An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  I had a phone call one day in 2000 from Carmine Starnino in Montreal wanting to come up to Ottawa to chat. Was it all right to bring a friend? This meeting was momentous. The friend turned out to be the poet Eric Ormsby, whose work I was already familiar with. We felt immediately at ease with each other and fell into delightful conversation in which, mutually, nothing needed to be explained. It’s most unusual to feel such immediate mutual attraction.

  This lovely meeting was an event I think of almost religiously as the Advent of Ormsby.

  Eric studied librarianship at Rutgers University and took a Ph.D. degree from Princeton in Near Eastern studies and Classical Arabic. He has worked as a curator in Near Eastern studies at Princeton. He has been a director of libraries at two research institutions: the Catholic University of America and, for ten years, until 1996, at McGill University where he is currently a professor of Islamic studies.

  He has published four collections of poetry and a recent book of essays, Facsimiles of Time: Essays on Poetry and Translation.

  John Updike wrote about Eric’s poems: “He is a most excellent poet, resonant and delicately exact with words and objects. Ormsby’s reverent attention to things as they are lights up his every page with a glow.”

  I soon persuaded Eric to turn his reverent attention onto the Porcupine’s Quill and he now functions as poetry editor for the Press, taking some of the pressure off me. His first book for the Press was David Solway’s The Lover’s Progress, followed by Norm Sibum’s Girls and Handsome Dogs. Norm and Eric celebrated the publication of this handsome book vigorously; Norm flaked out on Eric’s couch. In the morning Eric’s wife, Irena, came downstairs and Norm sat up and said brightly: “Good morning! May I give you a lift home?”

  Starting in 1990 the short story collections started to flow: Victims of Gravity by Dayv James-French; Quickening by Terry Griggs; Blue Husbands by Don Dickinson; Flight Paths of the Emperor by Steven Heighton; Man and His World by Clark Blaise; Bad Imaginings by Caroline Adderson; City of Orphans by Patricia Robertson; A Litany in Time of Plague by K. D. Miller; Lives of the Mind Slaves by Matt Cohen . . . the list flows on and on and all the work is of very high quality, all marked by an intensity and originality in the use of language.

  When I started out in the sixties Hugh Garner was considered a heavyweight; Morley Callaghan reigned. The prose was bangers-and-mash. My story writers are mercurial, their prose an extremely delicate instrument indeed.

  I feel rash enough to claim that most of what I’ve chosen stands above the ruck. I am ever more certain that a writer’s use of language is the key to that choosing. I wolf through manuscripts and become immediately impatient if I do not feel the urgency of the writer’s language, the compression, the precision, the suggestion. I receive endless letters of inquiry which explain to me that the proposed stories are about autistic children, child abuse, gay mores in Vancouver, the problems of female artists, hospital stories from a doctor’s perspective, and as I sigh and groan and curse I think of Paul Fussell’s comment on Evelyn Waugh: “Waugh is indispensable today because, for one thing, he is that rarity, a writer who cares about language. He knows that writing is an affair of words rather than soul, impulse, ‘sincerity,’ or an instinct for the significant. If the words aren’t there, nothing happens.”

  But the delight when the words are there. When I open the manila envelope and read:

  One side of Aunt Ella’s face was purple. One arm and one leg were, too. The purple skin looked rougher than the rest, and I wondered if it would feel hot if I touched it. She and her brother George, who was not purple anywhere, sipped their soup exactly together. First they raised their spoons to their lips, then they took the same shivery sip, then they lowered their spoons back down to their bowls. As if they’d practiced.

  k. d. miller

  Or this:

  My parents were married in a high wind that was conceived in the tropics and born in a jet stream. As it crawled up the coast, playing with flags and sailboats, teething on cliffs and peninsulas, it matured into a lusty and vigorous gale. A product of incompatible air currents—polar and equatorial, with a trace of African Simoon ancestry—it blew like a bastard, sweeping suddenly into the orchard where the wedding ceremony was proceeding at a lazy mid-August sun-sodden pace.

  terry griggs

  Or this:

