11 October
[journal]
There may be a confusion of our lives by media because so many small
growths appear as bumps on our central knot of existence, we are other people
because of books or movies, none of it is incorporated, we are desperate
to incorporate it but it is inert, an artifact, we forget it, cast it out
and it does not confuse our past - only dilute it. But our present is harried,
multiplied, distorted, wrenched, countless numbers of times every day by
fictitious modes of existence seeming as real as our continuous mode of
existence in ourselves. Is this why I seem to float? Words and images our
technical key, our formula. Destruction of our unity. And I keep looking
for more languages, more images, more existence - less existence? Less coherence?
Many webs hang on a few, few, nails.
13 October
"The generative, fruitful principle of analysis lies in the reconstruction
and reconstitution of the individual drama as an artist achieves it - with
enthusiasm for its development, a passion for its expression, color, and
ramifications. It is this attitude which is necessary to his salvation."
Diary of Anais Nin.
From discussion with Otto Rank: importance of learning as a self-adjustment
and not an integration into 'normal life'.
Also, "The new hero, still unknown, is the one who can live and
love in spite of our mal de siecle. The neurotic is the modern romantic
who refuses to die because his illusions and fantasies prevent him from
living." 284
But in my case it is cynicism as well as fantasies, in combat, and me
afraid of a stalemate. Richard was so presumptuous and so wrong;
and right - accidentally?
Oct 15
[letter]
We're having a beautiful fall; there's one tree down the street on which
each leaf is both red and gold, the colors shading into one another from
the stem outward - with its black branches, this tree is a kind of new miracle
every time I walk by it.
So much for background. I've just called Toronto to speak to Grandpa
and Grandma before they leave on Tuesday. I also spoke to Paul about his
job and the glories of being in Toronto. I want to spend a weekend soon
in Toronto, but not until my money comes (so I can shop).
I am taking the film course now; and it's possibly the best course I've
ever had. It is taught by Peter Harcourt, a young man just back from years
of study in England. He's lovely. A small man with brown hair and a soft
brown moustache, warm brown eyes; a sort of childish tilted smile. He stands
in front of his class and just talks - he looks at notes, "No, they're
pompous," and doesn't lecture from them but says whatever floats to
the top of his mind - usually good. It's not his brilliance as an intellect,
but his spontaneity, his warmth, his arrogance complicated by his sense
of humor, his enthusiasm for films - and his tilted smile.
Another young teacher is [Kerry] McSweeney in Victorian lit - he looks
like a rather stupid high school basketball player - big and gentle with
round brown eyes and a cowlick. This is his first year teaching, I think,
but he's very good. He seems still to be able to respond to what he teaches
and he's obviously intelligent.
There's a rumour from my friend Richard in Montreal that Peter Dyck is
getting married on the 28th of this month to Christine, a girl he knew in
Strasbourg; French. Don't say anything to people you know until I'm sure.
I'm quite sad to be losing another friend; but it's wonderful that he is
able to trust somebody at last.
Olivia writes from Oxford that she and Don have found a flat, that the
town is beautiful, that the English are apathetic. Andrea and Tony have
left for Europe, so we really have no friends left and will have to make
some more? But we have two cats - Petercat is large and malevolent, stalking
Little Cat with his hairless tail held up like a flag-pole rather than a
banner.
Michel is often good company but very foreign - he's carefully polite
at all times, restrained; and his Kingston friends tend to be boring political
scientists.
17 October
[letter]
I vote for the first time today, in an Ontario provincial election.
Another first - I'm reviewing Warrendale for the Journal - I'll send
you the clipping when it comes out.
It's raining - the water on the sidewalks intensifies the red of the
fallen leaves as brooks do the colors of pebbles. The back yard is thickly
covered with leaves.
17 October
[journal]
Rain, red leaves on the sidewalk brilliant under a film of water, mist
between the trees in MacDonald Park. Individual trees by the lake cut elegantly
into the soft wet furry sky. Chandeliers, turquoise-blue wallpaper in the
doctors' houses fringing the park, white fanlights, stained glass, black
iron knockers. Burlap curtains over students' second floor windows. Walls
furred over with ivy; Liz Robinson in boots and bluejeans hesitating outside
a door on West Street. I've been walking as I used to in first year, looking
into windows, stealing flowers, eating a chocolate bar.
The wet asphalt has a pebbled texture; the everlasting flame at the corner
of Barrie Street is flattened and distracted by the light rain. The park
is an eerie forest of blue light, fog, black tree trunks. Deserted. I stand
on the corner waiting for a line of cars to go by, slowly. Standing on a
corner in the rain watching cars go by could be an image for loneliness.
