The China Teaset

This gift is very fragile, my mother said, eyes all wide and serious.  They were warm hazel-green eyes all flecked with gold. 

Fragile.  I nodded seriously.  You had to be very careful with it.  Careful, yes, I knew what that meant.  Fragile.  Easily broken.  Use gentle hands.

 

You have to take care of it, she said, keep it clean and be very gentle with it at all times.  It's real china, and that means it can chip, or get broken, and there are lots of parts.  If you're not careful you might lose one. 

She showed me then: a tiny little teaset.

I looked at it and thought about what chipping meant: breaking the paint, breaking the pattern.  I didn't like chipping.  No chipping.  And no getting broken, no breaking the set.  It was a tiny little teaset with a platter the size of real tea saucer which all the other tiny little pieces sat on: a tiny teapot with a slender spout and a separate little lid; two little cups with delicate handles painted gold, and more gold around the rim, and one gold-rimmed platter for each for them to sit on.  I noticed that the gold-lined rose was on everything: the tiny teapot, tiny cups and tiny saucers, the tiny little pitcher for cream (also with gold handles) and the tiny little sugar pot, with its own tiny little lid.  A lot of tiny little pieces, in white china with gilt handles and tiny little gold-outlined pink roses.  I treasured each of the pieces instantly: delicate prized possessions.  My first collected piece of art.

If you lose one... Look at me now.  Her warm eyes serious but pleased.  If you lose one, it can never be replaced.  Never.  It comes from a far away place and once it's gone, it's gone forever.

Forever.  If I lost a little piece, it would be gone forever.  No buying a new one at the store, not even in the city.  Not even in the Hat.  No making one.  No finding one by luck.  Gone.  Gone forever.  The sudden gravity of Forever making my heart drop, heavy and aching.  I shook my head.  I wouldn't lose any.

*

You used to play with that teaset all the time, my mother said, thirty years later. 

I did, I said.   I’d loved this little teaset.  I was washing it, rinsing every tiny piece very carefuly in warm soapy water,  letting it air-dry before polishing it with a soft cloth.  I tried to be very gentle with it.  Was there a time when not all the set fit on the tiny little platter?  I wondered if there didn't used to be four little cups perhaps and four saucers.  It all seemed even tinier now.  Amazing that there is still a complete set: teapot, two teacups, two saucers, cream pitcher, sugar bowl,  two tiny lids and the matching service platter.   All in white china, gilt edges, with a simple gold-bordered rose motif. 

Exactly like my mother's.

Remoteness

I'm currently in a very remote town in Saskatchewan.  I didn't use to think it was remote: small, yes, but not remote.  Things were also different back then.  I remember when the bus came to this town.

To me this is how remote is defined: if you can't get there by public transit, then you're travelling to a remote place.  I had to fly for four hours, stay overnight, and then travel by bus for another four hours late the next day.  And finally another hour by car, because the bus no longer goes to my hometown.  No public transport can take me home.

The bus people were very impressive however and fast, and even though the bus we were on had to return shortly into the trip due to a transmission problem, it was overall a good trip.  The bus people hustled.  They were well-coordinated, quick, polite, informative, calm, and well-prepared.  I watched them back the new bus up to the old trailer full of freight, reconnect it, change over all the luggage (including my daisy suitcase containing my entire wardrobe), and calmly inform us when it was time to switch seats, which was done with no trouble whatsoever.

And the bus ride itself was tremendous.  The bus seats are covered in soft blue velour-feeling material, clean, spacious.  Everyone gets two seats to themselves.  After travelling by plane, being on a bus is luxurious.  

Luxury.

I rode the STC line, which used to go to my hometown when I was a little girl.  My bus had great clean windows which, since we were going to be travelling south for four hours, faced into the prairie sunset after a rain.  The sun was sinking into a lush, rainy-in-July Saskatchewan setting.  I settled into my plush seat and prepared to enjoy the vastness that is the prairie.

I took some pictures through the glass:

Endless prairie poles.

