Wednesday, August 21. One year in Taiwan. I was already drunk by the time I remembered, and it didn’t sober me up. It had been a bad day, there had been shouting, and tears. I had taken a taxi that morning. I walked home. There were no sidewalks, you had to walk in the road, it was just as awful as always: the cars, the smoking buses, the dirty, braying two-stroke scooters. I had a beer, walking home, and then another, a third. I bought the beers at convenience stores and knocked the caps off on the edges of the air conditioners in front of the stores. I began to feel things were not so important; I bought a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. When I came near home, I stopped and turned up a side street, and that is how I came to be so drunk. Up 中山二街, the morning market was closed and the chickens were quiet. I passed the chickens in the dim slimy warren of the morning market, in their stacked cages, the bars of which caked and spattered with corn mush and scat; I passed the orange plastic garbage bins, cursorily rinsed and upended for the night, where they would thrash out the last of their lives, throats cut. There was a toilet in here. I went around in a circle once, from the floury tables of noodle stalls to the smiling swine painted beneath the words, Taichung Royal Pork, and back again, and when I found the toilet, the door was locked. A large and truculent stench of vomit came from the small barred window beside the door. I returned to the chickens, and, standing on a slick rubber mat, in the high thin stink of rats, I urinated in the gutter that ran between the cages and the orange bins.
One is always writing about people not at all like oneself in an effort to mimic the real world and one is always writing about oneself, forever about oneself, because one cannot help it. The people one writes are all the people one lionizes and all the people one despises, they are symbols of the things one wishes one were and the things one wishes one were not.
Telmo was at the school for some reason tonight. I like seeing him even less than the other IACC types who’ve been introduced to me. There is an unresolvable competition, because I know he loved these kids when they were his. And I heard him say hello to Carra particularly, I know she has always been as she is now, and was once his favourite as she is now mine, and I am seethed in Jealousy. Quite unconscious, that majuscule. And last, merely as a man, not as a lover or a teacher, I resent his bluff ordinariness, his burly, friendly failure to understand me. Today I took him by surprise and he turned and shook my hand—the gesture seemed strange, foreign—and called me Mike. He said, ‘I thought you’d gone home.’ I knew he’d thought that, because last time he saw me he said, ‘Bill! You still here?’ And I knew he couldn’t really imagine how I must live here without having anything to do with the office or the whites. I remember the fragile, trembling New Zealander for whom I bought a beer on a Saturday morning, near noon, outdoors in the sun. He was recently arrived from a stint in Korea, and living on advances on his VISA card, and had just come out of a nightclub at 9:00 or so. He told me about speeding in Sydney—amphetamines, not engines—and confided that sometimes kids could be really fucking irritating. That’s true, but I’m sure I’d never say as much to a stranger. I don’t know if that makes me a liar, or him a buffoon, or both. He complained about his roommate, and I said why not get your own place and he said no, he couldn’t stand his own company, and I could see that and felt badly for him, but I didn’t say anything.
And I think how, to have said twice that he had thought I’d gone home, Telmo must imagine I am miserable, but I am not, I am nothing like miserable, and I think of that guy, who I guess has plenty of ‘friends’. Of course, Telmo is not like him. He is nice, and has a big, friendly way with adults and children. At the last moment, in front of the building, having heard the children saying my name and realizing his mistake, he castigated himself, saying, Why did I call you Mike, I don’t know why I called you Mike. Because you don’t know me, I said, That’s all right. And that’s true, as far as I am concerned, and sufficient. He went on, though, saying, But I’ve met you before, and I don’t know why I got it wrong. He makes a point of principle, then, of names. I can see that, I can see how he wants to be liked and likes to be charming. He is quite social. He cannot see how this can be irritating in itself. I wonder whether his own name has anything to do with it. It is an unusual name, and if a first meeting has gone well it will be remembered more easily at the second meeting than one’s own, ordinary name. Has he made an extra effort for this reason? At any rate, it would have been better for him to have noted it to me and made a small, light apology, than to belabour the point.
I doubt he loved her as I love her, not because I don’t think he has the heart for it, but because I think he has the mind not to. For the distance between his love for her and mine has begun to be the distance of unreason. The past few weeks I have been moving into unhealth and error, and into misjudgement to which I don’t imagine him susceptible. Maybe. But not likely. I have moved into infatuation. It is unwise, and unworthy of his staunch and solid manner. I am proud of it, and ashamed. I wrote the other day I was not ashamed. I am not ashamed of what can be seen. But there are worlds of pride and shame.
Satisfied Alistair MacLeod is overrated. I have only read one story, it is true, and I have never been much inclined to take seriously the alleged ‘international reputation as a master storyteller’ he somehow built on a truly scant literary output; but now I am satisfied. The great man’s style, ‘at once elegiac and life-affirming’ (barf), is apparently also cliché-ridden, clumsy, and eye-rollingly obvious. That reputation also seems to have afforded him the luxury of publishing stories whose abrupt, unjustified shifts of voice, didacticism, and failure to conceal the dusty, betweeded faculty warrior pulling the rustics’ strings would never—I hope—make it out of his writing seminar. Amateur night.
All right. Once more I have spoken too soon. I have held forth on a subject I admitted I knew next to nothing about even as I was insisting on my complete certainty of opinion. I have been shrill, hasty, and unjust, and now I must retract. I still think the lead-off story in As Birds Bring Forth The Sun et c. is a poor fellow, and my criticisms of MacLeod’s style are still more or less valid; but he is not guilty with anything like the regularity implied by my hysterical denunciation. And, for all that they do tend to be precious, stories I have since read have been very moving.
