G: Stan Persky asks why isn’t Anne Michaels included in Hooked on Canadian Books: The Good, the Better and the Best Canadian Novels since 1984?    Care to answer?

T: Michaels is a poet and her prose works, Fugitive Pieces (1996) and The Winter Vault (2009), aren’t novels.  Not in my books. What are they then?  I’d say propaganda – misleading publicity, deceptive information, distorted educational tracts.

G: That’s harsh.

T: Michaels might not think so: she might, in fact, take it as a back-handed compliment.  While much is made of her aesthetic kinship with Michael Ondaatje, too little is made (in this country) of her enduring friendship and literary collaboration with John Berger, who pronounced as early as 1956 (and has never retracted) a self-definition that remains as true of his works now as it was then: “I am a political propagandist … But my heart and eye have remained those of a painter.”  The Winter Vault tracks the impact massive river-centered engineering projects (the Saint Lawrence Seaway, the Aswan Dam) can have on the physical environment, on communities, on individuals in ways analogous to the ways Fugitive Pieces tracks the eugenics-centered human engineering of the Holocaust.  Her heart and eye may or may not be those of a painterly poet but these are definitely – some might say defiantly – works advocating certain political possibilities. In a recent interview with Quill & Quire (April 2009), Michaels said, “I don’t think political ideas, philosophical ideas really enter you until they enter you with feeling…. Fiction and poetry give us a way to think deeply and feel deeply about certain things that, if we met them in real life, would be chaotic. They allow us the space and time to contemplate right actions.”

Her writing, she says in the same interview, is a way of reminding readers that adaptations to changing circumstances are also acts of complicity. “I don’t stand above as a teacher. I am in complete solidarity with the reader. If anything, there is a pedagogy of the heart.”

G:  A pedagogy on behalf of what?

T: It takes some digging to get to the emotional arithmetic that sums up what she’s doing. Reviewing the newer of the two works on May 21, 2009 for The New York Times – the very fountainhead of received opinion – Jess Row admits that the term “lyric fiction” bestowed on  Michaels’s and Ondaatje’s  shared technique is “an absurd term” but can’t find a better one for their work as “archivists and re-enactors who use poetic immediacy to make the past present — not as an orderly narrative but as a series of fragments or snapshots linked by a kind of dream logic, a hallucination that is neither entirely past nor present.”   Row (as apologist for this “school” of writing which he describes as “something of an institution”  due to “the extraordinary success of  Ondaatje’s The English Patient” which preceded Fugitive Pieces by four years) sees antecedents in Virginia Woolf, Malcolm Lowry, Paul Bowles and John Berger and successors in numerous younger writers, notably Nadeem Aslam (Wasted Vigil, 2008).  Row admits that their technical innovations in fusing “the practice of the lyric poem — density of language, intense sensory observation, a willed suspension of time — with the novelist’s brick-by-brick construction of drama in time, and, more important, in history” causes all sorts of problems: specifically, thinning of narrative, self-consciousness of artistry, wispiness of dialogue, excessive thinking out loud by characters.  But none of this is seen as fatal because – o miracle of versification! – their “vaporous” (Row’s term) or “vacuumed” (my term) pages are more than outweighed by a “concentration on historical facts” that literally “stops time” in a way that leaves readers with sequences of indelible images.  I suppose that’s her pedagogy.  .

G: Wait a minute. Where does this “concentration on historical facts” come from? Ondaatje bases The English Patient on a Hungarian fascist who was a.) homosexual and b.) died in the 1950s. Isn’t the point that “historical facts” in these works are like furniture pieces, to be moved around and altered to achieve aesthetic/poetic effect?

