by André Alexis
I began this essay wanting simply to talk about Beckett, a writer who has meant much to me, as a way to avoid the emotions brought on by heartbreak. But rereading Beckett, taking the consolation his work offers (humour, a mirror, distraction), has had the effect of bringing me to think about the connection between “solace” and “reconciliation,” the solace one (sometimes) feels when one sees clearly where one is and where one has been. That is, the solace that comes when one is able to bring together, for instance, the end of a relationship and the moment when heartbreak begins to heal, or the first time one reads a writer (like Beckett) and the latest reading of him (which is another way of bringing two of one’s many selves together), or the moment of Dante’s greatest pain (at Beatrice’s death) and that moment’s transcendence through art (La Vita Nuova). Being able to hold two or more things together at once: that’s the reconciliation I have in mind, here.
* * *
1 Beckett’s characters are as obsessive as he is on this score. They regularly disavow responsibility for the words they speak. They refuse to admit they have any creativity. They compare themselves to mechanicals whose only work is the turning of a tap: on or off (see Cascando, for instance).
2 A prosimetrum is a literary work made up of passages of poetry and prose. For example: Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and, of course, this essay, which was written with La Vita Nuova very much in mind.
3 This translation of La Vita Nuova was modified from that of A. S. Kline (copyright 2001). Modifications by André Alexis.
4 “Shit! I stole it from Statius me-self.”
5 Borges was the first to speak of “reverse influence,” the idea that as Kafka’s work influences our reading of Dickens, it allows us to identify the Kafkaesque in Dickens. So, we can as meaningfully speak of Kafka’s influence on Dickens as of Dickens’s influence on Kafka.
6 An aside: how many ways are there for a writer to be original? While rereading Beckett and La Vita Nuova, I could come up with only two fairly bland versions of originality:
1. use the material you have in a new way formally (from sonnet to Shakespearean sonnet, from story to detective story, etc.)
2. think of the material you use in a new way (concrete poetry, sound poetry, etc.)
The problem, I think, is that I confused “originality” and “innovation.” The man or woman who first used language poetically was being original; all others have innovated. Origin comes from the Latin word origo, which means “beginning.” The phrase fons et origo means (or is translated as) “source and beginning.” The word innovation comes from the Latin word novus, which means “new.” Ezra Pound’s exhortation to the writer to “make it new” is an encouragement to do the one thing we can do: use the material we have inherited in a slightly different way. Pound is exhorting writers to do precisely what the greats who preceded us have done: renew the possibilities of the art, leave an unforgettable stamp. We are to do, over and again, what has been done a thousand times before. And fair enough: a new version of old or an old version of new.
But to get back to that “man or woman who first used language poetically” . . .
There’s no originality (in the sense of a beginning) there either, I think. The “man or woman who first used language poetically” is pure fiction. I mean, I can’t at all believe in the moment when one suddenly looked up and said something “poetic” to another or to herself. For one thing, this suggests a rigid line between poetic and non-poetic speech. (Walter Benjamin’s dictum that great poetry springs from great prose — speech, for instance — seems undeniably true, to me at any rate.) For another, it suggests that Poetry (understood as language used for aesthetic effect) came into being in one extraordinarily auspicious moment. Is that credible? No, I think Language itself is the fons et origo of Poetry. Poetry and prose (not quite arbitrarily separated) spring from the nature of language. All of us who use language are (at times) helplessly poetic. Poetry is an endless recurrence of the same, of the thing within language or the aspect of language that will out. Writers, and speakers too, exploit this aspect of language (or is it, rather, this flaw in language?). Poets draw our attention to it most insistently. On this model, the poetic is rather like the yellow and red motes of fire that dance above a fireplace. One wouldn’t say the fire “intends” them, though they are inevitable and captivating. The artist, the one who builds the fire, has intention. His or her intent may be the warmth or the motes, or both the warmth and the motes, but none is at the origin of fire.
7 I was originally asked to write this essay on Beckett by Michael Redhill for Brick magazine. After some debate, the editors of Brick declined to publish the essay. I had a note from Michael Redhill expressing his regret at the board’s decision, but there were two reasons the piece could not be accepted. First, some of the editors found the essay too “academic” for Brick. A good reason, I think, and I wish they’d left it at that. (After all, to “fail” when writing about Beckett is almost to succeed.)
Their second reason, however, was bewildering. Brick’s editors felt that the poems (the poems in particular) would hurt the woman with whom I had, two years previously, broken up, the woman they assumed was the “K” referred to in the essay. They did not know whom the essay was actually about, but they assumed they knew, because the Toronto literary scene is small, inbred, and provincial. Michael wrote me that, in his opinion, whomever the essay was actually about was immaterial. People in the community, and “K” herself, would assume it referred to her, and that — coupled with the essay’s academic tone — was enough to put them off. The editorial board did not feel that they could knowingly hurt someone who was bound to be upset by the personal nature of the revelations contained in the essay.
