Ira Wells: Trump, free speech and the age of offence PAGE 6

$6.50 Vol. 25, No. 3 April 2017

Adam Sternbergh The Great American Metaphor The lure—and the perils—of writing about a magical game

ALSO IN THIS ISSUE

Sarah Milroy The all-new Lawren Harris

Pankaj Mishra & Monobina Gupta The era of global rage

Zoe Whittall on Barbara Gowdy

Publications Mail Agreement #40032362 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to LRC, Circulation Dept. PO Box 8, Station K Toronto, ON M4P 2G1 PLUS Russell Smith on an East-becomes-West dystopia + Ken Coates chases the Franklin myth + Diana Fitzgerald Bryden on virgin-mania + Doug Gibson on a literary time machine + Amy Shaw on the great mystery of Vimy + Adam Dodek on the fall of a legal giant + Amanda Jernigan on Molly Peacock New in Paperback What Is Government Good At? A Canadian Answer Easy Prey Investors Donald J. Savoie Why Broken Safety Nets Threaten Canada before Television Winner of the Donner Prize for Your Wealth Excellence and Innovation in Public Al Rosen and Mark Rosen Radio, Taste, and the Struggle Policy Writing, 2016 for Cultural Democracy “No one in Canada is better qualified to Len Kuffert “… Savoie’s book is one that Canadians, write this long-overdue book than these both inside and outside of government, two outstanding forensic accountants.” “In a good-hearted and sympathetic should read with a sense of urgency.” R.T. Naylor, McGill University way, [Kuffert] charts the impact of Donner Prize Jury radio when it was young.” The National Post Making a Difference

Canada and the United Nations Legacies, Limits, Prospects Edited by Colin McCullough and Robert Teigrob Foreword by Lloyd Axworthy “A must-read for those with interests Mobilizing Mercy This Colossal Project in Canadian foreign relations or the A History of the Canadian Red Cross Building the Welland Ship Canal, international history of the twentieth Sarah Glassford 1913–1932 and twenty-first centuries.” Roberta M. Styran and Robert R. Taylor Robin S. Gendron, Nipissing University An engaging history that follows Canada’s leading humanitarian organization through The story of the construction of a decades of war, peace, and social change. technological monument that remains a cornerstone of the North American economy.

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Vol. 25, No. 3 • April 2017 EDITOR IN CHIEF Sarmishta Subramanian [email protected] MANAGING EDITOR 3 Rage and the Modern Machine 20 Very Magnetic North Michael Stevens Monobina Gupta in conversation with Uncovering an epic failed expedition, and its ASSISTANT EDITOR Pankaj Mishra hold on the Canadian psyche Bardia Sinaee Ken Coates 6 The Age of Offence ASSOCIATE EDITOR Trump, the politics of outrage and free speech 21 Her Father Is Weeping in the Beth Haddon on campus Kitchen POETRY EDITOR Moira MacDougall Ira Wells A poem COPY EDITOR Wendy Donawa 9 Tango Lesson Madeline Koch Lisa Richter 23 The Woman Inside CONTRIBUTING EDITORS 11 Outside Baseball In Barbara Gowdy’s new novel, an unusual Mohamed Huque, Molly Peacock, haunting sparks a deep reflection on Robin Roger, Judy Stoffman, Looking for capital-M Meaning in a magical Anthony Westell motherhood, family, identity game ONLINE EDITORS Zoe Whittall Adam Sternbergh Diana Kuprel, Jack Mitchell, Donald Rickerd, C.M. 12 Sophocles’ Jalopy 25 Empire in Collapse PROOFREADERS A poem Finally, a global turning-of-the-tables dystopian novel that transcends clichés about Islam and Heather Schultz, Robert Simone, Claire Kelly Patricia Treble the West RESEARCH 14 Battle Wary Russell Smith Rob Tilley Why is a fight on another continent, 50 years after Confederation, our nation’s founding 27 Couched in Verse DESIGN James Harbeck myth? In Molly Peacock’s latest collection, poetic form, ADVERTISING/SALES Amy Shaw like psychoanalysis, offers safe passage through perilous waters Michael Wile [email protected] 16 A Man of Our Time Amanda Jernigan Lawren Harris is once again jolted out of his DIRECTOR, OPERATIONS casket, in reappraisals that paint him as a 29 Pure Madness Michael Booth resolute modernist and urbanite Unsnarling the irrational, contradictory, still- DEVELOPMENT OFFICER Erica May Sarah Milroy thriving obsession with virginity Diana Fitzgerald Bryden ADMINISTRATOR 18 Playing against Type Christian Sharpe Sometimes getting to the future means travelling 31 All in the Family PUBLISHER in the other direction Can lawyers really run law firms? Helen Walsh Doug Gibson Adam Dodek [email protected] BOARD OF DIRECTORS 19 Watching the Weather George Bass, Q.C., Tom Kierans, O.C., A poem Don McCutchan, Trina McQueen, O.C., Michael Lithgow Jack Mintz, C.M., Jaime Watt ADVISORY COUNCIL Michael Adams, Ronald G. Atkey, P.C., Q.C., Alan Broadbent, C.M., Chris Ellis, Carol Hansell, Donald Macdonald, P.C., C.C., Grant Reuber, O.C., Don Rickerd, In memoriam C.M., Rana Sarkar, Mark Sarner, Bernard Richard Wagamese Schiff, Reed Scowen POETRY SUBMISSIONS 1955–2017 For guidelines, please see reviewcanada.ca. The LRC is saddened by the loss of one of its contributors, who will be missed. LRC design concept by Jackie Young/INK Founded in 1991 by P.A. Dutil The LRC is published 10 times a year by the Literary Cover art and pictures throughout the issue, unless otherwise indicated, by Justine Wong. Review of Canada Charitable Organization. ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION RATES Justine Wong is a freelance illustrator based in Tokyo, originally from Toronto. She is also the creator of the project Individuals in Canada $56/year plus GST/HST. “21 Days in Japan,” and is starting a new initiative “Ladies Draw Tokyo” to build a support system for female (Libraries and institutions in Canada $68/year plus GST/HST.) Outside Canada, please pay $86/year for ­creatives living in and travelling through Tokyo. individuals, or $98 for libraries and institutions.

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2 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Rage and the Modern Machine Monobina Gupta in conversation with Pankaj Mishra

new Pankaj Mishra book is always a publishing event. In critically acclaimed, Abest-selling works—most recently Temp­ ta­tions of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond; An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World; and From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia—the Indian essayist, author and public intellectual has offered thoughtful explorations of a globalizing India, contemporary spirituality and western impe- rialism’s history in Asia. Mishra’s latest book, The Age of Anger: A History of the Present, though, has struck a particular chord at a time when populism and fanaticism are taking hold in many parts of the world. Monobina Gupta is a journalist and author based in Delhi. She has worked with the Times of India and the Kolkata Telegraph, and written for Caught between disruptive change and uneven growth. the Economic Times, the Caravan and the New “Hands across the land,” Udo J. Keppler, 1932. Image courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. York Times’ India Ink. Her books, Didi: A Political Biography and Left Politics in Bengal: Time Travels ­critics with the “failed” collectivist project of social- stage for the demagogues with their arrogance and among Bhadralok Marxists, have examined the ism and to mock them as deluded jholawallahs. ignorance. fortunes of the left in Bengal as well as the rise of Mamata Banerjee, the powerful female leader Gupta: We should explain that word—a jhola Gupta: You emphasize that the rise of demagogues who brought down a long-ruling communist is a kind of sling bag, the cloth variety favoured is an essential part of the politics of ressentiment ­government there. She spoke with Mishra via email by bookish intellectuals, and wallah is just the and alienation afflicting large swathes of people last month. Hindi word for person. It’s interesting how the term today—those who have been left behind in the fre- jholawallah­ , once used to describe Marxist intel- netic search for more wealth. Globalization seems Monobina Gupta: I have followed your work over lectuals and activists, now refers to just about any to have engendered exactly the opposite of what the years with a great deal of interest. You drew left-wing critic of eco- its architects intended readers’ attention to the fault lines within the neo- nomic liberalization, it to deliver. In India, liberal economic project long before the crisis of including mainstream Globalization seems economic deprivation globalization and democracy exploded dramati- non-­governmental has fuelled popular cally. I recall a time not so far back when, in India, organizations. to have engendered rage, widespread cyni- certainly, critics of neoliberalism who questioned cism about parliamen- the narrative of trickle-down economics were Mishra: Exactly. Over exactly the opposite tary democracy and a brusquely dismissed as outmoded intellectuals. the past two decades, of what its architects loss of faith in institu- The entire discourse seemed to have been hijacked the Indian public tions. At the same time, by economists. You write in your book about this sphere came to be intended it to deliver. under Prime Minister tendency to overestimate economics and under- dominated by these Narendra Modi, anxi- play culture. American-educated or ety about minorities Americanized figures, who had grown up intel- and dissidents—particularly Muslims—is growing Pankaj Mishra: I think an economistic vocabulary lectually in post-Reagan America. In fact, you can stronger by the day. How can we better understand of endless growth and consumption dominated observe the hegemony of these neo-Americans in these contradictory developments, where eco- all other kinds of moral, political and intellectual most countries around the world. What they don’t nomic deprivation across religion, caste and gender discourses in recent decades—this explains much understand is that since the 19th century, social- feeds a rhetoric of hard nationalism rather than a of our helplessness today before the earthquakes of ism’s great historical role was to civilize capitalism, broad coalition of those who have been left out for our time. This rhetoric of individual entrepreneur- soften it with social-welfarist projects; and, with- the past two decades? ship and private wealth creation was, of course, the out this restraining and civilizing influence, the chosen language of the beneficiaries of neoliberal inequalities and upheavals imposed by capitalism Mishra: The mass suffering caused by uneven capitalism, and one of the ways in which they would grow intolerable, and politically toxic, as we growth and disruptive change and the loss of delegit­imated any alternative was to identify its witness today. So, the economistas prepared the legitimacy of political institutions have historically

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 3 benefitted right-wing demagogues more than the Mishra: Yes, I quote from Hugo von Hofmannsthal with corrupt politicians and institutions, people internationalist left. This perplexed socialist revo- in the book: “politics is magic” and “he who can are searching for other leaders and political struc- lutionaries right from the 19th century. Trying to summon the forces from the deep, him will they fol- tures. Where do you stand on the debate unfolding build a broad-based coalition of the suffering work- low.” In that sense, Modi is the Pied Piper of India, around populism? Do you see such personalities ing classes, they found themselves aghast at the who manipulates the masses at the level of emo- creating other avenues for expressing the discon- instant success of ethnic-racial nationalists and cul- tion and sentiment with highly potent rhetoric tentment and anger people feel? tural supremacists. I think the latter addressed the and imagery. He has successfully persuaded many widespread feelings of powerlessness and humilia- people that he stands with them in their loathing of Mishra: Yes, I believe very strongly that Bernie tion more directly and persuasively. They intuited the economically and culturally privileged, and he Sanders would have won against Trump, or that that global economic and technological processes is enacting their desire to curtail their privileges. It Hillary Clinton would have won with him on the were radically disruptive of older networks of com- means nothing at all that he is allied with the most ticket. The reason is that he was speaking the same munity and solidarity. powerful and wealthy people in India; this contra- language of disaffection as Trump, and of course The progressive left, which has its own grand diction does not strike his followers, although it much more sincerely. The problem with the left projects of radical change and rapid economic may seem clear to you and me. Likewise, Trump in many places is that it became too centrist and growth, has very rarely been as mainstream, and wedded to econ- sensitive to this disruption. It omistic and technocratic solutions speaks of justice and equality of redistribution and welfare. This and ­redistribution. But this does This nostalgia for a past when is why it was unable to seize this not address the existential fears things moved slowly and community moment of popular anger against of many who feel menaced by neo­liberalism and the aloof elites large-scale change. The far right, was clearly defined, has diverse that appear to impose it. on the other hand, quickly identi- fies scapegoats for their suffering. manifestations, from the cult of Mad Gupta: In an era of resurgent These “traitors” in the past used to nationalism, demands for national be Jews and cosmopolitan liberals. Men to the political craving for a autonomy in different contexts Now they are Muslims, women, also need careful engagement. cosmopolitan liberals and Jews. wholeness unviolated by foreigners. Nicola Sturgeon in the United Loathing or demonizing them not Kingdom is calling for another only brings instant gratification; referendum on Scottish indepen- it seems to offer a chance to rebuild a lost sense of has filled his cabinet with Goldman Sachs alumni dence. The term aazaadi [meaning “freedom”] has community and solidarity. The left and the centrist after raging against various elites and, of course, he been at the forefront of some of these demands in liberals have no such quick remedies. was always one of them, but the fact is invisible to the Indian context. Although the word was used many of his supporters. by feminists in the past to refer to aazaadi from Gupta: Discussing Rousseau in Age of Anger, you This is why I argue that we need to understand patriarchy, it is now strongly associated with the write: “His books were the biggest best-sellers of the workings of ressentiment, and return to fig- demand for independence in Kashmir. As you the eighteenth century, and we still return to them ures like Freud, Hermann Brochand Robert Musil probably know, the word became a rallying point today because they explore dark emotions stirring who observed this phenomenon in politics very and focus of controversy after students from Delhi’s in the hearts of strangers rather than the workings closely. Rational modes of analysis, which assume Jawaharlal Nehru University were arrested on the of abstract reason.” Emotion and feelings do indeed that individuals act out of perceived self-interest, charge of sedition for allegedly raising chants of seem to be at the centre stage of politics today— won’t take us too far, and may even be dangerously aazaadi on campus last year. Those arrests set in often accompanied by a suspicion of expertise. misleading. motion a struggle over nationalism that brought Do you think the proliferation of visual and social Kashmir into focus, but have also led to a witch media has made political life dramatic, without Gupta: It’s interesting to consider this from the hunt for dissident voices that the government con- always adding much substance to it? feminist perspective of the reason/emotion binary siders “anti‑national.” as a gendered one. Note how wildly popular women In such highly charged environments, Mishra: It has helped fragment the political land- leaders in India—there are several—are described what future do you see for such struggles for scape, and diminish the authority of its institutions in the media. Mamata Banerjee, twice elected chief self-­ determination?­ and personalities. I think Rousseau’s invocation minister of Bengal, for instance, is often referred of a troubled subjectivity against the instrumental to as a moody, temperamental leader, prone to Mishra: There are several things happening here. reason of powerful elites has a special charge today irrational decisions. Some of these terms would be The more a particular group, such as English because we are witnessing in many ways the mass fitting for many male Indian politicians too. But it nationalists or Brexiteers, stress their distinctive subjectivization of truth. The people empowered is primarily women leaders who are judged to be identity, the more the other members of that com- by Twitter and Facebook have their own versions of too emotional. munity will insist on separateness—like the Scots reality and their sheer multiplicity and proliferation are doing now. So the revolt against globalizing uniquely threaten political life, which is about ascer- Mishra: Such allegations are commonly deployed forces, such as we see in Brexit, incites the fragmen- taining the general will of a given community and against women in the public sphere. For a long tation of previously coherent political communities devising its shared values and agreed-upon truths. time, for instance, Arundhati Roy was described as in wholly unexpected ways. shrill and irrational, most loudly by members of the I think self-determination in the Indian context Gupta: Yes, a proliferation of social media makes ruling classes and technocratic elites who imagined has multiple meanings—it is the individual self as it harder to sense what “the people” feel about themselves to be in the possession of all the right much as the collective self that seeks determina- specific issues, something that played out dra- “facts” about India’s economic development and tion. Previously, the project of self-determination matically in India following the Modi government’s the right kind of rational schemas of progress. Of presupposed a clear outcome: the sovereign and demonetization policy, which withdrew high-value course, Roy was pointing to the human costs of independent nation-state. But as this ideal fades currency notes from circulation in the economy. such instrumental rationality, and saying that there or becomes more difficult to achieve in the age of Ostensibly done to curb corruption, prevent the is more to human life than maximizing utility and global flows, the struggle for self-determination hoarding of black money and cut off funding for profits, and that many people simply do not want takes on an additional charge: the young men “terror organizations,” the policy hurt vulnerable the kind of progress that uproots and dispossesses and women engaged in it are fighting for personal sections the most. Many actually died waiting in them. But this, in the conventional perspectives of recognition—of their dignity and identity—as ATM queues, and the lack of cash made day-to-day the self-appointed modernizers, was “irrational” much for political sovereignty. You see that in the life unmanageable for the poor, the elderly—people and “romantic.” cult of Burhan Wani [a young militant killed at the who are not plugged into the credit card or online hands of Indian forces, who has become a martyr] banking systems. But, despite suffering as a result Gupta: The distrust of conventional forms of poli- in Kashmir. of the policy, many among the working classes tics has created a space for “outsiders” who are not ­support the government because the cash crisis also seen to represent the system—Donald Trump, Gupta: Meanwhile, in the West, nationalist asser- affects or inconveniences the rich and well-to-do. Bernie Sanders, Kellie Leitch in Canada. Fed up tions appear to want renewed isolation and

4 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada autonomy from “outsiders.” Phenomena such as Brexit and Trump’s call for America First appear to feed on xenophobia and also on a sense of lost identity. To that extent, would it be fair to say that strong nationalism and a fear of the Other are byproducts of a market-oriented, WINNIPEG fragmented culture where the individual is always first?

Mishra: I think we should recognize that this nostalgia for a past when things moved slowly and community was clearly defined is experi- enced broadly. It has diverse political and cul- tural manifestations, from the cult of Mad Men, in which white men rule the roost, to the treach- erous political craving for a wholeness unvio- lated by foreigners. If we recognize this craving in its wide manifestations in our societies, then we are better placed to see that it springs from an increasingly unbearable experience of atomi- zation and anomie. The burden of individual- ism, which you carry alone as old solidarities weaken, and the imperative to compete with and outshine others in the marketplace have proven to be just too much for many people. The sense of exhaustion, and the feeling of being coerced and humiliated by opaque global elites, turns into a hatred and distrust of those nearest to you—people you can blame for your plight, who seem to be getting ahead of you, such as women in the workplace and politically asser- tive minorities. This is why I argue that we need different frameworks to understand where we are, and Image courtesy of Matt Boulton much more complex diagnoses and prescrip- tions than just the problem of inequality or the solution of redistribution.

Gupta: Given that our political class is either inept or unwilling to consider anything other than an expedient formula to grab power, does the responsibility of reformulating the complex debate now rest with outsiders?

Mishra: The big problem we have today, glob- ally, and I have been saying this for some time, Spur continues to explore the issue of nation building, at a critical moment is that decision makers in politics, business in our history, as we celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial and continue to and the media are incredibly homogenous in build our relationship with the new government in the United States. What their world views and agenda. Committed to a are the real and perceived threats that challenge a better Canada? What are way of economic production and consumption we are willing to risk to build a more just and equitable society? through individual self-aggrandizement, they have left very little space for dissenters and out- During a time of critical change across the globe, it seems ever more siders, or alternative visions. The result is that all important to explore what is at peril in our society and communities and kinds of demagogues have arisen to represent what chances we are willing to take in order to eliminate the barriers to a the mass of the excluded and the ignored. If better world. you look at the last 200 years and reflect on how our most path-breaking ideas were offered by outsiders and mavericks—from Rousseau to Gandhi—rather than mainstream politicians, technocrats, tenured professors and op-ed pun- SAVE THE DATE dits, you realize how impoverished our political and intellectual life has become, dominated as June 4 – 7 it is by people educated in the same way and speaking the same language of power—how to get it and how to hold on to it. This is why I praise “Spur festival is a wonderful benefi t to our local community. Pope Francis and rate him above our many It brings together artists, academics, activists, experts and lay public intellectuals. He at least comes to our people to join in conversations about topics that are timely and global modernity from a very different place, the critical for our city and our country.” global South and an ancient spiritual tradition, — New Media Manitoba and speaks of human needs and values we have ignored for too long. So we definitely need more such outsiders if we are not to lurch permanently between ­self-serving globalizers and rancid ethno- www.spurfestival.ca nationalists.

