by André Alexis
Third, Don, as an easterner, is acutely aware that central Canadians don’t give a rat’s ass about eastern Canadian culture. The more specific to the Maritimes a play is, the less chance it has of being produced in Toronto. And there are too few theatres in New Brunswick, say, for him to make a living. (It’s hard enough making a living as a playwright in Toronto.) So, though the accent he hears is a kind of distillation of eastern voices, though the way he writes is essentially Canadian, he’d just as soon his plays were performed in whatever accent suits the cast and company.
To me, all of this is sad. Leaving aside the question of eastern Canada’s cultural non-presence in other parts of the country, there is still the matter of theatre as the place where language, our language and our accents, should have uncontested precedence.31 So, I find it unsettling that, for practical reasons, we will rarely, if ever, hear the plays of Don Hannah, one of our best playwrights, in the accent in which they were written.
Water
It is my fifty-third birthday (it is, at this moment, 3:15 p.m. on January 15, 2010), and I am thinking about 1976, the year I resolved to be a writer. I wonder if it was a good year for me or a bad one. Hard to say, from here.
What have I accomplished since 1976? In literary terms: four books of fiction (Despair, Childhood, Ingrid and the Wolf, Asylum), a play (Lambton Kent), a handful of libretti (Orpheus and Eurydice, Aeneas and Dido, Waterland, Wilderness, Mnemosyne), countless book reviews and radio scripts.
Is there anything I would save of what I have written? Yes, maybe, but I don’t know what.
What kind of writer have I become? Clever, with too many ideas at times, lazy, far short of my own ideals, my literary language still unmastered.
What can I hope for?
Now, there’s a question that troubles me. I’ve been writing — steadily, constantly — since I was nineteen. I have refused to allow myself to consider that there was anything else for me to do in this life. Back then, success meant writing; failure, not writing. But halfway or more along this road, I’ve begun to wonder if I was made for any of this: writing, writers, the literary life. So, what more can I hope for from the writing life? More of the same . . . done slightly better, maybe, if I persist. But persist for what reason?32
Have I become a pessimist, then? Am I one of those bitter old scribblers who can’t stand young writers and loathes my peers?
No. Surprisingly not. Or not yet. The twenty-four years during which I’ve taught myself, well or poorly, to be a writer have not dampened my love for writing itself. I can, when I read a poem by Don McKay or a novel by Edward St Aubyn, still feel the thrill of words properly organized on a page. And that feeling, that thrill, wards off pessimism. Nor is it primarily new work that moves me. In recent years, I’ve been inspired by Lydia Davis’s translation of The Way by Swann’s, Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, the Pevear-Volokhonsky War and Peace, the poems of Tomas Tranströmer, Zbigniew Herbert, and Margaret Avison. A host of voices and sensibilities that have taken their place in my imagination.
I began this memoir with a few words about Atwood’s “This Is a Photograph of Me.” There is a dark aspect to the poem. I mean: what to make of someone insisting that he or she is present, if only the observer will look closely enough at the surface of the water where he or she has drowned? As I suggested at the beginning of this piece, there are a number of ways to interpret the poem, most of them a little bleak, I guess.
But Atwood’s final insistence on being (on the need to say, “I am here, if you look”) allows for a certain light. It’s possible, for instance, to think of the water in the poem as words, to think of the lake as literature. In and amongst all literary creation, a writer can get lost or drown, but his or her voice can be heard, still living, if one listens, if one will read.
In coming to Toronto, I wanted to add my voice to the voices of those who were writing the terrain, my country, into existence. And, on this my fifty-third birthday, twenty-four years after coming to Toronto, I’ve done that, whatever my disappointments or disillusion or fears for the decline of literary culture.
So, am I a pessimist? Yes, by nature.
An optimist? Yes, also by nature.
Drowned but still living is exactly how I feel.
