Five Legs Read online

  Also by Graeme Gibson

  Communion

  Perpetual Motion

  Gentleman Death

  The Bedside Book of Birds

  The Bedside Book of Beasts

  Copyright © 1969 Graeme Gibson

  Introduction copyright © 2012 by Sean Kane

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  First published in 1969 by House of Anansi Press Ltd.

  This edition published in 2012 by

  House of Anansi Press Inc.

  110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801

  Toronto, ON, M5V 2K4

  Tel. 416-363-4343

  Fax 416-363-1017

  www.houseofanansi.com

  Kind permission to reprint an excerpt from the following is gratefully acknowledged:

  “Unchained Melody” from the Motion Picture UNCHAINED.

  Lyric by Hy Zaret, Music by Alex North. © 1955 (Renewed)

  FRANK MUSIC CORP. All Rights Reserved.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Gibson, Graeme, 1934–

  Five legs / Graeme Gibson ; introduction by Sean Kane.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-77089-258-3

  I. Title.

  PS8563.I3F4 2012 C813’.54 C2012-903624-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012939994

  Cover design: Brian Morgan

  Cover illustration: Genevieve Simms

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

  INTRODUCTION

  BY SEAN KANE

  You walk into a literature class, expecting to learn about the life of the imagination, for that is how you survive, through creativity. Instead, your professor is filling a void with arid theory while cultivating an aristocracy of the sensitive. You must buy into that game — it is the only game in town. Or . . . what? Flee in search of a life meaning for which there are no signposts, only your capacity for creating it. What do you do?

  What Graeme Gibson did was split in two. One half of his stymied creativity reconstructed the failed imagination of his teacher, pictured as Professor Lucan Crackell of Western University, an amiable hypocrite who consoles himself with power in the institution, getting drunk with his students, and small-town Little Theatre. The other half of Gibson explored the fleeing trajectory of the creative spirit, embodied in Felix Oswald, tongue-tied and shaggy but with an x-ray vision that sees through every posture, including his own. Put these contrasting figures in a car with a group of students, punching through a snowstorm to the funeral of a classmate who has tragically died. The treacherous journey and the hilariously insane funeral afterward can be the setting for the big question: how do we choose between conformity and authentic existence when there is no way of knowing what an authentic existence is? The result is Five Legs, the first novel to bring the full artistry of literary modernism to Canada, a forerunner of the Ontario Gothic style, and the voice of a dark existential ecology that is the Canadian philosophical inflection of Green Consciousness. And something more, which I want to introduce here.

  That something more is an edgy phenomenon that happens in the margins of Gibson’s storytelling — it happens so quickly it doesn’t seem to happen at all. Take your eye off the immediate action, and there it is; return to the action, and it has gone. Here’s an example. Felix, a mix of shifting subjective intensities, is listening to a smothering woman who has crowded herself into his gaze. Suddenly, her tongue darts out at him. Then things return to normal as if nothing happened. Yet it has happened. Her tongue flickered out like the tongue of a serpent. It is like the weeping angel statues in an episode of Doctor Who: if you take your eye off one of those statues for an instant — if you even blink — it has moved closer to you in an evil parody of the children’s game. It wants to turn you to stone, make you one of them. The graveyard statues are inhabited by aliens. Are Gibson’s people inhabited by aliens? Yes, in a way they are.

  Critics explain events like the flickering tongue in Gibson’s work as psychological. They are an effect of stream of consciousness, with the character experiencing as real something the character has only imagined. Yet Gibson’s surreal events are coming out a reality beyond the self-enclosed subjectivity of the modernist character in, say, the novels of Joyce. “It can’t be, can it be true?” Felix asks himself in the cemetery where his classmate is about to be buried. “The gnomes, they really are. Graveyard trolls behind that sweating stone.” Felix’s view to the contrary, critics explain this surrealism as the standard atmosphere of the gothic novel, for example, the Scottish writer James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Certainly, the superstitious Puritanism of that tradition haunts the Scottish-Canadian limestone buildings of Gibson’s southwestern Ontario. But the gothic novel lets its reader off the hook. It says that the ghost might have been an illusion. Gibson doesn’t let you off the hook. After Felix is accosted by this confident female, after his hand has become temporarily detached as the result of a hearty masculinist handshake, he reflects on the experience he is having, allowing Gibson an opportunity for some narrative self-consciousness. Felix is now getting used to this mysterious Real that is springing such weird effects on his perception; he is coming to accept it as benign. So that now, in a reversal of the encroaching statues of Doctor Who, beings recede when he takes his eyes off them: “it’s true, they drift away whenever I remove my eyes; not when I’m looking, not when I see, for they’ve all stopped moving, they’re silent and posed like mannequins; yet when I look again they’re further off. But they’re smiling . . .”

  The reality Felix is dissolving into requires some getting used to. It is as if a living and intelligent Real has taken over the ending of Five Legs and become the book’s author. Somehow it has to. How else can one write of a world that isn’t objective or subjective, that isn’t composed of things or of ideas about things. Instead, Gibson’s cosmos is made of and held together by actual events or occasions of experience.

