Damages: Selected Stories 1982-2012

Damages

Selected Stories

1982–2012

Keath Fraser

With an introduction by John Metcalf

Biblioasis

Windsor, Ontario

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

The Iconoclast’s Journal

Terry Griggs

Heroes

Ray Robertson

The Story of My Face

Kathy Page

An Aesthetic Underground

John Metcalf

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

Light Shining Out of Darkness (a reSet Original)

Hugh Hood

Bad Imaginings

Caroline Adderson

Damages (a reSet Original)

Keath Fraser

Also by Keath Fraser

Fiction

Taking Cover

Foreign Affairs

Popular Anatomy

Telling My Love Lies

13 Ways of Listening to a Stranger

Charity

Non-Fiction

As for Me and My Body: A Memoir of Sinclair Ross

The Voice Gallery: Travels with a Glass Throat

Anthologies

Bad Trips

Worst Journeys: The Picador Book of Travel

Contents

The Brightest Heaven of Invention

The Anthologist Takes a Holiday

Roget’s Thesaurus

Bones

Libretto

Mother and Father Talk of Going South

Waiting

Le Mal de l’Air

Healing

Nation, Nation

Taking Cover

The Emerald City

There Are More Dark Women in the World than Light

Foreign Affairs

13 Ways of Listening to a Stranger

Damages

Flight

Memoir

Sturgeon

Telling My Love Lies

The American Caller

The Anniversary

Ethical Investing for the Blind

About the Author

In Memory

Lorraine

Bright sharer in all of these

He had often wondered what difference it would make.

But the emptiness in place of her was astounding.

– Alice Munro, Leaving Maverley

The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery. To intuit it, and recognize that the story-germ has some inherent mystery in it, and sort of midwife that mystery into the story in such a way that it isn’t damaged in the process, and may even get heightened or refined.

– George Saunders, The Paris Review

I assessed the damage. Save for a bit of a mess all was as it was.

– Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey

The Brightest Heaven of Invention

The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature says of Keath Fraser:

He is one of the most gifted of the new generation of fiction writers; his startling imagery, rich ideas, textured language, and astonishing range of characters are remarkable . . . ‘Foreign Affairs’ . . . is one of the masterpieces of Canadian short fiction . . .

Constance Rooke wrote of him in The Malahat Review: Keath Fraser is one of the most intelligent writers working in Canada.

Antanas Sileika reviewing in the Globe and Mail wrote: Fraser’s remarkable facility with language and images gives many of the stories the density of poetry.

Why then, in light of these glowing tributes, is an introduction to his work considered desirable? Simply because our society has failed to rise to meet his brilliance, failed to involve itself with his quiddities.

In The Canadian Short Story I detailed my first encounter with Keath, a story he sent me entitled Le Mal de l’Air, a submission for the 1982 volume of Best Canadian Stories; I spent pages in my book grappling with that story’s first paragraph. It was an electrifying encounter.

During a panel discussion at the Wild Writers conference on the short story in Stratford in 2000, Keath said:

I think writing is an extremely physical activity. Which sounds paradoxical, especially when I, as a writer, have for years envied the plastic arts, the visual arts, the painter who gets his hands dirty with paint, the sculptor who can feel that hammer striking stone. One of the regrets I have for the passing of the typewriter is that I no longer get to get my fingers dirty with the ribbon, the pages that smear you with wet ink. Everything seems now to be one level removed from where it used to be. But having said that, the physicality in writing is really in the concreteness of language.

The thing that inspires us to write is often, I think, a reaction against the kind of language that we’re assaulted with daily, the kind of words—the kind of buzz words—that drives us up walls as we watch television and read newspapers. And our desks are the last refuge for us as writers, where we can see how physical and concrete language can be. As writers, we’re trying to inspire other people—readers—with examples, with illustrations, of how else language can act, in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with the received language or the issues of the day.

I concluded my entry on Keath in The Canadian Short Story with an example of how language can act.

What could I do but love the man who wrote this sentence: His dinner lay in him like hooves?

Hooves!

There’s a simile to savour.

Keath published Taking Cover in 1982. This was followed in 1985 by the magnificent story collection Foreign Affairs. In 1995, he published the 582-page novel, Popular Anatomy which won the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award causing consternation among the assembled booksellers. This was followed by Telling My Love Lies (1996) and a Selected Stories, 13 Ways of Listening to a Stranger (2005).

In non-fiction, he published in 1997 As for Me and My Body: A Memoir of Sinclair Ross, followed in 2002 by The Voice Gallery: Travels with a Glass Throat. As editor, he published an anthology of travel pieces entitled Bad Trips (1991); in England the book was entitled Worst Journeys, an amusing example of the differences between North American and British English.

