An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  My friends were incredulous.

  My lawyer was apoplectic.

  A few days later while I was picking Elizabeth up to take her out to play Gale told me that she had no intention of going to Fredericton, that she had had no change of heart, that she had deceived me just to have another chance at custody. She also allowed that she thought I was simple.

  I again sued for divorce, this time being granted the divorce but denied custody. Gale’s parents committed breathtaking perjury. It was a sour day. The judge, too, seemed to think that I’d acted rather irresponsibly in cancelling the first divorce.

  Various people have asked me how I could have been so stupid. It was stupid, I suppose, in the terms of the workaday world. But what had been at stake was very important. It was the right sort of mistake to make, and I’m not sure I wouldn’t make a similar sort of mistake again.

  What does this sad catalogue leave me feeling thirty years later? My position is close to the sage words of P. J. O’Rourke, who in Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence and a Bad Haircut wrote:

  Miniskirts caused feminism. Women wore miniskirts. Construction workers made ape noises. Women got pissed off. Once the women were pissed off about this they started thinking about all the other things they had to be pissed off about. That led to feminism. Not that I’m criticizing. Look, Babe . . . I mean, Ms . . . I mean, yes, sir I do support feminism. I really do. But that doesn’t mean I want to go through it twice.

  WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE

  My first stint as a writer-in-residence was at the University of New Brunswick in 1972–73. I was offered the appointment through the good offices of Kent Thompson, a fellow writer and a professor in the UNB English department, who argued that the university should assist younger writers instead of automatically piling honours on those already laden.

  I had first met Kent when he was editor of The Fiddlehead, the literary magazine which has been associated with UNB for so many years and which has done so much to encourage young poets and fiction writers. In 1970 Kent organized under the umbrella of The Fiddlehead a conference of writers and critics to discuss the current state of fiction in Canada. It was Kent’s conviction that the critics were years behind the writers and he hoped the conference might stimulate some of them to grapple with the sudden sophistication that Canadian fiction was exhibiting. Nothing of the sort happened, of course, but it was interesting and instructive to spend time with Hugh Hood, Dave Godfrey, Rudy Wiebe, and David Helwig.

  Dave Godfrey was then a bright star in the firmament of Canadian letters, having helped found the House of Anansi and having written a bulky and ultimately incomprehensible book called The New Ancestors. He now designs computer software. He was at the time rabid with nationalism and my accent and antecedents seemed to rub him up very much the wrong way; at breakfast in the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel he read the stock market reports in a marked manner. I was relieved to discover, however, that his rage was general; during a dull but unexceptionable paper by Professor Hallvard Dahlie entitled “Self-Conscious Nationalism in the Novels of Hugh MacLennan,” Godfrey suggested that Professor Dahlie would benefit from “a good bum-fuck” administered by Scott Symons. This was a form of ideological re-education which had not previously occurred to me.

  If the academic offerings were tedious, the discussions among the writers were of great interest. I can recall my enthusiasm at the time for the ideas of the Imagists and how those ideas could be worked out in the story form. I began in the discussions at that conference what has turned into the lifelong task of attempting to teach academics the necessity of an aesthetic approach to literature. I’m now convinced it’s a task that’s largely hopeless.

  Canadian literary studies and “scholarship” have always been lax and undemanding. It is a field which attracts second- and third-rate minds. Such widely published critics as John Moss, who was a Ph.D. student at Fredericton when I was writer-in-residence, can to this day write gibberish such as the following and still retain the regard of his colleagues: “This novel, as much as any, shows why Callaghan is a significant writer in the Canadian tradition without necessarily being an accomplished artist. [WHAT?] The prose is awkwardly simplistic, but forceful and direct . . . [WHAT?] He is probably the best example we have of the serious artist as entertainer.” (WHAT?)

  The author of these moronic sentences is considered one of the chief adornments of the University of Ottawa’s English department.

  The lax and slapdash are everywhere. Three tiny examples suggestive of the whole. Going Down Slow concerns a teacher’s affair with a student. The entire plot centres on the affair’s illegality. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature describes the student, Susan, as a fellow teacher. Again, the new dictionary, The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (1998) has an encyclopedic element and carries hundreds of biographical entries. I am listed, correctly, under Metcalf but in company with Charles Theophilus Metcalf, governor general of British North America (1843–45) whose name is not Metcalf but Metcalfe.

  The entry for Ethel Wilson reads: “South-African-born Canadian novelist and essayist. Her many collections of stories include Love and Salt Water (1956) and Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories (1961).”

  Ethel Wilson published only six books in her career. Four of the six were novels. One was a book containing two novellas. One was a book of short stories. One is not “many.” Love and Salt Water, identified by Oxford as a story collection, is, in fact, a novel.

  But does any of this petty detail really matter?

  Yes.

  William Hoffer, the fabled Vancouver antiquarian book dealer, once wrote about Canadian writing: “The complicated pocket watch of literature has been replaced by a rude drawing of a watch with no moving parts.”

  “In Canada,” he used to say, “approximations are good enough.”

