Beauty & Sadness

by André Alexis

  Another problem for those who wander into his critical books looking for help in finding “good writing” is that Metcalf tends to like “finicky” and he particularly likes English versions of “finicky.” His own sentences, which he sometimes quotes as examples, are often overwritten and, at times, awkward in their frank desire to be good. It wouldn’t, usually, be fair to point to the failings in a man’s prose as a sign that he does not know good prose from bad. There are great critics who can recognize the good in art without being able to reproduce it themselves. But Metcalf is a special case. In a recent autobiographical book called An Aesthetic Underground: A Literary Memoir, he compares literature to fine wine and speaks of his sensibility as if it were a highly developed palate. He suggests that, as a connoisseur of wine can tell good wine from bad with a sip, so the trained literary mind can tell a good book after a page or two. He has made his sensibility the issue.

  Now, of course, many critics behave this way. Metcalf himself borrowed the “connoisseur” analogy from Cyril Connolly. But a novel or short story is different from wine in that, often and with the best work, you must finish to know what is effective and what is not. It’s easy to pick bad sentences in Poe’s work (Aldous Huxley does and snickers at them). But Poe stays in the mind, awkward prose or not. (Crome Yellow? Not so much, though it is certainly “better written.”) Dostoyevsky is a similar case. Yes, Nabokov was right to criticize Dostoyevsky’s writing. And yes, Demons is, for long stretches, badly written and tedious. But I defy anyone to point to the equivalent, anywhere in world literature, of the scene in which Kirilov, the nihilist, must decide whether or not to kill himself. Pure, unforgettable nightmare. Fanatics of “great prose,” like Metcalf (or Nabokov), reduce novels and stories to one of their elements and then insist that that element — style, in this case — is the legitimate one for critical consideration.

  What Metcalf and Cyril Connolly before him have done is to declare the finesse of their own sensibilities sufficient to tell “good” work from “bad.” But, of course, they are the only possessors of their sensibilities. There is no basis for a universal aesthetic scale, unless the thought behind a sensibility is unpacked. Just to be clear: I’m convinced that Metcalf and I, if we sat down together and read a page from such and such a book, would agree, maybe eight times out of ten, on what is good and what is not. On the evidence, I think Metcalf and I have similar sensibilities. But those who have been influenced by him — Ryan Bigge, for instance — don’t possess the same credibility as Metcalf, though they allow themselves to make the same kinds of pronouncements.

  So, one could legitimately say that Metcalf has turned a generation of critics away from “academic” evaluations of literature. He has insisted that pleasure is the most important aspect of any work (as Larkin did before him) and he made the critic’s own pleasure (or non-pleasure) the accepted content in an evaluation of literary works. Finally, he has, in anthologies like The Bumper Book, encouraged reviewers to vividly express their opinions, especially their unfavourable opinions, in the belief that a vivid put-down, first, is more entertaining and, second, leads to “discussion.”

  For twenty years now, we’ve had the “discussions” that unfounded, pugnacious reviews bring. What knowledge or understanding have they given us? Ryan Bigge insulting Leah McLaren in the pages of the Toronto Star, Carmine Starnino insulting whoever doesn’t happen to share his preference for certain kinds of verse, Philip Marchand expressing the opinion that poets shouldn’t write novels, David Solway insisting that a perfectly understandable and well-crafted poem by Al Purdy is not good because he doesn’t understand it. The discussion is rarely helpful in building a lucid aesthetic. One of the very few clear aesthetic opinions shed by Philip Marchand, for instance, is his belief that anyone who does not appreciate the greatness of Tolstoy’s War and Peace is “simply deficient in taste.” A dubious opinion, given that Henry James, who surely has as great a claim to “taste” as Marchand, and the later Tolstoy, who felt that War and Peace was badly done, both disliked the novel. As with all Metcalf’s children — and all of the writers I’ve just mentioned have been edited or published by him — Marchand’s statement is about himself, his belief in War and Peace’s greatness. He offers no defence of his opinion, believing that none is required. And so we have come to the point where the fact of an opinion is more important than the basis for it. As I suggested, this is neither criticism nor reviewing but autobiography. Marchand is telling me something about himself. Starnino is telling me about his sensibility and how much he believes in his beliefs. Bigge is settling a personal vendetta with McLaren. Solway is demonstrating the depths to which he’ll stoop to belittle Al Purdy or Anne Carson or whomever it is he doesn’t like this week.

  We have gone so far away from the idea of criticism, from the elaboration of an aesthetic vision tested against the books we read, that it really doesn’t matter who comments on our books or poems or plays. One opinion is as valuable as any other, because the work is a pretext for talk about oneself or for the generation of high emotion. If, under the supposed tyranny of academic criticism, the literary object disappeared under a mountain of methodology, nowadays it vanishes beneath the ego of the reviewer or the reviewer’s desire to create “talking points.”

  So, this is Metcalf’s progress: the discovery of a different road to the same desecration.

