Former
lead singer of the legendary 222s,
arguably Montreal's first punk rock band, Chris is now a
freelance writer based in Montreal. You can check out his
writing at looselips.ca
where he combines the sardonic humour of David Foster Wallace
and the deliciously contrived irreverence of Anthony
Bourdain.
I’ve
never been particularly interested in my family history, not
that there aren’t a few characters of note mixed in among
the seemingly endless charade of troubled individuals who colour
my genetic makeup. After all, none other than Robert Stanley
Weir, the lyricist of “O Canada,” is my great-great
grandfather, or great-granduncle, or something like that, which
I guess, if it actually meant anything to anybody, could afford
me bragging rights on the Ancestry.com message board.
But
when push comes to shove, like, really, what do I care about
any of them? What has some ancestor’s accomplishments—or
misery—got to do with me? It’s not like I’m
next in line to collect Bobby Weir’s SOCAN royalties.
Can you even collect royalties on a 140-year-old national anthem?
Probably not, and even if you could I’m way too far down
the list of descendants to jump aboard that potential gravy
train.. Any family wealth that might’ve come my way was
long ago blown on wine, women and… song, I suppose. Well,
okay, maybe not so much from all the joyous vocalizing, but
booze has certainly enjoyed a starring role, with mental illness
prominently featured alongside it in the handbill.
Nope,
for a good hundred years or so each new generation of Barrys
has experienced increasingly downward social mobility, culminating
with me, I suppose, being the only male of my generation and
remaining blissfully childless.
And
then there’s my mother’s side of the family.
You
see, over the past year or so, with nothing much better to do
in this time of plague, I’ll admit that I’ve taken
a modicum of interest in my Uncle Kenneth, my mother’s
older brother who one can safely assume no longer inhabits this
plane, albeit nobody’s quite sure exactly when he jumped
ship for the heavens.
Did
he die a broken man? Probably. But I’m no longer inclined
to believe he exited in the same fashion as his younger brother,
Malcolm, who met his own lonely demise in a doorway along Montreal’s
Ste-Catherine street, homeless with more dope or alcohol in
him than his relatively young body could withstand. But how
and where did Uncle Kenneth die? Nobody knows. There is no public
record of his passing. As he was throughout much of his life,
Kenneth remains a bit of an enigma.
But
lemme get to why I’m writing about the fucker in the first
place. Not long before the apocalypse hit by way of Wuhan last
year, my mother, who has faithfully worked the books and records
booth at the annual St. Thomas church fall fair for as long
as I can remember, passed me a well-worn paperback she came
across in the line of duty called The Damned and the Destroyed,
a 
1962
crime thriller written by one Kenneth Orvis. First published
in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, its cover promised a
tale of drug addiction and crime that was “brutal”
and “frightening in its intensity,” set just as
Montreal’s celebrated reputation as North America’s
capitol of vice was being dismantled by way of newly elected
mayor Johnny Drapeau and his corruption-bustin’ partner-in-crime,
lawyer Pax Plante.
Yes,
it was about heroin, a beast I’ve come to know with varying
degrees of intensity over the course of my life, and set in
late ’50s/early ’60s Montreal, a period of local
history I’ve long found intriguing. But otherwise, of
all the books she could’ve recommended, why this one?
“’Cuz
your Uncle Kenneth wrote it. You like to pretend you’re
a writer, I thought you might be interested in reading him.”
“Really,
Uncle Kenneth, huh? That’s kinda cool, Mom. It looks trashy,
have you read it?”
“Nah,
Kenneth was a hack. I’m sure it’s garbage.”
Compelled
by my mother’s ringing endorsement of her (presumably)
late brother’s work, I brought The Damned and the
Destroyed home with the intention of at least skimming
through its pages to see if ol’ Uncle Kenneth had any
talent, and of course, in less than twenty-four hours had already
lost it among the mounds of books, boxes, and shit forever littering
my apartment. I’d like to tell you that I eventually recovered
the thriller and was delighted to discover that, far from being
a hack, the prose therein rivaled Keats or Joyce, and that I
could categorically state Kenneth Orvis was some kind of unsung
literary genius, but I can’t. I still haven’t found
it. It’s not impossible that one of my cats, Lil Dickens
most likely, got to it and tore the already shredded paperback
apart, destruction being one of his favourite cuddly-cute pastimes.
If so, its remnants probably went into the recycle bin, never
to be seen again.
