An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  The following academic year I found part-time work at Vanier College, Snowdon Campus. It was an unspeakable employment. The word campus is misleading; it suggests lawns and manicured flower beds. The college was housed in what had been an office block and fronted onto the Decarie Expressway. Immediately next door was a large A&W. With the windows closed, the heat was intolerable; with the windows open, it was impossible to make oneself heard over the traffic.

  I taught two courses: creative writing and a course on the Canadian short story. Some way into this latter I was removed from the course on the grounds that I was not competent, lacking as I did an MA. The year was saved by the fact that I had one good student, now in theatre in Chicago, and by my office being adjacent to that of Barry Cameron—now a professor at UNB—who was severely shaken by what had signed up for his thoughtful courses in Canadian literature. We sustained each other by mutual bemoaning as we picked our way through the ankle-deep litter in the corridors.

  The chairman of the English department had retired from the fray; he used to lock himself in his office with the head of the remedial programme and gaze at rented videotapes of dubious artistic merit.

  I had become disenchanted with teaching because I couldn’t find people bright enough to teach. It is impossible to teach people at more than a rudimentary level if you do not share a vocabulary. I needed to be able to say to a student, What you need to do here is shape the paragraph in the spirit of the opening paragraph of Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill.” And have the student knowing author and story and capable of picking up the hint.

  I felt the same disenchantment recently at the Humber School for Writers in Toronto, a week-long course in the summer I’ve been teaching for some years now. A young man brought to the class sixteen stories, none of which made the slightest sense. They were shapeless and it was impossible to divine their aim. He didn’t seem to understand any questions I asked him about them. Something inspired me to ask him if he had read any short stories. He said he had read one but couldn’t remember much about it. I wrote out a long list of titles and told him to go away and start reading. He told me that same day at lunch that he was going to live in Montreal for a couple of months to see what it was like. I said that he’d find the architecture in Montreal more pleasing than Toronto. He said, “Architecture? That’s not anything I’d know about.”

  I gave up my apartment and moved in with Myrna a couple of days before we got married. She owned a house in the almost entirely Jewish enclave of Côte St. Luc. I was not entirely at ease in a community of observant or even semi-observant Jews. I wouldn’t have been at ease in a community of observant anything.

  I felt not at ease living in the house that Myrna had lived in with her first husband. I was feeling disenchanted with teaching, oppressed by the grind of separatist politics, constricted and confined. It was as if one cycle of my life were over and it was time to launch into new experience.

  The woman who lived opposite had a pale, weedy five-year-old who sometimes played with Myrna’s son, Ronald, who was the same age. When he came over his mother would screech from the middle of the road, “Don’t let him near anything treyf.”

  When Pesach rolls around, the celebration of Passover, Jews are required to clean their houses and get rid of all bread and any product which is not manufactured under rabbinical supervision and designated “suitable for Passover” or pesachdik.

  One afternoon during Pesach I was sitting on the front steps and eating a cheese sandwich. The horrid little boy drifted across and stood regarding me. In silence he broke a few twigs off a bush. He eventually said, pointing to the sandwich, “Is that pesachdik?”

  “Piss off,” I explained.

  Côte St. Luc, I decided, was not my natural habitat.

  It was to be another year before we moved.

  I often daydream about my natural habitat. Bath and Clifton would serve as models. Georgian terraces clad in honey-coloured stone. Pubs with cobbled courtyards shaded by vast horse chestnut trees. Little shops filled with dubious antiques. A used-book shop where a gentle old rogue also sells fading watercolours labelled “School of Cotman 1782–1842.” All a little shabby and seedy now. Once aristocratic, now déclassé, with a floating population of students, single professionals, and in the pub, the Colonel, “Call me Courtney,” in his canary-yellow waistcoat drinking pink gins. There’s something mildly louche about this sun-lit place, mildly raffish, Roger et Gallet savon, Eau de Cologne Jean-Marie Farina, sex in the afternoon, Spanish champagne.

  At some time during this Vanier year of suffering I was invited to the University of Ottawa to give a reading. I happened to bump into the chairman of the English department, Professor Glenn Clever, who said quite casually, “Oh, by the by, would you like to be writer-in-residence here next year?”

  “Yes,” I said, “thank you.”

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll send a contract.”

  Off he pottered.

  It was agreed that I would make myself available to students (as it turned out, all one of them) two days a week. I was commuting from Montreal and sleeping over in Ottawa for one night. The department had known months in advance of my arrival. When I duly presented myself on the first day of term I was introduced to the new chairman, Professor Marcotte. He informed me that my office was at the top of the old house which served as English department offices but that unfortunately the room didn’t have a desk in it. Or chair. There was, apparently, something wrong with the heating system so that the temperature in the room was stuck at over one hundred degrees.

  I returned to the Lord Elgin Hotel.

  It took three more weeks for the desk to appear.

  The chairs took another two.

  Two weeks before I left, my arrival was announced.

