by John Metcalf
The editorial task is not merely one of compilation; it is also critical. Frank Kermode described literary criticism as “the medium in which past work survives.” We hope that this anthology and succeeding ones will serve this function as well as offering immediate pleasure.
Into the 1978 volume, edited with Clark Blaise, went Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Elizabeth Spencer, and Kent Thompson. In the 1979 volume we published Mavis Gallant. In 1980 Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro along with Guy Vanderhaeghe and a first story from Linda Svendsen which later would be a part of her brilliant collection Marine Life.
Clark Blaise left Canada in 1980 because his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, could no longer tolerate the racial harassment she was enduring in Toronto. The loss to Canada was considerable. Clark Blaise, one of the handful of great story writers in Canada, was always reminded that despite his having become a Canadian citizen, he wasn’t a real Canadian. He and I were always referred to as American-born and British-born. Clark went on to a long career at Iowa and Bharati to a long career at Berkeley and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Middleman and Other Stories.
To succeed Clark as co-editor, I chose Leon Rooke, another American-born. Leon, too, had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the short story and his own exuberantly improvisational approach to the form was doubtless a liberating influence on what remained staid in my own judgement.
Leon has been and continues to be an important and shaping force in Canadian literature, so I’d like to quote from an essay I wrote about his work recently. The essay is entitled “This Here Jasper Is Gittin Ready to Talk.”
In the 1970s when I began to encounter Leon Rooke’s stories in the literary magazines I recognized immediately an interesting new voice. A way of approaching the form new to Canada—though not so new in the States—was beginning to make itself heard. Or should have been making itself heard for it was surprisingly difficult to get people to listen.
I remember showing some of the stories in what became The Love Parlour, Leon’s first book in Canada, to Michael Macklem, the publisher of Oberon Press. Michael has a doctorate in literature from Princeton and taught English at Yale. He declared the stories incomprehensible but said that if I thought they were good he’d publish them on my say-so but only on condition he wouldn’t have to read further.
This seeming inability to read Leon Rooke, to connect with his vitality, is puzzling because looking back at The Love Parlour now it doesn’t strike me as wildly innovative or madly experimental. It remains a good, solid collection but it is not a stylistic trailblazer.
To get Macklem to publish Leon’s second book in Canada, Cry Evil, I had to write little explanatory notes about each story. Macklem published the book but remained unconvinced. It was with Cry Evil that Leon began to move towards the sort of story that was to be his major contribution to the form. With Cry Evil we were treated to a display of Leon limbering up for the major work ahead. This is not to say that some of the stories in Cry Evil are not already masterly performances. I’m particularly fond of “The Deacon’s Tale,” “Adolpho Has Disappeared and We Haven’t a Clue Where to Find Him,” and “Biographical Notes.”
Another anecdote about listening. In 1980 Leon published his first novel, Fat Woman. It is a book which draws with intense imagination on his Southern roots. Every line of the book is instinct with the rhythms and cadences of Southern speech yet a young Canadian fiction writer, and a good one too, reviewing the book for a major newspaper, understood it as being set in Nova Scotia.
Yet another anecdote. When Leon and I left Oberon Press I wanted to move us to ECW Press because the owners, Jack David and Robert Lecker, were friends of mine and possessed of great energy and dedication to Canadian writing. I sent some of Leon’s new work to Jack David who seemed unenthusiastic. Indeed, he phoned me and asked me if I really stood behind the work, if I really considered it the genuine article. I told him very firmly that I did. A short while later, Leon was in Toronto giving a public reading and Jack David went to hear him. Jack phoned me the next day in great excitement. “Now I get it,” he said. “Now I’ve heard him. I just wasn’t getting it from the printed page.”
Jack David and Robert Lecker went on to publish two major books of Leon’s stories, Death Suite in 1981 and The Birth Control King of the Upper Volta in 1982.
