5You often hear writers claim they "always wanted to write novels." Not me. From the age of consciousness, I set my sights on finding a life beyond the known. I wanted to get off the farm, fill the void of ignorance, and conquer a city, which meant acquiring a circle of smart friends who gathered in bars and posed for black and white photographs that would someday be iconic. The actual business of working remained vague. Having drifted into the land of dead white males, I planted my flag in the seventeenth century, won a Dean''s medal, and stayed on at McGill for an M.A. thesis on the great god Milton.
The obvious next step was a Ph.D. Under the tutelage of a Princeton-educated scholar, I landed a prestigious research grant, which is how I ended up at Oxford, ready to explore the various meanings of fire in Paradise Lost. My plan was to get the doctorate, then find an academic post. On my first weekend trip down to London, I met and fell madly in love with a left-wing activist poet from Aberdeen. For the better part of a year, my life was a manic rhythm of ecstasy and despair. He had fled Scotland with a suitcase full of poems, hoping to find a London publisher. Instead, Margaret Thatcher''s austerity campaign galvanized his energies.
By the time we met, he''d rallied a circle of angry socialists dedicated to resisting the Tory government''s assault on the working class, a heritage of which he was proud. They read Franz Fanon, wore Che Guevara T-shirts, and spent hours arguing over strategy, all terribly exciting, just the kind of edgy existence I''d imagined living. The invasion of the Falkland Islands -- a smokescreen allowing the prime minister to entrench neo-liberal policies -- drove the movement into the streets, where violent clashes with police sent many to hospital or jail. At the peak of the crisis, a BBC film crew zoomed in on my poet and me embracing under an umbrella, while more focused rebels in the foreground dove for cover. His long-suffering wife saw the clip on TV and showed up at his bedsit with a small handgun in her purse, a vintage Smith & Wesson inherited from her grandfather, an IRA hero. I backed out of the room. After a few anguished phone conversations, I never saw him again. In the weeks that followed, between bouts of crying and swilling cheap wine, I scribbled an account of love and loss, the full glory details of our time together, ecstasy and betrayal, along with everything I thought and felt about London, life, literature -- a panoply of youthful disillusion and betrayal, raw, uncensored.
Even poor old Milton got tossed into the fire of suffering. Burned by life, I could not remember what had inspired me to spend so much time poring over a dead man''s words, and said so, boldly. I was devastated, paralyzed, unable to imagine the rest of my existence. I stayed in London, hiding out from the archives. It rained for a month. In the pit of misery, Barry Keehan knocked on my door. We''d dated briefly at grad school in Montreal, but I didn''t take him seriously. An indifferent scholar, he seemed more intent on establishing a reputation for throwing great parties than pursuing a career.
For reasons I never quite understood, he kept in touch after graduation, sent me ironic postcards, called at Christmas. Somehow he found me in London, at the pit of my blues, living in a cheap rooming house in Soho, thin as a pencil and too weak to resist company of any kind. In the context of a vast foreign city, gossip about McGill classmates and professors, our shared critique of all things Canadian, created an easy intimacy. When he set about seducing me, I assured him my heart was permanently broken. He shouldn''t interpret nonresistance as genuine interest. He claimed he didn''t care, the metaphysical heart was not an essential organ. Many people get along quite nicely without one. I decided to take him at his word.
Between languorous afternoons in my closet of a room, we sat in pubs and drank the last of my scholarship fund. Finally, on the verge of bankruptcy, I landed a job editing a Canadian professor''s manuscript, which required my presence in her office. Barry was broke and had to go home. In the meantime, he''d found time to read my furious typing, which he declared was a novel. He made no prescient comments that I can recall but offered to show it to an editor in Toronto. I was flattered to think my scribbling might have some poetic merit, but hardly invested with hope. Three months later, I got a thick envelope containing four single-spaced pages of notes from Barry, along with an offer of publication from McClelland & Stewart. I did another draft and sent it off.