  My office in Fredericton was in the old Arts Building between the offices of Robert Gibbs and Fred Cogswell. Robert Gibbs often held long discussions with students about Pre- and Post-Confederation poets, none of whom I’d read. He also had briefer and more interesting chats with his bookcase, briefcase, and filing cabinet.

  Fred Cogswell used his office as warehouse and editorial centre for Fiddlehead Poetry Books, an enterprise distinct from The Fiddlehead. He was always extremely affable and kept me abreast of the doings of all his poetesses. These conversations were baffling because his starting point was always an outcropping of some buried lode.

  An entirely typical exchange would run as follows:

  “She’s feeling a lot better now.”

  “Oh, hello, Fred. Pardon?”

  “Much closer to a decision.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  “We went for a long walk on the beach on Sunday.”

  “I see.”

  Silent puffing on his pipe.

  “His big mistake, you see, was to offer marriage.”

  “Mistake?”

  “It offended her deeply.”

  “Oh.”

  I had no idea to whom these daily bulletins referred and so they all combined in my mind into a composite, into an Identikit portrait of a Fiddlehead Poetry Books poetess—youngish, good-looking, sexually unhappy or inverted, offended at elemental levels by the world’s coarseness, terribly sincere, terribly sensitive, terribly intense—in sum, not unlike the Madeline Basset to whom Bertie Wooster often refers with a shudder.

  These chapbooks were unspeakable. During the years of his editorship he published 307 of them. At first I thought his motivation must be the desire for contiguity with young female flesh but came to understand that, worse, he actually believed in all this jejune inadequacy. I held the position that such an outpouring of drivel was an example of bad coin driving out good, that his wretched pamphlets took away attention from the three or four good poets we should have been reading.

  I had, of course, got it all wrong. Fred’s contribution was of th
e kind Canada understood and wanted. It was a kind of “outreach,” the literary equivalent of helium balloons on strings and painting the faces of children at “cultural” events. Cogswell was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1981.

  A recent Canada Council jury award prompted David Solway into velvety rage and a comic tour of the stunning banality of a new book by a Fiddlehead Poetry Books veteran. I quote from his essay “Getting on the Gravy Boat.”

  In 1999 Sharon H. Nelson, the author of ten little-known and largely unreviewed chapbooks dating back to 1972, received a $20,000 Canada Council Arts Grant to write a book of poems. Two and a half years later an eleven page collection appeared, entitled How the Soup Gets Made. Not counting a 12th page of Notes in which we are given a definition of parmentier and a detailed recipe for its preparation, this averages out to approximately $2000 per page, a sum whose literary amortization may in this case prove highly problematic.

  To get some sense of what this modest work entails, let us embark on a quick tour of its pages. The book begins with its title poem where we are initially apprised that

  Today I made leek and cauliflower soup

  because Brenda had dental surgery this morning . . .

  —which is surely a direct if unexpected way of whetting the reader’s appetite. While the soup is on the boil, we discover that the poet, speculating over the destiny of her restorative bouillon, is also thinking of

  Rahel and Bella and Maureen

  all of whom can’t eat anything made with allium . . .

  And of Maxiane who “no longer eats potatoes.” Once we have digested these disturbing facts, however, we learn to our immediate relief that Brenda is recovering well, and soon the steamy kitchen of Nelson’s culinary imagination begins to fill with ever more Goddesses of the Soup, a numinous sorority which proceeds to

  cook soup against the chill,

  and welcome the companionship of friends

  whose presences pervade the air

  with the rising scent of braising vegetables . . .

  Solway’s comic performance here can only suggest the contagion Cogswell spread for so many years.

  Long after my stint at UNB was over I was chatting to Kent Thompson about the general looniness of Fredericton and the astonishing marital frolics of the English department; he corrected me sharply, pointing out that the loony one had been me. And I suppose there’s truth in that too; I was distraught about my wife and daughter and Fredericton offered few distractions from grief.

  In fact, as far as I was concerned, Fredericton had little to offer at all. Its pizza parlours featured pizzas studded with turd-like mounds of hamburger and signs proudly claimed: Topped with Genuine (Mild) Canadian Cheddar. All Chinese restaurants served things in red sauce. I loathed the pretentiousness and awfulness of the vast Salvador Dalí painting in the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, so I rarely went there. I was banned for life from the River Room of the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel for unplugging two amplified Spanish singers from Saint John. I felt isolated, aware always of the oppressive miles of forests black and dripping.

  Years later when we were living on a farm in Ontario, Myrna and I were part of a group sponsoring some young refugee men from Vietnam. One of them, Cuong, said one day, “In Hong Kong . . . lights! . . . music! . . . women! In Canada . . . tree, tree, tree.” How deeply I empathized with his boredom!

  One of Fredericton’s few solaces was the presence of Alden Nowlan. He held court in a small house on the edge of campus and along with the painters Bruno and Molly Bobak and several talented musicians was one of UNB’s permanent artists-in-residence.

  Alden’s house was a mecca for visiting writers and for troops of young poets who dropped in for encouragement, words of wisdom, beer, and the ever-present gin. Evenings with Alden always began with great affability but the emotional direction of the evening could veer as the level in the gin bottle dropped. Or on some evenings, bottles.