Since Taking Cover in 1982, then, he has been in Canada’s literary world for nearly forty years, admired . . . this side idolatry . . . by a few of his peers but unknown to Best Seller lists and to the amorphous reading public. That academe has ignored him or, just as likely, has remained unaware of his existence, is no surprise; professors with a dogged interest still in CanLit remain bogged in the late-Victorian orotundities of Robertson Davies while their post-modern juniors, possessed by subfusc and nihilistic theories, cannot hear him as they scourge their betters interrogating and deconstructing suspect texts. Their sad fervour conjures Bartholomew Fair and Ben Jonson’s drab Puritan, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy.

Reticence with Keath is not an eccentricity; his innate reserve in a society sadly unbuttoned has contributed to his muted presence. It is all the more important, then, that we pay close attention to the two passionate and revelatory essays that he did commit, Becoming Complicit (first published in Brick: A Journal of Reviews No. 40, 1991) and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (first published in Canadian Literature No. 100, 1984). I have cobbled together from both, insights, necessarily abbreviated, into his ways of looking and thinking, into the depths of his feeling.

(The complete essays should be found in How Stories Mean edited by Metcalf and Struthers, The Porcupine’s Quill.)

When I was growing up I was refused the world by class, religion, and penury. Or so I believed. In what I was encouraged to think a happy childhood, I felt enjoined by loyalty, Catholicism, and debt to make the best of what I had. What I had was a not unperky time, scarred by doubt and a deep yearning to be of the world. I wanted to travel, be loved, afford new shoes. The size and diversity of my family, just as much as its tenderness for outsiders, held little significance in what to me was my narrow and dutiful place. The heresy that imagination was shaped in such contradictions I would have called traitorous. I was certainly safe from the scoop that I might be cultivating an impostor’s talents. Like every other child I could fly in my dreams; wish and I could peer down on earth. It was only natural that I read to escape.

Reflecting on how much felt forbidden to me then, I can see how climbing a neighbour’s cedar tree and raising my eyes above the power lines must first have tempted me into voyeurism upon the world. I could gaze all the way to the Sea Island airport. Books themselves, my earliest windows, were few, until I discovered the new neighbourhood library. But even this well-lighted place had its moment of denial, when my father seemed on the cusp of having to refuse my admittance, until I could assure him a card would cost only 15 cents. My poor well-meaning father. My poor comprehensive catechism. ‘Catholic,’ as drummed into children of the fifties, meant ‘universal,’ and we parroted answers to encompass the world, anatomizing it from every angle judged necessary to defend the fort. Yet fiction was a way of wandering out through the gates into forbidden territory, preferably of a frontier variety, where tents, lean-tos, and longhouses contained even less furniture than we had. This incited my yearning to understand how the past, my city, the larger world could possibly be articulated, in that anatomical sense, to satisfy the child’s wonder about everything outside him.

Believe me, everything was outside him. Or so I felt. Magazines, television, lessons, vacations . . . I was forbidden to read Dick Tracy in the funnies. I have the feeling yet that the pearly world remains beyond, that a perpetual yearning preys upon my life. It seemed life had prepared me to look at the world with the eyes of someone plagued by an imagination bound in childhood like the feet of a Chinese daughter in pre-revolutionary Nanking. When it began to uncurl, I sensed an invincible need to plant myself firmly upon the earth and, God knows, wander. At university I would sometimes roam the campus at night, peering into buildings, curious about the many paths to the western sea, if only I knew which to choose. It soon dawned that not only would I never know or study what went on in these rooms of that particular faculty, I would never even enter the building. This appalled me. How could one learn to live within the limits of one’s life, when the frontier instinct, from my grandparents to the first novel I can remember reading with utter absorption, about Pierre Radisson as I entered grade four, had uncovered in me the instinct opposite to limitations, confinement, stricture? The free enterprise of imagination, indeed the entrepreneurial spirit of a family of janitors and carpenters, cabbies and fishermen, shepherds and bus drivers, seemed to disavow the notion of inheriting the earth through doctrinal impoverishment.

I was fortunate in the way I imagine most writers are whose family lives have been too rigorous to turn out well-adjusted members of the body politic. Such an alien body, who could understand it?

In London, where I later went to study for three years, I began to realize that the voyeurism I’d practised as a child was becoming a problem. Now an outsider and foreigner both, still peering into rooms and wondering what went on in these, I began to surmise I was a chronic outsider, either too aloof or too shy to knock and enter the world I was already in. Besides, like a voyeur, I took my pleasure in solitude and imbibed it as I might lady jane (The Stones’ drug of choice, and inspiration for that wonderful song of theirs). A mistake if one were preparing, as I was, to offer anatomy lessons to the body politic back home. I’d need to brush up on home, even as I continued to travel farther from my country.

To see . . . is the voyeur’s first and abiding desire.

