Any judgment of a writer's last book, especially a posthumous one, is bound to be at least partly eulogy. So let me say right out that I knew Paul Quarrington for a long time, though at no point very well. We met in 1984 when, as a young admirer of his quirky baseball novel Home Game, I asked him to write something for the University of Toronto Review, an undergraduate literary magazine. Not only did he give us a piece – a sort of goofy fantasy poem called The Voyage of the Turtle, which I'm pretty sure has never appeared anywhere else – he later invited me for beer at the old Murray's Restaurant on Bloor Street.
As the years passed, we shared drinks a few more times, usually at long intervals, and talked about fishing, whisky, cigars, music and finding the funny. Certain writerly bits of his, like the pickled-egg-eating performance or riff on “sudden-death overtime” in The Life of Hope, are permanent features of my mental lumber room. We only went fishing together once, on Stoney Lake in the Kawarthas, and his reflection in this book that, nearing his end, he's done enough fishing to last him, made me sad. Not enough with me.
Cigar Box Banjo: Notes on Music and Life, by Paul Quarrington, GreyStone Books, 244 pages, $30
I mention all this not just to show what kind of guy he was, though this is indeed the kind of guy he was. But Quarrington – as he'll be here for the sake of formality; in life I always called him Paul Q – was more than just a generous soul. He was, in his shy fashion, a genius at living. Which is also to say, as this heartbreaking and funny book makes amply clear, that he was a genius of life’s end.
The backstory of Cigar Box Banjo – the title refers to the hoary tale of a poor kid who wins a music contest with a homemade instrument – may be familiar. In the midst of his busy creative life (among other things, writing a book about how he came to love playing music), Quarrington was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. He nudged the book over from music memoir to last-days diary without losing the power of either. In fact, the book he produced as a last gift to his many fans is in a category of its own, a layered, rambling, deceptively casual mixture of music history, coming-of-age narrative and reflection on mortality. There's even a CD – it includes versions of the last two songs Paul wrote, both about dying.
The memoir part is in the same vein as Giles Smith's Lost in Music, Nick Hornby's High Fidelity or Joe Pernice's Meat is Murder. For me, it's superior to all of them in the sense that he manages to put a “fifteen-year-old hard-drinking, hard-smoking bluesman from Don Mills, Ontario” into the same teenage-ambition pantheon as aspiring pop stars in Wolverhampton, London or Boston – places with better track records. The resulting suburban rec-room ambience, with the long transit journeys to Sam's to buy one Bob Dylan 45, later played over and over on a hand-me-down turntable and shop-class speakers, is so evocative you can practically feel the runnels in the plywood panelling and smell the Molson-stained shag on the floor.
Like all good memoirs, there are brushes with the later-famous, in this case singer-songwriter Dan Hill and music producer Daniel Lanois, among others. There is also plenty of arcana, especially about the blues, and funny-scary tales from the road when Quarrington was playing with Joe Hall and the Continental Drift and, later, his band Porkbelly Futures. What will be surprising to people who know Quarrington mainly from his novels is how, right to the end, music-making remained his true passion. He makes peace with his written works early on, in an excessively modest way if you ask me, but the desire to compose a really great song never waned.
That sustained him, as music and passion will, even as his time grew ever shorter. The inevitability of death is not usually experienced with such intimacy and directness as this, the diagnosis without respite. But Quarrington found the funny here, too, and he reminds us, and himself, several times of his medical therapist's wisdom that “the tumour hates laughter.” The descriptions of Don Mills fashion sense circa 1975 – the madras shirt, the dickie, the tight red pants – are hilarious, and a one-paragraph takedown of New Country music near the end of the book is as sharp as anything he ever wrote.
Sad, funny and wise – the writer's trifecta. The last word should go to him. Quarrington's description of how he reacted to his diagnosis will double as an account of what reading this book feels like: “The truest thing to say would be that it wasn't a single emotion, it was quite a few of them stumbling into each other to get out, like drunkards in a doorway.” Yes, exactly.
Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. His most recent book, Glenn Gould, recently appeared in Chinese translation.
