Leonara's Passion

Sunlight streamed through the slats of the blind, throwing fingers of light over the bed. Motes of dust shifted lazily through the streams of light. He stirred beside her; moaned lightly in his sleep. She strained to hear; was that someone's name? That most intrusive of curiosities, wanting to know, in a careless kind of way, the most intimate of another's needs.

She had been awake since dawn, studying him. To look at him like that, unaware, with no protective devices in place. Smooth cheeks, no blemishes, like a girl's. Hair tumbling in chestnut loops over his forehead, his ears. Vulnerable. That pleased her, the thought of his seeming vulnerability.

She felt tempted to bring her hand up, stroke the marbled shoulder closest to her. Instead, she brought her hand up to stroke her left breast, lingeringly. Her hand travelled with an impetus of its own to her face, then traced the scar on her cheekbone.

She turned again in his direction, was startled to see him watching her. She smiled and stretched, deliberately provocative, voluptuously. His face remained impassive yet strangely searching, wanting something of her.

He threw the light covering off and rose, walked toward the window, wordlessly. Stood there looking out, back turned to her. Like Donatello's 'David', she mused. Well formed but light, almost feline. Of course it was Michelangelo's 'David' that she preferred. As an art object, that is. As a sex object she preferred the artless helplessness of the perpetual adolescent. Eternal mother, warm and ready to receive - not nurture, receive.

All-embracing in a discriminating kind of way. Everywhere her venue. Belonging to no one and everyone. Like public property with a private lease. And this way, she mused with familiar satisfaction, life was less of a bloody bore. She needed these distractions as a release from business tension, as a cathartic outlet. And why bloody-well not?

She straightened up and shifted to her back to clasp her hands around the back of her neck, stare up at the ceiling, review her schedule. This would be a day of decisions. She had to draw up the season's calendar of public events. A Harold Brown retrospective for certain. He was currently enjoying a renaissance of public interest, might as well cash in on it. And what about a special showing of French impressionist pen-and-ink drawings? Could think of inviting the French ambassador to open the exhibition at a gala reception. Have to check the budget, think about the wine list. Talk to Sara about bringing over Jackson's exquisite mushroom drawings. She could mount that exhibition in much the same manner as the National Gallery, using excerpts from his diary to highlight the total effect. Look into the rumour of that Renoir going up for grabs; she could stretch the acquisition budget to allow for a prestigious coup.

"Well?"

She winced at the intrusion, resented her broken train of thought. Turned to regard him. His voice sounded surprisingly firm considering his state. He was picking at his fingers, again. He knew she hated that. People should control their ambitions, their emotions a little better than that. This was a civilized world they moved in.

Not straining herself with a verbal reply, she raised her eyebrows questioningly. Despite herself, annoyance turned to pleasure as the curator took over. With the sunlight playing over his flesh she could almost imagine him encapsulated in amber. Pity. As a specimen he would be simpler to deal with.

She would simply have to exercise a little more choice in future - be less eclectic? And by all means look for someone less ... what, dependent? Yes. More mature, less needy. A military type, for example. With the stunningly cruel yet beautiful face of Verrocchio's 'Condottiere'.

The sardonic half smile on her face was for herself, not for him, waiting for her response, glowering like an ill-tempered child.

"Yes, David?"
"David!"
"Sorry, Brian." She yawned, amused by the tremor in his voice.
"What's the matter? What's been happening?" His voice pleading. He meant to play on her sympathies. That was certainly assuming a great deal.

The floor creaked lightly as he walked toward the bed, settled on the rug, then leaned his head on the sheet thrown lightly over her, his eyes calf-like, appealing. She adored his long lashes.

"Absolutely nothing. There is nothing at all going on. Unless, of course" she said coquettishly, "you consider the marvellous break you're getting. A show of your own. Toronto's newest darling of the nouveau-arty set."

"Right ... and I'm grateful, of course I am! But you know that's not what I mean."
"...of course, non-objective art ... these surrealist abstractions don't do anything for me. A personal opinion, you understand." She tilted her face toward him, smiled warmly.
"Yes, I ..."

"I much prefer the Italian masters. However, I have it on absolutely impeccable authority that the latest craze among those who can afford it is for these little avant garde constructions of yours. How would you categorize them, Darling, pastiches?"
"Actually ..."
"...and with the right kind of presentation - which is what this show is all about ..."
"Goddammit! Never mind that now!" He brought his face closer, the earnest look on his face, the intensity with which he regarded her ....

"Brian, dear!"
"Look, you've got to level with me! I have to know!"
"Daarling" she drawled, wondering how long it would take him to finally accept the tedious inevitable. "Is it true that those little pellets you litter your canvases with, the ones you spray with that horrid aluminum paint - are they really rabbit droppings?"

