Literary Review of Canada – June 2021

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S e t BOLD FICTION NEW CALLS TO ACTION

UNTOLD HISTORIES

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A JOURNAL OF IDEAS

FIRST WORD COMPELLING PEOPLE PEDAGOGY Clippings Copy Cats Queen of Queen’s Kyle Wyatt A little from column A, The woman behind the writers 3 a little from column B J. R. McConvey J. D. M. Stewart 21 FURTHERMORE 14 Joel Henderson, Franklin James Latin, LITERATURE You Talkin’ to Me? and Robert Girvan Writing into the Sunset Beneath the dome lights 5 In the saddle with David Macfarlane Canadian novelists THE ARGUMENT 17 Bob Armstrong Toil and Trouble THE ARTS 24 What a way to make a living Stephen Marche The Art of War Lox and Loaded 7 In the trenches with Gary Barwin’s latest Mary Riter Hamilton Tom Jokinen THE PUBLIC SQUARE Anna Porter 27 But Blind They Were 18 The Unbearable Lightness The fallacy of an empty continent THIS AND THAT Coming of age Elaine Coburn Curious George takes a darker turn 10 Gayatri Kumar About the simple things 28 Alive and Kicking Rose Hendrie Le Chef continues 19 Family Pride to make an impression Profiles in gay life Graham Fraser GADGETS AND GIZMOS Kelvin Browne 12 Results Driven 30 RUMINATIONS An exercise in precision Alex Cyr BACKSTORY The Breakdown 20 Green Eggs and Glam Tales of corrugated fibreboard Richard D. Mohr Marlo Alexandra Burks 32 13

POETRY Yusuf Saadi, p. 9 Canisia Lubrin, p. 15 Joseph Dandurand, p. 23

OUR CONTRIBUTORS

Bob Armstrong has a book column in Graham Fraser wrote René Lévesque and the J. R. McConvey is a writer, producer, and the Winnipeg Free Press. His novel Prodigies, Parti Québécois in Power. educator. He also edits Root & Stem magazine. a Western, comes out this summer. Rose Hendrie is the magazine’s associate editor. Richard D. Mohr is professor emeritus of Kelvin Browne is the executive director of philosophy and classics at the University of Illinois the Gardiner Museum, in Toronto. Tom Jokinen is a frequent contributor to the Urbana-Champaign. magazine. He lives in Winnipeg. Marlo Alexandra Burks is the magazine’s Anna Porter is the author of Deceptions, new development coordinator. Gayatri Kumar reads in Toronto. an art-world thriller. Elaine Coburn directs the Centre for Feminist David Macfarlane is the award-winning author J. D. M. Stewart teaches at Bishop Strachan Research at York University. of several books. His latest is Likeness. School, in Toronto. He is the author of Being Prime Minister. Alex Cyr is the author of Runners of Stephen Marche is a novelist and essayist, ◆ the Nish: A Season in the Sun, Rain, Hail as well as the host of How Not to F*ck Up and Hell. He is trying to run faster than Your Kids Too Bad, an audio series. On the cover: “The Rollout,” he did in university. by Alex MacAskill.

WITH THANKS TO OUR SUPPORTERS

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Clippings

HE SENT ME THE STEWED TOMATO AND out of bookmarks (an occupational hazard for pappardelle recipe in the form of a someone like me, she was sure). sloppily photocopied clipping from It’s not the incoming waves of bookmarks that the Wall Street Journal, which she I have missed the most these past few years but annotated in her rather loopy hand- the measured perspective on this ever- perplexing Swriting, using pencil, of course. It was one of world of ours, the assurance that little has the countless recipes she passed along over the actually changed since I was that ever-p erplexed years. “She” being my grade 6 English teacher, eleven- year-old trying to diagram a stubborn who became a mentor, a confidant, and, after I sentence. “It wasn’t so long ago that you were moved to a big city that made her constantly fret the one who required patience,” she would about me, a faithful pen pal. remind me when I was convinced things were With each recipe came a quick story or a recap infuriatingly bleak. “At least you are an incred- of the latest meal: “The roast last evening was a ibly fast learner, so no one had to be patient triumph, and we have dandy leftovers.” But it very long.” was weeks after she sent the pappardelle recipe That was before these restless pandemic that I realized she’d gone to the post office sometimes — times that would have caused her no what prematurely — before trying it herself. She end of worry, especially for those of us in cities. emailed with a follow-up from the kitchen: the I know exactly what she would have said about dish was indeed a success, despite the fact that stockpiling the right foods, avoiding crowded she’d cut the pancetta too thick. Oh, and the spaces, and appreciating that, at the very least, titular noodles were impossible to find in my there was Peet’s Coffee, the Moccamaster, and hometown, population 2,000. Fettuccine was a pile of books to read. Nonetheless, I’ve been the best she could manage. “But still, wrong wishing she was here to actually say it. pasta and everything, it’s pretty good.” Then I found her again, or at least a whisper, Day after day, week after week, she would send in M. A. C. Farrant’s One Good Thing: A Living me updates: some short, some long, most — on Memoir. No pasta recipes appear in Farrant’s the surface and taken on their own — rather beguiling new book, which takes the form of inane. She would mention a quick weekend garrulous, often amusing letters addressed to away (“The trip was fruitful, fishing- wise”). Helen Chesnut, the real-life garden columnist She’d write about the latest policy that the new for the Times Colonist, in Victoria. This is a one- superintendent, who had never actually taught way epistolary relationship, centred on cucum- a day in his life, had instituted at school. She’d bers and soil conditions and the existential say how much she loved the latest Inspector questions that plague the author: about aging, Gamache novel. “Louise Penny will be a grand climate change, around-t he-clock news cover- person,” she hunted and pecked on her key- age, and the sudden arrival of unwanted change. board one August day, in anticipation of a book “I always look at what groceries people signing in Omaha. “Even if she’s not.” (Louise buy”— Farrant’s words, but I hear another’s Penny, for the record, proved amazing.) familiar voice in them. “Is there such a thing as She was my very own Helene Hanff, the a confidentiality code with cashiers, like there is charming screenwriter and transatlantic friend with doctors, lawyers, and priests?” And when it of British booksellers past. She boxed up and comes to the coronavirus, “isn’t what we’re liv- shipped foodstuffs she was convinced didn’t ing through now . . . epic poem material?” Yes, she exist in Toronto, and she never forgot to wish would have asked that too. me well on the random holidays that brought One Good Thing shows how garden-variety her joy — April Fool’s and Pi Day being her imperfections can still be instructive, delicious, favourites. even wonderful. They can distract us, momentar- Her name no longer appears in my inbox, and ily perhaps, but to positive effect, from all that every day I wish it would. From time to time, at remains wrong and bleak and contested in the least, I stumble upon a random comic strip that world. So thank you, M. A. C. Farrant, for your she once found humorous, cut out of the news- quotidian meditations, which, when folded paper, and laminated so that I would never run together, are most nourishing.

Kyle Wyatt, Editor-in-Chief

JUNE 2021 3 Literary Review of Canada Massey College 4 Devonshire Place Toronto, ON M5S 2E1 [email protected] EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Kyle Wyatt [email protected] MANAGING EDITOR Michael Strizic ASSOCIATE EDITOR Rose Hendrie POETRY EDITOR Moira MacDougall COPY EDITOR Barbara Czarnecki ART DIRECTOR Brian Morgan CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Cristina Austin, Murray Campbell, Bronwyn Drainie, Graham Fraser, Basil Guinane, Beth Haddon, Mark Lovewell, Amanda Perry, Cecily Ross, Alexander Sallas, Derek Ungless, Bruce K. Ward PUBLISHER Eithne McCredie DEVELOPMENT COORDINATOR Marlo Alexandra Burks BOARD OF DIRECTORS John Macfarlane (Chair), Scott Griffin, Neena Gupta, John Honderich, Kelly Jenkins, Joseph Kertes, Anna Porter, John Stackhouse, David Staines, Jaime Watt CORPORATE SECRETARY Vali Bennett FOUNDED IN 1991 BY P. A. DUTIL SUBMISSIONS See reviewcanada.ca/submissions for guidelines. SUBSCRIPTIONS AND CIRCULATION In Canada, $56/year plus GST/HST ($68 for libraries and institutions). Outside Canada, $86/year ($98 for libraries and institutions). Literary Review of Canada P.O. Box 8, Station K, Toronto, ON M4P 2G1 [email protected] (416) 932-5081 SUPPORT Literary Review of Canada is published ten times a year by Literary Review of Canada Charitable Organization (NO. 848431490RR0001). Donate at reviewcanada.ca/donate. ©2021 Literary Review of Canada. All rights, i ncluding translation into other languages, are reserved by the publisher in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and all other countries participating in the Universal Copyright Convention, the International Copyright Convention, and the Pan-American Copyright Convention. Nothing in this publication may be re produced without written permission. ISSN 1188-7494 Indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and the Canadian Index, and distributed by Disticor and Magazines Canada. Literary Review of Canada may allow carefully selected organizations to contact subscribers with offers that may be of interest. If you do not wish to receive such correspondence, email Subscriber Services at [email protected], call (416) 932-5081, or write P.O. Box 8, Station K, Toronto, ON M4P 2G1. Furthermore

RE: Period Piece actions that seem potentially winning, but also conflict and chauvinism and have lost fights over by Jeffrey Simpson (May) risky, are unlikely to be promoted from the hypo- territory. What separates them is how justly they thetical to the actual. Thus, I often leave a gath- deal with these realities. Thus, past battles do JEFFREY SIMPSON’S PERSPECTIVE ON THE PAST FIFTY ering of friends with a vague sense of regret and not necessarily taint our institutions today. If it is years of Canadian politics and cultural develop- feeling as though I’d left too much on the table. alleged that one is not treating all citizens fairly ment is worth the read. But I might be in his Of course, despite my natural reserve, it hap- or does not effectively resolve problems, then we target group of “critics” who, he says, would pens that I’m sometimes put on the spot and must carefully study it. What we should not do characterize Canada as a “racist hellhole.” forced to work from instinct. While at times this is presume its guilt before the inquiry. I just couldn’t accept the two main tenets of leads me to panic and freeze, or say something Yes, prejudice, including racism, exists in his counter-a rgument: that immigration con- utterly inane, there are also times when I let go, Canada. Yet to focus exclusively on that as a tinues apace — implying that Canada must jump, and somehow miraculously land squarely cause often does not well serve those one wants not be racist if people of colour want to move on my feet. This last outcome, the incredible to help. Many problems — like growing social here — and the high proportion of Canadians feeling it always gives rise to, both thrilling and inequality — have quite complex causes. who are “proud of health care, the passport, the nourishing, seems to scream, “Do this more!” What concerns me about Cutrara’s method is flag, and the Charter.” So thank you, Jamieson Findlay, for writing that by rushing too quickly to “mobilize” hist- Now I admit I have no idea what the “pre- just what I needed to read. And to the world, ory, to create the world she desires, she seems vailing discourse” of university history depart- look out: I come bearing freestyles of all man- not to have understood the history she wants ments is, but the fact that many have lost ner and form. to mobilize, nor the world she wants to change. interest in “sagas of success in Canadian hist- Another possibility is that she frankly believes in ory” is not a bad thing. Racism in Canada may Franklin James Latin socialism, rather than communitarian democ- be more insidious than hellish, but it exists. Kamloops, British Columbia racy — where some will succeed more and some Simpson acknowledges the historic treatment less, based on merit and healthy competition, of Indigenous peoples and the “debt” that RE: Historical Friction with a social safety net for all. If so, she is entitled remains there; but I got the sense that his lecture by Patrice Dutil (April) to her beliefs, but we must take care that our edu- was part requiem for a narrative of stoic settlers cation system has a more balanced approach. If and brave explorers — a narrative that is being I AGREE WITH SAMANTHA CUTRARA, IN HER LETTER our children are taught only the negative parts pushed aside by progressives eager to out-woke in the May issue responding to Patrice Dutil’s of the past, without understanding the positive one another. review of her book, that Canada must continu- developments of our country or understanding Racism is as prominent in Canadian hist- ally reimagine a new “we,” especially as the how to think with historical rigour, then we are ory as Confederation itself. Anti-Black, anti- country changes demographically and as we failing them as educators and as citizens. Indigenous, anti-Asian, and anti-Semitic reflect on how to be a more just society. Yet as sentiments, as well as many other manifestations that delightful cliché has it, the devil is in the Robert Girvan of xenophobia, were present at the founding details. Rationally, the only way to update our Toronto and throughout the country’s development. It’s “we” is to understand what we want to change. impossible to tell the story of Canada without We must begin with a balanced and methodo- FOR ANYONE WHO THINKS WE DON’T HAVE DUST- incorporating these awful facts. Whether one logically sound story about our country, focusing ups in Canadian history. takes the sneering stance of Trudeau père or the on the development of our crucial institutional lachrymose tone of Trudeau ﬁls is of no import. structures that endure to this day. Many don’t @DaleBarbour What matters is learning from our history — our know, for example, that Canada is near the top via Twitter real history — to make better our future. in most of the global indicators of what makes (Simpson also notes that, according to a for a successful country — as imperfect as we are. AS A SUBSCRIBER, I WAS DISAPPOINTED BY THE recent survey, “92 percent believed Canadians According to the Economist Intelligence snarky tone and lack of real engagement in this to be ‘polite.’ ” And I wonder: Have 92 percent of Unit’s Democracy Index for 2020, only twenty- review. Canadians never driven in Ontario?) three countries of 167 assessed are “full” democ- racies, when considering such factors as electoral @dgrhist Joel Henderson processes, pluralism, functioning of government, via Twitter Gatineau, Quebec political participation, culture, and civil liberties. Canada ranks fifth in the world, with a score of . . . and a Correction RE: Blowing Changes 9.24 out of 10. In comparison, the United States by Jamieson Findlay (April) is in the “flawed” democracy category, in twenty- IN DISCUSSING VARIOUS INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES fifth place, with a score of 7.92. spoken in Canada, Jeffrey Simpson’s “Period I WAS VERY MOVED BY JAMIESON FINDLAY’S ESSAY Canada is doing a lot right, and that should Piece” (May) suggested that Dene is a specific on improvisation. One thing he didn’t stress, be celebrated. We must also study our collective language. It is more accurately a grouping of however, which I feel is worth mentioning, is failures and the injustices that have occurred and Athabaskan languages spoken throughout the special kind of satisfaction that results from still occur on Canadian soil. A sound hist ory North America. The magazine thanks those who a successful ad lib. Like most people, I’m both course would include these failings as part of a pointed out the imprecise usage. cautious and incautious, depending on the con- fair and balanced overview. We must be rational text. But when it comes to the social sphere, my here, too, with a strong dose of historical know- Write to [email protected] or tag our internal critic is decidedly strong. While I’m in ledge and realism: all countries and all peoples, social media channels. We may edit comments and conversation with others, thoughts of words and including Indigenous peoples, have experienced feedback for length, clarity, and accuracy.

JUNE 2021 5 Celebrate Indigenous History Month

CLOTH 9781442647312 PAPER 9781442614475 PAPER 9781487526535 "Doodem and Council Fire is a work of "This is an important book that makes "A rich, nuanced account of power deep scholarship that could only have an original and thoughtful contribution and resistance, with ambitious themes been written by someone who has to the discussion of Indigenous-settler drawn out by close attention to the spent years studying doodem images relations in Canada." everyday." and pondering their meanings." AVRIL BELL RONALD NIEZEN University of Auckland McGill University DANIEL K. RICHTER University of Pennsylvania

CLOTH 9781487508951 PAPER 9781487520458 PAPER 9781442627703

"Several times this book brought me "Allyson D. Stevenson provides a path- "Seen but Not Seen is a meticulously- to tears. There is deep healing here, breaking, powerful, eye-opening study researched and beautifully written and truth, and an even deeper love." that is essential reading." documentary of the great contradiction of our national life." NOAH MERRILL SARAH CARTER University of Alberta Secretary, New England Yearly Meeting of HOLLY DOAN the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) Blacklock's Reporter

#IndigenousHistoryMonth

@utpress THE ARGUMENT

Toil and Trouble What a way to make a living Stephen Marche

ORK ISN’T WORKING ANY- more. COVID-19 has thrown off the machinery of twenty- first- century capitalism, and as it stalls and sputters, Wturning over on its side, the gears and wheels lie open and exposed. This virus has revealed just how far economic theory has diverged from the actual process of earning a living. The unemployment rate is the highest it’s been since the Great Depression, while the stock market has rallied well past pre-p andemic levels. The fortunes of America’s very richest have risen $406 billion (U.S.) since the outbreak, and as they spend their money on spaceship photo ops, the spectre of hunger stalks the ground they are so desperate to leave behind: 26 million American adults went without meals or relied on charity for groceries last fall, and at least 4.5 million Canadians have experienced food insecurity over the past year. COVID is a disease of the working poor. The failures of the political response, both nationally and internationally, have been failures to address the reality of their working lives. The inner workings of work need adjusting. The value of labour has never been in a more contradictory state. Working men and DONALD TRUMP WAS THE PRESIDENT OF 20,000 people, I think, who can look forward to the age women — meat packers, farm workers, cashiers, lies. Barack Obama told two. But Obama’s lies of leisure and of abundance without a dread,” care workers — have proven themselves to be mattered more because he is not a liar. Obama’s he wrote. “For we have been trained too long to essential as never before. They are the people first lie was that America is more united than strive and not to enjoy.” the system runs on. They are also, apparently, divided. It isn’t. The second was that “if you Our ancestors would find our modern work disposable. COVID represents the end of a long work hard and play by the rules, you will get lives frantically overburdened. During periods road. Middle- class men and women as young ahead.” This campaign bromide, repeated doz- of high prosperity, like the fourteenth century, as thirty have lived through multiple layoffs ens of times, was a classic piece of progressive peasants worked as little as 120 days a year. With already. They know in their bones that their pos- nostalgia — Obama’s signature brand. He tri- mid- morning and mid- afternoon breaks, their ition in society is unrelated to their abilities or angulated conservative and liberal impulses into workdays were rarely longer than eight hours. their efforts. The notion of lifting oneself up by a fantasy of opportunity. Both impulses were “For 95 per cent of our species’ history,” the the bootstraps is for rich kids and people living dreams of a world that had passed. Obama’s South African anthropologist James Suzman has in the past. The political rhetoric of hard work place in history is as the late-c oming physician recently written, “work did not occupy anything is like the rhetoric of the family farm. It will not to the American economy. He worked furiously like the hallowed place in people’s lives that it survive much contact with reality. to cure a patient that was already dead. does now.” The question that follows is obvious: What’s The sickness had been long. John Maynard The cult of hard work that we know today next? Nobody knows what the future of work Keynes wrote “Economic Possibilities for Our arose with factories, but it traces its roots back looks like in the immediate aftermath of the Grandchildren” in 1930, a moment similar to even further. Published in 1905, Max Weber’s O

T pandemic — maybe it will go right back to the our own in several key respects. The Depression The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism O

H way it was, or maybe the whole of office culture had arrived, but the memory of unprecedented described asceticism, not reason, as the founda- P

K will evaporate like a tidal pool. But the course growth was still alive. The glories of prosperity tion of capitalism. He described a society “dom- C O

T of the virus has already shown one obvious fact were fresh in the mind; the shadows of a dark inated by the continually repeated, often almost S

Y about how we organize our lives: the countries future were looming. In that moment of peril, passionate preaching of hard, continuous bodily M A

L that were able to stop working, that were able Keynes found hope against hope. “The disas- or mental labour.” For Weber, there were two A

;

. to imagine a value other than the marketplace, trous mistakes we have made,” he wrote, “blind motives behind the celebration of work rather D

T had lower death rates than the countries that us to what is going on under the surface — to the than its fruits: “Labour is, on the one hand, an L

R tried to stay open. true interpretation of the trend of things.” His approved ascetic technique,” connected to mon- A

R The larger implications of this moment prediction was beyond optimistic: in the long asticism and the defence against sexual tempta- B I L are truly revolutionary. But are we ready for a run, “mankind is solving its economic problem.” tion. “But the most important thing was that E R

U full re-evaluation of work’s place in society? Yet Keynes also knew that accepting the gift of even beyond that labour came to be considered T C

I Underlying that political question is a crisis that prosperity would be harder than generating it. in itself the end of life.” With work as an end in P

R can be described only as spiritual. Everyone feels A world without work was utopian, not because itself, capitalism took on a religious dimension: A T

S it, and for everyone it is personal. Can we learn of the material difficulties but because of the “Unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the L L

A to value ourselves without working like maniacs? transcendent ones. “There is no country and no lack of grace.”

