An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  It seems to me now, looking back, that the Great Vancouver Debate marked the beginning of an emotional disintegration in Bill. He wrote of that night: “I didn’t do well at the debate, and John had to carry most of the weight. Everything had simply become too terrible to endure.”

  But he was later to write—and I think with some justice: “It was a peculiar event in many ways. But it happened, and that was the victory. For the first time the dreaded language of objection achieved enough legitimacy to require response.”

  Much of Bill’s life was lived in a mess and an uproar. He was tall and almost emaciated and moved with awkward vigour. He looked rabbinical and not Reform either. His suits and flapping jackets were far from clean and his body odour was sometimes so fearsome that after his visits Myrna threw wide every window and bundled his sheets into the washing machine with dispatch. His control of his diabetes was intermittent and he was often soaked in diabetic and alcoholic sweats. He drank too much at home and was profligate in bars. He became infatuated easily, amours which always seemed to involve theatrical scenes with husbands or boyfriends and sudden international travel.

  And Bill talked. Words poured out of him. His energy was exhausting. He was a complex and cranky man and essentially contentious by nature. Enemies abounded; plots against him were always afoot. His rhetoric could easily spiral into incoherence. Even his friends and those who agreed with his basic ideas could sometimes be left wondering if they were in the company of a genius or a madman.

  I remember him sitting in our kitchen launching some complicated flight, words tumbling out of him, when Myrna suddenly interrupted. She said, “But that doesn’t follow. That doesn’t make sense.”

  He turned upon her and snapped, “There is nothing wrong with the transmission. Check the set.”

  When he was drinking in the afternoons he often conducted his business from a strip joint near his Gastown shop called, I seem to remember, No. 5. It was loud and smelled like a lion’s cage that had been hastily sluiced out with Old Dutch. I remember once listening to Bill’s explication of whatever he was explicating that day while alleged sisters on the stage inside a glass-sided shower soaped each other with interminable suds. He seemed known to most of the customers and was addressed by waiters and bouncers as “Professor.”

  All was not earnest lecture or exhortation, however. Bill was often bubbling with wit and stratagems, provocations he found amusing. An event. A Party. A Black-Tie Party. A Social Event. The Black-Tie Social Event of the Vancouver Season. On and on it swelled in his mind.

  He’d hold a Book Burning!

  In the parking lot beside his store he’d have waiters circulating with champagne while from the stock in the warehouse he’d burn . . . whatever was that day’s rage and contempt, all the bill bissett books, all grOnk pamphlets, all bpNichol’s endless verbiage, all productions of blewointment press, crates of Fred Cogswell’s Fiddlehead Poetry Books . . .

  Nichol (B.P.) Still. Vancouver: Pulp Press, 1983. Original wrappers. Author’s signed presentation to Bill Bissett, who has scrawled a number of notes relating to grant opportunities on the first and last leaves. Winner of the Three-Day Novel-Writing Contest. Steve Osborne and I made this contest up as a joke in 1976, never thinking that literature could fall so low as to take it seriously.

  But this sketch of Bill leaves out of the picture that flamboyant, eccentric, slightly crazy as he may have been, he was at the same time probably the most gifted bookman Canada has ever seen. He had a bloodhound nose for books. From other bookstores, from Goodwills, from junk furniture stores, from dumpsters, Bill would conjure rarities.

  I remember walking along Wellington Street in Ottawa with him and his sudden wheeling into a junk furniture store and unearthing from under a wind-up gramophone a July 1956 Esquire containing a Mavis Gallant story and two copies of Chatelaine dated March 1956 and July 1956 carrying two Alice Munro stories: “How Could I Do That?” (uncollected) and “Good-by Myra.” Bill bought these for pennies and said to me outside, “I could give you these but I’m going to charge you $20 to teach you a lesson.”

  Bill’s catalogues, or lists, as he modestly insisted on calling them, were an education in themselves but visits to the store and to the warehouse entirely rearranged one’s understanding of such words as scarce or rare as one gazed, pop-eyed, on a dozen copies of John Newlove’s Grave Sirs or on a stack of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s The Drunken Clock. Or looked at the boxes in the basement which contained the entire remaindering of Mavis Gallant’s The Pegnitz Junction.

  In the early days of Oberon Press, Michael Macklem had a marketing arrangement with a small London publisher called Dobson. Oberon books in England were distributed under Dobson’s imprint. Bill had the idea of going to see Dobson and cornering Oberon books whose print runs would have been tiny. This scheme fell through because Dobson was too lethargic to locate boxes and open them but it illustrates Bill’s piratical gusto.

  And then in the catalogues came the great discoveries . . . When Frederick Philip Grove was revealed as Felix Paul Greve, it was Bill who unearthed all the work in German, helped in this, in part, by Professor Dr. Walter Pache, then at Trier and subsequently at the University of Augsberg. It was Bill who was instrumental in revealing, through research in the University of Calgary archives, that Brian Moore had written four paperback thrillers under the names Michael Brian and Bernard Mara, all of them preceding his “first” book, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.

