Please come on the 17th. I am going to do partridges with that sauterne sauce you’re forever talking about, and with luck there’ll be strawberries in the market.
Yours,
Pauline
December 10
My sweet Pauline,
I will be there, bearing a walnut cake, just this minute out of the oven and ready for its brandy bath.
Until then,
F.
December 11
Dear Mr. Cruzzi,
You probably won’t remember meeting me at the Library Association meeting a few years back, when you were the guest speaker. We had a little visit afterwards. Maybe it will jog your memory if I tell you that I am the librarian (part-time) out in Nadeau and that I was a great friend of Mary Swann’s before she passed away. Wouldn’t she be surprised how famous she’s got to be? I hope there’s some way she knows.
Not so long ago I received an invitation to her symposium in Toronto, and last week I had a nice little note from Professor Lang saying you would be coming too and would be giving one of the speeches, in fact.
To get to the point, Professor Lang suggested that if I was driving down to Toronto maybe I could give you a ride, but the problem is, crazy as it seems, I’ve never learned to drive a car, and so I’ll be taking the bus into Kingston on Monday morning (Jan. 3) and then getting the 10:00 A.M. train. Whenever I go into Toronto, which isn’t half as often as I wish I could go, I take the train. Once I took a bus all the way and didn’t like it half as much and got bus sick part way there to make matters worse.
This may seem awfully forward of me, but I thought maybe we could take the train together and keep each other company on the way. We could meet at the train station in Kingston about 9:30 or so, in plenty of time to buy our tickets, unless we get them earlier, which I always do. So as you’ll know who I am, I’m five feet, four inches, and people say I’m on the thin side these days due to being a bit under the weather of late, though I’m bound to pick up before too long. I’ve got glasses with blue-grey frames and I’ll be wearing a brown suede coat if there’s no snow, but if it’s snowing, as it probably will be, I’ll be in my old down-filled blue coat with a grey fur collar (just artificial).
By now you’ve probably made other arrangements for getting there, so please don’t think my feelings will be hurt if I get there (the train station) and you’re not there. It was just that Professor Lang asked if I could drive you down, but as I explained, I don’t drive a car. Which is ridiculous living out in the country like I do. But anyway, I love the train, every minute of it, especially the part along the lake.
Sincerely,
Rose Hindmarch
P.S. Merry Christmas
December 18
Dear Ms. Hindmarch,
I expect Lang wrote and told you I was elderly and infirm and muddled and needed looking after, all of which is true or partly true, and so it is with gratitude that I accept your kind invitation to be your travelling companion.
I too love the train, especially at this time of the year. We can gaze out the window and you can tell me all about your good friend Mary Swann, whom I am sorry to say I met only briefly. It has been some years since I’ve passed through Nadeau, but I have been told that the local museum has a special Mary Swann display.
I send you best wishes for good health and for a happy Christmas.
Yours,
F. Cruzzi
P.S. Since we’ve met before, you’ll recognize me easily, though I am somewhat more tottery than I was when we talked at the Library Association.
Frederic Cruzzi: His Dreams
Everyone is familiar with the Persian poet Rashid and what he has written about the power of dreams, how if all the dreams dreamt by men on a single random night were gathered into a bundle and hurled into the early morning sky, the blaze of it would:
…put to shame
The paltry shrivelled,
Fires of the sun.
When Frederic Cruzzi’s wife, Hildë, was alive, the two of them occasionally made gifts to each other of their dreams as they moved about in their large old-fashioned kitchen preparing breakfast. Hildë, rhythmically buttering toast, described wild animals, brightly coloured food, sudden nakedness, and misplaced objects, objects that remained stubbornly unidentified.
Cruzzi himself, ever the editor, was sometimes guilty of polishing his disjointed dreams for Hildë’s benefit, giving them a sense of shape and applying small, elegant, decorative touches. (There are many modes of estrangement, the poet Rashid has observed, and elegance is one.) Cruzzi’s dreams, as conveyed to Hildë, were filled with flowers, with long healing conversations, with the whimsical or heroic defiance of gravity. A lack of linearity lent charm, and still does. He is forever in his dreams bumping his forehead against some surprise of texture or weather or, even at age eighty, watching his hands, which are the symbols, the messengers, of his whole self, travelling across a landscape of undiscovered female bodies, breasts, clefts, thighs, ankles—and all these mountains and vales pinned down by the patient cobalt eyes of his wife, Hildë.
