When I first read Nick
Mount’s Arrival, I recognized a
history of the various forms of academic, institutional and cultural
gatekeeping that emerged from the 1970s CanLit boom his book maps out, and also
imitates and re-contextualizes, roughly fifty years forward into a Canadian
present. My recognition is thoroughly personal, and signals my immersion in and
interpellation by an ingrained set of historical filters and blinders. I have
to acknowledge my own privilege, even as an undergraduate at Western in the
early 1980s, and the mobility that such privilege impalpably enabled, but it
was a privilege that worked more as deficit than enabler: in a scenario
somewhat akin to Kafka’s parable, I was shown the magical door into the
creative and academic domain of Anglo-CanLit, but was never invited to cross
the threshold.
I
have remained relatively adjacent ever since, though I have never mistaken my
own tenured position in an English Department for something to complain about;
but, for me, that position remains asymptotic to the still inaccessible domain
of what I now understand as a fiction of success in the intersecting parochial
circles of the Canadian literary world. Professor Mount frames, as apologist, as
enthusiast and critic, as a historically and aesthetically proximate
participant-observer, the key players in a nascent cultural nationalism that
shaped and informed how I was taught Anglo-Canadian literature and literary
history thirty-odd years past: Atwood, Laurence, Richler, Davies, Cohen,
Watson, Purdy, Munro, Layton. (Within this inherited framework, Francophone
literature becomes one of many cultural sets subsumed within or adjunct to a
larger English-speaking national mythos – despite Mount’s fairly robust
descriptions of Marie-Claire Blais, for example, or Anne Hébert or Hubert
Aquin.) When I opened Mount’s book a few months ago, I recognized a slice of
that past where I know I came from (as Northrop Frye might have put things), and
of the recalcitrant critical context into which I was not so much invited as trained,
and then passed over.
What follows isn’t really a late-to-the-game
review of Arrival so much as a brief
set of personal and critical riffs, set off by a few resonant moments in the
book as I’d read it through. Mount has already been both lauded and excoriated,
often for what amount to pretty much the same reasons. In Arrival, he accurately and attentively revisits the cultural nationalism
of (roughly) post-centennial English Canada around the creation and
promulgation, until the mid-1980s, of what was then called CanLit. His
perspective is self-consciously sesquicentennial, though it only lightly confronts
what feels to me like a contemporary recidivist nationalism that continues to
be caught in and to resist the unsettling roils of decolonization,
reconciliation, and gender trouble. Instead, Mount re-embraces what feels like
the narrowly bracketed recovery of Anglo-Eurological prestige that drove
polemics like Margaret Atwood’s Survival:
A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), after which Mount’s book is
named. Collectively around 1968 or so, CanLit very obviously wanted to
legitimate itself as a capital-L Literature. “I wrote this book,” Mount claims
at the outset of his 2017 preface, “because it didn’t exist,” re-imagining a
kind of literary-historical terra nullius
onto which CanLit, now alongside his populist history of the CanLit boom, once sought
to inscribe itself (Arrival 1). Mount
has been criticized for mostly omitting the complex intersections of race,
region, gender, class, orientation and ideology that wove themselves through
and articulated themselves against CanLit in the early 1970s, and for
re-asserting a literary emptiness that is clearly mistaken: even before
confederation, the nascent literary domain of the Canadian was embroiled in its
own aesthetic and cultural controversies.
Earle
Birney’s oft-quoted lines—from the brief squib of a poem he titled with the
first use of the clipped portmanteau “Can. Lit.,” and which he tellingly
split-dated both 1947 and 1966—assert that “it’s only by our lack of ghosts /
we’re haunted.” But Birney’s absolutism (“only”? really, Earle?) is tendentious
and misguided: there was plenty going on, and none of it lacked for ghosts.
