An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  But what on earth were “misplaced whimbrels”? According to the Shorter Oxford, “Applied to various small species of curlew.” According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, “any of a group of European shore birds resembling the curlew, but smaller, with a pale stripe along the crown: they breed on the islands north of England.”

  So did that mean the whimbrels were “misplaced”—put in the wrong place—because they’re supposed to be in Europe and not on the Gulf Islands? That made no sense whatever, so I consulted W. Earl Godfrey’s Birds of Canada and discovered that Webster’s New World Dictionary had let me down. Whimbrels were not confined to Europe. There is a North American whimbrel also known as the Hudsonian curlew. One population of whimbrels winters in California and nests in northwest Alaska and Canada. It is a spring and autumn transient in British Columbia and common on the coast.

  So a reasonable reading of “misplaced” would be that this particular pair of whimbrels hadn’t migrated at the right time. But “misplace” also means “to bestow (one’s love, trust, affection, etc.) on an unsuitable or undeserving object.” So the whimbrels, by playful extension, are also “misplaced” because they are receiving the misplaced attention of Miles’s wife.

  (I was later to learn that Keath’s work bulges with puns, play, complexities; it is best approached with humility and an array of dictionaries.)

  The whimbrel sentence captured the wife’s “intemperate” quality perfectly. The slightly sad vision of a woman on a beach playing the cello to an audience of two birds suggested about the wife hysteria, drama, theatricality of emotion. Yet at the same time the sentence was comic, of course, and the brief sentence “She wasn’t happy” reinforced the comic tone.

  But the comic tone also had the effect of making me wonder about Miles. What sort of husband would react in that way to his wife’s distress?

  And worrying at the paragraph again—why “whimbrels”? Did he just like the sound of it? Did he choose it for comic effect? Did he swell the sentence up with ornithological exactitude so that he could deflate it the more comically with: “She wasn’t happy”?

  (In 1986 at the Kingston Conference, Keath was to say: “For me pleasure is the ability to bury a reader in the story even if we don’t understand it at all. Have respect for the mystery. A fiction is more than understanding; it’s perception and delight.” So his advice to me would probably be to relax and reread.)

  Miles is “discomfited.” I suspect that some readers might have read that as “discomforted” meaning essentially “made uncomfortable” but “discomfited” means something much stronger: “1. Originally, to defeat; overthrow; put to flight; hence 2. To overthrow the plans or expectations of; thwart; frustrate.”

  And this harsher word fits perfectly with the picture the paragraph paints of marital discord.

  (In Keath’s choices of words secondary meanings often seem to obliquely thicken the story’s stew. The verbal noun “festering,” for example, has a secondary meaning of “rankling” meaning “embittering” which accords with the word “discomfited.”)

  Another aspect of this busy paragraph is the sounding of the story’s emotional notes: “festering,” “sick,” “illness,” “nausea,” “infected.”

  I read recently a book of art criticism by Robert Hughes called Nothing If Not Critical and was struck by the following passage on Manet. Hughes is referring to a painting from 1866 called The Fifer.

  Manet’s sense of touch was extraordinary but its bravura passages are in the details: how the generalized bagginess of a trouser leg, for instance, rendered in flat, thin paint and firmed up with swift daubs of darker tone in the folds, contrasts with the thick creamy white directional brush strokes that model the curve of a spat. The creaseless intelligent play of flat and round, thick and thin, “slow” and “fast” passages of paint is what gives Manet’s surface its probing liveliness. There is nothing “miraculous” about it, but it was not the result of a mechanically acquired technique either. It is there because, in his best work, Manet’s inquisitiveness never failed him; every inch of surface records an active desire to see and then find the proper translation of sight into mark.

  Although it is always dangerous to compare painting and writing, I thought the paragraph a useful way to think about how writing works. “The ceaseless intelligent play of flat and round, thick and thin, ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ passages of paint”; those words are surely pregnant with suggestion for a way of approaching Keath Fraser’s writing.

  I was so impressed by Keath’s work that I offered to help him get a collection published. What could I do but love the man who wrote this sentence: “His dinner lay in him like hooves.”

  Hooves!

  There’s a simile to savour.

  WINNING THE WAR

  In the academic year 1983–84 Mavis Gallant was writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto and was awarded the Canada-Australia Literary Prize, an alternating award designed to deepen the two countries’ knowledge of each other’s literature. The Australian High Commission in Ottawa arranged a luncheon in her honour in a private room in the National Arts Centre. Mavis had apparently requested my presence.

  I strolled up to the NAC and found the room. I was alone except for a man fighting starched napery on a makeshift bar. Then Mavis arrived, escorted by a subdued suit from External Affairs. Mavis inspected the table and went around reading all the name cards. Grumbling pugnaciously about his politics, she switched the name card of a Canada Council functionary, seating him at a distance and placing me beside her.

  Lunch proceeded with a litany of complaint from Mavis about the interminable line-ups at the Ontario Health Insurance office, the architectural brutality of the Robarts Library, the tardiness of Professor Solecki in providing her with a typewriter, the appalling manners of that very bearded man, you know—flapping a hand—in Alberta . . .

