Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada

The Age of Innocence

THE STORIES: Youth and hope! How adventurous, how exhilarating, how frightening it was to part the bushes at the edge and begin the journey into the dark jungle of prose fiction. Hacking through recalcitrant undergrowth with an untried machete. Sniffing the ground for possible trails. Tired metaphor: but that’s what it seemed to be when I was writing these stories between (as my little notebook reminds me) July 1965 and April 1968. It seemed a lonely exploration.

In one of his many memoirs, Clark Blaise tells of his years of apprenticeship at the University of Iowa: feverish reading of everything in sight, great safaris with new and historical figures, mighty hunters of the word, mighty game from American literature, world literature, even Canadian literature. My jungle was an emptier place; or perhaps I was lazy, or frightened.

Of course I knew something of the great masters, and I understood that as a Canadian I ought to look around for directions from my countrymen. I dutifully worked my way through Morley Callaghan, Hugh Garner, and Stephen Leacock: it was years before I even heard of Margaret Laurence, Sheila Watson or Sinclair Ross. I had tried to read The Mountain and the Valley: Ernest Buckler was a Nova Scotian like me, but somehow I was never able to get beyond about page five. I recognized that in Henry Kreisel’s The Betrayal and Douglas LePan’s The Deserter I was encountering solid writing on big subjects, but I saw no way to use their maps; and I was ignorant in the arrogance of my youth. There was no question that Brian Moore, when he appeared upon the scene, was a writer of superlative, heartbreaking talent. But I sensed I’d never learn my own way from his work; perhaps it was his European sensibility.

The first living, publishing writer I met was Austin Clarke. He burst upon the scene in Toronto like some elemental force; and through Macmillan, when I submitted a first novel (of which more later), I got to meet him. I was pleased, reassured by his generous welcoming embraces: even though I had published nothing, he treated me as if I were one of the gang, another writer. But from Austin’s Bajan prose I was obviously not going to learn much about rendering my own impulses. Nor from Mordecai Richler’s work: I read Son of a Smaller Hero, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and The Incomparable Atuk with enjoyment, but again without riveting recognition. Sarah Binks and Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack, however amusing, had the same lack of effect.

Had I been of scholarly or methodical tendency, I would have done a proper search of Canadian literature and perhaps have found something to intrigue me, but in my isolation I preferred to read The Alexandria Quartet yet again, to try more Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Chekhov, to get more Hemingway or Fitzgerald under my belt, or to devour the books I most enjoyed reading: mysteries and thrillers. Like an Eric Ambler hero, I walked alone in a cold and possibly hostile world.

But youth is brash. I was twenty-two when I began my first novel; I finished a fair copy fourteen months later. It is set in Toronto where I was living, and there are sections set in Montreal, Ottawa and Muskoka: sort of south, east, north and west, you see. The characters are university students. In an instinctive act of what critics call distancing, I had the hero come from Vancouver, not Nova Scotia. (His surname, Hood, is stolen from another young writer whom I never expected to meet.) Each of the four parts uses a different one of Eliot’s Four Quartets as a source of symbol and metaphor; each is governed by one of the four elements. The English Canadian hero falls in love with a French Canadian woman. Among my notes there are diagrams, references to Blake, to the Anatomy of Criticism, groupings of character and incident according to opposing poles of static-dynamic, rational-intuitive, chaotic-ordered. The novel is, of course, unpublished.

When I got far enough away from that book, I asked a friend of taste and wit to offer a brief judgement.

Well, he said, It proves you have a BA and that you understand the structure of the novel, that you can organize symbols, move your characters about, set scenes, and so forth. It would make a good thesis for an MA in creative writing.

Actually that overrates it.

But I learned a number of valuable lessons. I could actually get something out of my head and onto the paper; I could climb the mountain to a finished book. Those were positive; most of the lessons were negative.