I like driving with Greg when it rains (Washington this spring, when we
ran from the movie house across the slippery street to the flowerseller
and our small car, while we were still high after seeing A Man and a
Woman). Tonight the people in their moving enclosed spaces seemed to
have an intimacy that I wished for. But I came home - John A MacDonald floats
in a nest of yellow leaves - and lit the candles. They're reflected in the
mirror.
I'll forget: the spiced short candle held up by my dragon. My hooded
blue nylon jacket. Sophia Loren's pointed tiger-eyed face in Lady L.
That Greg's heart suddenly stopped beating when he was in Ottawa and would
not have begun again if his oculist had not pounded his chest - known what
to do.
24 October
[journal]
Leaves rattle along the street, six distinct stars are over the castle
on which the ivy moves in the wind, like the movement of someone passing
behind a dark hidden window. Beside the steps of my verandah is a pattern
of stiff dead leaves still attached to the tree by invisible branches, each
leaf lit by the streetlight behind and fixed in the pattern like a planet.
I was sitting on the steps wrapped in my cloak thinking of objects again.
The castle with its outline, shadows and flickers, position under the six
stars. The distinct separate leaves seeming to hold together in their exact
configuration, other leaves dropping, blowing, past them.
Monique Leyrac in her concert tonight. She stood at the microphone in
a clinging black dress, looking like a toreador with her round small bottom
and flat abdomen, moving like a toreador, with her whole body, flicking
her palms at the musicians, acting with her arms (like a bird's wing, a
woman's arm - Felix Krull) and face. Her body as expressive as her face
and voice: I long for such unity with my body, its precise connection with
myself. She was a perfect object. Like the perfect object, the castle, something
in the face of which I lose my surety of myself as an object and become
painful envious subject, nearly naked.
I don't want to leave Grant Hall for sidewalk, room, conversation with
Greg: it is the place on the side balcony overlooking the pianist, the bassist,
the drummer, the spotlights, and the singer moving that were the convincing
dream. Marianne: "come back from Barnygat / with thunder in his eyes"
made me cry. Mon Pays and the standing ovation left my heart pounding.
Michel ran up to give her the bouquet of carnations and kissed her hand:
he has such courage: I saw him in the wings twitching his coat button into
place, and then he simply walked out among the lights. He surely knows he's
ugly, but he summons up his charm, sentiment, warmth, sincerity, basic orthodoxy,
and moves out into the world as if he were also a perfect object.
I'm such a child. Gregory oppresses me because he is so familiar, clean;
banal not because he is banal but because we are. "The
stretches between the moments are so long, so grey, vague, so full of banality
with other people." But as I was explaining how my own life is not
enough, how being present at the concert is not enough, how 'raconter' may
be preferable to 'vivre' because the perfect object must be and cannot be
myself. Must be, for a reason I don't know. Cannot be because I can't really
ever be sure I am an object at all, or what kind of object.
The old anxiety has grown so strong this fall. I seem not to have grown
at all.
[undated letter]
Enclosed are both some money and my review and editorial from last week's
Journal.
We spent last weekend at Expo and shopping in Montreal - went to the
Expo art gallery, bought two pairs of Italian shoes, and some tall lace-up
Cossack boots.
Cold - the Montreal buses began to run again just as we were there. Also
went to three movies: now my love of movies is justified by my ambitions!
Greg is graduating at last so he can officially begin his Masters - he's
being recommended for a first class degree; after all his years of being
undiscovered!
So - flowers and candles again, my money has come at last!
It's raining - leaves are dead. Mind is full of films, Victorian writers,
philosophers, even some friends.
It's been a long time since I've heard from you. Harvest must be over.
I've heard nothing about school at all. Is something wrong?
Sunday October 29
[letter]
A short, impulsive note to tell you that, first, I was at Peter's wedding
in Montreal yesterday afternoon, and second, that all is well. I'm in the
middle of writing an essay on Alfred Lord Tennyson and wonder whether you
have an English course this year, and how you are and whether your excitement
has flowed into hard work and is all diffused before you have time to write
and tell me how it is?
I'm excited about work too - English, philosophy, and especially film.
My career decision complicates my life and self image because I oscillate
between elation and complete lack of confidence. But I always come to the
same conclusion: it will be difficult and 100% demanding but I can
do it, it is worth doing, and it will force me to live as I really want
to, with everything open and listening. I'm glad you were pleased as well;
I should have known that your feelings about films and movies aren't old
fashioned!
