An Aesthetic Underground

by John Metcalf

  Under these conditions and with an unsophisticated readership, books turn into commodity, into “product,” and they are packaged and sold as such. The ludicrous frenzy created over and around Ondaatje’s The English Patient can serve as an example. Philip Marchand in the Toronto Star was the only critic to say publicly that the book was ill-written and tedious.

  Prizes, too, have become a problem. There is something anti-literary about prizes. Literature is not a competition. Prizes deform a literature by focusing attention on a small clutch of books. The awards do not confer literary status; they are transparently marketing schemes. Media interest is less in theme and style than it is in the sum of money awarded. In Canada, prizes are celebrated in nationalistic rather than literary terms; we won is the national and media attitude rather than we read and experienced and enjoyed.

  When the short list for the Booker Prize was announced in 2002 the Globe and Mail published two fascinating letters to the editor on the subject on the same day. One was an upswelling of smarmy Babbittry from Douglas Gibson, president and publisher of McClelland and Stewart Ltd. The other was an indignant outburst from Stephen Henighan, author most recently of a book of literary essays, When Words Deny the World.

  Gibson wrote:

  The news that three Canadian authors have been nominated for the Booker Prize must bring pride and pleasure to all of us. James Adams is correct to dwell on the remarkable international success of our authors in recent years.

  In the past few months, we have read many pessimistic stories about Canadian publishing, centring on the financial failure of the General Publishing group. By happy contrast, now is a time to celebrate Canadian accomplishment and to recognize the farsighted role played by our government agencies—specifically, the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council—in supporting our authors and nurturing the publishers that launch them.

  If there were a writing Olympics, our men and women would be on the podium all the time, and our national anthem would be played so often that even non-Canadians would know the words.

  Henighan wrote:

  James Adams’s claim of a “golden age” in Canadian literature (Some Day, They’ll Call This the Golden Age—Sept. 25) overlooks the uncomfortable fact that the appearance of three Canadians on the Booker shortlist coincides with the judges’ decision to shortlist more “fun” and “popular” books. This is a commercial, not a literary, triumph. The Booker shortlist confirms that the Canadian publishing industry has perfected a strain of easily exportable, no-name entertainment.

  Mr. Adams himself underlines the commercial roots of his bias when he defines each book he mentions in terms of the prize money it has earned. “Golden age” is a gross misnomer. The metaphor Mr. Adams should have used comes from the history of American robber-baron capitalism. This is our Gilded Age. The difference is that, during the U.S. Gilded Age, writers stood outside the commercial glare and criticized it.

  Journalistic engagement with our culture has sunk now to columns in the Globe and Mail with smartass titles like “Arts Ink,” which on this day of writing informs us that Michael Jackson suffered minuscule burns while setting off fireworks at a charity concert.

  Rarely do we hear sane voices rising above “hype” and “buzz.” Rarely do we find people taking the long view, patiently comparing books from the present with books from the past. Rarely do we hear reference to the “crafte so longe to lerne.” The universities, once a countervailing influence, seem to have abandoned any public role and teachers of literature either echo media endorsement or simply play with themselves.

  Bloated bogus novels trumpeted.

  Florid verbiage.

  And an audience that can’t seem to tell the difference.

  We are in a mess.

  But so, I am cheered to find, is Australia.

  I read recently Snakecharmers in Texas: Essays 1980–1987 by Clive James. In a review of Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore written for The New Yorker, James looked back over Australian literature’s recent past and I was astonished to find that what he had to say about Australia was almost identical to what I had said about Canada in Freedom from Culture: Selected Essays 1982–1992.