I am not suggesting that something like the shape of my family, as recalled in these fragments as accurately as I can, wasn’t responsible for my becoming a writer. An articulated quilt may have shape. But we like to know what’s under the covers. Ideas are blankets with certain imaginative contours; but imaginative truth requires the voyeurism of wrinkles and those dyed red lines wrapped around flannelette sheets like ribbons. Metaphorical language isn’t the blanket language of expository prose. It requires the illicit every line of the way. Absence of the illicit is probably a more accurate reason for my quitting teaching than was any growing up of mine to reject authority out of hand.

I’ve long had this thing about touching and smelling the world. It’s no more possible for me to read a book without habitually raising it to my nose than it would be to make love to my wife without smelling her hair. I set aside the more obvious analogies of roses, roast pork, orange peel. . . As an incorrigible voyeur I am, I trust, typically human in my deviance. I also worry about time and how it might scar me, unless it’s watched closely, taken into my confidence, made love to. Writers of fiction want badly to make metaphors of the lines that time makes in us all.

I think the complicity required to do this is the same for writer and reader alike. We want to see the whole body of what in historical writing must necessarily be limited to a leg up or a shoulder to the wheel. I must sound as if I am impugning historians, Your Honour, but my intention is really to argue the case for the integrity of fiction by analogy. Imagination is the ability to see what we have never seen, by particularizing and generalizing from what we have seen, and may only dimly remember. To write successful imaginative literature, I suspect, one must see more vividly with the eyes shut than one ever does with them open. This is why the very best stories possess a dream-like essence, and why the finest novels possess irrefutable memory.

In a way, though not necessarily, the short story mediates—meditates even—between the denser texture of the lyric poem and the attenuated narrative of the novel. It is a meeting ground for another use of language, though not a different kind. This kind of language is moral to its bones in opposing evil—defined by Sartre as the systematic substitution of abstraction for the concrete. I think of the story and novella as spiritually restorative forms, in the way a summer cabin is, where solitude winnows worry, and where the first deep breath puts us in touch again with the natural world. Meanwhile, a house in the city may be filling up with refugees, whose stories demand attention in the novel, with no less urgency, no fewer skeletons.

The windows of the world are innumerable. Which to trust our luck at, which to choose? I became an impostor to see into character, enter worlds not my own, entice others with the illicit I would make moral. But I can only write about home, no matter where I may set my stories. Here is the exotic location of every narrative, grounded in those senses. Or so I believe. Home is nowhere but the imagination, a world you finally re-enter, this house my father built with his father, crowned with chimney bricks from the old Hotel Vancouver, that year I learned to read, 1950. How can we know anything worth knowing until the anonymous soul of our home meets history? Here, as I imagine, will it still stand as fiction when all the hotels have fallen down.

If the skeleton of fiction is narrative, then fiction’s flesh is a complex of nerves, brain cells, muscles, features, and senses. The interdependency of all these is taken for granted until the backbone, say, is dislocated, and the mortality of the human condition becomes increasingly apparent, important. The figures of fiction, both fat and starving, stand in awe of the brooding face of death. The resulting juxtaposition is what transfixes us.

it must be wonderful. By what in fiction are we redeemed if it isn’t the writer’s love of life, growing out of his awareness of death? No fiction will be supreme unless it is haunted by Death. This is another way of saying it must be haunted by Time. We do not, as Julian Huxley argues, have memory because we are aware of civilization. We have it because we are always facing death.

Death in many forms. The kind of death affecting us least often is the death of people. Even for Charlotte Brontë, whose brother, sisters, and mother all died off like broom blossom, the fact of human death was only one death among many. She, like us, faced deaths of far less dramatic kinds: the death of holidays, the death of years, the death of seasons, the death of meals, the death of days, the death of dreams, the death of visits, the death of books, the death of flowers, the death of altruism, the death of smells, the death of enthusiasms, the death of silences. In fiction as in life an awareness of death is the measure of perspective. Maturity is having learned to appreciate the didactic nature of memory. Growing up in Death’s brooding face, our imaginations are educated. This leads to compassion. It offers redemption. The more experiences we have, by which I mean simply the more we notice of the world, the more deaths we live through. It was patently wrong of Wittgenstein to say death is the experience we do not live through. Autobiographical (unlike Harlequin) fiction is full of death, death that is lived through, and it’s in this way the novelist distinguishes himself from the historian. How to remember what he is looking at is the novelist’s obsession. How to look at what he can’t remember is the historian’s. The perspective we value more, the perspective we must value more is the novelist’s. His memories are created in the face of their deaths.

In Taking Cover, the opening story, included in this volume, was Roget’s Thesaurus, a story imagining Roget’s career and told as in his voice at the age of 91.

As the story is brief, I am going to work my way through it, paragraph by paragraph, tussling with its movements and meanings.

