Brief Encounters with Canadian Folkies

Britta Lee Shain, Seeing the real you at last: Life and love on the road with Bob Dylan (2016)

I can’t really recommend reading this book, but if you’re at all tempted, I will say this: you won’t learn much about Bob Dylan, but you will get an idea of what it’s like to be in the orbit of a truly famous person. Shain’s goal in writing the book seems to be to prove that she is not just another woman Bob Dylan slept with a few times on tour, but rather his true soul mate and the only one in his entourage who really understands him. I don’t think she succeeds in that, but she does reveal what it takes to be a part of Bob Dylan’s world. Essentially, you have to do things for him. Shain is constantly running errands for Dylan: buying him clothes, boots, walking sticks, take-out food, picking up his girlfriends at the airport and then sitting downstairs reading a book and listening to them having sex upstairs. She believes that all these things bring her closer to Dylan and prove that he can’t live without her; to an outside observer, they suggest that she is one of many people Dylan uses to take care of whatever his needs are at any given moment with no regard for them as individuals. To quote what the man himself tells her when he gives her the kiss-off, “Sometimes I do bad things.”

But that’s neither here nor there. The book contains a number of references to Canada and Canadians, most of them passing and really not of much interest, but I’ll quote a few of the ones that stood out for me.

Sorrowful-Eyed Gentleman of the Northlands

As we’ve seen in numerous posts before, references to Canadian musicians are one of the most common ways Canada slips into books by non-Canadians. Shain is no exception, and given the world Dylan moves in, it should be no surprise that in this book we encounter the Canadian folk-rock triumvirate of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. Here is Shain meeting Neil Young:

May 30 1986. Prince is at the Wiltern Theater, as part of what will later be dubbed his Hit n’ Run Tour, since most of the shows are announced just days or hours before the actual concert takes place. Carole [Bob’s wife or “main girlfriend,” I can’t remember which] gets four passes, but Bob doesn’t want to go. Ernie [Shain’s boyfriend, who works in some capacity for Dylan, I can’t remember what — it’s through him that Shain meets the great man] and I escort her, and while she’s really getting off on the music, I spend most of the show mingling in the foyer with a growing chattering mob that prefers being outside of the music hall. Afterwards, backstage, I’m introduced to Neil Young, whose sorrowful dark-eyed gaze threatens to suck the very life out of me.  (59)

Yikes — these morose Canadians! Most intriguing (to me) is the question of what Neil is doing backstage at a Prince concert, but of course Shain has no interest in that. There’s more about Neil a couple of pages later, from June 5 1986:

A beautifully polished bus is also parked — engines running — in front of the hotel, and [Bill] Graham tells me this is Neil Young’s bus, and that unlike most rockers who rent their transportation, this is actually a bus that Neil Young owns — that he’s fixed it up really cool, and that other rockers rent it from him.  (61)

We don’t tend to think of Canadians as hard-headed businessmen, but that’s an interesting portrait of a man who never lets an opportunity to make a buck slip past his sorrowful eyes.

Neil’s bus is mentioned once more, when Shain is on tour with Dylan in 1987:

Bob and I are hanging out on the bus, getting loaded, watching one of the twelve Elvis Presley movies Ernie has secured at Dylan’s request for the road tour. Somewhere along the line we’ve acquired Neil Young’s bus, and it’s very cool, with deer antlers up front and center, above the driver’s seat.  (119)

There’s a glimpse of the gilded lives of celebrities and their hangers-on. Nice to think our great Canadian folk hero/businessman is making a little money off Bob.

Hanging with Joni Mitchell

From a long entry dated February 21, 1987, in which Shain and her boyfriend Ernie throw a Chinese New Year party for Dylan and some of his friends:

Actress/singer Ronee Blakely, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her supporting role in Nashville, shows up, looking beautiful but incredibly vulnerable. Some say she still hasn’t gotten over her relationship with Dylan.
Joni Mitchell is here, too! Plus all the usual suspects. This is by far the most successful of the parties to date.
Joni and friends wind up sitting around in Ernie’s den until three or four in the morning, long after Ernie’s gone to bed, singing Everly Brothers songs and other hits from the 50s and 60s while I pathetically try to keep the tune.  (83)

A lot of the book is written like this: a breathless catalogue of the appearances of famous or semi-famous people, with little Wikipedia-like notes of their main accomplishments dropped in if Shain thinks the reader may not know who they are. Canadian Joni Mitchell is famous enough to just be named; Ronee Blakely is not. It is, beyond that, a nice portrait of the down-to-earth Canadian folk genius singing the night away with some friends.

(As an aside, it’s interesting to note the similarities between Shain’s writing style and the parodic diary of  the Vancouver-born aspiring actress Kim Girard in Bruce Wagner’s I’m Losing You.)

The Laborious Writing Process of Leonard Cohen

This passage, after an Italian concert in 1987, gives a sense of how people in Dylan’s inner circle spend their time. It also illustrates how completely Shain has bought into the idea that a person’s value is based solely on how well they satisfy their “star”:

Dylan will be in rare form tonight, playing lengthy and cohesive harmonica intros to rarely performed classics like ‘License To Kill.’
After the show, Ernie and I go to an Italian eatery and buy tons of takeout antipasto for the bus ride — Bob has a thing for sausage — along with several bottles of Chianti. When Ernie has the time and is focused on working for Bob, he does go out of his way to make sure Dylan’s pleased.
While Bob cools off in his quarters at the rear of the bus, Ernie tells the rest of us the story of Dylan’s meeting with Leonard Cohen after Cohen’s Wiltern Theater show in ’85. He says that when Dylan complimented Cohen on the song ‘Suzanne,’ Leonard confessed that it took him five years to write it.
Later, Cohen told Dylan how much he liked ‘License To Kill.’
‘It took me five minutes,’ Bob crowed.  (169-70)

Poor Leonard. But perhaps we can learn something about the painstaking character of Canadian writers, constantly insecure about their work and doing everything they can to ensure they make their songs as good as they can be, versus the more casual approach of Americans who, in tune with their national spirit of exceptionalism, just assume that they’re entitled to the world’s attention?

A Mysterious (Canadian?) Woman

This passage relates to Dylan’s role in the film Hearts of Fire:

October 1986. Production of Hearts of Fire moves to Ontario, Canada, where Ernie rents a house for Dylan. Problems arise, I’m told, when Carole wants to join him, since Bob is occupied with another woman.  (73)

Exciting, I suppose, to think Dylan was living in Ontario in 1986. No doubt Canada was being used as a cheaper stand-in for some American location in the movie. We never hear about this other woman again; is she Canadian? Has she written a book about her experience with Dylan? Maybe she should — not everyone has slept with a Nobel Prize winner.