Ever since her death a year ago—a single cataclysmic explosion of the cranial artery—Cruzzi has kept his dreams to himself. He would sooner plunge his hand into boiling water than bore his good friends with his dreams. (Whereas these same friends approach the subject of their dreams rather frequently, and whenever they do Cruzzi knows he’s in for a dull time of it.)
Nevertheless, his dreams continue, and are, if anything, more varied, more vivid, more Dadaist in their narration, and more persistent in their reaching after odd tossed chunks of history. Their pursuit of him into old age amazes him, and he is perplexed always by their utter uselessness, sometimes comparing their substance to the magically soft, recurring skin of lint he peels from the steel mesh in the door of the electric clothes dryer. (There’s a certain pleasure in this peeling, he thinks; but to what use can the clean, gathered handful of fluff be put?)
The idea that dreams are the involuntary poetry of the mind appeals to him, but he rejects it. He is also by nature skeptical of that theory that dreams accumulate and become part of the making and unmaking of the universe, and equally distrusts the notion that dreams exorcise guilt or fear or mend the imagination. He doesn’t know what he believes, and remains as baffled as the poet Mary Swann (cosmic cousin to the great Rashid) who felt herself tormented by:
What seems
A broken memory that tears
At whitened nerves
Like useless dreams
The night preserves
In sealed undreamed-
Of jars.
Early in September, or perhaps late in August, after a short afternoon’s walk in the woods that began behind his house, Cruzzi fell asleep in an armchair by an open window, and in his first breath caught a glimpse of his mother’s white hand attempting to open a bottle of mineral water and, after making a struggle of it, handing it to her husband. In the foreground, a red cloth is spread on the grass, a picnic is in progress, and the sleeping Cruzzi catches with his second breath the round Muslim face of his father—soft, slightly overripe, as smooth and hairless as a pear, and made even rounder by a wonderful spreading candour. How they smile, the two of them! The radiance of their smiles forms the melody that keeps this dream aloft, even as a fly buzzes in Cruzzi’s ear, threatening to whisk the picnic cloth out of sight and overturn the bottle of mineral water. The smiles of the two picnickers are directed upward into the leaves of a small dusty tree, at each other, at the rippling water poured from the bottle, and at Cruzzi himself who is somehow there and not there.
Walking through this dream, and through all Cruzzi’s dreams, are the stout, sun-browned legs of his wife, Hildë. Mahogany is how he thinks of those legs, solid, polished lengths of hardwood between walking shorts and laced boots, legs brought to full strength on her annual hiking tours in the Appalachians or along the Bruce Trail. The roundness of Hildë’s brown thighs on the picnic cloth overwhelms the multiplicity
of other forms and gestures and brings a whimper to Cruzzi’s groin, breaking through the fragile arrangement of sandwiches and fruit and pulling him slowly and painfully to consciousness. In October, on that particular Saturday night when clocks are officially turned back one hour, Cruzzi sleeps soundly, thanks to a nightcap of warm whisky. It is almost as though the fibres still strong beneath his aged, flaking skin are fused to those other fibres that make up the smooth cotton sheets of his bed.
But toward morning, perhaps because of the dislocation of the single unaccommodated hour, his sleep is invaded by violence. The violence comes in the form of a voice that achieves a loudness rare in dreams. It goes on and on, booming against the tight weave of the sheets, and Cruzzi, sleeping, his hands curled into fists, struggles to hear what the voice is saying, but can hear only a roar of anger and injury. It is his own voice, of course, and this makes his inability to distinguish words all the more frustrating. An oldfashioned clock strikes the hour and announces that the floor—for a patterned floor has suddenly established itself in the void—is tilting dangerously. Hildë is running, her strong brown legs frightened, trying to keep her balance; but the voice, loud enough now to tighten a muscle in Cruzzi’s shoulder and bid him turn on his side, threatens to pull down the floor along with the slippery tiled walls and the beautiful ceiling tracked with blue-black hieroglyphics, which, because of their astringent colour and configuration, remain maddeningly unreadable.