I had begun my lists. Mother was always saying, Peter, why not play outside like other boys? Her patience with collectors was not prodigal; she didn’t understand my obsession. I wanted to polish words like shells, before I let them in. Sometimes I tied on bits of string to watch them sway, bump maybe, like chestnuts. They were treasures these words. I could have eaten them had the idiom not existed, even then, to mean remorse. I loved the way they smelled, their inky scent of coal. Sniffing their penny notebook made me think of fire. (See FERVOUR.)

The story starts, then, with Mother urging him to play outside like other boys, the capitalized Mother perhaps already suggesting something of what would seem to have been a close but testy relationship. But Peter wants to stay inside capturing words in his penny notebook. He wanted to polish words like shells; sometimes he played with words, tied on bits of string to watch them sway, bump maybe, like chestnuts.

A curious line. First the comparison of words with chestnuts. Fraser is invoking the ravishing rich colours of chestnuts fresh from the spiky case, what Hopkins was to describe as Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls capturing not the colours themselves but rather their glowing intensity. Secondly, and obviously, the line refers to the game of conkers. In this game, the child bores a hole through the chestnut, top to bottom, makes a big knot at one end of an 18-inch length of string onto which the nut is threaded until it sits on the knot. The game is to strike the opponent’s conker as hard as possible, turn and turn about, until one of the conkers breaks. The word conker is associated with conquer.

(When I was an evil child in the little world we soaked the conkers in vinegar—why I have no idea now—and then baked them in the oven until they were dull and wrinkled and brutal as cast iron.)

But Peter does not play this game outside with other children; he imagines the words held up in the air where they sway and bump maybe, like chestnuts. He imagines himself playing conkers with words but shrinks from the physicality of the other children’s play.

The words bump maybe are awkward rhythmically and suggest the child as rather timid and withdrawn. They were treasures these words, says the narrator, too precious to smash together. The very word Thesaurus, the dictionary informs us, comes from Greek through Latin, meaning treasure and in English, a treasury.

When he goes on to say he could have eaten the words, that he loved their smell, their inky scent of coal, that sniffing his notebook made him think of fire, it is being suggested that the words have, for him, an almost physical existence.

I fiddled with sounds and significations. No words could exist even in their thousands, until I made them objects on paper: hairpins, lapis lazuli, teeth, fish hooks, dead bees. . . Later on my study became a museum for the old weapons poets had used. Mother would have died. By then, of course, she had; pleased I had grown up to become what she approved, a doctor.

What is being described here is the exact opposite of conventional thinking, which is that words are an abstraction, that words are mere noises that betray the thingness of the thing described. For Peter No words could exist . . . until I made them objects on paper: hairpins, lapis lazuli, teeth, fish hooks, dead bees . . . For Peter these verbal abstractions are abstractions until he "made them objects on paper; even as a child, then, he sees himself as a creator, a maker, an artist. He fiddled with sounds and significations."

The adult Roget’s study became a museum for the old weapons poets had used. What does Fraser mean by the old weapons? Perhaps, simply, old books. Archaic usages? Perhaps weapons—the things they fought with—similes and metaphors? The word weapons is a curious use and must have purpose within the story. With a quicksilver mind like Keath’s, weapons may be playing around again with the fight between conkers.

But hold on: didn’t T.S. Eliot contend that while immature poets imitate, mature ones steal—this thievery no more dishonest, it seems, than a confident author’s homage to his predecessors? In this instance Fraser has pickpocketed a line from the pre-Imagist poet T.E. Hulme: Prose is a museum, where all the old weapons of poetry are kept. The anachronism here is that the historical Roget died before Hulme was born. Undaunted, Fraser’s Roget is a decidedly post-modern narrator.

There is wry humour in the transition from the vernacular of Mother would have died to the flat actuality of By then, of course, she had, a humour that possibly reflects resentment at his having become a doctor to please her.

The death of his mother and his profession as a doctor lead into the next paragraph about the death of his wife. This paragraph seems to me the core of the story.

My young wife died of tumours the size of apples. That I was a practitioner of healing seemed absurd. It smothered me like fog, her dying, her breath in the end so moist. When his wife died my uncle took a razor to his throat. (See DESPAIR, see INSANITY, see OMEGA.) He died disbelieving in the antidote of language. Oh, my wife, I have only words to play with.

I approach anything Keath writes gingerly. As we all should. We must read and re-read and in Seamus Heaney’s words we must not submit to the intellect’s eagerness to foreclose . . . but wait for a music to occur, an image to discover itself . . .

(Heaney is using discover here in the sense of reveal.)

