Roy McDonald and the Road Not Taken

LONDON, ONTARIO – It’s been a melancholy week with the announcement of Roy McDonald’s death last Wednesday. The first reports suggested that he may have been dead for as long as three or four weeks before his body was discovered tucked up in bed in the house where he lived for all of his 80 years but that got walked back considerably and it is now believed that he’d been dead for only a couple of days. (Or maybe they’re just saying this, so we won’t go, “Eww.”) With no phone or internet connection he wasn’t the easiest guy to keep tabs on.

Until fairly recently I usually managed to bump into him a couple times a year. Always at the Home County Folk Festival where he presided for all three days at the back of the mainstage crowd as a sort of non-musical attraction. And then, less dependably, I’d meet him standing outside of Joe Kool’s or the Starbucks at Dundas and Richmond where he’d plant himself and hold court with whoever passed by. In any of those situations, you’d have to hang around for about an hour to get in ten minutes worth of fractured conversation with Roy because he’d always pull in passersby and do the full introductions and bring everybody up to date and then that person would wander away and, “Ah, where were we? Yes, I’ve been reading this wonderful book about the holistic powers of organic cashews but the thing is you’ve got to eat them at a time when you’re . . . Oh, just a minute, Herman, have you ever met Ernest Forepaw?” And off we’d go again.

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It was maddening because I never cared about the stupid self-help books he was always reading or – perfectly pleasant as they all undoubtedly were – this parade of passing humans with whom he engaged in desultory chitchat. The vast majority of my encounters with Roy had this irritating garden party quality, this atmosphere of fussy distraction. It seemed I was always trying to draw a clear bead on this fundamentally likeable man whose life seemed so interesting in so many ways and yet never really found a way to take a deeper sounding. Could this incredibly wide circle of acquaintance that he cultivated so assiduously actually be a ruse for keeping people at a distance? Did anyone really know Roy well?

The very best conversation we ever had was our first. We met in the early ‘70s at the Art Mart in the upstairs gallery over top of the old central Library on Queens Ave. I would’ve been about 22 years old and Roy about 37. My first novel was about to be published by Applegarth Press, I’d heard of Roy, read some of his stuff in (and seen his smiling bearded visage on one of the front pages of) my older brother’s stash of 20 Cents Magazines. He initiated the conversation and the next thing I knew, there we were, perched on the side of a plinth-like platform for showcasing sculpture and being told by a janitor-type that the evening was over, everybody else had gone and he was looking to close the place up.

What had we talked about? We had both gone to Mountsfield Public School and we’d both dropped out of South so we had a lot of common referential ground between us. We somehow got onto the London flood of 1937 which my parents had gone through while they were courting and which Roy told me with a mischievous grin that he’d been present for as well. That flood was in April and Roy wasn’t born until June 4th that year but his mother had told him so many times about looking down from behind the old jail to survey the beginnings of the inundation in London West that Roy felt his muffled embryonic experience of the event qualified as at least a trace memory. I found that to be an utterly charming conceit and emblematic of his almost childlike gift for insinuating himself into situations.

As the first London-based writer I’d ever talked with at length, I was also trying to mine Roy for insights on how to make a go of it as a writer in this town but I realized pretty early on that Roy wasn’t really making a go of it in any sustainable sense and that our whole approaches to life and wordsmithery were so radically diverse and even at odds that there wasn’t much in his experience that I could carry over or apply to my own situation. Still, I liked him and wished him well and in October of 1981, I wrote a big feature article on him for the Encounter magazine supplement of The London Free Press:

ROY McDONALD (1988), 102 x 79 cm, China markers, acrylic and photos on paper, mounted on canvas. By Alan Dayton. Collection of the Woodstock Art Gallery. Photo Credit: Robert McNair

EVERYBODY IN LONDON seems to know Roy McDonald, if not by name or legend, then they’ll usually break down and exclaim, “Oh, him!”, once you’ve described his appearance. The first of the beatniks and the last of the hippies. The Hermit of Sleepy Hollow. A balding and slightly emaciated Walt Whitman in a trenchcoat, pounding the streets, riding the bus, scribbling away on clipboards in empty restaurant corners, and always hauling around eighty pounds of books, his personal cross, in a ratty brown satchel structurally reinforced by the criss-crossed peelings of sixteen rolls of 3M plastic tape. At least once a week people offer to buy him a new bag but Roy always turns them down with a look of mild reproof, suggesting that they’ve somehow missed the point.

