Cabbagetown Diary: A Documentary

by Juan Butler

Robert Fulford called it “a remarkable glimpse of the underbelly of Toronto,” but the reviews that greeted the publication of Cabbagetown Diary in 1970 were decidedly mixed. The novel’s rowdy concoction of grit and violence and rooming-house sleaze had a strongly polarizing effect on its readers. Many admired the frankness of Butler’s depiction of a sordid environment, and others deplored the obscenity of the language and the dangerous and careless ways in which his characters behave, bent as they are on downward self-transcendence. But Cabbagetown Diary was undeniably a promising debut by a young writer whose brash tone and pungent subject matter were unique in Canadian writing at that time. The novel takes the form of a diary written by a disaffected young Toronto bartender, Michael, over the course of his four-month liaison with Terry, a naive teenager who is new to the city. Michael introduces her to his friends and his inner-city haunts, to drink and drugs, and to the nihilist politics espoused by some in his circle. With hard-bitten cynicism and flashes of dark humour, Michael relates the vicissitudes of their summer together. This reissue of Cabbagetown Diary includes a biographical sketch by Charles Butler and an afterword by Tamas Dobozy.

Genres: Canada, Canadian Literature

228 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1970

About the author

Juan Butler (1942–1981) was a Canadian writer who was born in London, England. His three novels are Cabbagetown Diary: A Documentary (1970), The Garbageman (1972), and Canadian Healing Oil (1974). Butler suffered acute disappointment when the latter—the one he considered his best—proved an abysmal seller. In his later years he struggled with his mental health. He died by his own hand, in Toronto, at the age of 38.

Reviews

[Wanda Vanderstoop · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no biography here and so, from Bookrags:
Dictionary of Literary Biography on Juan (Antonio) Butler
Juan Butler was one of the most strident critics of Canadian society to disengage himself from the general optimism generated by Canada's centennial celebrations of 1967. At a time when most writers outside Quebec were searching for a uniquely Canadian identity, Butler was affirming his individuality--even his isolation--and claiming association with such international movements in art as surrealism and Dada.

Born in London, England, of mixed parentage--his mother was Spanish, his father English--Butler moved to Toronto, Ontario, as a young child. He attended St. Charles Separate School until grade eight and dropped out of De la Salle Collegiate after grade ten. He then began a succession of odd jobs: shoe salesman, warehouse laborer, translator (he was fluent in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese), insurance clerk (also his father's occupation), bartender, and cashier in a socialist bookstore. He also spent time traveling in Europe and Morocco. Most important for his writing, however, was that he took up residence in Toronto's Cabbagetown district, then one of the poorest and most volatile working-class ghettos in the country.

He began writing almost by accident. "I used to go to Allan Gardens a lot," he told an interviewer in 1974. "One day I started writing down things I saw. Before long I had three pages. I thought if I keep going I'll have a book." Three months later he did have a book: Cabbagetown Diary: A Documentary (1970) is a highly charged delineation of the mind-numbing effects of poverty and of the contrast between society's professed desire for freedom and equality with the conditions of life in the oppressed underbelly of that society found in Cabbagetown.

The novel takes place in 1967: the first diary entry is for 4 July, Butler's birthday and also that of his protagonist, Michael Taylor. Michael is a somewhat atypical product of Cabbagetown. He is uncouth and rebellious, to be sure, but he has a steady job that he enjoys (as a bartender in a women's club), he is not totally scornful of reading (the fact of his keeping a diary sets him apart from his fellows), and he treats his girlfriend, Terry, with a rough affection: "The truth is, though, that I do love her. A little, that is. Let's put it this way: I don't mind having her around, and that's quite an improvement over the other chicks I've shacked with. She's clean, too, and she shaves her underarms." Terry, inexplicably, loves him. She is from a small town in northern Ontario and is both naive and pliant, the perfect embodiment of Taylor's machismo fantasies. It is in defense of Terry's honor--a man tries to molest her during one of the novel's bacchanalian parties--that Michael commits his first act of uncontrolled violence since getting out of reform school. But by the end of the book (21 October) Michael and Terry have separated. "She tells me one day near the beginning of the month," Michael explains, "that she's pregnant and that it's my kid in her gut.... Naturally, I threw her out."

It is not inappropriate that Cabbagetown Diary has been placed on reading lists for university sociology courses, for it is more social documentary than novel, an attempt to portray the effects of environment rather than to explore solutions to the poverty and violence. Michael is not trying to improve Cabbagetown or even to escape from it; in fact, he much prefers it to the sterile suburbia to which his parents have moved. Cabbagetown Diary is a powerful and compelling book which contains many of the themes and some of the imagery that Butler explores with more finesse in The Garbageman (1972).

