Bill Exley has Spoken

William Arthur Exley [1939–2025]

LONDON, ONTARIO – 2025 was a dormant year for the Hermaneutics blog as I primarily focused on the compilation and sharpening up of a couple decades worth of my best essays and features to include in my next book. And at a more fundamental level than that, I’ve been slowly absorbing the implications of the recent death of my brother Bob. Of course, I’ve long understood that personal immortality was not in the cards for me or any of the people I love. But sibling death drives that conviction home to a whole new depth that demands some existential recalibration. In resuming the occasional posting of articles here, my intention going forward is to shun as best I can the more niggling distractions of politics and faddish sensation and try to plumb a deeper sounding of what American philosopher, Russell Kirk, called The Permanent Things. 

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Or you could say that I intend to concentrate on the kind of pieces that occasionally won the commendation of my late friend and fellow pilgrim, Bill Exley. I’m hoping Bill might have enjoyed this essay as well – though the fact that it’s about him would have weirded him out a little – as it’s going to be filled with a lot of the stuff that he cared about most: the exploration of some particularly rich London lore, some reflections on the art of pedagogy and the challenges of faith, and a celebration of the soul-shaping powers of literature and a certain kind of . . . if you’ll pardon the expression . . . music.

Born in London on November 15, 1939, William Arthur Exley died last summer on the 15th of July at the age of 84 years and eight months. An only child, Bill grew up in East London under an indolent father who had a predilection for drink and a distressing level of disengagement from his clever and bookish son. So complete was Charles Arthur Exley’s retreat when it came to meeting life’s challenges that his family had to move in with Bill’s mother’s parents on whom they relied for support. Charles Exley did not make old bones; dying when Bill was 23. Bill’s lifelong friend, Bob McKenzie, told me long ago that Bill was positively gleeful when he announced the death of his father. I recalled that memory to Bill just a couple months before he died and he denied Bob’s characterization. I expect McKenzie exaggerated Bill’s reaction quite a bit but probably not entirely. 

The younger Bill could be a nervy and mischievous soul; given to voicing impertinent and outrageous insights which, on reflection, he might wish to dial back a little. As he aged Bill developed a deeper and more tragic understanding of humanity’s weaknesses and flaws and an awareness of just how capricious fate can be in equipping this or that person to withstand life’s vicissitudes. Bill’s steadily deepening regard for the novels and poems of the brilliant but decidedly gloomy Thomas Hardy – a man he physically resembled more than a little – certainly accorded with such an unsentimental philosophy. By the end of his life, I believe Bill’s predominant feeling for his father was – after gratitude for the bare fact of life itself – pity. I also believe it was his father’s negative example that helped to instill in Bill such a pronounced sense of duty and commitment to seeing a thing through.

Bill’s relationship with his mother – who outlived her husband by 41 years – was much more solid and nourishing. Together with her parents she provided Bill with a decent semblance of a stable home life. And in that household where three upstanding adults were looking out for his best interests, Bill’s father’s more obnoxious tendencies were significantly dampened down. In a biographical note in the booklet of remembrance at his funeral – which Bill himself mostly wrote – he recalled his Gran singing to him as a child and his grandfather telling old family stories that helped the boy to situate himself in the world. His grandfather was particularly proud of an uncle, the Honourable James Sutherland, who had served with real distinction as the Minister of Public Works in the cabinet of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. In the bohemian circles in which Bill moved for most of his life, such an accomplishment might not muster much regard. But Bill was never stingy about paying respect to people who managed to excel in walks of life that were not his own.

From his grandparents’ house Bill attended Lady Beck elementary school and Sir Adam Beck high school; both those academies sharing the same large lot at the corner of Dundas and Highbury. Several blocks to the west on English Street between Dundas and King, Bill was able to latch onto a different kind of father figure at the First Church of Christ (Disciples) where he and his mother attended services and Bill studied theology, scripture and New Testament Greek with the Reverend Benny Eckardt and his assistant, Professor Ewart George. Both of these men recognized Bill’s pronounced intellectual capacities and challenged him in a wonderfully fruitful way that his father never would; helping him to channel his prodigious energies and build up his competence and confidence.
 