Okay, so having finished reading MacLeod’s second slender volume of (internationally reputed…) fiction, I think ye olde mixed verdict is in. He’s a very fine storyteller and a weak, unremarkable prose stylist. I don’t mean that he is merely plain, or that his is the rugged, unadorned, simple, homespun, direct, straightforward language of the Highland people clinging stubbornly to life among Cape Breton’s hills and rocky shores, or any other such garbage; I mean that his prose isn’t very good. But the stories, most of them, are alive. It is only a shame so often to see their maker’s clumsy thumbprints all over them.
I dreamed of poisonous creatures, of a room stacked with glass tanks. Snakes, awful, bloated, puffy-looking fish, jellyfish, black and venomous octopuses, serpents, lizards, scorpions. I look over and see a child watching a snake absorbedly, his left hand resting nonchalantly in the water of a tank churning with agitated fleshy black molluscs. And then I saw the vipers on the floor, striking, threatening, striking. I was stupid with terror; they were all around. I could not understand how anyone could be so careless, why the others were not raising an uproar. I saw little stoppers, like yellow rubber spacer washers, had been installed on the animals’ fangs. When after a few moments my anxiety began to subside I immediately noticed a man, feeling perhaps the stoppered snakes were not exciting enough, removing them [the stoppers] from the mouth of one animal.
Finally, women are a superfluity. I don’t mean in themselves. After all the uncertainty, the waffling, the self-incriminations, I bite the issue off: they are not needful, and though I should change, inevitably, god help me from becoming a simpering half-man. A hardness, something of a sneer, crosses my face. I am weak, but I despise my weakness, I despise it in the fullness of my strength.
Women are more likely to wear their hair long here. And then, recall the marvelous inscription on a tissue dispenser on the counter by the cash register in a bakery: I am certain she is very glad to have a man like you to be dependent on. Even if this is merely bad grammar it is telling.
But all that is nonsense, women are not very much more likely to wear their hair long, certainly no more likely to wear it very long, the fashions of a country whose women are not so free are cancelled out by the practicality of (relative) poverty, and at any rate I haven’t any real idea whether long hair is more common among women here than in Canada or not, I was just holding forth without any knowledge, broadcasting my ignorance. How’s that for Kafkaesque? That paltry, asinine word always seems to refer to a quite narrow band of content: paranoias, persecutions, paradoxes. What about his style, which is quite unmistakeable and is integral to the writhing, confined breathlessness of the stories? And, coming back to the point, what indeed is telling about it if it is only a mistake, as one sees everywhere? Nothing underlies it, then, but linguistic sloppiness, no attitude towards sex relations on the part of the copywriter or society-at-large. But even if the decision to use ‘be dependent upon’ instead of ‘depend’ represents a more or less conscious reflection of prevailing ideas, we cannot in any case be sure; so is the error, in fact, telling? How much do we need to know about the specific conditions of a thing’s production to be able to judge of its relation to the general environment? If such details are said to be entirely beside the point, what remains? The question is then only one of the observer’s relation to the object, and if anything about the inscription on the tissue dispenser is telling, it is only my reaction to it.
Children, up to a certain age, usually around nine or ten, find one’s anecdotes of younger life unconvincing and utterly uninteresting. This is because of their almost painfully foreshortened view of time. To speak of one’s youth as though it happened very long ago, when it seems to them an eternity must pass before they are themselves so old as the person you describe [your younger self], makes the years between you dilate, until even your shouts arrive as unintelligible echoes. This unfathomable distance is ordinarily compressed to the point of urgent immediacy by the same imperious exultant life-throb that makes a touch to the sole of the foot unbearable to them.
Strikingly, illustrations meant to convey to children learning English the meanings of ‘pretty’ and ‘ugly’ all prove reticent to actually portray what is meant. I have seen one case in which ‘pretty’ was a dolled-up girl and ‘ugly’ was a good-looking, normal boy making a funny face. Most often, however, the drawings perform a sort of values bait-and-switch, and actually depict ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, ‘young’ and ‘old’, ‘happy’ and ‘sad’. If we are so chary of telling children what ‘pretty’ and ‘ugly’ mean, are the words really so important that they must be taught at the same time as ‘round’ and ‘square’ or ‘hot’ and ‘cold’?
The idea, I suppose, is to equip children with language to express aesthetic preference, and there isn’t much question about whether that’s an important linguistic function. In general, though, at this level judgement is subsumed in preference, expressed using the verb ‘to like’; and the more complex expression of reasoning (I like it because…) is forgone entirely. Given that representations of subjective terms denoting the presence or absence of aesthetic value, like ‘pretty’ and ‘ugly’ are too complex to be satisfactorily rendered either in known terms or pictorially—and that, in a pinch, value judgements of all kinds can be expressed using ‘good’ and ‘bad’—why shouldn’t the teaching of such language be delayed? Consider further how rarely the word ‘ugly’ can be appropriately and politely used in ordinary discourse. I realize it is taught mainly to help define the unobjectionable ‘pretty’; but at this point having three syllables and being difficult to spell seems an inadequate reason not to replace what I see as a problematic little diptych with the word ‘beautiful’, whose antithesis can be more conveniently expressed as a mere negative.
I’m not sure any of us knows anything about children, except maybe Dr. Seuss. It can be so easy to love a child, so clear, so compulsory; but it is never simple. A child is neither an adult in miniature nor any kind of pre-person. This is what I mean when I say I do not understand children: there is nothing of substance missing from their persons—there will never be any more added to them—yet they lack so many of our own convolutions that their minds are at times almost unrecognizable. If this is true, it is a thing awesome to imagine and difficult to comprehend.
Mencken on Warren G. Harding: ‘I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.’
Byron, of Keats: ‘He is always frigging his Imagination.’