Beauty & Sadness

by André Alexis

  I’m writing about our time in Italy because although it was not entirely happy, there were transcendent moments. One evening in particular, after a day of

  writing, we lay in the bedroom together and Catherine read to me from her novel. In the same way that reading Plath’s “Tulips” was confirmation of how deeply I could be affected by poetry, this was a revelation. I listened as a fellow writer allowed me into her world of words. I can remember the bedroom still: white walls, bed on the ground, bathroom off to one side, a window facing the sea in one direction and the side of a mountain in the other. (At night, the constellations were so clear, it was easy to name the zodiac as it moved across the sky.) It was hot. We lay on top of the covers, me on my stomach, Catherine sitting up with her back against the wall. And I heard the latest version of the beginning to Claire’s Head.

  I miss being so close to someone else’s creativity, the thousands and thousands of micro-level decisions that go into writing a novel. Catherine’s work’s imperfections and possibilities were a mirror of the imperfections and possibilities in my own early drafts.

  It’s a paradox I haven’t quite thought through, but this moment with Catherine, a moment during which I felt privileged to be the first to hear a fellow writer’s work, was also the beginning of the end of my caring about “literary society.” When we went back to Toronto, I began to feel more and more distant from the writing community. And in fact, our time together in Positano (reading Catherine’s novel or translating Italo Calvino’s Il visconte dimezzato together, word for word, the listener holding the dictionary while the reader sounded the words out) was the last time I was completely happy to be a writer.8

  4. K (2)

  Ten years after we broke up, K and I began to see each other again. By this time, she was a committed poet, a member of a poetry reading group that included writers whose work I respect, like Maureen Hynes and Barry Dempster. Her ideas about poetry were fully developed and, now, radically different from mine.

  Our differences were thrown into relief when Jacob Scheire won a Governor General’s Award for Poetry. K didn’t feel he deserved the award, but she defended his poetry, while I couldn’t find anything in it to defend. The crux of the matter was, for me, Scheier’s unmemorable language and the slackness of his verse. For K, the poetry dealt with palpably true emotion. It wasn’t formless, and some of his lines and line breaks were subtle and created interesting wordplay. I saw some of her point and came to think of Scheier’s poetry less harshly.

  The thing about this second K, so very different from the first, was that she brought poetry into my life directly. With her, I began to seriously think about what poetry is, what it was meant to do, how it did what it did. Though I have always loved it, I had never thought to write poetry myself or, rather, I did think to do it, but I was so self-conscious about the writing that it destroyed whatever I wrote. With this second K — for her, rather — I surrendered to the idea of writing poetry. I wrote, with her in mind, the only poetry I have ever allowed myself to nurture; meaning: I went as far as I could with the poems I wrote, treating them seriously before setting them aside — not abandoned, as I had abandoned all the previous poetry I’d written, but left aside waiting for a (possible) moment of completion or a moment of resigned defeat.

  Maybe the most important aspect of this, for me, is that the writing of poetry has brought me back to zero, to the beginning of writing, unsure of what I’m doing, dependent on others to tell me what the work feels like to them, what it does. I’m once again an amateur.

  To Washington D.C., August 16, 2008

  These days, I think about a laconic

  or taciturn life, life in need of Roman

  words, words that end on the steps of the senate,

  Caesar’s life balanced against the needs of the people.

  Flying over the green hills of Pennsylvania,

  the land modest and strong, is not flying

  over the ragged, earth-scoring settlements

  that send up their own clouds, as if in defiance of God:

  Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Washington.

  Do the same creatures inhabit such different grounds?

  How to judge among the populi?

  Who are they to be weighed against Caesar?

  It would take a stoic, one who has reasoned

  patiently, to know when to add his knife to those

  of the conspirators or when to put

  his own chest forward in defiance.

  Coming in to land at Washington International,

  Memorial Bridge looking like dangerous

  lace over the Potomac, these questions rise

  as in a flood. What a strange age we live in, an age lower

  than Auden’s, more casually base. Even

  the prospect of change brings apprehension

  for some further, new debasement.