  His most vivid childhood memory was of sickness, which he loved. He loved staying in bed all day, reading books, eating Jell-O, flesh broth, globs of honey and aspirin crushed between two spoons. He loved the natural disorders of his body—vomiting, diarrhea, infections, swellings, pale sleeps and altered appetites. Because his parents did not believe in TV and because he had a window, Morris watched weather. He saw blushing sunrises, curtains of rain holding in the night, snow in the blue afternoons. Morris missed prodigious amounts of school, was top of his class, and never wore a hat, in the hopes of catching something special.

  annabel lyon

  We went on to publish On earth as it is by Steven Heighton; Driving Men Mad by Elise Levine; Influence of the Moon by Mary Borsky; Help Me, Jacques Cousteau by Gil Adamson; Lovers and Other Strangers by Carol Malyon; Telling My Love Lies by Keath Fraser; The Garden of Earthly Delights by Meeka Walsh; Kiss Me by Andrew Pyper; Buying on Time by Antanas Sileika; If I Were Me by Clark Blaise; Small Change by Elizabeth Hay; Promise of Shelter by Robyn Sarah; Learning to Live Indoors by Alison Acheson; Love in a Warm Climate by Kelley Aitken; The King of Siam by Murray Logan; Aquarium by Mike Barnes; Devil’s Darning Needle by Linda Holeman; Give Me Your Answer by K. D. Miller; One Last Good Look by Michael Winter; Walking in Paradise by Libby Creelman; How Did You Sleep? by Paul Glennon; Oxygen by Annabel Lyon; The One with the News by Sandra Sabatini; and Gambler’s Fallacy by Judith Cowan.

  People often ask where and how I find the manuscripts we publish. Very few indeed get chosen from what arrives in the mail. I’ve only accepted six unsolicited MSS since 1989. This is simply because most are awful in horrible ways. I look at so much material that it should be obvious I can’t read it all. Connolly’s paragraph plus two more for good measure are enough to do the trick. Covering letters are also a good short cut; if the salutation is “Hi!” or “Hello, Porcupine’s Quill” I read no further.

  I laughed in delighted recognition a few years ago when I was reading Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Ezra Pound, a life entitled A Serious Character. The sentences that made me laugh concerned the writer and editor Ford Madox Ford.

  Pound delighted in Ford’s brisk off-the-cuff literary judgements, which were nearly always right, and in his ability as an editor to detect the quality of a manuscript almost by its smell.

  (“I don’t read manuscripts,” Ford would say, “I know what’s in ’em.”)

  I find manuscripts by glancing at what arrives in the mail, by reading the literary magazines, and by following up the recommendations of Porcupine’s Quill writers. The writers obviously have a sense of what’s going to appeal to me. Steve Heighton, Elise Levine, Caroline Adderson, Leon Rooke, and Diane Schoemperlen all pass along suggestions. I trust their eyes and ears and I welcome their help; it works towards making the press a shared venture, an aesthetic underground. I was going to use the word network but I think the word web is more precise. The filaments of the web stretch from coast to coast and sometimes, nearly invisibly, stretch far back into the past.

  An example of that would be Mary Swan from Guelph. She sent me a letter of inquiry. Her track record in the magazines looked good. She sent me stories and an extraordinary novella entitled “The Deep.” I accepted immediately. Some weeks later she heard that “The Deep” had won first prize in the O Henry Award Stories in the States. All this might seem completely random but wasn’t. A filament was jiggling the web. Years before, Mary had been taught in Toronto by Alice Munro. They had kept in touch. Years later when Mary had a collection ready Alice had recommended me as an editor; “Tough
but fair,” Mary said Alice had said.

  Another example of the way the web works. In 1980 Clark Blaise and I edited Best Canadian Stories 80 for Oberon. We were both charmed by a story named “Esso” by a new young writer called Linda Svendsen. Years later she published the magnificent collection Marine Life. Fast-forward again and she is teaching writing at UBC, head of the Creative Writing Department. I got a letter from her a couple of years ago saying she had a student whose work she thought might interest me. I wrote to the student and in return was sent a wad of stories. They were astonishing, exciting, odd, entrancing. We published the stories in 2000. The book was Oxygen, the author Annabel Lyon.

