by John Metcalf
I felt from the beginning that the books we were publishing would not survive unless they existed in a critical context, unless they were discussed and compared and evaluated. Canadian history—and that includes its literature—is a sorry, insubstantial thing like the wake of a ship, churned foam continually flattening out and disappearing, leaving no track or trace. The books can only survive if people are reading them and that is why I wanted criticism addressed to the Common Reader even if the Common Reader is in short supply. The universities seemingly have little interest in contemporary writing and their professors have chosen to look inward and talk to each other in constipated jargon. I felt that what we needed was passionate and intelligent criticism from people for whom literature was part of life, from people who lived books, from people who wanted to share their passions. I also felt that it was not essential for me, editorially, to agree with all their opinions and arguments. The important thing, it seemed to me, was the current of passion itself, a current that would engage, introduce, reevaluate, provoke, disparage, praise.
We began the critical series in 1990 with Volleys, a debate amongst W. J. Keith, Sam Solecki, and me about the importance of the short story as a genre. In 1991 we published An Independent Stance by W. J. Keith and in 1993 How Stories Mean, a compendium of comment by writers on the genre. These books appeared under the series title Critical Directions under the editorship of J. R. (Tim) Struthers. The books are lively but sales were bleak. Again we let the series lapse.
Conscience nagged, however, and I knew we had a duty here and so I re-started the critical series with Ripostes by Philip Marchand in 1998. Phil had won my early enthusiasm and support for the intelligence and vigour of his reviewing in the Toronto Star. The book caused a mild uproar; he had called into question the reputations of Margaret Atwood, Timothy Findley, and Michael Ondaatje. He was irreverent about the Writers’ Union of Canada, saying memorably of Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, then chair of the Racial Minority Writers’ Committee, that she was “famous for her ability to weep in public.” The book was, amazingly, soon sold out.
We continued in 2000 with T. F. Rigelhof’s This Is Our Writing. In 2001, Eric Ormsby’s Facsimiles of Time. In 2002, Stephen Henighan’s When Words Deny the World, a book which sold out entirely in about a month. I have in the works major essay collections from David Solway, Carmine Starnino, and Michael Darling.
What accounts for the success of this critical series, I believe, is its thoughtful opposition to much academic and media opinion, opposition usually backed by devastating quotation. These books are a sustained attack on what Philip Marchand in one of his essays calls “our dogged Canadian willingness to be bored.”
Terry Rigelhof on Robertson Davies suggests the tone:
If Davies hadn’t added two more volumes to turn Fifth Business into the first volume of the Deptford Trilogy and demonstrated that he was incapable of writing in anything other than a stilted style or inventing any voice, male or female, that wasn’t Dunstan Ramsay’s, I’d be more tempted to celebrate his achievement here.
I’m pleased with the impact of the critical series. It is impinging on the awareness even of those not much given to reading.
The lacklustre Globe and Mail columnist James Adams launched a counterattack recently in his Weekend Diary. He quotes the travel writer Pico Iyer:
When a Canuck reads a sentence such as “Toronto is by official UN statistics the single most multicultural city in the world; it is also statistically the safest city in North American and, by the reckoning of many, the one with the richest literary culture,” he or she automatically tenses up and gets ready for the follow-through put-down.
Which had that sentence been written by John Metcalf, Stephen Henighan, Philip Marchand or another member of the Porcupine’s Quill group, would have occurred.
Notice the pathetic implication—as always—that to criticize a Canadian book is to criticize Canada. Where does the newspaper find these stand-on-guard dorks?
In 1997 Tim Inkster acquired from Douglas Fetherling the journal Canadian Notes and Queries. Fetherling had shifted the journal away from academic concerns and towards being “a periodical of Canadian literary and cultural history.” I took over the editorship with Number 51.1. We regard CNQ as a part of the critical component of the Porcupine’s Quill. With our reviews, profiles, interviews, and essays we wish to intrude rudely on the bland mindlessness of Canadian literary life. Michael Darling is the book review editor. Carmine Starnino is the poetry editor.
In 2001 we published a brilliant essay by David Solway entitled “Standard Average Canadian or The Influence of Al Purdy.” In essence, the essay described Purdy as the Stompin’ Tom Connors of Canadian poetry and deplored his influence on younger poets.