The legend of Roy McDonald is primarily sustained by the publication of three books over the last three years. (This is not to deny that there are earlier incarnations of the legend going as far back as his student days at South Secondary School when he wrote a weekly column for The London Free Press religious page entitled, Thoughts of a Teenager.) The most important and accessible of these books is Living: A London Journal, a one week excerpt from Roy’s voluminous diaries which was published by Ergo Books of London in 1978. With a number of passages like, “This is the journal of an ordinary week in the life of an ordinary person in an ordinary city in an ordinary country,” Roy attempts to convince the reader that he is reading the diary of an ‘everyman’ of the late twentieth century – a forty-four year old unemployed John Q. Public who looks like a Biblical prophet, still lives at home with his parents and spends every last minute of each waking day covering pieces of paper with his chicken-track scrawl or talking to a dizzying parade of friends and acquaintances about the world of ideas and books.

Clearly, he is not ordinary in terms of this particular society but perhaps in some more fundamental sense, he is. Describing the role of the monk in American society in her biography of Thomas Merton, Monica Furlong wrote that she saw him, “not as someone special . . . but as one who was not afraid to be simply ‘man’, who as he lived near to nature and his appetite was the ‘measure’ of what others might be if society did not distort them with greed or ambition or lust or desperate want.”

At first sight, to most people, Roy McDonald looks like a creep and a loser. A few months ago at the downtown News Depot, I watched a group of middle class teenaged boys swearing and laughing at Roy for the crime of standing there, looking as he does, and trying to read a magazine. Roy’s appearance can act as a red flag to those who are bullish about the glories of the consumer society. He rejects that dream almost completely – refuses to drive a car, is a strict vegetarian, has never paid income tax in his life and sees no sense in working at jobs that don’t interest him in order to make money he doesn’t need. His journal reflects the simplicity of his life, and the staples of most modern literature are conspicuously absent. No guns are fired, no romance is pursued, no kingdoms are amassed. Incident by incident, it gives the outline of a life so common, so impoverished and simple, that extraordinary is the only word for it.

In 1979, Don Bell’s biography of Roy, Pocketman, finally appeared. Chronicling an earlier period than the London Journal, Pocketman (with a substantial amount of invention and artistic licence) tells about Roy’s alcoholic vagrant years, careening back and forth between London and Montreal, quite unhinged and dangerously out of control. Though I find the book ultimately unsatisfying and in spots (like whenever Bell likens Pocketman unto a Sufi) downright pretentious, it does give a good idea of the pressures one has to resist to stand alone in direct opposition to the age. It’s interesting to note that even when Roy’s life hit rock bottom, he still elicited prejudice and malevolence from those around him. Once when he was thrown in jail for public drunkenness, even the other rubby-dubs felt impelled to mark their distinction from this weirdo by setting fire to his beard. Small surprise then that there should have been a time in his life when Roy succumbed to the vision of others and chose to obliterate himself in alcohol and self-humiliation.

It is in light of what Pocketman tells us that A London Journal becomes such a moving chronicle. On each of the seven mornings documented in that book, Roy no sooner gains consciousness than he must carefully instruct himself on just how he will go about getting through his day. He will not drink. He will not lose his temper. He will not fall into despair. Throughout the book Roy is carefully walking on eggshells. It is the opposite of The Lost Weekend (or for that matter, Pocketman). Roy strives to find himself by notating the minutiae of his existence; charting his way around large black holes in his search for a road that will see him through. That he has found that road and stuck to it for the better part of a decade is a commendable feat in itself. How rare is the alcoholic with sufficient resolve to successfully put down the bottle for once and for all. Roy is amused by readers of the book who will come up to him and ask if he still reciting those ‘just for today’ rules every morning. “No, obviously, that time is over. I’m not saying that I’ll never be tempted again or that I don’t still maintain that resolve . . . but the threat’s no longer so immediate.”