Shortly after his retirement as an English teacher, I lured Bill into the Baconian Club, knowing he’d appreciate this rather unconventional consortium of men – no girls allowed – who presented original papers on all manner of subjects, engaged in lively and sometimes lacerating repartee and conducted their meetings with a cod-eyed allegiance to parliamentary forms of comportment and address. I’d always hoped that one of these days, Bill might work up a paper about Benny Eckardt and that one-of-a-kind church which he operated in the seediest heart of old East London. At this late date, I rather doubt there’s anyone left with sufficient experience and insight to deliver an informed account of that uniquely dynamic church.
 
An absolute ball of energy, Eckardt served as a padre with the London Police Force and also ran an unaccredited Bible school called Philathea College which came under official censure for the reckless awarding of degrees. Back in the day Eckardt occasionally made headlines and set tongues a-clucking for his ministerial outreach to prostitutes and other assorted riff-raff. There was a huge biker wedding at the church in the ‘60s which flooded East London with all manner of Harleys and hogs. I twice caught personal glimpses of Eckardt’s crusty charm when watching him preside at the weddings of friends. At one of those ceremonies, he told the bride the ring should go on the groom's finger and not in his nose.
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Bill shared some of his childhood notebooks from Eckardt’s scripture classes with my wife for one of her art projects. And on those carefully jotted pages you could see that even by the age of ten, Bill understood how to organize information and keep records, complete with cross references; a mastery which would distinguish him as a Baconian executive and archivist over his 27 years of club membership. I was lucky enough to be secretary during Bill’s term as president in 2003/04. Ordinarily the secretary gets stuck with all kinds of numbing busywork but such was Bill’s magisterial oversight of the day-to-day mundanities of club business, that all I really had to concern myself with during my term in that office was the fun stuff: the recording and reading out of mawkishly grandiose club minutes.

No Record [1968] – That's Hugh McIntyre on bass

Like a good many Londoners of a certain age, my first encounter with Bill Exley took place in 1968 and was a strictly aural experience. At the age of 16, I forked over three and a half hard-earned dollars to Bluebird Records so that I could possess my very own copy of a just-released LP on the Allied label entitled No Record by an eight-member ensemble – comprised of four artists, a librarian, a high school teacher (Bill), a typesetter and a doctor – who called themselves The Nihilist Spasm Band. The late ‘60s was a particularly exciting time in popular music when I would often pick up intriguing looking albums by unknown artists on impulse. What made me take a chance on this one was that these eight musicians were London, Ontario boys; one of whom, their leader, was artist Greg Curnoe who I’d actually heard of. And I loved the titles of what I naively assumed would be their ‘songs’: Destroy the Nations, When in London Sleep at the York Hotel, The Byron Bog, Dog Face Man, Oh Brian Dibb and Destroy the Nations Again.

Though the term hadn’t been invented yet, the Spasms were a ‘noise band’. They all bashed and plucked and grinded away on home-made instruments – which included grotesquely amplified kazoos, a theremin and a three and a half string bass – and never bothered themselves with such bourgeois niceties as melody, harmony, rhythm or key. Spasm guitarist John Boyle once noted that the frustration he experienced when playing with actual musicians was that, “They cannot escape their musicality.” Any sort of proficiency or ordered interplay was never a burden for these agents of musical chaos. Their songs tended to build in intensity as they went along; starting out unpleasant and irritating and building to perfectly agonizing crescendos.
 
I diligently played that first album from end to end a grand total of once and the only thing that attracted me even a little bit was their lead vocalist – Bill – bellowing in a manic voice so closely miked that it was starting to distort: “Destroy the nations! Destroy America! England is dead! Destroy America! Yahgghh, yahaa!” But over all the record’s appeal was – could I possibly say? –  a little too subtle for me and I buried it in the back of my collection next to other odious duds like Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs and sold it a few years later when Layman House became the first shop in London where you could unload your disappointing platters for a buck or two.

