by John Metcalf
I first encountered William Hoffer through his catalogues. When I started many years ago to collect and document the short story in Canada it was inevitable I would meet Bill, though we first got to know each other through letters. He gradually became interested in what I was trying to do and helped me to narrow the focus. He was particularly helpful when I was putting together a collection of Contact Press and he eventually supervised its sale to the National Library.
“I had to help you sell it,” he said when I again thanked him. “You owed the shop over $4,000.”
We soon discovered shared convictions. Bill had very few serious customers outside the universities—he often said seventeen, worldwide—and we were both convinced that all the celebratory razzle-dazzle on the surface of things masked a deeply alarming reality. That reality was that the audience was tiny, that it had not prepared itself to be able to distinguish significant work, and that there was a blank ignorance of our literary past. We both felt there was an almost total confusion of literature with nationalism.
Literature, we both felt, had been co-opted by the state. Money, we believed, masked the truth of this reality. The large sums shovelled out through the Canada Council were cloyingly referred to as “watering the young shoots of Canadian literature” or “nurturing Canadian literature’s fragile blooms.”
Bill’s retort: The only plant that can’t be killed by overwatering is seaweed.
He decided that he would launch a campaign against the Canada Council and against the idea of state subsidy to protest all the toxic sludge the money had generated. His first line of attack was through his catalogues. Most dealers in antiquarian books and first editions are discreet and circumspect. It was, therefore, astonishing and liberating to read Bill’s increasingly vitriolic annotations:
Lane (Patrick) Beware the Months of Fire. Toronto: Anansi, 1974. Cloth in dust jacket. Of the eight “previous books by the same author,” five are broadsides or leaflets. This is the CanLit equivalent of wearing elevator shoes.
or
Davey (Frank) Griffon. np. (Toronto) Massasauga Editions, 1972. Small stapled wrappers. The edition limited to 200 numbered copies. A review copy, with the slip laid in. Davey produced two booklets under this imprint, both of which disfigure List 70.
or
Davies (Robertson) The Rebel Angels. New York: The Viking Press, 1982. Cloth and boards in dust jacket. The first American edition of the senile civil servant’s late pant around the track. When young he almost mattered, but now stands more revealed (in Charles Olson’s brilliant observation of how it is in life). Catalogued in weary acceptance of the obligation, only for the money.
Bill’s campaign against the idea of subsidy to the arts began in 1985. He wanted to call the campaign “Tanks Are Mighty Fine Things” after the title of a book published by the Chrysler Corporation in 1946. Permission was denied and so Bill called the campaign, simply, Tanks.
The campaign was both farcical and intensely serious. He wrote: “For more than 15 years I have used every avenue available to object to the false culture we promote in Canada, not because I have grudges, but because it is impossible for me to be a serious bookseller in a society that takes nothing seriously.”
Again, he wrote: “For many years I have ridiculed the absurd spectacle of apparently grown men and women pretending to have succeeded at the very difficult tasks of art.”
When questioned about what would happen when, Samson-like, he’d pulled down the pillar and the Temple of Subsidy had collapsed about him, he’d quote a Yiddish saying: The worst truth is better than the best lie.
What he meant by this was that even if we reduced literature to samizdat, to Xeroxes passed from hand to hand, that would be preferable to the lie that official CanLit had become.
Because no one would engage in debate on this topic, Bill employed a comic-book language to gain attention and to prosecute the campaign. He styled himself Commander of Tanks. Marius Kociejowski, a Canadian poet who lives in London, was given England, while I was designated Commander for Ontario and Toronto. The poet and teacher Peter Sanger was installed as District Commissioner for the Maritimes. Allies in the American book trade were also commissioned and issued titles and insignia. This small group along with a handful of delighted and appalled readers of Bill’s catalogues constituted what he called his “slapstick army.”