  Clive James, author of a delicious three-volume autobiography which begins with Unreliable Memoirs, wrote of Australia:

  Ardent republicans would like Australia to be self-sufficient in the arts the way it is in minerals. The idea that any one country can be culturally self-sufficient is inherently fallacious, but in the forward rush of Australian confidence during Gough Whitlam’s period of government, when grants were handed out to anybody with enough creative imagination to ask for one, reason was thrown into the back seat. For the last fifteen years, Australian artists in all fields, supposedly free at last from the imposition of being judged by alien—i.e. British—standards, have been judged by their own standards, and almost invariably found to be the authors of significant works. The glut of self-approval has been most evident in literature, which in normal circumstances customarily produces a strong critical movement to accompany any period of sustained creativity but in Australia’s case has largely failed to do so. The undoubted fact that some very good things have been written can’t stave off the consideration that many less good things have been given the same welcome . . . In Australia, while literature is rapidly becoming a cash crop, a literary community has been slower to emerge. Criticism is too often, in the strict sense, tendentious. Scale is duly hailed, ambition lauded, but the direction of the book—does it point the way? does it give us purpose?—is usually the basis of assessment. There are not many critics detached enough to quibble over detail, and ask why so many great writers have produced so little good writing.

  The relatively recent arrival of literary agents in Canada has accelerated the commercialization of the literary world. Agents want to make money and therefore take on as clients only writers whose books have commercial potential. Agents demand big advances for their writers. In most cases, the Canadian reading public is not large enough to buy a sufficient number of books to earn back the advance. If foreign sales are not made, the publisher is bound to lose. This situation will be tolerated while publishers are in competition to build lists but cannot be sustained indefinitely.

  One possible effect of all this might be that books will be tailored with an international audience in mind. This, in turn, will probably tilt the work towards genre writing. The large publishers will become less and less interested in books likely to appeal only to Canadian experience; publishing power resides in New York and London and those arbiters are more familiar with martinis than they are with moose and Mounties.

  If the large houses, as they are rumoured to be doing, start the practice of refusing to read un-agented manuscripts, then another layer of commercialization will have been put in place. Authors will have to be approved by agents whose raison d’être is to sell work with commercial potential.

  In my 1987 Tanks Campaign pamphlet against the idea of subsidy I concluded with these words:

  Publishing and all other aspects of the literary life in Canada need to be put on a commercial footing. I think that is the only way we can regain dignity and perspective.

  Free from government aid and approval, our writing can better work its magic on readers. In Required Reading, Philip Larkin wrote: “I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in. What I don’t like about subsidies and support is that they destroy the essential nexus between the writer and the reader. If the writer is being paid to write and the reader is being paid to read, the element of compulsive contact vanishes.”

  Despite the fact that sound commercial practice would leave us with a smaller—and much different—literary world, it would at least be ours, the possession of individuals. We would be free from Culture, free from nationalism, free from CanLit, and free f
or the first time in many years to begin the building of a literature in Canada, a literature, in Philip Larkin’s words, of compulsive contact.

  Having actually watched the process of commercialization over the fifteen years since I wrote those words, I have to admit that I was wrong. Commercial publishing in Canada has no place for the poetry of George Johnston or Eric Ormsby, no place for the essays of W. J. Keith, no place for the delicacies of Mary Borsky, Clark Blaise, or Libby Creelman. I still believe, passionately, in Larkin’s “compulsive contact,” still believe our literature needs to separate itself from the state. I have no idea how that can be effected. I have no answers other than the willing co-operation of individuals.

  Reviewing in 1964 Kipling’s Mind and Art edited by Andrew Rutherford, Evelyn Waugh wrote of Kipling’s priorities—and politics—a few sentences which aptly describe mine too.

  He believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defences fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.

  I thought often during the writing of this book of the House of Anansi. The press was sold to Jack Stoddart of General Publishing in 1989, the same year I started working with the Porcupine’s Quill. It was as if the Porcupine’s Quill was assuming the task which must be taken up by new people every twenty years or so.

  Dennis Lee said in an interview in the Montreal Star in 1969:

  Literature is a whole dimension of being a citizen of a country, which we’ve generally been deprived of. Without it, you have something less than an adequate society. You don’t have enough nourishment. It’s an underdeveloped situation.