Rush: Beloved Icons of a Norwegian Boyhood

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Boyhood Island (My Struggle: 3) (2014)

I really can’t believe that people have mistaken these books for literature. I finally got around to slogging my way through the second one, A Man In Love: 600 pages of pushing a stroller around Stockholm and moaning about “wanting to write!” and, to add insult to injury, not a single reference to Canada (unlike A Death in the Family, which at least had that redeeming feature). But I convinced myself that the second book was so bad because the events he was describing were relatively recent, and so time had not yet worked its alchemy, burning away the irrelevant details and leaving only the important, formative moments shining incandescently in his memory. This third one, I decided, would be much better, because it went all the way back to his childhood, and since Knausgaard would only be able to remember important things from so long ago, the book would be interesting.

How wrong I was. Knausgaard’s memory is much more formidable than I anticipated, and is matched only by his undying fascination with himself and his passion for recounting in excruciating detail every irrelevant and frankly boring event that has ever happened to him. This entire project is a monument to the way narcissism is devouring culture, but nothing more than that.

About the only good thing I can say about Boyhood Island is that it does contain one minor reference to Canada.

A New Fandom Heard From

Here at Wow — Canada! we have often noticed references to Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Leonard Cohen in books written by non-Canadians; in fact, as experts in this particular field (a field in which, I suspect, no one else would wish to be an expert), I think we can say they are the three most commonly mentioned Canadians. With this proviso, though: they have been so completely absorbed into the culture of the English-speaking world that they are often mentioned without any reference to, or perhaps even any awareness of, the fact that they are Canadian.

But young Karl Ove, unique soul that he is, pays tribute to a different icon of Canadian music, one we haven’t seen mentioned before:

And then there was the music. It too opened my room with its moods and the strong emotions it evoked in me, which had nothing to do with those I normally felt in life. Mostly I listened to the Beatles and Wings, but also to Yngve’s music, which for a long time was bands and solo artists like Gary Glitter, Mud, Slade, the Sweet, Rainbow, Status Quo, Rush, Led Zeppelin and Queen, but who in the course of his secondary school education changed as other, quite different, music began to sneak its way between all these old cassettes and records, like the Jam and a single by the Stranglers, called ‘No More Heroes’, an LP by the Boomtown Rats and one by the Clash, a cassette by Sham 69 and Kraftwerk, as well as the songs he recorded off the only radio music programme there was, Pop Spesial.   (376-77)

I was a little hard on Knausgaard at the beginning of this post, but this made me happy. A reference to Rush, those Canadian icons of prog rock. Knausgaard doesn’t mention that they’re Canadian — does he even know? — but in a way that makes it more gratifying to see that a Canadian band has found a place in the listening rotation of these two Norwegian brothers in the 1970s.

This is exciting partly because it gives the lie to a peculiarly Canadian form of anxiety, which is linked to our provincialism: No matter how successful any Canadian becomes within Canada, we Canadians tend to assume that no one outside our borders has ever heard of them. More than that, we often assume that “true success” means “success outside of Canada.” (Hence Mordecai Richler’s joke about writers who are “world famous in Canada.”) Obviously Joni, Neil and Leonard have passed that hurdle — but Rush? I wouldn’t have guessed that their music had reached as far as Scandinavia, but clearly I was wrong.

The Secret of Knausgaard’s Appeal?

When I read this passage, I felt that little thrill I always feel when I see Canada or a Canadian mentioned in a book by a non-Canadian author. In this case, however, there was an added jolt of excitement because I used to hear Rush on the radio when I was around the age Karl Ove is in this book. And I think this helps illuminate what is actually appealing about Knausgaard’s writing: it promotes a form of nostalgia in that we see elements of our own lives mirrored in his books, and that lends his work a patina of importance because at some deep level all of us think of our own lives as important; all of us experience life as if we were the central character in an unfolding novel of existence. (Of course everyone we encounter is living their own novel where they are the main character and we are nothing but bit players, but that doesn’t make the feeling any less powerful for us.) Knausgaard’s narcissism, his obsessive focus on writing about every one of his insignificant thoughts and feelings, has a way of validating our own narcissism and making us feel that perhaps our own thoughts and feelings are also worthy of notice.

Speaking of Nostalgia…

Here’s a Rush song, though probably from too late in their career to be a part of Knausgaard’s experience of them. Feeling my own narcissism validated by reading Boyhood Island, I picked this one because I remember hearing it on the radio when I was young:

Ah, that takes me back. Maybe Knausgaard isn’t so bad after all…?

The Impressively Ubiquitous Joni Mitchell

Eileen Myles, Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) (2010)

It is, of course, hard to say for certain what is true and what is fiction just based on reading a book, but this “novel,” to me, read a lot more like a memoir. (Perhaps that’s what Myles means by “a poet’s novel,” i.e. poets are incapable of writing about anything other than themselves?) It’s also odd that it’s called Inferno, since the book follows the tripartite division of Dante’s entire Divine Comedy: the opening section (the true Inferno) details Myles’ life of poverty when she came to New York City to try to be a poet, the middle section (written in the form of a grant application, a clever touch) suggests the possibility of effort redeemed, as in Purgatory, and then the final section, in which she has achieved the fame she longed for, is her Paradise.

Canada is not mentioned, but we have another reference to one of our country’s most famous musicians, Joni Mitchell — I say “another” because Mitchell is also mentioned in Myles’ Chelsea Girls, along with Neil Young and Canada itself. The Mitchell reference in this book comes as Myles is describing her early experience of going to poetry readings and performing at them as part of trying to break into the poetry scene:

It was clear that I could only venture into this world if I was alone — because if I had any friends at all they would just laugh at these weirdos, but in New York I had committed myself to a life in which I had nothing better to do. If this is what poets did and who they were I would be with them. It was a professional choice. It was high time I got on with my career. I was home alone most days except when I sat in a coffee shop to write so at night I needed an adventure, to step up like in the Joni Mitchell song: “she tapes her regrets to a microphone stand” — that was me, and one day I knew I would be famous. These scenes were part of it — pushing into the unknown, even if it meant sitting in a room full of creeps, in used leftover looking spaces waiting for my turn.     (49)

There’s nothing about Canada there, and it isn’t even mentioned that Joni Mitchell is Canadian, but we can see how her lyrics are a touchstone for a young woman starting out as a poet in New York, just as they were a touchstone for the characters in Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? For Myles, the song lyric seems to express the idea of taking a chance on something risky even if you aren’t certain it will work out, as the girl in “Blonde in the Bleachers” takes a chance with a “rock n roll man” even though she knows she won’t be able to keep him.

Eileen Myles vs Chris Kraus

I read Inferno because I came across a quote from it in an article about Chris Kraus somewhere. The quote was about a European reading tour that Myles and Kraus went on with Kathy Acker and was something along the lines of, “Chris Kraus was totally obsessed with Kathy Acker.” I’ve been interested in Kraus ever since I read her brilliant book torpor (several references to Canada) and I guess I was curious to see what else Myles had to say about her and what the context of that quote was. (Kraus’s name has also been around a lot lately because of  the I Love Dick TV series, and she seems to be getting some (much-deserved) notice as an early exemplar of the “autofiction” genre that includes currently trendy writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard (who also mentions Canada) and Sheila Heti (who is actually Canadian), not to mention Myles herself, since Inferno could probably fit under that umbrella.) As I said at the opening of this post, it’s hard to tell what is actually “true” and what is fictionalized in these books since the average reader will have no independent knowledge of the source material i.e. the writer’s actual life. I wonder, though, if torpor is a little more fictionalized than some other examples, and if that authorial shaping of the material, rather than simply recording it, is what makes it so good (though one could argue that the act of writing is itself a process of shaping). Maybe Kraus is just a superior writer.

