Murder

by David Adams Richards

  As Nietzsche says, “men believe in the truth of that which is plainly strongly believed.” Many of the views strongly believed today have become a mantra for our literary society, because it is also assumed that a literary society is “proactive” in a way that is accepted within the parameters of a left-of-centre ideology. To some, it is absolutely absurd to refute this or to look at life as being positive by looking at it in any other way. Those who do are sooner or later cast out. When they are cast out, they are not called “renegades.” They are called “conventional”; whereas those who hold on to the mantra are called “original.”

  This is particularly distressing when one comes from an area of the world that is looked upon as conventional anyway—the Maritimes. It sometimes puts us at a double disadvantage. If we try to write truthfully about our own experience to say it is as wondrous and as human as anyone else’s, we come into the centre of the ring already one eight-count down. Or at least we did when I was a youngster.

  At first glance, it seems not too much of a problem to join with other professionals, who seem more worldly than we are. And perhaps it is so seamless that you feel you have always belonged. And if you agree with the opinions of the group, then you do. Yet many opinions are reshaped to fit the prevailing ones. And the opinions of groups are often notional rather than experience based. And this is a dangerous problem: the problem of assumption rather than truth.

  “Whatever else poetry is freedom. / Forget the rhetoric, the trick of lying / All poets pick up sooner or later,” Irving Layton warns. He is right. But he is not only making a statement here. He is also revealing a condition. Poetry is freedom. It has to be, to be poetry. Therefore you must guard it as you would freedom. I will paraphrase what Alice Munro, speaking to my good friend Jack Hodgins, said one night: “They talk about the writing family—I have no idea what that means—a writer is on her own.”

  She is right. Margaret Laurence spoke of a writing “breed,” which I believe cannot exist and remain true at the same time. It is an oxymoron, of course, but one to which we should pay close attention. Joining with a volley of strong, seemingly worldly opinion and becoming included with famous people is a vague and elusive kind of attraction to a young person.

  Yet, as Munro and Layton suggest, joining in a group dynamic may be tantamount (and I said may be—I am not saying it always is) to giving up your ethical or literary values for a powerful group value and is really self-imposed bondage. No real harm can come to your work if you refuse it, as writers and musicians and artists like Beethoven and Dostoyevsky and Keats and Hardy and Bronte and Picasso and Eudora Welty refused it. But it is not easy. For harm can come to your reputation and peace of mind. If you are not what is seen to be correct, you are seen to be in error. So it is, in many ways, the hardest and most necessary thing an artist, man or woman, can ever do. At some point, you must turn away. If and when you do, you are seen to being doing such; and that is never lost on those who have a whimsical idea of attachment as priority.

  I am directing my talk to the young writer, of course. Only you can decide when you are true to yourself as an artist or have slid to those who want you to change yourself for what they think is acceptable. Or to find out what is acceptable, knowing that someday it will be of value. What we say that is acceptable to ourselves is the question—it is the voice of our own moral compass pointing true north. To change the compass bearing in ourselves to please the more popular conceit is to know, even if others do not detect it right away.

  I suppose that when I was writing as a young kid from what was considered backwoods Maritimes, most of the really popular conceptions of literature, and more importantly the categories in which people were viewed, came to me from away. So from the very first, the popular conceptions of what literature and even freedom was tended to alienate me, as did many of the works called “brilliant” from central Canada or New York. Perhaps that is why I think this conversation important. Nor am I saying there is only one way to write, or that some of these works weren’t brilliant. But I am suggesting to the young writer that there is one way to write for you, and no one can do this but you. So many times the real rural landscape of my youth was dismissed by writers who were considered important and dazzling.

  It is the only advice I, as a middle-aged man, have to give. Most of those “brilliant” novels that came to me by way of urban life did not seem to understand what I knew about working-class men and women when I was fifteen. But many university profs later told me that these books did and not to think so was an error on my part.

  So even before I ever finished writing a book, I was told I was in error. And if I had believed I was in error, not one of my books would have been written. This was a crisis faced when I was twenty and twenty-one, and though the world has changed and the Maritimes are no longer looked upon the way they once were, it is what I believe other young men and women, no matter where they are from, will sooner or later have to face.

  It is much better to believe in leftist ideology, for instance, if those on a committee that might get you something believe that is what writing should promote. And if this is the test you come up against, it is more than a symbolic one if it changes an opinion about a character that might be in conflict. Even a modest realignment of a novel’s intention for personal comfort can make a writer forgo true art. We are not all heroes, like Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead—where Rand took on the problem of an artist refusing convention even if this convention made him famous. At times, this novel is achingly oversimplified so that Rand can make her point. But the point is made. And all in all, it is as true now as it was then. Or was when Alden Nowlan praised Brian Bartlett for not succumbing to the fashionable self-consciousness of his more hip and with-it friends.