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 5 ESSAY The Age of Offence Trump, the politics of outrage and free speech on campus Ira Wells

mong those invested in the notion that higher education is currently col- Alapsing before our eyes, fewer pieces of evidence are proffered more frequently (or more uncritically) than the modern university’s sup- posed tendency to nurture and promote “offence taking” as a default attitude toward the world. Our universities, we are told, have discarded their traditional raison in order to become incubators of moral outrage. Administrators, having abandoned time-honoured liberal arts ideals, today quiver to the cheap thrill of indignation; professors, having given up on Shakespeare and the “great books,” now indoctrinate students in radical Marxist ideology and seek to cultivate a generation of “social justice warriors.” Our campuses have become closed, ideologically insular places that are hostile to the freedom of speech and intolerant of dissent. This opinion—broadcast by bilious media personalities who have never listened in on a fac- concerns over “cultural appropriation.” An official of opinion and argument indicate the diversity of ulty meeting, have no knowledge of universities’ with the centre explained that, as yoga comes from opinion that can flourish on campus, and any academic priorities and have not set foot in an cultures that “have experienced oppression, cul- argument that posits “the university” as a singular, undergraduate lecture since Trudeau père occu- tural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism monolithic entity betrays a basic ignorance of how pied 24 Sussex—is, unsurprisingly, a grotesque and western supremacy … we need to be mindful these institutions operate. parody of the complex, often internally conflicted of this and how we express ourselves while practis- Still, in their different ways, these cases offer reality of modern institutions of higher learning. ing yoga.” a revealing index of current power dynamics in Yet this view, however exaggerated, is not entirely A third recent flashpoint involved the “Islamo­ various contexts within higher education. Many baseless. An increasingly sensitive and fine-grained phobic” video productions of members of a student students, administrators and student services vocabulary for registering and opposing forms of union at St. Michael’s College at the University of organizations currently find it morally compelling sexism, racism, ableism and religious intolerance Toronto. In one seven-second video, recorded at or politically expedient to take the side of offence has undeniably been developing within higher an off-campus birthday party, a student counsel- takers—particularly when those taking offence are education. lor is seen reading from a book entitled Islam for members of racial, sexual or religious minorities. Indeed, a trifecta of recent events suggests Dummies; in another, she sings “Would you be my Taking offence, or aligning oneself with those who that these movements currently hold the bal- Muslim boy?” to the tune of Estelle’s “American have, has emerged as a kind of credential, a way of ance of power on Canadian university campuses. Boy.” The campus Muslim Students’ Association claiming one’s place within a righteous inner circle. In December 2016, Sandor Dosman was (now accused the counsellor of “mocking Islam,” par- The firings and suspensions join news stories about famously) fired from his job as a café operator at ticipating in “institutionalized racism, xenophobia, cancelled speaking invitations, the barring of white Wilfrid Laurier University for posting a sardonic job and Islamophobia,” and possibly damaging the students from “safe spaces” and campus events, ad calling for “a new slave (full-time staff member) “emotional and mental health” of Muslim students. the refusal of mainstream stand-up comics such to boss (mentor) around Veritas Café.” “Given the The student union’s president, vice president and as Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock to perform on cam- importance that Laurier places on being an inclu- the counsellor featured in the video all resigned puses—where, according to Rock, “you can’t even sive, welcoming and respectful community,” the their positions, agreed to undertake further cultural be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.” administration explained, casual use of the word sensitivity training and prorogued the union. Although media coverage does its work of sim- “slave” was a fire-able offence. Dosman’s dismissal These incidents differ in some important ways. plification and amplification, the fact remains that, recalled for some a case at the University of Ottawa No student, so far as we know, complained about in certain quarters within the academy, the thresh- in 2015, where a free yoga class was cancelled by the U of O yoga class, whereas some students were old for causing (and taking) offence has never been the Centre for Students with Disabilities due to offended by theIslam for Dummies video. And lower. A bad joke can bring down a student govern- each case involved different actors—the Laurier ment. The wrong word can get you fired. Practising Ira Wells is the author of Fighting Words: Polemics firing was initiated by the Graduate Student Union yoga could make you complicit in histories of and Social Change in Literary Naturalism and supported by the administration, while at U imperial rape. Simply showing one’s face in certain (University of Alabama Press, 2013). His writing of T, the controversy boiled down to a confronta- places could induce a micro trauma in students has appeared in American Quarterly, the New tion between student groups. The conflict of per- from vulnerable communities. Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the spectives and factions would not surprise anyone Of course, at the precise moment when some Guardian, the Globe and Mail and elsewhere. familiar with universities. Intersecting fault lines academics were finessing a new vocabulary of

6 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada microaggression—calibrating their social micro- passively reflect, but actively constructs our social essay “What Are We Allowed to Say?” the Yale scopes to make increasingly fine-grained distinc- environments, and that the old binary between scholar David Bromwich quotes Tariq Modood, tions between subtle forms of offence—Donald speech and action is therefore suspect. Offence the director of Bristol University’s Centre for the Trump was presiding over the indiscriminate taking, as a habit of mind, combines the attention Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, who argues that demolition of the norms of civic discourse and an to historical injustice with a cognizance of the ways “the group which feels hurt is the ultimate arbiter unprecedented coarsening of the public sphere. in which our apparently natural, inherited modes of whether a hurt has taken place.” The Ontario In mirror opposition to what was happening on of communication can cause a kind of “innocent” Human Rights Commission already provides this campus, Trump has perfected what we might call a violence. The culture of offence taking would dis- subjective understanding of offence taking with politics of macroaggression. abuse us of this innocence. Thanks to overlapping juridical force: “Discrimination happens,” the Before the U.S. election, expert opinion assured strands in liberal education, social justice move- commission explains, “when a person experiences us that Trump’s categorical smearing of entire ments and digital media, we now have access to an negative treatment or impact, intentional or not, nationalities and religions was bound to backfire. It increasingly rich vocabulary to identify, distinguish because of their gender identity or gender expres- was a simple matter of demography: the candidate’s and denounce sources of injustice. As a direct sion [or other protected grounds].” The violation spasms of vulgarity may have titillated his base, but result, offensive speech—a cavalier willingness to resides not in the intention of the offender, but in they also irretrievably alienated vast swaths of the puncture the doilied sensibilities of political cor- “experiences” and “impacts” perceptible only to electorate, including women, blacks, Hispanics, rectness—has acquired a new potency. the victim. Muslims, Evangelical Christians and Reagan On the political left, the capacity to articulate We can recognize that offensive speech is Democrats. outrage toward offence reads as a sign of progres- entirely subjective while also recognizing that its Well, we know how all that worked out. The basic sive thinking: taking offence is a marker of cultural effects can be empirically real. The U of T Muslim dynamic has continued into his presidency: Trump status. On the populist right, a willingness to offend Students’ Association’s warning of the emotional continues to cast the “fake news media,” West Coast manifests as a brave repudiation of orthodoxy, and mental harm caused by offensive speech is judges and political opponents as elites, while rail- or as base-level authenticity. In our digital com- backed by a body of therapeutic literature that high- ing against the bad “hombres” and “dudes” that munities—what the social scientist Sherry Turkle lights the link between psychological and physical he intends to deport or incarcerate. injury. In Free Speech: Ten Principles When Trump goes low, his approval for a Connected World, Timothy ratings go high. A commitment to the force and Garton Ash quotes law scholars As it turned out, the diverse Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, coalition of Trump skeptics—the reality of offensive speech unites the who write, “the immediate short- unlikely confederacy of GOP insiders, term harms of hate speech include neoconservatives, public relations neo-Nazi with the gender studies rapid breathing, headaches, raised professionals and leftists who were blood pressure, dizziness, rapid pulse so certain of Trump’s defeat—had major. It is a grammar that informs rate, drug taking, risk-taking behav- all stumbled into committing some (consciously or not) their every ior and even suicide.” What starts as version of what literary critics once speech often ends in something more called the affective fallacy. They pre- Facebook post, every tweet. concrete.­ sumed that voters, confronted with But what would it mean to take Trump’s boundless vulgarity, would seriously the subjective definition of feel what they felt, hear what they heard: a churlish calls the “online real”—how we situate ourselves in offence? If hate speech, discrimination and less demagogue spewing loathsome nonsense. Instead, relation to the prohibitions against and injunctions overt (i.e., systemic, unintentional, institutional- what many voters heard—and apparently continue toward offensive speech constitutes an inescapable ized) forms of offence can traverse the boundary to hear—is an authentic appeal for liberty from facet of self-presentation. Those who take to social from speech into action, then some will insist that a corrupt authority. The more Trump goaded his media to support Trump’s Muslim ban or Kellie we have a clear social obligation to curb hostile opponents into denouncing his latest outrage, the Leitch’s “Canadian values” test portray sensitivity expression. Taken to its logical conclusion, Garton more evidence he appeared to garner of an insti- to offensive speech as a sign of elite decadence; the Ash contends, this would give “everyone a right to tutionalized elite creeping ever further into the offence takers, in turn, often construe the mildest exercise a veto simply by pronouncing the words sovereign terrain of the private self. The actual exe- impropriety as a sign of crypto-fascism or incipient ‘I am offended’.” David Bromwich believes that, cution was closer to performance art than a coher- barbarism. A commitment to the force and real- for all intents and purposes, this veto has already ent political strategy, and its stunning effectiveness ity of offensive speech thus unites the neo-Nazi been granted. Words such as “right,” “feel” and derived from the perfect continuity of media and with the gender studies major. It is a grammar that “offended,” he claims, “all are coming to have legal message. It was Marshall McLuhan as rewritten by informs (consciously or not) their every Facebook definitions that carry immediate force … Feeling Huckleberry Finn: vulgarity is freedom. post, every tweet, every public utterance. counts because feeling in the offended person is a But what is offensive speech? The fluctuating dispositive fact: proof (which needs no further sup- e live in an age of offence. This is not to (and always contested) historical standard for port) that a crime was committed. We are not far in Wregurgitate the familiar claim that the inter- identifying discriminatory or otherwise hostile America—is it just America?—from evolving a right net enables more of what some consider offensive speech reveals that such language is not offensive to feel good about ourselves.” speech than was available in more innocent times. because of any measurable property inherent to In short, there is no debating another human Rather, it is to recognize that offensiveness and the speech itself. Rather, the offensiveness of the being’s psychological pain. When a student group offendability have emerged as our distinctive form speech registers in the emotional response of claims that vulnerable students have experienced of cultural literacy. Never has the taking of offence the audience. This much is common sense: a joke an offence, then that offence has taken place. (and the performance of offended-ness) enjoyed isn’t funny if it must be explained; a speech act isn’t The rebuttal, offered by a tradition of free- more widespread cultural legitimacy. offensive if it doesn’t offend. The most toxic expres- speech advocates extending from John Stuart Mill Our current culture of offence taking has a his- sion of anti-Semitism is perfectly inoffensive when to Salman Rushdie, is that no one has the right tory and a context. The capacity to recognize and uttered in the exclusive company of neo-Nazis. not to be offended. Political actors will inevitably name sources of injustice was constitutive of every Short of positing some omniscient, God-like arbiter claim to be offended, and use their veto, for the progressive structural change in modern legal of offensive language, we must recognize that such same reason that such groups do anything: because and political culture, from the elimination of Jim speech is a socially constructed category produced it is expedient for them to do so. This is why Mill Crow to the institution of human rights laws to by particular communities of people in particular thought that the alleged offensiveness of a given the liberalization of marriage. This basic impulse historical moments. There is nothing inherently speech act was a poor excuse for regulating it. If toward equity and social justice—harnessed by offensive about certain combinations of words. the “test” of permissible speech is “offence to those the civil rights, feminist and queer movements— The unavoidable corollary is that, because offen- whose opinion is attacked,” Mill wrote, “experi- was then nourished and informed by strands of sive speech does not exist in the world, offence ence testifies that this offence is given whenever post-­structuralist philosophy that emphasized can only ever occur when another human claims the attack is telling and powerful, and that every the ­reality-shaping function of language. If a gen- to have been offended. And who could possibly opponent who pushes them hard, and whom eration of undergraduates took anything away from validate the claim of offence other than the offence- they find it difficult to answer,” will be decried as “theory,” it is the notion that language does not taking party itself? In his London Review of Books “offensive.”­

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 7 Bromwich cites those lines without recogniz- by the Graduate Student Union at Laurier, casual anyone outside those circles, including many clas- ing that J.S. Mill (an eminently privileged English use of the word “slave” really is offensive, regardless sical liberals—the academic leftists’ natural allies in philosopher and member of Parliament) never had of whether anyone took offence. The presumption the fight for progressive values—the notion that we to think very deeply or sympathetically about the is that the use of the word slave perpetuated an need a new professional class of exorcists to detect experience of, say, hate speech; he was approach- unconscious or systemic form of racism that was all offensive speech and re-educate the public mind ing these philosophical problems from the per- the more insidious precisely because no one had comes across as self-interested charlatanism. spective of someone who already had his hands recognized it as such. After all, is it not true that, The culture of offence taking arose from intel- on the levers of cultural power. Mill is surely right throughout history, many decent citizens—socially lectual and activist traditions that have created to observe that the cry of “I’m offended” often conscious, progressive, forward-thinking people— tangible (and as yet only partially realized) social operates as a political bludgeon with gains for historically marginalized which to silence an opponent. But Some will see the legitimation of communities. But we cannot afford the more interesting and challenging to ignore that some contemporary questions involve the actual uses of Trumpist microaggression as evidence adherents of those progressive tra- that bludgeon. Some political actors ditions are easily cast as hucksters have used their moral indignation to that, more than ever, the university and snake-oil salesmen in the cur- effect positive social change—and rent political climate. Nor should we their desire to chill certain kinds of needs to be a safe space. This means ignore the very real costs for those speech is perfectly compatible with who, for whatever reason, fail to adapt (or necessary to achieve) a more just more sensitivity, more censorship. to the new landscape of microagres- society. At other times, groups may sion. The question, today, is how to use their veto for the most craven political pur- nevertheless participated in subtle forms of racist effect progressive social change without actively poses. In either case, the actual uses of that veto are thought and action without ever recognizing their contributing to the right-wing parody of academia, never morally neutral. own racism? Isn’t there something particularly leaving large numbers of well-intentioned people The question, in today’s academic culture of treacherous about the racist comment that does behind and bolstering the compensatory offensive- offence taking, is not whether the offended party not offend? ness of Trumpism. is to be recognized as the sole judge of offensive The root of the university’s image problem lies in speech (which was settled long ago), but whether this final turn, from a common-sense understand- ne prominent way of conceptualizing the link instances of offensive language require an offended ing of offence as subjective to the idea that offence- Obetween the offence-taking culture of micro- party at all. No sooner had the subjective under- causing speech is, in fact, objectively real—and aggression and the offence-giving culture of macro­ standing of offence taking (the idea that offence that it is never more real than when it is operating aggression, in the days after Trump’s victory, was only ever exists in the minds of the offended) been at an invisible or ideological level. To the graduate to blame the latter on the former. This is essentially accepted than academic theoreticians of offence student or professor steeped in Althusser, Gramsci, Mark Lilla’s approach in “The End of Identity began to insist the opposite: that forms of racial, Fanon or Žižek, the suggestion that the worst forms Liberalism,” an essay for the New York Times in sexual or gender-based offence exist—and even of (say) racism are operating on such an engrained, which Lilla, a humanities professor, argues that thrive—precisely where no one had ever registered unconscious level that we are not even aware of “campus diversity consciousness” had percolated the offence. From this perspective, exemplified them as racist will be uncontroversial. However, to down through the liberal media into every facet

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8 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada of American politics. To under- ened new order. Inclusivity stand their own complicity in only becomes inclusive through the creation of Trumpism, Lilla repeated acts of exclusion. claims, campus liberals need Tango Lesson to recognize the ways in which n the late stages of the U.S. “their own obsession with diver- After a history lesson, crash course in Buenos Aires Ipresidential election, the sim- sity has encouraged white, rural, a hundred years before our time, we begin mering conflict between the religious Americans to think of opposing sides of offence culture themselves as a disadvantaged at last. You gently place my arm over yours, my hand came to a head at the University group whose identity is being on your shoulder, our bodies distant enough of Toronto. On September 27, threatened or ignored.” The vit- psychology professor Jordan riol of such voters, who live in Peterson posted a YouTube to have an invisible body between us — this is open embrace, predominantly white enclaves, is video called “Professor Against less a rejection of “real” diversity you explain, abrazo abierto. We dare not dance in abrazo cerrado, Political Correctness.” The than it is a repudiation of the video was an hour-long diatribe “omnipresent rhetoric of iden- where our chests would nearly touch — I’m not single- against Bill C-16, an amend- tity” whose principal origin is the minded enough about learning these moves to unlock ment to the Canadian Human university campus. Rights Act and Criminal Code to Lilla’s assessment of Trump­ what I fear might spill out, should I let myself fall add gender identity and gender ism overemphasizes the power of into your hazelnut voice — so rich and deep I might never expression to the list of pro- campus diversity consciousness hibited grounds of discrimina- and radically underestimates emerge from it. You teach me the new skill of following, tion. What really provoked the ire the role of the so-called alt-right though your lead feels less like control and more of his opponents, however—and media in actively stoking race turned the incident into a cause and gender-based hatred. He célèbre—was Peterson’s stated like stewardship, carving swans of negative space gives short shrift indeed to the refusal to address his students by progressive social outcomes that that stretch their graceful necks along the diagonals their preferred gender pronouns: have resulted from this “con- sciousness.” But Lilla is correct to of our bodies. We’re in a conversation of pauses I don’t recognize another per- push us to think about the actual and advances. I step too soon, but you are eminently patient, son’s right to determine what political consequences of our pronouns I use to address intentions. One of the great rhet- your large hand over mine, poised mid-air, a paper crane them … I think [gender-neutral orical achievements of our time mid-flight. As you shift your weight from side to side, pronouns] are connected to an has been the right-wing media’s underground apparatus of rad- ability to bamboozle vast swaths I wait, trying to sense which way we are going, ical left political motivations. of people into accepting that the and for a moment, I have the chance to look at you not I think uttering those words recognition of minority rights makes me a tool of those is actually part of an “elite” pol- motivations. And I’m going to looking at me, your calm grey eyes fixed above my head. itical agenda: Muslim, African try and be a tool of my own American and LGBTQ commun- On the small of my back, your warm hand — motivations as clearly as I can ities (among other beneficiaries articulate them and not the of “diversity consciousness”) a breathing orchid, cupped flame. mouthpiece of some murder- become manifestations of the ous ideology. cultural elite, and are therefore Lisa Richter worthy of skepticism and con- It was characteristic of argu- tempt (if not deportation). In this ments against “political cor- populist perversion of reality, the Lisa Richter lives, writes and teaches English as a second language in rectness” that Peterson’s most university plays a vital rhetorical Toronto. Her poetry has appeared in the Malahat Review, the Puritan, urgent case study—the coercion role in transforming the most Canthius, (parenthetical) and the Toronto Quarterly, among others. to use ze, hir, zhe, em and so disadvantaged communities She was longlisted for the 2015 CBC Poetry Prize, and her chapbook, on—existed in the realm of pure into the most advantaged, the Intertextual, was published by Pooka Press in 2010. Her first full-length col­ fantasy. No student had ever most downtrodden into the most lection, Closer to Where We Began, is now available from Tightrope Books. actually asked him to use those privileged. She is reading Lorine Niedecker’s Collected Works, Alice Munro’s Selected pronouns; no administrator In short, the rhetoric of Stories and Susie Berg’s most recent collection of poetry, All This Blood. had instructed him to do so. No diversity consciousness has been matter: he would courageously weaponized in a campaign to refuse a request that had never subvert the political agenda for been made. which it was originally fashioned. Nowhere is that Today, neo-Nazis and university administrators In the course of the various protests and debates clearer than in the word “diversity” itself, a once can link arms and sing in celebration of diversity as that followed, Peterson exposed himself as ignorant vaguely progressive sounding (and now meaning- a cultural value. But the lesson here is not only that of many of the finer legal and scholarly facts upon less) word that has been appropriated by the full the rhetoric of diversity and inclusivity has been which his case rested: Bill C-16, the federal bill spectrum of political (and corporate) operators. weaponized in the promotion of white nationalistic that proposes adding gender identity and expres- Consider David Duke’s “Paradigm for True Human propaganda (although Duke’s intended audience sion to the Canadian Human Rights Act, does not Diversity,” available on his website, in which the will immediately grasp that recognizing “differ- make it a hate crime to misuse a pronoun; there former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, Holocaust ence” is a necessary first step in establishing more was not a “remote” chance that his infringement denier and Nazi sympathizer affirms that: permanent racial hierarchies). To the contrary, of the Ontario Human Rights Code could land him words such as diversity and inclusivity were always in prison, a Solzhenitsyn of our times; and there every people and culture has the right to weaponized—and never more obviously than when is a large body of scholarly literature recognizing preserve its unique expression of Humanity, they are used by liberals themselves. When admin- the existence of non-binary sexual expression and that every people has the right to maintain istrators at Laurier invoke inclusivity to justify the orientation. and enrich its unique culture, to nurture its firing of an insufficiently race-conscious employee, But despite the imprecision and falseness of particular expressions of art, music, literature, they reveal that the primary function of such lan- much of what he spoke, Peterson could always philosophies, architecture, religion, diet, trad- guage always involves the consolidation of political revert to the fallback position that he was, after all, itions and values. power: inclusivity is predicated upon the violent speaking, and should be free to do so. His basic expulsion of those identified as unfit for the enlight- message—that you could oppose a “murderous”