JUNE 2021 7 In our own time, the cult of hard work has enough problem that the government long ago any hope of slowing down spiralling inequal- increased as its validity has declined. There is established a hotline to combat it. The herbivore ity. Those policies will require massive change. a whole industry of books that will tell you men decided to vote with their lives and with With Capital and Ideology, the French econo- how you or your children can get ahead: 10,000 their sperm. Japan now has the lowest number mist Thomas Piketty joins a long line of think- hours of practice, or grit, or the ability to pass the of births since record keeping began. ers — stretching back through Keynes to Karl marshmallow test, or some other conveniently Again, COVID-19 has been a revelation: after Marx himself — who have convinced themselves within- reach mode of self-d etermination. None the onset of the disease, suicide rates in Japan that the vast prosperity of exploitative capital- of them mention luck or rich parents. declined by 20 percent, but then they surged ism can be redirected to the liberation of human In hindsight, the most risible example of this past pre-C OVID levels. The system doesn’t potential. His plans include transnational gov- cult appeared in 2013, in the form of Lean In: need indictment. It indicts itself. The culture ernment bodies to oversee taxation and “a cap- Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, in which a of hard work is an exploitative practice of self- ital endowment to be given to each young adult tech executive argued that women needed to destruction. John Henry died with a hammer (at age 25, say), financed by a progressive tax on work harder and that their hard work would be in his hand. private wealth.” Literally, you’d get an inherit- rewarded by equality in the end. The myth of ◆ ance for being a person. This policy is feasible pluck and resolve — a world of girl bosses with THE PANDEMIC HAS REVEALED THE PATHOLOGY OF on a fiscal level; the question is whether wealthy side hustles — served as a replacement fantasy our work lives. It also offers a tantalizing oppor- countries can find the will. for necessary public policy. Family leave and tunity to reformulate the value of labour, both Embracing laziness goes against all of our mandated board parity are the solutions to in ourselves and in the public sphere. “The most ingrained instincts, which is why it will women’s inequality, but the U.S. government, in economic problem is not — if we look into the be so difficult, perhaps impossible to actually particular, is too dysfunctional to enact anything future — the permanent problem of the human achieve. The question of labour and its value so practical. So instead, the answer, as usual, is race,” Keynes wrote nine decades ago. “It will transcends the grandest questions of political that everybody must work harder. be those peoples, who can keep alive, and culti- and economic organization. It amounts to a And what was Sheryl Sandberg working so vate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself spiritual revaluation of value itself. Can we hard for? All her talent, all her brilliance, all her and do not sell themselves for the means of life, escape the myths we have built around money dedication went to serve a company whose pri- who will be able to enjoy the abundance when and self-worth? mary effect on society is to increase loneliness it comes.” ◆ and depression, and whose political effects have The moment has come to ask what the point THE MYTHS OF LABOUR WILL BE HARD TO ESCAPE contributed to the decline of democracy. Only a is — why we’re doing all this work. Policies are because they lie deep in ourselves. The cult of pathological society could promote such a life emerging that value humanity over the labour hard work offers individuals a profound and as a model. it can produce. These policies have not been grounding myth of self-g eneration: the belief By now, the pathology of pre- pandemic work formulated into a party or even a platform but that, through inner forces, they may triumph culture is obvious. In 2016, Lyft actively pro- are growing in strength, outside the boundaries over the world. This myth is so powerful, so moted a story of one of its drivers picking of the traditional left or right. The solution to innate, that anyone steeped in it cannot aban- up a fare on the way to give birth don it: Nobody gave me anything. I made to her child. An ad campaign for my own life. It’s a beautiful thing to Fiverr — a marketplace, remember, “Can we escape the myths be able to think about yourself, but, intended to advertise freelance labour if it was ever true, it was true only in in the way those workers want to be we have built around money the past. perceived — promoted the risk of men- The world, as it is coming to be, will tal illness through work: “Sleep dep- and self-worth?” require new ways to value ourselves, rivation is your drug of choice.” The ways that are different from earning modern exploitation of labour has a living. In “Economic Possibilities devolved into outright theft. A 2017 study from the future of industrial capitalism can be sum- for Our Grandchildren,” Keynes quoted a trad- the Economic Policy Institute found that, in ten marized in a phrase: the world needs a politics itional charwoman’s epitaph, which imagined states alone, 2.4 million workers had $8 billion of laziness. paradise as permanent inactivity: “Don’t mourn (U.S.) taken from their wages each year. Wage Countries across Europe have already begun for me, friends, don’t weep for me never / For I’m theft within those states alone is roughly half implementing greatly reduced workweeks going to do nothing for ever and ever.” of all property crime in America. Meanwhile, with stunning effects. France, in 2000, reduced But there was a second part to the cleaning tax evasion, according to research into the Swiss weekly hours to thirty-f ive. In Holland, the lady’s epitaph, which is perhaps sadder: “With Leaks and the Panama Papers, amounts to average workweek is now twenty-n ine hours. psalms and sweet music the heavens’ll be ring- nearly 30 percent of the taxes owed by the top Sweden has begun to experiment with six-hour ing, / But I shall have nothing to do with the 0.01 percent. workdays. Companies report greater productiv- singing.” Nonetheless the cult of hard work persists. ity. Workers report vastly improved well-being. The cult of hard work has destroyed, for Conspicuous consumption has been replaced by But paying the same for less labour is only the charwoman, any impulse to contribute. conspicuous labour. The perception of busyness a beginning. The real hope of the politics of That would be the most terrible sacrifice to the is an elite human capital characteristic. It’s all a laziness is the separation of work from its fruits ancient cult of labour for labour’s sake. We will joke, and a thinning joke at that. The younger altogether: money for nothing. Universal basic need ways of shaping the earth other than vacil- you are, the less funny it is. The difference income is no longer a purely utopian concept. lating between frenzy and emptiness. The world among the outcomes of individuals’ lives is not In many countries, it would be little more than may not owe you a living, but you don’t owe the mainly in how much one works. It’s mainly in an extension of what has already been put in world your being either. how much one is given. Conspicuous labour is place during COVID — easily accessible pay- an all too transparent cover for the newly dom- ment for people who stayed home. Canada Inspirations inant rentier reality. has historically been a leader in universal basic Everyone will have to come to an individual income, going back to a social experiment in The Protestant Ethic and reckoning with the new futility. Already in Japan, Manitoba in the 1970s. And now the idea is start- the Spirit of Capitalism during a long period of economic stagnation, ing to take hold in hyper- capitalist places like Max Weber there emerged a group of individuals, dubbed Los Angeles. Recently the mayor, Eric Garcetti, George Allen & Unwin Limited, 1930 the “herbivore men,” who became famous as outlined a proposal to give thousands of dollars sexless introverts. Western media accounts, in direct monthly payments to homeless people Essays in Persuasion almost all brief and focused on the sex, missed in his city. The program would be relatively John Maynard Keynes the point of the herbivore lifestyle. Their refusal small — $24 million (U.S.) — but it shows an Harcourt Brace, 1932 was more general and more widespread. They unprecedented willingness to hand over cash to refused the life of the salaryman. They refused to people who have done nothing to earn it. Capital and Ideology participate in a system of achievement in which These are teases, though — hints, suggestions, Thomas Piketty karoshi, or “death by overwork,” is a serious small-scale tests. Only radical policies have Harvard University Press, 2020

8 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA Glossary of Air

Air Words are scarce Never I offer mangoes made of in our economy of . air — ripe, golden. From sentences you pluck them. Eyes Your resurface, gulp Perhaps language feels the hospital’s austere light, dive unreal because we hold onto words back into body with your son but touch them — why on the horizon. history’s poems genuflect to your single wrinkled finger, Finish We never the library, knuckle crumpled like a page but each of us must decide I’ve fallen asleep on. on a book to be buried with. One The IV’s droplets pool mid- (Winds practising scales air, fall one by , tiny knocks above the deserted parking lot.) before God enters the phenomenal world. Memories You share made of air. Flying into Montreal Stone Your Bengali is made of air; penniless. Years later, worn mine is broken. You perform by physical labour, you nailed tayammum with a black , an office job, bought a semi- unearthing your own father’s detached on Jane for 70k, language into prayer. thinking of heir. Yusuf Saadi

Yusuf Saadi is an award-winning poet in Montreal. This poem appears in Pluviophile, a Grifﬁn Prize ﬁnalist published by Nightwood Editions.

FROM ONE OF CANADA’S MOST CELEBRATED WRITERS and the author of the classic memoir The Danger Tree comes an occasionally hilarious, sometimes heart-breaking meditation on love, memory, and the fathomless depths of grief.

DOUBLEDAY CANADA THE PUBLIC SQUARE

But Blind They Were The fallacy of an empty continent Elaine Coburn

Seen but Not Seen: Inﬂuential Canadians and the First Nations from the 1840s to Today Donald B. Smith University of Toronto Press 488 pages, softcover and ebook

N HER PREFACE TO WRITING THE CIRCLE: Native Women of Western Canada, a poetry collection published in 1990, the Métis scholar and poet Emma LaRocque asked, “Here are our voices — who will Ihear?” The question emphasizes Indigenous women’s determination to tell their own stories, in their own words. But, as LaRocque acknowledged, there are no guarantees such voices, even when spoken, will actually be heard. The historian Donald B. Smith, an expert on Confederation and nineteenth- century Indigenous histories, makes a similar point in his new book, Seen but Not Seen. From the 1840s until the 1960s, many well-known politicians, artists, scholars, journalists, and clergy- men, including Sir John A. Macdonald, Emily Diagnosing a chronic vision problem. Carr, George Monro Grant, and Abbé Lionel Groulx, interacted with Indigenous people race will soon be extinct.” With few exceptions, member consulted any chiefs or Indian councils in their everyday lives. Some had important, such views persisted for decades. Consider how prior to the legislative debate,” Smith points out. personal relationships with them. Macdonald, the historian Jacques Rousseau and the educa- Another portrait is of George McDougall, for instance, sponsored a young Iroquois man, tor George Brown explained their inclusion of a Methodist minister whose adopted “Indian Thomas Green, in his civil engineering studies sixty- five seventeenth-century Indigenous fig- daughter” died in the 1869–70 smallpox epi- at McGill University; he also cherished a Cree ures in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, in demic. McDougall, who fought “paganism” his granddaughter, a frequent visitor to his home. 1966: “Like fireflies they glimmer for a moment entire life, supported the removal of the Manitou Upon her death, Carr willed her paints, brushes, before disappearing again into the dark forest Stone, an intact meteorite long incorporated R K

and unused canvases to George Clutesi, a young of unrecorded histo ry.” In romantic tones that into Blackfoot and Cree spiritual ceremonies in C I L

Nuu-chah-nulth artist. invoked the trope of the “vanishing Indian,” northern Alberta. Eventually, in an all too famil- F

; 9

But with few exceptions, Smith argues, these Rousseau and Brown saw archival and “fragmen- iar appropriation of religious and artistic objects, 5 P white Canadians failed to truly see Indigenous tary” curiosities. the stone ended up at the Methodist Victoria , S D

people, much less understand them as they Certainly, there was a radically diminished College, in Cobourg, Ontario, where it could N O F understood themselves. Macdonald referred to Indigenous presence by the 1850s: just 15,000 edify white audiences. (Today it is displayed at D them as “savages” who required assimilation people, making up “less than one per cent of the the Royal Alberta Museum, in Edmonton.) R A L for their own good. And Carr, who adamantly total population of approximately two million” A pious judge, John Alexander Boyd kept an L O P opposed residential schools and empathized in the Union of the Canadas. But those numbers “Indian notebook” with place names and histor- Y R with those she saw as outsiders, demonstrated were the consequence of concerted efforts by ies, which he gathered from scholarly journals. R A H

no interest at all in the struggles to assert politicians, missionaries, legal experts, and edu- He spent his summers in a series of cottages on ; A

Indigenous title to the land. cators. Smith provides detailed, deft biograph- Georgian Bay, in Ontario, next to the Wasauksing T R E

Smith’s book is about such determined ical sketches of some of these people — fifteen First Nation. Despite his amateur interests in eth- B L A

unseeing. major individuals and many minor ones. nography, Boyd avoided any meaningful contact F O ◆ John A. Macdonald is, of course, among them. with his Wasauksing neighbours, as did many S E V

AS SMITH KNOWS, NORTH AMERICAN HISTORY DOES In 1857, at the Assembly of the Canadas, he intro- cottagers. And in a judicial opinion on June 10, I H not start in 1492. But by the mid- nineteenth cen- duced the Act for the Gradual Civilization of 1885, he concluded that as “heathens and barbar- C R A

tury, when his story begins, Europeans had nat- the Indian Tribes. The legislation, which passed ians,” Indigenous peoples had no proprietary L A I

uralized their presence on the continent, while with just one dissenting vote, was part of a larger rights to their own lands — a judgment that C N selectively erasing huge swaths of the past from push to establish reserves as “training schools” helped affirm settler occupation like his. I V O the public consciousness. for adaptation to “modern conditions.” The aim A few decades later, in 1941, the McGill pro- R P

In 1845, young Sandford Fleming, the engin- was to enfranchise status Indians and grant them fessor Stephen Leacock wrote Canada: The M O eer who would one day invent standard time, full citizenship rights as private individual land- Foundations of Its Future, a popular book com- R F

described in his journal a prevailing assump- owners, ultimately ending the reserve system and missioned by the Seagram magnate Sam E T tion about Indigenous people: “They are dying the existence of “Indians” as distinct peoples. Bronfman. Leacock’s account began with “The P A D away every year and it is supposed that their “Neither Macdonald nor any other Cabinet Empty Continent,” a chapter that dismissed A