* * *
1 In the documentary called Ingmar Bergman on Life and Work, Ingmar Bergman speaks with some wonder of the fact that he could still accurately visualize a room in his maternal grandmother’s home. In that part of the film called “Dialogue with Childhood,” Bergman says, “. . . my mother’s mother died when I was twelve and I hadn’t been [to her home] since I was maybe ten or eleven. And yet I can remember it in detail. There were things in that apartment that still have a magic significance and importance. I used a lot of that in Fanny and Alexander. If one can draw any conclusions from it . . . it may well be that, in a way, the whole of my creativity is in reality terribly childish. It’s rooted in my childhood. I can, in less than a second, go right back into my childhood. I think that all I’ve done on the whole, anything of any value, has its roots in my childhood. Or, in dialectical terms, it’s a dialogue with my childhood. I’ve never distanced myself from my childhood, but I have indeed carried on a dialogue with it. . . .” I’ve quoted Bergman at length, here, not because I identify with what he says, though I very much do, but because the “dialectic” Bergman describes brings to mind the dialectic I have with the idea of “Canada.” It is different, of course. “Canada” is a vivid, primal whiteness that influences the impressions, colours, and feelings in my daily life. When I say “whiteness,” I mean that my country is in constant need of definition. It is always as it was when I first encountered it, at the age of four: mysterious, anxiety inducing. My daily experience brings me closer to an understanding of Canada, but paradoxically “Canada” is erased by my experience. Meaning: my country is not limited to my experience, is much greater than my experience of it, but my experience is crucial to an understanding of my country. A perverse dialectic, at the extremes of which either I or Canada is erased. That sounds excessively Hegelian, but the back and forth is crucial to my understanding of myself and of the land on which I dwell. And all of my writing has been part of this dialogue with my Canada.
2 I wanted to meet Ondaatje because I liked his poetry and had been overwhelmed by Coming Through Slaughter, which I’d read at one sitting, as if it were good mystery. Also, a friend of mine had once described going to a public reading at which Ondaatje had been one of the readers. Ondaatje, apparently, had been dressed in black and looked the part of a poet: moody, handsome, and slightly louche. He was, in a word, everything I wanted to be. When I did meet him, some ten years after coming to Toronto, I found him sympathetic, generous, not at all disappointing, but guarded. The kind of man who speaks more easily of what’s going on with you than what’s going on with him. Atwood: a different story. When I finally met her, Atwood seemed the embodiment not of the poetic but of the professional, a writer aware of herself as a writer, not unfriendly, not particularly friendly, either. On one occasion, she commiserated with me on the writing of my second novel. On another, she stuck her tongue out at me from across a table.
3 At the time I left Ottawa, I couldn’t have told you why this “living presence” mattered. One instinctively seeks out those who have lived the life one wants to live. But then, in 2007, I was teaching at the University of Toronto and invited P. K. Page to speak to my creative writing class. She was a revelation. Not only a poet I had admired for some time, but the embodiment of a life lived in writing. It’s hard to express what this “embodiment” means, exactly. P. K. didn’t give the best answers I’ve heard to the questions she was asked. She gave her answers. But, in so doing, you could feel the depth of thought and feeling that had gone into the creation of her self and her work. My students were inspired by her. Against my own expectations, I was, too. By then, I had met any
number of writers. But I felt, meeting P. K. Page, the cost and value of a life spent allowing the world to come through oneself in language and images. I could feel the nobility of her surrender to the process, and it renewed my own commitment to what is, in the end, a spiritual exercise.
4 I would very much like to name these people. It feels cowardly to admit the feeling without delving, even if lightly, into it. After all, the writers I dislike are part of what drives my creativity. The reason I’ve chosen not to name these people is, first, that I can’t stand to write their names. And then again, it distresses me to admit that the worst of me is such an integral part of the “spiritual exercise” that is writing.
