Gwendolyn MacEwen

This article first appeared in The Varsity (Sept. 1995).

Rosemary Sullivan, an English professor at the University of Toronto's Erindale campus, says Canadians are caught in a kind of cultural amnesia. That's one of the reasons she wrote the recently released Shadowmaker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen (Harper Collins, 1995).

"Canadian culture doesn't have as many literary biographies as one would expect at this point in its history," says Sullivan. "And we need to recover those cultural moments and figures."

Canadian literature has reached a point in the 1990s where it can begin to look back critically and with nostalgia on the 1960s, when it made its first major cultural impact.

"In the 1960s a national project was acting as a catalyst to push the writing," says Sullivan.

Social events like Expo '67, which celebrated Canada's 100th birthday, and the introduction of the Canadian flag in 1965 help spur a growing nationalism. Canadian literature as we have come to know it was born in this period. And MacEwen, who published more than 20 books before her often troubled life ended in 1987, was a significant part of that birthing process.

An intensely talented writer with an original, if somewhat odd, personality, MacEwen serves as a emblem of the writers that laid the foundation of the Canadian imagination.

"It's valuable to write about her to show how textured and rich that period of the 1960s was," says Sullivan. "MacEwen had an originality and range as a writer. And she lived in a time when Canadian culture was just beginning to define itself."

Born in Toronto's west end in 1941, MacEwen grew up in the Keele and Bloor district. After she dropped out of high school two months before graduation, she saw her first novel, Julian the Magician, published in New York City when she was only 19-years-old. That novel has since been called one of the great works of the modern period.

Her later books included 11 collections of poetry, two short story collections, a second novel and three children's books. She also followed up her consuming interest in mythology by teaching herself Hebrew, Arabic and classical and modern Greek. Looking back on her life, it is difficult to come to a simple understanding of such a complex person.

Sullivan sums up MacEwen's life this way: "It's the narrative of a young woman inventing herself out of almost impossible odds with fierce intellectual training, turning herself into a remarkable writer at a moment in time that was very interesting."

Simple enough, perhaps. But is it enough to know that MacEwen's mother was in and out of mental institutions her whole life? Can the poetry be explained by the knowledge that MacEwen's father wasted his talent for photography and ended up an alcoholic on skid row, passing on his artistic ambitions to his youngest daughter? Sullivan thinks not.

"MacEwen's life had a tragic cast," she says, though she's quick to point out that no one should feel sorry for her.

"Pity implies a type of condescension," she says, "and there's too much intellectual and imaginative energy there [in MacEwen's life] for one not to feel amazing admiration."

Sullivan says she was anxious to make it clear how exciting the writer's life can be, although illustrating that life is difficult because so much of it is lived in the mind. MacEwen's early life had much pain, she says, but it also demonstrated a remarkable courage and prepared her to be the sort of writer that she would become.

"As her family was falling apart, MacEwen was writing magical books about magicians," she says. "She was always seeking some way of turning pain into affirmation."

MacEwen's only criticism of modern poetry was that it often seemed to be a reflection on pain. And she, who was so aware of the dark side of the psyche, wanted to celebrate life.

A writer with a Romantic temperament, MacEwen took the elements that life had given her and consolidated them in her art. One of her lovers told Sullivan that MacEwen was not an allegorical poet.

"What she was writing was her real life," she said.

"It was as if she lacked a kind of protective covering," says Sullivan. "The world seemed so immediate [to her] and constantly present that it seemed too much of an assault."

It was this assault that Sullivan postulates dragged MacEwen down into the dark regions of her psyche and pushed her towards the binge drinking that eventually ended her life.

The biography reads like a detective story. Sullivan uses the first-person voice to insert herself into the narrative, pointing to the architecture of the narrative. It's a way of demonstrating that writing a biography is a balancing act between the objective and the subjective.

"As soon as you turn a life into a narrative, you're selecting out what you think is relevant," she says. "Someone else would write the life differently, emphasizing different points."

She says MacEwen divided her life into separate compartments. There were many friends of hers who were unaware of other friends, which made writing the biography that much more difficult. There was often only one version of events and no corroborating evidence. But, Sullivan adds, there is always a place for doubt.

"To suggest that one can locate a truth about a life is presumptuous," she says. "An arrogant assurance that 'this is what's going on' is dangerous."