  Yet, standing up for one’s art is a nebulous kind of engineering of one’s own soul and is therefore difficult to write about now. Nor does everyone feel uncomfortable within groups that preach a common destiny for politics in literary culture. Yet, in some ways, I really believe the best writers do, and in many ways, have had to face it all of their lives. And the great painters and the great musicians, too. They have had to stand up against the odds in ways unimaginably painful and for so little gain it seems fruitless to continue on the line of their true compass.

  But seems is the word.

  When Beethoven was writing his greatest symphony, he was reviled, hated, called “an abuser of women and children.” His lawyer and his nephew thought he was mad—and wanted him imprisoned, as an embarrassment. Since he was going deaf and blind, all he could utter to them was “da da da da, da da da da, da da da da, da dada!” Which proved to them his encroaching imbecility, yet became, of course, the signature moment of the Ninth Symphony’s “Ode to Joy.” Can I say that if he was not condemned, not reviled, not thought of as mad, he might never have composed the greatest piece of music ever? One does not necessarily include the other, and to say so is false romanticism. But by the time he wrote this symphony, he was jubilantly mocked as a failure by musicians he had disagreed with most of his life. They exulted in his failure, both personal and professional, and had driven spikes into the heart of his reputation. How many of us, in our comfortable perches preaching artistic greatness, would spend one night like him in order to accomplish what he did? What I am saying, of course, is that he did not want to be in this position, either—he did not wish to be reviled and mocked on the street, hated by his own blood. But he would not and could not forgo the demands of his own creative conscience to create in some safer way. If that is a drastic example, it is not a qualitative exception.

  It is somewhat true that Beethoven himself becomes the poster boy for what many well-thought-of Canadian and American novels (and the mountains of theory about those novels) have preached concerning the one-dimensional violent male in our society from the 1970s on. In fact, in many books, the male is viewed in no other way, especially a working-class male. And Beethoven is the po
ster boy. Not in what he wrote or how his heart was, but at certain times in how he acted. He is, or at times was, looked upon as deeply flawed in his humanity, of course.

  Except for the “Ode to Joy.”

  And there, for the entire field of today’s sometimes precious literary semantics, lies the rub. I am simply suggesting that a character like a Beethoven must be written about like a Beethoven. But to say this, to certain professors and writers back when I began to write, was to be seen in error.

  For some reason, back when I began to write, and for years and years, critics believed that violence was most often one-dimensional, and always male, and therefore easy to define and fight against. A certain kind of male was the “authority figure,” whom we must be against and therefore write against. Priests, of course, but working males, businessmen, executives, as well. Therefore, for sophisticated people, the guilty were always quite easy to define. What was worse is that far, far too many educated people were comfortable with this. In affluent, intellectual, urban Canada, it was a means of categorizing people, and this, too, was seen as correct. The only problem was that some of these texts knew nothing about violence: how it developed and worked not only overtly but coercively or covertly. And some of the violence people were against and aghast at was nothing more than actual physical labour. Physical labour was often misunderstood and despised, and so the characters that did it were, as well.

  Looking back, I realize that for a long time, my own work was not considered successful because I did not agree with those who had attached so much importance to what they thought my work should say. I seemed on the wrong side of the fence. My work was physical and seemed violent. My work seemed misogynistic, degrading to women. My work seemed, as a good friend once lamented, too working class. But worst of all, to him and to others, my work was outside the realm of the university and seemed anti-intellectual.

  Of course, seems is the word.

  Seems is an important word in the literature of all men and women from Shakespeare to Emily Dickinson. Shakespeare uses seems as does Milton. Both use it to show a counterfeit in our midst. Seems is the word that plays like a water strider across the consciousness of all good men and women, to change what seems like, to actually be. “Seems to be violent” may not be violent—and “seems to be concerned and considerate” may be, looking closer, trifling and sanctimonious.

  In Milton’s Paradise Lost, what seems to be, when Beelzebub and Satan meet in Hell, or when Eve is tempted, never really is. Seems is an approximation or a perversion of a great truth that becomes, over time, an outright lie that can be savage and deadening. Savage and deadening—a bit harsh, perhaps? But if we change our landscape, or characters, or the intended meanings and humanity of those characters on small matters in order to belong, we will lack the necessary courage to deliberate on the important ones that take us outside these groups to true art.

  I have discovered over the last number of years that if I am a writer, then I am supposed to be like-minded and in sync with other writers in Canada. Supposedly we all want the same things. I have letters from PEN, and from the Writers’ Union and the Canada Council for the Arts, that state this. And maybe this is even true. Who knows? Maybe we do want the same things. But maybe we have to arrive at the things we all want differently, by our own road, so to speak. And I also suppose this is what everyone says they want.

  Yet once I became well known, some then believed I would be like-minded. That I would look upon the world that treated my people so much differently than the more urban and sophisticated world others came from, and still I would be like-minded. That is, have the same ideas about my world that they who didn’t know my world did. The idea that if you are well known, you should be like-minded is a rather powerful one in literary circles today. Why would you be well known if you are not like-minded?