T:  Have you ever tried watching the film version of The English Patient sitting alongside a military historian?   Whatever the costumers and prop people were doing, they weren’t concentrating on historical detail – officers wear insignia that doesn’t match their ranks,  American GIs wear Russian helmets,  wartime American flags have fifty stars, trucks have post-war radial tyres,  German paratroopers configure equipment in the British manner and land several months earlier than they actually did, marketplace Egyptians wear Tunisian burnooses, cars in Egypt have 1980s registration plates, a soldier wears a Sunderland football scarf from the 1970s.  So he told me and what I checked out, checks out.  When I went to see the film with my historian friend, it was lapses in continuity more than the anachronisms that  deflected my attention from the romance or adventure or whatever: nobody on the set of The English Patient was concentrating on the basics of realistic film making – the amount of liquid in glasses increases between sips, bits of bomb disposal equipment disappear and reappear between shots, hair-dos change from one angle to another,  lightning flashes are too fast for a thunderstorm, the sun is in more than one place if  you watch the  shadows,  the music Hanna plays doesn’t correspond to the piano keys she’s depressing and on and on it goes ever more depressingly.  Or comically.  Okay, Ondaatje isn’t responsible for any of this but I’m cataloguing the mishaps with “furniture” in the film to underline a point about poetic “intuitions” trumping historical accuracy.  Can both actively co-exist in Ondaatje’s and Michaels’s “lyrical fiction”?

Ondaatje’s “English patient” is modelled, as you say, on László Ede Almásy de Zsadány et Törökszentmiklós who died  in Austria on  March 22, 1951 of amoebic dysentery.  He was more than a garden variety Hungarian fascist: Almásy was an officer in the German military intelligence service – the Abwehr – who delivered agents to Cairo for Rommel and was so effective that Rommel promoted him to Major for his success in breaching Allied security and awarded him an Iron Cross for further undercover successes in Libya.  At the end of the North African Campaign, Almásy went to Turkey –not Italy – where he plotted revolution in Egypt to slow the Allied advance on Berlin.  When that failed, he scooted to Budapest where he did a noble thing and helped save some Jewish families from the concentration camps while working hand-in-hand with Catholic Church authorities.  Arrested by Soviet counter-intelligence, he was tried for treason but “escaped” when a member of King Farouk’s family bribed his captors.  With the help of MI6, he returned to Egypt and resumed civilian life under Farouk’s protection.  Almásy’s sexual orientation was “closeted” until several years after The English Patient was published but his fascism wasn’t.  Ondaatje’s romanticizing of Almásy did have a real world consequence: in 1995, Hungarian patriots erected a new epigraph on his grave honouring him as Pilot, Sahara Explorer, and Discoverer of the Zerzuza Oasis.   Nice.  For some critics of Ondaatje, this is small potatoes: the rotten meat of his misbegotten mise en scene is uncovered when you ask the question, what would have happened to Almásy had he made his way to Italy rather than to Turkey and been there during the Italian campaign and its mop-up?   Refuge in Vatican City would have been the only thing to save him from shooting, hanging, or garrotting – no Allied combatant or non-combatant would have risked their own safety and security to assist him.

G: You say, “for some critics,” what about yourself?

T:  In my commentary in Hooked on Stephen Marche’s silly and self-serving critique of CanLit and, specifically, his claim that Margaret Atwood’s career “much like CanLit itself, has entered a Shavian twilight, where every book she produces takes away from her legacy”, I assert “Her talent remains robust; Michael Ondaatje is the only established author whose career has entered not a “Shavian twilight,” but the Klieg day-out-of-night of Planet Hollywood where every new novel sadly reduces his legacy.”   There are two good things to be said about The English Patient: one is left unsaid in my book and that is that its description of Kip’s training as a bomb disposal expert is as good as Ondaatje’s writing about working lives in In the Skin of a Lion ; the second, which I do mention,  is that it was this book that led Pico Iyer into a wonderfully clear-headed view about what he termed “New Canadian fiction”  in his essay in the June 2002 issue of Harper’s Magazine –writing that offers a kind of multiculturalism that can be “known only at the individual level, where people understand that it is only in the imagination that we can begin to penetrate the Other (or to allow the Other to penetrate us)”, a multiculturalism based on shared beliefs not shared roots and, especially, on the most universal of all shared beliefs, the belief that art transcends ideology and political identity.  This seemed to me worth quoting as an endorsement of Iyer’s article in general and the notice it pays in particular to the brilliant Madeleine Thien’s first book but it’s not an endorsement of Ondaatje’s novel.  You want endorsements of Canadian novels of WWII  — read me on Madeleine Thien’s Certainty,  Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Tiger’s Claw, Darcy Tamayose’s Odori.  The English Patient frankly disgusts me – it’s worse than simply a badly researched, badly written bad book.   But let’s start with the bad writing.   Here’s Nicholas Spice writing of The English Patient in The London Review of Books (24 September 1992):