10 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA an Indigenous past: “The Indians were too few than five centuries. Before that there were more emerged. The Cree political leader, lawyer, and to count. Their use of the resources of the con- than two hundred centuries of human habita- writer “represented a whole new generation of tinent was scarcely more than that by crows tion, struggle and achievements.” This record, young Indigenous people who spoke English and wolves, their development of it nothing.” he argued, was as meaningful as anything that and/or French well, who had travelled and read (Tellingly, the Seagram representatives who came after. Ryerson would later be credited with widely, and who were prepared to speak out on reviewed an early draft objected to “swipes that producing one of the first non- Indigenous hist- issues of concern.” Leacock took at immigrants, French Canadians, ories of Canada “to reject the founding myth of Over the years, Smith observes, “the val- Roman Catholic priests, Americans, and the Cabot, Cartier, and Champlain.” ues, attitudes, and assumptions of many non- Irish” and asked him to revise those racially ◆ Indigenous Canadians towards the First Nations charged statements, which he did begrudgingly.) EVEN IF THE TYPICAL CANADIAN SAW INDIGENOUS have undergone radical and extraordinary ◆ people without seeing them as contemporaries change.” Several religious institutions, though BEFORE THE 1960S, ONLY A HANDFUL OF or equals, Smith does not consider this attitude not the Catholic Church, have offered apologies Canadians truly saw the realities and struggles a personal failing. Rather, as a good historian for their roles in the residential school system. of Indigenous peoples and understood them might be expected to do, he insists that all indi- Educational institutions, including universities, as contemporary human beings. A nineteenth- viduals, from the powerful to those largely for- have been transformed with more Indigenous century Baptist minister, Silas Rand, became gotten, must be understood within the context faculty and students (even if they are still under- close to the Mi’kmaq during his (largely of their time. In his preface, Smith recalls his represented). Scholars like Olive Dickason and failed) attempts to convert them from Roman own youthful failure to see: John Borrows have corrected old mispercep- Catholicism, for instance. In an 1854 speech, tions. Creative writers like Maria Campbell, Rand “shouted from the platform” an unusually I was born in Toronto in 1946 and Tomson Highway, and Liz Howard have entered lucid assessment of the continent- wide injustice: grew up in Oakville, located halfway the broader imagination, and, in the process, between the cities of Hamilton and have transformed popular understandings of Shame on us! We invade the territory Toronto. During my boyhood I cannot Indigenous peoples. of men made like ourselves, and fash- recall a single reference in public or high Racism and ignorance still exist, of course. ioned in the image of God . . . we treat school to the Mississauga First Nations, There are narratives left to unravel, as Gina them as though they had no rights. We Ojibwe-s peakers who call themselves, Starblanket and Dallas Hunt described in seize upon their country. We rob them “Anishinabe” (meaning in English, Storying Violence, their book from 2020. “Be of their lands. We drive them from their “human being”), or in its plural form, aware of your histories, of your stories,” they homes. We plunder them of all they hold “Anishinabeg.” I do not remember meet- urged non- Indigenous residents of Canada, “and dear and sacred; we deceive and defraud ing anyone in Oakville who self- identified then figure out what it means to take responsibil- them — we violate the most solemn treat- as “Indian.” Indigenous people did not ity for those histories, so that you might inter- ies made with them; we impoverish, enter into the conversation. First Nations rupt enduring cycles of settler colonial violence.” degrade, despise and abuse them. were not mentioned in the newspapers. To see Indigenous peoples, in other words, we must also see ourselves. With this well-w ritten, A dedicated few also pointed out the wrongs Smith’s awakening began in the 1960s, during engrossing, and often sobering book, Smith of colonial settlement and worked side by side the civil rights and decolonization movements, helps us do some of that work, with all the with Indigenous communities as they struggled when major figures such as Harold Cardinal responsibilities it implies. to maintain their cultures and relationships with their lands. In what became British Columbia, for instance, the ethnographer James Teit married a Nlaka’pamux woman, Lucy Antko, in 1892, so deepening a lifelong commitment to First Nations advocacy. In what can be read only as a compliment to Teit’s tireless efforts “as a translator, secretary, and lobbyist,” Smith notes that by 1913, “the Department of Indian Affairs had gathered a thick dossier on James Teit’s activities on behalf of Indigenous rights.” In the 1930s and 1940s, the Coleridge scholar Kathleen Coburn drew on long-s tanding friend ships with a Mohawk writer, Ethel Brant Monture, and the Tabobandungs, an Anishinaabe family who lived close to her Georgian Bay cottage, to learn about and later champion Indigenous voices and causes. Particularly with her reviews in The Canadian Forum, Coburn critiqued unfounded prejudices that were far too common. Around that same time, in 1944, Maisie Hurley, born in Wales, became the first woman admitted to the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia, as a lifetime associate. Two years later, she established the Native Voice, an advocacy newspaper with an otherwise all- Indigenous staff, including the editors Jack Benyon, a veteran of the First World War, and Ruth Smith, who graduated from the Coqualeetza Residential School. By the end of the decade, the paper had 3,000 subscribers. The Marxist scholar Stanley Ryerson was another outlier. He adamantly refused to contribute to the erasure of Indigenous annals. In The Founding of Canada: Beginnings to 1815, which went through four editions in the 1960s and sold 12,000 copies, Ryerson observed, “The written record of our country’s history covers less

JUNE 2021 11 THE PUBLIC SQUARE

Alive and Kicking Le Chef continues to make an impression Graham Fraser

Duplessis est encore en vie Pierre B. Berthelot Les éditions du Septentrion 408 pages, softcover and ebook

HROUGHOUT FEBRUARY 1978, MANY Quebeckers changed their plans for Wednesday nights. Strikers at the newspaper Montréal-M atin moved a union meeting. A university hist- Tory class persuaded its professor to reschedule a lecture. They all wanted to watch a seven-p art television mini-s eries. Even the premier’s office organized a special screening of the second episode for reporters who had been obliged to cover a first ministers’ conference. The show that so transfixed the province that month was Duplessis, a dramatization of the career of Maurice Duplessis. Directed by Mark Blandford and written by Denys Arcand, it was broadcast almost twenty years after the premier died in office, at the age of sixty- nine. Arcand wrote, and the actor Jean Lapointe personified, a detailed portrait of a highly complex figure: Once again giving a former premier the royal treatment. a politician who revealed corruption and then profited from it, who was kind and brutal, loyal vengeful, hypocritical, vulgar, ignorant and by the Société des Amis de Maurice L. Duplessis, and unscrupulous, sentimental and ruthless, proud of being so.” And he proceeds to show at the Séminaire Saint-Joseph de Trois-Rivières. and always cunning, earthy, and funny. (Arcand how that view is incomplete. The nationalist historian Robert Rumilly was had previously written and directed the 1972 ◆ one of the few to gain access to those papers. documentary Québec: Duplessis et après . . . .) The CHANGES OVER TIME IN THE PERCEPTIONS OF AN Born in Martinique, Rumilly was an admirer result was a much more nuanced picture than individual or a phenomenon have made for an of Marshal Pétain in the years after the Great the usual caricature of a malevolent dictator who interesting current in the writing of history. In War and a member of the reactionary, ultra- single- handedly prevented Quebec from join- 1979, for example, Frances FitzGerald looked at conservative Action française. After the organ- ing the progress of the postwar Western world, how twentieth- century textbooks had evolved ization was condemned by Pope Pius XI, in late keeping it locked in an almost medieval stability. (and often served as propaganda) with her book 1926, and its members threatened with excom- At intervals, Quebec rediscovers Maurice America Revised. Merrill D. Peterson did some- munication, Rumilly immigrated to a Quebec Duplessis, who led the province from 1936 thing similar in 1994, with Lincoln in American that he imagined was “a France before the until his death in 1959, with a four-year exile in Memory, where he examined the image of the Revolution,” meaning traditional and Catholic, opposition from 1939 to 1944. And as historians sixteenth president, from his assassination in but with an American dynamism. once again revisit the near- mythic figure, they 1865 through to the civil rights era a century Not long after he arrived in Canada, Rumilly are drawing some interesting comparisons to later. Closer to home, the historian Jonathan F. became involved with conservative intellectuals contemporary politics: like François Legault, Vance showed how views of the First World War who were admirers of French reactionaries like Duplessis created his own party; like Legault, became the basis of myth with his 1999 book, Charles Maurras, a key organizer of Action he was a conservative nationalist populist; like Death So Noble. And with Unbuttoned, from 2017, française, and right-wing leaders like Franco, Legault, his base was rural and small-town, off Christopher Dummitt presented a dramatic Mussolini, and Salazar. He joined McGill as a the island of Montreal. picture of how public opinion of William Lyon literature professor, in the 1930s, began publish- E

With Duplessis est encore en vie (Duplessis Mackenzie King had shifted over the decades. ing a series of biographies of French Canadian É T L

is still alive), the historian Pierre B. Berthelot Once considered a shrewdly procrastinating and politicians, including Wilfrid Laurier, Henri S I looks at the different ways the former premier compromising politician, King came to be seen Bourassa, and Camillien Houde. Rumilly then O N R has been treated in the past, primarily by focus- as a strange spiritualist who just happened to be became infatuated with Duplessis, writing E V I L ing on biographies by Robert Rumilly, in 1973, our longest- serving prime minister. propaganda on the premier’s behalf and a fawn- . E

and Conrad Black, in 1977, as well as Arcand’s These and other historians have enjoyed the ing hagiography, Maurice Duplessis et son temps, . J work. (Berthelot actually borrows his title from benefit of new information becoming available, after his death. S D N

Arcand, who wanted to use it for the 1978 mini- which has led to new interpretations. King’s fas- Rumilly worked on his biography at the same O F series.) Berthelot begins his book by laying out cination with spiritualism became known only time as Conrad Black, who also had access to ; C E the one-d imensional view that often persists: after his death, for example, when his papers the Duplessis papers (he microfilmed a por- B É that of an authoritarian who appeared to be became accessible. So in that sense, Berthelot is tion of them, which he gave to the libraries at U Q

the incarnation “of all of the worst traits of at a disadvantage, because Duplessis’s papers are McGill and York Universities). The two travelled Q N A the Québécois: a man who was cruel, nasty, still largely inaccessible — and fiercely guarded to interview aging sources together, with Black B

12 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA chauffeuring the older man. But Black parted RUMINATIONS company with the partisan admirer by including darker elements in his character sketch of Duplessis, describing him as “a paradoxical figure — gregarious and aloof, generous and cruel, all-f orgiving and vindictive, a fanatical The Breakdown upholder of Parliament and the courts and the rule of law who did not hesitate to bend them to his own purposes.” Tales of corrugated fibreboard “According to Rumilly, the defeat of Duplessis”— in 1939 —”was the result of a trap Marlo Alexandra Burks laid by Ottawa, underlining the fear, blackmail and the immensity of the forces that Duplessis faced,” writes Berthelot. “For Black, Duplessis’s defeat was due instead to his own incompe- tence as well as his consumption of alcohol.” OOD HAS ALWAYS BEEN A ears, apparently quite freshly severed.” (To serve A fundamental difference distinguished the two plastic substance, whether various purposes, indeed.) biographies: Black was prepared to deal with carved, pressed, or shred- There have been a few further modifications the darker shadows of his subject’s character, ded and mixed with water since Jones’s invention and Doyle’s story, but by while Rumilly was not willing to acknowledge and chemicals to form and large we produce the same kind of vessel they existed. Wpulp. The magazines and books we hold in our today. Never one to let any personal reference go hands attest to that transformation, but we don’t In Canada, cardboard boxes tend to be made without response, Black shot back at Berthelot in often think about their materiality. We’re con- primarily from recycled fibre: the process isn’t the National Post, shortly after Duplessis est encore cerned mostly with the message, the product, or 100 percent circular, since the fibre (from old en vie was published in February: the usefulness of the thing. boxes) is mixed with wood chips and sawmill But materiality is quite often top of mind residues, including bark, wood shavings, and Berthelot falsely states that my subse- when it comes to cardboard. Maybe it’s the flut- sawdust. Nevertheless, the strands that are used quent disagreement with Rumilly arose ing, which vaguely channels the tall and slen- are strong enough to be recycled up to nine from my supposedly indiscreet treatment der pine trees it came from, or it’s the woody times, and this recycled material accounts for of Duplessis on physical matters that were and fibrous smell. Over thirty-fi ve odour-a ctive about 90 percent of a cube’s matter (the rest revealed by the doctor who attended to compounds — including vanillin (imparted by comes from newly cut trees). The vast major- him when he died in northern Quebec, whisky barrels), dodecalactone (with its notes ity of timber in Canada is harvested on Crown and in references to his alcoholism prior of peach), and para-c resol (which recalls a lands, and in accordance with forest laws (some to becoming a teetotaller in 1943. In fact, stable) — can stimulate the imagination and of the strictest in the world), those stands must Rumilly was aggrieved because I had to awaken unexpected emotions. It’s elemental and be regenerated. This is the good news. quote a few cases where he was referred to chemical and a bit magical. Empty, a cardboard The trees are one part. The pulp and paper as a Duplessist propagandist, and unlike box gives both space and structure to a wander- mills are another. Federal and provincial laws his whitewash of the subject, I pointed ing mind. Toddlers often have more fun with the have been put in place to minimize harm to the out all of Duplessis’ less attractive aspects. packaging than with the toy it once concealed. environment, but they do not always guarantee And we’ve all seen the cat’s curiosity piqued safe processing. In 2014, to cite but one example, In the same newspaper column, Black reiter- when confronted with a mysterious c offer 47 million litres of wastewater spilled from the ated one of his major arguments from his mas- (is it the smell?). The contents can be wholly Boat Harbour Effluent Treatment Facility, in sive Duplessis biography: that intellectuals like irrelevant: the chest is the real treasure. Pictou County, Nova Scotia, and flowed into Berthelot refuse to admit that French Canadians Corrugated fibreboard — the stuff of card- Mi’kmaw burial grounds. The following year, the owe their cultural survival to the Roman Catholic board boxes — was first processed about 150 journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Church and that their achievement of approxi- years ago. On November 1, 1871, one Albert Jones took up the increasing deleterious effects on mate economic equality with English Canadians of New York City submitted paperwork to the health and ecology that had been linked to the is due to Duplessis’s use of the church’s under- United States Patent Office, outlining the utility local mill. The upshot: “After decades of local paid teachers and nurses to reduce personnel and “various purposes” of his invention: “to pro- pollution impacts and lack of environmental costs and modernize the province. vide means for securely packing vials and bottles compliance, corporate social responsibility Berthelot’s book, however, is part of a much with a single thickness of the packing material initiatives need implementing for the mill wider re- evaluation of twentieth- century Quebec between the surface of the article packed.” to maintain its social licence to operate.” (In history. This assessment challenges the idea that Jones’s application was successful, and within January 2020, the mill was shut down.) the Duplessis era was one of unrelieved dark- three years, Oliver Long was tweaking the design Of course, rarely is the box maker’s social ness — the grande noirceur — and that the elec- by gluing liner sheets to either side of the fluted licence top of mind when we order some- tion of the Liberals in 1960 was a unique and medium. This development happened to thing — groceries, books, kitty litter — to be transformative event. Marxist historians, for coincide with the arrival of mass production. delivered to our homes. All that seems very instance, have argued that Duplessis was a rep- In 1884, Carl Ferdinand Dahl was awarded a remote and unsubstantial. There’s a subtle irony resentative of the political aristocracy and acted patent for kraft paper (kraft means “strong” in here: Some seventeen years before Doyle pub- on behalf of North American capitalism. Others German), which came to be used to line those lished “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” have maintained that he laid the groundwork for corrugated boards. Eventually, the cardboard the word “cardboard” had already assumed a the Quiet Revolution. box became vital for shipping delicate items, metaphorical sense. “Ottawa is not a cardboard Politicians as various as Pierre Trudeau, like medical supplies. The humble but soon to city,” John J. Rowan wrote of the new capital Robert Bourassa, and René Lévesque were, at one be ubiquitous container even found its way into in 1876. “There are no shanties, no shoddy. point or another, painted with what Berthelot an Arthur Conan Doyle story, “The Adventure Everything is solid, substantial, and handsome.” describes as “the supreme insult”— being com- of the Cardboard Box,” published in The Strand Cardboard, with all of its conspicuous ver- pared to Duplessis. But, as Black has pointed Magazine in 1893. Though the titular package satility, is entangled in our very imagination. out and as experienced politicians in Quebec itself occupied little real estate in the narrative, When our small children or our cats play with know, Duplessis succeeded in creating a move- especially compared with the acuity of Sherlock a box, whatever its size, their forts and dens ment that united all those who opposed the Holmes, it was the herald of mystery: “At two become the unassailable redoubts of fancy. party with the deepest roots in the province, o’clock yesterday afternoon a small packet, But material conditions can’t be ignored, and a the Quebec Liberals. So did René Lévesque. wrapped in brown paper, was handed in by the wish-f ulfillment dream can easily mutate into And now François Legault has done the same postman. A cardboard box was inside, which one of anxiety. In our modern accumulation thing. In that sense, as Berthelot’s title suggests, was filled with coarse salt. On emptying this, of boxes, are we not creating a darker kind of Duplessis is still very much alive. Miss Cushing was horrified to find two human cardboard city?

JUNE 2021 13 COMPELLING PEOPLE

Copy Cats A little from column A, a little from column B J. D. M. Stewart

Newspapering: 50 Years of Reporting from Canada and around the World Norman Webster Barlow Books 392 pages, hardcover

A Life in Paragraphs: Essays Robert Fulford Optimum Publishing 256 pages, softcover

N THE COVER OF NORMAN Webster’s Newspapering is a red Parker Jotter, the vintage pen with the famous clicker on top. On the front of Robert OFulford’s A Life in Paragraphs is an illustration, by Seth, of a pipe-s moking man who is bang- ing away with two fingers on what looks like an Olympia typewriter. Both covers are evocative of something old school and iconic, and for good reason. These are books by elder statesmen of journalism — two masters of their craft. Both know how to tell a good story through observa- The many column inches between them. tion, anecdote, intelligence, and humour. From Fulford’s exploration of the “ambitious and newsroom was a pigsty. Most reporters sat at Webster witnessed a lot in a career that took spectacularly extensive sex life” of H. G. Wells desks jammed into rows, with piles of paper him from China to Queen’s Park in Toronto to Webster’s description of Pope John Paul II as teetering on every surface. It looked like a draw- during the Bill Davis years, and on to London a mix of Churchill, Kennedy, and Muhammad ing by Dr. Seuss. The air was blue with smoke, during the early days of the Thatcher reign. From Ali, these books are lively and informative, with of course, and the noise of typewriters, Teletype 1983 to 1989, he served as the Globe and Mail ’s much between the covers. machines, jangling telephones and shouting editor- in-chief, a position he also held with the Newspapering is not a memoir but a collec- deskmen often moved the scene from Seuss Gazette from 1989 to 1993. Like any great reporter, tion of Webster’s most interesting and import- to Dante.” Webster has keen powers of observation, and ant pieces — an assortment that spans fifty-p lus For two years, beginning in 1969, Webster his pithy descriptions of well-known figures years. Although a number of the selections cast served as the Globe’s first correspondent in from the past half century pop from the page. a retrospective eye on Canada and various global Beijing. These were the days of a Communist Adrienne Clarkson, for example, is described events, this is more a combination of life-in- nation closed to the West, and Webster, in the as “feisty, flinty, glamorous, brainy, ravenously print reminiscences and moment-i n-time obser- early going, chafed at the restrictions on foreign ambitious, and ferociously energetic. . . . The vations, from when Webster was capturing “the journalists. “Were our readers going to criticize drive, the hunger for recognition, were palp- first rough draft of history,” as the Washington us for not reporting more of the ruthless realities able.” When Brian Mulroney “was in full, unbut- Post’s Philip L. Graham used to say. of Red China?” he recalls wondering at the time. toned flow, there was no stopping him. You Through this expansive compilation, Webster “Ah, my friend,” responded a colleague from an said ‘Hello,’ and your part of the conversation gives the reader a look at a great swath of Eastern bloc nation, “it is better to be criticized was over.” In the early days, the former Ontario Canadian and international politics as well as a than never to see the sun.” NDP leader Stephen Lewis “had all the charm of bygone era in print journalism. In one column, Webster won a National Newspaper Award for a barracuda.” Webster had him pegged as early from the Montreal Gazette in 2009, he looks back his reporting on what was known as “Ping-Pong as 1976, writing in the Globe, “Stephen Lewis is on his decades of reporting and recalls his early diplomacy,” the effort to soften the ground not like you and me. He has never said ‘Uhh’ days as an intern at that “classy outfit” the Globe before Richard Nixon’s eventual visit to the in his life.” and Mail : “Its elevator operators wore uniforms country in 1972. “It started, in public at least, Such amusing and insightful anecdotes make and gloves. The top floor had a squash court with a Chinese invitation to the U.S. table tennis Newspapering a delightful read. Webster’s pas- installed by a previous publisher. Employees team in April 1971. And so I found myself that sions for history, people, and politics — both were paid in cash, their weekly wages counted spring travelling in the team bus around Beijing international and domestic — are infused into out in bills and change and handed over at a with a bunch of slightly goofy Americans,” he each piece. As is fitting for a writer from his era wicket by the company accountant. The paper writes in a 2006 Gazette column. Webster returns (he turned eighty this year), Webster is never itself cost a dime, recently raised from a nickel, often to the topic of China, weighing in on at the centre of things. He stays in the back- S N I and fresh papers were rushed to Maple Leaf everything from Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and ground and lets the story reveal itself. “Show, K R A