Tim had been receiving a grant of $3,000 a year towards the magazine’s expenses from the Ontario Arts Council. After the David Solway essay appeared, Lorraine Filyer, the Ontario Arts Council Literary Supremo, phoned Tim and informed him that she and her henchthingies, as Frank magazine would say, had decided to reduce his grant to zero. The reason she gave was the journal’s “lack of editorial vision.” Tim promptly secured financing for the magazine from the Upper Canada Brewing Company, a better class of people.
The most recent issue of the journal was a special issue on Norman Levine. Cynthia Flood contributed a definitive essay on Norman’s style which is the very model of what literary criticism should be.
Norman wrote in the journal: “Canada Made Me was published by Putnam in November 1958. A long review by Paul West in the Christmas issue of the New Statesman and Nation was read by Honor Balfour of the London office of Time. She interviewed me. When her piece appeared, the 500 copies that McClelland had went quickly. He wouldn’t take any more. Nor would any other Canadian publisher. I had to accept that Canadian publishing was closed to my work.”
Norman told me that when he was writer-in-residence at UNB in Fredericton he gave a reading at the Saint John campus and afterwards a professor came up to him and said, “Are you the Levine that wrote Canada Made Me?” Norman said that he was and the scholar spat at his feet and walked away.
Yet I’ve long held that Canada Made Me sits at the centre of Canadian literature. It is concerned with the essence of Canada: immigration, the lives of immigrants. How deeply that spitting scholar would loathe such an opinion! Not many readers have discovered the book yet but we have reprinted it and it is available. It sells three or four copies in a year. It will not go away. We do somewhat better with the reprint of From a Seaside Town but only because the Tate St. Ives buys copies regularly.
Norman is of singular importance to me. He is the very figure of the artist. He has worked quietly for decades forging a radical style. He has survived. He has survived the indifference of audience and he has produced stories which are at the centre of achievement in Canadian literature, “A Small Piece of Blue,” “We All Begin in a Little Magazine,” “Champagne Barn,” “Something Happened Here” . . .
He has also had to endure the crassness of the Canadian literary world. I have already mentioned that Cynthia Good of Penguin Books Canada, who published Champagne Barn and, later, Something Happened Here, was quoted in the Ottawa Citizen as saying: “At the time, we considered Norman to be on a par with Alice Munro or Mavis Gallant. We weren’t alone. That’s how many people viewed him at the time.”
At the time?
She is quoted later as saying that sales of Something Happened Here were “modest.” Aha! Norman’s fall from grace was linked to numbers, was it? She is equating sales with achievement. And in this she’s not alone.
Jenny Jackson, the Ottawa Citizen books columnist, wrote in review of Clark Blaise: “The book is put out by Porcupine’s Quill, the press of the unjustly forgotten, those with the PR epitaph ‘a writer’s writer’ . . .” Her words attempt to be patronizing. She goes on to gloat that Clark never “broke through” to a “mass audience.” C
ould one suggest that if writers are “unjustly forgotten” then it just might be the duty of a books columnist to seek justice for them. “A writer’s writer” means that the writer is so good other writers are influenced by him or her. Isn’t Jackson’s job to connect that excellence with a readership? But it isn’t really literature that is her subject matter. What she’s really interested in is exactly PR. Recently she wrote in a review of Stephen Henighan: “His first four books of fiction have earned respectful reviews, if little money.”
Sales.
Numbers.
What a squalid little mind she has! I despise her pat acceptance of the status quo. People who employ numbers arguments are usually coarse souled. I had thought of sending her a poker-work plaque, elegantly executed, of the old graffito: Eat Shit! Fifty Billion Flies Can’t Be Wrong!
Sarah Hampson, continuing this trend of Levine-bashing, wrote a slighting and obtuse profile of Norman which was published in the Globe and Mail in July 2002. She concentrated on what she perceived as his eccentricity and his penury.
“Levine unlocks the door to his apartment; pushes it forward and gestures for me to enter first. The smell of time rises up from a soiled mauve carpet, a sagging floral-print sofa . . .”
