The Age of Cities (24 page)

4.
In search of a prompt from the text, I discovered the single circumstance of words circled in pencil, apparently by the author. In the manuscript's second chapter, “J[une 19]59,” Alberta envisions the Fraser delta “before the age of cities.” The final four words are heavily circled in the manuscript.

5.
Then again, there is evidence to support another interpretation. There's the uncharacteristic brevity of the work to consider as well as the absence of elements that typically accompany a realist narrative (a detailed history of incidents from the childhood and adolescence of the central characters, for example). While somewhat reminiscent of the conclusion of Nathanael West's Hollywood exposé,
The Day of the Locust
(1939), the sudden appearance of “choppy” episodic scenes toward the close of the final chapter are suggestive of an incomplete (if near to being whole) novel.

6.
Derrill Dobkins, Certified Graphologist, was the past president of the Ontario Chapter of the International Graphoanalyst Society. He graciously offered me the number of an American counterpart, Marlyse Winterbourne of Enid, Oklahoma, whose experience with police investigations is, Dobkins said, the stuff of IGS legend.

7.
The last, truly desperate measure was a weekend trip to Tina's Trash & Treasures. The coarse woman my student had described proved unhelpful yet again. She could not recall the specific volume, nor give me an estimate of the point of origin for the boxes of books in which it had be found. She did inform me that her “scrounger” traveled throughout the Valley and spent weekends in Vancouver flea markets. In short, the book could have come from an estate sale in tony Point Grey or a swap meet held at a farm in Matsqui.

8.
“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice
: 148.

9.
“Fiction (1940-1960)” in
Literary History of Canada
: 207.

10.
A History of Canadian Literature
: 150-156.

11.
“Fiction (1940-1960)” in
Literary History of Canada
: 207.

12.
Ibid: 210.

13.
See “The Writer and His Public 1920-1960” in
Literary History of Canada
: 20.

14.
See Dickinson's chapter, “Critical Homophobia and Canadian Canon-Formation” in
Here is Queer: Nationalisms, Sexualities, and the Literatures of Canada,
especially 69-78. Dickinson makes frequent reference to Robert K. Martin's essay, “Sex and Politics in Wartime Canada: The Attack on Patrick Anderson.”

15.
While scholars take note of both Sinclair Ross's
As For Me and My House
(1941) and Ernest Buckler's
The Mountain and the Valley
(1952) as novels that have “rich, though generally unacknowledged, homoerotic subtexts” (Tom Hasting “Gay and Lesbian Writing,”
Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada
: 419), Scott Symons'
Combat Journal for Place d'Armes
(1967) is generally regarded as the first novel to represent gay sexuality as a having a full cultural complement. Tom Warner's history of queer activism in Canada,
Never Going Back,
anchors the appearance of the first openly lesbian and gay themes in film, theatre, visual art and literature in the early 1960s.

16.
“Terminal Note” in
Maurice:
240.

17.
In
The Trouble with Normal,
Mary Louise Adams defines normalization as being an important aspect of moral regulation, “the social and political project of rendering ‘natural' the perspectives and ideologies of hegemonic interests” (14).

18.
A.C. Penta.
Best Sellers.
September 1, 1965: 222.

19.
Compare E.M. Forster's “Terminal Note” in the typescript of
Maurice:
there's been a change in attitude in England, he observes, “from ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt” (240).

20.
Never Going Back:
43.

21.
Never Going Back:
17. And codified in law and medical discourse. Warner notes that
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
first published in 1952, lists homosexuality as a sexual deviation—and can be located in the manual's “Sociopathic Personality Disturbances” section (24).

22.
The unpublished translation poses its own questions. Is the translation the author's own or was he part of a social circle that included, for instance, a classics professor (or even a high school teacher at a tradition-minded private school) who not only provided a fresh take, but then gave it to the author for his novel's epigraph?

Then there is the question of the reference itself. While there is divided critical opinion of the intent of the ostensible farming manual of Publius Virgilius Maro (b. 70 B.C.), it is clear that the excerpt—related to the conservation of the strength of a farmer's flock that comes with isolating the afflicted animal—was chosen because it relates to the protagonist's dilemma. Avoiding love's “negative potential” (Putnam, Michael C.J. Virgil's
Poem of the Earth:
199) and the chaos that emotion can bring to the social order, then, has obvious implications that reach far into the story of Winston Wilson.

23.
These speculations do not provide a satisfactory answer at all. It remains impossible to determine the author's social standing, level of education, or personal affiliations. For all one knows, the author might have been a Home Economics teacher with time on her hands, an avid appetite for literature and a burning desire to write a novel. It is tempting to believe that one of Canada's west coast modernists, Sheila Watson, filled those sheaves with her words. During WW II Watson taught high school in the most likely real-world counterpart to River Bend City, Mission, B.C. Unless she underwent to radical shift of themes and style, though, the manuscript could not have come from her hand.

24.
Historical Novels:
7.

25.
The English Historical Novel:
4.

26.
“Fragment”: 176.

27.
Maurice:
vi.