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 9 radical-left ideology through boorish behaviour Timothy Garton Ash, when he asks: “Do we want social feedback loop that, in turn, construes offen- directed toward sexual minorities—was a mes- to be the kind of human beings who are habitually sive speech as a kind of incantatory black magic, sage that some people were perfectly attuned to at the ready to take offence, and our children to be capable of producing trauma and sickening minds. hear in the fall of 2016. Peterson was at his most educated and socialized that way? Do we wish our Students pick up on the institutional signals, which persuasive when defending his argument in free children to learn to be adults or our adults to be at this moment seem to confirm that racist, sexist, speech terms—a defence that had nothing to do treated like children? Should our role model be the and homo- and trans-phobic language really does with gender, the law or the linguistic evolution of thin-skinned identity activist who is always crying, have the power to wound. Whether that message singular versus plural pronouns, and everything to ‘I am offended’?” will equip students for the brutalities that await is do with the claim that his opponents wanted him Anyone who has attempted to converse with one question. Another involves the ethical stakes silenced. the online homophobe or neo-Nazi (whose of an education that encourages students to inter- This claim was persuasive because it was true. utterances are typically clogged with hashtags nalize language that constrains, circumscribes or Peterson’s adversaries were quite unduly shapes their identity. open about the fact that they Students today, as Mark wanted him fired or otherwise The fetishization of moral outrage Kingwell argued in the Globe muzzled. In some cases, such as and Mail, are not “snowflakes.” when protesters brought a white- contributes to a social feedback loop Millennials are no more fragile noise machine to a rally, this silen- or precarious than students of cing was literal. When the U of T that, in turn, construes offensive speech any previous generation. Rather, agreed to host a forum about the students today must be educated debate, the Queer Caucus of CUPE as a kind of incantatory black magic, into their own unique sense of 3902, a trade union representing capable of producing trauma and fragility, and some factions within 7,000 U of T sessional and contract the modern university have found staff, called for a boycott of an sickening minds. it politically efficacious to provide event that they claimed “questions that education. One can recog- the legitimacy of trans rights.” nize that hateful speech must be In agreeing to hold the forum in the first place, like #WhiteGenocide or #AllLivesMatter) will chilled while also recognizing that offence taking as the U of T had struck an uneasy middle ground ­immediately recognize the futility of the “more a default response to the world is politically nuga- between the two cultures of offence. On the one speech” argument. Bigots are not famously recep- tory and often self-defeating. hand, the university allowed Peterson to undercut tive to dispassionate ratiocination (“Yes, after fur- What is clear now—as Donald Trump prepares his own argument (that he was being silenced) ther deliberation I have concluded that blacks are to unleash another round of executive orders, and by handing him a megaphone. Free speech was not sub-human after all”) and anyway, the notion as the likes of Kellie Leitch and Kevin O’Leary fire given its due. On the other, by “arranging for sup- that the pain and humiliation caused by racist up their populist engines, hoping to rekindle the port” just outside the auditorium for those who felt or religious epithets are somehow ameliorated latent forces of conservatism in this country— overwhelmed by Peterson’s speech, the university by additional speech is wishful thinking. This is the culture of offence is here to stay. The urgent gave credence to the suggestion that Peterson’s Stanley Fish’s argument in There’s No Such Thing as question for all of us is how to operate within that views really were psychologically harmful. And Free Speech … and It’s a Good Thing, Too, in which culture—how to advance a progressive political if that were the case—if Peterson’s speech did he argues that the freedom of any speech always agenda without contributing to further polariza- cross the line from speech into harmful action, emerges against the backdrop of what is unsayable. tion and fuelling the rise of aspiring demagogues. if it constituted “hate speech,” as Professor Mary In Fish’s words, We can recognize that political correctness is a Bryson explicitly alleged during the forum—then phantom construction of the cultural right while the university had indeed provided a platform to a when someone observes, as someone surely also recognizing that the popular perception of that hate-monger. will, that antiharassment codes chill speech, phantom remains a politically charged force—and Where do we go from here? Some will see the one could reply that since speech only that we can play a strategic role in neutralizing it. popular legitimation of Trumpist macroaggression becomes intelligible against the background A first step will involve recognizing that the (alongside the rise of right-wing media: Breitbart of what isn’t being said, the background of very distinction between offence taking and and Drudge in the United States, Rebel Media what has already been silenced, the only offence giving construes one side of the debate in Canada) as further evidence that now, more question is the political one of which speech as fragile, responsive and hypersensitive, and the than ever, the university needs to be inclusive is going to be chilled, and, all things con- other as robust, active and resilient. The truth, and respectful of difference—a safe space where sidered, it seems a good thing to chill speech as anyone familiar with the president’s Twitter diversity is valued and students are sheltered from like “nigger,” “cunt,” “kike,” and “faggot.” And feed can attest, is that Trump himself is con- the atavistic forces ascendant in the wider political if someone then says, “But what happened stantly taking offence—from the New York Times, culture. On our increasingly cosmopolitan, diverse to free-speech principles?” one could say … from the cast of Hamilton, from Meryl Streep. and globalized campuses, we must remain ever free-speech principles don’t exist except as a As an incubator of blind outrage and wounded vigilant against naturalizing our own assumptions component in a bad argument in which such indignation, the academy pales in comparison and cognizant of the minor yet morally important principles are invoked to mask motives that with what Trumpism has been able to achieve. ways in which offensive speech can be an impedi- would not withstand close scrutiny. Cathartic as it would be to savour the countless ment to learning. instances in which Trump has proven himself to This approach will involve the re-entrenchment Anyone opposed to the teaching of Holocaust be congenitally thin-skinned and easily offended, and expansion both of implicit norms and explicit denialism in public schools has already abandoned squabbles over offendability will only distract from disciplinary measures for curbing the freedom of the fantasy of free speech; the truth is that what is our most urgent priorities in the current power expression. There will be more cultural sensitiv- sayable in any society always has to be balanced struggle. The defeat of Trumpism will be a long- ity training, more censorship, more calling out, against what is unsayable, and what remains term project, involving continuous judicial exertion more exclusions to preserve the purity of inclu- unsaid. Fish argues that we must be particularly and radical political innovation. But we also need sivity. The right-wing media will continue to do wary of those who would cloak their own agenda to devise new ways of speaking to one another, new its work. The university will appear increasingly beneath the veil of abstract principle—“I’m for ways of communicating across difference, and this ridiculous, brittle and irrelevant. free speech,” or “I’m for diversity.” Such slogans is a project for which those in higher education may The classical liberal rebuttal is that we need are almost always intended to conceal the actual be uniquely suited. At a minimum, we must refuse more speech, not less, and that treating students political motives and stakes of the speech under to contribute to a populist cultural support mech- as so psychologically delicate and fragile as to be consideration. The real question is: what is such anism that feeds on our well-intentioned outrage. traumatized by disagreeable speech is infantil- speech intended to do? Short-circuiting Trump’s engine of resentment and izing. Here, the offence-taking student or group in The modern university’s provisional and tac- indignation is not, of course, any sort of political question is told to grow a thicker skin. The proper tical embrace of the logic of microaggression and end in itself; it is only the necessary precondi- response to offensive speech is additional speech, offence taking did not (contra Lilla) cause the cur- tion for reimagining the more equitable future preferably in the form of a dignified and well- rent eruption of Trumpist macroaggression. But that many progressives thought we had already reasoned rebuttal. This is a position favoured by the fetishization of moral outrage contributes to a achieved.

10 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Outside Baseball Looking for capital-M Meaning in a magical game Adam Sternbergh

Baseball Life Advice: Loving the Game That Saved Me Stacey May Fowles McClelland and Stewart 256 pages, softcover ISBN 9780771038716

Fail Better: Why Baseball Matters Mark Kingwell Biblioasis 304 pages, softcover ISBN 9781771961530

t’s baseball, Ray.” This quote from Field of Dreams is one of the all-time great pop- “Icultural koans, perhaps second only in cine- matic history to “Forget it, Jake—it’s Chinatown.” As an explanation for the persistent tug of America’s pastime, the quote is both inadequate and perfect, as though nothing more need be said—though, of course, much more has been said, and is said, and will be said, in that movie and elsewhere. Like most memorable movie quotes, “It’s baseball, Ray” is actually a misquote, much like “Play it again, Sam”; the actual line from the film is “The one constant through all the years has been baseball.” And that line comes nestled in a longer, languid, melliflu- ously sentimental bit of speechifying by James Earl Jones. “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers,” he intones in his famously resonant voice. “It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt fitted white pajamas. Who woke up his sleeping powerful as the writer who wields it. The best novel and erased again. But baseball has marked the parents with his unhinged whooping as Mookie about sports I’ve ever read, for example, is not time. This field, this game, is a part of our past, Ray. Wilson’s bounder snuck through Bill Buckner’s legs. about baseball; it’s End Zone by Don DeLillo, about It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could Who felt physical nausea as the Jays’ first chance American football and, not incidentally, nuclear be again.” to win a World Series, in 1992, went into extra war. It contains this haunting, perfect passage, As difficult as it may be to explain the peculiar innings, yet who felt eerily calm and confident as about the introduction of a college team’s first black appeal of baseball, it is just as difficult to define Mitch Williams grooved a meatball to Joe Carter, player, Taft Robinson: “Taft caught a flare pass, what makes great baseball writing great. Yet it’s who redirected it into the left field stands of the evaded two men and went racing down the side- practically a prerequisite of modern baseball fan- SkyDome the following fall. Who later walked up a line, Bobby Iselin, a cornerback, gave up the chase dom to buy into the assumption that baseball, as jam-packed and jubilant Yonge Street in a kind of at the 25. Bobby used to be the team’s fastest man.” both an athletic pursuit and a handy metaphor for catatonic numbness. I’d argue that is as telling and poetic and resonant a everything, is uniquely poetic among sports. It’s Which is to say: I love baseball. It’s baseball, distillation of sports and life and race and America not. I say this as a lifelong baseball fan. I say this as Ray! Yet I’m not convinced it has magical pow- as anything about steamrollers and blackboards. someone who grew up watching the bad, protean ers. Martin Amis and David Foster Wallace have Two new books arrive, along with spring, along version of the Blue Jays as they patrolled the hard both written brilliantly about tennis, Nick Hornby with the baseball season, each invoking a similar green carpet at Exhibition Stadium in their slim- has written brilliantly about English football, and mission. The first, Fail Better: Why Baseball Matters, the best nonfiction book I’ve ever read about is a long, sprawling and loosely linked series of Adam Sternbergh is culture editor at New York sports is King of the World, by David Remnick, essays by the philosopher and public intellectual magazine and the former culture editor of the a meditation on Muhammad Ali that doubles as a Mark Kingwell. The second,Baseball Life Advice: New York Times Magazine. He is the author of deft history of race and the American media. The Loving the Game That Saved Me, is a long, sprawl- two novels, including the Edgar-nominated Shovel temptation when writing about baseball is to avoid ing and loosely linked memoir of sorts from the Ready; his third novel, The Blinds, will be published the hard work of finding the magic in the game and journalist and novelist Stacey May Fowles. As their by Ecco/HarperCollins in August 2017. He lives in to instead lean on its hand-me-down mystique like titles suggest, these books are not here to shoot the Brooklyn. a crutch. As with any metaphor, baseball is only as breeze or joke around: no, we’re in the territory of

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 11 lives saved, of mattering. “Baseball is ers we really don’t personally know hope. Baseball is narrative. Baseball at all? What’s in it for us? The true is a thing to do when there’s nothing fan roots blindly—it’s what makes to be done,” writes Fowles, echo- being a true fan so much fun—but ing, perhaps inadvertently, Samuel Sophocles’ Jalopy the writer should at least cast a self- critical eye on the roots of his or her Beckett. For Kingwell, such echoes The father attempts to start his son’s piece-of-shit car. Got are not inadvertent; they are so loud own fandom. Instead, Fowles’s chap- it going once, but the timing’s rough. Our bedroom funks they barely qualify as echoes. “Fail ter fixates on a simple question: will with the vile reek of burning oil. It was puffin’ blue smoke. Better” is, as the book’s epigraph Price, the affable, charming bulldog drives home, a snippet from one of Now it won’t turn over. Annexing the driver’s seat, the son owner, stay in Toronto, or will he go? Beckett’s most famous, and most gives it a go, desperate for any sign of mechanical respect. Spoiler: He went. This is a fact fridge-magnet-ready, quotes: “All But his elder is all ever-present, gum-chewing disdain, long since resolved, over a season of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. which emanates from him like whatever it is dribbling ago, which in baseball time is an Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail from the exhaust pipe, smearing our shared dirt drive- eternity. Why this chapter has not again. Fail better.” way. Persistent as a raccoon drawn on by the perfume of been updated, or expanded, but Already we’ve sailed past the anti-freeze, doesn’t his kid just push the pedal down again instead simply arrives with an domain of skinny Lloyd Moseby and again while the older man gruffs: Trash the goddamn italicized addendum declaring that and Gary Carter and, in the modern thing. S’no good. But the kid won’t stop, maybe can’t. His Price signed with the Red Sox in December of 2015, is unclear. It’s day, Jose Bautista’s epic bat flip and foot riding an arc of true need down to the floorboard, Josh Donaldson’s hair; past, even, also a shame, given it would have the engine’s rough racket: guttural scatter pops — more the iconic Canadian sportswriter been genuinely interesting to read alive than any car just off the lot — again and again, until Allison Gordon and the mythopoetic about the aftermath of this event for baseball novelist W.P. Kinsella; and his mother — a solo Greek chorus urging compromise, Fowles herself, especially having just into the realm of capital-M Meaning dealing with reality — comes out to serenade them inside. read so much on how irrationally and capital-B Beckett. Baseball And the play, whatever it stands for, ends. No curtain call invested (because every single thing tends to inspire this sort of ambi- needed, the car’s deep-bowing silence, an empty stage, an about being a sports fan is irrational) tion. Occasionally, it even supports uncrowned king dying peacefully, the drama elsewhere. she was in Price’s decision. Instead, it. The New Yorker staffer and base- her insights only go so far as “the ball writer Roger Angell has not, to Claire Kelly reality is that, in life and in baseball, my knowledge, in his 96 years and people pack their bags and move counting, ever put a single word on.” That they do. As a tweet, it might wrong. But, to lean on another well- Claire Kelly’s first full-length collection, Maunder, is available have some resonance, but as a chap- worn baseball metaphor, when you from Palimpsest Press. She has curated a chapbook of emerg­ ter in a book, it feels like a reheated swing for the fences, you occasion- ing Edmonton poets for Frog Hollow Press’s City Series. She lives meal that has barely been warmed ally whiff. You strike a foul ball into and writes and reads in Edmonton. Currently, she is reading The back to room temperature. the stands. You pound a dribbler Scapegoat, written by Sophia Nikolaidou and translated by Karen The larger problem is that Fowles up the middle. You go down, pin- Emmerich, and she is rereading Kayla Czaga’s For Your Safety sets herself the task of not just revisit- wheeling, in the dirt. Please Hold On and Brecken Hancock’s Broom Broom. ing her observations about particular Fowles is up first. Her book grew moments of interest, but also diag- out of a collection of thoughts, tweets, nosing baseball’s recuperative, even columns and, mostly, a weekly news- life-saving, powers. Yet she too often letter she began publishing in 2015, which collected rather to make clear what that premise is (as she lands on squishy sentiments such as “and maybe particularly inspiring baseball quotes along with does, early on), and the difficulty of delivering on it’s only in these communal moments of suffering her impressions of the game. Her book doubles as it successfully. that we realize that all we really have is each other.” a pseudo-memoir, chronicling her own bouts with A project like this poses a writerly challenge, and Or, on the very next page, “I’m okay with admitting a near-paralyzing anxiety, and examining how a a readerly question: can the author take her own that my ‘insider information’ primarily comes from complete immersion into baseball, bordering on experiences, her own struggles and stumbles and inside my heart.” (This line makes even the author the obsessive (she attends nearly every Jays home tiny triumphs, and recast them in a way that feels cringe, as she follows it with an apologetic shrug: game in person), helped her deal with a troubling universal? Sports, as a vessel for writing about per- “Yeah, I’m kind of ashamed I wrote that, but it’s the period in her life. As a result, the collection has a sonal feelings, offers the handy element of common truth.”) breezy, ephemeral quality but a self-serious mis- experience; we don’t all know what it feels like to Fowles fares better when she zeroes in on tar- sion. “I’m not in any way resentful of baseball’s be crippled by anxiety, but we do know (or at least gets like the perils of fandom-while-female, as in strange grip on me,” she writes in an opening chap- those of us drawn to a book like this) what it felt the chapter “Watching Like a Girl,” in which she ter, “but rather am grateful, and would even go so like to watch Jose Bautista defiantly flip his bat after details the clumsy efforts by Major League Baseball far as to say that my need for it saved my life.” hitting a monumental home run. For a writer, tying to appeal to women, with such gimmicks as pink- This proves a difficult trick to pull off. It’s diffi- those two things together—the personal and the accented uniforms on Mother’s Day or special cult enough when done with careful consideration communal—in a way that feels fresh and revelatory events like “Fields of Fashion” targeted at female and the benefit and context of time—when you are is where the magic happens, or doesn’t. fans. She fares better still when she explores the looking back through the prism of hindsight at the An early chapter on David Price, the pitcher influence on her of Allison Gordon, who covered strange pull that baseball exerted on you, and why— obtained in a trade by the Blue Jays for their 2015 the Blue Jays for the Toronto Star and became the but it’s especially difficult when you’re essentially stretch drive, illuminates this dilemma. The chap- first female beat reporter in baseball history. corralling a herd of more or less contemporaneous ter carries the date stamp November 27, 2015, and (Gordon is referenced reverently in both of these musings and observations and repackaging them it’s a long exposition on Fowles’s feelings about books, and rightly so.) But Fowles’s reportorial as a book. One handy way to evaluate any book Price’s potential post-season departure from the chapters generally work better than her essayistic about baseball, especially one that revels in a Jays as a free agent. She recounts Price’s appeal— ones—which limits the satisfactions of the book. rambling, collegial looseness, is to decide whether, “he was indisputably affable, charming, and kind- This, after all, is the underlying challenge of any as a reader, you might enjoy watching a game with hearted, with a winning smile and an adorable writing about sports. We’re all watching the same its author over beers. I suspect that if a stranger sat French bulldog named Astro”—and adds her own thing. We don’t need to be told what happened. down next to you at a sports bar and opened by arm’s-length observations, which she admits are We need to be given a new way to think about it, to saying (as Fowles does), “in recovering from men- overly starry-eyed. “The hopeful (or perhaps naïve) consider it, to see it again afresh. tal illness, I’ve learned that structure is the key to among us would like to think that Price is driven It’s unfair to compare any writer to Roger Angell, any therapeutic process,” you might smile politely, less by money and more by heart,” she writes. since Angell is as good at writing about baseball as then look for your chance to scoot a few bar stools There is an opportunity here for Fowles to explore any other living writer is at writing about anything. in the opposite direction. This is not to make light thornier elements of fandom: For example, why do But consider this passage from a brief dispatch of Fowles’s experience, or her book’s premise, but we invest essentially imaginary attributes to play- he wrote on Derek Jeter’s final game at Yankee