  Confusion and doubt bring with them thoughts about

  the senator from Illinois: great, honest,

  despicable or what? As the plane sinks into

  D.C., I think again of Illinois, and of a word:

  marble. Infinite marble. All potential,

  like the roar of the plane’s engines, all sound

  and silence at once. Neither Caesar nor of the

  people, not of his time nor far from it,

  no conspirator, no altruist, either.

  Coming in to land, I hear both everything

  and nothing and wonder about America.9

  Whether this poem is good or bad, indifferent or promising, it is the product of a willingness to be vulnerable — because poetry, which leaves you little place to hide, does make you vulnerable. And, in part, this willingness came out of my respect for the nakedness of K’s work.10 I said above that when one is living with another writer, the greatest influence comes from the “third writer” that the two of you create together. This is true, but no other writer, certainly none with whom I’ve had such combustible disagreements, has taught me more about my own aesthetic frailties — which is to say, more about myself, in the end.

  But there’s something else here.

  I mean, why should I wish to be an amateur again? Why be vulnerable in poetry when I’ve spent years learning a discipline (prose) that I haven’t yet mastered? What is there about humiliation and creation that they should go so closely hand in hand?11

  I can’t speak for other writers, of course. But, for me, the humiliation of beginning anew, feeling helpless, is very like the experience of coming to Canada for the first time. There is a fear of judgement, a waiting for disapproval, a humiliation in anticipation of humiliation. Rather than avoid this feeling, I have spent a lot of my creative life reliving it. It’s a way to remember my beginnings, yes, but also a way of saying “This doesn’t hurt me,” though of course it does. Being unsure of a poem, a play, a radio monologue — when trying to do those things for the first time — is embarrassing in exactly the way it was embarrassing to be asked to say words I would “mispronounce” in my Trinidadian accent when I first came to Canada. “Mastery” is also part of the mechanism. I felt I belonged, the day I was able to say “ask,” not “aks,” the day people stopped asking me to say things, because I had learned to say them in a way that no longer marked me as an outsider.

  A Literary Culture in Decline

  A sadness has dogged my time in Toronto. This is the city in which I have been disabused of a number of useless notions, where I have lost a certain innocence. I would have lost it in London or Paris, Tokyo or Port of Spain, no doubt. But my education has happened here, in Toronto, during this long decline in Canadian literary culture. So, my sadness is for the loss of innocence as well as for my culture’s slow agony.

  Where to start?

  I am writing these words on January 1, 2010, almost exactly twenty-three ye
ars after I first came to Toronto. The Toronto Star’s book section is small, ineptly edited, and not worth reading. (And when I say “ineptly edited,” I mean that the current book editor, in allowing personal attacks and collegiate vitriol to stand as “book reviews,” has directly contributed to the irrelevance of the two measly, advert-ridden pages the Star now puts out, dutifully, Sunday after Sunday.) The Globe and Mail ’s book section has been reduced from a stand-alone magazine to a handful of pages in the Focus section. The Globe book section’s slow death has been even more painful to witness than the Star’s.12

  Neither the Sun nor the National Post has a book section that is worthy of mention. Eye magazine, under Kevin Connolly’s stewardship, was interesting, but it’s been quite a while since Kevin was there and it’s much less interesting now. NOW magazine’s book page is, I think, unspeakably amateurish, and one wonders why they bother with books at all. One wonders why any of them bother. Is it to some feeling of guilt that we owe such book sections as remain, like vestigial limbs, in our newspapers?

  In the eighties and early nineties, the Globe and Mail ’s book section was very good indeed. Stan Persky — one of my favourite Canadian reviewers — wrote for the Globe, as did Jay Scott, though he was the paper’s film reviewer. (In fact, for a moment there, the intellectual aspirations of our reviewers was almost baffling. I remember being pleasantly stunned when Jay Scott spoke of Roland Barthes in the course of reviewing a Hollywood picture.) There were also Morris Wolfe and George Fetherling. The Toronto Star was almost as good, in those days. Ken Adachi was their regular reviewer, with Robert Fulford and Urjo Kareda, among others, contributing.