The basic question to ask of this paragraph is: what is its mood? How is it meant to make us feel? Is Roget dismissing or diminishing the importance to him of her death, he having taken the antidote of language, of words? Or is he mourning her death and saying that fiddling with words, paltry playing, is all that is left to him? Desolate, then, or inoculated against grief? The answer would seem to me to lie, very possibly ambiguously, in the words apples and moist. The yoking of tumours and apples is peculiar; apples summons pleasing associations, suggests his wife’s youth, beauty, sweetness. Apples increases the horrors of tumours. And moist works on more than one level. On a physical level, we might expect dying breath to be dry and scant. Moist seems to summon again the youth and beauty in apples. Roget’s physical (and emotional) closeness to the dying woman is also suggested in moist; he is bent over her close enough to feel her breath on his face. Moist also links back to smothering fog, that thick, wet pea-soup fog for which London was notorious, a fog so dense that one was unable to see one’s hand in front of one’s face, becoming directionless, disoriented.

That I was a practitioner of healing seemed absurd.

This line, too, suggests emotional devastation. It might also hint at continuing resentment over his Mother’s pressuring him into the profession. But the next line, "When his wife died my uncle took a razor to his throat," with its prompt that we should consult in his Thesaurus DESPAIR, INSANITY, and OMEGA, might seem rather heartless given the reality, the gore, of his uncle’s suicide.

He died disbelieving in the antidote of language.

Disbelieving means not believing in but it also means not having faith in; Roget implies that he did have faith in the antidote, that his faith in language counteracted the despair felt at his wife’s death. The address in the vocative to his wife’s spirit, however—Oh, my wife, I have only words to play with—seems to be saying to her shade that with her death his world has narrowed to trivial word play.

How to deal with what seems to be illogicality? Apples and moist seem obviously to carry emotion yet antidote seems to move in the opposite direction. Unless we see that early emotion as once-felt, but now are reading an old man’s reminiscences?

I’ve often wondered how we’d understand the paragraph had Keath described the size of the tumours differently. Surely, apples and moist are emotionally load-bearing, moist intensified by its so, the wet sibilancy. How would we read if Keath had described the tumours as being not the size of apples but as something else of roughly the same size, say, the size of tennis balls?

I remain rather puzzled.

Am I meant to be?

Or could it be apples connotes the kind of death he will go on at the end to suggest refurbishes him?

Meanwhile:

When I retired it was because of deafness. My passion for travel spent, my sense of duty to the poor used up, I remembered listening for words everywhere. At the Athenaeum, among the dying in Millbank Penitentiary, after concerts, at the Royal Society, during sermons in St. Pancras. I started to consolidate. At last I could describe—not prescribe. After fifty years I concluded synonyms were reductive, did not exist, were only analogous words. Unlike Dr. Johnson I was no poet. My book would be a philosopher’s tool, my sobriquet a thesaurus.

This paragraph moves us many years forward. He represents himself as My passion for travel spent, my sense of duty to the poor used up, I remembered listening for words everywhere, that is, remembered words gathered in the time before he became deaf. His task now would be their organization. How neatly that is put, At last I could describe—not prescribe. That is to say, he no longer had to write prescriptions for patients, another instance of his dislike of doctoring.

My passion for travel spent . . . is a deliberate echo of the line in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, And calm of mind, all passion spent . . . Such an allusion, echo, would obviously be in the mind of a lexicographer and so adds texture to this autobiographical account.

Keath often slips in such allusions. These allusions are often bravura flourishes, part of his exuberant, fizzing invention. There is nothing pretentious, affected, or erudite in these allusions and echoes; they are simply with him inevitably and constantly, the loose pocket change of an education in literature. In some stories, however, quotations and allusions are structural. In the story Flight, for example, the section headed Father, his incorporation of quotations and references to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Windhover are extensive and absolutely structural in that as the hot air balloon is blowing off-course and descending, running out of fuel, far out now over the ocean, the old couple in its wicker basket are reliving their lives in memories; as the balloon falls, the references are to the kestrel that rises, soars, and hovers. The quotations and allusions, by implication, set the couple’s lives against the life of Christ and against the lives of those whose seemingly dull existence of service is, at its end, revealed as glory.

Aren’t we overdue? wonders the wife.

I wonder, says the husband (like Roget, also a retired doctor), "if we are heading a bit more off course?"

The Windhover:

to Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning’s minion king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,

                          in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl

                          and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, 

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Go back now into the story and read again in its final pages:

He rebuffs the big wind—

A billion times lovelier—

The mastery of the thing!

. . . this hot air’s brutish

Their hearts in hiding, stirred . . .

      sheer trudging . . .

When things seemed bleakest

        ah my dear, fall

Against Hopkins’ linguistically ravishing devotions are set the details of commercial tourism, the corny jokes: D’you hear the one, asks the sandy-haired gondolier, about the sailor in the desert who thinks he sees an albatross drinking lion piss?

The story does not allude to the poem’s final line that includes the words Fall, gall, and gash, but those words hover, their absence a presence, a suggestion of the nature of the possible finale.

My contribution was to relationships. I created families out of ideas like Space and Matter and Affections. I grouped words in precisely a thousand ways: reacquainted siblings, introduced cousins, befriended black sheep, mediated between enemies. I printed place names and organized a banquet.

