Deeps, whitewater
Post #1, 7 March 2022: Mike Mazurki, Helen Stanyer, Jack Oudemans, Nancy Bauer, Oscar Peterson
Today’s post contains five entries relating to my childhood in British Columbia, New Brunswick and the UK. Drawing from fifty-two notebooks dating back to the 1970s, I begin my diary of Canadian biography by entering the ring with a notable American wrestler:
Mike Mazurki. Wrestler and Actor. A telegram, June 4th, 1960, announces my birth in Prince Rupert Hospital, ten days premature, at 6:30 a.m. At that hour my father is steaming from England to Montreal, his teal-blue Austin-Healey stowed in the hold. In receipt of the happy news he disembarks and speeds that finicky roadster seven days straight across North America to meet his first-born son. When he catches up to us visiting the family in Vancouver, my grandmother Winnie K. puts her foot down on his intention to drive back to Rupert with me stuffed in the cuddy. Instead, I’m flown north in my mother’s arms, leaving him to contend with the convertible’s over-heating radiator on that lonely highway. By coincidence, Grandpa K. has organized on behalf of the Prince Rupert Rotary Club a visit by Mike Mazurki, professional wrestler and Hollywood B-Movie heavy. The massive pugilist sits adjacent to my mother and is permitted to cradle me in his arms while walking the aisle. He forms a keen attachment, only very grudgingly handing me back. (27 May 2015, Ottawa.)
Helen Stanyer. Grandmother. As a small boy I stay part of the summers at my grandparents’ cottage in Balfour on Kootenay Lake in British Columbia. Grandfather Jasper indulges my use of wood from his workshop to build a raft. Irregular in shape, it is quite a modernist raft really. But it floats, and I anchor it with a stone. My Grandmother, fiercely protective of her husband, shakes her head at this waste of quality lumber. (My “Lake Song” from the early 2000s mourns her passing. Perhaps, by inspiring that song, and by retaining this memory of his tolerance and quiet good humour, that wood was not entirely wasted.)
Driven up the other side of Kootenay Lake I’m intrigued by a ‘house of glass’ barely visible through the trees, a folly constructed of clear bottles. The local Balfour boys I meet on the lakeshore ruthlessly spear frogs with sharp sticks; the pungent smell of outboard fuel and fish on the life jacket Grandpa makes me wear. He places me in the bow as ballast before speeding up the lake in his 23-foot cedar-strip freight canoe.
A family rift means that I don’t see them so much after that. Our trip—wife Léa, daughters Dorian, Kyrie and me—to Nelson in 1996, where we meet Grandma with Mum and Dad, thus is significant and important. It overflows with unexpressed love dammed up over the years. Later, I loop the guitar part to the Lake Song as a soundtrack to the slideshow created for Léa’s father’s funeral at Ottawa’s Beechwood cemetery. (March 2019, Edinburgh.)
...In her youth my grandmother supported her parents running their handsome hotel at Skeena Crossing near Hazelton B.C. Her father David Wesley Pratt was of Irish extraction, from County Fermanagh, and her mother was from a Bohemian village near Vienna. Hotel-keeping ran in his family, and she’d come to North America as a young au pair in 1902.
Skeena Crossing lay at the centre of a cluster of indigenous communities still somewhat intact after less than a century of colonization: Kispiox, Gitanyow, Gitwangak, Gitsegukla, Gitanmaax and Stekyawden.
Gitxsan territory was a frequent destination for painters Emily Carr, A.Y. Jackson, Anne Savage, and Edwin Holgate, as well as anthropologist Marius Barbeau, all repeat guests at the hotel. Of this group, my acerbic grandmother reminisced disapprovingly about Carr’s peculiar dresses and Jackson’s constant tobacco odour. Holgate and Savage had left no impression, but Dr. Barbeau gifted her parents with a signed copy of his Totems of the Pacific Northwest.
In this domestic arrière-scene of a contact narrative, replete with examples of indigenous resistance to physical and cultural appropriations, my grandmother bore witness to complex and unequal exchanges. Her sophisticated metropolitan guests both exploited the Gitxsan clans and to some extent protected them. For example, Barbeau sought in vain to preserve their culture within a new national park. Yet, pecuniary interests underlay his altruism, too.
