Kingston, October 1969 [undated
letter]
Notice this address because it is where I'm going to be alive, hopefully:
30 William Street, Apartment 15. If it seems familiar it should, Rasheed
and Lucette lived here last year. Three high-ceilinged rooms and a sleeping
closet. Where I am sitting I can see a long narrow rectangle of late evening,
blue, factory rooftops and chimneys from the old locomotive works, and beyond
it the lake, then the island, then the sky, four long strips each of a different
color of blue, eleven small yellow lights on the shore of the island. Sounds
of traffic because this is near downtown. [floorplan]
30 William is on a corner one block from the waterfront and the long
brick shed that used to be the locomotive factory. If I lean on the high
windowsill-cum-shelf-cum-indoor parapet I can see Kingston Harbour and the
Wolfe Island ferry moving slowly out in its skirts of light. King Street,
running alongside this building on the northwest side, is lined with trees,
large limestone clubs, banks, insurance offices. The waterfront street running
parallel to it one block away has families living behind lines of washing
and newspaper-stuffed windows.
My building is like the banks and clubs. It has been both. The hallways
are still papered in what looks like burgundy-and-cream brocade. The large
entrance hallway downstairs is tiled in black and white marble diamonds.
But one of the windows onto the stairs hangs open on its hinges. The weather
comes in the front door and the marble tiles need washing. The silver and
green medallioned wallpaper in one of the third floor hallways is rain-stained
and peeling because the fire escape door onto the roof is left open. So
it is grandiose low-cost housing for people with grandiose low-cost taste,
older hippies with talent in drama, graduate students, non-conformists old
enough to have decided how non-to-conform. Across the hall is Kig, a tall
thin girl with a striking wolfish face, probably twenty five, living with
seventeen year old baby-faced Maxie. My friend Mad used to live downstairs
in the apartment with the bank-vault bedroom. Also on first floor is Stumm,
PhD student in chemistry, in flight from the Baptist ministry, turkey-necked
and gauche. Somewhere in the building is DC Butler, raised in Europe as
the child of a diplomat or something, sophisticated, lazy, a little fat,
studying as he likes but on the fringe of the university. The rest I don't
know.
Tuesday
Your letter has come - you fit into your wedding dress so well!
This is all the letter I can manage for the moment.
Lawford has given me a raise, $45 a month, and has made it retroactive
for two months - so here is that one hundred dollar bonus from him to send
to Judy. Then I think that debt is settled.
October 15 1968 [journal]
I came home on Saturday and saw that the new grey kitten with black stripes
was not there, but I thought she must be sleeping. I went into the bathroom.
Image: in the narrow bottom of the toilet bowl, the kitten, dead, fur
wet and dark clinging to her rat's body, curled against one side of the
porcelain bowl, her front paws crossed limply in front of her body and her
head back against the bowl, mouth and eyes open, a curved form graceful
as a fetus, but horrible because of the dead fleas scattered on the water
and on the sides of the bowl, drowned as they deserted her. I finally lifted
her out by her front paws and saw her body stretched out by its own limp
weight, naked and strange, thin, long. She was a fierce gay young animal
with a round belly striped lengthwise like a watermelon. Pavane for a dead
infant. Gift from a cornucopia. Position of birth. Posture of death, crossed
hands, mouth and eyes - that's what it is.
16 October [journal]
Day carefully labeled, uncorrectly because it's 2:30. The two cats asleep
on the chair. Yorrick across the table drinking his coke in Franco's dim
restaurant (almost see the sawdust on the floor) with lights on only parts
of his face, skin pink and very mobile over his blunt squared Dutch features,
large mouth, blue eyes, blond feathery hair. He went to Kennedy's funeral,
decided while he was sailing, one Friday, after work, took the plane there
and back. His boss said it was alright.
Talked about - states of grace, people proffered and what to do about
them ("We are born with no debts"), our inability to accept less
than what we knew then and had then. The loss of grace because of people
let in, at the same time the desire to test ourselves in confusion. Games.
His image of the painting - a beginning that is accidental, playful, random
- then the surprise of recognition and the grappling work that makes it
into a painting. Is Peter's presentation of himself, his showmanship, the
random preparation, play leading to care and work. Yorrick: "You play
games. You test me. Even if I would never see you again, I would remember
that you were something," in his blunt mouthy Dutch accent.
Then as I rode away with the Ben Shahn book he gave me, he called after,
"That's a game too". Lights on the newly washed pavement and slick
sticky sound of my tires. No one else except Paul and maybe Jerry knows
about the states of grace. And Leonard Cohen.
-
Yorrick is really Jorg [slash through the o] - he woke me at 1:30 when
I was in bed, banged hard on the door and then came in before I was really
awake or could see him. He had been at a party, was a little drunk? Took
a taxi here. Stayed until just now, nearly 4:30. He talked riddles. Finally
we got nowhere, he said we had gotten nowhere. I sat in silence and waited
(remember Arnold at Cox's) while he looked for words. There is a kind of
power about him, his puzzles, his incoherence, seriousness, laughter. "Yes,
I should have come, but not so soon." "I wanted to go out like
a Russian dancer." At the beginning, when he came in, he felt good.
-
On the way to see 400 coups tonight I noticed that the girl ahead
of me was limping slightly. I didn't notice until I had been following her
nearly half a block close behind. Her right leg was thinner and nearly exactly
like mine. I fell into step behind her, and we walked exactly the same.
It was a huge joke and I looked around to see whether anyone was appreciating
it. Then I stopped and looked after her when she went up the library steps.
Not bad. I had never seen myself before. Not bad. But she wore a nondescript
coat and ugly brown shoes, short hair, glasses. I didn't see her face. And
I was going past in my leather skirt, new sandal flats, black tights, striped
jersey, leather cap, earrings, my half profile and cheek bone composed into
my arrogant and expectant expression.
So much for my superiority to other cripples.
Self irony is fake of me.
-
Monday, Patricia Wainman-Wood's dinner party, her grown-up bubble and
delicious canard à l'orange, her slinky bottom and her laughing intelligent
sexuality. (Intelligence in a woman can be forgotten with such a laugh -
but Lawford can't take it and prefers mild harmless gentle pretty Carol
- bah.) It's her mouth we remember, she knows it's beautiful and shines
it in pink lipstick. Long-nosed John Rae, dour Patrick, but she makes them
feel happy and mannish. Well. It's useful to be able to cook or at least
to like to. Dear Arnold Desser. I liked cooking for him because he was so
impatient.
