Finding Again the World Read online

  This autobiographical mode, currently on offer in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novels, will resonate among readers weary of old-hat fiction. But Metcalf’s mode is perhaps more intolerant of quotidian life’s longueurs. He wants metaphorical movement more than he wants and-then/and-then narrative. For him, life requires ceremonial attention—as much to knee scabs and dandelions as to humdrum coach tours and sipping beer in a piazza—if he’s to reconfigure such commonalities in fiction. Their style is in the display of what the old novelist calls “particular life.” (Is there any other writer, by the way, who wrings more theatre from a restaurant meal than John? I’m thinking here of the ritual in his novellas like “The Girl in Gingham” and “Polly Ongle”; but also of shipboard dining in “The Museum at the End of the World”.) It isn’t solipsism driving his work but a kind of self-curatorship, collecting words he will live by, into sentences resembling little picture galleries, his paragraphs sometimes self-effacing exhibitions in order to interweave past and present. The effect can be disorienting.

  Afterwards, the younger people had strolled back through deep lanes to the family house for the reception. I’d walked with a girl called Susan who turned out to be the sister of one of the bridesmaids. She’d picked a buttercup and lodged it behind her ear. She’d said:

  Do you know what this means in Tahiti?

  Late in the evening they’d been wandering about the house calling to us to come and eat strawberries, calling out that I had to make another speech.

  Jack?

  We know you’re there!

  Susan?

  Jack and Su-san!

  The larger drawing-room was warm and quick with candlelight. In the centre of the dark polished refectory table stood a gleaming silver épergne piled with tiny wild strawberries. By the side of it stood octagonal silver sugar casters. The candelabra on the table glossed the wood’s dark grain. Reflected in the épergne’s curves and facets, points of flame quivered.

  You will pay attention to your right . . .

  Traffic was thickening.

  Fisher!

  The bus was slowing.

  Susan Fisher!

  . . . above the piazza. The Villa is still owned by the Aldobrandini family. You will notice the central avenue of box trees. The park is noted for its grottos and Baroque fountains.

  “Doubtless by Bernini,” I said.

  “Is that a palm tree?” said Helen.

  “The Nipples of Venus”

  Several years ago in a review of Lydia Davis’s collected stories, the TLS included a sentence I think applicable to Metcalf’s stories: “What suspense there is, is often external to the story, in the sense that Davis’s formal experiments become craft-conscious performances, the pleasure of following them a combination of following the wit and humour within, while also wondering if Davis can successfully pull off the framing experiment.”

  John’s fiction is curiously underappreciated, perhaps even among those who admire it. Is this the usual case of readers fondling and forgetting books, what happens to many writers who flash and burn (in Canada, more like spark and smolder)—or in his case, might it be a subtle question of our not bothering to read it carefully enough after concluding it’s derivative? A case even of our resenting it, as the familiar English stuff we’ve long read, seen on screen, had our fill of with types and tropes and textures ever since England was invented to swamp the colonies with acerbic novels and class-conscious dramas?

  For someone so indebted to the legacy of English prose, Metcalf is agnostic and iconoclastic. His method is pawky, astonishingly precise, a little dangerous. He is always performing himself, drolly, often jazzily, and in endless rehearsal whether in letters, essays, or fiction. His are riffs tempered by an infinite capacity to get right what he’s listening for. Languid, he is no heartthrob, yet I sometimes think of Sinatra. The unexpected phrasings, the way he inhabits a line or delivers a lyric. The balladeer with an impish ear for the ring-a-ding-ding and yet a simultaneous immersion in craft (here, grammar) making him sound like no other writer (his character is pondering a misspelled poster in the window of a “holistic” pharmacy, WHERE HAS ALL THE GOOD BACTERIA GONE?):

  . . . He wondered who would be rash enough to swallow something called Slippery Elm on the advice of people unable to distinguish singular from plural. He thought of going in and trying to make this point to the girl behind the counter, but the ochre hair and the cluster of stainless-steel surgical clamps climbing the cartilage of her right ear dissuaded him.

