Our Times

When I was young, I fell in love with French and Italian music of the 1960s and ’70s through listening to my parents’ cassette tapes from those years. Later, when I got a hold of the song titles through the internet and after I started speaking these languages, I would make CDs of my favourite songs to listen to on my Walkman. I still have some of them in my car, grateful for a car that still has a CD player.

I must sound ancient.

My mom wasn’t always a big fan of these CDs and each time we were in the car together back then, she used to say “Let’s listen to the radio instead.”

‘Why radio?’ I used to protest.

‘Because radio is always alive,’ she would respond with excitement.

I never forgot those words, that radio was alive. Years later, when I turned my great interest in Italian singer-songwriter (cantautore) movement of the ’60s into a radio-documentary and found myself on-air and in radio studios in Vancouver, Milan and Rome, I understood exactly what she meant.

Those few minutes before going on-air – when your technical co-host did a countdown with his fingers and locked eyes with you – those moments of excitement that were accompanied by a huge adrenaline rush, were moments that never lost their novelty no matter how many times you went on-air. It was the kind of feeling that I always assumed theatre actors must have before stepping onto the stage each night, no matter how many times they had done the same play, because the energy of the performance was alive and everything was happening in real time.

Recently, I sat down with my guest Ruth Tschannen as part of a recording of one of my podcast episodes where Ruth shared her poignant account of her near-death experience and how it changed the trajectory of her life. Taking a trip down memory lane, she talked about the role of radio in the Switzerland of her childhood, how she and her brother used to listen to a fairy tale radio broadcast that was on every Tuesday evening and how that experience alone would set her nine year old imagination aflame through the richness of the storytelling and the patience and presence that radio listening required.

Since recording that episode, I have been thinking a lot about radio as a Live medium, thinking of what my mom used to say and picturing young Ruth seated by the radio, enthusiastically visualizing the stories in her imagination…to think that we once tuned in and listened with focused attention to a medium that provided no visual distractions, a medium that required us to be so completely present – because what we were experiencing was all captured in the ‘now’ of that moment – is a thought that has stayed with me.

For me, radio always had a timeless quality to it. I recalled hearing the recording of Neville Chamberlain’s chilling BBC radio address to the nation on September 3^rd, 1939, announcing that Britain was at war with Germany and reading about the critical role the medium played during the Second World War. I also remembered the role of radio in my own childhood during the war, when lights would go out unexpectedly but radios remained on in case there were announcements interrupting all programming to warn: ‘What you are hearing is a danger alarm, please proceed immediately to your refuge area until further notice.’

And then there was the creative platform that the medium offered. From the brilliance of late-night radio theatre that kept many graveyard shift workers company to the long-held tradition of radio symphony orchestras and voices and personalities that became household names. For me this was a trip down memory lane as well, remembering a satirical program my parents used to listen to every Friday morning called ‘Friday Mornings with You’, the theme song of which was the soundtrack of breakfast every Friday. My parents never missed a single episode.

As I grew older, this invisible world became more real through CBC Radio 2 and its classical music programming.  The voices of Eric Friesen (and his unforgettably distinctive “Hello, I am Eric Friesen” at the beginning of Studio Sparks), Shelagh Rogers (Take Five), Tom Allen (Music and Company) and Andy Sheppard (After Hours) during the week and Saturday Afternoons at the Opera that broadcasted Live performances from the Met during the weekends accompanied me on the radio dials of the same Walkman every morning on the way to university and when studying late at night. When I started my first university internship at the provincial government, I heard about the passing of the legendary Peter Gzowski and came to learn so much through the intelligence and enthusiasm of these personalities who kept me company all throughout my 20s.

It was in fact while listening to Tom Allen’s Music and Company one morning on the way to work that I heard him speak with his in-studio guest about the famous house on 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn of the late 1930s, where composer Benjamin Britten and opera singer Peter Pears lived together with the poet W.H Auden, novelist Carson McCullers, and editor George Davis under one roof and created some of their best work collectively. Allen and his guest were talking about a book that had chronicled this period and I remember being so captivated by the story of this house – a house that Anais Nin had coined ‘February House’ because the majority of its occupants were born in February. I remember sitting in the car, in the parking lot across from the Canadian Television studios where I worked, glued to the radio (and risking being late) but not wanting to miss even a minute of this incredible story.