  Peter Howard of Serendipity Books in California has written of these and similar feats: “These acts no other Canadian bookseller could emulate.”

  When I was looking through the collection of papers and documents Bill and I had intended publishing as “The Tanks Diary” I came across a letter to Bill from John Newlove. It concerned buying a set of the Tanks books and the last few lines seem prescient now.

  “I did see you at the Antiquarian Book Fair. I said hello to you. But you were fulminating and sailed on by like some rusty, derelict freighter careering madly towards the rocks.”

  Not long after the failure of the Tanks campaign Bill told me that as W. H. Auden had said of Yeats that Ireland had “hurt him into poetry” so he felt that Canada had hurt him into redefining himself. He said he felt Canada was too primitive to allow him to be the person he wanted to be. He closed the shop, shipped his books to Peter Howard in California, and moved to live in Moscow, where he learned Russian every day from a tutor and had visions of opening a store which would deal not in modern first editions but in the antiquarian books of Europe. In 1997 he developed cancer of the brain and returned to Victoria to die in his father’s care.

  Let me, sadly and affectionately, give him the last word.

  Ringwood (Gwen Pharis) The Courting of Marie Jenvrin. Toronto: Samuel French (Canada) Limited, 1951. On the copyright page appears a brief plug by the publisher that ought to warm the hearts of our new nationalists.

  “Printed in Canada on Canadian paper by Monetary Times Printing Co. of Canada, Ltd., Toronto, Canada.”

  Original printed wrappers. A bright copy, but the text is occasionally marked in pen.

  LEGO

  Doubt should always nag the anthologist. It is a necessary anxiety. Surely posterity . . . This is one of my horrors. One of the 4 a.m. rehearsals when sleep won’t come. Is it possible—surely not?—that posterity might view me much as I view such silly old buggers as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, A. L. Rowse, and Arthur Bryant?

  It is entirely possible.

  But, for me, the die is cast.

  How, then, do I set about making choices?

  In the year I was born, 1938, Cyril Connolly published a book about literary style called Enemies of Promise. When I read this book years later it changed and deepened my understanding of literature to such an extent that I can say absolutely seriously that the book changed my life. Connolly’s career as writer, reviewer, editor, publishe
r, book collector, cultural impresario, and arbiter elegantiae also suggested to me the possibility of a literary life lived passionately. Here from the book’s opening chapter is the passage which had such a profound impact on me so many years ago:

  What kills a literary reputation is inflation. The advertising, publicity and enthusiasm which a book generates—in a word its success—imply a reaction against it. The element of inflation in a writer’s success, the extent to which it has been forced, is something that has to be written off. One can fool the public about a book but the public will store up resentment in proportion to its folly. The public can be fooled deliberately by advertising and publicity or it can be fooled by accident, by the writer fooling himself. If we look at the boom pages of the Sunday papers we can see the fooling of the public going on, inflation at work. A word like genius is used so many times that eventually the sentence “Jenkins has genius. Cauliflower Ear is immense!” becomes true because he has as much genius and is as immense as are the other writers who have been praised there. It is the words that suffer for in the inflation they have lost their meaning. The public at first suffers too but in the end it ceases to care and so new words have to be dragged out of retirement and forced to suggest merit. Often the public is taken in by a book because, although bad, it is topical, its up-to-dateness passes as originality, its ideas seem important because they are “in the air.” The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Dusty Answer, Decline and Fall, Brave New World, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Fountain, Good-bye Mr. Chips are examples of books which had a success quite out of proportion to their undoubted merit and which now reacts unfavourably on their authors, because the overexcitable public who read those books have been fooled. None of the authors expected their books to become best-sellers but, without knowing it, they had hit upon the contemporary chemical combination of illusion with disillusion which makes books sell.

  But it is also possible to write a good book and for it to be imitated and for those imitations to have more success than the original so that when the vogue which they have created and surfeited is past, they drag the good book down with them. This is what happened to Hemingway who made certain pointillist discoveries in style which have led almost to his undoing. So much depends on style, this factor of which we are growing more and more suspicious, that although the tendency of criticism is to explain a writer either in terms of his sexual experience or his economic background, I still believe his technique remains the soundest base for a diagnosis, that it should be possible to learn as much about an author’s income and sex-life from one paragraph of his writing as from his cheque stubs and his love-letters and that one should also be able to learn how well he writes, and who are his influences. Critics who ignore style are liable to lump good and bad writers together in support of pre-conceived theories.

  An expert should be able to tell a carpet by one skein of it; a vintage by rinsing a glassful round his mouth. Applied to prose there is one advantage attached to this method—a passage taken from its context is isolated from the rest of a book, and cannot depend on the goodwill which the author has cleverly established with his reader. This is important, for in all the books which become best-sellers and then flop, this salesmanship exists. The author has fooled the reader by winning him over at the beginning, and so establishing a favourable atmosphere for putting across his inferior article—for making him accept false sentiment, bad writing, or unreal situations. To write a best-seller is to set oneself a problem in seduction. A book of this kind is a confidence trick. The reader is given a cigar and a glass of brandy and asked to put his feet up and listen. The author then tells him the tale. The most favourable atmosphere is a stall at a theatre, and consequently of all things which enjoy contemporary success that which obtains it with least merit is the average play.