She managed not to see his grandeur.
Inspired by Norman’s anecdotes over the years about St. Ives and about the painters who were his friends—Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, and Francis Bacon—Myrna and I decided to go there for a holiday to see the Alfred Wallis paintings in the Tate St. Ives. Wallis was a primitive painter so powerful that after you’ve seen the paintings you can only see St. Ives itself through his eyes. He died in 1942 and is buried in the cemetery above Porthmeor Beach in a grave covered with Bernard Leach tiles.
Holidays with Myrna are usually boot-camp affairs as she insists on climbing mountains, hacking across moors in knee-deep heather, squelching through bogs. On this occasion she wheedled me into walking the cliff path from St. Ives to Zennor, an expedition I now think of as the Zennor Death March. The distance is only about ten miles but the path follows the ups and downs of the headlands and the “walk” often becomes a vertiginous scrabble, the sea surging and sloshing hundreds of feet below; later, I read that that walk was rated as “severe.” We did this without water or proper shoes and many hours later collapsed in Zennor into the one-roomed Tinners’ Arms, a pub once frequented by Katherine Mansfield and D. H Lawrence, where we rehydrated with many pints of meditative ale and caught the Land’s End bus back to St. Ives.
Between 1989 and 2002 the Porcupine’s Quill has published about twenty novels. I said earlier that I felt that most of what I’d chosen to publish stands above the ruck. I feel this more strongly about the story collections than I do about the novels. There are a few story collections, too, that I have reservations about but novels present real problems. They do everywhere. I wonder sometimes if Canada has ever produced a great novel. Possibly Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman. I’m still not sure.
There are twentieth-century names against which we have to weigh all novels before we can talk lightly of “greatness” or “significance.” Conrad, Joyce, Beckett, Naipaul, Waugh, Nabokov . . .
The recent Toronto media uproar about Dennis Bock’s ill-written The Ash Garden is a perfect illustration of judgements passed without the felt weight of tradition. A perfect line for a critic is Spender’s “I think continually of those who were truly great.” What I am getting at is that there are thousands of novels but very few like, say, Graham Swift’s Waterland. We ought to know the fate of most of “The New Face of Fiction.” Most novels are fated to become literature’s leafmould.
Leafmould. Concurrent with the writing of this book I’ve been editing for the Press, of course, and putting together an issue of Canadian Notes and Queries containing an essay on the House of Anansi and a bibliography of the press which runs from the founding in 1967 to 1989 when the press was bought by Jack Stoddart. Noting what was published year after year and trying to decide now what was worthy and what was a mistake has inevitably left me considering the value of what I am doing with the Porcupine’s Quill. How much of the work is likely not to become leafmould? Anansi published forty-eight poetry titles; I’d say that seven are still of interest. Of the fifty-five fiction titles there are thirteen I can reread and commend.
It is not a criticism of the House of Anansi that so many of its books have become leafmould. The books of any literary press—of all presses—are of a time and place and it is inevitable that many will not be of lasting significance. But cherished by posterity or forgotten entirely, all these books are essential in the growth of a nation’s literature. What is important is, in Dennis Lee’s words, that we “wrestle with the mind and passion of our own time and place.” What is important is that ambitious books are written and read, that new writers are launched, new readers won over, that the delight of reading and writing is handed on. The shape and significance of a literature take a very long time to reveal themselves.
There were reasons why the House of Anansi published so much that was fated to disappear. Anansi was a strident nationalist wake-up call to an almost comatose industry. The very act of publishing a Canadian book was for Anansi a political act. The press was also under enormous pressure to publish from the generation it was addressing. And publish it did—poets, hippies, ravers, practitioners of experimental prose, American draft evaders, cosmic weed smokers . . . Anansi was perhaps too much a part of the sixties ferment to be objective about its choices.
I have some hopes that the publications of the Porcupine’s Quill will fare better. I haven’t had to suffer the heated expectation of an entire generation as Anansi did; during the years I’ve been editing almost the reverse has been true. Literature has lost its sixties and seventies glamour, nationalism has languished, cultural ferment has subsided into apathy and indifference. Ideal conditions for making cool—and purely aesthetic—choices. Another factor in favour of the survival of Porcupine’s Quill books is that I am much older than Dennis Lee was when he was making those choices, older and less driven. I like to think that age gives me a certain distance; I’m less likely than Dennis was to get involved in the moment.