12 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Stadium. Following a Jeter double that helped tie lent companion. As with the famously unhurried the score, he wrote, “we were free over the next game of baseball, you sit back, settle in, endure the hour or more to watch his naked, intelligent face occasional stretches of tedium, wait patiently for in riveting closeups, while he fought and almost an outbreak of beauty and wonder, and are reliably ILLUMINATING lost the battle with his emotions. Between pitches rewarded. out at short, or while on the bench, he flicked his Perhaps my biggest personal disappointment in The Great Class pale gaze this way and that, taking in the heart- both of these books is in how much they leave out War 1914-1918 rending familiar, and he pressed his lips together, or fail to explore. The state of modern fandom, espe- Jacques Pauwels or dropped his head, or looked elsewhere in bird- cially in regard to baseball, is novel and fluid and $34.95 paperback like twitches.” You could have sat right next to Roger perplexing and endlessly intriguing. For example, Canadian historian Angell at the stadium that day and seen exactly I am, as stated, a baseball fan. I also play fan- Jacques Pauwels offers a revisionist account what he saw, but you tasy baseball, a bizarre of the great-power would never have seen and ignoble pursuit dynamics that produced it in exactly the way he by which I “employ” and sustained the First It’s practically a World War. saw it. And you would real-life players on a revel in sitting next to prerequisite of modern fictional team, accruing him, and hearing him their statistics, in com- recount it to you, and baseball fandom to buy petition with other fans. what it meant to him. For both of these books A paucity of inter- into the assumption not to even flick at the THOUGHTFUL esting observation is essential absurdity of certainly not an issue in that baseball is uniquely fantasy sports seems, Too Young to Die: Mark Kingwell’s collec- if not an indictable Canada’s Boy Soldiers, poetic among athletic Sailors and Airmen in tion. It’s not quite cor- offence, then at least the Second World War rect to call Fail Better pursuits. It’s not. an egregious missed John Boileau and a tour of Kingwell’s opportunity. Dan Black baseball knowledge, I say this as a lifelong Similarly, while both $34.95 hardcover fandom and history, Fowles and Kingwell Extensively researched and illustrated with photos, because “tour” sug- baseball fan. nod toward the advent, maps, and letters, this gests there is material over the last 30 years or volume tells the story of the Second World War he left out, which so, of advanced statis- through the experiences of seems unlikely. But there are many kinds of base- tical analysis to baseball, neither delves too deeply, underage soldiers. ball books, and many kinds of baseball fans, and let alone deeply enough, into its philosophical if you are the kind that longs for a book about implications. The rise of sabermetrics—basically, baseball that also contains a chapter called, simply, the use of data and algorithms to analyze past “Love,” and which begins with the solitary sentence performance and thus attempt to predict future ENGAGING “What is love?,” then Kingwell has written just the results—is a subject that seems so tailor-made for book for you. Kingwell’s particular affinities that I hope he one The Trans-Pacific Partnership Kingwell has an agile, and active, and engaging day writes a book about it. Baseball statisticians and Canada: mind, and has no problem—in fact, seems excited can now, for example, tell you the exact distance, A Citizen’s Guide by—dropping references to Aristotle and the velocity and trajectory of every single home run, Edited by Scott Sinclair movie Frozen just 26 words apart. At a certain and how many previous balls batted in precisely and Stuart Trew point, I stopped dog-earing pages with men- that way enjoyed a similarly glorious outcome, and $22.95 paperback tions of Kierkegaard, or Hegel, or J.D. Salinger, how many died at the warning track. There is an A new collection by or Wittgenstein, or Glenn Gould, or Seth Rogen, obvious existential desperation to this brand of Canadian policy experts sheds light on how the or Marshall McLuhan, or Heidegger, or Justin analysis. What is more fundamentally human than fl uctuating terms of this deal could impact health Bieber, or Sun Tzu, because my copy threatened to a longing to conquer the unknowable? To read, care, environmental become a dog with infinite ears. Kingwell’s baili- in the tea leaves, or chicken guts, or Wins Above protection, foreign investment, and more. wick is applying his expansive knowledge of philo- Replacement of a backup infielder, a sense of what sophical principles to quotidian pop pursuits—he the future might hold? has written 17 previous books, including one titled Baseball, among all sports, is singularly well Catch and Release: Trout Fishing and the Meaning suited to statistical oversaturation, in part because of Life—and one of this book’s recurring pleasures so much of the play on the field involves solitary INFORMATIVE is learning the distinction, say, between a pragma- humans engaged in easily definable acts. (Whether Final Report of tist, an empiricist and an authoritarian, as it applies a batter gets a hit, for example, is less complicated, the Truth and to umpires. The pragmatist says “There’s balls and on a metaphysical level, than all the kinetic inter- Reconciliation strikes, and I call them as they are!”; the empiricist action of a basketball fast-break or a kickoff return Commission of says, “There’s balls and strikes and I call them as for a touchdown.) If we can predict a player’s future Canada I see ’em,” and the authoritarian says, “There’s batting average accurately to a fourth decimal Volume One: Summary balls and there’s strikes, and they ain’t nothing ’til place (as the statistics seem to promise), can the $22.95 paperback I call ’em.” mysteries of the universe, of life and death and love The full text of the The ranginess of the book underscores its occa- and meaning, be far behind? It’s no coincidence Commission’s summary volume, including its sional flaw—any book that takes such an ambling that Nate Silver, the current pop guru of predictive fi ndings and its 94 Calls path will inevitably wander off into the weeds analytics, rose up through the ranks of baseball to Action. now and again. If Kingwell commits a crime, it’s a analysis. He applied his critical thinking to track- crime of curation: at times it seems there is no fact ing base hits, and then, later, to tracking political or snippet or tidbit of knowledge he won’t happily polling. And if you don’t think we as a society have trot out to display. In fact, reading Fail Better is not become overly invested in the notion that numbers, unlike the satisfying experience of watching a lazy properly processed, can magically predict our col- baseball game on a summer afternoon. Lounging lective fate, then you were deaf to the confounded www.lorimer.ca in the bleachers with friends, you easily and wail that rose, south of the Canadian border, in happily spend a few hours shooting the shit, one- the late hours of November 8 of last year. If that Independent. Canadian. Since 1970. upping each other with stats or trivia, occasionally is not a subject worthy of the collected wisdom of Made possible with the support of the stumbling on actual insights, and enjoying it all the Heidegger, Glenn Gould, Sun Tzu and Seth Rogen, Ontario Media Development Corporation while. In this sense, Kingwell makes for an excel- then I don’t know what is.

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 13 Battle Wary Why is a fight on another continent, 50 years after Confederation, our nation’s founding myth? Amy Shaw

Vimy: The Battle and the Legend Tim Cook Allen Lane 479 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780735233164

he year 2017 is the 150th anniversary of Canada’s Confederation. It is also the T100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge during the First World War. Celebrations and commemorations of both are rife this year, and it is difficult to say which is more important in the popular imagination. The two events are in curious competition as founding myths, and also often conflated in a narrative that presents the country’s political founding in 1867, but situates its founding in a real emotional sense as happening at Vimy Ridge. Why have we decided this? The oddity of a battle on another continent, one that took place 50 years after Confederation, being the actual birth of the nation is accepted among Canadians with strangely little question. It is difficult to explain to an outsider. The battle was not in defence of the country against a foreign invader; nor was it won in a fight for freedom against an imperial oppressor. Canadians fought in Europe, as a colony of Britain, in vocal support of the values of the British Empire. Why, then, do we accord so much importance to Canadians, hungry for external validation, won emphasize the British connection; sometimes it this event? overseas. It was not our first or most important vic- showed independence. Sometimes the battle has The battle of Vimy Ridge beganon April 9, 1917, tory even in the First World War. The Second Battle been shrouded in grief and loss and a poignant and ended three days later. The ridge was a key of Ypres was seen, during and in the first years after search for peace; sometimes it was about victory piece of high ground that had fallen under German the war, as its most significant Canadian action. and showing Canadians’ instinctive abilities as war- control early in the war. Several costly efforts to And Vimy was not a battle against as clear-cut a vil- riors. Although each narrative served explicit politi- retake it had been unsuccessful. Doing so this lain as the Second World War would later provide. cal goals, Cook plays down the role of officialdom time was crucial to the success of the British Battle The tangle of alliances and imperial obligations that in shaping the collective memory. His argument of Arras. The battle was hard-fought and bloody put Canadians in France in 1917 seems less suited hinges on the grassroots nature of myth making. and the Canadian victory is generally credited to to myth making than the country’s later battles What he presents as more formative than poli- technological innovation, especially the creep- against Nazis. Why then do people make pilgrim- tics in shaping the Vimy myth is art. This includes ing artillery barrage, and to meticulous planning ages to Vimy? novels such as The Stone Carvers, and paintings and preparation. The capture of the ridge was Tim Cook’s latest book, Vimy: The Battle and the such as Ghosts of Vimy Ridge, which hangs in the psychologically important to the Allies, a needed Legend, addresses this conundrum. The first part of Railway Committee Room in the Centre Block on victory after a string of stalemates and losses. It the book describes the battle. The second discusses Parliament Hill, but it mainly involves the memo- was psychologically important to the Canadians how Vimy has been used over time to serve the rial in France. Cook describes the decades-long too—the battle was the first time that all four of our needs and ends of generations of Canadians, and creation of the monument and argues that its effec- divisions had fought together. That doing so led to how its popularity and meaning have shifted over tiveness is a large part of why Vimy is treated with victory seemed evidence of this nation’s especial the years. Cook is a popular and award-winning reverence. The memorial that the Canadian sculp- military valour. military historian and his description of the battle is tor Walter Allward created is so unique, evocative This was heartening, both to the soldiers and vivid and painstakingly detailed, showcasing both and beautiful that Canadians built their memory on the home front, but it was, at first, not any heroism and the inhuman scale of industrialized of Vimy’s importance and exceptionalism on the more than that. Vimy was not the first victory that warfare, and the damage it does to men’s bodies. work. A large part of this book of military history is The second part of the book, the shaping a paean to the power of art. Amy Shaw teaches history at the University of the battle into what he calls “the legend,” traces This seems all to the good, and indeed decid- of Lethbridge. She is the author of Crisis of the ebbs and flows of Vimy’s place in popular ing that the Battle of Vimy Ridge was the birth of Conscience: Conscientious Objection in Canada imagination. The battle has variously had a more Canada as a nation itself seems, in some ways, during the First World War (UBC Press, 2009) and or less prominent place in the public conscious- harmless enough. It is factually incorrect, but co-editor of A Sisterhood of Suffering and Service: ness in the century since it was fought. It has few countries’ founding myths stand up to much Women and Girls in Canada and Newfoundland also been presented in different and sometimes scrutiny. It is the imagined community that during the First World War (UBC Press, 2012). conflicting ways. Sometimes Vimy was a means to comes of them that is important, more than the

14 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada stories themselves.­ The trouble is, Vimy has seri- That narrative, the founding of Canada in the sary solution to the problem of an insufficiently ous limitations in creating community. The battle battle at Vimy, bothers me more than it should. patriotic new country, what traits in citizenship are is sometimes treated as shorthand for the entire The trumpery is part of it—the explanation that we lauding? First World War. And that war was as fracturing as Canadians won because of some innate superiority, Canada is unusual in the comparative non­ it was unifying. The losses at Vimy were part of a because we are better than the French and British, violence of its founding. English Canada had its trend that led to military conscription in Canada. who lost battles for the ridge earlier in the war, or origins in the rejection of the American Revolution, Conscription was resisted by several groups and than those who won the ridge, as the Moroccans and the confederation of the British North led to rioting and death in Quebec. The First did, but were unable to hold it. Tens of thousands American colonies, in 1867 and the years following, World War is remembered very differently among of our allies died fighting there, numbers that seem was a political decision encouraged by the mother French Canadians. We tend to be a bit careful in unimaginable today. The Germans lost tens of thou- country. Great damage was done to the indigenous our commemoration of Confederation, alert to the sands more. Part of why the memorial took so long people, but more often through repression than absences, aware of the effects of the event on the to build was the length of time needed for burials through battle. This makes for what some might indigenous people who had no say in our country’s and the removal of mines. These mendo not get to characterize as a boring history: a focus on law and founding and who suffered during its expansion. be part of the memory of the battle, except as foils, order and an absence of revolution and civil wars. Commemoration of Vimy generally receives less evidence of imperial European obduracy. In claim- The Battle of Vimy Ridge in this context is appealing sensitive treatment. That this was certainly no emo- ing the battle as solely ours, we have taken from simply because it is a battle, and battles are more tional founding of our nation for French Canadians those groups the opportunity to grieve their losses exciting than debates. is not part of the narrative. Cook does include dis- there. The French role at the ceremonies at the Is it not callow and imitatively childish, though, cussion of the conscription riots, a strength of the Vimy Memorial is to be grateful. Other connections to put forward a battle as a moment of indepen- book. It sits rather awkwardly though, unreconciled have been similarly obviated. The battle was part dence simply because it is exciting, and something with his conclusions about the reverence due the of a larger British offensive, and commanded by that other countries have? A 150-year-old country memory of the battle. Lieutenant General Julian Byng, not the Canadian is mature enough to recognize the value of its idio- Cook takes apart the construction of Vimy, shows general Arthur Currie, as our dominant nationalist syncrasies. And they are valuable. Canada has a us its joints and fissures. He quotes the key people narrative prefers. British soldiers fought with the tradition of negotiation, of process. This has quite involved saying quite explicitly that Vimy was not Canadians at Vimy. They have been erased as well. often been incomplete, but it is something that can the birth of a nation, that it was not even the most The limitations of a battle as a founding event be built on. Placing the birth of the nation on a ridge strategically important battle in which Canadians are troubling, too. A battle is closed, violent, finite. in France during the First World War is not. A coun- were involved during the First World War. And he A single event. I distrust its tidy, restricted simplic- try that had its origins in pragmatism rather than says this does not matter. For Cook, the construc- ity the same way I distrust the religious language martial fervour, and whose founding involved a tion of the myth of Vimy Ridge out of a hodgepodge about Vimy—trips to the memorial are described process of negotiation over years offers possibilities of needs and aims is not dishonest; it is valuable. as pilgrimages and the ridge itself, frequently, as for inclusivity. It becomes a country where “enemy” Canadians made of Vimy what they needed, and the “sacred soil.” This banishes complexity and silences is not a key concept, and one that can accept new- making was—is—the key thing. It is an intriguing analysis. Being told to hold something in reverence comers of a variety of religious and ethnic back- interpretation, but Cook’s skill at presenting popu- is being told not to discuss it, to mention it only grounds without fear of damage to a static sense of larly appealing, nationalistic history in a nuanced in hushed tones and archaic cliché: “The brave self. If commemoration is as much about our hopes way is rare, and the dominant narrative remains the Canadians rushed into the storm of steel.” If we for the future as it is about our interpretation of the battle, not its heroic construction.­ present victory in battle as a glorious and neces- past, this seems more solid ground.

MAY 2017 from ROSEWAY PUBLISHING Just Jen: Thriving Through Multiple Sclerosis by Jen Powley

“Trust this writer: she’s the real thing.” — Lorri Neilsen Glenn, author of Untying the Apron

“Even as she illuminates some of the darkest corners of her disease, Powley’s resilience, humanity and scrappy sense of humour shine through on every page.” — Sarah Mian, author of When the Saints

Jen Powley was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at fifteen. By thirty-five, she had lost the use of her arms and legs. Just Jen is a powerful memoir that tells the story of Powley’s life at the time of her diagnosis, and the infinite, irrevocable ways it has changed since. Just Jen is a powerful, uplifting and unforgettable work by an author who has laid her life — and her body — bare in order to survive.

fernwoodpublishing.ca/roseway an imprint of Fernwood Publishing

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 15 A Man of Our Time Lawren Harris is once again jolted out of his casket, in reappraisals that paint him as a resolute modernist and urbanite Sarah Milroy

Higher States: Lawren Harris and His American Contemporaries Roald Nasgaard and Gwendolyn Owens Goose Lane Editions 204 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780864929655

s there more to say about Lawren Harris? One can be forgiven for saying no, as Harris Ihas for decades been a steady source of lore for lovers of Canadian art: the pipe-smoking, tweed-clad scion of the crusty Harris clan (made rich through farm machinery manufacturing), majordomo of Toronto’s all-male Arts & Letters Club, patron of the Studio Building (a modernist artist commune of sorts that he commissioned and erected in Rosedale, of all places), the pioneering producer and purveyor of the new national imagery of the Group of Seven, his bearing erect at the easel, his hair stiff as a toilet brush (not my joke, alas, but Lawren S. Harris painting “Eight Red Houses,” c. 1926. source not for attribution). I could go on. Private Collection. Image courtesy of the McMichael Gallery. A steady stream of affirmations had begun unfolding even before his death in Vancouver in and sub-Arctic landscapes curated by the actor of several of his tightly prescriptive recipes for mys- 1970 at the age of 85: a full survey in 1963 (under the and comedian Steve Martin, with curators Cynthia tical exaltation. Theosophy had a number of adher- direction of Ian McNair); Lawren S. Harris: Urban Burlingham and Andrew Hunter. ents in the Toronto art world, but for many Harris’s Scenes and Wilderness Landscapes 1906–1930 by The show, which wended its way northward leap into theosophy was a dive off the deep end. Jeremy Adamson at the Art Gallery of Ontario in to the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2016 after show- Contemporary Canadian commentators (such 1978; Peter Larisey’s biography, Light for a Cold ings in Los Angeles and Boston, represented both as the late University of Waterloo professor Robert Land, in 1993; Andrew Hunter’s Americas Society an opportunity and a problem. On the one hand, Linsley) have also criticized Harris’s notion of exhibition in 2000, titled Lawren Stewart Harris: the exhibition was an undeniably grand occasion: the white, uninhabited wastelands of Canada as A Painter’s Progress; and James King’s affable soup- a dazzling affirmation of a Canadian talent by a problematic in their obliviousness to Canada’s to-nuts biography, Inward Journey: The Life of Hollywood star who saw in Harris a kindred spirit to indigenous (and conspicuously not white) peoples, Lawren Harris, in 2012. Edward Hopper, the artists allied (in Martin’s view) particularly curious given Harris’s first-hand Then, just when it seemed that all veneration in their explorations of solitude. On the other hand, experience of the Inuit during his Arctic travels— had been paid and the dust could safely settle, a it was an exhibition that, in its original inception, we have his snapshots to prove it—not to mention fresh round of reckoning ensued, with Harris play- elided the many thorny issues that have grown up his close friendship with Emily Carr, a settler artist ing a standout role at the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s around the Harris legacy here in Canada, such as known for her embrace of indigenous culture. 2012 exhibition Painting Canada: Tom Thomson the suspiciously Aryan delight Harris took in “the Rallying creatively to land this show in Toronto and The Group of Seven in London, England great North and its living whiteness, its loneliness on a location-specific critical footing, Hunter (although one British critic likened his mountain and replenishment” (as Harris explained it), eman- devised a curatorial prelude that presented Harris’s paintings to Disney’s animations for Fantasia), fol- ating “cleansing rhythms” from its icy peaks and early and heavily impastoed paintings of the lowed, two years later, by Ian Thom’s Lawren Harris: frozen vastness. slums of Toronto near where the AGO now stands Canadian Visionary at the Vancouver Art Gallery. These views were of a piece with Harris’s fascin- (evidence, perhaps, of Harris’s discomfiture with Nothing could have prepared us, though, for ation with theosophy—a spiritual and intellectual social injustice and his own privileged place within the hype and the hoopla of last year’s The Idea of trend then popular on both sides of the Atlantic. it), giving audiences the backstory of his defining North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris, a magis- (Kandinsky and Mondrian were also adherents.) retreat to the North, or at least of his fascination terial touring exhibition devoted to Harris’s Arctic If one reads theosophy now, it can seem faintly with the idea of it (evidence, possibly, of his dis- menacing—with its celebration of the purity of the comfiture with the social and ethnic compression Sarah Milroy is a Toronto writer and curator, former northern race—not to mention downright kooky. of urban life). The show concluded by returning editor and publisher of Canadian Art and former art Take Kandinsky’s assertion, in his landmark tract audiences to the multi-ethnic urban Toronto set- critic of the Globe and Mail. She was the co-curator Concerning the Spiritual in Art, that “the life of the ting that Harris had left behind, merging Harris’s of From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British spirit may be fairly represented as a large acute- later abstracts with commissioned contemporary Columbia (2014) and Vanessa Bell (2017), both at angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal art by Toronto artists who are living and working in the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. parts with the narrowest segment uppermost,” one the city today—a kind of curatorial Hail Mary pass

