become president of the company. But much more important than that is the feeling that I’ve been unmade … that the events of the past few years in Canada have been systematically destroying me, my culture. I have slowly been eliminated — all my faiths…. Take the new flag (one floats by out the train window) — that is as good a symbol as any of the dissolution I feel. Every time I look at that frigging Maple Leaf I dissolve. I simply cease to exist. It’s not a question of patriotism — my family’s been tangled up with the New World for over two centuries now. It’s a question of reality. Take just the visual fact of the flag. It’s a non-flag…. I can’t explain it.”
And then they were at the Toronto Union Station. Jackson was gone … wishing him well. He was perplexed by their conversation — the complete frankness of it. It made him uneasy. Not because it was frank, but because it implied more to the novel than the novel he had planned. But he didn’t realize that yet.
He appraised the station … a splendid thermal bath. It was in the best style of the period: monumental Roman Classic. And at the same time he regretted its predecessor for which his grandfather had been an architect … it had been that brownstone Romanesque that Richardson had made famous — full of rough brawn. And inside the station he flinched at the juxtaposition of this muted thermal bath style, like some great banking house, and the constrained jazz of the new billboardings now around the wall. — The ads were representative, he mused, of the new Toronto: a pair of TV personalities “invited” you flagrantly to “Listen Here” — standing at ease in their red waistcoats and their glasses that made them look relaxed middle-class intelligent. Respectable hicks he decided. Or high-class jerks. It didn’t much matter. In either case they didn’t belong in the station. Not in this station, his station. Which meant that one day the station would be pulled down. But he didn’t dare admit that either. Another billboard boasted the “brightest paper in town” that it boosted. Beside it a forty-foot guarantee of medical insurance. Lastly a cigarette sanctioned by a wholesome lass in tartan. Yes — it was a good cross-section of Toronto-town. Add only the stationwagon perched comfortably over the stairwell — “Canadian built — for quality,” and you had the complete picture. The only difference between the Canadian and American stationwagon being that the Canadian had less chrome and cost more. All of this, and the conversation with Jackson, hackled him. He walked over to the ticket booth. Last time he had taken the CPR. This time he would take the “Rapido,” the “National” line.
“… the ticket booth is the same old bronzed respectable — like a bank wicket, but jazzed over now with a fay red-white-blue decor of posters. The attendants the same — a sort of cheap felt blazer, Minute-Man blue with red trims. Look like gas station attendants on a Labour Day parade … that’s it — the new Guild of All-Canadians. And they are descendants of the Amurrican Minute Men — same narrow folk culture that produced the car-spangled banner. It’s the colours … those folk hues. This is just a mutation of the same: part Rotary Club cheeriness, part cheerleader razzummatazz, part modern electronix.Christ I hate it: the Canadettes! Preview of 1984. Bless damned Orwell! Just time for a snack in the York Pioneer Room … ”
He settled in and looked it over … quickly discredited it as part of the new Canadian kick for their cottage pine past. Simply a comfortable Canadian variation of the American Abe Lincoln myth. It made posthumous peasants out of all their ancestors. He couldn’t take much of that. He enjoyed peasants; but he didn’t like retroactive peasanthood as a national patriotic pastime. There was something sick in it … an inverted snobbery. The fact was that the “log cabin legend” simply didn’t belong in Canada … it really belonged only to that initial, and belated, American yeoman tradition in Southwestern Ontario — Grit Ontario … Canadian equivalent of the New England Myth that still implicitly dominates Amurrican thought. The thought that Canada, at this late date would be subjected to a pirated and aborted American puritan legend depressed him. And he fled.
“… I thought of touring the new City Hall. Haven’t yet. A good idea now … after all if this New Canada is real and right I’m as much a tourist in Canada now as anyone else. & I can see the Old City Hall at the same time. But didn’t have the courage…. The exposure would rob me of the energy I need for Montreal.”
Suddenly the real magnitude of what he was doing and of what was being done to him shook him. He hadn’t as yet completely allowed himself to know. But every now and then he had a deep realization of what he was really doing — some deep tissue of him opened and he shook from stem to gudgeon. The only thing he could do now was to see someone: people still fortified him. He phoned Beatrice Ellis — he had kept in touch with her these past difficult months. She had edited his book of essays. Had done a sensitive job — and she had told him then (that was four years ago) that he had something much more important to say, that he wouldn’t get away merely with his essays. There was just time for a cup of tea together (it wasn’t a “drink” — that was what happened in novels; and he smiled.) Beatrice had “died” a few months ago, heart failure, under an oxygen tent — and then been revived and come back to tell about it. She would know. He tried — between the lines — to tell her what he was really doing … tried to tell her that he knew that the novel was for real. He wanted to tell her of the hara-kiri explicit in it. But it was hard to acknowledge fear to someone who has already died and come back. That strengthened him again. And at 4:45 p.m. he was on board the Rapido …
“the Rapido! the very name pillages me of more blood. Part of the mediocre anonymity of the New Nation. An evasion of identity. An abstraction. Might as well call it the ‘Quickie’ — the Cdn Quickie.
But that would be too American. At least the CPR has the guts to be the Chateau Champlain … or the Royal York. Well — the new name matches the new ticket booth matches the new Canadettes in the booth matches the Respectable Hick matches the New Flag matches the new entry to the train itself … from the main floor of the thermal bathroom. I got a new respect for that great arched Roman Bath as I saw in contrast the board-and-batten triumphal arch all of eight feet tall through which we went to the train. Red-white-blue archlet — not the old colours, grim old colours, full of gristle and gut, but these new candy-floss colours. (Oh, Christ, even the colours of my community are undergoing a change of life — are being gelded!) At the arch entry a professional greeter welcomes us in. Rolls out the cheap red carpet for all of us members of the new lower middle-class Canadian royalty. Pathetic.Plush for the people.
Why can’t I be proud of it? I should be. It is clean, competent, fresh, proper. It even has this mitigated concern for majesty — the plush carpet, the stage-set entry, the self-effacing CN impresario to grimace us at entryway … I suppose because it makes me by definition part of these New Canadettes. A sort of post-graduated folk-yeoman-king…. Hell — why should I be proud of it? This isn’t what my people spent two centuries here for! Even if I wanted I have no right to be proud of it!
Dumped my bags on the rack between cars #3012 and 3011 … & slump into a seat — lucky got one by a window, facing forwards (dislike riding backwards). Ten minutes to go … catch up on my Notes.
… 4:45 p.m., sharp, the station moves away from us … leaving me exposed sudden to the body of my city … out the back corner of my eye that becalmed Beaux-Arts bulk, rising like a series of improved Buckingham Palaces piled atop each other — the Royal York, could only be she
the long slit unended of Yonge Street — like all our streets — dissolved only by infinity
