Flirt: The Interviews (11 page)

—Here will do nicely, in the lovely shade of your purple beech. You really do have some British aesthetics, my dear, at least in this garden. Still, I sense a certain toughness, a recent loss of innocence, reflected in the wildness of the field beyond the fence. Barbed wire next to boxwood, you see. Or perhaps I'm responding to the Canadian sensibility.

—Your mother's last name was Hockey.

—Indeed. Edith Hockey. My mother was never a professional singer, only a keen amateur one with a sweet voice. I miss my mother.

—You visited Canada once in the seventies and called it an extraordinary place and said North America was the locale of the future. Is it?

—Certainly one was worried by a lack of culture, but back then there was terrific energy and vitality in the place. I seriously considered staying over here permanently. But that was eastern Canada. This place, your place is different. Lush and alive in a complex, natural way. When I was a child in England, our nanny would take us on walks to see how many more houses had fallen off the cliff in the next village. If it were too wet for a walk, we'd watch from the nursery window as a tug pulled a fleet of fishing smacks out to sea. Your home reminds me of there, of that. Across the field, would those be Douglas fir, right on your property?

—Fir, yes. Western red cedar. There's a scraggy balsam back there, and vine maples. Indian plum, salmonberries. So lush it drives me crazy; I dream the forest creeping nearer and taking my house. And earthquakes sending trees onto my head.

—Those are fertile dreams, indeed, but they have little to do with trees, I can tell you that. Dreams are the artist's workshop.

—While you were in eastern Canada and thinking of staying, I was in high school in Vancouver and discovering how you could save my heart from breaking. My sister was dead, my parents were dark, I'd quit the volleyball team and grown bored with Grade 11 biology, with analyzing John Donne's sonnets for symbols, with Christian boyfriends and married ones and the ones who played rugby like church. I was thin and tired, and the music of James Taylor or Glen Campbell or Gordon Lightfoot no longer seemed adequate to express my obsessions. Nice chords, some pretty lyrics, nuanced finger-picking, helpful clichés, but something missing in a pop song.

—A teenager likely requires bitonality – the harmonizing of two common chords simultaneously – to express the natural way of being young in a cruel world. Popular music cannot tolerate dissonance, it's a pity but true. Were you at all suicidal? Of course you were, my dear girl, look at those lovely hands of yours. I myself loathed that abominable hole of artistic self-doubt – if you are original, well you are considered a lunatic and consequently become unpopular – but suicide is so cowardly, running away's as bad. I decided I simply had got to stick it out. Wystan once wrote to me this: “If you are really to develop to your full stature, you will have, I think, to suffer and make others suffer, in ways which are totally strange to you at present, and against every conscious value that you have.” That is such uplifting advice, I think. But that was Wystan, the dear soul. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen I knew every note of Beethoven and Brahms.

—That's it. Adolescence is bitonality. Melisma. The enharmonic change. Our choirs were good, our director a genius and demanding. And in the clusters and scaffolds of your difficult and stunning notes required to push, say,
A Ceremony of Carols
to its purest form, I felt my brain and body come together for the first time. I entered a private and turgid room at the core of myself. Beauty. We made records, we festivalled. And at the end of high school, we travelled Europe to sing in churches and schools and to see where all of this beauty came from. And on day two we visited Aldeburgh where you were said to be ill – a return of the heart problems, the murmur from three months old – and we were young, Benjamin, but I
knew what it meant to be near you and to express my thanks for all those notes, all that harmony with a million overtones that had saved me from myself. And we stayed in Stuttgart during the World Cup and Germany won that year, 1974, and the streets weren't safe for teenagers from Canada. And we sang, one evening, in Matthew Church in Stuttgart, a town my father bombed in WWII just before Berlin and his own private and turgid room as a young man shot down and imprisoned. And a reporter wrote this about our performance:

“The entire program with several very difficult compositions was presented from memory. The mixed choir sang first. The capacity to invest each respective style with the appropriate feeling was astonishing: delicate in sound and vitally inspired by the director. The girls' choir impressively took up the second half, finishing with the crowning glory – ‘Missa Brevis in D' of Benjamin Britten, ravishingly negotiated.”

