June: inconsequential moments

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sunny bike pathIt rained heavily all morning while I read the weekend papers, all lights on to brighten the gloom. Then the rain grew lighter and at some imperceptible point, stopped altogether and the sun began to break through. By late afternoon, it was a real June day. I knew it would be too wet to go up through the woods to my favourite walk on the ridge trail, so I chose the paved bicycle path instead.

It turns out that I don’t need to go into the woods because it is breathing out on either side of the path, a moist, woody, green exhalation like a blessing. A stiff breeze draws my eyes upward. I have not realized how tall the trees are until now nor how many of them are poplars. The wind catches the tops, tossing them first one way and then another, moving wave-like across the height. The poplars sing as they stir. Poplars have always spoken to me. They stood close in by the first home I remember and danced in slight air currents when all else was still.

poplars in the windThe path emerges from the shade of the woods to a crescent of mown lawn lying open to the sun. I go as far as the culvert that carries the little brook under the path. The brook edges the woods here, dividing it from the lawn, flowing under ferns and low branches. Today it is babbling busily with the runoff. I wish I could capture its bubbling music.

One cardinal has been singing as I walked and I catch a glimpse of his vivid red and his crested head as he leads me away from his nest. I cannot follow him. I do not fly.

The half hour’s walk has been quiet and contented, easy and relaxed.

Earlier in the day, I listened to author James Lasdun being interviewed mainly about his recent memoir Give Me Everything You Have, the story of his 5 year ordeal at the hands of a cyber stalker, a writer and former student whom he calls Nazrin. Initially Lasdun helped her by sending her novel of life in repressive Iran to his editor, but then Nazrin turns on him, accuses him of stealing her book and selling it to other Iranian writers who publish her stories. She goes on to accuse him on “Comments” of drugging and sexually assaulting women. She caps this by emailing him increasingly violent anti-Semitic threats. None of it is apparently bad enough to merit police action, particularly since Nazrin has left New York City for Los Angeles and is outside of Lasdun’s available police jurisdiction.

Lasdun’s mind is more and more taken up with the harassment. He becomes obsessed with it.  He begins writing an account of what is happening as documentation and the account morphs into a book.

One of the central images he uses in the book is that of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Green Knight rode into the dining hall and challenged the Knights of the Round Table to cut off his head, promising that in a year and a day, he would in turn, cut off his beheader’s head, a give-me-everything-you’ve-got challenge if ever there was one. Sir Gawain beheads him. The Green Knight takes his head under his arm and rides away. Now the real story begins.

Since Lasdun published his book, several other people have contacted him to say that Nazrin has also stalked them. Meanwhile she has stopped communicating. Now there are moments, Lasdun says,when he realizes that life can be inconsequential.

He means that life does not have to be full of high drama and desperate struggle. It does not have to be full of significance and fraught with conflict. Moments can be ordinary and forgettable. He did not have to explain what he meant. You could hear the relief in his voice

Having had an interesting life and having spent a good deal of it dodging and weaving in expectation of the Green Knight’s revenge, I was grateful to be reminded that life can be peacefull and I carried that comfort with me as I took a walk on a breezy late afternoon in mid June.

Lost Gardens

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rosesHalf a century ago, it was still possible to amble across a hayfield on the hill where I was born and come upon the stone-walled cellar hole of a house that had been burned down or had been abandoned and had fallen in. Always you found these simple roses growing there. The cellar holes are still there but the woods has taken over the fields now, and roses do not grow in shade.

But I have found other lost gardens.

path thro woodsI go through the woods in the park half a block from my home and wend my way up to what I call the ridge trail.

sunny old roadIt must be an abandoned road that the parks people mow. I know that at one point before the place became a municipal park, it was a golf course. I have literally stumbled over the water pipes that watered the greens, But this road seems to go even further back than that. In the early spring, I would pass lilac bushes in bloom at intervals, which suggest that once there were houses dotted along it. One late spirea is still hanging on.

spirea

There hardly seems to be enough room at the edge of the road for substantial buildings. The land falls steeply off on both sides. I wonder if these were summer cottages. They would have been near the mouth of the river and in walking distance of Lake Ontario. Then I note that people have planted rhubarb.

rhubarbAnd there are honey locusts that were covered in white flowers last week.

locustsThey are young trees, so they are puzzling. Locusts are not native to these parts, but we planted one in the yard of that house under the hill I talked about in my post on Gatsby. (115journals.com) And I see very tall ones on Davenport Rd, maybe 70 ft. high. Perhaps they are evidence of the golf course, but it has been gone for 50 years, in which case they would be taller. They must have self-seeded as most of the woods did once it was let to grow.

