs (a reSet Original)

  JOHN METCALF

  A Good Baby

  LEON ROOKE

  First Things First (a reSet Original)

  DIANE SCHOEMPERLEN

  I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well (a reSet Original)

  NORMAN LEVINE

  The Stand-In

  DAVID HELWIG

  Light Shining Out of Darkness

  (a reSet Original)

  HUGH HOOD

  Bad Imaginings

  CAROLINE ADDERSON

  FINDING AGAIN

  THE WORLD

  JOHN METCALF

  SELECTED STORIES

  FOREWORD BY KEATH FRASER

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ON

  Copyright © John Metcalf, 2018

  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 license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Metcalf, John, 1938–

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Finding again the world : selected stories / John Metcalf.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77196-252-0 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-77196-253-7 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS8576.E83A6 2018 C813’.54 C2018-901737-6

  C2018-901738-4

  Readied for the Press by Daniel Wells

  Copy-edited by Emily Donaldson

  Cover and text design by Gordon Robertson

  The goofy but charming hare on the cover, surveying its world for possible beagles, is after an early British Delft tile that sits on my desk as a coaster.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  This book is for Daniel Wells

  Visionary friend and fount of inspiration

  O swallows, swallows, poems are not

  The point. Finding again the world,

  That is the point . . .

  — The Blue Swallows. Howard Nemerov.

  . . . I’ve come close to matching the feeling of the night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but I’ve never quite got there. I’ve gotten close, but not all the way there. I’m always looking for it, listening and feeling for it . . .

  — Miles: The Autobiography

  FOREWORD

  You might be forgiven if the first thing you notice about his fiction isn’t the fiction. Instead, a sensibility. “How I hug these words to myself, savouring them.” He’s the frail novelist in exile, imbiber of digitalis and glycerine capsules, recollecting a bucolic English childhood of luminous wonder. Another story begins: “I sometimes think my tiredness is different from other people’s. A different kind of thing.” Already weary at twenty, this narrator too experiences a luminous flashback once the right words arise to talk about it. Or a wheezy Boer War vet, instructing a baffled child: “Waterford glass—brilliant. Can you see the colours? The green of the cress and the drops of water like diamonds? Brilliant. A question of the lead-content, you see. You do see, don’t you. You do understand what I’m telling you” (even an antagonist discriminates, passionately). “Always be attentive. Always accumulate facts.” John Metcalf, arbiter elegantiae at thirty, seemed uncommon from the start. You get the picture in these early stories—the old novelist with his “images that haunt my nights and days”—of a fervent curator in full command of his art and more than willing to share its secrets. What is authentic? How is it done?

  John once urged his stories on young readers as “things to be lived through and experienced”—as autobiographical in the reading, he hoped, as they were in the writing. But he cautioned against reading them as autobiography—not that autobiography, like fiction, wasn’t also invented to refurbish its subject. Art, not life, determined reality. What really mattered was whether selected events felt alive, not whether or not they happened to the author.

  You do wonder how they could not have happened to him, when he hugged words to himself (as he does in these stories) like “facts”:

  If I wrote CAT, he would stare at the word with a troubled frown. When I sounded out C-A-T, he would say indignantly: Well, it’s cat, innit? We had a cat, old tom-cat. Furry knackers, he had, and if you stroked ’em . . .

  When you read a Metcalf story you never forget who’s writing it, the language charged with the purpose of its being. His being. “And it is to language that I have given my heart.” (An early essay reminds us that the author had not given it to themes and induced plots.) This metaphor comes from someone who inherited as much a condition of the heart from his cleric-father as he did a devotion to the word—though not necessarily the one in Genesis:

  C-O-W evoked his Auntie Fran—right old scrubber she was, having it away for the price of a pint . . .

  —segueing into a vivid if less than elegant culture:

  Such remarks would spill over into general debate on the ethics of white women having it off with spades and Pakis, they was heathen, wasn’t they? Said their prayers to gods and that, didn’t they. Didn’t they? Well, there you are then. And their houses stank of curry and that. You couldn’t deny it. Not if you knew what you was talking about.

  In the beginning, then, the word.

  Followed inevitably by linguistic theatre of a very entertaining order.

  Among his early productions, this one in “The Eastmill Reception Centre,” of the young narrator teaching language to delinquents, moves on to a second act where the older man, now a middle-age writer in Canada, laments the “desolating emptiness” of his civilized life compared to what he remembers of the intense lives of those semi-literate charges. “Words!” His, it seems, are paltry and mere “blathering!” he calls them, no consolation for
his having missed out ever since on the pyrotechnic lives of unreconstructed juveniles.