Peter's wedding was nice and he seems very fond of Christine. The ceremony
was in French - I think he was glad to have me there because none of his
family and no one from his past could come. I'll tell you about it at more
length when I've gotten some work done. If you need more money please say
so. Greg sends his love.
30 October
[journal]
This morning I spoke for over an hour on Tennyson's thinking in In
Memoriam, relation to Kant's transcendental illusion; use of science
as new imaginative compost, neuroticism of his love for Hallam, his lack
of negative capability, ambiguity present in his use of Hallam's death,
first as an emotional centre for his life and second as a formula manipulated
rhetorically. I spoke to a large extent off the cuff and did some thinking
as I spoke. When I finished I was exhausted. No one had interrupted. McSweeney
said, "That was very good - quite brilliant." And all day I've
been happy with a sense of capability: I can do English and succeeded this
time in thinking, working, with great concentration and effectiveness at
the same time as speaking. I am more articulate in speaking than I used
to be. Skill is important.
5 November
Two things this fall (and today fall is the spring of winter - sharp
white branches, gulls' bellies flashing against the intense contrasts of
blue and grey in the sky, cold, isolated yellow leaves on high branches
like impressionist leaves, so single, tree trunks heavily black, newly placed
sculptures, pale yellow light and a strangeness in the look of everything)
the two things are my decision to make films and my recurring rebellion
against the relationship with Greg.
Films - exhileration of everything to be learned, hope of a centre for
my life, fear of inability. Suspicion of my eagerness at adopting it as
centre. From enforced centrelessness to a life devoted to work - it's like
readopting a morality. Or is it collapse from confidence in my personal
world as it happens to me, as centre to a willful creation of my
personal world - therefore decision, responsibility - arbitrariness
- (there was nothing arbitrary about my Sexsmith world, altho' I lived on
will then the world beyond my work sparkled, pushed itself at me and I walked
about touching it).
So now I must decide that the passive responsiveness of those days is
really gone forever, with the unity of its glamour and mine? In that case
I really can only drift and wait, or else begin to work and decide to work
terribly well. Yet the glamour must come back from time to time or I shall
have nothing to work with - I must work at producing the glamour and I don't
know whether glamour is not killed by producing heaves of mind. Being creative
for me has always been just being: now I must work at it constantly
watchfully - and yet my objection to work is that it prevents the watching
and seeing I must now work to be.
I think constantly about ways of training myself: learning another seven
languages, learning to sketch and photograph, learning to write character
sketches and dialogue, learning to walk and see resources; learning to hold
the intensity of ambiguity, paradox; understanding what modern people are
- all things I want to do, not as exercises only but for themselves. I can't
think of any other work which could demand all of what I could do or want
to do. Everything I know, see, think, read is potentially valuable, and
this is exciting; but at the same time I rebel at doing everything for a
central purpose, too much like morality again.
And so I could do things, no longer in spite of as I usually have,
but not because of either, simply as doing - yes, but I know there's
a sanction for this doing what I like, and it makes me temporarily uneasy
and at the same time there are things that have to be done: whatever is
useful to get me into a position in which I can do and not dream.
If I begin this I must try terribly hard: I seem to have begun it, but
remembering how suddenly I made this beginning, I must remember how easily
I could end it - in any way, by marrying, dying, writing, bumming, or going
back to psychology. (Never!) At the same time, you see, the suddenness seems
a stroke of permanence - as an 'I will' with a date, a moment, an exact
spot, and a celebration barefoot in the rain at the lakeshore.
But can I, can I, even if I will with all I am?
And Greg - sometimes the relationship is dead, he seems passive and friendly,
a kind of half-formed shape becoming steadily a political scientist, in
becoming gaining a sort of contour that he lacked and needs, but one I've
no use for. I don't like him because he is what he is: I appreciate him
for what he is not. I miss forcefulness, I miss insight and rapport and
impact, God what a great husband he would make, for someone who most of
all needs a husband. I need his support but the quality of support I get
from him often bores me, doesn't convince me.
Last night I sat up finishing Adam Bede, and then crawled into
bed beside him, removing the little grey cat. He was a large very warm body
and I felt full of tenderness for it, but then as always when he talked
to me I felt disappointed. Confusion - I know I'm intolerant and lack the
objectivity to tell when I'm greedy or actually missing something, and so
I tell myself I won't see him, to see if I'm more alive without him, but
go back immediately to see what he is really like. Later; je ne peux jamais
le [unfinished sentence]
[undated letter]
Very lively and happy letter, which I'll answer when I've done some Hegel,
some Sartre, some Dickens and Tennyson, some essays for my beloved Peter
Harcourt, and some painful experimental psych. And written Olivia.
