Heroes Read online

  The author of fifty-four books translated into seven languages, twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, Layton lists his favourite recreation as “polemicizing,” a search for ways to perpetuate his inelastic faith in himself as a bon vivant, freethinker and Olympic-grade lover. His seventy-eight years have not slowed him down exactly, but instead of being a freelance firecracker attempting to explode every social shibboleth within range, he has become a verbal cannon, aiming big salvos at big targets.

  We meet at the Hostaria Romana, a downtown Montreal pasta joint he describes as having “exquisite food, served as if the guests were royalty.” The spaghetti Bolognese turns out to be mediocre, but the conversation is wonderful. “Civilization has never been in greater danger,” Layton begins, characteristically ignoring the dubious comforts of understatement. “But I don’t regard that danger as a menace or a bad thing. On the contrary, with danger, you have the possibility of change and hope, an opportunity to do something different. Everything becomes negotiable, because there’s the possibility of doing things in a fundamentally new way. Too often in the past we’ve drawn back and resisted the opportunity for genuine improvement.”

  Unlike most Canadians, who tend to blame everything from the Maple Leafs hockey team’s perpetual losing streak to the clouds of locusts chomping on Alberta’s barley fields on the lousy politicians in charge of our destinies, Layton shrugs them off as being irrelevant. He puts down Jean Chrétien as never having had the character, stamina or personality required by Canada’s precarious situation. “You’ve got to have not only the right man but the right moment,” he explains. “This is the right moment, but we don’t have the right man.” Quebec premier Robert Bourassa he praises as a “cool-headed economist who understands that the most important thing is to feed and clothe people, so you can’t go wild with your nationalism. “

  Only Pierre Trudeau earns the poet’s broiling wrath. “He thinks he’s a visionary,” Layton begins winding himself up. “But a certified visionary must understand the elements he’s working with, and Trudeau ignores the French-Canadian fact. He always struck me as being very opinionated, highly dogmatic and, above all, arrogant. His pit-bull attitudes are based on his inability to listen; he feels so superior to everybody because of his training as a Jesuit and his observance of the catechism of Angry Anglohood. In short, his temper and his rooster masculinity militate against his ability to govern.”

  Partly because he has travelled and read so widely, Layton views Canada’s perpetual constitutional crisis from a worldwide perspective. “I see the quest for independence, whether it’s in Quebec or Eastern Europe, springing out of the alienation of the individual from a world he never made. I see modern man as being alienated from God, from nature and, finally, in this last stage, from himself. We feel afraid, forlorn and comfortless, seeking a touch of warmth, like lost sheep plunging back into a flock that follows no direction.” Amen.

  That’s a mild rant for a rainy Tuesday noon hour, but Layton is just getting started and turns less forgiving with every slurp of pasta. “I can’t help feeling,” he glooms, “that we’re now in a situation analogous to the fourth or fifth centuries, during the fall of the Roman Empire, when the barbarian hordes were knocking on the gates. Those barbarians were external. Ours are internal, in the sense that they’re our own citizens who have shaken off the restraints of civilization. It’s even true of the arts. Will we ever see another Milton, Shakespeare, Racine or T.S. Eliot? Forget it. That kind of greatness is gone forever, destroyed by technology and the forces of so-called education. If you want great poetry today, don’t go to the poets who are all busy writing their sweet little lyrics, God bless them. If you want great poetry today, go to films and music.”

  Curiously, Layton’s pessimism excludes the future of Quebec, because he feels its society is firmly rooted in a distinct history, religion, language, literature and memory. That’s where the grievances and the difficulties come in, he believes, because English Canada lacks such unifying anchors. This doesn’t only mean English Canada would have a tough time facing the determined collective will of French Canada, but that those of us outside Quebec are much more open to the destructive forces of the modern world. “Menaced by the Anglos, the French Canadians pull in,” he explains, “because they feel they’re protecting something valuable against the onset of mediocratization and homogenization. English Canadians don’t have much intellectual baggage whatsoever. None at all, really. So they have very little to protect and not much will to fight back.”

