conversations with the dead

a message from beyond the grave from my old friend stuart mclean

Photo by Drew Tilk on Unsplash

There are a handful of people with whom I keep in almost daily touch, engaging in long, involved, at times comfortingly repetitive conversations, irrespective of the fact that they are dead.

One of them is my old friend the late broadcaster Stuart McLean who died of cancer a few years back at the age of 68, which is old enough not to be totally tragic, except that for me, it was. Mostly because I hadn’t seen him in over a year. I heard from my father he’d been diagnosed and was receiving treatment and I just… pretended it wasn’t happening.

He can’t die. He doesn’t even eat saturated fat, plus I just had a baby, I remember thinking, in a fit of deranged myopia. (Massive head smack of a lesson learned.) Here he is at my first wedding contemplating the second-last oyster:

Stuart was a wonderful friend and also an extremely weird one. He was a mentor to countless young artists (musicians, performers and editors mostly, he launched dozens of brilliant careers), but not really to me. At least not as a writer. He was too brutal. I suspect it was because, like him, I started in soft-journalism and moved into books. It’s also possible I wasn’t very good at the time, or at least not as good as I could be or would be, and both of us knew it.

When my first novel came out I remember proudly presenting him with a signed copy in his house — a modernist industrial barn-style building at the end of a dead end alley in Kensington Market. He read the inscription and the first page, then smiled and nodded, closed the book and never opened it again. Months later when I mustered up the courage to ask him why he looked confused, as if he’d forgotten I’d written a book at all.

Then his face brightened. “Oh I remember!” he said, “too many adverbs.”

He was right of course.

He did, however, give me lots of strategic advice on other work stuff. Having battled the CBC for years (they never did manage to get him to sign a contract) he was something of a copyright retention legend. His first rules for creators were as follows: “1) Don’t sign anything. 2) Avoid professional contact with lawyers.” I’m not sure this wisdom even made sense at the time — Stuart was an anomaly — but thinking of it still makes me laugh. in part because he hisses it in my ear every time I’m signing a contract or talking to a lawyer.

Stuart was (and is) funny and wise but in reality he was nothing like the folksy, garrulous Garrison Keeler-type-persona he channelled in his hit radio show, The Vinyl Cafe. If you’re not aware of his work, watch a bit of this clip below and you’ll get an immediate sense of why he was so adored by audiences across North America (he did a couple of British tours too). His delivery is both soothing and giddy, a kind of subtle Jedi-mind trick of cadence and gesture. Like many great performers he was master hypnotist.

On stage and public radio he channeled a kind of wide-eyed self-deprecating earnestness to great effect (as well as fame and fortune), but in person he was like a hard-drinking pixie crossed with wry Buddhist monk. He was unapologetically sweary and could be oddly dissociative in social situations. Stuart was the only person I know who took enormous pleasure in the creation of awkward silences. He would just let them “hang,” and watch the people around him squirm, waiting, with a look of open curiosity, to see what happened next. It was agonising, then creepy, then funny and finally an endearing quality, especially in a celebrity. Like his brutal honesty, it took some getting used to.

Back when I was a newspaper columnist I remember once fretting about some minor editorial disagreement with my editor and he said, out of nowhere, “You know you’re already fired, right?”

“What?” I said, startled.

“Unless you win the lottery or write a bestseller, no one quits a national column so you’re already fired. Just remember that kid.”

“Remember what?”

“You just need to process it in advance, because it’s already done. You have to think like a mobster. The moment you feel the cool steel barrel of the gun against the back of your head — and you will feel it — don’t resist. Instead surrender. Don’t think ‘Oh fuck!’ but instead, ‘Ah well, so today’s the day I get fired. How interesting.’”

Irritating right? But also excellent advice.

Like everyone who loved him, I’d obviously much prefer to have Stuart here today, but given the unfortunate circumstances, I’ve got to say from my perspective, he’s really making the best of his new role. The ghost thing suits his fey, ethereal vibe. He seems into it, or maybe I’m just projecting, a grand rationalisation born of my own guilt and regret over not having called him when I could have. Either way it explains why he accompanies me on my walks in the cemetery and hangs around my shed so much.

Do you have conversations with dead people? Who are they and what do they tell you?

Today’s the day to tell me in comments. Happy Hallows.