A Writer's World (44 page)

And best of all, early one morning I went down to Union Station to watch the transcontinental train come in out of the darkness from Vancouver. Ah, Canada! I knew exactly what to expect of this experience, but still it stirred me: the hiss and rumble of it, the travel-grimed gleam of the sleeper cars, the grey faces peering out of sleeper windows, the proud exhaustion of it all, and the thick tumble of the disembarking passengers, a blur of boots and lumberjackets and hoods and bundled children, clattering down the steps to breakfast, grandma, and Toronto, out of the limitless and magnificent hinterland.

These varied stimuli left me puzzled. What were the intentions of this city? On a wall of the stock exchange, downtown, there is a mural sculpture entitled
Workforce
, by Roben Longo: and since it expresses nothing if not resolute purpose, I spent some time contemplating its significance.

Its eight figures, ranging from a stockbroker to what seems to be a female miner, do not look at all happy – the pursuit of happiness, after all, is not written into the Canadian constitution. Nor do they look exactly inspired by some visionary cause: it is true that the armed forces
lady in the middle is disturbingly like a Soviet Intourist guide, but no particular ideology seems to be implied. They are marching determinedly, but joylessly, arm-in-arm, upon an undefined objective. Wealth? Fame? Security? The afterlife? I could not decide. Just as, so Toronto itself has taught us, the medium can be the message, so it seemed that for the stock exchange workforce the movement was the destination.

Well, do cities have to have destinations? Perhaps not, but most of them do, if it is only a destination in the past, or in the ideal. Toronto seems to me, in time as in emotion, a limbo-city. It is not, like London, England, obsessed with its own history. It is not an act of faith, like Moscow or Manhattan. It has none of Rio's exuberant sense of young identity. It is neither brassily capitalist nor rigidly public sector. It looks forward to no millennium, back to no golden age. It is what it is, and the people in its streets, walking with the steady, tireless, infantry-like pace that is particular to this city, seem on the whole resigned, without either bitterness or exhilaration, to being just what they are.

Among the principal cities of the lost British Empire, Toronto has been one of the most casual (rather than the most ruthless) in discarding the physical remnants of its colonial past. On the other hand there is no mistaking this for a city of the United States, either. If that lady at the airport thought she was entering, if only by the back door, the land of the free and the home of the brave, she would be taken aback by the temper of Toronto. Not only do Torontonians constantly snipe at all things American, but this is by no means a place of the clean slate, the fresh start. It is riddled with class and family origin. Humble parentage, wealthy backgrounds, lower-class homes and upper-class values are staples of Toronto dialogue, and the nature of society is meticulously appraised and classified.

For it is not a free-and-easy, damn-Yankee sort of city – anything but. Even its accents, when they have been flattened out from the Scots, the Finnish, or the Estonian, are oddly muted, made for undertones and surmises rather than certainties and swank. There is no raucous equivalent of Brooklynese, no local Cockney wryness: nor will any loud-mouthed Torontonian Ocker come sprawling into the café, beer can in hand, to put his feet up on the vacant chair and bemuse you with this year's slang – Sydney has invented a living language all its own, but so far as I know nobody has written a dictionary of Torontese.

It is as though some unseen instrument of restraint were keeping all things, even the vernacular, within limits. One could hardly call authority
in Toronto Orwellian – it seems without malevolence; but at the same time nobody can possibly ignore it, for it seems to have a finger, or at least an announcement, almost everywhere. If it is not admonishing you to save energy it is riding about on motor-bike sidecars looking for layabouts; if it is not hoisting one flag outside city hall it is hoisting another outside the Ontario Parliament; in the middle of shopping streets you find its incongruous offices, and no one but it will sell you a bottle of Scotch. I have heard it address criminals as ‘sir' (‘I'm going to send you to prison, sir, for three months, in the hope that it will teach you a lesson') and say ‘pardon' to traffic offenders (Offender: ‘Well, hell, how'm I supposed to get the bloody thing unloaded?' Policeman: ‘Pardon?'). Yet it is treated by most Torontonians with such respect that if the Bomb itself were to be fizzing at the fuse on King Street, I suspect, they would wait for the lights to change before running for the subway.

