Metcalf - Finding again the world: selected stories

Cape Breton is the T hought-Control Centre of Canada

RAY SMITH

A Night at the Opera

RAY SMITH

Going Down Slow

JOHN METCALF

Century

RAY SMITH

Quickening

TERRY GRIGGS

Moody Food

RAY ROBERTSON

Alphabet

KATHY PAGE

Lunar Attractions

CLARK BLAISE

Lord Nelson Tavern

RAY SMITH

The Iconoclasts Journal

TERRY GRIGGS

Heroes

RAY ROBERTSON

An Aesthetic Underground

JOHN METCALF

A History of Forgetting

CAROLINE ADDERSON

The Camera Always Lies

HUGH HOOD

Canada Made Me

NORMAN LEVINE

Vital Signs (a reSet Original)

JOHN METCALF

A Good Baby

LEON ROOKE

First Things First (a reSet Original)

DIANE SCHOEMPERLEN

I Dont Want to Know Anyone Too Well (a reSet Original)

NORMAN LEVINE

The Stand-In

DAVID HELWIG

Light Shining Out of Darkness
(a reSet Original)

HUGH HOOD

Bad Imaginings

CAROLINE ADDERSON

FINDING AGAIN

THE WORLD

JOHN METCALF

SELECTED STORIES

FOREWORD BY KEATH FRASER

BIBLIOASIS

WINDSOR, ON

C opyright John Metcalf, 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmit ted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

FIRST EDITION

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Metcalf, John, 1938

[Short stories. Selections]

Finding again the world : selected stories / John Metcalf.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77196-252-0 (softcover).ISBN 978-1-77196-253-7 (ebook)

I. Title.

PS8576.E83A6 2018 C813.54 C2018-901737-6

C2018-901738-4

Readied for the Press by Daniel Wells

Copy-edited by Emily Donaldson

Cover and text design by Gordon Robertson

The goofy but charming hare on the cover, surveying its world for possible beagles, is after an early British Delft tile that sits on my desk as a coaster.

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

This book is for Daniel Wells

Visionary friend and fount of inspiration

O swallows, swallows, poems are not

The point. Finding again the world,

That is the point...

The Blue Swallows . Howard Nemerov.

... Ive come close to matching the feeling of the night in 1944 in music, when I first heard Diz and Bird, but Ive never quite got there. Ive gotten close, but not all the way there. Im always looking for it, listening and feeling for it...

Miles: The Autobiography

FOREWORD

You might be forgiven if the first thing you notice about his fiction isnt the fiction. Instead, a sensibility. How I hug these words to myself, savouring them. Hes the frail novelist in exile, imbiber of digitalis and glycerine capsules, recollecting a bucolic English childhood of luminous wonder. Another story begins: I sometimes think my tiredness is different from other peoples. A different kind of thing. Already weary at twenty, this narrator too experiences a luminous flashback once the right words arise to talk about it. Or a wheezy Boer War vet, instructing a baffled child: Waterford glassbrilliant. Can you see the colours? The green of the cress and the drops of water like diamonds? Brilliant. A question of the lead-content, you see. You do see, dont you. You do understand what Im telling you (even an antagonist discriminates, passionately). Always be attentive. Always accumulate facts. John Metcalf, arbiter elegantiae at thirty, seemed uncommon from the start. You get the picture in these early storiesthe old novelist with his images that haunt my nights and daysof a fervent curator in full command of his art and more than willing to share its secrets. What is authentic? How is it done?

John once urged his stories on young readers as things to be lived through and experiencedas autobiographical in the reading, he hoped, as they were in the writing. But he cautioned against reading them as autobiographynot that autobiography, like fiction, wasnt also invented to refurbish its subject. Art, not life, determined reality. What really mattered was whether selected events felt alive, not whether or not they happened to the author.

You do wonder how they could not have happened to him, when he hugged words to himself (as he does in these stories) like facts:

If I wrote CAT, he would stare at the word with a troubled frown. When I sounded out C-A-T, he would say indignantly: Well, its cat , innit? We had a cat, old tom-cat. Furry knackers, he had, and if you stroked em...

When you read a Metcalf story you never forget whos writing it, the language charged with the purpose of its being. His being. And it is to language that I have given my heart. (An early essay reminds us that the author had not given it to themes and induced plots.) This metaphor comes from someone who inherited as much a condition of the heart from his cleric-father as he did a devotion to the wordthough not necessarily the one in Genesis:

C-O-W evoked his Auntie Franright old scrubber she was, having it away for the price of a pint...

segueing into a vivid if less than elegant culture:

Such remarks would spill over into general debate on the ethics of white women having it off with spades and Pakis, they was heathen, wasnt they? Said their prayers to gods and that, didnt they. Didnt they? Well, there you are then. And their houses stank of curry and that. You couldnt deny it. Not if you knew what you was talking about.

In the beginning, then, the word.

Followed inevitably by linguistic theatre of a very entertaining order.

Among his early productions, this one in The Eastmill Reception Centre, of the young narrator teaching language to delinquents, moves on to a second act where the older man, now a middle-age writer in Canada, laments the desolating emptiness of his civilized life compared to what he remembers of the intense lives of those semi-literate charges. Words! His , it seems, are paltry and mere blathering! he calls them, no consolation for his having missed out ever since on the pyrotechnic lives of unreconstructed juveniles.