The irony that explains this startling nationalism, and an almost contradictory dismissal of a country in which I had lived, at the time, for ten years as a visitor, foreign student, foreigner — never “immigrant” — is that I became in time, officially in 1985, a better Canadian, whatever this term implies, than if I had, as some “immigrants” do, rejected my own country, or had minimized the contribution of that country, as some “immigrants” have done, from countries they have fled because of race, poverty, unemployment, political upheaval, and as in recent times, racial massacres.
Did I know what no UIC supervisor could, with the year I had given myself in which to prove to myself whether I could write a novel? Or a short story. Or a play. Anything. Anything worthy of being published. And published in the literary magazines that existed in 1963: Tamarack Review, run by Robert Weaver; Canadian Literature, edited by William New; the Queen’s Quarterly; and one radical magazine, Evidence, edited by Kenneth Craig, from 471 Bay Street, a quarterly whose price was four dollars a year. Kenneth warned writers seeking publication that “manu-scripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope.”
Volume one of Evidence magazine published the following writers and artists, most of whom drank almost every night in the Pilot Tavern, on the corner of Bloor and Yonge, on the northwest corner, north of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. They were:
William Ronald — Toronto abstract expressionist painter now living in New York and exhibiting with the Kootz Gallery.
Ray Jessel — Well-known writer of songs and sketches for Canadian revues. Latest revue soon to be opening in New York.
Austin Clarke — Young fiction writer from the West Indies. Just completed second novel and has published his poems widely in Canada.
Kenneth Craig — Editor of Evidence.
Gerald Gladstone — Toronto-born sculptor and painter exhibiting at the Isaacs Gallery.
Lynne de Ceuleneer — Young advertising artist who is a promising painter. [And was, at the time, Kenneth’s “lady.”]
Joyce Wieland — Toronto-born painter represented by the Here and Now Gallery.
William Ronald was concerned about “ideas,” and in his piece he wrote:
At a certain stage admirable ideas seriously worry the well disposed life of such people as kings, statesmen and religious leaders. Weakness stands fluttering her alternating banner. Upset and entranced these people engulf something far more serious than we may imagine.
Ray Jessel’s piece, “How Many Miles from Gil to Bill?” begins with a strong statement of historical categorization:
Since the goings-on at Minton’s in the early ’40’s crystallized into a handy reference point for the Jazz Critics, history has been nice enough to hand those indefatigables yet another “era” on a platter.
Gerald Gladstone advises us that:
A great piece of sculpting is the road, at the corner of King and Church Streets, just in front of the Royal Bank of Canada, Main Branch. It’s been ten years in the making — every type of person has helped make it — it expresses the complete wordless statement of a built city that is decaying into a completed sculptural whole.
And he ends by offering this assistance: “To make a modern piece of sculpting, just take two of anything — break one into two pieces — put them together and you’re finished. It’s that easy. Nature does it all the time.”
Following my contribution — a very wordy poem that has no title, a poem which abuses all the rules of writing that I have subsequently warned my students not to commit — is a very interesting advertisement for Irving Layton’s collection of poems, A Red Carpet for the Sun, published by McClelland & Stewart, for $3.50: “cloth, Paper $1.95, with two blurbs for ‘the collected poems of one of the most powerful poets writing in Canada today.’”
Roy Fuller regarded Layton as “This mature and excellent poet.”
Hear what Robertson Davies said: “These poems are the feelings and thoughts of a man who pierces through triviality to something that is enduring,” prophesying in 1964 what Layton would become.
Here now, is my poem, untitled, bringing shame upon my head, to read it now, in 2015, fifty-two years after it was composed; written at a time when I imitated Dylan Thomas and found no literary consolation in Irving Layton, or Earl Birney, or Alfred Purdy, or Margaret Atwood, or Dennis Lee, or Robert French, or any of the Montreal Poets … there was no one living Canadian in whom I could entrust my flimsy and tentative verses, for inspiration and for strengthening, and for width. And for relevance. For I never thought there was a relevant model amongst Canadian writers on whom I might base my work. And even today, more than fifty years later, I have not found among our writers a model that speaks to me in the same way as I speak to my readers, meaning the people whom I would like to read my novels, and who do read my writing.
I have never held the obsession that the reader of my work is the important force in determining what I write. I write with a profound ignoring of the reader, and his taste, and moreover of any influence I might think the prevailing fashion, or style has upon the writer. I am therefore a loner in this sense of being unacquainted with a particular school, or style of writing, so far as a Canadian model is concerned. And I have never held a Canadian writer as a model of my own work. This is simply because the theme and the style of Canadian literature are irrelevant to my work. I do not therefore see any connection, in the sense of “literary ancestry” to my writing. I am alone, singular, peculiar, and foreign to the establishment that governs and controls Canadian literature.
This singularity is both a benefit and a disadvantage: it allows me to experiment, to discover literary territory in the same way as seafarers and sea dogs like Drake and Hawkins “discovered” countries and West Indian islands, widening the scope of my journeys into unknown waters, and it disclosed from my penetrations the limits and the vastness of boundaries that I might have tried to imitate.
