Literary Blog Hop: Feb 2-5

 

The Literary Blog Hop is a fortnightly event held at The Blue Bookcase prompting book bloggers to answer a question.

What setting (time or place) from a book or story would you most like to visit? Eudora Welty said that, “Being shown how to locate, to place, any account is what does most toward making us believe it…,” so in what location would you most like to hang out?

This question is more difficult than it seems.  I don’t like when local settings are described in too much details, but I like to feel the atmosphere of a place at a certain time. 

I think that ideally, I would like to be in the place described in the book I am reading at the moment.  I think it can enhance the reading experience.  For instance, I thought it gave more atmosphere to The Cousin, by John Calabro, to read it when I was in Italy.  However, I wonder if that might not also reduce to power of the imagination.  Reading is about interpreting language and perhaps knowing too much about where it comes from might spoil that liberty we are given when reading.  I suppose both reading experiences have their appeal.

Since I discovered Margaret Atwood’s works, I have wanted to visit Canada (even more than before).  As you might have guessed by now I am passionate about her writing, but also about the life she led while growing up and the myth she embodies.  Significantly, Atwood says that locations are at the origin of her writing.  This might partly explain my growing desire to visit those places. 

When I went to Canada last June, I was both visiting a real place, but also an imaginary world created through writing.  Quite often, I associated these places to specific stories.  My favourite experience was going to Ward’s Island in Toronto, which is one of the settings of “Isis in Darkness” (as well as The Robber Bride).  As I was taking the ferry, the narrator was sitting next to me on his search for Selena.  Like him, I went looking for her house.  Which one could be Selena’s house?  In the same story, the Bohemian Embassy is also mentioned and it is a place I would like to have seen.  However, the story is set a few decades ago.  I will never be able to experience the Toronto of the late 50s when Margaret Atwood did her first reading in the Bohemian Embassy.  I can still imagine it though…

Is this Selena's house?

You can see my posts on my trip to Canada in the June 2010 archives.  Quite often I have related the place to a piece of writing.  I am still in the process of writing those posts and I am writing the one on Ward’s Island at the moment, but I have already posted the one on the Bohemian Embassy.  I know it is taking me a long time to write that travel diary, but, at least, I get to visit the place a second time!

Canada 2010: Toronto – Wards Island

On that glorious sunday, I set to go to Ward’s Island.  This was the place I wanted most to see and the one I preferred in Toronto.  As I had not been to Kensington market and also wanted to visit a couple of bookshops on Bloor and Bathurst Streets, I decided to go for a little wander first. 

Church on Bloor Street

I left from Yonge Street, walked up to Bloor Street and walked west until I reached Bathurst.  I, of course, stopped a few times to visit some bookshops and ended up with a heavy bag to carry around with me all day.  Some parts of Bloor Street were nice, with a bit of activity, but others were too quiet and so was Bathurst Street.  I like to find a buzz in a city; otherwise it reminds me of those boring and depressing Sundays in France (I used to hate them!). 

Kensington market area on a sunny sunday

I was then happy to arrive to Nassau Street and get closer to Kensington market.  The buzz was there, it was sunny and people were happy.  I stopped for a bit of food, enjoying the heat and looking at passers-by. 

Stall in Chinatown

After a walk around the streets of Kensington market and Chinatown – and a couple of stops in shops I must admit – I jumped in a street car that took me to Harbourfront  where I caught a ferry to Ward’s island.

On the ferry to Ward's Island

You might think it is a strange choice to go to Ward’s Island rather than Centre Island, which is usually favoured by tourists.  Ward’s Island is one of the two inhabited parts, Algonquin island being the other, and I had been told how chaming it was.  I also wanted to see where Richard from Margaret Atwood’s “Isis in Darkness” went to look for Selena – it is also where Charis from The Robber Bride lives.

View of the city from Ward's Island

“One day he bought a bottle of Italian red wine and took the ferry over to Wards Island.  He knew Selena lived over there.  That at least had been in the poems.

He didn’t know what he intended to do.  He wanted to see her, take hold of her, go to bed with her.  He didn’t know how he was going to get from the first step to the last.  He didn’t care what came of it.  He wanted.

He got off the ferry and walked up and down the small streets of the island, where he had never been.  These were summer homes, cheap and insubstantial, white clapboard or pastel, o sided with insulbrick.  Cars were not permitted.  There were kids on bicycles, dumpy women in swimsuits taking sunbaths on their lawns.  Portable radios played.  It was not what he’s had in mind as Selena’s milieu.  He thought of asking someone where she lived – they would know, she’d stand out here – but he didn’t want to advertise his presence.  He considered turning around, taking the next ferry back.

Then, off at the end of the streets, he saw a minute one-storey cottage, in the shade of two large willows.  There had been willows in the poems.  He could at least try.

The door was open.  It was her house, because she was n it.  She was not at all surprised to see him.

. . .

