I was deeply happy. It was one of the periods of inexplicable grace when every day is a new parcel one unwraps, layer on layer of tissue paper covering bits of crystal, scraps of words in a foreign language, pure white stones. I spent my lunch hours writing in notebooks, which I kept locked in my desk. The men never bothered me, apart from trying to feed me little pieces of cake. They were all sad when I began to smoke — I remember that. I could write without hearing anyone, but poetry was leaving me. It was not an abrupt removal but like a recurring tide whose high-water mark recedes inch by inch. Presently I was deep inland and the sea was gone. I would mourn it much later: it was such a gentle separation at the time that I scarcely noticed. I had notebooks stuffed with streets and people: my journals were full of “but what he really must have meant was …” There were endless political puzzles I tried to solve by comparing one thing with another, but of course nothing matched; I had not lost my adolescent habit of private, passionate manifestos. If politics were nothing but chess — Mr. Tracy’s ways of sliding out of conviction — K was surely Social Justice and Q Extreme Morality. I was certain of this, and that after the war — unless we were completely swallowed up, like those Canadian battalions at Hong Kong — K and Q would envelop the world. Having no one to listen to, I could not have a thought without writing it down. There were pages and pages of dead butterflies, wings without motion or lift. I began to ration my writing, for fear I would dream through life as my father had done. I was afraid I had inherited a poisoned gene from him, a vocation without a gift. He had spent his own short time like a priest in charge of a relic, forever expecting the blessed blood to liquefy. I had no assurance I was not the same. I was so like him in some ways that a man once stopped me in front of the Bell Telephone building on Beaver Hall Hill and said, “Could you possibly be Angus Muir’s sister?” That is how years telescope in men’s minds. That particular place must be the windiest in Montreal, for I remember dust and ragged papers blowing in whirlpools and that I had to hold my hair. I said, “No, I’m not,” without explaining that I was not his sister but his daughter. I had heard people say, referring to me but not knowing who I was, “He had a daughter, but apparently she died.” We couldn’t both be dead. Having come down on the side of life, I kept my distance. Writing now had to occupy an enormous space. I had lived in New York until a year before and there were things I was sick with missing. There was no theatre, no music; there was one museum of art with not much in it. There was not even a free public lending library in the sense of the meaning that would have been given the words “free public lending library” in Toronto or New York. The municipal library was considered a sinister joke. There was a persistent, apocryphal story among English Canadians that an American philanthropic foundation (the Carnegie was usually mentioned) had offered to establish a free public lending library on condition that its contents were not to be censored by the provincial government of Quebec or by the Catholic Church, and that the offer had been turned down. The story may not have been true but its persistence shows the political and cultural climate of Montreal then. Educated French Canadians summed it up in shorter form: their story was that when you looked up “Darwin” in the card index of the Bibliothèque de Montréal you found “See anti-Darwin.” A Canadian actress I knew in New York sent me the first published text of The Skin of Our Teeth. I wrote imploring her to tell me everything about the production — the costumes, the staging, the voices. I’ve never seen it performed — not read it since the end of the war. I’ve been told that it doesn’t hold, that it is not rooted in anything specific. It was then; its Ice Age was Fascism. I read it the year of Dieppe, in a year when “Russia” meant “Leningrad,” when Malta could be neither fed nor defended. The Japanese were anywhere they wanted to be. Vast areas of the world were covered with silence and ice. One morning I read a little notice in the Gazette that Miss Margaret Urn would be taking auditions for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I presented myself during my lunch hour with The Skin of Our Teeth and a manuscript one-act play of my own, in case. I had expected to find queues of applicants but I was the only one. Miss Urn received me in a small room of a dingy office suite on St. Catherine Street. We sat down on opposite sides of a table. I was rendered shy by her bearing, which had a headmistress quality, and perplexed by her accent — it was the voice any North American actor will pick up after six months of looking for work in the West End, but I did not know that. I opened The Skin of Our Teeth and began to read. It was floating rather than reading, for I had much of it by heart. When I read “Have you milked the mammoth?” Miss Urn stopped me. She reached over the table and placed her hand on the page.
“My dear child, what is this rubbish?” she said.
I stammered, “It is a … a play in New York.”