  Deskless, chairless, studentless, I was bored out of my mind. To while away the time I decided, pinching Kent Thompson’s idea, to organize a conference on the short story. I invited Clark Blaise, Hugh Hood, Kent Thompson, Alice Munro, Ray Smith, Margaret Laurence, and Audrey Thomas and they gave readings to upwards of three hundred students every evening. During the day, the critics I’d invited, W. H. New, George Bowering, Barry Cameron, Patricia Morley, Frank Davey, Doug Barbour, and Michael Dixon, gave papers on the work of writers they’d been paired with. The whole affair was introduced by Robert Weaver of CBC Anthology.

  I had scraped together the necessary money for this conference from the Canada Council and from the University of Ottawa Student Council; the English department confined its support to insisting that papers be signed indemnifying it in case of financial shortfall. At one point, enraged and sickened by the department’s pissy attitude, I offered in writing to make good out of my own pocket any loss that might be incurred.

  As the date of the conference approached, my days were spent on the run booking hotel rooms, booking the Press Club, arranging an auditorium, checking sound systems, writing letters, confirming, soothing.

  The University of Ottawa had promised to publish the papers presented at the conference but, of course, reneged. I regret to this day the loss of that volume. George Bowering gave an involving and quirky paper on Audrey Thomas. Doug Barbour was entertaining and stimulating on Ray Smith’s work. Frank Davey’s paper on Clark Blaise was astonishing in that he seriously advanced the view that Blaise’s writing was akin to journalism—this of one of the country’s most poetic writers.

  The only unhappy writer was Margaret Laurence. I’d paired her with an academic called Patricia Morley. This woman taught at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute for Women’s Studies, a name that always makes me smile because it sounds like some ghastly joint in a David Lodge novel. Compared with Patricia Morley, Margaret Atwood sounds vivacious. To say that Patricia Morley talks in a relentless monotone does not even suggest . . . Morley had more or less appropriated poor Margaret who came to me in weeping complaint and had to be bought Scotch.


  I was happy escaping from Ottawa. A dismal little university. A bland, parochial little town. I was not to know then that in the future I was to spend more than twenty years there. A couple of years ago Mordecai Richler asked me how long it had been and, shaking his head sorrowfully, said, “John, John, it’s a long sentence.”

  Back in Montreal, Elspeth Cameron, then chair of English at Loyola, offered me a job as writer-in-residence for the balance of the year. Though I religiously kept office hours, not a single student came to see me. I spent a lot of time with Harry Hill propping up the faculty club bar. Harry, though camp as a line of tents, was one of the most brilliant teachers I’ve ever seen in action. If Loyola had not itself been a dim little college riven by vicious academic politics, it could have built round Harry Hill a very important drama school but they predictably squandered the opportunity.

  Hugh Hood published A New Athens, the second volume of his roman-fleuve, in 1977 but he’d probably written it in 1976. Myrna remembers reading the manuscript in second carbon. He phoned one day in the summer and asked us if we’d like to drive with him to look at Athens and surrounding countryside. We were much taken by the countryside and we were soon scouting houses on our own. We both had the feeling that this was the move towards something different that had been ordained for us.

  We drove about the area looking at Plum Hollow, Philipsville, Forfar (which sold a five-year-old cheddar called “Old Baby”), Chantry, Elgin, and one day found an old stone house just outside Delta, a village about ten miles from Athens. I was charmed to discover that Delta was in the Township of Bastard. I was also charmed to discover that Delta was the birthplace of Lorne Pierce who had been editor-in-chief of Ryerson Press. I named my press the Bastard Press and it was under that imprint that Newlove and I published Dreams Surround Us.

  And dreams did surround us. The house had been built in about 1840. There were exposed ceiling beams, wide-sawn plank floors, a vast garden to one side, a forty-one-acre field in the back vivid with meadow flowers, and in front of the house an ancient mulberry tree laden with plump maroon berries.

  STEERING THE CRAFT

  Between 1976 and 1993 I edited and co-edited eighteen anthologies of Canadian short stories and compiled seven textbooks of Canadian stories for use in schools and universities. I did all this work with the conscious intention of changing the nature and shape of short fiction in Canada.

  In 1971, David Helwig and Tom Marshall edited a story anthology for Oberon entitled Fourteen Stories High. This was followed in 1972 by New Canadian Stories, which became the title of the annuals that were to follow. David Helwig resigned from editing the series in 1975 because he had accepted a job with the CBC Drama Department which precluded outside work and through David’s intervention I was offered the job as co-editor with Joan Harcourt.

  The policy of the series when I took over was to publish previously unpublished work. Helwig had started the series with the intention of providing another outlet for new work and new writers. Joan Harcourt and I were receiving manuscripts by the hundred. Nearly all were atrocious. I was soon driven to begging friends for unpublished stories—and at that, I wasn’t getting the cream because Oberon could not afford to match the payments offered by some of the magazines, nominal though such payments were. (An entire genre in Canadian literature was shaped by the fact that some publications paid as much as a hundred dollars for a story, others far less, or nothing.) It dawned on me slowly that we were in direct competition with the literary magazines for a very small crop of good work. There was not much point in this and I began to get restless with the whole policy and purpose of the series.

