The Stand-In Read online

  Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada

  RAY SMITH

  A Night at the Opera

  RAY SMITH

  Going Down Slow

  JOHN METCALF

  Century

  RAY SMITH

  Quickening

  TERRY GRIGGS

  Moody Food

  RAY ROBERTSON

  Alphabet

  KATHY PAGE

  Lunar Attractions

  CLARK BLAISE

  Lord Nelson Tavern

  RAY SMITH

  An Aesthetic Underground

  JOHN METCALF

  Heroes

  RAY ROBERTSON

  A History of Forgetting

  CAROLINE ADDERSON

  The Camera Always Lies

  HUGH HOOD

  Canada Made Me

  NORMAN LEVINE

  Vital Signs (a reSet Original)

  JOHN METCALF

  A Good Baby

  LEON ROOKE

  First Things First (a reSet Original)

  DIANE SCHOEMPERLEN

  I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well (a reSet Original)

  NORMAN LEVINE

  THE STAND-IN

  DAVID HELWIG

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ONTARIO

  Copyright © David Helwig 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright

  Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Helwig, David, 1938–, author

  The stand-in / David Helwig.

  (reSet books)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  isbn 978-1-77196-200-1 (softcover). — isbn 978-1-77196-201-8 (ebook)

  I. Title. II. Series: Reset books

  ps8515.e4s73 2017 c813’.54 c2017-901954-6

  c2017-901953-8

  Readied for the press by Daniel Wells

  Copy-edited by Natalie Hamilton

  Cover and text design by Gordon Robertson

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  to the listeners

  ONE

  IT IS DEATH brought me here, ladies and gentlemen. I am not the man you wanted, but Denman Tarrington, who had been invited to deliver this first set of Jakeson lectures, is no longer with us. A week ago he was found dead on a green tile floor in front of a mirror covered with steam in a hotel near Lincoln Center. As a result of that—misadventure let us call it—your committee had to find a replacement with words at the ready and willing to come to a small Canadian campus in the depth of winter. I am told that a Famous Feminist declined. A Great Scholar pleaded illness. And so it went, until I walked into my apartment in Montreal one evening, after an absence of a few days, and the telephone rang. A proposal was made to me. As a retired professor who taught for many years at this institution, I could be assumed to be prepared for the weather, and so yesterday afternoon, a small plane dropped out of the clouds into a snowsquall, and I was driven through the white sweep of empty land and delivered to you as a last desperate gesture to avoid annulment.

  We don’t care what you say as long as you fill three hours. That is what I have been told. In words almost that blunt. Since I delivered lectures here for nearly forty years, it was felt I could be counted on. Yes, and when I left, I mentioned to one or two colleagues research subjects I intended to pursue in my retirement, a gesture conventional enough, but remembered by someone, I suppose.

  Your president, when he introduced me, give a brief and kind though somewhat inaccurate account of my career, but it is perhaps as well to let it stand. You will not remember corrections if I offer them, though I am compelled to say that I was not a championship badminton player, even when I was a hard-muscled and competitive young man. I will admit to a fondness for the game, but Denman Tarrington, who had long arms and a quick way of slicing the bird into a difficult corner, often defeated me, though in doubles, my wife and I could drive him and his tall consort into the floor of the court. The late Denman Tarrington, as we must now refer to him. For most of you he is only a name, a celebrated, semi-divine figure who left this university before you arrived, before some of you were born.

  I remember once meeting him in the corridor of Arminian Hall on his way to teach a class, when he stopped to explain to me how much he liked going in to lecture with the musk of a female student fresh in his beard. That was many years ago, of course, when teachers were allowed to treat their classes as a harem, although I’m not sure the Baptist elders on the Board of Governors ever gave their explicit approval. Still it was the way of the times and Tarrington was quick to sense possibilities. I imagine he was also quick to sense that the world had changed and he might have to stop.

  Though he garbled a few things in his introduction, your president—and I am grateful to you, sir—got the title of my lecture series correct. The Music of No Mind. Appropriate perhaps to mention at this point that I believe the title is a quotation, though I have been unable to locate the source. Yesterday evening, I spent an hour at the university library trying to run it down, but I failed, though I did overhear a conversation which was not without interest on the subject of tattoos and where on her perfect body a young woman might have one inscribed. The students who were discussing the matter were disgusted by nose rings. As I am myself. Some of you may be aware of Tarrington’s little book, Body Piercing and Theories of Transcendence. The picture on the back cover shows Tarrington with a ring in his nose. Old bull that he was.

  The Music of No Mind. What that means will become clear, I trust, as the series of lectures goes on, but it strikes me now that the errors in your president’s introduction of me are indeed germane. I have corrected one, but will not correct them all, and from this day the errors will take on the nature of fact. What is spoken is, in some sense, true. Did you know that the finest artist this country has produced was listed in an important exhibition catalogue as deceased several months before his death, and that even years later, many argued for the catalogue’s veracity?

