JACK  ADRIAN

I met fellow University of Toronto student Jack Adrian (1949?-1992) about 1970. [NOTE: Jack was a Canadian, not the British novelist.] In those days I was an Objectivist or, more accurately, student of Objectivism; I studied with enthusiam the works of Ayn Rand, the Russian-American novelist-philosopher (1905-1982). I attended a University of Toronto group, Radicals for Capitalism, that fervently discussed her works; it met in the Graduate Students Union of the University of Toronto every Sunday evening.

The group had various entertainments. I remember once we invited Richard B. Needham, a Globe and Mail newspaper humorist who wrote a witty column for 15 or more years on the editorial page. We invited him because of the no-nonsense pro-capitalist views he sometimes expressed. (He also wrote very funny books, the best of which was The Garden of Needham.) Needham looked like the cartoon character Mr. Magoo.

I don't recall how Jack came to join us. But one evening he explained the evolution of Western classical music to our group. Jack, a music student at both the Royal Conservatory of Music on Bloor Street West and the Music Faculty at the Edward Johnson Building on Queen's Park Crescent, played a number of LP records and explained them.

He carefully showed how Western music had developed from Gregorian chant through religious motets to classical to romantic to dodecaphonic music.

By the end of the evening I was very impressed. (I'm a sucker for anyone who has expertise.) Jack and I got to talking.

One night, perhaps that one but I don't remember, we kept on talking ardently all the while I was walking home in the cold winter night.

Jack had an ironic sense of humor, a sardonic smile, and a dry, squeezed sort of voice. He was very slim, about five-feet-ten (he claimed; he looked much shorter to me), with slightly longish brown hair, black plastic glasses, and a spit curl at the front. He loved Beethoven with a passion. He admired Wagner, Brahms, Mozart, Bach, and Schoenberg. He attempted to integrate his love of tightly structured music into his admiration for Ayn Rand and her philosophy. He aspired to be a great composer, probably in the classical tradition.

At that time I was living at 95 Macpherson Avenue, renting a room from Mr. and Mrs. Moon. Their house, which Mr. Moon was renovating himself, had bare wallboard through much of it. It remained unfinished for years. Andy Moon was a letter carrier; years later, he was to be one of my supervisors at Stn. "F" until his accidental death about 1990 from exposure on a northern lake.

As Jack and I reached my place, deep in conversation, Jack realized he had mislaid his key and was locked out. It was too late to wake up his landlord, so he asked to stay at my place. I put him up in the basement. Next morning Andy saw him sleeping there on a couch, but said nothing.

After that, Jack and I were friends. He migrated from rooming house to rooming house, often, I think, being thrown out for having girls in his room, or for smoking. Some of these rooming houses were on Madison Avenue. I quickly met Jack's friend Leslie Kinton, a pianist who later became part of a classical two-piano duo.

Jack had a girlfriend whose name was Joanne. (Joanne had once been Leslie's girlfriend, he tells me; Leslie had found Jack and Joanne together in, ahem, a compromising position. She had thus become Jack's.) Joanne was so-so in attractiveness, I thought, but Jack was smitten; Joanne wanted to be a pianist. Jack and she eventually lived together in the then-new 666 Spadina Avenue apartment building, but the couple split about 1971.

Like me, Jack got by in 1970 with little money. Sometimes he took me to free musical events at the Conservatory or the Edward Johnson building. One was a concert at which Leslie played one of Jack's short piano compositions, which Jack called a "nairda" (Adrian spelled backwards). I eventually commissioned Jack to compose an original nairda, which he did. It was a few pages long, made spidery noises, and dwelt bound in blue covers. I had it for many years, but don't know where it is now.

Jack had been born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario. He told me about his first teenage kiss from a girl (he fainted; she found this flattering). I remember his telling me that his father had died young from a heart attack. I did not realize at the time how significant a piece of information this was.

After many decades I remain very grateful to Jack. During the period of our friendship he taught me much about music, playing me many pieces on one of the world's most memorably awful portable record players. He introduced me to many composers and conductors. Like a good teacher, he was very opinionated, and backed up his preferences with plausible reasoning. His composition teacher at the Faculty was Sam Dolin, a well-respected (in the tiny Canadian classical music field) modern composer. Dolin taught Jack about the forms and strategies of classical music.

