An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  Nineteen eighty-two turned out to be my last year with Oberon. There were touchy quarrels with Macklem but more serious, perhaps, was the sense that Oberon was not becoming the press we’d hoped for. Its energy was failing. The press did no advertising, organized no readings, failed to launch its new titles. Far too many of the books it was publishing were undistinguished. There were too many books of insipid poetry, too many books of merely competent stories. There were too many seasons featuring yet another volume by Raymond Souster, yet another anaemic gathering by the indefatigable Elizabeth Brewster. There was no commanding artistic vision. The books seemed random.

  Oberon had published a few singular books by Hugh Hood, Leon Rooke, Norman Levine, Keath Fraser, and David Helwig but their sharpness was somehow blunted by the blandness of the company they kept. The energy and virtuosity of the writing in Best Canadian Stories was not reflected in Oberon’s list. The press seemed to be fading.

  When the breakup came with Macklem I arranged to publish with Jack David and Robert Lecker at ECW Press. I also arranged for Leon Rooke and Hugh Hood to move there. Jack and Robert were dedicated to Canadian literature but were financially unstable. In taking us on they bit off more than they could chew and Jack told me later that with the flow of books and with a coast-to-coast tour we called the ECW Roadshow we brought the press to the brink of ruin. Hugh published None Genuine Without This Signature and Black and White Keys, Leon published Death Suite and The Birth Control King of the Upper Volta, while I published Kicking Against the Pricks.

  Leon and I were still hankering after putting our mark on the Canadian story and we persuaded Ed Carson at General Publishing to start an annual anthology which would be the flagship title for his New Press Canadian Classics series. The book was to be called The New Press Anthology: Best Canadian Short Fiction. I remember with pleasure the unnecessarily frequent martini-drenched planning sessions held with Ed Carson and Leon at the Courtyard Café at the Windsor Arms in Toronto.

  The first volume appeared in 1984 in mass market format and from the very beginning we realized that we were dealing with a literary world that had undergone a sea change. Possibly we had ourselves effected a change. Possibly Canada was simply struggling out of its weird time warp. Alongside Alice Munro, Ray Smith, Carol Shields, Clark Blaise, Margaret Atwood, and Norman Levine, we were drawing in new names and new sensibilities which were sophisticated and innovative.

  In eight short years we had moved from Joan Harcourt’s “simple, sturdy constructions” and Mavis Gallant’s “pallid little ‘I’ stories” to the joy of discovering a new writer whose opening two sentences were: “May, Minnie, Maud for God’s sake, or Myrna—even worse. Names she might have worn like a crown of link sausages.”

  How complex, how plump, how rich.

  (The opening sentences of an early Terry Griggs story called “India.”)

  Ed Carson had given us $1,500 to award to the best story in each volume. The prize was, of course, intended to create publicity. In that first volume we gave the prize to Mavis Gallant for “Luc and His Father.” The second New Press Fiction Prize was awarded to Ray Smith for his novella “The Continental” and Rohinton Mistry achieved his first publication in book form with his story “Auspicious Occasion.” After this second volume there were palace revolutions at General Publishing, defections, financial reversals, changing priorities, and the series was cancelled. Ed Carson moved to Random House.

  Leon and I started talking about a new venture, an annual book which would be closer in feel to a magazine, a big magazine that featured new fiction but also included poetry, memoirs, profiles, and a review article about the year’s best books. I took the idea to Macmillan and in 1988 The Macmillan Anthology (1) appeared with fiction by, among others, Keath Fraser, Mavis Gallant, Terry Griggs, Norman Levine, and Diane Schoemperlen. The book also featured poetry by Lorna Crozier and John Newlove. Sam Tata photographed the writers for us. Sinclair Ross wrote a memoir about life with his mother entitled “Just Wind and Horses” and John Mills wrote a comic memoir about owning a steam laundry in Montreal and his attempts to seduce Aviva Layton away from Irving. Janice Kulyk Keefer wrote a profile of Mavis Gallant and Mavis Gallant gave us “Leaving the Party,” one of her comic stories about life in Paris. Michael Darling wrote “The Year in Review,” a castigation of varieties of bad writing.