For figurative language to succeed it must work at the level of ordinary meaning as well as at the level of allusion. Ondaatje’s images fail sometimes to achieve this balanced ambiguity. His imagery has about it something of the 17th-century Metaphysical conceit (‘There was that small indentation at her throat we called the Bosphorus. I would dive from her shoulder into the Bosphorus. Rest my eye there’) and it lays itself open to Johnson’s criticism of that kind of poetry: its wit though ‘new’ is not ‘natural’ and it is prone to produce ‘combinations of confused magnificence’. Some of Ondaatje’s combinations are more confused than magnificent. . . .  At other moments in The English Patient a fog descends: ‘Cold nights in the desert. He plucked a thread from the horde of nights and put it into his mouth like food.’

I’m quoting Spice because despite the figurative language that he sees doesn’t work, he’s  an admirer of The English Patient. He likes it a lot for being a very male book, a book about different ways of being a man, different ways of being Ondaatje. Looked at this way, it becomes understandable that the bluff, earthy, blunt-spoken Caravaggio should be the character that Ondaatje has most difficulty filling out: for I guess that this is how Ondaatje sees himself. Meanwhile, the mercurial Kip can be seen as the man Ondaatje would have liked to have been, and he is created with all the love and detail with which a man creates his ideal self. As for Almasy, the man of no or any identity, the brilliant foreigner who sponges up English values and English literariness, I see him as the writer in Ondaatje, his creative intelligence. So Ondaatje’s deep ambivalence about Almasy is scarcely surprising. For Ondaatje’s voice is Almasy’s, Almasy’s style Ondaatje’s, a style which at best generates things of real beauty, at worst creates effects of trompe-l’oeil which make us suspect that there is less to what we read than meets the eye.

Actually, there’s more to The English Patient than first met Spice’s eye. My gut reaction on first reading it was more visceral – a gag reflex to incipient vomiting.  That’s not exaggerating.   If I approached the book gingerly as Stan Persky asserts, it has little to do with deference and everything to do with my ambivalence about the things that  disgust me. In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker sums up our reasoning processes in this way:  we think and react according to multiple operating systems and each one is appropriate to only one part of the active intelligence surrounding our own.  The ones modules or components that cause us the greatest difficulty whenever we attempt to integrate our own intelligence with the communal are the three where it’s extremely difficult to judge where cognition is short-circuited by emotion – the system that assesses danger based on fear, the system that assesses contamination based on disgust, and the moral sense.  I don’t want fear, disgust, or any emotionally-compromised moral sense getting the better of my understanding of how things are and how they might be ameliorated: it’s so easy, so all too human, to be so disgusted by stupidity, censoriousness, bullying, intimidation, Hitlerism, Stalinism and to feel so contaminated by them that you just close your eyes if you can’t run away. But if you have an even stronger visceral sympathy for the victims, where do you find the strength to turn that sympathy into action?  For me, humour, irony, fellowship with individuals (not crowds), uxoriousness, literature, and freedom of expression work in ways that organized religion and political partisanship don’t.   What disgusts me about The English Patient is its gross stupidity about the Italian Campaign in WWII and its many misrepresentations of what was humanly and politically possible in those circumstances and what wasn’t.   This isn’t the historian or literary critic in me speaking at this very moment – this is the son-in-law, nephew and friend of English, Canadian, and American warriors who survived the major battles and stayed on for the clean up operations: hence the troubling question – how clearly am I seeing what’s happening in the book when I keep thinking of what couldn’t possibly have happened at all outside the realm of authorial whimsy.   I’ve heard too many stories of what happened to the Allied armies seriously wounded because of a lack of medical facilities.  It’s no exaggeration to say that not one Canadian nurse could have been spared to nurse anyone whose identity was in doubt: Ondaatje’s English patient would have been turned over to the Military Police long before he’d gotten as far as the villa.   Let’s get back to Michaels while I try to stop remembering the worst of the war stories I know.

G: What is your problem with her?

