Swann (29 page)

Cruzzi, still sleeping, shifts the whole of his body and brings a bony thumb into the cavity of his mouth.

Landscapes, earthquakes and sharp cliffs give way suddenly to an Alpine meadow and warm sunlight. (It is a cold night in Kingston, the temperature reaches minus ten, low for this time of year, and Cruzzi gropes in his sleep for the wool-filled quilt he keeps at the foot of the bed.)

Hildë is laughing, pulling away from him, and showing a smile that has turned provisional. Then she is arranging fruit in a bowl, placing the plums carefully so that the soft blue cleft that marks each one catches a streak of lustre from the sun. But no—it’s not the sun, but the moon. She dances lightly into his arms, giving him the kind of embrace that promises nothing, then whirls away on legs that are thinner, whiter, that shine from calf to thigh with a strange lacteal whiteness. (Cruzzi wakens briefly, scratches his genitals, acknowledges soreness in his joints, and is carried with his next exhalation through the doorway of a cottage where he discovers a stairway, corridors, a great hall brilliantly lit, a table set for twelve, and stately music.)

The face on the television screen has been talking for several minutes now. The subject is Libya, a hijacked plane, a terrorist’s telephone call, impossible demands. Gadaffi appears
briefly, peers with fanatical eyes into the camera, then wavers and flickers. After a minute his wide retreating image seems to float. Cruzzi can feel his own face begin to fade and dissolve into a miasma of dots—then his brown-speckled hand on his coffee cup and then the length of his arm. He is being eaten up by light. He is a young man standing in the corridor of a train and in his hand is a postcard. Hieroglyphics again, but this time he struggles harder to make them out. The words are in French, written very large, and they promise foolishness, gaiety, passion, love … especially love.

Snow is everywhere, filling up the woods behind Cruzzi’s house and the crevasses between the drifts of his breath. From nowhere comes a saving hand, warm, pale in colour, talcum enriched, a gold ring gleaming, a few muffled words that point toward a dream inside this dream, a house-like cave built into a hillside.

But the door is sealed by pressure, his bladder again, then a seizure of coughing, and numbness in the feet, and his loud voice filling the kitchen. Hildë is weeping, her brown arms over her eyes, and he is striking out at her with his voice, with his hand, even his fist, so that she falls under the snow, which is deeper than ever now and so heavy that he must scramble like a madman in his effort to rescue her.

The
Kingston Banner
, even before Frederic Cruzzi arrived from England to be its editor, had perforce been something of an anomaly as a regional newspaper, its constituency being
an uneasy yoking of town and gown, farmers, civil servants, and petit-bourgeoisie. Its advertisers were the owners of such small, conservative family businesses as the Princess Tearoom and Diamond Bros. Colonial Furniture Emporium, but its most vociferous readers were revolutionaries and progressives of the academic stripe. The
Banner’s
editorial policy, as a result, tended to be skittish, gliding between pragmatic waltz and feinting soft-shoe, and for that reason was always, and still is, perused with a knowing wink of the eye. This is accepted by everybody. It is also accepted that the real battles are fought on the Letters-to-the-Editor page, which occasionally spills over to a second page and once—in 1970, with the War Measures Act—to a third. Here, despite quaint temporary alliances and retreats into unanimity, the struggle assumes those classic polarities between those who would stand still and those who would move forward.

The boisterous, ongoing warfare of the Letters page has mostly been regarded by Cruzzi as analogous to a healthy game of societal tennis, both amusing and lifegiving. Sometimes, too, it yields an inch of enlightenment. But warfare abruptly stops at the Entertainment page. Even among those readers who would never dream of subscribing to the Kingston Regional Theatre or the fledgling Eastern Ontario Symphony, and who would rather dive naked into a patch of summer thistle than be caught reading one of the books reviewed in the
Banner
, there is a silent consensus that
art
is somehow privileged and deserving of protection. A dirty book discovered in a school library may raise a brief fuss, but the general concept of art is sacred in the Kingston region, and lip service, if nothing else, is paid to it.

