Murther and Walking Spirits

  What do the Yanks know of England?

  No, not England. Not even the Never-Never Land of Wodehouse. The Old Country. The Country That Never Was. What does that poem call it? The Land of Lost Content…. What was it, come to that? Not all lavender. Don’t you think it was. The fish and the corduroy trousis. The dirty stories of the tailors, which I wasn’t supposed to hear. Nasty Bowen, who hung around the Lion Yard and would drink a cup of his piss for a penny. And many a penny he had, from boys like me who wanted to see if it would kill him, as it was supposed to do. Fred ffrench and I clubbed together a ha’penny each, for a try. And we made sure it was the right thing, and not some beer he’d substituted on the sly. Did Nasty drop dead? Not he. Lived to drink again. Liz Duckett and Jack the Jockey – I knew something about them, sure enough. Sin, but they seemed to thrive on it. Poor old Liz. The Pater used to send her money he could ill afford, every month, because she’d been faithful when we were down on our luck. I took that over, as soon as I could afford it. Till she died. Lance would never send her a penny. Lance became hard. Or maybe just sensible. I never help the weak, he said, when I put it up to him. Hard. But there’s good sense in it, too. No amount of help can make the weak strong. A good heart, old Liz. Died of syphilis, I suppose, as anybody might have foreseen. But even syphilitics know what it is to be hungry…. Struggle, struggle, struggle. That’s what it’s been. Brocky laughs when I say so. You must have had some fun somewhere along the way, he says. But I emphasize the struggle with him. He’s had an easy passage, so far. Education. Mind you, he seems to take to it. I can’t say I ever did, though I’ve picked up a few things here and there on my way. I’m surprised sometimes how much I know that people with far better chances than I ever had don’t know. Poetry. Always liked it, though Brocky says I have a sweet tooth. A Shropshire Lad. Yes, I find myself in a lot of that, though I was a next-door Montgomeryshire lad. The other side of the Wrekin. Yes and the Breidden, too.

  What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

  But that came later. When I tackled education, I was sure education had to hurt…. The books I bought! Ten-cent classics. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the very first, and I have it still. Somewhere. I couldn’t get beyond page three. Jimmy King tells me Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic, and a tough old bird. Preached detachment from the outer world, and the brotherhood of man. Fat chance I had of detaching myself from the outer world! I had to struggle not to be eaten alive by it. But the brotherhood of man – yes. I liked that better than the Methodist doctrine of Christian love, which always seemed a bit sticky to me. You can love a brother, but you don’t have to crawl all over him and lick his sores, like that Francis of Assisi. I had a shot at him. A nut. I even bought Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Second-hand, but still a full seventy-five cents. Couldn’t understand a word. That convinced me that I was really stupid. But somehow I managed to get along. I wish I had been able to get a real education. But look at Jimmy King. A professor, but what has his knowledge made of him? Tries to borrow money from me. Has never put by a penny in his life. Work! … Night school. Hard sledding after a full day at the Courier. But it was there I discovered the reading I really liked. Poetry. Not many people in the class cared about it because most of them wanted accounting and shorthand. I did those, but I squeezed in Literature. Tennyson, Swinburne. The poetry that was nearest to music. I suppose music and poetry took the place of religion, for me. Do so still, I think, though Brocky says it’s cheap music and cheap poetry. How easily the educated young dismiss your props and stays! Religion had withered for me. As if a bunch of flowers had turned into those rustling, dry corpses of flowers that Vina keeps all winter and calls “everlastings.” Dust-catchers. Poetry and music … Of course music was what we had at home. My sister Maude, a fine musician. Church organist at seventeen. Could play anything at sight. What evenings we had, every Sunday! We all sang. Lance and I were best in “Watchman, What of the Night?” There was a duet! A real bowel-shaker, as Hardy makes somebody say. I was the fearful, despairing Soul, in the tenor, and Lance was a terrific bass as the Reassuring Spirit.

  Tenor: Say, watchman, what of the night?

  Do the dews of the morning fall?

  Have the orient skies a border of light

  Like the fringe of a funeral pall? –

  Bass: The night is fast waning on high

  And soon shall the darkness flee

  And the morn shall spread o’er the blushing sky

  And bright shall its glories be.