But there were models. These models had to be West Indian, black American, African to a less degree, and some of the classics, so far as the experimenting with language and “voice” are concerned. However, I never attempted with theme. For the narrative I wanted to present had to be pure in its relation to the narrator and the narrative itself. So, I found solace in William Faulkner, tasted the concentrated narrative of James Joyce and recoiled from its thickness and its virulent taste; and embraced Geoffrey Chaucer and tried to retain the lines of Shakespeare. And something of T.S. Eliot’s irreverence with tradition.
This is part of the poem that was published in Evidence magazine, in 1963, in Volume One:
In my barefoot days, under the sun, blackened
By miles of walking, and moons of coming, and never going,
In my bastard days, young and pure; before
I saw everything, but innocence in the girls,
Browned and cocoed, on the beaches, marbly
Under the sore foot, and lazy as my native-cousins
Stretching in yawns till moonshine come;
In my first days of growing with the canes
On the two sides of my upbringing
Flogged-out, and repaired
In the booted days, when the tamarinds, new-cut,
And cutting into the havoc of my ways of living,
When the church-bells, tolling for dinner and mass
Roused me from the rascals, propping the corner
With sailor-jokes, and the tales dribbled by mother
And grandmother …
And it goes on for seventeen more lines, justifying Robert Weaver’s stinging reprimand of my effrontery to submit it first to the Tamarack Review, telling me that “poems enclosed showed no poetic value” and advising me that I should, perhaps, turn my literary attention to other things; but more important than Weaver’s chilly commentary, is my recognition of T.S. Eliot in some of the music and phrasing, and Dylan Thomas’s echoes in the other lines. It is obvious to me, fifty-two years after this was publishe
d, what I was reading, either for pleasure, or for instruction.
Thirty lines before I came to a full stop. How reminiscent of the opening sentence in the short story, “When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks.” I wonder what influence the one, the poem, had on the other, the short story; and why I was so attracted to long, breathless, unpunctuated salvos?
Fridays then signalled a hiatus in which I could breathe some relief from the imprecation of debtors; and this would become a feature of my life as a writer for a very long time: the evading of the jabs of penury by the dipsy-doodling of prescience, knowing when to duck, when to run, when to breathe. I indulged in all pleasures late on Friday afternoons, all of Saturday, the beginning of Sunday, moderated by going to church and thinking of going to church, and not going to church very often; and by five o’clock on Sunday nights, when back in Barbados I would be listening to the choirs of King’s College Cambridge, to the service from St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and to the mellifluous tones of Southerners who mixed the Bible with personal psychology, growing out in their rich molasses voices the hard, cruel, brutal character of their other lives and livelihood as members of the Ku Klux Klan, at least as racists, when I should be sitting close to the “private set” from Hilversum in Holland, so close that I could hear the waves of distance coming through the speaker, and not, as was the case in Toronto, at this hour of dusk in the good weather, darkness for the seven months of winter, preparing for the harshness, the realism of the week, which began for me on Sunday night, in sleepless twisting of the body, instilling in my anxiety and limbs, the planting of insomnia. But insomnia is part of the life of the writer.
In 2007, Margaret Atwood gave a talk at a dinner at which she was guest of honour. She called her talk “The Writing Life.” And she talked about writing. Pierre Berton, at the end of his life, wrote a book on this subject. I have not read Berton’s book, so I do not know if his views agreed with what I consider to be a very casual title for a life of hardship, a life of uncertainty, a life that results very often in ruined family and broken promises of money and of love, and of charity. The Writing Life! The title so chosen is usually expressed in terms that remind me of the frivolousness of sports. The Sporting Life! No matter that the Sporting Life, with its similarity in title with The Writing Life, can never be so synonymous in its nature, to “the writing life” that Atwood and Berton unfortunately suggested.
For me “The Writing Life” does not reflect the burdensomeness, the instability of life of a writer, the torment that is the characteristic of “The Life of the Writer.” I do not think that this change in title (epithet and subject) suggests a similarity as it appears at first glance, to do.
What have I ruined in my life, personally and in association, in my relentless craving after becoming a writer? In 1963, I thought I was too old to embark upon this uncertain body of water, over which to chart a career, water that is always shifting, with currents that were not always flowing in the desired destination, rudderless because of personal disposition and also because of the evaluation of my work, what little it was, through whim and whimsy, and what was being written and was fashionable. And race. Race has always featured in these considerations. No black man, no immigrant in living memory, meaning no living immigrant in the second half of the century had ever expressed the thought, the experiment, of wanting to be a writer. It must have been as startling to be heard, as it was for my wife when I announced to her that Friday afternoon that I was not going back to work, but would “go on the dole” for one year; and after that year, in failure or in success, I would return to work, and cease being a financial liability on the Canadian society. My life on welfare lasted six months, when to my astonishment, and to the shock of others, my first manuscript, The Survivors of the Crossing, was accepted by McClelland & Stewart. I would have to work with an editor, and if the revisions and the editorial changes were satisfactory, I would be published. Heinemann in London was the co-publisher.