This was back in the early 2000s, before the ease of smart phones and speed searches. I remember being so disappointed not to have caught the name of the book or the author having had to miss the ending of the broadcast to go to work. All I had was the mention of ‘7 Middagh Street’ in Brooklyn, words I held on to as I began my search of what I later found to be the title of Sherill Tippins’ book: February House.

Reading February House had such a profound impact on me that to this day, I’d say it is and remains to be one of the best and most memorable books I’ve read. A few years later, I connected with Sherill, a surreal experience to connect with your favourite author and to tell her how much her work has meant to you.

February House came in to my life at a time when the world was in the grips of another war, the war in Iraq. As a young writer at the time and as someone who remembered living in the midst of a war as a child, the role of artists and writers in times of war was a topic that I thought about often.

And it was thanks to Sherill’s research and moving storytelling that I first read about W.H Auden’s views on the role of writers and artists in times of war, where she wrote about Auden’s questions on ‘what the artist’s role should be in relation to society especially during wartime’ and his discussions with Klaus Mann whose position was that ‘culture could not afford to be impartial.’

As Sherill wrote:

“Auden believed that artists did not belong in the realm of politics – both because they were likely to prove ineffectual and because they had other, separate but equally important, work to do. If this work concerned, as he had suggested, making us ‘more aware of ourselves and the world around us’ so that we might become more difficult for politicians to deceive, then it was the artist’s responsibility to seek out and communicate those truths that could help raise human consciousness toward greater understanding and better actions.” 

In Sherill’s words, to the question of ‘what should I do as a writer?’ Auden (who was being criticized by the likes of George Orwell for having left England during the war) – had said: ‘Write as well and as truthfully as you can’ that ‘the struggle of culture with ignorance and barbarism is continuous and never ending. War, as such, is only a sharp reminder that civilized life is always in greater danger than we realize, and that we have never done as much to maintain it as we could.’

In the same context, Sherill told us how in a letter from E.M Forster sent from London in 1940 to Auden’s friend, Christopher Isherwood, Forster wrote ‘I am sure we are all in for a bad time during the next six months, perhaps for being killed. That’s one of my reasons for not wanting you and Auden back here. Another is that you both must and can carry on civilization.’

Now, all these years later since I read February House, thoughts on the role of writers in times of war and social turmoil have come to the forefront once again, not that they ever went away, but perhaps they have returned with the coating of 18 years of life experience since reading Sherill’s account of Auden’s reflections, asking me if I ever found a firm ground to stand on the topic especially as we continue to witness more wars and grapple with the unknown outcomes of dramatic social changes.

And the one answer that has and continues to make sense to me, is that it is through works of art (in any form) and through stories – real or imagined (which always has an element of the ‘real’) – that we can understand the depth of human condition, understand why people do what they do, see different perspectives and grasp issues from different points of view. That, it is through reading and telling and re-telling of our stories and through becoming witness to our shared humanity and lived experiences that we can guard the sanctity of civilized life.

If, as novelist Elif Shafak says, storytellers are memory keepers, and if tyranny almost always begins by first eliminating the elders, the wisdom keepers, and the guardians of shared stories, then it becomes imperative to safeguard these stories and their keepers and never cease to use our imagination to write, create and share them.

It is in that spirit, that I am re-reading February House (because that’s what you do with books that have impacted you profoundly) and as I pick up my paperback copy this afternoon, leafing through all the pages that I had earmarked back in my 20s, I think of Sherill and how she has enriched my life with her work, her kindness and the gift of her friendship that is now going on its 14th year, while in the background Léo Ferré sings his famous Avec le temps on Ici Musique – the French programming arm of CBC Radio.