Shadow Maker is Sullivan's second literary recovery project. Her first, a biography of prose poet Elizabeth Smart, was nominated for the Governor General's award for non-fiction.

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Related links:

• Gwendolyn MacEwen (U of T Poetry)
• Gwendolyn MacEwen (Wikipedia)
• The Selected Gwendolyn MacEwen (Exile Editions, 2007)
• Gwendolyn MacEwen Park

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Comment:

Reading this 14 years later (cripes!), I'm struck most by this:

"Canadian culture doesn't have as many literary biographies as one would expect at this point in its history," says Sullivan. "And we need to recover those cultural moments and figures."

Canadian literature has reached a point in the 1990s where it can begin to look back critically and with nostalgia on the 1960s, when it made its first major cultural impact.

In the intervening decade-and-a-half, we haven't been overwhelmed with critical biographies, critical cultural histories, critical literary reviews. John Metcalf and Roy MacSkimming provided radically different perspectives on the post-nationalist ferment period. I've blogged on both ot them recently. George Fetherling's memoirs are perhaps the best reflections of the period to date.

There's much yet to be written (and not all of it about the Sixties Generation, either).

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to Amy Lavender Harris's Imagining Toronto (Mansfield Press, 2009) for a different kind of critical review of time and place.

Robins Feeding

This has absolutely nothing to do with literature. It's just cute and astonishing. These robins were born in a nest on my front porch eight days ago.

John Metcalf

Shut Up He Explained: A Literary Memoir Vol. II
by John Metcalf
Biblioasis, 2007

An Aesthetic Underground: A Literary Memoir
by John Metcalf
Thomas Allen, 2003

Kicking Against The Pricks
by John Metcalf
ECW, 1982

For 40 years, John Metcalf has been trying to introduce Canadian readers to elegance. In 1982, he told Geoff Hancock, "Critics in Canada don’t have a horror of elegance. They don’t even know its there." He quoted Evelyn Waugh’s Paris Review interview:

I think that your questions are dealing too much with the creation of character and not enough with the technique of writing. I regard writing not as investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language. And with this I am obsessed. It is drama, speech, and events that interest me.

In response to that quotation, Metcalf said:

Now, that sentence, ‘I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language’ is a statement that many today would have difficulty understanding. They’re so used to the idea of literature being about something or of using literature as something else – as sociology, history, psychology, what have you. The idea that it’s a verbal structure in the sense in which a lyric poem, for example, is a verbal structure, is an idea that’s largely foreign now to most readers of novels – even intelligent readers of novels (Kicking Against The Pricks, 10).

Here is the essence of Metcalf’s project: To inculcate into Canadian letters an aesthetic that takes pleasure in rhetoric. Short stories, he insists, are "performance," not telling of tales. What should concern refined readers is the arrangement of the words. The extent to which he takes this argument is perhaps best shown by noting that Kicking Against the Pricks includes an essay titled, "Punctuation as Score." An example:

Single marks here are appropriate to tone and character; I would go so far as to say that they are an aspect of characterization. The irony implied in the single marks would have been too crude had the marks been double; the reader would have been bludgeoned rather than tapped or flicked.

Do not ask yourself, then, what a story is "about." Ezra Pound told us poems are their own meanings. Metcalf says the same of short stories. Ask yourself, How well has the writer performed? (Did you notice how I punctuated that last sentence? I could have written: ‘Ask yourself, "How well has the writer performed?"’ Or ‘Ask yourself: How well has the writer performed?’ Or ‘Ask yourself how well the writer has performed.’ – This is the type of reading Metcalf demands. Which variation is best?)

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Metcalf was born in England in 1938. In 1962, he moved to Montreal, where he taught high school. He began writing short stories. He won a CBC writing contest. He had eight stories accepted for back-to-back issues of PRISM (he submitted 16), and his work was selected to appear in Modern Canadian Stories (Ryerson Press, 1966) alongside the writing of Mordecai Richler, Alice Munro, Hugh Hood, Ethel Wilson and Irving Layton.

In An Aesthetic Underground, Metcalf writes: "The book represented only the fourth time since Raymond Knister’s Canadian Short Stories in 1928 that Canadian story writers had been anthologized."

