An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  Rosen College Preparatory High School occupied five rooms on the floor about the Chateau Bar BQ Restaurant and Takeout Service. There were three classrooms, the Library, the supplies locker, and the Office. The staff was all part-time and so in my five years I came to know only the morning shift—Geography, Mathematics, and Science. At recess, the four of us would huddle in the supplies locker and make coffee.

  Mr. Kapoor was a reserved and melancholy hypochondriac from New Delhi who habitually wore black suits and shoes, a white shirt, and striped college tie. His only concession to summer was that he wore the gleaming shoes without socks. I remember his telling me one day that peahens became fertilized by raising their tail feathers during a rain storm; he held earnestly to this, telling me that it was indeed so because his grandmother had told him, she having seen it with her own eyes in Delhi. He taught science in all grades.

  Mr. Gingley was a retired accountant who taught Mathematics and wore a curiously pink hearing aid which was shaped like a fat human ear.

  Mr. Helwig Syllm, the Geography teacher, was an ex-masseur.

  Mrs. Rosen, who drew salaries as secretary, teacher, and School Nurse, would sometimes grip one by the arm in the hall and hiss: “Don’t foment. My husband can fire anyone. Anyone.”

  Mr. Ross was actually a genial man but with marked eccentricities. He lived to do battle with the education department bureaucrats in Quebec City who were continually finding him in violation of codes and attempting to close him down. They claimed he had no gymnasium; he countered that he had an arrangement with the Y. They announced an inspection of the library; he gave me taxi money to transport suitcases of my own books into the library cupboard for the duration. They claimed the school afforded no toilets for the students; he countered that the school had a toilet arrangement with the Bar BQ management. On and on it went, Mr. Ross in wheezing chuckles as he recounted his latest coup against the faceless ones.

  The years with Ross were the happiest years of my teaching career. I remember going to him on the first day I worked at Ross High School and asking him for chalk. He took two sticks from a box and wrapped them in a twist of paper. Next week I asked for more. He looked astonished and said, “You’ve had your chalk for this year!” But he wasn’t always penny-pinching and if I was late in the morning and had had to skip breakfast he would go to a nearby restaurant and bring me coffee and hot buttered toast in waxed paper which I’d eat while teaching Chaucer.

  I taught in the mornings and walked home at midday. I usually then corrected essays for an hour or so. I was correcting class sets for the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal for fifty cents an essay. I liaised with the English department head at Northmount High School, a charming Englishman who wore silk suits and who used to say to his students, “If you don’t be quiet, I shall go quite rigid.” We liked each other. In the late afternoons and early evenings I worked on fiction.

  My writing was going well. I was getting stories published in the literary magazines and there were signs and portents everywhere. I was awarded a Canada Council grant in 1968. I remember taking that cheque to a branch of the Banque Nationale near our apartment. The teller examined it and said, “We don’t cash cheques from foreign countries.” A hint of things to come.

  I was awarded the President’s Medal of the University of Western Ontario in 1969 for the best short story of the year. That was “The Estuary.” Mordecai Richler selected “Keys and Watercress” for his Penguin anthology Canadian Writing Today. During these years Professor Alec Lucas at McGill was working on an anthology for the American paperback company Dell. The book was called Great Canadian Stories and it finally appeared in 1971. I had met Alec Lucas at a launching party for a young protégé of Louis Dudek’s. Drink was flowing abundantly and Alec endeared himself to me eternally when Louis Dudek rose and quieted the uproar, saying, “And now I think the time has come to listen to our young poet.” Alec said loudly into the silence, and in a petulant tone, “They always have to spoil these occasions.”

  Alec had fallen into the habit of summoning Ray Smith and me to the McGill Faculty Club at lunchtime to pick our brains for his anthology. He was going to include both of us but wanted our opinions of our contemporaries. These lunches were nearly always purely liquid as the food in the faculty club was disgusting. One day someone wrote in chalk on the club wall: The poor hate you. I picked up the nub of chalk and wrote underneath: They wouldn’t if they’d eaten here.