"Jee-sus! You're not even listening to me! Yeah, that's what they are, all right. Shit! And that's what you think my work is too, I know that. Now please, give me some idea of where we're at!"

"Oh, sorry Love. Where we're at?" She repeated, then paused and the silence and his expectations weighted the air around them, suddenly made her sick of the game.
"Well, exactly nowhere" she finally pronounced, articulating carefully.
"Just like that?" He demanded incredulously. "Everything was fine. It was, wasn't it? What'd I do wrong?"

His breath breezed stale cigarettes, liquor, an altogether unsavoury excess. Her nose twitched, like a rabbit, she told herself, suppressing a giggle. Ill-timed, dearie, that would most surely devastate the poor dear, the dolt. Remember what Mama taught you; only resort to ridicule when all else fails. Give him another chance to muster his resources. She drew away and propped herself on an elbow, her hair shifting over her shoulders.

"Nothing, nothing is wrong. You've done nothing. Comes a time when a relationship has nothing to keep it going."
"How can you say that?" How can he sound so anguished? Marvellous, had no idea he had thespian talents as well. Might recommend he explore that option, give up the dabbling in oils - some other time, when he'd be more receptive to good advice.

"I'm a romantic, an inveterate romantic" she sighed. "And Lovey, there's nothing left. I'm ready to move on."

He turned away, hugged his arms around his bent knees. The silence encompassed the dishevelled bed, the stale air, his brooding figure, her condescension; her patience which was wearing thin. Old girl, she reminded herself, be kind, remember what Mama always said.

Tedious! And last night's party at the Purple Pansy; an utter bore. Waste of time ... almost. Was getting tired of all the little arty-farty backstabbings, whining. And the bloody tantrum he threw! Just because ... what the hell was his name, now?

"I satisfy you, don't I? Well?" She mocked with vigour. Blew him a well-rounded kiss.

He drew his breath. So audibly, oh dear! "You cold bitch! You're frigid, that's what's wrong!" His voice breaking, sounding almost, she thought with relish, like a castrato. Really!"
"That's better" she said, her voice deliberately encouraging. "That's more like it! Get it out of your head, let it all hang out, Lovey."

"No...I..." he disclaimed, his voice stricken now, head bent like a broken puppet's, in despair.
"It's therapeutic" she assured him. Godamm! If it isn't time for this little bedroom farce to end, she thought, with growing irritation.

He rose from the floor, hung his face pleadingly over hers. "I didn't mean it. I'm frustrated. It just ...." He began striding about the room, back and forth. Splendid, a caged pussycat.

Her eye caught the helmet glimmering on top of the French armoire. Photography was her own medium, her forte, and he had been persuaded to pose for her last night; a tipsy Cupid, resplendent in his glowing nakedness, the metal helmet set awry on his head, posing obligingly. Oh, call them Adonis, Salai or David, they're all the same; fey sprites in love with themselves and vehemently denying it.

Why didn't he go? These scenes were so damn predictable. She really was getting sick of these pseudo-incestuous relationships.

Her attention turned back to him, striding the floor. She wasn't entirely insensitive. But it might be just what he needed, a bit of anguish; self-manufactured or not, this blow to his self-esteem. Excite, perhaps, his latent genius. How droll.

She watched him stop before the portrait dominating the wall before the bed. With him, she appraised the self-portrait of the Great Man, ran her eyes over the flowing beard, the piercing eyes that bespoke his genius. "This goddamn picture! How can you stand it staring down at you all the time? Everywhere you turn, those eyes follow. It gives me the creeps!"

She glanced at the clock on the night table, yanked the sheet off herself and slid out of the bed to stride, finally, into the bathroom. Placing herself on the toilet, grateful for its unexpected warmth, she waited. Not bothering to shut the door, she grinned at him watching from the other room, his face stricken, mouth gulping air like a drowning guppy.

His face crumpled, his breathing resounded in shallow gulps. Turning with a piercing shout he plucked his clothes off the floor, slapped them hastily on; the whole thing taking seconds, then exited, slamming the door behind him, resoundingly.

She sighed, rose, flushed the toilet.

Turning the taps on full, she began to run her bath, sprinkled salts into the rushing water, the aromatic fragrance of a heady musk rising with the steam to fill the lavender-coloured room. She sniffed appreciatively and padded back to the bedroom, briefly surveyed the mess.

She lifted a snifter from her bureau. Some brandy left. She warmed it with her hands, held the glass up to observe more closely the colour shimmering on the sides of the glass, then tilted it and played her tongue in the viscous liquid.

Hands on her ample hips, she stood before the picture of the Maestro, da Vinci. the bathroom thundered a waterfall. Water, she recalled, was thought to portray sensuality ... the background of the Mona Lisa, that half-wittish, asexual creature, that clever joke.