Gardens for sale between periods.” He continues the drabness he first encountered there to the don’t tell,” which remains one of the golden P

D with this gem, which captures what for many is explosive expansion of the country’s economy rules of journalistic excellence, radiates from I V A

the romantic image of journalism’s den: “The and its continuing political controversies. each paragraph. D

14 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA ROBERT FULFORD IS A VERY DIFFERENT SORT of journalist than Norman Webster, but like from The Dyzgraphxst Newspapering, Fulford’s A Life in Paragraphs gives the reader a comforting dose of nostalgia. Essays emerging with their late-summer / songs in early June,word on Charles Dickens, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Anton Chekhov, and many others all feature his thoughtful insight and powerful intellect. The one about Davies, in particular, provides a felicitous juxtaposition to Webster’s book, since it focuses on the author of Fifth Business — a reluctant journalist. Davies had “no desire, so far as we know, to enter daily journalism and what E. M. Forster called ‘the world of telegrams and anger.’ ” But he would go on to be a newspaperman in Peterborough, Ontario: “When he was editor and then publisher, from the early 1940s to the early 1960s, the Examiner ’s editorials were quoted more often than those of any other paper in the country.” Born in 1932 into a journalism family, Fulford emerged in 1958 as a prominent writer on the arts with the Toronto Star. From 1968 to 1987, he served as the editor of Saturday Night, before it was acquired by Conrad Black. Though Fulford has had an impressive career and despite this collection’s title, A Life in Paragraphs is drawn almost exclusively from his more recent writings for Queen’s Quarterly. Readers expecting a grand sweep of his opus will be disappointed; however, they will be more than satisfied with his trade- mark intellectual food for thought. word as you, too, sing These selections are as eclectic as they are the woods, pull out their hair / as though they, too, are aware, interesting, ranging in topic from Sigmund Freud and tango to the old Partisan Review and and lust-sharp for life, as though demanding I into the gaze of another / the history of television. Each essay is filled with so many ideas and things to contemplate passerby adrift in their love-drunk uncertain self / before that it’s best to read them one at a time — two at most — and to reflect for a moment after- one new woman who smells like she’s ghazal’d a hasty lunch wards. As Michael Enright says in a cover blurb, greets the one who must name her arrival, trip-first; she hands a Fulford essay is “like a crisp dry martini.” One should savour and not overindulge. To read a Fulford essay is to be exposed to a to the bewildered crowd, I: a quick slash on the tongue, nothingmore / writer who is infinitely erudite and curious, as and all of this I make from a glimpse of my mother in the mirror, well as to delight in learning. It is like a mas- seeing because it was necessary to see, / everything orphaned ter class in cultural studies, presented in the literary form of a matryoshka doll. Take his Canisia Lubrin exquisite piece about memory, which begins gently enough by referring to the diaries of Canisia Lubrin is a writer, editor, and teacher and was the 2019 writer-in-residence at Queen’s University. This selection comes from The Dyzgraphxst, a Grifﬁn Prize Charles Ritchie, the diplomat: “He kept a jour- ﬁnalist published by McClelland & Stewart. nal, Charles Ritchie said, because he didn’t want life to slip away from him like sand slipping through his fingers.” A number of paragraphs later, we are back hundreds of years, in the medi- Bloom feared the humanities were losing their it could do to us. And his readers were at least eval and Renaissance periods: “Scholars would importance to “the sciences, the professions, prepared to understand it when it arrived and give public displays of their learning, some of the social sciences, and the business schools,” poisoned the air of freedom.” them boasting of their ability to quote in Latin Fulford writes, “all of them steadily increas- ◆ or Greek all of the important classical authors. ing in power and prestige.” And what of the NOT SURPRISINGLY, COMING FROM TWO WRITERS Debaters thought nothing of spontaneously great works of literature and lessons contained in their twilight years, Newspapering and A Life inserting into their arguments direct quotations within them? Fulford is clearly in Bloom’s in Paragraphs both reflect the notion that know- running thousands of words long.” camp, as he echoes his defence of the Western ledge, curiosity, writing, contemplation, and an The essays in this collection are timeless — as canon against those who would rather eschew attempt to understand the human condition the best essays always are — but one of them it: “Humanists, rather than learning from old are valuable components of a full life. All of truly resonates today. In 2012, Fulford wrote books, would dedicate themselves to battling these lead to a sense of who we are, underscored on the twenty-fi fth anniversary of The Closing against Eurocentrism. Students would be taught by a sense of the past. “History thickens daily of the American Mind, Allan Bloom’s “ambi- to unlearn the value of these books before they existence and gives life meaning by linking us tious and audacious book.” It had made a big learned what the books could teach.” with chains of ancestors,” Fulford writes, in an splash on university campuses across North Nine years after the original publication essay that begins with a riff on a Buddy Rich America (I remember the conversations it insti- of this piece, the reflexive dismissal of any- drum solo. “History, if understood even a little, gated when I was a student at McGill, in the thing that comes from a traditional or classical becomes the background against which we enact late 1980s and early 1990s) and ended up selling tradition would surely irk Fulford even more. our lives. Without some personal sense of hist- over a million copies. Why? “Partly by accident, “Perhaps that’s what seems most important ory, we work on an empty stage.” Bloom had hit on a subject many Americans, to me about Bloom’s book today,” he writes. Robert Fulford and Norman Webster, who and educated people elsewhere, were worrying “He didn’t live to see the unfolding of the full have given much to this country through their about: the purpose, or lack of it, in university craziness of political correctness, but he saw it words, had a crowded stage, and their books education.” coming and understood its causes and the harm deserve a wide audience.

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You Talkin’ to Me? Beneath the dome lights David Macfarlane

Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers Marcello Di Cintio Biblioasis 288 pages, softcover and ebook

NE REASON TO PURCHASE AND read Marcello Di Cintio’s Driven is to show support for a beleaguered sector of the non-fi ction world: the pitch- Oless, outline-f ree book. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea whether a pitch or outline was involved in the creation of Driven. It just doesn’t feel that way. I can’t imagine how an outline of the book could have been any more detailed than this: Empathetic, keen- eyed writer encounters everyday subject. Reader watches what develops. Here, I have come to realize, is my favourite kind of non- fiction. It is not, alas, the publishing world’s favourite. You may be unaware of the tyranny of pitches and the oppression of outlines. You may be unaware of their triumphant rise in magazine and book publishing. So let me put it this way: A subject as complex as our present. There are now courses on how to write pitches. There are writers who specialize in them. known tropes of cab driving: the demimonde of Driven is like fourteen cab rides with drivers Doubtless there are reasons for this develop- sex and drugs through which night drivers navi- telling you their life stories, except that Di Cintio ment. Possibly some of them are good. Personally, gate, and the brain surgeon from Beirut who is doesn’t do his interviews in cars. A lot of them I hate the damn things. But that’s my prob- now behind the wheel in Toronto or Montreal. happen in Tim Hortons, in a cross-c ountry lem. If you are a conscientious objector to Instead, he sticks to wanting to know about cab checkup of crullers and double- doubles. What pitches, you’re probably retired or not very busy. drivers, and this impulse — plain, old- fashioned unfolds, in an unpredictable, strangely under- The pitch has become an expected step in the inquisitiveness — is a journalistic force not to be stated, outline-r esistant way, is not quite the hist- dance — which, in itself, makes it clear who’s underestimated. ory of the modern world but a good chunk of it: leading. Managers like outlines because outlines Included in any credible anthology of great are like what managers do. The fact that they are magazine articles is one that John McPhee wrote Some drivers had fled or fought wars the opposite of what writers do is unfortunate, for The New Yorker in 1966. It’s a story that has I knew little about. Many suffered hor- but there you go. influenced generations of non- fiction writers, rific violence. Some perpetrated it. They Good non- fiction writers are writers who are and it’s worth pointing out that the story’s weren’t all heroes. I met bullies and blow- curious. Good non-fi ction writers are alive to raison d’être is McPhee’s curiosity. There is no hards. Pranksters, weirdos, and misan- what they are seeing and learning, which makes other engine. Driven has the same under- the- thropes. My drivers weren’t all family men, the story they are formulating a constantly radar appeal. It takes up a subject so ordinary and they weren’t all men. Perhaps the only shifting target. Good writers often don’t know that you hardly notice it, but it becomes more thing they shared was that their cramped what they are going to write until they write it. interesting the closer you look. In fact, the closer driver’s seats couldn’t contain their life Discovering what to write is what good writing you look, the more your view is not of a single stories. Each had crossed many borders, is. (That’s not something outline specialists like subject at all but of an entire world. The world both real and metaphorical, before the to broadcast.) of oranges in John McPhee’s case; that of taxi first day they switched on their roof light. One reason that good non- fiction can be so drivers in Marcello Di Cintio’s. compelling is that we, the readers, sense the “I’d spent years crossing borders around the The result is a two-s troke engine of non- risk the writer is taking. We are witnessing the world to document suffering and injustice. fiction: Di Cintio asks his subjects questions act of searching — first for the story and then Resilience and love,” Di Cintio writes in his about their job, and his subjects answer. At one for the best way to tell it. Where is Joan Didion introduction. “Yet I hardly needed to leave level it could hardly be simpler: cab drivers going with this, we wonder. Or Susan Orlean. Or Canada for these stories. I could’ve found almost talking about cab driving. But what they end David Foster Wallace. Well, they were wonder- as many on my cab rides to and from the air- up talking about is a subject as complex as our ing, too, for a while. Not knowing is the begin- port, because the taxi itself is a border. Beneath present. They describe our time. Revolutions,

T ning of the adventure. the roof light of every cab, a map of frontiers famines, escapes, journeys, adventures, traged- T E

N No big event kicks Driven into gear. Nobody and dividing lines unfolds. The taxi occupies ies, social calamity, political chaos, economic N E

B is a celebrity. There is no specific wrong to be the margin between public and private space: disaster — all these are in the backgrounds of

E I righted, no particular injustice to be exposed. accessible to all but simultaneously personal the drivers we wonder about as they transport M A

J Indeed, Di Cintio consciously abjures the best- and intimate.” us from point A to point B.

JUNE 2021 17 THE ARTS

The Art of War In the trenches with Mary Riter Hamilton Anna Porter

I Can Only Paint: The Story of Battleﬁeld Artist Mary Riter Hamilton Irene Gammel McGill-Queen’s University Press 400 pages, hardcover

HE CANADIAN WAR MUSEUM’S CANVAS of War, which toured the country throughout 2000–01, was the largest exhibition of Canadian war art ever organized. It featured the work Tof some of our best artists, including members of the celebrated Group of Seven, who had witnessed the slaughter of the thousands of young men who had fought in two world wars. The painter Frederick Varley, for example, had seen the undeterred heroism, immense sacrifice, and unimaginable losses of the “war to end all wars” at first hand. “We are forever tainted with its abortiveness and its cruel drama,” he said of the front, “and for the life of me I don’t know how that can help progression. It is foul and smelly — and heartbreaking.” An important book accompanied Canvas of She captured the spirit of resilience. War. While it featured only a small portion of the 13,000 paintings, drawings, and sculptures do the portraits of fifteen lieutenant- governors, Hamilton sold several paintings and left held in the museum’s vaults, it was nevertheless and although she had exhibited her paintings instructions with Hart to sell whatever art, jewel- a very fine collection of desperately sad art, as abroad, the granting agencies of the day were lery, and property she had left, then got ready well as formal portraits of some pugnacious- not interested. to leave — travelling from Victoria to Vancouver looking military leaders. Perhaps the reason was Hamilton’s forthright and onward to New York via Winnipeg, Toronto, A

Neither the exhibition nor the book included manner in personally approaching members of Ottawa, and Montreal. Contrary to the claims D A N

the battlefield paintings of Mary Riter Hamilton. the Advisory Arts Council. Perhaps it was her she made in her travel documents, she was not A C

Yet she was there, shortly after the First World being a westerner or being too aggressive for a thirty- five but fifty- one. Had she revealed the S E V

War ended, and, unlike most of her contem- lady or her “defiance of institutional power,” truth, she worried, she might not have been able I H poraries, she painted the sites where bodies and when she insisted that the West should be repre- to board the SS La Touraine, bound for Europe. C R A body parts were still being dug out of the mud. sented in the National Gallery. Regardless, the Upon her arrival in France, she witnessed D N

She was at the ruins of Ypres, in West Flanders, Ottawa establishment did not bend. It viewed the destroyed city of Arras and the remnants A

Y and at Vimy Ridge, in northern France, where her as “a troublesome woman, no matter how of Vimy, littered with spent shells, shrapnel, R A R

3,598 Canadians had lost their lives and more good her art.” wrecked tanks, unexploded ordnance, muddy B I L

than 7,000 were wounded. (In total, the war During the war, Canada commissioned no trenches, and shreds of clothing. Her paint- ;

2 claimed 61,000 Canadian lives and wounded women artists to travel overseas, but Gammel’s ings — of Arras, of Villers-au-Bois, of soldiers 9

, another 172,000.) I Can Only Paint makes it clear that even if searching for bodies, of Vimy Ridge in its deso- Y

D Many of the artists sent to Europe to com- women had been sent, Hamilton would not late landscape — are stark, melancholy, bereft.

T memorate Canada’s role in the Great War have been among them. It was a question not of Hamilton captured the aftermath of a battle E K

R were backed by the newspaper magnate Lord talent but of “temperament.” She was a painter where young men — some of them barely six- A

Beaverbrook, through his Canadian War who showed too little humility. teen years old — had clambered up sodden —

S Memorials Fund. Established in 1916, it was ◆ slopes, and you can feel her own sense of loss E R

Y responsible for more than 900 works. But it IT WAS NOT UNTIL 1919 THAT MARY RITER as you study the art. The colour reproductions ,

L did not fund Mary Riter Hamilton as she toiled Hamilton, a widow, finally made it overseas of Isolated Grave and Camouﬂage, Vimy Ridge and L A

H to capture hundreds of scenes. Nor did the with the support of those she wanted to hon- of her Mont-Saint-Éloi paintings are among H Advisory Arts Council for the National Gallery. our, through the Amputation Club of British the finest in the book. Other works are sunny T O

It is clear from Irene Gammel’s meticulous Columbia and The Gold Stripe, a magazine for in a way that Hamilton’s lonely, isolated time , research that Hamilton’s exclusion was not for wounded veterans. She would send paintings to in Europe was not. The weather was cold and N O T L

lack of effort on her part. It is almost painful her editor, and all profits from their sale would wet, her small hut was leaky, and she was always I M to read her tireless pleadings and the dismis- go to the soldiers. The University Women’s Club running out of food and money to replenish A H

sive responses. Although Robert Borden had in Victoria also offered a little funding, as did her supplies. R E T purchased some of her pieces shortly after he Margaret Janet Hart, who, though not personally The extraordinary Tragedy of War in Dear I R

became prime minister, although Government wealthy, managed to send some money when Old Battered France depicts the remnants of R A

House in Victoria had commissioned her to Hamilton needed it the most. a tall wooden cross and parts of its sculpted M