Unbelievable water in the fields.

This is where we turned around.  Bad transmission.

Train tracks to nowhere.

Sun setting over slough water.

But then my camera ran out of juice and I just enjoyed the spectacle.  

The point is, yes, the flight was short, I enjoyed the layover in Saskatoon immensely, and the bus ride was both cheap (only $48) and moving, flooding me with feelings of love and nostalgia for the place where I grew up.

This still only got me to Swift Current.  After that: a one-hour drive by car.  Luckily the car contained both my dad and my uncle, who are some of my favourite people ever.  So we chatted and swapped stories and sped along the dark empty prairie highway under a black sky filled with stars.

It's not that the trip to get here is a bad trip.  I'm surprised more people don't take trips through Saskatchewan in the summer.  It's so beautiful, with so many secrets and good things: Pine Cree, Jones Peak, fishing at the dam, canoeing, camping, so much unspoiled nature.  There's Cypress, the winery, a horse ranch (more than one), sand dunes and the wandering desert, dinosaurs, rocks, birds, insects, good people.  And so much more.  Plants.  Flowers, trees, wheat, even weeds.  Thistle and tumbleweed and foxtails.  A photo of thistles growing along a bumper crop of wheat:

Crop by Winston Stevenson

It's a very beautiful place and I feel no matter how hard I try to capture it, to document it, to photograph it or write about it, there will always be more.  There are dozen different views just from my hammock chair.  There are always half a dozen ways to photograph the same thing: a field of wheat, an individual farm, the land, the sky, an old car in the weeds, the pasture.  I could go on forever.  The prairies are vast.

Which is, of course, what makes places in them so remote.  And it's the remoteness of the prairies that makes them so precious, the absolute absence of people.  Not many are willing to make this trip.  Not many see the point.  

People travel to see mountains or beaches or tropical forests.  But to me the most beautiful place is where I was born: in the wide open space of the Canadian prairie.  Where one has the freedom to walk in a beautiful garden, and be utterly alone, except for a friendly cat.  

Very friendly.

This is one of the world's perfect vacation spots, completely hidden from the outside.  An oasis hiding in plain sight.  Worth a plane ride, a layover, a broken bus transmission and a road trip to see.

Days without Internet

Being without the internet has gotten for me to be like being away without food or water, or sunlight.  It's that important to my existence: I rely on it for my well-being.  Without it I begin to crave and be anxious.  My mouth waters and my lips feel parched when I ponder my inability to check my email, or click on Facebook.  I lower my standards and engage in risky behaviour.  I steal unlocked wifi and use other people's phones in public.  I sneak away from functions and gatherings and click a few links, meeting up briefly with others who have crept away from the crowd for a moment.  The internet has replaced smoker culture.

It's not really the internet itself.  I can go cold off of websites I get obsessed with (comics and comedy sites that may or may not show a lot of cat pictures).  I don't mind missing news, and I never check weather anyway.  I do get irritated with not being able to check facts or investigate hunches, but it's when I can no longer write letters that I become first incredibly frustrated and then brokenhearted, and begin to wilt away tragically.  I bet I would die pining for the internet, to be able to connect.  

That's what I'm addicted to: making connections.  Continuing conversations.  Conversations which stimulate and inform, whether I'm the teacher or the one one learning from whatever is being related.    I like talking with people who are constantly learning about interesting things.   I like to carry on many conversations with many people, some of whom I love, some I barely know, some I've never even met.  Most of all I enjoy conversation with my husband.  We converse.  We make connections, we connect, we are connected.  I especially like talking with people who are entertaining and knowledgeable about many things, and my husband is an excellent example of both these things.  I love talking to him, even if just over the internet.

The internet isn't quite at the pace of actual conversation, not yet.  I like the speed of email and letters through Facebook private messages, or Google+, which is the best for picture letters.  Postcards from the internet.  I like being able to send pictures to my husband; it makes me start looking around for that which is beautiful or strange or otherwise pleasing to the eye.  Looking at things with an appraising mind, motivated by the desire to delight someone I love. 