After Cabbagetown Diary, which had been completed in 1968, Butler did no writing until 1972, when he produced The Garbageman in six weeks. It has been called "a pure anarchist work ... far and away the most revolutionary novel ever published in this country." The novel's surreal structure makes it difficult to tell what really happens from what takes place within the deranged mind of its young hero. Fred Miller lives with his parents in suburban Toronto, and, as Butler had, he works for a while in his father's insurance company before quitting and going to Europe. At the end of the novel he is back in Toronto, in a psychiatric hospital apparently suffering from paranoid schizophrenia (which Margaret Atwood has called "Canada's national mental illness"). Miller believes he has murdered an American marine in Barcelona and an Italian student in Paris; graphic details of the crimes occupy nearly half the book. Near the end, Miller announces to his psychiatrist: "I'm Ravachol, Bonnot, Durruti, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. André Breton wrote about me and Salvador Dali drew my portrait. I'm an anarcho-surrealist-nihilist. Beware!" But his criminal malignancy is, like Iago's, motiveless.

Butler sent a copy of The Garbageman to the English novelist Colin Wilson, who replied in a letter that he "found it very interesting although (as you probably expected) a bit revolting." In a second letter Wilson warned Butler against the trap of believing that "violence and ruthlessness" always triumph over "goodness." "I think that this is the interesting point you've reached in your work. If you're really to develop as an artist, you can't avoid trying to answer it. So far you've presented violence and ruthlessness ... 'without comment,' as if you are merely a recorder trying to be honest. But you're dealing with the most frightening and important issue of our time, and you can't pretend to be merely an observer."

Whether as a result of Wilson's advice or not, Butler's next, and last, novel, Canadian Healing Oil (1974), is a radical departure from his earlier work. With grants from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, Butler had visited Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands before writing the novel: "I didn't really get the idea for it, though," he has said, "until I came back and went to Quebec City. The parallels between the two cultures are so strong. They both have colonial mentalities. They're living in history as if it were alive--really schizophrenic. The book's about the death of the colonial mentality."

Like The Garbageman, Canadian Healing Oil is written in a surrealistic style, reminiscent in tone of contemporary works by such Quebecois writers as Jacques Godbout and Hubert Aquin. The protagonist is a Toronto bookstore clerk named John, who falls in love with one of his customers, "a pretty pussy-cat Siamese, black-haired, liquid-eyed, yummy-breasted" girl he calls Miss Patricia. Lying in bed in her apartment, John dreams of a voyage to Puerto Rico; Miss Patricia has given him a vial of holy water for protection against danger. After waking, he either takes or dreams again of a trip to the Virgin Islands, where he is given a bottle of Canadian Healing Oil, "A Universal Liniment" made by Booker-B.D.H. Ltd., Demerara, Guyana, to be used, he is told, "solely for the moment when you come face to face with your ... destiny." There is not much in the novel about death or colonialism, but it is a very personal, lyrical account of Butler's search for his own identity. John, whose name is the English equivalent of Juan, is lost in San Juan, Puerto Rico's capital, and also on St. John, one of the Virgin Islands. Both the West Indies and Quebec City have St. John the Baptist as their patron saint ("I, St. John, the Eagle," says John at the outset, "the evangelist whom Christ loved the most, ..." and later, "I'm St. John, the disciple whom Christ loved the most, the man who wrote Revelation ..."). Each chapter ends with a lithograph of the head of Jean de Brébeuf, one of the Jesuits martyred by the Iroquois in 1649; the final page has a reproduction of a holy card showing the beatification of all eight of "the blessed Canadian martyrs": the name "Jean" before Brébeuf has been changed to John.

After Canadian Healing Oil, Butler seems to have withdrawn from the world. He was married, briefly, in 1974 and lived for short periods in Montreal and Vancouver. He returned to Toronto, where he died suddenly on 2 June 1981, at the age of thirty-eight, while he was undergoing psychiatric treatment at the Clarke Institute. His three novels remain, however, to speak eloquently and convincingly of Butler's futile search for meaning in a universe he perceived as violent and illogical. If surrealism is the literary expression of anarchy, then in Butler's world there could be no authority, no social responsibility, and ultimately no order. There is no doubt that Butler saw himself as a kind of martyr to the cause of anarchy: his last letter to his editor, Carol Martin, was a long, rambling apology for past misbehavior and also a formal leave-taking; it was signed, "Yours in Christ, Juan Butler."

[Mike Sauve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe sometimes books find people by occult means, when and where they are prepared to read them. I have lived near Allan Gardens since I moved to Toronto at 19. The park, full of families and dogs and dying listerine drunks, is what inspired my own initial forays into fiction writing. In fact my journalism career sort of died as all I kept pitching were 'slices of life' from Allan Gardens. Like these ones: https://scorpionofscofflaw.files.word...

http://nationalpost.com/posted-toront...