When Cruzzi took over the
Banner
he was bemused, and so was Hildë, by a long-running feature on the Entertainment page known as “The Poet’s Corner.” A number of
local poets, mostly elderly, always genteel, vied for this small weekly space, dropping off batches of sonnets at the
Banner
office on Second Street, as well as quatrains, sestinas, limericks, haiku, bumpity-bump, and shrimpy dactyls, all attached to such unblushing titles as “Seagull Serenade,” “Springtime Reverie,” “Ode to Fort Henry,” “Birches at Eventide,” “The Stalwart Flag Old Sadie,” “The First Bluebird,” “Sailors Ahoy,” “Cupid in Action,” “The Trillium,” “The Old Thrashing Crew,” “The Eve of Virtue,” and so on. Payment, regardless of length or verse form, was five dollars, but this rather small sum in no way discouraged the number of submissions. Cruzzi, in his first month in Kingston, looked carefully at both quantity and quality and immediately announced plans to terminate “The Poet’s Corner.”

What a fool he was in those days, he with his heavy tweed suits and strangely unbarbered hair, his queer way of talking, his manners and pronouncements. The public outcry over the cancellation of “The Poet’s Corner” was unprecedented and appeared to come from all quarters of the community. He was labelled a philistine and a brute journalist of the modern school. The word foreigner was invoked: Frenchy, Limey, Wog—there was understandable confusion here. Readers might be willing to tolerate the new typeface imposed on them, and no one seemed to miss the old “Pie of the Week” feature when it disappeared from the Women’s page, but they refused to surrender Li’l Abner and “The Poet’s Corner.” Culture was culture. Even the advertisers became restless, and Cruzzi, in the interest of comity and suffering a heretic’s embarrassment, capitulated, though he let it be known that there would be a two-year interregnum on seagull poems.

In time, because the Kingston literary community was
small, he and Hildë befriended and grew fond of the local poets. Cruzzi even took a certain glee in the awfulness of their product. Herb Farlingham’s poem “Springtime Reverie,” for instance (“Mrs. Robin in feathered galoshes/Splashes in puddles chirping ‘O my goshes!’ ”), gave him moments of precious hilarity that were especially welcome after a day spent composing careful, pointed, balanced, and doomed-to-be-ignored editorials on the arms race or the threat of McCarthyism.

In 1955, toward the end of a long golden summer, Cruzzi opened an envelope addressed to “The Poet’s Corner,” and out fell a single poem, typed for once, titled “Anatomy of a Passing Thought” written by one Kurt Wiesmann of William Avenue, just two streets from Byron Road where Cruzzi and Hildë lived. The sixteen-line poem possessed grace and strength. Light seemed to shine through it. Cruzzi read it quickly, with amazement. One line, toward the end, briefly alarmed him by veering toward sentimentality, but the next line answered back, mocking, witty, and containing that spacey necessary bridge that in the best poetry joins binocular clarity to universal vision. Extraordinary.

It was 5:30 in the afternoon. He took a deep breath and rubbed a hand through his thick, still-unbarbered hair. Hildë was expecting him at home for a picnic supper with friends. Already she would have set the table under the trees, a red table cloth, wine glasses turned upside down, paper napkins folded and weighed down by cutlery. Nevertheless he sat down at his desk and wrote Mr. Wiesmann a letter telling him why his poem was unsuitable for the
Banner
. It was unrhymed. It had no regular metre. It did not celebrate nature, or allude to God, or even to Kingston and its environs. It did not tug at the heartstrings or touch the
tear ducts and was in no way calculated to bring forth a gruff chuckle of recognition; in short it was too good for “The Poet’s Corner.” He ended the letter, “Yours resignedly, F. Cruzzi,” surprising himself; he had not realized his own resignation until that moment. (Rationality won’t rescue this scene the way, say, a footnote can save a muddled paragraph, but it might be argued that Cruzzi, by this time, had acquired an understanding and even a respect for his readers’ sensibilities.)

Kurt Wiesmann, a chemist with a local cooking-oil manufacturer, was delighted with his letter of rejection, and continued to send the
Banner
unprintable poems. In a year’s time Cruzzi and Hildë had read close to fifty of them, and they both urged Wiesmann, by now a friend and frequent visitor in their house, to approach a book publisher. They were astonished, moved, and entertained by what he wrote, and felt he should have an audience larger than the two of them.