In the absence of being able to talk, I took pictures.  Pictures of the last few days without internet.  I don't know if they will delight or not, but even if I failed to get the shot: they made me appreciate and enjoy the places I went much more than I would have if I were not taking pictures.  Having a camera in my hand made me really look, hopefully made me see.  To look around and search for beauty.  Finding it everywhere.

Being able to connect to the conversation again after being without it for four days is like shooting up heroin after a dry spell.  At least, it's like I imagine a Lou Reed song would feel if it shot up heroin.  I wonder if that means I'm addicted to my husband, because it's his conversation I crave the most when I can't have any at all.  Maybe I married him to sate my craving for good conversation.   He spends a lot of time on the internet.  Maybe he's a fellow addict.  I hope he likes the way I captured the world for him while we were apart.

The photos I took for for him in my days without internet can be seen the following posts.

Learning to Garden (My Summer Project) Part 1

My father's passion has always been gardening.  I've enjoyed the fruits of his labour, though only really appreciated it more recently, appreciated it for what it is: the time it took to make and grow his garden, the simplicity of it, the perfection.  I appreciate it more now and I've taken an interest.  I want to learn how to make something like this and see how it was done, to try to see if I could do it, if I could make something like this and watch it grow.  

Some of the trees in this garden are more than ten years old and taller than the house.  I remember when they were planted.  Some of them I helped plant or gave as gifts. 

A garden like this requires a lot of upkeep, and this has been a hectic year for my parents.  I wanted to help out.  I walked in the garden and noticed the paths needed to be raked, so that's what I decided to help out with.

The paths, first of all, let me explain.  The paths were designed and made by my father, my father and me, one summer maybe ten years ago.  My father designed everything and cut all the sod, because cutting sod is hard work and requires a lot of strength.  I laid the sod though.  My dad cut it, and I laid all the sod in that part of the garden, and my mom brought the sod from the truck in a wheelbarrow to where we were working.  The sod part took us about two days.
 
Before that, though, my dad had designed the garden.  This was to be like an English walking garden with paths in the shape of great circles interlinked with lines and each other, sectioning off brick-lined flowerbeds and swaths of lush grass. 

He designed it all with a stick and a piece of string and didn't even plan it out first on paper as far as I know.  He just went out into the back behind the catonia aster hedge where nothing was but dirt, and plotted out the size of the garden.  Then he tied the string to the stick and put it in the dirt, and walked until the string pulled taut.  He walked in a circle and that was the edge of a flowerbed or a path, or the far side of a path with a little more string.

He planned it all out and then paved the edges of the paths with bricks laid in, one at a time, each brick hand-sanded and cleaned (by him), taken from the ruins of the old brick warehouse his father used to own, back when the business was new.  Beautiful old red clay bricks, lovingly restored.

Then we spent two days filling all the grass parts with sod.  It was no easy thing, I tell you, but undeniably worth it.  Dad cut it, I laid it, mom hauled it.  She's a great hauler, a tromper; my mother is of pioneer stock.  My father too of course.  And me.  If somewhat belatedly.

The grass in that garden is always thick and often wet; it holds the dew and the rain and the stardust at midnight.  Walking through it is like a cool massage and a drink for the bottoms of your feet, sluicing away dust and leaving them feeling clean and rejuvenated.

I could talk for hours about the flower beds.  And there are trees of all kinds, a cedar, a cherry tree, one side bordered by saskatoonberry bushes grown eight feet tall now, the other by the thick carraganas that were there from the beginning.  And the elms behind those.  Rosebushes.  It's a beautifuly made garden.

The paths, though.  The paths used to be dug down and full of soft, crumbly sand that's firm underfoot but crinkles up between your toes.  Paths like being at the beach.  

To keep the sand soft like that we need to rake it, and rake it a lot, especially after a hard rain.  Because the sand also has clay in it, and the clay gets hard baked after heavy rain in the sun.  The hot, dry, July in Saskatchewan sun.