—The Germans said this? Oh, well done. Well done, indeed, my dear. Is that a varied thrush I hear?

—Varied thrush.

—Sounds like a harpsichord.

—It was well done, and we were all so moved during that performance. We could feel it in our bodies, in our hearts. The church was dark and the soccer games were done, most of us had throat infections and homesickness, and we'd lunched in a German village that was mourning the loss of a local farmer's son: his motorcycle crashed on cobbled streets. Sometime during that evening performance – during some bitonal moment – the whole lot of us grew up and into ourselves, into our voices, and became selves. Through your notes. Surely no other composer can say he did this for young people. You knew what you were giving to us, didn't you? You intended it that way.

—Oh, what's this now!!

—Greta.

—Greta?! You have a dachshund named Greta?! Oh Oh Oh!

—She'll get down if you want. She's really my ex-husband's dog and she's not well-trained.

—Oh Oh Oh!

—She shouldn't do that. No kissy! Ask her to get down.

—Not at all. Gilda was ours, Peter's and mine. And another tiny one called Clytie. Your husband was homosexual I gather?

—No, Benjamin. He just loved the breed.

—But where had he encountered the breed?

—I don't know. Not with me.

—No, you seem like spaniels.

—Yes, I had springers.

—Peter and I had one of those, too. I'm confused about your husband, I must say. There. Greta has settled. Sometimes they're just looking for a warm sweater-vest to snuggle in. There is truly nothing like a small dog in one's lap.

—My husband, like you, wrote of Paul Bunyan. I wonder if you were taken, as he was, by a mythology so masculine and destructive. A man as big as a machine who plucks trees in the name of progress, who hangs out in a logging camp with a homosocial band of shirtless Swedes and whose best friend is an enormous blue ox. In your operetta, Paul gets married, okay, but he's lousy at it and his wife leaves camp with their daughter. The whole thing is a little too Gilbert and Sullivan for me, but there are gorgeous moments. I'm thinking of “Bunyan's Goodnight”:

—Please. You won't sing it. Greta sleeps.

—No, okay, but Auden's libretto: “Now let the complex spirit dissolve in the darkness where the actual and the possible are mysteriously exchanged. Dear children, trust the night and have faith in tomorrow that these hours of ambiguity and indecision may be also the hours of healing.” Those words set against your birdsong, the night birds, their minor and melancholic fade. I'm helped by that idea of night, the sound of that night.

—Wystan is a most consoling poet. Speaking of birds, what is that delightful sound I keep hearing.

—What sound?

—That one, the birds, I think, chortling and muttering. It's lovely, really, and I'd like to know what sort of bird makes that lovely sound. Over there, behind the hawthorn hedge. Hear it? Lovely, really.

—Chickens.

—No.

—Yes, they're very happy hens. They make that sound when they're happy and when no hawks circle.

—Really. How awfully fantastic. I envy chickens, you know.

—Why is that?

—Well, it's quite a naughty reason, really.

—Go ahead. I'm Canadian.

—Because if they feel like doing it, they do it.

—Those are hens, Benjamin, and they have no rooster. I believe only the rooster feels like doing it and will often not ask a hen's permission, and he'll do it so often and forcefully to whichever hen is proximate that the feathers are worn from her back and next morning she's last one out of the coop hoping he'll be too tired by the time she arrives. Lay an egg, beak a grub, flutter in dust: these are a hen's pleasures.

—I wonder: which instrument will I use to mimic that sound? Flutes would be too obvious. Something expressive of what you've just explained: the innocence and vulnerability . . .

—Aren't those the twin themes of all your work? Even the
War Requiem
?

—Clarinets may be too goose-like. I've solved these problems before, you know, many times. It once took me several days walking in the chapel to find a way to make a noise like bath water running out. I once used china mugs hung on a length of string hit with a wooden spoon to suggest first raindrops falling on the ark. It's almost like mathematics, is it not? Aeolian harp, perhaps, to express the way a hen's feathers are layered and firm, yet delicate and soft. A nice C major for purity and simplicity.

—One critic said that “Mr. Britten will have proved his worth as a composer when he succeeds in writing music that relies less on superficial effect.”

