by John Metcalf
I fell into his work with immediate relish because I recognized how supremely gifted he is and I also recognized—and deeply approved of—his influences—Waugh and Kingsley Amis. There is about Russell a very British quality which comes from his South African background and that too might explain Canadian unease with his sprightly writing.
Here’s a snippet of two punks in a Swiss Chalet, from Noise; his work is crammed with such vignettes.
There were two punks with mohawks at the cash counter, waiting for someone to materialize behind it. James waited behind them for a minute. There didn’t seem to be anybody working in the whole place. He shivered in the air conditioning. The Muzak breezed along. The punks were looking about, too. They had a glazed look. One of them had a T-shirt which read, “WHERE’S THE FUCKING MONEY YOU OWE ME?”
“What’s with all these pictures of like Heidi houses?” said one.
The other one squinted at the blown-up posters on the walls.
“Switzerland,” he announced.
“Why Switzerland?”
“It’s a Swiss Chalet, right.”
James glimpsed movement through a hatch into the kitchen, and waved his arm at whatever it was.
“I don’t get Switzerland,” said the first punk, as slowly as if in a dream. “I mean it’s never really turned me on, you know?”
“Yeah. It’s not sexy.”
“Exactly. Switzerland’s not sexy. Fuck Switzerland.”
“Fucking Swiss bastards. Fuck ’em.”
The novels I choose for the Press are always fun but the main focus for me remains short fiction. The Press is already the press for the short story, so in 2002 I turned my attention to a related form, the novella. I suggested to Tim that we start publishing stand-alone novellas. The form is an awkward one for publishers; conventional wisdom is that novellas are too long for magazines and too short for books and if they’re published at all they’re published in collections of stories.
I wanted to take novellas out of their surrounding clutter and shine the spotlight on them in much the same way that museum curators have abandoned display cabinets crammed with jumbled objects and have highlighted a few exquisite artifacts in austere cases.
A single novella can live in one’s mind and imagination as vividly as can a novel. There is no need to defend the idea. I simply look back at the years of pleasure given me by such novellas as Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” Nathanael West’s “Miss Lonelyhearts,” Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus,” Evelyn Waugh’s “Scott-King’s Modern Europe” . . . We started our programme with two intense and sophisticated novellas by David Helwig (“The Stand-In”) and Mary Swan (“The Deep”).
Some people are curious about the process of editing. I have always felt editing to be mildly impertinent and arrogant and I only feel that I can do it because I am a writer myself and know that most of the writers I work with have read my fiction and have some regard for it.
Major editing involves rearranging the building blocks of a story, cutting passages, finding a more effective starting place, giving greater weight to pertinent images. This is emotional and intuitive work.
Minor editing, though vastly important, is line-by-line testing and probing. An aspect of this kind of editing more common than readers might suppose is forcing writers to be logical and precise. I edited two books for the Honourable Heward Grafftey, science minister in Joe Clark’s brief government, because he was a neighbour and because I like him. I remember handing him a chapter scored with red ink marking lapses in logic.
“But, well,” he sputtered, “I am by training a lawyer.”
“Then I’m glad,” I replied, “you’re not representing me.”
I once wrote jokingly that the essence of editing was to go through each typescript finding the word careen and crossing it out. Writers refuse to accept that the word means “to cause a ship to lean or lie on one side for calking, barnacle removal, or repair.” It can (only just) have an extended meaning of leaning sideways but such a meaning is compromised by its “ship” connotations. The word derives from the Latin carina, the keel of a ship. Writers believe the word to mean “rapid motion” or “reckless motion” possibly confusing it with career, from the Latin currere, to run, with connotations of war chariots. Driving this through writerly skulls is difficult.
The ideal editor must accept the uniqueness of each text and deal with it on its own terms. I try not to impose anything of my own style but rather seek to understand a book’s rhetoric and then work to ensure that the writer performs that rhetoric to the top of his bent. I also feel quite strongly that an editor can only suggest changes; the writer must be ultimately responsible for the work.
The level and depth of editorial meddling is dictated not by some abstract theory but by the typescript itself. Sometimes good editing is the ability to see when little or none is needed. There are some writers who are so painstaking and meticulous and who have so burnished their manuscripts that editing is more or less a formality. I’m thinking here of such writers as Keath Fraser, Caroline Adderson, Annabel Lyon, and Mary Borsky.
Editorial meddling also has national characteristics. The British generally tend to feel that getting a book right is the writer’s problem; they are less likely than other nationalities to accept a flawed book and work on it. American editors, because they are editors and editors edit, are more likely to regard finished books as interesting seeds of possible books. Consider the editing career of Gordon Lish at Knopf and Esquire; his work on Raymond Carver was so extensive that some American critics have said that Lish’s name should be on the books as co-author. When I came to Canada in the sixties there were editors but at the Ryerson Press they were usually ex-salesmen who had done well on the road and had been rewarded with a comfortable berth in Toronto; they seemed to favour books on antique cars. I also had an impression that many editors in Canada were from the UK just as trade union activists seemed to be exclusively Scottish.