As for what Myles has to say about Kraus, it turned out there was nothing in the book beyond what was quoted in the article, so the joke was on me.

Music

Here’s the song “Blonde in the Bleachers” quoted by Myles:

 

“Ask not what Canada can do for you”

Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls (1994)

There is nothing new or remarkable here, at least with reference to Canada, but this book does repeat a couple of ideas we’ve seen before, and I’ll simply catalogue those.

A Place to Dodge the Draft

This is from the story “1969”:

I’d often be found passed out on the couch of the house I stayed in that summer with Crime and Punishment on the floor next to my toes. If I could finish that book that summer then my life wouldn’t be a complete waste. I had a boyfriend. His name was Mike and he was also a blackout drinker. He was 21 and had just graduated from college. I thought we looked alike. He would always get drunk and say to me, “Leena, I ain’t gonna march.” I always felt like I was in a movie when he said that. Who does he think he is, I wondered. He wasn’t going to Canada. The war would end. Something would happen. He just wasn’t the type. When those foreign things would erupt from his soul it would just be so strange. It was like he was turning into a thing. I’d grab his dick and the crisis would be over. He was the first person I really had sex with.  (102-3)

When Mike says “I ain’t gonna march,” he means he won’t join the army and go to Vietnam, although the narrator (Myles herself?) seems to interpret this as self-dramatization on his part. It isn’t clear why she thinks he wouldn’t go to Canada — too uncivilized? he’s not decisive enough to take that step? — but Canada exists in the minds of these characters as a place to get away from the draft. Beyond that, though, the book has nothing to say about our country.

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell

There are also references to two Canadians who were staples on the U.S. music scene in the late 60s and early 70s. This is from the story “Bath, Maine”:

The place looked kind of “datey,” like it was attached to a restaurant. The clientele was sunburned and clean, like vacationers. Was I feeling better? In the last place when I had nothing to say in my notebook I began to write the words from the jukebox

And only love
can break
your heart
So try to make sure
right from
the start…

It made me suspicious. (7-8)

The song on the jukebox is, of course, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by Canadian Neil Young — though he isn’t actually named in the story. I’m not sure why it makes her suspicious.

This is from “1969” again:

The safety of it all, the baby being held by the parents in the middle of the highway. Going home. Not even going to Woodstock.
Liked that baby, huh Leena? “Mo” asked me that from the front seat. I was that kind of Leena by now, and that was the end of the first night. Joanie Mitchell didn’t show. Do you blame her? I finally saw the movie in 1987. It would have been painful before then though I didn’t know why.  (113)

It’s strange that she spells Mitchell’s name as “Joanie” rather than “Joni”; if that has some significance, it’s not clear to me.

Larger Thoughts?

I suppose we could argue that these references are typically American in the sense that they see Canada only in terms of what it offers to Americans — a place to avoid the draft, a place that supplies music for Americans to listen to — but never question or wonder about what Canada is actually like on its own terms.

There is more about Canada as a haven for draft dodgers and about Joni Mitchell in our post on Lorrie Moore; there is more about Joni Mitchell in our post on Graham Nash and our post on Dave Van Ronk; and there is lots more about Neil Young here.

The Music

Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” seems appropriate, and this live version includes a little explanation of why, as Myles says, she “didn’t show”:

Here’s the CSNY version from the “Woodstock” film Myles mentions:

And here is the album version of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” presumably what is on the jukebox:

A Canadian Interlude: Emily Carr on “Remittance Men”

Emily Carr, Growing Pains: An Autobiography (1946)

I wouldn’t normally discuss a book written by a Canadian here, since that contravenes the essential principle of this site, but, being once again stranded at the cottage with nothing to read, I happened to pick up an old copy of Emily Carr’s autobiography that has been lying around there for years. I was struck by how neatly one particular passage picked up what I suppose could be called the “Canadian side” of ideas about immigrating to Canada that we have seen in works by Dickens and Basil Bunting:

The most particular sin for which we were whipped was called insubordination. Most always it arose from the same cause — remittance men, or remittance men’s wives. Canada was infested at that time by Old Country younger sons and ne’er-do-wells, people who had been shipped to Canada on a one-way ticket. These people lived on small remittances received from home. They were too lazy and too incompetent to work, stuck up, indolent, considering it beneath their dignity to earn but not beneath their dignity to take all Canada was willing to hand out.  (13)

This passage gives us a glimpse of how someone like Amy’s brother Tip, in Little Dorrit, would have been viewed in Canada in the last quarter of the 19th century. While Amy clearly sees Canada as a country that offers her brother an opportunity for a fresh start in life, those already in Canada have a markedly more negative view of new arrivals.

The word “infested” is particularly interesting. That’s the sort of word that is typically used when the writer wants to associate immigrants with some sort of vermin that are going to overrun the country and destroy its existing social fabric; in the contemporary world, we would probably associate it with diatribes against immigrants of a different race or religion. And yet Carr uses it here to refer to immigrants from England (the “Old Country”) — the country her own parents had immigrated to Canada from not that much earlier.

I suppose it shows that in the absence of racial, cultural or national differences, some reason will still be found to dislike newcomers.

Exiled to the CFL

Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes (1968)

This “fictional memoir” (which presumably means much the same thing as “semi-autobiographical novel”) gives an account of Exley’s drinking, time in mental institutions and ardent New York Giants fandom, among other things. It ends (SPOILER ALERT!) with Exley sitting down and writing a semi-autobiographical novel, making the book a sort of record of its own creation. Along the way, there are a few references to Canada.

Football on the Glacier

One of the key elements of the book is Exley’s obsession with (or, to put it in contemporary terms, “man-crush on”) Frank Gifford. They were at USC at the same time (though they never knew each other), and Exley follows Gifford’s career as a pro, becoming a fan of the New York Giants and going to watch them play at the Polo Grounds. Exley also develops a fascination with Steve Owen, who coaches the Giants during the early part of Gifford’s time there, but is fired a couple of years before the team wins a championship. When Exley hears about Owen’s death, he decides to go to his funeral, and reflects on Owen’s post-Giants career:

It was Owen who over the years kept bringing me back to life’s hard fact of famelessness. It was for this reason, as much as any other, that I had wanted to make the trip to Oneida to make my remembrances. After the day at the Polo Grounds I heard of Owen from time to time, that he was a line coach for one NFL team or another, that he was coaching somewhere in Canada — perhaps at Winnipeg or Saskatchewan. Wherever, it must have seemed to him the sunless, glacial side of the moon.  (70-71)

The path of Owens’ career after he leaves the Giants is clearly one of decline. To be a line coach in the NFL, after having been a head coach, is a significant step down, and to end up coaching in the CFL marks an even greater fall, to the sort of job no one would take unless they had no better options. The very vagueness of the reference — “Winnipeg or Saskatchewan or somewhere” — reinforces this, suggesting the narrator isn’t sure where Owen went but the specific place doesn’t really matter, all that matters is that it’s in Canada, and nothing in Canada matters.