  Most excitingly, I was selected for New Canadian Writing 1969, the second volume of a series published by Clarke Irwin. The year before, they had published New Canadian Writing 1968 with stories by David Lewis Stein, Clark Blaise, and Dave Godfrey.

  In the publisher’s foreword to the 1968 book Bill Clarke wrote:

  The stories in this collection are representative of the current trends, of the move away from the old established patterns towards new methods of conveying impressions. They are not necessarily the best stories that will appear in this decade but they are important in that they are indicative of the work being done by young Canadian writers today. It is the publisher’s intention to continue this programme with the publication of other volumes of a similar nature.

  New Canadian Writing 1969 was the final volume in the series.

  Clark’s stories were “The Fabulous Eddie Brewster,” “How I Became a Jew,” “The Examination,” and “Notes Beyond a History.” Bill Clarke was exquisitely mannered and perhaps excessively genteel. He felt that “How I Became a Jew” had in its blunt usage of the word Jew the potential to offend. Clark and I were vastly amused when he proposed that Clark change the title to, “How I Became a Jewish Person.”

  New Canadian Writing 1969 also contained stories by D. O. Spettigue and C. J. Newman. I had five stories in the book: “The Children Green and Golden,” “Walking Round the City,” “Robert, Standing,” “Our Mr. Benson,” and “The Estuary.” These stories caused quite a stir and were singled out in reviews. As a result Clarke Irwin proposed that I publish a collection with them. This appeared in 1970 and was entitled The Lady Who Sold Furniture.

  But many other changes were accompanying these little literary triumphs and trophies. The most momentous event in these years was the birth of our daughter, Elizabeth, in 1969. I went with Gale to the hospital, of course, but the usual happened. I cannot stand other people’s pain and I usually faint or vomit. Receiving pain while falling off cliffs or in the boxing ring is somehow different; one is to a degree immune, perhaps because charged with adrenalin. Gale was in labour and extremely vocal. I was distressed and lurched out into the corridor, my vision a migraine-like blizzard of white mesh. I bumbled along the wall and fell through a pair of swing doors and then fell down a flight of stone stairs. After I had come to and after my vision returned to normal I ignominiously got a taxi and went home to bed.

  Elizabeth was a great joy to me and especially so when she was learning to talk, which she did early. She used to deliver long, excited monologues with many repetitions attempting to describe or explain such things as thunder. She sounded oddly like Lucky’s speeches in Waiting for Godot.

  There was something irresistibly delicious about a two-year-old standing staring at a large toy lion and saying admiringly, “My word!” Though usually sunny, she had cross days and on one of these I’d taken her to a zoo. I said to her with forced parental enthusiasm, “Oh, look, Elizabeth! A llama!”

  She glowered at the beast.

  Then said plonkingly, “What’s it for?”

  There were changes, too, on the job front. I stopped marking exercise books partly because I was busy writing texts and partly because I couldn’t stand any longer changing their and there and its and it’s. The increasing frequency of the publication of my stories meant that I was building a small reputation and that reputation was opening up new employment possibilities. I was beginning to review for the Montreal Star. By strange chance, I was to revi
ew Eudora Welty’s lovely last novel, Losing Battles. Mr. Ross remained intransigent about wages, so with considerable regret I left the old bugger to his comic machinations. By 1970 I had acquired two part-time jobs, one teaching writing at McGill for Bharati Mukherjee, the other teaching literature at the Loyola CEGEP.

  There is for a writer nothing quite like the experience of a first book. No subsequent book means quite as much. To hold that first book in one’s hands is to hold proof that one indeed is what one has for years dared and hoped to be. I was so elated by The Lady Who Sold Furniture that I put copies in every room in the apartment so that I could see it and stroke it wherever I was.

