Fly with the plumes
Post #18: Alistair MacLeod, Michael Ondaatje, Rebecca Hossack, Christopher Hitchens
Alistair Macleod. Writer. Alistair flew into Moncton today, is charming us with wry anecdotes. Delighted to be in the Maritimes, his writerly fame is now cresting at the tail end of a long professorial career. I’ve recruited him as one of four keynote speakers at the Atlantic Cultural Space conference, along with Herménégilde Chiasson, George Elliott Clarke, and Patricia Quinn, head of Ireland’s Arts Council. Three hundred Canadian and international delegates have gathered from around the Atlantic basin, north and south. MacLeod’s unflinching gaze into the grit of Scottish diaspora in Cape Breton seems to resonate with my source text, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. (23 May 2002, Moncton.)
...Reaching Dr. Macleod by phone in Windsor has meant first engaging with Mrs. MacLeod; then I hear her track him down in the house. Brief, terse calls; but in person he’s a marvelous companion. Alas, the schedule went out the window this afternoon as he digressed from his drift that the ‘voices of our time’ are regional. Nobody minded. He captivated the plenary with a weave of texts and memories that indeed blended with Gilroy’s hypothesis of a common Atlantic culture forged in empire, trade, conquest, slavery, and abolition. A rare talent; Alistair’s variations play subtly on just a few basic themes, rather like the Scottish musical tradition itself. (25 May 2002, Shediac.)
Michael Ondaatje. Writer.
You must fly with the plumes, I mean, be lifted up on the wings of desire, still following at the back of that great leader who gave me light and hope.
My sole advantage over Dante, in his strictly textual rapport with the ancient Virgil, is to have followed a poet-guide only a single generation older. As boys of perhaps twelve, Ernest Bauer and I leafed Michael Ondaatje’s early chapbook as we assembled Maritime samizdat for the Fiddlehead in the Bauers’ basement. Nancy had set us up with a long-jawed stapler, and faithfully we sorted large creamy pages of scant text into discrete piles. The miraculous act of stapling turned them into books.
Now, decades later, in a finalist interview to become a senior director in Ottawa, the president of the committee surprises me with the question: “What is your favourite Canadian novel?”
Not pausing to consider, I blurt: “Ondaatje. Coming Through Slaughter.”
I explain how this masterwork of prose poetry, Black history, jazz lore, and love, was named not for a massacre but rather a hamlet in the deep south, and that its author, by deft and unspoken analogy, made Buddy Bolden’s legend the unlikely signature for an incredible élan in Canadian letters in the late 1970s.
This is too abstruse, the word ‘slaughter’ has seized the interview room—an Ottawa hotel suite—with unintended connotations. Clearly, none of them knows the book. A misjudged citation. Two events deepen that impression.
The first happens instantly when the fire alarm erupts, unaccountably blasting kick-ass country rock through a distorting ceiling speaker.
“Your exit music?” grins the greatest of the CEOs on the hiring panel.
The second event, well... for another time. What I’ll say is that mentioning Ondaatje’s poetic archaeology of a doomed trumpeter’s scant traces—intimations of an authentic cultural leadership—has ruffled these arbiters of the arts in Canada. (ca. 2003, Ottawa.)
Rebecca Hossack. Art Dealer. Encountering London art dealer Rebecca Hossack in her booth in the Los Angeles International Art Fair, I spot Bruce Chatwin’s name in a sequence of large photographs featuring book-lined shelves.
“It’s true that Bruce Chatwin used to hang out in your gallery to write?” I ask.
“Where did you hear that?” she looks up, eyes narrowing.
How could I have known this? Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography? Student years in London? Chatwin’s What Am I Doing Here?
“It’s on the edge of my recollection,” I shake my head.
“Yes,” she says. “His brother used to drop him off. I’m sorry... really. You know I was busy; I had the gallery to run, he was very ill... he didn’t seem to understand that. But he came around often; he said I had a healing smile.”
She demonstrates, and her colleague laughs, “See, she still has it!”
During a brief silence, I puzzle over this exchange—cynical, condescending, contrite?
“I suppose he was drawn to the Aboriginal art,” I venture, thinking of The Songlines.
Rebecca smiles less healingly, handing me a Northern Australian artist’s catalogue as she turns away to greet an American dealer.
Moving on, I plumb my memory: someone had something to do with her gallery... had a paratrooper once scaled a wall? Later, she overtakes me in different aisle, but I turn too late to read her eyes. (14 January 2010, Los Angeles.)
Christopher Hitchens. Writer. Traversing the rear façade of the New York Public Library facing Bryant Park, we notice Christopher Hitchens perching anonymously among people lounging along a low granite retaining wall abutting the terrace restaurant. Everyone’s relaxing in the receding heat of the day. He fixes Léa with a keen stare, nodding with a smile when she gestures that we are headed inside for his sold-out talk.
Dylan intro and extro music. Imaginative use of audio clips to motivate and punctuate the conversation. Hitchens enters bearing a tumbler of whisky. Interviewer Paul Holdengräber labours the theme of mortality, taking his time getting to political questions, lingering over child-rearing, Hitchens’ relations with his father and mother, her suicide in Athens. Even then the political is reached via a literary vein: why did Hitch repudiate his old friend Edward Said? It was the latter’s quietism regarding Islamic extremism. Pressed, Hitchens repents neither supporting the Iraq War nor his general rightward shift. The audience cools palpably. Israel’s attack on the Gaza relief flotilla? Totally justified, he shrugs. These were Hamas dressed up as ‘activists.’ He gravitates to class concerns: his mother‘s determination to lift his status through elite education; references to ‘position’ and ‘property-owning’—a certain innocence underscoring the acrid brilliance. A boyish bravery. Affirmed by warm applause.
Back outside, Veuve Clicquot with oysters and fine cheeses on the terrace facing Bryant Park, capped with dessert bearing a birthday sparkler. Léa sketches Kyrie; I make these notes. Hot, magical night; the park brilliantly-lit from atop a skyscraper, scattered lawn chairs draped with New Yorkers; ‘round midnight, an unhurried walk home down Broadway. (4 June 2010, New York City.)