The Doctrine of Affections

By Paul Headrick

A poverty-stricken guitar virtuoso navigates the political landscape of nineteenth-century Parisian society as he comes out of retirement for one final concert. A sessional instructor competing for the prestigious Interdisciplinary Chair in Aretha Franklin studies gets sidetracked by her obsession with a mysterious student in a yellow hat. A dying doo-wop DJ and his wife try to bridge the estrangement wrought by illness as they travel in search of the horns, drums, and vocals of highlife. In the eleven stories that make up The Doctrine of Affections, Paul Headrick takes us on a fascinating journey into the heart of music. From the perfectly honed decrescendo of a symphony’s string section to the down-home chord progressions at a late-night kitchen party, Headrick’s stories question the subtle differences between hearing and listening, and communicating and understanding. The subjects of this collection are soloists, ensemble players, scholars, collectors, and lovers of music, but their experiences with risk, religion, relief, and often regret make their stories resonate for readers who are hearing their songs for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freehand Books
• Release date: Apr 9, 2010
• ISBN: 9781460400074

Paul Headrick

Paul Headrick completed an MA in Creative Writing at Concordia University, and a PhD in English Literature at York University. His first novel, That Tune Clutches My Heart (Gaspereau Press), was published in 2008 and was shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize (BC Book Awards). He is also the author of a textbook, A Method for Writing Essays about Literature (Nelson Education). Paul currently lives in Vancouver, where he teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Langara College.

Book preview

Cover: The Doctrine of Affections, by Paul Headrick.

The Doctrine of Affections

PAUL HEADRICK

The

Doctrine of

Affections

freehand books Logo: Freehand Books.

copyright © Paul Headrick 2010

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical—including photocopying, recording, taping, or through the use of information storage and retrieval systems—without prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright), One Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5E 1E5.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Headrick, Paul, 1957—

The doctrine of affections / Paul Headrick.

ISBN 978-1-55111-978-6 (print) ISBN 978-1-4604-0007-4 (epub)

I. Title.

PS8615.E245D62 2010     C813’.6     C2009-907036-7

Freehand Books

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Edited by Melanie Little

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Logo: Canada Council for the Arts. Logo: Conseil des Arts du Canada.

Freehand Books gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program. ¶ Freehand Books gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its publishing program provided by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

For Katherine and Jim

Contents

THE STUDIES OF FERNANDO SOR

THE FRANKLIN CHAIR

A VIOLINIST

THE TRAVELLER’S SONG

AFTER CHUCK BLAKENEY DIED

ROSIE

THE YOUNGEST GODS

HIGHLIFE

THE CANDLE THIEF

SHAME ON THE JOHNSON BOYS

IMAGINE ME AND YOU, I DO

Cover

Half Title Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

THE STUDIES OF FERNANDO SOR

THE FRANKLIN CHAIR

A VIOLINIST

THE TRAVELLER’S SONG

AFTER CHUCK BLAKENEY DIED

ROSIE

THE YOUNGEST GODS

HIGHLIFE

THE CANDLE THIEF

SHAME ON THE JOHNSON BOYS

IMAGINE ME AND YOU, I DO

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Guide

Cover

Half Title Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Contents

Start of Content

Acknowledgements

About the Author

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The Doctrine of Affections:

the baroque idea that music embodies the most profound emotions and that a single musical movement should arouse a single emotion in the sensitive listener.

The Studies of Fernando Sor

TO THE MISERY OF Fernando Sor’s final days of poverty and sickness in Paris was added the irritation of his landlady’s insistence, repeated on almost every humiliating encounter, that his studies should have names. It began one morning when Mme Renard sidled into Sor’s dark room along with the porter who delivered water to the old apartments at 34 Marché St-Honoré. Sor was playing one of the many studies he had composed for his students, and Mme Renard waited, standing with her head to one side to signal her attentiveness, till the final notes plucked from the worn gut strings had faded. Sor, after taking several long breaths, gracefully raised himself from his reverential pose over his guitar, and then Mme Renard, in a voice surprisingly strong and deep in such a tiny woman, said, M. Sor, what’s the name of the lovely song you were playing?

It is a study, Mme Renard, ‘Study Number Twelve,’ Sor replied in his careful, formal French.

But what’s its name?

That is its name; it is ‘Study Number Twelve.’

But it’s such a pretty song. Surely, it must have a name.

Mme Renard appeared to listen while Sor explained the instructional functions of studies and why they were numbered sequentially. She pursed her small mouth, her habitual expression suggesting a sanitary barrier against the distasteful. When he concluded she said, But it’s so pretty. It makes me think of two young lovers who’ve gone to the seaside and are walking hand in hand along the shore. It should have a name, like ‘The Sweethearts’ Promenade.’