"Old Misanthrope" she murmured. "Two can play at that game."

 

The Innocence of Rasputin

Recently I read a news report that Rasputin's daughter Marie had died of a heart attack in California. Apparently, she had been busy the last few years co-authoring a book attempting to exonerate her father of what she claimed were 'calumniating infamies'.

Coincidentally, I had a dream shortly afterward. I recall waking from the dream disturbed, yet only one scene remained clear; that I was in a bucolic setting and there saw my uncle walking toward me. He looked young and sported a full head of hair, which seemed peculiar in itself since I'd never known him young and he'd always been bald. As he approached me he began to diminish in size and his clothes appeared to melt until he stood before me wearing a fatuous smile and nothing else; a naked imp. That same dream occurred three nights in succession.

Guilt. It was as simple as that; I felt subliminally guilty because I'd impugned his memory. "Rachel, I have bad news for you", my kid brother Barry had said, calling from Toronto. His voice sounded half-strangled, a poor connection I thought.

"What?" I gulped, imagining all kinds of disasters that might really have mattered to me.
"Uncle Frank died."

At first it didn't quite penetrate. I mean, my first reaction was, why was this bad news? After all, the man had been sick for a while, he wasn't young, and furthermore he meant very little to me. Too bad, I felt, but that's life.

"Oh", I finally replied. I suppose my reaction seemed too pallid, even long-distance.

"He was a good man", Barry said with surprising piety, as though daring me to deny it.

Again, I didn't know what the hell he meant. What was so good about the man? Barry hardly knew him. Then I recalled that during his last visit Barry had been wildly enthusiastic about his late discovery that Uncle Frank was an amateur soil-tiller. Barry is a professional environmentalist, you see, with a doctorate in ecology, and he was thrilled to discover that Uncle Frank used manure instead of commercial fertilizer on his vegetables. Barry is younger than me, another generation entirely.
Mine isn't particularly dedicated to anything, while his is serious, too serious about issues that pass right by me. "You don't know what you're missing, Rachel", Barry had once said to me. "I'd like to turn you on."

"Incest doesn't excite me", I'd said, and he looked disgusted. Maybe he thought there was a natural affinity in both kinds of grass, and getting me into one would excite a latent interest in the other.

All this nonsense going through my head, and I said, almost casually, "What the hell! He wasn't such a good man..."
"What do you mean?" Barry shot back.
"He was a child-molester, our Uncle Frank."
"What the hell...!"
"That's right, dear brother. Me, he assaulted me, before you were ever born."

Silence, then a cool and very polite 'goodbye'. And that was the last time he called. Pity. I miss him.

In retrospect I think I was wrong, I should have shut up; of course I should have, but I always was impulsive. Anyway, it brought back memories, and I began to muse on definitions of good and bad; how to equate personal characteristics with one or the other, and who, really, is the final judge?

When I was about six or seven I used to run, two steps at a time, up and down the stairs to our second-floor flat. Once my mother had given me an empty  milk bottle to return, and sent me out for a quart of milk from the corner store. I tripped, missing the second-to-last step. The bottle remained intact, but I incurred a hairline fracture. I wore a cast for about six weeks. Since my mother worked, my aunt, Uncle Frank's wife, offered to take me to the hospital to have the cast removed at the proper time.

My aunt and uncle had a roomy apartment on Dundas Street, back then. I can remember him going up through a trap-door in the ceiling of the hallway to get to the roof. He'd trap pigeons up there; show them to me, their beady eyes blinking as he gently stroked their feathers. They were destined for the cookpot.

I had two cousins, a boy and a girl, both older than me. My aunt wouldn't permit me to sleep with either of them, but instead set up a makeshift bed for me, between her bedroom and her children's, beside a French door connecting the two. In the morning, before daylight, I saw my aunt get up from her bed and move like a white-sheeted wraith down the hallway toward the kitchen. I had slept badly during the night, not only because the 'bed' was uncomfortable, but also because it was my first night ever away from home. The traffic outside threw ribbons of light over the ceiling, and shadows seemed to loom from every corner. I worried too about how the 'operation' would proceed the following day - cutting the cast off. I imagined the knife slipping, and goodbye arm.

My uncle, seeing that I was awake, motioned me to get up, to come over. He lifted a corner of the quilt, inviting me into his bed. "Come, get in", he said. At first it seemed an appealing idea. Then I caught the thick odour of nightsweat and hung back, shaking my head. "Get in", he insisted, "and don't make any noise - you don't want to wake your cousins."

Obedienty, I scrunched myself into a private little ball, distancing myself from him, but surprisingly he moved closer. "I won't hurt you", he promised, weighting me down, "relax and don't make any noise."