It's been raining a lot this summer and my parents have been very busy, with the Centennial and so many people here and with them travelling so much -- the paths looked to me like they needed work.

So I started raking.


(To Be Continued)

That Summer in Paris, by Morley Callaghan (1963)

I've read a little bit of Callaghan's work before: a few stories, a couple novels, and I was really looking forward to That Summer in Paris, not least because it's another account of that glittering golden age of American expats living and drinking and writing together the City of Light in the 1920s: the maturation of modernism.  I love these books; I love the stories about the stories.

That Summer in Paris was written more than forty years after its events unfold. Callaghan explains in the introduction that he hadn't thought about Hemingway at all for years, but upon hearing of his death, he began to be obsessed with thinking about him and that one summer spent in his circle in Paris, in 1929.  And so he decided to write a book about it.  Quite interesting, I think, when you realize that he wrote this book shortly after Hemingway wrote his own Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast, though That Summer saw publication first.  The two books could not be more different.

The first chapter of That Summer is an exhilarating gallop towards greatness that I think perfectly captures the way young thinkers view the world, that perfect surety, the arrogant certainty that the greats have been doing it wrong, and that we, the rising new stars, have the right of it.  It's done in swift little sentences that leave the reader breathless, feeling the anticipation (when will it happen? when will the big break come?) as keenly as Callaghan might have felt it himself more than seventy years ago.

But the more I read of That Summer, the more unpleasant Callaghan himself became.  It's a strange thing, I think, for a writer to be a character in his own work.  Stein handles it brilliantly by simply making her autobiography come from someone else: anything she says isn't her, it's Alice.  But here, we get Callaghan on Callaghan, and it feels oily to me.  He is so careful in his presentation of himself, so very careful to appear humble, aware now, forty years after the fact, of the foibles of his own youth, able to laugh at himself.  But I can't help being aware that he is the one pointing out his own humility, over and over again, and he does so with smug pride.

He is distasteful in many ways.  Callaghan makes it a point to illustrate the misogyny of Perkins the publisher who thinks that all girls should grow up in convents and from whom Callaghan gets "the impression that women who plunged into a man's world were a nuisance" (52), which Callaghan denounces as one of Perkins's "fatalistic convictions" (52). But throughout the book, it becomes more and more clear that Callaghan himself holds this view.  During his first whirlwind, starstruck trip to New York City, he is lucky enough to be seated next to Katherine Anne Porter, one of the greatest of the great writers, and all he wonders about her is "why she went home alone" (41).  His brief mention of Bryher Ellerman, an important writer in her own time, immediately puts her in her place: she is "the writer, who was the daughter of Sir John Ellerman, the shipping magnate, one of the rich men of England."  And her true purpose follows almost immediately: "It had been a very nice thing for [McAlmon] to marry a rich girl and get a handsome divorce settlement" (65).  Women are resources for men to use, in this autobiographical world, and they damn well better know their place.  During a chapter about the Fitzgeralds, Callaghan reflects on how wonderful it is that his own convent-raised wife has no designs on the limelight herself, "hoping she would never feel driven to jockey with [him] publically for attention" (139).  Women should be seen and not heard, right, Morley?  He dismisses Gertrude Stein, whom he never met, as having "nothing whatever to say. [...] As for her deluded coterie, well, [he] had no interest in finding one of them who would lead [him] shyly to her den" (157).  He breathlessly mentions spotting Picasso, the most famous of this coterie, walking through Paris a few pages later, but I guess Picasso is allowed to be deluded.