  His reifications of youth, woo-able women, staring regretfully into the abyss at three a.m.

  The desk clerk gave him a key. As he opened the door a man who was sitting in an armchair watching television turned an astonished head. He was naked except for a dove-grey Stetson and mauve ankle socks.

  Or championing—as Sinatra did, the long-play album in the forties—the short story collection in the sixties, and ever since, as an interpretive showcase for the shorter single. One imagines Sinatra’s hit ballad All or Nothing at All as an umbrella title for the collected Metcalf memoirs. Mainly, though, it’s hard to forget after hearing it, the voice. No slurrings. Captivating and clear as a Waterford tumbler of single-malt. A writer who can hold his liquor, aware of the challenge in committing to a line and then delivering unwaveringly:

  “In Alberta,” he said, “there is nothing old. The buildings are brutal. The streets merely numbered. Bottle-openers are screwed to the headboards of hotel beds.”

  Here in “Ceazer Salad,” a bravura state-of-the-nation story, the itinerant voice renders in rueful rant and elegiac awareness a sensibility uncommon in Canada. On Parliament Hill, “Forde stood behind the cannon’s cascabel, running his fingertip over the Broad Arrow cut into the metal. He patted the sun-warmed bronze and walked around the cannon, looking at the touchhole, trunnions, quoins, and tompion, reveling in this antique terminology. . . .”

  The cannon with its Broad Arrow, the statues of Louis-Philippe Hébert, the Gothic Revival buildings behind him, all spoke the same cultural language, all belonged to the same world, a world for which his education had groomed him, a world now as relevant as potsherds and shell-middens.

  Equally curatorial, “The Museum at the End of the World” re-travels this recurrent passion of Robert Forde’s to be made whole again by associating himself with history, art, language. A blending of cultural reference and natural worlds (he really is a crooner, this writer, at the ship’s bar with his Famous Grouse Scotch), taking precise note of the mysterious, white enchantment blooming alongside their hull in the Black Sea: “The rise and fall was like a stately carousel, a slow-motion firework display, an underwater Swan Lake of jellyfish.” Even when fusions of art and life disappoint Forde—as when touring Chekov’s house he finds it gives up “nothing” of the “heroic energy” or tubercular pain through which the playwright once wrote—Metcalf will compose his own sentence to bring inside this museum the “particular life” long favoured by his fading writer in exile. (Gatekeepers need not apply, only a writer forges conjunctions like these: “Forde prowled the house on his own, photographing the rooms hoping for some emanation of the spirit who’d written Uncle Vanya, who’d delighted in catching crayfish and picking mushrooms and wild berries, who’d loved a pet mongoose called Sod, which roamed the house at night extracting corks from bottles.”)

  Among immigrant writers who have influenced our literature by their style (Leacock, Wilson, Lowry, Ondaatje) Metcalf must be included. As he must among our best native-born writers of the short story, Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro. Of a fellow story writer, among dozens he has championed, he wrote in Shut Up He Explained, “There is in every thing she writes clarity and lucidity. I have over thirty-five years of reading typescripts come to realize that these qualities are rare indeed. Her very clarity is a form of passion.” Finding Again the World serves to remind us this passionate clarity is what he has long reve
red in his own stories. “Writers’ first books often recreate the intensity with which children experience and apprehend the world. Those remembered worlds, worlds outside time, live in luminous and holy detail.”

  I think of the parablist simplicity yet intricate technique of “The Children Green and Golden.” Of its plain prose collecting the story’s cards and caterpillars, along with its high-summer experiences foreshadowing a poetic tradition for the young character David. When the poet is ideally suited to his work, according to Eliot, he is perpetually melding into metaphor, from experiences as disparate as the noise of a typewriter and the smell of cooking, new ways of seeing. This is why John’s old novelist in exile, beset by “the insistence of . . . pictures,” is unable to sleep in the summer heat. He’s too old to write any more, but these pictures are the legacy he is to go on living by, after he is no longer going on.

