I was in the South of France, walking along a quay battered by autumn waves, as low in mind as I was ever likely to be. My marriage had dropped from a height. There weren’t two pieces left I could fit together. Lapwing wasn’t to blame, yet I kept wanting to hold him responsible for something. Why? I still don’t know. I said to myself, O.K., imagine your name is Harry Lapwing. Harry Lapwing. You are a prairie Socialist, a William Morris scholar. All your life this will make you appear boring and dull. When you went to England in the late forties and said you were Canadian, and Socialist, and working on aspects of William Morris, people got a stiff, trapped look, as if you were about to read them a poem. You had the same conversation twenty-seven times, once for each year of your life:
“Which part of Canada are you from?”
“I was born in Manitoba.”
“We have cousins in Victoria.”
“I’ve never been out there.”
“I believe it’s quite pretty.”
“I wouldn’t know. Anyway, I haven’t much eye.”
One day, in France, at a shabby Mediterranean resort called Rivebelle (you had gone there because it was cheap) someone said, “I’d say you’ve got quite an eye — very much so,” looking straight at Edie, your wife.
The speaker was a tall, slouched man with straight black hair, pale skin, and a limp. (It turned out that some kid at the beach had gouged him behind the knee with the point of a sunshade.) You met in the airless, shadowed salon of a Victorian villa, where an English novelist had invited everyone he could think of — friends and neighbors and strangers picked up in cafés — to hear a protégé of his playing Scriabin and Schubert through the hottest hours of the day.
You took one look at the ashy stranger and labeled him “the mooch.” He had already said he was a playwright. No one had asked, but in those days, the late Truman era, travelers from North America felt bound to explain why they weren’t back home and on the job. It seemed all right for a playwright to drift through Europe. You pictured him sitting in airports, taking down dialogue.
He had said, “What part of Canada are you from?”
You weren’t expecting this, because he sounded as if he came from some part of Canada, too. He should have known before asking that your answer could be brief and direct or cautious and reserved; you might say, “That’s hard to explain,” or even “I’m not sure what you mean.” You were so startled, in fact, that you missed four lines of the usual exchange and replied, “I wouldn’t know. Anyway, I don’t have much eye.”
He said, “I’d say you’ve got quite an eye…” and then turned to Edie: “How about you?”
“Oh, I’m not from any part of anything,” Edie said. “My people came from Poland.”
Now, you have already told her not to say this without also mentioning that her father was big in cement. At that time Poland just meant Polack. Chopin was dead. History hadn’t got round to John Paul II. She looked over your head at the big guy, the mooch. Fergus Bray was his name; the accent you had spotted but couldn’t place was Cape Breton Island. So that he wasn’t asking the usual empty question (empty because for most people virtually any answer was bound to be unrevealing) but making a social remark — the only social remark he will ever address to you.
You are not tall. Your head is large — not abnormally but remarkably. Once, at the beach, someone placed a child’s life belt with an inflated toy sea horse on your head, and it sat there, like Cleopatra’s diadem. Your wife laughed, with her mouth wide open, uncovering a few of the iron fillings they plugged kids’ teeth with during the Depression. You said, “Ah, that’s enough, Edie,” but your voice lacked authority. The first time you ever heard a recording of your own voice, you couldn’t figure out who that squeaker might be. Some showoff in London said you had a voice like H.G. Wells’—all but the accent. You have no objection to sounding like Wells. Your voice is the product of two or three generations of advanced university education, not made for bawling orders.
Today, nearly forty years later, no one would dare crown you with a sea-horse life belt or criticize your voice. You are Dr. Lapwing, recently retired as president of a prairie university called Osier, after having been for a long time the head of its English department. You still travel and publish. You have been presented to the Queen, and have lunched with a prime minister. He urged you to accept a cigar, and frowned with displeasure when you started to smoke.
To the Queen you said, “…and I also write books.”
“Oh?” said Her Majesty. “And do you earn a great deal of money from writing books?”
You started to give your opinion of the academic publishing crisis, but there were a number of other persons waiting, and the Queen was obliged to turn away. You found this exchange dazzling. For ten minutes you became a monarchist, until you discovered that Her Majesty often asks the same question: “Do you earn a great deal of money with your poems, vaulting poles, copper mines, music scores?” The reason for the question must be that the answer cannot drag much beyond “Yes” or “No.” “Do you like writing books?” might bring on a full paragraph, and there isn’t time. You are proud that you tried to furnish a complete and truthful answer. You are once more anti-monarchist, and will not be taken in a second time.
The subject of your studies is still William Morris. Your metaphor is “frontiers.” You have published a number of volumes that elegantly combine your two preoccupations: “William Morris: Frontiers of Indifference.” “Continuity of a Frontier: The Young William Morris.” “Widening Frontiers: The Role of the Divine in William Morris.” “Secondary Transformations in William Morris: A Double Frontier.”
When you and Edie shook hands with the mooch for the first time, you were on a grant, pursuing your first Morris mirage. To be allowed to pursue anything for a year was a singular honor; grants were hard to come by. While you wrote and reflected, your books and papers spread over the kitchen table in the two-room dwelling you had rented in the oldest part of Rivebelle, your wife sat across from you, reading a novel. There was nowhere else for her to sit; the bedroom gave on a narrow medieval alley. You could not very well ask Edie to spend her life in the dark, or send her into the streets to be stared at by yokels. She didn’t object to the staring, but it disturbed you. You couldn’t concentrate, knowing that she was out there, alone, with men trying to guess what she looked like with her clothes off.
What was she reading? Not the thick, gray, cementlike Prix Goncourt novel you had chosen, had even cut the pages of, for her. You looked, and saw a French translation of “Forever Amber.” She had been taught to read French by nuns — another problem; she was too Polish Catholic for your enlightened friends, and too flighty about religion to count as a mystic. To intellectual Protestants, she seemed to be one more lapsed Catholic without guilt or conviction.
“You shouldn’t be reading that. It’s trash.”
“It’s not trash. It’s a classic. The woman in the bookstore said so. It’s published in a classics series.”
“Maybe in France. Nowhere else in the civilized world.”
“Well, it’s their own business, isn’t it? It’s French.”
“Edie, it’s American. There was even a movie.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Last year. Five years ago. It’s the kind of movie I wouldn’t be caught dead at.”
“Neither would I,” said Edie staunchly.
“Only the French would call that a classic.”
“Then what are we doing here?”
“Have you forgotten London? The bedbugs?”
“At least there was a scale in the room.”