16 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada aimed at contextualizing Harris’s mod- (along with fellow Canadians Bertram ernist angst in the here and now. Brooker, Jock MacDonald and Kathleen This coda proved confusing for some, Munn) to the writings of theosophists but it seemed truly to jolt Harris out of Annie Besant and C.W Leadbeater (not his silk-lined casket once and for all, pro- to mention Blake and Whitman and voking us to wonder if we had ever really the influential mystic Richard Maurice known this artist in the first place. Was Bucke based in London, Ontario), and he a trust-fund oddball or a true bohem- lets us in on his front-row attendance at ian, a reactionary minter of jingoistic, Thomas Wilfred’s Clavilux performance white-on-white Canadiana or a radical at Convocation Hall at the University of unraveller of the artistic status quo? Toronto in 1924, a kind of visual organ Of course, he was to some extent all recital in which veils of colour and form of these things, but as the newest project flared silently onto a giant screen before on Harris makes clear, he was first and the audience. In a way that now seems foremost a striver. Higher States: Lawren delightfully nerdy, Harris was always up Harris and His American Contemporaries, for an experiment in thought and feeling. the publication that accompanies the Gwendolyn Owens’s essay “A High McMichael Canadian Art Collection’s Sort of Seeing: Emerson, Harris and current exhibition of the same name, the American Moderns,” consolidates a was organized by Roald Nasgaard and range of research on Harris’s relation- Gwendolyn Owens, and it sets Harris ship to the American Transcendentalist within the fuller North American story, tradition, which originated in literature teasing out further complexities in a leg- with Emerson, and moved on through acy that seems to get more complicated Whitman and Thoreau, influential on with each passing year. both sides of the border. (Canadian art- Yes, Harris was a purveyor of artis- ist David Milne, for example, was deeply tic nationalism, declaring a bold new influenced by this line of thought.) Canadian art in the aftermath of the Harris’s contemporaries noted ear- Great War alongside his fellow members lier—Marin, Dove, Hartley, O’Keeffe— of the Group of Seven. But he was also a translated this tradition into a modern committed internationalist, a perspec- vernacular, all of them within the circle of tive arising from his own experience of the photographer and legendary modern international art as a student in Germany dealer Alfred Stieglitz, and Harris rightly and his many later trips to New York came to take his place within this milieu. and other eastern U.S. cities, including Owens delves, too, into Harris’s expos- Buffalo, where he took in a famous exhib- ure to the collector and artist Katherine ition of contemporary Scandinavian Dreier, and to the lesser known (in his- landscape painting at the Albright-Knox torical hindsight) museum patron, stage Lawren S. Harris (Canadian, 1885–1970), Mountain Experience, ca. 1936, Art Gallery in 1913. Harris took J.E.H. Oil on canvas, 142.6 x 88.2 cm, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Collection of the designer and spiritual leader Nicholas MacDonald along with him on that trip, School of Art. © Family of Lawren S. Harris. Roerich, who showed Harris’s work at his and together they carried the artistic pol- museum on New York’s upper west side, len of Swedish landscape artist Gustaf Fjæstad and also, wherever possible, to show it. (Even in Dennis a hotbed for likeminded mystic seekers. his ilk back to the Toronto hive—a story ably told Reid’s pioneering 1985 AGO exhibition Atma Finally, Owens fleshes out the story of Harris’s in Nasgaard’s 1984 exhibition The Mystic North, at Buddhi Manas, an intrepid exhibition devoted Santa Fe years (1938 to 1940), a journey pos- the AGO. And it was Harris the internationalist, entirely to Harris’s late abstract work, comparisons sibly prompted by his viewing of a show of Mrs. again, who held the Art Gallery of Toronto’s feet to his fellow artistic travellers were described rather John D. Rockefeller’s collection at Dartmouth to the fire when the opportunity arose to bring than shown.) This move is all to the good; the argu- College, which featured a number of indigenous Katherine Dreier’s famous 1926 Société Anonyme ment has now been irrefutably made regarding objects from the American Southwest. Once in International Exhibition of Modern Art to Toronto— Harris’s connection to the abstract trends of his New Mexico, Harris joined ranks with Raymond one of the first and most important exhibitions of time on both sides of the border, and we can see it Jonson, Emil Bisttram, Stuart Walker and others abstract art in North America—insisting that he and feel it for ourselves. to form the Transcendental Painting Group—all of would rent a hall and present the exhibition himself In his lead essay, “Harris’s Modernity: The them espousing the wish to make art that reflected if the burghers of Hogtown proved too sluggish to Engineering Draughtsman’s Instruments,” Nas­ inner states of being. It was only Harris’s need to seize the opportunity. gaard tells us much about the climate around have access to his inheritance, unavailable to him Finally, this is the man who married the nice abstraction in the Toronto of the 1920s, also chart- as a non-resident Canadian, that precipitated the Toronto girl from a good family only to leave her ing the artist’s interactions with the New York couple’s move back to Canada. But his commit- for his best friend’s wife (Bess Housser) and bust a scene. Citing art historian Sara Angel’s recent ment to exploring the frontier of abstraction never move, first to Hanover, New Hampshire, for three research on Lawren Harris’s scrapbooks—which abated. years (his uncle taught literature and philosophy reveal how Harris actively collected print repro- This did indeed lead to some wild and woolly at Dartmouth) and then to Santa Fe, New Mexico, ductions of the works of such artists as Georgia painterly experiments during his later Vancouver where he took the helm of the Transcendental O’Keeffe, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Charles years, as Harris followed his bliss into geriatric Group of Painters. If Harris has come to be equated Demuth and Arthur Dove—Nasgaard deepens our oblivion—some of which feature fluffy brushwork with the stuffy status quo of Canadian art, it is understanding of Harris’s artistic path of abstract- and the synthetic colouration of arcade plush toys. clearly time for a second look. ing from nature, even describing his initial discom- Most critics and curators have demurely turned Higher States has some very particular fish to fort in yielding to the allure of international trends their gaze from these final pictures, and this exhib- fry, hinging on Harris’s artistic transition from land- (like abstraction) given his devoutly nationalistic ition does likewise, avoiding as well the faintly scape to abstraction, and his movement from High opening position. eugenicist vapours that cling to Harris’s theosoph- Arctic and Canadian Shield minimalism to the As well, he underscores Harris’s engagement ical musings. Having set their parameters clearly, geometric, faintly technological-seeming New Age with the modern world in all its manifestations, though, the curators solidly achieve their goals: to forms of his later career, abstractions that always from product design to interior design, architec- explore the story of one of Canada’s most intrepid contained within them (à la Kandinsky) the sug- ture and fashion. “Harris may have been spiritu- and industrious modern artists as he makes his gestion of space. But unlike all previous books or ally minded,” Nasgaard writes, “but he was not a journey into abstraction to take his place among exhibitions on Harris, Nasgaard and Owens go retiring monk. He lived a life immersed in modern his North American peers, commanding our atten- out of their way not just to mention the full North culture and its traces are everywhere in his work.” tion for an artistic legacy that shows no signs of American context in which Harris worked, but Nasgaard also explores the relationship of Harris settling soon.

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 17 Playing against Type Sometimes getting to the future means travelling in the other direction Doug Gibson

Gutenberg’s Fingerprint: Paper, Pixels and the Lasting Impression of Books Merilyn Simonds ECW Press 392 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781770413528

ecently I devoured the memoir Avid Reader: A Life, by the legendary American Reditor and publisher of the late 20th cen- tury Robert Gottlieb. It contains the warning that “all editors’ memoirs basically come down to the same thing: ‘So I said to him, “Leo! Don’t just do war! Do peace too!” ’ ” “Naturally, it’s one’s successes one tends to remember—as with Leo,” Gottlieb ruefully con- cludes. But in his own case the successes include Chandler & Price. Barclay first entered Simonds’s by Cai Lun in 105 CE.) And second, that Merilyn books such as Catch-22, and The Chosen, and True life in 1996 at a Kingston launch for her novel, The Simonds has an essayist’s mind, swooping and Grit, and the authors Gottlieb­ edited range from Convict Lover, where he gleefully showed her a dipping here and there as fancy (and especially Toni Morrison to John Cheever, from John le Carré piece of his own handmade printing to commemor- an attractive word, or a revealing phrase or story) to Barbara Tuchman, and from Miss Piggy to Bill ate the event: “You see? The C and T at the end of lures her. Clinton. These books, and the others he published ‘Convict’? The bit that connects them? That’s called One example out of many: when Barclay begins with enthusiasm, sold millions of copies, often with a ligature. We chose the type especially. It’s like the to teach her how to set type by hand, he produces a initial print runs of hundreds of thousands. letters are handcuffed together.” drawer that he slides out of the type cabinet. Yet I am confident that Gottlieb would enjoy And Simonds, chuckling, finds herself launched Merilyn Simonds’s unusual new project, Guten­ into a world of book detail—ligatures?—that she “California Job Case,” he says as if introducing berg’s Fingerprint: Paper, Pixels and the Lasting had never imagined. me to a friend. Impression of Books, about the making of a short At the time that Barclay persuades her to send The wooden tray with its dozens of com- book of fictional pieces entitled “The Paradise along some of her short, fictional fragments for his partments looks familiar. Project.” That 64-page literary exercise was pub- little press to publish in a slim single volume, she is lished by Thee [sic] Hellbox Press in Kingston, an experienced author, with 16 books to her name. To most of us, accustomed to the QWERTY Ontario, with a print run of 290 [sic] copies. What She has worked in the newspaper and the magazine keyboard, its arrangement soon seems random, I’m sure would attract Bob Gottlieb to Simonds’s worlds, and been the chair of the Writers’ Union as the very useful full-page illustration in the book book is the fact that he is a book guy to his finger- of Canada as well as a mentor teaching writers at demonstrates. By putting the most frequently used tips and toenails, and this is a book about books. universities across Canada. Yet she signs on with lowercase letters—t, n, e, i, o, r—into the biggest Whereby hangs a tale. him to publish this little book the old-fashioned bins, arranged directly in front of the typesetter, the The hero of Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, to whom way, and thus begins a journey through the history printers in San Francisco who invented the system the book is dedicated, is an ageless inventor named of book making. claimed they had reduced “hand travel” by more Hugh Barclay, who late in life became a printer, The chapter titles in Gutenberg’s Fingerprint than half a mile a day. armed with a 19th-century printing press, a beloved are instructive, and will allow potential readers Hand travel! to decide whether this is a journey they want to Oh yes, and where does this “lowercase” phrase Doug Gibson, after a career in publishing that ran undertake. They are, in order, “Hugh, Me and The come from? from 1968 to 2007 and involved being the head of Book,” “Paper,” “Type,” “Ink,” “Press,” “Book.” Macmillan of Canada and McClelland & Stewart, As you can see, the arrangement is logical, “Historically, the common letters and the skipped from the quiet role of editor and publisher allowing Simonds, and us, to follow the progress capitals were kept in two separate cases,” into the loud one of shameless author. He has writ­ of her own book being printed, stage by stage, with Hugh says. He never misses an opportunity ten two books, Stories about Storytellers (ECW Barclay as our jovial guide. But two things soon for instruction. “The capitals were in an upper Press, 2011) and Across Canada by Story: A Coast- become clear. First, that the history of printing case, which explains the name. The other let- to-Coast Literary Adventure (ECW Press, 2015). is a version of the history of western civilization. ters were in the lower case—you’re smart, you He has given more than 160 performances of these (Western, because the softer Chinese paper and get the idea.” two books, and is preparing to tour with a new the vast Chinese alphabet made the Gutenberg- sesquicentennial show entitled “Canada’s Greatest style mass production of printed books impractical Simonds is indeed smart, although she introdu- Storytellers, 1867–2017.” there, despite the early Chinese invention of paper ces us to a character named “Stupid Merilyn,” who

18 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada makes occasional walk-on appearances. When I ask him why he doesn’t paint, Once, confronted by the task of typeset- he says, “I don’t know. It just doesn’t ting, she confesses: Watching the Weather seem important anymore.” He has lost heart. Hugh is all heart. My head hurts. I feel as though I’ve It’s hard watching your father die, I can’t wait for the two of them to meet. been dropped onto another planet, like time spent listening to bad weather When they do meet, these men from one where the citizens speak a lan- rattle a body from the inside. guage I recognize, although all the different generations plunge excitedly words have unfamiliar meanings. into working together on the e-book that You hear a horrid wind in his chest, “This is a clean case,” says Hugh. follows a parallel track to Barclay’s trad- Not very, I think, surveying the see it slim his frame and leave blood itional book. Erik, the disheartened former messy heaps of metal letters. The on small bits of crumpled tissue painter, has taken up a career as a graphic heaps are called “sorts.” When a type- you find in his room. In the mind designer/art director and is now a highly setter runs out of a particular letter, that struggles. It ruins the man skilled e-book designer; even if he some- he is “out of sorts.” I have lots of letters times scandalizes his mother with casual and, still, I’m out of sorts. haphazardly. You sense a gathering asides, for example, that he can program storm whenever his eyes lose focus, ligatures right out of any chosen typeface. Aha! There are many such moments and sometimes when they find it. But he keeps her (and us) informed and here, including the fascinating pages At times he leaves the room while involved in the progress of the new book. Soon he is even undertaking to provide where typefaces are discussed by name, sitting there. You hate this, with examples such as Boldoni, Helvetica, ghostly woodblock illustrations for the Arial, Georgia, Times and Gotham all project, and it goes wonderfully well. Both and you hope what love has vouchsafed displayed, before Garamond is chosen for versions of the book advance, as we cheer Simonds’s book. And Hugh Barclay’s pref- and what of it you have left to give them on. erence for serif type is well explained with can warm something in all that icy wind. The final section of the book allows a diagram that will fix in even the most Merilyn Simonds, the early adopter, to pre- type-innocent reader’s mind the differ- Michael Lithgow dict where books are going. She notes that ence between serif and sans serif. readers are now “encouraged to explore Barclay is, of course, a larger-than-life and engage with the text. The reader’s Michael Lithgow lives in Edmonton where he teaches character. He is an inventor, an innovator role is no longer passive, it is active, even at Athabasca University. His essays and poetry have and an enemy of the tried and true, which though he or she can’t actually affect the appeared in academic and literary journals including ARC, makes him an interesting companion outcome.” Contemporary Verse 2, American Communication Journal, along the way to the finished book, where TNQ and Fiddlehead. His first collection of poetry, Waking decisions have to be made daily. It is a The latest catchphrase—which may in the Tree House, was published by Cormorant Books in tribute to him, and to Simonds’s treat- well be obsolete before this book is 2012, and shortlisted for the Quebec Writers Federation First ment of his personality (and to how the printed—is “augmented reality,” or Book Award. Work from this collection was included in The book actively engages the reader), that at AR: virtual images laid over real ones Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2012 (Tightrope Books). one point I found myself yelling “No! No! to create an “augmented” display. AR Don’t you see the trouble this will cause?” integrates graphics, sounds, touch Barclay, you see, at that point in the pro- (haptics), and smell into a real-world duction process had become thrilled by environment, blurring the line between the prospect of leaving some of the pages Coming up in the LRC the actual and the computer-generated. in the little book left uncut, like a French novel. This charmingly eccentric plan (a “Smell.” Really? Hold that unlikely description of wide application through- thought. out this enterprise) has endless complica- The madness of The key phrase here, I think, is “which tions, including the eventual need to bind may well be obsolete before this book is a special paper knife into the finished Mackenzie King printed.” Certainly, anyone reading this package, along with—dammit—a page of Charlotte Gray book to learn about the future of reading instructions on how to use it. will find that while Merilyn Simonds’s But this is much more than just a The animals next door book raises many questions, it is too journey along the Gutenberg road to a sensible to produce many confident pre- precious old-fashioned book, where the Lisa Rundle dictions. Although it is notable that she author is involved like a medieval pil- has put a lot of time and effort in turning grim at every point. In her life, Merilyn Stephen Heighton her out-of-print paper books into digital Simonds is proud to be described as an e-books. “early adopter,” in contrast to her Luddite Donna Bailey Nurse A final detail, one that Bob Gottlieb husband, the writer Wayne Grady. So, would like: the endpapers for the pre- while she follows the route for this very Post-scarcity survivor cults cious little book are specially created, with traditional book, she engages her son Erik the help of the artist Emily Cook, from to create it at the same time in a digital ver- Navneet Alang paper whose fibre comes from daylilies sion, an e-book. picked from Merilyn Simonds’s garden. Erik is a fascinating character, a gifted Speaking of the dead In discussing this process, Merilyn the young artist who at the age of 19 was Sandra Martin Essayist tells us that way back, about 1780, in Berlin, an apprentice to the famous Matthias Koops in London decided that painter Attila Richard Lukacs. When Erik for printing books, paper made from straw came home, he gave shows that sold out Weekend at Duddy’s would be ideal. Nicholas Basbanes, in his and his career took off, so that at 25 he and John Semley 2013 book, On Paper: The Everything of Its his wife owned a Toronto house, full of his Two-Thousand-Year History (published art. Then, out of the blue, the gas company by Gottlieb’s old company, Knopf) writes caused an explosion, and the house, and Prehistoric road trips about handling a book based on straw. the future art, went up in flames. Since Renée Hetherington After more than 200 years, the paper still then Erik has done little painting. In his held “the agreeable aroma—of fresh-cut mother’s words: grass.”