My earnest beavering and the result suggested that if I were bored writing something, it would be boring to read. I saw clearly the error of metaphoric and symbolic schemes imported from outside and imposed upon the material: they would lack conviction; readers would sense the artificiality. I found I had to resist a tendency to set-piece scenes; instead, I should seek more fluid kinds of narrative progression. One note reads: Stop writing sociological, psychological crap! I became deeply suspicious of the relevance to me in my work of the standard novel as it developed through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries: The Great Tradition. Much as I admired and admire Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad and their colleagues, I suspected they had had all the adventure of inventing and stretching the form, and that a real artist ought to seek forms from within his own imperatives, that forms should arise out of the raw chaos of the material. I found I was bored writing someone else’s book.

But theory, even theory arrived at through experience, will not produce art.

While writing that first book, I wrote three short stories for relaxation. They were quirky, fun to write, and suggested certain directions, but they failed in various ways and have never been published.

(The progress of my career is complicated by a second novel which I worked on during various periods over the next three years; I learned various things before abandoning it, but none of the lessons bulks large here.)

My first reasonably successful excursion into the short story was The Galoshes (June-September, 1965). It is worked up from several snippets of anecdote from life at Dalhousie University. It is the weakest story in the collection – Black Angus is a pompous failure – but I can still look with a certain satisfaction on some sections for their lightness of touch: the progression of Jasper’s encounters with the other tenants is efficient and even enjoyable; I was pleased to have been so successful at what was simply an accurate rendering of a real and surreal apartment building. The conclusion of the two left feet is also anecdotally true, while the composition of the picture of Jasper in Gorsebrook Field was lifted from the Dylan Thomas record jacket with the bird in the snow.

Eight months passed before I tried another short story – Passion. (May, June and July, 1966; I actually wrote 172 pages during the three months, most of them on the second novel.) All writers succumb at times to the lure of word play. I came out of this story reasonably satisfied that I could play the game too, but with profound gratitude that James Joyce had been called to follow that trail to its magnificent conclusion: my material was elsewhere. Unlikely though it may seem, elements of this story are also based on anecdote: Cathy and Heathcliff are both alive and well and married, but not to each other; a recent photo reveals that she still has long-straight-glistening-goldenhair; so far as I know, neither of them knows the identification, and I think I’ll leave them in ignorance.

Colours (August-September 1966) eschews wordplay for other aesthetics. My commentary on it in Sixteen by Twelve is still in print, so I needn’t add much here. The disquisition on the string of pearls I thought a rather obvious explanation of the impulse to particularity, and Dennis Lee was right to place the story first. I was working from the notion that, if nothing else, I should try to get whatever I was writing about so strongly onto the page that its power, colour, spoor would reach up to the reader unforgettably; philosophy, ideas,the general, if dealt with at all, should be embodied, not talked through, it should be within the whole story like blood, not worn outside like a T-shirt advertising a tavern. When Van Gogh was doing his sunflowers and Rembrandt his ox carcass they were interested in sunflowers and ox carcasses. My motto was: No Billboards.

My next essay into soi-disant originality was the title story (November 1966-January 1967.) Canadian nationalism was in the air just then, thick in the air in Toronto. Large political enthusiasms (and there were lots about in the late sixties) seem to me to suffer loss of clarity, complexity, subtlety. Cape Breton… was my attempt to retrieve and fix some nuances in a valid balance. The use of juxtaposition, as mentioned in the story, was certainly not new: I got it from Pound, and he got it from others. This has been the most anthologized of the stories, somewhat through misreading, I suspect. The dream of glorious nationalism expressed through the resistance anecdotes is, for example, undercut in the first sentence of the BC anecdote: You can’t see up through the mist (up through the high timber where the air is clean and good)… The parenthesis is meant to be specifically Hemingwayish in tone and vocabulary: the Canadian nationalist, with few home grown dreams, dreams in American terms. I thought the point was hammered home in the last few lines of the story, an exhortation of absurd futility. When Robert Weaver published it in Tamarack Review this became my first published story, and I became another in the long line of writers he discovered.