-
Frantic morning. Woke at five, thought of A's tilted prick and felt very
warm, got the hairbrush and worked at it. In the middle two babies? two
cats? began to scream and I wanted to discover what they screamed at, but
first I had to finish; by now it was academic and no longer interested me
much. Finally, no kick but a simple bump-to-a-halt sensation of finish.
By this time the cats, babies, had stopped crying but I couldn't sleep.
Then finally between 7:30 and 8:00, when the alarm had rung twice, dreams of waking onto a snowy cemetery where cats fought
among stiff grass. I dreamed I looked onto my street and it was snowing.
Sinister dreams, breathing, strange things in my apartment. Dragged
myself to work. Pat quit for a job in the English department. Gloom. But
cold, and gold leaves in bushes, on the trees.
November 4 [journal]
Weekend at Granby, Robert de Chazal, Rob, Chaz, de Chaz. Last weekend,
Monday night, Thursday night, Friday morning, this weekend, gradually gradually
something coming out of nothing. The Scarboro bluffs, grey sand and water,
the huge fire on the narrow beach, black trees on the bluff in silhouette
from below, but rags of orange leaf along the grey sky.
Maureen. "We take our village to City Hall Square," fat rectangular
body and small face struggling out impatiently, radiantly, to tell us how
wonderful she finds the fact that she is seventeen and can write poetry
that suddenly people value her for, to Robert, "I want to get to know
you." And to me, "And you too, I think."
The drive there and back, daylight disappearing, color fading and then
winter-dark. Service centres for coffee, the good feeling of stepping out
of the car into the cold and running across to the usually ugly deserted
box with waitresses distracted and charmingly curt, "Good, that's not
hard to make," or tired and grumbling. ("We got the take-out in
here now too oh-ho-h-h.") Silence as we look at stars through the windshield,
both leaning forward with our chins nearly on the dash; bursts of talk,
dark countryside, lights. We stop beside the road for fresh air, turn off
all our lights to see the starlight. Trucks go past, an assault first of
light and then of sound, with the sound dying quickly after passing whooshtt
and the light plowing solidly on in a long narrow swath across the road
and the ditches into the fields on either side. Silence again, enormity.
A talk with Greg in the Union - I tell him I don't know what I'm doing
and whether I want to.
-
Saturday, early Sunday. Rob on the carpet at Jack Usher's, lying in his
tight cut-offs, sweater and medallion, talking as if he never had learned
to fence. He has been thinking and worried about us, he wants to be in love,
he doesn't want to complicate his life, he thinks he should at least be
in love with people he sleeps with, he never had enjoyed it so well. "What
do you do with people? You need them but it is better by yourself. You want
them to give to you or take from you but you don't want to give to them."
I say that sometimes you enjoy enjoying them and it's selfish in your own
way, but he doesn't understand the strength of physical presence, his rough
hair like beaver, like a squirrel's tail, his squared-off body, hands, legs,
his too-large face and his ridiculous wonderful complete sincerity, and
his smile that changes the shape of his potato jaw, his voice like his father's
but younger and thinner. He said of Marny (a summer in the Gaspé
with Marny) that she was too wild, "She had too much wildness in her,
and I really have none at all. I'm very conservative probably." He
said of me "You're all question marks," finger tracing them on
my face. I came to work on Wednesday morning depressed, lonely, sure he
would not ever see me or want to see me, I wanted to get out. By
Wednesday evening I had gathered myself together and wanted to go on with
whatever strange artificial partial relationship we have, to risk myself
again and watch to see it grow or die away. He is impatient, he wants what
I said, to be in love and to be alone, not to be lonely, to fuck well, not
to fuck anyone he doesn't love, to be one and whole with someone besides
himself as he is only with himself. I recognize it because I remember it.
Now I've come to love risking myself, just a little, as part of being one
in myself, risking, stretching myself by making it work and pretend and
devise strategy in the arena. Pain. I admit my bedazzlement with the physical
world, physical people, Rob's rough clean hair beside my knee with firelight.
"Maybe it's partly because you've made me reveal myself when there's
nothing to reveal." "Being with other people forces you to be
something you aren't exactly, and you can only be yourself by yourself.
When I enjoy something I want to just enjoy it and go on, and not make something
of it."
The first Monday, asking me to come for dinner, "Don't say no, because
I'm lonely."
Tonight, "Let me think for several days. That's not fair is it?"
What is it, all of fear, honesty, personal formlessness, low key despair
like Greg's, youth, emotional meanness or fastidiousness. The easy way he
touched me on the first weekend.
I really think he'll decide to end it, and I'm sorry because I was beginning
to value him. It makes me think of Peter, the silly short meaningless confused
attempt. With the difference that Rob is physically good and Peter was not.
"Maybe I want you to be snowed. Maybe you're too sophisticated and
I don't know how to handle it." "You could learn." "I
guess I don't want to."
And he didn't know who Henry Miller is.
But he stood at the door looking confused and sad but just a little false
in either the confusion or the sadness.
-
He began "Something is wrong." I know, I know, but I would
like to know what. How could we expect to be in love with each other. I
will not adore him as he wants. I might be more intelligent than he, certainly
older. But he is genuine and real. And large, and when in half light he
smiles at me or puts his arms all around me, wrapped nearly twice he is
warm, male. I respect him and I want to touch him. It would have been enough
for a while.
As we came back on 401 from New York State he turned his lights off and
we drove in the dark. He got a ticket. We drove quite fast. Above us, high,
was a single wind-cloud, brilliant with moonlight, again enormity, and we
drove with our chins on the dashboard almost to Kingston.
My happiness all weekend at Granby. The strange clean room upstairs that
I slept in, with "Cress Delehanty" in the bookshelf, waking early
Saturday in the strange house to hear Mr de Chazal speaking French on the
telephone. Mrs de Chazal's books on children's art, the squirrel, the black-branch
wet bush full of grosbeaks, some chickadees, an acrobatic nuthatch, a jay,
but especially the fat yellow grosbeaks. Camera magazines, Robert finally
getting up, and the unspoken agreement between his father and mother and
me that he is a fine manly nice looking young man.
The school pictures in his top drawer, a jug-eared dark kid with his
eyes set oddly. Slides of Mauritius, with himself twelve years old in a
striped teeshirt, undistinguished awkward body in short pants. The girl
in his graduating class who had him over every night for a body session.