Now, the essay was about the woman in question, but only to an extent. It was also about another woman entirely, one with whom I had more recently broken up. And it was also about my first love, my break-up with whom deeply marked my sensibility. So, the poems were written about three women, not one. And the André Alexis in question was not entirely me, either. For one thing, I find the emotional devastation that follows the end of a relationship too difficult a place to write from.
If the editors of Brick had not known me, if they had had no idea whom I was referring to, would they have had the same qualms about the piece? I don’t think so. They would still have found the Beckett commentary “academic” and the first poem would still have struck them as bitter, but I don’t believe they’d have moved to protect someone who did not exist for them. Michael Redhill, in a post to me, insisted that I’m wrong to believe this, that the tone of the piece would have put them off, would have forced them to protect this unknown woman at the heart of the bitter first poem.
But take a look at the poems (at the “personal material”) again. The first poem, which begins “On certain days,” is, indeed, bitter. But its bitterness is what one would expect after a break-up, no? The second poem, “By morning light,” is written in the style of a Japanese poem — consciously minimalist, moving towards Beckettian. No woman is mentioned. The third poem, “A calm comes over me,” is revealing, but revealing of the state of bliss that follows lovemaking. It is filled with regret and longing. These are, surely, not offensive things to feel about a woman. But, in any case, the poem is not about “K” at all. The final poem begins “Wondering what I loved.” It is a poem of enduring affection, written with three women in mind, the “moment” in it pure invention. So, bitterness, heartbreak, longing, love, and reconciliation with the past: a sequence of emotions that (pointedly) underlies the progress of the essay itself, from the bitterness of the first poem to the grief transformed at the heart of Dante’s Vita Nuova.
WATER: A MEMOIR
. . . home is just a place you started out, the only place
you still know how to think from, so that that place is mated to this by necessity as well as choice . . .
— Roo Borson, Summer Grass
Thinking from Home
I had a wonderful grade-thirteen English teacher named Mr. Holloway. He introduced us to the Canadas of Fifth Business, The Stone Angel, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. And having discovered various versions of the world outside my door, I wanted to explore literary Canada for myself.
During my first year at Carleton University, I avoided the books I was supposed to read and, instead, read all the Canadian work I could. I discovered George Bowering, Michael Ondaatje, Earle Birney, Margaret Avison, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Dorothy Livesay. Poets, mostly, and the poet who mattered most was Margaret Atwood. For weeks, I listened obsessively to a recording of her reading from her own work. I had her voice in my head. In fact, I had a particular poem in my head: “This Is a Photograph of Me.”
This Is a Photograph of Me
It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;
then, as you scan
it, you can see something in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.
In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.
(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the centre
of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or how small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion.
but if you look long enough
eventually
you will see me.)
So . . . there I was, a nineteen-year-old man, an immigrant, listening to a Canadian woman read a poem that was crucial to him. “This Is a Photograph of Me” was not a “feminist” poem for me, not at the time. I didn’t know, then, that feminism was important to Margaret Atwood, and it would not have occurred to me that feminism could pin down a poem’s meaning. Nor did I read it as an encryption of my own “ghostly” situation. Being an immigrant and being black, I was, of course, aware that certain people are “seen,” others not. But Atwood’s poem didn’t — or did not yet — have that kind of meaning for me. At the time, the things that mattered most as I listened to the poem were the house, the balsam (or spruce), the lake, and the low hills. The land is what mattered.
(Well, the land and Margaret Atwood’s monotonous and suggestive voice.)
“This Is a Photograph of Me” held within itself a place and an anxiety — a ghost story, even — that corresponded to my own anxieties about being lost (or being gone) in Canada. Another way of putting it is: I thought I could recognize the vantage from which “This Is a Photograph of Me” was written, the point from which it was written. Atwood seemed conscious of the environment, the way a cautious animal is: uncertain of what’s before her and what is not.
Interestingly, “This Is a Photograph of Me” echoes another poem that fascinated me in 1976, my first year at Carleton: Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man.” “The Snow Man” is more philosophically angular than Atwood’s poem, but it preceded her to an intriguing place, a place where world and mind interact in singular ways. “The Snow Man” is a poem that (memorably) suggests there is such a thing as a “mind of winter” (intelligence or imagination as the essence of a season) and that one can hear “the sound of the land.” More: both “This Is a Photograph of Me” and “The Snow Man” end with a listener (Stevens) or observer (Atwood) who is both there and not there. Here is the “The Snow Man”:
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
When I first read Stevens’s poem, it struck me as Canadian, and that provoked an interesting question: is it possible to write a “Canadian” poem without actually being Canadian? Could Wallace Stevens, an American poet, have been, unbeknownst to himself, secretly Canadian? As absurd as that question is, it has intrigued me for some time.