  Me, pathetic and in dread of death, and Lance like great, powerful Hope, and Maude thundering away in that rich accompaniment when we joined voices and I plucked up spirit and we really brought the roof down on

  That night is near, and the cheerless tomb

  Shall keep thy body in store

  Till the morn of eternity rise on the gloom

  And the night shall be no more!

  That always made the Mater weep. But happy tears, because it was the Christian promise made into music. Poor Mater; the first to go. And Elaine would sing Tosti’s “Good-Bye,” and we all had wet eyes. Happy misery, Brocky calls it. Happy Welsh misery. But it fed us as his taste in music certainly doesn’t. Nobody sings that stuff any more. Indeed, I never hear anybody sing now, who isn’t paid to do it. We sang because we couldn’t help it…. Vina sang at some of those evenings, after we were married. A really good contralto. Her star piece was something German by somebody called Böhm. “Still Wie die Nacht.” But of course she sang it in English:

  Still as the night,

  Deep as the sea –

  Should love, thy love e’er be!

  That’s asking for a good deal, certainly, from a talkative Welsh husband. But when she sang

  Glowing as steel

  As rock firm and free

  Shall love, my love e’er be!

  I had a sense that she was singing from the heart. As rock firm and free. That’s her loyalty, and mine as well. Because through all the ups and downs we’ve been loyal. Except for that one thing. But there’s no point in worrying about that now…. Poor Maude. Died young. Consumption, of course. Runs in the family. Jimmy King calls it the disease of romance, but it doesn’t look very romantic when you see somebody near the end. Horror and pain. Could hardly bear to be touched. But poor Maude had a terrible blow. Cruelly jilted, not a month before the wedding. Now, it seems, consumption is pretty much a thing of the past. Brocky is sometimes near it. I know the look. Julia. Why are so many in our family fools about women? … I was certainly a fool about Elsie Hare. But when she dropped me and married Elmer Vansickle I got over it. Wouldn’t be beaten by a girl. That marriage never prospered. Vansickle couldn’t hold a job. A boozer. Met Elsie a few years ago at the Toronto Exhibition. Wouldn’t have known her if she hadn’t told me who she was. Had run to fat and she’d lost a front tooth, and stuck a piece of adhesive tape over the hole. Pathetic! She had a kind of soothering way of talking. Not humble, but respectful. Respectful to me! When I’d been a slave to her, and she certainly must have remembered that. A lucky escape. Her grammar was terrible. She’d have disgraced me, which Vina has never done. Vina was on the upward path, like me, and for a while we climbed together. Twin Battleships, as Bernard Shaw says in that play. What happened? That awful row, I suppose. Nothing could have been quite the same after that. But she’s been loyal. We’ve both been loyal. I know she frets about the women I meet, and certainly some of them are charming, but they haven’t got what she’s got. Inherited from Loyalist forebears? Possibly. I believe heredity is discredited now by the people who think they know. But I have a tailoring background, and I know that the best broadcloth isn’t made of second-grade wool…. What will become of Brocky? He’s got good stuff in him, on both sides, though he makes fun of his mother’s ideas, and mine. But he’s not really close-woven. A bit slack to the hand, as Uncle David used to say when he fingered a piece of stuff. He knew, even if he did finish up married
to the Angel. Mary Evans the Angel. Not that she was an angel, but she owned the Angel Inn. A good pub. Right by St. Mary’s Church, where the Angel Inn has to be. The Angel of the Angelus, named in the days when churches and pubs weren’t as far apart as the Methodists thought they should be. The Angel was a happy pub. I hope old David lived happily, rotten though he was to the Pater. Old David liked freedom and a merry life better than respectability…. I’ve read this story to the end, and I don’t think I’ve taken in a word. But of course I’ve read it many times. Wodehouse never fails. Like music, almost. Meaning, but never an exact meaning that you can seize. Just feeling. That’s what I read him for, I suppose. He makes a reality of the Land of Lost Content, or a part of it…. Vina’s gone to bed, but I know she’s not asleep. She’s waiting for me to come up and say good-night. Min’s taken up that bloody hot milk. I tell Vina it’s constipating, and constipation breeds God knows what illnesses, but nothing will break her of the habit. Autointoxication.