  But why should the death of book review sections matter?

  My answer to that question is entangled in my idealism. For me, book sections have been, even if only potentially, necessary forums for the exchange of ideas. When I read the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement, I can, if I choose, find out what John Searle thinks about relativism. I can read about Tariq Ali’s or Ian Buruma’s thoughts on Islam in Europe. I can revisit Galileo’s relationship to the church or Stephen J. Gould’s thoughts on baseball. Books are where ideas come to you without a middleman, but the reception books and ideas are given is matter from the agora, the place where men and women work out what it is they think about politics, religion, science, art, and beauty. In other words, a book section isn’t only about letting people know that such and such a work has been published. It’s a place where consideration happens, and the nature of a consideration is important, whatever book or idea sets it in motion. (“Consideration,” for me, isn’t so much a matter of determining the ultimate value of a work, but rather of allowing a community to participate in the evaluation of the work.) I also think that book review sections, being public and relatively slow-moving — being moderated — are superior to blogs, which descend into squabbling — and the desire to dominate — well before proper consideration has been given to the ideas under discussion. The anonymity of online commentary is counter-agoran. Not knowing with whom you’re dealing means not knowing where you are.

  Not to go too deeply into the obvious but, of course, there are any number of agorai. The audience for the New York Review of Books (leftist) is not identical to that for the Times Literary Supplement (rightist). A good book review section (or, as is the case with the New York Review of Books, a magazine) gives us a strong picture of a particular agora. The Globe and Mail ’s book section as it was in the eighties was an inspiring venue for Canadian intellectual life, one that allowed me to believe in the seriousness of my fellow countrymen.

  So, in answer to my own question: for me, the loss or decline of book sections has been part of the loss or decline of my community.

  There is a second part to this answer, though . . .

  These days, Canadian literary reviewing is so woefully incompetent, it makes you wonder if there’s something in our culture that poisons critics in their cradles. I was once told, by a short, pompous man with thick, dark-rimmed glasses (a self-styled “critic”), that criticism is “the rich loam out of which literature blooms.” If that were the case, Canadian literature would have withered, died, and blown away long ago. The failure of our country to produce a single literary critic of any worth, at least since the death of Northrop Frye, is striking. And in this age when book review pages are disappearing from our dying newspapers, things are likely to get worse. That is, we’re likely to be left with nothing but the sheer opinion-spreading that passes for critical thought these days.

  How we got to this pass is difficult to articulate. Or, rather, there are such a number of interesting narratives, it’s difficult to settle on any single one. Is Canadian literary reviewing worse than British or American reviewing? In that there is less of it, yes. In that there are fewer venues for it, yes. But neither the British nor the Americans have produced any particularly compelling critics lately, either. James Wood, who is the one name anyone mentions — and there is a kind of desperation in the mentioning — is, by his own choice, a limited critic. His assumption is that his judgement — a decision on whether or not such and such a work is “good” — is the most important aspect of “criticism” has led to lively enough talk, but he has not, as far as I know, written a convincing work to elucidate what it is we do when we write fiction or provided a new vantage from which to look on literature.13 In his way, Wood is a throwback to practitioner/critics like Nabokov or Tolstoy whose judgements are part of their own aesthetic process, having more to do with how they create than with understanding the work under consideration. (Think, for instance, of Nabokov’s schoolmarmish condescension towards Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy’s inability to see any value in Shakespeare’s work.) Wood’s inability to appreciate Paul Auster or Thomas Pynchon is in no way a victory for the critical — or, rather, reviewing —consciousness. It’s a defeat. And part of what is wrong these days is the forgetting that there is such a thing as the defeat of the critic. Criticism is, by its nature, the chronicle of a small community: writer, book, reader.14 It is, for the brief time it exists, a community of equals. A reader/critic who fails to appreciate or understand a book tends to blame the book or the writer. And, in fact, it may well be that book X is ineptly done or that the writer is at fault. But readers are generally blind to their own deficiencies and reviewers even more so. It’s very, very rare to find a reviewer — whose job, after all, is to convince us that he or she knows whereof he or she speaks — who will even admit the possibility that he or she is the weak member in the community he or she is chronicling.