But it turned out that publishers in Canada found Wiesmann’s poems “too European;” American publishers thought them “too Canadian,” and a British publisher sensed “an American influence that might be troubling” to his readers. Hildë, exasperated, suggested one night—the three of them were in the kitchen drinking filtered coffee and eating cheesecake—that they publish the poems themselves.

In a month’s time they were in production. It was Kurt Wiesmann who suggested the name Peregrine Press. He was a restless man, tied down by a family and job, but a traveller by instinct. His book was titled
Inroads
(Hildë’s idea) and was favourably reviewed as “a courageous voice speaking with the full force of the alienated.” A Toronto newspaper wrote, “The newly launched Peregrine Press
must be congratulated on its discovery of a fresh new Canadian voice.”

Their second poet was the elegant Glen Forrestal of Ottawa, later to win a Governor General’s Award, who wrote to the Peregrine Press introducing himself as a member of the Kurt Wiesmann fan club and a veteran of several serious peregrinations of his own. Their third poet was the fey, frangible Rhoda MacKenzie, and after that came Cassie Sinclair, Hugh Walkley Donaldson, Mary Swann, Mavis Stockard, w.w. wooley, Burnt Umber, Serge Tawowski, and a number of others who went on to make names for themselves.

Printing was done during off-hours at the
Banner
and paid for out of Cruzzi’s pocket. Hildë, who had set up an office in an upstairs bedroom, read the manuscripts that soon came flowing in. She had a sharp eye and, with some notable exceptions, excellent judgement. “Whatever we decide to publish must have a new sound.” She said this in a voice that contained more and more of the sonorous Canadian inflection. To a local businessman, whom she attempted to convert into a patron, she said, “We have the responsibility as a small press to work at the frontier.”

Along the frontier a few mistakes were inevitably made. Even Hildë admitted she had been taken in by Rhoda MacKenzie’s work, that behind its fretwork there was little substance. And both she and Cruzzi regretted the title they chose for Mary Swann’s book—
Swann’s Songs
. An inexplicable lapse of sensibility. A miscalculation, an embarrassment.

For twenty years the press operated out of the Cruzzi house on Byron Road. Methodically, working in the early mornings after her daily lakeside walk, Hildë read submissions, edited manuscripts, handled correspondence, and
attended, if necessary, to financial matters—though bookkeeping took little time since the Peregrine Press never earned a profit and print-runs were small, generally between two hundred and three hundred copies. Always, in the final stages before the publication of a new book, a group of friends, the official board as they called themselves, gathered in the Cruzzi dining-room for a long evening of plum brandy and hard work: collating pages, stapling, gluing covers, the best of these covers designed by Barney Ouilette, and remarkably handsome, with a nod toward modernism and a suggestion of what Hildë liked to call “fire along the frontier.”

Her only agony was the problem of what to do with unsuccessful manuscripts. Tenderhearted, she laboured over her letters of rejection, striving for a blend of honesty and kindness, but forbidding herself to give false encouragement, explaining carefully what the press was looking for. These explanations gave her pleasure, as though she were reciting a beloved prayer. “New sounds,” she explained, “and innovative technique, but work that turns on a solid core of language.”

Despite her tact, there was sometimes acrimony, once an obscene phone call, several times scolding letters impugning her taste. Herb Farlingham, who would have financed the publication of his
Seasoned Sonnets
if Hildë had let him, wept openly. “I’m so terribly sorry,” Hildë said, supplying him with tea and a paper towel for his tears. “It’s nothing personal, you may be sure.” The Peregrine Press, she explained, thankful for a ready excuse, had very early taken a stand on self-publication and was anxious to avoid even the appearance of being a vanity press.

This stricture was put to the test years later when Hildë herself began to write poetry. She had reached the age
of fifty, her waist had thickened, and her hair, which was short and straight with a bang over her forehead, was almost completely white. She had a dozen interests, though her ardour, flatteringly, centred on Cruzzi. There was her schedule of reading, her music, her fling at oil painting, her tennis and her hiking, her work with the blind. She was robust, cheerful, impatient, amiable, always occupied, always determined and passionate in her undertakings, pleased as a child with her successes, and smiling with her round face in her failures. That round face of hers, friends said, was unique in its openness, and yet it was a year before she showed her husband what she had been writing. “Here,” she said to him late one evening, thrusting a folder forward. “I want you to be absolutely honest with me.”