The stamp is compliments of Michel, who is forever getting mail from
France.
We had a Russian Revolution party on the 7th, with some professors and
our favorite people, and I made some peruski for it but forgot the salt
in the crust and the sugar in the filling - but our guests assumed, I think,
that the oddness of the taste was a Russian characteristic.
The phil department has recommended me for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship
- a great honour, but little more, because only 150 are awarded out of many
people in the US and Canada who are recommended - although only a few from
each university can submit applications. Also it's only for study in the
US which doesn't really interest me - but I'll apply just to see if I can
get one! [I didn't apply.]
I'm off to class.
[undated letter November sometime]
You've been to college not even a whole semester and already you've begun
to sound college educated - I'm amazed at the little differences in your
letters - small differences in style. And you sound very young! And happy!
First, about English: I spent my first year in college English just floundering,
feeling that I must learn everything, memorize everything, understand the
implications of everything, and was all confused. And got a B. But you're
right - the first thing is to really look for personal enjoyment.
The second thing is to try to understand why you enjoy it - what it warms
in you and what was similar in the poet or writer to what you are: you clarify
two things at once.
The third thing is to think of all the ways he could have spoiled that
contact with you by writing the thing less expertly, and comparing his way
with whatever your way would have been - that's how you understand style
without being irrelevant. After a while there's a little family of writers
you know in this way and they start talking back and forth to each other
as well as to you. Then you're a critic, and a good one!
I've spent years trying to work out a way of doing English and this is
what I've finally worked out - for film as well, because I badly need a
frame for my film reviews. I'm trying it out on Tennyson, and my philosophers
too - and all the time, biographies and autobiographies are important.
It's exciting that a poem should have told you how I feel about dancing!
You've got English, history, sociology, education - and what's the other
one?
It's 3 a.m. now - I've just taken a review down to the Journal office
to have it typeset and am coffee-wide-awake. But you'll be glad to know
that I long ago lost my ability to stay up all night. I need eight hours
every night. It's a shame. You'll be glad to know, also, that the
absorption of so much material is as difficult - impossible - for me as
for you. The trick is organizing it so that only a little of it needs to
be absorbed.
Rudy's picture is a good one - what a nice face he has! If he likes cats,
he'd love our small grey cat with its bald tail-tip: Pierre is idiotically
affectionate, sleeps on my lap purring like an engine while I'm typing,
chews my chair, bites my shoulder. When he hears Greg's footstep, or Michel's,
on the stairs, he rushes down to meet them. If a human even brushes against
him accidentally in passing he purrs for joy. This charm of his works of
course: all three of us slyly feed him milk when the others aren't around.
Petercat has moved in his attitude to Pierre from hostility to disdain -
he'll give him a nasty swat if Pierre bumptiously comes too near - which
he always does because he's afraid of nothing - and chase him under the
stove. Petercat is too large to get under so Pierre lies low and bats out
at him with a very quick paw. The rest of the time Petercat stalks about
looking malevolent - I think he's bitter because Olivia abandoned him to
us.
We had snow too - gone now - deep, very beautiful. It reminded me of
the first snowfall walks taken with Olivia and I missed her. I need someone
to talk to about English. I guess I'll talk to you.
Got a letter from Paul, who sounds happy. We are making plans to have
our Christmas here. I think I'll make my first fruitcake. We'll use Greg's
place since he and Michel will be gone for the holidays; and we'll put some
fire in the fireplace, listen to the records - but have a chicken
or duck rather than a turkey, believe me!
Hey, I think we do give you credit for understanding why we've grown
away from you, and we are glad for your understanding. But you know understanding
changes things only so far. (Don't stop understanding - it changes
things a little.)
I got a letter from Uncle Walter - he wrote to congratulate me for my
scholarship. Did you send G'ma Epp a newspaper clipping from the Grande
Prairie paper? What picture did they use - that old high school one? Anyway,
he wrote two full pages, asked me to tell him about Judy and Paul: very
sincere and warm. I think he feels we're the only relatives at all like
him - in a way he's our generation. (I can't imagine anyone further apart
than Uncle Bill and him.) Anyway, he seems to like us.