Driving back on Sunday through the small French villages into Vermont,
talking about our romantic histories, the day in high school when one of
the boys was the first to get his finger into a girl and took all his friends
aside individually to tell them about it. It was a wonderful day, Robert
said. And there were two times in his life when he was really happy, the
first when he French-kissed a girl for the first time, the second after
he had slept with Marny for the first time.
The Gauchers on their farm, the kitchen with polished linoleum, wood
stove, painted plaster fruit and calendars on the walls, Eatons curtains.
I was very happy coming back with him last weekend. I felt like a grande
amoureuse who'd found herself at last. We ate bread and cheese, the houses
in the sunset towns were magic, with gold windows as we drove along a lakeshore,
and then the empty roads, white face with dark hills curving close around
us, the stretches of throughway and the brilliant long cloud that stayed
with us, dark speed, excited awareness of Rob, an other, a new other, elusive
still. Maybe altogether eluded. I'll be sorry. So much for the grande amoureuse
who can't find any men who can take it.
- See, the ordinary body we cross through
- Vulnerable, inhabited, warm
- - Berger Permanent Red
"Accept that it is necessary for him to create
a kind of tidal world of flux" Berger says, as precondition
to being impressed by the kinds of art that don't usually impress me because
it is still "solidity, weight" and certainly "identity"
that I would have to create to justify myself. Being happy, ie being solidly
myself, is the moral criterion of my time. "You
think as though history begins afresh with each individual." Yes
I do, each "ordinary body we cross through, vulnerable, inhabited,
warm" sine que non of history. "... Important
point is that a valid work of art promises in some way or another the possibility
of an increase, an improvement." West Side Story? Camelot?
The Lord of the Rings. Promises "mastering of reality"
or in "fervour of an implied desire ...Van Gogh."
"... the contours you have drawn no longer
marking the edge of what you have seen, but the edge of what you have become."
Like writing.
"He who has not felt the difficulties of his
art does nothing that counts; he, who like my son, has felt them too soon,
does nothing at all." Chardin quoted. "Without any sense of the
future one lacks a sense of perspective, and without perspective one is
constantly forced into attitudes and theories of trivial opportunism."
"Find significance in the scraps around him ... thinness, spikiness
... fragmentary failures of nerve ... to paint well an artist needs a sense
of space that is either secure or meaningfully dramatic ... unending possibility,"
- my feeling on the Granby weekend and the year I was eighteen.
"his greatness now invests with false significance
his loneliness, his temperament, his separation from other people, his personal
tragedies."
"made in the image of our most destructive
and antisocial fantasies."
"driven into art for its romantic consolations,
inevitably delight either in formal, technical perfection or in subjective
chaos ... lack imagination, if it is the ability to disclose that which
exists."
"art that derives from an unlived life and
propagates it"
"function of the form of a work of
art is to concentrate, to hold the pressure of both the artist's and the
spectator's experience of the content."
"objects and not images at all"
"points of physical coincidence between a
man falling and a man going forwards ... laughter mistaken for weeping,
a gesture of affection for one of attack"
-
Dear Arnold, Saturday night, jazz flaring, rattling, in the plastic kitchen
radio, my limbs warm, sore under covers, lying boneless, tortoise shell
cat at my head, a line of headache wavering through my brain like seaweed
in water, you've become unreal to me except for moments that come back very
clearly because of what you were in them: "laughter mistaken for weeping"
reminded me. I was to see The legend of Lyla Clare with Greg this
afternoon (red bush shirt from Rob and Salvation Army hat). Came out grumbling
about triviality not wanting to write Don and Olivia because there is no
point, no understanding, no reality or reason for continuing to know them,
"It's all bland, with people, one big triviality." Greg, tightly,
"I'm sorry you feel like that." Crossing the car lot to Nellie's,
"The only way you can manage is being like Lawford, yapyapyapyap coming
from no one and going to no one." He crossed the street and we walked
parallel. Was furiously impatient with him to hurry and sit down and let
me cut his hair off and go home. His red neck bent, stiff muddy blond hair
curling up at the ends, like his small, hurt blue eyes. "You look like
a sheep about to be slaughtered" I said when he said "That makes
me feel very peaceful." "Why are you so hostile?" I wanted
to smile at the correctness of that question.
So I told him about the dream, two mornings ago.
I was at home, in Mother and Father's bedroom. Father was on his side of
the bed, lying on his side with his back to us, asleep. I lay beside Mother
in bed, she had her arms around me from the back, I lay quite indifferent,
comfortable, passive as Mother moved against me, unsurprised when she came
into me like a man. After three strokes I knew I was going to climax and
lay waiting for it - I did, six kicks in the womb - Mother counted them
aloud. I thought, still in my dream, how odd it was that I should have climaxed
so fast, and vaginally too, with my mother as I never had with anyone.
And then to Greg: "I knew it was Mother but it was exactly like
being with you. I've been thinking about how I've been with you, indifferent,
sometimes really hostile. Maybe I'm looking for my father now. Arnold, certainly
Don. It sounds implausible but a dream like that is already implausible."
All of this as I put on the bush jacket and hat and gloves dramatically.
"It's all trivial. I don't think I believe in humanity." Out the
door. Pause in the hall. Come back. "What do you think of that?"
Greg looked beaten. "This time it's you who are doing the analyzing."
I feel put off by his mouth. "This is a mood. You don't always feel
this way." So I go home.
Now I feel sad when I remember the times we had warming each other under
the blankets in winter, making custard and bran muffins. I've only been
nostalgic for Greg once before, when I was desperate at home. I'm a little
desperate today, disoriented in myself because I was to be the person whose
superiority (remember that) was to be my happiness, my inner music-room-with-fireplace
life that makes me at once vulnerable and invulnerably serene. Hence, for
me, unhappiness = sin because it is unequivocal failure as a person. I'm
in many ways bereft - I have no genuine 'social concern,' I can't think
of a social order that would be better and I think I've discovered that
I can't be a helper (child psychologist) because I don't genuinely like
people who aren't extraordinary. I'm good at being a student but now there
is nothing I really want to write a thesis on, I've never had a real intellectual
passion and I've got my dilettantish BA, honours as it is and first class
as it probably will be. (I can send a clipping to the Grande Prairie Herald
Tribune.) Greg thinks maybe I could be an English teacher; it's a good living
and lets you do what you want. He's going to be a sociology prof
and although he's nice enough he can only get through to people after he's
slept with them three months or so.