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 19 Very Magnetic North Uncovering an epic failed expedition, and its hold on the Canadian psyche Ken Coates

Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition Paul Watson McClelland and Stewart 384 pages, hardcover ISBN 9780393249385

or more than 150 years, explorers, ­scientists, archeologists and maritime Fscholars searched for the lost ships from Sir A grand adventure tale about the fringes of the British Empire. John Franklin’s last expedition. It was an explora- “Do you know how the ship came inside the bottle?” Cigarette Card. Image courtesy of the George Arents Collection, tion conundrum of the highest order, played out The New York Public Library Digital Collections. on the vast, icy and forbidding landscapes of the Arctic Islands in the Canadian North. Few outsiders The story of the final discovery—a uniquely Geiger himself played a significant role in the pub- ventured into this cold expanse, leaving the land Canadian account of the tangled relationships lic debate about the discovery when, as CEO of the and the sea ice for the Inuit who had inhabited the among government and academic archeologists, RCGS, he was aboard one of the ships involved area for generations. But people kept looking for Parks Canada, Arctic philanthropist and tech- in the 2014 search, and was subsequently pushed evidence of Franklin’s demise, searching archival entrepreneur Jim Balsillie, the Royal Canadian into the forefront by the Government of Canada in collections for clues, revisiting the documentary Geographical Society, the positioning of the search announcing the discovery. To others involved, he records from the many searching expeditions sent for Franklin in the Conservative government’s was given undue credit for playing a significant role north to find clues of Franklin’s fate, walking the ambitious northern agenda, and the intervention in the find; he was the controversial co-recipient of coastlines and, later in the story, using advanced of the Prime Minister’s Office in the announce- the Polar Medal for the discovery. scientific equipment to scour the sea bed. The goal ment of the discovery—made headlines, largely Earlier searches for the Franklin ships, too, remained the same from the late 1840s on: to find through the writing and actions of Paul Watson. He appear to have encompassed political intrigue, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. fought hard in the initial news cycle and through his controversy about financial contributions to the Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin award-winning BuzzFeed article, as he does again exploration effort and struggles for recognition. Expedition recounts the unfolding of this grand now in Ice Ghosts, to give credit to the scientists and Watson’s second “book” focuses on the effort by Arctic tale, the best known of all of the Arctic scholars and to Balsillie’s support for the searching the Royal Navy and others, including the Hudson’s exploratory adventures and one documented in expeditions, and to explain the interventions of the Bay Company, to search for the missing Franklin dozens of books over the years. But Vancouver RCGS and the PMO. More generally, he situates ships. This campaign was aided by the unflagging author Paul Watson, a highly regarded journalist, the Franklin search in the broad context of Arctic persistence of Lady Franklin to determine her hus- writer and photographer, has something vital to exploration, the multi-generation effort to find the band’s fate, secure for him recognition as the first add to this sometimes-controversial account of the remains of the expedition, and Inuit engagement to complete the Northwest Passage and otherwise final discovery of the lost ships—a scientific and with and understanding of the Franklin story. memorialize his contributions to Arctic science and cultural achievement of considerable importance Ice Ghosts is actually a series of smaller marine exploration. The British government, and, for stodgy old Canada, a minor sense of adven- books. The first recounts the familiar story of and various privately funded expeditions, headed ture and political intrigue. Watson himself is part John Franklin’s 1845–48 effort to navigate the into the Arctic, ostensibly to find Franklin and his of the story. He accompanied the icebreaker CCGS long-sought—but ice-clogged and treacherous— crew and, when the passage of time made the lost Sir Wilfrid Laurier on the 2014 search effort, the Northwest Passage across the top of continental party’s survival unlikely, to continue the effort to expedition that discovered Erebus and touched off a North America. This is a subject that attracted wide- map the Arctic Islands and find the Northwest flurry of activity that subsequently led to the identi- spread attention at the time, transfixed the world Passage. Intense debates raged about the fate of the fication of the resting site of Terror in 2016. Watson’s in the years that followed and continued to attract crew and, after evidence was found of their demise, reporting on the 2014 events, which focused on attention and effort. Every few years, from the 19th the cause of death (including a prolonged debate efforts by Stephen Harper’s Conservative govern- century on, intrepid explorers, armchair adventur- about the possibility of lead poisoning, botulism ment to use the discovery for political purposes, ers, scholars and biographers have added to the and cannibalism). led to a contretemps with his employer, the Toronto impressive pile of books on Sir John Franklin—a The third element brings the story up to date. It Star, the paper’s refusal to publish his critique of celebration of, and preoccupation with, monumen- begins with an account of Inuit oral history, par- the government and the journalist’s subsequent tal failure that mirrors the fascination of Australians ticularly that shared by the storyteller Hummahuk, resignation. and New Zealanders with the military debacle at of the lost outsiders and physical evidence of their Gallipoli in World War One. disaster. It gives considerable attention to the work Ken Coates is Canada Research Chair in Regional One of the best works on the subject is the one of Louie Kamookak, whom Watson describes as “an Innovation, Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School of by anthropologist Owen Beattie and John Geiger, Inuk detective,” who listened to stories from elders Public Policy, at the University of Saskatchewan. Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition. about the missing European explorers. Watson

20 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada uses Kamookak’s life history The interest in the Franklin and his interest in the Franklin expedition is, at one level, akin expedition as a window into the to the American preoccupation world of Inuit cosmology, oral Her Father Is Weeping in with the lost flight of aviator tradition and the transmission Amelia Earhart, which continues of cultural knowledge. He also to the present day. For genera- documents the reluctance of out- the Kitchen tions, uncertainty about the last side researchers to give credence stages of the Franklin expedition because he cannot remember to Inuit stories about the fate of bewildered observers. How far how to arrange placemats on the table. Franklin and his men, and shows did they travel? Where were the that they erred in not listening He lays a careful line of kibble ships finally stopped? What hap- carefully to what the Inuit had across the floor. It is the tow-rope. pened to the last of the expedition to say. Watson then picks up the If only he could reach the chairlift members? Now the main ques- efforts by Parks Canada, the gov- he would rise singing. tions have been answered. Is a ernment of Nunavut and academ- He would play his violin on the summit; mystery still fascinating when it ics to solve the Franklin mystery. its high arpeggios become is no longer a mystery? Not many He follows the complicated web the screeling voices of anoraked children whodunits start by identifying of science, discovery, journalism in the winter park swinging and swinging both the victim and the murderer. (Peter Mansbridge factors into the the cold afternoon, till he walks the morning beach Another mystery about the account) and politics in the effort. opening oysters with his penknife. He pays the scrambling child Franklin expedition continues to Watson also devotes consider- endure: why do Canadians care a penny for each oyster she brings; she laughs, able attention to the efforts of so much? In 1979, I had the good mock horror as he slurps them down. philanthropist/entrepreneur Jim fortune to start a master’s of his- Balsillie and the business leader’s Then the woman on his porch brings two cold beers tory program at the University struggles with the government of as they sit with their feet on the railing of Manitoba. I was attracted Canada over the search effort. watching her brown boys tumble the garden. to the university, in part, because It is this last segment where They call him Grandad, clamour for his jokes and card tricks. the renowned Canadian histor- Watson is at his best. His por- ian W.L. Morton was teaching a trayal of the Inuit is careful Down here, tormentors hide his shoes, graduate level course on north- and respectful. He gives Louie make him count backwards by sevens. ern Canadian history, one of Kamookak and his commun- Where is his violin? the few in the country. In many ity credit for their knowledge Who took away the boys? respects, Morton was even bet- of the area and their effort to They have flung all his goodness into the fiery furnace. ter than expected. He was kind, solve the puzzle. He shows how generous with his time and one

Balsillie got drawn into the search of the greatest gentlemen, in the The chairlift, unstopping, disappears in the mist. and decided to invest millions, traditional meaning of the term, and how the RCGS became Along the road, the windows of houses in the Canadian academy. His involved. He does a nice job of stare out through chestnut trees. course—which consisted of an explaining how and why Parks expedition-by-expedition nar- Canada came to play a lead- Wendy Donawa rative of the exploration of the ing role, and recognizes the Far North—was the opposite of often-ignored contributions of what I expected (and wanted), Wendy Donawa, a retired museum curator and academic in Victoria, has academic and government arche- however. In fact, the course ended published poems in Arc Poetry, Prairie Fire, Room, Plenitude, Freefall, ologists. Watson describes the before we got to the Klondike several anthologies and three chapbooks, most recently The Gorge: A 2014 expedition (in which he took Gold Rush, one of the defining Cartography of Sorrows (JackPine Press, 2016). Her first poetry collection, part), as well as the 2016 search events in post-contact history of Thin Air of the Knowable, is forthcoming with Brick Books. She is cur­ effort, as a mini-adventure story, the North. I could not, for the life rently reading Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, re-reading Pauline Holdstock’s and conveys much of the frustra- of me, figure out why this distin- Into the Heart of the Country and starting on Annie Proulx’s Barkskins. tion, indecision, guesswork and guished scholar devoted so much excitement of the two discoveries. time to what was, to me, an anti- The manner in which Watson fol- quarian exercise. Each class was lows Louie Kamookak through devoted to a single Arctic exped- the discovery to the subsequent ceremonies is both Franklin’s expedition. For the full political story, ition, with the emphasis on overland journeys. To intriguing and heartwarming. The glimpses of Inuit readers are encouraged to look at Watson’s “The my mind, the detail was exquisite but the relevance history, culture and knowledge sharing stand as an Wreck of HMS Erebus: How a Landmark Discovery to northern Canadian history was minimal, at best. effective counterpoint to the rivalries and difficul- Triggered a Fight for Canada’s History,” posted on My view of Arctic exploration has not changed ties that accompanied some aspects of the broader BuzzFeed on September 14, 2015. much since that time. I understand the curiosity search effort. This is not the last we will hear of the Franklin and the humans-against-the-Arctic-elements piece. If the discovery of the resting sites of Erebus expedition. Like an inexhaustible historical well, These are grand adventure tales, in the long tradition and Terror represented an excellent blend of the Franklin story will continue to spawn more of stories from the fringes of the British Empire that sustained government and academic effort, Inuit books about Sir John, Lady Franklin, his persistent filled the pages of the school readers for generations cultural understanding, private philanthropy and second wife, the many explorers who ventured of English-language children. I simply do not see scientific discovery, the post-2016 debates reflected northward to find the expedition and their remains, the historical relevance, particularly to Canada. The less favourably on Canadian politics. Fortunately and more. One hopes that Louie Kamookak (who major actors were British mariners, looking for work for the country’s reputation—but unfortunately for just received the Order of Nunavut) will share more and career advancement in the post–Napoleonic the reader—Ice Ghosts is designed for international of the stories that he has held and honoured for so Wars doldrums that undercut prospects for naval audiences and therefore Watson does not devote long. Stenton and his longtime collaborator Robert fame. The imperative to search for the Northwest a great deal of effort to explaining these political Park’s version of the events of the final discovery, Passage, initially a desperately sought-after trade dynamics. He does not even cover the struggle along with that of Ryan Harris, deserve a wide audi- route to Asia, was reduced by climate and geog- over recognition—Kamookak was, with Nunavut ence. The fascinating role of Jim Balsillie, and his raphy to a scientific and topographical curiosity, archeologist Doug Stenton and marine archeologist transition from BlackBerry entrepreneur to Arctic one that centred on Franklin and his colleagues as Ryan Harris, a recipient of the Polar Medal, as was philanthropist, is recounted in Ice Ghosts, but there exemplars of the spirit of the empire. Geiger—although Watson does refer to the “ugly is much more to the story, which has tinges of The subsequent interest in the Franklin squabble” that followed the find. To give the author Canadian nationalism and a business-government ­expedition, particularly as a piece of Canadian his- his due, he is focused unerringly on the search for to and fro. tory, puzzles me. Canada provided the landscape

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 21 and a few Inuit participants and some Hudson’s Bay Company actors. Otherwise, Canadians played a limited role. The islands that Franklin and other British mariners mapped were claimed for the British and remained as British territory until their transfer to a reluctant Canada in 1880. Canada then largely ignored the vast region for several gen- erations, relying on the lack of international pres- sure to protect the region. To put it bluntly, Canada was not much interested in the region until after the Second World War and then primarily for reasons of sovereignty, continental defence, and a growing and intrusive sense of responsibility for the Inuit in the region. There are other explorers, without the mys- tery and the mass death, that are more important to the evolution of Canada: Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye, David Thompson, Alexander Mackenzie and Robert Campbell. But it is the mariners—Martin Frobisher, Captain James Cook, Captain George Vancouver and, of course, Franklin—who appear to hold greater appeal to readers. One failed expedition—mass death in an Inuit homeland that had sustained indigenous people for centuries—seems an unlikely focus for such a sustained national effort and, after 2014, quite extensive celebration. The Franklin exped- ition demonstrated that Europeans struggled to survive in the Far North, had difficulty navigating the waters and failed, tragically, to adapt when their expedition ran into extreme difficulties. This seems, in sum, an odd episode to turn into an iconic example of Canadian history in the North. Ice Ghosts is a fine book. Paul Watson is a gifted journalist and he works hard to give a sense of place and circumstance, and paints evocative word pictures of the northern landscapes, people and communities he encounters. Perhaps he could say a little less about the cold weather, although that is certainly the lived reality of the region, par- ticularly for visitors from the South. Whatever the merits of the national and international obsession with Arctic exploration, it is always nice to see a writer weave together the past and present and to do so in a thoughtful and insightful manner. Canadians will continue their effort to make sense of the Franklin expedition. Ice Ghosts is a significant contribution to this ongoing, if somewhat strange, preoccupation.­

Read well Now that we are well into Canada’s sesquicentennial, and with a change of government in the United States, Spur tackles the issue of nation building with a particular look at the real and perceived threats For greatat any reading size. at any size to creating a better Canada, and what we are willing to risk in order to build a more just and equitable society. In the aftermath of the Quebec City tragedy, and during a time of criti- cal change around the globe, it seems ever more important to explore the kinds of chances we will take in order to eliminate the barriers to thriving, productive, inclusive societies and communities. SAVE THE DATE June 1 – 4

www.spurfestival.ca

22 reviewcanada.ca visit the newLiterary reviewcanada.ca Review of Canada The Woman Inside In Barbara Gowdy’s new novel, an unusual haunting sparks a deep reflection on motherhood, family, identity Zoe Whittall

when it comes from Gowdy, I am Little Sister willing to go along, because the effect Barbara Gowdy is much deeper and more interesting HarperCollins, Patrick Crean Editions than your average Parent Trap/Freaky 312 pages, hardcover Friday narrative gimmick. ISBN 9781554688609 As I reflect on her earlier work, it occurs to me that mainstream pub­ lishing has caught up to Gowdy. n the late 1990s when I first Although books like We Seldom Look arrived in Toronto, I shared an on Love were perhaps outliers in their Iapartment with Mariko Tamaki, time, increasingly, Gowdy’s strange who was, like me, an emerging writer. oeuvre has a lot more company in the We passed the books Falling Angels front-of-store displays at major book and We So Seldom Look on Love back retailers; Claire Cameron’s forth- and forth, asking each other the ques- coming novel, The Last Neanderthal, tions, How does she do it? How does for example, is narrated by a family she think of these things? It was a time that walked the Earth on those short in my life, my early twenties, when legs 40,000 years ago, and Gowdy’s I held tight to many possibly imma- new novel comes a year after Yann ture, and definitely misguided, beliefs Martel’s last, which brought us a about Canadian literature—that it widow nestled inside her husband’s was all terribly boring, that the only corpse. The prize lists are full of books truly innovative work was coming with extraordinary premises. out of the East Village in New York But Gowdy still offers something City or the Mission in San Francisco, startling and original in a field of or Montreal 20 years earlier. But books with strange and magical story­ Barbara Gowdy was an exception, lines. This time we follow the story of stacked alongside Kathy Acker, David sensible 30-something Rose, whom Wojnarowicz and Eileen Myles on The spectre of Rose lingers inside Harriet. we meet at the repertory theatre her our cheap IKEA shelves. Her prose family owns and runs, shortly before “Family Group with Two Spirits,” William Hope, 1920. was sparse and muscular and she Image Courtesy of National Media Museum. she has a strange, out-of-body expe- wrote about things that were totally rience during a thunderstorm that strange. But you did not have to go to This Ain’t the ary thriller about a near-empathetic pedophile, it changes the course of her life. Rosedale Library or your friend’s staff pick shelf at was met with mixed reviews from some readers She finds herself right inside the body of another Book City to find it; Gowdy was unquestionably who could not quite accept the material, especially woman, not in a dream, but as though trying on her part of the CanLit mainstream, her books were on coming from a female literary writer. The novel was skin suit and walking around. Rose is an otherwise the tables at Chapters, where Mariko and I worked a bestseller and did well critically—it was short- plain and unambitious woman, and Harriet, the as booksellers. listed for the Governor General’s Award, longlisted person she inhabits for finite time periods, is a Almost 20 years later, on a terrible news day in for the Giller and won the Trillium award—but perfect stranger. It is only Rose who knows what is early 2017, one that would stretch into what feels one got the impression that its author, who has happening. Harriet herself is unaffected. like an infinite period of slow democratic demise always taken risks—novels narrated by elephants, If Rose were into astrology, she would probably (although I did not fully realize it at the time), a tweet necrophiliacs—had, to say the least, gone too far know she was deep into her Saturn Return, that stood out between the depressing headlines and for some. Which is too bad, because Helpless is a time of life between your late twenties and early apocalyptic memes. It was an announcement about modern masterpiece. thirties when you are reassessing who you are and the upcoming arrival of Little Sister. It felt like an With Little Sister, without a doubt Gowdy renews what you want from life. It is a time when women antidote to that bad day, for the way in which Gowdy her reputation as one of Canada’s most innovative are pressured to settle down, have kids, have “it finds beauty amid the most awful moments in life. writers. Her prose is clean and economical—noth- all.” Rose definitely does not. She has a relationship Gowdy’s fans have been waiting a while. It has ing extraneous to cloud the sentence. And it is with a man she sleeps with a few times a week that been ten years since the publication of her last partly her striking style that allows the reader to is about as passionate as a lukewarm friendship. novel, Helpless, in 2007. A creepy and precise liter- follow her to peculiar places. (I am conscious, as Her mother is slowly succumbing to dementia and I write this, of every adjective and adverb.) If you Rose is not sure how to deal with that. She also Zoe Whittall is the author of the bestselling novel had asked me if I would like to read a book about never reckoned emotionally with the accidental The Best Kind of People, which was a finalist for a woman who wakes up in another woman’s body death of her younger sister, Ava, for which she still the 2016 Giller Prize, and five previous books. from time to time, the answer would be no. But feels responsible. Similar to Claire Messud’s The

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 23 Woman Upstairs, Little Sister captures the loneli- Or inside someone else. Yes, inside more hasty hysterectomy she herself had as a younger ness and ennui particular to 30-something women accurately described the feeling of visiting, as woman, and finds herself trying to steer Harriet’s who stand by as their peers are having children opposed to having, the woman’s body. life toward what she imagines would be a better or spectacular careers, or both, and are starting to future. discover the world suddenly does not value them For some writers this is what it can feel like to as it once did. wake up after walking around inside someone after She brooded over Harriet’s baby. Lately, We watch Rose inhabit Harriet each time there a day of work, to imagine what it is to see their hand every faint tickly noise—the car engine cool- is a thunderstorm, and while at first she thinks move to grab something, to look out the window at ing, the dishwasher starting—was the baby’s she is having a migraine or has been drugged, even- the wind in the trees and try to hear their thoughts. heartbeat. tually she gives up asking what is happening and Rose finds it is always a little shaky, and she retains focuses on Harriet and the mystery Little Sister is named for Rose’s of who she is. Instead of consulting deceased sibling, and the memory of scientists, doctors and psychics, Rose Gowdy’s descriptions of Rose Ava is what keeps Rose, consciously keeps her secret to herself and comes occupying Harriet while retaining her and unconsciously, obsessed with to be obsessed with Harriet’s personal Harriet and drives her fixation on problems, which allow her to escape own consciousness are remarkably motherhood, an identity she cannot her own. But the question of why it have biologically. That she is at the is happening, and what will happen similar to what it is, in the most same time losing her mother only if she meets Harriet, or if she never deepens the predicament Rose finds comes back from Harriet’s body—this magical moments of writing, to herself in. The speculative situation is the suspense that drives the novel. forces some pretty meaningful explo- The reader wonders if, and when, embody a character. ration about the complicated and Harriet will ever find out about these often contradictory feelings women internal hauntings, and then about whether or not her authorial thoughts and feelings all the while. can have about the choice to be mothers, or not. Rose can succeed in helping Harriet with the crisis But Harriet acts upon her as much as the other Who is Rose once she has spent time inside Harriet, in her life. way round (again, this is not unlike writing), even once she has felt connected to her pregnancy? On another level, Rose’s inhabiting of Harriet’s when Rose realizes the depth of Harriet’s sadness Is she a mother, a child? Gowdy is careful not to body gets at the nature of writing itself. Gowdy’s and decides to intervene despite the risk of being moralize about abortion, although the narrative descriptions of Rose occupying Harriet while found out. could have easily tipped over into this territory. retaining her own consciousness let us see through Gowdy has always been adept at melancholy, Instead she deftly guides Rose through honest self- Rose’s eyes as she decides to do and say things as and the heart of Little Sister is about grieving as reflection. Harriet. It is remarkably similar to what it is, in the much as it is about a woman who has a little astral Little Sister manages to be a lot of books at most magical moments of writing, to embody a projection problem. While inside Harriet, when- once—a suspenseful, cinematic romp through a character. ever she catches a glimpse of a reflection, she sees series of external and internal storms, a sometimes her sister Ava’s eyes. When Harriet becomes unex- sexy comedy, a graceful story of a woman trying to Harriet? Who was Harriet? Rose had never pectedly pregnant and Rose finds herself growing make sense of her life choices. For the Gowdy fan, before dreamed that she was someone else. emotionally attached to the fetus, she grieves the they are all well worth the wait.