  Beside me, on the table that holds my glass of water, you will see a book which is that artist’s biography. The liquid in the glass, let me say, is water, though had Denman Tarrington survived his last hot wash to stand here, it would no doubt have been gin or vodka. After one or two youthful adventures, I made the decision to abstain from alcohol, and in earlier years this was held against me. I must be a cissy, since I didn’t get drunk with the boys. When Tarrington, in his days on this campus, wasn’t tampering with his female students, he was often to be found carrying on an uproarious and wide-reaching unofficial seminar in a local dive. Occasionally I would drop in—we were friends, at least of a sort—and now and then I would make my small contribution to th
e discussion. Once or twice, I believe, Tarrington or one of his students arranged to have my soft drink spiked. I hope I survived the evenings with my dignity intact. Memory is vague, but I believe on those nights there were more than the usual number of jokes in questionable taste. The world has grown more abstemious now. Once, drink was everyone’s muse. No more. Now they are all dead or on the wagon.

  The history of history: look here, inside the cover of my copy of this biography, a number of abrupt communications which have been placed there with a rubber stamp. In an assertive red we are told that the book is Property of Maritime Air Command. At some point in its history—letters also in red but in a different typeface tell us—it belonged to the Maritime Air Command Station Library, Gorsebrook. Just below these two messages are those saddest, saddest words of all, rubber-stamped twice in a sort of rusty orange, Library Discard, and below, again, yet paler, Library Discard. So it came into my hands in a secondhand book shop in Halifax, though there is a name in greasy blue ballpoint ink which suggests I was not the first owner after the Maritime Air Command had abandoned it.

  Of course we ask ourselves questions about the book, who it was in Maritime Air Command who read it, and whether—it was published in 1936—it might have been the favoured reading of a young pilot who hoped to become a painter but later went down over the Atlantic or in Germany. In the lower corner of the blank page before the half-title, there is one more imprint of a rubber stamp, in purple this time. With the Compliments of The Canadian Committee, 56 Sparks Street, Ottawa. So this, we must guess, is how the book came into the Station Library at Gorsebrook. A few patriots in Ottawa, determined that men in the armed forces should be made aware of the art of their country, mailed it off.

  The cast of characters in Ottawa: in a good but slightly worn suit, a man of middle age who until recently had difficulty finding work, but has now got a place with The Canadian Committee and who reads through the publishers’ lists in search of books that might be sent out to sailors, soldiers, and airmen. Giving this man his marching orders, the chairman of the organization, a short broad person who has made his living as a lawyer, one with many political connections and a surprising streak of idealism as well as a powerful dislike of the United States. He is reputed to be the slave of his shrewish wife, but that is a misunderstanding of their relationship, for in fact they are fond of each other, and if he listens to her opinions, it is because he respects them. There were, of course, others involved in the committee, but they are no business of ours. One of the men we have met was aware of the work of James Wilson Morrice and felt that copies of the first biography should be bought and distributed.

  All this is less than perfectly certain, you will say, but the imprints of those stamps are there in the front of the book. Here, if I hold it up, you can see them. There, you see, Library Discard, Library Discard, stamped twice with the energy of some inchoate anger by one of those librarians whose most urgent desire is to throw things out. The unofficial editor set loose in the book of life. Here in the corner is the stamp of the Canadian Committee, those two men in Ottawa.

  This biography I hold in my hand comes from the days when it was still possible to write a life without a thousand footnotes. Such a book would now be twice as long, swollen with attributions. Here we have only a prefatory note explaining who it was the author spoke with in setting out to tell his tale. He was, of course, writing when those who had known his subject were still alive, including Somerset Maugham, whose work I admired in the days before he too was consigned to the junkheap. Hard to believe now, but I met Maugham once, in a restaurant near Menton, though I spoke only a few words, and he was silent, a wrinkled, stone-eyed old creature with the face of a snapping turtle, basking in the sun of the Riviera, hating the world. Memory and hate: the two are twins.

  Let us look at two moments, many years apart, each of them, perhaps, indicative. In 1905, Maugham was in France, and he got to know Morrice as one of the artists who dined in a restaurant in Montparnasse called Le Chat Blanc, in an upstairs room where a number of artists and literary figures gathered. This was la belle époque, when Paris was the centre of the world. In one of his novels, Maugham described the painter, a man with a shining bald pate, pointed beard, bright exophthalmic eyes, drunk. Maugham would have it, in his portrait of Morrice under another name, that he was frequently so shaky from drink that his hand could hardly hold a brush. The biographer tells us that while Maugham perhaps exaggerates the painter’s alcoholism, he was known to sit in the cafés with his little box of paints, drinking absinthe, doing those small rapid brilliant oil sketches—on thin pieces of wood—of whatever he saw in front of his chair at the café, perhaps close by his apartment on the Quai des Grands Augustins, only a few steps from where Picasso, who had arrived in Paris months before, set up a studio some years later.

  So there we have Morrice, as portrayed by Maugham, inebriated, popular, a man of whom no one had a bad word to say.