T: Her images – strong as they sometimes are – don’t do anything to create the texture of lived experience because the wispiness of dialogue and excess of thinking out loud allows readers to see whatever it is they want to see and remember whatever it is they want to remember.  In The Winter Vault Michaels re-views the opening of the seaway between Montreal and Lake Ontario (1959) and the damming of the Nile at Aswan in Egypt (1970) as the swallowing of two tradition-bound ways of living alongside rivers.  It’s the same kind of book that – as Brian Dillon writes of Ondaatje’s Divisadero in The London Review of Books (13 December 2007) – makes you wonder what some people are after when they open a novel. Vapid nostrums dressed as timeless wisdom? Pretty vignettes from a simpler life? Flowery assurance that this simpler life conceals, would you believe it, a seam of tragedy? Cooking tips? Whatever it is, it is all there, and they are welcome to it. Ondaatje takes some of the techniques that we might value most in fiction – the formal refutation of strict chronology; the elaboration of character as little more than a rumour or a scattering of particles; a narrator’s capacious sense of literary and intellectual history – and drains them of all energy, wit, mystery and real ambition.

That’s what I mean by Michaels’s writing as vacuuming.

G:  And that’s the secret of its success?

T: To figure out why this kind of thing succeeds in the way it does with some readers (and not with me and my kind) takes more intellectual rigour than most of us have to spare for such flaccid stuff. It demands, for instance, a rereading of Arthur Symons’s prescient essay The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), the polemic that forever altered T.S. Eliot’s literary sensibilities and those of every poet that draws positive reinforcement for “creativity” from Eliot’s procedure – “surrender, then contemplate, then do something about it” as Frank Kermode so succinctly put it in a recent essay.  Symons was on the side of Thomas Hardy in his 1891 critique of Zola:

What cannot be discerned by eye and ear, what may be apprehended only by the mental tactility that comes from a sympathetic appreciativeness of life in all its manifestations, this is the gift which renders its possessor a more accurate delineator of human nature than many another with twice his powers and means of external observation, but without that sympathy.

In Symon’s tract, artistic sympathy is systematized: it is the function of the artist to liberate symbols – realities more real than socio-economic conditions, historical circumstances, whatever – by reversing allocations of space (Mrs. Dalloway’s death is literally a parenthesis in Virginia Woolf’s novel), by abandoning sequential logic in exposition, by dwelling in intimate details (Swann’s languid 1500 word depiction of his first kiss of Odette).  Originality of outlook, stylishness, the soulfulness of the writer become the measure of the thing made. Convictions replace argument, celebration replaces characterization.  Nothing needs to happen and less is the measure of more.

G: Can you be more specific?

T:  Michaels begins The Winter Vault: “Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone.”  Note the initial “Perhaps.”   We did or we didn’t and there’s no “perhaps” about it: there’s an argument to be made from the philological root of the Bible’s “Adam” (not simply earth as far too many commentators allege but red earth) for coating skin with ochre being as ancient a human practice as vocalizing the sounds of birds (but a far more retrograde one since ochre is a lead oxide that creates devolutions in neurological processes).  But that’s not what interests Michaels – meditation as sign of soulfulness is her game.  And she can be as syntactically daft at it as Ondaatje who inadvertently raised the question “Can a penis sleep like a sea horse?” on the first page of The English Patient : “She has nursed him for months and she knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse…” Does a penis sleep?  If it does, can it assume the shape of a sea horse?  A poet friend whose favourite post-coital relaxation is watching his male lovers sleep in the nude says “no” to the first and “yes” to the second but even if he’s wrong and a penis does sleep and can assume such a shape, it is blatant nonsense to assert on a factual level that a penis sleeps like a sea horse given how little observed the slumbering habits of sea horses are and our general inability to adequately understand sleep mechanisms in any and all life forms.

G: But that’s obviously not what Ondaatje means.

T: Perhaps. Not. But it is what he has written.  The opening words of Hooked on Canadian Books: The Good, the Better and the Best Canadian Novels since 1984 are:

This book is written from one reader to another — to as many others as possible — in the hope that enough copies will be bought and circulated so that you who read privately and you who participate in reading clubs will find reader-friendly approaches to recent Canadian novels in English that expand the narratives of your own lives—yielding diversion, solace, perspective, comfort, counsel, and insight along your meanders from first paragraphs to last.