18 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA Christ figure, in the Sainte- Catherine graveyard THIS AND THAT where thirty- one Canadians had been buried. Hamilton’s title speaks of her strong feelings for France, where she had studied before the war. Her devastating paintings of Flanders destroyed, of a Canadian monument at Passchendaele, of a Curious George dugout along the Somme, and of the cemeteries and burnt-out landscapes — they all depict her horror at what the soldiers must have suffered. About the simple things Her sympathy for the men who had endured the war extended to the prisoners who con- Rose Hendrie tinued to languish in makeshift camps. With disease rampant and facilities scarce, the young German boys who appear in some of Hamilton’s paintings seem as lost and broken as many of the damaged Canadians who had recently Soft Zipper: Objects, Food, Rooms cajoling, self- ironical” tone. It was in his class- returned home. George Bowering room, as a rapt undergraduate straining to see Because she was there after Armistice Day, New Star Books which texts were pinned under the professor’s Hamilton was able to show how life began to 160 pages, softcover and ebook arm, that she first encountered Gertrude Stein, return in France. The First Pilgrimage to Notre whose 1914 collection, Tender Buttons, informs so Dame de Lorette after the War of 1914–1918, one much of the present book. Like Stein, Bowering of the larger reproductions in the book, shows a OME HAVE CALLED GEORGE BOWERING delivers his findings in a kind of “continuous throng of women and children marching to the a “rear-view mirror guy,” but he’s no present,” with moments moving freely through remains of a church in Ablain-Saint-Nazaire. The such thing. He is looking everywhere, him, as he struggles with the remote control or sky is heavy, the scene dark with small patches at the world and his pieces of it, with looks to an old camera from his RCAF days, his of sunlight on the ruined towers and on the his head slanted and the corners of collection of frog figurines, or the bashed tuba new sprouting grass. Many in the painting hold Shis mouth raised. Bowering is the grinning boy with a sound more interesting for its wounds. To umbrellas to protect themselves from a down- who turns life over and takes it apart to see if the the past he goes, and back again. Now on to the pour that threatens to drench the procession. centre is cork, like a baseball. He’s the guy who next: his favourite cane. Some of Hamilton’s most arresting work treasures the earth — the largest object he’s ever Bowering understands that some stories are springs from her observations of life returning touched — with all the cities and coasts and the so small and precious that they must be cupped even to the front lines. Trenches on the Somme is room in Rome where Keats died. He’s the man carefully in the hands. (Not like the cane, whose filled with startlingly red poppies against a grim who places memories of his beloved ballpark on handle has broken off a few too many times.) purple sky, for instance. Two older men in white a shelf alongside the complete poems of Samuel With the bard’s sensorium, he defers to touch, put their shovels to work in Filling the Shell Holes Beckett. And the one whose “crooked fingers” which is not a sentimental act but one filled in No Man’s Land, with a few charred trees in the stroke his father’s dusty felt skullcap. He’s the with wonder and unknowing — he has no idea, background. poet who breaks down in tears at the haunting for instance, why the words he used to habitu- In May 1920, Hamilton arrived in Ypres, which beauty of Donatello’s Penitent Magdalene (and ally doodle were “yes” and “chicken.” In an she found largely destroyed, its cathedral just doesn’t dare try to describe it). He’s the husband interview, the writer Judith Fitzgerald once a few columns and Gothic arches, its famous whose wife, Jean, makes sure he doesn’t exist on asked him what makes a poet a poet. Bowering Cloth Hall roofless and full of debris. Yet the a diet of meat loaf alone, and the father who answered with a list of nine qualities, the first main square was coming alive with a flag- waving draws faces on bananas. He’s the writer — past, of which was “insatiable curiosity about the celebration, and busy stalls offered colourful present, and ceaselessly forward — who for facts.” And of course facts must be poked and clothes. The Market among the Ruins of Ypres cap- eighty-fi ve years has relished the startling and prodded, and occasionally played with. Just tures the spirit of a resilient city that had seen wonderful jumble we call existence. George ask Willy, his buddy and faithful second, who much of the war’s action. One of Hamilton’s Bowering picks up the objects of his life and boasted, “I guarantee to eat any sandwich you paintings of it was exhibited at the Salon in releases them in a shower of shapes and colours, make.” Bowering whipped up sardines and Paris in 1922. just like the buttons his grandmother kept in a Scotch mints. ◆ big glass bowl. Other men of words join these perambula- AFTER SIX YEARS OF DOCUMENTING THE END Soft Zipper is not Bowering’s first memoir but tions: the likes of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles result of war, Mary Riter Hamilton managed to rather his sixth, possibly his seventh (out of over Olson, Roland Barthes, George Oppen, Warren scrape together enough money to return home. a hundred books). But don’t call him prolific, Tallman — whose stained mahogany table now She left Europe “a wounded war worker but also at least not to his face. “All my life I have disap- serves as Bowering’s desk. They gaze down an unsung hero who now needed help herself,” proved of myself for being so idle, for fiddling from pictures in his study, provide epigraphs, Gammel writes. With her collection completed, around when I could be writing,” he laments or offer general bolstering, quite literally in Hamilton hoped that the National Gallery on his website. But a writer’s life is what he has Tallman’s case. These “big writer figures,” a term would see its value and purchase it. But the made, and along the way he’s gained honours Bowering would never use for himself, guide museum declined in April 1926, on the grounds and awards, his figurative pockets stuffed with him in pursuit of sentences that are “clear but that her paintings “duplicated work already in laurels. mysterious at the same time.” On occasion, the Beaverbrook Collection of War Art.” Bowering is a collector of objects, people, Bowering’s syntax dances into abstraction and Although a number of Canadian artists had spaces, and the deceptive significance of everyday meta- textualism —“if this writing is a memoir tackled similar subjects in Europe, Hamilton’s accessories — like the comb in his actual pocket. rather than a fiction”— as if to give his sandwich approach was entirely different. As a small, Soft Zipper is, as Lisa Robertson calls it in her of words a bit of extra crunch. rather perfunctory gesture, the gallery’s direc- introduction, “a fragmented anti-m emoir which Like the best memoirs, Soft Zipper offers a slice tor, Eric Brown, offered to buy three of her organizes a lifetime of vignettes and recollections of a mind. And like the best, Bowering does not oils. But Hamilton — ever the “troublesome around a resolutely objective, rather than sub- fall under the spell of his own mythology. He is woman”— rejected the offer and accepted, jective point of view.” Readers will not learn how an object among many, each one doing “their instead, one from the Public Archives of Canada it felt for young George to write his first poem own doings,” as Olson would have wanted. to house all 227 works. at his mother’s kitchen table, but we do know Sly and playful, forever on the lookout for the Irene Gammel, a professor of literature and that he once ate eleven roast potatoes (the best beauty of a line, the groaning delight of a pun, visual culture at Ryerson University, has auth- kind) on a visit back to Oliver, British Columbia. or the wisdom of sentences that remain as fresh ored numerous books, including Looking for And isn’t that little glimpse into his life, and his today as they were sixty, a hundred, or hundreds Anne of Green Gables, from 2008. With I Can mother’s love, its own form of intimacy? of years ago, Bowering is present and writing. Only Paint, she has given us a revelation about a Robertson, a former student of Bowering’s, Lives are made up of words, and these are very remarkable painter. speaks fondly of his vernacular prose, its “light, good ones.

JUNE 2021 19 GADGETS AND GIZMOS

Results Driven An exercise in precision Alex Cyr

Beyond the Finish Line: Images, Evidence, and the History of the Photo-Finish Jonathan Finn McGill-Queen’s University Press 248 pages, hardcover and ebook

OT INFREQUENTLY, THE most dramatic moments of the United States Olympic Team Trials for track and field have nothing to do with gold med- Nals; rather, they are about bronze ones. A close race for first or second means little, because the top three from each event punch their tickets to the Games. A close race for third, however, will take two competitors separated by mere frac- tions of a second and divide them even further into newly minted Olympian and instantly forgotten also-ran. Even hard-core fans often forget that Carmelita Jeter won the women’s 100-metre final at the 2012 trials in Eugene, Oregon, for example. But most recall the battle for third between Allyson Felix and Jeneba Tarmoh. Both But who actually won? sprinters ran 11.07 seconds, and, despite that time being world-class, only one of them would track and the chronometer simultaneously. Finn, when deciding winners or recognizing records; head to London. Officials consulted Hayward who researches visual culture at Wilfrid Laurier they instead look no further than the hundredth Field’s state-of-the-art photo- finish system, a University, punctuates his text with photos of or thousandth. These bodies have concluded marvel of technology worth far more than most such inventions and of the armies of officials that factors beyond athletic performance, such would-be Olympians make in a year, in an required to operate some of them. as slight variations in course length, or even the attempt to resolve the literal dead heat. Even that Photo-finish advancements, Finn explains, thickness of paint on a swimming pool, can wasn’t enough. have been fuelled by a mutually beneficial account for minuscule differences. Such is the drama that propels Jonathan relationship between the commercialization And although technology has wildly sur- Finn’s Beyond the Finish Line. Despite the massive of sport and the growth of technology. Greater passed human capabilities in capturing and evolution in sports timing, there are still some stakes in competition — better athletes, bigger interpreting results, reading a photo finish or basic problems it might never solve. As read- bets, larger budgets — called for more certainty determining a false start still requires an element ers come to appreciate the many innovations about results. And more certainty compelled of judgment. That, Finn points out, remains behind a stirring photo finish, they also come athletes to continually fine-tune their bodies in dependent on human intervention. to understand technology’s ongoing limitations. order to improve, even by a millisecond. This It was this sort of intervention that lent the Finn takes us on a deeply researched journey relationship has culminated in the moderniza- 100-metre final at the 2012 trials such drama. to show how much these technologies have tion of sport — a shift from the mythical ethos When Felix and Tarmoh were caught in that changed since their introduction in the 1870s. of the ancient Greeks to the absolute, seemingly dead heat, when even the high-tech cameras Back then, as horse racing gained in popularity, objective quantifiability of science. could not clearly show who was deserving of Leland Stanford (who founded the university ◆ the bronze medal, the decision fell to Roger that bears his name) realized that photographs THE GROWING PROMINENCE OF FINISH-LINE TECH- Jennings, known as the best timer in the world could help settle bets. Later, John C. Hemment, nologies led to the rise of lucrative timing com- by some of his contemporaries. Jennings inter- O T O

a war photographer, earned praise in some panies, whose names are now closely linked to polated a finishing order and then immediately H P

quarters for his near-i nstantaneous finish-l ine sporting events: Swiss Timing, Omega, Seiko. protested his own subjective decision. In the G N adjudicating. But not everyone was convinced: Such companies, the modern- day adjudicators end, despite the joined forces of Jennings’s U T I jockeys, in particular, were skeptical of the grainy of winners and losers, are worth billions of dol- instincts and the stadium’s technology, Felix and E Z and askew snapshots. (Eventually, the crooner lars and boast computers that can record an ath- Tarmoh had to resort to a runoff (from which E H C

Bing Crosby would help normalize their use.) lete’s time to the millionth of a second. Tarmoh eventually withdrew, because she felt S T U

By the turn of the twentieth century, technolo- But should we record performances with such the situation had been handled unfairly). E D gies began to account for time, not just placing. precision? Finn points out that sport stands at Finn’s meticulous walk through time shows D E U

Key inventions, like an “eye in the sky” that was an important juncture. It’s possible that timing that, as much as the tools have developed and as S

; perched metres into the air, permitted officials technologies now offer us more information much as the relationship between humans and S N A to see the finish line from a better angle, and than we need. The international federations for timing systems has improved our interpretation V E

Gustavus T. Kirby’s “two eyes” camera allowed skiing, swimming, and track and field, for their of results, computers and automation will never R A

for more accurate results by videotaping the part, do not consider millionths of a second fully eliminate the drama of competition. M

20 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA PEDAGOGY

Queen of Queen’s The woman behind the writers J. R. McConvey

It’s always the chance word, unthinking the crowded scene he’d helped create. He meant maybe I would get in next time. So I called and gesture that unlocks the face before you. those who can survive off their fiction alone. asked for feedback. She told me that she’d look Reveals the intricate countries I shook my head. The number, he whispered, at my work again and get back to me. When she deep within the eyes. The hidden was under twenty. did, she invited me to join her class. lives, like sudden miracles, With Carolyn Smart passing on the torch That was one of the best lessons I ever got: that breathe there. in Kingston, I reached out to some of those That a writer needs to be willing to take feed- — Bronwen Wallace who have spent time with her — as students, as back and criticism. That such willingness was the protegés, as award winners — and asked them most important thing. When someone gets what T THE END OF THE CURRENT about the advice she’d given them over the years. you are trying to do and brings something to academic year, one of Canada’s Inevitably, they responded with a variation on your work — a suggestion, a question, a concern most quietly effective creative writ- the same theme. that you don’t see. ing programs is losing its heart. Carolyn Smart has run the under- Anna Maxymiw, whose debut novel, Minique, Omar El Akkad, whose second novel is What Agraduate courses at Queen’s University — coded comes out next year: Carolyn was and is still the Strange Paradise: One of the things Carolyn CWRI — since she took over from Bronwen patron saint of undergrad writers. I cringe to had us do early on in her class was spend a lot Wallace in 1989, following Wallace’s death of time responding to the writing our peers pro- from cancer at forty- four. I was Carolyn Smart’s duced. It was a way to think carefully about what student in the early 2000s, and, for a time, I it means to critique, about why a piece moves thought she had offered me terrible advice. you in a particular direction or prompts a par- As I was finishing up my English degree and ticular reaction. But, more than that, it was an thinking about my future as a writer, I asked if I education in what language can do. You’re put should pursue a master of fine arts degree. She in a position where you’re writing something advised against it. “There used to be teaching critical about another person’s work, something jobs,” she explained, “but there are no jobs any- you know came from a very vulnerable place, more.” If I couldn’t teach, the chances of making and suddenly you become intimately aware of a living off books were slim. the power of words. Years passed, and as the MFA came to loom over literary culture, I figured I’d been steered Grace O’Connell, who has published two novels wrong. The first time I met with editors at a pub- and who teaches creative writing at the University lishing house, they asked me where I’d come of Toronto: Carolyn guided each of us to develop from. I told them the subway, not understanding not just a thick skin, but a keen instinct about they wanted to know my credentials. Successful our own work. To be able to take criticism writers were supposed to have advanced degrees, and find it useful, not discouraging, but also but I hadn’t pursued one right out of school. And to hold to a core of our work and purpose, to now that I was in my twenties, already beholden know when and why if we want to stand firm to Toronto landlords, I couldn’t afford it. on something. Over time, I had some jobs that involved writ- Carolyn taught us balance and thoughtful- ing and some that didn’t. I took on debt and ness around revision, and, most importantly, built a family, working on fiction when I could. to revise, revise, revise — to carve away until we In 2019, the year I turned forty, I published my found the thing of beauty buried in our drafts. first book, a collection of short stories. At last, I And she was fun as hell while she did it all. thought, I’d shrugged off the albatross of being ◆ untrained, an amateur among the certified; I had She helped many sharpen their skills. A GOOD TEACHER, ESPECIALLY AT THE UNDER- achieved success, in spite of missing such a big graduate level, must transform criticism into an part of a writer’s formal education. think about some of the stuff I submitted in her invitation. This is not the same as solicitation It took almost no time after publishing that class, because who’s doing good writing when or enticement — although, done poorly, it can book to realize that I’d been wrong about they’re nineteen? Not very many people, and turn into that. Carolyn’s advice. First, on surveying those definitely not me. But her feedback was never The modern MFA has become a fundamen- who were now my peers on bookstore shelves, I cruel and never abrupt. She guided us through tally transactional system. Despite the continu- came to see that her workshop had provided me the ups and downs of receiving critique with ing erosion of financial stability for writers, with much of what people get from MFAs — and absolute grace, which I realize now is a virtue these programs offer ample enticement: Come had arguably done it better. Second, I under- that not so many creative writing instructors join the ranks of masters! Acquire a key that stood that literary success in Canada is a phan- have. will open gates! Be good enough, and you tom, provided it is measured by the number will be allowed to buy passage through a vet- H S

A of copies one sells or the amount of money Tanis Rideout, who wrote the novel Above All ted stream — one you will pay to traverse, both L P

S one makes. When I was promoting my book at Things: Carolyn Smart taught me how exciting it financially and mentally. The system is also, N U the Toronto International Festival of Authors, I could be to get criticism. My first experience with necessarily, solicitous. Businesses compete, and ; O

T struck up a casual conversation with the direc- her was rejection. I applied for her class, and I a program’s reputation must be burnished and R E

B tor at the time, Geoffrey Taylor. “Do you know didn’t get in. I was pretty upset, but I wanted advertised. The condensed nature of communi- M

U how many there are?” he asked, as we took in to know what I could do better, in hopes that cations in our digital culture means the sales

JUNE 2021 21 pitch must be brief enough to fit into the first the Artful Codger Press, which published Lake cess, being a professional creative writer appears line of a Google search: optimized language Effect 4. We had a wild book launch and took all a ludicrous decision. If you grow up understand- urges you to “study with award-w inning writers” the leftover wine back to a classmate’s house and ing you’ll become a lawyer or an engineer with and to “fast-track your skills.” The lineup to get put on records and danced to Bowie. a guaranteed financial return, it takes a leap to in the door is long and the competition notori- give up those aspirational eidolons and commit ously tough. Moez Surani, whose most recent poetry collection yourself to an activity that is uncertain at best, All of which is to say that the majority of is Are the Rivers in Your Poems Real: I went to and increasingly detached from the notion of those students entering MFA programs have Queen’s to study biology. After taking Carolyn’s sustainable income. The carrot of artistic epiph- already decided to be writers. Indeed, focused class as an elective, I switched to English litera- any might have been enough of a lure long ago, as the degree is on concentrated learning, it ture. Some teachers can get so absorbed in the but the idea that aesthetic perfection at any offers little time to be other things. The path is style of different periods — be it modernism or cost is its own reward has fallen out of fashion. set: once you have spent thousands of dollars the Renaissance or ancient Greece — that they What good is your masterpiece if you had to or gone into significant debt to certify yourself look for work that conforms to those ideals. This hurt others to create it? And whose definition of in a particular calling — and top programs typ- approach implicitly conveys the belief that lit- perfect are we using? ically run between $10,000 and $25,000 — it erature is written in some mystified and exalted As the mid-list disappears in the rear-view becomes difficult (and, I can imagine, not “elsewhere.” But for Carolyn, great writing can mirror, and as publishing becomes a matter of especially appealing) to justify pursuing an be contemporary and local. a few celebrity voices floating a few big houses alternative course. while everyone else ekes out a readership in the Thus, the MFA functions beyond the realm Mark Medley, who spent many years as the books indie presses, it’s hardly reasonable to imagine of invitation. For many of those who show up, editor of the National Post and of the Globe being the kind of novelist found on the back of the hardest decision has already been made. and Mail: Unlike every other course I took at hardcovers from the 1980s, posing on a boat, Whereas those who take creative writing as Queen’s, Carolyn’s workshop was one you had with expensive jewellery on display. Modern part of their undergraduate degree may still to apply for. When I wrote the story I applied Canadian publishing no longer offers that kind be exploring the deeper question: What is it, with, it was probably the first time since high of payout, if it ever did; consider that Margaret exactly, that I am? school that I’d written something new. It was Atwood’s total net worth is estimated to be called “Grace” (ugh), and it was about a nun roughly what the Toronto Raptors’ Fred VanVleet John Elizabeth Stintzi, a poet, novelist, and living in Las Vegas (double ugh). I think it will make for the 2020–21 NBA season. writing teacher at the Kansas City Art Institute: was magical realism. In any case, Carolyn let What’s left is the circle. This comes with no I believe that undergraduate workshops can me in. I can’t remember everyone, but Moez formal definition. It might be best defined not actually be the most valuable in terms of a Surani, Omar El Akkad, Gillian Savigny, and as an industry or even a community but as an writer’s career. That experience is where we’re Kate McQuaid were all there. ongoing conversation, an ever-s hifting cluster the most challenged and free to play, which I Carolyn introduced me to writers and forms of smaller, overlapping rings. Often, it is writers believe is integral to the discovery of one’s voice. of writing of which I’d been completely ignor- talking to writers, sharing ideas and opportun- I also firmly believe that undergradu- ities, offering emotional and business ate writers are the most vulnerable support, commiserating about crap to poor instruction, as many have “Carolyn Smart’s focus points book deals, figuring out how to keep not developed a sense of conviction, going. because they have not yet found a outwards, toward others and Many professional sports have the voice they are comfortable writing concept of the coaching tree. A head through. the ways she can uplift them.” coach whose assistants go on to lead their own teams, taking their phil- Omar El Akkad: I studied computer osophy with them, is said to have a science, though I was terrible at it, and to this ant, despite being an English major. She pushed large coaching tree (the NFL’s Bill Parcells is day I can’t program my way out of a paper me outside my comfort zone, made me write in a classic example). In literary circles, there are bag. I hardly ever went to class and spent most ways I never would have done if not for her class. trees of influence, but typically they originate of my time writing for pretty well any stu- But, most of all, it was the first time I felt a part with editors whose highest esteem is reserved dent publication that would accept my work. of a writing community. Before I took her work- for their own visions; think of Gordon Lish in I applied to Carolyn’s prose class as I was head- shop, the idea of being “a writer” was this hazy, the United States or John Metcalf here. Perhaps ing into second year, which would have been nebulous concept. It was what I’d always wanted as a symptom of this trend toward egomania as 2001. The very first time that class got together, to do, but I don’t think I knew what that would pedagogy, Canadian MFA culture over the last the first time I met Carolyn in person, was a entail. Her class provided me with a passport to few years has been rattled by highly public reck- Tuesday — September 11, a few hours after the a country I’d always wanted to visit. onings over physical and sexual abuse at some planes had hit the towers. of what are supposed to be our best programs, In the following years, I took her advanced Michael Crummey, author of The Innocents: by the very people who would deign to influence prose class, in which we produced the very In 1994, I won the inaugural Bronwen Wallace the next generation. first edition of the Lake Effect anthology. From Award, which Carolyn helped found, organize, While this system has functioned, brokenly, Queen’s, I landed summer internships, first at and administer. She became a mentor and a in graduate studies programs, where people the Edmonton Journal and then, the following champion of mine for years afterwards. She was have worked very hard and paid large sums year, at the Globe and Mail, where I was eventu- someone who made me feel like I had a shot, of money to be included, it does not function ally hired full-time and spent the next decade and that was a rare gift through my twenties. the same way in undergraduate programs. The of my life. My writing education was essentially There are endless opportunities for humiliation professor of a prestigious MFA program might Carolyn’s class and newspaper work. and embarrassment in a writer’s life, especially in have a large public profile and corresponding the early going. Carolyn offered a constant bit of self- regard and might feel entitled to berate the Anna Maxymiw: I did a medial degree in English shelter from that steady downpour. students — o perating under the assumption that and psychology and took Carolyn’s workshops ◆ “you asked for this.” But, typically, undergrad in my third and fourth years. I hadn’t heard THE IDEA THAT WRITING IS HARD IS EASY TO SCOFF skin is not yet thick, many big life decisions have about her classes — it was my friend Carly at. It’s not rocket science or banking or dentistry not yet been made, and imagining oneself as a Watters, who’s now a literary agent, who told or any other profession that requires extensive, particular thing, especially something as daft as a me that she was applying and that I should too. rigorous training. The profusion of online pub- writer, is no easy feat. A timid nineteen-y ear-old We both got in. And all of a sudden, we were lications that blur the line between writing and economics student who decides to experiment thrust into this world. Carolyn brought in fabu- so-called content has done nothing to clarify with creative writing is unlikely to be encour- lous guest lecturers — Billeh Nickerson, Genni what it means to be a writer, or what one must aged by a teacher who screams profanities. Gunn, Sheri-D Wilson — who helped critique do to be considered one. The qualities that denote not just a good our work with the same tact and patience that For those whose motives and expectations of teacher but a good mentor and steward of Carolyn showed. We also met Laurie Lewis of self are shaped by conventional metrics of suc- careers in their earliest stages reverse the power