By contrast, you know, Hemingway's female characters are invariably strong, complex, passionate, ferocious: his men may be big game hunters, but the women he paints are always lions, and in a Hemingway story, the lions win as often as not.  I get why people compare these two men: they worked on the Star at the same time; they knew many of the same people; they were direct contemporaries; they both boxed.  But I struggle, reading this book, to see any similarities in writing style.  Over and over, Callaghan expresses his disgust with form: "the words should be as transparent as glass, and every time a writer used a brilliant phrase to prove himself witty or clever he merely took the mind of the reader away from the object and directed it at himself; he became simply a performer" (12).  And Hemingway is a pure master of form, writing sentences so beautiful they cause the reader to linger, to lounge around in his words.  I remember a scene from The Nick Adams Stories about an obscene, obscenely fat prostitute and Nick's inexplicable, undeniable lust for her, and it remains one of the most beautiful and powerful things I've ever read.  Hemingway uses brilliant phrases to further illuminate his object; Callaghan can't even imagine this as a possibility.  The blurb on the back of this book calls his writing "lucid" as though being easy is a good thing.  I am of the school which believes it is not: the easier a work is to read, the easier it is for readers to skim whole pages and chapters without having processed a word.

Callaghan speaks as if he and Fitzgerald and Hemingway were the very best of friends, when in fact he only met both of these men a handful of times over a few months.  He claims to know Hem's innermost thoughts and desires, while at the same time exclaiming that Hem couldn't possibly have known his.  My feeling is that he constantly broadcast his own small, petty, ugly motives onto Hemingway.  The book has several instances where Callaghan starts out by telling us Hemingway was a great guy, proceeds to tell a story about him which attempts to paint him a very poor light, and concludes by saying that Hemingway was awful.  But more often than not, the whole story makes Hemingway all the more attractive, and in a way Callaghan seems completely blind to.  The best example of this is a story about a sparring match that took place between Hemingway and Callaghan early on.  Callaghan bloodies Hemingway's lip and continues to poke at it, making it bleed quite badly.  I don't know much about boxing but this strikes me as a bizarre thing to do in a friendly spar.  Hemingway's response is to spit a mouthful of blood all over Callaghan's face, saying "'That's what bullfighters do when they're wounded.  It's a way of showing contempt'" (105).  I love this moment.  I imagine the spars between these two and always, in my mind's eye, I see Hemingway, tall and muscular, holding back, keeping it friendly, with short, fat Callaghan giving it all he has and thinking they were equals.  I imagine Hemingway finally growing tired and contemptuous, and this act, spitting blood: my god, such a brutal, sexual act.  Callaghan, naturally, is shocked and appalled, as of course anyone in his place would be, though he does nothing about it.  He uses this episode to try to illustrate the darkness in Hemingway, the "strange nocturnal depths of his mind" (105), and he and his wife discuss how dreadful it all is.  Fine.  But a few chapters later, Callaghan recounts with some pride how upon receiving a minor insult from a crass reporter in Toronto, he becomes "blind with rage" (150) and jumps over a couch to knock the man down and throttle him.  Strange nocturnal depths, all right.

Overall, Callaghan and his wife both come across as snide, ignorant, and almost unbelievably delusional.  Callaghan seems almost incapable of taking people at their word; he regularly assumes they do not mean what they say and instead builds up his own huge fantasies about them, projecting motives and ascribing emotions that, by his own account, people do not actually exhibit.  He admits to this at times, such as when he first comes to Paris and has built an elaborate fantasy world in which he and Hemingway and Fitzgerald (whom he's never even met) are all the best of friends and sit in cafes together discussing writing, and is hurt and angry when this daydream never materializes.  He can't fathom why Hemingway doesn't want Fitzgerald to know where he lives, because in his mind they are and must be close, and although Hemingway explains that it's because Scott's out-of-control lifestyle affects his work, Callaghan instead stacks tenuous assumption upon tenuous assumption to come up with Hemingway's "true" motives: petty jealousy and disloyalty.  It is obvious to me that whatever the Callaghans judge others to be is a measure only of what they themselves are.