What was the atmosphere like, when I started out? What novel could serve as my model. Who, as Ralph Ellison said, were my “literary ancestors”? And who were my “literary family”?
There was no black Canadian writer. There were three West Indians. Wallace Collins, a Jamaican, who came over from England and the raw rise in racism, and the Notting Hill Riots. Clyde Hosein, from Trinidad, who specialized in brilliant short stories, published primarily in England. And Lloyd Brown, a reporter at the Globe and Mail — the first black man to have been hired by that newspaper, a graduate in journalism from the University of Western Ontario — tormenting me by its presumption that you could be taught how to write, even non-fiction, and journalism, and graduate with a degree! — and who was now writing plays.
Charles Roach, a Trinidadian, who later became a distinguished lawyer representing blacks against the police and other acts of discrimination, was at this time, in the early 1960s, writing poetry.
Ernest X, an immigrant from the Bahamas, who was writing plays.
All of these young men were at the beginning of their careers. The only other writer with a published book was Wallace Collins.
This then, was the atmosphere. The writers who “had made it” in fiction were Arthur Hailey, whom we envied for the huge amount of money he made from Airport, and other works, turned almost immedi-
ately into television dramas and movies; and a gentleman named Robert Mirvish, the brother of Honest Ed, who, when I met him in the drawing room of the Kilbourns in Rosedale, advised me, “Don’t mind what they say, Austin. Write things that sell, and make money. Don’t get trapped in fancy fiction.”
But it was Arthur Hailey, not for his literary style who would impress me, and lots of beginning writers, both black and white, but the amount of money he made, from everything he wrote, that drew us in that direction, unsuccessfully, but which caused us to be looking up in the sky, to see the shape of airplanes.
If I were going to pick a model for my fiction it would be Hugh Garner, who wrote about a socialism and realism that I wanted to address. But Garner lived and died in utter, deep neglect, from the critics, reviewers, and the establishment. Canada was not ready for him. It is his honesty, and his raucous language, so similar to the rasp in his voice, like a shout into an empty barrel, a hoarseness caused by his chain-smoking of unfiltered green Macdonald’s cigarettes.
And suddenly it is a Friday afternoon, and I am in the front row of seats in Varsity Stadium, looking east, to the red brick building where I had lectures in statistics by Professor Triantis; in economic history by Professor Karl Helleiner, in which the brightest student was George Ramsay Cook, himself a professor emeritus now, at York University; and in political science, by Professor C.B. Macpherson, who made good socialists of all of us West Indians, and whom we remember even today with affection and gratitude for his understanding of us, black students, from the West Indies. On this afternoon, Varsity Stadium is overrun with people, people in numbers greater than the crowd of a homecoming football match between Toronto and McGill; but with the difference that on this afternoon, the stadium is not dressed in the colours of supporting allegiance, in the blue of Varsity, and in the red of McGill, but in the multi-coloured mufti of white liberals. It is a “teach-in.” America has just killed another black man for demonstrating his civil rights. Or a Southern sheriff, or a Southern governor — Wallace or Faubus — has just brought out the cops and national guards of their empires of violence to stop a child from entering an all-white school or a lunch counter. Something more violent than the disgrace we have been living through for the entire month has just happened. Michael Ignatieff organized this “teach-in,” and, knowing of my activity in civil rights protests, invited me to speak. I would have drawn a comparison between the horrors taking place in America, and the threat of those horrors crossing the border like illegal immigrants. There were beautiful women on the pasture, sitting. There were always beautiful women at these civil rights demonstrations. Beauty and social conscience, and liberalism w
ent hand in brassiere, hand in waist, in those days that corresponded almost with the political dogma, “Make Love Not War.” We were all beatniks and hippies. Weird people in the eyes of everybody else who were not “beat.” To be “beat” held a certain honour. Pot-smoking, soiled, dirty, colour-loving, drug-loving, jazz-loving, hillbillying, bearded men, and women who wore dresses that showed the beauty of their physique and breasts, loose-dressed women.
I cannot remember what I spoke about, but I do remember the applause, the kind of applause that any kind of speech defending Negro civil rights in Canada; any kind of harangue against the apartheid regime in South Africa under Verwoerd, against racism in Rhodesia under Ian Smith, and especially racial segregation and racial violence in the United States of America; any declaration of sympathy for the Black Power movement, and to make the appeal international, any collaborative opinion of showing that racism was international, was greeted with applause, for these were the days of liberalism: a struggle engaged in by Jews and blacks. So, my speech, similar to the opinion pieces I had been writing for the Telegram and the Toronto Star newspapers, had to bring a large crowd, and bring the house down, for there was vocal, public declaration of sympathy amongst these white liberals, and a few socially conscious blacks, that gave the civil rights movement its moral strength. More than that, it showed, for a short time in the late 1950s and 1960s, how Jews identified their own status with that of the Negro.
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