22 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA The Sturgeon’s Lover

In the deepest part of the river to survive the cold wet winters there lived a great sturgeon until the people too walked into and she swam along the bottom the water and fell to the bottom and fed upon the dead who had fallen. as the man kissed his lover. She was about three hundred years old and when she was full, she came to Today we do not fish for sturgeon the surface and jumped as high as as their numbers have been decimated she could and all the males came by overfishing and loss of spawning to her and she kissed each male grounds. Whenever I catch a sturgeon and let them have her. Months later in my net I let her go and she always she quietly went to her favourite part turns back and smiles as she flicks of the river and there she released her mighty tail and splashes me. her eggs in the millions and then began My son always laughs as I stand there again to swim the bottom and to search stunned and wet, while the great sturgeon for any new bodies that had fallen slowly swims away and turns back from upriver, which she feasted upon to blow us a kiss. We both wipe with her old softly kissed lips. our lips as the great sturgeon falls to the bottom of the water. The legend goes that a fisherman There, waiting for her, is her lover. had fallen into the waters and was drowning He kisses her one last time. when the great sturgeon came to him She cries as she begins to eat him. and asked him for a kiss. He agreed and the two fell in love and together they would feed upon all the food at the bottom of the river. One day her eggs came to life and created the people across the water. Joseph Dandurand The people lived there for centuries and the sturgeon and man would visit Joseph Dandurand is a poet, playwright, and author, as well as the director of the Kwantlen Cultural Center, in British Columbia. This poem appears in from time to time, bringing them food The East Side of It All, a Grifﬁn Prize ﬁnalist published by Nightwood Editions.

dynamic at play in this broken system. Carolyn talk to and meet her students several times since opportunities. How do you begin to measure Smart put many of these qualities — listen- then. I really admire how much work and effort that kind of impact? ing, kindness, critique that builds rather than she has put into it over the years. She really has ◆ destroys — at the centre of her pedagogy. It’s the been such an integral and positive part of the AS IT TURNS OUT, THERE ARE STILL TEACHING JOBS. reason her coaching tree of connected circles Queen’s and Kingston literary communities. Many CWRI alumni have gone on to teach cre- is so large. Her focus points outwards, toward ative writing, demonstrating how far and wide others and the ways she can uplift them. She John Elizabeth Stintzi: I first talked to Carolyn the coaching tree can grow. Perhaps, then, the practises literary success in its most Canadian when I got a random call from an Ontario true masters are not those authors who immedi- form: as a refutation of ego. number two years ago; she personally informed ately come to mind as commercial and critical me that I was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace successes but rather those who convene and Catherine Hernandez, who was the 2018 writer- Award (a duty which she said was her favourite nurture the circles. Perhaps CanLit belongs to in-residence at Queen’s University: Carolyn part of the award). I remember her telling me, its teachers. offered me a place to dig deep into the story after I won, that Bronwen would have been My own teaching resumé doesn’t yet include a I wanted to tell. It was healing for me to be so happy to see me win, which meant a great creative writing gig. But that’s fine by me. Thanks given the opportunity to research and develop deal to me. It was hard to fight the imposter to Carolyn Smart, I understand this is an honour my novel, about the rise of white supremacy in syndrome in that moment, to feel as though I one must earn. Unlike rocket science, banking, Canada, with the unconditional support of a deserved it. It was a strange and emotional day, or dentistry, creative writing has no absolutes, white woman, who kept asking me, “What do but Carolyn really did pull me into the present no immutable rules. What’s considered good is you need? How can I help you?” She was like by telling me that. And I believed her, because it dependent on context, and as styles and habits this delightful anomaly at Queen’s, a spry and was clear she believed it, too. change, the shape of mastery shifts. So writing cheerful person in this formal institution who is an easy field into which one may walk and wanted to give me, this queer brown woman Omar El Akkad: As a teacher, Carolyn has men- proclaim expertise. But proclamations call atten- without a degree, a chance to dream big. tored thirty years’ worth of students, who have tion to the self. gone on to win just about every literary award in A teacher who is truly invested in developing Iain Reid, who wrote I’m Thinking of Ending Canada. God knows how many times I’ve man- new writers is one who listens for the whispers Things and Foe: I was in Carolyn’s workshop aged to strike up a conversation with a far more under the noise, hears their potential, and offers during my last year at Queen’s, and we met talented and successful writer than myself by them a place to resonate. In the grace with which up again about six or seven years later, when I mentioning how we’d both once been Carolyn’s they conduct and amplify the results, you will moved back to Kingston. She has invited me to students. She’s created an entire constellation of find the future of Canadian literature.

JUNE 2021 23 LITERATURE

Writing into the Sunset In the saddle with Canadian novelists Bob Armstrong

EW DISTINCTIONS BETWEEN CANADA and the United States seem as profound as those that differentiate the paths taken in settling the western frontier. Our side of the border saw Fcentralized control, early imposition of law and order, and the state’s monopoly of violence; their side witnessed land rushes, gold rushes, vigilantes, range wars, desperadoes, gunmen, outlaws, and decades of total war. That side pioneered a genre of film and television that, at times, has dominated Hollywood; this side produced actors who learned to hide their accents so they could play their neighbours’ heroes. Canadian writers looking to corral some of the western action have taken several different approaches, but nearly all of them have engaged, in one way or another, with a nearly 130-year- old essay written by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner; even those who have sought to debunk its central argument have ended up reinforcing its power. In “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” from 1893, Turner made much of the “closing” of the frontier in the United States, at least according Rounding up tales of the frontier. to the 1890 census. He described “unsettled” land —“the meeting point between savagery the Turnerian forces crossing the border into Chance wants to turn the story of the wolf- and civilization”— as an environment that cre- the northern prairies. Others have set their work ers’ depredations in the Cypress Hills into an ated self-r eliance, equality, and cooperation. For entirely in the United States. Still others have American epic that will harden hearts for the him, the challenge of clearing forests, breaking found distinctly Canadian ways of exploring the coming global wars. In one chilling scene, he car- the soil, and building towns created the nation’s impact of the frontier and its closing. All have ries on an extended monologue about drawing very character: submitted the history of westward settlement strength from one’s violent national history. To in North America to interrogation and revision. counter Italian and German armies — inspired That coarseness and strength combined ◆ by the racial memory of ancient Rome and with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that CROSS-BORDER CONNECTIONS ARE CENTRAL IN GUY Teutonic hordes — America will need to embrace practical, inventive turn of mind, quick Vanderhaeghe’s three Westerns: The Englishman’s its own courageous and violent inheritance: to find expedients; that masterful grasp of Boy, from 1996, The Last Crossing, from 2002, and “They who resurrect the savage ghosts of their material things, lacking in the artistic but A Good Man, from 2011. The Englishman’s Boy, past must be challenged with the savage ghosts powerful to effect great ends; that restless, which won a Governor General’s Award, depicts of our past.” (Ultimately, Chance’s attempt to nervous energy; that dominant individ- frontier America as a moral wasteland, with repurpose the Cypress Hills Massacre ends badly ualism, working for good and for evil, the titular character joining a group of wolf- for all — in ways that perpetuate the horrors of and withal that buoyancy and exuberance hunting outlaws on a search for stolen horses the frontier.) which comes with freedom. that ends with the brutality of the Cypress Hills The Englishman’s Boy fits with a common Massacre, in June 1873. While one storyline fol- Canadian assumption that violence and injustice

Shortly after the essay began to circulate, lows the boy and the wolfers on their ride from are foreign imports. The wolfers are Americans, A D the first literary Western, Owen Wister’s The Montana to the North-West Territories (in what after all. The one good man among them is a A N

Virginian, presented readers with a character who is now southern Saskatchewan), another focuses Canadian, and things don’t go well for him. The A C

S personified Turner’s ideal American: a brave, on a Canadian writer in silent- era Los Angeles, boy himself stands in for Canada. At the begin- E V I

unrefined, and chivalrous cowboy who wins the who becomes swept up by a charismatic film- ning of the novel, he’s an impoverished teen- H C heart of a schoolmarm while defeating a mur- maker named Damon Ira Chance. Chance ager running away from a violent family, likely R A

derous Wyoming rustler. Every Western hero wants to outshine D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Appalachians. Hired by a travelling aristocrat, D N A since has followed in the nameless Virginian’s Nation with a script about the conquest of the he’s later forced to join the wolfers when the Y R footsteps — or has been deliberately distanced West — a film that takes Turner’s thesis to its Englishman dies. He’s a young Canada — aban- A R B from him. darkest extremes. doned by one master, taken up by another, and I L

;

In Canada, unlike in the United States, treaty “The American spirit is a frontier spirit,” traumatized by all he has witnessed. 3 5 9 1

making and policing preceded most European Chance says as he explains his vision to the Vanderhaeghe returned to the theme of rela- , Y settlement and thus prevented the sort of action hapless writer, “restless, impatient of constraint, tive innocence in his third Western, A Good E N that fuels most Western plots. So Canadian eager for a look over the next hill, the next peek Man. In it, a former NWMP constable named N U L writers working within the genre have had to around the bend in the river. The American des- Wesley Case attempts to act as a go-between R A

develop unique strategies. Some have shown tiny is forward momentum.” for Colonel James Walsh during the delicate G

24 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA diplomatic dealings with the Hunkpapa Lakota pluck — crimes you could not hang or banish Lie in It, from 2015, and My Name Is a Knife, leader Sitting Bull, when his people take refuge for — you could not improve on these districts from 2018, she presents Boone as a man who in Canada after the Battle of the Little Bighorn. as places of penance.” Time and again, Simpson knows he doesn’t belong in a civilized land and As a Canadian Heritage Minute would have and his men seek the “castor El Dorado” of the is acutely aware of the tragedy he brings upon it, the North West Mounted Police dealt hon- Upper Missouri River, just south of present-d ay himself and Kentucky. estly with Sitting Bull, in sharp contrast to Alberta. And time and again, they are thwarted Hawley takes pains to show how the Boone the U.S. Cavalry. Yes, Canada resisted entreat- by Piegan resistance. In The Trade, the colonial family, lapsed Quakers from Pennsylvania, are ies to allow the American military to follow outsiders who forcibly push across the border driven toward the frontier by social disapproval Sitting Bull north. But as Vanderhaeghe shows, are those who are travelling south. and poverty. When Boone leads settlers to the it also withheld aid while the refugees fought The search for resources that could quickly be fort that will eventually bear his name, a land hunger — which eventually forced them to depleted is a recurring theme in the history of speculator named Hill tells him the new settle- return to the United States. “I could almost hear the West, as waves of outsiders exploited beaver ment won’t be a place for “border trash,” imply- them thinking,” Case says of those who, like pelts, bison hides, gold, and the land. Another ing, though not quite saying, “present company him, represent the British Empire. “ ‘Yes, British recurring theme is irony, which has a powerful excepted.” (On Turner’s frontier, the low-born fair dealing has tamed the savage.’ But as yet, fair presence in Stenson’s third Western, The Great hero can achieve greatness through his courage, dealing has come without a price tag. It has cost Karoo, from 2008. As it tells the story of the strength, and talents alone.) us nothing.” cowboys and NWMP constables who form the Boone loves Kentucky as he finds it — rich in Canadian innocence may be tarnished in Mounted Canadian Rifles during the Boer War, deer and bison and largely free of the original Vanderhaeghe’s books, but in George Bowering’s the novel highlights the nearsightedness of a inhabitants (much of the Ohio Valley having Shoot!, from 1994, it’s non- existent. Bowering sat- group of men who, having recently occupied been depopulated by disease and inter- tribal irizes the smug assurances: “Canadian history is the prairies, set off to fight those doing the same conflict). And yet he comes to know that he mainly written by schoolteachers who know a thing in South Africa. is destroying it. “I want to believe that this is lot about the Government. If an individual with “My problem with the Boers is how they took Heaven now just here,” he says. “Is there any a gun shows up, he had better be an American the land from the Bantus and Zulus,” one man great wrong in wanting Heaven now?” After or else.” The derision is obvious, given that his says at a recruitment meeting. “Killed them and Boone is captured by the Shawnee, he prospers novel tells the story of the “wild McLean boys” made them slaves. I say that’s worth a war, on in their company, enjoying life among them of Hat Creek, British Columbia, who were the assumption Britain will treat the blacks any more than he did among the settlers, who blame hanged in 1881 for killing the magistrate and better.” This shortly after the local townsfolk him for the shortcomings of their expedition. gold commissioner John Ussher. The McLeans have watched the hanging of Charcoal, a Blood Hawley’s protagonist is a far cry from the were the mixed-r ace sons of Donald McLean, a man convicted of killing his wife’s lover and the plastic hero played by Fess Parker in the 1960s Hudson’s Bay Company trader in what is today NWMP officer sent to arrest him. One witness, television series Daniel Boone, but Hollywood Kamloops. Bowering portrays McLean as a brutal perhaps a veteran of the fur trade, given his age legends die hard — and some are simply murderer of Indigenous people: and French accent, observes, “Yessir me, I ting immune to revision. At one point, Boone con- fronts the speculator who uses his In the old days the Hudson’s Bay reputation to attract investors: “Hill, Company used to whip Indians “It’s fitting that in a Canadian you are not telling the truth. I was not and threaten their families. The the first there, you know that.” Hill Americans shot them. Now the novel of the late frontier, we replies with “What does that matter? Provincial Judges came around on It is my book.” their circuits and hanged them, and end up in a national park.” In My Name Is a Knife, Hawley sometimes hanged white men who gives equal time to the challenges of got liquored up and shot people. Boone’s wife, Rebecca, who endures dey hang da last wild Indian today. . . . Yessir me, hardship, the deaths of her children, abuse from In the novel, as in history, McLean leaves his I wonder what dey’ll ever do now.” angry family and neighbours, and Daniel’s fre- sons in poverty when he is killed in the 1864 ◆ quent and lengthy absences. She tells Daniel that Chilcotin War. IRONY, IN THE FORM OF UNINTENDED CONSE- the source of their troubles is his inborn dissatis- Fred Stenson is similarly dismissive of Can- quences, has always been at the heart of the fron- faction with where he is: “Your poor old ma told adian innocence. The first of his three Westerns, tier story. Even Turner acknowledged it. If the me that you were born hands-first. Reaching for The Trade, from 2000, covers several decades challenge of pathfinding, breaking the soil, and, some other place already.” near the end of the fur trade, as the Hudson’s yes, fighting the original inhabitants of the land After the real-life Daniel Boone was eventu- Bay Company, governed by the microman- had produced admirable characteristics in the ally forced out of Kentucky by his debts and dis- ager George Simpson, seeks to exploit the last American personality, what would happen when putes, he settled in present- day Missouri, when remaining bonanzas of beaver pelts. Later in the that challenge was finished? Turner suggested it was still a Spanish possession. He lived long novel, traders are forced to acknowledge how that foreign conquest might be the next step: enough to see the territory change hands mul- their mere presence stimulates conflict by bring- “The American energy will continually demand tiple times, long enough for it to become a state ing warring peoples together at the forts, where a wider field for its exercise. But never again will and the jumping-o ff point for thousands of dis- they exchange furs for muskets. such gifts of free land offer themselves.” Five satisfied men seeking a better place further west. The Trade posits a West that is the opposite years later, a force of frontiersmen not unlike Hawley is not the only writer of her genera- of what Frederick Jackson Turner saw. Stenson’s the horsemen in The Great Karoo would help tion to focus on the American frontier instead of characters are not free and self-r eliant individuals the future cowboy president Teddy Roosevelt the Canadian one. Patrick deWitt, for example, but rather corporate office- holders at the mercy capture Cuba during the Spanish-A merican War. hit the big time in 2011 with The Sisters Brothers, a of their overlord’s whims. Instead of romanti- Western movies have also noted the paradox dark comedy about a pair of hired guns who are cized Jeremiah Johnsons free to do as they please, of the frontiersman who makes himself obsolete hunting a German prospector in the California they are victims of and participants in nasty through conquest. Witness that famous final Gold Rush (John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix office politics. Simpson upbraids the protagon- shot in The Searchers: The obsessive Indian fighter played them in the 2018 film adaptation). In À la ist, the trader Harriott, when the younger man Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne, has res- recherche de New Babylon, from 2015, Dominique nearly kills his horse while attempting a perilous cued his niece from the Comanche. He stands Scali had a cast of nineteenth-c entury characters mission. “She was my horse,” Harriott tries to alone outside the family’s cabin, with no place in wander throughout the High Plains and the explain. “You’re a Company servant,” Simpson the domestic world of the now-safe West. American Southwest (W. Donald Wilson’s trans- responds. “You have no horse.” Alix Hawley tackles this tension in her por- lation, In Search of New Babylon, came out in Indeed, rather than being a place of freedom, trayal of the famed frontiersman Daniel Boone, 2017). And Tyler Enfield set his 2020 novel, Like Stenson’s frontier resembles a prison. At one who led a small group of settlers into Kentucky Rum-Drunk Angels, in California and the Arizona point, Simpson even imagines the West as a during the American Revolution — the first such Territory and filled it with references to Gabriel future penal colony. “For indolence, coward- European settlement beyond the Appalachian García Márquez and Arabian Nights. Whatever ice, disloyalty, drunkenness and general lack of Mountains. In her two novels, All True Not a their other merits, these Westerns can feel less