Is my meaning clear?  I am writing as one reader to other readers in what I take to be an expansive way.  I am, as I write at the end of the next paragraph, “first, last, and always a reader of contemporary fiction—especially Canadian novels.”   As this kind of reader, I take several kinds of pleasure in writing that is simply good and other, more complex pleasures in writing that is better, and find the greatest of pleasures I know as a reader on the rare occasions when I read the best novels in contemporary Canadian fiction and am enthused by their connectedness to great novelists of the past.   It wasn’t my purpose in this book to write extensively of what is ambiguous, inadequate, and just plain bad novel-writing.  My purpose is to draw readers to different kinds of conversations about familiar and unfamiliar books.  Should I have feigned a larger ambition?  Should I have added “Volume 1” to the title, suggesting succeeding volumes in which I might possibly take up the works of novelists not included here – novels by writers better known for their short stories or poetry or plays or generic mysteries or fantasies or graphics or non-fiction works?   Would a simple “Volume 1” have focussed the attention of reviewers on the book I actually wrote rather than on whichever one they wish I’d written?

G: What is it that they want from you that you don’t deliver?

T: Nastiness as adjunct to critical perceptiveness!  As a book reviewer for a national newpaper, my brief is to engage readers with the works I choose to write about for them.  Criticism is, for me, an act of exclusion in the first instance.  I simply will no longer write about that which is not of compelling interest: once I did, now I don’t.    Hooked on Canadian Books started from the same premise but is fuelled by a certain dread – I drafted it in the twenty-three months between a series of seizures and strokes and the craniotomy that we now have reason to believe will prevent more seizures, more strokes, more cognitive deficits – and a greater joy:  if it doesn’t sing on-key at least a little of D.H. Lawrence’s “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through” it isn’t doing what I designed it to do.  And that is to answer the knocking in the night that brings hope not harm:

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine, wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Let them come in.

G: Anne Michaels’s prose works aren’t singled out for non-admission:  Stan Persky notes in his “Curb Your Enthusiasm, Eh” post on this site that your book “doesn’t mention Jane Rule, William Gibson, George Bowering, or the urban crime writers William Deverell and Lawrence Gough, but that’s not because he’s trying to tell us something about what he doesn’t like, it’s just that he’s somewhat weak, in this case, on West Coast writers.”

T: Actually, I am saying something about what I don’t like in the cases of Gough, Bowering and Gibson. I do state clearly and very early on that in my childhood “Mind and heart sped towards Dickens and Dumas, Cervantes and Stevenson, Fennimore Cooper and Twain, Conan Doyle and Kipling and veered sharply away from Lewis Carroll, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Jack London. The child was the father of the man—the world of everyday people and plausible adventures are so richly rewarding that speculative fiction and animal stories then held and now hold minimal appeal.”  I ought to have included J.M. Barrie alongside Jules Verne and interjected “whimsy” between “speculative fiction and animal stories” to be more explicit about Bowering’s omission.  Bowering is whimsical in the way Thomas Pynchon is, isn’t he?  It’s a much shorter distance between Peter Pan and Pynchon than is generally admitted among academics.   Should I have included Jane Rule?  Weren’t all her notable novels completed prior to 1984?  I’ll concede that in the case of her two final books, I am weak on this particular west coast writer.  Including her would have provided a glorious pretext, at least, for relating one of my favourite moments in Canadian literary life – Jane’s declaration at an AGM of The Writers’ Union of Canada that she was retiring from writing because she had nothing more to say and Pierre Berton’s loud and shocked “No! Writers don’t retire.  They die first.”  Wouldn’t our collective literary life be better off with more retirements and fewer writers working on past their “best buy” dates?  I deeply admire Brian Fawcett for retiring as a poet when he did.  I admire him even more for turning his attention to the writing he’s done since then.  I admire him most of all for getting better with every book he writes: in his most recent, Robin Blaser (2010), co-written with Persky, Fawcett writes inter alia of “at least eight important things about writing and living I likely wouldn’t have learned otherwise, and which I’ve permanently adopted and adapted.”  Here’s the first – in full:

I learned that real thinking and writing is more about orchestration of materials than creativity. Your task, whether as a poet or novelist or scholar or union researcher or urban planner, is to integrate your own intelligence with the active intelligence around you to enhance articulation.  You are not here to impose your signature on a set of materials, raw or cooked, human or inanimate.  You are here to discover both their essential and detailed truth, and to put them into action politically and personally.

