New liver, old demons

[Guest guest]

New liver, old demons

Playwright Tom Walmsley has had a burst of productivity since his liver

transplant, but, writes GUY DIXON, if you're expecting a feel-good story, you've

got the wrong man

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By GUY DIXON

The playwright Tom Walmsley is bundled in layers of dark sweaters and

sweatshirts. He warily glances from across the table and smirks at the idea that

his recovery from a liver transplant could be seen as a holiday story of hope

and good cheer.

If it's a holiday, then every weekend feels like New Year's, as the drug he

takes on Fridays to try to prevent his body from rejecting his new liver leaves

him strung out in a

let-me-suffer-here-with-the-Rose-Bowl-parade-passing-by-on-the-TV-screen kind of

way.

" With the drugs they have me on to combat hepatitis C from coming back into my

new liver and things like that, you've got all kinds of side effects, you know?

Depression, this, that and the other thing. So I never know whether or not this

is my actual point of view or that I'm just having a reaction to the drugs, " he

says.

Yet, it seems a far cry from this time last year, when Walmsley, the highly

regarded Toronto writer known for his violent, caustically sexual plays and

novels, was still hoping for a transplant candidate to come through. He had been

hospitalized a number of times with delirium. His liver, damaged from years of

alcohol and drug abuse, was failing. Even his relationship with a woman he had

lived with for about eight years was coming to an end.

As he describes it now, looking healthy and sitting in a friend's quiet

apartment in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood where he has been staying since the

operation last April, he had been resigned to the possibility before the

operation that he might not recover, as his health worsened and he found it

harder and harder to function. " The image that came to mind was a bag of wet

laundry that I dragged myself through everyday, " he says. This was while he was

struggling to complete his violent, small-town novel, Kid Stuff.

" Yeah, it was just from all of the poison in my system, you know? And it was

hard to think and hard to . . . " He pauses. " The only thing I could think

about, really, was the book. As far as anything else went, like remembering

where I put my shoes or returning a phone call or anything, I was completely

lost. Once I got the operation, that all went away. "

The obvious question is whether his transplant has now changed his outlook on

life, whether the violence in his hardscrabble writing will suddenly be replaced

with the goodness of man. Immediately, though, there's the realization of how

ridiculous it is to ask someone, particularly Walmsley, to create such a neat,

made-for-holidays summation of life and death.

Yet he plays along. " Everything is different, but at the same time, not really.

It's still life. Life itself didn't change. "

Nor has his world-view. " It would have been nice if I would have suddenly looked

at the world and thought: Here I've been wrong all along; that the police don't

work for the system, they're my friends; that the President of the United States

does want to bring freedom to the world; and Mel Lastman was a good mayor. " He

breaks out into a breathless laugh. " None of this came to pass. "

Walmsley still fits the bill of a tough, 56-year-old writer, once pegged as

Canada's answer to S. Burroughs. It was a label that he fought when he

was younger. As he talks, he huddles within his layers of clothes and his voice

gives way a little, but so does everyone else's in these first few days of

winter cold.

While exchanging war stories about Interferon and other debilitating drugs,

Walmsley can't help asking a few razor-edged questions of his own about fear and

dying. They immediately cut through the surface politesse, a little like the

violence in his writing. Yet the effect, in person, is inviting, not offensive.

Maybe there are traces, in that kind of forthrightness, of the Liverpool,

England-born teenage boxer and wrestler who grew up mainly in Oshawa, Ont., who

then slipped into years of alcohol and heroin abuse, mostly while in Vancouver,

who continued to garner acclaim despite long stretches away from the stage and

the publishing world, who never settled on the conformity of a 9-to-5 career and

a car in the garage.

Then there are Walmsley's self-deprecating jokes about his torn feelings between

his fascination with the darker side of life and his religious faith. A little

over a year ago, he realized that he didn't want to die without converting to

Catholicism. And as he says, his faith has " affected my ultimate outlook. "

" I talked to Bill Glassco [co-founder of Toronto's Tarragon Theatre] before he

died, and there was a brave man. I asked him at that time what kind of religious

convictions he had because he said he just wanted it to be over then.