Sunday November 26
[letter]
It's been a good Sunday afternoon - I've written Olivia and Grandpa Epp
and Grandma (to thank them for the $10 they've just sent as a Christmas
present) and then Greg and I took Krista out into the country to wander
in a nearby game preserve with moss, ferns, glacial rocks, and beavers.
Krista [Maeots] is a new friend - she's editor of the Journal this year
and I've gotten to know her during film classes as well as when I bring
in film reviews. We've made friendly gestures for some time - on Friday
she and Joan invited me out with them and she became very open. I'm glad
to know her because she's a remarkable person, especially remarkable as
a girl. When she left high school in Calgary she worked as a reporter for
the Calgary Herald for two years. This year she's finishing a BA in political
science and English. She's excited about films - as well as nearly everything
she does. She has many of the same sorts of hangups as I - loneliness in
high school, alienation from parents, minority group background (Estonian),
independence: she even had the same sort of childish reaction when she went
home and her parents didn't want her to wear her bluejeans everywhere! Tears
and feelings of extreme estrangement - but she seems a little ahead of me
in getting rid of them. She's blond, blue-eyed, and looks fourteen - she
nearly always goes to classes and parties in bluejeans and cowboy boots.
Her voice is a husky little whisper - no one would guess how capable she
is. She too hitchhiked east by herself, from Calgary, this summer! I'm looking
forward to knowing her better. You'd like her - she's knowledgeable about
politics in Canada, and is really very political, but she's just as interested
in literature.
[Krista later was active in women's politics and the NDP Waffle in Canada,
was CBC Morningside producer before she died in 1978.]
Krista, by the way, also likes Harcourt very much - I still think he's
the most wonderful professor ever to happen to Queen's, in his way, in his
funny original childlike superconsious way.
Back to Hegel and Sartre - I have to lead the discussion about one of
our films in Harcourt's class.
[undated letter]
Among my papers I found a journal note written I think when I was seventeen.
It described a scene like this: I was studying by lamplight, actually daydreaming
when you came in and asked, "Are you studying or are you writing a
letter?" "Studying." "But you weren't thinking of studies
were you?" "No." "You had that look on your face. Don't
look that way - yes, do look that way, it's you. It's just that when you
look that way I feel as tho' it's me sitting there." The note reminded
me of a closeness we no longer have - but also of your continuing miraculous
ability to respond to people. It is so rare, so absent in nearly everyone
I know that I might not miss it as much as I do if you hadn't been my mother.
Your last letter was a new example of it - you are growing all the time
and even better, it makes you happy to realize it. You're rare - you and
Bill too, whom you would like because you have so much in common after all.
There was another entry, describing the wedding in Valhalla that we went
to with Father one night: I talked about how much you wanted to go to school
and how you also wanted to be, like the Stolees, gracious, graceful, distinctive
- and I wrote that I didn't think you would ever do either. Now you are
going to school, and the gracious-graceful-distinctive characteristics are
growing out of your natural unselfishness with experiences and successes
- so really I've no reason any longer for wanting to change your life. You
have the chances you need and more than enough capability of using them:
I'm more and more sure of this and more and more willing to watch and learn
rather than deplore and criticize. It's as though you've graduated and I
now have to just have confidence. We always mix our roles don't we?
Your letter pleased me very much; I felt much more hopeful about possibilities
for our understanding each other again, as we did before my most important
ideas changed so much.
In summary - yes: I am interested in your growing up and I hope my recurring
mistakes in interpretation don't discourage you from telling me - enthusiastically,
often, in detail.
3 December
[journal]
My face has changed in the last three years. People who knew me before
I went to Europe don't always know it. There I am at the bottom of the mirror,
like a fish lying on the bottom of a round-sided jar: face with hair falling
down on either side, circles around my eyes (hard, adult eyes, like round
stones). It has a large, raw look about it, aggressive when still, or stony
and resistant, rather blunt: strong but not warm. When I smile the effect
is different, there's an eyebrow-raised shift in the contours so that my
long sullen cheeks bunch up under my eyes.
One afternoon last week I sat on the stool in Greg's kitchen talking
about Huis Clos and Sartre's fascination with the threat of another
face looking at one - the vulnerability of being seen as something you can
only partially remember becoming or seeing in mirrors. Where can I classify
myself as face and body-moving-speaking object complex? With Jeanie Rosenberg
who looks intelligent but not beautiful, pretty for moments on good days?