5 When I was younger, I was obsessed with Russian literature. Tolstoy was my favourite, but the Dostoyevsky of Brothers Karamazov and the Turgenyev of Fathers and Sons weren’t far behind. So, when I first read about Tolstoy’s dislike of Turgenyev and his unwillingness to hang around St. Petersburg with the literary society of his time, I really couldn’t understand it. Who wouldn’t want to hang out with Dostoyevsky? I wondered. As it happens, Dostoyevsky and Turgenyev and Fet and whoever . . . most of them felt the same way. Once they’d found the vantage from which they would do their life’s work, literary society became superfluous. Sadly, because it is the last nail in the coffin of my literary idealism, I now understand exactly why one wouldn’t want to hang out with Fyodor or Ivan, Afanasy or Anton. One day, while I was talking to Michael Helm, he turned to me and said, “You know, other writers are a lot like family. You’re glad they’re alive, but you don’t actually want to be around them too much.” If you’ve been around writers for long enough, this will seem self-evident.
6 While Catherine did not mind my using her name, K very much did. So, it feels as if there are “black spots” in the text, places where others have pasted over parts of the window. While writing fiction, I choose those spots. I control what is revealed, in the name of a kind of “truth,” which is, of course, a kind of lie. (Cocteau says of the poet, “I am a lie that tells only the truth.” Not bad as a definition of fiction, either.) Though I understand perfectly why privacy is important, it is still a little odd to have those black spots determined by others. It is baffling, in fact, because in this essay I am as helpless before the (entirely reasonable) needs of others as I usually am before my own.
7 I remember quite a bit about our time at Santa Maddalena. Beatrice was a fantastically generous European snob. She had owned an art gallery in Milan and had once spent a day in Athens (I think it was) with Marcel Duchamp. Zadie was friendly and entirely unpretentious. There were a handful of visitors during my month at Santa Maddalena: Alexander Chancellor, Alexander Waugh and his wife, and Colm Tóibín. What I remember most vividly, though, is the groundskeeper, an Algerian or Middle Eastern man: short, thin as a whippet. He was in his thirties, I guess, very friendly to me, but with a wary and slightly pugnacious look on his face at all times. He and his wife cooked, cleaned, and did what menial work needed to be done. Unfortunately, the Algerian man was a bit of a know-it-all. Before we had come, the chickens Beatrice kept for their eggs had developed a strong case of fleas. Rather than bring in a vet and waste the Baronessa’s money, the Algerian decided to deal with the problem himself. Convinced that it was the chickens’ anuses that were the problem, that their anuses attracted the fleas, he took a cotton swab rubbed with DDT and, daily, cleaned the chickens’ anuses. He didn’t tell anyone that he’d decided to do this. He simply went ahead with it. Not surprisingly, the chickens began to die out. No one could figure out why, until they discovered what the Algerian had done and understood that the chickens were dying from DDT poisoning. This story itself suggests the odd irreality of Santa Maddalena. The other thing I vividly remember is Santa Maddalena’s guest book. It was signed by a number of artists and writers. The signature I remember best was by Robert Wilson, the theatre director. It was so appealing to me, I tried to write my own name in Wilson’s style for some time afterwards.
8 So, the last time I was entirely happy to be a writer was, in fact, when I was most a reader.
9 I could have chosen a less “finished” poem, here, I guess. In the Beckett essay, I chose the awkward and ungainly, because the struggle for emotion and for distance — for reconciliation — is what I was after. It’s what I’m after here, too, to an extent. But I’ve destroyed most of the poems I wrote while I was with K. The only other one I might have chosen I did not because a poet friend remarked that the final lines feature a rhyme that was too dead on: “do,” “you.” It sounded to her like “moon” and “June,” and she suggested that John Donne, for instance, would have been more subtle. In this, she was wrong. For comedic effect, John Donne does, in fact, use common rhymes. In “Woman’s Constancy,” for instance, he rhymes “could” and “would,” “you” and “true,” “do” and “too.” But her point had to do with something deeper. The poem was problematic because its four final lines didn’t deal with the emotion of its beginning.