  Although Joan and I got on well together, I began to hanker after the idea of a fresh co-editor, someone not quite so nice as Joan, someone harsher in judgement. I felt I needed to work with someone who really knew short fiction, who lived and breathed it as I did. I wanted someone who would understand style and elegance and who would be repelled by socially acceptable themes. I decided on Clark Blaise. Joan resigned by mutual agreement in 1977 and I persuaded Michael Macklem, Oberon’s publisher, to change both the title and policy of the anthology.

  The title was now to be Best Canadian Stories and the policy was to concentrate on republishing the best stories from the literary magazines. I had wanted an outright policy of republication only but Macklem argued that such a policy would be bad PR and would result in reviewers berating Oberon for closing off yet another publishing outlet. Under pressure, I agreed that we would continue to read and consider unsolicited manuscripts.

  Joan Harcourt, in her farewell foreword to the 1978 book, said:

  I learned some things during my stint as co-editor of New (now Best) Canadian Stories, many of them small, some that I didn’t want to know, but learn I did. Mostly I learned that this country is full of people shrouded in arctic light, trapped in their Canadian loneliness, sometimes writing badly about it, sometimes well, occasionally brilliantly. Probably I’ve read as many stories typed on kitchen tables in efficiency apartments and in echoing old houses in small towns as has anyone in the country. Some of the writers whose stories I read cut slightly ridiculous figures, but they were fighting the battle the best way they knew. Courage is where you find it, and I do dignify them with the title “writer” even when the stories were less than good: they had a faith and that’s more important than the product.

  I think I learned that there is little real fiction in Canada. What we have instead are personal histories with the names changed and the facts slightly bent . . . The large run of the stories we received presented carefully crafted reliquaries, little boxes in which were enshrined little memories. Some of these reliquaries were elaborately enamelled, but mostly they were simple, sturdy constructions.

  This extract from her introduction illustrates what I meant when I said that Joan was nice. I found the “simple, sturdy constructions” far less “carefully crafted” than she did.

  (Mavis Gallant, in a letter, described them disdainfully as “pallid little ‘I’ stories” though she was talking about the ones we’d selected.)

  It is with Joan’s first paragraph that I am in violent disagreement.

  “. . . they had a faith and that’s more important than the product.”

  Although Joan is saying this of inadequate writers, it’s an attitude which has condoned and fostered the mediocrity of all Canadian writing from its beginnings to the present.

  When I was a child and aunts for my birthday gave me socks, my mother used to say to my disgruntled little self, “It’s the thought that counts.” I considered this argument but it seemed to me that what I was left with was, inescapably, socks.

  My desire to change the title and direction of New Canadian Stories was prompted by a belief that “product” was more important than “faith.”

  I was tired of socks.

  As I grew into the job I was able to see that by presenting what I considered the best I was promoting one kind of writing and suppressing another. I was deliberately suppressing, I came to realize, Joan Harcourt’s “simple, sturdy constructions.” I wasn’t interested in “personal histories with the names changed.” I was interested in sparkling language, in play, in glorious rhetoric. I was also promoting a fiction which was looking outwards for its models and its energy. The direction of that gaze was inevitably the United States. I set out to change the concept and shape of what a story is and how it should be read.

  In Kicking Against the Pricks (1982) I wrote:

  Where 20 years ago Canadian stories stressed content—what a story was about—the main emphasis now is on the story as verbal and rhetorical performance. Our best writers are concerned with the story as thing to be experienced rather than as thing to be understood. This more than anything else is what seems to baffle some readers—and not a few critics; it is difficult for those of us writing stories to understand why this is so since these concerns have been dominant
since about 1925.

  Alice Munro in a piece she wrote for me in 1982 said the same sort of thing in a different way:

  I will start out by explaining how I read stories written by other people. For one thing, I can start reading them anywhere; from beginning to end, from end to beginning, from any point in between in either direction. So obviously I don’t take up a story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere, with views and neat diversions along the way. I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It’s more like a house. Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way. This is the nearest I can come to explaining what a story does for me, and what I want my stories to do for other people.

  The 1976 Oberon volume carries a foreword which said in part:

  76: New Canadian Stories is a transitional volume. It contains previously unpublished stories as well as stories that have appeared in the literary magazines. Starting next year, in frank emulation of Martha Foley’s Best American Short Stories, Oberon’s anthology will be entitled 77: Best Canadian Stories. Though we will continue to consider unpublished manuscripts, our principal purpose will be to find and collect the best published stories of the year.

  In 1976 I managed to work in among others, Norman Levine, Hugh Hood, Audrey Thomas, Clark Blaise, Elizabeth Spencer, and Leon Rooke.

  In the foreword to the 1977 volume I wrote:

  An anthology such as this offers some slight hope. It offers to a larger audience work that otherwise might well not have been seen; it extends the life of a piece of work; it directs the attention of readers to writers who otherwise might have been consigned to the vaults on microfilm.