Metcalf was soon to remedy that.

As the jacket of An Aesthetic Underground notes:

Since the 1960s, [Metcalf] has been instrumental in getting Canadian writing into schools, has organized readings, helped found the Writers’ Union of Canada, orchestrated conferences, encouraged accessible and vigorous critical debate, and documented the history of Canadian publishing in three fabled book collections, two of which are now housed in the National Library. Between 1976 and 1993 he edited and co-edited 18 anthologies of Canadian short stories and compiled seven textbooks of Canadian stories for use in schools and universities.

In that same work, he writes:

I suffered from the delusion that Canada could be improved. Since then, I feel that year by year Canada has been in continuous cultural decline. Our schools are a disaster. Our public life is a grim farce.

Here we see the other side of Metcalf, the one perhaps more broadly known. The curmudgeon. The anti-nationalist. The High Modernist. Metcalf employs a rhetorical strategy that emphasizes the distance between his ambition (large, transformational) and his achievements (large, but recognized only by a quiet few). It is also, of course, a strategy that portions blame elsewhere. Canada is in cultural decline, he says. Continuous cultural decline. His messianic mission failed because he came down from the mountain and we were all watching TV or reading Michael Ondattje.

Roy MacSkimming's The Perilous Trade tells a compelling counter-narrative, one grounded in the concrete realities of the publishing business, not aesthetic ideals. (Are these contexts in anything other than perpetual conflict?)

The jacket copy of Shut Up He Explained captures the nature of Metcalf's struggle:

Indeed, this may just be his most important and engaged book. Certainly it will be among his most controversial. What his critics will refuse to see, of course, is that it is also among his most positive, that it is a celebration of the best literature Canada has to offer, the birth of which Metcalf himself both witnessed and actively encouraged (emphasis added).

Shut Up He Explained purports to be the sequel to An Aesthetic Underground. In a simplistic way it is, but it is also much more. David Helwig calls it an "anatomy," lifting the meaning from Northrop Frye: "quotation, digression, obsession." He is right. Metcalf explores in his latest all the themes and issues of his previous nonfiction writings. However, though it’s subtitled "A Literary Memoir," it is not anything as simple as that. What it is, is a performance. And a compelling one, too.

An Aesthetic Underground seemed to me to be shackled. I wasn’t sure by what. By Metcalf’s Englishness, I thought. He writes about his first wife, his divorce, his second wife, the adopted and foster children, but he does not confess deep conflicts in his soul. The book is called a memoir, but Metcalf is most animated when slamming cultural bureaucrats and the ignorance of Canadian readers. That is, when he is most argumentative. Later I realized, too, that chunks of this memoir (2003) were lifted straight out of Kicking Against the Pricks (1982). Memories that one took for current, were in fact over 20 years old. Had the passage of time brought no new insights? It seemed not. Metcalf’s persona was remarkably consistent.

Funnily enough. The anecdote Metcalf recounts to explain the title of Shut Up He Explained also occurs in Kicking Against the Pricks. Here it is in the earlier book:

I was grateful, too, for George Bowering’s maunderings because the funny spelling reminded me of Ring Lardner and I went back to "The Young Immigrunts" which contained the lines:
Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly.
Shut up he explained.

Metcalf says in the first chapter of Shut Up that many people tried to dissuade him from using the title, but he insisted and won out. I’m glad he persisted. It’s the right title because, caught at the right angle, it’s exceptionally funny. Which Metcalf is, especially I would argue when he is at his most insightful. He is earnest too, of course. One could hardly edit an anthology called Best Canadian Stories and not be. And that earnestness can be damaging. Kicking Against the Pricks is a title meant to wound. Shut Up also appears to be, but it isn’t.

An anecdote from the opening chapter:

I remember being at Hugh Hood’s house one day in 1978 after Alice Munro had published Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You and Who Do You Think You Are? In generally playful mood, we were composing other conversational and colliquial titles that Alice might use on future books. Our minds seemed to be running on admonitions to children. Hugh’s best advice was Just You Wait Until You Get Home. Mine was You Should Have Gone Before We Left. In collegial spirit, we passed them on to Alice who was very unamused.

In a nutshell, that’s John Metcalf. Clever, mischievous, lively.

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Is he right?