  We give a hoot. It’s a civilized act to wrestle with the mind and passions of our own time and place.

  And if we don’t do that, we’re less than civilized.

  Exactly so, Dennis.

  And that is why, lofty tree or future leafmould, the wrestling must go on.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Books by John Metcalf

  New Canadian Writing 1969. Clarke, Irwin. Toronto, 1969.

  The Lady Who Sold Furniture. Clarke, Irwin. Toronto, 1970.

  Going Down Slow. McClelland and Stewart. Toronto, 1972.

  The Teeth of My Father. Oberon Press. Ottawa, 1975.

  Girl in Gingham. Oberon Press. Ottawa, 1978.

  General Ludd. ECW Press. Toronto, 1980.

  Selected Stories. McClelland and Stewart. Toronto, 1982.

  Kicking Against the Pricks. ECW Press. Toronto, 1982.

  Adult Entertainment. Macmillan. Toronto, 1986.

  Adult Entertainment. St. Martin’s Press. New York, 1990.

  Adult Entertainment. Random House of Canada, 1990. Paperback release.

  What Is a Canadian Literature? Red Kite Press. Guelph, 1988.

  Volleys (with Sam Solecki & W. J. Keith). Porcupine’s Quill. Erin, 1990.

  Shooting the Stars. Porcupine’s Quill. Erin, 1993.

  Freedom from Culture. ECW Press. Toronto, 1994.

  Acts of Kindness and of Love (with Tony Calzetta). Presswerk Editions, 1995.

  An Aesthetic Underground. Thomas Allen Publishers. Toronto, 2003.

  Forde Abroad. Porcupine’s Quill. Erin, 2003.

  Standing Stones: The Best Stories of John Metcalf. Thomas Allen Publishers. Toronto, 2004.

  Shut Up He Explained. Biblioasis. Windsor, 2007.

  Going Down Slow. Biblioasis. Windsor, 2007. (Reprint)

  The Canadian Short Story. Oberon Press, Ottawa, 2014.

  Books Edited by John Metcalf

  trade books

  Best Canadian Stories 1976 (with Joan Harcourt). Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Best Canadian Stories 1977 (with Joan Harcourt). Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Best Canadian Stories 1978 (with Clark Blaise). Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Best Canadian Stories 1979 (with Clark Blaise). Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Best Canadian Stories 1980 (with Clark Blaise). Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Best Canadian Stories 1981 (with Leon Rooke). Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Best Canadian Stories 1982 (with Leon Rooke). Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Here and Now: Canadian Stories (with Clark Blaise). Oberon Press. Ottawa, 1977.

  First Impressions. Oberon Press. Ottawa, 1980.

  Second Impressions. Oberon Press. Ottawa, 1981.

  Third Impressions. Oberon Press. Ottawa, 1982.

  Making It New. Methuen Publishing. Toronto, 1982.

  The New Press Anthology: Best Canadian Stories (Vol. I) (with Leon Rooke). General Publishing. Toronto, 1984.

  The New Press Anthology: Best Canadian Stories (Vol. II) (with Leon Rooke). General Publishing. Toronto, 1985.

  The Bumper Book. ECW Press. Toronto, 1987.

  Carry on Bumping. ECW Press. Toronto, 1988.

  Writers in Aspic. Véhicule Press. Montreal, 1988.

  The Macmillan Anthology 1 (with Leon Rooke). Macmillan. Toronto, 1988.

  The Macmillan Anthology 2 (with Leon Rooke). Macmillan. Toronto, 1989.

  The Macmillan Anthology 3 (with Kent Thompson). Macmillan. Toronto, 1990.

  How Stories Mean (with J. R. [Tim] Struthers). Porcupine’s Quill. Erin, 1993.

  The New Story Writers. Quarry Press. Kingston, 1992.

  Cuento canadiense contemporáneo. John Metcalf (compilador), traducción: Juan Carlos Rodriguez. Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México. Mexico, 1996.