For a prose writer (for me, at any rate), the criticism of poets often has to be interpreted with the same care one uses to interpret their poems. The poets I know, aware as they are that the change of one word can alter the meaning(s) of a poem, are hesitant in their suggestions. Their criticisms are preceded by words like “It’s your poem, so . . .” or “This is good, if you’re happy with it . . .” When writers of prose — professional writers, I mean — criticize your work, they mention structure, characterization, rhythm. They point to concrete “problems” in your novel or story. Their comments are less cloud-like, less vague, though not necessarily better or more helpful. Though it may not have as many words as a short story, a poem can take longer to finish. So, in a way, poetic criticism can be like Zen koans, aids to a meditation on poetry. Not that there aren’t moments when poets are entirely clear. After I sent him a poem in which I had compared the body of a drowned goat floating in the Mediterranean to a “roving footstool,” Michael Redhill wrote: “Lose the fucking footstool. Just because something looks like another doesn’t make it a good image.” A good lesson for prose writers, too, but a matter of life and death for poets.
10 In the story “Cocteau,” from the first section of this book, some of Marin’s poetry was lifted (with permission) from K’s work.
11 And not just for me, either. According to Philip Guston, a great painter, the artist Franz Kline once said to him: “You know what creation really is? To have the capacity to be embarrassed.”
12 I’m a contributing reviewer to the Globe and Mail’s book section, but I’m entirely pessimistic about the section’s future. The book section’s editor, Martin Levin, still manages to find capable reviewers, now and then, but one wonders if the newspaper itself really cares, since it has decided to pander to popular taste (or, more accurately, the decline in popular taste) by shortening the reviews and including breezy interviews with “interesting” authors.
13 In an article on Henry James, Wood wrote, “contemporary scholars are simply not interested in value judgment at all (they have smaller fish to fry).” James Wood is interested in value judgements. He takes them as a chief part of his intellectual brief. In a review of Denis Donoghue’s Speaking of Beauty, he reuses the “smaller fish to fry” analogy and then says “Who bothers, when teaching Portrait of a Lady for the umpteenth time, to explain that it is a great book and a beautiful one?” Now, surely the job is to explain why the book is “great” or “beautiful,” not that it is “great” or “beautiful.” And in explaining why, academics — for whom Wood, here, has little but scorn and derision — do resort to showing how the book achieves its effects. Is there a more efficient way to demonstrate “greatness” or “beauty”? At the beginning of his career, James Wood sought to make a virtue — perhaps the ultimate virtue — of the reviewer’s declaration of what is great and what beautiful.
N
ow, my words about Wood’s critical thinking concern The Broken Estate, his first book, above all, and such practical criticism of his as I’ve chanced to read in The New Yorker or in other places over the last few years. (His latest book, How Fiction Works, is a different kettle of fish. It marks the beginning of an interesting critical endeavour. And it warrants separate consideration.) As far as I can tell, Wood’s insights into fiction are really descriptions (of plot or language) and analogy, not the result of any particularly deep understanding. Here’s another (and fairly typical) sentence from his essay on Henry James: “The particular difficulty, and the difficult reward, of late James is the way in which he transfers his own acute sensitivity to verbal calibration onto his characters: they become Chief Justices of the word, forever raising to moral scrutiny certain anointed terms and phrases. This is what gives late James its strongly philosophical flavor.” These are, conspicuously, “writerly” sentences, a little overwrought for their purpose, because Wood is preening. And then, “Chief Justices of the word”? An interesting analogy, but what does it mean, and what does it mean when applied to Maisie or Mrs. Gereth? Is the difference between Daisy Miller (early James) and Maisie (late James), both of them “innocents,” really down to Maisie being authoritatively sensitive to language? And is it his characters’ Jamesian language use that gives late Henry James its “strongly philosophical flavour” or, more plausibly, the play of moral and philosophical ideas along with James’s constant struggle for expository precision? For me, Wood’s insights, in his earlier work, are almost inevitably flimsy and a product of his performative reviewing.