She led him to a stone breakwater overlooking the lake, and they sat on it and ate the sandwiches.  She had some lemonade in a milk bottle; they passed it back and forth.  It was like a ritual, like a communion; she was letting him partake.  She sat cross-legged, with sunglasses on.  Two people went by in a canoe.  The lake rippled, threw off glints of light.  Richard felt absurd and happy.”  (“Isis in Darkness” from Wilderness Tips)

Could this be Selena's house?

In the first half of the 20th century, Toronto Islands used to be a place where the city dwellers would have a summer home and come to escape the summer heat.  However, in the 30s, some of the homes on Hanlan’s point were destroyed to build the airport.  Later, in the 50s, the land was transferred to the Metro Parks Department and homes were slowly demolished to transform the islands into a park because of flooding problems.  Atwood refers to this in an unpublished story called “Ménage à Trois”, which can be found at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library (MS 200, Box 95, Folder 4).  Some inhabitants opposed this decision, but by 1970, only 250 homes – on Wards and Algonquin Islands – remained.  A long fight ensued before the islanders were finally granted the right to stay there and keep their homes, provided that they were living there full-time if I am not mistaken.  This is a condensed summary, but you can read more about it here and here. 

Street signs on Wards Island

I loved going around the “streets” of these two islands.  The habitations are really different on each island.  On Ward’s island, these are mostly small colourful cottages, while on Algonquin’s island the houses were definitely more upmarket.  I kept asking myself which one could have been Selena’s house. 

Houses on Algonquin Island

I stopped for a cold drink in the garden of the Rectory Café, which was built in 1948 and survived the demolitions.  It was lovely to sit there browsing through my new books.

Not where I got my books from, but I found this swapping spot quite original

Being there allowed me to take a breath of fresh air.  I sat on the beach looking at this beautiful lake…

Bird an boat watching on Lake Ontario

I also noticed many cats chilling in gardens and on the “roads”.  It must be a paradise for them with so few cars around.  Animals are a great ice-breaker as they provided me with an opening to start chatting with a few islanders.  I ended up walking with one of them who told me a bit about the islands.

Cat lying on the road

I unfortunately had to leave, but I know I will come back.  I might even treat myself with a couple of nights on the island next time I’m in Toronto.  When I got back to the ferry dock, the sun was setting on the city.  It was beautiful!

City skyline in the sunset

 

Canada 2010: Toronto – Yorkville

Zanzibar, Yonge St

I was lucky to meet an acquaintance when I was in Toronto.  She brought me to Remy’s in Yorkville, an area I hadn’t been to yet (unfortunately, I didn’t take any pictures).  She explained to me that this was the area where you could find literary cafés in the 60’s and 70’s, unfortunately these have disappeared.  As another friend in Toronto remarked, the only building (institution) remaining from these times in this area is the Zanzibar, a strip club on Yonge Street…  Sad…

Yorkville has now become a “hip” shopping area; certainly nice for its cafés with rooftop patios, but not what it must have been.  Back in the days, the area was the centre of the hippie generation (you can see a CBC feature on Yorkville and the hippie culture in the 60’s here)  and it saw the birth of literary cafés in the vein of the Bohemian Embassy, a place where many Canadian artists, such as Margaret Atwood or Gwendolyn McEwen, made their debuts in the early 60’s.  At the time, the Bohemian Embassy was located at 7 St. Nicholas Street, I passed not far from there but was not then aware of where it used to be located so I did not make the detour.  If you want to learn more about the Bohemian Embassy, you can read the book written by its founder, Don Cullen, and I’ve also just discovered that a documentary was made about it.

Atwood mentions the Bohemian Embassy in one of her short stories, “Isis in Darkness”.  The story, which is often thought to be a tribute to Gwendolyn MacEwen, is concerned with the rise and fall of a female poet discovered by the main character, Richard, at the Bohemian Embassy in the 60’s, when he was also trying to break through as a poet.  The description she makes of this coffee-house is faithful to the one she gives in interviews (that espresso machine seems to have been quite traumatic!).  Here is an extract of “Isis in Darkness”:

“He met her on a Tuesday night, at the coffee-house.  The coffee-house, because as far as Richard knew there was not another one like it in Toronto.  It was called The Bohemian Embassy, in reference to the anti-bourgeois things that were supposed to go on in there, and to a certain extent did go on.  It sometimes got mail from more innocent citizens who had seen the listing in the phone book and thought it was a real embassy, and were writing about travel visas.  This was a source of hilarity among the regulars, of whom Richard was not quite one.

The coffee-house was on a little cobbled side-street, up on the second floor of a disused warehouse.  It was reached by a treacherous flight of wooden stairs with no banister; inside, it was dimly lit, smoke-filled, and closed down at intervals by the fire department.  The walls had been painted black, and there were small tables with checked cloths and driping candles.  It also had an espresso machine, the first one Richard had ever seen.  This machine was practicaly an icon, pointing as it did to other, superior cultures, far from Toronto.  But ut had its drawbacks.  While you were reading your poetry out loud, as Richard sometimes did, Max behind the coffee bar might turn on the machine, adding a whooshing, gurgling sound effect, as of someone being pressure-cooked and strangled.”