  Sometimes I receive collections of stories or novels which I don’t consider publishable in their submitted form but there may be in the MS a spark of language, a tension, that suggests that the writer is capable of a better book. In that sort of case I have to take a gamble. Will I be able to tease from this writer a different book, a better book? Will the writer accept a new direction? Have I the energy to enter into this manuscript? Is this going to work between us emotionally? Or should I simply reject the manuscript? Temperamentally, I incline to the gamble; I want to bet on what the writer will do rather than has done.

  Gil Adamson’s Help Me, Jacques Cousteau is an example of a book that evolved. Gil came to me as a result of a recommendation by Steve Heighton. She sent in a collection of stories that seemed to me disparate in style and subject matter, too much a grab bag. I wrote to her suggesting that the funniest and the most moving of the stories concerned families and that she should group these stories together and write some new ones, thereby creating a linked collection. I sensed that at some level these particular stories had an autobiographical impulse and were intensely felt. Gil at first resisted the book I could sense but gradually relaxed into writing it.

  She wrote in the book’s acknowledgements: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not only coincidental, but is also a damned lie, according to my mother.”

  For the last few years I’ve been teaching every summer at the Humber School for Writers at Humber College in Toronto. The course is usually in the last week of July. This is developing into another source of manuscripts. I have published from Humber, Sharon English (Uncomfortably Numb) and Mary-Lou Zeitoun (13).

  One of the pleasures of that week at Humber is the company of Mark Leyner, Bruce Jay Friedman, Tim O’Brien, and D. M. Thomas. In 1999 Mordecai Richler taught there and was rather badly behaved. On the opening morning of classes Joe Kertes, the director of the course, dropped into Mordecai’s room to see that all was well. Mordecai was sitting on the edge of the desk smoking a cheroot and staring out of the window. The class was sitting in strained silence. Nothing seemed to be happening. Joe said brightly, “So! Shall we make a start?” Mordecai shuffled himself around and said, “What would be the point?”

  For the record, however, since the first time I met him in 1970, Richler treated me with great courtesy, kindness, and generosity. I still remember with acute embarrassment interviewing him in the early seventies in his study in his Westmount house to discover halfway through that I’d pressed the wrong buttons on my tape recorder. He confined himself to a sigh.

  Last year Humber was enlivened by the presence of Roddy Doyle. Mary-Lou Zeitoun read the opening chapter of her novel 13 as class work; 13 is a story as told by a thirteen-year-old punk rocker. When she’d finished, Roddy Doyle said, “Fuckin’ great!” I thought that would make an excellent blurb for the back of the book. He did write one for her but it was more decorous.

  In 1993 in addition to the Sherbrooke Street setback the Press suffered another. I had wanted to link the Porcupine’s Quill with a similar literary press in the States or England. Literary presses have always tended to be internationalist and my hope was that we could select half a dozen American authors, say, and promote them in Canada while the other press promoted some of our authors in the States. I hoped that we could have launches and reading tours for the Americans and that all this would lead to our literary worlds drawing closer together.

  Tim and I got in touch with the publisher and editorial director of Gray Wolf Press, Scott Walker. The press is based in Minneapolis. We exchanged books and catalogues and discussed on the phone the idea of some kind of co-operation. Scott and a couple of his editors were to be in New York for a book fair and we agreed to meet there. As it was a warm, pleasant day we met in Central Park and spent a few hours discussing the price of paper, unit costs, and the non-viability of short story collections in the US market. It slowly became clear that they considered our list too literary. I thought theirs too commercial. And their unit costs were about a quarter of ours.

  This venture cost Tim a lot of money in plane fares and hotels and restaurants and I’ve never heard the end of it. The taxi to La Guardia drove at such demented speed that when we reached the airport, a very shaken Tim had to have a little lie-down. And the most vivid memory for both of us is the small printed posters tacked to the trees in Central Park. They said: Please Do Not Feed the Rats.

