the great slice of limestone into Kingston, that grey canyon cut by the highway down into the valley of the old capital town of the Canadas — Kingston … where I walked that afternoon in November — to have the pleasure of seeing that unsung Ontario Trinity … St.Andrew’s Presbytery — the best of Ontario stonework; Elizabeth Cottage — the loveliest Walter Scott gothic; & (aptly Anglican) Okill’s Folly — the most splendiferous Regency manor — now the residence of the Principal of Queen’s Univ … all within a few hundred yards of each other — & was as joyous as if I had walked from La Place de la Concorde to the Louvre to La Sainte Chapelle; & had wanted to take a whip to the passers-by who didn’t make obeisance to these splendours.& why not — infraction against beauty is a crime against the state!
Of course the Penitentiary … Child’s King Arthur come ironically true, with its busy turrets … & the Military College (dare one still call it “Royal” — because that too will go soon enough — we’ll rechristen it the Federal Military College … surreptitiously! — and then by Order-in-Council)
the old #2 route thence to Ganonoque’s Golden Apple — laden with stonehouses and flowers spurting out of stone roadcut canyons …. & that day, it was February 28, when my wife & I sunbathed on the front porch of the deserted summer cottage, over the Thousand Islands, after returning from Amurrica — laughing at the legend of the frozen North (the look on the mongrel dog’s face, & then his master’s, when he saw us there!) The Ontario Front … Giant sentinel Mulleins stalking the land still in dried khaki above the white field beds. I know just where the climax oak and the hickory start again, near Kingston
… Oh, out that window is all of me underfoot. Out that window is inside me, always. That can’t be taken away. Can it? & now it is dark … I can see the Macdonald-Cartier “Highway” (damn the official term “Freeway” — it sounds like some boxtop prize … or, closer to the truth, a come-on to the Yank tourists) and its load of cattle-cars … all bypassing this Front, happily for the Front, unhappily for them … because suddenly the people that made the land disappear, under the asphalt and the speedometer.
The lights of the great Du Pont factory outside Brockville — and I pray that our lakeside won’t become like that of the American lakefront or Toronto … a shambles of hotdoggeral and gimcrap, and factories:because Lake Ontario may be the American back door, but it is our front door. Our garden. Then Upper Canada Village … which warns me that our history is now under glass … or under the St. Lawrence Seaway — and that this is but a sop to our vestigial historic consciences.After all, the Village is under the supervision of the provincial tourist department! QED. Goddam it.
So — I have a nostalgia. For my land, and its people. I’m a romantic. A sin in this era of belated Canadian positivism. I cry “too little for the sensibility,” when all our intellectuals moan “too little for their minds.” Too bad! I love my land. & damn their dry eyes. Detesticulate.
The home in Iroquois, where we were received for lunch … bad 1920’s Art Nouveau with a painting of an Irish setter on velvet over the fireplace — & the look on the man’s face, he was from the West, when I told him there was no sound in our East like the prairie meadowlark … I thought he was going to kiss me … but he got me another drink instead, unasked & we loved each other across the ages. &then quarrelled over politics. But meadowlark still sang.
Oh, yes, goddam it — I love my land … & I love my people. Still.Unpardonable crime in this age of “cool culture” & commissions. Or is it simply untenable fidelity? The latter has it, of course. So, I’ll love, &go under, hating those who so conscientiously kill my love …
Abruptly I am grilled … a cold sear of bright grilling me — grilling my flesh all bloodless bright red — Hate: of a sudden hate has me, has won … carries me off bodiless in triumph. Jerk me forward to catch this rape in the act, before too late — before I dissolve before I detonate. Make notes, ward off the evil eye now. What happened? What in this Hell happened? Go back & piece the evidence together. First — Where am I? & then sink back as I see … the train had stopped, lurched my eyes back into the traincar … Back in? No! — out: train swallowed me out of my land, smothered me away from my earth … dispersed me under the grill of neonessent light, those candy floss red seats — at once compressing and atomizing me. Anteus bereft … Christ — in a hot sweat I need a pee. & heave me into the aisle, into — “Hello Hugh — you look as though you need a tonic” — I look up to find the soft laughing eyes of Jack Greg … we speed to the bar-car.Thank God it’s him … someone I can want to see. Fellow publishing house man. Feverish in delight I leech him of the blood the Rapido has just haemorrhaged out of me … squandered. & over a martini I don’t want we giggle indecorously about the Great Auk the Royal Ontario Museum has just acquired (both bird-watchers!) Positively clenching the padded seats with our buttockry …
“God knows that’s what the museum needed — a Great Auk!— the one thing all museums need, and lack … ” and I catch Greg’s lilting gawkwardness out my eye-corner in a feline complicity of joy … we both mould the seat pads in an accredited squirm of delight, harvesting their Great Auk.
Greg — “It was bought from Vassar College” — a burst of sweet gigglement again.
Me — “God — our provincial Auk came from Vassar!”
Greg — “What’s more, it was Audubon’s Great Auk.”
That is too much — we eye each other openly, as silent upon our peak … More laughter. & then the Great Auk has done its service. Has bound us as one flesh, refurbished — & can be discarded, like any dildo.I stop — suddenly aware how nearly the laughter has consummated my self-expenditure. So close to depleting my entire reserve of credulity now, of faith, of available energy. Suddenly wary — I nurse my last ounce of resistance. Look around at the bar-car. At this new world of plausible plush. I’ll have to be careful.
Joined by two of Greg’s friends … an Englit don & wife from the University of Toronto. A typical Englit combination — the wife has a beard, bass voice, & three testicles. She is a TV producer when she isn’t producing hubby. He is a falsetto — visually if not audibly; as slight as his wife is muscle-bound, no beard because no chin to carry one … I bethink me of the Great Auk again … Thank God for the Great Auk — after all, the provincial museum is part of the provincial university — it can do yeoman service therein. Audubon’s Great Auk, bought from the girls of Vassar …. It will just be sufficient.
Jabberwocky for half-an-hour, as I keep withholding me from the decor of the bar-car … And then the Englits are leaving … wife carrying hubbie off by the scruff of his neck. Mrs. doesn’t like being in a “beer hall.” Incredible — but so … But who am I to laugh — because I can’t stand the place either, although for different reasons