(The afternoon Greg, Arnold and I came back from Toronto in the Triumph
with me squashed into the luggage section happy to lean an elbow against
Desser's back and to look at his neck. He and G argued about national characteristics,
ie Jews and negroes, intellectuals and baseball players, and I was quietly
delighted to have them both, that cold sunny day. We got to Kingston and
since I was late for work anyway went to get the pictures at Linden's. Desser
ripped through them, and then got to the candlelight pewter
pictures and was wild with pride. We set up G's projector in the hall,
it wouldn't slide, and all sat on the floor looking at me. I was a bit giddy.
Then Desser said "I'm in love with her but she certainly isn't you."
Greg left us alone to get milk from Palmers and we had a fight about whether
I was 'using' him to try on something new for myself and I was about to
protest when G came back and A left. I seethed to G, then put on the blue
cotton hat from Beaufort and stormed the Grad Residence. "Do you know
what's under this hat? A browbeater to browbeat you back with." He
projected the slides all over again and I, almost losing courage, launched
my defense. "And if I did represent something to you, I wouldn't
be the one to represent it?" "Yes," although it wasn't true.
What happened after that. I think he invited me to stay for supper and we
argued about whether I would go home. He wanted to send me home because
of Greg. I wanted to stay because all weekend I hadn't really been with
him and I wanted to touch him. In those days, and afterwards too, he never
touched me out of affection, it always took a prelude, and then it was always
serious. But he said, "All right, tonight we'll just sleep" and
I misunderstood him and went home.
Saturday very late November
I'm at Coxes and have been spying on other people's lives again - their
photograph albums. First page David with his face much thinner and longer
stepping into the street holding his hand out in front of a car, Sarah's
round eyes, one hand in a suit pocket, mouth held back tight (amusement?),
the photograph blue-tinted, probably London. Marilyn at the rail of a transatlantic,
lifeboat behind her, white hat and gloves, a much fatter face, smiling.
Wedding pictures, David's jacket too big. Class portrait with Marilyn as
teacher, in a jumper, smiling, Westbrook School, 1750 Deguire Street Montreal
9. Then babies, distinguished grandmothers, Marilyn still much fatter, with
big breasts. One portrait of Marilyn and a great grandmother, mother in
print dresses with Sarah, friends, friends' babies. A new baby, the grandmother
again, David holding the baby, more fat under his chin. House in Banff.
Sarah and Rachel with friends' children, birthday parties and Christmases,
M smiling. M and friends on rocks beside (I suppose) the ocean, surrounded
by children, a glare of white sky and water behind them. Sarah taller, thin
and long-legged. M thinner, skirts shorter, smiling with her arms around
her children. This house on King Street. Family portraits at Lake Ontario,
smiling. M almost lanky, more casual. Then a picture of David and M sitting
across the table from each other, maps on the table, M with her chin on
her hand, her elbow on the table. Long neck, black sweater, not smiling.
Sharp gracious profile. Pictures of David at the beach. She takes most of
the pictures, out of focus, overexposed, and puts them in anyway. By the
ocean, with her hair in a long braid, but some of it blown out, beautiful
with that uncareful mouth she has. Friends' children older. Last Christmas.
Other pictures since then are still in white envelopes. Harcourt's summer
cottage. The summer was Harcourt's cottage.
And Marilyn now is about thirty or nearly thirty, slim and restless as
a very young animal, like a colt ready to startle, long neck tossing her
chin up in laughter or pride, her mouth selfconscious and really voluptuous
in her thin face, long quick insubstantial body flickering while her mouth
lingers. And David so ready to be seriously interested in a conversation,
no mannerism, like Greg but without Greg's betrayal of humility. David's
enthusiasms, M's cooking, their parties (to which I am no longer invited
although we had a little vogue in the early summer when Greg and I were
still together), the Harcourts and Lawfords here, and their house undistinguished
except for the feeling of happiness here, the two beautiful filly daughters
and their beautiful mother, with the tolerant and affectionate sturdy father
who keeps something of himself for himself. Beatles records, Wagner. M sets
herself apart by her pride and generosity, skills, loveliness, but mainly
by her pride and her posture. I don't know, nothing personal comes from
her. Once or twice on the telephone, this summer, nearly! She is an alternative.
I am lonely. Myself slides, like a many-leaf shutter in a camera, petals
sliding over one another, I am narrow and closer sometimes, but the sliding
movement is myself as well as the narrowed beam of light. I slide as I consider
alternatives, these powerful shapes and voices who are other people, with
their own styles that are styles and not a sliding out of desperate accidental
limbs to catch hold of the real world. What shall I be? Would it be better
to be M? To be David? Could I hold my neck that way? Could I learn Joan's
trick of speaking sharply and ironically but gently so that ... If I had
legs like M's and will I be pretty as Joan when I am thirty five? I don't
talk about my being as it is in the centre, I write as another posing of
a timid or reckless limb in the world, but the sliding is this exactly,
look at Carolyn's bottom, slight, like a seashell, pretty. Carol's cracked
full mouth if I could so graciously feign respectful interest no it's humiliating
and boring to be so nice, she's a minister's daughter like a minister's
wife, without edges, slippery and round but she said, one day "I feel
like nothing." I remember the bathroom mirror this morning, that awkward
form of buttocks and back, crooked, tilted to one side, bumpy, this is the
body I recklessly offer them, the others? I stare. Judy telling Susie on
the other side of the raspberry rows that I stare at her dancing and make
her feel uncomfortable. I have to spend the rest of my life inside this
body, and it's changing, sliding like myself, but imperceptibly, toward
something I don't choose and do fear.
Lawford's hostility to me is like Father's, this bitter girl-child with
man's worm in her heart, where are her graces?
Pierre Léger's poem - Voyage de la délivrance -
makes me feel that Greg and I and our house this summer were something peaceful,
quite serene and full of love of life, of food, music, color, the lake glittering
below. I wish my house were that now. But before this house can be a délivrance
for those who can lie back (not Rob, not Peter although I wish he
could) and before I can carry flowers into the bedroom of visiting people
I love and set them on the floor under the window that is like a French
window, trees pressed in close full of spider webs I must rearrange that
peace in myself, in this book (which now instead of remembering and praising
asserts, questions, is full of polemic and cries of confusion) and I don't
know how, except to plan and resolve, but those lists are always silly,
unabsolute, so I won't put them in, write them separately.
