EJ: And your father?

DC: Fitting my father into a paragraph centering on honour, on what is honourable, is in some ways no problem. Thirty years after his death he is, for me and for starters, easy to be unambivalently fond of. He was I think not a complex man: he was sixteen years old in a small town in Ontario when WWI began and he was in the trenches near Arras when it ended, and although he marched through those small-town streets with the other vets on the anniversaries of Armistice Day when I was too young to know what was up, he never, even much later, had a lot to say about all that. Not about that and not about, I quite often felt, much else either. Words weren’t his thing. When both my brother and I became published academics, he knew how many books there were but other than that, not much; and he didn’t really want to be told. You didn’t talk about what you’d accomplished, that was bad form. It was a code. Sometimes this felt OK, it was so not the continual palaver, on the page or aloud, that you and your likes kept on with. Other times it felt boring. Basically it’s that last that oppressed me but here’s another story, a tennis story which my dad, a gifted athlete, naturally wouldn’t approve of me telling, a story which links him with, scarey partnership, the great Orientalist Edward Said. Said had a letter in the LRB years ago in which he pointed out that tennis nowadays was remote from what it had been in his own warmly-remembered tennis playing years; the millions of available dollars and the year-round cashing-in on those millions had moved it far from the real world, there was no longer the remotest connection between the game the Samprases were playing and the game old guys like my contemporary Edward Said had played, and this was a loss. I wrote to agree with him and told the story, which LRB readers also got to read, of the English Davis Cup team barnstorming in Ontario in the 1920s and, when they reached Jack Coles’s hometown, needing a replacement for one of their two singles contests. Jack Coles was the local #1, knew he would be outgunned, decided therefore to go for every line and hit every ball as hard as he could, got lucky and…won the match. There was no way, my letter concluded, that this could happen nowadays. This may strike you as having little to do with honour, but it’s part of my picture of this man, that he could do this Homeric, high-noon thing and tell the story only (at least in my hearing) once, a story I’d have amplified and told dozens of times if I’d had such news ready to go. Large-scale verb though it may be that’s coming next here, I honour him for the difference.

Oh, one more thing that he did. He admired my mother all the days of their life together. She deserved every day of it, which doesn’t make his awareness of it any less worth honouring.

EJ: You also quote Cyril Connolly: ‘For me to love the poem is to love the poet who wrote it and become his man’.

DC: Whether it’s a poet or some other kind of writer, it’s not a line I would sign my name to. It evokes, for me, a query I once put to myself in an idle moment – I asked myself how much it mattered to me that I had never met Albert Camus, never heard him read, never had the chance to tell him how, on my first reading of a remembered page of the first of his books (L’Etranger, a thin book which, for its clarity and its swiftness and also for its thinness was carried about in my back pocket for most of a Paris summer long ago, the first summer of the book’s life and the twentieth of mine), two sentences moved out of their paragraph and gave me a minute or so’s feeling of something I had no experience of and no definition for but knew was special, knew that the two sentences had halted the usual haphazard running of the film of my life and was now letting me know, or guess, or half-understand, with a sort of, possibly (the word I’m choosing to use next here could ruin all this, I know, but try not to let it do that), wonder, that two average-length sentences could do this, that I was now in an unusual mind-state which these sentences had, without a syllable of warning, effected, achieved, for me. I was, I think, startled that this was a thing you could do, that the little echoes that these words were mutually and perfectly offering and receiving inside their lines could do this. But that’s all it was. It was the words, the lines, the little thin book. It wasn’t the man, it was what he had in a special hour, or in twenty tries over two weeks, made.

In light of the admission in this conversation that among my favourite readings are literary biographies, the above paragraph might seem a non sequitur. But I don’t think it is. Learning, and wanting to learn, details of the life and work-habits of the author of a book or books which one likes very much does not mean one is en route to liking or (tired-of-life word) loving that author. It doesn’t mean one is willing to ‘become his man’. There’s a plethora of reasons why this is so, it seems to me. Some other day.

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