  This is the other-than-human reality explored today by the philosophers and screenplay writers who call themselves Speculative Realists. Gibson himself would go on to explore it in relation to the great unnameable that is wilderness. Yet at the time of writing Five Legs, he was backed into this vision of wild Being, together with his avatar Felix, by the crisis of authenticity I mentioned.

  Gibson apparently bounced that crisis off the lives of his contemporaries at university and off the literature he was reading in graduate school. The darting tongue comes, of all places, from Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. That poem is about an unformed youth who tries to escape what he perceives as the terrifying maturity of womanhood. Like the eternal Adonises of Gibson’s Western University, he prefers athletic prowess, which he finds in hunting wild animals. Eluding Venus, he runs headlong into a boar that wounds him fatally in the thigh. And so he joins the tragic parade of fated youths nursed and mourned by women, including Milton’s Lycidas and the student in Gibson’s novel who is killed on the road by a charging boar in the form of a motor vehicle. They are
all woven into the dense texture of Five Legs, Shakespeare’s Adonis, most of all.

  It is debatable if Shakespeare saw in the thought systems of his time something that was fatal to beautiful youths. There’s no doubt Gibson sees it. Something in our culture maims all males at the very heart of their sexuality. All the men in Five Legs are in crisis. They are in flight. Or, if they have accepted their beautiful accomplished Venuses, they are in a state of regret which is just as maiming. Why are young men always seeming to stay, meaning to fly? The answer to this question is to be found in Five Legs, which, among the other qualities that make it a classic, is the great study of the mystery of male self-consciousness. The answer is partly metaphysical. I suggested earlier that Gibson’s people are inhabited by aliens. That alien in us is our spirits which remember “a time when the earth was full and bones didn’t sing between us and the heart.” Once our spirits were comfortable on this planet; now they are hemmed in and made alien by a world reduced to lifeless material for human beings, with all their deadly codes, to manage.

  For my wife and sons

  LUCAN 1

  RRRINGGG! And aware suddenly of the day. Grey chills. Blessed Jesus what a night, what a terrible night. Like a mouth full of.

  Must not, can not sleep on this morning, of all last mornings. Awake. Cautious in established areas of warmth he lies and beside him the body of Rose. Stirring. Today maybe? Periodic flow.

  Fructify dear God the mortal loins of us Thy . . .

  Like I was, a student, and as I have become. So would he. Except. He’s dead. I cannot let myself lie and dream.

  Mild jactitation of the lashes. Awake, yes she is. Grey-green upper lids in cold light. “Morning dear.”

  A deliberate turn and she vanishes sighing under the coverlet. Waiting, we wait and Rose day by day.

  Now after troubled sleep, a shift on naked arms.

  “How are you feeling?”

  No response.

  “Rose . . . has anything happened?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  Morning and then the evening of the sixth day.

  “But I feel awfully queasy or something.”

  That’s good. Her eyes already wait another day. The sullen flow. Last night perhaps, the party. Could be, God knows. And smiling ruefully. “I don’t feel any hell myself.”

  “Oh Lucan don’t joke. It’s serious. Feel just terrible and anyway you know I never drink too much.”

  Lucan Crackell takes his wife’s dry hand. Explaining. Thought it might. Didn’t mean, no certainly didn’t. Everything in perspective that’s all. He sits the better to comfort. Good Lord my eye! Take that! A baker’s dozen red hot needles. Don’t move.

  Poised and bravely smiling at her side. Through the pain of it. Rough winter winds impatient at the window; rattling southward over evergreens and through the wretched branches of a thousand naked towns. Great, just great. As if this stinking morning and funeral aren’t enough.

  Cold curtain-filtered light lies softly without shadow on the room. Day by day. Above all other things dear Rose, our sense of humour. Don’t want to be losing that.

  “Lucan. Would you get me a coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think I’d feel better if I had a coffee.”

  Softly now. Cup of coffee, couple of two-twenty-twos and I’m a new man. Easing out the old legs into . . . where in hell are my frigging slippers? Don’t, good Lord don’t look! Bare foot enquiringly down there in a draught. Important thing is not to move your head. Patience. Patience is the operative word.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Here they are. Couldn’t find my slippers.”

  Rising, Lucan carefully from bed. Water’s the answer. Five generous tumblers before retiring. Never does to forget the essentials. A good flushing out. Absorb and subsequently evacuate the poison. On woolly feet into the bathroom. Avert the eyes. Flick. Some terrible mornings Rose; in my youth. I remember one with my belly distended, hard as a bloody rock.

  He pushes at the plastic cap with his thumb. Useful material, plastic. Raincoats to kitchenware. And three medium size, format moyen, white discs in the hand. Don’t know where we’d be today without it.

  Thought I should surely die. Probing, soft pads of his cool fingers. Probing. Doctor, I need a doctor because it has burst! Discharging unspeakable poisons. And thump-thumping on my poor body. Not appendicitis young man, but something you ate. Drank? Absolute alcohol! Dear-dear that was very foolish, very foolish indeed. Bespectacled professional stricture. And me so close to death.

