The Age of Cities (22 page)

“It's somebody's story,” said the volume's erstwhile guardian.

My student explained that though he had dislodged the first few sheets and read them, he had left the rest of the artifact intact. Thank the gods for small mercies: he told me that when he is not rummaging like a scavenger through used goods shops, he's an adherent of crime dramas on television—and on these programs the forensics teams are adamant that the crime scene be given a
cordon sanitaire
until after their investigation has terminated. Otherwise, he elaborated, “the evidence could become tainted.” I had been promoted to Textual Forensics Expert, I could see. An enthusiastic amateur hoping to solve the mystery of the book's origin, he had diligently returned to the shop in order to quiz the proprietor. She was unhelpful, the student informed me. Her reply? Wearing a sheepish look, he recalled that the gravel-voiced merchant had been succinct to the point of bluntness: “Don't ask me, honey. We get a shit-load of books in here every damned week.” Thus concluded one promising line of inquiry.

 

Figure 2

The
Junior Homemaking cachette

 

He left his untitled
[4]
“find” with me. The temptation to read the contents was not to be resisted. Yet before giving into that first bibliophilic impulse, I thought to be methodical; each one of the tightly-bound sheaves, accordingly, was labeled and catalogued. It was scarcely necessary. The obscure author who had placed the sheaves of papers inside must have been nothing if not cautious and precise. Each “page,” a piece of paper exactly 20.3 cm wide and 15.25 cm long (but folded in half lengthwise), was numbered and placed atop the next. With the exception of one untitled sheet inscribed with epigraph-like excerpts of poems by Virgil and Edgar Lee Masters, sections had been labeled “Prol S 58,” “A 59,” “J 59,” “O 59,” and so on, and then tied together with cotton twine and arranged by narrative chronology in the
cachette
. Every sentence, moreover, had been written with a soft lead pencil (all the better to correct errors?); the author had made use of just one side of each sheaf.

 

Figure 3
Manuscript page "Prol S 58"

Unlike the famously haphazard collected poems of Emily Dickinson or the equally notorious illegible manuscripts of Charlotte Brontë, both the order and clarity of these manuscript pages presented no impediments; there was no ambiguity to be found, no word undecipherable, no sheaf improperly ordered. Transcription proceeded without incident. The flawless legibility hinted that this manuscript was less a work-in-progress than a completed draft.
[5]

 

Now that the manuscript had seen the light of day, the question of what to do with it arose as a matter of course. There was little appeal in keeping it stored away in my office as though it were mine alone to possess. The manuscript was in fact valuable as a revelatory historical document—its narrative pointedly set between the historically-veracious hanging of a homosexual murderer in spring and the death of a bisexual matinee idol in autumn—that provides certain access to a subjectivity and a subculture entirely invisible to the popular imagination. Furthermore, the manuscript's cultural portrait both complicates and localizes the understanding of a bygone era grossly simplified and homogenized by influential American media images (from exercises in exclusively heterosexual nostalgia such as
American Graffiti, Grease,
and
Happy Days
to a trapped-in-amber syndicated series like
Leave It to Beaver
).

Seeking the publication of an anonymous work was unusual, admittedly, but there were literary elements to it as well that recommended I introduce it to other readers. Yet, in assessing the merit of the volume for publication purposes, the question of authorship remained a troubling—and by no means trivial—detail. It seemed imperative to solve the mystery and reveal the source. Despite my best efforts, that quest was fruitless. No inner Hercule Poirot could I make manifest; evidence was sullen, revealing no secrets. Avenues proposed by colleagues proved unproductive as well.

Necessity was in fact the mother of invention in this case, and for me inventiveness entailed contacting graphologists and text authenticators. This extraordinary—one might say desperate—measure reflected my native skepticism being overwhelmed by frustration. I did, incidentally, draw the line at a recommended “forensic psychic” who promises to reveal truth upon laying her hands on any artifact. While graphology has always shined like a dubious beacon of pseudo-science for me (like phrenologists, television psychics, and readers of tea leaves: a trap for the credulous), I decided nevertheless to send copies of the same two manuscript pages to a pair of respected graphologists, one in Ontario and the other in Oklahoma.
[6]
“What's the harm?” I concluded, borrowing some of Winston Wilson's late-blooming devil-may-care attitude.

Regrettably, their results were mere sketches and, accordingly, inconclusive. Each employed their specialist's vocabulary of inflated buckles, open loops, hooks, strokes, degree of connection, upstrokes, sloping t-bars, and line spacing, but their analyses could not supply much concrete data. The Canadian analyst, for instance, detected “literary leanings,” “pessimism,” “repression,” “consistency,” “desire for change,” and “caution” in the handwriting of the unknown author. From the same sample, the Oklahoman deduced “caution” and “repression.” She determined additional traits: “sarcasm,” “idiosyncrasy,” “narrow-mindedness,” and “indecisiveness.” The composite personality that results brings us nowhere close to a useful (or even coherent) profile. The best efforts of these experts could not ultimately coax the now schizoid but still ghostly author from “the other side.” Interestingly, both analysts ascertained that the writer was a left-handed male, and Ms. Winterbourne supplemented her assertion with a curious and terse notation: “May have issues about his masculinity.” The analysts of paper and ink could confirm that the text was produced between 1955 and 1965. The quality of the products was not exceptional. Their commonplace nature effectively prevented the extraction of any further information
[7]
that might reveal the absent author.