  “Well, I don’t know what you’re going to do, Brocky, but I’m going to bed.”

  And I know what you’ll do, my son. You’ll play music – Tchaikovsky – very quietly, and feed your misery about Julia. Happy misery, and don’t think you’ve escaped it, because I know better. It’s just that you feed it with different music.

  (6)

  BROCHWEL: (When his father has left the library, and has had time to mount the stairs and reach Malvina’s bedroom, where he will chat for a few minutes before he puts out her light, Brochwel does indeed put a record on the Orthophonic, turning the volume down low. It is not Tchaikovsky; it is a record he takes from his university briefcase; its title is “June in January” and it is played and sung in the weakly plaintive, almost whimpering style of the time.

  It’s June in January

  Because I’m in love –)

  “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.” Noel Coward. Place the quotation, Mr. Gilmartin. Private Lives. And how right he is. This gets to me as better stuff doesn’t. Because my feelings are cheap? No; because this is the voice of my generation and all popular romanticism inclines toward cheapness, and I can’t expect to escape it. Not completely, or I’d be a prig. I know better, or think I do. When I want the music of romanticism I turn on the Big Boys and my elders think

  If that’s not good enough for him

  Which is good enough for me,

  Why, what a very cultivated kind of youth

  This kind of youth must be.

  G & S. And very good stuff, too. A lot more wisdom in it than most people think. What’s that –

  The pain that is all but a pleasure will change

  For the pleasure that’s all but pain –

  Nobody includes that in his Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, editor. But old “Q” has room for some stuff that isn’t nearly as close to the mark. I wish Frosty wouldn’t always call him “Q” as if he was an intimate friend. Doctor James Pliny Whitney Frost, the eminent poet and lecturer, Professor of Eng-Lang-and-Lit at Waverley University. The personification of poetry and good taste, as presented to the young. Never try a quote from Noel Coward on Frosty. Not a bad guy, if only he wasn’t so bloody impeccable. Give me old Jimmy King who will always be Number Two to Frosty because he Drinks. I’ve seen him Drinking right in this room. Dad keeps very good Scotch…. “I’m a teetotaller, but not a bigoted one, ” Jimmy says, when his eyes are swimming, as if we’d never heard it before. I’m the pride and joy of both Frosty and Jimmy because I know how to write the kind of essays they like; impeccable for Frosty, and rather more peccable, but funnier, for Jimmy. I understand very well how to be a Pride and Joy to my teachers, and I play it to the hilt. But not a pride and joy to Dad and Mother. I’d have to be something other than a Grade A student of Eng-Lang-and-Lit to make the Grade A with them. I’d have to give up Julia…. Why does Mother hate her so? Because she does, though she’s all good manners and “graciousness” when I have the nerve to ask Julia here. That’s when Mother speaks with all her nineteenth-century clarity and correctness. It’s that ass Bidwell who keeps telling me that Mother is “gracious,” which he thinks is a very fine thing to say about an older woman. Bidwell: my rival in Eng-Lang-and-Lit, but he never quite tops me. Can’t, because, although he knows everything and has read everything, and reads Virginia Woolf and gives papers about her to the English Club, he’s never had a real feeling in his life. Or if he has, he takes good care to keep it out of his essays. That time he made Frosty furious by hinting that there was something dicey about Tennyson’s friendship with Hallam – that was when the shit hit the fan! … “I’m not sure I fully understand what you are suggesting, Mr. Bidwell, but if what I dimly apprehend is correct I must ask you never to make such a suggestion in this class again.” I knew better than anybody in the class what Bidwell was suggesting because he suggested it to me one warm spring night and I hope I was tactful in my refusal. Don’t want to hurt his feelings but No Thanks! … Bidwell knows all about Oscar Wilde, who must be handled with kid gloves, at Waverley in this year of grace. Bidwell has read about Wilde’s trial in the Notable British Trials series, which he wormed out of the Reserved Shelves in the library. But he didn’t know that the person who lured Wilde into those treacherous bypaths was a Canadian. Yes, Robert Ross, a member of one of our First Families. An odd footnote to Canada’s meagre association with Eng-Lang-and-Lit, but this is an odd country. Wilde, betrayed by those errand boys and out-of-work valets. Why didn’t he see through them?