What it did lack was any artifice of coherence, though not for lack of trying. (“No
Whitman wanted,” is how Birney puts it, a claim about absent mythopoeia I once
heard, when I was a graduate student, repeated back to me by the one and only
Helen Vendler, on a train in Ireland from Sligo to Dublin, to meet Seamus
Heaney. But that’s another story.) If you think about it, charging Mount with
the same sins of omission and the same typological longing as his subjects and
predecessors, with their attendant exclusions and implicit structural racisms,
isn’t really much of a critique. What might be better to ask is why he or we might want to return to such
formations CanLit now, at 150+, at a remove of at least half a century.
The origin story that Mount offers is
one that I was taught, too, although his rather Toronto-centric balancing act
between two founding (father) figures for CanLit, Northrop Frye and Marshall
McLuhan, is both distorted and out of keeping with my own experience. What I
received at lectures and in seminars was mostly Frye and more Frye; one of my
professors at Western joked that many of his colleagues were “small Frye”—a
terrible pun, but not far off the mark. Mount’s argument for the formation of
CanLit centres on the intersection of granting bodies like the Canada Council
with secondary and post-secondary schools and with the publishing industry,
particularly the dissemination of the New Canadian Library. But, in terms of an
aesthetic of cultural nationalism, the often conflicted counterpoint of the
work of U of T professors Frye and McLuhan remains for Mount at the core of the
CanLit’s conceptual apparatus:
Mostly,
what Frye—and McLuhan—did for Canadian writers of all kinds and loyalties was
to provide examples of international success, proof that you could be not just
Canadian and a writer but Canadian and written about, argued over, read. (75)
It’s notable that
McLuhan is second banana in Mount’s phrasing here, but the idea is still not far
from what I experienced: that Frye and McLuhan offer forms of imitatio scriptor, modeling literary
greatness on a cosmopolitan stage. It’s no accident that Atwood’s Survival begins with epigraphs from
Margaret Avison and from Frye, her professor, that gesture at the collision of
the parochial and the worldly. Birney’s poem doesn’t, in fact, lack for ghosts,
and the spectres of Frye and Roy Daniells, it’s possible to remark now, loom
posthumously through his lines; those spectres, it turns out, are the ones who
lament a literary lack, and did so well in advance of what Mount presents as
CanLit.
In
Survival, Atwood echoes and
re-purposes a “great man” ideology of literary value, transposing its key so
that it might, in a gesture of gender-neutrality, include women’s writing too:
“In Canada there are many authors and many books, but few obvious classics”
(11). What constitutes a “classic,” for Atwood in 1972, remains relatively
unchallenged, and still resolutely patriarchal, as she suggests when she quotes
another U of T professor, E. K. Brown, with measured irony around an aesthetic
of greatness that’s hardly at any remove from Thomas Carlyle: “A great art is
fostered by artists and audience possessing in common a passionate and peculiar
interest in the kind of life that exists in the country where they live” (qtd.
on 181). Roy Daniells, who was chair of my own Department of English at UBC
through the 1950s, is deeply and thoroughly influenced by Brown, who had in turn
emerged from the tutelage of Pelham Edgar, when he reproduces this yearning for
Anglo-Celtic greatness and for reconstructed autochthony in a 1955 chapter on
Canada’s “Literature: Poetry and the Novel” (qtd. in Djwa 313). Noting that no
great writer has yet emerged who might be “capable of producing a large number
of stories which are united by a sensibility, a style, a locale, and a
selection of material,” Daniells nonetheless asks for a literature keyed to
geography and cultural amalgam, expressing a unifying sense of “first the land
itself, the great terrain, and second the juxtapositions of race, nationality,
and creed within the country and upon the continent.” Daniells, Djwa argues,
was
particularly interested in the larger geographical features that had
conditioned the history of the country – especially the experience of entering
the country through the St Lawrence (a concept later developed metaphorically
by Frye in his Conclusion to the Literary History of Canada) – and the
importance of landscape on all forms of new writing. (309)
Greatness comes in
response to addressing the pressing existential and fundamentally
Anglo-Canadian, settler-culture question of where here is. CanLit, in Mount’s
reading, aspires—and occasionally achieves—recognizable greatness. But it does
so by stringent gatekeeping, by carefully policing its nascent boundaries.
