Duet. Carol Shields

delivers them on wheeled trolleys. They turn the pages slowly, and sometimes I see their heads bobbing in silent confirmation to the print. Unlike me, they have the appearance of serious scholars; distanced from their crisp stacks of notes, they are purposeful, industrious, admirable.

      What I am doing is common, snoopy, vulgar; reading the junky old novelettes and serialized articles of Susanna Moodie; catlike I wait for her to lose her grip. And though she is careful, artfully careful, I am finding gold. The bridal bed she mentions in her story ‘The Miss Greens,’ a hint of sexuality, hurray. Her democratic posture slipping in a book review in the Victoria Magazine, get it down, get it down. Her fear of ugliness. And today I find something altogether unsavoury – the way in which she dwells on the mutilated body of a young pioneer mother who is killed by a panther. She skirts the dreadful sight, but she is really circling in, moving around and around it, horrified, but hoping for one more view. Yes, Susanna, it must be true, you are crazy, crazy.

      Susanna Strickland Moodie 1803-1885. Gentle English upbringing, gracious country house, large and literary family, privately tutored at home, an early scribbler of stories. Later to emerge in a small way in London reform circles, a meeting with a Lieutenant Moodie in a friend’s drawing-room, marriage, pregnancy, birth, emigration, all in rapid order. Then more children, poverty, struggle, writing, writing by lamplight, a rag dipped into lard for a wick, writing to pay off debts and buy flour. Then burying her husband and going senile, little wonder, at eighty, and death in Toronto.

      It is a real life, a matter of record, sewn together like a leather glove with all the years joining, no worse than some and better than many. A private life, completed, deserving decent burial, deserving the sweet black eclipse, but I am setting out to exhume her, searching, prying into the small seams, counting stitches, adding, subtracting, keeping score, invading an area of existence where I’ve no real rights. I ask the squares of light that fall on the oak table, doesn’t this woman deserve the seal of oblivion? It is, after all, what I would want.

      But I keep poking away.

      No wonder Richard seals his letter with Scotch tape. No wonder Meredith locks her diary, burns her mail, carries the telephone into her room when she talks. No wonder Martin is driven to subterfuge, not telling me that his latest paper has been turned down by the Renaissance Society. And concealing, for who knows what sinister purposes, his brilliant hanks of wool.

      And John Spalding in Birmingham.

      Poor John Spalding, how I added him up. Lecturer in English, possessor of a shrewish wife and precocious child, querulous and slightly affected, drinking too much at staff parties and forcing arguments about World Federalism, writing essays for obscure quarterlies; John Spalding, failed novelist, poor John Spalding.

      How was he to know when he rented his flat to strangers that he would get me, Judith Gill, incorrigibly curious, for a tenant. Curious is kind; I am an invader, I am an enemy.

      And he is a right chump, just handing it over like that, giving me several hundred square feet of new territory to explore. Drawers and cupboards to open. His books left candidly on the shelves where I could analyze the subtlety of his underlining or jeer at his marginal notations.

      All that year I filtered him through the wallpaper, the kitchen utensils, the old snapshots, the shaving equipment, distilling him from the ratty blankets and the unpardonable home carpentry, the Marks-and-Spencer lamp shades and the paper bag in the bathroom cupboard where for mysterious reasons he saved burnt-out lightbulbs. Why, why?

      The task of the biographer is to enlarge on available data.

      The total image would never exist were it not for the careful daily accumulation of details. I had long since memorized the working axioms, the fleshy certitudes. Thus I peered into cupboards thinking. ‘Tell me what a man eats and I will tell you who he is.’ While examining the bookshelves, recalled that, ‘A man’s sensitivity is indexed in his library.’ While looking into the household accounts – ‘A man’s bank balance betrays his character.’ Into his medicine cabinet – ‘A man’s weakness is outlined by the medicines which enslave him.’

      And his sex life, his and Isabel’s, strewn about the flat like a mouldering marriage map; ancient douche bag under a pile of sheets in the airing cupboard; The Potent Male in paperback between the bedsprings; a disintegrating diaphram, dusty with powder in a zippered case; rubber safes sealed in plastic and hastily stuffed behind a crusted vaseline jar; half-squeezed tubes of vaginal jelly, sprays, circular discs emptied of birth control pills – didn’t that woman ever throw anything away – stains on the mattress, brown-edged, stiff to the touch, ancient, untended.

      Almost against the drift of my will I became an assimilator of details and, out of all the miscellaneous and unsorted debris in the Birmingham flat, John Spalding, wiry (or so I believe him to be), university lecturer, neurotic specialist in Thomas Hardy, a man who suffered insomnia and constipation, who fantasized on a love life beyond Isabel’s loathsome douche bag, who was behind on his telephone bill – out of all this, John Spalding achieved, in my mind at least, something like solid dimensions.

      Martin was busy that year. Daily he shut himself inside the walnut horizons of Trinity Library, having deluded himself into thinking he was happier in England than he had ever been before. The children were occupied in their daily battle with English schooling, and I was alone in the flat most of the time, restless between biographies, wandering from room to room, pondering on John and Isabel for want of something better to do.

      Gradually they grew inside my head, a shifting composite leafing out like cauliflower, growing more and more elaborate, branching off like the filaments of a child’s daydream. I could almost touch them through the walls. Almost.

      Then I discovered, on the top shelf of John’s bookcase, a row of loose-leaf notebooks.

      His manuscripts.

      I had noticed them before in their brown-and-buff covers, but the blank private spines had made me disinclined, until this particular day, to reach for them.

      But taking them down at last, I knew before I had opened the first one that I was onto the real thing; the total disclosure which is what a biographer prays for, the swift fall of facts which requires no more laborious jigsaws. That first notebook weighed heavy in my hands; I knew it must all be there.

      I had already known – someone must have told me – that John Spalding had written a number of novels, and that all of them had been rejected by publishers. And here they were, seven of them.

      Since I had no way of recognizing their chronology, I simply started off, in orderly fashion, with the notebook on the far left. In a week I had read the whole shelf, the work, I guessed, of several years. I swallowed them, digested them whole in the ivory-tinted afternoons to the tune of the ticking clock and the spit of the gas fire.

      Before long a pattern emerged from all that print, the rickety frame upon which he hung his rambling stream-of-consciousness plots. Like ugly cousins they resembled each other. Their insights bled geometrically, one to the other.

      The machinery consisted of a shy sensitive young man pitted against the incomprehensible world of irritable women, cruel children, sour beer, and leaking roofs. Suddenly this man is given the gift of perfect beauty, and the form of this gift varies slightly from novel to novel. In one case it appears in the shape of a poetry-reciting nymphet; in another case it occurs as a French orphan with large unforgettable eyes. And large unforgettable breasts. A friendship with a black man, struck up one day on a bus, which leads into a damp cave of brothels and spiritualism. Thus stimulated, the frail world of the sensitive young man swirls with sudden meaning, warming his heart, skin, brain, blood, bowels, each in turn. And then a blackout, a plunge as the music fades. The blood cools, and the hand of despair stretches forth. On the journey between wretchedness and joy and back to wretchedness, the young man is tormented by poverty and by the level of his uninformed taste. He is taunted by his mysterious resistance to the materialistic world or his adherence to fatal truths. Thousands and thousands of pages, yards and yards of ascent and descent, all totally and climactically boring.

      Although, in fairness, the first book – at least the one on the far left which