Years later they bought a house on Indian Road, right next to High Park. My uncle transformed the paltry yard into a Garden of Eden. Neat rows of vegetables thrived under his devoted hoe. He grew fruit trees from seed and lavished care on every type of flower. although a short, squat man with a broad peasant face, when in his garden he glowed, became a voluptuary moving as in a trance through a green dream.

I disliked their house, but would go there with my mother, leave her there, and go off myself to High Park to wander around; over to Grenadier Pond, where the Queen's Grenadiers were reputed to have followed their leader unswervingly, drowning, every last man of them, unwilling to break the perfection of their suicidal march. From there to the animal cages, where bison and oriental goats were kept. Then to the smaller ponds where water-fowl abounded and if I was sharp-eyed I could catch them mating. I'd lose myself in the trees, imagining I was in a jungle and not me at all, but my hero, Tarzan of the Apes.

I was a dark-skinned child, small for my age, with long black hair. My mother would wash my hair with coarse soap that stung my eyes, and then rinse it with lemon juice, accentuating the agony. Finally, she would rake it with a fine-toothed comb; my school shed a lot of 'cooties'. My hair, curly, would snag on the comb, and it was an excruciating procedure. Once, to try to make her stop torturing me, I shouted apropos of nothing. "Uncle pulled my pants down!". She slapped me.

Well, it had been true. He had persuaded me to let him take my pants down one evening at High Park; promised me a purse of my own, real leather, just like one he'd bought for his daughter. I was an avaricious child, but I never did get that purse.

Not long after, I persuaded my mother to let me get my hair cut short. I thought I would look pert, like my cousin with her short, curly bob. My mother sent me to him. He had, you see, huge shears because he was a tailor by profession. He hefted each braid in his beefy hands and asked, "You sure?", then lopped them off. Seeing them looped on the floor, myself cropped and unbeautiful in the mirror, I felt bitterly disappointed.

As for the molesting, it wasn't only him, I'll say that much. I mean, I can remember teenaged boys who lived below our flat, trapping me in the common bathroom, unzipping their pants and exhibiting their prizes. I couldn't have been more than five or six then. A roomer on the same floor would wait to hear my footsteps in the hallway, then open his door and flash. And the old men in the park, always following me, promising goodies. I was frankly fascinated. Fascinated, I think, that men were so damned silly.

At my wedding he was there, with his bluff peasant heartiness. Holding a glass of vodka, he gave my husband-to-be pertinent advice. God, he looked like a real muzhik, that man; a Russian peasant. Which of course was what he had been. After the ceremony, when he'd had a little more to drink, he wove his exuberant way among the guests, following me and my husband around, giving us more specific advice. When we left after the reception Uncle Frank shouted after us, finally: "Have - a - good - time!"

When, years later, we bought a house of our own, he gave us a peach tree.

All the above is by way of explanation, background - an attempt to balance the weights of good and bad. Now take history's treatment of Grigory Efimovich Rasputin, also a Russian muzhik. Russian peasantry considered him a holy man, a starets. History documents him as one of the most iniquitous and unprincipled villains of recent history, a charlatan of the first order, who freely manipulated that brace of royal simpletons, Nicholas II and Alexandra. On the other hand he raged against the establishment, the aristocracy both religious and secular. "No wonder the peasants are ignorant and poor - you give them taverns and brothels, not hospitals and schools!"

Rasputin advocated social assistance for the indigent, fought against war, and later against the conscription of farmers. Naturally, he also accepted 'gifts' for his political manoeuvrings, and he delighted in lurid exhibitionism. But again, he dispensed personal largess to needy petitioners.

He was, in the end, a victim of what we now call 'bad press'. A more indulgent muse chronicled the exploits of Byron, Boswell, and Rousseau.

Not long after my brother's call, my mother came to spend a few days with me. We walked along a pathway in a park where where I live now. It was a lovely, crisp autumn day, and we waded through leaves: their acrid odour, rising and mingling with the cool air, reminding me of High Park.

"Do you remember, Ma", I felt suddenly moved to ask her "Once when I was a child, I told you that Uncle Frank molested me?"

She stopped, turned her astonished face to mine: "What do you mean?"
"I mean that he bothered me, sexually."
"No! You never said anything like that to me, I wouldn't forget! Are you serious? Something like that happened?"
"Yes."
She tipped her face toward me. "You're sure?"
"Of course."
"If I knew!" she spat savagely. "If I knew - I would have torn his eyes out!"

We resumed our walk, an awkward silence between us, and I wondered at myself; what could my motive be, to place this burden on her? Foment an awkward distance between my mother and her sister, Uncle Frank's wife? Finally she turned to me.

