by John Metcalf
All this is to say, then, that thus far Blaise and Levine have survived the process of literary winnowing and were picked to represent Canada in two international compilations that survey world writing in English. As were Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant.
Why is it, then, that Clark Blaise and Norman Levine are largely unknown or ignored in Canada? Why is it that Norman Levine’s stories have so long been out of print? Why is it that Norman Levine’s work is not taught in any Canadian university? Why is it that Blaise’s A North American Education and Tribal Justice languish in the respectable ghetto of New Press Canadian Classics still in the first issue of the first printing sixteen years after publication?
“Place him with Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant,” declares Maclean’s Magazine of Blaise.
What happened?
Because Blaise’s career did not flourish in the USA there was no pressure on Canada to recognize a compelling writer in our midst. A North American Education and Tribal Justice remain two of the most glowing and obviously important volumes of stories ever published in Canada. And this is to make no mention of the delights of Resident Alien, Days and Nights in Calcutta and Man and His World.
Although Blaise was well reviewed, the New York Times Review of Books describing the stories as “glittering,” The New Yorker did not adopt him and his publisher, Doubleday, did little to promote him. Canada remained deaf to his prose, and to the prose of his wife, Bharati Mukherjee.
Norman Levine’s obscurity in Canada is even more curious than Blaise’s. Ron Corbett, an Ottawa Citizen columnist, wrote a profile of Norman Levine recently and said: “Today, how Mr. Levine will be remembered in Canada is a question not only unknown, it is one largely unasked. None of his books or stories are taught at a Canadian university . . . Viking-Penguin, the last company to publish a new Levine book, says it has no plans to publish another one.”
Corbett then goes on to quote Penguin Books Canada publisher Cynthia Good. She had published Champagne Barn and, later, Something Happened Here.
Corbett quotes her as saying: “At the time, we considered Norman to be on a par with Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant. We weren’t alone. That’s how many people viewed him at the time.”
Norman Levine remains the writer he always was, a writer of central importance, one of Canada’s best.
Here is a suggestion of the way Levine’s work has been received elsewhere: “. . . passionate and brilliantly rendered” (New Statesman), “. . . masterly . . .” (Times Literary Supplement), “Impressive and fascinating . . .” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung), “Timeless elegance . . .” (The Times). “Norman Levine is one of the most outstanding short story writers working in English today” (Encounter).
Levine has been only nominally published in the USA.
Clark Blaise has been published in the USA but by a low-key publisher which treated him as a “mid-list” writer; he was not, in other words, heavily promoted.
It is curious that European and British praise for Levine has not been echoed in Canada. Such praise seems no longer to carry as much authority for Canadians as American praise. When one considers the careers of all four writers it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the success of two of them and the relative obscurity of the other two centre upon publication in the USA and more particularly in The New Yorker. Further, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, were it not for American endorsement, Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant would languish in exactly the same Canadian obscurity.
Norman Levine and Clark Blaise are nearing the end of careers; they have behind them achieved bodies of work. What is there to say to brilliant writers nearer to the beginnings of careers? What is there to say to Caroline Adderson, to Terry Griggs, to Annabel Lyon, to Michael Winter? And to all the other writers who are part of our current flowering in the Canadian short story?
The fame you are so properly seeking cannot be conferred in Canada or by Canada. Canada cannot hear you. Canada cannot recognize you. Canada will not read you unless you are validated elsewhere.
THE MONTREAL STORY TELLERS
I called hugh hood at the end of 1970 and proposed to him that we put together a group of writers to give readings in high schools and colleges. The group came to consist of Hugh, Ray Smith, Ray Fraser, Clark Blaise, and me. I won’t go into great detail about the Story Tellers because there is a book edited by J. R. (Tim) Struthers called The Montreal Story Tellers: Memoirs, Photographs, Critical Essays. The book appeared in 1985 and was published by Montreal’s Véhicule Press.