  The magazine Walrus published a version of this section of “Water.” They asked for an optimistic ending. So, I wrote this coda:

  We move, as critical thinkers, towards the communal or away from it, towards the idea of a common critical enterprise or back to belief in the sanctity of opinion. So, perhaps the time has come to revisit the idea of literary theory, to reconsider a virtue at the heart of it.

  In Alternating Currents, Octavio Paz writes of criticism that it is “a world of ideas that as it develops creates an intellectual space: a critical sphere surrounding a work of literature, an echo that prolongs it or contradicts it. Such a space represents the meeting place with other works, the possibility of a dialogue between them.” Paz’s is a vision of “criticism” as communal construct, the creation of a place where books meet, but it can also be taken as the vision of a place where thinkers and lovers of literature can evolve a shareable language. At the end of any critical revolution, we are left with jargon. Words like “logocentrism” or “differance” are a stink given off by the corpse of that movement known as Deconstructionism. It’s important to remember, though, that they once held ideas that were, for a time, useful in finding a new vantage point on literature, in creating a common ground for thinkers about literature.

  Before, I spoke of James Wood. His early work is, for me, exemplary of the worst of criticism (or reviewing) as plastic surgery. If one enjoyed the theatre of operations, one could regularly catch Dr. Wood cutting away work that he felt wasn’t worthy of the pursuit that is “great literature.” But with How Fiction Works something important has changed. Though How Fiction Works doesn’t acknowledge its own prejudices and assumptions, James Wood has begun to move away from judgement and towards the contemplation of ideas (“free indirect style,” “detail,” the nature of “character” in fiction, etc.) that might serve as a useful ground from which we can all talk about novels or short stories. Today’s preoccupation with free indirect style has the potential to become the next decade’s “phallogocentrism,” but it was startling to read Wood write of David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon with an eye not primarily to a dismissal of “hysterical realism” but, rather, to an understanding of the necessity, the logic of their creation. And in that possibility of understanding there is what is best about theory: the brief — inevitably brief, because every generation has to renovate the language and idea of criticism — sense that literature is one of the most startling things we humans do, our hive-making, our adaptive coloration.

  Asylum

  During the eighties and early nineties, times were good f
or writers. Advances were generous. Survival as a writer was a slightly easier proposition for some of us than it had been in the past.

  After I sold my first book Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, I was encouraged to write a novel. (Though people speak with respect of Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, short stories are still a difficult sell in our country.) So, I wrote a novel: Childhood. It did well enough and earned a generous advance on my next adult novel. I then wrote a children’s book called Ingrid and the Wolf. It also did well. That is, it was nominated for an award.

  I then spent ten years writing a book about Ottawa, a novel whose objective was to chronicle the city’s complications of morality and language and foreign influence. Asylum, the novel in question, was an effort to pack up all that Ottawa has meant to me and arrange it in the confines of a novel, where it would be kept safe.

  Asylum hasn’t made back its advance. It received mostly good reviews, but the book did not sell, nor was it nominated for any awards. Worse: during the ten years it had taken me to fit Ottawa neatly into Asylum, the publishing landscape changed. Publishers, losing money in difficult financial times, are now skittish. Childhood’s success made Asylum possible, but Asylum may make Pastoral, my next novel, more difficult — an interesting turn of events for a novelist.

  I am writing this sentence on January 5, 2010. I am fifty-two years old, unsure if I can go on writing as I have previously. More likely, things will be different. Perhaps Norman Levine’s stories of the writing life — I’m thinking in particular of one in which a writer goes to his school reunion and quietly bums money off each of his former classmates — will once again be relevant.

  Was Asylum a “failure,” then?

  Well, for its publishers, I suppose it may be disappointing. And yet, two years later, I think it’s still too early to say. Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli: books have their fates in the capacities of their readers. So, Asylum’s time may come when it meets another set of readers.

  And for Asylum’s readers? Here, as always, “failure” is as partial as “success.” Some will like a work, others will not. It’s the fate of any book to meet with acceptance and rejection. So, “failure” is difficult to gauge and “success” tends to be measurable mostly in monetary terms.

  Finally, did I accomplish the artistic goals I set out to accomplish when I began the book? Yes, I did. The book I finished is very different from the book I set out to write, but the book I wrote is the one I needed to write. Characters and situations led me to the (somewhat unexpected) harbour that is the final draft. Would I have written Asylum differently, knowing what I know now? No, because I’m not so in control of my psyche that I can force it to do my bidding. And novels are an affair as much of the psyche as of the reasoning part of oneself.

  More interesting than all of these questions of supposed “success” or presumed “failure” is the question of how Asylum lives within my psyche now. Its failure to please on a wide enough scale has been an invitation to reconsider what writing means to me and what I hope to accomplish as a writer. Childhood brought no such soul searching. So, in a curious way, Childhood’s “success” does not belong to me as much as Asylum’s “failure” does.