I didn’t have the luck to study poetry with a living poet or the novel with a living novelist.  What I learned, I learned from the books they wrote and I learned this particular lesson best and with the greatest whump in the gut by reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life.  Virginia Woolf called it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”  She’s right.  Martin Amis has called it “the greatest novel in the English language.” He’s right.

G: Why?

T: The active intelligence around her into which she inserts her own intelligence was debating the status of women, the nature of marriage, the public conflicts between ideals and self-interest, the tendency of religion to collapse into hypocrisy, the need for political and educational reforms.  Through the voices of her large cast of realistic characters, we’re made aware of the issues of the day – the Great Reform Bill, the infancy of the railway system,  the death of George IV, medical practice and malpractice – around which the greater debates swirl.   The genius of the book is that Eliot not only “enhances articulation” but discovers and uncovers the “essential and detailed truth” of how a reactionary mindset within a settled community faces unwelcome changes. Read Middlemarch. Read The Winter Vault.  Compare. Contrast. “The novel can do anything.” Henry James says.  Eliot’s does everything.  By imposing her signature on a similar set of materials, Michaels doesn’t do even the basic minimum required in novel-writing.   I’m no longer analytical enough in my approach to “theory” and its practitioners to be able to adumbrate what Michaels has learned from  Berger and Berger has acquired from  Frederick Antal, Ernst Fischer and Walter Benjamin to provide any well-argued refutation of  Berger’s (and Michaels’s) claim that they have managed to reconcile a theory of socially determined art with a theory of original, autonomous, symbol-centric individual genius that is both philosophically convincing and morally challenging. That’s why Anne Michaels is invisible to me as a novelist.

G: Anything else you want to say?

T: Stan Persky doesn’t accept my claim that John Harris’s Small Rain and Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock are novels.  I owe him and other readers more substantiation than my book provides. Even though Harris and Munro might claim that they’ve written books of interlinked stories, what they’ve written is wondrously novelistic in both cases if you think (as I obviously do) that Milan Kundera is a novelist.  Like Kundera, both Harris and Munro are loose-limbed and laid-back in the ways they go about interweaving fragile relationships with authorial asides on what it is to be in these worlds they inhabit literally and figuratively.  Like Kundera, their storytelling is disjointed, structurally as minimalist as they can make it, but effervescent and wise.  In The Art of the Novel, Kundera writes in his essay “Sixty-three Words”, “the real geniuses of the comic are not those who make us laugh hardest but those who reveal some unknown realm of the comic.  History has always been considered an exclusively serious territory.  But there is the undiscovered comic side to history. Just as there is the (hard-to-take) comic side to sexuality.”  Because Harris’s Small Rain, Munro’s The View from Castle Rock, Fawcett’s Gender Wars and Akenson’s An Irish History of Civilization all reveal unknown realms of the comic in trajectories that begin at their beginnings and end at their ends, they’re novels no matter how episodic they may or may not be to their authors.

.

4978 words  July 23, 2010

When I approach a book, particularly by an author I don’t know or haven’t read, I pay attention to the book jacket. I read the blurbs, and the publisher’s description of the contents.Books found in university libraries have usually been stripped of this information, and thus an element of their personality. A book has lost part of its history when it gets a generic cover. Of course, I know this is done to preserve, etc., but it does mean something is missing.

From Frank Davey: “In the 1975 installment you ask (not rhetorically, I assume) “How can one juror or one jury decide to change the perimeters of the prize? ” One way one juror can manipulate the outcome is by simply being underhanded. In the 1980s Judith Fitzgerald, Barry Callaghan, and I were the poetry jury for the National Magazine Awards. We were asked not to consult with one another, but rather to read each of the roughly 70 poems submitted and independently assign each one a number on a scale from 1 to 100. The NMA staff would tally the numbers and declare a winner. When the results were announced, Judith and I were both puzzled because a poem each of us had rated somewhat low was the winner. So we contacted one another to try to figure out what had happened. That made us even more puzzled, because what we found was (a) that we had both followed the NMA’s's instructions dutifully, and (b) that we had both given a Robert Kroetsch poem our high score of 100. Judith then contacted the NMA, and was told that Callaghan had given a ranking of zero to every poem except his #1 choice, to which he had given 100. I think the NMA should have disqualified such ‘judging,’ but it either was too surprised to act or didn’t have the nerve.