  Since this attempt and after probes at Carcanet Press in England I’ve come to the conclusion that small presses are necessarily individualist. I very much value my own freedom at Porcupine’s Quill and I certainly wouldn’t welcome an advisory board. I find the products of boards and committees generally lumpy—like the annual Journey Prize Anthology. Though I do still sometimes hanker after an American or British component I know the deal would founder on the rock of Tim’s dedication to Zephyr Antique laid.

  “Sure their books are cheaper,” said Tim about Gray Wolf. “Nastier, too. Nasty paper. Perfect bound.”

  End of subject.

  He was right.

  In 1994, the books were brilliant but sales were not and Tim was on the verge of bankruptcy. He phoned me in deep despond and asked me to start dismantling the list by placing our writers with other publishers. Tim needed $14,000 to survive and couldn’t raise it anywhere his pride would allow him to. I called Anna Porter at Key Porter Books and we talked around the problem for a while and then I baulked. Our list was building in 1994 in exactly the way I’d dreamed. We positively glittered. Quickening by Terry Griggs, Blue Husbands by Don Dickinson, Flight Paths of the Emperor by Steven Heighton, Dance with Desire by Irving Layton, A Night at the Opera, by Ray Smith, Forests of the Medieval World by Don Coles, Bad Imaginings by Caroline Adderson—I could not cast these pearls away.

  And then a dream of salvation came to me.

  Sometime earlier in Ottawa on my ceaseless rounds I’d dropped in at a used book store called Benjamin Books. The owner of the store, whose interests run more in Marxist-Leninist directions than in literary ones, said he had a box of books that might interest me. The books came from the libraries of Archibald Lampman, his wife, Maud (Playter) Lampman, his father-in-law, Edward Playter, his sister Isabelle who married Ernest Voorhis, and his daughter Natalie who married Loftus MacInnes, son of the poet Tom MacInnes.

  The books had belonged to a member of the Lampman–MacInnes family.

  It was a treasure trove of Canadian material. It included the dedication copy of Lampman’s first book, Among the Millet and Other Poems; he had copied out the dedicatory poem “To My Wife” and inscribed the book “To My Beloved Maud.” The highlight of the collection was a holograph book of Lampman’s sonnets written a year before Among the Millet was published. There are 101 differences between the holograph versions and the printed versions. There was also a clutch of signed presentation books to Lampman by William Wilfred Campbell, Bliss Carman, Charles G. D. Roberts, and John Henry Brown. Masses of Duncan Campbell Scott all inscribed to Lampman’s daughter, Natalie. There were completely unrecorded leaflets, poems, and pamphlets. There was even a signed photograph of Duncan Campbell Scott and Rupert Brooke dated August 1913 taken in the garden of Scott’s house, now destroyed, on Lisgar Street in Ottawa.

  The store’s owner,
Mordy Bubis, really wasn’t paying sufficient attention and sold the books to me for $7,000. I added to this collection a lot of Duncan Campbell Scott material I’d collected over the years down to and including his Christmas cards which all carried poems, some of them unrecorded. It seemed obvious that all this material ought to be in the National Library. I offered it but they declined, saying they already had a lot of Lampman. I thought this was rather like the British Museum saying they already had lots of Shakespeare but the National Library is something of an intellectual morgue at the best of times. Eventually I sold the entire collection to Michael Gnarowski for $20,000 which was a figure absurdly low but I needed money to save the press.

  The next problem was Tim’s pride. I doubted he would simply accept $14,000 as a gift. I proposed, therefore, that he sell me the archives of the Press from 1989 onwards. The University of Guelph had been buying them previously but had informed Tim and Elke that although they were still interested in acquiring them they would no longer pay. Tim agreed to my proposal and I sent him a cheque. It amused me to think that Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott were reaching out from the grave in continued support of Canadian literature. I bought from Tim a second batch of archives when I sold my Anansi collection to the National Library. I’m hoping that this rather vast archive, along with all the edited manuscripts and correspondence, will end up in McGill’s Rare Book Room.