old roadwith pinesEventually, the trail leads to a small stand of pine trees and just past them a monument to the early European explorers, including Etienne Brulé, who was the first of them to sight the big lake. Then it is down a steep hill to the river, a story for another day.

river w. rushes

Naked Windows: a voyeur’s confession

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kitchen windowMy kitchen window has been naked for the last few days. I have disassembled the Venetian blind and am in the process of washing the slats. I raised my eyes from the sink the other night to discover my neighbor was also naked – as people usually are in the shower. Detail was indistinct, but it was apparent which member of the family it was. An unsettling insight. Why is that? The house I live in is the mirror image of the one across the double drive and the bathroom windows on both are original, having never been upgraded. Fortunately, someone has stuck an opaque film over my top pane. Not so on the neighbor’s, although both have pebbled glass on the bottom. Shower before dark, I guess, and count your blessings that those people haven’t taken down their kitchen curtains.

Naked windows happen to everyone who moves frequently. Sometimes I feel as if I hold a world’s record for that. Inevitably, there is a house or an apartment where the previous people denuded the windows when they left. The last of the furniture gets carried in at dusk. The big truck drives away and, suddenly, you realize that you are on a lighted stage and the neighborhood is getting a good look at the new kid on the block. Finding sheets for the bed is already a challenge. Tacking one up over a window is downright daunting. You undress in the bathroom with a prayer of thanksgiving for the skylight.

It is some time usually before you can tackle the window covering problem. It’s hard to say whether naked windows are worse in the summer when the sun wakes you up just after 5 or in the winter when you can’t avoid turning on the lights and turning the place back into a stage.

My fallback position is to buy vinyl mini blinds, but that works only if your windows are standard size. It takes weeks more to get Sears to cut them to size for irregular windows although Ikea drapes are pretty instant. Most of them can be modified for a rod or a drapery track. Somewhere in that mass of unpacked boxes there are curtain hooks, but you can’t find them. That is why I have several hundred hooks of various shapes in the top of the broom closet. Don’t get me started on the agony of screwing the blinds onto the woodwork. It’s bad enough to make me settle for blinds only for the first few years because I can’t face putting up rods.

Behind the duplex I live in, across the yard and a sunken parking lot, hidden behind trees is a four-story apartment building. For years, it was just there, doing no harm, except for Wednesdays when the garbage dumpster got hoisted onto the truck and the empty one deposited. Then one of the ash trees got ill and one summer morning a team of acrobatic tree-men arrived to put it out of its misery. I, for one, was happy to endure its slow demise, but liability laws dictated otherwise. After they had swanned about on high wires, amputating 18 inch lengths and lowering them down with much yelling of encouragement, they ran the whole thing through a chipper and drove off with the mulch. Silence fell, a silence that still resonated with tree death, as if the other trees were still shivering or timidly unfolding their arms. I stood in the silence looking out at the great hole in my world and saw…. that was no hole. That were eight tableaux. There was the crossing guard putting on her florescent vest. There was a thin chested man -with no shirt – looking at the internet. There was a room that Scheherazade would be comfortable living in. There was a mother showing her toddler the sparrow on the window ledge. There was the totally uncluttered home of a couple who dressed in the white robes of some religious outfit or other.

I mean – tell yourself not to look. How is that possible? Every time you adjust the blinds or open a window, there they are- five or six different dramas playing out. The thin chested man never wears a shirt, at home anyway. Full disclosure here -I am a girl, if an old one, so this next bit is not as creepy as it could be. The most astonishing is the while-robed woman who runs up and down her hallway every morning passing through the living room and past both bedroom doors over and over again, wearing –  red bikini pants and bra!

Buz Lurhmann stole this idea from me for his recent Great Gatsby. The camera pulls back from Myrtle’s apartment in New York City. Tom Buchanan, whose mistress Myrtle is, Nick Carroway and other hangers-on are drinking bootlegged booze, listening to jazz and generally having a hell of a time. We see her fire escape landing where someone seems to be recovering or someone is playing a horn. (I can’t remember.) Then as the camera pulls back and back, we see more and more windows, all in high definition, all sporting men and women similarly whooping it up and just enjoying the jazz age. Did Tom really rent Myrtle a place in Harlem? That scene, which just grows and grows, was worth the $10 I paid for matinee admission.

Really living where I do, I could cancel the cable and still be entertained.