All of which brings me circling back to the subject of novels. Most “mainstream” novels are fated to become leafmould and this is why I try to keep away from them. A nasty part of me rubs its hands with glee whenever I read in a review that a novel records the doings of two or three generations of whoever . . . there’s one I won’t have to bother with.
As I put this in “Travelling Northward”:
Six figure sums were routinely advanced to artistes who penned swollen sagas of powerful industrial families, of immigrant families rising from poverty to become powerful industrialists, of landowning families who diversified into powerful new industries and became more powerful than they’d been before but at the same time becoming riven by incest, insanity, possession by the devil, litigation and Alzheimer’s, homosexual and lesbian inversion, poltergeists and hysterectomy, losing that guiding vision of their founder old Grandfather Ebenezer who used to kneel on the good earth running soil through his wise old fingers saying wise dawn things to little barefoot Mattie who never forgot a single utterance . . . and who went on to found an empire in oil, microchips, and laser-beam technology before renouncing the world and establishing an Ecological Foundation and Nature Reserve in memory of Grandfather Ebenezer where she cleaned up oil-fouled seabirds and imparted gentle wisdom to little barefoot Bobbie who three hundred pages later would corner the world market in extruded protein.
Working with Tim and Elke I’m able to publish novels which are eccentric and quirky, novels no commercial house would ever touch. I cannot write about them all but I delight in having published Alexander Scala’s Dr. Swarthmore, Keath Fraser’s Popular Anatomy, Susan Perly’s Love Street, Leo Simpson’s Sailor Man, Terry Griggs’s The Lusty Man, Ray Smith’s A Ni
ght at the Opera, and Harold Rhenisch’s Carnival.
I don’t claim that these are “great” novels but they’re lovely performances and they all gave me great pleasure. Alexander Scala’s Dr. Swarthmore, a darkly comic tale of divine revelation and capitalism, has a curious history. Scala wrote it after leaving Harvard when he was twenty-two. He submitted it to Penguin Books which rejected it on the quaint grounds of blasphemy. Scala was so insulted that he put the MS in a drawer for thirty years. Steven Heighton in Kingston, a friend of Scala’s, read the MS and phoned me to commend it. I loved the book from its opening page.
A review said of it: “Assuredly the first novel of the new millennium in which the Second Person of the Trinity has a walk-on part in a cheap suit.”
All of these novels received far less than their due because they are all unusual and demanding and we do not have enough money to publicize them in the way the commercial houses do. Brenda Sharpe, who created the Porcupine’s Quill Web site, claims that Leo Simpson’s Sailor Man is one of the best books the Press has ever published. It received, to the best of my knowledge, one review, and sold 368 copies.
Of all our novels How Insensitive and Noise by Russell Smith have provided me with the most fun. I received from Russell a letter of the utmost snottiness and a sample chapter of How Insensitive. The letter, as I recall it, described Canadian literature as being concerned with angst on farms. Canadian literature was written by boring middle-aged people for other boring middle-aged people. His book, in contrast, was by a young urban person and reflected Canada’s real urban concerns and blah, blah. He concluded the letter by saying more or less that I probably wouldn’t like the book because I was myself a boring middle-aged establishment fart. I was charmed by the sheer aggression of this letter and even more charmed by the writing itself. Russell has written scenes more brilliantly funny than any other Canadian writer. He is a master of dialogue. Comparison with Kingsley Amis would not be inappropriate. How Insensitive sold an astonishing number of copies—well into the thousands. Noise, a better book, sold far fewer copies. Inexplicable. Although How Insensitive was short-listed for the Governor General’s Award, reviews of both books have been mixed and there is in general a grudging reaction to Russell’s work. Part of this can be explained by the fact that Canadians tend to resist humour. They are made uneasy by sophistication and Russell is very sophisticated indeed. He is also an intellectual and his questing intelligence is displayed in the construction of his prose and in the narrative devices he invents.