Some writers operate in what I think of as “closed systems.” You can’t go inside them except in superficial ways. This is because they’ve perfected a style and vocabulary that is so idiosyncratic or mannered that an outsider, an editor, cannot really contribute. Terry Griggs would be a good Canadian example. Ronald Firbank springs to mind. How did Robert Bridges edit Gerard Manley Hopkins? All that an editor can usefully do with a closed-system writer is say, These stories are stronger than these, so let’s drop the weaker ones. This was exactly the process with Terry Griggs’s extraordinary collection Quickening.
At the opposite end of the scale are writers whose work cries out for intercession. This is not to be negatively critical. A writer’s style is the outcome of, among other things, temperament. Some writers write in a passionate outpouring of words and that approach seems to them necessary and natural. Steven Heighton writes in this way and in my editing of his work I always attempt to prune his lushness, concentrate, suggest the dryness of fino rather than the sugar of oloroso, the marksman’s rifle rather than the shotgun blast. He is always good-natured about my plaintive nagging. In the New Quarterly special issue on my editing work Steve reproduced a letter I’d sent him about a story which appeared in his collection On earth as it is. The story was “Townsmen of a Stiller Town” which takes place in a morgue, an important detail given my first quoted note.
I wrote in part . . . “P. 22. If Basil had been drinking rye his breath wouldn’t be ‘briny.’ What about ‘a breath as foul and harsh as formaldehyde’?
“P. 20, middle of page. ‘Joliffe’s pipe on its side, sifting ash over papers.’
“You cannot say this. ‘To sift’ is a precise action of riddling material over a grill—metaphorically, I suppose you could ‘sift through archives.’ But a pipe can’t sift.
“Please please an old man and change this.
“Sorry to fuss so much but getting things right will mean that your w
ork will live. Get them wrong and wild dogs will gnaw at your corpse.”
Possibly the loving combat I’m always locked in with Steve comes from my own temperament, from my own neurotic writing methods. I write an initial sentence usually many times over until it strikes me as perfect in diction and rhythm. Then I do the same thing with the second sentence. But joining the second sentence to the first changes both and so I rewrite both. This slightly mad process goes on, sentence by sentence, for weeks.
Sometimes manuscripts beg to be reshaped or rewritten. It often happens that the energy level in a story drops in one or more places. A good editor can feel these lapses or collapses as easily as an electrician can check current with a voltmeter. Conversely the voltmeter can pick up an energy surge; sometimes a paragraph or a couple of pages will stand out from surrounding competence and proclaim themselves and it often turns out that that paragraph or those pages are the emotional core of the story demanding to be taken out and reshaped.
To return to the image of a voltmeter checking current. This is as real to me as sewing on buttons might be for someone else. And, for me, as commonplace. I remember performing tricks once at the Humber School for Writers. A student submitted a story to the class and I rather astonished her by saying, “This story you’ve totally invented just as you’ve invented the characters. It’s all rather plodding, I’m afraid. The only place in the story where you’ve connected to any real emotion is in the description of the inside of the sheds in the garden. And those sheds are drawn from your own life and childhood.” She agreed that this was true, so I sent her off to think more about sheds.
I am not saying here that the current surges because material is autobiographical or “sincere,” or that the “real” is more real than the imagined. It is simply that the real, the sheds, came alive in her story because nouns were coming into play. She was looking at things rather than playing with Lego. Sometimes the voltmeter picks up a sentence or paragraph because the writer is not concentrating sufficiently on the imagined world. When writers wander from the concrete, the particular, the current always drops. As I work on this book, I’m working with an ex-Humber student, Judith McCormack, on a short story collection. One of the stories is called “The Cardinal Humours.” Here is its opening sentence:
When Eduardo de Majia left Barcelona on an overcast, grey-yellow day in the fall of 1873, he left behind his wife and his two sons, and he took with him trunks and barrels of medicaments, bitter syrups, dried herbs, astringent tonics, white powders of various kinds, and sixty-three vials of tinctures.
I noticed that I wrote to her . . . “Page 1 ‘white powders of various kinds’ is very weak after the more specific things which precede. Try one of: nostrums, infusions, lenitives, paregorics, carminatives, balsams—all words fitting to the tradition and period.
“‘Bitter syrups’ also sounds a bit dodgy. ‘Syrup’ is defined as ‘any sweet thick liquid.’ Rethink this one.
“And come to think of it, ‘astringent tonics’ sounds a touch unlikely.”
Well, I admit.
It possibly is a strange way to spend one’s days.
Of recent years, Tim and I have had to revise our vision of the Press. Our earlier conventional assumptions about nurturing careers crumbled under the increasing commercialization of the industry in Canada and the advent of agents. Our writers were being offered advances we couldn’t come anywhere near meeting and they defected to Doubleday, Anansi, Key Porter, HarperCollins, McClelland and Stewart, Random House, and Knopf. I suggested to Tim that under his logo he print: Purveyors to the Trade. Tim, reviewing the list of publishers and authors, said rather grimly, “Well, I suppose we must be doing something right.”