The Truth about Le Carré’s A Delicate Truth

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SAMSUNG DIGITAL CAMERAOn Sunday May 26/13, I heard John Le Carré interviewed about his new novel A Delicate Truth. (free CBC app, Arts/Writers and Company podcast May, 26, 2013.) He agreed to do this interview because he had been interviewed by Eleanor Wachtel in 2010. He told her, once they were off the air that he would not be doing any more radio interviews. (This was a decision based on prior consideration and not a reaction to this interview, which he greatly enjoyed.)  So I consider myself fortunate to have chanced upon it as I drove home.

Indeed, I consider myself fortunate that he published this his twenty third novel, so fortunate that I tried to buy it several days before its release. Le Carré can be trusted to tell a good story and to do so with elegance and wit. But, looking over reviews of the novel, I found that not everyone agreed.

Most reviews began by referring to George Smiley, the protagonist of Le Carré’s breakthrough novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold as well as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the recent Gary Oldman movie. Once the Berlin Wall fell, readers wondered what Le Carré would write about. But, of course, there are always enemies, big pharma – The Constant Gardener, arms dealers – The Night Manager, unscrupulous bankers –Our Kind of Traitor. Spies were replaced by whistle blowers, but there was still intrigue enough for readers as well as plots that twisted and turned toward ambiguous endings. Yet some discontented reviewers lamented that these later novels lacked the subtlety and complexity of the earlier ones. The Globe and Mail reviewer of A Delicate Truth, Richard Poplac, declares that Le Carré “has reduced himself to writing a series of screeds”; he says about the writer’s recent protagonists, “not a word out of their mouths rings true” and calls the novel “a clunker”. Set against Poplac’s rant, were more positive comments; from the LA Times, “While some fans will miss the ambiguity of earlier books, A Delicate Truth delivers plentiful intelligence and thrills”.

George Smiley’s conundrum was whether or not he could preserve a modicum of humanity while serving his country or whether the compromises he would be forced to make in its service would make such inroads into his soul that he would be as bad as the enemy. Indeed those Cold War novels depicted the Western Intelligence Agencies as more or less morally equivalent to the KGB.

A Delicate Truth focuses on two men in the British Foreign Office who face the same challenge. We meet the first one in a hotel room in the British Crown Colony of Gibraltar under the name of Paul Anderson, going slowly mad as he awaits a phone call to tell him that the mission is underway.  “Paul” is a low flyer in the foreign office, a few years from retirement, “a violet by a rocky brook” sort of person: he has never attracted attention. The mission, once it gets underway, turns out to be the extraction of one code-named Punter who is about to buy missiles, “a jihadest equivalent of the Scarlet Pimpernel, an even wilier version of Osama Bin Laden” (National Post – 13/05/03). The land operatives are British soldiers, temporarily demobbed so as to be deniable, and the sea operatives are employees of an American private military outfit called Ethical Outcomes. Paul is there to act as “red telephone”, the eyes and ears of Fergus Quinn M.P. At the moment when the attack has to go or be called off, Paul heeds the advice of Jeb, the British soldier in charge, and refuses to give the go-ahead. Other, rasher heads prevail and, according to reports, the mission is a brilliant success. Punter, apparently, is spirited off to the American ship lying off-shore and suffers Rendition.

After that long first chapter, we find ourselves back in London witnessing the moral struggles of a younger foreign office minion named Toby Bell, who has bugged the office of his boss Fergus Quinn, and is about to retrieve the tape. Before we get there, though, we get Toby’s background. He is a thoroughly decent fellow who wanted to resign when Blair took the nation to war in Iraq under the false pretense of weapons of mass destruction. His mentor, Oakley, tells him, “Hyprocisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, dear boy. In an imperfect world, the best we can hope for.” Toby finds himself summarily shipped off to Madrid and the Cairo, rising with each step, until now fluent in Arabic, he returns to London to be Quinn’s private secretary, with a mandate from superiors to keep the Minister out of trouble.  Only thing is, Quinn never gives Toby a glimpse of what he is up to, hence the bugged office.

Of course Toby finds out something very troubling that has to do with a vaguely British operative named Jay Crispin and the American outfit, Ethical Outcomes.

Then we find ourselves years later in Cornwall, Le Carré’s home territory, watching Sir Christopher Probyn settle into his retirement as a benevolent lord of the manor personage. Wait a minute, isn’t this Paul! And doesn’t he magically run into Jeb, disgraced and reduced to “tinkering” and doesn’t Jeb have some awful here-to-for repressed information about what really happened in Gibraltar! What to do? Kit Probyn aka Sir Christopher aka Paul knows just the thing. Call that number he called before he met Fergus Quinn. The number belongs to Toby.

