How Renaissance came to be, Part I

When I was in high school, I lived in Mississauga, a train or a bus and a subway away from downtown Toronto. Mississauga was safe and suburban. Toronto was exciting. As I began to gain more freedom from my protective parents, I found myself prowling the St. Lawrence Market area of Toronto. I ate alone at The Old Spaghetti Factory. I wandered the market and a store called Frida’s that smelled of patchouli and had white cotton nightgowns and weavings from India. I bought a bell pull made of fabric chickens. And I took myself off to the movies alone too – to see the movie A Room With A View. This movie is the story of the awakening of a sheltered proper girl with masses of dark brown hair and a waspish waist, who felt peevish after playing Beethoven. The girl’s name was Lucy Honeychurch but she might as well have been me in so many ways, unchaperoned at last in the big city, feeling my newfound freedom. Lucy begins as a sheltered young girl visiting Florence with her peevish maiden cousin. And then Italy and George Emerson work their magic on her, and she loosens up, and she sees a man die in front of her, and she is seized in a meadow on a hillside and is kissed. I can’t express how much I loved this movie. It was funny – the subtitles! – and charming and the awakening happened in the fields around Florence.

I went to the prom that year, not in a satin or silk dress, but in a longish white cotton skirt with layers of seams on it, folds sewn down, and a white cotton blouse, with lace edging. My only concession to it being the mid-80s was that I wore the outfit with Madonna-like white lace tights on my legs and white shoes. But I felt like I was Lucy Honeychurch, or that I was approximating her.

In English class that year we had to do independent studies, and I chose to do the works of E.M. Forster, the author who first wrote Lucy Honeychurch into being. His motto, repeated in his books, tattooed itself into my life: only connect.

It was Forster who introduced me to Florence, to humour, to male nudity in the sacred lake, to Art and Life and Beauty in their capitalized glory. He taught me to be kind and real but also to shun conventionality when it wanted to hold me back, to listen deeply to myself.

In the editor’s introduction to A Room with a View, Oliver Stallybrass writes that of E.M. Forster’s six novels, “A Room with a View has, if not the longest gestation period (a distinction claimed by A Passage to India), at least the most complicated pre-natal history.” I’m tickled at the metaphor and also at the parallels to the long gestation of my own book. Forster began making notes in the winter of 1901-2 and published the novel in 1908. (At least mine is not like the novel written by one of Forster’s characters whose life work “was carried away by a landslip” leading her “tempted into cigarettes.”)

Fast-forward twenty years… (to be continued)