Mount suggests—and I think he’s wrong
about this, given my own epigone encounters with some of these writers—that the
universities (such as my own campus, where Daniells was a key player in the
founding of the academic/public intellectual journal Canadian Literature, a juggernaut of canon formation in 1958)
played a minor role in the making of CanLit, which he understands as more
populist and distributed:
Universities
did little to encourage Canadian literature, but they did create a record
number of new spaces in which others could – all those new campuses and new
classrooms and the theatres, galleries, bookstores, pubs, and cafes that
followed them. More by accident than by design (which is pretty much how a
university develops, because pretty much how knowledge develops), they greatly
increased the opportunities for the kind of chance encounters that turn young
people toward artistic lives. (75)
I’d like to pause here
to tell one of two stories, this one involving me—who positioned himself,
albeit about a decade late, as one of those “young people”—being turned not
toward but away from CanLit.
As
an undergraduate at Western, I was in close proximity to a number of first- and
second-generation CanLiterati; I took courses from James Reaney and Don McKay,
for example, and—because Toronto was only a two-hour drive up the 401—there was
a robust slate of live readings and a strong writer-in-residence programme. In
my fourth year, I took what I understood to be one of the English Department’s
first versions of a creative writing seminar, led by a professor whose own
output inclined toward creative non-fiction, his nearly sui generis mix of the critical and the confessional. (I won’t name
him, but if you are so inclined you can find him out.) He, too, seemed to me at
the time to be CanLit adjacent, an adherent more than a recognized member of
the clique—award-winning writers were his friends and colleagues. I thought,
like others in the class, that we were being offered slight but tangible access
to the post-Survival literary
establishment, that a university, as a key site of the management of what
constituted a nascent contemporary canon of Canadian writing, was opening the
gate a crack.
I
ended up with a B+ in the course, a grade designed to signal, as the professor
later explained to me, that I had lots of knowledge but no real talent. For him
I didn’t write—especially poetry—the right way, or well. I had already had some
inkling of this trouble when I had visited the current writer-in-residence, a
Toronto-based poet in print through McClelland and Stewart, earlier in the
term; “Hmm,” she had said as she flipped through the handful of pages I had
submitted, “do you really want to publish these?” The poems were, she said,
“kind of precious,” and she didn’t know what to tell me. “Do you want these
published?” she repeated, at a loss for suggestions. “No,” I said. “No.” Which
was a lie. What I had wanted from her was some recognition even of my writing’s
modest value, some affirmation, some key to set me on the road to any sort of
publication. But it wasn’t forthcoming, and I left her temporary office
temporarily defeated. (Footnote: one of the texts she read, which I had been
drafting and developing for the creative writing seminar, would eventually find
publication as a long-form prose poem called “Pining” in West Coast Line.) What would have helped me, I think, was even a
pittance of generosity. The creative writing professor, in a semblance of
deference, invited me out after the term was done for a beer at a local pub,
Chaucer’s. I came prepared with two books in my satchel: Michael Ondaatje’s The Cinnamon Peeler and George
Bowering’s George, Vancouver. I
admired both poets, and one of my favourite texts had been Ondaatje’s chapbook Tin Roof, a copy of which I had bought
from Ondaatje himself at a reading at the Forest City Gallery. Look, I said to
my prof as I set them on the table: “This is the kind of writing I don’t want
to do.” I was, even then, more of a formalist, reacting against the looseness
of TISH and the confessional and landscape regionalism. It’s that
as-yet-unsettled formalism, I think, that had been read as “precious.” “Well,”
he said over his beer, adopting the condescension of the trained academic,
“these are two very different writers, you know.” They were both his friends.
Yes, I knew. “I’ve never met anyone,” he told me, “who seemed to know so much
about recent poetry but wasn’t able to do it.” His version of the CanLit gate
was closing for me. He seemed to think he was trying to be gentle, but there
was meanness there, a stiff inability even to want to foster my desire, as a
tyro, to be a part of that small cultural world, a world he himself wasn’t
quite in with.