But
my interest was piqued. While they were hardly a familiar subject
around the dinner table, growing up I’d been dimly aware
that my mother had two much older brothers, both fuckups to
varying degrees, and that one had been a published author at
one point. I started doing a little research on the man and
was impressed to discover that Uncle Kenneth had actually seen
several books published in his day. One had recently been reissued,
and it seemed there were actually more than a few people who
felt his output was really quite wonderful.
In
the Guardian, no less a personality than bestselling
thriller writer Lee Child, for fuck’s sake, was touting
my sorry uncle as one of the greats. The Damned and the
Destroyed was probably his favourite book and something
he could only aspire to in his own writing. Who knew?
Maybe
there were some unclaimed ancestral royalties I could go chasing
after all. Kenneth never had kids, at least legitimate ones,
and I knew his surviving sisters, my mother and Aunt Flora,
had better things to do in their golden years than chase publishers
for a few pennies.
Up
until this point, all I really knew about Kenneth was that most
of his life had been spent in prison and that he was prone to
substance abuse. Hack writer, lover of illicit substances? I
know, take away the prison bit and it sure sounded like we had
a lot in common.
What
did strike me while researching the great man was that nobody
really knew his story. What’s more, I discovered there
was a small contingent out there who actively yearned to decipher
the mystery that is Kenneth Orvis, people who’d valiantly
tried to get a better handle on the guy. But outside of detecting
that he used a nom de plume and was in fact arch-criminal
Kenneth Lemieux, son of influential businessman Malcolm Lemieux,
they didn’t appear to have gotten very far with their
investigations. Some of the info I came across even seemed a
little suspect, which didn’t come as much of a surprise
to my mother.
“Kenneth
was always full of shit,” she politely told me. “Of
course his writer bios would just be more fiction.”
It’s
true. So far as even his loved ones are concerned, Kenneth Orvis
Lemieux indeed lied as he breathed, with self-aggrandizement
being his stock in trade, especially if it meant selling a few
more books or upping his game with whomever he was trying to
hustle. More than one of his bios had him playing pro hockey
as a young man. Now Uncle Kenneth might have been a lot of things,
but a professional athlete wasn’t one of them. His younger
brother, Malcolm, mind you, had played hockey in the junior
leagues and might have gone pro if, er, life hadn’t gotten
in the way.
Cutting
to the chase here, the more I read up on Kenneth—not that
there are volumes devoted to the guy—the more I started
feeling honour-bound to at least try and set the record straight.
My mother is in her late eighties now, healthy as a horse but…
well, we all know how quickly that can change once someone’s
closing in on their nineties, God forbid. And Auntie Flora has
a good decade on her at least. Everyone else is dead, so barring
a few cousins with conflicting views on the family’s history
and Kenneth’s place in it, trying to get the skinny on
the fucker hasn’t been easy.
However,
given his enormous contribution to the cultural fabric of the
entire Western world, I’ve felt obliged to at least try
and corner my mother and Aunt Flora to pick their brains on
what the fuck actually happened to Kenneth. Having become vaguely
interested in the man myself, I knew I’d be pissed if
I procrastinated too long and let the moment slip away. I now
understood that the planet needed the definitive biography of
Kenneth Orvis Lemieux, and that the good lord baby Jesus had
delivered me unto this world so I could tell it.
So
now that all my grueling research is behind me and I’m
actually writing this thing, have I succeeded in my duty to
the divine? Nah, not even close, but I think I’ve been
able to sketch together a somewhat clearer picture of Kenneth’s
stint on this earth—even if, admittedly, a lot of it remains
speculation.
This
much I know: Kenneth Orvis Lemieux was born in the spring of
1912, a couple days before RMS Titanic took its famous nosedive
into the North Atlantic.
The
rest I’m not so sure about.
But
I’ve got it on good authority that he was the son of my
grandfather, Joseph Malcolm Lemieux Sr, and one Mary Florence
Elizabeth Daly, aka Grandma. He had one younger brother, the
aforementioned Malcolm, born in 1915, and two much younger sisters,
Flora (aka Auntie Flora) and my mother (aka Mom), who came along
even later in their parents’ troubled relationship, shortly
before their uber-successful industrialist father left my grandmother
for his mistress in the late 1940s, leaving her only their surprisingly
modest house in lower Westmount by way of alimony.