Thus the forces for good or at least for the truth begin to assemble. The third member of the group is Kit’s daughter, Emily, a doctor who treats the poor and needy in London’s east end. There we have the essence of the book: who will stand up for the individual who has been deemed unimportant, an acceptable loss in the face of the war on terror. And can the delicate truth be brought to light in the face of bureaucratic duplicity? Will the well-meaning opponents of officialdom find themselves declared traitors?

In a world where “War’s gone corporate” and intelligence is purchased from private spy agencies, truth becomes relative.

It is true that A Delicate Truth, like the other post-Cold War novels, lacks the irony of the Smiley books. Something changed so that Le Carré could no longer afford that detached point of view. Certainly 9/11 and the resulting War on Terror and the 2003 invasion of Iraq played a part in that. I find it hard to regret that.

A novelist is not a made-to-measure workman. He writes out of his soul and conscience. And I am very grateful to have yet another brilliant novel from Le Carré’s pen.

Blithe Spirit: frivolity in dark times

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Starting on Sept 7, 1940, London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights. Between then and May 1941, it was blitzed 71 times, with a loss of 28,556 lives and a million buildings. Noel Coward’s office and home were destroyed. The actor, playwright and songwriter, who had worked in Intelligence for the war effort, went to Snowdonia in Wales in the spring of 1941 and wrote the play Blithe Spirit in 5 days. It premiered in Manchester in June 1941 and in London’s west end in July. First nighters walked across boards from a recently destroyed bomb shelter to get in the theatre door.

It seems outrageous that such a frivolous play could have emerged from such darkness, but that was Noel Coward for you, the man who sang “Let’s not be beastly to the Germans”, as you can hear if you Google his name and Blitz.

Phillip Hoare records in his biography of Coward that there was some feeling that it was not on to “make fun of death at the height of war” (Wikipedia), but black humour can salve the soul. Evidently, the play’s spiritualism and its assumption that, not only, is there life after death but that it is accessible won out.

And the play is very funny. I saw it performed at the Stratford Festival at Stratford, Ontario last Saturday and can attest to that.

The humour lies in the fact that the blithe spirit, the ghost of Charles Condomine’s deceased first wife, accidentally materialized by an inept medium, is visible and audible only to him. When he talks to her telling, for example, to shut up and get lost, his second wife naturally assumes, since there is apparently no one else in the room, that he is talking to her. Eventually, wife #2 begins to believe Charles’s protests that he is seeing a ghost and it seems as though they are settling in for a rather peculiar menage a trois, but the ghost wife has other plans. When we trooped back to our seats after the second break, the action took a darker turn until it arrived at an explosive end as Charles tiptoed off stage.

Coward’s snappy dialogue was declaimed in a suitably stagey manner by Ben Carlson, Seanna McKenna and Sara Topham. (Full disclosure – Ben is the son of a friend and Sara is his daughter in law.) The supporting characters added to the fun and the set was a beautiful country drawing room, capable of its own tricksy humour.

Coward drew his title from Shelley’s “Ode to A Skylark”, which I was pleased to discover is still part of the furniture of my mind, having been memorized at some point for credit – at least the first stanza and of course, stashed away in a remote dusty attic of that mind.

Hail to thee, blithe spirit,
Bird thou never wert
That from heaven or near it,
Pourest thy full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Isn’t that just the way the world goes? Just when things feel grim as possible, some darned skylark or cardinal or robin or finch or red winged blackbird sets up a song that pulls us skyward.

The Great Gatsby: a personal response

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Jay Gatsby and I go back a long way. No not to that hot summer of 1922, but to the hot summer of 1952. Having cycled to Burlington beach by myself, I lay in the sun reading Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for the first time. The 18 year-old boy I had given my heart to had, apparently, thrown me over, so I fell for Jay Gatsby instead. And got sunstroke. Next day, I was invalided home from my summer job on the ladies’ blouse counter and spent 3 days hallucinating lightshows, green and otherwise, and longing for a cool, blue pool.

That was just the beginning. Even after the boy came back into my life, became my husband and the father of my two children, Gatsby and I carried on and not clandestinely. I taught the novel to my grade 12 classes throughout most of my 35 year career as a high school English teacher. My husband and I began by believing Fitzgerald’s dictim that “living well was the best revenge” and ended by revising it to “eating well is the best revenge”. That was after the energy crisis and subsequent recession in the 70’s.