[undated letter]
Real letter writing has not been working very well this fall - I thought
perhaps I could get into the mood by writing a very factual half-diary -
it isn't friendship or company but it's something.
Monday
A new experience today, electioneering for Joan Newman, who ran for alderman
in one of our city wards in Kingston. She is an old friend of Greg's and
Don and Olivia's, very young, pretty, single, left-wing and radical. Today
was the election day and she sent me around after work knocking on doors
to remind people to vote and put in a last word for her. She was running
in one of the poor areas, narrow stairs with impossible numbers of apartments
in old houses, glimpses through half-open doors of shabby and strange-smelling
houses, people standing framed in the door with all the details of their
lives summarizing them in the background, like portraits by Karsh.
Wet shiny night, snow melted. Campaign headquarters in one of the ward
houses, muddy linoleum living room floor, mugs of coffee in the kitchen,
canvassers coming in cold, Joan in jeans and a sweater looking thin and
nervous, and about fourteen years old with her hoarse laugh and childish
smile and transparent skin. Her campaign manager, a law student, business-like
but rather silly with his freckles and vanity (his name is Wilf Day!), telephone
ringing and the nine year old daughter of the house making conversation
with Joan's supporters ("Where were you born?"). An Italian immigrant
who has no vote of his own yet but wants to help Kingston's poor tenants
and so has worked for Joan. Other students and some neighbours.
Then at eight o'clock I rushed to City Hall to scrutineer the ballot
counting for Poll #9 - the votes were counted and I rushed through newscasters,
blackboards, extension cords for microphones, to telephone our totals to
campaign headquarters. Then rushed back to headquarters to wait for the
other fourteen polls to come in. More coffee and tension. People leaping
for the telephone. Joan sitting on the floor beside the radio. Totals accumulating
and eventually the pretty-sure certainty that Joan was in (she kept exclaiming,
"Only 89 votes ahead of that idiot! I'm humiliated!") and is an
alderman, the only woman on the council. Then a victory party, and a red
headed philosophy professor, young and sympathetic, to talk to in a corner.
Work tomorrow, much too early in the morning.
Tuesday
Peter Harcourt called and asked me to lunch, red wine, pizza and salad
at Lino's on a red-checked (plastic) tablecloth. I looked at the lines around
his evasive blue eyes (he doesn't look at me when I speak to him) and he
talked about women, Joan and the Elizabeth I reminded him of. When I had
dinner with them on Saturday his daughter Jenny brought down their wedding
picture. He was thin, pinch-faced as a Siamese cat, very arrogant. She looks
as she does now, with her head on the side, frightened, holding onto Peter's
arm. His hand is clamped over hers. He's a rare, lovely man, full of complexities
and obtusities but alive at high heat, self-ironical, funny, uncannily aware.
I want to be like him. And he's a bit of a letch, he loves women, and lusts
after them, but really loves them as hardly any men know how, imaginatively,
sensually, intellectually. He distorts them a little but at the same time
sees them affectionately and accurately and with excitement as even
or especially their husbands and lovers do not. He's been my best course
at Queen's, without exaggeration. From him I am learning a style of living
and thinking that almost (not quite) fits me and that I can stretch out
in or remake to my size. We can touch each other now and that tension is
gone. It never was sexual attraction but it was physical attraction, from
even early last year. He was special. I see the kids in class this year
look at him as I did, and then he comes up to sit beside me when the film
begins, and I feel immensely older and really graduated. I am too, I'm not
his student anymore. It's equality. Ha, if it were so easy.
Wednesday
At my piano lesson today, Olivia Campbell gave me a new book to work
in, much harder, with really pretty 'pieces.' Practiced for an hour and
a half at Wade's and went to the Film Society with Wade (resident psychiatrist)
to see a funny Czech film called Peter and Pavla, Czech neo-realism
of supermarkets and grey kitchens, a fifteen year old being "talked
to" by his parents, beautifully done so that I remembered very well,
thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Wade has asked me to Curlew River (Benjamin
Britten's opera) on Saturday. I wonder what's happened to his Beverly and
why he's interested in me.
Lawford seems very grey, soft, unhappy these days. We don't get along,
he seems either petulant or egotistical or else just superficial, and I
judge him for the bleakness of his power-playing isolated false-heartiness
lonely unaware life. But I don't know what to do and he feels I judge him
I'm sure, and I feel he judges me for not being sincerely interested in
his treaty project or at least clever enough to seem interested as Carol
does.
Thursday
The pattern of working days: alarm rings and I stumble out of the blue
blanket and down the four steps to turn it off - it's on the windowsill
where I can see it from my nest-bed and when I turn it off I get the glimpse
of lake, tarred roofs, the Wolfe Island ferry, rough water, bare trees on
Fort Henry Heights, snow drifting, secretaries arriving at the Mutual Life
Building, the glimpse that wakes me up. Sometimes there is an early sun,
not often lately, that makes lake, sky, island, roofs, glare with a white
light I can't look into. My house sitting warm around me, the cats let out
of the kitchen where they've been screeching ever since they heard me stir,
rattle of cat food in their dish, milk if I feel generous. Plants watered
to bridge the time before I can venture into face washing, the tall broad-leafed
plant on the wide kitchen sill beside two dried dusty red pomegranates and
a row of green bottles, two snaky philodendrons in pots on the second shelf
of the cupboard with wine glasses and cat food where the cats can't reach,
two spiky small unnamed plants in glass globes on the Japanese table (that
Paul cut down to coffee table height from my old desk), the knotted-root
cat-eating fist-leafed carnivorous plants on my desk and bed closet steps,
the bathroom sill's geranium.
The blue-diamond towel is warm from hanging over my lacquer-red pipe-radiator.
Hot water. Instant Breakfast. Makeup seen grumpily through the red-framed
mirror propped against the window in front of the lake. The new working
girl clothes, a beautiful short leather jacket cut neatly like a cowboy's
denim jacket to fit the side of the body, very dark blue leather, the collar
standing up against wind, and three smart zippered pockets. Flaring black
skirt, black leather gloves Madeleine stole from her grandmother, black
and white floating scarf, and the broad-brimmed black (Salvation Army, 30¢,
very smart) gaucho hat if I feel nervy.
