Crossings

CROSSINGS
Copyright © 1979 by the Estate of Betty Lambert

Introduction copyright © 2011 by the Claudia Casper

Second edition: 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

ARSENAL PULP PRESS
Suite 101, 211 East Georgia St.
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 1Z6
arsenalpulp.com

This publication is made possible with support from the City of Vancouver's 125th Anniversary Grants Program, the Office of Vancouver's Poet Laureate Brad Cran, and the participation of the Government of Canada.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund) and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program) for its publishing activities.

Cover photograph by Herb Gilbert

Printed and bound in Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

Lambert, Betty, 1933-1983
Crossings / Betty Lambert.

Originally publ.: Vancouver : Pulp Press, 1979.
Issued also in electronic format.
ISBN 978-1-55152-427-6

I. Title.

PS8573.A385C76 2011 C813'.54 C2011-904107-3

by Claudia Casper

Betty Lambert's only novel is utterly contemporary, utterly shocking, razor sharp (I swear you can cut yourself while reading this book), and as original and controversial as the day she ripped the last sheet of paper from her typewriter and laid it on top of the manuscript.

Crossings
re-entered my life when the wry firebrand Anakana Schofield, a Vancouver writer and critic with an avid interest in the city's working-class literature and labour history, invited me to join other writers to read at an event at the Vancouver Public Library in December 2010. Anakana, with the sharp eye of a literary immigrant from Ireland, was wandering the VPL's Canadiana reference section when she found a mention of
Crossings
and became intrigued. She found a copy and was bowled over by the passion, complexity, and commitment of Lambert's writing and the fact that “she did not turn away from depicting the difficult stuff.”

When she spoke of the novel, Anakana was astonished by how few people had even heard of it. She decided to organize the VPL event, called “
Crossings
: A Return.” During the evening, writers Annabel Lyon, Renee Rodin, Juliane Okot Bitek, myself, and Anakana and performance artist Lori Weidenhammer read from their favourite passages, and Lambert's sister, nephew, and daughter spoke movingly and stirringly about the woman they remembered and had lost much too early at the age of fifty.

Now
Crossings
has been chosen as one of ten books reissued in 2011 in honour of Vancouver's 125th birthday, and at last this masterpiece will get the chance to take its proper place among the important literature of the twentieth century.

The city of Vancouver that plays a starring role in
Crossings
was a rough-edged port town with a resource-based economy and home to beatniks, heroin addicts, and slacker businessmen who skied or sailed in the afternoons. It was a pre-Expo Vancouver, when real estate prices were not the city's primary meme and False Creek was not yet a cluster of condo glass. You could still scare yourself looking down at the ocean through knotholes in the wooden sidewalk of the Cambie Street Bridge, and when you glanced to the east, you saw the sign for Sweeney's Barrels and great piles of peeled logs stacked dockside. Gastown's steam clock had not been installed, and bars still had separate Ladies' entrances and covered windows to hide the shameful activity of imbibing alcohol.

When Lambert wrote her novel the first generation of women for whom the pill was available from the onset of puberty was sexually active. Anti-war protests were taking place under the banner “Make Love Not War,” a slogan whose meaning expanded to include the conflicts of race, gender, and class. Feminism and sexual liberation were hitting their stride, yet sexual assault, rape, spousal abuse, sexual harassment, and inequality flourished. Fierce, brutal, often silent struggles were going on between the genders, and class conflict sometimes played out between men and women so that the wounds of class and the wounds of gender became morally entangled—pain and confusion abounded among the daisies and the guns and the long hair. In September 1975, Pat Lowther, the gifted Canadian poet and University of British Columbia instructor who had just submitted her latest collection of poems,
A Stone Diary
, to Oxford University Press, was murdered in North Vancouver by her husband. Lowther's publisher was a friend of Lambert's, and it seems likely Lambert would have known her and certainly known about her murder.

I arrived at Pulp Press in 1980, a young woman who had moved to Vancouver from Toronto with the pure but inchoate intention to write. By then Betty was the writer who had made the big time; the US edition of
Crossings
had been published by Viking in New York, and her plays were being produced by numerous theatre companies. Meanwhile, the contradictions of that era played out in the offices of Pulp. I do not describe the situation with blame. It was a time of sudden change; we were all reaching for new social ideals and hopes while anchored by the society we were born into and weighed down by our own ignorance and human limitations. The culture at Pulp Press was a culture of men. They were the writers and artists, the movers and shakers, and the deliverers of the most, and frequently the best, one-liners; they were also the ones who started, financed, and ran the press and who mostly made the final editorial decisions. And then there were the women: typesetters, editors, shippers, frequently also writers, often girlfriends and common-law wives; yet somehow we were more the audience than the actors. Also, amid all the drinking and chaos, there was physical violence against some of the women in relationships—it was known but not spoken of, left invisible and hush-hush in shadows, glanced at only when unavoidable. There was less vocabulary and social context for such actions then than now (there is still no precise vocabulary—“wife abuse” doesn't cover girlfriends or women in more casual sexual relationships, yet the phenomenon is the same), and things are harder to see and talk about when we have inadequate language.

When I finally read
Crossings
in the mid-'80s I was astonished at the clear-eyed, brave precision of Lambert's understanding of the desire for self-annihilation, the potency of sexuality linked to it, and her scalpel-like ability to deconstruct the subtextual aggressions of class and culture. In
Crossings
, class and gender are fully weaponized. Lambert's story of a mutually destructive, erotic affair between a writer, Vicky, and Mik, an ex-con and logger (“You can't destroy me. I've been destroyed by experts”) is unflinchingly non-judgmental as it tracks their protracted chess game of physical violence, intellectual superiority, and emotional dominance.