In homage to Bill, I reordered the album late this summer on CD. And again, the sole highlight on there was that voice which this time brought tears to my eyes. What a gloriously intense doofus that man could be. Once again, I dragged my sorry ass through the whole thing just in case there were some finer nuances that I was better equipped to appreciate today. There weren’t. But I did chuckle inwardly at two offhand comments which I’d filed away during that 57-year interlude between listenings. One was Sheila Curnoe’s remark when I asked her what she thought of the Nihilist Spasm Band: “Some husbands bowl once a week,” she sighed. “Greg has the band.” The other came from 2020 - the year of the Covid lockdowns and all the bilious George Floyd hoo-ha in the States – which you may recall was a leap year. And I remembered a commenter writing in to Instapundit’s ‘Open Thread’ one night, saying that having to endure an extra day in that stinker of a year was like discovering a hidden bonus track on a Yoko Ono album. Thank the merciful Lord, there are no bonus cuts on the CD reissue of No Record.
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And yet . . . and yet . . . though I have no use for their music or their records, I cannot dismiss the Nihilist Spasm Band as an unalloyed waste of time and energy. For more than fifty years the band would get together on Monday nights – at the York Hotel or Victoria Tavern, the Forest City Gallery or one of the member’s studios, garages or basements – and whether some semblance of an audience had gathered or not – they’d go through their abrasive paces and thoroughly enjoy themselves. Strictly speaking, audiences weren’t really necessary to this band’s survival. Making money and having some sort of career was never the point. These were all personal friends who loved getting together once a week to shoot the shit and raise a cacophonous racket. 

There was some speculation that they might call it a day following Greg Curnoe’s 1992 death in a bike accident. But then they wondered, ‘What else are we going to do on a Monday night?’ and shambolically, obliviously soldiered on. Then in the late ‘90s, a Japanese record company started reissuing their several albums and this, in turn, spurred on the unlikeliest period of their existence – the touring years – during which the Band visited Europe seven times, playing gigs in France, England, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Poland, and also performed three times in Japan where they once turned up as featured guests on a particularly surreal morning show. To everyone’s surprise – including the band’s – there was a scattered but fiercely dedicated coterie of people out there who regarded the Spasms as trailblazing fathers of the Noise Music movement. “In Japan, they think we’re gods,” the Spasms’ enormous, bearded bassist, Hugh McIntyre, told me in the wake of one of those trips; subtle signs of incredulity twinkling away on his usually stern face.
 
Several noise musicians from around the world made their way to London to pay homage to the boys on their home turf as well as two big-name, American rock bands. In the late ‘90s, Thurston Moore and Lee Renaldo of the punk-cum-noise band, Sonic Youth, sat in with the Spasms at a ‘No Music’ festival that was held at Aeolian Hall for a few years. Then while touring Canada in 2004, global chart-toppers R.E.M. were stuck in London on the Monday night before their John Labatt Centre gig and, on a tip from writer/musician Jeremy Hobbs, dropped in on the Spasms at one of their weekly get-togethers; even joining in for a couple of improvised numbers at evening’s end. I’m not sure how life-changing that encounter was for R.E.M. but when Thurston Moore learned of Bill Exley’s passing in July, he posted his extravagant regrets on social media, declaring him to be: “The greatest lead vocalist in the history of music . . . Johnny Rotten was Bobby Goldsboro compared to this guy.”

Now with the death of their front man – and, lest we forget, they also lost Hugh McIntrye in 2004 – you wouldn’t want to bet good money that the Spasms will once more rise from the ashes. This far into their dotage, could they possibly catch an even more improbable third wind? To get a sense of what there was to love about this band – and to see some glorious clips of Bill in his madly bellowing prime - may I commend to your attention a surprisingly charming (if occasionally vulgar) 90-minute documentary from the turn of the century that is freely available on YouTube called What About Me: The Rise of The Nihilist Spasm Band.
 
You might wonder how Bill was able to juggle his edgy, larynx-shredding Spasm Band persona with a 34-year career as a respected English teacher and Department Head at Elmira District High School where a sizable portion of his mostly rural students came from God-fearing Amish homes? With great discretion, that’s how. Elmira was just far enough away from London that there wasn’t that much awareness of what the other town was up to. In those pre-social media and internet days, it wasn’t so challenging to keep local phenomena local. Bill was a little worried about being caught out and for a period, the Spasms would set up a sort of curtained cage that Bill “sang” from during public performances. But realizing that perhaps such coyness was drawing more attention than just letting Bill go out there and be his usual manic self – like, ‘Why are you hiding your front man?’ – they retired that strategy.
 