Readers of the Journal all have their favourite bits and the book which is now into its second printing continues to sell well; due in no small measure to Roy’s peerless salesmanship – at least five of the eighty pounds of literature which Roy lugs around is his own. I knew that I was going to have to read the whole book when, very early in its pages, Roy revealed his rarely resisted impulse to brush up against trees that he liked. I’m an old tree-hugger from way back myself, was amazed to find anyone else indulging in the practice (let alone confessing it) and then began to wonder if perhaps the act wasn’t some sort of private sacramental rite intuitively practiced by children of the Forest City in search of a civil communion.

The third book, published in 1980 was Roy’s mammoth ‘pun-poem’, The Answer Questioned. Originally recited at a Nihilist Picnic and then printed in the long-defunct 20 Cents Magazine, Roy insists that “the poem is a meditation on life and death” and maybe it is but I still think it’s a lot of fun. More eagerly, I anticipate two McDonald projects which are in the works – a book of subjective essays and his book (he’ll never come out and call it a biography or a study) on Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke.

Roy’s attraction to Bucke seems only fitting. Of the fifty-three books mentioned in A London Journal, at least half of them are concerned with human potential and its fuller realization in psychological and religious realms. The superintendent of the London Asylum in the late nineteenth century, Bucke was also the author of Cosmic Consciousness, a fascinating study of man’s mystic relation to the infinite, which is still in print eighty years after its first publication. While London for the most part ignores him, his following is avid elsewhere and there is even a Richard Maurice Bucke Society in Montreal. His work at the Asylum was both revolutionary and humanitarian. He was one of the personalities studied in CBC Radio’s recent and necessarily short series on Canadian mystics. The circumstances of Bucke’s death (he lived to be sixty-five) seem ironically, poetically perfect for the demise of a Canadian mystic: stepping out one night to gaze at the stars, he slipped on a patch of ice and fell, receiving an instantly fatal blow to the head.

October 18th, 1981
It is 11:38 p.m. Have just returned from visit to Roy’s in preparation for magazine article. Am feeling a little overwhelmed by it all. Would very much like to stuff my head in a bucket of water and yodel for a few hours but am mindful of the need to get these impressions down while they’re fresh. (I wonder if Roy’s recording his end of our encounter right now? Do fish swim?) Call me a fool. I figured, you walk over to Roy’s with your tape recorder, sit down for a couple hours while he answers your questions and then you say goodnight. I was there for more than two hours before he answered a single question. His mother showed me into the living room, Roy came through from his bedroom, said hello and asked, “Would you like to take a tour of the place?”

“Sure,” I said, playing right into his hands.

So Roy dragged me back outside through the frigid wind and rain to commence our tour of the south London writer’s home with – what else? – his father’s tool shed. One by one, Roy pulled the tools down from the wall. “Do you know what this one is?” he asked. “See this handle? My father made that himself. And this is the hoe I used as a child,” said Roy, handing me an implement built to the scale of a Munchkin. “What are we doing here?” I kept asking myself. I wanted to ask it of Roy but couldn’t, fearing that such a question might offend him, like when people offer to buy him a new satchel.

Then came a tour of the backyard, pointing out the garden, what grew in each row. Then Roy named the neighbours who lived to each side, how long they’d lived there, what their pets were like. Then I met the famous blue spruce which Roy brushes up against more than any other tree. (I guess it’s sort of his ‘steady’.) And then we entered into the (brace yourself) garage! Its major feature was a built-in mechanic’s pit but Roy must’ve kept us in there for twenty minutes, bombarding me with unremarkable details as my eyes glazed over and my brain began to implode.