  An habitation giddy and unsure

  Hath he that buildeth on the vulgar heart.

  Place the quotation, Mr. Gilmartin. Yes sir. Henry IV, Part 2. Do you think it means that Shakespeare was a snob, Mr. G? Not necessarily, Professor JPWF. Maybe it just means that Shakespeare knew his onions, and how many beans made five and a few things like that. Anyway, snobs aren’t always wrong. Q: Are you a snob, Mr. G? A: From time to time, sir, as occasion serves and the situation demands, like yourself and the rest of us…. There’s nobody who doesn’t hold himself superior to somebody is there, sir? We academic snobs, now. Not that I class myself with you, sir, but I am beginning to see people in terms of what they know about Eng-Lang-and-Lit. That isn’t easy…. My mother, now, thinks Thomas Hardy is the bee’s knees and the feline’s slumberwear, but I notice that she turns to Les Misérables and tonight she was reading St. Elmo which must surely hold some sort of award for the Most Awful Novel. What am I to make of that? There is no accounting for tastes, to which Aunt Min invariably adds, “as the old woman said when she kissed the cow.” And my father, who reads P. G. Wodehouse over and over again, and then stuns me by coming out with a scrap of Ossian that he learned at his mother’s knee. I’ve never read Ossian, though I suppose I ought to take a peep, some time…. What did I learn at my mother’s knee? Swiss Family Robinson, which isn’t too bad, and The Water Babies, which bears the Prof JPWF Stamp of Approval as genuine Eng-Lang-and-Lit and which must also be one of the beastliest, most finger-wagging books ever written for children even by a Low Church parson, but also Sammy and Susie Littletail and Bunny Fluffkins’ Birthday Party, which aren’t any kind of Lit…. Q: Has anybody, possibly excepting you, sir, Prof JPWF, ever been brought up on a strict diet of the Best That Has Been Thought and Said? We all need to take aboard a certain amount of rubbish to keep us human (again excepting you, Prof). Like “It’s June in January,” so let’s have it again, shall we? Would it surprise you to learn, Prof, that I grew up on a heavy diet of the comic strips – yes, the despised Funny Papers – and that I still gobble quite a few of them every day? Mutt and Jeff has provided me with many a treasured phrase. “Such ignorance is indeed refreshing,” says Mutt, when Jeff has insisted on spelling Eugene with a U. And Jeff says, “Mutt will throw a jealous fit,” when he has himself engaged the affections of that fair enslaver, Miss Klutz. And “Insect!” and “Lowbrow!” as Maggie says when she beans Jiggs with the rolling-pin. I have to have this stuff as the drug addict has to have hi
s snort. It keeps me from sinking under the sheer weight of excellence, of aspiration, of insight, of transcendent beauty, which is Eng-Lang-and-Lit. The mind can only endure so much grandeur. Or my mind, anyhow. Obviously not yours, Prof…. Q: Tell me Prof, how in God’s name did you come to be saddled with the name of James Pliny Whitney? … Not that JPW was inconsiderable. By no means. He was no slouch, and his finest achievement was to bring Niagara Falls right into everybody’s room, like Love in Bloom, twinkling and shuddering into a glass bulb with a tiny prickle on the end. Yes, our never-sufficiently-to-be-praised Hydro Electric Power System sprang from the loins – pardon the seeming indelicacy, Prof – of James Pliny Whitney…. Q: Was that it? Did your parents foresee in a vision, when you were still snoozing in the womb, that you would bring another kind of light into the lives of Young Canada? The Light of Eng-Lang-and-Lit? The light that never was on sea or land until chaps like you channelled it down into a thousand shimmering, shuddering light-bulbs like me, to say nothing of an infinitely greater number of dim bulbs, fit only for the clothes closets and the boarding-house-back-halls of academia? And all with our little prickle at the bottom, for piercing and deflating people who question our authority, as you yourself so efficiently do, Prof? Ah yes, I see it now. Your name, James Pliny Whitney Frost, is one of those splendid puns that life delights in and that only a few people see. People like me…. “June in January” has ceased to feed my melancholy. So what now? “Love in Bloom”?