Certain writers, academics, and bureaucrats were designated “War Criminals.” Bill defined as War Criminals “those who are more enthusiastic about getting grants than they are about the things they get the grants to do.” He went on to say, “The fictional absolutism of the Tanks vocabulary . . . had the virtue of being hugely entertaining to those who were not offended by it, and incredibly offensive to those who were.”
Bowering (George), editor Great Canadian Sports Stories. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1979. Cloth in dust jacket. Various tedious contributors. Offered as a scarce Bowering C item, and an out of the way anthology. Oberon Press is “owned” by Michael Macklem, one of the more ugly of the meek members of the resurrection in Canada. Macklem has attempted to be the James Laughlin of Canadian publishing, but has managed little more than strict compliance with the Official Languages Act through the publication of endless translations of bad French-Canadian novels all of which remain in print in their first printings of fewer than 200 copies in cloth. Anyone who has suffered the misfortune of actually speaking to him has discovered how offensive a man he is, how unjustified in his high opinion of himself. I take this opportunity to dispose of him; I have dispatched a war criminal indictment under separate cover.
$35.00
The Tanks vocabulary began to creep even into his private correspondence. In a letter to me he wrote: “All I want to do is to roll my 11 armoured divisions into town, destroy everything without pity, burn down the unsanitary shanty towns (weird regional magazines, creative writing departments, etc., etc.) and set the Canadian people free. God, in the form of George Patton, casting man out of a Garden of Eden in which every piece of fruit is poisoned . . .”
Bill’s opening shot of the campaign was by way of pamphlet. He wrote: “In London, Marius Kociejowski, a Canadian poet in exile, showed me his essay The Machine Minders. It was so perfectly suitable to what I was trying to do with Tanks that I brought it back and made it the first Tanks imprint, using it as an example of criticism, and as a way of walking point with my metaphorical army of ideas against subsidies to the arts.”
The second shot fired was my own pamphlet “Freedom from Culture.” This appeared in 1987 and over the following year was printed in four editions. One of these editions was printed in large numbers by the Fraser Institute, a “strange bedfellows” deal that Bill had struck.
The pamphlet’s intention was to be funny about Subsidy, Government, Bureaucracy, and the Administration of Culture but utterly serious in pointing out that:
It is not only individual writers who are softened and subverted by grants; the method by which grants are awarded has further emasculated our literary world. The Canada Council prides itself on its jury system. Grants are given to writers by juries of their peers. Officers of the Council do not interfere or attempt to influence decisions. Everyone prides themselves on this exemplary arm’s length relationship with government. But this very jury system which protects writers from direct government influence is responsible for a totally servile literary climate in the country.
Canadian writers do not brawl in the country’s newspaper columns. We lack the pleasures of literary brouhaha and imbroglio. We don’t have honest reviewing, we don’t have pungent criticism, we don’t have open faction. Reviews written by Canadian writers are usually ecstatic—or cautious, circumspect, tepid. Spades tend to get described not as spades but as agricultural implements. CanLit suffers from terminal politeness.
Very few writers in Canada care to express publicly their honest opinions about the work of other writers and of
the literature in general. Every writer in Canada knows that the writer he criticizes today may be sitting on a jury tomorrow and handing out grants—or not, as the case might be. Self-interest dictates lies. Or, at best, silence.
Even the academic critics are in a similar situation since their commentaries on and discussion of the texts are similarly juried by the Canada Council. Fatuous flatulence or costive noodling, it all gets the professorial nod. Backs are scratched and logs are rolled. There are conferences to attend. Readings to deliver. Subsidized seminars in Tahiti.
We’re all in this together.
. . .
And what of audience?
From 1957 onwards, million upon million has been spent in Canada to provide us with a literature. We have, in effect, tried to buy a literature much as a parvenu might hire a decorator to create for him instant antiquity—and with much the same embarrassing results.