The comparison of Canada to the “sunless, glacial side of the moon” further emphasizes the magnitude of Owen’s decline — he’s been utterly cast out of society into a harsh, depopulated wasteland — and brings in by implication the common idea that Canada is cold. Our country is portrayed as a place of exile from a better and more civilized world for a football coach just as surely as it is for an academic in a David Lodge novel.

And how marvellous is that phrase, “life’s hard fact of famelessness”? This idea — Exley’s desire to achieve fame, and at the same time his self-loathing rage at his inability to do so — is central to the novel, and makes Owen into a kind of avatar of the author’s self-image. And so, in a way, Canada becomes the gloomy resting place of those afflicted by famelessness, the most shameful of all American diseases.

The Upstate New York Connection

We have noted before the tendency of writers from, or writing about, upstate New York (including Lorrie Moore, Chris Kraus and James Salter) to show a greater — and perhaps more accurate? — awareness of Canada than American writers generally, no doubt as a result of our geographical proximity. Much of A Fan’s Notes also takes place in upstate New York, and this scene, from a series of reminiscences about Exley’s father, emphasizes that closeness:

In 1938, the day before President Roosevelt snipped the ceremonial ribbon opening the International Bridge spanning the Thousand Islands and uniting the U.S. with Canada, it is told, apocryphally or otherwise, that my father beat that exemplary poseur to the punch, with wire cutters severed the cable which had been strung across the bridge’s entrance to bar hoi polloi, climbed into the back seat of a convertible roadster, and had himself driven over the arcing, sky-rising span, while in imitation of F.D.R. he sat magnificently in the back seat, his jaw thrust grandly out, and, hand aflutter, bestowed his benedictions on the lovely and (one somehow imagines) startled islands.  (30-31)

By “International Bridge,” Exley must mean the “Thousand Islands Bridge,” which opened in 1938, when Roosevelt was president, and the fact that a bridge is all it takes to “unite” our two countries emphasizes our proximity. Exley’s father’s ability to drive across the bridge so easily before it has opened could be read as a reference to our “undefended border” with the U.S., which is a theme that has come up several times before. And we have already noted President Roosevelt’s connection to Canada (he owned a cottage on Campobello Island), which is probably not being alluded to here but is still interesting given his opening of the bridge.

But beyond the obvious fact that Canada is directly north of the U.S., there’s really nothing being said about our country; it’s as if we exist only by virtue of our geographic relationship with the U.S. The bridge to Canada is a staging-ground for one of Exley’s father’s legendary adventures, but there is no suggestion that he would use it to actually travel to Canada.

Fishing in Canada (Again)

Canada is mentioned in relation to one of Exley’s girlfriends:

She was spending a lot of time with her sister because her sister’s husband, Ronald, had just died of a heart attack. Her sister had found him on the davenport. There had been a smile on Ronald’s face. He was probably dreaming of fishing in Canada because he went there every year, the two of them went together. “Ronald loved to fish,” she said dolefully. “Oh,” I said.  (148)

The connection between fishing and Canada, in the context of salmon, was the subject of one of our earliest posts, and appeared more recently in our post on the stories of John Cheever. I’m not sure there’s anything new here; the portrayal of Canada as a place Americans go on fishing vacations is in line with the idea of Canada as a less developed, more “wilderness” nation than the U.S. where Americans can go to escape their everyday lives (see also the Canadian cottage).

The Fraudulent Surgeons of Montreal

And then there is also this, in relation to a train journey:

I found myself drinking beer and eating ham sandwiches in one of these booths with a Marine sergeant returning from Korea, a vernal-cheeked coed with large breasts, coming from some cow-sounding college in Pennsylvania where, she had loftily announced, she was studying veterinary medicine, and a goateed and fraudulent-looking surgeon travelling to Montreal.  (176)

It’s hard to draw too much from that; the association of the “fraudulent-looking” surgeon with Montreal may suggest that Canada is a bit of a backwater when compared to the U.S., the sort of place where fraudulent medical practitioners can take advantage of the ignorant populace — but it’s hard to say.

In Conclusion (Almost)

I suppose it’s a testament to how much ground we’ve already covered in the last three-plus years here at Wow — Canada! that while there are a number of references to Canada in A Fan’s Notes, there’s not much new. We get the idea that Canada is cold, that the CFL is an inferior league to the NFL, and that Canada is easy to get into (undefended border) but somehow a less advanced or developed nation than the U.S., which makes it a great place to go fishing (wilderness) but not to go for a medical procedure (fraudulent surgeons). But these are all familiar ideas about our country, and it is beginning to feel as if there are a limited number of ways of portraying Canada that recur throughout the works of different authors.

And Finally…

This isn’t a direct reference to Canada, but it seemed worth at least a brief mention. Much of the novel takes place in bars (no surprise there, I suppose, given that it’s about a failing writer); this is from a description of one of them:

Invariably from some nook in the room a life-sized, cardboard, and Technicolored waitress named Mabel winked forever lasciviously and invited one to shout, “Hey, Mabel,” and demand a bottle of Black Label.  (265)

This refers to Carling Black Label, an “iconic Canadian brand” (as they say in the “ad biz”) that became popular outside Canada (which is the standard Canadian way of measuring success), in both the U.S. and the UK. Exley is describing one element of the “Hey Mabel — Black Label” ad campaign that ran in the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s, and the way he describes the cardboard waitress as “invariably” part of the bar’s milieu indicates how established the Carling brand was as an element of American popular culture (you can read this brief history of Black Label if you’re curious). Here’s a sample of the TV ads that helped make Black Label so successful in the U.S.:

Animated version:

Later on, this series of ads was successful in the UK:

Sadly, due to my age, I don’t recall any of these classic ads from when they originally aired; what I remember is the early 90s Black Label campaign, when Black Label became a popular brand with the hip downtown crowd. The ads were a riff on the 60s originals in the way so much 90s “culture” was a “meta” reference to something that had come before:

I guess it seemed cool at the time.

The Romance of Canada 1: Chateaubriand Pays Us a Visit

François-René de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb (1850)

Canada has an interesting presence in French literature. Based on my (admittedly limited) reading (further study is needed, as they say) our country seems to be much more in the minds of earlier writers (i.e. in the 17th and 18th centuries) than in the minds of 19th-century authors. I suppose this makes sense in that references to Canada dwindle in French literature after France loses its colonial interest in our country; still, it feels counterintuitive, somehow, that when, in the 19th century, we would expect Canada’s profile in Europe to be growing, in France, at least, it seems to be shrinking.

Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb enacts this process in miniature: there are a number of references to Canada in the early parts of the book, which deal with the last couple of decades of the 18th century; as the book proceeds into the 19th century, however, Canada vanishes from the narrative and European matters take up Chateaubriand’s attention. (I should also mention that the Penguin edition I read (pictured above) contains  only selections from the book, so there may be later references to Canada that weren’t included.)

The “Father of French Romanticism” Considers a Career as a Lumberjack

This passage relates a discussion between Chateaubriand and his parents about what career path he should choose (it’s basically down to the army or the church):

I hit on an absurd idea: I declared that I would go to Canada to clear forests or to India to join the army of one of the princes of that country.

By one of those contrasts which are to be found in all men, my father, normally so reasonable, was never greatly shocked by an adventurous project. He grumbled to my mother about my changes of mind, but decided to despatch me to India. I was sent off to Saint-Malo, where a ship was being fitted out for Pondicherry.  (71)

It’s hard to know how seriously to take this suggestion of going to Canada “to clear forests”; the author himself calls it “absurd,” and it may be no more meaningful than a modern teenager’s threat to run away from home if they don’t get their way. Still, the idea of Canada as a wilderness of trees needing to be cut down is apparently already firmly established, and while Chateaubriand doesn’t use the word “lumberjack,” we can see the outline of that quintessentially Canadian figure hovering in the background.

This perceived lack of civilization is in marked contrast to the impression we get of India, where apparently there are princes with armies on the move — something much more aligned with the activities of European men in the late 18th century. It’s perhaps not surprising that Chateaubriand’s father in the end chooses the aristocratic pursuit of war-making for his son rather than the more laborious job of tree-cutting.

A Country that Keeps Getting In the Way

But Chateaubriand didn’t just fantasize about running away to Canada; after the French Revolution, he actually came here. (You can get a sense of his overall impression from two quick facts: the chapter of his book that includes the trip to Canada is called “Among the Savages,” and the phrase “the Canadian forests” comes up repeatedly.) His reasons for the trip were, first, to see the United States (not Canada), and second, to discover the Northwest Passage, which he seems to have thought would be a fairly simple matter.

Before he reaches North America, however, his ship encounters some difficulties due to wind and weather. Instead of arriving in the U.S., he finds himself off the coast of Canada, as if our country were somehow preventing him from reaching his destination. This is part of a description of the journey after a stop-off on the island of Graciosa:

The wind forced us to bear north, and we arrived at the Banks of Newfoundland. Some floating icebergs were drifting around in the midst of a pale, cold mist.  (123)

It’s pretty clear that Newfoundland is not where he wants to be, and the description has a compressed quality that shows a distinct lack of interest. This vision of Canada is probably more or less what a European of the period would imagine: a few icebergs and a cold mist — which isn’t so bad since there’s nothing to see anyway. What do these French sailors do now that they have arrived on the shores of Canada? They beat a hasty retreat to the nearest French possessions:

We steered for the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, looking for a new port of call.  (124)

In fairness, Canada isn’t really his object, so perhaps we shouldn’t judge him too harshly.

What’s The Opposite of “Civilizing”?

They make it to Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, and Chateaubriand strikes up a bit of an acquaintance with the Governor there:

I dined two or three times with the Governor, an extremely polite and obliging officer. He grew a few European vegetables on a slope outside. After dinner she showed me what he called his garden. A sweet, delicate smell of heliotrope came from a small patch of flowering beans; it was not wafted to us by a gentle breeze from home, but by a wild Newfoundland wind which had no connexion with the exiled plant, no attractive element of reminiscence or delight. In this perfume which was no longer breathed in by beauty, purified in its breast, or diffused in its wake, in this perfume of a changed dawn, a different culture, another world, there lingered all the melancholy of nostalgia, absence, and youth.  (125)

And in the next paragraph, still referring to the Governor:

My host inquired after the Revolution; I asked him for news of the North-West Passage. He was in the van of the wilderness, but he knew nothing of the Eskimos and received nothing from Canada but partridges.  (125)

The opposition between the “wild Newfoundland wind” and the flowering bean plants sets up the contrast one would expect between the wilderness of Canada and the civilization of Europe. We get the impression that Canada is a desolate country where fragile beauties are beaten down rather than cherished and enjoyed.

The statement that the Governor is “in the van” (i.e. the vanguard) of the wilderness is an interesting one. We should perhaps expect the opposite statement: that as the governor of these French islands right next to the wilds of Newfoundland, he is in the van of civilization, standing at the tip of the civilizing influence which Europe has pushed out towards the wilds of Canada. And yet Chateaubriand sees it the opposite way; if Saint-Pierre and Miquelon are the van of the wilderness, then that suggests that the process is moving in the other direction, and that the wilds of the New World are stretching their influence back towards the supposed colonizers, and perhaps will somehow uncivilize the civilizers, so to speak.

(I don’t want to place too much emphasis on the use of a specific word in a book I have only read in translation, but just for comparison, here is a passage where Chateaubriand uses “vanguard” in the more expected way:

It has been observed that the settlers are often preceded in the woods by bees: these are the vanguard of the farmers, the symbols of the industry and civilization whose coming they herald.  (143)

There we can see “vanguard” used in its more standard sense, which suggests that perhaps Chateaubriand was intentionally playing with its meaning in the earlier passage, suggesting that Canada had a kind of de-civilizing power that Europeans had not yet recognized, as it does in Sylvia Plath’s poem “Two Campers in Cloud Country.” Or perhaps it’s just an instance of carelessness, by either Chateaubriand or his translator.)

Melancholy Reflections on Past Defeats

Chateaubriand has some interesting observations on the failure of the French colonial project in Canada:

In the shameful years of Louis XV’s reign, the episode of the Canadian War consoles us as if it were a page of our ancient history discovered in the Tower of London.
Montcalm, given the task of defending Canada unaided, against forces which are regularly replenished and four times his own in number, fights successfully for two years, defeating Lord Loudon and General Abercromby. At last his luck deserts him; he falls wounded beneath the walls of Quebec, and two days later breathes his last: his grenadiers bury him in a hole made by a bombshell, a grave worthy of the honour of our arms! His noble enemy Wolfe dies facing him; he pays with his own life for Montcalm’s life and for the glory of expiring on a few French flags.  (142-43)

It seems odd, at first, that Chateaubriand would go to the trouble of describing a defeat, and yet it’s in character with the overall tone of much of the book, which could perhaps best be characterized by the world “melancholy”. His vision of life is one in which anything good is always in the past; the present is always slipping away; and the future holds only the promise of worse things to come. It is fitting, then, that he sees a tragic glory in Montcalm’s defeat, and awards him what would now be called a “moral victory” simply for having held out so long against such terrible odds. This kind of ringing, elegiac tone is the essence of Chateaubriand’s style and one of the key elements of his romanticism.