Meanwhile we lived in a house under a hill, where springs bubbled to the surface and pheasants called. We built rock gardens and planted bushes and trees for the birds. We planted a cedar hedge and built fences and dry stone walls. We sunk a pool beside the house. We bought a sailboat. We lived in a cul de sac and walked to work. We holidayed in Europe en famille.

Then Robert Redford’s Great Gatsby came out on film just in time for me to show it to my classes as my dream came apart.

It is many years later now, so many that I wasn’t sure I even had a copy of the novel. Not that I really need it since after so many repetitions I have virtually memorized it. But there it was beside Zelda’s novel Save Me the Waltz and Scott’s This Side of Paradise. I searched it out when I came home from watching Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby.

In his Los Angeles Times review, Charles McNulty begins by remarking that from reading some reviews of Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby, “you’d think that the Australian… would be facing extradition for his crime against an American classic”. McNulty begins by calling the movie “relentlessly bouncy” and the CGI-enhanced opulence eye-tiring, but very soon, he concludes that it is a “diverting pop-culture riff that has as much to say about Fitzgerald’s novel as it does about the connection between two decadent eras, the Jazz Age and our own”. He goes on to illustrate how our perception of a classic, such as Hamlet, changes as we age and as the times we live in change.

I found myself an audience of one in a huge auditorium and absentmindedly wandered back out to pick up my 3D glasses. But no, this theatre was not equipped for 3D. Just as well, I got dizzy anyway. Yes, it was dazzling; yes, the party scenes were fantastic and overdone; yes, their effect was shallow and empty. (Wasn’t that the point?) True some of the music was Twenties -Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’- but much of it showed Jay Z’s hiphop influence, startlingly vital. For a brief moment I caught Beyonce singing Amy Winehouse’s ‘Black to Black’. And frankly, the window sequence at Myrtle’s Manhattan apartment was worth the price of admission.

Robert Redford in the 1974 movie was never my idea of Jay Gatsby. Too cool. Of course, Gatsby played cool but locked inside was James Gatz, the desperate poor boy and the bootlegger, the fellow rumoured to have killed a man. Di Caprio has more of that inner tension, so that when he strikes out at Tom Buchanan, it is not entirely unexpected. Daisy is hard to get wrong. Be beautiful and vulnerable and Carey Mulligan can do that. Indeed, Fitzgerald’s characters are not deep. Gatsby is mysterious, but not complex.

Christopher HItchens said that The Great Gatsby “remains great because it confronts the defeat of youth and beauty and idealism and finds the defeat unbearable and then turns to face it unflinchingly”.

Nick Carroway, the narrator, strengthened by his father’s midwestern upbringing, goes back to Chicago to work in finance, sobered but unbowed, Mr Luhrmann. He does not end up writing out his pain in a rehab centre. Just sayin’.

Spoiler alert: Gatsby and his creator died young. As indeed did Zelda Fitzgerald, Daisy’s prototype. At least Gatsby did not fall victim to alcohol, madness or fire. Having outlived his dream, that was probably for the best. But even to the last, Gatsby lived in hope, waiting for Daisy’s call. It was that hopefulness that made NIck call out, “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

Much to my surprise, I survived into old age in spite of opportunities not to. I survived loss and grief and illness that, each in its turn, felt unbearable. Gatsby has gone with me through the years, the real one in the book. Screen Gatsby’s are just for an afternoon.

Mother’s Day

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95994044Here’s to all the women who are mothers but didn’t get celebrated (or not to their satisfaction).  Here’s to those who mother other people’s children. Here’s to bereft mothers. Here’s to those who want to be mothers but are not. Here’s to cat mothers and dog mothers. Here’s to all those of whatever gender who follow the Great Mothering principle of the world.

The crab apple blossoms made a fuchsia display of themselves next to the more demure apple blossoms this weekend in our town. Down by the river, the unselfconscious swans swam right to my feet.

swans

Once again Georgia loaned me her family, although I was chastised that, in fact, it was always my family and of course was and is. As it turned out all the men had to be elsewhere with other mothers or working and so we were seven women and a six month old baby girl at the round brunch table, one of us, very much a mother-in-training at 11. There was an almost-teenaged boy hiding out somewhere and two younger girls, who had written loving tributes to “the best mother in the world”. She needs that positive reinforcement. She is the only mother doing baby-duty.

One of the absent men had precooked most of brunch and a young aunt grilled the French toast. We had champagne.

trillium enlarged

Happy Mother’s Day!