  Hugh Hood. Light Shining Out of Darkness and Other Stories. McClelland and Stewart. Toronto, 2001.

  Best Canadian Stories 2007. Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Best Canadian Stories 2008. Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Best Canadian Stories 2009. Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Best Canadian Stories 2010. Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Best Canadian Stories 2011. Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Best Canadian Stories 2012. Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Best Canadian Stories 2013. Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  Best Canadian Stories 2014. Oberon Press. Ottawa.

  textbooks

  Wordcraft (Books 1–5). J. M. Dent and Sons. Toronto, 1967–77. (Vocabulary and comprehension books, Grades 7–11.)

  Rhyme and Reason. Ryerson Press. Toronto, 1969. (Poetry textbook, Grades 8–10.)

  Salutation. Ryerson Press. Toronto, 1970. (Anthology of world poetry. Grades 10–12.)

  Sixteen by Twelve. McGraw-Hill. Toronto, 1971. (Canadian short stories. Grades 10–12.)

  The Narrative Voice. McGraw-Hill. Toronto, 1971. (Canadian short stories. University text.)

  Kaleidoscope. Van Nostrand Reinhold. Toronto, 1972. (Canadian short stories. Junior high school.)

  The Speaking Earth. Van Nostrand Reinhold. Toronto, 1972. (Canadian poetry. Grades 9–11.)

  Stories Plus. McGraw-Hill. Toronto, 1979. (Canadian stories. Grades 10–12.)

  New Worlds. McGraw-Hill. Toronto, 1980. (Canadian stories. Grades 8–9.)

  Making It New. Methuen. Toronto, 1982. (Trade and university text.)

  Canadian Classics. McGraw-Hill Ryerson. Toronto, 1993.

  For Oberon Press

  At Peace. Ann Copeland. 1978.

  Taking Cover. Keath Fraser. 1982.

  The Elizabeth Stories. Isabel Huggan. 1984.

  The Love Parlour. Leon Rooke. 1977

  Cry Evil. Leon Rooke. 1980.

  For Quarry Press, Macmillan and ECW Press

  Hockey Night in Canada and Other Stories. Diane Schoemperlen. 1991.

  The Man of My Dreams. Diane Schoemperlen. 1990.

  Death Suite. Leon Rooke. 1981.

  For the Porcupine’s Quill Press

  Cape Breton Is
the Thought-Control Centre of Canada. Ray Smith. 1989.

  The Improved Binoculars. Irving Layton. 1991.

  Lunar Attractions. Clark Blaise. 1990.

  Europe. Louis Dudek. 1991.

  Endeared by Dark: The Collected Poems of George Johnston. 1990.

  Victims of Gravity. Dayv James-French. 1990.

  Volleys. Solecki, Metcalf, Keith. 1990.

  Quickening. Terry Griggs. 1991.

  Blue Husbands. Don Dickinson. 1991.

  The Happiness of Others. Leon Rooke. 1991.

  Portraits of Canadian Writers. Sam Tata. 1991.

  An Independent Stance. W. J. Keith. 1991.

  Flight Paths of the Emperor. Steven Heighton. 1992.

  Dance with Desire. Irving Layton. 1992.

  While Breath Persist. Gael Turnbull. 1992.

  A Night at the Opera. Ray Smith. 1992.

  Thank Your Mother for the Rabbits. John Mills. 1992.

  Man and His World. Clark Blaise. 1992.

  Forests of the Medieval World. Don Coles. 1993.

  Bad Imaginings. Caroline Adderson. 1993.

  How Stories Mean. John Metcalf and J. R. (Tim) Struthers. 1993.

  Apology for Absence. John Newlove. 1993.

  Mogul Recollected. Richard Outram. 1993.

  Shooting the Stars. John Metcalf. 1993.

  From a Seaside Town. Norman Levine. 1993.

  Canada Made Me. Norman Levine. 1993.

  Onlyville. Cynthia Holz. 1994.

  City of Orphans. Patricia Robertson. 1994.