  It was a rich book and lavishly produced.

  With The Macmillan Anthology (2) disaster struck. Leon and I had a falling-out which we could not resolve. Leon, without much consultation, had put together a seventy-eight-page section of the book and written an introduction to it which began:

  Over the summer of 1988 and on into fall, over 80 poets, novelists, short-story writers, and dramatists were invited to contribute what I shamelessly insisted on calling Position Papers: brief documents that would lay out the writers’ literary aesthetic, define major operating principles, encapsulate aims and objectives, describe the philosophical lodestone that steered the individual writer’s work—and in the bargain consider, generally, the way of literature in the world. Is the humanist tradition, I asked these writers, ragged and crippled and largely defunct in these postmodernist times, or can literature still shoot, as Cynthia Ozick and others insist it must, “for a corona, subtle or otherwise, of moral grandeur”? Can it prop up humanity’s flagging spirit, somehow make easier the sleep of the innocent, vanquished dead?

  Leon Rooke has written some of the finest stories published in Canada yet when he edges towards his Southern-Baptist-Preacher Mode he can be capable of writing blather. Language and rhetoric grip him and the result tends to be sloppy and imprecise. Can one “prop up” spirit? What does “the innocent, vanquished dead” mean?

  The responses Leon gathered made me cringe. Give writers a chance to be windy and pompous and they’ll grab it every time. The responses made much of Love, Death, Posterity, the Human Condition, and reiterated: Only Connect.

  All this was bad enough but Leon concluded this introduction with what I felt amounted to a personal attack. He wrote: “A cadre of good citizens felt kinship with the project, and gratitude for the opportunity, but refused out of firm disagreement with John Metcalf for his variety of stands on assorted issues related to art and society.”

  Silence would have sufficed. I felt that this was a betrayal.

  I did not doubt that what Leon was reporting was accurate. As Connie Rooke said to me at about this time, “You have no idea how many enemies you’ve got out there.” I was busy in 1987 and 1988 with the Tanks Campaign, Bill Hoffer’s guerrilla-theatre offensive against the Canada Council. I had on all possible occasions attacked Margaret Atwood’s critical book Survival, describing it as not only silly but dangerous; this was widely considered lèse-majesté. I’d also in 1987 published the pamphlet “Freedom from Culture,” an attack on subsidy culture, which caused froth to appear at the corners of mouths.

  One paragraph can stand for the tone of the whole.

  The purpose of the Book Purchase Programme was to give added subsidy to the publishers and to get Canadian books into the hands of Canadian readers. Year after year of purchase passed until the news leaked out that the Council had been unable to give many of the Book Kits away: even such truly captive audiences as the inmates of prisons spurned them. Kits composed of Canadian fiction were met with particular opprobrium. By 1985, in a rented warehouse on Richmond Road in Toronto, the Canada Council had accumulated 70,000 volumes of unwanted CanLit.

  I’d also edited in 1987 and 1988 The Bumper Book and Carry on Bumping, volumes of squibs, jibes, vulgarities, and literary scurrility, books which drew out the enemy delightfully in their reviews: “bedevilled by spite, resentment, and jealousy,” “gratuitous bitchiness,” “bile,” “anti-Canadian.”

  I was becoming a hammer of the Canadian cultural nationalists and Leon wanted to distance himself.

  I edited The Third Macmillan Anthology with Kent
Thompson. Regrettably it was to be the last. It was particularly rich with fiction by Mary Borsky, Douglas Glover, Terry Griggs, Hugh Hood, Leon Rooke, Diane Schoemperlen, and Linda Svendsen. “The Year in Review” by Kevin Connolly, Michael Darling, and Fraser Sutherland was deliciously tart. But the books were large and lavish and not selling well and Macmillan decided not to lose more money.

  The coolness between Leon and me lasted for some time but Leon’s a difficult man to remain angry with. So now our quarrel is water (and Scotch) under the bridge. In 1991 I republished with Porcupine’s Quill some of his out-of-print stories in a volume called The Happiness of Others and we’re soon to republish more. Myrna always proffers Scotch when Leon visits for the pleasure of hearing him say in that beguiling accent, “Well, just a touch.”