A Queer Love Story The Letters of Jane Rule and Rick Bébout Edited by Marilyn Schuster; Foreword by Margaret Atwood

“These letters swept me up like a novel. Jane and Rick’s running analysis of the sea “changes occurring in queer life, from the radical seventies, through the AIDS-devastated eighties, to the assimilationist nineties, is incisive, deeply considered and, above all, engaged. In the current era of atrophying attention spans and political atomization, these lush, eloquent letters between people who see themselves first and foremost as part of a movement are exhilarating.”

-Alison Bechdel, cartoonist and author of Fun Home 978-0-7748-3543-5 | hardcover | 650 pages ”

ubcpress.ca thought that counts

24 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Empire in Collapse Finally, a global turning-of-the-tables dystopian novel that transcends clichés about Islam and the West Russell Smith

American War Omar El Akkad McClelland and Stewart 330 pages, softcover ISBN 9781524779856

he rise of jihadist Islam and the ­turmoil of the Arab world have led to a Tfew dystopian it-can-happen-here novels that imagine the rise of a powerful Islamist state to the detriment of democratic values. Michel Houellebecq’s Submission imagines a not-too- distant French republic in which an Islamist party is elected to the federal government (its only serious opposition is the racist nationalist party). Women’s rights and academic freedom suffer, but the protag- onist, an academic, finds himself placated by the idea of (newly legal) polygamy. Boualem Sansal’s novel 2084: The End of the World is set in a vast A nation in ruins. desert caliphate where prayer is mandatory nine Photograph by Arnold Genthe (San Francisco, 1906). Image courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. times a day and heretics are executed in public. These pessimistic fantasies turn on the idea of the Sarat’s father is killed, and her mother must flee Arab empire who, like the CIA of our own time, act Muslim world as threatening and expansionist, and war by getting her family into a filthy refugee camp. as agents provocateurs; here they seek out hardened the liberal west as soft and permissive. Food is scarce; a synthetic apricot gel, from surplus children to radicalize. The children of the camps Omar El Akkad’s spec-fic novel American military rations, comes in handy. Occasionally, ord- have only distant glimpses of a materially comfort- War, set between 2075 and 2123—after the ris- nance rain down randomly, from rogue Birds—lost able world—in the Arabic fashion magazines they ing seas have wiped out coastal states—posits a drones, flying beyond the range of their controllers. can sometimes obtain. And the new desert has its less expected binary. It begins with this familiar Life is hell. own evil prisons, its own Guantanamo Bay, where doomsday scenario, as recounted long after the fact So far, so Margaret Atwood. useless confessions are extracted from terrorists by a historian in Alaska, now a habitable and now But what gives this novel its clever political through waterboarding. bourgeois zone. This narrator is a framing device, allegory is what we piece together about the state This global turning-of-tables sounds didactic however: the main narrative is that of a child whose of the world beyond the United States. All refugee but the slow reveal of this state of affairs keeps it story he claims to know. The child, a girl named aid comes from the Red Crescent. A mysteri- subtle. El Akkad’s focus is actually artistic: it is not Sarat, grows up in the blighted, burning U.S. South ous older man starts teaching Sarat how to use a on the global geopolitics but on Sarat’s immedi- during the great civil war that has once again pitted sniper rifle, and he in turn seems to be working ate surroundings—on the smell of the sewage the Red (southern) states against the Blue (north- for a wealthy foreigner from a privileged place, an gutters in the camps, the value of industrial soap ern). The war erupted over fossil fuels: the Blue empire across the sea that is not torn by war or in the showers, the ubiquitous sticky apricot gel. government, having moved inland to flee the rising famine. “The guns are ours,” the foreigner tells her These surface details are what make American waters (to the ignominious capital of Columbus, grimly, “but the blood is yours.” We are told early War a novel rather than a clever polemic; its feel- Ohio), banned the use of gasoline, which enraged on that while the United States has descended into ing of realness—heat and sweat and hunger are on oil-producing Texas and stirred ancient southern civil war, poverty and anarchy, the Arab world has every page, along with the soundtrack of rebellious animosities. Sarat’s narrative is interspersed with united to form a great stable empire. But the signifi- country music that fuels the aggrieved South—is colourful excerpts of other historical documents: cance of this great power imbalance only becomes remarkable in a book written by a reporter. transcriptions of commissions of inquiry, witness gradually evident. El Akkad has experience with these conditions, accounts, speeches for reunification. At the outset The agent of the Arab empire claims it is a demo- of course. A foreign correspondent for the Globe of her story, the war is in a stalemate, a fortified line cratic republic. It certainly does not appear to be and Mail, he covered the war in Afghanistan, the keeping angry and impoverished southerners out Islamist. It is westernized. The heat-blighted waste- military trials at Guantanamo Bay and the Arab from the more prosperous north. Extremist south- land of the United States, with its refugee camps Spring in Egypt. His sensitivity to the daily dep- ern militia bands war even among themselves, as and its massacres, its warring militias, its irrational rivations caused by war—a preoccupation with they all resent their official representatives, the tribal loyalties, its child soldiers and its suicide suffering that might be called affinity for misery— moderate Free Southern States government. bombers, is now isolated. Only the Arabs (and feels like a manifestation of a righteous anger at sometimes the wealthy Russians) send humanitar- what he has witnessed. Indeed, the book is cruelly Russell Smith’s most recent book is Confidence ian relief. The starving and embittered inhabitants violent, graphically so, and some of the more pain- (Biblioasis, 2015). He writes weekly on the arts for of America are not welcome in other countries. Its ful scenes (torture, a refugee camp massacre) are the Globe and Mail. camps are infiltrated by sophisticated agents of the unsparing in their gruesome detail.

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 25 Novels written by journalists tend to have the ain’ts and don’t-wannas and don’t-got-nos that it detail, which could be played lasciviously by a male same flaw: as it is the job of the reporter to explain verges on cartoonish; one wonders if the sound of author, is a footnote. It is trivial in her develop- things—in clear and linear fashion—they tend it is learned from life or from cinematic representa- ment; just another un-nourished part of her. She to involve more telling than showing. El Akkad’s tions (and other novels). has one lover in the book and their brief coupling is style is convincingly novelistic, however. The These overly familiar devices do not detract, described without any detail or even much sensual- perceptions are strictly those of his characters, however, from the rushing drive of the narrative. ity—it is a practical affair, an efficient and emotion- and largely sensory; his language is strong with- Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of this novel less stress relief. It is not important as sex, but it is out being poetic, his descriptions colourful without is in its creation of a convincing and compelling important to the plot. being reportorial. In Sarat’s childhood home is child terrorist. Sarat knows only deprivation and Sarat’s complexity, and her sad deficiencies, kept “a bowl lined with oil to trap mosquitoes.” The violence in her life, caused apparently randomly by serve to humanize the child soldier and the suicide house is seen adorned with such secrets: “the flying the representatives of power, and this is why she is bomber that we know only from news reports. balls of blood trapped in the bowl; the eyes of the chosen by the foreign agent as ripe for cultivation as Here, El Akkad is saying, is a normal kid, with pine floorboards laced with honey; worms picked a child soldier. He teaches her vengeance, and how typical problems, until her family gets destroyed by her father’s hand and impaled by war. War corrupts everything; on hooks to teach the children a El Akkad’s focus is actually artistic: it is after its ravages there are no good ritual from the days when the river intentions, no moral side to take. still carried fish.” not on the global geopolitics but on the As a political allegory, American If there is a technical lesson War makes no statement about El Akkad still has to learn from smell of the sewage gutters in the camps, the relative merits of the western the greats of fiction, it is in the or Muslim worlds: it is not clear advantages of being rigorous with the ubiquitous sticky apricot gel. what values have permitted the point of view. In the first chapter Islamic union to flourish while describing Sarat’s life, we are privy to the thoughts to cultivate her hatred, and how to fear nothing. the former imperial power eats itself. The cur- of Martina, Sarat’s mother, and then of the sister And to shoot a sniper’s rifle. It is a chillingly convin- rent culture wars—permissive, decadent secular- Dana and the brother Simon. This jumping around cing manual for how to radicalize a refugee child. ism versus rigid, ascetic traditionalism—are not in perspective may be attributed to the novel’s Her kind and sympathetic caretakers convince her reflected in this scenario. Indeed, what it relies on framing device (it turns out that all these reminis- that every time the peace talks are suspended, is an eerie similarity of culture in two perceived cences are imagined by the historian narrator from her side has scored a victory. But these victories opposites. This projection suggests that given an a later date, after having read Sarat’s buried diaries), keep her people enslaved by war. uncontrollable economic cataclysm—one that but I suspect they are not deliberate at all, just con- By the book’s end Sarat is a ruthless monster, comes from environmental degradation already venient. The effect of these shifts is to draw atten- a killing machine, broken and numbed. And yet well advanced—cultural difference will disappear tion to the oversight of an omniscient narrator, to she is always, if not exactly sympathetic, at least or become irrelevant, for it is poverty, not religion, the artificiality of narration itself, and this distracts fascinating. Her characterization is complex and that creates war, and war that creates child soldiers. from the immediacy of the events portrayed. deft. Always a big, strong tomboy as a child—who Look how easily, this fantasy murmurs, the most Sometimes, too, the deep-Southern dialect that shaves her head early in life and keeps it that way— sophisticated nation on Earth could become the most of the characters espouse is rife with so many she is clearly a lesbian by early adulthood, and this mirror image of its current bogeymen. 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26 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Couched in Verse In Molly Peacock’s latest collection, poetic form, like psychoanalysis, offers safe passage through perilous waters Amanda Jernigan

poems in real time.” I thought of that as I read the Buying flowers The Analyst afterword to The Analyst, thinking, no, don’t do it: lowers Molly Peacock no hand-wringing. I wanted the poet to walk out panic levels Biblioasis of the darkened theatre as her alter ego does in the as bevels 128 pages, softcover poem “The Pottery Jar,” with her spine “straight- in mirrors ISBN 9781771961639 ened,” her head held high. reduce terrors For me the most effective bit of context setting by taking for this book is a single line from Peacock’s Poetry images little girl, escaping monsters, washes Foundation essay (the quotations-within-the- and breaking up on unfamiliar shores where an analyst quotation are from James Merrill): as her life in their edges … Atakes her in. Over 40 years the analyst letters evolved alongside her psychoanalysis, she (from “A Simple Purchase,” in Cornucopia: New and cares for her, as the little girl turns into a poet, a writes, “poetry and psychoanalysis ‘like a May fete’ Selected Poems) grown woman, a grey queen. She marries a knight became inextricable, a double helix ‘wound in rib- and moves to a faraway land. Then the analyst has bons round the pole’ of a developing self.” Form, too, lowers panic levels. A rhyme scheme a stroke, an AVM (that stands for arteriovenous In poetry circles, Peacock is often classed as a can be the clew that promises a poet a way back out malformation). She becomes a of a traumatic memory—and thus little girl, escaping monsters, and The Analyst is a re-creative project, an emboldens her to venture into it, washes up on unfamiliar shores— in the first place. where the poet takes her in. attempt to summon up anew the whole The Analyst, like Peacock’s Such is the backstory, or one of earlier collections, has its share of them, of Molly Peacock’s new col- long, collaborative creation that was the impossible emotions. But it is also lection of poems, The Analyst (full a book about possible healing, disclosure: Biblioasis has pub- analysis itself. and in this context it is interest- lished my work, as well). The story ing to see Peacock experimenting, is autobiographical, yet strikingly archetypal in its formalist, meaning that she makes liberal use of not just with the containment of sense by sound, shape, even if some of its key figures—the analyst, rhyme and metre—the sorts of patterning associ- but with that Pope-ian echo of sense by sound, that that monster known as an AVM—are not part of the ated with traditional prosody. But, as Peacock match of form and content. I am thinking of her use classical repertoire. writes in her essay “From Gilded Cage to Rib Cage,” of repetition: repeated words, repeated phrases, If your poems are mythopoeic but the myth— traditional prosody is also associated with “the even whole lines; anaphora; homonymic words or the story with which they are engaged—is not (or common wisdom … that the poet must choose phrases; identical rhyme (always in her toolkit, but not yet) part of a common horde, how do you give the suitable form for the subject.” As Alexander used more consistently here than elsewhere): your reader the context? How do you tell that reader Pope wrote, in his Essay on Criticism, “’Tis not enough, but not too much? enough no harshness gives offence, / The sound Slice the baby potatoes, skins on, Peacock has been giving readers the backstory must seem an Echo to the sense.” turn to the smooth black surface on for this book in other venues since early last year, Here, Peacock parts ways with traditional the stove where two steamers — enamel — when her essay “White Swan, Black Swan: Poetry prosody, cleaving to what she sees as a particu- swim like red fish painted on enamel in an Analytical Hour” appeared on the blog of larly female tradition of poets who will choose a and prepare with attention, like you, the Poetry Foundation; her essay “My Analyst of verse form not to match (Peacock’s word), or echo my intimate witness, like you 40 Years Had a Stroke—Then Became an Artist,” (Pope’s word), the feeling but rather “to contain, who will never speak to me again in Partisan, followed a few months later. She cites to control, or otherwise make the feeling safe to whom I will never see again, both essays in her brief afterword to The Analyst, explore.” She cites poems by Elizabeth Bishop and hearing from your friend who tried which does its own bit of context setting. But the Barbara Howes, among others—she might have when you said, Let me die, afterword—a few paragraphs at the collection’s cited Richard Wilbur, another poet she admires: for end—left me wanting more (I went back to both this strategy is not the sole province of women. As I want to die, to help you ... of those online essays, rapt). And also less. “The Wilbur writes (in an oft-quoted passage), “one does (from “Gusto”) poems in this book raise the question of whether not use poetry for its major purposes, as a means of psychoanalysis releases or defeats a poet’s muse,” organizing oneself and the world, until one’s world I think not only of the compulsive repeti- Peacock writes. In Molly Peacock: A Critical somehow gets out of hand.” tions of trauma, but of the evolving repetitions of Introduction, his 2014 monograph on the poet’s Peacock’s world has been out of hand for almost psychotherapy (Freud’s remember, repeat, work work, Jason Guriel flags “one slightly worrisome, as long as she can remember: a violent, alcoholic through) or physiotherapy (the analyst’s “twist[ing] recurring sign” in Peacock’s recent poetry: “the father; a depressed and often absent mother; a and learn[ing]” [“Life, Lightened”] as she remas- gimmick of a poet wringing her hands over her sister she was made to care for while still a child ters keys, and words, and stairs, post-stroke). herself. “Formal verse often makes impossible “Repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise”: that’s Amanda Jernigan is the author of two books of emotions possible,” she writes in “From Gilded Elizabeth Bishop, in “North Haven,” her memo- poetry and the editor, most recently, of Earth and Cage,” and she intuited this early on. By 1989, when rial poem for Robert Lowell. In previous books, Heaven: An Anthology of Myth Poetry (Fitzhenry her third book came out, she was a master of the Peacock has shown us how the repetitions of poetic and Whiteside, 2015). strategy: form can contain the ruptures of violence. Here,

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 27 she shows us how they can also enact processes tion; “Tuesday Tombstone,” with its grave inver- riddles, this one creates story-creatures that do not of growth and change; of hard-won, incremental sions; “Mandala in the Making,” the book’s carefully quite evaporate in the light of their “solved” iden- revision. orchestrated final poem—and, most of all, the two tities. Other solutions, discernible in the poem’s “[Peacock’s] life was too fragmented to treat in translated Anglo-Saxon riddle poems that Peacock sol-lunar light, propose themselves: in the context collage,” writes Guriel, in that 2014 monograph. drops, without context or (much) comment, into of Peacock’s book, “analysis & poetry” (or “poetry From the start, she eschewed the trendy a-linearity the middle of the collection. Through some sleuth- & analysis”), “word & world,” “reader & writer” … of much late 20th-century American poetry. He ing in the publication credits, I determined these Enigma is not the same as obscurity: as Peacock quotes her: “I valued clarity above all else in writing were written for—or at least included in—another herself pointed out in Arc Poetry Magazine, the and was so often disappointed by my obscureness.” project, a collection of Anglo-Saxon translations authors of the Anglo-Saxon riddle poems are “val- Reading The Analyst, I sometimes felt Peacock takes by contemporary poets, called The Word Exchange. iant” in their devotion to clarity—describing the her devotion to clarity too far, resorting to straight But the inclusion of these riddles in The Analyst is moon, in this instance, “four times in an effort to description, ploddingly prosaic: not gratuitous. It is perfect, indicating in two suc- get it right.” But it (enigma) is a friend of complex- cinct, lightning flashes of verse the shape-shifting ity. (“As an older woman, I hardly ever feel anything Thank you for waving goodbye as that young woman virtuosity that can be a quality of a speaker in a unalloyed,” Peacock writes in her Partisan essay.) set off to cohabit with a man who wore a bathrobe poem, a soul in analysis (“I was a girl, a grey And also of mystery. till 5 in the afternoon and smelled of Balkan Sobranies, queen, / and a man, solo, all in a single hour” Guriel speaks of Peacock’s “late style” as a casual and thank you for the welcome back. [from “Riddle, or The Therapy Hour”]). Here is the confidence—one not always underwritten by Thank you for your applause as she changed second riddle, quoted in full: pains taken. But reading these poems I wondered the locks and the password to the bank account, if her late style may hold out something else, as for now she had a bank account. I watched a wonder, a bright marauder, well. A poet who has spent her career labouring (from “The Pottery Jar”) bearing its booty between its horns. in the service of clarity has earned the right, in An etched ship of air, a silver sky-sliver, her seventies—and as she begins to contemplate Rereading the book, I could see that this is at it lugged a month’s loot from its raid on time what Northrop Frye called the riddle of death—to least to some extent intentional: as Peacock writes to build a great bower from all it brought back embrace the pleasures of enigma. in her Partisan essay, description “recreates life — if only it might make plunder into art. I can see how, like a patient in analysis, I have from extinction. Analysis is all gone now.” The Climbing the sky-cliffs rose another wonder projected my own preoccupations—with myths, Analyst is a re-creative project, an attempt to sum- its dazzle known to all dwellers on earth. with riddles (both central to my own poetry; both, mon up anew not only the person of that intimate It seized the spoils and drove the silver creature like form, technologies that make “impossible emo- witness the speaker mourns, but also the whole with all its wrecked wishes off to the west tions possible”)—onto Peacock. Perhaps this is just long, collaborative creation that was the analysis (hurling back insults as it hurried home). in the nature of reading. There is a sense in which itself. Dust rose to heaven. Dew fell on earth. all writers, even the least “confessional,” confess to If that explains the prevalence of prosy descrip- Night went forth. Nothing afterwards then. language, to the empty page—that opaque confes- tion in The Analyst, it did not quite, for me, give it No man knew how to map its path. sional screen on the other side of which is a reader. aesthetic warrant. And yet, it was against the back- (“Riddle: Moon & Sun”) Yet any lifelong reader will know that the opposite drop of those prosy passages that I appreciated the is also true: books—which, if silent, are far from lyric energy of the poems that are for me the book’s Peacock gives the traditional “solution” of the unresponsive—are the intimate witnesses to our triumphs: “Credo,” which hums with pent-up emo- riddle in her title. But like many of the Anglo-Saxon (readers’, as well as writers’) inner lives.