Toronto is Toronto and perhaps that is enough. I look out of my window now, on a bright spring afternoon, and what do I see? No Satanic mills, but a city clean, neat, and ordered, built still to a human scale, unhurried and polite. It has all the prerequisites of your modern major city – your revolving restaurants, your Henry Moore statue, your trees with electric lights in them, your gay bars, your outdoor elevators, your atriums, your Sotheby Parke Bernet, your restaurants offering (Glossops on Prince Arthur Avenue) ‘deep-fried pears stuffed with ripe camembert on a bed of nutmeg-scented spinach'. Yet by and large it has escaped the plastic blight of contemporary urbanism, and the squalid dangers too.

Only in Toronto, I think, will a streetcar stop to allow you over a pedestrian crossing – surely one of the most esoteric experiences of travel in the 1980s. Only in Toronto are the subways quite so wholesome, the parks so mugger-less, the children so well behaved (even at the Science Centre, where the temptation to fuse circuits or permanently disorient laser beams must be almost irresistible). Only the greatest of the world's cities can outclass Toronto's theatres, cinemas, art galleries and newspapers, the variety of its restaurants, the number of its TV channels, the calibre of its visiting performers. Poets and artists are innumerable, I am assured, and are to be found in those cafés where writers and painters hang out, while over on the Toronto Islands, though permanently threatened by official improvements, a truly Bohemian colony still honourably survives, in a late fragrance of the flower people, tight-knit, higgledy-piggledy, and attended by many cats in its shacks and snug bungalows.

I spent a morning out there, watching the pintail ducks bobbing about the ice and the great grey geese pecking for worms in the grass; and seen from that Indianified sort of foreshore the achievement of Toronto, towering in gold and steel across the water, seemed to me rather marvellous: there on the edge of the wilderness, beside that cold, empty lake, to have raised itself in 150 years from colonial township to metropolis, to have absorbed settlers from half the world, yet to have kept its original mores so recognizable still! For it is in many ways a conservative, indeed a conservationist achievement. What has
not
happened to Toronto is as remarkable as what
has
happened. It ought by all the odds to be a brilliant, brutal city, but it isn't. Its downtown ought to be vulgar and spectacular, but is actually dignified, well proportioned, and indeed noble. Its sex-and-sin quarters, where the young prostitutes loiter and the rock shops scream, are hardly another Reeperbahn, and the punks to be seen parading Yonge Street on a Saturday night are downright touching in their bravado, so scrupulously are they ignored.

The real achievement of Toronto is to have remained itself. It says something for the character of this city that even now, 150 years old, with 300,000 Italian residents, and 50,000 Greeks, and heaven knows how many Portuguese, Hungarians, Poles, Latvians, Chileans, Maltese, Chinese, Finns, with skyscrapers dominating it, and American TV beamed into every home – with condominiums rising everywhere, and a gigantic hotel dominating the waterfront, and those cheese-stuffed pears at Glossops – it says something for Toronto that it can still be defined, by an elderly citizen over a glass of sherry, with a Manx cat purring at her feet and a portrait of her late husband on the side-table, as ‘not such a bad old place'.

So this is the New World! Not such a bad old place! Again, for myself it is not what I would want of a Promised Land, were I in need of one, and when I thought of that woman at the airport, and tried to put myself in her shoes, wherever she was across the sprawling city, I felt that if fate really were to make me an immigrant here I might be profoundly unhappy.

Not because Toronto would be unkind to me. It would not leave me to starve in the street, or bankrupt me with medical bills, or refuse me admittance to discos because I was black. No, it would be a subtler oppression than that – the oppression of reticence. Toronto is the most undemonstrative city I know, and the least inquisitive. The Walkman might be made for it. It swarms with clubs, cliques and cultural societies, but seems armour-plated against the individual. There are few cities in the
world where one can feel, as one walks the streets or rides the subways, for better or for worse, so all alone.