A month later, he sold the manuscript to a prestigious U.K. publisher. A year later I was a published author.The Guardian review was dithyrambic -- voice of a generation, lyric masterpiece, etc. -- and a string of influential critics concurred. The modest Canadian and U.K.
advances were trumped by a hefty American deal and a film option, followed by translations into a dozen languages. The movie came out under another title, with a famous actress playing me. Little that I could recognize as my work appeared on screen, but I made a lot of money. The doctoral thesis deadline passed. Letters from McGill went unopened. At the age of twenty-seven, I was famous for a novel I could hardly remember writing. The truth is, I had -- and still have -- no love for that book. I did not believe it stacked up against the great novels of our time.
A page turner, breathless momentum, but no depth, no theme or awareness of context. Since that accidental beginning, I''ve struggled for decades to write a better book -- innovative, deep, worthy of the form. In my own estimation, I have come close to succeeding. At least I''ve stayed with the mission. But in the world of literature and the public eye, I''m still the author of one commercial sensation, a torrent of undigested emotion bereft of meaning. My heartbreak book was not to my literary taste. But I was stuck with it, unable to be another kind of writer. Erosionwas a hurricane that swept through my life, leaving me perched on a precipice.
The title paid homage to a poem by E.J. Pratt, one of Canada''s leading poets between the wars. In retrospect, a cringeworthy choice, but at the time my heart craved dark matter. I can still recite Pratt''s lines from memory: It took the sea a thousand years / A thousand years to trace / The granite features of this cliff / In crag and scarp and base. It took the sea an hour one night, / An hour of storm to place / The sculpture of these granite seams / Upon a woman''s face. On the strength of his success with Erosion, Barry founded The Keehan Literary Agency, which went on to discover and represent many of Canada''s finest writers. I was able to pay cash for a house in Cabbagetown.
A tiny house on a double lot, a storey and a half with teal blue siding, ornate white trim, a picket fence, and patches of garden front and back, plus a decrepit garage at the side. #By the time I returned from the funeral, the purple sage was in bloom. My tenant in the basement suite had locked the front door and taken in newspapers that piled up in my absence. A few shingles had blown off the porch, a reminder it needed repair, preferably before winter. After the gloomy atmosphere of the farmhouse, my little haven felt like heaven. There was a message on the answering machine from Delores, Barry''s executive assistant. A petit Haitian with a voice like soft ice cream, she always makes an invitation to interact with the Great Man sound like you''ve won the lottery. I called back, she said he wanted to see me as soon as possible.
We agreed on 10:00 a.m. the following day. Hanging up, I noted two significant points: My agent did not come to the phone and he did not invite me to lunch, which sounded like he had bad news. I dug out the latest draft of my novel-in-progress and settled down in the garden to give it a quick re-read, in case he actually wanted to talk about the manuscript. Unlikely, but I always prefer to be prepared. In the early years, the Keehan Agency''s offices were located in a lovely turn-of-the-century mansion on a residential street near the University of Toronto. A few years ago, Barry cashed in on the property boom and moved into a rented suite in a Bay Street skyscraper.
I told him I thought this gave the wrong signal to writers, suggesting the agency was making gobs of money from our ever-declining advances. Barry said sending signals to authors wasn''t what agenting was about; the firm needed to be close to the city''s corporate heartbeat in order to save us all from penury. I didn''t take much notice at the time, but the new, improved Keehan Inc. was about to veer into ancillary adventures that would have little to do with actual books. They kept a lawyer on retainer and shared space with some nebulous Internet concern whose activity was not obvious from the corporate logo. Taking the elevator up to the twenty-second floor gave me vertigo. I was kept waiting in the lobby for twenty-eight minutes, long enough to become thoroughly discouraged by an article in a literary trade magazine by a well-established fiction writer explaining why he spent years sweating over the biography of a famous dead Canadian -- because the literary novel is finished, he said. People don''t read them anymore.
Publishers had lost the ability to make real novels seem important to the book-buying market. What did he mean by "seem" important? That novels aren''t, really, but should be made to appear important? Isn''t he really talking about hype, the province of supermarket bestsellers? I hadn''t quite finished the article when Delores summoned me into the inner sanctuary. Barry leapt up from the desk, threw his arms out wide (we do not hug in business situations), and demanded to know where I''d been. He''d been trying to reach me all week.Sturdy, broad-shouldered, unfailingly well.