I suppose. I vacillate even now between disgusted underrating and childlike
overrating (the times at home, when I was twelve or thirteen, I suppose
- I would carry the kerosene lamp into my parents' bedroom on nights when
they weren't home and hold it below my face as I smiled into the mirror.
The light thrown from below, its yellow-orange color and the strong shadows
it cast, made me beautiful and I sometimes remembered myself as that face),
I'm anxious constantly about this resistant non-thing that keeps me five
feet off the floor, and the fatty bony clay thing thru which I peer from
two round holes. Neither will do, they aren't me - but there's no exposing
their masquerade because what I am is the carefully collected chosen features
of people who won't recognize my need of them and keep them for themselves,
like the Black Russian, seeming not to know the power of the non-thing that
she too may not recognize as herself.
7 December
Sense of color: Olivia's long letter from Oxford, not strange, remembering
me. Don's renaissance into books, paintings, movies, concerts, his being
happy with Olivia. Cat lying against my left arm as I write, purring as
he falls asleep. Greg having gone to sleep disgruntled. Mad Murray at the
Cine-Guild meeting in her green knit dress, across the table from me showing
me the green in her eye, standing at an office doorway with the overhead
light making her hair brassy, coming downstairs with me after having left
the cream out in the English lounge, both of us laughing as we walked over
the stiff frozen grass and sliding on the black surface of the sidewalks
after a freezing rain. Jackie Roddick's beautiful poem, Mad's description
of how she too stands in front of mirrors, "touching myself,"
how she's leaving school partly because she's a failure with people. She
has no little games like Mad and doesn't want them. I know her: she wants
to be recognized as she is, by someone who will suddenly see her
and know. It's sad that it is touching to think of her in front of a mirror
- Jackie with her short round calves, always in black tights and squashed
shoes, round pink straightforward face, controlled strong voice, capability
and that amazing poem with its lucidity and fragility.
Harcourt's arm along the side of mine during a segment of Diary of
a Chambermaid this afternoon, moments when I was at ease during my presentation
this afternoon, the feeling of euphoria afterwards because it had gone well.
Outcroppings of arrogance from time to time - about being able to think
or write, or play, or speak as well as, the better. Being friends with Krista,
learning to know people in the class like Grace and Bill and Frank and John
Glassco.
Harcourt's gossipy intimacy - how real is it? I told him on impulse that
I was trying to learn something from him for my English class papers - relevance,
personalness. "A relevance English literature had stopped having for
me," H.
11 December
What about Peter Harcourt, why is his style of life as it is? This personability,
his 'innocence' or straightforwardness. Is it courage? What does he do when
he really wants to reach out toward someone? How much room is there for
a special gesture or a sudden generosity? His generosity is effective generosity
- when we speak to him and he seems really to see us and to want us to like
him - we're happy - but would it ever be possible to forget that this generosity
is not especially for us? I could ask him - it's an attractive style, does
it work? Don't you feel displayed, scattered, public? What do you keep?
Do you have enough energy for everyone? Is your wife left out? Your children?
Why do you hate Christmas? - Because as so public you can't possibly afford
to be sentimental?
He repeats things - sometimes he'll tell people things twice that he's
obviously told other people many times. There's a kind of facility in his
offhand compliments. Does he have a sense of power over moist-eyed Trigg
who confides in him?
And Madeleine Murray, who is so much like him, terribly personal with
everyone, funny, complimentary, inevitably charming, not quite trustworthy.
-
For our last (Christmas) class, Harcourt showed The Golden Coach with
Anna Magnani as Columbine - solid face, hard round eyes, incredulous scraping
voice, "Ferdinand, sit down!" and a laugh like stones bumping
down an incline - a landslide. "Do you miss them?" "A leetle."
The King's Viceroy, the child acrobats, the stage at the beginning and end.
Harcourt rising from the waves of seats as the lights come on, peer at
him over the tops of my knees, the audience has been close for nearly two
hours, it's been funny, we've been aware of each other's laughs and comments,
we're slow to leave but I hurry because I haven't anything to say - just
jump up to look at my bottom in the mirror and go down the Ellis Hall steps
in pointed-toed leaps. Stars brilliant, turquoise blue sky, cold, Steve
behind, then across the street, where's Harcourt, leap across sidewalks,
God someone's watching, runs across the street, Harcourt I feel as though
I wish I had a very good friend. What would you do? Not talk; run to the
park or jump over cracks like these, here between the parked cars and the
frozen Chemistry Building grass, both feel as I do, know it. What about
Greg? His main --- isn't spontaneity. His main --- isn't energy. There was
somebody but she isn't here this year.