In his Quill and Quire review of Shut Up, Nathan Whitlock managed to say that "many of [Metcalf's] attacks on CanLit complacency ... are as accurate and necessary as ever."

Yet he is also barely contained in his complaint that Shut Up is a confused mess:

Even the most language-conscious reviewer starts to suspect that either Metcalf’s intentions aren’t serious (the “prankster” angle), or that he has reached a point in his career in which, utterly despairing of our ability to recognize literary greatness, he has given up even trying to make sense.

Whitlock concludes:

Like his protegé Stephen Henighan, Metcalf is much better at identifying symptoms than diagnosing the underlying illness, and he is no good at all at prescribing a cure – his beloved “aesthetic approach” to literature being just as likely to lead to empty, middlebrow doily-making as to James Joyce.

Doily-making. James Joyce. Are these the only options?

At the heart of the three books under consideration here, is Metcalf’s engagement with the short story in Canada. For 40 years, Metcalf has been championing elegance (the same word Sean Penn used in reference to Barak Obama at last year's Oscars). Elegance would seem to be on an up-swing, and in increasing (and necessary) demand, and I applaud Metcalf's ability to illustrate literary elegance and promote it.

At the same time, one must acknowledge that Metcalf can be inelegant. Whitlock's brief review provides some examples. The habit of long quotation, for example. Long self-quotation.

Metcalf has left a legacy (which he continues to build on) which will not soon fade. One wishes, however, that he'd met encountered editors equal in intelligence and determination who could have wrestled Metcalf's worse habits out of him.

That said, I don't share Whitlock's complaint that Shut Up is a "mess."

I found it more compelling than An Aesthetic Underground, probably because it provided a more revealing account of Metcalf the man. Yes, it rambled. Yes, it was a little bit memoir, a little bit literary criticism, a little bit confessional, a little bit laundry list, and a little bit promotional for his engagement with Biblioasis.

But for all of those reasons, I thought the book "worked." It rose above the sum of its disparate parts, and it will stand as a testament to a remarkable career. (Alex Good's review of Shut Up in The Toronto Star [Oct. 14, 2007] carried the headline: "Still the grouch, still essential.")

The Globe and Mail's review of the title was headlined, "Metcalf: Still Canlit's Gadfly" (Oct. 6, 2007).

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Here's something new from Metcalf: An interview with Nigel Beale (May 2009). So you can hear him for yourself. Or this one from the same site (2007).

New Facebook Group

There is now a Facebook group for this blog.

The Perilous Trade

Let's confess: Writers are odd. We have this strange view of literature, that is it something significant unto itself.

Literature qua literature, as the graduate students might say. It makes nothing happen.

This dysfunctional view has been stoked by the academy, though the englightened among us (read economists) know truly what's what.

Which is that, it's the economy, stupid.

Which means literature is subservient to the publishing industry, otherwise known as The Perilous Trade (M&S, 2003, 2007).

This rich and rewarding reference work by Roy MacSkimming is subtitled "Book Publishing in Canada 1946-2006." Reading it, one is likely to be amazed that there is any such thing as Canadian literature at all.

Perilous trade? More risky than rum running, readers are led to believe.

The ups-and-downs of the industry are all here, and surely this book is required reading in all Canadian publishing programs. The high level advice will surprise no one: Non-fiction makes money, trade publishing (i.e., literature) doesn't.

The publishing industry in Canada has weathered massive storms in the past six decades. A few people got rich, most didn't. It's all here: the Chapters debacle, the Stoddart debacle, the multinationals debacle, the rise of the internet, the rise and fall and rise (and fall?) of government supports, the post Expo 67 boom.

What isn't here (it's not what this book is about) is an analysis of how the forces of the industry picked winners and losers among Canadian writers. The book makes clear that there were many strong winds blowing. Surely this chaotic market influenced "Canadian literature" (I throw this category out there at the risk that it actually exists).

MacSkimming quotes the always striking John Metcalf on the recent state of publishing in Canada: "the manufacturing of celebrity by ignorant media and the manipulation of the audience by publicity budgets" (371).

He also quotes Karl Siegler, who "prophesied ... the great flowering of Canadian owned publishing since the 1960s will eventually prove to have been a one-generation phenomenon" (372).