Cruzzi, still sleeping, shifts the whole of his body and brings a bony thumb into the cavity of his mouth.
Landscapes, earthquakes and sharp cliffs give way suddenly to an Alpine meadow and warm sunlight. (It is a cold night in Kingston, the temperature reaches minus ten, low for this time of year, and Cruzzi gropes in his sleep for the wool-filled quilt he keeps at the foot of the bed.)
Hildë is laughing, pulling away from him, and showing a smile that has turned provisional. Then she is arranging fruit in a bowl, placing the plums carefully so that the soft blue cleft that marks each one catches a streak of lustre from the sun. But no—it’s not the sun, but the moon. She dances lightly into his arms, giving him the kind of embrace that promises nothing, then whirls away on legs that are thinner, whiter, that shine from calf to thigh with a strange lacteal whiteness. (Cruzzi wakens briefly, scratches his genitals, acknowledges soreness in his joints, and is carried with his next exhalation through the doorway of a cottage where he discovers a stairway, corridors, a great hall brilliantly lit, a table set for twelve, and stately music.)
The face on the television screen has been talking for several minutes now. The subject is Libya, a hijacked plane, a terrorist’s telephone call, impossible demands. Gadaffi appears briefly, peers with fanatical eyes into the camera, then wavers and flickers. After a minute his wide retreating image seems to float. Cruzzi can feel his own face begin to fade and dissolve into a miasma of dots—then his brown-speckled hand on his coffee cup and then the length of his arm. He is being eaten up by light. He is a young man standing in the corridor of a train and in his hand is a postcard. Hieroglyphics again, but this time he struggles harder to make them out. The words are in French, written very large, and they promise foolishness, gaiety, passion, love … especially love.
Snow is everywhere, filling up the woods behind Cruzzi’s house and the crevasses between the drifts of his breath. From nowhere comes a saving hand, warm, pale in colour, talcum enriched, a gold ring gleaming, a few muffled words that point toward a dream inside this dream, a house-like cave built into a hillside.
But the door is sealed by pressure, his bladder again, then a seizure of coughing, and numbness in the feet, and his loud voice filling the kitchen. Hildë is weeping, her brown arms over her eyes, and he is striking out at her with his voice, with his hand, even his fist, so that she falls under the snow, which is deeper than ever now and so heavy that he must scramble like a madman in his effort to rescue her.
Frederic Cruzzi: His Short Untranscribed History of the Peregrine Press: 1956–1976
The Kingston Banner, even before Frederic Cruzzi arrived from England to be its editor, had perforce been something of an anomaly as a regional newspaper, its constituency being an uneasy yoking of town and gown, farmers, civil servants, and petit-bourgeoisie. Its advertisers were the owners of such small, conservative family businesses as the Princess Tearoom and Diamond Bros. Colonial Furniture Emporium, but its most vociferous readers were revolutionaries and progressives of the academic stripe. The Banner’s editorial policy, as a result, tended to be skittish, gliding between pragmatic waltz and feinting soft-shoe, and for that reason was always, and still is, perused with a knowing wink of the eye. This is accepted by everybody. It is also accepted that the real battles are fought on the Letters-to-the-Editor page, which occasionally spills over to a second page and once—in 1970, with the War Measures Act—to a third. Here, despite quaint temporary alliances and retreats into unanimity, the struggle assumes those classic polarities between those who would stand still and those who would move forward.
The boisterous, ongoing warfare of the Letters page has mostly been regarded by Cruzzi as analogous to a healthy game of societal tennis, both amusing and lifegiving. Sometimes, too, it yields an inch of enlightenment. But warfare abruptly stops at the Entertainment page. Even among those readers who would never dream of subscribing to the Kingston Regional Theatre or the fledgling Eastern Ontario Symphony, and who would rather dive naked into a patch of summer thistle than be caught reading one of the books reviewed in the Banner, there is a silent consensus that art is somehow privileged and deserving of protection. A dirty book discovered in a school library may raise a brief fuss, but the general concept of art is sacred in the Kingston region, and lip service, if nothing else, is paid to it.
