Part 1 (1/2)
This All Happened.
Michael Winter.
We acknowledge for their financial support of our publis.h.i.+ng program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publis.h.i.+ng Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Introduction by Lisa Moore.
Gabriel English, the narrator of Michael Winter's This All Happened, has a lot in common with the writer Michael Winter. For instance, Gabriel is writing a novel based on the American artist Rockwell Kent. Michael Winter wrote the novel The Big Why, based on Rockwell Kent, soon after the publication of This All Happened.
Gabriel lives with roommates in a creaky downtown St. John's house with raspberries growing in the garden. Michael Winter, for a time, lived with roommates in a house downtown very like Gabriel's. When a visitor ate raspberries out of Michael's garden, she could smell them, later, on her fingers, just as Gabriel does.
And Gabriel has fallen dangerously in love with a gorgeous, much-sought- after filmmaker girlfriend who is full of errant desire and equivocation, ambivalence, ambition, joyousness, and insight. A girlfriend who, when she throws back her head in laughter, at the New Year's party that opens Winter's startlingly beautiful and spare novel, has a taut white throat, and lips in a crescent of broken apple.
But who knows for sure if it can be said that the same thing happened to Michael Winter? We are given a caveat: ”This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people living or dead is intentional and encouraged.”
Much of This All Happened is an interrogation of what is true, or how the stories we tell help the truth to shape-s.h.i.+ft and transform. The chasm between truth and how we try to capture it with words (that ever-warping medium) has always been a preoccupation for Michael Winter, one that makes us aware of our subjectivity, causes us to question our beliefs, and jostles our understanding of what, exactly, happened.
Winter invents; no two of his novels are alike. Here the form is a record of a full year, unfolding day by day in an urgent, charging present tense. This All Happened is a log, noting the course of a turbulent love affair, each entry in chronological order, marked by the date.
Some entries are as brief as a koan: ”There are white flowers on the raspberry bushes.”
Some are aphoristic: ”Life is a battle between attaining comfort and rebelling against it.”
There is unabashed poetry: ”The cod are full of capelin, Max says. They are little purses full of silver coins.”
Some entries contain maxims about writing: ”One of my key tenets: if you know what the next scene is you've already written it.”
And there are elongated entries about moments: ”I'm writing honest moments and people who are themselves and people who make fun of themselves and are silly and childish and unsophisticated and warm and generous and loving and full of toughness too and original and s.e.xy and rough and animalish and playful and have guts and a red red tender heart bursting crying at small wonderful irrational things at moments at hot moments that steam and penetrate our brains and sizzle like a branding iron into the marrow and make us h.o.r.n.y and I like trying to put words to these moments give particulars and hand them delicately to people...”
On January 2, Gabriel tells us his girlfriend, Lydia, has these words for life: want, crave, desire, yearn.
He says: ”And who wouldn't want these words, but they do frighten me.”
In this way, Winter differs entirely from Gabriel English, because in this novel the author's very pulse and breath is full of want, craving, and desire-and though there's the boiling-over engine of jealousy, this prose is fearless.
Here is what I crave in any novel: surety.
An authority of voice that allows the reader that singular and intense pleasure: the suspension of disbelief.
This All Happened is bursting with that kind of authority. Also, there is humour, l.u.s.t, jealousy, landscape so accurately rendered the reader looks up and sees the boulders and scrubby spruce and churning ocean as though she had never seen them before.
There is talk of writing, of style and form, infidelity, drunkenness, community, friends.h.i.+p, canoeing, and anguish-inspiring, crazy-making, meaning-of-life-provoking love.
Love that burns so very hot and bright, it is destined not to last.
But one thing of which we may be certain: the record of the moment will endure.
Gabriel writes in his last entry: ”A moment winks like a black locomotive, harnessed fire, sitting impatiently on its haunches, forever primed to lurch and devour.”