We sulked for a while but soon came around to realize that we couldn’t expect young writers to turn down the chance of a reasonable income when all we can offer is an advance of $500. We understood that we’d have to see the function and purpose of the Porcupine’s Quill differently. We had become, willy-nilly, a launching pad for careers, so we needed to stop thinking “defection” and to embrace the new reality. We needed to see ourselves as talent scouts and expansive impresarios. Tim, with his always wily business sense, recouped some of his expenses by selling authors’ first books to the larger publishers of their second books for republication and then, with considerable chutzpah, advertising the fact on his Web site, thereby using the major publishers to aggrandize the Porcupine’s Quill’s reputation.
I want to end this section on the Porcupine’s Quill on a celebratory note because I feel we have much to celebrate. The Press has achieved all that I’d wanted at the beginning. Our writers are elegant and sophisticated. They love language and flaunt it. Joan Harcourt’s “carefully crafted reliquaries, little boxes in which are enshrined little memories” have been firmly suppressed. And the Press does indeed crackle with energy. There’s little question we’re the best literary press in Canada. Perhaps in North America.
Along with acquiring manuscripts and editing where necessary and with printing and binding, a press has to sell books. Launchings are an effective way of selling books and are necessary to an author’s sense of occasion. We launched books in Toronto and Ottawa and I’ll conclude with an account of the Magnum Reading Series and the celebration of Irving Layton’s eightieth birthday.
That one evening can stand for the entire spirit of the Porcupine’s Quill adventure.
In 1990 I was in Toronto visiting Tony Calzetta. Tony had an exhibition on at the Lake Gallery and we went together to look at the paintings. I was introduced to Fran Hill, the gallery’s director. Chatting with Fran was a friend from university days, Lise Giroux. Fran and Lise had both studied art history at York University. Lise told me that she, too, was from Ottawa and was opening a bookstore there. I promised to drop in. The Magnum Readings and Exhibitions Series evolved from this chance encounter.
Lise Giroux and Yoni Freeman together ran side-by-side establishments, the Magnum Book Store and Opus Bistro. The bookstore was managed by Paula Black while Opus was managed by Lise. Yoni, originally from Israel, was the presiding culinary genius. Prior to opening Opus he had worked under Jamie Kennedy and Michael Stadtlander, two of Toronto’s most acclaimed chefs, at the Scaramouche restaurant. When I reported to Myrna that Yoni was from Israel, she, as an ex-kibbutznik, claimed that the words Israeli chef constituted a perfect oxymoron but she was won over after the first mouthful.
The Opus Bistro quickly built a reputation as being one of the best restaurants in Ottawa. It was always packed with noisy and happy diners and reservations were necessary days in advance. Where to Eat in Canada (1993) raved about Yoni’s cooking:
His cooking may look simple and straight-forward, but actually it’s about as simple as an ode by Horace. Try his black-bean soup with smoked pork, his blue-cheese salad with pears, his baked salmon with horseradish and sour cream—which we much prefer to his blackened sole. The menu is constantly changing and dishes like liver with calvados, cellentani with fresh squid and mussels, salmon with pink peppercorns and roast duckling with sour cherries are now little but a memory . . .
It seemed obvious to all of us that good food and drink were the natural partners of good books and paintings. Our conversations circled around ways and means and motives. Lise had a vision of the Magnum Book Store becoming a cultural centre and a cultural force in Ottawa. Sitting at the commodious Opus bar we consumed many a meditative Gibson (two ounces of Bombay Sapphire gin, three drops of vermouth, two cocktail onions).
We were setting out, we realized, to build a community. We were tired of cultural events being ghettoized in universities and auditoria, tired of institutional battery-acid coffee in Styrofoam cups, tired of littered floors, tired of dragooned student audiences wearing reversed baseball caps. We wanted something more intimate and gracious. We wanted the audience involved in the whole venture, able to meet and mingle with the writers and painters and—which is just as i
mportant—with each other. We wanted everyone to share in a coffee, a beer, a glass of wine, and enjoy paintings and conversation in a relaxed atmosphere.
This idea of building a community was also pursued in the generous hosting of writers and painters at Opus Bistro for dinner on the Saturday preceding the reading on Sunday evening. But—central question in the arts—who was going to pay the bills? We had visions of corporate sponsors and of sponsorship by publishers but these visions remained visions. No corporate entity showed the slightest interest in what we were attempting. Inevitably, Lise and Yoni shouldered the burden; Fran Hill and I helped by donating our time and energies.
I suggested to Lise a mechanism that would allow us to pay the readers and give us at the same time a faint chance to recoup some of our costs. We would ask each reader to give us a piece of previously unpublished work. For this work we would give the reader $200—the same sum paid by the Canada Council for a reading. I would then make thirty Xerox copies of the piece and staple them into card covers. Each would carry the following statement of limitation:
Here first published in an edition of thirty copies
of which