The policies and activities of the Council and other granting agencies have flooded the country with unwanted and unreadable books; alienated readers in public libraries offer up silent thanks for the maple leaf stickers on spines which identify books as Canadian. Worse than this flood of inadequacy, the Council has put into place a parody of the entire machinery of a literary culture; for the benefit of no readership, subsidized books are reviewed in subsidized journals by subsidized writers. It all fills one with the slightly uneasy amusement one feels in watching a chimpanzees’ tea party.
Nor can we rely on our academics to comment on the Emperor’s New Clothes and destroy this machinery gone mad because they themselves are a paid part of it; they are subsidized to inflate, conflate, huff and puff. We can’t expect the monkey to berate the organ-grinder.
It’s fairly obvious by now that the Canada Council has failed. In failing to build an audience it has failed entirely. Indeed, the Council’s existence absolves any possible audience from responsibility. “Art and suchlike,” we might imagine people saying, “it’s nothing to do with me. The State takes care of that sort of thing.”
The perpetuation of its own bureaucratic routines and the expansion of its “programmes” have become the Council’s raison d’être.
Writing in Canada became CanLit.
CanLit is fast petrifying into Culture.
The values of artists are necessarily elitist. The values of a bureaucracy are necessarily bureaucratic. The Canada Council in its administration of Culture is quite understandably concerned with regional representation, with aboriginal representation, with proportional language representation, and with equality of sexual representation on juries and in awards. Such a concern with “fairness” is laudable in a political context; in artistic terms it is risible.
What the Council really wants—though it would claim otherwise—is to use its funding as an equivalent of the federal equalization payments to the provinces. Fund more women in Saskatchewan. More painters needed in New Brunswick. Too many anglophone writers in Toronto. A dearth of francophone drama in Manitoba.
And if applicants with vaguely artistic aspirations couldn’t qualify as any conceivable variety of artist, they could always apply for the popularist Explorations Grant—the type of programme described by Charles Osborne [of the Arts Council of Great Britain] as “that perversion of the aesthetic urge invented by bored arts administrators yearning to become social workers.”
What has all this to do with art?
With literature?
These and other such observations brought down on my head more vituperation and seething hatred than I could have imagined. The go-back-to-where-you-came-from brigade frothed and spluttered in apoplectic rage tossing about words like traitor, fascist, and Brit. Even today, sixteen years later, these dumbores are still hooting their outrage like chimps who’ve had their peanuts pinched.
The Canada Council itself was sufficiently worried by “Freedom from Culture” that it hired Professor Tom Henighan of Carleton University to write an article refuting it. This he sat himself down to do but found halfway through that I’d converted him.
The Tanks campaign’s main offensive was the publication of six volumes Bill intended to be exemplary—exemplary both as literature and as book design. He was setting out to prove that exceptional literature, beautifully designed, could be produced without subsidy and could make a profit.
The books were Eight Poems, by Norm Sibum; The Voyeur and the Countess Wielpolska, by George McWhirter; The Topography of Typography by El Lissitzky; Five Stories, by W. P. Kinsella; Corpses, Brats and Cricket Music, by George Faludy, translated from the Hungarian by Robin Skelton; and Autobiographies, by Elizabeth Smart (edited by Christina Burridge).
What to say of these books?
Norm Sibum’s poems are, as always, interesting and involving. George McWhirter’s two-page poem is competent; laid into the folder are two lithographs of trees by Diane Ostoich, lithographs which stand in no relation whatsoever to the poem.
Marius Kociejowski’s essay The Machine Minders is disfigured by Maureen Sugrue’s awful illustrations.
I’m not able to say how well Robin Skelton translated George Faludy’s poetry as I cannot read Hungarian. The verse sounds as if he’s got it right but I must admit that Skelton makes me uneasy. His own poetry is correct and competent but somehow bloodless. His claims to have been a “witch” must surely give any sane person pause. My ex-wife worked for years for a New York publisher of books concerning the occult—a natural, if not inevitable, place for her to end up. She once phoned me to ask if I knew a Robin Skelton because they’d just received from him the typescript of a book of “spells.” One spell, she said, caused levitation.