What this means is that if this has not really all happened, it will, and will again and again, for every reader.
to, for, and because of MARY.
Gabriel English was the protagonist in a book of stories I wrote ent.i.tled One Last Good Look. Let me tell you about Gabriel English. He is a writer. He's supposed to be writing a novel. Instead, he writes a collection of daily vignettes over a full calendar year. These small windows onto moments follow the evolving pa.s.sion and anguish Gabriel feels for Lydia Murphy. The vignettes also doc.u.ment the desperate relations.h.i.+ps that blossom and fail around him. Gabriel discusses his friends, confesses his failings, copies overheard drunken conversations, declares his dreams, reports gossip, and charts the ebb and flow of his love affair with the people and geography of Newfoundland in particular, the port city of St John's. The result of this daily examination is the book you're holding. This All Happened is a literary tableau of Newfoundland life, for better or for worse, seen from within.
Caveat: This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to people living or dead is intentional and encouraged. Fictional characters and experience come to life when we compare them with the people and places we know. New experience is always a comparison to the known.
- M. W.
January.
1 Lydia leans back to laugh at something Wilf Jardine says. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s are the closest thing to Wilf, and he is looking down her taut white throat. Lydia's teeth and lips a crescent of broken apple. Offering up her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and throat to Wilf. She wants to go elsewhere after the midnight fireworks, and that ambition to persist, I have decided, is drawing me to her.
A toast! and Max Wareham hands me a brandy. Max is naked under a pale raglan. I steady myself against the back of a chair. I love Max. This year I must confess all to Max. And in the periphery Lydia is still entranced by Wilf. Can I love a woman who is so entranced? Wilf lurches to me, kisses me, and I want to smack Wilf for being powerful in Lydia's eyes. I want to make sure my forearm catches his chin in the followthrough. Wilf Jardine's short white hair and suit jacket are doused in peppermint schnapps. He's apologizing for wolfing down Lydia. That's what he is, a wolf. Wilf the white-haired, ravenous wolf. He clinks my gla.s.s when the clock hands meet at twelve, and Max cries out, To Old Year's Night! I watch pearls of liquor spinning out before my brandy snifter smashes on the hardwood. Wet splinters across all the shoes. All Shoes Night. And Alex, our hostess, says, n.o.body move.
Alex Fleming, in a black sleeveless number, brushes our feet with a straw broom. She pushes flakes of wet gla.s.s into a yellow pan. She sweeps the toes of my black shoes a little extra, first act of the new year. Swipes at my knees, brush handle between my legs, and Max my dear friend Max is dancing barefoot in a raincoat.
Alex, just minutes before, had fingered the dust on the windowsill and said, drunkenly, Gabriel, you s.h.a.gger. She pressed a thigh against the outside of my knee and I could see down the entire front of her black number. Imagine, she's all of twenty-six and pressing me. She said, If I could get my claws into you. She gave me her entire eye. What I mean is she threw herself at me with one eye. And while I did not lurch, I did not decline.
Maisie Pye grabs my elbow and steers me back to Lydia.
Lydia leans on my shoulder. Wilf, she says. Wilf said, Any chance of a Christmas fling?
Me: Wilf said that?
Make you jealous?
Wilf Wilf f.u.c.k you Wilf.
Lydia and I rock against the fridge, Max opening the door for the last few beers. There's a garbage bucket full of ice cubes and broken beer bottles, and Max Wareham, when he spoke to me almost naked, spreading lapels to show his fat nipples, Max had a sliver of brown gla.s.s hanging from his lip the size of a number-fourteen wet fly. He says, I know youre the apple of someone's eye, Gabe.
I love you, man.
Max: I love you too, man. He pauses, almost in deep sorrow. He says, Hard to say I love you without adding man.
Me: You love me?
Max considers this.
I'm talking to Lydia, Max.
I love you anyway, man. I love you unconditionally, and you can leave off the man. Pretend I never said it.