If the mystery of authorship remains—permanently?—unresolved (or else we heed Michel Foucault's warning that our quest for the inviolable origin of things is an understandable if wrong-headed and quite possibly foolhardy venture
[8]
), a secondary mystery is surely worth our consideration: why had this manuscript been sequestered away? If it was autobiographical or a
roman à clef,
then it is sensible to assume that the author would not dare risk the public exposure (humiliation or retribution) that publication would be sure to bring. Another possibility, equally probable, is that a second copy of the manuscript was actually sent out for publication and subsequently rejected. Since publishers do not maintain records (or an archive) of rejected manuscripts, verification of any sort is not forthcoming yet again.

Granting the complete absence of the author and knowledge about “his” social circumstances, it is intriguing to speculate further on the author's historical predicament. A cursory overview of the Canadian literary infrastructure indicates that while there is undoubtedly such an animal today—a thriving one supported by government grants, televised awards ceremonies, arts festivals, university English departments, agents, and so forth—it was still fundamentally inchoate circa 1959 and, then as now, based largely in Toronto. Moreover, that miniscule publishing sector's interest in the literary vanguard is undetectable. Seeing that an American author like William Burroughs was publishing such risqué works as
Junkie,
(1953) and
Naked Lunch (1959)
during the period, it does not seem reckless to contend that Canadian publishing house concerns invested heavily in conventional literary stock. In short, at mid-century (an age well before the foreign-owned multinational publishing conglomerates of today) Canada was no haven for the publication of a novice writer on the edge of the nation holding what would have amounted to a radically controversial perspective.

Nor did publishers print as many titles as today. Surveying literary production between 1940 and 1960 in a 1965 essay, Hugo McPherson reports that some 370 literary novels were published in Canada during the period (a staggering 1.5 per month, in other words), the bulk of which, he states, “consist[ed] of domestic romances, often honest or earnest in intention, but abjectly imitative of the stereotypes of magazine fiction.”
[9]
McPherson complains that this Canadian fiction had all the hallmarks of provincialism since its choice of material was decidedly unworldly and apolitical. (Similarly, discussing the literature of social protest and social change during the same period, W.H. New
[10]
makes mention of novels and poems addressing voting rights, living wages, and labour unrest. The politics of gender, sexuality, and skin colour were to rear their heads a full decade later.) McPherson's essay bluntly includes a long statement by one J.R. MacGillivray, whose unequivocal conclusion (in 1949) was that Canadian novelists have “no apparent awareness of ideas and events, but [live in] a perfect isolation from place and time.” MacGillivray then exposed his profound disappointment with a rhetorical question: “Where else is there the equal to that ivory tower, soundproof, windowless, air-conditioned, and bombproof, in which these novelists tap at their typewriters undisturbed by the falling heavens?”
[11]
If in general literature of the era was a parochial, apolitical, and timid family, we can surmise that it would not have welcomed a shameful cousin like Winston Wilson and his unrepentant homosexual comrades into its fold with open arms. It would seem likely that something as trifling as Alberta's sympathetic response to Leo Mantha (the scandalous
amour fou
murderer, an inmate at the Fraser Valley's Oakalla Prison Farm, and, on April 28, 1959, the last man put to death by hanging in British Columbia) might have prompted a censorious reply.

McPherson does eventually submit a list comprised of a “small group of writers who in various ways have expanded the Canadian consciousness of the self, and its relation to ideas, imagination, and events.”
[12]
That group includes Hugh MacLennan, Barry Callaghan, Gabrielle Roy, Robertson Davies, Sinclair Ross, Ethel Wilson, and Mordecai Richler. It is a minute canon of figures, we might add, whose representation of Canada (and whose influential contributions to “the Canadian consciousness of the self”) is stocked exclusively with heterosexual characters and predicaments. Tradition-minded literary vision aside, there is no doubting that the St. Laurent/Diefenbaker years were also a time of literary-cultural expansion, a fact made especially clear by the growth of literary journals—like
Contact (1952),
Tamarack Review
(1956),
Waterloo Review
(1958),
Canadian Literature
(1959),
Prism
(1959), and
Tish
(1961). While Desmond Pacey's essay in
Literary History of Canada
claims that this flourishing of Canadian magazines and journals “provided invaluable opportunities for young writers to try their wings,” he does not by and large disclose the nature of the literary production.
[13]
If journals were ideologically predisposed to valorize some representations while discouraging others (witness the construction of the “aggressively masculinist and heterosexist” Canadian poetic canon,
[14]
for example), then their flourishing would have been of negligible benefit to an author submitting a de trop representation of sexuality.

How then, we might ask, might a publisher have responded to the manuscript nestled inside
Junior Homemaking?
Again, of course, we can only speculate. Considering that the novel graphically depicts (for the times) a sexual encounter between two men, its being published would have been putting on public display an act both criminal—and one not decriminalized until 1969—and distasteful. And because Winston's fateful sexual rendezvous would be arguably obscene, any interested publishing house would have understood its vulnerability to litigation. Furthermore, the very fact that the tradition of Canadian homosexual literature is a scant one even today (we might recall, too, that what is arguably the first Canadian lesbian novel was set in Nevada and authored by the American-born Jane Rule in 1964)
[15]
suggests that to his own detriment the writer was ahead of his time. As another point of comparison, we might also pay attention to a question privately posed in 1960 by E.M. Forster—at the time one of England's most celebrated literary figures, the first president of the National Council for Civil Liberties, and the outspoken defender of the putative obscenity of Radclyffe Hall and D.H. Lawrence. On the cover page of his unpublished manuscript of
Maurice,
a novel begun in 1913 and “Dedicated to a Happier Year,” he wrote: “Publishable—but worth it?” The question was answered in the affirmative only after
Maurice
appeared in 1971, one year after Forster's death.
[16]