Finally we went indoors and my heart sank as Roy led me down to the basement for a tour of the McDonalds’ freezer, their fruit cellar, their potato bin and other subterranean highlights. In a manner something akin to brainwashing or sensory deprivation, Roy’s methods began to pay off. When I finally saw something which ordinarily might be of marginal interest, I was seized by a curiosity so violent it approached absorbed fascination. Such was certainly the case when my eyes fell upon Roy’s previous satchel. It lay there on the cement floor, exactly as it had been dropped ten years ago – tattered and covered in dust, its contents visibly rotting. If it had turned out to be a gym bag of Paleolithic man, I couldn’t have felt more awe, more humility in its presence.

This was followed so closely by another inestimable treasure that my head went dizzy with delight. There, from the shelves where Mrs. McDonald stored her home preserves, Roy reached out and plucked his very first diaries from the mid ‘50s. I leafed through the pages greedily, charmed both by the remarkably serious bent of Roy’s adolescent mind (these were the days when he entertained dreams of becoming a Unitarian minister) and his fluctuating styles of handwriting, some retaining only the faintest resemblance to the older man’s inimitable scrawl. Most days the entries were short and businesslike, barely one eighth of a page, but on days when Roy was seized by a need for self-improvement, he could go on for pages (he later revealed that his all-time record for number of pages written in one day is eighty), outlining what must be done and even attempting a mercilessly rigid charting of his days.

One such chart began:
7:00 – arise
7:01 – go to washroom, make bed
7:05 – carry books to desk and study math. Concentrate.
And on and on, throughout the day, culminating with my favourite command of them all: “Go to sleep.”

Upstairs one confronts a rare and wonderful thing; a home which seems to fit its occupants just right. There’s nothing very flashy or impressive about it. Some things at first seem incongruous – a leaded glass display case built into the mantle contains china hand-painted by Roy’s aunt next to a volume of Uncle Wiggly. The explanation of such arrangements is simple enough. In this house there is no artifice. These are not theme rooms or showcases. What you see are the things they use, the things they value, the things that really matter.

Roy’s father is now living in Parkwood Hospital after a major stroke but his presence in the house is still very tangible, due largely to the many furnishings he has made by hand. His most accomplished piece is a beautiful cedar chest in Mrs. McDonald’s bedroom; as lovely to feel as to look at. The piece perhaps most indicative of the man and his spirit is the handle on their outside gate. Though I watched it closely as I operated its series of latches and levers, I couldn’t begin to tell you how it worked. It was outrageously elaborate and visually captivating; a mechanical hymn to the joys of tinkering and puttering about in a workshop.

Mrs. McDonald’s attitude toward my visit seemed to be one of intrigue and shyness, the latter quality falling away in stages. She didn’t want us going into her bedroom to look at the chest but eventually relented. She didn’t want me to see her original paintings but eventually was bringing them into me by the armload. She didn’t want to interrupt our interview but did so constantly and delightfully. She didn’t want me to see her diary (as proof that the urge runs deep in the family) but eventually dropped it into my lap. In short, Ellen Violet McDonald is tickled pink by Roy’s fame and the two of them share an open and respectful relationship.

Roy’s grand tour has been carefully thought out over the years and he saves his trump card for the grand finale. There was only one place left to go – it was time to see Roy’s bedroom. Two seconds after entering his room, I knew the answer to the question which puzzles hundreds: “But why does he always write in restaurants?” It’s like seeing Miss Havisham’s mansion crammed into a rabbit hutch. It’s like seeing the hotel room made famous by Henny Youngman – a room so tiny he had to step outside to change his mind.

Yellowing newspapers piled up on the bed for weeks have begun to conform to the shape of Roy’s body. One whole corner is crammed with two rows of over-sized files, organized by a system no secretary could penetrate. I pulled out one folder and found Secrets of Masterful Salesmanship sandwiched in next to a list of films which Roy had seen in 1965. Preventing access to the closet is a box of toys which Roy has successfully squirreled away and preserved from his infancy. “Ah boy,” he said, proudly holding forth a wooden Pinocchio pull-toy. “They just don’t make ‘em like this anymore.” Against another wall is a tiny desk that looks as though Roy hasn’t been able to use it for approximately twenty years. Above the writing surface are paper-stuffed wickets, all of them crammed to overflowing, their contents spilling out in the direction of the floor but miraculously held in place by adhesive layers of dust. “Everyone who visits my room gets to select a marble,” said Roy, extending a tin chock full of them.