Besides exposing me to a great deal of music, Jack also revealed the basics of harmony and counterpoint, and taught me about musical form and musical composition. He opened many doors of thought for me. He caused me to think about large-scale forms in music and how these might be applied in other arts, for example, poetry, plays and novels. (I was trying to write a Shakespearean play in modern English to be called The Death of Hektor. These days it is called Hektor and Andromake).

Alas, all I gave back to Jack was my friendship, my love of Shakespeare, and my knowledge of ring-composition structure in Homer.

# # #

During the spring of 1971 I was living at 14 Sussex Avenue in a second-floor front room. Out my window you could see the University's Robarts Library going up, a triangular building in the momentarily-fashionable brutalist style. When I graduated I turned the room over to Jack, and he lived there during the summer.

In the fall, Jack and our fellow-Objectivist friend Ian Darwin (then a mainframe-computer geek, now a Unix maven with his own company in Palgrave, Ontario) and a third Objectivist Mike Sheedy moved into rooms at 16 Admiral Road. Ian also installed there an attractive young woman who had recently come to the city; she lived in a third-floor front room with a tiny balcony. Ian introduced me to this young woman, and she and I quickly became involved. She practically begged me to move in with her. So I ended up in the house as well, living with the miraculous person I had fallen in love with. She and I later rented an additional second room.

During this time Jack and I got part-time jobs working for an Objectivist named Gayle Stelljes, an American from Nebraska. He had a small group of salesmen in a storefront office on King Street West a few doors from the then headquarters of the Globe and Mail newspaper, the Wright Building. We sold subscriptions to the Report on Business section of the Globe by long-distance telephone WATS lines, mostly to denizens of Alberta. (These business sections were printed in plants near major Canadian cities by the then-new method of satellite transmission of data.) Jack was reasonably good at sales, I less good. Our friend the Objectivist poet Eric Layman worked there too.

But in February of 1972 my dearly-beloved sweetie went away for a month to edit a fellow Objectivist's novel. She assured me several times she would return at the end of the month. She never returned. She married the novelist instead.

I was heartbroken. I was betrayed. I was furious. My friends in the house attempted to console me; but after several months I left, fleeing to my parents. Jack was particularly kind. We talked about friendship. He believed that friends didn't have to teach each other anything. True friends just like being with each other.

We also talked about prostitution and gay people. Jack felt that men who paid for prostitutes were dishonest. They were dishonestly seeking someone to tell them they were wonderful lovers and fine men. This was despicable.

Gay people too were somehow dishonest. (I forget Jack's argument.) In retrospect I realize that Jack was more than a little homophobic.

That was the end of the year or so in which I felt that Jack was my best friend.

# # #

It was not until the fall of 1973, after a year of recovery from my affair, that I returned to Toronto. Jack was now working for Gayle Stelljes selling real estate. It seems that Gayle had had a falling-out with his Globe bosses. He was highly principled and honest, and felt that they were not. Jack and Gayle seemed happy to be selling from the first floor of a house on Sherbourne Street.

But soon Jack and I had our own falling-out.

In 1969 the famous "Objecti-schism" had occurred. Ayn Rand and her "intellectual heir" Nathaniel Branden had quarrelled and split. First, Rand had denounced Branden as a dishonest, lying scoundrel; then he had replied with a brief but effective statement in which he claimed that, while he had done wrong, the real cause for the split was because he and Rand had had an affair, and he had fallen out of love with her. Instant scandal . . .

Now this split gradually divided the Objectivist fan body. About 1974 Jack came to feel that it was vital that, among fans of Rand and Branden, he only associate with those who had taken Rand's side in the dispute. This I could not do. My reading of the situation was that I was too far from the site to know who was telling the truth; I genuinely felt I didn't know. Jack felt that Rand was such an epitome of virtue that any good person would instantly know that she was the truthful one, Branden a damned and evil liar.

Over this -- what shall I call it? -- petty crap our friendship ended. We had a long talk over our differences in Queen's Park. We reiterated our positions. I said that I felt an invisible wall had come between us. Jack seemed to be determined to end our friendship. We went our separate ways; he resolutely, I with extreme reluctance to lose my friend.

After that I saw Jack only twice.