A Visit to the Falls

While in America Chateaubriand naturally wants to see for himself one of its greatest natural wonders, Niagara Falls. He makes his way there, travelling with “a troop of settlers and Indians”:

It was there that I first made the acquaintance of the rattlesnake, which allows itself to be bewitched by the sound of a flute. The Greeks would have turned my Canadian into Orpheus, the flute into a lyre, and the snake into Cerberus or perhaps Eurydice.  (144)

It’s hard to be certain what to make of this; the “Canadian” is presumably one of the natives, not one of the settlers. At first Chateaubriand seems to be saying that Canada does not lend itself to mythologizing, in the way the world of the ancient Greeks did; and yet, with his tales of rattlesnakes charmed by flutes, is he not himself actually mythologizing in much the same way?

In any case, he goes on to visit Niagara Falls:

The Niagara Falls savages in the English dependency were entrusted with the task of policing that side of the frontier. This weird constabulary, armed with bows and arrows, prevented us from passing. I had to send the Dutchman to the fort at Niagara for a permit in order to enter the territory of the British government. This saddened me a little, for I remembered that France had once ruled over both Upper and Lower Canada. My guide returned with the permit: I still have it; it is signed: Captain Gordon.  (145-46)

The phrase “English dependency” means Canada, as opposed to the United States, and makes clear that the Falls Chateaubriand went on to visit were what we now think of as the Canadian side. This passage offers a very different take on the French colonial experience than the earlier one: there, Montcalm’s loss was portrayed as being somehow honourable, even glorious; here, the loss of France’s possessions in Canada brings only sadness. (Sadness — at least in its literary form, “melancholy” — is, as I alluded to above, the keynote emotion of this book.)

It seems worthwhile, since we’ve come across references to Niagara Falls several times before, to quote at least a bit of Chateaubriand’s impressions:

Already, six miles away, a column of mist indicated the position of the waterfall to me. My heart beat with joy mingled with terror as I entered the wood which concealed from my view one of the most awe-inspiring sights that Nature has offered to mankind.
We dismounted, and leading our horses by the bridle, we made our way across heaths and copses until we reached the bank of the Niagara River, seven or eight hundred paces above the Falls. As I was moving forward, the guide caught me by the arm; he stopped me at the very edge of the water, which was going past with the swiftness of an arrow. It did not froth or foam, but glided in a solid mass over the sloping rock; its silence before its fall contrasted with the roar of the fall itself….
The guide continued to hold me back, for I felt so to speak drawn towards the river, and I had an involuntary longing to throw myself in….
Today, great highroads lead to the cataract; there are inns on both the American and English banks, and mills and factories beneath the chasm.
I have seen the cascades of the Alps with their chamois and those of the Pyrenees with their lizards; I have not been far enough up the Nile to see its cataracts, which are mere rapids; I make no mention of the waters of Terni and Tivoli, graceful adornments for ruins or subjects for the poet’s song: “Et praeceps Anio ac Tiburni lucus.”
Niagara eclipses everything.   (146-47)

That passage pretty much has it all, doesn’t it? What a concentration of romantic ideas: the joy mingled with terror as he is about to come face to face with Nature’s sublime; the strange, bewitching appeal of death as he yearns to throw himself into the current; the reference to the shallow consumerism that has now taken over and degraded the site, so different from its unspoiled state when he visited; and finally the implication of a wild and savage beauty in the Falls, utterly unlike the refined waters of Terni and Tivoli.

That last is, of course, a typical association with Canada, but in the view of the romantic mind, the idea of a wilderness ceases to be something menacing, or something that needs to be tamed or civilized, and becomes instead something that must be appreciated for its natural beauty. We are seeing here the idea, which would ultimately become a cliché, that the unspoiled wonders of nature are more beautiful than all the works of man, and that God is, in a sense, the first and ultimate artist.

Conclusions?

Chateaubriand inaugurates several strands of what we might think of as a “romantic” view of Canada. First, in his plan to run away here to become a lumberjack, we glimpse the petulant teenager strain of romanticism, always trying to shock or upset his parents. In his desire to find the Northwest Passage, we see the romantic image of the discoverer-hero, setting out to map the uncharted wilderness for the benefit of all mankind. His references to First Nations people seem to partake of the “noble savage” idea, while his discussion of Montcalm’s loss on the Plains of Abraham is replete with the melancholy sense of vanished glory and noble failure.

And finally, there is the discussion of Niagara Falls. Chateaubriand may not have had a huge impact on Canadian history — he never got around to locating that pesky Northwest Passage, after all — but he certainly had a major, if unwitting, impact on the Canadian tourist industry. His account of visiting Niagara Falls is the earliest one by a major European writer that I have come across, and in his visit he essentially set the pattern of Canadian tourism that still prevails today: when people come to Canada, if there’s one thing they know they want to see, that one thing will be Niagara Falls. In places around the world where Canada is known for absolutely nothing else, we are known for Niagara Falls.

And the reason Chateaubriand wanted to see the Falls — the desire to be confronted with what we might call “the natural sublime” — is the same reason people come today, and his description of the feelings aroused by the sight will be meaningful to anyone who has been there. Beyond that, in his description of the “great highroads” and the “inns” that have sprung up around the Falls since his visit, he took note of the beginnings of the tourist industry that dominates Niagara Falls today, and he probably wouldn’t be surprised by the hotels, gift shops, and casinos that have appeared since. Ripley’s Museum might shock him a little.

The Idea of a Commonwealth, and a Poem About Montreal

Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Holiday: A Memoir (2012)

Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir is a bit of an odd book: he originally wrote it to chronicle the time he spent as part of a tour with Stevie Wonder advocating making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday (hence the book’s title) rather than as a conventional memoir. In the course of writing about the tour, however, he ended up writing about his childhood and youth as well. The process shows through in the structure of the book, which begins with Stevie Wonder, then suddenly leaps back in time to his parents and his childhood, and then gradually works its way forward to Stevie Wonder again, with various jumps and detours along the way. The book doesn’t really touch on the last years of his life at all (see below).

His relationship with his mother is powerfully conveyed, and his experiences as a campus activist and young author trying to get published are sharp and often amusing. And of course there are the backstage anecdotes you expect from a book like this – smoking gigantic joints with Bob Marley and so on. He seems to have stumbled more or less by accident into being a musician, by way of writing poetry and then making what would now be called “spoken word” albums – at least based on what he describes in the book.

If you’re a fan of his music, it’s definitely worth reading. There are even a couple of references to Canada.