Writing is perforce the loneliest profession, but some painters can chat while working: the sociable profession? My old friend Ken Tolmie was living in Toronto at this time, and I often dropped in to his studio while he was working. Apart from the enjoyment his company always affords, I could watch pictures being made, consider finished works, talk painting. Moving one’s mind from one art to another has always fascinated me and I have tried to learn from music and painting; have tried to achieve in words the subtlety of development and the emotional power of music, the visual clarity of painting. Tolmie has often used the camera as a visual notebook, so there were always boxes of photos in his studio. Shuffling through a stack one day, I picked three which interested me, took them home, and tried to write a story around them. The photos were of, as I recall, a graveyard, a gazebo, and a beach. Peril (March-April 1967) was my first concerted exploration of indirection. I was also trying to work in a relaxed, even languid progression, unlike the punchy, intense, aggressive (that is, lyric) progressions of Cape Breton… or Passion. I was happy with the easy swing of the pieces, but the closures are rather crude, perhaps, almost surprise endings. When John Metcalf selected it for his anthology The Narrative Voice, I wrote a commentary which, as is usually the case, oversimplified. But it says a number of things about the way I was working in the story and in the book; it has long been out of print, so I take the liberty of including it here, slightly shortened, slightly altered.

DINOSAUR

1. What I do not write

Walter wanted to stay with her, he did not want to go outside again. Outside you were jostled by people, the eyes of strangers stared at you and hated you for being different from them. Down into the subway, bustle and push, sweat and rush, and up again into the streets to those bloody big doors of Jaspers, VanDamme & Co. Have you finished the Commissions Post-Due Statement? And you’d hardly finished your coffee…

Penny for them, said Carol.

He squeezed her small body to him and looked desperately about.

The light on the ceiling, he replied. I was wondering what you call that shape. A trapezium?

Funny man, and nibbled his ear.

My God, if only she knew, and he squeezed her again, squeezing shut his eyes to keep out the terror and failing. Who wrote that? When? Where? Obviously part of a novel. Twentieth century. English or North American. Subway is Toronto. Penny for them sounds rather English. Let’s leave it for a while.

Call it the bone of a dinosaur and try to reconstruct the rest of the book. It begins the previous Friday afternoon, inside Walter’s head. He should be working on Commissions Post-Due but has instead been making bad metaphors on the slow passage of time. For a page or two he reflects on past injuries inflicted by the fat pig of a supervisor, daydreams of revenge. Miles, another clerk about Walter’s age but better looking, a hotshot, owner of sports car, with connections, slips a needle or two into him. Closing time, home for the weekend with Carol. He likes her, thinks he might marry her, but she’s a bit dumb and he finds he’s coming to hate that one stray strand of hair… Rest of novel: Miles gets Carol, Walter makes fool of himself at office party, has several smoothly plotted perceptions about life and people (including another woman), Carol sees too late she was wrong and the novel ends with Walter coming to a largish symbolic, metaphoric and / or psychological perception about life. He acts upon this at about 3:06 A.M. on the dark night of his soul by attacking those bloody big doors at Jaspers, VanDamme & Co. with a blow torch. We are left to guess if he goes insane, gets arrested, dies as the doors fall on him, or writes a novel about the spiritual agonies of a Commissions Post-Due clerk.

Does your reconstruction look much different from mine? You included a couple of awful parents? Right: the point is, we both have dinosaurs on our hands. If we can reconstruct a novel from a fragment it is a dinosaur, extinct, and no damn use to a writer today. It was useful thirty, forty years ago: alive, flexible, adventurous, still growing, still discovering. In a word: healthy.

2. And why

The author? Me, of course. I wrote it an hour ago. It is part of a novel, a large pastiche novel floating around in my head, a novel I hope I never bother to write. Apart from a certain archness in tone which I think is understandable under the circumstances, it seems to me a reasonably convincing bit. It satisfies all the conventions