"It never happened" she said, with a rising inflection. "You were only imagining things." She looked at me with her knowing eye.
"You always did have an active imagination, and you're still mischievous!"
She went on to describe what a paragon of strength my uncle had been to her after my father's death. And when his own death stared him in the face, how noble he had been, blessing his family with his continued concern for them, ignoring his own pain.

So it's true. Everything balances out. A small girl's unhappiness becomes a grown woman's spite. There is nothing to forgive, and I have already forgotten. Uncle, rest in peace.

About What It's Like to Die

 

My father had no patience with vanity. It wasn't that he was so intolerant a person, he simply had no time for frivolities. He was too busy living; earning a living and living to learn. When he wasn't working he was reading - omnivorously, anything he could get his hands on. He passed that legacy - not for work but for love of the written word - on to his children. I was the oldest.

Because he professed never to care for external appearances I was surprised after his operation to realize that he was reluctant to have anyone see him, that he considered himself, his appearance, repugnant. He had cancer of the throat.

He had always feared sickness, operations, and it was later that I was told he was given the option of an operation to prolong his life for another year or to simply let the cancer run rampant, undisturbed. By the time his cancer had been discovered it was too late to stem the tide of its inexorable growth.

He was unprepossessing in appearance. A short, broad, muscular man with black wiry hair when he was younger, his hair turned a steel grey as he grew older. This sign of age, the grey hair, had distressed me terribly; that outward manifestation of man's perishability. And his once-hard stomach gradually distended with the weight of the years which sat upon him. He was only five feet tall but when I was a child he appeared a respectable height.

My father's friends noted my fierce attachment to my father with amusement. They enjoyed teasing me, for the reaction. They would say something like: "What's so special about him anyway? He's just a little guy". And I'd reply hotly, "he isn't! He's big and strong and he's smart." Which was true. And I hated them for appearing to doubt it.

And although my replies generally brought forth gales of adult laughter, none of my father's friends disputed the fact of my father's intelligence, even as a joke. They came to him often for advice, or to have him explain a situation beyond their comprehension.

I have since learned things about my father that I hadn't known earlier, when he still lived. He had been born in Poland just after the turn of the century. Actually, about 1910. We never did know the correct date, nor did he. His family had lived in a small town not far from Warsaw. His father had been a scholar of sorts, a rebbe, but both his parents died before my father was twelve. His relatives lived nearby but they were almost destitute as were most of the country people there, so they arranged for my father to be taken care of in the local poorhouse. Soon after, an undernourished boy too small for his age, he ran away to Warsaw to try to locate his older brother, who had himself run away, years earlier.

He had no success in his search and wandered the streets of Warsaw unkempt, unfed and unhoused. He was only one of many such vagrants, children who begged for sustenance in the streets. Eventually, a Jewish philanthropic organization attempted to gather these wanderers and to provide for them. There, among other boys bereft of family, my father found companionship. Several years later the boys were sent en masse to Canada. On arrival, they were dispersed to various farming communities and my father and several of his friends found themselves working on a farm in Georgetown, Ontario, to pay off their passage. All through his life these orphan children remained steadfast friends, an extended family closer to each other than most genuine family members often are.

In the family album there was one photograph that I often looked at although it made me vaguely unhappy. The picture was that of a group of about ten young men, boys really, and the background was the farm in Georgetown. The boys wore what appeared to be leggings of some kind and underwear-type long-sleeved shirts. Some held rakes and manure forks, reminiscent of the famous American Gothic painting. The boys' heads were uniformly shaven and their cheeks were gaunt. Their eyes seemed hollow and painful; haunting. My father was the smallest among them. At first he had to point himself out to me, for I could not recognize him in the photograph.

I suppose it was because of my father's initial poor start in life and his later malnourishment as a youth that he became prone in middle age to a variety of illnesses. I recall hushed talk of Burgess' Disease and hardening of the arteries, although I'm not quite certain he had any of these. I do recall though, that once, when I was about eight years old, he was bathing and discovered that one of his big toes had turned a purple-black colour. My father rarely went to see a doctor but for this my mother insisted that he visit the family doctor, an old medical practitioner whose office stood on a corner of College Street. It was discovered that the big toe was gangrenous, or just beginning to be so, and measures were taken to save it. In retrospect, although he was never so diagnosed, I am reasonably certain that he had been an undiagnosed diabetic and it was Diabetes Mellitus which led invariably to those other disease symptoms and thereafter, his legs always gave him trouble from poor circulation. His feet were always sore and painful. Still, it wasn't the untreated diabetes nor the other ailments that took his life.