All around me then I see those same faces from the airport carousel, so unflustered, so reserved. I caught the eye once of a subway driver, as he rested at his controls for a few moments in the bright lights of the station, waiting for the guard's signal, and never did I see an eye so fathomlessly subdued – not a flicker could I raise in it, not a glint of interest or irritation, before the whistle blew and he disappeared once more into the dark. It takes time, more time than a subway driver has, for the Toronto face, having passed through several stages of suspicion, nervous apprehension, and anxiety to please, to light up in a simple smile. Compulsory lessons in small talk, I sometimes think, might well be added to those school classes in Heritage Languages, and there might usefully be courses too in How to Respond to Casual Remarks in Elevators.

Sometimes I think it is the flatness of the landscape that causes this flattening of the spirit – those interminable suburbs stretching away, that huge plane of the lake, those long grid roads which deprive the place of surprise or intricacy. Sometimes I think it must be the climate, numbing the nerve ends, or even the sheer empty vastness of the Toronto sky, settled so conclusively upon the horizon, wherever you look, unimpeded by hills. Could it be the history of the place, and the deference to authority that restrains the jaywalkers still? Could it be underpopulation; ought there to be a couple of million more people in the city, to give it punch or jostle? Could it be the permanent compromise of Toronto, neither quite this nor altogether that, capitalist but compassionate, American but royalist, multi-cultural but traditionalist?

Or could it be, I occasionally ask myself, me? This is a city conducive to self-doubt and introspection. It is hard to feel that Torontonians by and large, for all the civic propaganda and guidebook hype, share in any grand satisfaction of the spirit, hard to imagine anyone waking up on a spring morning to cry, ‘Here I am, here in T.O., thank God for my good fortune!' I asked immigrants of many nationalities if they liked Toronto, and though at first, out of diplomacy or good manners, they nearly all said yes, a few minutes of probing generally found them less than enthusiastic. Why? ‘Because the people is cold here.' ‘Because these people just mind their own business and make the dollars.' ‘Because the neighbours don't smile and say hullo, how's things.' ‘Because nobody talks, know what I mean?'

Never I note because the citizenry has been unkind, or because the city is unpleasant: only because, in the course of its 150 years of careful
progress, so calculated, so civilized, somewhere along the way Toronto lost, or failed to find, the gift of contact or of merriment. I know of nowhere much less merry than the Liquor Control Board retail stores, clinical and disapproving as Wedding Palaces in Leningrad. And even the most naturally merry of the immigrants, the dancing Greeks, the witty Poles, the lyrical Hungarians, somehow seem to have forfeited their
joie
de
vivre
when they embraced the liberties of this town.

Among the innumerable conveniences of Toronto, which is an extremely convenient city, one of the most attractive is the system of tunnels which lies beneath the downtown streets, and which, with its wonderful bright-lit sequences of stores, cafés, malls, and intersections, is almost a second city in itself. I loved to think of all the warmth and life down there, the passing crowds, the coffee smells, the Muzak, and the clink of cups, when the streets above were half-empty in the rain, or scoured by cold winds; and one of my great pleasures was to wander aimless through those comfortable labyrinths, lulled from one Golden Oldie to the next, surfacing now and then to find myself on an unknown street corner, or all unexpectedly in the lobby of some tremendous bank.

But after a time I came to think of them as escape tunnels. It was not just that they were warm and dry; they had an intimacy to them, a brush of human empathy, a feeling absent from the greater city above our heads. Might it be, I wondered, that down there a new kind of Torontonian was evolving after all, brought to life by the glare of the lights, stripped of inhibition by the press of the crowds, and even perhaps induced to burst into song, or dance a few steps down the escalator, by the beat of the canned music?

‘What d'you think?' I asked a friend. ‘Are they changing the character of Toronto?'

‘You must be joking,' he replied. ‘You couldn't do that in a sesquicentury.'

He's probably right. Toronto is Toronto, below or above the ground. And you, madam, into whatever obscurely ethnic enclave you vanished when we parted at the airport that day, have they changed
you
yet? Have they subdued your peculiar accent? Have they taught you not to push, or talk to yourself, or hurl abuse at officialdom? Are you still refusing to pay that customs charge, or have they persuaded you to fill in the form and be sure to ask for a receipt for tax purposes? Are you happy? Are you homesick? Are you still yourself?