  With toothpaste stinging tongue refreshed and balding skull wet comb-disguised, he comes down the stairs. Shocking. Haven’t been like that, not just like that since. Duty of course. Martin’s supervisor so it is the least I can do. Carry him out in his own. Simply no way out, that’s all.

  Toast. A little honey might be. Just the thing to fill the void. Soothing. He crosses the hall in tartan dressing gown. Casually. Into the kitchen, January window light with crystals restless on the outer pane. Stinking winter. With gleaming kettle stainless in his hand Lucan slips in the toaster’s plug easily, then smartly to the sink and a rush of water. A child would make the difference yes, a child . . . She must be! Sickness, that’s hopeful. Nausea and everything. She’s never been this long before. Six days at least so maybe she is, this time. God knows it isn’t my fault if she’s not.

  Cups on saucers and the reassuring clink of cutlery. Domestic sounds. So important. Epitome of life’s joy, the heritage and gift of children. And their fear of this hope was their failure, he’s sure of that. He reaches for the giant jar. One cent on every shopping dollar. Distraught he was on Wood’s bed next to mine. O Jesus Woody! I am undone, un-frigging-done. Fixed by the fickle finger and for.

  What’s the trouble?

  She’s up the pole.

  Who for Chrissakes?

  Beryl.

  Not Beryl! Jesus Frank she even looks like a mother.

  I’m telling you, when she filled me in last night I frigging near left town. Snuck in here and started packing the old books but was too upset. I mean really scared. Couldn’t do a bloody thing.

  Curtains bellied, sighing into the room. Poor bastard. Silly sexy bastard.

  Can’t Lucan. Just can’t do the honourable thing. By her. Marriage! Mr. and Mrs. Walter Bronowski take great pleasure. And my mother! Lucan, my mother! Oh boy. She’ll die. Disown me and die. I swear she will. Serve me bloody well right. Bloody fool! Jesus I feel terrible.

  The bright tray neatly waits. Milk. Now get the milk Lucan. Nice girl like Susan, for example. Or Rose. Dark chill of the back stairs in cold light. Clean coat of white wash do the trick. Dispose of all this clutter; wash them down. Lying softly without shadow a mantle of light.

  Unlikely. But hypothetically say. Most propitious of all conceivable circumstances . . . and anyone would. Terrible for her. Alone. Betrayed and alone. Man has responsibilities, inescapable commitments far more extensive than mere personal gratification.

  You’re right! Phoned Wells already and he said it’s probably nothing. Probably nerves he said. It happens you know. But just in case I’m supposed to see she gets lots of exercise. Lifting things. Pushing them around. And baths, hot baths are really good. For assurance he turned, surveyed and turned again. And then do you know what he said? He said, I hope you’re humble Frank, in the face of one of God’s greatest mysteries! Ha. The bastard. Still he’s a good head. Getting hold of some quinine . . . and ergot. That’s the stuff you know. Ergot.

  Reaching into the milk box he feels intruding coldness on his arm. The shadowy north and through the wretched. A bar of light pierces the contained grey air. Squeezing with one arm cold bottles to his belly, he shuts the little door comes up the stairs. Smoothing on girls’ bodies, their slim girls’ bodies, baby oil and iodine, in the sun: pale shoulders and thighs easily in
the sun. Nice looking pair of girls no doubt: with their. Fine legs on them.

  Curtains swelling into the room. Just hypothetically but you’d have to. Complicity engenders mutual responsibility. Unthinkable not. There, push it right home. Nothing like a bit of weather stripping to keep the draughts at bay.

  From the smaller bottle he decants cream as the kettle mumbles into life. The white with the white. Shadowed from snowglare light, behind the desk he’d been with turning pencil slowly in his hand. Oh God! You must see Dr. Howell, that I can’t you must know for you saw me all lost and wild in those terrible days. Yet you. Chat on that stinking phone. And you smile. Oh God. Tap-tapping to the rhythm of his voice. Goodness yes, most unpleasant. Certainly sir, of course. And by one of the Alumni. A matter of decorum certainly. In the great hall. He’s quite right. Indeed. The shining receiver rested carelessly in his long fingers and he raised his eyes to look at me. Obviously a fat cat on the line. President perhaps. Solidly important from behind his desk and he’s sending me down, the son-of-a-bitch; as head of the department he’s sending me down through this icy day! Very true sir. Respect for our university and its staff. Without a shadow sir and if I might say so, a boost to the university’s collective morale. As well, a general improvement in our internal self-­confidence don’t you know. Yes I thought so. A smiling suppliant, nodding on the bloody phone. And slapping heavily at the window, a sluggish fly. Buzzing and slapping. Heavily. His life-blood dripping dark-staining the road of his youth. Seeping black about his head, a flower on the snow.

  God how she struggled in storms of love. Wake all the dead! What ho! A pair of self-anointed worshippers, warm body sweat gathering gently on their brows, in the sun, their lips and stubble-shadowed under-arms. Moist and warm. Nice-looking girls.

  By violence. Death. But it’s worse for her.

  Her young man, lost. Struck down by a car, an unknown car last night. Had you heard? Soft features, condolence through his thin nose sighing. Shocking Lucan: absolutely shocking. The silver pencil, slow circles on circles inscribed. Such a pleasant young man.