London had never seen anything quite like it. Recalcitrant louts, my words, they scented taxonomy and grew inebrious. Mother was well out of it.

These paragraphs describe the organization of the Thesaurus as the discovering, recording, and bringing together of family members. The stress is on Roget’s control, his fathering; he sees himself as a paterfamilias. He imagines that London (by which he means Fashionable London, Society) had never seen such an occasion as this gathering-in, this banquet. He imagines some of his words, the black sheep in the family, as recalcitrant louts who have scented (suspected, got wind of) taxonomy (classification) and became drunkenly riotous and rebellious. Mother was well out of this quarrelsome gathering; she wouldn’t have regarded it as at all proper.

This imagining of his words as people underlines Roget’s remoteness from actual people.

He is asserting himself in these paragraphs, imagining himself as an enforcer, an officer perhaps, disciplining the recruited rabble, a man necessarily hard, the sort of man his Mother had never seen in him, the boy who didn’t want to go out and play with the other children.

With his Thesaurus he is asserting himself, perhaps essentially for the first time.

She knew me for my polite accomplishments, my papers on optics, comparative anatomy, the poor, zoology, human aging, mathematics, the deaf and dumb. I was a Renaissance man for I chewed what I bit off. Still, I was no more satisfied with my Bridgewater Treatise on the design of all natural history than with my report for the Water Commission on pollution in the Thames. Only less pessimistic. By the time Asiatic cholera broke out, and people were vomiting and diarrhoetic, my work had been forgotten. Not until I fathered my Thesaurus did I dream of prinking. Who knew, perhaps crazy poets would become Roget’s trollops, when they discovered his interest in truth not eloquence.

Here again Roget reverts to resentment of Mother and his lifetime’s polite achievements dutifully carried out in part to please her, all now forgotten by the public. Interesting, too, that he comments on the outbreak of Asiatic cholera against which he was ineffective, just as he had been unable to cure his wife’s tumours. Doctoring, then, had achieved little. But there is a bass line running through this recital of setbacks—I was a Renaissance man . . .; this music sounds loudly at the paragraph’s end to lead us into the clarion sound of trumpets in the seventh paragraph. With the publication of his Thesaurus, which he had fathered, what a change we see in the good and heretofore dutiful doctor.

The sexual implications of fathered now appear in his dreams, dreams of prinking, that is, dressing fashionably, and consorting with promiscuous poets who would become his lollipop trollops. (I seem to recall from a journal of hers the poet Sylvia Plath once actually alluding to her flashier, younger self as Roget’s trollop, not quite so enamoured now, by what the hopeful Roget here imagines is to become her discovery of his interest in truth not eloquence.) The loveliest touch in this sentence is that Roget for the first time talks about himself in the third person—usually a sign of delusions of grandeur as evidenced by what follows.

My book appeared the same year as volumes by Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville—fabulators, all of us. (See FICTION.) I too dreamed of the unity of man’s existence, and offered a tool for attacking false logic, truisms, jargon, sophism. Though any fretless voice can sing if words are as precise as notes, men in power often sound discordant. Music isn’t accident, nor memory history. Language (like the violin) so long to learn.

That third-person Roget has led us into this paragraph wherein he is claiming to be an artist, the equal of Dickens, Hawthorne, and Melville, fabulators, all of us. His assertion should probably incline us towards the delusional reading in the previous paragraph—except that his belief, as expressed here, in the strength of words used precisely, musically, seems to incline us towards reading his Thesaurus as at least a handbook to the novel, a sort of score for the more famous works.

The words (like the violin), emphasized by the brackets, take us back into the story, quite deliberately I’m sure, to the second paragraph, I fiddled with sounds and significations, and assert once again that what he has achieved isn’t fiddling but a work of art as demanding as mastery of the violin. This vision of himself is confirmed by Language . . . so long to learn, as so long to learn is another of Keath’s quotations, this time from Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls:

That lyf so short,

the craft so long to lerne,

Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge.

There is no language, I used to say to Mother, like our own. Look how nations that we oppress trust it. It’s the bridge we use to bring back silks and spices, tobacco leaves and cinnamon. Yet all one reviewer wrote of my work was it made eloquence too easy for the lazy and ignorant. Eloquence I have always distrusted. Maybe this is why my Thesaurus has gone through twenty-eight editions.

Men are odd animals. I have never felt as at home around them as around their words; without these they’re monkeys. (see TRUISM.) The other day I was going through my book and it struck me I have more words for Disapprobation than Approbation. Why is this?

Again, Roget reverts to his long-ago struggles with Mother for respect, his suggesting to her that words, far from being playthings, are actually keys to dominion and empire. He mentioned silks and spices, tobacco leaves and cinnamon, benefits she could easily grasp, to justify his work with words, seeking still to coax from her long-sought approval.