Saturday evening
[undated letter]
Buns and mousse before going to bed, hard boiled eggs and tea? I'm following
one of your traditions: there's a pan of bread dough rising on the floor
beside the rad, and a pumpkin cake in the oven. The Creation and
Small Cat lying against my writing arm, purring.
Do you have time left over after homework to think about Christmas? I've
begun to feel quite motherly at the thought of Judy and Paul coming - I
made a fruitcake, did I tell you? Full of stuff, really packed - cut up
figs and dried apricots soaked in cherry brandy, etc - and now resting in
a wine-y cloth, mellowing for Christmas. At the same time I made my first
loaf of bread (a sweet dough recipe) and some cinnamon rolls which I packed
with nuts and raisins, but forgot the cinnamon - the bread turned out extremely
well, fine textured and well risen and all, so I've become arrogant enough
to try regular white bread today. Will you tell me how you make your brown
bread? I still like all the pounding and kneading and the suspense of seeing
whether it will really rise - such a wrinkled flat lump of dough.
Also - very urgent - please immediately send your Christmas pudding recipe,
Paul said he wanted to have some this year, in remembrance of the jar of
it he had for last year's Christmas dinner.
I saw both Judy and Paul last weekend, on Sunday. Victoria had invited
Greg to a concert with the violinist Oistrach and Neil had lent him the
Triumph, so we set out at dawn on Sunday morning down the 401 to Toronto
- on the way the leaves were all outlined in wet white snow that blew against
them from one direction only - it was beautiful and no one else was on the
road. When we got to Toronto the sun was shining - we found Paul's address
in the Chinese district not far from City Hall. A slight, good looking Chinese
boy answered the door and showed us up the very clean Victorian hall and
stairway to room #3 - Paul was in, remains of a porridge breakfast, basket
of apples, books and records, some Christmas presents we shouldn't have
seen - a very clean pleasant room, with a socket in the wall where the gas
had been led in, in the very old days before electricity in Toronto!
(The pumpkin cake is out - not burned.) Greg took the car up to
York to get Judy while Paul told me about his summer's adventures. Both
J and P look good - Paul's hair is longer, and he's so gay he can't keep
his face pinned down. Judy was wearing brown eye shadow that made her look
Italian and very pretty.
We sat and ate apples, joked and reminisced, felt really happy to be
together (the first time for the three of us since the Rasheed summer).
Then Harvey came to pick us up in the station wagon - Toozie sat as far
into the corner as she could and hugged her doll. Maria pretended not to
see me - made obvious conversation with her father until she forgot to be
shy. When we got inside the door the kids all dived for Paul's furry Russian
hat and harassed him generally. Maria eventually talked to me. I asked her
if she'd told her parents about things in the summer - about chasing the
pigs and about the raft. She said no, she'd wanted to have secrets. But
she was still full of glee about being the only one to have been able to
float the raft. Anne says she likes school but is too lazy to learn to read.
Anne herself is looking younger and less tired. Chin is less of a baby
and Toozie is going to nursery school - the kid is doing wonderful large
paintings, hundreds of them; she has pigtails now.
We had borscht - your kind, made with chicken - for dinner. Candlelight
- and purist Maria went around making sure all the doors were closed so
there was no extra light.
When the kids went to bed we sat around - Harvey beat Paul at chess,
then Paul beat him. We told them all the dreadful stages their family will
have to go through - the two-against-one conspirings have already begun.
Harvey seems to like Paul - talks to him seriously and with less reserve
than he does to us.
When Greg came back from the concert at midnight we drove back to Kingston,
fighting sleep - and I had to get up early to prepare a Hegel paper.
Exam period is coming - I have only one, and an essay. Krista has flown
home to Calgary, other people are going in all directions. Olivia wrote
a very long letter - she says Don is much less driven this year and can
go to concerts, ballets, movies, visiting or picnicking, that he's rediscovered
novels and people. As a result they are happier together than they have
ever been. O says she misses me - which makes me glad: her whole letter
was her old self, even tho' she mourned not being "eighteen and screwed
up" still, having to become an adult and discover alienation. I miss
her too.
In film class last Thursday I had to lead the class discussion. Peter
Harcourt talked me into it - he's had a student do it once before but we
don't usually like to because the class is large and rather intimidatingly
intelligent. The film I was to discuss was Bunuel's Diary of a Chambermaid,
a rather complex ambiguous film - I think Peter was pleased with the discussion
(another great Peter you see!) because a few people spoke (my friends!)
who don't usually say anything. The best part was picking up momentum and
losing shyness.
