The Big Why (38 page)

Sometimes the people bursting with life feel they dont deserve it. What they feel is the fact that they havent managed to throw themselves into the joy of devotion. They have not placed themselves in servitude. They have always led and therefore have never experienced the love that comes from admiration, from not being in charge, from not having the light shine upon one’s acts.

I saw Bob Bartlett soon before he died. He was seventy and in rough shape. He had just accepted an award for marine service. He had been in the wilderness for thirty years, living at Murray Hill and singing for his supper. Then this award, a medal from the National Geographic Society. It was in late April, and the first creamy magnolia blossoms were pushing out, the size of the top joint of your thumb. I passed a butcher in white, rubber boots on, blood on his shirt, carrying a bicycle wheel. He reminded me of Tom Dobie. And inside, when Bob Bartlett rose in his dinner jacket, they all stood around him, applauding. I saw his face. Bob’s face looked out at them with astonishment. That he had achieved this acclaim. But there was something else in his face as well: a satisfaction, an appreciation. It looked as though he was saying to himself, I deserve this.

He had no good work and he was drinking. After the First World War he took a bit part in a Hollywood movie,
The Viking
. A romance set during the seal hunt. The first talking film, Bartlett said, shot outside the United States, and they shot it in Newfoundland.

I showed it, he said, to the sealers in Brigus. They were extras in it. I took them down one night to the government wharf and sat them there. I had Tom Dobie unfurl the mainsail on the
Morrissey
, and I projected the movie on it. What a sight — the sealers sitting on the wharf to watch themselves copy over ice pans up on the sail. It was a fine thing.

We were drinking at the Explorers Club. There was a woman with a blue spot on her lip watching us. She was finding the clasp on the back of her necklace. Bartlett saw me look at her.

He was writing a memoir. He thought that could be a ripping good yarn. He wanted to know if I’d ever read Siegfried Sassoon’s memoir.

It’s a good diary, he said. Of the war — it’s what my brother must have felt. There’s a scene, Bartlett said, where he’s describing a bath. He says that his memories of how the water was poured into the vat may not be of much interest to anyone, but for him it was a good bath and it’s his own story he’s trying to tell.

Bartlett let out a little laugh.

When he said that, Kent, I realized that I’ve never told my own story. I’ve told a public story. And here Sassoon is, just attempting to show the war’s effect on a solitary-minded young man.

But it’s still a public story, I said. It’s not his real, deep-down personal, gut-truth story.

The thirties, he said, were hard. Peary had found him work investigating the condition of ships. During the Second World War he made hydro measurements in uncharted channels aboard the
Morrissey
. It was this patronage that made Bartlett change his mind about Peary.

They worked the
Morrissey
north through straits and channels near Baffin Island. They gauged their depth and breadth for the U.S. Navy. Bartlett was by then a citizen of the United States, and he was part of the merchant marine. Once he came across a U-boat — it sizzled to the surface in front of them. The
Morrissey
full of American sounding equipment, enough to make them prisoners of war.

How far off’s that icefield.

It’ll take us twenty minutes, sir, to wend back into that.

Okay, direct our bow towards that sub.

Sir.

Get me some fish. Bring up some good fish and let’s start waving. Just wave to them. Be delirious.

They waved and a sailor manning the gunning tower studied them through binoculars. They waited for the
Morrissey
to come alongside. Then the captain and a naval officer who knew English. You are a fishing boat.

Youre welcome to this. We havent seen a soul in months.

You are American.

No, sir, Newfoundlanders.

They took the fish. They thanked Bartlett. I was just, he said, a regular seafaring man.

So what youre saying is that you supplied a German submarine.

Good one, Kent.

As they quartered and sailed off, Bartlett noticed another sailor come up onto the U-boat’s gunning tower. He was holding a birdcage. In the cage a linnet. To think of a bird in a submarine. He was giving it some air.

I knew it was a linnet for the tune it sang. Did you know, Kent, that they pluck the eyes out of a linnet when it’s young. To make it sing like that.

I guess the linnet never knows it’s under water.

He was going home to Brigus, he said. His mother, his best girl, had passed away. This seemed to bring him much sadness. He said, Youve moved inland, I hear.

I have had a dairy farm, I said, in the Adirondacks for thirty years.

So youre off the water.

I nodded.

Augustine, Bartlett said, thought the land baptized. It is the seas that have no faith.

Me: I went to the sea to live but ended up inland.

I guess, he said, you moved to the sea to be a pagan. But in the end, Kent, youre a good Christian man.

He seemed upset, so I asked him. I wanted to tell him that I loved him. I asked him if he felt he was loved. He thought about this. He was very drunk.

I decided to get very drunk with him. Then he told me this. This was in the last year of his life. His mother had wanted him to be a minister: a Wesleyan Methodist minister. She had pounded it into him until his father had said, You can’t forge steel, Mary, in a cold fire. He’d wanted to marry. This woman he’d met in England. But he felt it safer to stay single. He wanted to be a sealing captain, like his father. This too he failed at. He lucked into work in the North. He knew he liked living on boats. So his goal became to stand at the north pole.

Are you brave enough, he said, to be yourself, to explore your deep self.

Me: One is only ever oneself.

Well, that’s good, because everyone else is taken.

He laughed at that, cheered it, and called for another round.

For me, the difficulty was curbing myself to be with others.

For thirty years Bob Bartlett remained a virgin. For twenty years he wiggled the arses of vessels through pack ice. At thirty-three he got to stand eighty miles from the north pole. And that was it. From then on, it’s been downhill.