JUNE 2021 25 like explorations of the frontier and more like Unlike many other novelists of her genera- Forced to work, the prisoners help build a playful manipulations of storytelling tropes, as tion, Adamson looks to the Canadian West. She highway that will connect Banff with the train when Enfield adds deliberate anachronism by also pushes her timeline past the symbolic fron- station in Laggan, now Lake Louise. (Today, that having young women toss their underwear at a tier cut-off of 1890. The first of her two novels, highway goes through country that’s so wild glamorous train robber. The Outlander, from 2007, is the story of Mary the government has had to construct several But a deadly serious irony is at the heart Boulton — or “the bride”— a woman who is multi- million-d ollar overpasses for deer and of Clifford Jackman’s dark debut, The Winter chased through the prairies and foothills toward elk. Even the wolves have learned to use the Family. Published in 2015, it explores violence the Crowsnest Pass after killing her husband. infrastructure to ambush prey.) When Jack tries in politics as it follows a band of outlaws, led It’s a dreamlike text, filled with memorable and to return to the life he once knew, trouble finds initially by the psychopath Quentin Ross and surreal scenes both entirely imaginary (an arrow him — thanks to both the nun and prison camp. later by the even more psychopathic Augustus attack in early twentieth- century Alberta) and Even in the vast and rugged Rockies, Ridgerunner Winter. At first, the gang fights for the “good stranger than fiction (the obliteration of a min- reminds us, the era of freedom is quickly com- side.” They come together in 1864, during ing town in the 1903 Frank Slide). ing to an end. William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea, Ridgerunner focuses on Mary’s second hus- When Jack’s father, William Moreland, jumps which breaks the back of the Confederacy. Made band, an outlaw named William Moreland, a train during his crime spree, he ends up in outlaws because they take “war is hell” a little nicknamed the Ridgerunner, and her fourteen- Lethbridge, the first city he’s ever seen. It’s a dis- too literally, they then confront the Klan during year-old son, Jack Boulton. After his mother’s quieting place for a man accustomed to a remote Reconstruction. After they take that fight too far, death, and with his father on a robbing spree in cabin: “It really was a wonder of progress. But they’re given a chance to redeem themselves by Montana in an attempt to stockpile money for like all wonders, natural or otherwise, it made challenging Chicago Democrats in the 1876 elec- the future, Jack is taken in by a wealthy former your own life seem temporary, and it told you tion (this was when the Republicans were the nun who lives in Banff and is determined to things about the passage of time you didn’t want less overtly racist party). When the gang, predict- “civilize” the boy. There are hints of Huck Finn in to know.” ably, takes this third contest too far, members Jack’s predicament: the “orphaned” child taken ◆ head west as committed desperadoes. in by a woman who cleans him up, sends him to WHETHER THEY CELEBRATE TURNER’S FRONTIER In 1889, just before the rush of Sooners into school, and gives him a proper name — Charles thesis or complicate it, virtually all Westerns what has until then been set aside as Indian D’Arcy Euphastus Cload. (The renaming also are haunted by the word “last”: The last buf- Territory, the gang is given one last chance to echoes an all too familiar residential-s chool falo hunt. The last gunfight. The last roundup. make a big score — by helping a group of land- narrative, especially considering the nasty nun.) The middle book in Vanderhaeghe’s trilogy was hungry settlers wipe out a Native village that Ridgerunner is set primarily in Banff National The Last Crossing. In American Westerns, the stands in their way. But Augustus Winter knows Park, at a moment so far removed from the last frontier is often Mexico, as it was for Sam that opportunities to carry out robberies and frontier era that governments are frantically try- Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch, vamoosing to the evade the Pinkertons are disappearing along with ing to preserve any unsettled wilderness that’s Mexican Revolution around the same time that the frontier, so it would be better to attack the left. This effort means cutting the Nakoda off Jack and William are trying to evade the author- rich men who’ve hired them. Get one big score, from the land — all in the service of paying big- ities around Banff. Cormac McCarthy, in his he argues, and hightail it out of the business: game hunters who come to re-enact their Daniel Border Trilogy set in the 1940s and ’50s, advances Boone fantasies. the temporal boundary further still, with a kind This ain’t nothing compared to how bad With Canada embroiled in the First World War, of frontier drama in the mountains and deserts it’s gonna get. Ten years ago if the law foreign nationals from hostile nations — mostly of northern Mexico. was on you, why, you’d just run into the Ukrainians originally from the Austro- Hungarian It’s fitting that in a Canadian novel of the late woods. There was always more coun- Empire — are locked in an internment camp frontier, we end up in a national park. Parks are, try. . . . Now it’s just Oklahoma. And after near Castle Mountain. The wilderness that rep- after all, rife with our frontier fantasies. They are the big land run in April, Oklahoma’s not resents freedom to some is, again, quite literally where we reconnect with our wild side while even Oklahoma anymore. Nothing but a prison. Young Jack, himself on the lam after wearing space-age synthetic fabrics and carrying towns and railways . . . escaping the nun, sees in the camp a dispiriting satellite navigation equipment. They are where message from the future: we seek an authentic experience in an area The end of the lawless frontier as an end to that has been artificially delineated as a wild freedom is the Turner corollary that gave us such He could not do this every day, hovering place — supposedly stripped of human influ- Westerns as The Wild Bunch and Butch Cassidy over the work area, watching men who ence, except for that of commerce. They even and the Sundance Kid. It’s also a key theme in Gil would forever be prisoners. For this was a provide tourism entrepreneurs with dreams of Adamson’s second novel, Ridgerunner, a finalist war without end, or it felt like that to him. gold — yet another chapter in the ongoing quest for the 2020 Giller Prize. This was life from now on. for El Dorado.

“A timely exploration of the most troubling economic fallout of the pandemic.” —Heather Scoffield, Toronto Star economics columnist and Ottawa Bureau Chief “[Gauvin and MacEwen’s] analysis shows precisely how the tax system favors the rich at the expense of the rest of us. And they provide solutions!” —Ed Broadbent, chair of the Broadbent Institute and former leader of the NDP

Available in bookstores and online now $24.95 paper | 978-1-4594-1656-7 LITERATURE

Lox and Loaded Gary Barwin’s latest Tom Jokinen

Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: the First World War and are presumed safely The travellers reach a rutted wagon track and The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy preserved in the ice. Meanwhile, he has a whole come upon a man carving a stick. “What are Gary Barwin new war to contend with, as Nazi soldiers and you making?” Motl asks. “A smaller stick,” the Random House Canada collaborators are busy corralling and shooting man answers. “We’re poor. It’s entertainment.” 344 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook Lithuanian Jews. From a pile of burning books, So the story goes, history as told through jokes, Motl saves a copy of May’s Mutterliebe (Motherly with alternating episodes of startling violence. love). “You can burn a book or a library,” he There’s a moment when a man with an accor- HE TOWN OF RADEBEUL, A SUBURB OF thinks, “but to really destroy a story you have to dion climbs atop a pile of dead Jews, who were Dresden, is perhaps best known as destroy the language and its people.” beaten to death with iron bars, and begins to the home of the Karl May Museum. Motl is what in Yiddish is called a schlemiel: play the Lithuanian national anthem. It’s a dark May, who died in 1912, wrote adven- a sympathetic fool caught up in a fantasy. In scene made darker by a quick Google search: ture tales of the American West, this case, the dream is “the life of the cowboy.” true story, this happened in Kovno in July 1941. Tpotboilers about the Apache chief Winnetou and Nothing, Motl says, “is impossible when it’s an Barwin didn’t need to invent it, which is his his German friend Old Shatterhand — a kind of illusion,” including survival. It’s up to Barwin to point. For what purpose did God include the Teutonic Lone Ranger. His seventy books have reveal how his protagonist discovers, over time, accordion, Motl asks himself. sold over 200 million copies. From these tales, In a frantic encounter with soldiers, Motl’s an “Indianer” sub culture grew that still persists. mother disappears, but soon enough he meets In Bad Segeberg, in the north, a Karl May Festival up with a young woman, Esther, who emerges gives fans the chance to play the cowboys and as a love interest (with limitations, given Motl’s Indians game — complete with the Pony Express, deficiencies). She becomes co- choreographer the sheriff’s office, and the saloon. Kids in face of a bizarre mission to deliver certain papers, paint sit in teepees or pan for gold. Like Wagner, which may save scores of lives, to Heinrich May is a cultural icon. Himmler in Berlin. The pair pose as Karaites, Hitler was a fan. “On his bookshelf there are members of a medieval Jewish sect that the political and government publications, bro- Nazis determined to be just Muslim enough chures and books about health and breeding to escape massacre (a bureaucratic nicety that German shepherds,” a 1933 newspaper report works in Motl and Esther’s favour; a historical claimed. “And then — listen up, German fact that sheds light on the absurd arbitrariness boys! — a series of books by — Karl May!” The of Nazi policy). Guess what — hijinks ensue. Führer spoke, with admiration, of how white But it works. Americans had “gunned down the millions of How? The style is madcap, and there are too Redskins to a few hundred thousand.” He saw many puns: “And then the ‘blintz’-krieg.” The the Western colonizers as a model for creat- whole tale operates at such a high pitch that it ing Lebensraum, or “living space,” on his own becomes mildly exhausting. And still, between frontier: the trick was to wipe out those already fabulism and real-world tragedy, the light gets there. In a 2012 piece for The New Yorker, Rivka through. The Greeks knew how to pull this off, Galchen suggested that the shoot-’em-up shows as did Sholem Aleichem in the Tevye stories (on at the Karl May Festival tap into fascist national which Fiddler on the Roof is based). Aleichem’s sentiments or even act as a “working through of was Yiddish comedy, shtetl humour. He also had the trauma of the Nuremberg trials.” a character named Motl, a schlemiel, plus over- Somewhere in here is what Gary Barwin calls the-top colloquial scripture about a missing God “the delirious overreaching humour of tragedy.” and the need to create one in His place. This is His latest novel, Nothing the Same, Everything The chance to play cowboy. Barwin’s style too: Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, is the deepest of black comedies, written as a cross that he has more in common with the “Indianer” The yellow sun climbed and fell, men between a grandfather’s embellished account than he does with the gunslingers — that he’s were hung, homesteads were burned, men of the Holocaust, the Yiddish tales of Sholem more Winnetou than Old Shatterhand. drank, fought on empty main streets, shot Aleichem, and a May Western. It’s a high-wire Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted is also a each other through the back or between act. Barwin takes risks, most of which he pulls road story. With a horse named Theodor Herzl, the buttons, spared each other, helped off. When he succeeds, it’s due in part to that Motl and his mother embark on their journey to each other, found love then lost it, while S E

G ironclad rule of trauma comedy: no jokes unless escape terror and find his lost testes. In answer others sought a Hebrew God who thought A M

I you have a blood connection to the victims. to the plan to wipe out his race, Motl will make it no longer possible to write His poetry

T (Barwin was born in Northern Ireland to South a family: “While Nazis obliterated, he would in these times and gazed instead silently T E

G African parents of Ashkenazi descent; he now create.” As they ride, he continues to dream, into His corned beef in some transubstan-

;

E lives in Hamilton, Ontario.) the scenes in his head always preferable to the tial cosmic cookhouse. C N

A So he offers up the character Motl, a middle- ones in front of him: “Motl strode forward, I L

L aged man who lives with his mother, Gitl. The his chest pushed out like a rooster’s, his two Any work that successfully wrong-foots you A

E setting is Lithuania in 1941, and the pair have a hands resting on the pearl-h andled six-s hooters on your own complacency, when it comes to R U

T quest before them: to retrieve Motl’s testicles, given to him in gratitude after he perforated what you think you know about war and trauma, C I

P which were shot off in the Swiss Alps during a scoundrel.” is vital, no matter how the story is told.

JUNE 2021 27 LITERATURE

The Unbearable Lightness Coming of age takes a darker turn Gayatri Kumar

Happy Hour Marlowe Granados Flying Books 288 pages, softcover and ebook

Borderline Marie-Sissi LaBrèche Translated by Melissa Bull Anvil Press 152 pages, softcover

Y AND LARGE, WOMEN’S COMING- OF- age narratives used to follow self- improving, redemptive arcs, but they have taken a darker turn in recent years. “I’ve come to believe Bone can take the sentimental temperature of a cultural moment by looking at its novels’ hero- ines,” wrote Stephanie Danler for the New York Times in 2019. And the tone of this latest breed of books is “a rebellion cut through with apathy.” In response to our hyper- digital, hyper- corporate, hyper-u njust reality, these protagon- ists have become “gloriously self-d estructive” With much that’s funny and flagrant inside. and “essentially alienated,” inching their way toward new and disturbing resolutions. simply means a variety of fears instilled in you she wasn’t enunciating to their liking. I know Two new novels are part of this rebellious when you’re young enough to be scared.” She she sometimes warbles. So I repeated emphatic- turn: Marlowe Granados’s Happy Hour and remains steadfastly unimpressed by most of ally, ‘Nothing! Nothing at all!’” It’s certainly a Marie-Sissi LaBrèche’s Borderline (published in her acquaintances, with a pointed disregard for refreshing take. French in 2000 and translated by Melissa Bull those in the bloviating professions: “Gala had It’s hard not to warm to a story with such last year). Both chart the course of world- weary been talking to, of all people, a fiction writer.” good intentions. Like Granados, Isa is Pinay and women in their twenties — one with insouci- The worst offenders are straight men, and, not Salvadoreña, and she’s a heroine who would ance, the other with dark rage. Each has a very incidentally, the girls don’t really care so long as much rather talk about Escada and oysters than different take on youthful disaffection. their dinner companions pick up the tab (which, about trauma or displacement (very little space ◆ Isa notes, is something of a concern with those is given to reflections on her “heritage”). When ISA EPLEY, HAPPY HOUR ’S PRECOCIOUSLY SELF- writers). Soon it becomes clear that Happy Hour Isa bats away the occasional microaggression, assured narrator, arrives in New York in May is not about what its protagonist has to learn in she decides exactly how or if she will engage 2013 with little more than her most cherished New York; rather it’s about just how much she with the terms of her rationalization. The liter- fashions and an eye for droll observations. She already knows. ary marketplace too often expects a dissection of is joined by Gala Novak, her somewhat less Last year, Editorial Magazine described Happy othering from its writers of colour. Happy Hour worldly best friend (it is only Gala’s second Hour as “a bildungsroman for and by the party refuses to yield to that imperative, and it’s the time on a plane). Over the course of one sul- girl.” Granados’s literary influences are a throw- better for it. And shouldn’t women of colour be try summer, the pair scrape by on a series of back: she has cited Anita Loos, for example, the allowed to give zero fucks too? uninspiring jobs — selling clothes from a mar- author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the comic Yet the book fails to live up to its promise. As ket stall, filling seats for a network television novel from 1925. And Happy Hour ’s lighter tone bold as it is to have a young woman resolutely show — to fund their nighttime adventures does seem to belong to another time. Isa and set on a path of individualism, the novel falters with various actors, artists, writers, models, and Gala are like modern- day flappers, for whom in its delivery. For one thing, it’s painfully self- aristocratic Brits with houses in the Hamptons. glamour and fun are as serious as any other conscious. Consider the steady stream of Isa’s The business of going out, Isa tells us, is like pursuit. Not everyone agrees. The pair’s lack grating wisdoms: scrambling eggs (“you should “fieldwork.” She documents her findings in her of professional ambition flummoxes the city’s always add a splash of milk to make the mixture not so reliable diary, which gives the novel its social climbers, a reaction Granados plays on a buttery yellow”), handling admirers (“you narrative form. to hilarious effect. In one of the funniest scenes, should never wear what someone gifted you in “At the end of the day, I want to learn!” the two friends attend a photography exhibition front of the person who gifted it”), and drinking Isa declares, before picking up a volume of where they are repeatedly asked what they are wine (best done at home to avoid irresponsible essays on cruelty. After reading it, she remarks, doing in the city. When Gala responds, with no behaviour). The prose occasionally veers into R K C “I would really like to ask an expert about hesitation, that they are doing “absolutely noth- bald didacticism: “People think it is frivolous, I L F why this is worth my time.” Unlike her friend ing,” their interlocutors are unsatisfied, until but feminine things are often thought of that ; B B Daisy —“a real ingénue”— Isa knows better Isa steps in: “No one seemed to understand way; it is an important kind of knowledge that I R A than to believe in things like moral fibre, “which what Gala was saying, and I thought perhaps is overlooked.” And while Happy Hour is an C