The last time I visited with Greg Curnoe at a Labour Day party in his studio – just a few months before his bike accident – he was finalizing the selection of tracks to be included on the Spasms’ not-all-that-avidly awaited fifth LP – entitled What About Me? – and was toying with Bill that they were going to include an obscene tirade that he’d spontaneously tossed off between takes, in which he musically explicated upon the fornicational enthusiasms of Peter Cottontail as he went humping on down that bunny trail. On some level I think Bill knew that Greg was kidding but with four years still to go until he retired, the joke really unsettled him.

Occasionally one of his students would find out about Mr. Exley’s other occupation but Bill wouldn’t feed their curiosity on that score at all. And with even a little reflection it seems that his students came to understand that this curmudgeonly and eccentric teacher – famous for stunts like reciting Hamlet’s dead father’s speech into an empty garbage pail for extra ghostly resonance – probably got up to some pretty wild stuff in his spare time as well and maybe that was okay.
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The message board for condolences at Bill’s funeral was packed with fond testimonials from ex-students who recalled a transformative teacher who made heavy demands on his students but could also work wonders with building an understanding of how great writing is achieved and how it can help you to navigate life. The most famous of Bill’s ex-students – who, whatever his flaws as a bit of a liberal wet, has always paid Bill generous homage – is the best-selling New Yorker essayist Malcolm Gladwell. Bill’s frequent scribbled suggestion that Gladwell find a more apt and memorable way to express himself – “Re-Word,” he would scrawl in red pencil again and again on his papers – remains a watchword for Gladwell to this day. 

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Bill with Malcolm Gladwell at the 75th Anniversary Reunion of Elmira District Secondary School

And just as importantly, Gladwell told an Elmira area magazine, Mr. Exley helped him develop a level of comfort and confidence in being himself: “When you’re an adolescent, you’re very conscious of how awkward you are and so, when you meet someone who has embraced his awkwardness, it puts you at ease. Mr. Exley was a quirky guy. Highly eccentric. He had all kinds of weird mannerisms and a funny way of laughing — but in a fabulous way. As a teenager, I found it tremendously appealing.”
   
I first met Bill in the flesh in my early 20s when I found gainful employment as the dishwasher at the finest, priciest and smallest restaurant in town – only seven tables – the Auberge du Petit Prince. The proprietors of the joint were Ginette Bisaillon (chef) and Robin Askew (wine steward) who were good friends with the Curnoe set and particularly on weekends, it was not unusual for the place to be invaded after closing time by the Nihilist Spasm Band and their wives and miscellaneous scribblers who worked on 20 Cents magazine. Though they ran London’s most exclusive and best-reviewed eatery, there was nothing sniffy about the owners and we backroom toilers were invited to join in with this crew as they loaded up on leftovers and killed copious bottles of wine; the evening often wrapping up with Exley’s stentorian recitation to a pretty squiffy crowd of great memorized swaths of poetry by Milton, Tennyson or Wordsworth. Though I found Greg Curnoe a little intimidating at that time – which probably had more to do with my age and insecurity than anything he was projecting – I kept my eyes and ears open and managed to learn a lot on that job about how art gets made in London. Probably owing to his skill at interacting with students who weren’t that much younger than me, I found Bill much more approachable and came to have a real affection for him.
 