  The third glass of Pinot Grigio has turned lukewarm between us, and Layton grows silent for a few precious nanoseconds as his audience—the bevy of gathered waiters, who stand around like cashiered hedge fund managers—agree with him.

  But the poet ends on an up note. “I have two deities,” he confides. “My main deity is chance; the other is love. I’m a great believer in chance. I was born circumcised, which gave me the vanity and egotism of a saviour, and made my mother favour me. I was the only one in her brood of seven who attended high school, because our family couldn’t afford the fees. She felt that if I turned out to be the Messiah, I should know the English language, history and so on. I’ve been a great believer in chance ever since.” Layton hints that Canada may be salvaged by just such a confluence of good fortune.

  I can’t resist. “Surely,” I plead with him, “as a putative Messiah, you can save this country.” His eyebrows shoot up, not sure whether I’m joshing. “I don’t think I can save it,” he replies, sadly shaking his great mane of grey curls.

  Then he quickly recovers his customary triple-A chutzpah. “I shouldn’t be overcome by such modesty all of a sudden,” he snorts. “Maybe after I’ve had another drink …”

  —1997

  A Fond Farewell to Robertson Davies

  “ALL MORTALS ARE REPLACEABLE” runs the modern mantra, betraying the ethic of programmed obsolescence that has come to dominate North American culture. There are exceptions, and one of them, Robertson Davies, died recently, leaving a gap in the Canadian ethos that cannot be filled.

  A society can afford to lose only so many voices of wisdom and civility before it feels cut loose from its spiritual moorings. In the past decade, that list of departed Canadian beacons of enlightenment has included Morley Callaghan, Marian Engel, Barbara Frum, Northrop Frye, Margaret Laurence, Bruce Hutchison, Roger Lemelin, Arthur Lower, Hugh MacLennan and Sandy Ross. The greatest of them was Robertson Davies. A writer of serious mien with a bespoke twinkle in his eyes, he left open the natural speculation by anyone he met: whether he resembled God or did the Supreme Deity sport a bearded countenance like his?

  No matter. “Rob,” as he was known to his friends, championed mid-nineteenth-century thought and sentiment, describing himself as the most reluctant of patriots, finding Canada hard to endure yet impossible to flee. “God, how I tried to love this country,” exclaims a character in his play Fortune My Foe. “I have given all I have to Canada—my love, then my hate, and now my bitter indifference. But this raw, frost-bitten country has worn me out, and its raw, frost-bitten people have numbed my heart.”

  In less lofty language, he once explained to me in private that while he had many chances to live elsewhere, he just couldn’t bring himself to leave. “I belong here,” he told me, with a pained expression. “To divorce yourself from your roots is spiritual suicide. I just am a Canadian. It’s not a thing you can escape from. It’s like having blue eyes.”

  Well, not quite. The life Davies chose for himself hardly qualified him as one of your McKenzie-Brother, run-of-the-brew, prototypical Canadian hosers. After graduating from Upper Canada College and Oxford’s Balliol College, he created an intellectual haven for himself as founding Master of the University of Toronto’s Massey College. Inside its elegant, very un-Canadian walls, he moved among his Fellows in their gowned splendour, looking extraordinarily magnificent in his necromancer’s beard, living in the Master’s Lodge, the BMW in his private driveway, p
residing at High Table, sniffing snuff out of an ivory horn, sipping claret and responding with supreme indifference to charges that the institution he headed was snobbish, sexist, anachronistic and perhaps even a little absurd. The place reflected perfectly his view of life and his genius for civilized eccentricity that he so brilliantly captured in his novels. They felt so authentic because they were, in spirit if not in detail, autobiographical with never a touch of plea bargaining.

