Personal Effects
Post #4, 7 April 2022: Phyllis, John Mortimer, Karen Kain, Anne-Sophie Mutter, William Dray, Michael Piva
Phyllis. Concert violist. To alleviate allergies, a blind healer has advised soft-spoken Phyllis to study the latest Chuck Norris movie: “It’s all explained in there.”
We two are paused mid-point on the bridge connecting the National Arts Centre to the University of Ottawa. A decade ago, I’d fine-tune my NAC work schedule to sprint off to classes in its History department, saving two minutes by dodging through the congenial lobby of the National Defence Headquarters. (That edifice would be barred and heavily fortified following the US embassy bombing in Beirut.)
Having imparted the healer’s insight, Phyllis flushes in the sun’s heat, her viola slung over her shoulder. We haven’t seen each other since I left the NAC last year to pursue doctoral studies in Montreal.
Weighing her take on the equably violent action star, I concede: “There must be some reason to see a Chuck Norris movie.” (June 1994, Ottawa)
John Mortimer QC. Writer. The celebrated British writer and barrister visited Ottawa in winter 1982 to serve as dramaturg for his ‘entertainment’ entitled When That I Was. In this virtuosic one-man Studio show, Edward Atienza played the last hold-out from Shakespeare’s company, living secretly in a court theatre shuttered by Puritans. Was there an anti-Thatcher stance encoded in that wistful monologue? Perhaps. I thought Mortimer had tapped into censorship’s universal oppressiveness.
Assigned as his runner and aide-de-camp, I relished the intellectual and physical evolution of a remarkable production. ‘Horace Rumpole’ was detectable in his owlish creator whose rounded spectacles magnified eyes of watery lucidity. Under Eleanor Fazan’s direction, Atienza was at his fussy best, closing each performance with a reedy vocalization of the eponymous fool’s song from Twelfth Night, delicately set by Alan Laing. I still sing and play on the guitar a version inspired by Alan’s enchanting melody.
Rumpole of the Bailey... that British sensibility attenuating gradually in English-Canadian culture. Last night, I happened to sit near Mortimer at the Royal Court Theatre for the remount of Top Girls. Now chairing the theatre’s council, he was present with family members, of wider girth, more garrulous, an open-necked shirt, casual scarf, one arm draped over the back of a seat; a kind of force-field around him. (April 1991, London.)
Karen Kain. Prima Ballerina. Following intermission during a National Ballet of Canada performance in the mid 1980s, the Green Room concession had closed as usual. It was then that my crewman Pat O’Leary found Karen Kain’s wallet. She’d left it beside the self-serve coffee machine in the NAC’s carpentry shop, dimmed to running lights in the far hinterland of the Opera stage. Soon afterwards I learned that another stagehand—the one who maintained that coin-operated service—was a kleptomaniac. His suburban home was stacked with pilfered NAC items. Luckily, the star ballerina’s fulsome wallet hadn’t fallen into those greedy hands. (Most dancers’ incomes wouldn’t amount to a senior stagehand’s taxes.) No, honest Pat immediately turned his find over to me, and we presented it to the soloist in her dressing room. Unaware that a vital personal effect had gone astray, she thanked us warmly for its safe return. I must say, observing Karen Kain from time-to-time over a period of fifteen years she never seemed unduly ruffled by any challenge or setback. Most Canadians would be astonished to know the level of grit and sheer determination necessary to a dance career in this country. (N.d. ca. 1996, Regina.)
Anne-Sophie Mutter. Violin Virtuoso. Already a jet-setter when I first encountered her in the 1980s, Anne-Sophie Mutter would perform in Ottawa a couple of times during my time with the NAC Orchestra. A few years later, in London at the Barbican, I’d attend her riveting UK premiere of ‘Partita-Interlude-Chain II’, with composer Lutoslawski conducting. Thickets of bows bending to its gusts. In the crowd-pleasing second half, Mozart’s ‘Sinfonia Concertante’ was given a vivacious reading recalling her Ottawa appearances. One of those nights, in the hush after the orchestra tuned to the oboe’s drone, she paused to unclasp her jewelled Swiss watch. Turning to enter the stage she entrusted it to me—the least of the managers hovering in the wing—and I tucked it inside my suit jacket. From this icy beauty inhabiting lofty heights I took this gesture as an obscure token of kinship. It seemed to weigh five pounds. (January 2009, Ottawa.)