“Is that to make up for the ones they lose just by setting foot in here?” I asked, selecting a fine, clear aggie. “Roy, let’s get out of here and start the interview. I can’t take anymore.”

We only had about a half hour for the interview before I had to catch the last bus home. I told Roy to try to be concise and to the point and he really tried for about ten minutes but then . . . well, you know Roy. Anyway, it’s all on tape and someday when I’m feeling stronger I might even play it.

Roy escorted me out to the bus stop and while I waited, chain smoking my first cigarettes in almost three hours, Roy told me all the things I’d have to be sure to include in the story. “Carl Jung has been a really big influence. And Albert Schweitzer – his whole conception of the sacredness of life sums up my religious feelings. And somewhere in there I want to thank my friends for their support and their encouragement. They’ll know who they are. And in addition to being a teacher, I’m also a learner. Be sure you . . .”

I’d reached my limit. I tuned him out completely, stopped listening to his words and simply watched his lips move, his beard blow, his nose and cheeks turn bright red as he yammered into the wind and the rain. I nodded my head once every fifteen seconds and kept an eye out for the arrival of the Wellington Road bus. It pulled up, the doors opened, I stepped on, Roy kept talking after me, said goodnight and the doors swung shut.

“Some fella, isn’t he?” asked the driver as I fumbled through my pocket for the fare.

“You bet,” I said.

As the bus began to move, the driver looked closely to his right, studying Roy as he walked along the sidewalk. “You know, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen him without that great heavy bag.”

How do you conclude the ongoing story of the ever-scribbling diarist? I don’t think you ever do. Certainly not until all the evidence is in and Roy is just hitting his stride as London’s foremost compiler of evidence. He may wear me down. I may not be able to plug instantly into all his enthusiasms but I still would not deny that Roy is a very special kind of person and every town should have one; someone who’ll stand back from the blur and the fuss and look longer and deeper at the everyday things that the rest of us take for granted; slowly piling up his insights and transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary through sheer power of observation.      

In the thirty six and a half years since that feature appeared, Roy never produced another book. No volume on Richard Maurice Bucke; no collection of subjective essays. When I was in charge of literary programming at the Forest City Gallery through the mid to late ‘80s, I booked Roy in twice to give readings and was a little appalled when, both times (and I begged him not to do it the second time), he dragged out The Answer Questioned and some other old chestnuts, including an oddly generic love poem to a woman named Rose, that I’d heard a dozen times before and always found banal and cliched. By about 1990 I simply stopped asking about new work and its progress because I could see it was not forthcoming.

Yes, he was apparently still blackening notebooks by the score and about five or six years ago he told me with some pride that UWO had agreed to archive all of his papers but - like the work of J.D. Salinger’s last, lost decades – was any of the stuff he was churning out intended for any sort of public consumption? Or was it all comprised of more diaristic jottings about chatting up coffee shop waitresses and the people he met in walking his London rounds? And did I have any right to be mystified or a little let down by the resounding anticlimax of it all?  If greater expectations were ever in place, did Roy really put them there?

As London’s most visible and widely recognized bohemian of the literary persuasion, Roy had stood four-square against the usual social, domestic and occupational pressures and trappings that can fritter away a writer’s concentration. In withholding all his focus and energies so as to keep his mind clear, he was committing himself to a pretty meagre and lonely life. I had once assumed – or maybe just hoped – that he’d foregone all those pleasures and comforts as part of some larger strategy that would leave him free to pursue some otherwise unattainable pearl of great price. Now I’m more inclined to believe that, no, that was just the way that Roy had to live and he was lucky enough to live in a family and a town and among a circle of friends who helped him get away with it.

Walking my dog in the wee hours of most mornings, we’ll sometimes come across one of those ancient trees that are so substantial and gorgeous that when the folks from the City laid down the sidewalk for that block, they took a little jog with the otherwise arrow-straight pavement so as to accommodate its base and allow it to continue thriving. I didn’t know why at first but Roy McDonald always pops into my mind.