When Cruzzi took over the Banner he was bemused, and so was Hildë, by a long-running feature on the Entertainment page known as “The Poet’s Corner.” A number of local poets, mostly elderly, always genteel, vied for this small weekly space, dropping off batches of sonnets at the Banner office on Second Street, as well as quatrains, sestinas, limericks, haiku, bumpity-bump, and shrimpy dactyls, all attached to such unblushing titles as “Seagull Serenade,” “Springtime Reverie,” “Ode to Fort Henry,” “Birches at Eventide,” “The Stalwart Flag Old Sadie,” “The First Bluebird,” “Sailors Ahoy,” “Cupid in Action,” “The Trillium,” “The Old Thrashing Crew,” “The Eve of Virtue,” and so on. Payment, regardless of length or verse form, was five dollars, but this rather small sum in no way discouraged the number of submissions. Cruzzi, in his first month in Kingston, looked carefully at both quantity and quality and immediately announced plans to terminate “The Poet’s Corner.”
What a fool he was in those days, he with his heavy tweed suits and strangely unbarbered hair, his queer way of talking, his manners and pronouncements. The public outcry over the cancellation of “The Poet’s Corner” was unprecedented and appeared to come from all quarters of the community. He was labelled a philistine and a brute journalist of the modern school. The word foreigner was invoked: Frenchy, Limey, Wog—there was understandable confusion here. Readers might be willing to tolerate the new typeface imposed on them, and no one seemed to miss the old “Pie of the Week” feature when it disappeared from the Women’s page, but they refused to surrender Li’l Abner and “The Poet’s Corner.” Culture was culture. Even the advertisers became restless, and Cruzzi, in the interest of comity and suffering a heretic’s embarrassment, capitulated, though he let it be known that there would be a two-year interregnum on seagull poems.
In time, because the Kingston literary community was small, he and Hildë befriended and grew fond of the local poets. Cruzzi even took a certain glee in the awfulness of their product. Herb Farlingham’s poem “Springtime Reverie,” for instance (“Mrs. Robin in feathered galoshes/Splashes in puddles chirping ‘O my goshes!’ ”), gave him moments of precious hilarity that were especially welcome after a day spent composing careful, pointed, balanc
ed, and doomed-to-be-ignored editorials on the arms race or the threat of McCarthyism.
In 1955, toward the end of a long golden summer, Cruzzi opened an envelope addressed to “The Poet’s Corner,” and out fell a single poem, typed for once, titled “Anatomy of a Passing Thought” written by one Kurt Wiesmann of William Avenue, just two streets from Byron Road where Cruzzi and Hildë lived. The sixteen-line poem possessed grace and strength. Light seemed to shine through it. Cruzzi read it quickly, with amazement. One line, toward the end, briefly alarmed him by veering toward sentimentality, but the next line answered back, mocking, witty, and containing that spacey necessary bridge that in the best poetry joins binocular clarity to universal vision. Extraordinary.
It was 5:30 in the afternoon. He took a deep breath and rubbed a hand through his thick, still-unbarbered hair. Hildë was expecting him at home for a picnic supper with friends. Already she would have set the table under the trees, a red table cloth, wine glasses turned upside down, paper napkins folded and weighed down by cutlery. Nevertheless he sat down at his desk and wrote Mr. Wiesmann a letter telling him why his poem was unsuitable for the Banner. It was unrhymed. It had no regular metre. It did not celebrate nature, or allude to God, or even to Kingston and its environs. It did not tug at the heartstrings or touch the tear ducts and was in no way calculated to bring forth a gruff chuckle of recognition; in short it was too good for “The Poet’s Corner.” He ended the letter, “Yours resignedly, F. Cruzzi,” surprising himself; he had not realized his own resignation until that moment. (Rationality won’t rescue this scene the way, say, a footnote can save a muddled paragraph, but it might be argued that Cruzzi, by this time, had acquired an understanding and even a respect for his readers’ sensibilities.)