  Well then, we move forward to 1961. Just like that. One quick cut. We all live in the movies now. Morrice is long dead. The clothes the actors wear are different, of course, the furnishings, the quality of the light. We are at Maugham’s villa, not very far from the restaurant where I saw the ancient reptile. He is well on in years, and on this evening, he has grown tired and abandoned his company, including his daughter, and retired to his room where he has fallen into a state of agitation. The old brain is failing, and a primitive rage is set loose. “I will show them,” he shouts, or so we are told, “I’ll put them back into the gutter where they belong. I’ll get even with them. Sons of bitches!” The man who was his secretary and lover gave him a sedative and he lapsed into sleep and silence.

  I will have more to say about silence. The phone rings. No one there.

  Biography is a curious discipline. No secret that the selection of incidents allows the story to be told in any number of ways. If the subject wrote or spoke, the bias of his own statements will create the framework which is filled in by the later babblers. Of course, in nearly every case, the subject of a biography is celebrated. It is clear that fame has its own narrative, and the public achievements must be the justification of any life’s telling.

  Say that I was to write a biography of our colleague, Denman Tarrington. That phrase—our colleague—is merely conventional, of course, since few of you knew him. I do see Frank Puncheon and Annabelle Disney among you. Yes Belle, I noticed your presence and those perfect new teeth. Did you notice mine? Ou sont les dents d’antan? You of course knew Denman when I did. I remember things he said about you, though I won’t repeat them right now. We can meet later.

  Perhaps I am out of the habit of giving lectures. I notice—as I shouldn’t—the faces in front of me, Annabelle of the Perfect Teeth, your ruddy president, several with their eyes closed who may be contemplating my words or, more likely, have simply dozed off. There are three men with striped neckties. Now the necktie is growing more unusual everywhere, even in the academic world, and to see three striped ones in this audience is odd almost to the point that one might consider it ominous. Old school ties. Three members of a Certain Department. Three strips of stripes from the drunken brush of god.

  To return: say I was to set out to biographize DT. The justification would not be that my wife and I trounced him and Madeleine on the badminton court. Who would wish to know such a thing, or any of the other events of our young lives that were shared here on nights when snow howled round the house, except that our Denman went on to become their Denman, the public intellectual, coming forth from his small New England college to define the symbols of contemporary life in those famous, and if I may say so, incoherent essays like “Happy Electron Bombardment” and “The Suicide Note as a Rhetoric of Desire”? I would be compelled to search for the roots of his informing ideas on the badminton court or in the dark nights of snowbound endurance and or to tell shaggy anecdotes of what came later, how his wife vanished, how my wife became his.
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  Every generation has its own language. To catch Tarring­ton’s essence, one would have had to catch the tone, half learned, half vulgar, of his speech. Maugham’s biographer, if I may make a quick step back for a flick-of-the-wrist drop shot, points out that he was in his manner of speech essentially an Edwardian, a fusty old party who habitually used the phrase “sexual congress” for an activity he was fond of. With both sorts, it appears, but mostly with chaps. Morrice had a pretty French mistress. That was how things were then.

  I may say, Mr. President, that it had been my hope to illustrate this lecture with slides, but in my race to the airport in Montreal, I left the box of slides in a taxicab, and though I will attempt to trace them, it is possible that I will never see them again, and I must create the required images by means of words. I would not disparage the power of language, but have you ever tried to find words for colour, green, let us say? We have that one word, and so we are driven to likenesses, metaphors. There are all the vegetable greens, the green of a stick of celery, the green of a pepper squash, the green, not very different perhaps, of spinach, the green of the avocado, unknown in Canada in my youth but now so common, the green of unripe pears, unripe apples, leaves in bud and the mosses and fungae, all the greens of green. My daughter married a man named Green, and I have Green grandchildren. There was too the hint of green in the skin of the great DT as he lay dead on the floor of that New York hotel, blood no longer circulating, the skin first pale, then growing discoloured and under the fluorescent lights showing that slightest tendency to the pallor verdurous.

  Then there are Morrice’s greens and hints of green. I was speaking of Maugham, who as a young man couldn’t see the point of the Impressionists. Though he collected paintings later on, some of them valuable, we can’t take him seriously as an art critic, but it’s worth noting that he says of his fictionalized Morrice that he has the most fascinating sense of colour in the world. If one were to examine the small painting of a juggler entertaining a crowd on a street by the Seine, one would say that the predominant colours are black and certain tones of ochre, the juggled balls highlights of red, and yet there is everywhere a feeling of green or blue or conversation between the two. I revived my memory of all these things in your library just this morning. The river is brown but not quite brown, for like the Seine itself, it has a dim green transparency. In an earlier, smaller, quicker oil sketch, a Paris street with a kiosk, there is a sense of the light of evening, and in the darkening background, against a sky that is mauve with touches of yellow ochre, once again, hints of some odd green. If one examined his work side by side with the impressionists who were still painting around him, or even the intimistes like Bonnard and Vuillard, one might say that he was the prince of greens. The manner of his famous painting looking outward from a café in Cuba is in ways parallel to that of his friend Matisse, but the colours, green orchestrated against yellow and blue, would have been alien to Matisse.