  In 1985 I guest edited a polemical issue of The Literary Review, an American quarterly published by Fairleigh Dickinson University in Rutherford, New Jersey. The title of the issue was On the Edge: Canadian Short Stories. Barry Cameron wrote an introduction describing for American readers the battle we were engaged in.

  Try to swallow this academic horse pill.

  When one studies Canadian literature, one is not studying literature as such but the literature written in Canada or by Canadians in a nationalist context. In such a situation, a writer who has less merit on other ideological grounds—aesthetic, for instance, which is conventionally privileged by students of literature—may be more important in a social or historical sense. Thus a self-consciously Canadian writer like Hugh MacLennan may be given precedence on the curriculum over, say, Leon Rooke (who would, incidentally, probably be discriminated against unjustly and solely because of his post-modernist tendencies), Margaret Laurence over Mavis Gallant on the grounds of Canadian setting, or W. P. Kinsella over John Metcalf because Kinsella writes about Canadian Indians.

  This sort of tension between so-called nationalist (social and historical) values, on the one hand, and the apparent absence of those values despite other merits, on the other, exists of course whenever literature is situated nationally; but that tension is exacerbated when one is dealing with a nascent literature like Canada’s. This is not to say that all those writers who are attractive to the nationalists lack literary merit or that the Canadian social formation and history are not inscribed in the texts of these writers collected here, but it is to say that because they do not deal overtly with acceptable ideological themes . . . most of those in this anthology have resided in or on the margins of Canadian literary discourse until very recently.

  Clark Blaise, Leon Rooke, and I were editing not as scholars or academics but as writers, front-line troops in a battle to set in place the next generation of writers, hand-picked by us as gifted and as likely to stand for the positions we’d been asserting and defending. Academic critics such as David Jackel in the Literary History of Canada, Volume Four (1990) continue to raise their thin bleat against “rootless cosmopolitanism” but who’s listening? The war is largely over. Only a few feeble pockets of resistance to clean up. A Valgardson here. A Kinsella there. Skirmishes on the lower slopes of Maude Barlow.

  In 1992 I put together an anthology called The New Story Writers. I chose to include Don Dickinson, Keath Fraser, Douglas Glover, Terry Griggs, Steven Heighton, Dayv James-French, Rohinton Mistry, Diane Schoemperlen, and Linda Svendsen.

  Anthologizing is necessary but inexact. It is easy to recognize talent but impossible to predict the shape of careers. A couple of the writers on this list may fall away from the short story but I remain satisfied with the book.

  In the fall of 2001 Kim Jernigan, Peter Hinchcliffe and I put on a short story conference as part of the Stratford Festival. It was organized by The New Quarterly and the Porcupine’s Quill, though most of the tedious organization fell on Kim’s shoulders as she was in Stratford. Kim has exquisite taste and The New Quarterly unerringly recognizes important new talent. Both Kim and I felt that there was a flowering going on in the story form that was extraordinary and we both felt we should examine and celebrate this efflorescence.

  The conference lasted for three days and featured panel discussions, readings, and lectures. Alice Quinn, Alice Munro’s editor at The New Yorker, came to talk about Alice’s work. The central idea of the conference was that older writers would give talks on the work of younger ones. Academics were not wanted.

  I found that the writers I’d celebrated in 1992 in The New Story Writers were suddenly not so new and mysteriously not as young as they’d been. In fact, they were now the mid-career writers lecturing on the work of writers far younger. These younger writers represent what will soon be a third generation.

  The conference was called “Wild Writers We Have Known: A Celebration of the Canadian Short Story in English.” The writers present were a roll-call: Caroline Adderson, Mike Barnes, David Bergen, Libby Creelman, Michael Crummey, Keath Fraser, Douglas Glover, Terry Griggs, Steven Heighton, Mark Anthony Jarman, Elise Levine, Annabel Lyon, K. D. Miller, Andrew Pyper, Veronica Ross, Sandra Sabatini, Robyn Sarah, Diane Schoemperlen, Russell Smith, and Michael Winter. Leon Rooke attended as reader and godfather.

  They gave us a feast of language unimaginable in 1976.

