Biting the Hand that Feeds You

LONDON, ONTARIO – While I’ve long been aware of tensions that can trouble relations between artists of various kinds and more conventional denizens of the workaday world – such soul-wilting energies as resentment, projection, envy and contempt – I’m happy to report that these were not issues in my home of origin.

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Two of Jack and Verna Goodden’s four sons early on showed signs of Bohemian proclivity; Ted primarily as a visual artist who would make stained glass work his specialty and myself primarily as a writer. Our parents didn’t exactly see the point in the eccentric projects we took on. And to be honest, neither did we; not all of the time. But assuming a parental posture of something like, “Who knows? It might work out,” the folks pretty well left us to our own inclinations; figuring that so long as we weren’t torturing cats or building altars to Moloch, it probably wouldn’t do us any harm to take our fledgling interests for a run and see what could be developed.

Indeed, in a few instances, you’d have to say that they quietly encouraged us. In my eighteenth year they gave me my first typewriter as a Christmas present - a beautiful second-hand Remington Noiseless; the first in what would turn out to be a fleet of such machines that I sequentially drove into the earth until computer technology and the advent of the word processor forced me to adopt a new technology. (Yes, even as a teenager, I was resistant to most kinds of change.) And more passively - but, in a way, more impressively – our parents allowed each of us to annex considerable portions of their home to use as our first studios and never grumbled about the resultant loss of space; Ted heading up to the half-finished attic and me moving into the two thirds-finished basement.
 
In an article I wrote about Ted’s art practice about a quarter century ago, the atmosphere in our home of origin was described as one of ‘benign neglect’. Jack felt wounded by that comment and attributed it to Ted. Incredibly enough, it was several years after Jack died that I thought to revisit the article and discovered that it was me who'd dropped those dreaded words in a descriptive paragraph. That Ted didn’t rebut them at the time shows that either one of us could’ve said it. And on reflection, I suspect I first heard the phrase from Ted and utilized it in the piece. But I felt awful that I’d left Ted all alone in the doghouse of Jack’s annoyance and didn’t step up with some graceful rephrasing of my own to try to repair the injury.
 
Obviously Jack was fine with ‘benign’; it was ‘neglect’ that got up his nose and - even though we didn’t intend it that way - rightly so. I hope that by the end of his life Jack understood that both of us were deeply grateful for a home life that granted us the latitude to freely explore more irregular interests and less traveled avenues of self-expression. This wasn’t the case in a good few of the homes that we knew best. I particularly remember a quarterbacking friend of my brothers who was routinely reduced to tears at the prospect of having to face his father on those dark days when South’s football team lost a game. How tricky it must be, I thought, to sort out your own best gifts and aptitudes in a home where you were subjected to such intrusive pressures.
 
Another expectation that our parents never burdened us with was higher education; which was just fine with me. Indeed, I didn’t even finish high school. But even though I was about the furthest thing imaginable from an academic keener, I learned a lot about my chosen craft at South Secondary School and was more than encouraged to pursue my literary aspirations by a handful of exceptional English teachers. A couple weeks ago I attended the memorial service for one of my favourites; a teacher whose class, strictly speaking, I wasn’t even enrolled in. Though I’d dropped out after grade eleven, Ian Underhill allowed me to monitor his grade twelve class, marked all my essays as if I was one of his diploma students and – most helpfully for me – got me to cut back on my showboating excesses and dig into the subject at hand with something approximating academic rigour. To this day when I’m working on a piece where a more sober approach is called for (or any essay that requires footnotes) I tell myself, “Do this one for Mr. Underhill.”

Ian taught in a portable classroom that was set up in the northwestern corner of the football field; giving his class a physical set-apartness that seemed to inspire a different kind of application in his students. It was only a short walk from the main school but schlepping over there in all kinds of weather to a space that was his and nobody else’s, seemed to awaken a slightly more independent and committed spirit in his pupils; letting us know we could do things differently there.