Unlike most of my father's friends who in time became quite well off,my father always had to struggle to make a living. Some of his friends ran small businesses of their own, became musicians, professionals, tradesmen, entrepreneurs. My father remained a labourer for most of his life. The earliest I can recall is that he worked at a factory, Fashion Hat & Cap, on Chestnut Street in Toronto, as a steam presser. His job was to mechanically work a steam press to block caps and that is what he did for many years. The factory was hot and dry, dimly lit and poorly ventilated. His arms and hands became so muscular from his work that years later nurses at the hospital found it impossible to check his pulse at the wrist. He used to laugh about that. He once brought home an orange that he had forgotten to eat from his lunchbag and had placed on top of the steam presser. The orange was light and hollow, all the moisture gone, preserved like an Egyptian mummy.

Both my parents were staunch trade unionists and voted for the CCF Party. Political talk was common around the kitchen table. I would sit quietly and listen, fascinated at the heated arguments that often ensued, between my parents and some of their friends as my father continued to uphold the socialist ideal and others might dispute its need and even legitimacy in this country.

In his spare time my father spent as much time as he could manage at the United Jewish Peoples' Order, the headquarters of which, years ago, was on Christie Street across from Christie Pitts Park, north of Bloor Street. There was a great number of books kept there and for a while my father volunteered his time as a librarian. I used to go to that same building every day after school to be tutored in a small classroom along with a handful of other children, in Jewish history and Yiddish. I had begun going to the Morris Winchevsky school when an old house on another street had been utilized for classroom purposes, before the acquisition of the Christie Street property and I can remember there were always kerosene lamps handy in case of a blackout as these were the war years.

Occasionally, there I would pick up some literature written by Dr. James Endicott and read it, impressed by the fervour of his arguments for a better, more equitable world. Once, my father pointed out Paul Robeson to me, a tall dark man, walking down a corridor of the building, a guest of the U.J.P.O.; there to deliver a talk in the auditorium next to where our after-school-classroom was situated.

The basement of the building - which was, I believe, an old converted church - housed a functional cafeteria set around with small round tables and wire-hooped chairs, at which there generally sat a crowd of men - talking, playing dominoes. The fragrance of coffee and doughnuts, accompanied by the click of dominoes and the murmur of bantering voices so well describes the ambiance, the homey comfort of the place.

On V-E day my father celebrated what was an especially poignant time for him by giving me a large green-covered book of short stories that I still treasure. He was forever encouraging me to read. As soon as I was old enough to understand he gave me books to read that most would consider too difficult for a child. But with these books and my father's explanations I was made sensitive to the world as it is. My father described in great detail the circumstances of the Holocaust. In this way I became extremely aware of just how special Jews are in this world; the exquisitely frail equilibrium that exists between life and death; the monumental horror of prejudice; the abomination that is war.

My father had me read Tobacco Road, introduced me to Howard Fast and John Steinbeck; tried to imbue in me a sense of fairness to other people. One of the few books he bought for me was called Palaces on Monday; it had been bound irregularly, the cover put on backwards and upside down, and I suppose he was able to pay less for it. The book described the building of the underground rail system, the subway in Moscow, seen through the eyes of a young boy and girl whose American father was an engineer on the project. Nor did he neglect the adventure writers like Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson; he wanted me to read everything.

Despite the fact that our family lived in a small flat - two bedrooms between two adults and three young children; a tiny kitchen that seated us only because we were all so small, the adults and the children; and a bathroom shared with another family and a boarder - my father was determined that I would receive other kinds of stimulation normally reserved for people with money. One of his good friends was a house painter and an amateur musician and agreed to teach me to play an instrument. The oboe; I still have that oboe. Ancient and faded now, it must have been quite old even then. My music teacher was a kind and patient man but I was a frivolous child and had no inclination to learn, even to please my father. Oboe reeds cost $.25 each then and they were a luxury my parents could ill afford. Every time I heard the ridiculous squeaks my puffings elicited from the instrument, I would break up laughing, my teeth clamping on the delicate reed. Finally, my father decided I was not meant to express myself musically.

Another memory I have though, is confirmation that he was quite capable of musicality himself. I have a hazy recollection of sitting high in the balcony at Massey Hall with my mother and peering down at an orchestra on the stage. There was a man sitting on the right-hand side and back of the orchestra and on his lap was an immense glittering, gold-belled instrument. My father played a tuba, an instrument almost as large as he himself. Not long ago my mother told me he had also played a fiddle, but I had never heard him play one.

Although he could never afford to become a real collector, numismatics fascinated him and he collected foreign coins. The coins held an attraction for him and when he came across an exotic coin my father would add it to his collection. He kept a metal strong box in a cupboard which he would sometimes open with a key. The box contained a few papers, a few brown daguerreotypes, and the prized coin collection.

