The Heavy Bear

Chapter 3

AS THE EARLY September darkness continued to melt like chocolate around the house, and the world of mortgages and bills and social noise required me once again to enter a classroom and stand at the head of it, I put on my Buster Keaton deadpan mask in order to hide my mounting anxiety, in order to keep the cornered animal from snarling and lashing out. Meanwhile, the encounter with the little comedian kept returning me to my own beginnings, as if some ur-projectionist had reversed the reel.

I spent my entire childhood in the same small bungalow, literally a stone’s throw from the banks of a great river, the wild, 850-mile-long Fraser. My immediate family – parents, two much older brothers and a slightly older sister – made a subsistence income in the salmon fishing industry. It was not as unusual a profession as vaudeville, perhaps, but it was unusual enough and afforded a certain amount of freedom from the nine-to-five rat race, which, in the 1960s and early 1970s on the west coast, didn’t seem like much of a race. Our town was gull-haunted, sleepy, steeping under the lunar changes and the persistent rains like an ever-darkening tea bag. The neighbourhood I grew up in was the most haunted, condensed part of that intensifying darkness. Within a few blocks of my house, in every direction, lay ruins of some kind: stove-in fishboats and moss-sagged net sheds along the river; a whole row of empty, condemned shops on the little main street; at least five crumbling two-storey houses from the Georgian past, abandoned after being bought up by real estate companies waiting patiently for an upturn in the economy that never seemed to approach; and, believe it or not, a mile in the opposite direction, an entire vegetable canning factory filled with silent, greasy machines just waiting for a ghostly hand from Hollywood’s silver age to set them in motion again.

My entire childhood world was a Buster Keaton film set, circa 1924. When I look back on it, and imagine the sunlight and the flowering abandoned orchards that had been planted by the pioneers who had built the abandoned houses – all those plum and pear, cherry and apple trees thriving in forgetfulness along with the untended blue-joint grass and the great coal-smoke blackberry bushes – everything quickly becomes black and white and intensely silent. When I see myself, either in memory or in the photographs so rarely taken at the time because to develop them cost money that our family couldn’t spare, I was a serious child, even in play – especially in play. As Keaton himself routinely remarked about his legendary deadpan, “I was concentrating so hard that I wasn’t even aware that I wasn’t smiling.” Between our town’s one flaking totem pole with the rain-gnawed raven, bear and raccoon, and the grey, pyramidal, granite World War I cenotaph with, ironically enough, the names of two Aboriginal soldiers engraved on the sides, I lived the five years of my greatest innocence and watched the ten years of Buster Keaton’s most inspired genius.

That the man himself, in the fall of 1964, so close to his own material death, should approach within a few miles of that perfect film set and of the infant who would perform on it seemed at once eerie and joyous. It was as if he had arrived to direct successive generations in the art of the tragic vision, and his most inspired directorial touch was to withdraw.

Fighting sleep, drinking coffee, I saw him there again, outside of the image on the screen – I saw the real man. No, I see him. He’s both young and handsome and old and drink-ravaged, and he’s looking through the complicated camera of every blue heron set up in the marsh, standing on the rusted rails of the tracks that still ran through town to the riverbank but no longer carried any trains, hovering in his huge mime’s face over the slack tide and those sleepers in the houses who, as children, would have watched his films when they first appeared, back before Hollywood had the bureaucratic bit firmly in its glittering mouth. I was not a religious man. I believed in a human fate in human hands – and yet the image of Buster Keaton on the edge of my childhood came close to a vision of God. It was right that this should be so, for what is a vision of God if it isn’t an acknowledgement of life’s gravity and an intense avowal to keep the faith? Every day in North America life is sold to us as a trivial, passing entertainment, and death as a horror whose spiritual and emotional meanings are to be avoided at all cost.

I would not buy the trivia and I could not turn my eyes from the horror. Keaton was making cold laughter out on the tracks and in the marshes, in the attic rooms of abandoned houses. He was the god of the black and white, of silence, and he was approaching even as he withdrew – like a more famous god of the human imagination, he was visible nowhere but present everywhere. No, but wait – he is visible. There he is, on the side of Mr. Atkey’s house in the summer of 1969. He is a spoiled rich boy somehow alone with a spoiled rich girl on an ocean liner somehow floating out to sea at night. And that ocean liner floats straight off the side of the house and onto the Fraser River, and drifts past the silt islands in the mouth where the lumber baron, H. R. MacMillan, once entertained Keaton’s even more celebrated peers, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, for pheasant-shooting parties.

There could no longer be any disbelief: Keaton was the god of time and art, and he was as cruel and merciful as the most credible of gods. I placed my bare neck on the altar. While I did not smile, my whole body prepared to laugh.