It is not about sweethearts, said Sor, still seated, holding his guitar, his posture balanced and his intelligent hands resting in perfect position out of a habit acquired over years of intense training. It is about the slur, and the use of the thumb to distinguish a particular voice.

After Mme Renard took her leave, following that first discussion of the studies, Sor leaned over his guitar and wept, not with simple tears, but painful, confusing gasps of shame and failure. Who can say with confidence why that unremarkable conversation should have upset him so? Perhaps his reaction can be attributed simply to exhaustion, coming, not after a sudden burst of energy, but rather from years of struggle against a ubiquitous though inscrutable power. Sor had never ceased to feel his long exile from Spain. He had been forced into discomforting expediencies while seeking patronage in the midst of revolutions, wars, and violent dynastic disputes, all seeming perfectly timed to steal his strength and destroy the security he needed to practise his art. When he settled at last in Paris in the early 1830s, he found that la guitaromanie, as the fashionable passion for Sor’s instrument was known, had begun to wane, just when he was most in need of money to support himself and meet the substantial expenses of bringing his cherished daughter, Caroline, into society. Sor’s publishers had exploited him. He had no savings, and his income had gradually diminished while his debts had grown. Then, freedom from his responsibility to his daughter had arrived, not with the happy marriage he so wished for her, but through her death from a swift and mysterious illness. After pouring his sorrow into a mass in Caroline’s honour, Sor lapsed into inactivity, failing even to keep up with the teaching of the few enthusiastic students who had stayed with him though the popularity of his instrument had passed.

Finally, the day had come when Sor could not pay for his lodging. In an awkward conversation with Mme Renard, it became implicit that the rent would be made up in the prestige of Sor’s continued tenancy, though he would have to move to his current room from the more spacious accommodations he had shared with his daughter. But Mme Renard immediately began to presume upon their unstated agreement and to seek occasions to engage Sor in conversation. She longed for social ascent and had cunning enough to work into her comments the suggestion of a threat. Perhaps after all it is not difficult to understand how a conversation that in previous years would only have drawn a smile from the good-natured maestro would now strike him as the cruel joke of an abdicating deity.

It was an easy matter for Mme Renard to arrange to be at Sor’s door when water was delivered or waste removed. Every few days she would appear, and often she would find Sor playing one of his studies, as more and more in his time of crisis he had been finding that only their rare combination of beauty and technical purpose offered reassurance. Mme Renard would wait, sometimes standing, a thin arm reaching out from under her shawl to rest proprietorially on the piano that Sor no longer played, sometimes sitting her tiny frame quietly in the one comfortable chair in Sor’s room, always in a position affected so pointedly to convey respect that it succeeded only in suggesting its absence. When Sor was done, she would compliment him and ask about the music.

Surely you won’t tell me this is another orphan song you’ve been playing, M. Sor. It’s so delightful, it reminds me of my home where I grew up, said Mme Renard on one occasion.

Please, please, Mme Renard, Sor said, and he struggled to overcome the frustration and grief that her comments had the strange power to evoke in him. Against his better judgment, he roused himself to take an unusual step. Let me try to explain. It is indeed another study, and if you think of your home while you listen, or of anything other than the music itself, the music becomes only a diversion, and you miss its true worth. Allow me to play for you again, and try to notice the way the study is composed of a series of phrases, each with a relationship to the others. Feel the way these phrases build on each other, contributing to the music’s final shape. Sor played the study once more, at certain moments looking at Mme Renard with his deep brown eyes, arching his fine eyebrows, subtly turning in his right shoulder, trying in this way to draw attention to the movement from phrase to phrase and the study’s modest yet emphatic beauty.

I’m sure I don’t understand the right way, said Mme Renard when the study was again concluded. I’m only an uneducated woman, struggling to pay my way in the world, but your music makes me imagine and remember. If you won’t give your song a name, I will. I’ll call it ‘The Fields of Touraine,’ because it reminds me of the beautiful farm there where I grew up. She pursed her mouth, rose from the chair, and left. Sor’s hands remained in position, but the strings on which they rested became strange.

Sor’s despair grew, and increasingly he spent his hours brooding on his difficulties. He wrote a letter to his sovereign, King Fernando VII, tactfully including a reference to the honour he had received from the Pope, while entreating for permission to return, perhaps even to a humble position in the court at Madrid. It had, after all, been twenty years since Sor and all the other French sympathizers, the afrancesados, had been forced to flee after Joseph Bonaparte’s government fell. The letter received no reply—whether because its reception was hostile or because it was simply lost by the incompetent administration, it is impossible to say. It’s true that suicide entered Sor’s thoughts, not so much as a possibility but as a further source of pain, a solution perfectly satisfactory save for being completely unavailable to him. And even if he could have brought himself to seek the assistance of friends, none remained in Paris, most having returned to Spain.