I recently came across a diary entry from a few years later in September of 1981 when my wife and I attended the annual Nihilist Picnic at Poplar Hill with our six month-old daughter who handily won one of their athletic events – the so-called ‘Exley Jump’ – where the ribbon was awarded to the contestant who could jump on the spot for the longest duration. Emily trounced her competition by bouncing up and down for twenty minutes in the spring-loaded harness of her Jolly Jumper whose hanging bracket I held aloft. After the games and a potluck picnic came the speeches and I made a note of Exley’s stirring address on the subject of “Deterioration” which had been inspired by his visit the week before to the Western Fair; particularly savouring the dismay in his voice when he tragically declared: “I used to be able to ride the Ferris wheel with impunity.”
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Bill retired from teaching in 1996 and he and Norma and their two girls returned to London, buying a house on the northern-most block of Wellington Street. Thus began the era when I really got to know Bill best and saw him most frequently. A great supporter of the arts and an encourager of young talent, one suddenly began to meet Bill at every play or art opening or concert or reading. When I was invited to emcee a recital of Christmas music by Brassroots and the Pro Musica Choir at Metropolitan United Church that December, I bought my first ever suit as a sign of respect for the musicians and the occasion. In addition to announcing each carol or selection before it was performed, I had been asked to choose and read out about a dozen seasonal poems which would punctuate the music and I had some performer’s anxiety about that. While I was an old hand at reading out my own words in public – invariably prose – this kind of material was a real departure for me and I extensively rehearsed every selection. You might think that spotting Bill that night, sitting with Norma in the balcony, would unnerve me even further. After all, this was a man who knew a thing or two about poetry and how to declaim it. But I drew courage from his presence because I knew that he would want me to do well and sought out Bill’s face whenever I needed some anchoring. One of the poems I read out that night was an old favourite of mine by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) entitled The Oxen. 

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
 ‘Now they are all on their knees,’
An elder said as we sat in a flock
 By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
 They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
 To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
 In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
 ‘Come; see the oxen kneel

‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
 Our childhood used to know,’
I should go with him in the gloom,
 Hoping it might be so.

Many years later when Bill’s championing of Hardy was at its peak, he told me that my reading that night was his introduction to that much-anthologised poem which surprised me. It could be that circa 1996 Bill was primarily conversant with Hardy’s novels and stories and hadn’t yet explored much of his verse. That seems to be the way it goes for most readers and – for that matter – that’s also the way it went down for Hardy himself. One of very few English writers who won high renown in both fiction and verse, he only published poetry in the last third of his life when the appalled reception of Jude the Obscure convinced him that he was played out as a novelist and should put that genre aside before he committed irreparable damage to his reputation. 

Raised in a tepid Anglican home and working for a few years as a young man with an architect who undertook a lot of church restoration, Hardy was a God-haunted atheist for all of his adult life; attracted by the beauty and the consolations of a faith to which he could no longer give his intellectual assent. And the longer that standoff between desire and reason remained, the bitterer Hardy became. He was a most peculiarly outfitted artist. Though he had an uncanny capacity for describing landscapes and country life and the carefully coded complexity of social hierarchies, his plots were driven by way too many harsh coincidences visited upon characters so chronically wounded and stubborn that they didn’t give the fates too many chances to throw them a lucky break. And this gloomy perspective of his became more and more pervasive as he moved into middle age and beyond. 

In an early novel like Under the Greenwood Tree, he could set a rustic tale of romance within a church-based community without giving vent to rancour and resentment. And even though he would steadily cut back on the comedy and crank up the pessimism, I consider his middle period novels – The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Far from the Madding Crowd to be his masterpieces. But then he tipped over into the hysteria-zone with Tess of the d'Ubervilles and was totally consumed by the furies in Jude the Obscure which is one long howl of desolating misery . . . every bit as bleak as The Book of Job but with no hint of reconciliation to God or fate at the end.

Like Hardy, Bill’s devout childhood faith contracted and became less sure as his intelligence and curiosity expanded along rigorously rational lines and he would always struggle to replace his old and easy certainties with a religious allegiance more becoming to an adult. But unlike Hardy, Bill never rejected faith outright though he did send his contemplation of such questions underground; holding his theological cards so close to his chest that a lot of his friends were astonished at the overt religiosity of the funeral service he so carefully planned and which was presided over by Reverend (and Baconian) Keith McKee, who had been one of Bill’s students in Elmira back in the day.