I would, however, like to reminisce about Hugh Hood. Noreen Mallory, Hugh’s wife, phoned us on Tuesday, August first, 2000, to tell us that Hugh had died. He had for some years been suffering from Parkinson’s disease. The funeral service was held on August third. Myrna and I drove to Montreal. The congregation was sparse. Only two other writers were present. Joel Yanofsky was there to report for the Gazette and W. J. Keith and his wife, Hiroko, had come down from Toronto. The Montreal writing community was conspicuously absent.
The Globe and Mail asked me to write an obituary. An excerpt follows:
Hugh Hood, who died on Tuesday in Montreal, was a man of vibrant and engaging eccentricity. He was a cornucopia of information which he imparted relentlessly. The range of his knowledge was astonishing: history, literature, theology, Haydn, Canadian politics, hockey, baseball trivia, the names of the sidemen in every obscure band Bing Crosby sang with, the names of the scriptwriters on every Carry On film.
He had something like a photographic memory and when we were driving to readings in Montreal during the 1970s, he would unreel for us long quotations from P. G. Wodehouse, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and Raymond Chandler. Our task was to guess the title and date.
Hugh was eccentric variously. His dress was usually casual. He sometimes invested in new sneakers. He organized his writing life under strange numerical schemes which made vital sense to him but which were incomprehensible to his listeners. He boasted that his car was the cheapest new car that it was possible to own in North America. At that point, this was a Russian Lada with holes in the dashboard where the instrumentation would have been had he taken those options.
My wife and I were once driving with Hugh to Toronto to read at Harbourfront. As we pulled out of the drive, my wife asked Hugh why he had not put on his seat belt. Taking in a comprehensive survey through the ages of the doctrines of Free Will, Salvation, Law, and the nature of the Social Contract, the answer lasted until we were approaching Oshawa.
I recall, too, with great affection, a cross-country reading tour that Hugh and I did with Leon Rooke when the three of us were published by ECW Press. Leon and I used to trade our Air Canada chicken for his wine. He loved the chicken and would talk at length about the cleverness of its packaging, the beauty of plastic, form and content, Marshall McLuhan, Japanese packaging . . . a typical Hoodian arabesque.
Hugh ate vegetables only from tins. His soup of choice was Campbell’s. He described most cuisines as “foreign muck.” He insisted his coffee be instant.
I shall miss him.
Ray Smith wrote an obituary for the Gazette, opening with the following anecdote:
It was 1971 and the five Montreal Story Tellers were taking Canadian literature to a West Island high school, one of a series of school readings we did over two years. I think Raymond Fraser was on stage when in the wings John Metcalf told the rest of us that his marriage had collapsed.
We sympathized, offered beds, names of lawyers, shrinks. Hugh Hood privately slipped John a piece of paper.
“You’ll need this,” Hugh murmured.
When he looked at it later, Metcalf found it was a cheque for $400.
That would be about $1,800 today. John was amazed, but only briefly. Of course Hugh would do that, not because he was rich, for he wasn’t, but because he was Hugh.
All of the Story Tellers wrote memoir pieces for the book Ti
m Struthers compiled and I’d like to quote excerpts from Ray Smith’s. It gives an affectionate portrait of Hugh and suggests something of the hilarity of the Montreal Story Tellers expeditions.
The five of us are in Hugh’s car driving to a reading. Probably along some ghastly six-laner like the Decarie Expressway. Known as “The Big Ditch,” it has concrete walls fifty feet high. A dangerous and depressing place. Hugh gleefully extols freeways, concrete, and the Decarie.
“Yessir,” he exults, “they ought to pave the island from end to end. Concrete is civilization.”
He goes on in this vein. I never know if he is being serious or trying to get a rise out of someone. John plunges in. “You are being deliberately perverse, Hugh.” John’s ideal landscape is perhaps filled with the barren hills and green valleys of Yorkshire or Cumberland; he looks upon a life which includes the Decarie Expressway as something from Hieronymus Bosch, and his life here as a punishment for an adolescence spent in furtive wanking.