  All the while that he presided over Massey, stressing tradition over practicality, the Master was playing a splendid joke on his detractors. In 1970, after writing a stack of novels, plays and works of theatrical criticism that brought him mild approval at home and virtually no notice abroad, Davies published Fifth Business to universal international acclaim. Saul Bellow and John Fowles, then the English-speaking world’s leading fiction writers, were loud in their praises, as was the New York Times and just about every other reviewer except Mother Jones. Davies had finally found his place at the pinnacle of literary acclaim, which was only proper, since that was where he had always meant to be. That success was repeated with The Manticore and his six subsequent novels.

  I spent much of an afternoon chatting with the illustrious author at his cozy Massey College digs, later attending one of his High Table dinners. He sat there at the head of the tableaux, theatrical in appearance, almost ostentatiously dated in his manner. You expected him to wear a Cromwellian collar while debating whether Thomas More, Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII, was a fanatical heretic or a saint. “I am very interested in the condition of sainthood,” he confided, presumably including his own. “It is just as interesting as evil.”

  Unexpectedly, we moved to the subject of pornography. “It is a cheat,” he declared. “It is an attempt to provide a sexual experience by second-hand means—rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody hum a few bars. It’s not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships; pornography—a twenty-second best.” Davies hated nothing worse than what he called “young fogies”—those pretenders who everlastingly harped on the fact that they were young but thought and acted with a degree of caution that would be excessive in their grandfathers. “They are the curse of the world,” he thundered. “They don’t even know what they are conserving. “

  While he had great respect for his craft, Davies categorized himself as a simple storyteller. “I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, ‘I will tell you a story,’ and then passes the hat. When he’s taken up the collection, he tells his story, and just before the denouement, passes the hat again. If it’s worth anything, fine. If not, he ceases to be an author.”

  Our conversation kept coming back to why he felt so alienated from and yet obsessed with being—and remaining—Canadian. “Canada demands a great deal from people,” he said, emphasizing each syllable like a preacher mouthing a benediction. “It is not, as some countries are, quick to offer in return a pleasant atmosphere or easy kind of life. I mean, France demands an awful lot from her people too, but France also offers gifts in the way of a genial, pleasant sort of life and many amenities.” “Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures,” he lamented.

  “A lot of people complain that my novels aren’t about Canada. I think they are, because I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit, which it fears, and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker. This makes for tension, and tension is the very stuff of art, plays, novels—the whole lot.”

  Like his books, Davies’ conversation was peppered with the supernatural, and he ended the evening by returning to sainthood, almost as if he felt he should claim its halo. “Most saints have been unbearable nuisances in life. Some were reformers, some were sages, some were visionaries, but all were intensely alive, and thus a rebuke to people who were not. So many got martyred because nobody could stand them. Society hates exceptional people, because such people make them feel inferior.”

  Robertson Davies was, if not a saint, certainly a genius. It was to his credit and to our gain that he was such a magnificent storyteller—and that he was ours.

  —1997

  The “Fillum” Moguls Who Made Me

  JOAN DIDION, who chronicled the psychic extravagances of the California lifestyle, once observed that the oral history of Los Angeles was written in piano bars: “People tell each other about their first wives and last husbands. ‘Stay funny,’ they say, while listening to ‘Moon River,’ ‘Love for Sale’ and ‘Send in the Clowns.’

  “ In the Toronto of the 1970s, the bar was Club 22 and the clowns were the hucksters who breach-birthed the Canadian movie industry on the premises, tucked into a corner of the Courtyard Café, at St. Thomas and Bloor. The bar was part of the Windsor Arms Hotel, purchased in 1963 by George Minden, a U of T philosophy and English graduate who picked his friends by whether or not they knew when to laugh at the bassoon joke in Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture. His watering hole became the epicentre of the city’s—and the country’s—cultural renaissance. If Toronto was downtown Canada, the Courtyard was uptown Toronto.