That Sophisticated Land to the North

This passage is from a description of Scott-Heron’s father, Gil Heron, who, we have already been told, “was originally from Jamaica”. It describes him at the time he met Scott-Heron’s mother, Bobbie, in Chicago:

Gil Heron was young, exotic, and worldly, a veteran of the Canadian Air Force. He was also physical and athletic, and went all out when he competed. The Aries fire lit up his face and made it glow. The joy of winning brought a smile that made you feel like you were standing in a bright, warm sun. Sometimes he was romantic and sometimes thoughtful, brooding over the quality of his competition and teammates who couldn’t get the ball to him when they were pressed. He loved to talk about soccer, past games, teammates, opponents ridiculed as their pointless, desperate pursuit of him always ended the same way: Goooooaaaaal!  (19-20)

Heron played soccer in the United States until:

…the Scottish national team visited Chicago for a “friendly” match, an exhibition game, and were impressed. In fact, after the game members of the coaching staff spoke to him and made an informal offer for him to come to Scotland to play. He was, after all, already a citizen of the commonwealth.
My mother and father separated when I was one and a half years old, when Celtic, in Glasgow, Scotland, offered him a formal contract. My father decided to take an opportunity to do what he had always wanted to do: play football fulltime, at the highest level, against the best players…. To play with Celtic was also a Jackie Robinson-like invitation for him. It was something that had been beyond the reach and outside the dreams of Blacks. (21-22)

The way the words “veteran of the Canadian Air Force” immediately follow the word “worldly,” as if to provide an explanation, implies that his time in the Canadian Air Force is part of what has given him this air of worldliness, and we can be flattered by the idea that spending time in the Canadian armed forces turns you into a sophisticated cosmopolitan. At least to Scott-Heron’s mother, at that time, Canada was not the boring provincial backwater we see in some portrayals, but rather an exciting and perhaps slightly romantic country.

Beyond that, it’s fascinating to see how the idea of a larger commonwealth citizenship, one that transcends nationality, runs through the passages about Scott-Heron’s father: though from Jamaica, his family immigrated to Canada (easier because both were commonwealth countries?) and he joined the Canadian Air Force; later, when an opportunity arises to play soccer in Scotland, being a citizen of the commonwealth smooths the way again. (Heron became the first Black player to play for Celtic – you can read his Wikipedia entry for a little more information about him.)

Montreal In Verse

Scott-Heron often drops little (or sometimes large) chunks of verse into his narrative as a way of telling his story. A visit to Montreal for a concert inspires one of his longer poetic passages:

Montreal, November 7, 1980

I had no choice aside from moving quick
An ex-country hick whose image was city slick
The last one they would’ve ever picked
When I was in school doing my weekend stick
Compared to my classmates I couldn’t sing a lick
And through record store windows when they saw my flick
On the cover of an LP they wished for a brick
Because it wasn’t just out there it was actually a hit
And what they were wondering was what made me tick
It was that in spite of themselves they could all feel it

In reality I was heading for work
In the back of a cab I was changing my shirt
My Mickey Mouse was saying it was five to eight
So theoretically I was already late.
Next to me in the backseat were my daughter and my wife
And I’d probably say never been happier in my life.
Light rain was falling on the Montreal streets
And I slipped on my shoes and leaned back in the seat
As we pulled up to the Forum where the Canadiens played.
Tonight: “Stevie Wonder” the marquee proudly displayed
But not a word about me or my “Amnesia Express”
But I was feeling too good to start getting depressed.

It was only four days since I had found out for sure
That Stevie wanted me opening the rest of the tour.
News of Bob Marley’s illness was a helluva blow
I thought. And the eight o’clock news came on the radio
It looked like a sellout though the weather was damp
And fortunately no cars blocked the underground ramp.
As the cab took the curves beneath the old hockey rink
I was lighting a Viceroy and still trying to think
Of how Hartford had sounded and the tunes we should play;
Made mental notes of the order and felt it was okay

Keg Leg, my man, stood near the security line
‘Cause I never had I.D. and couldn’t get in sometimes
I was carrying Gia as we moved down the hall
And I nodded and smiled as I heard my name called.
Things were getting familiar and I was finding my niche
But I didn’t want to give producers any reason to bitch.
I told my brother to get the band ready at eight o’clock
And it was damn near ten after when I moved into my spot
James Grayer gave me a smile and tapped his Mickey Mouse
The lights went down and the crowd perked up
Because I was finally in the house.   (262-3)

To clarify a couple of points: Gia is Scott-Heron’s daughter, the “Amnesia Express” is the name of his backing band, and he got his place as the permanent opener on Stevie Wonder’s tour when Bob Marley became too ill to perform and had to drop out. And a Mickey Mouse, I assume from the context, means a watch: interesting as Mickey Mouse watches were one of the items of desirable Americana mentioned in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, which we considered recently.

I don’t know that we can conclude a lot from this poem; there are a couple of local references (the Forum, the Canadiens) but other than that it focuses on what is going through Scott-Heron’s mind on the cab ride; he’s not making statements about Montreal or the impression it creates on him. And perhaps that’s just the point: to Scott-Heron, Montreal is just another city, another stop on the tour, and the fact that it is in Canada isn’t even particularly meaningful to him.

Except for the fact that it is Montreal, and not some other city, that he chooses to memorialize in verse.

Left Unsaid (Unrelated to Canada)

It seems difficult to leave this book without glancing at the question of what Scott-Heron leaves out. There are some oblique references in the final chapter to not being allowed into his mother’s apartment, but nothing is ever clearly explained. I do recall reading a harrowing article about him in The New Yorker years ago, however, and I managed to track it down: called “New York Is Killing Me,” it is a portrait of Scott-Heron a year or two before his death.

It’s not a pretty picture, obviously, but if you’re thinking of reading The Last Holiday, the article makes a useful companion piece in terms of filling out the story of the latter part of Scott-Heron’s life.

The Music

Of course, there has to be music. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is Scott-Heron’s most famous song, but we’ve already featured it, so I’m going to put up my personal favourite, “Home Is Where the Hatred Is”:

I also like this one, which is a little closer to his “spoken word” roots:

And finally, we might as well have Scott-Heron’s tribute to a couple of jazz greats:

And that’s that.

Sex, Drugs, Classical Music … and Canada, Of Course

Blair Tindall, Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs and Classical Music (2004)

This is a strange book. I suppose you could categorize it as a memoir and not be too far off; it also seems to purport to be an “exposé” of the dark side of the classical music scene, though it really isn’t, or not to any great extent. There’s very little in the way of a narrative thread running through the book: much of it concerns Tindall’s own life, of course, but she often drops her story for long disquisitions on the history of classical music in the U.S., the lives of particular performers, and so on. As a result, the book ends up being a heterogeneous mix of personal anecdotes, social history, and op-ed type passages on “the state of classical music.” If I had to sum it up in a word, I would call it “lumpy”.

When I got to the end of the book and found out that Tindall had become a journalist, the book’s form – or maybe I should say, its lack of consistent form – made a little more sense to me: it’s more like a lot of articles on various topics related to classical music strung together without much of an organizing principle. And when I looked up a few of her articles online, there were definite parallels with the book, suggesting that perhaps some repurposing had gone on. That said, a lot of the personal anecdotes are interesting or amusing enough to be worth reading, and the portrait of the life of freelance classical musicians in New York, which hovers somewhere between subsistence and poverty, is sharply drawn and affecting.