One tries to remain optimistic. Is it about who owns the means of production or about the ability of Canadians to tell their own unique stories? Or just about the best writers being able to get their work in front of readers?

One just hopes the age old questions go on and on.

Is it good enough that Canadians maintain an ability to write best sellers and sell them internationally?

I say no. What kind of culture is that?

A boring one. But I'm just a literary snob.

Marianne Apostolides

Being a graduate of East York Collegiate Institute (1987), I feel like I ought to have known Marianne Apostolides or at least the protagonist of her novel Swim (Book Thug, 2009).

Kat is the main character's name and swim is what she does, 39 laps to be exact, her age. While she swims, she contemplates a question: Whether to leave her husband. Meanwhile, her teenage daughter sits poolside and starts a conversation with an attractive young man.

This action takes place in Greece, where Kat has taken her daughter following the death of her father (the girl's grandfather). Back to the home country, is the purpose of the journey. Back also, perhaps, to a place of fundamental truth and stability.

Because instability is all around Kat. Her swimming is the central metaphor for this; she is in constant process, constant motion. But the details she reveals of her life are also highly uncertain. Her marriage is not strong. She has an affair. She is studying literary theory.

Of that triumvirate, literary theory may be the most destabilizing of them all!

Kat swims and plans by the end of 39 laps to make a decision about the fate of her marriage. While she swims, she thinks about her life and quotes Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan.

At this point, I interrupt this post to say where the hell was the internet when I was an undergraduate?! Where was Google?! Look at what you can find out now with only a simple one, two, click.... And people are wasting their time downloading fucking ringtones?

I learned today that 40 per cent of Canadians have bought a book online. That makes book buying the most pervasive online activity. Which should be good news for books like Swim, because good luck finding any book published by the glorious little Book Thug on the shelves of Chapters-Indigo. At the big John and Richmond store, I couldn't even find a copy of Barry Hannah's Airships.

But I digress.

Swim is only 93 pages long. One is tempted to call it a poetic novel, but it's more of a theory novel. My mother, for that reason, wouldn't like it. I thought it was charming, though it reminded me of being an undergraduate (the last time I read any significant amount of theory). I would like Apostolides to write something without quoting others. To ingest the theory and spit out something that is completely her own.

I recognize that that request may be unfair.

The author has given us something unique with her debut novel. I'm glad to have read it.

Derek Weiler

I probably met Derek Weiler first at the University of Waterloo in the late-1980s, when we both studied English there and wrote for the student newspaper, Imprint. Strangely, I have no recollection of meeting him then. I knew his byline, though, and took note when I started to see it again a decade later in Quill and Quire, where he would become editor, and other places.

Weiler passed away yesterday at the age of 40. I met him a few times in the past decade and corresponded on occasion. We were Facebook "friends," but I don't have any claim to have known him. As has been universally reported upon the news of his death, Weiler was highly professional, courteous, inquisitive, sensitive, generous, articulate, interesting, well-read, funny, and skeptical. In short, just about everything one could ever ask for in a fellow human being.

Many others knew him in greater specificity, and their tributes are beginning to tell us a little bit more about this remarkable man. He had seemed to me to be a contemporary, which he was, and part of an open-ended future, which is never a sure thing for any of us. This is a hard fact that shocks us every time someone dies who shouldn't, even though we know that time will come for each of us.

Weiler apparently had been the subject of serious medical concerns for some time. Knowing this now (only learning it today), I am all the more amazed at what he was able to accomplish. By which I don't mean the volume of his work, or the position he attained, but the persistent clarity of his critical prose. I enjoyed reading his editorial and reviews and interviews for the pleasure of being walked through his thoughts. He gave good read, Weiler did.

It goes without saying that he will be missed. Those who knew him best will know most how much has now gone. The rest of us can be saddened and shocked and reminded again of the pain of loss and be befuddled by what it all means to lose someone so clearly marked as a leader and mentor. There are many socks now needing pulling up, more questions to ask and decorum to uphold. Life, in its mystery, will go on.

To the student journalists out there, at this moment I envy you. What roaring balls of fire you must be. Dig for the truth, be relentless, learn your trade inside and out. But please, in the end, don't forget how to be nice. To gain the world, you needn't lose your soul.

Derek, you've caused a sensation. I wish you were here to see it.