The Topography of Typography is four sheets printed beautifully by Glenn Goluska at his Imprimerie Dromadaire. It is, like all such exercises, precious.
I have profound problems with Elizabeth Smart. I loathe her writing and consider By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept an abomination, a foul gush of emotional incontinence. I considered her relationship with George Barker sad and shabby; when I met her in Toronto she had become an utterly hopeless drunk. George Barker sticks in my mind less for his poetry than for his remark in a London pub to the young Norman Levine: “Sorry chum, nothing personal. But coming from Canada, you haven’t got a chance.”
I begged Bill not to publish W. P. Kinsella’s crudities. Back came contempt, condescension, accusation, paranoia—to all of which I paid little attention. Bill’s hostilities were reflex.
The Tanks books were frankly a hodge-podge. They weren’t beautiful. The artwork did not marry the texts and in some cases was simply inept. The format of the books (eleven by about seven inches) seemed to emphasize their awkwardness.
Although the books were the campaign’s loudest salvo, there was a constant chatter of small arms fire which never seemed to quiet—letters, conversations in the shop and on the phone, harangues at book fairs, reissues of “Freedom from Culture,” and, of course, the increasingly vituperative catalogues.
Even though Bill was positively bleeding money on the project and was deeply depressed about the failure of the books to sell, he soon managed to turn defeat into victory. In the sometimes strange way his mind worked he now started to propose that the fact that he had produced the books with his own money and not with “funny money” was a victorious protest in itself against the system and a standing rebuke to it. The failure of the books to sell he put down to media hostility or indifference, apathetic bookstore owners, and a Canadian literary sensibility numbed by thirty years of subsidized inanity.
Had his books been good books, I could have agreed with him more wholeheartedly.
During the National Book Festival in April 1987, there was a debate in Vancouver between the forces of Tanks and the forces of the Canada Council: Bill and I defending our objections, and Andreas Schroeder and David Godfrey defending subsidy. The debate was chaired by Eleanor Wachtel. The question was, Have g
overnment subsidies benefited Canadian literature?
Bill had commissioned a striking poster from Carol Moiseiwitsch and these were widely displayed in Vancouver. The debate took place on a Monday evening and on the preceding Saturday in the Globe and Mail William French announced that there was no point in going since all the tickets were sold out. There were no tickets as the event was free of charge. Despite this confusion, about 150 people turned up and the evening was filmed by the local community TV channel.
Everyone seemed mildly hysterical and paranoid. More heat than light was shed; books were brandished; statistics bandied about. A local crazy had to be escorted out in full rant denouncing logging, the persecution of beluga whales, and harmful rays emitted by the CBC. Other hecklers took his place.
There are over 350 wonderful presses in this country! shouted one.
Shame! cried another. Shame!
Eleanor Wachtel tried to impose order.
The level of debate was infantile. David Godfrey held up a book of poems by Dorothy Livesay and demanded to know whether she was a worthy poet. It was conceded that she had some value. Then, declared Godfrey, the argument was won as the book in question, this very book, had been published by a subsidized small press. His press. And so on. Bill Hoffer said suddenly that Dave Godfrey had no moral right to be speaking in this debate as he owned a company that wrote software for the Chinese military. Dave Godfrey threatened to sue Bill Hoffer if Hoffer ever repeated that remark. Hoffer repeated it.
It was a ridiculous evening. According to subsequent newspaper accounts the pro-subsidy forces were victorious; to us it seemed simply a cacophony.
Dave Godfrey behaved with concentrated viciousness and after the debate jostled his way out without speaking to anyone. I insisted on stopping him and shaking his hand; he snarled at me about the company I kept. I had not gone to Vancouver for a fight; I had gone there for what was to me an important intellectual discussion. The discussion didn’t really take place; it’s essential for Canada’s future that it does.