I don't remember these sorts of flaws being present in the other things I've read by Callaghan.  Misogyny in the priest and hookers book?  Surely I would remember that.  One thing this book makes me want to do very badly is to read more Callaghan, to see if his fiction is better, as I remember it being, than this memoir.  Callaghan points out that he was being published in the early days of all the little magazines coming out of Paris.  He eagerly writes about the thrilling revelation that it "had been Scott Fitzgerald who had talked to [a publisher] most enthusiastically" (47), leading to an offer from Scribner's to publish not one, but two of Callaghan's books.  I wanted to read "Amuck in the Bush" and "The Predicament" and "They Come over in the Spring" and the other stories Callaghan mentions in That Summer, to read the stories that made Pound and Fitzgerald and Hemingway believers in the first place.  Because clearly, once, he was great.  So I went looking for his stories.  I have The New Yorker Stories, but of course those are all from later in Callaghan's career, when he was back in Toronto.  I searched around online stores and in libraries, both public and university, and was shocked to realize that the early stories are just not readily available to the public anymore.  Is he is only being published in Canada now?  No Canadians I've asked have ever even heard of him, let alone read him.  Has Callaghan fallen this far out of favour?

Disappointed, I went back to my own shelf to look for A Moveable Feast, looking forward to snuggling up with Hemingway before bed, and there: Morley Callaghan's Stories, first edition, published in 1959 by Macmillan.  This is one of those times when I agree with Tom that a personal library should never have any sort of order, because in searching for what you think you want, you tend to find what you actually need.  It was tucked in next to Borges, naturally.  Inside, a wealth of early Callaghan stories: all those mentioned above and many more, fifty-seven in all.  

I read all the stories mentioned in That Summer, and was startled by how strong they are, how true.  Most of these early stories are extremely good, I think.  They, like the best of Hemingway, don't make assumptions about what the characters in them think or how they reason.  The stories just show, with deft precision, how they act, and we are left to think about the why of it for ourselves.  Reading these stories, I certainly see why the comparison to Hemingway has been made: both writers are concerned with the lives of what are, perhaps, unsavoury characters, and in writing the truth so purely, these stories are made beautiful.

Well.  Perhaps not so much with one of his first stories,  "A Girl with Ambition".  It's written largely from the girl's point of view, and her thoughts about Harry (who is quite obviously based on Callaghan himself).  He writes that no other man stands as high in her mind as Harry does, though what she actually does suggests otherwise.  The story shows Harry very clearly, shows the girl's actions quite truthfully, but it feels dead wrong when it comes to her thoughts.  Of course Callaghan would thinks this low-class girl would hold him, a moderately wealthy law student, in the very highest esteem, because he holds himself in the highest esteem.  This early tendency towards narcissism and  self-aggrandizment becomes so overblown and absurd in That Summer that I can only find it despicable.  I wonder if this was Callaghan's downfall, finally: his inability to understand that not all people have the same thoughts that he has, that what would motivate him, if he were in their shoes, is not what actually does motivate them.  If a writer's job is to expose truth, then writing, as Hemingway does, about characters who share his own experiences and have his own understanding of the world, and showing only their motives, and the true actions of everyone else, does this.  Callaghan fails at this because he doesn't understand the true motives of others; he ascribes them his own, regardless of who they are.  When he avoids forcing his own thoughts into the minds of his characters, writing only what they do and not what they think, his writing is very good.  When he doesn't, he writes something like That Summer.  Gone is the clean clear prose, the observer's approach, the purity and the fairness.  Instead it's all about Callaghan, or rather, all about how Callaghan tries to construct himself to appear.  It's a tell-all, with Callaghan working hard to disguise the fact that he himself is the tattler.  

Many of the people in the book appear in other works, such as A Moveable Feast and That Summer in Paris, so it is interesting to gain a broader understanding of who these minor characters are and how they fit into the literary and publishing world.  But over and over, it seemed that these people were trotted out to testify to one of two things: the greatness of Callaghan the writer, or the badness of Hemingway the man.  The interesting bits of trivia and history are spoiled by the ugliness of Callaghan's view, the jealous, snide, backwater sniping, the malicious gossip.  It's like he wants to rip apart everyone who was in Paris, maybe because no one in Paris seems to have remembered him.  This book reads like a gossip magazine written by a person who is very bitter about not having been invited to the party.