  The book contains five short stories and a 102-page novella. Although I still quite like the stories the meat of the book is the novella. In the novella I managed to deploy what I’d been struggling to teach myself in the preceding years. I’d wanted to get away from plot and towards a story that moved forward in a different way. What I was after, though I couldn’t quite articulate it, was a story that was powered through images that generated strong emotion. I wanted a story propelled by a series of emotional jolts. This, in turn, implied a close observation of surface and detail. In acutely observed surfaces are depths. To deliver the emotion the language had to be utterly clean and sharp, cuttingly precise. Dialogue, too, had to make demands on the reader. It had to be fast, full of implied tone, utterly lacking in “stage directions”; in brief, the dialogue had to be a performance in which the reader took part.

  It was here perhaps that everything collecting had taught me was brought into play. Everything that paintings had taught me. Everything I’d learned from the Imagist poets. Everything I’d thrilled to in the theatre.

  My short stories had been tending in the right direction—“Keys and Watercress” and “Dandelions” move forward in intense images—but I could not then have expressed as a theory what I was grappling with. I was listening to CBC Anthology one evening when an actor started reading a story called “Images” by a writer named Alice Munro. I think this was in 1968 but it might have been 1967. It certainly preceded publication of Dance of the Happy Shades. I was galvanized by this story. I recognized immediately what she was doing. She had succeeded brilliantly at the very thing that I was still messing with and by using the title “Images” she’d pointed out the method of her fiction. She allowed my own thinking about these technical problems to expand. I wrote to her in great excitement and we entered into a correspondence which lasted for years.

  In 1985 The Malahat Review (Number 70) put out under the editorship of Constance Rooke “A Special Issue on John Metcalf.” I was immensely flattered by Alice Munro’s contribution and immodestly quote it here. It refers back to the sixties and the story “Images.”

  On John Metcalf: Taking Writing Seriously

  I think John wrote to me for the first time after a story of mine was read on the radio, before I had published any books. Or maybe it was just after the first book came out. I was living in Victoria then. I had absolutely no status as a writer. A creative writing teacher at the University of Victoria had told me that I wrote the kind of things he used to write when he was 15. So I was quite surprised by this letter of appreciation. I was stunned by it, really—it was a bouquet, a burst of handsome praise. He had taken the trouble to do this—to write so generously and thoughtfully, to a writer he didn’t know, a writer of no importance, no connections. He didn’t do that out of kindness alone, though it seemed to me so wonderfully kind. He did it because he believes writing is important.

  I didn’t meet him until three or four years later. We wrote letters. We wrote about what we were working on and what a hard time we were having with it and what we thought about each other’s writing, and other people’s, too. We developed then what I hate to describe as a literary friendship—that sounds to me too pretentious and genteel for the letters we wrote—but I suppose that’s the kind of friendship it was, and is. He was bracing and encouraging and not always uncritical. I was learning that remarkable respect for his opinion that many of his writer friends have. I’ve never lost it. Praise from him, you feel, is real gold. Once he is your friend he will back you up and make allowances for your quirks and problems and refrain from blabbing your confidences, he will be kind and loyal and affectionate, but he won’t tell you he likes your writing if he doesn’t. I have the feeling—and I’m sure there are other writers who have it—that he is one person who can tell where the soft spots are, where the words are pasted over the cracks, can tell what’s fake, what’s shoddy, what’s an evasion, maybe even mark the place where a loss of faith hit you, not momentously like an avalanche but drearily like a dry trickle of clods and stones. It won’t matter what compliments you’ve been getting from other quarters.

  This makes him sound like one of those mentors people idealize from the past—a wise ironical fellow, incorruptible, never fooled. It’s absurd to make him into anything like that. He never set himself up to be anybody’s literary conscience—that’s a rickety business you have to develop for yourself—and he has a blind spot or two, like the rest of us. If I do think of him this way, as somebody sitting out there not being fooled, I probably should apologize for it. But it is very useful, and our friends all have their uses.

  And it’s exactly how I do think of him. I’m grateful to him, and so I should be.

  He does take writing seriously, that’s all it is. He has a consistent, natural respect for it, which is something a lot rarer than you’d think.