  Well, yes, but what should the reviewer do? Begin every negative review with a mea culpa, an apology for his or her betrayal of the book under consideration? No, that’s not necessary. The problem is, rather, in the approach. Our reviews have become, at their worst, about the revelation of the reviewer’s opinion, not about a consideration of the book or an account of the small world that briefly held writer and reviewer in the orbit of a book. Reviews have turned into a species of autobiography, with the book under review being little more than a pretext for personal revelation.15

  If I had to blame any one Canadian writer for this state of affairs, I’d blame John Metcalf.16 I think Metcalf’s influence on reviewing has been woeful and unfortunate. At least, it is if you accept my version of how we’ve come to the place we’re at . . .

  Northrop Frye was a great critic, but his work — and some of the work he influenced, Margaret Atwood’s Survival above all — was one of the stimuli for a kind of populist critical rebellion. Frye’s work was academic, specialized, and structuralist. The Anatomy of Criticism is a book that, it’s been suggested, put methodology first and, to an extent, the literary works it was scrutinizing second. I don’t think that’s entirely fair. Frye’s respect for the literary work was, to me, inspiring. And he was a good practical critic (or critical reviewer). He could write a clear evaluation of Wallace Stevens, say, that was accessible to
all, whether you had read his Anatomy of Criticism or not.

  Atwood’s Survival was also academic and, perhaps, a little rigidly methodological. It put classification above aesthetic consideration. The works Atwood writes about are put into categories she has devised, their importance based on taxonomy. Personally, I think Survival is a brilliant book, suggestive and stimulating, but a common complaint of Metcalf’s and of those influenced by him was that critics like Atwood rated books more highly than they should have because, for instance, they were examples of “Canadian Gothic.” Books by, again for instance, Frederick Philip Grove which, practically speaking, had little real influence on Canadian writing were lauded because they were exemplars of certain tendencies in Canadian literature. To Metcalf, this meant that academics had created or were creating a distorted version of Canadian literature. Worse, academic classification — as an end in itself — gave the impression that academics are the ones best equipped to deal with literary works. Refusing to deal with whether a book was actually any good or not, refusing to judge a work’s sheer aesthetic worth, led to a breach in the reading public. On one side, in their ivory towers, were the academics who never allowed themselves to be troubled by trivial things like the actual pleasure a book gives. On the other side were writers like John Metcalf who insisted that not only was the pleasure a book gave important, but that the pleasure it gave was, likely, a better indication of the book’s influence as well. That is, people read and love The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. They don’t read, unless forced to, Settlers of the Marsh. So, what does “influence” mean if you can call Settlers of the Marsh as influential a work as Duddy Kravitz simply because Settlers is an exemplar of the immigrant’s tale?

  In the 1980s, Metcalf waged an effective campaign against “academic” criticism. He cultivated and published writers who announced their allegiance to him by insisting that the pleasure a book gives is its most important aspect. In Kicking against the Pricks, which is by some distance his best book, I think, Metcalf makes a convincing case for his concerns. For one thing, in an essay called “Punctuation as Score,” he demonstrates a sensitivity to language and he makes that something of a calling card. (It’s as if he were saying: I’ve meditated on words, on what they can do, and on how they are most effectively used. Have you?) An essay like “Punctuation as Score” is, for me, at any rate, so amusing — and instructive — that it’s possible to forgive the shaky foundation of his argument in other parts of the book. Foremost among the shaky arguments is the idea that “good writing” is easily distinguished from bad. Anyone who has actually tried to set down rules to help discriminate between good and bad writing knows just how difficult this is. Metcalf doesn’t set down rules, though. He takes sentences or paragraphs that he considers examples of “brilliant” writing and then does the written equivalent of pointing and saying, “There, you see?” Having spent so much time arguing against the “academic,” there really isn’t much more that Metcalf can do. He has painted himself into a corner where any introduction of system or method would itself be considered “academic.” Not surprisingly, Metcalf and his followers do a lot of pointing.