  A combination of Beverly Hills’ Polo Lounge, Elaine’s and Sardi’s in New York (where the stars went to be private in public), Blakes in London and the Gaslight in Paris, it was my hangout. During his fourteen-year gig, Paul Drake, the resident pianist who later married into Belgian royalty, became Club 22’s chief animator and musical host. Among the many visitors was an aging Debbie Reynolds, who arrived with eighty suitcases. (Asked about her love life, she confided: “I haven’t forgotten how, I just don’t remember why.”) One of the highlights Drake recalled was the night Christopher Plummer, celebrating the premiere of his film Murder by Decree, rose unsteadily in his seat to proclaim with Shakespearean cadence and customary dignity: “We live in a world where celebrities hold the proxies for our identities …” Only to be drowned out by the drunken cheers of the pseudo-celebs.

  It was the kind of place where macho males were judged by the angles of their cigars. Except for the odd Hollywood agent temporarily slumming in the Great White North, Club 22’s clientele was Canadian. Well, un-Canadian, really—much too ballsy to qualify for citizenship, except retroactively. (One exception was a Hamilton-born visiting Hollywood director of horror movies who never removed his sunglasses—with mirrors on the inside— and kept muttering: “Gonna lie doggo in ma’ Tuscanny shack” while snorting cocaine off his Porsche key.)

  They were self-proclaimed geniuses who lived off each other by pitching movies. Walking into Club 22 was like visiting a zoo at feeding time. The restless titter of macho machers making deals to make deals kept the place buzzing, and the buzz was always about future films, or “fillums,” as the patrons described their art form.

  The Toronto movie boom of the 1970s was uncannily like the Leduc oil strike of the 1940s: everybody pretended to be what they claimed they were, holding on to their precious piece of the action. The movies they made have long been forgotten, but they portrayed—occasionally brilliantly but mostly middling—truths that were large and small, yet essentially Canadian.

  What the big screen demanded was alchemy, and that was in short supply. “We’re going straight to cult,” a frustrated Cabbagetown movie mogul announced, then jauntily began lining up his next blockbuster. The movie people felt most alive as they tested their nerves, digging their tax shelters, waiting out the offers, swinging on a bankable star who had told them she “would kill” to be in their movie but hadn’t shown up yet. The trick was to stay in the game.

  The extras were mostly CBC types, showbiz hangers-on, camp followers of more than two sexes, not to mention the whiskey priests flaunting their self-appointed authority as they toyed with the pine nuts floating in their chilled cucumber soup.

  Scattered among the plush-brown banquettes were the real machers: Bill Marshall (the only one with a private phone at his table
), Bob Cooper, Robert Cohen, Jon Slan, Garth Drabinsky, David Perlmutter, George Mendeluk, and Fil Fraser from Calgary, whose Why Shoot the Teacher was a Canadian breakthrough film. The entertainment lawyer Michael Levine was everywhere, acting as executive producer to more movies than he later claimed.

  The star of the circus was Mike McCabe, my political pal from Ottawa days, then head of the Canadian Film Development Corporation, which provided the industry’s momentum and seed money. Brash, confident, done up in bushy beard and safari jacket, he turned Canada into the world’s third-largest film production centre, with $150 million invested in new movies during its top year.

  The self-described starlets who nightly sat around Club 22 waiting to be discovered were convinced that to be an actress you only had to look like one. The sexual thermostat was always set on high. Late one night, I noticed a Club 22 regular posing as a producer (mussed haircut, peasant body shirt, Riviera jeans) leaning over a stunning brunette and conversationally asking her what she liked doing best. “Balling,” she replied, assuming this was an appointment for her screen test. The confused would-be seducer backed away, and the jilted bride started to cry, her perfectly formed tears refracted by the ceiling spotlights, glittering like a spill of diamonds.

  At the bottom of the movie industry’s pecking order were the writers, of course, charged with the unglamorous job of turning the wild, late-night Club 22 fantasies, jotted down on table napkins, into filmable shooting scripts. “Our position,” declared Frank Pierson, the visiting head of the Screen Writers Guild, “is that hopefully, someday, the industry can forget the old joke about the Polish starlet who thought she could get ahead by fucking the writer.”