Around 2010 I took our grandkids over to the Exleys’ to show them ‘Plastopolis’; Bill’s massive tabletop creation of an ancient Roman town which he’d artfully designed and fashioned out of multi-coloured plasticine. After Norma gave us all lunch, Bill and I got into a discussion of the classic texts which had meant the most to us. And while Bill had knocked back a lot more of those books than me, I was struck by the marked Catholic deficit in his reading – Milton but no Dante, for instance; no trace of Catholic historians like Lord Acton or Christopher Dawson. While he could be wildly funny and had a profound understanding of wordplay, Bill’s ruling faculty always was reason. And I couldn’t help wondering if some of Catholicism’s rich multiformity and its openness to mystery mightn’t have helped him to navigate some of the cul de sacs he worked himself into in those realms where reason can only take you so far. He probably would have dismissed – and rightly so – the maxim we blithely mutter at our house when faced with some inscrutable article of faith that can’t be grasped by reason alone: “This is one of those times when our church asks us to believe six impossible things before breakfast.” But I think he might have seen the wisdom of G.K. Chesterton’s pronouncement (when discussing the denouement of The Book of Job) that, “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man”.

Bill was one of the most constant readers I’ve ever known and was able to keep up his rate of literary consumption to the very end by limiting the amount of time he’d hand over to the all-consuming maw of the internet; a strategy whose wisdom becomes more apparent to me every day. He didn’t go online at all until 2005 and one of the first web services he actually subscribed to was an outfit that provided a concise wrap-up of daily news events rendered entirely in Latin. I’m pretty sure about that date because Bill told me – beaming with pride – of the April afternoon when he was plugging away on the computer and mentioned to Norma that John Paul II had just died. “Oh,” she said. “Did you read about that on your internet thingee?”
 
“No,” he told her, pointing to his ear and the nearest open window. “They’re ringing the death knell at St. Peter’s Seminary.”

In the last two years of his life, Bill participated in two special reading groups that I was part of.  I’d been badgering him for a while to redress that Catholic deficit of his so it made perfect sense for him to join us that first year when we took six months to dig into the works of G.K Chesterton. I anticipated that he might pass on last year’s exploration of John Buchan who doesn’t have so exalted a reputation as GKC but Bill said he was curious to see what we all found so attractive about his books. Throughout what would prove to be his final six months, Bill never said a word about his obviously declining health. By our June meeting he had become so frail and thin that I had to help him out to a waiting car at the end. And our July meeting opened with a toast to his memory and an hour of testimony and remembrance. One of the members recalled our March session when we were trying to chart Buchan’s progress over the years as a writer of thrillers and Bill had casually tossed off an appraisal that left us all panting in amazement. “I would characterize The 39 Steps as a chase, Greenmantle as a quest, and Mr. Standfast as a pilgrimage.”

A decade ago when I was editing The London Yodeller, I asked Bill if he had any interest in writing some reviews or features for our paper but – flattered by the invite – he turned me down without a moment’s hesitation. That wasn’t the way he liked to work. He didn’t express it this way but my sense was that he saw himself as a teacher first of all and only secondarily as a writer. Always when I think of Bill Exley, the first thing I recall isn’t so much the words or his message as his commandingly resonant voice. Like Socrates or St. Augustine, he was a teacher/writer of a very ancient school indeed; a 21st century scribe who had been gifted with the voice and demeanor of a classical orator. 
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In addition to the Baconians, we both gave talks on literary subjects to the Time Out program at the Metropolitan United Church. The audience there was 90% comprised of retired women – no men allowed (almost) – so we often gave the same lecture to both groups; learning which sections needed to be tightened or tweaked between presentations. Having taken the time to carefully prepare what we wanted to say, we both adhered strictly to the text when giving our talk. But when we made adjustments between readings, I couldn’t help noticing that most of Bill’s tweaks were thespian rather than literary: changing the speed at which he read this passage, or the volume and inflection that would really put another passage across. Bill took great satisfaction in preparing those 45-minute talks and was rightly proud of them. In the brief life’s sketch included in the Order of Service brochure at his funeral, he said he'd delivered eighteen of them. 

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Bill in concert with The Nihilist Spasm Band

So let me close with a little suggestion that Bill might not have approved of while he was alive but can’t possibly object to now. Except for a few video clips of Spasm band performances, that uniquely compelling voice has now gone silent. But Bill being Bill, you just know that there is a filing drawer somewhere in which he has collected every one of those Baconian/Time Out talks. If laying them out into a proper book seems too grand a project, then how about overheating the copying machine and printing up fifty or a hundred home-made compilations? It would not only be a great memento of the man we miss today; I think you’ll find– at least for those who knew him in life – that running our eyeballs back and forth across those pages will revive those Exley-an cadences once again.

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