Academic neglect of Rooke’s work is easily understandable. Not many academics actually read contemporary writing and many of them were unaware of his existence. Another part of the answer, less silly than it sounds, is that Leon is playful. Not a good thing to be in any of the arts in Canada. Yet another strike against him is that he moved progressively away from normative realism into fable, fantasy, pastiche of genre writing, all in scrambled shapes of his own invention. This departure from realism did not endear him to academics whose hastily cobbled canon really had no room for his shenanigans; shenanigans, furthermore, which were suspiciously American.
But the central reason for his early neglect is that most readers were not hearing what Leon was up to. Their attention was directed elsewhere, to theme, perhaps, or form. They were in a similar situation to an earnest gallery-goer standing in front of a Rothko and asking, “What does it mean?” The answer is, “Look.”
To the reader who asks, “What does it mean?” of Rooke’s “Sixteen-Year-Old Susan March Confesses to the Innocent Murder of All the Devious Strangers Who Would Drag Her Down” the answer is, “Listen.”
Listen.
Rooke has published four or five plays and many of the stories are essentially scripts—monologues or voices talking, arguing. The insistent direction in his work is theatrical. Leon himself is never happier than on a stage, the rhetoric flying high and wide and often over the top. Leon is a performer. Leon is a self-confessed ham. His stories are performances.
He is very prolific, having published by now some three hundred short stories in literary magazines. Most are uncollected because on further reflection he felt they simply did not work. Leon doesn’t brood for months over the shape and detail of what he hopes will be a masterwork; he picks up his horn and tries out a few runs, a few phrases to see if something is going to happen.
I sometimes think that Rooke’s academic acceptance has been slow because academics have been slow to think of Leon as, say, a tenor sax player and the story as a jazz improvisation. If the reader does respond in those terms it becomes immediately obvious what Leon is up to.
Leon is leading the parade. He doesn’t want a tweed-with-leather-elbow-patches response. He wants celebrants performing along with him. He wants a Second Line. At other times he wants to preach, a big Texas tenor sound, wave after wave of impossibly mounting fervour.
Leon preaching always reminds me of recordings I’ve heard of the Reverend Kelsey leading his Washington congregation in “Lion of the Tribe of Judah”; the preacher’s voice probes at the words, repeats, hums, slides into falsetto, repeats and finds a form and then all rhythmic hell breaks loose, hands clapping, jugs grunting and booming, a trombone’s urging. All rather glorious.
In the foreword to the first volume Leon and I edited together in 1981, a volume which included Blaise, Gallant, Levine, Munro, Thompson, and Svendsen, I wrote:
Now past our tenth year, in one guise or another, and still committed to presenting each year a gathering of fine fiction, it is interesting to glance back at our tracks in the snow. Despite all the annual grumbling by reviewers, it seems clear to me that over the last ten years the general standards of story writing in Canada have been rising. The art is becoming generally more sophisticated. Best Canadian Stories still cannot stand comparison with Best American Stories but that is not, and should not be surprising; what is pleasing is that the comparison is no longer quite so devastatingly painful.
That this is not an entirely subjective judgement is attested to in remarks by W. J. Keith in his 1985 book Canadian Literature in English: “Thanks to Metcalf, whose num
erous anthologies of short stories have been appearing regularly since the early 1970s, a whole generation of talented writers is emerging who find the short story a satisfying and infinitely varied form of expression.”
Such forewords and attitudes and the demolition of the “simple, sturdy constructions” enraged the cultural nationalists who would have much preferred to remain in huddled celebration of the muddy achievement of Raymond Knister, Morley Callaghan, Hugh Garner, and Ernest Buckler.
Between 1980 and 1994 my writing was excluded from every trade anthology of national scope. I was excluded from The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English edited by Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver. I was excluded from Weaver’s Canadian Short Stories: Fourth Series and Fifth Series. I was excluded from Wayne Grady’s Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories and from The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Stories. I was excluded from Michael Ondaatje’s anthology From Ink Lake.
This list of names came to mind when I read in Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, “The logic of nationalism always flows downhill, toward the gutter.”
