Copyright Ruth Seeley
This blog was never intended to be personal ramblings. The next entry was to have been about a series of four Canadian historical fictions I’ve read recently. But that one will have to wait. And in a way, this entry is about books. More precisely it’s about the connections we form with fellow readers, particularly if they share our very precise taste in literature.
Just over two years ago, I saw my friend Colin Krivy when he was in Vancouver at the outset of a cross-Canada cycling trip. He’d quit his Ontario government job, rented his house in Toronto, arranged for someone to look after his dog, and had decided that after he cycled across Canada he was going to become a teacher and writer. He wasn’t sure where he was going to do his education degree – admissions were tight in Ontario, and he was considering going to school in Australia as well, depending on where he was accepted.
For five or six months I had been trying to track down a phone number or an email address for his father, because it just didn’t seem like Colin not to have got in touch for so long. His first email from the road came from Merritt, but that was early days and pre Roger’s Pass, so I thought he might have been using his rest days to actually rest rather than rush to the closest internet café to email us. Then too, I had moved in September of 2004 and had a different email address – and had messed up my sending out the notification of it, managing to get both my email address and my new phone number wrong. But something had been nagging at me, and that’s why I was trying to track down his dad. I missed Colin, and I had been reading a lot of wonderful books recently, including some new-to-me Australian authors like Tim Winton and Joy Dettman, and I wanted to talk to him about them, find out if he was in Australia, and get him to send me hot young Aussie author recommendations if he was.
On Monday, July 31, 2006, having become increasingly concerned by the fact that I hadn’t heard from Colin in more than two years, I ‘googled’ him, only to discover that he had died two years and 20 days earlier, only 10 days into his cycling trip. Hit by a car about an hour’s drive northeast of Calgary, he never regained consciousness, and died July 11, 2004 at Calgary’s Foothills Hospital.
And so….
The day I met Colin he was 26, and engrossed in Martin Amis’s London Fields in the lunchroom at the Ontario Court of Appeal. I had already read it and asked him if he was enjoying it. He launched into a dissertation on Amis's brilliance. I said I'd found London Fields rather turgid. One of his lovely arched eyebrows shot up, and I could see no one had warned him about me, even though he’d been one of the job’s unique selling points ('we have a playwright on staff' was the phrase used. ‘When would you like me to start?’ I’d asked.). After that we were off and running, with me making my usual claim that Amis's first novel, The Rachel Papers, was actually one of his best works and in many ways the best male 'rites of passage' novel written since J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Like me, I don’t think Colin had encountered too many people since leaving university who read literature as if we were still working hard on our undergraduate degrees.
I'm not sure if Colin gave up on Martin Amis before he got to his autobiography, Experience, a book I found profoundly affecting. I hadn't realized it dealt so intensively with Amis's relationship with his father, Kingsley. I was reading it in Montreal at a difficult time in my life and immediately prior to the anniversary of my father's death. I found it very touching, and it was enough to make me continue reading Amis at least up to Yellow Dog. But Colin had given up on Amis after Night Train I think. I had given it to him in hardcover for his birthday one year, knowing he would be thrilled. Sadly, it was terrible, and when he asked me if I had read it prior to giving it to him (a terrible habit I acquired while working in a bookstore, the art of reading a book and leaving no trace), I had to confess that yes, I had, and that I didn't think he was going to like it. And he didn't. But that was nothing compared with his fury with Time's Arrow, the one that's written backwards. He had tossed it in the back seat of his car and refused to even try to finish it. I borrowed it and read it. When I returned it to him I gently explained that the secret was to start at the end of each chapter and read upwards and backwards, from end of chapter to beginning, rather than down and forwards. I think he actually snorted when I said this - he had had it with Amis's pyrotechnics. I had always said I was on Julian Barnes' side in the Amis/Barnes brouhaha, and I think Colin eventually came to agree with me that there was more substance in Barnes' work and a whole lot more flash in Amis's.
Among the many literary connections we had in addition to Amis was Gabriel Garcia Marquez, after whom he named his dog. As soon as he told me he'd got a dog and named her Gabby, I asked if he'd named her after Marquez. I think he was relieved that someone actually got it on the first go.
Gabby was a lovely dog, and the bond between her and Colin was touching to witness. He worried about her being alone all day while he was at work, and hired a dog walker to take her out in the middle of the day when she was a puppy. But years after Gabby was more than capable of spending the day on her own, Colin, at great personal expense, continued to pay the dog walker because he knew that she and Gabby had bonded, and he was afraid Gabby would miss her. He brought Gabby over to my house one day, along with a treat, an enormous pig’s ear which she delicately devoured on my living room rug. She ate it silently and ferociously, and I was mesmerized by her intensity. When it was time to give her some water, Colin surprised me by whipping out a stainless steel dog water bowl. I pointed out that I had bowls, but Colin would never have presumed that I’d be willing to use one of my bowls as a dog-watering dish. Later that day, Colin gave me a ride somewhere, and as Gabby and I waited in the car while he went into the Harbord Bakery, it became apparent to me that I was a poor substitute for the love of her life. She was polite to me, she was even relatively attentive. But she wanted Colin back, and she kept up a low keening and her eyes firmly fixed on the bakery entrance until he reappeared.