  Alden was a very large man. Operations on his throat for cancer had left his voice growly and his face puffy and this, combined with his bulk and beardedness, suggested an obese bear as he sat in his armchair sweating and rumbling and roaring about the monarchy (he supported the Stuart Pretender) or about the paucity of scientific evidence of the world’s being round (he was a founding member of the Canadian Flat Earth Society).

  Alden was brought up in a small village in Nova Scotia in conditions of dire poverty. He was an autodidact and proud of the fact. But it also made him prickly. He was likely to attack and bait visitors for the relative ease and comfort of their circumstances, demanding to know how with their obvious gentility and education they could hope to understand “life.”

  To hear Alden’s account, he never saw paper or pencil until the age of twenty-five. Some professorial visitors seemed to feel shame at their lack of humble origins and at their ordinary fathers who hadn’t gnawed at the bark of trees to sustain life. Alden derived a great deal of entertainment from these exercises.

  I was rather bored by the romanticism of the idea that the life of New Brunswick peasants was somehow more “real” than the life of, say, Toronto stockbrokers and I used to tell him to stop talking balls. It was at about this point that the evenings degenerated into slurred and rumbling abuse.

  Patrick Toner has written a biography of Nowlan entitled If I Could Turn and Meet Myself: The Life of Alden Nowlan. In it he recreates the first time I went to Nowlan’s house in 1970 during Kent Thompson’s conference.

  Kent Thompson was not a frequent visitor to the Nowlan household. The man he brought that night, John Metcalf, was a first-time visitor. He had made a good impression among the UNB faculty, so good that it was generally understood that he might soon become a familiar face. Nowlan was holding forth in the den about a topic central to his mythos: the poverty of his youth. He catalogued his various deprivations like a mantra. “We had no indoor plumbing, no running water. I didn’t even learn how to use a telephone until I had moved away at the age of 19 . . .”

  “Yes, I know how that is,” Kent Thompson said from the corner where he had been listening. “I, too, had a pretty impoverished childhood.”

  The guests could not listen to Thompson; they were too focussed on Nowlan, who fixed the professor in his stare while Thompson spoke. People started looking away. There was a void of silence before Nowlan responded.

  “Oh, yes, Kent,” he said, his voice steady. “I know that you knew just what it was like. Take your family for instance. They were so poor they could only afford to trade the car in every second year . . .”

  “Oh, come off it, Alden,” Thompson protested.

  But Nowlan was relentless. “You were so poor that you could only afford a party line for your telephone, so poor that you sometimes had only beans and bacon to go with your potatoes . . .” And on and on, every word twisting the knife deeper.

  Thompson had not had an easy week, either, what with the stress of organizing the conference. He put down his glass in disgust and walked towards the door. “That’s right, Kent,” Nowlan persisted. “Go back to where you are wanted, because it’s not here.”

  Metcalf had had enough, too. “Alden, you’ve obviously had way too much to drink, and have no right to subject Kent or anyone else to your blatherings.”

  But Thompson had already grabbed his coat, nearly in tears, muttering on his way out, “I know one thing: I’m sick and tired of taking all this shit.” Metcalf followed . . .

  The next day Nowlan remembered enough about the night before to know that he owed Thompson a huge apology. There were a few people brave enough to remind him. “You were wrong and I’d be a shit to myself and to Kent if I didn’t say so,” Metcalf wrote on Monday, after cooling down. “Which, being said, I hope we can proceed as before and that you’ll reply to this. You must know that I admire your work this side idolatry.”

  So what had this jolly evening been about? The bel
licosity of gin, anti-Americanism, and Alden’s insecurity in educated company.

  He was kind and attentive to the young poets who hung about the house but he rarely criticized their work or put to them the necessary steel. And not one of them has emerged as a writer of any significance. Part of this acceptance was, I’m sure, kindness and camaraderie. Part of it may also have been a lack of knowledge about the traditional forms and techniques.

  The camaraderie had a special Maritime tinge and was destructive to certain of these aspiring poets. When Charlie Parker was dying in the apartment of the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter from the combined effects of heroin, ulcers, and cirrhosis of the liver the attending doctor asked him if he drank. Parker is alleged to have replied: “The occasional glass of sherry.” I’ve been known to sip the occasional sherry myself and don’t object at all to taking off the edge of day at about 4 p.m., but Alden drank violently and pathologically. When I once suggested that fifty-two ounces of undiluted gin was going at it rather hard, he countered by saying that where he came from he was not accounted a drinker. And that remark is revealing. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are drunken and violent societies. Drinking is equated with manliness. Alden endorsed this suicidal drinking as part of being both man and poet. The legacy he left to some of those impressionable boys caused years of suffering.

  I had, of course, known his poetry before going to Fredericton. When I wrote to him after that unpleasant evening in 1970 and criticized his behaviour I rather smarmily used Ben Jonson’s phrase about Shakespeare to describe my liking for his work . . . this side idolatry. (It is taken from Jonson’s 1641 tribute to Shakespeare in Timber or Discoveries and I assumed Alden would recognize it.)