—No friendliness – no encouragement – no perception. I was discouraged by such critics. Later, I was appreciated but not understood.

—What about the superficial effect?

—You know yourself that writing isn't that way, it doesn't happen that way. You get a sense of the whole work, and then you plan it, and you sit
down and write it, and it takes charge, and it all goes to pieces, in my experience! You try and control it, and sometimes you succeed, but not always. As E.M. Forster writes, very wisely, in
Aspects of the Novel
, the work has to take over. One doesn't like it taking over, because it does things quite often that you don't like. But there is . . . an inner compulsion that one does one's best to control.

—So superficial effects are the will of the material, rather than the ego of the artist?

—Artists are artists because they have an extra sensitivity – a skin less, perhaps, than other people; and the great ones have an uncomfortable habit of being right about many things, long before their time. So. When you hear of an artist saying or doing something strange and unpopular, think of that extra sensitivity – that skin less – before you condemn him. Ah, the self-doubting artist. What is the cure? It is not public acceptance, no. That is just another harness for the artist. What, oh dear god, what is that?

—Where are you looking?

—Your neighbour's field, riding on the mowing machine. Oh dear lord. Turn my chair, would you. Greta: Off! Off! Off! Oh dear, dear lord. There is something so compelling in the amoral landscape, don't you agree?

—He's twelve years old, Benjamin. His parents are accountants.

—Indeed, and look at the delicacy of the shoulders, or more precisely, where shoulder meets bicep. Were he to wear a shirt, those bones would not be so lovely, so profound in the lowering sun of early evening. A boy should always be just that way: his long torso made golden in late sun, his legs long in blue jeans astride an animal of growling power. Oh dear heaven. Total acceptance of the sensual, my dear, that is the goal of the artist. It's all spoiled somewhat by the ridiculous wires dangling from his ears, but nevertheless.

—He's twelve. He's listening to music. They all do that now. Music is constant companion and portable consolation. My daughter, in the months since her father betrayed her and moved to another family, to another daughter not his, to another farm nearby and its cliffs and wealth, my daughter healed her heart with Van Morrison's cheering early stuff, with
Queens of the Stone Age, with German death metal, with Frank Sinatra and Annie Lennox and “Do Ya Think I'm Sexy.” I praise a culture that makes music so available, so portable, so private. My daughter has been saved, as I was, by the world's notes.

—Eclectic, indeed. It causes me great pain in my old murmering heart to think of your daughter's innocence before her father diminished it, and what must be her daily – no, hourly – struggle to both maintain what remains of it and to also reject the inadequacies of innocence. Innocence outraged. Will music be enough? I think not. I wish to write a ballet set in Australia – or maybe right here on southern Vancouver Island – I want to work out something to do with the Aboriginals. Western civilization is not bringing up its children properly, but the Aboriginals did. They reared their children to deal with life and be at one with it, and we haven't done that. We've got more kind of complicated and more difficult. I want to show two things simultaneously: the life of a boy growing up in an Australian Aboriginal tribe and the life of a boy growing up English. The English boy gets the tragic ending, of course. But with your daughter's suffering, perhaps, will come the capacity for art and therefore the promise of healing, if not peace.

—I find that comforting.

—Give me your hand to hold. Both hands. Rest your head against my knee. They replaced a valve in my heart, you know. An aortic homograft: human tissue grafted rather than a mechanical valve inserted. I was told that despite the best care in the world, some valves taken from humans let you down when transplanted into others. I was never the same. Bits of debris from the valve entered the circulation and one lodged in my brain. This caused a weakness in my right hand that prevented speed on the piano. I missed my walks, I missed swimming in the cold sea at night, badminton, skiing. I missed my body and its acts. I lost heart, I suppose. It isn't fun to feel like the wrong end of a broken down bus for most of the time. But people die at the right moment, and I believe I did. The greatness of a person includes the time when he was born and the time endured, but this is difficult to understand. Mmmmmmmm. I so like to feel your lovely hand through my hair like that. I believe I was a horse in a past incarnation.
And you kiss well for a woman. For a woman of your age. Total acceptance of the sensual, my dear, there along my neck. Yes. Thank-you. We are all so fragile, you see.