Once
the strikingly beautiful charwoman’s daughter from Goose
Village—the most rundown of early-twentieth-century Irish-Catholic
Montreal slums—who hit the marriage jackpot when she bagged
my grandfather, my grandmother, Flora Sr, an Irish Catholic
who successfully passed herself off as a Scottish Protestant
for the socio-economic benefits the latter identity afforded,
would soon learn that the house her husband ever-so-generously
awarded her also came with a huge delinquent tax bill.
Malcolm
Sr might have been worth a lot of money, but he was also exceptionally,
almost maniacally, frugal. He kept dem big bucks of his close
by throughout his life. Some might even describe him as “cheap,”
although I never knew him well enough to make that kind of assertion.
My grandmother, on the other hand, might beg to differ, given
how poorly she fared in their separation settlement.
Nevertheless,
for a few years thereafter, my grandmother, along with my mother
and her older sister, Flora (Junior), survived on the twenty-dollar
child-support payments my grandfather was legally obliged to
fork over every week while taking in boarders to help with the
tax bill on the house. Sure, it may sound grand, but more than
a few times the family would find themselves short of enough
cash to pay for frivolities like, er… food. My grandmother
would die only a few years later, a delicate old bag in her
late forties humbled, heartbroken, and broke.
Throughout
this period, in the post-war 1940s, Uncle Kenneth, then employed
as a cub reporter for some long-forgotten trade paper in Toronto,
would sometimes return to Montreal and his mother’s home,
always with some new, impossibly attractive woman on his arm,
stay for a few days, and throw my grandmother a few dollars
by way of support. Nobody was quite sure how Kenneth was able
to be as generous as he sometimes was, nor how the dapper thirty-something
could afford to wear the finest tailored suits and drive late-model
cars, but they had their suspicions.
Outside
of his short-lived trade-paper gig, hardly a lucrative endeavor,
Kenneth was thoroughly averse to the horrors of working a proper
job and hadn’t been seeing any handouts from his father
for at least a decade. Malcolm Sr wasn’t one to spoil
his kids, even at the best of times.
Kenneth
and Malcolm Sr had become estranged years earlier anyway, once
it became clear Kenneth was never going to be following in the
old man’s footsteps. It hurt him, of course, but he handled
his estrangement from dear old dad a little better than his
younger brother, Malcolm Jr, a simpler, sensitive man who’d
also become persona non grata in his father’s
eyes after finding a love letter the old dawg had written to
his mistress and promptly spilling the beans to his mother—hastening
his parent’s separation.
When
it all went down, Malcolm Jr had been following his father’s
career path managing the family marble mine up in L’Annonciation
and enjoying the rewards that came with being his father’s
favoured son. But once Malcolm Sr learned he was the traitorous
piece of shit who’d informed his mom about his father’s
infidelity, the kid was immediately fired and sent back home
to Montreal. Emotionally devastated by the ordeal, Malcolm Jr
promptly turned to the bottle with a devotion that would eventually
kill him. His father never spoke to him again.
Kenneth,
on the other hand, had been blessed with his mother’s
physical beauty, a notably sharp mind, and an almost otherworldly
charisma. He was by all accounts the most charming fella one
could ever hope to meet. As my mother says, “Kenneth could
charm the birds out of the trees.” A good thing too, ’cuz
given his profound aversion to employment, he relied on that
storied magnetism to get by in the world and support his decidedly
expensive tastes.
Those
expensive tastes undoubtedly came by way of his upbringing.
Malcolm Lemieux Sr had always been a champ when it came to earning
money. A working-class schmuck from the Quebec City suburb of
Lévis, just across the river from la Capitale, Malcolm
had somehow managed to score himself a university education
in the early days of the twentieth century and learn anglais
well enough to trick most people into believing this French-Canadian
was in fact Protestant (Anglican, no less!), thereby upping
his social status and the resulting business opportunities.
Before
losing his entire fortune when the stock market crashed in ’29,
Malcolm Sr had worked his way up the corporate ladder to become
the biggest of bigshots at Studebaker Canada, the general manager
of what was then one of the leading car manufacturers in the
world. After the market crash he would regroup, make another
fortune manufacturing munitions for the war effort, and with
those funds purchase the aforesaid, highly profitable marble
mine up in L’Annonciation. It became the gift that kept
on giving.
At
one point he even became the Grand Poobah of the local Masons,
later holding the title of El Presidente of the Montreal Shriners
as well. By all measures a happenin’ dude, when Malcolm
Lemieux died the Shriners held a big parade along Ste. Catherine
Street to celebrate his life. They might have paraded right
past Malcolm Jr, who had been known, just a few years prior,
to sleep in doorways along that particular thoroughfare.