William H. Dray. Philosopher. Arriving at the University of Ottawa near the end of his career as a philosopher of history, it seemed Professor Dray had parachuted into a chasm between two emerging paradigms: social over narrative history, and continental over analytical philosophy. I learned later that he’d survived the war as an RCAF navigator, a gruelling life-experience not shared with younger colleagues.
Although an oft-cited international scholar, Dray wasn’t much sought out by peers either in the Philosophy or History departments to which he was jointly appointed. By 1984 he was selling off his library box-by-box to a local bookseller. The sacrificial volumes rested mournfully on the table in his office where we met.
“How…possibly?” seemed to him a more compelling opening stance for historical inquiry than the mechanical ‘covering laws’ proposed by his rival Hempel, or the positivism of Marxist social history, or computer-based Cliometrics—though he’d considered these avenues deeply. He allowed that they were strong on the what of history; it was to fathom why people acted as they did, through ‘empathetic’ understanding, that he steered students to R.G. Collingwood and Louis O. Mink.
Perhaps his interest caught on my combining university study with a demanding job in the arts. An eyebrow lifted when he saw I’d selected non-academic narrative stalwarts Barbara Tuchman and John Keegan for comparative analysis. We discussed Lewis Namier’s ‘prosopography’, seeking to understand history through the biographical study of social networks, and Henri Bergson’s non-linear concept of temporal ‘duration’. But Dray was most intensely interested in explanation and causation, how these could be rendered logically and consistently in historiography.
“Alas,” his red felt pen neatly inscribes one of my essays, “how difficult it seems to be to be consistent in theory and practice!”
Reserved. Decked in grey flannel with a tie. A clinician diagnosing logical fallacies in historical writing. Though attentive and courteous in conversation, one sensed a formidable mind restless and perhaps rootless in Ottawa’s intellectual landscape. (18 February 2018, Ottawa.)
Michael Piva. Historian. Bearded socialist par excellence, Michael’s intense gaze locked on his undergraduate class in labour history through squarely-framed glasses, insisting we come to grips with the fundamental question.
“WHY DO WE STUDY HISTORY?” he demanded, for the second time.
Under the lecture room’s harsh fluorescents, uncomfortable in swivel bucket seats, we jotted notes on shaky fold-out tablets. The sparse twenty of us looked down the tiered rows apprehensively to our skinny hirsute professor, bristling in the certainty of the Marx-Hegel axis, his hard-shell briefcase laid open on a chair beside him.
At the University of Ottawa in the 1980s Marx-inflected social history had taken the high ground, so the acceptable answer should have been obvious. Nonetheless, awkward silence prevailed until the least timid among us, a young woman, softly ventured: “don’t we study history to learn from the past?”
The youthful historian’s wordless glare ensured that nobody would risk another ‘antiquarian’ response.
“WE STUDY HISTORY,” he declaimed, after sufficient pause, “TO BRING ABOUT SOCIAL CHANGE!”
His labour history research was top-notch, thorough, engaged; he was right to stir us to seriousness. What would I answer him today? I might be inclined to say, “we study history to honour ancestors.” We write history as an ethical responsibility to connect those who came before to others who will come after; we observe with a self-reflexive gaze, but not rigidly according to abstractions of class, gender or identity.
Not all ancestors merit study. Neither ought historians reinforce the “clan” as our polity’s organizing principle. Yet, in Canada, why is it that Indigenous communities are more likely than so-called ‘settlers’ to honour elders and ancestors in the passing-down of memory? (October 2019, Ottawa.)
Your next to last paragraph is wonderfully put; I had never thought of history in that way before, but I believe it.
That which you are inclined to say reminded me of Paul Ricoeur's massive <Time and Narrative>, which I read long ago preparing for comprehensive exams at York. At the end of three volumes, he concludes that the difference between fictional and historical narrative is that the latter owes a debt to the dead in a way the former does not. The debt to the dead would presumably be difficult to separate from honoring one's ancestors. Likewise, I like the hint (if I do not misread you) that white "settler" Canadians, fragile or not, would do well to honor their elders as our indigenous co-habitants do. Sometimes I think (for one example) the fact alone that my ancestors went to church on Sundays is enough to justify my doing so when I feel like it... contemporary iconoclasts, walk away.