Interpreting the urban landscape

>> John Ralston Saul takes a walking tour of St-Henri, and finds hope in language squabbles and squeegee punks

by JACQUIE CHARLTON

John Ralston Saul and I began our walk through St-Henri near the old Coleco toy factory on the banks of the Lachine Canal. The building has been turned into lofts since it shut down its manufacturing operations in the early 1980s, but as recently as a couple of years ago you could go in and see unrenovated walls covered with the small stickers of hockey players used in the manufacture of table-top hockey games, and the noticeably innocent graffiti of a forgotten generation of workers.

The amazing thing about St-Henri is that it was built and populated purely for its factories; at one time, in fact, this place was the heart of the entire Canadian manufacturing industry, source of tin hockey games and fighter jets. What remains, now that each and every factory has closed, is a whole part of town whose residents don't work. Saul must have thought it was an intriguing place too, because he accepted our invitation to a two-hour walking tour through it when he was in town last week.

Saul has something to say about hockey, the signs of Montreal's decline, and a multitude of other bits of Canadiana, in his new book on Canada, Reflections of a Siamese Twin. With hockey, he writes, Canadians don't care so much for the players as the team, though in recent years desperate attempts have been made to rework it as a sport of heroes. So too with a lot of other myths recently imposed on the country that have nothing to do with the reality of what Canadians are.

Neo-liberalism, for one. Our winter and other assorted hardships have made Canadians' predilection for helping each other out innate--despite attempts in recent years to impose absolutes of unfettered free enterprise, economic individualism and blaming the loser if he or she can't keep up. And in a week in which the grand chief of neo-liberalism, Jean Chrétien, refused to meet with a group of ordinary Canadians at a televised Town Hall meeting--one in which he would no doubt have been asked about the losers in the economy--Saul's book is timely indeed.

Saul said he likes walking in the poor neighbourhoods of the cities he visits. The things people see when they travel, he said, are hotels, what's around the hotel, specific hotel services and hotel restaurants. "It's like an international Disneyland," he said, and described his visit to a ghetto in San Antonio, some of whose houses had no running water. He seemed to treat this fact more as an inanity than a shame.

He was very nice, and much less the academic he'd seemed when I met him for an interviewlast summer. He seemed genuinely curious about everything around him, notably the incongruous reptile store on Notre-Dame and the Victorian fountain in Parc St-Henri, with its bizarre, tongue-lolling Native heads in haut relief. He sneered a bit at the Ville-Marie Expressway towering over the rooftops, an example, he said, of the interests of people moving in and out of a city predominating over those of the people in it. "Typical urban landscape," he said, while looking at a barren expanse of train tracks further on. "Empty train tracks and full expressways."

He admitted to loving Montreal. "Montreal has luft--you know, the German word. Paris and London don't have luft. Berlin and New York have luft. It's this quality of making you feel energized instead of exhausted." He attributed it to being next to a mountain, and what it did for the circulation of the air.

From its early days as a village, Saul explained, Montreal has been characterized by tensions between its linguistic and cultural groups. "People think there's something abstractly wrong with this tension. Tension is a fabulous thing! What could be worse than living in a city without tension? The old school anglos and the St-Jean-Baptisters don't realize that Montrealers actually love that tension--the not knowing what's going to be said next in what language."

Montreal's destiny, he said, was as a jumping-off point for the rest of Canada: "All of Canada was created from Montreal's ideas." He explained that what's sent Montreal's vocation so badly off track in recent years is, yes, political uncertainty, but also the artificial north-south reorganization of the economy imposed by treaties like NAFTA. Historically and geographically, says Saul, Canada is suited for an east-west flow--with Montreal as the entrance. In Reflections of a Siamese Twin, he says Montreal is naturally destined for much better things than "a few festivals and a few international organizations" and calls Montreal "potentially a city of our times."

Saul laughed when he heard Mirror photographer Tshi's first idea for a photo: Saul squeegeeing a car windshield. He described a radio talk show he'd heard recently where the topic was squeegee kids. Participants, he said incredulously, debated squeegee kids as if they were some kind of conscious (and highly disconcerting) new social phenomenon, and not just a bunch of kids trying to make ends meet. "It's not a very original idea, but when is someone going to look at what causes them to be there?" he said. "I doubt if any one of them decided when he or she was little, 'I'm going to grow up to be poor and become a squeegee worker.'"

We discussed how he writes his books (longhand, with a black ballpoint pen on legal paper; computers, he said, "are like the Queen's handbag--an encumbrance") and how well he did in school (he did okay, but did nothing more than he had to do). We passed a school and I asked him what he thought about Montreal's high school dropout rate. In the Catholic School Commission the rate is about 45 per cent; in St-Henri's high schools it's been estimated at about 80 per cent. Saul was surprised and sad. "A democratic society simply can't go on working when the education of a large part of its citizens is eliminated." He raised his voice for the first time, and the visible delight he'd had in the visit was gone.