Kenneth
(and Flora and Malcolm Jr) had grown up in the leafy hills of
Westmount beside the pampered sons of other captains of industry.
He rode his father’s horses on Mount-Royal, lazed at the
family’s rural estate in the Laurentians, adorned himself
in the priciest, hippest clothes, banged rich girls, and wrote.
Oh yes, though he was thoroughly disinterested in most other
subjects at high school, the boy loved to write. He aped his
literary heroes, and was pretty good at it too. He told people
he had every intention of rising to the toppermost of the poppermost
of the literary world once he was through with this education
nonsense he was forced to endure.
Kenneth
enjoyed the kind of a privileged childhood common to rich kids
everywhere, but then the depression hit just as he was entering
mid-adolescence. Suddenly there was no money. Gone were the
horses and all that entitled, lazy fun, replaced instead by
financial anxiety and the kind of family strife that so often
accompanies these predicaments. Exacerbating the situation was
Kenneth’s goal to become a celebrated man of letters,
which hadn’t been much of a hit with Malcolm Sr. While
his father apparently had a great appreciation for art, loved
animals, music, and a few other pansy-esque things of that nature,
writing, to his mind, wasn’t a serious profession; certainly
not one befitting his eldest son. Hemingway aside, writing was
the domain of sensitive homosexuals as far as Malcolm Sr was
concerned.
Already
strained, their relationship wasn’t much helped when,
in late high school, Kenneth cashed a series of cheques forged
with his father’s signature, no doubt so he could buy
himself some spiffy new duds and go back to dazzling the local
girls with his wealth and sophistication. His father had likely
cut off the kid’s allowance, and given that Kenneth was
never going to be anyone’s paperboy, I suppose he did
what he felt he had to do. It’s hard to be a teenage bon
vivant without a little coin, after all.
“Kenneth
was fastidious,” Flora told me recently, “almost
to the point of being obsessive-compulsive. He very much cared
about his appearance and how others viewed him. He was very
good-looking and… oh, the girls just loved him. He had
his problems, but I remember him as a wonderful, kind, generous
older brother. I know he loved me and your mother very much.”
Flora
was the only family member to keep in regular touch with Kenneth
in his adulthood. His mother a corpse and his father thoroughly
ashamed and divested of him, Kenneth, by the time he permanently
returned from Toronto, an utterly distasteful backwater burgh
to his mind, found himself largely alone in the world; outside,
that is, of the wealthy women he occasionally hooked up with
and the increasingly lower lowlifes that became his social circle.
Around
this time, according to his last printed work, an obscure alleged
autobiography titled Over and Under the Table: Anatomy of
an Alcoholic, released in 1984 by a tiny Montreal publisher
called Optimum Press, Kenneth apparently fell into drink with
an intensity similar to that of his younger brother. Judging
from his increasingly desperate lifestyle and intimacy with
smack, as evidenced by his painfully astute descriptions of
junkiedom in The Damned and the Destroyed, it’s
likely he was suffering a dope habit to boot.
Unemployed,
with zero desire to subject himself to the indignities of a
full-time job, forever unpublished and intensely unhappy, Kenneth
went back to his teenage hustle and started passing bad cheques
around. As far as crooks go, he was a petty successful one.
He scammed banks out of thousands of dollars back when a couple
grand could buy a person a goddamned house. A shitty house in
the middle of nowhere maybe, but you get the idea.
According
to newspaper reports from the period, Kenneth Lemieux was what
they called a “Saturday noon operator,” meaning
he’d arrive at the bank just before they were closing
for the weekend to cash his bogus cheques. Charming, articulate,
impeccably dressed, and cultured like the privileged son he
was, few tellers suspected that a man of his obvious wealth
and stature could be some desperate character passing fraudulent
cheques. As my mother says, “Kenneth always carried himself
like a big shot. He figured he deserved all the finer things
in life. But he was lazy, he just didn’t want to work
for them. Passing bad cheques was easy money, so that’s
how he supported himself.”
But
all good things must come to an end, and he eventually started
getting busted, regularly; a pattern that would repeat for pretty
much the rest of his life. He’d pass a couple bad cheques,
get tracked down, do a few months’ time, be released from
jail, and then go back to his fraudulent activities again. Kenneth
was a smart guy, so it’s odd he kept returning to the
same old racket, one that kept leading to his arrest. Then again,
when you’re jonesing, the immediacy of the moment always
weighs heavier than any potential consequences down the road.