Betty Lambert was born in Calgary to a working-class family in 1933, during the Great Depression. “My father died when I was twelve,” Lambert wrote, “and I was no longer working-class, I was welfare-class, and I was determined to get out … Writing was a way out, but soon it became more than that, it became a necessity.” She wrote more than sixty plays for radio and stage, produced to enthusiastic acclaim in Vancouver, Toronto, and New York, as well as dozens of stories. She was also a knowledgeable, energetic, and generous professor of English at Simon Fraser University. She was a socialist with a cutting wit and deep moral skepticism.

Lambert finished writing
Crossings
in 1976 or 1977 and was discouraged when the manuscript failed to find a publisher. She handed it to a friend, Brian Brett, who was about to retire from his partnership in the literary publishing company Blackfish Press, with the words, “maybe you can find someone for it.” Brett writes, “I was in love with Betty, though she was almost twenty years my elder. She was so good, so hot, so smart, and had been a power in the sixties, but was left behind. It was near criminal. She'd gone from being a honcho to not being able to find anyone to publish
Crossings
.”

Brett interested Stephen Osborne, founder of
Geist
magazine and one of the early and most committed instigators of Pulp Press (later reincarnated as Arsenal Pulp Press, publisher of this book, under the new leadership of Brian Lam). Osborne drove out to Brett's house in Tsawwassen one afternoon and, after much drinking of whiskey, a box containing the manuscript was produced from the depths of a closet. That night Osborne sat down at his kitchen table in Burnaby and opened the box with the intention of reading just a few pages, but he continued through the night, finishing the last page at eight o'clock the next morning. He realized he had just read a truly remarkable work.

Crossings
was published in 1979 by Pulp and received a rave review by Canada's top book critic at the
Globe and Mail
, William French, who wrote, “Rarely has the complex subject of male-female relationships been dissected with such skill and subtlety …
Crossings
is that
rara avis
, the kind of novel that makes you say, after the first few pages, now here's a
real
writer.” The novel was picked up by Viking in the US and released under the title
Bring Down the Sun
. Lambert's career was on the rise again. In 1980 her radio play
Grasshopper Hill
won the ACTRA Nellie Award and a new stage play,
Jennie's Story
, opened to a standing ovation at Toronto's St. Lawrence Centre, won the 1983 Chalmers Canadian Play Award, and was nominated for a Governor General's Award. In February of 1983, Lambert was diagnosed with lung cancer. After chemotherapy she went into remission for several months and managed to complete a new play,
Under the Skin,
before the discovery of a brain tumour. She died on November 4, 1983, blinded by three tumours and unable to speak because of pneumonia. Days earlier she'd written on a notepad, “I want to write.”

Biographical descriptions of Lambert's life include the sound of a typewriter being worked furiously. She was driven to write—she was a woman with a fire inside and a lot to say at a time when women still were not expected to say much; were expected, if they did insist on using their voices, to entertain, to emote, to speak about “women's issues”—love and child-rearing—but not about the desire to destroy, to annihilate the self, not about ethics and truth and the muddied waters of evil and good in which we all swim.

Lambert had not only the determination to write as a woman who thought and loved thinking (
Crossings
' narrator is frequently criticized within the text for being too rational, cerebral, and philosophical), she also had the courage to write about the volatile, primal, “reprehensible” (to quote Jane Rule's review) world of passion. Lambert's writing about sex is superior to most writers' and equal to any. The following passage describes Vicky midway between orgasms with Mik: “I was under the sea at last, slippery and silk, silver and single, whole, not moving, as salmon do, resting in their element, gills moving imperceptibly, breathing. His sweat on my tongue.” She writes devastatingly well about bad sex too: “So. Benjamin Ferris poked it in one last time. Without a safe. Without consulting the little calendar, without a norform. He did it. Yes he did. Back and forth he went like a little man. Brave as brave. And ooops, here he comes, and he's out and running all over the sheet.”

The raw, wild, primal life-and-death world of sex and babies infiltrates the politically correct, cultured world of early yuppiedom and academia, while separate from both realms and rising above them is the perceptive, probing mind of Lambert's narrator Vicky. Her cool voice, silently screaming like Plath's, like Kathryn Harrison's in
The Kiss
—the only way in which she truly exists is through her voice—anatomizes her libidinal participation in her own destruction.

The narrative structure of
Crossings
, daring and virtuoso in the author's effortless handling of time, darts back and forth across the narrator's life. Lambert uses fragments, repetition, recapitulation, and interruption, even ending paragraphs mid-sentence to contradict what has gone before. The narrative circles back around its story several times, like an anxious dog preparing to lie down.

Her main themes, honesty and truth, are even more relevant now than when she wrote the novel, given the wild explosion of plugged-in voices telling us “facts” and interpreting them for us. Lambert writes, “I thought truth was something you could work out, like the logarithms upon which a slide rule is premised. I thought if you could once discover the base, you could work it out from there. I thought if I could ascertain facts, it would all come clear. Multi-dependent, multi-causal perhaps, but there in some solid and satisfying way.” Lambert's approach to her themes, along with her narrative structure and bold content, makes
Crossings
a contemporary novel. If I haven't made it clear yet, let me say now—this is in no way an old-fashioned or musty book. It slaps you in the face and wakes you out of your trance while pulling you deeper into the author's.