In refusing to sell his clan’s imposing funeral pole one elderly chief made it pointedly clear to Barbeau: “You get me the tombstone of Governor Douglas and I will give you the totem of my grand-uncles.” Known for acquisitive tenacity in brokering artefact-purchases on behalf of private collectors, the wily anthropologist simply outwaited the old chief and purchased the pole from his sons after he’d passed away the following year.
After college, my grandmother taught primary school to classes of indigenous students in a nearby schoolhouse. In a photograph, the young teacher stands erect behind her class of twenty young boys and girls from the nearby reserve. A strict but encouraging figure, likely alert to her students’ primary lifeworld, but with that frontier openness that is neither judgmental nor preservationist in any anthropological way. The aesthetic of her life, like her work ethic, was lived and performed but never represented. Perhaps it was a suspicion of ‘representation’ that marked her regard for Emily Carr, a hesitation shared by at least some of the indigenous people whom Carr painted. (October 2019, Ottawa.)
Michiel Oudemans. Artist, Photographer. One warm day in the Spring of 1966, we picnicked with our neighbours the Oudemans on the Nashwaak River outside of Fredericton. In years of high run-off after a snowy winter the river formed a bottleneck chute that only the boldest of canoeists would catapult themselves over. This was one of those years. My two-year-old sister Helen and I had strayed from the picnic blankets, just out of sight of the adults, wandering down to the rocky shore of the foaming river. Leaning forward to dip the nipple of her bottle into the water, my sister suddenly tumbled in and hurtled downstream, a rolling blur of limbs and toddler clothes. My scream elicited instant adult action, but it was Michiel Oudemans, then an early teenager, who dashed downstream, struggled out into the rapids and caught hold of her. Helen was unconscious, requiring CPR. I learned from my father just now that Michiel, who’d later become an artist, passed away from cancer in Truro, Nova Scotia, about six months ago. He is remembered as a hero in our family for that miraculous rescue. (August 2017, Ottawa.)
Nancy Bauer. Writer. In a letter dated 1 March 1970, Fredericton, sent to me on our sabbatical year in London, my friend Ernest Bauer, aged nine, opens by discussing his mother, Nancy, before piling on news from our street:
Dear Mark,
I haven’t much to say except my mother put her elbow through the window and had to go get it fiddled with. It wasn’t anything bad if I’m making it sound that way. David R. got a pup he named Herman or Cinders or both He! He! It is sort of glum around here. I’ve ordered for the first time Arrow books sequel to the Lucky Books.
I guess there IS something to tell you. We had a flood, nineteen bridges washed out, two deaths, floods. $100,000,000.0 no cents of course. Johnny says hello with the clang of his pot covers and Gracie says Hi to Helen with the flick of her brush.
Love Ernie
... The Deep. In objecting that Ernie come sailing with me, Mrs. Bauer always would ask how deep the water was. The absurdity of that question apropos simple drowning masked her true fear, which had nothing if not depths. (16 February 2011, on the Queen Mary at Long Beach, California.)
… To Montreal’s new symphony hall for Kent Nagano conducting St. John’s Passion. A coincidence to see Ernest in the loge immediately opposite us. To lunch afterwards. (11 November 2011, Montreal.)
... In 1968 or ’69 Mrs. Bauer recruited me along with Ernie as child actors for an amateur stage adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. We had but a few lines yet nonetheless were dragooned to rehearsals. As these progressed, we perhaps dimly grasped Jackson’s writerly purpose: an indictment of village scapegoating and collective hysteria. Only gradually did her story and the mise-en-scène affect us as we capered around the empty night-time building wearing itchy peasant smocks.
With her untimely death aged 48 in 1965, Jackson had passed into a feminist martyrdom as a “housewife writer,” as Nancy Bauer was at that time. This was beyond our ken, but likely it’s what had prompted the proto-feminist English-Lit conclave then incubating at UNB and Saint Thomas University to select The Lottery for production.
The ‘drawing of the lots’ was disturbing, fixed of course such that the same actress always selected the short stick. Then we villagers stoned her to death. At one rehearsal she bleated that the children were pelting her too hard with the papier-maché rocks. In retrospect, I wonder if truly it was just Ernie and I—the children—throwing the paper rocks too forcefully? I realize now that, even in our boyish innocence, human group violence seemed alarmingly natural. (June 2015, Ottawa.)