To paraphrase Lou Reed, poorly, “(tomorrow) is just some
other time.”
While
he effectively disowned my mother around this period, the mid-1950s—this
after she politely refused to cash in my father’s life
insurance policy so she could hand him the proceeds for no other
reason than he claimed to “be in a situation” and
“needed” it—throughout his various trials
and tribulations Kenneth did continue to stay in loose touch
with Flora, who had moved to the Maritimes.
As
the decades progressed, life increasingly became a bitch for
Uncle Kenneth. Middle-aged, in and out of prison, his former
good looks ravaged by age and the excesses of his, er, ”hedonistic”
lifestyle—if you’re prepared to label addiction
hedonistic, that is—the one positive in what had become
of his existence by this point was that he’d started to
write again.
“He
started sending me his manuscripts to proofread and get my opinion
of them,” Flora recalls. “I guess some of them eventually
became his books.”
The
story goes that sometime in the mid-1950s, during one of his
stints in prison, Kenneth was taken under the guidance of a
sympathetic chaplain, a man who apparently recognized that the
lost soul which was the great Kenneth Lemieux might be able
to find some sort of spiritual rebirth and redemption if he
were only able to concentrate long enough on his one great passion:
writing. The chaplain apparently made a strong enough impression
on Kenneth that he was able to put his vices aside for a minute
and start developing the Great Canadian novel, a text that would
become his first published book, Hickory House. What
else is there to do in prison, anyway? Might as well write to
wile the (hard) time away.
I haven’t
seen, let alone read, Hickory House, but I do know it was published
as a paperback original by the uber-prestigious Harlequin publishing
house in 1956, so it’s safe to say Macbeth it
ain’t. Still, Kenneth could now pass himself off as a
bona fide published author, discreetly neglecting to mention
the book’s publisher when pressed on the subject. Regardless,
Hickory House apparently sold well enough to be considered
a low-rent hit of sorts. More importantly perhaps, the minor
success of the title, which Kenneth liked to describe as “a
blockbuster,” served as motivation to, according to Kenneth,
compose his next magnum opus, Walk Alone—or
I Walk Alone, take your pick.
I say
“according to Kenneth” ’cuz it’s unclear
if Walk Alone ever really existed. It’s not at all impossible
Kenneth just threw out the title so he could claim, in an effort
to impress potential new publishers, to have written two novels.
But I defy anyone reading this to find a copy of the book. Actually,
lemme up that and challenge anyone to even find a mention of
it anywhere, outside of Kenneth himself in Over and Under
the Table, where he uncharacteristically admits that Walk
Alone didn’t quite set the world on fire or break
any sales records—even though he’d described it
as one of his “blockbusters” a couple decades prior.
Whether
Walk Alone ever existed became largely irrelevant once
his true second novel, The Damned and the Destroyed,
was published in ’62. The product, according to its acknowledgments,
of five years’ research, roughly the same amount of time
since Hickory House had set the world aflame, The
Damned and the Destroyed was a full-blown hardcover title,
released throughout the English-speaking globe via legitimate,
reputable publishers. Better, it even managed to sell a few
copies and garner Kenneth a modest reputation in literary circles.
What
exactly required five years’ worth of research remains
something of a mystery, given the story revolved around heroin
addiction and Montreal’s criminal underbelly; but sure,
I’ll give Kenneth credit for sharing an intimacy with
both things. Besides, it could easily take a fella five full
years to come up with a second blockbuster—assuming the
existence of Walk Alone is indeed fiction—while nursing
a smack and/or alcohol habit, let alone writing between prison
stays. Unless, of course, Kenneth composed the entire thing
over a stint in prison, an environment which, largely free of
dope and alcohol, could certainly be conducive for a recently,
albeit temporarily, detoxed addict to start expressing himself
creatively.
Regardless,
The Damned and the Destroyed can rightfully be labeled
a triumph, both artistically and commercially. That’s
the one Lee Child and other Orvis aficionados believe to be
Kenneth’s best work. The paperback of which I believe
my cat Lil Dickens also enjoyed.