While the cultural nationalists were busily enshrining mediocrity and proclaiming it genius the academics were doing the same thing in their mausoleums. I have written of this extensively in What Is a Canadian Literature? And Freedom from Culture: Selected Essays 1982–1992. Academics damage the short story genre by maintaining a stolid silence on the alleged merits of writing which is deplorable. One example must suffice.
Morley Callaghan has been cemented into place as the father of the short story in Canada. Our only alleged ancestor more revered by nationalists is Duncan Campbell Scott, from whom, claims Wayne Grady, all Canadian story writers are artistically descended. Penguin Books paid Grady money for writing this know-nothing twaddle and spread the shame of it all over the world.
In the seventies John Mills was reviewing frequently in the literary magazines and Myrna became an instant fan when she read a Mills review which opened, “Coarsened as I am by years of reading for pleasure . . .” John reviewed Morley Callaghan’s Close to the Sun Again (1977) in Queen’s Quarterly.
If Close to the Sun Again were a first novel by a young writer I would say of it that it shows some awareness of the technique of plot construction, that though the dialogue is inept and the prose generally abysmal, there are signs in the last two chapters that the author is beginning to slough the deleterious effects of high school training on his writing habits, and that he might also move on to themes of greater interest and importance if he could only empty his head of jejune notions of psychological realism picked up God knows where. The writer is Morley Callaghan, however, who has been around a long time and is unlikely to improve; nor would he, on the evidence of what is written about him on the dust-jacket, particularly want to . . .
Hemingway is invoked twice on the dust-jacket. Callaghan worked with him on the Toronto Star, then lived on the periphery of his circle in Paris where, presumably, he joined the Master’s declared war against rhetoric in general and the adjective in particular, while remaining well-insulated against that peculiar electricity that used to flow through Hemingway’s early writing. We are also told that Edmund Wilson called him “the most unjustly neglected novelist in the English-speaking world,” and that, despite this neglect, his last novel sold more than half a million copies in the Soviet Union . . . It is good to know that 60 years after the Revolution petit-bourgeois notions of what constitutes a novel are still alive and well in Mother Russia. Apart from that I don’t know why Callaghan succeeds in foreign countries. Perhaps he translates well and there is some internal evidence to suggest that Close to the Sun Again was translated from manuscript into, let us say, Lithuanian then back into English for Macmillan by some well-intentioned, polyglot, but tone-deaf and maladroit Pole.
A passage like the following: “The scratching little hollow ping was like the beating of a heart, only not muffled like a heart: it came throbbing in the vastness of cathedral space . . .” makes a man clutch and fumble at his chest to ascertain whether his pacemaker’s working properly. My own heart, and I am speaking now as a hypochondriac, does not make these scratching little pinging sounds, muffled or otherwise, and in any case there is, in my opinion, a contradiction between the ideas of scratching and throbbing. It is a clumsy, sloppy metaphor but at least it represents a step, or rather stagger, in the direction of colourful prose and, in contrast to such sodden, dispiriting stuff as: “She went on to say that her father had taken her to Europe, and in Paris they had gone to one of those small clubs that had fight cards. Her father had been impressed by a good-looking boy named Robert Riopelle, a middleweight, a lonely-looking boy, a kid, with all the great natural talents. The French boy had a strangely moving, noble character. The kid took a shine to her father, too . . .” it shines “like a good deed in a naughty world.” So this French boy “had a strangely moving, noble character,” had he? Apart from the stylistic poverty of using an auxiliary verb instead of a proper one, the sentence with its vagueness and pomposity breaks every rule in the book of narrative art (including the Jamesian ukase that the reader must be shown, not told) while creating no new rule of its own. Perhaps this is what the dust-jacket means when he says, perhaps a little too glibly, that “the novel is told in Morley Callaghan’s distinctive style—so easy and flowing that it seems to be no style at all.” But the style is there—and it is abominable.