“Perverse?” Hugh cries. “Shit no. Do you realize that if the Romans . . .”
Given half a chance, Hugh will talk on the history of concrete all the way to the reading, be it in Rosemere or be it in Vancouver. Long before that, John will have thrown himself screaming from the car; or will be in paroxysms of hysterical laughter. But neither is given a chance: Clark interrupts with an apt quotation from Rilke, Schiller, or Pushkin; someone whose work I have never read. Clark quotes in the original language.
In the back seat, I murmur to Fraser: “Bring out the Argentine brandy.”
“Bulgarian this week,” says Fraser as he digs the mickey from the inevitable Air Canada bag. “Bulgarian was only 19.6 cents an ounce.”
Fraser uses a housewife’s calculator to buy his booze. We each take a pull and Ray offers it around but all refuse. Fraser and I are, of course, the only Maritimers in the group.
Hugh and Clark are now fully into the discussion about concrete.
“Those nineteenth-century romantics are ontological arseholes,” Hugh is saying.
In rebuttal Clark summarizes Bergson.
Another car comes close to ours. Hugh rolls down his window and yells, “Watch out, you stupid fucker, the future of Canadian literature is in this car.”
Metcalf says, “Quebec drivers are all either suicidal or drunk. Probably both.”
Clark quotes Alberto Moravia on Italian drivers. In Italian.
I remark that I once skimmed a Moravia novel. The cover had promised steamy sex, but the text was a philosophical working out of exquisitely attenuated ennui.
Clark quotes Anouilh on ennui.
Fraser’s nerve breaks and we get another pull at the Bulgarian.
“Moravia is a teleological arsehole,” says Hugh. In illustration he quotes two pages of a Moravia novel he read in 1947. He quotes in English.
Now John reaches for the bottle. “I saw a great line yesterday in The High Window by Raymond Chandler: ‘large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones.’ Superb.”
Hugh quotes the next two pages of the novel.
I interrupt to point out a girl standing at a stop light and wearing a see-through top and no bra. Hugh sings a song he has written about lingerie. I never did learn the words, but something like:
Your girdle is a hurdle
I never want to jump
But your garter belts send me
And bikini panties rend me
And black stockings bend me
Into a hump-hump-hump!
On the last line Hugh bounces vigorously in his seat. A good thing we are no longer on the expressway, for the car swerves into the next lane and heads for a lamp post. As Hugh nonchalantly regains control, John remarks in tightly controlled hysteria: “Hugh, if I might make a small suggestion . . .”
Hugh ignores him; he has noticed a fellow in jeans and jean jacket staring in amazement from the sidewalk. Hugh rolls down the window.
“Hump-hump-hump!” he bellows. “Culture!” He guns the car around the corner. “And why don’t you get a haircut, you long-haired hippie freak.” He rolls up the window. “That’s telling him.”
Clark quotes Yukio Mishima on lingerie. This time he quotes in English.
Fraser flourishes the bottle. Metcalf grabs it in desperation.
I reflect that whatever Hugh’s estimable qualities—and they are many—if he wore a hat it would inevitably bear a card reading: “In this style, 10/6.”
Ray is referring here, of course, to the Tenniel illustration.
We are probably too close to Hugh’s novel sequence The New Age to form a judgement yet. I feel that some of the novels are more successful than others but I have not yet been able to absorb all twelve books and see them as one. Many readers have problems with Hugh’s meanderings down byways of information, his asides, his digressions, feeling that these are blemishes on the books’ artistry and destructive of the suspension of disbelief. Other readers feel that Hugh’s disquisitions are an essential part of his charm. The novella Five New Facts About Giorgione would be a good starting point for coming to some decision about this argument. I found the book maddening.
I feel much clearer about Hugh’s early work perhaps because I have lived with it for so many years. In any literature there are certain works which seem obviously to stand in the national canon. I am convinced that Hugh’s Around the Mountain is one such book. It is my favourite among his short fiction. It was conceived and written as a cycle of twelve stories which together capture Montreal as it was in 1967. Exhibiting an endearing innocence Hugh thought it would sell to American tourists wanting a souvenir of Montreal and Expo 67.