Partly as the result of that question, I conceived
— when I was at Carleton — the idea of writing work that only Canadians could understand. Yes, I know: ridiculous, like a dog whistle for Canadians. But as someone who was unsure (and anxious about) what “Canadian” meant, it was, perhaps, natural for me to imagine a quality, an intellectual or emotional aspect shared by all who are Canadian, some quality I possessed, perhaps without being consciously aware of it, that was proof of my belonging. From there, it was a short step to imagining a literary work that could play on this quality or aspect I assumed all Canadians possessed.
Since then, I’ve come to think that the desire to write a short story or novel that could be understood only by Canadians is unworthy of a serious writer. A work which could only be understood by Canadians would have military value — you read it to someone at a border and discover at once if he or she is Canadian — but little else, excluding as it does most of humanity from its audience.
Or am I wrong here? I’ve come to accept that the greatest art is, inevitably, effortlessly universal, that great art triggers responses in readers irrespective of the reader’s time and place. The Iliad, War and Peace, King Lear . . . these were all written from somewhere, and that somewhere is held within them. But, of course, it’s not necessary to be Greek to understand The Iliad or English to understand Lear. Right. Fine. But what if, for argument’s sake, the poem that could be understood only by Canadians were deeply moving to Canadians, a poem that called to their minds precisely the land from which they think, from which their selves derive their being? When I first imagined this work, I did not think of it as a Canadian epic, an Iliad set in Kapuskasing, for instance. Rather I imagined something like the distillation of a Canadian night, a distillate of time or moments or things experienced in Canada alone.1
I have abandoned most of the literary fantasies my nineteen-year-old self conceived. They were based on the longing to belong, longing for a quality I might acquire — or unknowingly possess — that would allow me to feel I could not be bereft of Canadian culture, or of the land that is Canada. No such quality exists, but the desire to find it still moves me at times.
And as I’m going to be your guide through certain scenes and a handful of Canadian works, it’s probably good to know that your docent is, among other things, often troubled by desire for a “home.”
My First Experiences in Toronto
I left Ottawa, in 1987, to accompany my then partner to Toronto, where she would go to the Ontario College of Art and I could become part of “literary society.” I thought it might be good to meet Margaret Atwood or Michael Ondaatje, and I assumed they — and others I admired — would recognize me as one of them: that is, as a writer.2 (This is, of course, the worst possible reason to meet anyone.)
I had begun to write seriously in Ottawa. I had friends who were writers. One of them, Michael McCadden, had published a story in the Malahat Review and he’d had a play staged. That was success, as far as I was concerned. But one rarely heard about Ottawa writers in the forums that mattered to me: the Globe and Mail, Canadian Fiction Magazine, and so on. Well, no, you would occasionally read about Norman Levine, the one unquestionably great writer from Ottawa, but he hadn’t lived in Ottawa for years, so his wasn’t a living presence.3
Toronto had something else going for it. Like any big city, it attracts writers from all over the country — all those who are ambitious, as I then was. I imagined I would meet the men and women who were my contemporaries, the ones engaged in the work I had devoted myself to doing: writing stories or plays or novels that mattered. (By “mattered,” I mean I imagined myself and my contemporaries writing as well and as profoundly as Tolstoy or Joyce — unrealistic, because one has to be dead to be “Tolstoy” or “Joyce.”)
Twenty-three years later, it seems I was both right and wrong to come to Toronto.
For me, at least, Toronto is a leveller. It has taken as much as it has given. An anecdote: during my first week in Toronto, I was looking for work. I was near the corner of Yonge and Bloor, a little south of Bloor, when I decided to cross the street from the east side to the west. The cars were stopped at the light. So, no danger. But as I was about to step up onto the sidewalk, I noticed a disturbed-looking man with red “Dr. Zorba” hair coming at me. I paid no attention to him until he lowered his shoulder and knocked me back into the street. I didn’t fall, but I was pushed back onto the road into the path of the cars that were now approaching. I stepped up onto the pavement, too stunned to do or think anything. And by the time I felt outrage, the incident was over. It felt as if the city were trying to tell me something, and I regretted moving from Ottawa. I’d have felt this way for some time if, almost immediately after the incident, I hadn’t got my first job in Toronto, working in a bookstore. Rejection followed by acceptance: the pattern has defined my time in Toronto. It’s as if the city and I are in love but don’t actually like each other.