One of the old faded photographs in the box was of a dark bearded man; another was of a young boy standing beside a wicker planter. These depicted my father's father and my father himself - and there were a few others. Once he picked up one of the photographs and showed it to me. The picture was of an oval-faced dark browed young man with black hair. The man had a thin mustache. I detested mustaches. "Who do you think that is?" my father prompted.

"Hitler", I said positively. "It must be Hitler."

A pained look crossed my father's face. He said nothing, merely took the picture from me, turned away, shut himself away from me.
"What's wrong?" I asked. "What's the matter?" Thinking about it now, I'm not certain whether my reply had been impish or whether at that tender age all mustaches were synonymous with the hated Hitler; reason compels me to believe I was just being mischievous, for why, even then, would I think my father would cherish a photograph of that hideously detestable monster?

Later my mother told me it was a photograph of my father's brother. My father, for years after the war, believed his brother was still alive. He wrote endless letters to agencies and individuals looking for information about his brother. There was no information to give, none was received. Without doubt he, like other millions of hapless innocents, provided fuel for the ovens at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka.

Waiting for the Messiah - a Memoir, Irving Layton with David O'Rourke

 

Waiting for the Messiah - a Memoir, Irving Layton with David O'Rourke
McClelland and Stewart, 25 Hollinger Road, Toronto
c. 1985. Hardback, 264 pages.

 

To this reader, it is hard to reconcile the initial chapter of this book with the succeeding ones. Indeed, the further one delves in this memoir the more it appears as though the reader has been made privy to the maturing of a writer. The beginning chapters have a naivete, an arrogance and even a kind of silliness (deliberately playful, let us dare hope) which is off-putting and unworthy of the literary stature of this man, despite his flamboyance and provocative style.

But, for those of you who may decide to embark upon this reading adventure, a word of advice - persevere. It's worth it, for the work steadily improves and becomes less tendentiously tedious (the initial style and content going far to give credence that some people will do anything for attention and that advanced age is no guarantor of social or emotional maturity) and progressively interesting.

Less, alas, as a result of Layton's own life experience, more as a fallout of his place in the times he writes of, and his relationships, close, tenuous, distanced or what-have-you, with other, more interesting, and sometimes more talented people than he.

Which is not to deny the man's estimable talent. I have tried to in the past, mind, when his misanthropic and seemingly misogynist attitudes have infuriated me to the point of denying the man his due - and my adversary-in-opinion has been none other than my husband, an ardent admirer of this latter-day bard - an unhappy experience.

Layton begins his memoir, logically enough, at the beginning. We are informed that the incipient poet was 'born with the smell of baked Challa in his nostrils', a startling revelation but infinitely less so than his other well-known claim, that he was born with the messianic sign - already circumcised. This affectation does not grow dim with the passage of time, but since it offers a kind of comfort to the man there is no point denying him that cushion.

During his growing, and omnivorously-reading years, he imbibed stories of the lives of other saviours and heroes, including Moses, Buddha, Alexander the Great - whose own births were accompanied by bizarre circumstances, as his was. Thus was born a legend of self.

Once departing from that thesis, we are introduced to life in the Lazarovitch family, with father Moishe, a soft-spoken, pious and scholarly man who brought the shtetl with him to Montreal; mother Klara who shrieks curses down upon young Irving's hapless head; siblings Avrum, Dora, Esther, Gertie, Harry, Hyman and Larry. And, of course, the extended family members, most particularly the men whom sisters had wed, and whose foibles and coarseness are discoursed upon at length. Layton's childhood was not a happy one.

In a background of grinding poverty, in a family whose orientation was mercenary (how else survive in the hostile environment for immigrant Jews in turn-of-the-century Montreal?), the emerging intellectualism of the young boy with a mischievous temperament was a puzzle and a nuisance to his family. While Layton was increasingly drawn by education, with an emphasis on literature and the beauty of language, his increasingly alienated family demanded that he assume the life of an itinerant peddler, an occupation at which, fleetingly, given his gregarious character, he was able to succeed very well at.

But Layton had a self-vision of a glory greater than earning dollars with which to support himself, and eventually evolve into budding mercantilism. His love of, and admiration for poetry, was first inspired by the beautifully rendered readings of Tennyson's Ballad of the Revenge by one of the few teachers for whom Layton had some modicum of respect at Baron Byng High School.

In total, Layton's experiences with teachers in general throughout the public school system, and on into college were dismal, demoralizing affairs for the budding scholar/poet. Insensitive clods they were, demineralized, myopic, harsh, coldly demanding and censorious of the high-spiritedness of a rebellious adolescent with a penchant for learning, but only in the environment of nurturance, which was, alas, a scarce commodity.