" He said: 'None.' And I said to him: 'You're a better man than I. I couldn't

have gotten through my thing without that.' And Bill said that maybe I had a

worse conscience than him. " Walmsley says with a laugh, " I don't doubt that was

true. "

Years earlier, before converting to Catholicism, Walmsley nearly went to a

theological school in England to become an Anglican priest. But, like a

character in his play Blood, he jokes that the one thing that stopped him was

the idea of life as a man of the church in a small English town.

" And you know, you're the confidant for these young women coming and crying on

your shoulder. And I thought, man, you won't be able to sustain it, you know? I

thought, I have enough trouble with guilt over that kind of behaviour anyway.

But not as a representative of the church! I just couldn't. So it was my own

sinful nature that kept me out of it. "

The theme here isn't shock value or irreverence for its own sake. Walmsley says

he's not out to jab people's sensibilities. Instead, it's to rip the lid off

bland social niceties and delve, at least a little bit, into the psychological

murk.

" What's at the very bottom of it all. . . . How you feel about women, or what

you think about your own death, and how it is with your responsibility with

fatherhood, the whole thing. Man, it's a swamp, you know? And so I don't know if

there's a new Tom Walmsley in this or not, really. "

Since his operation, Walmsley has had return stays in the hospital. And like any

difficult recovery, this has meant having to find his place again. An initial

urge was to return to the church. " In some ways, I still haven't found my feet

from that [operation], you know? Like, I didn't make any preparations for

living, let's say. "

He adds: " Whether it's with the church or my work or anything like that, I'm not

contented, obviously. I haven't hit a kind of plateau where I'm feeling that now

I know exactly. . . . " He pauses again. " I thought at some age you could kind of

stop thinking, you know? You knew what you were doing and what you were going to

do, and you didn't have to think beyond it. But it hasn't turned out that way. "

After another pause, he adds: " It's the great thing about life, though, isn't

it? "

His transplant in April had been a long shot. A sister of his was going to

donate a piece of her own liver, but tests showed her liver couldn't be used.

Then fellow Toronto playwright Healey, who has shunned publicity for his

saintly act, sent an e-mail to Walmsley saying he would like to donate some of

his liver. (Liver grows back into a complete organ in both the donor's body and

the recipient's after a successful transplant operation.) Still, Walmsley wasn't

betting on surviving.

" I had the last rites before I went for the operation. Not the very day [of the

operation]. That week though, I had confession. I had the last rites. I was

prepared for a poor outcome, you could say. " He doesn't say this sadly, but

matter-of-factly. " I was so prepared for things to kind of come to an end. My

whole direction was just getting the novel published before it

[fate/illness/death] caught up with me. I didn't have a plan B. "

Eight months later, Walmsley has had a burst of productivity. He has completed

three plays and a book of poetry. Two of the plays are a kind of prequel and

sequel to his 1982 play White Boys and have been accepted by Toronto's Theatre

Passe Muraille, which recently staged his mid-nineties play Blood. His poetry

book, Honeymoon in Berlin, was published by Anvil Press in Vancouver. And

another poetry book, Sin, will be coming out this month, all despite the fact

that he has had to continue taking an Interferon-like drug that knocks him out

each weekend.

He seems adamant, though, that his work isn't seen as a source of feel-good

inspiration. " I think a part of me, I'd say, is optimistic. But I don't think

any writer . . . well, I shouldn't say that. . . . As a writer, I don't think my

job is to be a shill for mental health. " He laughs again under his breath.

" It's not supposed to be the glee club. This idea that people want to see things

that make them feel better -- I don't think that's my function. They've got TV

for that, or Santa Claus or whatever the hell they want to see. The stuff that

moves me the most is, oh God, just dealing with what we all have to deal with in

life. "

Indeed, his old demons, as he describes them, are still rearing up in his work.

When forced to summarize his new prequel and sequel to White Boys in a few

words, he says they are about drinking and sex. The springboard for the poetry

book Honeymoon in Berlin is a woman on Internet fetish sites who eats excrement.

Addiction, however, is one theme that he's less interested in exploring, he

indicates.

Yet, " even if I don't write about addiction every minute, I do know that

feeling. I need a strong reason to live. Just life on its own, the way it's

handed out, just won't do. It has always been like that for me. "