Walk to work, old men at the intersections herding children across to
school, they know me and some say good morning, but one never replies. Icy
sidewalk, hate winter. The law school and the long basement corridor to
the Treaty Project room. Tina is there because she comes in at 8:30, hair
in a long pigtail, tall, erect, angular but graceful, wide dark-skinned
wide-eyed face of a Rose Red, hair the color of hazel nuts, looks like a
tomboy but married to a politics prof and 25 years old. We like each other,
she's Danish, foreign born and a little crusty, likes only whoever she likes.
Dana comes in when I do, plump little bourgeois that she looks, Czechoslovakian
and a two-month emigrée, blond, butter-chinned, transparent white
skin like a little animal's soft underbelly. Her English is oddly accented
but very good. She is indignant when we explain something she already knows
and yet her normal Slovak personality, which I suspect is very playful,
comes out only once in a while because she's stranded among the affectless
formalities of the English language and hasn't yet found the turns of speech
that are both correct and her own. I know how she feels from France.
The secretaries are already there, Lana with her Greek eyes and nose
and her lumbering elephant walk body, little explosions of happy obscenity
around her as she works, a fearless knowledge of ingenious vulgarities that
Lawford admires and emulates. Solid sexless Lana who is incapable of deceit
and whom we all love more than anyone else. Diana whom we hired because
she was very pretty. Carolyn who is the only one of us who has a child,
pale, tall, serious, classically pretty but uninteresting.
And Carol, Lawford's best girl, patient with him, able to flatter and
encourage and draw him out, gentle, well-reared, ladylike, round-eyed, married,
devious. It's impossible to dislike her in fact but in principle I can't
stand her.
After a while Lawford comes in and we wait to see what his mood will
be, if he comes in joking, everything is fine.
Can't get any further tonight, need to sleep.
Greg's thesis is nearly done.
Has the telephone company bothered you about those credit card calls?
If it does don't tell them who made them. The credit card has expired and
I can't use it now, otherwise I'd call.
December 17, 1968, 30 William Street #15, Kingston [journal]
I came home today, after last night's far open melted loving with Greg,
after At play in the fields of the Lord, oatmeal bread breakfast,
brilliant white sunless guilty morning away from work. Before scallops at
Murphy's and buttery-milk oyster stew, before Pas de deux with Greg
seeing it for the first time, before the short on Borduas shot by Dufaux,
constantly tracking, then stopping dead to stare at a composition like [sketch]
white frozen sea cutting into land, before Persona, before seeing
the Lawfords and the Coxes and the Harcourts at the movie, before cheesecake
and whipped cream at the Astor, before jubilantly walking home to give Greg
the fruitcake and feed the cats milk, I bought a Nikon F Photomatic Tn.
I'm committed.
21 Dec
"Writing which continues the expression of
the advancing edge of human consciousness" - from a book by a cultural
historian.
24 Dec
Christmas Eve, cynically called Tuesday Eve. I have been happy. Walking
fast on Princess Street, crowds of people, very cold, going to get my first
contact sheet from Linden's. Wright with his powdery pure face likes me.
He sold me the Nikon and a Linhof tripod. I hesitated. He said, "Well,
don't look at them through the paper bag" and smiled.
Looking for more red wool, knitting a Lautrec scarf for the black cape,
Jack Usher's pretty youngest daughter at the cash register in Ross's, Billy
McGee stopped on the street to look at his photograph, met him later at
the head of a band, Patrick whose legs fly under her black miniskirt and
pea jacket, laughing through the crowds. A new Canadian photo mag,
makeup, The favorite game, new records, Judy Collins and piano classical,
it's dark now, the salesgirl at Coles is confused, hostile, when I ask simply
whether they are closed.
My street and my steps, a fat newsprint letter from Greg, and before
I read it, Desser's happy loving letter reread now many times. Evening,
singing loudly with, around, Judy Collins' reedy intelligent voice, the
room vibrates.
This morning, a knock; I came to the door in bra and brown tights; it
was Peter and he had come in before I reached the door. I looked at him
because the morning had been flavoured by the sad desperate night before,
could say little, had planned to go away to Montreal for Christmas to escape
them. Peter wanted me on his lap, nibbled my skin where I rub perfume. "I
had a hangover this morning." "So did I." "I meant a
psychological one." "I knew you would have a psychological one.
That's part of why I came." He came also because he wanted to put his
hands on me. When he looks at me directly the turquoise eyes have yellow
centres, reflections of the curtains.
"I do love you a little but I don't understand you."
"You just refuse falsehood." "Because I'm not tough enough
to take it." "That's how you see it." "You're a lovely
woman."
Cats lying on his lap along my leg. We go out, walk across the park to
the practice house and he toward home. I cry. I have the camera on my neck.
(The lake slate blue-grey this morning.) I scramble on an ice slick, almost
fall. A second later a car somewhere behind us spins out and guns its motor.
"That should have been on the soundtrack at that moment."
Anne was shy and awkward on the telephone. Judy was less shy. Now the
cat asleep on my lap, blue blanket, peace and certainty that I won't be
Diane Lawford. (Peter's "She should die! Die!" last night.) "But
I feel like her in a lot of ways." "I know, but no I won't say
it." "I just haven't been at it as long." "That was
what I was going to say."
I wake to Christmas morning with the room below, across, brilliant with
sunlight because it's nearly eleven, and a dazzling sunny morning through
the yellow curtains, turns them into solid intense blocks of color. The
lake steaming plumes because it is so cold. I put Judy Collins back on -
"Like a bird / On a wire" belted out sturdy/desperation. I look
out the window at the roofs, read a little of Favorite game and am
ready to walk toward the practice house in the cape when Mike comes to the
door and I hug him out of happiness. We go out into the country for a walk,
but passing the penitentiary at Portsmouth there is a heavy crooked line
of jerry-built jetties near the water, weeds, lily pad new ice, brilliant
sun reflections, all so beautiful that I stop Mike and take fifteen pictures,
standing in the snow in the cap, feet freezing. Mike amused. Cursing at
my ignorance, enraged and delighted.
Mike's machine shop, filtered orange yellow light from the skylights.
Along the lake on the airport road, lake blue and green like the skin
on a mirror, mist in scraps lying along it, the plumes rising higher in
the centre of the lake, twenty feet surely, to be sailing in that freezing
cauldron.