I must have paced around that park a million times. And I observed the same screaming assholes yelling their undying hatreds and the same saints picking those assholes up off the ground that Juan Butler did. My first effort at a novel was essentially an effort to write "this novel." Imagine my surprise when I picked this up at a book sale and began reading the very story I'd intended to write. Though set almost 50 years ago, the descriptions of the drunken merriment that leads to the inevitable drunken faceplants and drunken hospitalizations and drunken tears ring truer than ever today.

Then just for fun add the fact that the protagonist shares my first name. Spooky.

The only thing I dislike about the book is that some of the humourous language hasn't aged well. And incidentally, these are the flaws that plague that first novel attempt of mine. An attempt to be this kind of wise-cracking Bukowski type who is above it all yet in love with it all. Tough guy wisecracks, piss and lilies type of stuff.

After reading the first few pages, I thought maybe it was some little-read gem I had lucked into, and that I might contact the author and meet him. I was saddened to learn that he had taken his own life at 38. I am 34 now, and feel some uncanny connection to Juan Butler.

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much enjoy narratives where the main character is living through all these important historical moments and he's just. there. he's just some guy. and he's not even a good guy, Michael is incredibly self-centred, misogynistic, and mean. He's a bystander in a time of radical social upheaval, caring more about his next beer than anything more than a week away. He is present in the moment, and this makes for an incredibly rich and dense depiction of the slums of mid-century Toronto, with sights, sounds, and smells interwoven with personal histories and cultural context that take precident over grand-sweeping theses and morals. Cabbagetown Diary is just that: a diary. Who has time to care about all that political stuff when you're dreading your next minimum wage shift at the job you hate so that you can barely afford your terrible apartment?

This book challenged to come to terms with the underbelly of the city I've been living in for the past 3 years, and it's made me reevaluate just how privledged I am to be where I am. I treat Toronto like an escape from the monotony and the closets of suburbia, and I can pretend the unsavoury parts of it don't exist. But they do, and their stories deserve to be heard.

[Adam Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book for my book club I got to read it again, which is fantastic, and I loved it all over again.
The best thing about the book this time through was the Toronto of the late 1960’s was so vividly portrayed it was like I was there. I don’t know of another book that exists that says what it was like to be at the Riverdale Zoo. I don’t know another book that describes being in a gay bar in Toronto in the 1960’s, or come to that in the 1970’s or 1980’s either. I do know of one set there in the 1990’s, Hogtown Bonbons. Even Kicking the Sky, a recent book set in the same time period, doesn’t begin to go into the level of detail of downtown Toronto of old as this book.
“Christ, that old sun, as soon as it warms up, turns all these rooms into blast furnaces. You just won’t find anybody inside on a hot summer day.”
The book starts and everyone is outside, it’s a time of hanging out with friends on the street corner and having an ice cream in the park. My book club made much of the lack of morality in the book but I loved that the story was so straight-forward, easily relatable, not trying too hard. There’s an innocence in the story that would disappear by his next book in 1972 when the publishing restrictions were looser and so was morality.
I was struck by how well the book was written, with the girlfriend Terry the foil to Michael. I was disappointed others in the club had a difficult time stepping into Michael’s shoes. The endnotes say:
“Butler refuses to indulge in the fantasies of agency, where characters denied political, cultural, or spiritual resources from the moment they are born can somehow, inexplicably, step outside of their actions and view them from the perspective of upper-middle-class or ivory-tower morality.”
And I really agree, Michael is a product of his upbringing, but the author goes on:
“it is precisely from this—the readers’ alienation from Michael—that the novel draws its power… an attempt to make readers recoil from what’s on the page, to keep them in confrontation with what they’re reading rather than being swept away by it….”
See I didn’t feel that. I wouldn’t say Michael was a hero or even an anti-hero but I just found him relatable. Yes, he had problems but I didn’t judge them in a way that this author, Tamas Dobozy, seems to have. Not having lived in this period I was able to make a lot of allowance for the time period the book was set in. Yes there was violence and racism but there was also oppression and police brutality and I think they fed off each other. The author does make an interesting point when he says:
“…the problem with Canada’s literary culture was that at no time in the nation’s history had we executed a writer for the things he or she had written.”
He goes on to say of this book:
“The first printer charged such a high price for the work that Martin was forced to go elsewhere; the second agreed to a more modest sum, but then tried to censor the book’s contents during the printing process.”
I think a lot of it is that we didn’t allow it. Propriety didn’t allow it and for such a long time Canada was victim to that set of rules. Even up to five years ago pornography was routinely stopped at the border and labelled obscene and destroyed. During the AIDS crisis literature describing condom use was too obscene for the populous and destroyed, what hope did covert authors have in the period before 1965?
This is an underground work that has survived, I hope there are others to be found in the future.
A closing note, I think it does help that I wasn’t born in this period. I know a lot of people were turned off by the lack of morality in this book, but there’s a scene where Michael takes his girlfriend to a party and in the corner of the room a couple starts to make out and things evolve and Michael puts the moves on his girlfriend and she has a look on her face that would stop a clock and refuses. I’ve been there. Finding things like this helped me relate to these characters written 50 years before and I love that. It was a different time, a different Toronto, but not everything has changed.