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28 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada Pure Madness Unsnarling the irrational, contradictory, still-thriving obsession with virginity Diana Fitzgerald Bryden

persists as a central feature of how we Virgin Envy: The Cultural (In) discuss female virginity. Significance of the Hymen In spite of a title and introduc- Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos tion that playfully suggest envy as and Adriana Spahr, editors the central, mock-Freudian theme, University of Regina Press it is not much in evidence in these 247 pages, softcover essays. Obsession, yes. Fascination. ISBN 9780889774230 Manipulation, above all; if virgin- ity is a cultural chimera, a female virgin is a projection and avatar of f the editors of Virgin Envy: all the fantasies, expectations and The Cultural (In)Significance political expediencies of her time. Iof the Hymen considered, even In her essay “Bollywood Virgins,” briefly, appropriating the title of Asma Sayed describes the ways in Madonna’s iconic song for their book, which Bollywood films uphold and they may have dismissed it as too reinforce prevailing social mores in corny. But, as usual when it comes contemporary Indian society, featur- to iconography, Madonna was on ing virginal heroines who invariably to something. The essays in Virgin marry their first sexual partner; she Envy explore in depth what the pop also shows us that some films have singer was gesturing at: what virgin- begun to test these boundaries in ity is like—what it stands in for, what significant, if circumscribed ways. It it is groomed and manipulated and is hardly surprising that Bollywood fetishized to represent—as much as reflects the social conservatism that what it is. surrounds it, in Sayed’s opinion. She The essays in this voracious and quotes Hanne Blank, who noted in wide-ranging collection are paired We are conditioned to identify virginity with straight women, but what about men? Lesbians? her 2007 book Virgin: The Untouched thematically in four sections: “Too “George the Second’s cherry, Groffien or Biggarou and the Harrison’s heart cherries,” by History that virginity “has been used Much Pain for Such Little Reward”; George Bradshaw (1812). Image courtesy New York Public Library Digital Collections. as an organizing principle of human “Blood, Blood, Blood … and More cultures for millennia.” Blood”; “Men Be Virgins Too: Queering Virginity,” do we care about it and to what end? What do our And yet virginity itself, as Amy Burge notes in and “F*ck: They Entrapped Us in Social Issues and attitudes on the subject say about us? the first chapter, is full of contradictions. For one Politics.” There is a lot of cross-fertilization here. Most of us (I include myself here) have been thing, any proof identified by penetration, Burge As editors Jonathan A. Allan, Cristina Santos and conditioned to think of virginity primarily as the writes, must be “retrospective … since virginity Adriana Spahr make clear in their introduction, domain of heterosexual women and girls. As the is something that exists only as it is lost.” (This, although the authors take diverse approaches— editors note, “though virginity studies is a field the elusive and ephemeral nature of virginity, is a looking at everything from vampire fantasy novels dominated by the idea that virginity is female, les- theme returned to often in the essays that follow.) to filmmaker Derek Jarman’s depiction of Saint bian experiences of virginity are unaccounted for For another, in order to be aware of one’s own vir- Sebastian, the early Christian martyr—they all in the scholarship.” Virgin Envy proposes to redress ginity, one must be sexually aware and therefore, if acknowledge the enduring cultural and social sig- this assumption among many others, and to exam- we accept the common equation of virginity with nificance of virginity. Beyond that, they play with ine the social and political significance of virginity innocence, already in some ways non-virginal. the idea that much of what we define as virginity far beyond accepted conventions. What about men, Before this awareness, it is assumed, one is a pre- is more notional than actual, which raises some they ask? Bisexuals? “How does a bisexual person sexual child. obvious questions: Performed, rescinded, even lose virginity? Twice?” This goes to the heart of Gibson Ncube’s essay reinstated (think Purity Balls and reconstructed The symbolism of the hymen is deeply embed- “Troping Boyishness,” which while dense with hymens), when does virginity actually exist? Why ded in most cultures, Jodi McAlister, an Australian theory is also extremely moving. Ncube aims to feminist historian who has studied romance and redress what he describes as “a cavernous gap in Diana Fitzgerald Bryden is the author of No Place virginity, tells us—although as Cristen Conger illus- the research on male virginity, in particular mas- Strange, shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel trated in a witty 2012 Huffington Post article, there culine queer virginity in the Arab Muslim societies Award and longlisted for the IMPAC/Dublin Award, are widespread misconceptions about its location, of North Africa, in literature or otherwise.” First as well as two books of poetry and numerous essays, its permeability and how it is “broken.” As Conger he examines the theory that a gay male child, reviews and short fiction. She recently completed pointed out, a hymen is not a vacuum seal, and an identity often conflated with effeminacy, can her second novel, and her monthly fiction series is often gone—or eroded to the point of insignifi- only be perceived as gay retroactively once he “Can You Hear Me Now?” is online at channillo. cance—by the time of first sexual penetration. Yet has reached gay adulthood (before which he is an com. Visit www.dianafitzgeraldbryden.com. breaking the hymen, complete with pain and blood, effeminate boy, and effeminate boys might grow

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 29 up to be heterosexual men). Ncube inverts this century Mexico” were frequently portrayed in both deep” is the response. And in Karen Connelly’s equation slightly when speaking of two gay literary popular and official culture as “sexualized vixen[s].” soon-to-be-released novel, The Change Room, a protagonists: “it is imperative to view effeminacy as The authors also detail the use of rape and genital mother who has just found out her teenage daugh- an intrinsic part of their makeup and not only as a torture (of both women and men) by armed forces ter is a lesbian and has been sleeping with her signifier of future homosexuality.” in Argentina in the mid 1970s and early ’80s; the lover for months insists that the girl is still a virgin The protagonists he describes are the creations objective was to humiliate both sexes and to emas- because she has not had sex with a boy. Each of of “two openly gay writers of Maghrebian origin: culate the men. While women were symbolically these examples underscores, with tenderness and Abdella Taïa (Morocco) and Eyet-Chékib Djaziri stripped of “virginity” over and over, men were humour, the value of a book such as Virgin Envy, (Franco-Tunisian),” and it is through their work that made to feel they had been turned into women, and the need for us to question the narrowness of he homes in on his point. These authors describe and, as with Ncube’s “passive” partners, to be fem- received notions of virginity, sexuality and gender. the invisibility of homosexuality in their respective inized was to be despised. But shouldn’t virginity be passé in our sexually countries, where queer virginity gives a gay man a In my youth, heterosexual boys, if they referred liberated western culture? Maybe, but society, like kind of power while, at the same time, as a “pas- to their own virginity at all, tended to do so with individuals, is not necessarily honest with itself sive” sexual partner he is seen as weak, disgusting, quick, joking references whose chief aim was about sex. In her essay, Burge draws a direct line feminized. The man who penetrates him is none to divert attention from it. When they “lost it,” from medieval orientalist romances to contem- of these, not even gay. Ncube tells us that for both they usually did so with more experienced girls porary “sheikh” fantasies whose exoticized heroes Taïa and Djaziri “the loss of virginity is intrinsically or women and were considered lucky, while the expect western women to be experienced (i.e., not linked to the development of a sexual identity con- girls might be labelled slutty (the corollary to this virgins) and are stunned and delighted to be proved sidered deviant, ‘unspeakable,’ and undesirable in double standard was yet another double standard, wrong. By displacing the obsession with virginity the Arab Muslim world of the protagonists.” in which boys were unlikely ever to admit to having onto an “other,” Burge says, western culture reveals Individual readers will naturally be drawn been coerced). its own fixations and prejudices. to some of these essays over others, and some My own unscientific sampling of recent popular stamina is required for theory-heavy language, culture reveals that our attitudes toward virginity As much as many Western readers, indicated but each has something fresh to say. Two stand- can be exploited to considerable comic effect. In through countless news and comment pieces, outs, perhaps because the stakes they examine Yvette Edwards’s wonderful novel A Cupboard Full might condemn “foreign” cultures for con- are so high, are Ncube’s essay and “The Policing of Coats, a young British girl is informed by her best tinuing to conduct virginity tests, the gender of Viragos and Other ‘Fuckable’ Bodies,” by Tracy friend that once a woman has had sex she walks hegemony that these tests uphold is clearly Crowe Morey and Adriana Spahr. Morey and Spahr with her toes turned out. In Rick Famuyiwa’s 2015 evident and even celebrated in our own examine virginity as an ideological and social tool movie, the race satire Dope, three teens at band romantic cultural imagination. in a number of Latin American military cultures; camp are told by a new white friend that he is still Chile under Augusto Pinochet, for one, where, we “technically a virgin” because white girls will per- As the authors and editors of Virgin Envy argue, are told, conscripted female soldiers “had to abide form fellatio and allow anal but not vaginal sex in it is time for more honesty on the subject of virginity by military regulations that kept them in a state of the interest of preserving their own “virginity.” “So and all that surrounds it. Time to acknowledge that permanent girlhood.” By contrast, the authors tell the question is,” he announces with high serious- definitions of purity, like hymens, are far more elas- us, “predominantly lower-class and Indigenous ness to his rapt audience, “not, am I technically a tic, far more various, than our limited imaginations revolutionary women in the first part of twentieth- virgin, but … am I technically … gay?” “Whoa, that’s may have allowed.

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30 reviewcanada.ca Literary Review of Canada All in the Family Can lawyers really run law firms? Adam Dodek

managing partner Norman Bacal. Bacal literally enterprise with an identifiable strategy and brand. Breakdown: The Inside Story of the Rise and grew up with Heenan Blaikie, starting at the firm’s As viewers of legal dramas on television know Fall of Heenan Blaikie Montreal office as a student from McGill’s law well, law firms expand either through mergers with Norman Bacal school, coming of age there as a young lawyer, mak- other firms or by opening a new office in another Barlow Books ing partner, moving to Toronto to start the firm’s location. Heenan Blaikie, along with competitors 336 pages, hardcover second office in 1989 and serving as Heenan’s co- Stikeman Elliott and Blake Cassells & Graydon, ISBN 9781988025155 managing partner from 1997 until 2012. chose the second option. The firm had another Breakdown: The Inside Story of the Rise and Fall decision to make: to choose a “greenfield,” a of Heenan Blaikie weaves together Bacal’s personal brand-new office, or a “brownfield,” which usually remember going to the offices of Heenan narrative with Heenan Blaikie’s dramatic story. involves taking over an existing firm—more of a Blaikie in 2001, when I was an associate For Bacal, the two were inescapably interwoven. takeover than a merger of equals. There are chal- Iat another Bay Street law firm in Toronto. He invested his considerable talents and energy in lenges for both approaches. A brownfield brings a Heenan’s offices were not like those dour, wood- expanding Heenan nationally and internationally. local team with local contacts, but those lawyers panelled offices of other law firms. They were He pioneered the lucrative field of film financing might not share the same values as the firm they are bright, light filled—different because Heenan tried in Canada, working with the likes of Robert Lantos, joining. When Norm Bacal instead opened a new to be different. For four decades, the office in Toronto in 1989, he was able to firm attracted a marquee list of counsel There is a real question, for many bring Heenan’s unusual corporate cul- including former prime ministers Pierre ture from Montreal with him and trans- Trudeau and Jean Chrétien, a former law firms, as to why lawyers mit it effectively, at least for a while. (“He Quebec premier, and former and future had seats from the old Montreal Forum Supreme Court justices. It was also with no business or management in his office!” one Toronto Heenan law- home to several controversial figures: yer told me.) Marcel Aubut, the larger-than-life for- training would be running a large It is clear this was important to the mer president of the Quebec Nordiques firm. There was no “eat what you kill” who resigned as head of the Canadian professional services firm. culture at Heenan, with partners remu- Olympic Committee two years ago in the nerated in accordance with the revenue face of allegations of sexual harassment and, most Warner Brothers and MGM. By the end of his sec- that they generated. Quite the opposite: as Bacal notoriously, Jacques Bouchard, who was embroiled ond year as a partner in Montreal, he tells us, only describes it, there was a “Heenan tax”; partners with a former Israeli Mossad operative in Russian one other lawyer generated more revenue for the received less in remuneration than they would have arms deals with African dictators. firm: Roy Heenan himself. Bacal could have left likely gotten at other firms. This was part of what Heenan Blaikie began as a boutique Montreal Heenan and started his own boutique firm. Instead, Bacal labels Heenan’s “social contract,” wherein the law firm, formed in 1973 by lawyers Roy Heenan, he devoted his energies to building and managing firm’s lawyers agreed to earn less in exchange for Peter Blaikie and Donald Johnston, with a hand- Heenan Blaikie. Thus, by the time we get to Bacal greater freedom to practise law as they wanted, in a shake. In a quaint but reckless move, the firm did almost literally turning the lights off at the firm in more convivial atmosphere. This was a key element not have a written partnership agreement until the 2014, the last words of the chapter hardly come as a to Heenan’s distinct culture, of which Bacal was beginning of this century. By the end of the first surprise: “and then I cried.” a chief propagator. I have spoken to many former decade of the 21st century, Heenan Blaikie had The story of Heenan’s changing fortunes is in Heenan lawyers and over and over again, the same grown to become one of the largest law firms in some ways the story of the tremendous shifts in the phrases come up: “It was a nice place to work”; Canada. (Johnston’s name was dropped when he Canadian legal market over the past four decades. “I enjoyed the people”; “there were no assholes at left the firm to join Pierre Trudeau’s cabinet in When the firm was formed, almost all Canadian Heenan.” The last claim is a rather difficult one to 1980.) It had more than 500 lawyers in offices law firms were local. Most law societies prohibited make about any law firm. in eight Canadian cities, plus an office in Paris. In partnerships with out-of-province lawyers until In many ways, Heenan operated like a fam- Montreal, it occupied prime space on the edge of the Supreme Court held that such restrictions ily business. (In Breakdown, Bacal frequently Old Montreal. In Toronto, Heenan moved into the violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in describes the “Heenan family,” as do many of his brand-new Bay Adelaide Centre in August 2009. 1989. As their clients’ businesses became more former colleagues with whom I have spoken.) That move epitomized the firm’s confidence. national, law firms realized that in order to avoid And the firm enjoyed the successes, and faced But within just a few years the firm was in crisis, losing legal work, they would need to expand into the challenges, associated with such operations. and in February 2014 the partners from Heenan’s other provinces. In other areas, there has not been The firm suffered a leadership void after its much- nine offices gathered at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth nearly enough change. Most law firms were and revered founder Roy Heenan stepped down as Hotel and voted to dissolve the firm. The Heenan still are partnerships where individual lawyers chair in 2012. (Heenan passed away in February of dream had come to an abrupt end. How could this share in the profits of the firm and have the right, this year.) No one ever replaced him in that posi- happen? if not the responsibility, to share in the manage- tion, or in his ability to bring unity to divergent Probably no one has thought more about the ment and decision making of the firm. While this interests within the firm. Since 1997, Heenan had rise and fall of Heenan Blaikie than its former co- model may work well for a firm with 20 or perhaps employed a co-managing partner structure with even 50 lawyers, it is not well suited for a law firm Guy Tremblay in Montreal and Bacal in Toronto. Adam Dodek is a law professor at the University with more than 500 lawyers in offices scattered This may have worked for the firm at the time, but it of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law and the vice president across Canada and internationally. The modern was hardly a recipe for effective management of an of the Canadian Association for Legal Ethics. He is Canadian law firm looks much more like its corpor- organization that had grown to revenues exceed- researching the rise and fall of Heenan Blaikie as ate clients but does not necessarily operate as such. ing a quarter of a billion dollars and employing a case study about changes in the Canadian legal Many large firms still resemble groups of individ- more than 1,100 people. And when Tremblay and profession over the past 40 years. ual lawyers rather than being a single, focused Bacal retreated from firm management between

April 2017 reviewcanada.ca 31 2011 and 2012, the troubles escalated rapidly. turned to professional non-legal managers as chief The last third of the book is a pacey description executive officers or chief operating officers to run of the firm’s decline and ultimate collapse. Bacal their firms. Heenan did not realize it needed to do is rightly proud of Heenan’s culture. This sense this until the firm was already collapsing. By the of a common culture unites individuals in a firm, time Bacal came back from management exile in and when it falters, the firm can fail. (The title of a the summer of 2013 and began to actively engage Harvard Law School case study on Heenan Blaikie in trying to save the firm, Heenan was hemorrhag- is called “The Glue Dissolves.”) It also explains ing lawyers. Bacal thought he could have righted Bacal’s frustration and anger as cracks appeared at the ship, but he did not have the time or the nec- Heenan after he and Tremblay stepped back. essary support to do so. Whether he could have Bacal is slow to cast blame, which limits both the remains unclear. dramatic storytelling and the ability of the reader Many issues challenged the firm in its final to judge the reasons for the firm’s demise. To the years: an unproductive Paris office that seemed extent that Bacal points fingers, it is more collec- to hang like an albatross around the firm’s neck; Join the tive than individual. The firm did not plan well for a rogue partner in Jacques Bouchard, who unbe- Graphite Club, succession after Bacal and Tremblay. The partners knownst to almost anyone in the firm was working did not consider whether the dual partnership that to broker sales of Russian helicopters to African devoted to the long­ had worked so well for Bacal and Tremblay would dictators; convoluted and unclear lines of author- work with other, different personalities. (It did not.) ity; lateral partners who never really gelled with term sustainability It did not help that the firm failed to provide its new the Heenan culture. Warren Buffett said that “you of the LRC and its leaders with the training necessary to lead a firm of only find out who is swimming naked when the more than 500 lawyers. Indeed, there is a real ques- tide goes out.” A former Heenan partner recently elemental place tion, for many law firms, as to why lawyers with no repeated this to me, offering it as an explanation for business or management training would be run- the firm’s demise. in Canadian life. ning a large professional services firm in any case. I have spoken with many other Bay Street This is a question not just about Heenan Blaikie but lawyers and managing partners and asked them about many large law firms. whether they were affected by Heenan’s collapse. For Lawyers are notoriously arrogant in asserting Partners who took no interest in the management that no one but lawyers can provide legal services, of their firms suddenly started asking questions. membership but they have no problem believing that they are Managing partners became even more vigilant in perfectly capable of management, marketing, lob- watching the numbers. “We pulled up our britches,” bene ts, visit bying, human resources, etc., with absolutely no one told me. reviewcanada. training in the subject. Lawyers are not natural Law has always been a business as well as a managers, although they think they are. Bacal profession, although many lament this fact. But ca/graphite candidly acknowledges some of these flaws, but he one lesson from Heenan’s demise is clear: paying did not take steps to professionalize Heenan’s man- attention to the business of law is essential to the agement. In the early 2000s, many large law firms practice of law. Matters. the Public Because To join, please contact:

Conversation Club e Graphite Th Helen Walsh, President, conservation: Literary Review of Canada LRC back issues [email protected] and subscriptions. 416-944-1101 ext. 227

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