I watched Ian guide students who were struggling to devise strategies for taking hold of the challenges they faced and encourage those who were sailing along a little too comfortably to branch out or up their game a little. And no matter what kind of tripe you were reading in your spare time, this omnivorous reader had a genius for recommending something that was kind of related to your current enthusiasm but a whole lot better for your soul. Ian was one of the first people I knew who carried a torch for my favourite Canadian novelist, Richard B. Wright. (Dig in here if you’d like to see my full exposition on RBW:
https://www.hermangoodden.ca/blog/a-celebration-of-richard-b-wright )

By the time I left South, I’d written a hopelessly indulgent autobiography; a book that nobody else should ever read but an invaluable record, to me, of childhood lore that might have slipped beyond recall if I hadn’t set it down when the material was still reasonably fresh. I’d also compiled a couple hundred pages of short stories, edited two school newspapers and contributed poems and dramatic snippets that were incorporated into a couple of school shows. Ian, bless his heart, read all that stuff – which really can’t have been that much fun - and gave me insightful advice . . . which sometimes . . . or eventually . . . I took. I’ll always remember the wonderfully gentle way in which he suggested that an account of my first trip to the East Coast was perhaps a little too influenced by my reading of Tom Wolfe. In effect, he had caught me plagiarizing – in spirit if not in word – but didn’t humiliate me in that calling-out so much as nudge me over into my own proper lane. Admiration for another writer can pull you off your own best course, he told me; particularly when you’re young. It’s something to watch out for.

Ian unintentionally taught me another valuable lesson that year. That grade twelve English class took up the final period of the school day and I used to love it when his old friend and English-teaching colleague Bill Cockburn would swing by the portable after our class to check in with his compatriot. Watching these two riff away about Moby Dick or baseball (they both loved the game and about fifteen years later, Ian was instrumental in helping me line up W.P. Kinsella of Shoeless Joe fame for a reading at the Forest City Gallery) . . . and hearing them groan about some insane new directive from the office or speculate about whether J.D. Salinger was developing anything other than his toenails during his long silent phase . . . their easygoing banter assuaged my concern that friendships might not be so important to men once they became adults.
 
During that same year, I also monitored Marion Woodman’s Philosophical English course. And that was it. Solely focused on writing and reading, I let every other subject go hang. And even though the school was not receiving any government funding for my very partial participation in their curricula, they still saw fit to award me with a medal for my work in the ‘Creative Arts’ and a mighty cash stipend - forty dollars as I recall - which I immediately blew on books and records, including the Stones’ just-released double album set, Exile on Main Street. All of which was pretty damned sporting of them, I would say, and (like the indulgence of my middle class parents for the artsy inclinations of their children) indicative of not just tolerance but encouragement for aspirants who were setting out on unorthodox paths.
 
South would canvas local businesses to put up the money for those awards. Mine was called The Birks Medal and featured an engraved Romanesque head of the founder of the Birks Jewelry Company, Henry Birks, on the front side. A few years later a friend dropped around with his boring and crabby communist girlfriend in tow - a nearly extinguished flame he was working up the courage to dump - and she scooped up my medal from a shelf near my desk, screwed up her nose and groaned out loud. "And just what the fuck does that capitalist stooge know about the creative arts?" she asked.
 
I was stunned by the vindictiveness of her outburst. And for that matter, wasn't the design and manufacture of jewelry a form of art? And if he was nothing more than an uncultured tycoon, wasn't it kind of commendable that he'd spread around some of his largesse in this way? I’d just met her for the first time five minutes ago and she pulls this? What an ignorant pillock, I thought. And then – and I don’t know where I got the nerve or the inspiration to even try to pull this hoax – I looked her square in the eye and said, “What do you mean? Henry Birks was a founding member of the Group of Seven?”
 
“Was he really?” she asked, aghast at her faux pas.
 
“You betcha,” I said. “You can look it up when you get home.”
 
(Oh, for the days when you could feed somebody a line of hooey and they couldn’t pull a gadget out of their pocket to regain their equilibrium.)
 
I realize that I’ve been thinking about that horrible girl quite a lot these past several months whenever I watch news clips of massed protesters; seventy-five per cent of whom seem to be arrogant, uninformed women with a monstrous sense of entitlement and a simmering resentment for anybody who doesn't share their particular ideological possession. There they are night after night - gluing themselves to masterpieces and roadways, defacing statues and monuments, yelling down conservative speakers and donning kaffiyahs in addled emulation of middle-eastern terrorists – attempting to work out their daddy issues by dumping on the patriarchy or Western civilization or capitalist society; all of which have granted them the luxury to take their liberty and comfort for granted.