He had a budding romance, both with a young woman (and by extension, her mother) and with the dialectic of communism. With the former because he was a normal, lustily yearning young male, the latter because it was socially verboten. After that flirtation, Layton dabbled, with friends who drew him into their circle, with socialist ideals. He met, and became a personal friend of David Lewis whose analytical and brilliant mind he appreciated, but whose oratory he felt was far from brilliant. Through Lewis he met Abraham Klein, then a young articling lawyer, and language-precise, fiery poet with whose help he was able to master Latin, and make his senior grades.

A chance encounter led him to attend college, at a time when Layton was drifting along, with nothing much else to do but earn the odd dollar to keep a roof over his head and go to meetings at the Young Peoples' Socialist League communist meetings, and Horn's Cafeteria, the hangout for social radicals of the time where social responsibility, proletarians' rights, Marx and Engels, the Communist Manifesto, the evils of the capitalist class, unions and labour were discussed with resounding vigour, and the pilpul of opinion had its day.

In that forum Layton was exposed to the explosive mixture of socialist and communist thought, Trotskyism, anarchism. It was a heady, pleasing ongoing experience for the young man, which he balanced with his private readings of Shelley and Keats, trying to hone his own, by then, not inconsiderable skills, both as an orator, and a poet. Very little of the social cant, of the traditional exposition to which he was exposed was taken at face value; he observed and trod daintily among the ideals and ideas, although his admiration for some of the exponents knew no bounds.

This was the Quebec of the Catholic Church with its stranglehold on the thoughts and minds of Quebecois; it was the Quebec of Arcand, and of police brutality. And this was a Layton whose mind and heart were torn between social activism and literary endeavour. In the end, his literary ambitions emerged victorious, although there is an inescapable thread of social activism in the warp and woof of his literary work.

The college of Layton's choice turned out to be Macdonald College, chosen for the logical reason that it was the only institute of higher learning which he could manage to afford. Associated with McGill University, the only degree this college conferred was that of Agriculture and this explains neatly why Layton's degree is in this area.

Because of the cautious, conservative, intellectually stilted atmosphere of the college, Layton decided that he would form a speakers' club which he called the Social Research Club. To its regular meetings he invited the then-president of the Royal Bank of Canada, followed in fairly rapid succession by the pacifist Lavell Smith, the fabled Dr. Normal Bethune, and the founder of the CCF, J.S. Woodsworth. His plans to also invite Tim Buck were thwarted by the organized efforts of other members of the student body who feared the college would be irremediably tainted red, thus scuttling their future plans for a civil service career.

Layton experienced a great deal of satisfaction in knowing that exposure to these fiery speakers of the time, some of them exceedingly controversial, opened up the minds of their student listeners. Even so, the reputation that Layton acquired while at the college was not that of a social facilitator, but that of a rabble rouser, and both the unlikely appellations of 'Hitler' and 'Trotsky' often crowned his reputation there.

Layton mourned the sad fact that while at college the literary-poetic idols held to review and admiration were those of the era of Edwardian England, and as delightful and earth-shaking at their time as they were, they did not reflect the social and cultural tradition of the country and the times which he inhabited. He professes to some bitterness at not having been exposed to the works of T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Walt Whitman, let alone Canadian poets like Lampman, Bliss Carman or E.J. Pratt.

This lack left him with the impression for too long, he felt, that he could do no better than to emulate their style. It was when he became exposed through his own search and pique to the work of these ground-breakers that it dawned upon him what progressive poetry, free verse reflecting the temper of the times could really accomplish.

The man, obsessed with the earthiness of life, of passions unleashed, scorning convention and the limpid and sexually repressed poetic style of his peers, evolved a poetic address uniquely his own. One that shocked both the reading public and the then-literary establishment. It was not 'polite'.

He writes of his marriages, of his attachment to women, to his ideas and his poetry. He writes of the joy and ecstasy of creative achievement, of self-affirmation in the final realization that one is yes indeed, a poet of incalculable creative ability. Which there is no denying Irving Layton is.

This is a good book, a rewarding book, and in its own way, a revelation, Messiah complex aside. For in his very own, inimitable way, Layton really has been a messiah; he has helped to unleash unbridled sensualism in poetic expression, given it a fire of his own devising, and brought poetry where it belongs, in the gut as well as the mind of the reader.

Abrasive and even abusive he can be at times, but where is there a poet whose totality is perfection? It is unfortunate that Layton's very well-publicized divergence of opinion with Elspeth Cameron and his dismissal of her 'unauthorized' biography of him did not result in an increased public interest in his own book. One has the impression that the increased notoriety he might have traded upon as a result of the acrimonious exchanges in the media would translate itself in brisk sales, but alas, volume one of his memoirs has not sold well.

Still, he's preparing to write the second volume of Waiting for the Messiah and this reviewer, however inclined to be critical as I am, intends to wait for that messiah. Stay tuned.