  By the time I came to write “The Lady Who Sold Furniture” I knew exactly what I was doing and why. The novella still stands up for me after all these years. It hasn’t lost its flavour. These are the first two paragraphs:

  Purple. Purpleness with a zigzag line of black. A zigzag line of black stitching. Peter pushed the bedspread down from his face and moved his head on the pillow. He expected for a second to see above his head the raftered darkness of the barn and to hear the clatter of sabots on the cobbles, the everymorning shout of Monsieur Anglais! But the only sounds were sparrows on the window sill and the distant rattle of the milkman’s van.

  Sunlight lay over the floorboards and the worn carpet. His boots and rucksack lay where he’d dropped them the night before. The sole of one boot was grey with caked mud except where the tips of the steel cleats glinted in the sunshine.

  The Lady Who Sold Furniture was published in 1970. Clarke Irwin printed 1,500 copies but bound up only 750 copies. These were bound in black cloth. Some years later they bound the rest in grey cloth. Copies of this second binding are still available from ECW Press. This means that the book has sold fewer than 1,500 copies in thirty-nine years.

  The novella is also available along with two others—“Girl in Gingham” and “Private Parts: A Memoir”—in Shooting the Stars, published in 1993 by the Porcupine’s Quill; a glance at my royalty statements shows that Shooting the Stars sold in 1999 0 (zero) copies with a wild surge in 2000 to 4 (four) copies, slumping in 2001 to 0 (zero) again.

  Reviews in 1970 were very favourable and the book is routinely mentioned as a landmark volume in histories of literature and guides to culture. In The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in English, edited by Jenny Stringer, the entry on me reads in part: “His abiding reputation as one of the finest prose stylists in contemporary Canada was established with the vividly observed and imaginatively disquieting stories collected in The Lady Who Sold Furniture (1970).”

  Surely this critical encomium and my book’s virtual disappearance require some kind of explanation?

  In 2001 I wrote an essay for the National Post which attempted to explore the reasons for the similar neglect of Blaise and Levine; the conclusion I arrived at was that Canadians merely parroted American estimations and as a society were incapable of informed, independent judgement. This provoked a vicious, personal letter to the Post from Douglas Gibson of McClelland and Stewart.

  My pie
ce was called “Canadian Classics” and I’d like to quote from it:

  Let us probe a little deeper into my contention that Canada cannot elect “classics” by considering the careers of two other writers, Clark Blaise and Norman Levine. If I had to pick the best six story writers in Canada I would certainly select Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant and I would with equal certainty select Clark Blaise and Norman Levine.

  I would have to admit that Blaise and Levine are lesser writers than Munro and Gallant. They have written fewer and less complex stories and both have a narrower range both of subject matter and emotion. Yet they remain so obviously in the same league as Munro and Gallant. Both men have written stories which are at the centre of Canadian achievement in the short story form. Both voices are wonderfully individual and alive. I cannot imagine Canadian literature without thinking of such Levine stories as “A Small Piece of Blue,” “Something Happened Here,” “By the Richelieu,” and “Champagne Barn.” Nor can I imagine Canadian literature without thinking of such Blaise stories as “A North American Education,” “The Salesman’s Son Grows Older,” “Eyes,” “How I Became a Jew,” and “Meditations on Starch.”

  Despite the bizarre inclusions and the even more bizarre exclusions we must put some weight on the fact that both Clark Blaise and Norman Levine are given entries in The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English and The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Literature in English.

  The Oxford Companion says: “Levine’s spare, understated prose style is seen at its best in his short stories. Predominantly first-person narratives, they exhibit a keen eye for external details, but their prime concern is with the subjective experience of the outsider.”

  Of Blaise’s work The Oxford Companion says: “The autobiographical dimension in much of his highly regarded fiction is integral to his treatments of the impermanence and relativity of personal identity . . . His short stories in A North American Education (1973), Tribal Justice (1974), and Resident Alien (1986) are widely considered to represent his central achievement.”