  Until, after dessert, waiters filled the glasses again and the High Commissioner rose and made a deft and graceful little speech ending with the words:

  “And now let us drink a toast to Mavis Gallant and to the day she sets foot on our shores.”

  In a loud Lady Bracknell voice she said, “GO to Australia! I have no intention of GOING to Australia! Why would anyone think . . . I’m writing a book. Who in their right mind . . .”

  When the clamour died down and the High Commissioner and his entourage had departed and the man from External had simply decamped, I offered to walk Mavis back to her hotel. We strolled along Sparks Street in the sunshine and she said, “I really don’t know why you keep on doing these anthologies. No one will ever thank you for them. In fact, they’ll hate you. You should just get on with your own work.”

  Because I was rather in awe of her as a writer I said something or other bland in reply but I’ve often thought of that conversation and all these years later still wish I’d explained myself. I wish I’d said, “You chose to leave and at the time you did it was doubtless the smartest thing to do. You went into a kind of exile and as things turned out you live your daily life in the pleasures of Paris but your work goes first to The New Yorker and then, in the USA, to Random House. What I’m getting at is that you’re not dependent on Paris or on France itself for your career. My case is a bit different. I chose to come here—quite possibly a mistake—but choose I did and then I reinforced that choice by becoming a citizen. I make very little money from my writing, so have to work at other things. My daily life is enmeshed in Canadian literary matters in a way that yours probably isn’t in French literary matters.

  “And as a writer, citizen, and teacher I feel I have responsibilities to the literature. But there’s nothing particularly virtuous in all this. I’m just very much involved with this society, locked in mortal combat with the bloody place. I feel I have to attempt to shape taste, to encourage younger writers, to edit, to criticize—and anthologies are an expression of that.”

&nbs
p; A touch pompous but I still wish I’d said something of the kind.

  In 1980 it had occurred to me to try to revive the idea of New Canadian Writing, that is, the idea of putting three writers together in a book, each writer being given room for a handful of stories. I decided on the title First Impressions because the book would, I hoped, be making a good first impression and first impressions are what book collectors collect, the first printing of the first edition. I took the idea to Macklem who was agreeable. I had wanted the books all to be called First Impressions and designated 2 and 3 and so on. But in 1981 Macklem overrode me and called the second volume Second Impressions. And then Third Impressions rendering the title meaningless. He was equally stubborn over my story collection, insisting right up to his defeat that the book should be entitled not The Teeth of My Father but My Father’s Teeth. A strange deafness on his part. After I left Oberon, the series was continued as Coming Attractions.

  Although Michael Macklem has published dozens of important books and laboured mightily on behalf of Canadian writing, no one would describe him as a fount of sweetness and light. He is one of the most abrasive men I’ve ever met. His idea of a conversation is to talk louder whenever his interlocutor attempts to say anything. He seems to have little grasp of social niceties. When Myrna and I first moved to Ottawa I suggested that it might be the polite thing to invite Michael and his wife, Anne, to dinner. Michael stood in the entrance hall and looked about and then said, “Well, there’s some money here and I know you haven’t got any so it must be hers.”

  Myrna was less than charmed.

  The introduction to Third Impressions in 1982 is worth reproducing as I outlined a rationale for the series:

  It is increasingly difficult for short story writers to make the great leap from publication in the literary magazines to publication in book form. There are the obvious primary reasons for this difficulty, which are economic, and then there are the obvious secondary reasons, which are cultural and economic—the lack of any literary infrastructure in Canada, the decay of traditional faith in the idea of investing in a literary career rather than solely in discrete books that offer the hope of immediate financial return, the deep-seated feeling in publishers and readers that short stories, while admirable, are really, though one wouldn’t shout it, merely limbering-up exercises.

  There is another, usually adverse, factor, however, which is not often discussed and that is the part played in the story writer’s fortunes by chance. When I was thinking about putting this book together, I wrote to several young writers whose names were familiar to me through their work in the literary magazines. I also solicited names from such literary colleagues as Geoff Hancock of Canadian Fiction Magazine and Robert Weaver of CBC’s Anthology. One of the first names on my list was Guy Vanderhaeghe, whose work over the last two years has been gaining in strength and authority and one of whose stories I had earlier selected for inclusion in Best Canadian Stories.

  I wrote to Vanderhaeghe but I was about a week too late. A collection of his stories had just been accepted by another publisher. I was delighted for him, of course, but, given the literary climate, surprised; I found myself thinking about the vagaries of publishing. I found myself thinking how quality is sometimes only perceived by someone’s directing attention to it; how such “directing” is so often at whim and attention paid to it by chance.

  My own work was first published in book form simply because somebody at Clarke, Irwin had decided to take an altruistic risk on an annual volume called New Canadian Writing. These books, featuring the work of three writers per volume, survived for two years. Aurora, which published a story by Vanderhaeghe, lasted for three years before succumbing to the public’s indifference. What, I wonder, might have happened to Vanderhaeghe had he been writing and publishing the same stories at a period when Aurora hadn’t existed, when Best Canadian Stories hadn’t been born. Would he have remained known only to those who read the literary magazines?