In Cine Club the same night we learned how to splice film - even black
and white is pretty expensive so I'll save my Christmas money - I can use
Club equipment and we're going to have an editing room in one of the English
annexes.
Greg has bought a box of mandarin oranges. He'd make a good father because
he loves buying treats for people and makes a big thing out of holidays.
His head of department says he's sure to get a Canada Council award to go
to England next year, so this is probably our last year together.
I was invited last night to visit Michael Fox's
place as a kind of Christmas party - he is my 19th century philosophy prof
- and it was a good time because I enjoyed his wife (piano student, expecting
her first child in 4 months) and learned some interesting
philosophy gossip eg the faculty pool shark is our ponderous Dr Estall!
This year I'm learning to know and feel peer to an unusual number of faculty
members - it makes a difference to the classes afterwards. Don't forget
the pudding recipe.
-
The bread turned out rather spongy and a little yeast tasting although
it was good. Luckily the whole loaf was eaten within an hour because the
slices dried out very quickly. Would that be because of the extra half cup
of water I accidentally put in? Or because I punched it down once too many
times when the loaf came out very deformed-looking the first time?
Saturday Dec 16
[letter]
Judy sent a note saying she may send one of Joanne's boyfriends down
with Paul on Friday - some boy called Jay who'd be in residence otherwise.
Maybe we'll have a Christmas like your traditional ones, with strays of
all kinds. Mouths to feed - I'm pleased with the idea. But there isn't any
snow, and there hasn't been this year except for three days long ago. I've
a new record tho', of early Italian lauds or religious folk songs,
very beautiful and very Christmas like.
I've been wanting to tell you about the apartment at 40 Clergy East -
the winter atmosphere which is really very pleasant - on the first landing,
two cats' dishes - when either of them hear the rattle of the cat food in
the saucers they drop from the second landing like missiles, and there's
usually a funny contest between them to see who'll eat at one of the bowls
while the other is ignored. Music coming from the first floor - my lauds,
or jazz or folk-rock or The Creation - from Greg's record player
which is constantly on while he works. When he recognizes my uneven clumping
on the stairs he usually whistles to make sure and then comes out to hug
me hello - shortly afterwards Michel comes downstairs to make coffee or
get one of his many snacks or show Greg something queer he's found in one
of their politics texts - he says "bonjour" always (and on the
telephone, "âllo," asserting his Frenchness) and likes to
sit down across the table in the kitchen while the kettle boils to talk
about politics to Greg, or people and his experiences in Mexico to me. If
it's early afternoon we all hang around until 1:30 p.m. and listen for the
thump of the mail as it's tossed inside the door downstairs. Michel always
gets a letter or two, every day, and his Montreal newspaper. Greg gets things
from universities and I usually end up with library notices.
Meanwhile Cat is sleeping on the radiator in Greg's room, or if it's
sunny, on the wide windowsill beside his desk. Petercat comes in hungry,
mieuws until he's fed, and then goes to sleep in Olivia's old red armchair
in the hall. Greg's two rooms are tidy - large bed flat on the floor under
a very low-silled window, covered with a red woven thing. Many books, sound
of typing or else of pots scraping in the kitchen as somebody cooks, with
a speaker from the phonograph led in for company. Smells of all kinds -
a lot of oatmeal smells when Greg cooks and baked potato smells when Michel
cooks.
Sunday - I was writing this last night while waiting for a young man
to pick me up to go to the Psychology Department party - 'young man' definitely,
not 'boy' or even 'friend' - 'young man' because his name is John Glassco
whose uncle was responsible for the Glassco Commission Report and whose
father is Big in the Brazilian Traction Company - somebody whose life in
Canada has been as different from ours as it is possible to be in this country
- dancing school as a boy! Two original Tom Thompson's at home. Old Family.
He's a very gentle person in spite of it, seemingly without arrogance. It
seems that even with all the money they have his father made the 6 children
work their way through school, and so John has, even in mines in the north
- I think it's astonishing and it was obviously successful.
For the Christmas party we all had to bring a "50¢ present
suitably wrapped" - I gave away a basket of kumquats! And got a package
of bath salts from a Santa Claus called Wiebe. (Wiebe is in the English
department - he's from south of Winnipeg, he was a 'Conference' and is now
an Anglican - he's quite repulsive, very opinionated and insensitive.)
part 3
- raw forming volume 7: august 1967 - september 1968
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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