  Is this coda convincing? Possibly not if the writer has already seduced us into thinking his words, gloriously deployed in recounting his time teaching words, are every bit as vivid as the menacing tattoos he now insists will never be his. After such empathy, bathos? But this brings up something characteristic of John’s endings. They’re often elegiac, because the perspective of time and its attenuation obsesses him. No other Canadian writer embodies as he does Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility, the notion of present time fallen from a time when metaphysical poets such as Donne had felt their thought as intimately as the odour of a rose. “A thought to Donne was an experience,” wrote Eliot, “it modified his sensibility.” Metcalf’s allegiance to metaphor over exposition has long been his way of expressing sensuous thought. “All else is tricks of the trade or inexpressible,” comments his old novelist in “The Years in Exile”—not, incidentally, a fan of Wordsworth’s “abstractions.” “My mind is full of pictures.”

  When I hinted earlier that John’s voice seemed worldly before his time, weary even, it’s as though his understanding of a less than whole (or complete) life was with him since he started writing these stories. A worry for characters, a warning to himself. His passion for language has long fueled a desire to rekindle through it the feeling that the material world is indeed radiant if it isn’t over-thought, mislaid, or replaced with the ersatz.

  Which is Howard Nemerov’s exhortation in “The Blue Swallows,” the poem from which he has here chosen his title. The poet, divided between intellect and imagination, rediscovers through words the rapture of the world. “Seeing,” as the poem goes, “the swallows’ tails as nibs / Dipped in invisible ink, writing . . .” In John’s stories the world of nature is always an important means of educating sensibility. “It is only the natural world”, he wrote in that essay for schoolchildren, “which makes sense.” In an essay of his own, Nemerov has written that “Poetry is getting something right in language . . .” And so does Metcalf’s fiction: “The caterpillar humped its body and started to flow over the edge of the cigarette-packet. Its body creased into a row of folds like a tiny concertina.” Such a pastoral vision, as he called it, “occurs again and again in my stories.” Indeed the vision of swallows is a happy, final one for his recurrent character David in this story “The Children Green and Golden”.

  Finding Again the World includes stories from the 1960s through the writer’s middle period in the 1980s. It also contains two Robert Forde stories from some years later, after returning to this fictional alter-ego whom he’d first imagined in “Travelling Northward” as a protagonist of curatorial heft and dazzling comic intelligence. Not included here are any of the non-Forde novellas he published during his middle years, which, as remarkable as those are, don’t supplant the briefer, early stories, which stand on their own as overlooked contributions to Canadian writing. They are often sterling examples of the genre to which Metcalf has long devoted himself as a writer and editor. (Critic, too, the brilliance of whose insight into the qualitative differences between Hemingway’s stories and Morley Callaghan’s, say, only reinforcing his credentials for having made such discriminations down the decades.)

  When he came to Canada in 1962, his credentials for becoming a published author were modest but probably worth, in today’s pennies, a pretty MFA. In other words, very little. At twenty-something he’d read Dylan Thomas (having reveled in similar seascapes as a child), responded deeply enough to Katherine Mansfield’s stories, and in Spain shaken in admiration Ernest Hemingway’s hand. He possessed a degree in literature and some sort of teaching certificate qualifying him to teach in an English detention centre followed by time in a remedial secondary called Bluebell Modern. Over the stultifying turmoil of those places, he opted for emigration. By comparison he found his new high school in Montreal resembled a rest home.

  “The students were polite,” he recounts in the memoir An Aesthetic Underground, “tolerant of the idea of learning, and mostly able to read. No one threatened me with a knife. It was refreshing.” Desolate, he means, if once again comic. Cultural absurdity would prove an irresistible theme when he began writing, a key means of italicizing through the vivid, assimilated language of lodestone characters like David Hendricks and the later Robert Forde, an ardent tradition he longed to conserve, commemorate, collect against an attenuated present. This reaches its fullest articulation in Forde, visiting say the Archeological Museum in Odessa: “And the highlight of all for Forde was a hoard of Scythian silver tetradrachmas.” Kneeling for a better view of these coins heaped theatrically on black velvet, “He was gripped by the iconography, fascinated by the way the style had perfected itself. . . . ‘Sheila!’ he called. ‘Come and see how alive these horses are.’”