Mills’s review and my essay on Callaghan’s stories “Winner Take All” will, I predict, be entirely ignored. When the next batch of Guides, Companions, and Encyclopaedias appears a Weaver clone will have been found to extol Callaghan’s nonexistent virtues.
I bring this matter up not to be contentious but to illuminate the fact that we are living a critical lie. If we are blind and deaf to Callaghan’s cacophonies how can we genuinely respond to Alice Munro’s glories? How can students trust us or our works of reference if we describe as “distinguished” writing that is stumblebum?
Nearly all the editing I did between 1976 and 1993 was, as it were, editing against the grain. I was suppressing the “simple, sturdy constructions” and searching for sophistication, elegance, invention, language that sang. What the public, such as it is, really wanted was W. P. Kinsella and W. D. Valgardson but it wasn’t going to get them from me.
In an article by Andy Lamey in the magazine Gravitas he quotes that sad Marxist hulk Robin Mathews, both synapses buzzing, as saying: “Metcalf has always supported the reactionary forces in Canada at the level of ‘the barking dog.’” What this means I’m not entirely sure. Actually I hold no party political position; I simply find politicians embarrassing. When it comes to literary editing, however, I suspect that I’ve been the very reverse of reactionary.
In the foreword to 82: Best Canadian Stories Leon Rooke wrote, “This is winsome stuff, gladdening to the heart, necessary to life and limb. The ‘best’ writer—our position of faith—is always the stranger, the writer not heard from yet.”
I wrote an essay about Keath Fraser for The New Quarterly which describes the central joy of editing, the joy of finding, in Leon’s words, “the writer not heard from yet.”
I first encountered Keath’s writing in 1981 when I was editing Oberon’s Best Canadian Stories with Leon Rooke. I remember I was sitting in the kitchen with a moody cup of coffee eyeing the morning’s pile of manila envelopes. I ripped one open and glanced over the opening sentence. The story was entitled “Le Mal de l’Air.” This is what I read:
“Suppose he had a three-day-old festering on the elbow, ate pork at his mother’s on Sunday and got sick: his wife would rather blame his illness on bee-stings than on worms in a good woman’s meat.”
Huh?
The second sentence:
“Bees she believed just as likely to cause nausea and the shakes as they were a slowly puffed-up arm.”
By now I was intrigued.
By the time I’d finished the first p
aragraph I realized I’d found a writer of strange power and accomplishment. I read the entire story sitting there in the kitchen in a state of mounting excitement.
Here’s the paragraph in full:
Suppose he had a three-day-old festering on the elbow, ate pork at his mother’s on Sunday and got sick: his wife would rather blame his illness on bee-stings than on worms in a good woman’s meat. Bees she believed just as likely to cause nausea and the shakes as they were a slowly puffed-up arm. Her responses were intemperate and increasingly persistent. She had been to the doctor who could find nothing wrong inside her long, splendid body. Once she took her cello to the Gulf Islands and played on the beach for a pair of misplaced whimbrels. She wasn’t happy. You had to conclude that something had infected their marriage. “Or am I just getting bitter,” wondered the discomfited Miles, “as the two of us grow alike?”
What a mysterious paragraph this was. What could I make of it? It was alive with differing cadences, tones, and levels of diction. It was full of movement. It was busy. The first sentence changed pace at the colon, changed from a colloquial tone to something more formal. Then followed the playful buzz of “bees she believed.” Then in the third sentence the diction changed again becoming Latinate, echoing perhaps the words of a doctor or psychiatrist.
But why did he use the words “a good woman’s meat”? Why was she good? The word seemed to come from the unnamed wife rather than from Miles. Was it perhaps in defence of the mother whom Miles has accused of bad housewifery? In the word “good” were we hearing an incredibly compressed version of their quarrel?
The simple inversion of “Bees she believed” stressed the irrationality of her belief. The strong stresses falling one after the other prepared us for the “intemperate” responses in the next sentence. And I wonder if Keath intended us to be thinking of the phrase “bees in her bonnet.”