Harcourt's house all light on the first floor, hallway, dining room,
living room, Joan in her muted plaid dress cooking, John and Jenny (that
beautiful child, fragile, all legs, red tights and yellow plaid skirt),
two fish in a baking dish, one a goldfish and the other John's hammerhead
black fish with its lace tail fin curving around it like seaweed, back like
hummingbird wings in black silk, fluttering only at the tips. My Claude
Leveillee's on as we eat in that dining room like a prism. Peter refills
with Winzertanz. Birdseed on the snow in the back yard. John behind the
table in the corner, cheerful English hardluck face with hair like Peter's
long and soft. Jenny looking very steadily out of that face like Joan's,
eleven but small, slight, full of confidence, princess in her room full
of miniature things upstairs, books on the windowsill and a print of one
of the Group of Seven, another room full of light like a cube of glass,
like a glass paperweight with her objects, doll's bed, Nancy Drew books,
Christmas presents swirling in it. Peter at the end of his table in his
grey cardigan and plaid shirt and some reddish tie presumably worn for the
day's sake, and his baggy grey pants looking like Chaplin with the two fugitive
blue eyes and the mouth (like Jenny's) under his moustache, beautiful and
completely ageless. Joan on the other side of me, pointed profile, powdery
skin and hair, expressions pulled across her face by her eyes as she turns
them from child to child, self deprecatingly (oh I know the kind of small,
pointed, flame centre she must have, irony, caution, the laugh that pulls
her shoulders forward as though her arms are weightless.) Did she decide
to speak as she does?
Afternoon. I light the fire, which Peter must have laid last night. Joan
sits in the charcoal carved-out chair working on her cushion cover, red
and orange. I sit on the stool in front of the fire knitting the Lautrec
scarf, red on the green corded velvet, my long skirt. The lilac colored
shirt. When Peter lights one of Charlie's cigarettes, the flame reflected
on the south window is like a butterfly in the birch's branches outside.
Judy Collins and twilight. Peter reads Gorki plays, we do our handwork until
the fire begins to deepen our reds and oranges. Peter takes Johnny and me
downstairs to the piano. I struggle with simple timing and an A#. Peter
talks about when he learned. Johnny goes back upstairs. He's nine. We're
both exhausted after the piano and come upstairs to have soup and cheese,
mincemeat tarts. Peter talks about his film world, is full of excitement.
The kids are sent to bed after their critical half hour of television. Peter
tucks them in. Joan goes to bed. He goes up to tuck her in. Then comes back
and we lie beside the fire. He shows me a picture in Match, of a
freckled young girl nursing a very small fish-shaped baby, he likes it and
I do as well. I promise him a bastard. I'm comfortable with him (to Charlie:
"I didn't give you an A because it would give you an upper hand. I
made that mistake with Ellie Epp."), still with that heavy physical
passivity of the summer. He rolls over and unbuttons my shirt, runs his
hands back and forth over my breasts, not with a lover-like concentration
or interest, but like a clay worker softening his clay. This time, the same
effect of heaviness and, because of the day it had been, peace. He asked
if I would go upstairs then because he wanted to lie warm with me, he said.
In his room, "What a good wife she is; she's washed my bathrobe for
you." We undress silently side by side and he holds back the cover
for me, he has a fish body too, a gollem body with a round white middle
and small neat hands and feet, then that face that could fit hardly any
body at all. When at the final moment I said, "You can't come in because
I've stopped taking pills," "What a time to tell me," real
annoyance, but I hadn't thought it would come to that.
There's somebody called Rose Marie who writes him love notes that he
leaves in his room. Jenny knows he has mistresses and brings it up in front
of starched Doug Bowie. Her room is next door. Desser would be horrified,
and even more if I told him how comradely and unphysical it was, that struggle
to bring the half-life in his crooked little finger-prick into real strength,
or to kill it. We killed it eventually and lay alongside of one another
for a while. Then he went to bed with Joan (tucked me in!) and I listened
to him moving about as a little ink blue ice blue night came in past the
window shade I had propped back. For a long time did not sleep, then heard
Jenny yell, "Shh-hh, Ellie's asleep." Peter came in for his slippers,
kissed me chastely, brought me a peeled loose-sectioned orange in a blue
bowl. Breakfast with Joan slight in her wrapper, hair down, thin shouldered
as Jenny.
I pulled back the covers over four or five curly black pubic hairs, I
wonder if Joan changed the sheets.
Broken pipes, morning, Humanities Building, film Time is [Don
Levy] from the Nuffield Foundation. "It makes you want to make films
because he's so in love with the medium." "And uses it to make
love with the world." "Of course." "I want to go out
and love the world a little." "Give me a hug before you go."
He drugs me. I don't see him, but he's careful of me and I of him. That
was Christmas Day!
31 Dec [journal]
In Ottawa three nights ago I went to see The fixer with Greg,
deep in new snow, my long black cape, he in his leather gold-colored jacket
after we'd had dinner with Nana and I had taken Greg's picture aureoled by the
white face of the grandfather clock. He thinks he may not see her after
he leaves because she is 84 and will die. [Another photo of Greg]
When we came home from the movie we sat downstairs in the living room
with one light low behind us and I wanted to seize Greg and bite him. Because
of The fixer, Alan Bates' blue eyed shaggy haired face in the village,
then the ghetto, then the prisons. Becoming political, do I have to? Ferociously,
"But what does it say about how you should spend your life?
What does it say about how I should spend my life? You've stopped
looking for alternatives. I've stopped looking for alternatives. We assume
there aren't any. You're lazy."
"It's to stay alive. It's very important! Hardly anyone does. The
guy in Take one talking about how nearly everyone dies between the
ages of twenty and thirty." Greg is already partly dead because he's
never (?) been really alive. "I nag you because I think you're a good
person or could be a really good person if you had what you lack. The first
thing is understanding, experience, because you don't know what people are
like and the second is courage because you don't do anything about what
you know." ("You won't reach in after people, like your father"
who came to the door when we left, stood on the porch with his hands in
his pockets looking steadily and I thought sadly after us as we backed down
the drive. I asked Greg what he thought of it. "Feeling more than he
can say, that's why I hate things like goodbye parties." "Greg!")
And about my camera, tears in my eyes because it was important to believe
that I can do something with that camera. "I can't take pictures if
it isn't out of love of the world. Like those pictures - the mother and child, the
green
shirt man. The way they look at the camera, it's as if I love the world
and respect them." It was very clear how I should live, I had three
points! The first is that I have to be honest and only say what's true.