  This picture, for instance, remembered from his childhood, the gamekeeper’s gibbet strung with the corpses of stoats and weasels . . .

  Over the bodies in a gauze of sound crawled the iridescent flies.

  In the beginning, yes, the word.

  Gauze!

  Keath Fraser

  2018

  THE CHILDREN GREEN AND GOLDEN

  David waited outside the gate while Pete went up the steps to the front door. They didn’t like going to Rory’s house because his mother was funny. She always said things like, “So you are Rory’s little friends,” and she never seemed to get dressed. She was always wearing a nightdress and her toe-nails were bright red. Rory’s father had gone away. Rory used to steal money from her purse and one day he had watched her through the keyhole when she was having a bath.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Callaghan. Can Rory come out, please?”

  “Rory! Rory, darling! Your friends are here for you.”

  They walked slowly along the hot pavement, towels under their arms and hands in pockets, towards the path that led down to the Promenade. The sun was already melting the tar between the paving-stones and forcing it up into shining bubbles. In the gardens, the sweet-chestnut trees with their mounds of cool leaves were quite still in the morning heat. Pete was rattling a careless stick along the slats of the fences. Turning to the others he said, “Who’s got any money on them?”

  “I’ve got a couple of bob,” said Rory.

  “Let’s get ten Weights.”

  “No. Park Drive. They’re stronger.”

  David stopped stamping on the tar-bubbles and said, “And three banana ices at Rossi’s.”

  “Whose money is it?” said Rory.

  “All right. All right,” said David. “She give it to you?”

  “No, I nicked it. So what? You got any money?”

  “Yes. It just so happens that I have.”

  “Show us then.”

  David slipped back behind Rory and Pete, pretending to grope in his pocket, and flicked his towel at the back of Rory’s head. As David ran out into the road Rory shouted, “You wait, sodguts,” and they chased each other back and forth across the road fighting with their towels. Suddenly Pete shouted, “Squirrel!” and the three of them searched the gutter for stones and pebbles.

  When they neared the cliff-path Pete said, “Let’s go along the top and through the park.”

  “What about going across the golf-course? See if we can find some balls.”

  “Yes, but if we go through the park we can have a deck at the ponds, can’t we?”

  They strolled along the cliff-top path leading to the park, stopping every now and then to throw stones at the grey squirrels or to hurl their pen-knives into the tree trunks. The morning was heavy with the smell of pine trees and the sun came in brilliant yellow patches through their shade. David stabbed at the top of a fence post but the blade of his knife closed and cut his little finger.

  They stopped at the wooden kiosk by the park gates and Rory said to the old man, “Can I have ten Park Drive, please?”

  “I can’t sell cigarettes to minors, son. You can see the notice for yourself.”

  “Oh, they’re not for me. They’re for my Dad. He’s waiting down on the beach.”

  “Well, if you’re sure they’re not for you. . . .”

  Rory called to David, “Did he say he wanted matches?”

  “No. He’s got his lighter, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes. That’s all, thank you.”

  And they strolled on into the park. The park-benches were grouped around two oblong fish-ponds which were covered with water-lilies. The ponds were teeming with orange and silver goldfish, huge lazy fish lying near the surface under the lily-pads. The park-keeper in his brown suit walked round and round.

  “You could get them with a spear,” said Pete. “One of those with three prongs like they use for dabfish.”

  “Or nightlines,” said David.

  “Bombs would be best,” said Rory. “You could climb in at night and dynamite them.”

  They stood staring at the fish. Suddenly Rory said, “Come on. Let’s get going. The parkie’s coming and we don’t want to be recognized.”

  They left the park and wandered down the path towards the dunes.

  “Shall we go to the cliff?” said Pete.

  “Hey, yes. Perhaps those swifts are nesting again.”