  As one might expect, the most annoying thing about this constant consideration and reconsideration of a book you’ve just finished is the self-doubt it brings.17 Was I meant to be a writer at all, I wonder? Yes, of course. Is there any other career I can take up? No, it’s too late. Do I have the courage to carry on with my literary aspirations and visions, whatever the pressure of the marketplace? Yes. In my worst moments, when self-doubt keeps me awake, it helps to recall why I came to Toronto (to write), why I wanted to write (to imagine the range of possibilities hidden in the word “home”), and why writing matters to me (because there are books I love, books I want to write, and because there are words, like tootoolbay or kunumunu, wajank or waheen, that bring such pleasure.18 There are moments when, thinking of words or of writing, I can still feel the strength of my commitment to the art form that has chosen me.

  Other Books

  Whatever the disappointments of “literary society,” however distressing it is to imagine that literature is a thing in decline because our thinking about it is shallow, and although the bewilderment at having written an unpopular book is, well, bewildering, there are still works I admire, books that remind me of why I want to keep writing. There are actually quite a number of them. In the last twenty years my contemporaries have written some very fine books (or plays) and I could happily write about any number — from Margaret Visser’s The Geometry of Love to Darren O’Donnell’s Radio Rooster Says That’s Bad. But I’m not a completist and, besides, the contemplation of a handful of books has brought me solace and pleasure these past few months and I’d like to talk about them: Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida, Eunoia, Hunger’s Brides, Muriella Pent, and The Woodcutter. It is, of course, impossible to give a complete or even adequate account of such absorbing and suggestive books in the space of this memoir. Still, I’d like to talk about aspects of them that have caught my attention.

  1. Roo Borson’s Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida

  For my money, Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida is the single most impressive collection of poems written in Canada in quite some time. You could point to books of poetry in which individual poems are more immediately accessible than those in Short Journey. For instance, in Don McKay’s Night Field, the poem “Moth Fear” moved me deeply the first time I read it (in K’s living room, dim light from a window that looked onto the brick wall of the house next door) and has stayed with me since. None of the poems in Short Journey got to me so quickly. But I have lived with Short Journey for some time now, having read it closely and been drawn repeatedly back to it, and the book has so grown in my imagination that I can’t think of any recent book of Canadian poetry I would take in its place.

  The most obvious thing about Short Journey is that it is a kind of anti ars poetica. Rather than declaring what poetry is and how it should be done, Roo begins, in the poem “Summer Grass,” with a question: “Do you still love poetry?” It isn’t a rhetorical question. All of the pieces that follow struggle, either in their structure or in their sound, to capture some inkling or quality of what poetry is, so that the question can be given a meaningful answer. Not a definitive answer. There is no definitive answer to the question “What is poetry?” As a consequence, there can be no definitive answer to Roo’s “Do you still love poetry?” either. The journey, in Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida, is towards poetry itself, upriver towards a possible source, but the source is not attained. The final lines of the book are

  Early in the morning or else past sundown,

  at evening, dusk,

  the wind through the open window,

  the radio on and the unopened map beside you —

  A strophe, incomplete, ending with a dash, suggesting imminent departure, not arrival.

  One of the aspects of the book that seems to have puzzled reviewers is its use of prose. If you accept that a definition or understanding of poetry is at the heart of Roo’s search, however, the use of prose makes simple, lucid sense. Poetry is usually defined in relation to prose. In simplistic terms, poetry is what prose is not and vice versa. By juxtaposing moments of poetry with moments of prose, Short Journey pushes the poetic element of poetry into the foreground, doesn’t it? Well, yes and no. Short Journey is a book that refuses simple answers. Yes, the section called “A Bit of History” — which is about poetry — is prose-like compared to the more traditional poems in the section “Water Colour.” But “Autumn Record” (the most beautiful part of the book, I think) is filled with prose poems, and the long, narrative prose piece “Persimmons” is suffused with poetry: in its quality of observation, in its elegiac tone, in its juxtaposition of intimacy and death:

  These nights, to get to sleep, I imagine a

  bullet ent
ering the back of my head.

  In other words, Short Journey also raises the question of what, exactly, “prose” is.

  Another reason for the “prose” in Short Journey is a little less obvious: Short Journey Upriver toward Oishida is influenced by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. No, that’s to put it too casually. Short Journey is written with Basho in mind, with Basho’s poetry as both guidance and accompanying music. Short Journey is a work of devotion to and an argument with the work of Basho. And throughout Short Journey, the choice of Basho as “master” is deeply felt and has great influence on the texts. What that has to do with Roo’s “prose” is this: Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi, or Narrow Road to the Deep North, is a travel narrative in which prose and poetry intermingle. In fact, the majority of Narrow Road is what we would call “prose,” but some of that “prose” is clearly poetic. Narrow Road is one of those works that suggest, without ever saying so, that the poetic is something other than words disposed on a page according to certain rules (Basho’s haiku, for instance).