[Adam Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite book of the year. I loved it.
This is the best book I’ve ever read about Toronto. The author takes you there, to the Cabbagetown slum of 1968 and describes the landmarks of the time so well it’s like you’re there. Picture Yorkville as the author describes it:
“Yorkville Avenue. Two blocks of discotheques with the music blaring out onto the street; sidewalk coffee houses where you can watch people who watch you as you drink a fifty-cent coffee; art galleries full of modern painting that looks like the stuff we did in grade one; a poster store where my friend George got his posters; and about half a million people and cars moving up and down like a permanently flowing river.”
A lot of books have been compared to Catcher in the Rye and to me this one is the closest. The short vignettes, the sense of humour. This to me is what a first book can be. Too often I feel Canadian authors get too swept up in their own lives when writing their first book. I was young, I was depressed, I took drugs, the end. This book isn’t all about the author. A part of it is but it’s also his life, his humour, his friends, and the city.
Some passages still ring true today:
“But just think of all those joes that work in offices. They live in some stupid suburb ten miles out of the city. They have to get up at six in the morning, drink an instant breakfast, kiss wives whose faces are covered in beauty cream so you can’t even see them, run like hell so they don’t miss the bus, and spend an hour on it with about ten thousand other joes all crammed in like so many sardines in a can, fight their way into a subway car, get their feet stepped on about twenty times, and all that so that they can arrive thirty seconds late for work and have the boss give them a dirty look and write their name on a piece of paper.”
I’ve often thought of these self-obsessed pretentious first novels that it’s like depressing fish in a barrel. When you add in the humour, the work can really shine:
“Mrs. Waddling’s caught a cold and every time she blows her nose she reminds me more than ever of a duck. Honk. Honk. She better not leave the city in duck-hunting season or they’ll get her for sure.”
On the St Charles Tavern:
“I went in there one day with a friend. It’s dimly lit and except for the perfume you’d think you were walking into a straight bar. Then, as your eyes get used to the light you see that there’s nothing but guys in the place. Hundreds of them. They look you up and down as you walk towards the end trying to find a seat, and you realize what a broad in a miniskirt feels like on a windy day.”
An elephant in the Riverdale Zoo:
“He’s covered in shit and dirt and he looks about as happy as a hungry Jew with nothing but pork to eat in the house.”
“We walk past a baboon who’s picking his ass for fleas and throwing them at the spectators. Each time he does it, he smiles, his top lip lifting up a foot, exposing buck teeth that would make Jake jealous. Some little kid throws a stick at him and he picks it up, looks at it, then throws it back at him, hitting the kid’s mother. The kid laughs and the baboon smiles. It’s obvious that they’re in on this together. It’s probably the baboon that thought up the whole idea cause the kid doesn’t look too smart.”
Yes there is some anti-Semitism and racism but it seems casual to me and I wasn’t there in 1968 to gauge the mood of the populace so I don’t know how commonplace it was. I feel I can’t judge.
There’s so many great scenes in the book, the author going for a drink in a rowdy tavern, seeing hippies on the street, walking in Allen Gardens.
Loved this book. For me required reading for those living in the city.

[dimwig · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love that this book exists

[Tamara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Idgaf if you think that Michaels behaviour is a product of its time, he’s just an asshole. Book just repeats over and over again like I get it you hate women just kiss a man and get it over with then

[Nick Papaxanthos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ugly story. Can't look away. Shame the climax occurs offscreen, so to speak.

[The Master · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lost curiosity, this. You'd think a slice-of-life diary set in one of Toronto's poorest neighbourhoods and featuring a cast of grubby lowlifes would be more popular. That it doesn't feature on any lists of great Toronto novels is understandable -- the narrator's casual racism and sexism are certainly of their time (late 60s). Can's see that thing going over as well today. "About as funny as a truck full of dead babies," as the narrator puts it. Still, it was a quick and amusing read, a kind of life among the lowly in a part of town I've spent a lot of time in lately.