Perhaps his book has more words for Disapprobation than Approbation because he has been coloured by Mother’s lifelong disappointment in him. Or perhaps because, for him, Men (the word meaning the then-universally understood Mankind) are sadly marked by simian characteristics?

So I spend my last days at West Malvern in my ninety-first year. I no longer walk in parks. I’m pleased I fear death, it makes me feel younger. Death is a poet’s idiom to take the mind off complacency. (see SWAN SONG, see CROSSING THE BAR, see THE GREAT ADVENTURE.) I have never thought of death but that it has refurbished me.

I’m pleased I fear death, says the ninety-one-year-old Roget, it makes me feel younger. Makes him feel younger, presumably, by giving greater intensity to the days left to him. The oddest sentence in the story for me is the final one:

I have never thought of death but that it has refurbished me. What a peculiar word, in this context, is refurbished. The dictionary gives us as meanings:

1. brighten up, redecorate

2. restore, repair

The word is undeniably cheerful. The sentence echoes the earlier sentence about feeling younger and here would seem to mean that the thought of death spurs him on to greater efforts, encourages him to return to the fray but I cannot read the sentence without being looped back immediately and emotionally to:

Oh, my wife . . .

I’m left with the unresolved possibility that the final line calls into question the reliability of much of Roget’s account.

Since the 1920s, stories in the modernist mode have reached towards endings beyond the end-mechanisms of plot; they have typically led us towards characters reaching some new understanding of themselves, towards characters moving in the direction of change—the epiphany story as we now call them. Roget’s Thesaurus does not offer the comfort of that now-familiar ending; its ending pushes us back into the story with questions, questions such as—Is Roget quite the person he makes himself out to be? Can we believe everything he says about himself? If we believe in his feeling refurbished, what were his feelings about his young wife?

tumours the size of apples

her breath in the end so moist

None of this is resolved. Rather, we are left gnawing on the story. . . Unless—could it be—somehow the word apples, as Roget chooses to remember his wife’s fatal tumours, serve to refurbish him via an Edenic memory of freshness? The perspective we value more, the perspective we must value more—as Keath wrote in his essay Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction—is the novelist’s. His memories are created in the face of their deaths.

Roget has indeed only words to play with. By now one realizes that this infamous yet playful line from Lolita, which Roget steals retroactively from Nabokov, belongs to that other unreliable narrator Humbert Humbert, and that in apotheosizing his young wife, the apple of his eye, Roget is recalling a memory of loss he can’t and does not wish to let go because it continues to refurbish him.

Roget’s Thesaurus seems to work rather in the way that poems do, revealing more of themselves only as they lose their initial strangeness through repeated readings. The compression of the sentences, the weight that individual words and phrases and allusions carry, should tilt us towards approaching the story as a kind of poem. And meaning? A line of Archibald MacLeish comes to mind: A poem should not mean but be, and that lovely aphorism of I.A. Richards’ hovers: A poem is an activity, seeking to become itself.

Keath’s story acts rather like that for me.

Difficulty and strangeness diminish with the simple passing of time. When T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was published in 1922, it was met by many with bewilderment and derision. One contemporary review described it as the ravings of a drunken helot, the allusion being to the Spartan practice of making a slave (helot) babbling drunk in front of their sons as an object lesson in the wisdom of watering one’s wine.

Nowadays, The Waste Land, while not easy to read—and why should it be?—is not seen as so fearsomely strange as it once was. That contemporary reviewer, by the way, was Arthur Waugh, managing director of the prestigious publishing house Chapman and Hall, a flabby old duffer who was intellectually scuppered by surging sentimentality, the father of Evelyn Waugh—who wasn’t.

My first encounter with Roget’s Thesaurus reminded me of my first encounter with Gerard Manley Hopkins, of reading The Windhover when I was fifteen.

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-black embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

To my young self it might as well have been written in Ugric but Robert Bridges’ Notes tell us that sillion means a furrow and when we pay attention to the poem’s dedication: To Christ our Lord, and when we stop connecting plough with Massey Harris/Massey Ferguson and see and hear what Hopkins is describing, the poem starts to become itself.

Not all Keath’s stories are as densely packed as Roget’s Thesaurus. Chatting with him years ago, he said that some of the earlier stories in this first book, Taking Cover, were so deliberately wrought because he was trying to make an impression, trying to storm the portals of the literary journals; on my portal he didn’t even need to knock.

Most of Keath’s stories are actually easy to enter; the voices that tell them draw us swiftly, almost helplessly, into each new world he makes, worlds never abstract, always concrete, intensely realized. The title of an earlier Selected stories, 13 Ways of Listening to a Stranger, directs us simply to listen.

~

Listen to Rajam, waiter and tennis whizz, as he talks at the opening of Waiting.