28 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA interrogation of self-p resentation — Granados she has borderline personality disorder, or, as spread the storm inside my head across purposely avoids any internal reflection — her she tells it, with characteristic bluntness, “a sick my cheeks. Because there’s a storm inside narrator’s constant explanations demolish even personality. A personality with the flu.” When my head. That’s right. A big storm, with the smallest bit of tension: “By not saving his emptiness and self- loathing come calling, she wind, rain, and even hurricanes. As soon number, I’d created a sense of distance.” Such turns to sex, booze, and eventually writing, as I close my eyes, it’s El Niño behind relentless contrivance denies the reader any all of which she pursues compulsively and my eyelids. It’s El Niño with its millions opportunity to lose herself within the narrative. with creativity. of dollars’ worth of damage, its thou- We yearn for intimacy or emotional truth, for But Borderline is not a maudlin tale; there’s sands of dead, and countless devastated messiness or a flash of genuine joy, or indeed the much that is funny and flagrant in its pages. territories. forgetting of self that one associates with a good The prologue lists Sissi’s fears, which include time. The tale ends up closer to organized fun. cows, whales, bills, the government, “butt- ugly At age eight, Sissi, fed up with her moth- Isa Epley might want to dispense with being rapists,” “butt-u gly killers,” and “foreigners er’s listlessness, declares that she would have Moral, but Happy Hour is a text that wants to who open dépanneurs and can’t understand sliced her parent in two and thrown her “evil- teach its readers a Lesson. And that, as the nar- you just want matches.” The story opens in a masked face into the fire,” if only she’d had Luke rator herself might say, makes it very tiresome hotel room at the Château de L’Argoat, the nar- Skywalker’s lightsaber. On the page before, an indeed. rator’s legs “spread so wide they’re almost on unexpected string of expletives on the way to ◆ either side of my ears.” At her twenty- fourth- school —“Jesus-m other- fucking-Christ-f ucking- AT TIMES, IT’S DIFFICULT TO BELIEVE THAT birthday party, fuelled by alcohol and a desper- goddamn- fucking- shit!”— occasions shock and Marie-Sissi LaBrèche’s clever and devastating ate need for attention, she strips down in front laughter. And in the opening chapter, a hookup autofictional debut was written over twenty years of her guests and begins to pleasure herself. The with a man named Éric —“super gross, super fat, ago. The book’s tone resonates fiercely with the onlookers panic and try to get her off the floor, super misshapen”— ends with him climaxing, current moment. As in Happy Hour, rather unfortunately, in the narrator’s the protagonist of Borderline defies hair. “I hate that,” Sissi deadpans. conventions (and wants you to know “We yearn for intimacy or “I looked like a colander dripping it). But where Isa issues her challenges spaghetti.” with wryness and a lack of concern, emotional truth, for messiness Ugliness rendered in fine prose or Sissi leads with unrestrained anger. dressed up in personal charm — these At twenty-s ix, Sissi Labrèche is try- or a flash of genuine joy.” are old tricks. Borderline goes full throt- ing to come to terms with a traumatic tle with ugliness laid bare, but this childhood. Growing up, she lived with is where the story starts to feel self- her mother and grandmother in a cockroach- but not before an errant partygoer tries to cop indulgent: it’s a bold novel but a thin character infested apartment in Montreal’s east end, a feel — just as Sissi had predicted someone study. Isn’t there more to Sissi, we wonder, than where she spent her days watching TV and play- would. In the forcefulness of the first- person fury and victimhood? Isn’t there more to her ing with her Fisher-P rice figurines. (The text is narration, it’s easy to feel implicated in these maternal figures than their pathologies? Readers littered with references to 1980s pop culture.) moments of self- destruction. Her guests can’t in our #MeToo era will likely feel solidarity with Sissi’s mother, spaced out on antidepressants, resist her, even as they pity her; are we, the read- Sissi’s spirited mid- coital misandry, but it’s not figures more as an absence than as a presence; ers, any different? clear that Éric deserves such violent emascula- to her daughter, she appears “erased.” Her Sissi is an utterly original character: bitter, tion — especially when her anger stems less from grandmother, who is by turns protective and honest, and mercurial. LaBrèche writes her in the culture’s patriarchal leanings or its spiritual manipulative, occasionally threatens to put torrential, wildly associative prose that spills out emptiness and more from her childhood aban- her granddaughter in foster care or, worse, sell “like puke out of a paper bag,” much like the donment and the alienation of illness. (And her to “the white slave trade.” The narrator is narrator’s feelings: in its fat shaming, among other references, the eight when her mother is placed in a psychiatric book does show its age.) ward, eleven when she attempts suicide. While I’m crying like a moron, crying to the Happy Hour and Borderline remind us that the the other kids at school draw (bad) renderings point of making my eyeballs pop out of stakes of women’s writing continue to be high, of “The American Way of Life,” it’s always “The my head. My tears shoot out like machine just as the prospect of reinforcing pernicious Russian Way of Life, The Concentration Camp gun bullets, it’s like I want to pierce all narratives remains ever present. But not all rebel- Way of Life” for Sissi. of humanity with my pain. I wet every- lions succeed. Both works, in the end, struggle Haunted by her mother’s schizophrenia and thing, I stain everything, too. My cheap to render fully realized and complex human bruised by her grandmother’s cruelty, Sissi has to mascara smears on my face, draws funny portraits. But each, in its way, pushes the limits contend with her own mental health struggles: shapes over my skin, funny shapes that of representation.

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@ UCalgaryPress press.ucalgary.ca LITERATURE

Family Pride Profiles in gay life Kelvin Browne

The Family Way Christopher DiRaddo Esplanade Books 400 pages, softcover and ebook

Burning the Night Glen Huser NeWest Press 272 pages, softcover and ebook

F YOU WERE GAY AND BORN IN THE 1950S, as I was, your teenage years were likely spent ferreting out books that spoke to your suppressed longings. Of course, there were more texts with homosexual Iundertones and overtones than I ever realized back then. But they didn’t line the shelves of the local library in the small Okanagan Valley town where I grew up. Neither could they be found in the nearby bookstore, which mostly featured a sanitized assortment of cookbooks and religious tomes. Even when I did stumble across something interesting, I didn’t always grasp exactly what I The hidden stories of previous times. was reading. Oscar Wilde was famously homosexual, but I didn’t make the connection with ment, which Paul owns. The drama kicks off When their father has a heart attack, Paul Dorian Gray — although he seemed like boy- when his good friends Eve and Wendy, a lesbian and Kate fly across the country to Kelowna to friend material. Similarly, I was only vaguely couple Paul has known for a couple of decades, visit him. In the hospital, before his father is aware of what was going on in Christopher ask him to be their sperm donor. discharged, Paul speaks to him about his deci- Isherwood’s A Single Man (I wish Tom Ford’s Over the course of eighteen months, the sion to have a child but sign away his paternity excellent movie adaptation had been available story follows significant birthdays, debauched rights. He’s going to be “cool Uncle Paul,” as then). A knowing older friend once recom- holidays, health issues, confrontations with Wendy describes it. “You’re going to fall in love mended Brideshead Revisited, but Evelyn Waugh parents, pregnancy, and the hundreds of mun- with that kid,” his father warns. “Fall in love proved too subtle for a young teen’s desire for dane moments of the day-to-day. The age gap with it the way I fell in love with you, and what explicit details. On the other hand, John Rechy’s and the financial differences between Paul and will you do then?” It’s the classic dilemma of City of Night, with its sordid hustler narrative, Michael cause the odd point of tension, as does an aging father who has learned to communi- was altogether too graphic, especially in the the allure of romantic roads not taken. There’s a cate too late, while his son realizes that, despite connection between coming out and landing supporting cast of friends and objects of desire, being gay, he has turned out a lot like the man in the gutter. Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking some of whom seem recycled from The Boys in whose influence he sought to reject. “This is a play, The Boys in the Band, was remote from my the Band: the sex addict, the drinker, the older great opportunity, one that doesn’t come around predicament too. The flamboyant lives of New wealthy fellow who likes fancy dinners and drag. often for people like me,” Paul says. “I need you York “faggots” weren’t relatable to someone But for the most part the book feels real, with its to accept what I want to do with my life.” But who was trying to hide who he was to avoid gritty descriptions of gay bars and their sexual rejection goes both ways: “If you want me to be being bullied. dynamics, as well as believable gay sex — as in, more a part of your life,” his father replies, “then All this is to say that had I come across it’s not always good. you have to be more of a part of mine.” Christopher DiRaddo’s The Family Way or Glen The Family Way, which is DiRaddo’s second Things have changed somewhat since 2011. Huser’s Burning the Night when I was younger, novel, is most compelling in its depictions of the In the novel, characters’ work doesn’t dominate it would have made the path to accepting my challenges and clashes all families face. Michael their lives the way it does now for ambitious gays queer identity a lot less terrifying. has come to Montreal to escape the Maritimes who are trying to afford a new house or a trip to ◆ and his brutish father. Paul, similarly, has not St. Bart’s. The agony of AIDS has receded further THE FAMILY WAY IS A SAGA ABOUT FAMILY, MOST OF returned home for many years. And it’s true that from the collective consciousness, though it it of the chosen variety — those like-m inded most of the biological relations in the story have still haunts the community, especially for those individuals who make up for the indifference already been or are on the brink of becoming of us who are fifty- plus. As well, queer couples or judgment of blood relations. The tale begins unchosen. The exception is Paul’s sister, Kate, having children are not the novelty (or perver- T in 2011 in Montreal, where DiRaddo lives, and who is definitely inner circle. She demonstrates sion, depending on your perspective) they once A R T centres on Paul, a handsome bear who’s fast that married women can grow tired of the same were but merely one of the routine hurdles in E P

approaching the milestone of forty. He and his sex with the same partner, and that it’s not just life — alongside decisions on whether to live N E T twink boyfriend of three years, Michael, and horny gay guys who occasionally seek distraction together, get married, buy a dog or a cat, or have S R A their two cats have just moved into a new apart- in the arms of an appealing stranger. an open relationship. K

30 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA Aside from a few hetero interlopers, DiRaddo Library. “Where did these naked figures exist his exposed skin and Radcliffe’s camera lens. presents a milieu exclusive of straight society. apart from the reference pages?” he wonders. God, it’s exciting. You would not believe how It’s a reminder that chosen family remains a “Had they ever hung on someone’s wall?” this man looked.” powerful concept for those who have nowhere Years later, when Curtis moves to Edmonton The hardships and heartbreaks of Harriet’s else to turn. to get his teaching degree, he contacts Harriet, and Phillip’s lives are rendered poignantly. Even ◆ now a widow, who says she’s been waiting for Curtis’s mother’s lack of sympathy toward her BURNING THE NIGHT ’S NARRATOR, CURTIS, IS his call. She introduces him to fancy restaurants sister-i n-l aw becomes understandable as Curtis something of an odd duck: shy, thin, artistic, and music and nurtures his inner aesthete. In learns more. But while these incidents add bookish, and very repressed. A childhood trip return, she asks him to read to her from a jour- drama, Huser is guilty of not allowing his nar- to the dentist in Edmonton — Curtis’s small nal Phillip kept during the last year of his life. rator to reveal what he knows when he knows town is distant and dentist-l ess — proves life Curtis becomes increasingly enthralled with it. Readers are kept guessing over what caused changing when his mother takes him for an his alluring aunt and her lost love. (A photo Harriet to lose her sight, for instance. There is impromptu visit to his aunt Harriet’s house. reveals that Phillip was extraordinarily hand- not the pleasant suspense of piecing together the Harriet is blind, sophisticated, and more inter- some.) When Harriet passes away, her nephew puzzle within the narrative flow. esting than the rest of Curtis’s family combined. inherits scraps of Phillip’s drawings, and soon Questions remain over why Curtis is so con- She married his uncle Hartley, and together they Curtis’s own sketches come to mimic them. sumed by the lives of these two people, and raised her illegitimate son, Phip, after the death He keeps a copy of the journal, which he now whether he has any form of sex life, or any of Phillip, who was the boy’s father and the love knows almost by heart, falling deeper under life, for that matter, outside of them. He is an of Harriet’s life. the spell of the young man’s writings. Curtis enigma, yet one who is not fully realized. I am For someone like Curtis, growing up in the obsesses over two pages that have been cut brought back to my elementary school days, ’50s, gay but unaware of what that means other out — pages that relate to a period when Phillip where Curtis joins the likes of the beautiful than that he’s not like his brother, the revelation went to study art in Toronto, and the time Dorian, the Brideshead fellows, and all those that there is a world more aligned with his sens- shortly before his death, in December 1917, when other characters I couldn’t quite fathom. ibilities hits him like a lightning bolt. Glen Huser he was reunited with Harriet. ◆ won a Governor General’s Award in 2003 for his The journal, like Charles’s diary in Alan WHILE BOOKS WITH GAY CONTENT SHOULDN’T BE children’s book Stitches, and in Burning the Night, Hollinghurst’s The Swimming- Pool Library, is lumped into a ghetto genre, The Family Way he shows a gift for making experiences, even a pervasive presence, especially the missing and Burning the Night take their place beside those not intrinsically glamorous, as visceral and pages, which Curtis suspects tell of a dalliance those influential titles of my past, even with magical as they would have been for Curtis. “It with Radcliffe Malthus, a notorious gay pho- their references to the AIDS crisis and same-sex was crazy for a blind woman to have a picture tographer. Curtis goes so far as to hunt down couples starting families, which were unknown of a naked lady on her wall,” he says in awe. The Malthus’s former secretary, who has what Curtis topics at the time. Neither novel aspires to give walls of Curtis’s own home are adorned with is looking for: nude studio portraits of Phillip. the sweeping perspective of gay life that authors nature scenes of grizzlies and elk, his mother’s “I feel like I’ve been travelling back in time like Alan Hollinghurst do so well. But for read- plaster-o f- Paris plaques of geese, and gilt-r immed and the tour stopped at a point of interest, you ers of my generation, in particular, they offer prints of Jesus as a shepherd. Curtis had only know,” Curtis says. “Only the point is Phillip, a look back to previous, difficult times, which ever seen such “unclad figures” in encyclopedias beautiful and vulnerable and so alive somehow, are easily forgotten in our apparently more or the art history section of the Yarrow Public with only the air of the conservatory between tolerant present. BACKSTORY

Green Eggs and Glam

N ITS CELEBRATION OF IMAGINATION, would take the average citizen to determine that Dr. Seuss’s first book, And to Think That I Professor Mohr’s little monograph was a schol- Saw It on Mulberry Street, from 1937, was arly effort rather than a masturbatory aid. Berton more important to my development as answered, “Thirty seconds.” The attorney then a writer than my parents. So the recent asked, “And how long do you think it would Inews flash that it had been cancelled — pulled take the average Canada Customs agent to fig- out of print by its own publisher — spun my ure this out?” Berton’s answer: “Thirty minutes.” mind back to the time the government of The judge had to call for order in the court! And Canada cancelled me. although Berton’s witty testimony made a splash In April 1993, my first book with Beacon in newspapers, it nearly proved fatal. Press, the Unitarian Universalist non- profit When, six years on, the case finally reached that had published James Baldwin and the the Supreme Court of Canada, liberals were Pentagon Papers, was seized by Canada Customs hoping that it would serve as the vehicle to as being in violation of federal obscenity laws. overturn the Butler decision, from 1992. In that The obscenity in question appeared in “Knights, case, the court had upheld bans on pornography, Young Men, Boys,” a chapter that I titled after the reasoning that porn is violence against women supernumeraries of Wagner’s Parsifal. Roughly because it views women as degraded. That is, halfway through the book, the chapter is illus- pornography can be banned because it expresses trated with thirty-s ix images of knights, young an incorrect political view. In 1986, this line of men, and boys. There are two photos from the reasoning had been laughed out of the courts in 1951 Bayreuth staging of the opera, for example, the United States — without even reaching the and several portraits from Robert Mapplethorpe’s Supreme Court in Washington. Why? Because in X Portfolio, plus works by Tom of Finland, Rex, a deliberative democracy, the most obvious vio- Lynn Davis, Man Ray, Duncan Grant, George lations of rights to free speech are those that gag Bellows, and George Luks. As the Library Journal someone because of his or her political expres- put it at the time, this mix supported “the thesis sion. At least that’s how it should be. that homosexuality offers society an ideal model Well, on this score, Canadian liberals failed for the principle of equality.” miserably — not one justice favoured over- After Oxford University Press welshed on its turning Butler, which remains the substantive law contractual arrangement with Beacon to distrib- of the land. But my book did win its case on a ute my book north of the border, one of its four technicality — an important one. The court ruled Canadian book reps resigned in protest (I felt that customs officials had to be made smarter: horrible), and a Vancouver LGBTQ bookstore, their thirty minutes of indecision had to drop Little Sister’s, heroically tried to import the thing down to the thirty seconds of the common per- directly. But Canada Customs would have none son. More specifically, the court shifted burdens of it. Yes, my manuscript had been rejected by of proof. Before the ruling, a book had to prove nine university presses and twenty- three printers that it was not obscene before being allowed to before finding a distributor, but this was the first cross the border; after, customs had to prove that time a government had gotten in the way. something was indecent before seizing it. And The case against my book dragged through the this procedural reversal, as a practical matter, gut- courts for seven years. In the autumn of 1994, a ted Butler. Certain “extreme” materials are still bench trial in Vancouver had the carnivalesque occasionally stopped at the border, but there air of obscenity trials past. Pierre Berton was have been no significant prosecutions for adult the expert witness on behalf of my pages, and porn in Canada since my book’s uncancelling in he brought down the house. An attorney asked 2000 helped save from its better angels a country this pillar of Canadiana how long he thought it that means a great deal to me.

Richard D. Mohr is the author of Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies.

32 LITERARY REVIEW OF CANADA NEW SPRING

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