The second is that I have to work only out of love of the world, and the
two aren't necessarily compatible. And the third is that I have to stay
alive somehow and really look for alternatives but especially I have to
stay alive." [other images from the first roll: market woman, market man, daughter, mother and child
2]
"Don and Olivia are partly right but not completely. I do have to
go out and become what I am in relation to something. But I have to come
back, like dialectic, I have to come back and digest. Like after the trip
in Europe." So three nights ago in that odd movie-made passion I worked
out my life resolutions as I understand them now.
When we went upstairs to bed I was full of the feeling that I can be
someone, not like Richard, that I can do whatever I want, but that I can
do something very well, that I can become something extraordinary,
if I find what I want to be and don't lose myself somewhere, by marrying
or by not marrying, studying or not studying, by finding or not finding
the particular men with whom I could be excited as with Desser and challenged
as with Don, seen as with Peter, confident as with Greg. Yeah. And
at the same time I wonder if I won't die before I can become anything; I
scrutinize my body for omens. Last night I lay awake near morning listening
to the pains that have settled in my hip and knee, wondering about scars,
stiffness, rheumatism at twenty four and invalidity at twenty five, half
believing the hints of my body's mutiny. I thought about my journal, if
I died would someone want it? Who would I give it to? Not Greg because he
wouldn't feel it. Not Desser, although I long for him, because he doesn't
know me. Olivia and Don? Mother? And at this moment I realize that if I
do actually die this little patch takes on a prophetic importance. Well,
I don't know; I feel that I might, and I don't want to. At the same
time the future is so uncertain, vague, and my desires for it so far from
the ceremony of most people's lives, that I haven't any clear sense of missing
or losing something, only of being certain that I'm unfinished and my life
hasn't assumed or found an aesthetic pattern, or an organic pattern. Like
an ameba (my eighteen year old image of myself) it has grown by swallowing,
extended its boundaries quite formlessly. No, not formlessly because somethings
are disbelieved now (although little of what I've seen has been rejected;
the sensuous remains, the tangle of colors, the joy memories that I've put
down here) that once were believed even if only half understood.
If I wanted an image of the starting point, my beginning self, it would
be that of the ten year old I was. One night at the Sexsmith Bible Institute
I went out early to the greensilver Mercury. I remember the collar of a
winter coat, I remember smiling at a strange boy I passed and continuing
to smile after he'd gone, and then passing Darlene Hamm whom I thought pretty
and whom I knew to be in the centre of approval, admiration, good manners,
self certainty, pretty clothes whose edges I seemed to prowl, sullen, pretty
only in the private moments no one knew how to evoke, badly dressed in other
people's old clothes that didn't fit, usually in shoes that my hobble had
deformed very quickly. (Those shoes - they're the proof, the image, the
reminder of deformity. I always loved new ones.) (Peter saying "So
you're going to hobble home by yourself?", did it take an effort to
say "hobble"? I said "Yes, I'm going to hobble home by myself,"
and it took an effort, but not like the first day at school in nylons.)
When she passed I was struck, evaporated, turned to the self I thought she
saw and no longer the delighted strong self I had believed the minute before.
Not very different as I am now. Something is different but I may not know
what until I've passed it.
The details of that night in Sexsmith remain - cold, blue dark, frozen
mud in the street and I think frost of the sidewalk boards. What structure
there is in my life may really be sensual, this sort of detail echoing,
repeating through the different knots of time I've kept, these knots with
so many details intact, lymph nodes (if I understand what they are) catching
cells from the flow, isolating them with others similarly caught.
Other nights in Sexsmith, a night at the old place when I got up and
walked through the unfamiliar dark pasture past the meadow with thistles
that could only be reached through a thicket of poplars and willows, to
the dirt road going up up over Hill Sixty. The bicycle hurtling down the
shiny track where the road had been flattened. Moonlight out of a turquoise
sky, road, trees, pasture, garden, yard, flat hayroofed barn (not designed
that way, but unfinished). Caragana hedge, board sidewalk, the old white
house.
7 January, Tuesday, 1969
Went to meet a prospective staff member of Peter's new film department,
dinner with him and Peter Duffy and Joanna Downing (Downey?). We drink,
but it doesn't seem to make much difference, our tongue more slippery. Joan
loves David but doesn't know it Peter says. "I need someone to arrest
me" he says. "But it can't be me" I say, "because I
won't make the effort, because ..." I believe that he and Joan have
a good marriage and he has a good life. "But, you have a very nice
life, you know," I say. "I know" he says. This when we have
kissed goodnight in his car and are holding hands.
13 Jan Monday
Greg went home today, after the weekend here. Tomorrow he is leaving
for London, by a late night plane from Montreal. Saturday was his birthday
- I didn't celebrate because it seemed unreal. I don't ever do things for
him. Last night, Sunday, we went to bed with Chopin on the phonograph, because
of the cool green room under the eaves at 40 Clergy St East - under one
of the blue blankets, with the cats scratching to be let out of the kitchen.
Lay in my closet bed on my stomach, Greg beside me, felt both of us very
small in the house, in the city, on the surface of the earth and was frightened
at having launched myself away from someone with whom I am so at ease, so
easily myself. Finding Greg was lucky; I seem ungrateful. At the same time
I know I'm right; this is like Frank - I thought I would never find anyone
again who would be so much my friend and lover, and yet I wanted to grow.
But last night we slept together for the last time in Kingston - I told
him I still love him, I guess, and he said he guessed he still did too in
his way, and then I noticed that he was crying a little, soundlessly, and
held him against me with his head slanted on my shoulder so that his tears
wet my hair. When I asked him what he was feeling, he said he supposed he
was sad. And then we rolled over and fell asleep.
Tonight I came home to find four bananas and a note with advice about
a book and a little nostalgia. He's Greg, and I've insisted on wanting dramatic
emotions from him that he can't produce and that aren't part of him at all.
But he is Greg and when I don't worry about being responsible for him, to
him, when I'm free of him I love him. Perhaps he had a worse fall than I
give him credit for. There is the story, back in this book, that I haven't
finished yet. The day in fall when we took the Triumph to Watertown [in
the US] to buy bluejeans and necked on the ferry coming from Wolfe Island
because I was jealous of Leslie.
part 2
- raw forming volume 8: september 1968 - july 1969
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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