So here is my other undergraduate story
triggered by Nick Mount’s book. In my first year at Western, Austin Clarke was
the writer-in-residence. Among other things, he took it upon himself to hold
weekly informal seminars for any students who wanted to talk about writing or
to get a bit of feedback on their work: a workshop, but without the constraints
of formal study. He modeled a kind of generosity and personal attentiveness, a
practice of care, that was rigorous but also, I came to realize later,
atypically open-hearted for the Canadian scene. He had a way of making space
for others, not by deference, but by interested engagement. He is one of the
very few non-white writers cited in Atwood’s Survival, and not so much as colleague but more an figural example,
as stand-in. Her chapter seven describes “The Reluctant Immigrant” by
summarizing two stories from Clarke’s When
He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks; they centre, for Atwood,
on economic and social disenfranchisement, “failure masquerading as
achievement,” devolving to debasing resentments about money (151-2)—they’re not
about craft or voice, but reductively allegorize social marginalization through
realist depictions of urban racism. Mount repurposes Atwood’s distancing
tactics when he re-narrates an anecdote about one of publisher Jack
McClelland’s notorious encounters with Clarke:
Austin
Clarke was so abusive to M&S staff that Jack [McClelland] suggested he look
for another publisher. “What you need more than anything else, “ writes Jack,
“is a good swift kick in the ass.” (173).
Mount seems charmed by
McClelland’s blustery machismo, but what I hear in this story is recalcitrant
structural racism, an inability to empathize with Clarke, to address what it is
he might have been angry about. The threat was that a version of that cultural
gate, suffused with a version of white universalism, might snap shut.
In
the first of our writing workshops with Clarke, he brought along two LPs and a
portable record player. One was a boxed set of Beethoven symphonies, I think
the von Karajan complete on Deutsche Grammophon. To get the ten or so of us
present to reflect on the relationship between style and meaning, he wanted to
play one of the pieces, one movement, but couldn’t get the records out of the
cardboard sleeves. He pulled out a jackknife and, cursing under his breath,
tried to cut the box open along the edge. “My daughter,” he said, “has scotch
taped it for a joke.” He gave up, and tossed the set onto the table in front of
him. The other record was Milestones
by Miles Davis. It hadn’t been taped up. He played us the title track, a
famously galloping modal tune that begins side two. “What do you hear?” he
asked us. Part of his point was no doubt to invite us to consider the
challenges of blackness in Canada. Most people registered the up-tempo groove
as ebullient, liquid, sanguine, joyful. No, said Austin Clarke, “what I hear is
anger. Miles is angry. Think of the blade-like sound of his Harmon mute on
other songs.” And then he laughed. And he didn’t tell us exactly what he knew Miles
Davis was angry about.
When
I turned in some of my nascent fiction to him later in the term, he didn’t put
me off. I had what I thought was a concept—something like second-rate Lydia Davis, I’d later figure out—that I wouldn’t write more than a page per story, a story
per page. The idea was to be clipped and suggestive. His unlit pipe clamped in
his teeth, Clarke read it through silently, in front of me, looked up over the
top of the page, and said, “Great. Now where’s the rest of it?” Two lessons, at
least, emerge for me from that moment: first, don’t have so little humility as
to believe your own aesthetic malarkey, and second, more importantly, try to ask
for more, be kind, be generous, be open. Austin Clarke’s sense of anger came, I
think, from having that generosity thwarted and unreturned. That negation, that
thwarting, I think, is a large part of what still constitutes CanLit at all.
Such gatekeeping needs not so much to be reanimated as to have its worn out scotch
tape cut.
Books and Such I
Quoted From
Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature.
Anansi, 1972.
Birney, Earle. Ghost in the Wheels: The Selected Poems of
Earle Birney.
McClelland and Stewart, 1977.
Djwa, Sandra. Professing English: A Life of Roy Daniells.
U of
Toronto P, 2002.
Mount, Nick. Arrival: The Story of CanLit. Anansi,
2017.