This is a calling like any other, except I was not called. I was not chosen. I was born to it, as some bird to flight. People ask me, what is the secret of waiting? People ask me, do you like waiting? Okay, no one asks me, but I have a mind to tell them. The best service is given on an empty stomach. This is the secret. Hey, I am happy to work up high and have the gratuities of the high rollers. I am pleased to look down over this beautiful city and out to sea where the world comes from. Men on court would lose matches for a chance to wait where I wait. Rajam, they say to me. How do you rate a job at Le Soleil Couchant?

Give service, I answer. Superb service.

Oh, yeah? What’s a raghead like you know about a French restaurant, hey?

They are only teasing, and I thrash them according to my temper. I serve to their backhand and wrong-foot them. It is my laugh then. At the net I cut off their volleys to spite their noses. They pay up. They call me the Sick Sikh and the White Man’s Burden, their burden. I laugh. I am the wild Indian with as many arms as Shiva.

Hey, who’s she?

Stupid, stupid.

Forest Hills Champ?

These tennis bums make me laugh. I am lucky to be nimble and vanquish them soundly. I have my dignity and eat it too. Not like my mother and my grandmother in the countryside who pick blueberries all summer and stain their fingers with the blue globes. Their dignity is twenty cents a pound.

Where’s your turban, R.J.? You trash it?

I have no turban. I am Hindu.

Yeah? Well. That’s real fine.

They think I am a new-fashioned Sikh who cuts his hair and goes bareheaded.

How subtly Keath suggests Indian-English speech, an occasional omission of articles, awkwardness, a certain pomposity of diction stemming from what now seems to us an old-fashioned vocabulary, English proverbs and sayings not exactly understood.

I was born to it, as some bird to flight.

I thrash them according to my temper.

. . . I cut off their volleys to spite their noses.

I am lucky to be nimble and vanquish them soundly.

I have my dignity and eat it too.

I am an erstwhile Hindu.

The whole punctuated by Rajam’s repeated mental commentary on the condescending and ignorant insults of his tennis opponents and the vapidities of restaurant critics: stupid, stupid.

~

Listen to the way we are introduced to the boarding house and its inmates in 13 Ways of Listening to a Stranger.

So who CARES if he’s a recidivist says Howard so long as he respects the TV news hour and isn’t responsible for the SMELL in the house. Howard won’t lock his door. He says Kerby’s a shoplifter, not a thief.

What’s the diff? Andrew asks him.

Lots says Howard. Thievery is anti-social.

Here comes the whale you guys so can it. Old Gerry asking for quiet so we can find out more about whales landing dead on beaches in White Rock. Yesterday we got only part of the story and a full twelve seconds of footage. Lookit says Gerry. Goddamn WHALE.

Around here we’re conditioned to lifting words above TV.

Gerry’s divorced and a laid-off sawmill worker in his fifties too one-stroke he says to do anything else. He’s never had a holiday, outings hardly. The beach, he confided once, he remembers for a memory of his son as an infant. Gerry was tending him in the sand at a picnic like a small fire in the wind. He cupped his hands around the cheeks, banked up the blankets, he didn’t know what all he didn’t do to keep his son warm in the ocean breeze. He’s the only man I’ve heard admit nursing mothers aren’t the only ones who feel sexual twinges breast-feeding babies. Nursing fathers feel it too, bottle-feeding. Boy, I don’t want to sound like a PERVERT said Gerry. Just a fact. You feel twinges in your organ. He guessed his son would be somewhere in his twenties now. Could barely remember the little boy. Gerry could hardly veil the sorrow coming back to him from a distance, when he listened.

The mildly looney logic of Howard’s opening assertions, old Gerry calling for quiet because the whale is coming on, we can easily imagine this uproar at the supper table as a daily occurrence, the news always on the TV, always being shouted over.

Gerry, a sawmill worker in his fifties, divorced and laid-off, too one-stroke he says to do anything else, he’s never had a holiday, outings hardly. Gerry is swiftly sketched in his speech—he didn’t know what all else he didn’t do—and by his implicitly identifying himself with a simple one-purpose machine—too one-stroke. He stands out, however, in his claim that bottle-feeding a baby can cause twinges in one’s organ. Though not old, he’s referred to as Old Gerry because the other men feel affectionate towards him.

Later in the story, Gerry refers to his son, whom he says he hasn’t seen in more than twenty years, an image so strange yet simultaneously so real that we understand from it the depth of his connection with the baby. The image is also strategic as it sets up the story’s ending.

Gerry says he remembers Saturday mornings because his son resembled a dolphin. Gerry climbed the stairs to his crib. He’d find his son rocking on his stomach, making little squeals, fat, white-skinned cheeks shining and his mouth turned up in a gummy grin. He had this bulgy forehead says Gerry and this bald head.

On a rereading, one will probably make a connection between the dolphin and the dead whale on TV.

The play with italics