A few years ago, he said, I met this man in New York. A married man, much younger than me. And we got into it. We got into everything. We’d been to a bar where a man was aloft, his legs in straps, and you could go over to him. You could manoeuvre his thighs and stand between them. The man did this, and fucked him from behind. I watched the man do this. It was a strange new world, it was. We went back to my room at the Murray Hill Hotel and got into it. The man guided me. I ended up with my fist in the man. I had my hand up the man’s rectum. The man showed me how to follow the course of the large intestine to the solar plexus.

He slugged back his drink, then pushed it along the bar with a finger inside the glass.

Can I call you Rockwell?

It’s far too late to stand on formalities, Bob.

I could feel the man’s heart beat, he said. And then, You believe that? I know. It’s hard to believe.

We continued drinking. Bob Bartlett’s hands, one on the zinc counter, the other gripping a new glass of whisky. The very hand. I noticed that his thumb had a blackened nail.

The question is not, he said, were you loved. Or did you love. Or did you love yourself. Or did you allow love to move you, though that’s a big one. Move you. The question, Rockwell, is did you get to be who you are. And if not, then why. That, my friend, is the big why.

Thing is, I’ve lived my life by ideas. I’ve been governed by them. I learned what I thought was the just life and applied those ideas to my conduct. I saw monogamy as a good thing, so I strove for monogamy. I disregarded my inner hunch. There is the life that is acted out, and then there is the secret life. But I do not advocate a merger between the secret life and the willed one. I do not believe bad men should confess to their badness and find ways to reroute badness into socially constructive ways. Let the badness be bottled up. Let it remain unexplored. There is something to be said for repression. To have a secret does not mean one is living a lie. A hand is played out and a hand is kept close to the chest. What is wrong in living the double life? Why praise the open one? Why risk feelings? Why risk the embarrassment that may come from revealing them? What is so wrong with discretion? Why not withhold emotion? So much is said without saying anything, and so much harm is done through confession and openness. One can be known without revelation. The whole point of revelation is that it comes from the inside. It blooms inwardly. The biblical stories of visions are not meant to be seen with the outer eye.

I imagined what Gerald might say: that often this leads to hypocrisy. You live at odds with your ideals. You spend your life trying to find out what other people think of you, and then you get old and moribund. Youre old and repetitious and you realize the world is getting younger. The opposite of suddenly, Gerald said once, is over time. And over time one realizes a change has occurred. This appears to people as some kind of conversion. It carries the odour of spirituality. I have tried, Gerald said, to represent things with an exact correspondence to the real. You have too, Kent. You have managed to uncover something, rather than perform a feat. Your life has been the feat. Your art, he said, is plain but imbued with spirit. Your friends are interesting. It is your life, not your art, that will last. In a sense, none of us, Kent, had a religion. In another sense, we were all the most religious people in the world.

But what are you to do when what youve struggled for your whole life seems like the most obvious thing in the world. Art is all about expanding the world, making it possible to think new things. Living well will infuse your work with an exuberance. But what do you do when you hit your limit? When your art is no longer new.

Gerald: When youre unhappy, you dont have a sense of privacy. You tell everyone you meet how you feel and what you think. When youre in that place, you must achieve a poise between revelation and secrecy.

That poise. The privilege of someone who is well balanced. Then the question of discretion becomes irrelevant, because youre living your life well.

Some of Rockwell Kent’s books inspired this novel, including his autobiography,
It’s Me, O Lord
; the travel book
N by E
; some collected essays on art and living,
Rockwellkentiana
; and his chapbook,
After Long Years
. Captain Robert A. Bartlett’s autobiography,
The Log of Bob Bartlett
, was helpful too.

I plundered many books on Newfoundland to supply colour and detail to
The Big Why
. For instance, the scene of the boys out rabbit-catching and the image of Tom Dobie and his father breaking through river ice were prompted by passages from
Little Nord Easter
by Victor Butler.

The description of Bob Bartlett projecting the film
The Viking
on a ship’s sail is borrowed from a documentary by Victoria King.

Curatorial comments from two art catalogues proved very helpful:
Rockwell Kent: The Newfoundland Work
by Gemey Kelly, and
Distant Shores: The Odyssey of Rockwell Kent
by Constance Martin.

The idea that a private journal contrasts in tone and intimacy from a published memoir is a point that Ronald Rompkey makes in his books on Eliot Curwen and Wilfred Grenfell. I also stole, from his
Labrador Odyssey
, the description of the living quarters on board a freighter bound for Turnavik.

A notable source of unpublished material was Mark Ferguson, especially his thesis, “Making Fish” (Folklore Department, Memorial University, St John’s). David O’Meara provided the Sexday anecdote.

I thank Claire Wilkshire, Larry Mathews, and Martha Sharpe for reading and commenting on early versions of this manuscript. I thank Christine Pountney for her wise suggestions and imaginative leaps, which make this novel more interesting to read.

A hearty thank you to my agent, Anne McDermid.

I wrote this book wondering what Lisa Moore would think of it.

I am grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council for funding during the long haul. The Civitella Ranieri Foundation was also very kind to me.

For a full list of acknowledgments and an author’s note on the writing method, please visit the House of Anansi Press web site at www.anansi.ca and click on
The Big Why
.

I thank you Edgar Saltus.

MICHAEL WINTER
is the author of the novel
This All Happened
, which won the Winterset Award, and two books of short stories,
Creaking in Their Skins
and
One Last Good Look
. He divides his time between Toronto and St. John's.