… A dream of sliding down Stanley St. in new black shoes, gliding on icy slush. I’ll need a new pair, I thought, these are ruined. Our neighbour Mr. Bauer gazes out his front window at me, straight up the street ahead in the distance. He, with sons Ernest and John, have converted their bungalow into an art installation, adding a mezzanine holding hundreds of small black lumpen forms like trolls and gnomes. The rest of the house is empty, but for a series of raw plywood panels inserted into various walls and floors. (January 2017, Ottawa.)
Oscar Peterson. Pianist. Taken to see Oscar Peterson perform at the Fredericton Playhouse, I’m certain the great man turned to wink directly at me, the boy in the third row. He seemed even grander than the Steinway. The audience hung on every note. After one sublime left-hand flourish he looked straight up in pure delight and everyone cheered to the limits of their ability.
Later, in the 1980s, I worked at the National Arts Centre. Oscar visited from time-to-time. A CBC co-production titled Three Pianos brought him together with Michel LeGrand and Claude Bolling in the NAC’s opera house. The three concert grands sat centre-stage on turntables, with a bank of audience ranged behind them. CBC’s veteran arts producer Paddy Sampson was an old hand. His request for a directly-vertical camera shot required some exquisite stage rigging.
Though only twenty-three, nonetheless I was assigned by Executive Producer Ted Demetre as the NAC’s principal representative. I’d meet the CBC team regularly in the smoke-choked boardroom with the charismatic Irishman Sampson presiding. Nothing was ever left to chance; television shows weren’t thrown together then. If anything, such ‘gala’ events as this one had a Cold-War high-culture seriousness that’s long since melted away.
The gentle giant Oscar was courteous even to a young manager like me, though his childlike quality could deepen into seriousness. I couldn’t tell if the piano-playing ever really gelled on this show—at times it was hard to absorb the sheer barrage of notes from three such maximalists. (Might a summit of minimalists, say Philip Glass, Abdullah Ibrahim and Richie Beirach have been more intriguing, musically?)
In 2005, my boss Marcel Beaudry, then CEO of the National Capital Commission, rejected my proposal to name the new concert zone on LeBreton Flats the ‘Oscar Peterson Park.’ Fearful of local ridicule, he was determined that ‘LeBreton’ it should remain. Later in the 2000s, I collaborated with the NAC to locate Oscar’s statue at its south-west corner. Attending a dinner in the NAC Café with his widow, along with the sculptor Ruth Abernethy and others, to celebrate the commemoration’s completion, one keenly felt the absence of Oscar’s élan.
Discussing the ‘arms-length’ principle with MP Bob Rae, seated across from me, I mentioned how political staffers had swarmed my office, dictating programming selections for the Canada Day show I was producing on Parliament Hill. Such political interference had started under Paul Martin and intensified under Stephen Harper. They’d overruled my inclusion of classical music; offers to artists had to be rescinded. A few days later Rae took flak in the House of Commons for dubbing those staffers “jihadis.” (January 2009, Ottawa.)
Playing something of a supporting role in this excellent début, I claim my right to nostalgie. I believe it was our babysitter Dennis who recruited us for the Lottery. Of course, some years later you and I would produce our own version at Fredericton High School; it was a stunning achievement - fusing two plays into one (rather Frankensteinian) spectacle - I still have faded purple mimeographed copies of the script. // I always say that Oscar Peterson playing in Fredericton changed my life (perhaps we were there together - 1973-ish). Sitting in the third row, I had a dawning sense that I was in the presence of greatness - and that such a greatness could exist. I remember a shy smile, profuse sweating and a large handkerchief on the piano top. He was humble. Gentlemanly. I still sit occasionally at the piano and try to play like he did. (this might sound presumptuous, but that's what Jazz IS - being presumptuous.) I have somewhere his piano course, with tapes and cheat sheets and the like. It is a deep wish that the métro station Lionel Groulx in Montreal, not far from his childhood home, be re-named Oscar Peterson station. There have been pétitions to that end that I have signed. // The dream, of the art installation, as many will know, is not far from reality.// Yes, you were always careening down hills, and skimming over deep drownable water, while i was busy hitting fungos into the neighbours' picture windows at Finkway Park. I sprained my ankle something fierce in Rodney Mcinnis's back yard for God sakes; my Krazy Karpet headed purposefully into a stand of birches. Crabbe Mountain would have been the end of me. I still think of Crabbe Mountain as a kind of Mount Doom. Sauron ran the T-Bar. Odd, when we sailed under the Confédération bridge together in the early nineties, I remember thinking - hmm, this water is so shallow- I bet I couldn't drown in it! Ernie