If
nothing else, the title genuinely kickstarted Kenneth’s
career as a writer. Shortly after the book started gaining attention,
he picked up an agent, celebrated British literary luminary
Herbert Van Thal no less, who advised him “to get on the
espionage bandwagon—fast!,” which he did, his next
blockbuster, Night Without Darkness (1965), being a
spy caper concerning a scientist who gets kidnapped by commie
radicals. Night Without Darkness, while maybe not quite
the “blockbuster” Kenneth claimed for all his titles,
was as close to a hit novel as he’d ever come, and, like
its predecessor, was released in hardcover by respectable publishers
around the entire English-speaking world. He was on a roll now,
almost financially comfortable, and pressed to churn out another
thriller that would build upon his two-strong streak of blockbuster
novels.
So
far as anyone can recall, it appears his relative success as
an author encouraged Kenneth to put his primary career as a
criminal aside for a time. In the second half of the 1960s he
married his second—possibly third—wife, a widow
named Florence Ethel Duke Van Der Voort, and rumour has it that
for a time there he even found the Lord, God help him. Of course,
old habits die hard, and whether he was walking with Jesus or
not, it seems Kenneth never strayed too far from his lifelong
friend the bottle, if not his other vices. After all, it took
him another five years to puke up his next book, Cry Hallelujah!
(1970), well after any commercial acceptance he’d
enjoyed as the first-rate thriller writer of Night Without
Darkness had been forgotten.
Cry
Hallelujah! failed miserably. A fairly conventional tale
concerning the rise and fall of a female evangelist preacher
named, get ready for it, Hallelujah, Kenneth’s
New York publishers recognized the book for the dud it was and
promptly passed. He couldn’t even find a home for it in
his native Canada, which is probably saying something, what
exactly I’m not quite sure.
In
fact, Cry Hallelujah! wouldn’t have been printed
at all if it weren’t for noted British publisher Dennis
Dobson, who, sympathetic to Kenneth’s cause, became the
only publisher anywhere in the world willing to take a chance
on it. Dobson was hardly rewarded for his conviction. The book
sold poorly, didn’t see a second printing, or make it
into paperback. Even Kenneth, writing in his autobiography years
later, conceded that it “bombed.”
While
he’d go on to author three more thrillers: Into a
Dark Mirror (1971), The Disinherited (1974), The
Doomsday List (1974), plus his autobiography, none would
see a second printing. Indeed, his last three thrillers were
only released in the UK, where they were mostly ignored. By
the 1970s, Kenneth’s New York publishers had lost interest
in his literary gifts entirely. The rejection of the arguably
lacklustre Cry Hallelujah! effort had essentially sealed
his fate, and his subsequent return to writing thrillers wasn’t
going to change anyone’s mind about the man’s commercial
potential. As a writer, Kenneth Orvis was done.
Flora
says she often lost touch with Kenneth in the 1970s. She’d
go lengthy periods without hearing anything from him and he’d
long stopped sending her his manuscripts for proofing. Concerned,
she’d find herself phoning up the Elizabeth Fry and John
Howard societies to see if he’d been sent back to prison—which
is invariably where she’d find him, always for the same
old crime, his stock in trade, passing bad cheques.
To
his dubious credit though, by the dawn of the 1980s, when he
was closing in on his seventh decade of life, forever struggling
with addiction and the stigma lifelong criminality can bring
a feller in the straight world, Kenneth was still on the hustle.
I suppose he needed to be. What else was he going to do?
I still
have no idea of what killed him or exactly how or when he died.
Nobody does. Perhaps he knew the end was nigh when he sat down
to write Over and Under the Table, determined to set the record
straight in that special Kenneth way of his. Based on what I
know of the book, I’d hazard a fairly educated guess that,
like its author throughout his life, the book is full of shit.
Or maybe not. There certainly aren’t many copies of it
floating around to find out. Regardless, Kenneth completely
dropped out of the picture in the 1980s. Flora’s calls
to the Elizabeth Fry Society were no longer providing any clues.
For all intents and purposes, Kenneth disappeared that decade,
at least from Flora and the family.
I do
know, however, that as late as 1983 he was offering three-day
creative-writing seminars at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto,
cashing in on his notoriety as the internationally renowned
author of eight bestselling books, blockbusters actually, in
an effort to bilk a few aspiring Hemingways out of their hard-earned
money. Although, truth be told, the farther I get through The
Damned and the Destroyed, the more I’m apt to believe
that Kenneth, semi-sober at least, was fully capable of passing
along a few pearls of wisdom on how best to spin a yarn to these
saps. Honestly, it’s a suspenseful book. Well-written.
I might even finish it some day.