Several years after our breakup I ran into Jack at a phone booth near Varsity Stadium. He was wearing one of those dumb small fedora hats with a feather, the kind that older men out of style then sometimes wore. It was clear to me that Jack was going youthfully bald and was self-conscious about it. We chatted briefly. He had attended the University of Alberta and attained a Ph.D. in musicology. (A thought flickered across my mind. Musicology? But it was composition that he was interested in.) Jack was pleasant, but didn't seem interested in me or in what I was doing. A gulf almost as great as had been between us that day in Queen's Park still seemed to separate us. Alas, we were still estranged.

A decade went by. I drifted into a job at the post office and worked hard. One day about 1987 at a little after six a.m. on a weekday I was riding the Yonge Street subway to work in my letter carrier outfit. A man across the aisle addressed me. It was Jack.

He was still wearing a little fedora. He wore a wrinkled brown suit, slightly out of fashion. He seemed self-conscious. The fedora showed he was still sensitive about his baldness. He chatted politely and pleasantly with me, asking about my life. I answered in grunts and short sentences. I had gradually grown pissed with him . . . for dumping me because of a stupid philosophical disagreement. I didn't feel like talking.

Jack told me he was working for National Trust Company on King Street East (it was bought out about the year 2000 by Toronto-Dominion Bank, and folded into their operations). Jack was a junior executive in the charge cards department. I almost humphed, I was so unimpressed. Serves you right, I thought. I don't give a damn.

I asked if he still composed. He looked self-conscious. "Sometimes." He asked if I still had a lot of books. I said, "A basement full." He smiled.

He had acquired a wife, some children, and a house in Don Mills. (For those who may not know, Don Mills is a bland Toronto suburb, in fact the quintessential Canadian suburb. Created by industrial millionaire E. P. Taylor in the early 1950s, it was the first deliberately-planned "suburban community" in Canada. The very name is redolent of -- symbolic of -- Canadian suburbia.)

His stop, King Street, came. Jack rose to get off. He said "Goodbye!" very pleasantly, smiling and waving.

I never saw him again.

# # #

I went on being quietly furious with Jack Adrian and ignoring his existence until 1995.

About February that year I realized I was no longer angry with Jack. I was no longer angry, in fact, with several other friends who had come and gone over the years . . . I felt a strange desire to build bridges between myself and some of them, if this could be done. It was time to call them again, see if we could make up our differences and be friends.

So I first called up an old girlfriend's mother and tried to find out what had happened to her. Alas, her mother was ill with a horrible cough; she could not talk to me. I never found the courage to call again.

As for Jack, I tried to look him up in the phone book. But, not seeing his listing, I phoned our former mutual friend, the poet Eric Layman (whom I had also not seen for years). After some pleasanteries I asked Eric what had happened to our friend Jack.

"Jack? Oh . . . He died. In December 1992."

Shock. I couldn't believe it. My friend Jack . . . dead??

But I had just been going to forgive him!

Eric explained that Jack had married, bought a house in Don Mills, and had several children.

Jack had worked as a salesman. He drank somewhat, and had smoked too much. He had gotten out of shape. Apparently, his marriage was unhappy.

Then one December day in 1992, there was a snowstorm. Jack attempted to dig out his car to go to work. He had a heart attack. He barely made it to the hospital alive.

He never came out.

My friend had died at a young age of a heart attack. Just like his father before him.

So my friend . . . was dead, dead! At 43! Damnably dead. Doornail dead . . .

No chance to make things up, no chance to make things right. No chance to meet his kids. Dead! Dead, damn him, dead! . . .

# # #

I don't know that I learned anything from this experience. I couldn't not be angry with Jack Adrian, for dropping me as a friend because of his misguided confidence in Ayn Rand. (To learn how misguided, read the biography of Rand by Barbara Branden and the memoir by Nathaniel Branden.) But I was so . . . sorry, and am still a bit shocked at his death. I felt mortal, mortal, mortal for months afterwards. Jack's death caused me to look at my own life, to measure what my life is about. Are my personal, my philosophical disputes worth stewing about?

But while I can forgive him, and don't care a hoot about our disagreements, I find I still can't forgive the young woman I loved 29 years ago for leaving me, and preferring that wannabe novelist.

Screw her! I say.

So perhaps I haven't learned anything at all. I only know I have to be me, and feel what I deeply feel . . . right or wrong.

Jack, you poor unlucky bastard, I'm sorry . . .

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