“I think that both Judith and I assigned numerical values to the poems as if we were grading essays — except that 100 was a possible top mark. So 50 would be a bare pass, 40 pretty dismal, 25 dismal, and 0-10 hopeless. 60 would be mediocre, 70 not bad, 80 good, 90 outstanding etc. So by “relatively low” I meant a C+ or so.”

Thus,  the Kroetsch poem scored 200 from two judges and 0 from the third for a total of 200. The poem that won would get 100 plus maybe 65 from each of the other two for a total of 230. So, one judge is able to nullify the other two.

I’ve heard similar stories from many other writers. On a Canada Council jury one judge gave all the grant nominees she wanted to get awards 10 out or 10, and all the others 1. The nominees she was supporting always got the grant effectively nullifying the other jurors.

What this underlines is the importance of the jury selection. It’s arduous. More often than not, it is unpaid. So, why do people do it?

I’m sure some senior writers do it with some sense of obligation, of paying back to the community. Others might see it as a feather in their cap. And, unfortunately, others take it on to throw their weight around (whether they have weight or not).

My partner, George Bowering, cares deeply about poetry. He keeps up with the journals, follows new publications and because he travels widely with readings and has for years, knows many people in the poetry world. He also taught for nearly 40 years and has been a dogged advocate for Canadian poets and poetry, both in English and French. But sometimes when the GG announces the short-list, and he looks at the list of jury members there are names he doesn’t recognize, names he’s never heard of or seen in print.

Here’s the announcement for the 2009 Booker jury members:

“The judging panel for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is announced today, 17 December 2008.  The line-up consists of Lucasta Miller, biographer and critic; Michael Prodger, Literary Editor of The Sunday Telegraph; John Mullan, academic, journalist and broadcaster and Sue Perkins, comedian and broadcaster. James Naughtie, one of the country’s best-known broadcasters, was announced as Chair of the Judges in November.”

Not a single writer in the bunch. Interesting, eh?

I received an email recently from a writer who has been on juries for both national and international prizes. We were musing about the psychology of prize juries and if there is a difference at the national and international level: “International versus national. Yes, very different I believe. At the national level, I’m of the view that the prevailing literary hierarchies are of great importance. The prizes function as a systemic part of the whole literary ordering. This works in tacit and explicit ways. In other words, while some jurors may work the levers without apology, others merely enact and reinforce the hierarchy through their at-times unconscious allegiances and loyalties. You could think of these prizes as a moderated esteem distribution system, the working parts of which (jurors, invited guests) don’t necessarily see the role they are playing.”

Susan Musgrave says the publishing industry is training readers to look for prize stickers. Susan suggests an underground sticker movement. Writers would sneak into bookstores and put stickers on their own books. “WINNER; Writer’s Choice Award.”

1976 Jury:

Walter Allan, literary critic and novelist, also worked in journalism, being at one time literary editor of the New Statesman. Mary Wilson, wife of the prime minister, and not a novel reader—see the note from The Guardian below. Francis King, novelist, short story writer and poet.
The 1976 ShortList

Andre Brink: An Instant in the Wind, W H Allen; R C Hutchinson: Rising, Michael Joseph; Brian Moore: The Doctor’s Wife, Cape; Julian Rathbone: King Fisher Lives, Michael Joseph; David Storey: Saville, Cape; William Trevor: The Children of Dynmouth, Bodley Head

R. C. Hutchinson—Rising VPL

The blurb on the front cover, “R. C. Hutchinson is a born novelist…a real creative writer, and we must cherish him.” J. B.. Priestly. On the back, “R. C. Hutchinson will be read fifty—perhaps a hundred—years hence.” C. S. Lewis. Well, I’ve read lots of Priestly and Lewis but this is my first Hutchinson.

Hutchinson was a best-selling novelist, first book published in 1930. He had a lengthy career in the military and often used his experiences and his travels in his fiction. This novel is set in South America. It’s meandering and arduous, as we slug through complicated family relationships, juggles, and mines.

The writing goes over the top on a regular basis. “When the voice of a hermit finch broke out like a practiced soloist’s from the muted hubbub of the undergrowth he surmised that dawn could not be far away.”

Or, “The mist has been enfeebled by the maturing sun, it hung its flaming curtains which a fresh gust of wind abruptly pushed aside.”

