Flirt: The Interviews by Lorna Jackson Page B

and I wonder what it was about your first wife – you were nineteen and she was thirty-four – that drew you into her arms and kept you there for so long.

    â€”Great. The sporting breeds. The Irish setter looks tough to beat. Let’s stay for one more round. I’d like to see a film this afternoon. You can drop me downtown and I’ll find something.
    â€”Are you cold, Mr. Ondaatje, or is it just me?

I Flirt with BENJAMIN BRITTEN
    â€”That’s the Pacific Ocean you can smell this evening. Will you stay in the wheelchair, Benjamin, or should we arrange a blanket and pillows on the grass?
    â€”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.
    â€”Your mother’s last name was Hockey.
    â€”Indeed. Edith Hockey. My mother was never a professional singer, only a keen amateur one with a sweet voice. I miss my mother.
    â€”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?
    â€”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?
    â€”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.
    â€”Those are fertile dreams, indeed, but they have little to do with trees, I can tell you that. Dreams are the artist’s workshop.

    â€”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.
    â€”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