  Reconstituting literacy among students in schools also meant, if he hoped to write fiction, teaching himself to discard, distrust, and deepen his own language. He read the stories of Richard Yates, the early Alice Munro, and contemporaries like Hugh Hood and Clark Blaise with whom he formed in the early 1970s an alliance of fiction writers in Montreal Storytellers. He began to publish in little magazines and to be broadcast on CBC. Theatrical fiction, the way its parts and characters performed, such as in Waugh and Wodehouse, was already in his genetic juice; but in his early stories it is the painter’s hand we notice first, the impeccable eye, accompanied by an unusually flawless ear that could nail an image, balance a periodic sentence, or carry a scene by counterpoint.

  Magic tossed off, as if by shorthand:

  Blasts on its whistle, the train slowing through a small country station.

  Nether Hindlop.

  On the platform, rolls of fencing wire, wicker crates of racing pigeons, holding a ginger cat in his arms, a porter.

  “Single Gents Only”

  Or, in a later story, movement achieved by an arresting predicate:

  A tug, its bridge blazing with lights, its sides armoured with tires like a row of shields, thrashed past them out to sea.

  “The Museum at the End of the World”

  Or even, by way of careful technique, a climax slowed down:

  He felt a mounting excitement.

  All, all, dear ladies, a question of balance.

  And he’d found it.

  His balancing pole, as it were, commas.

  COMMAS

  No risk of falling now; no staggering run up the incline of a sagging rope.

  Earth COMMA lie lightly on her COMMA who COMMA who COMMA

  Living COMMA scarcely burdened you.

  “Gentle as Flowers Make the Stones”

  Here a Montreal poet is mentally translating a lyric from the Latin poet Martial, about a pet slave girl’s death, while being seduced by a groupie. With much rehearsing he manages to deliver his lines in a kind of risky, linguistic climax, both elegiac and comic. Long before the on-going selfies of Norwegian novelists, John was struggling with the comforts afforded by his profession and finding them endlessly uncomfortable—working through, as Jim Haine does in this story, technical innovation, constant revisions, low sales. (Wasn’t it another Latin poet, adapting Hippocrates, who observed ars longa, vita brevis?) John’s perspective has always been gleefully, movingly, paradoxical. The title of his character’s unreviewed book of poems is (what else?) The Distance Travelled.

  If anything his fiction has become more autobiographical over the last half century. His Forde stories, now part of the Canadian canon, are idiosyncratic as no other contemporary writing is (Forde is Metcalf); but so are the early stories idiosyncratic, a sensibility at work under the John Metcalf brand, his style chronically determined in every line to be neither generic nor received, perforce catawampus and thereby eccentric, deceptively at odds with whatever traditional models his distillations might resemble.

  Bicarbonato di soda?

  . . . polenta, rigaton
i, tortellini . . .

  Praaaaaaaaap . . .

  Scooters on the Via Sistina.

  Praaaaaaaaap . . .

  Helen passing gas.

  “The Nipples of Venus”

  Those traditional models began at home. “I studied my father. He was, unknowingly, teaching me what is now my craft.” “The Teeth of My Father” is dedicated to Alice Munro and seems to nod at childhood’s influence on the early stories of both writers. But there was more to it. This story, and one of hers dedicated to him (as he tells us in the essay “Picking Winners”), “arose in part out of our discussions of theoretical problems.” She and he “were toying with certain ‘postmodern’ problems as early as 1971. We were both writing stories which commented on themselves or which quoted other texts. . . .”

  In the beginning was the word—but in “The Teeth of My Father” whose word? The chicken-and-egg question of genesis is buried not so deep here as the Canadian narrator looks back on stories he wrote about his alter ego David growing up in southern England. It’s structured as a compendium of earlier fragments and stories this author has chosen to gather within the shell-memoir of his eccentric father (and mother), a kind of “loose box” of bizarre dental kits and cobbling lasts, family idiosyncrasies of which there are many. Such particulars drive the story, as they always do in Metcalf, dauntingly. “After the bleeding stopped, pyorrhea set in followed by general pyemia, and he was confined to bed for nearly three weeks in high fever. I can remember the stench in the bedroom and looking at the blobs of pus that gathered at the corners of his sleeping mouth.”

  I find unexpectedly moving the final scene at the rail station between a now weakened father, driving his old Morris, and David just back from term at university. It’s rendered in the shy, affectionate language of emotional avoidance, very understated, as though in elegiac contrast to the charged speech we recall as the seminal influence on David’s nascent craft. “Inside my head, I practised the voices and inflections of his rhetoric, the rise and fall, the timing of the pause, the silence, the understated gesture, the rhetorical series of questions and their thundering denial. As early as ten, I could predict the emotional flow of the sermon, sense its pattern.”