  “Imagine what can be done when like-minded people get together,” the husband of a very famous writer once wrote to me.

  Well, yes, as I pointed out, I can imagine, and I have not thought it necessary to join. I tell you, if I was like-minded with any writer in this country or any other, I would never have written Blood Ties, or For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down, Lives of Short Duration or Mercy Among the Children, nor would I have been able to conceive of writing them. For parts of all of my novels, good or bad, come from a belief that if I were holding to any group’s theories about these books or the characters in these books, my intentions would then have to be altered or dismissed.

  But there is something else that bothered me. It is this: the idea that like-minded people are somehow good people who are forcing needed change in the world, and these needed changes must be explained within the context of a literary work—so much so, that these needed changes should be fostered upon my characters themselves. I have discovered that this is almost always a misshaping of the phrase “like-minded people” and a misrepresentation of art. There are needed changes, of course. I know that. Who am I to say there are not?

  But I have learned that the needed changes some espouse tirelessly are the very ones that would categorically deny that the world I grew up in and write about has virtue. That the rural world I write about has value in the way I demand it in my books, regardless of the flaws and on occasion because of the flaws of that world. As I have mentioned, what was considered one of the biggest flaws of that world was physical labour, which many in the insulated urban world did not investigate or understand.

  The idea was that if I was a trouper—a good fellow—I would essentially show in my work that I wanted these people to change—that I would want Cecil in Blood Ties to change and Leah to transform in a way that would make them, well, responsible, in a middle-class way. And by being middle class, they would then know how to be more acceptable and have a more progressive value system. I am speaking here of my own experience because it is what I know.

  Yet, I have come to the realization that many Maritime writers have dealt with the same thing and have been dealt the same blows, for we still—or at least in my generation—lived in a world where we wrote about our traditions as being at least not more negative than other so-called systems.

  I believe this is the truth about the best work of Nowlan, MacLeod, Buckler, Trethewey and others. I do not think this is comparable in any other part of the country. I believe there are many reasons for this, the very least of which is backwardness. But it is in some circles (or, at least, was back when I was younger)—and in some powerful literary circles of critics and publishers—looked upon as backwardness and sometimes as ignorance and prejudice.

  Of course, Nowlan and MacLeod, Buckler and Trethewey, and younger writers like Ken Harvey and Joel Hines, are really just the opposite of backwardness, or prejudice, or ignorance. Their worlds reflect a healthy scepticism of power (both chauvinist and feminist), an unusual kindness for the underdog, a real pursuit of equality among men and women and a dislike of notional knowledge rather than knowledge gained from hard-earned experience. Much of today’s writing says, in fact, that this is what it is after, and yet so little of it has the power of earned experience found in the books of Trethewey, Nowlan, Harvey, Hines, MacLeod or Buckler. Many of these writers have in their own lifetimes been derisively dismissed and, at times, scapegoated. Yet, few writers who have dismissed them can equal their power and their, as Oscar Wilde calls it, “instinct for life.” One CBC writer said to me onstage that only a writer who has lived should write—that is, a writer older than I was at the time of my earliest books. Anyone who thinks this knows little or nothing about writing, or what lived experience entails.

  We might realize that the two funniest writers in English Canada, both Atlantic writers, Herb Curtis and Wayne Johnston, have never won the Leacock Medal Award for Humour. Why? It is probably because their work is considered vulgar, because it is utterly human. Besides this, both writers have an unseen quality. Just as Nowlan most often knew in his poems what was true, both Cur
tis and Johnston know what is actually funny. You have to actually know what is funny to be funny—or to judge what is funny.

  Those who cannot judge what is funny will have no more success in judging what is truly tragic. Much of what is considered tragic in Canadian letters is simply the reinforcement of what is considered politically incorrect by today’s comfortable and intellectualized middle class.

  The essays of Wayne Curtis (who is the brother of Herb Curtis) are some of the finest written in English Canada, and they are often dismissed because they seem so ordinary.

  Yet, their instinct for life at times far surpasses those that have won awards.

  There is another problem I wish to briefly address. It is the more terrible problem, if you will. A scapegoat is almost always needed to ensure collaboration within a group. If the group is one that believes inherently that literature must be part of urban social activism and that good literature is politically correct literature (still, in some way, a prevalent ideology in central Canada and the United States, certainly throughout the seventies and eighties), then those who don’t seem to be writing in the vein of urban social activism will be scapegoated. Especially if their refusal of social activism initially seems, as Nowlan’s and MacLeod’s did, to be in direct conflict with the prevailing status quo.

  You see, this is the secret: no matter what group, body or institution, there are always exclusions. That is fine, of course, until we use the fact that they don’t belong in order to dishonestly or boorishly keep from them that which they might very well deserve.