  “They’re not swifts,” said Pete. “They’re swallows.”

  “Swifts. You can tell by the shape of the tail.”

  “Swallows. They’re swallows, I tell you. Didn’t you see the blue on their backs?”

  “It’d be difficult to get up there,” said Rory. “You’d need ropes and climbing irons. Or you could lower someone on a rope from the top.”

  They were still arguing as the path petered out into the loose sand of the dunes. The coarse silver-green dune grass cut against their bare legs. Suddenly Rory checked them with an outstretched hand. He pointed over to the right where, half-hidden behind a rise, a man and woman lay in the sun. He gestured Pete to the right and David to the left and they crouched low and worked their way towards the dune. When they were getting close, all three sank flat into the sand and wormed their way nearer.

  They peered over the edge into the hollow. The man was lying beside the woman, one arm around her. The straps of her bathing costume were undone and the man was rubbing suntan oil on her back. They stared at the white bulge of her breasts which the loosened costume revealed. When she rolled over completely onto her stomach Rory gestured them back. They slid carefully down the bank. He raised his eyebrows in question and Pete and David nodded. Pete was biting on his fingers to keep from laughing. Rory nodded and they sprang up in sight of the couple and he shouted, “Give her a big belly!”

  And then they were running. Running with their mouths open and their hearts pounding, running and stumbling for dear life through the heavy sand of the dunes. They did not look back, but ran and ran until the blood pounded in their temples and their throats were dry and aching and they could run no more. Eventually, with shaking legs, they collapsed into the dunes near their favourite cliff.

  David was fighting for breath and crying tears of laughter at the same time. Pete shouted, in a voice trembling with laughter, “Give her a big belly!” and hurled himself upon Rory. They wrestled backwards and forwards until Pete threw Rory and sat on his chest, pinning his arms to the ground. He said, “Did you see them coming after us, Dave?”

  “I didn’t look. I was going too fast.”

  “Hey, get off, Pete, you silly bugger. You’re hurting.”

  “Did you see him, Rory?”

  Rory sprang to his feet, and shook the sand out of his hair. “No. I didn’t happen to be watching.”

  “He was coming fast. I think we just made it. Hey, what if he’d caught us?”

  “There’s three of us. We could have got him down.”

  “We’d have beat him
up.”

  “We’d have given him a rabbit punch.”

  “Hit him right in the neck with a rabbit punch.”

  They settled back, using their towels as pillows, and stared up into the blue of the sky. Gulls dipped and floated lazily over the edge of the cliff towards the sea. David took off his shoes and socks and dug his feet into the sand, letting it trickle between his toes. He unbuttoned his shirt to let the heat sink into his chest and stomach and wriggled his shoulders in the loose sand until he was comfortable. It was so quiet they could hear the whisper of the dune grass. High up against the sandstone cliff the black shapes of the swallows flickered like the blink of an eyelash. The heat seemed to roll in waves.

  Pete said, “Are you going in today, Dave?” David only grunted.

  “Are you?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Got your cozzie?”

  “Mmmm. Got it on.”

  Rory was lying on his stomach looking over the edge of the low cliff. Below, there was a level stretch of beach, an arc contained in the curve of the cliffs.

  “Hey! Come and look at this,” called Rory.

  “What?”

  “Come and look.”

  Near the tide-line a few small children were playing with buckets and spades, but nearer to the foot of the cliff a man and woman were putting up a sort of flag or banner which drooped between two poles. The boys could not read what it said because it faced out towards the beach. Near the banner were two boxes, like huge suitcases.

  “What do you think they’re doing?” said Rory.

  “Dunno. Can’t see from here.”

  “Let’s go down and look.”

  “Shall we?”

  “Yes, come on. We can look at the swallow nests later.”

  With their towels round their necks, they scrambled down the fault where the cliff had crumbled into large boulders and heaps of rubble, and ran the final few yards onto the beach.