  One sentence from these paragraphs was the Damascus Road experience for me.

  “An expert should be able to tell a carpet by one skein of it; a vintage by rinsing a glassful round his mouth.”

  This sentence changed the way I thought and felt about prose. As the sentence grew in my mind, the implications and ramifications continued to amaze me. The sentence forced me first of all to stop thinking about plot or context. It forced me to think about verbs and nouns, adjectives and adverbs, the nature and level of diction, the placement of words, the rhythms of sentences, the functions of punctuation. In brief, it forced me to consider writing as technical performance, as rhetoric organized to achieve certain emotional effects.

  The sentence also implies, of course, that the entire story, the entire book, must be written with an intensity that will live up to and survive the sort of scrutiny given to the one paragraph. Connolly is implying a prose written with the deliberation usually given to poetry.

  The sentence further implies that form and content are indivisible, that the way something is being said is what is being said.

  The sentence also suggests that a piece of writing should be a refined pleasure—as is wine, as are the old Persian carpets made before the introduction of aniline dyes. This in turn implies that good prose is not something we read through for comprehension, for information, as a medium for getting us from A to B. Connolly suggests we taste the prose, fondle it, explore and experience it. What a radical way of looking at prose this is! For when we have explored it, we have not finished with it; we cannot then dismiss it as “understood.” We can come back to it again and again as we do with paintings or music. “Understanding” in the utilitarian high-school or university sense is a barrier to understanding. If we have read properly, we have not “understood” the prose—an intellectual activity—rather, we have experienced the prose by entering into a relationship with it. Prose which is brilliantly performed offers inexhaustible pleasures.

  So much conventional writing is close to being automatic writing. Without formal innovation—which is a breaking through crusted convention to emotion and significance—writing becomes portly and arteriosclerotic. It is salutary for a young writer to watch the comfortably middlebrow, authors once internationally acclaimed, parading to oblivion . . .

  When I look back down the vista of books that have come and gone, when I idly pick up this one or that to read a paragraph or two—as I happened to glance last week at John Buchan’s The House of the Four Winds and at J. B. Priestley’s The Good Companions—I’m always struck now by the flabby, imprecise language, by the sheer padding and hackery, by the use of words and phrases as mere verbal counters which, shuffled together, clack out conventional sentences.

  Here, for example, is the first paragraph of the first chapter of The House of the Four Winds. I have italicized the clichés, the verbal counters, and the deliberately archaic usages which stand for “rusticity.”

  The inn at Kremisch, the Stag with the Two Heads, has an upper room so bowed with age that it leans drunkenly over the village street. It is a bare place, which must be chilly in winter, for the old casement has many chinks in it, and the china stove does not look efficient, and the rough beechen table, marked by many beer mugs, and the seats of beechwood and hide are scarcely luxurious. But on this summer night to one who had been tramping all day on roads deep in white dust under a merciless sun, it seemed a haven of ease. Jaikie had eaten an admirable supper on a corner of the table, a supper of cold ham, an omelet, hot toasted rye-cakes and a seductive cheese. He had drunk wine tapped from a barrel and cold as water from a mountain spring, and had concluded with coffee and cream in a blue cup as large as a basin. Now he could light his pipe and watch the green dusk deepen behind the onion spire of the village church.

  This was never writing; it is the equivalent with words of joining together bits of Lego.

  Innovative shapes must be forged in language which is precise and quick to the touch. Touching that language must be like touching skin or an animal’s pelt. Nothing else will do; nothing else will last. This is not to say that the writing must be “poetic” or fancy in any
way; rather, it must be precise, concentrated, and above all, appropriate.

  Let us look at a more contentious example.

  Rohinton Mistry’s first book of stories, Tales from Firozsha Baag, was reviewed by Michael Darling in The Macmillan Anthology (1). He wrote in part:

  Mistry is not deceived that story-writing is an academic game of narrative hide-and-seek; he has a moral vision and a desire to impart it through carefully structured language. The fact that the language often fails him does not negate the sincerity of the attempt . . .

  Mistry’s weakness is his diction, which occasionally seems to evoke the legacy of the Raj; phrases like “high dudgeon,” “unbeknownst to,” and “cherubic features” don’t really fit the contexts into which they’re placed. Also, the Indian words are often strung together in what seems like an unnecessary striving for “local colour”: “Bawaji got paan pichkari right on his white dugli . . .” A little of this goes a long way, which Mistry seems to be aware of, as by the end of the book the non-English words are few and far between.

  Darling has, as usual, put his finger exactly on the problem. Consider the following quotations:

  The first light of morning barely illumined the sky as Gustad Noble faced eastward to offer his orisons to Ahura Mazda. The hour was approaching six, and up in the compound’s solitary tree the sparrows began to call.

  and

  Erie had been listening all that week to thaw, a trickle of melt tickling her inner ear, the sound of water dripping off the eaves, drip into that handful of bare stones by the corner of the barn, drop off the branches of the forsythia out front.