For some months Sor had seldom ventured outside, but now he began to contrive to miss his landlady’s visits simply by leaving before those times when he expected her. It was winter, and most streets were troughs of foul mud, for the Parisian authorities were still spending money on beautification projects, parks, and public monuments, and not on improvements to the city’s dangerously inadequate drain and sewer system. Sor had no money to spend in cafés, and the cold stung too severely to allow him to sit, so he walked about, trying to avoid the worst of the filth. Though sixty years old, Sor was not feeble, and he was willing to endure discomfort in order not to face Mme Renard.

At first Sor headed west on his walks, past the Tuileries into the fashionable quarters. The water that could have supplied the houses of Paris cascaded out of fountains. From a distance in the dark early evenings the new gas lights along the Champs Élysées flickered in a warm orange-yellow chain, but they only illuminated ramshackle shops and bars and a broader version of the swampy trenches Sor found elsewhere. Almost in spite of himself, he went past the scenes of happier times, the great houses in whose salons his concerts had been such successes: Salle de la rue Cléry, where the young pianist Franz Liszt had been among the other performers; M. Dietz’s, in whose salon he and the guitarist Dionisio Aguado had first performed Sor’s Los Dos Amigos; Salle de la rue Chantereine, where Sor met his great friend, the Venezuelan, Emanuel Faxardo, now returned to his homeland to join with Bolivar.

Sor was not always able to avoid Mme Renard, and soon she began to arrive from time to time with one or another of her friends. Of course. If she were to gain by having Sor as a tenant, she would need not only to talk about him with the people she knew, but to show how she was acquainted with him. Sor was naturally polite, but in his melancholy it required an exertion to express civilities. The first few times these visits took place, the conversations did not persist far beyond the point of introductions. One morning, however, Mme Renard arrived in the company of an elderly man she introduced as M. Guillemet, of whom she had previously spoken to Sor.

M. Guillemet was much admired by Mme Renard for the substantial profits he had made when his real estate speculations, begun with little capital, had proved fortuitously timed to take advantage of the inflation in the neighbourhood of the Champs Élysées. His prescience had given him the status of an authority in Mme Renard’s ambitious bourgeois circle, and when she wasn’t tormenting Sor with her complaints about his unnamed studies, she frequently quoted M. Guillemet’s comments on the political events of the day—the labourers’ workshops would accomplish the opposite of what the regime intended; Louis-Philippe’s effort to placate the old nobility only distanced him from his real support and power. M. Guillemet was bald, his skull oddly smooth above his wrinkled face; he wore a plain black suit, and, like Mme Renard and a surprising number of her friends, was exceptionally short. But somehow, perhaps in his peculiar wide-legged stance, or just from the subtle projection of the confidence that comes from having multiplied an investment, he communicated a certain strength and energy.

M. Sor, said Mme Renard, M. Guillemet, too, has been to St. Petersburg. Isn’t that right, M. Guillemet?

"And Moscow as well. I had the great fortune to see Mlle Hellin dance your Cendrillon with the Moscow Ballet. It was magnificent. Why have you not written more ballets?"

M. Guillemet looked coolly at Sor as he said this, as though evaluating the results of an experiment, and the sensation this produced in Sor, that of being measured so disinterestedly, disturbed him. When M. Guillemet and Mme Renard finally left he slumped into a chair with relief and a sense of shame that, again, matters of such little consequence should affect him so.

Early the next morning Sor headed out, before the porter would arrive, potentially with Mme Renard and more of her company. Dissatisfied with himself for earlier succumbing to the nostalgia that had been directing his footsteps, he crossed through the Tuileries then headed east along the Seine in the penetrating chill, away from familiar neighbourhoods.

As he walked and as the sun rose and began to turn the dark sky grey, Sor was surprised to find that he was not alone. On the contrary, the

Reviews for The Doctrine of Affections

[icolford · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This collection of short fiction from the author of the novel The Tune that Clutches My Heart (2008) is a stellar example of the form. All of the stories in The Doctrine of Affections are connected in some manner to music, and Headrick's characters are mostly either practitioners or enthusiasts. But music is not necessarily where the stories begin or end. The amazing thing about these stories is the way Headrick consistently uses music as a means to get inside his characters and peel back the layers concealing their longings and vulnerabilities. These characters do a lot of thinking and talking about music. In most cases the plot is constructed around a musical endeavour or event. For the reader, these thoughts, discussions and performances provide insight into lives that are richly multifaceted. These are expertly constructed, well written and straightforward narratives, except perhaps for the last story, "Imagine Me and You, I Do," which dabbles with a metafictional construct that is not entirely successful. But overall Headrick's collection will satisfy and reward an adventurous reader looking for something off the beaten track.