  On the first evening of the conference there was a reception in a Stratford restaurant and to walk into that bar and see all those friends and acquaintances gathered, that array of very sophisticated talent, warmed the cockles and astonished me anew at what we’d done.

  Kim Jernigan said to me, “Do you realize that there are twenty-one writers here and that you’ve edited and published sixteen of them?”

  Writing about the conference in the National Post Jeet Heer said:

  A teacher can never fully know what impact he or she has, since students go on to have lives of their own. After many years of tireless service to Canadian literature, for which he’s received little money and much abuse, Metcalf occasionally feels beleaguered and tired.

  Yet at the Stratford conference he will see the fruits of his pedagogical labours: an entire generation of Canadian writers committed to the deeply Metcalfian goods of cosmopolitanism and aestheticism.

  ACTS OF KINDNESS AND LOVE

  Myrna and i lived in Delta from 1976 to 1981. Myrna’s son, Ronnie, adapted to the life astonishingly. In Côte St. Luc we could hardly pry him away from the TV. He shrank in urban nervousness even from a passing poodle. Within weeks in Delta he’d made friends with our neighbour, Wayne Woods, whose farm was half a mile away up the dirt road, and went there every day after school to help with milking and chores. He metamorphosed into a dung-stained urchin who barged his way fearlessly through herds of pressing heifers and slapped a flank with the best of them.

  When Elizabeth came up for the holidays she, too, took to this country life with ease, astonishing us all one day by finding and casually picking up a black rat snake that was at least six feet long. Ronnie and she established a sideline of catching leopard frogs which they sold to American tourists who used them as live bait for bass fishing on Beverley Lake.

  We were doing reasonably well financially in those years, which was just as well as this was a rocky country. Many wives had to work “out” in Hershey’s chocolate factory on the line in Smith’s Falls or as cleaners in Brockville’s psychiatric empire. I was awarded Canada Council grants in 1976, 1978, and 1980. Royalties were coming in from a variety of publishers. In this period I earned over $16,000 from McGraw-Hill Ryerson alone, and most of that royalties on Sixteen by Twelve. I wrote a large number of reports on manuscripts for the Canada Council. I was also reviewing for newspapers, reading manuscripts for Oberon Press, writing CBC commissions, and giving public readings.

  The texture of our day-to-day life can best be suggested by reproducing here a memoir I wrote for Elizabeth. It is tinged a little with guilt and sadness but captures, I hope, a time and place. The memoir is entitled Acts of Kindness and of Love which is, of course, a quotation from Wordsworth’s
“Tintern Abbey.”

  The “beauteous forms” Wordsworth refers to are the farms, the cottages, the woods, hedges, and orchards.

  These beauteous forms,

  Through a long absence, have not been to me

  As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

  But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din

  Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

  In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

  Felt in the blood and felt along the heart;

  And passing even into my purer mind,

  With tranquil restoration:—feelings too

  Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

  As have no slight or trivial influence

  On that best portion of a good man’s life,

  His little, nameless, unremembered, acts

  Of kindness and of love.

  In George Tetford’s yard, leaning against the green-and-silver Ford pickup, sitting on the tractor, crowding at the picnic table, we’re all awaiting the arrival of George’s uncle Willard with his flat black box of knives. Maureen, George’s wife, stays on the porch; the business of the afternoon is not for women. Down behind the barn, greasy black smoke is piling into the sky from the old tires that are heating the water in the oil drum.

  Two of Maureen’s kids and my daughter, Liz, are whispering with the pasty-faced and treacherous Howland kids from the next farm up the road. Their mother doses them every Saturday with molasses and sulphur but they remain chronically loathsome with sties, snot, boils, and impetigo. Nothing will purify their rotten blood. They leave Liz tied to fence posts with binder twine. They take the ladder away. They abandon her to geese.

  Where the road curves we see the travelling dust of Uncle Willard’s truck. One of George’s dogs runs out to the gate and stands there with its bow legs quivering. Another starts yapping hysterically at the trunk of the maple tree and yaps and yaps until someone scores on its ribs with a stone. Behind Maureen on the porch, the kitchen curtains are pulled aside as George’s malignant mother cranes for a better view.