The Sweetness of Life

Twenty-five years ago in Vancouver, an under­ground pub­lish­ing house threw a party in a man­sion in a wealthy neigh­bour­hood of curv­ing streets with no side­walks, to cel­e­brate a new book. The pub­lish­ing house was Pulp Press, fore­run­ner of Arsenal Pulp Press. The man­sion was the rented com­mu­nal home of sev­eral under­paid edi­tors and other friends of under­ground pub­lish­ing; the book was Class Warfare, a col­lec­tion of sto­ries by D. M. Fraser, who was a writer admired for the beauty of his prose and sought after for the plea­sure of his con­ver­sa­tion. Fraser wrote his sto­ries on scraps of paper in seedy beer par­lours and tran­scribed them into gal­leys late at night on the type­set­ting machine in the office of the under­ground pub­lish­ing house, which was sit­u­ated between two down­town beer par­lours and was never locked (dur­ing these sojourns Fraser was often accom­pa­nied by an unem­ployed night watch­man who used to sleep on the fire escape in his uni­form); when the sto­ries were done the gal­leys appeared on the pas­teup table, ready to be printed in the house peri­od­i­cal, a four-page zine called 3-Cent Pulp, where they set a lit­er­ary stan­dard rarely achieved by other mag­a­zines. Fraser’s sto­ries resem­ble musi­cal riffs more than con­ven­tional nar­ra­tive, and sev­eral can be clas­si­fied as fugues or vari­a­tions on a theme: in one of them, writ­ten in 1973, a hair styl­ist inquires rhetor­i­cally: “Have you known the sweet­ness of life, do you remem­ber it?” and goes on to ask, “Have you danced to the gen­tle strains of Pachelbel, in the stilly night? Have you loi­tered till dawn in water­front bars, con­tem­plat­ing the mythic sailors who never appear? Have you ever wanted to be an antelope?” 

The publisher’s party in the man­sion, once the casino sup­plies and the food had been ordered and arrange­ments made with the magi­cian, and the invi­ta­tions printed, came to be known as The Sweetness of Life Party, which was how it was announced on the invi­ta­tion; and per­haps because the invi­ta­tion, which was ele­gantly printed, offered a coun­ter­point to an epoch remem­bered now for the Vietnam War and Wounded Knee and Trudeau’s open-necked shirts, and it was win­ter and it was dull in Vancouver, it became the best-attended lit­er­ary party in the his­tory of the city, and an event that so excited my sister’s ex-boyfriend, an affa­ble and very tall young man, that he arrived early and already intox­i­cated, and he passed out in the vestibule while shak­ing hands with my sister’s new boyfriend and fell flat on the car­pet. More peo­ple came up the stairs and soon a steady stream of peo­ple were try­ing to get through the door and around my sister’s ex-boyfriend, whose body filled up much of the vestibule; finally sev­eral new arrivals helped my sister’s new boyfriend carry her ex-boyfriend down to his car, which was parked against the house, and got him into the back seat and threw a blan­ket over him. 

More peo­ple came into the man­sion: they could be seen park­ing in the street and com­ing along the avenue and they con­tin­ued com­ing in until more than four hun­dred had arrived and no one had left; it seemed impos­si­ble that more could enter but more did, another hun­dred were counted as the rooms and hall­ways and the two stair­cases filled up with peo­ple jammed side to side and all talk­ing at the same time, as my sister’s ex-boyfriend slept peace­fully in the back seat of his car. There was a bar in the kitchen and one in the base­ment and one upstairs; the roulette table was in the liv­ing room, the black­jack tables were upstairs and the poker was in the base­ment. The poker play­ers were fierce men (where did they come from?) who glared fero­ciously at their cards and each other; one approached them cau­tiously, indeed one tried not to approach them at all. When the place was filled up, the move­ment of peo­ple became a glacial tide that surged slowly through the rooms and hall­ways as the music of Pachelbel’s Canon and Satie’s Gymnopedie washed over them, inter­spersed with cow­boy songs of long­ing and hard drink­ing writ­ten by some of the under­paid edi­tors who moon­lighted as under­paid song­writ­ers; in the end no one was crushed and noth­ing was stolen. Handsome men in tuxe­dos lin­gered on the stair­cases and along the hall­ways; they seemed to have mate­ri­al­ized from a dream. The magi­cian was Mandrake, who had inspired the comic strip that many of us remem­bered from child­hood: he had been dis­cov­ered liv­ing in retire­ment in New Westminster and cajoled into com­ing to the party by Jean Paul Cortane, the house anar­chist whose motto was “no rev­o­lu­tion but in laugh­ter.” Mandrake was an ele­gant man, some­what shorter than the comic strip ver­sion, but equally gifted in the art of illu­sion. I met him in the kitchen in a cross-current of bod­ies and he set my cig­a­rette alight by touch­ing it grace­fully with a fin­ger­tip from which shot forth yel­low flame. He per­formed in the liv­ing room mere inches away from his audi­ence, who were astounded by the manip­u­la­tion of the rings and the elab­o­rate shower of coloured scarves. At the end of the per­for­mance, my brother, who was pressed against the wall under the stair­case, heard voices raised in argu­ment com­ing through the wall behind him, which turned out to be a closet door and which then opened, press­ing my brother into the crowd. A man and a woman came out of the closet; they were dishev­elled and angry; they snarled at each other and began slowly to move in oppo­site direc­tions through the crowd: this was the only dis­cor­dant note at the party named for the sweet­ness of life. No one wanted to go home. At two in the morn­ing I went out­side and walked around the enor­mous house. Music throbbed into the cold win­ter night; win­dows pulsed yel­low light into the dark­ness; the side­walks were lined with cars parked for miles in both direc­tions: it was clos­ing time at the beer par­lours and there had been a rumour that the drinkers in at least one of them were plan­ning to show up: there would be nowhere for them to park, and indeed no crash­ers appeared at the door of the man­sion. My sister’s ex-boyfriend was still in his car, uncon­scious in the back seat; he would awake with­out hav­ing tasted the sweet­ness of life. Inside, the Pachelbel played on, and even­tu­ally the crowd thinned out and dancers took over the floor. I found Fraser stand­ing in the mid­dle of the kitchen, with a cig­a­rette and a drink, sur­rounded by friends, tri­umphant in the sweet­ness of our being.