Colin and I both loved Peter Carey, and I think we agreed Oscar and Lucinda was our favourite (although I may have made a case for The Tax Inspector just to be difficult once). We adored Ian McEwan - well - we both aspired to write something a tenth as good as Atonement. Nancy Huston was a Canadian ex-pat author living in France of whom I had never heard - Colin was particularly taken with her collection of stories, Slow Emergencies, which I read on his recommendation. I remember getting an email from him about The Corrections at a time when I knew nothing about the whole Oprah fuss regarding Jonathan Franzen’s refusal to allow his novel to become an Oprah pick. I misunderstood what he'd said and emailed back to say I had actually had trouble finishing it and what did he think was so good about it. He replied pertly, "I didn't say it was good - I said that it had made me laugh out loud in parts." He gave me a dispensation on reading Don DeLillo’s Underworld - I made three valiant efforts and he encouraged me to give it up. He knew I’d read and appreciated White Noise and Libra, and that I wasn’t giving up on DeLillo as an author. I think the fact that Colin was a baseball fan made Underworld far more bearable for him than for me. That was the only spectator sport he enjoyed watching on TV, and in fact he often didn’t bother having the cable connected. I was always startled and slightly in awe of Colin’s willingness to cut his losses with books he wasn't enjoying – and he in turn found it odd that I would always try to plod through them once I'd started them. I also remember discussing the Cracker series with him - I had cable at the time and was able to watch the series every week - and I remember excitedly telling him about the scene between Coltrane and the priest in one episode and declaring that it was the best writing for television I'd ever seen. I had always intended to get the series on videotape or DVD for him, because I knew he'd seen them sporadically and out of sequence.
I gave him a copy of David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars, or loaned him my copy. It was very much a book I’d bought for the cover and opening paragraph – I hadn’t read any reviews of it and it was his first novel. But it was a rewarding read for both of us.
Having read Roddy Doyle's Barrytown trilogy (The Snapper, The Van and The Commitments) and of course Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha, I got us tickets to hear Doyle at Convocation Hall in Toronto. Colin was the only person I knew in Toronto who would willingly accompany me to readings. Doyle read from The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. We were both impressed by his unassuming manner and his matter of fact transformation from rather ordinary teacher of geography to amazing novelist - Doyle gave us both hope.
Colin was an inveterate writer of letters to the editor, and of opinion pieces for the back page of The Globe and Mail's front section, the same page on which the Social Studies column appears. He often emailed me the links to his pieces when they appeared and the last one he sent was about the absurdity of bridge becoming a potential Olympic sport - we were in absolute agreement that one must distinguish between a game and a sport. One of these essays resulted from an encounter he and Gabby had had in the park near the house he’d bought in the east end of Toronto. Gabby had had to go to obedience school because she was just too fond of joggers in the park – she would leap on them with her muddy paws and Colin realized this just wasn’t appropriate behaviour. When he called me to tell me she’d graduated, he made a point of saying that she was the smartest dog in the class – and there was not a trace of self mockery in his voice when he said this. I had to stifle a giggle – he was dead serious and there was no reason for me to believe it was merely a proud human companion talking and that his conclusion regarding her brilliance wasn’t objective. Gabby’s behaviour may have been modified, but her general friendliness wasn’t, and one of the people they encountered turned out to be none other than one of Colin’s heroes, the brilliant Canadian actor, playwright, and novelist Ann-Marie Macdonald. He didn’t realize who she was until after they’d talked in the park, and he wrote a charming essay about their encounter for The Globe and Mail.
It was very strange to read one of Colin's letters to the editor about circumcision on the net after reading of his death. It was one of the ones he hadn't shared with me. It was very 'him' - iconoclastic, witty, well reasoned, and strongly worded. Here's a taste of his style: “...to assert that to have the procedure done is tantamount to torture is just plain offensive. Jews have been circumcising their male children for thousands of years. And believe it or not, we’re not all physically, sexually and psychologically scarred because of it.”
I am glad, after Colin told me Jewish people feel very much at loose ends on Christmas Day and tend to stay home eating cold pizza, that I started inviting him to my low-key Christmas celebrations. He was only able to make it once. I made a kugel for him, the first one I'd ever made, and he was suitably gratified by the pantheistic culinary effort. The following year he was in Florida visiting his grandparents, and then I myself left Toronto. I am also glad that I once hugged him really really hard, almost sending him through the plate glass window of a bookstore. More than anything else, I am glad that the last time I saw him I had nothing but good things to say to him about the new course he'd crafted for his life. I just had no idea it would kill him, and so soon.
In the last few years of his life, Colin was writing mostly prose rather than drama, and the last story he sent me was about a woman who habitually left the keys to her house in the door. The tension between her husband and herself was delicately depicted, centring around her absent-mindedness and its implications for their relationship. Like Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby, she was careless in a way that her husband worried would cause harm to others. As it turned out, she herself was murdered as a result of leaving her keys in the lock. It's hard, in hindsight, not to view the bleakness present in this work as foreshadowing of his own untimely death.
Colin Stuart Krivy
February 23, 1967 to July 11, 2004
Rest in peace, Coli-baba.
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