And, of course, there are a few references to Canada to make it all worthwhile. The first comes in a description of one of Tindall’s fellow students at the North Carolina School of the Arts:

Next door to me was Kristin. She’d brought her French horn from a Montana town of 250, where, at best, girls returned home to a husband and farm after attending a local college. One snowy night, pianist Lili Kraus had played eighty miles away in Great Falls, the only big town between Billings and Calgary.   (22)

The passage on a general level speaks to the cultural desolation that exists outside major cities. Interestingly, however, Canada is not mentioned as an example of some kind of wasteland, as often happens with American authors; rather, Calgary represents one outpost of civlization at the far end of the musical desert in which Tindall’s roommate has grown up. I think we can take that as a compliment.

The next reference to Canada is simply a brief mention in a performance itinerary about Tindall’s friend (and sometime lover), the pianist Sam Sanders:

By April, Sam hit the road with Itzhak, traveling to Dallas, Quebec and across the Midwest.  (182)

There’s an interesting pattern of decreasing specificity there: Dallas is a city, Quebec a province, and the Midwest a region that encompasses several states. Ordinarily it’s Canada that is treated in the vaguest way in lists like this and U.S. locations that are named more specifically, but here the one Canadian location actually occupies the middle position, and it is “the Midwest” that is treated like a vast expanse of nothingness.

So that’s a nice step up for us. Of course it would be Quebec that the famous Itzhak Perlman includes on his tour.

And finally, there is this, which was definitely the most interesting Canadian reference in the book:

Schlepping back from a gig in Jersey, I held my instruments tightly while passing through Port Authority. The bus station had long been known as a magnet for crime. However, today it felt safe, even bucolic, as Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik echoed down empty corridors. New York had discovered “musical bug spray,” a term coined by Northwestern University professor Robert Gjerdingen. The technique was first used in 1985 to chase away loiterers at a Canadian 7-Eleven. The trend spread as Pavarotti cleared out Denver parking lots, Chopin thwarted Toronto thugs, and an endless loop of Mozart blared across a Florida slum….
I thought about the message of the Port Authority’s Mozart. It was 1994, and the sound of classical music had become offensive enough to be used as an effective weapon against crime.  (205)

Tindall doesn’t seem to think the trend towards using classical music to chase away loiterers is anything to be proud of, but at least in this somewhat questionable area, Canada can claim to be a leader. This passage also reflects an idea of Canadian cities that runs counter to their usual image of being much “safer” than American cities: even Toronto, it turns out, has thugs.

Personal Reminiscences

In an example of what Northrop Frye might have called the “pre-critical response,” I have to confess a particular fondness for that paragraph because I experienced what it describes first-hand. In the mid-90s, when I used to travel to the wilds of Scarborough to work, I had to take a bus from Kennedy station (apologies for the Toronto references for those who have no idea what I’m talking about), and during that time the TTC, in response to a couple of stabbings, instituted exactly the program Tindall is describing at Kennedy: in an attempt to make the station feel inhospitable to the sort of people who stab other people, they started piping in classical music (I think it was mostly Beethoven) all day. And so every morning, while I waited for my bus, I was treated to some music.

(Of course in the age of the iPod/iPhone, when anyone who wishes can walk around permanently cocooned in whatever music they choose, this “musical bug spray” idea would never work. But those were different times.)

What were the results? I don’t personally recall feeling any “safer” in the station, but then I was only waiting around there in the mornings, and the stabbings likely occurred at night. I don’t think anyone else got stabbed while the classical music was being played, so I suppose it “worked,” in some sense. The program didn’t last very long though – I think after a month or two at most the station was silent again. No doubt non-stop Beethoven was driving the TTC employees crazy and they complained about a “poisoned work environment” or something like that.

The Music

Since the book is about music, it seems a shame not to include a little. Here is Mozart’s Oboe Concerto, just to give a sense of what Tindall’s instrument (did I mention she’s an oboist?) sounds like:

“An ill wind that no one blows good,” as a repeated joke in the book has it.

One of Tindall’s boyfriends has a particular fondness for Mahler’s Fifth; here’s a version conducted by Leonard Bernstein, who also features in the book:

Though I find this version by von Karajan more compelling, particularly the first movement:

Bonus Pop-Culture Tie-In

Mozart in the Jungle has recently been used as the basis for a TV series by Amazon. I haven’t watched it, but here’s the trailer:

My impression, based on that, is that the show bears little relation to the actual content of the book, but really just uses the subtitle as the jumping-off point for a largely fictionalized narrative. Still, it might be fun.

Mother Runs Off … to Canada

James Lees-Milne, Another Self (1970)

Another Self is generally referred to as a “semi-autobiographical novel,” though today, no doubt, it would just be marketed as a “memoir”. Lees-Milne is best-known as a diarist – a number of volumes of his diaries have been published – and as a key figure in the early years of the National Trust, and was also a member of the Mitford circle. (There are similarities between his description of his father in this book and the father figure in the work of Nancy and Jessica Mitford.) Another Self gives an account of his childhood and youth, the idea behind the title apparently being that the person he was then is no longer the same as the person who wrote this book.

The reference to Canada comes at a point in the book when Lees-Milne is describing how his parents reacted to his lack of success at Eton:

My housemaster recommended that there was little point in my remaining at school beyond the summer half. Eton, he hinted, could do little further for me, and I might just as well make room for some other boy who would benefit from it. My father was naturally in a blazing temper. My mother who could not face up to the recriminations which, she explained, would only make her ill, kissed me fondly goodbye, and sailed away to Canada.  (45)

There is something about that scene – not romantic precisely – but melodramatic, I think. The threat of illness, the fond kiss, the abrupt departure for a distant location – these elements seem borrowed from the Victorian stage and make this moment feel not so much natural as constructed for effect – though whether constructed by the author or by his mother is hard to say.

Canada’s emphatic placement at the end of the paragraph makes our country the dramatic culmination of the whole passage – it is this departure to Canada that the narrative leads up to. And yet Canada itself remains mysterious. Why does she sail to Canada? What does she do there? We are never told. The name of our country simply sits on the page, unexplained and, perhaps, inexplicable.

Of course, as a (former) British colony, Canada would offer at least some of the comforts of familiarity to Lees-Milne’s mother: she would be able to speak the language and so on. We could almost imagine Canada as a sort of sanatorium, maintained by the Empire, where Englishwomen can go when they need a break from life at home. After a few months in the colonial wilderness, no doubt, whatever problems they had back in England will begin to look relatively minor.

And in fact, in the next chapter the narrator’s mother is back in England, and no reference to Canada is ever made again. We can speculate about the reasons behind the journey – did she have a lover there, or a lover who was going there? She had already run – or more accurately, flown – off with a balloonist before the abrupt departure to Canada, so something along those lines is possible – but we are never told.

Canada is the means by which the mother dramatically gives up on life and escapes from reality, but only temporarily. Sailing to Canada is not a real decision with irrevocable consequences; it is, rather, a gesture that conveys the mother’s mental and emotional state at that particular moment in time, but can always be retracted later. For her, living in Canada is a momentary aberration, not a permanent state.