Since Hugh’s death I have put together for the New Canadian Library a selection of his stories with an Afterword. The selection is entitled Light Shining Out of Darkness, that title being the title of one of the selections. I like to think the title expresses the essence of Hugh’s life and writing.
CONDUCT UNBECOMING
Aunts aren’t gentlemen is P. G. Wodehouse’s last complete novel. It was published in 1974 when he was ninety-three. He died in 1975 leaving behind a first draft of Sunset at Blandings. During the sunset years of the late sixties and seventies it seemed to me that many women stopped behaving like gentlemen.
Sisterhood was relentless. Bastions were stormed, institutions toppled with maenadic energy. Women were joining consciousness-raising groups and, once raised, were everywhere forsaking their husbands for electric toothbrushes. Men, meanwhile, were wagging around like bewildered golden retrievers unable to figure out their transgression and dispirited by the mistresses’ permanent scowls.
I once saw a Margaret Atwood novel on offer in a dealer’s catalogue which was described as being inscribed: “To —— in feminist frenzy.” “Frenzy” aptly describes those heady days. By coincidence, it was Margaret Atwood who gave me my first personal encounter with the feminist schtick. We had been reading together one evening for David Helwig at Queen’s University and a group was going on to Toronto the next day by train for some other literary event. I asked people in the group who wanted coffee or soft drinks and went to the serving hatch. On return, I handed a coffee to Margaret Atwood who asked me how much it had cost. I did my gentlemanly mumble saying it was of no import. She demanded to know what it had cost. I had no idea as I’d paid for various drinks with a twenty-dollar bill. Why, Margaret Atwood demanded to know, should I pay for her coffee? What was my motivation? Was I really unaware that I was patronizing her? Demeaning her? Belittling her? Was I unaware that I was showing contempt for women . . . I received the full nine yards.
What I’d thought I’d been doing was getting her a cup of coffee.
Ah, well.
Loyola, along with every other campus in the country, throbbed with radical energy. Gale was often on campus, often in the faculty club. Aggressive feminism was central to the Zeitgeist. It was
n’t an intellectual or practical feminism—equal pay for equal work, say—but rather an implacable emotionalism directed against the opposite sex. I am not meek by nature and during 1970 and 1971 our relationship became increasingly testy.
Gale was pregnant with our second child and demanded an abortion. I was strongly opposed but felt rather helplessly that it wasn’t my decision to make. She found a doctor willing to claim that the pregnancy was detrimental to her mental health and the operation was performed at a local hospital. Shortly after this she started spending time with a Loyola student called Elizabeth Bateman.
Elizabeth Bateman was tall with lank and malodorous hair. She was probably mucky for ideological reasons. She called herself Bitsy. She wore boots and suspenders. She claimed to be a photographer. Gale declared herself passionately in love with this unappetizing creature. The lesbian life, she announced, was the life for her. And she intended it, she said, for our daughter, Elizabeth, too. I objected to the situation and left the house, moving into what amounted to a commune of Loyola faculty members whose marriages had gone awry. Gale referred to this house as Heartbreak Hotel.
I sued for divorce. Gale did not even attend the hearing and I was granted the divorce and custody of Elizabeth. I was preparing to move to Fredericton where I had been offered a year’s work as writer-in-residence. Elizabeth was still living with Gale and Bitsy as I hadn’t wanted to move her into temporary accommodation. In Fredericton I was going to share a house with my friend Douglas Rollins, a fellow teacher who was studying for a Ph.D.
Gale came to see me one afternoon and said that she had changed her mind about the divorce and wished to go to Fredericton with me. The decree was not yet absolute and she asked me to cancel the action as a demonstration of my general faith and devotion. This I did because I still loved her and was distressed about Elizabeth’s emotional state. We went to the Palais de Justice and I filled in the paperwork.