  I’m afraid it’s very possible.

  Many people assert that if a thing is good, it will be recognized and rewarded as such, that quality, as it were, will out. The implication of this idea for us is that stuff that remains in the literary magazines deserves to remain there. I wish I could wholeheartedly believe that.

  After more than 15 years of involvement in Canada’s literary world, I don’t have an exactly Panglossian view of its workings; chance seems more firmly seated in its halls of judgement than taste. I remember taking upon myself years ago the role of honorary agent for Clark Blaise; I wrote a letter of support to McClelland and Stewart urging them to publish A North American Education. My letter to Anna Porter, then editor-in-chief, was written in words of fire. To no avail. The manuscript was returned to Blaise pretty much by return mail; Anna Porter had thought the stories “boring.” And this from the editor-in-chief of Canada’s most prestigious publisher about what is, unarguably, one of the most brilliant story collections ever published in Canada.

  Third Impressions itself and the earlier books in this series exist, too, by chance. They exist because I happened to be worried about diminishing opportunities for younger writers, because Michael Macklem, Oberon’s publisher, happened to be prepared to listen to me that day and happened, perhaps, to have had a good breakfast. I happened to care about younger writers because I care about writing in general and because chance had so arranged things that I was taught to care by the great kindness shown to me when I was young by Margaret Laurence and Mordecai Richler.

  The choice of writers in this book is also, to an extent, the result of chance. They are writers who have taken my eye. But I am not, God knows, without blind spots. Is there someone as brilliant as Blaise who is cursing my stupidity and shortsightedness? Are there brilliant stories in the literary magazines that my glazed eyes have failed to recognize?

  I hope not.

  But expect so.

  My own beginnings were a long time ago and now I feel rather like the narrator in Norman Levine’s story “We All Begin in a Little Magazine,” but I can remember how wildly excited I was when I was first published in a magazine. I told everyone I met as casually as my delight allowed.

  “Congratulations!” they said. “Prism?”

  And I was forced to admit that, no, it wasn’t available on newsstands. Or at libraries. Or anywhere really. And the years passed with my friends asking how you spelled Wascana Review and was Tamarack as in the tree—until that day arrived when five stories were published in New Canadian Writing 1969. The fact that the book wasn’t widely available in grocery stores, nor, truth be told, in bookstores didn’t bother me a bit. It was a book—or at least, a third of a book—and the effect on me was tonic. With that publication, I started to allow myself to think of myself as a writer; I was, in my own eyes, no longer a high-school teacher with delusions of grandeur but a published author whose book was, if you went to a hell of a lot of trouble, available.

  The rewards were immediate. They were not, needless to say, financial. The most immediate reward was that I started writing even harder than before and soon had a book that was wholly mine—The Lady Who Sold Furniture.

  Writers whose work appeared in the first two issues of Impressions have, apparently, been similarly galvanized. Martin Avery is publishing a novel. Ernest Hekkanen has just completed a novel. Mike Mason has published a novella and is writing with great urgency. Linda Svendsen’s work has appeared again in Atlantic Monthly and she seems to be nearing her first collection.

  The value of publication in such a book as Impressions is, then, for the writers, obvious. But what of readers? Are readers having foisted on them what is, if one hopes these writers are to have a long career, juvenilia? This point was fairly raised in a condescending review of Second Impressions written by an unhappy lady in Toronto. My heart always sinks when I glance at the foot of a review and see: X is a freelance writer living in Y. This tends to mean that the reviewer is eit
her a part-time journalist in search of $75 or, worse, an unpublished writer into whose soul the iron has entered.

  This reviewer of Second Impressions said snottily of the writing that it was “at least as competent as the writing one finds in little literary publications,” which is not surprising in that most of it was from “little literary publications.” But perhaps this reviewer is unaware that the work of Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Clark Blaise, Norman Levine, Jack Hodgins, Leon Rooke, Hugh Hood, and Margaret Atwood—not to mention Hemingway, Pound, Waugh—appeared or appears regularly in the little magazines.

  “Little literary publications,” forsooth!

  Are these volumes the literary equivalent of Amateur Night with fumbling conjurors and singers excruciatingly off-key? Obviously, I don’t believe so. Nor do the dedicated editors of the literary magazines who first published most of these stories. And obviously the editors of Atlantic Monthly don’t think so.

  On the other hand, I do believe that the writers in this book and in the earlier ones are capable of producing still better work, work that is more deeply imaginative, more complicated, more demanding. But whether they will go on from strength to strength depends. It depends on talent—which they obviously have—and it depends on many variables that could be lumped together under chance—money, time, tranquillity, understanding wives or husbands, health, fair winds. But perhaps more than anything else it depends on the interest and support and criticism they receive from readers.

  The highlights of the three volumes were, for me, Linda Svendsen, Don Dickinson, and Isabel Huggan, who with much coaxing and prompting added to the three stories in First Impressions to gain international acclaim with The Elizabeth Stories.