There Is A Season Patrick Lane McClelland & Stewart ISBN 0771046340 paper, 320 pages $22 (CDN)

Legend has it that Jack Kerouac died while watching The Galloping Gourmet on television, his internal organs so deteriorated from years of constant drinking that they pulled unexpectedly apart like rotted paper, releasing his life’s blood into his abdominal cavity so that he bled to death before he could be treated. Dead in 1969 at 47.

Re-reading Kerouac’s Desolation Angels a year ago was almost too painful to continue with. The memories I had from my first reading of it were of the incredibly romantic (as I saw it) life that he and his friends had led back then: their mad adventures in bohemian New York and San Francisco, the night-time jazz joints, the spontaneity, and the solitary summer weeks he’d spent writing in his fire lookout atop Desolation Peak, gazing across the void at Mount Hozomeen: “Hozomeen, Hozomeen, most beautiful mountain I ever seen”. Kerouac’s strength was and always will be his ability to capture the enthusiasms and excitement of a young man in his prime: you wanted to be there with him: his work and life (and I thought of them as one and the same) were inspirational: they made you want to change.

What I hadn’t noticed in my first reading was that Kerouac was, even then, an alcoholic. On re-reading, though, the evidence was clear. There were so many casual references to his drinking studded throughout the text that — knowing the rotten death which lay just 13 years ahead of him — I wanted to reach into the pages and grab him, shake him, yell at him to come to his senses, to stop.

But of course he would not have heeded me had I been able to accomplish this, crossing time and space and breaking the impermeable barrier which separates readers from their authors: alcoholics are puppets in other hands, their addiction pulling at the cords which control their shaking limbs, leading them to liquor stores out of range of their friends and neighbors inquisitive eyes; guiding them by flashlight to the secret vodka caches: tucked behind the slim books of poetry on bookshelves, slipped beneath their gardens’ shrubs.

Writers and alcohol have had a long association: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner. It is a “classic” writer’s libation, part of that man-of-the-world image which male writers have cultivated. Entire books have been written about alcohol as a source of inspiration, a means of loosening up, getting the words to flow; I won’t try to recap that history here. I live not half a mile from the spot where Malcolm Lowry revised his definitive almost-self-portrait of the doomed alcoholic Consul in Under the Volcano and I sometimes wonder if the beach at Cates Park might still yield sand-smoothed fragments left from the bottles that Lowry tossed from the porch of his squatter’s shack. His also was a sad end: dead in 1957 at 47, his body eaten apart by booze.

But some manage to struggle free.

Honored Canadian poet Patrick Lane’s new book There is a Season describes the first tentative year of his withdrawal “from the scourge of forty-five years of drinking”. Subtitled A Memoir in a Garden, it is more memoir than gardening guide but does not fit the standard shape of either genre. Twelve chapters take us through “the first year of the new century”, from a cold, pale January when Lane, at 62, finds

my senses seem to be thin glass, so acute at their edges I am afraid I will cut myself simply by touching the silicon edge of a bamboo leaf

By July he notes that

[t]here is strength in my hands that hasn’t been there in years. It isn’t only muscle and bone. Strength is grace and sureness.

When I started this book I was expecting standard autobiography, a more-or-less chronological recounting of the events of a life — still in search of markings to a writer’s path. There are such markings in the book:

It was 1960, the year I began writing poetry. I began because it gave me something I didn’t have in my life. I had always wanted to be an artist, a painter, but there was no money for oil paints or acrylics. Writing was cheap. I had a tiny portable typewriter, a worn black ribbon, and a sheaf of canary-yellow paper. I had an HB pencil and a pink eraser. Where the typewriter came from I don’t remember. Late at night after my wife and children were asleep I would sit at the tiny kitchen table in front of our trailer and try to turn words into poems.

Never in my life had I tried to do anything so difficult. I knew what a good poem was. I’d read the poets, but I couldn’t do what they could do. I couldn’t write about daffodils and skylarks or about Massachusetts, Black Mountain, or San Francisco. They weren’t what I knew, there words were not from where I had been made. Without advice or help from anyone I wrote about what happened around me.

But this is not chronology: it is a more dappled telling. Memories of Lane’s life are called up from a fragmented past and, along with the red-shafted flicker, the junco, the chickadee, and the squirrel, they warm themselves in the shafts of sunlight that thread through the trees surrounding the shade garden which Lane and poet/partner Lorna Crozier share. You sense that much has been forgotten, and that there would be ample cause if Lane were one to indulge in regret.

There is a lot of buried pain; but there is, in the end, a healing, and I was glad to find Lane coming back, at last, into his senses.