The dust jacket says Hutchinson was writing the final pages on the day of his death, but this novel is clearly unfinished, “Objectless, he turned and wandered back towards where a home of sorts, a wife, a family, had once been constantly awaiting him…” Then a postscript, presumably by Hutchinson’s wife explaining the extensive notes he left for a large final chapter.

These are stock characters, and offensive by today’s standards. No zip. No Borges here. It seems right to assume that this book made the short-list as a tribute to Hutchinson’s career not on its merits. I won’t be searching out his other books. Actually, I didn’t quite finish this one, but then neither did he.

William Trevor—The Children of Dynmouth VPL

Timothy Gedge is the town nuisance, and consciously so. He has huge potential for evil (so do many of the other characters though they are more socially aware to avoid being so obvious). Even the local pastor can’t have any compassion for him. He wrecks havoc in many homes by telling people the truth. Well, sometimes it’s the truth and other times it is what Timothy would like to be the truth.

The novel is better than the other one by Trevor on a previous short list but you could be in the middle of a Victorian novel—but then that is true of many of these books. Sigh. This one really falls apart in the highly romanticized ending where Trevor explains what has happened, and why. It’s sappy and unsatisfactory—and also suggests that the novel hasn’t done its job.

A guest report from George Bowering:

Julian Rathbone,–King Fisher Lives VPL

“Here is why I read this book. Jean and I went to Nuevo Vallarte for a week, and I had thought that three books would get me through, but I finished them before we got to the airport for the trip home. So she gave me Rathbone’s book for the plane. I think that she wanted to see my reaction to it. She said that I could borrow it (though of course she had borrowed it from the library) only if I wrote a report on it.

“What were the books I took with me, you ask. The first was Don’t Touch the Poet, Jersey City, 1998, by Lyman Gilmore. This is a biography of the US poet Joel Oppenheimer, by a faculty member of the small college in New Hampshire to which Oppenheimer had escaped from a life below 14^th Street in NYC. The writing is hardly professional or scholarly, being peppered with repetitions and errors. Lyman says, for example, that Margaret Randall left NYC and lived in New Mexico before going to Cuba. It was Mexico City, actually. Still, as a consumer of writing by and about the poets of the Allen anthology of 1960, I enjoyed the details of Oppenheimer’s life. I used to correspond with him back in the day.

“The second book was Strange Pilgrims, Toronto, Knopf, 1992, a group of twelve short stories by Gabriel García Marquez. This is only the third book by the Colombian “magic realist” that I have read. I picked it up for 50 cents at the Vancouver Public Library toss-out sale. The stories are various in length, point-of-view, and a lot of other things, but held together, or so the author hoped, by the fact that each is about a character who has come at some time in the past from the Caribbean to a European place such as Barcelona or Paris. In translation, at least, the stories of García Marquez are highly readable, and you find yourself racing through them. I should have brought a book by Michel Butor. But you know, I have to confess that I ate these stories up, they were so enjoyable. When I had finished the book I left it at the towel shack next to the pool, where some thick paperbacks by pop writers lay untouched. An hour later it was gone.

“The third book was Gary Snyder’s most recent book of talks and essays, Back on the Fire, Berkeley, 2007. Because many of the pieces in the collection were talks given to groups interested in ecology or Japan, there is quite a lot of repetition. For example, about eight times you find out that Snyder is now opposed to the forest service idea that all forest fires have to be fought against. In among the forest/mountain pieces you find stuff about other poets, such as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen and Ko Un. I liked these bits the best.

“Jean took six books down with her, I think. But she has to read a lot because she is assembling her famous Booker Report. I know, as I suggested, why she loaned me the Rathbone book. Normally, you have to bribe me to read a novel by an Englishman of the past half-century, unless it is John Berger or B.S. Johnson. But it was either this Rathbone or the Air Transat magazine for four and a half hours.

“Rathbone is, apparently, author of several exotic thrillers of the sort that the Brits have always liked, Mr. Midshipman Easy and all that. Romances in which some Brit of either sex goes to Tangiers or Bangladesh to risk all instead of growing old in stodgy Blighty. There is a chassis of that in this novel, but it looks as if Rathbone wanted to write something that the university crowd would accept without a plain brown wrapper.

“The title character is a American writer who comes to a Brit university as artist in residence, misbehaves in the sixties manner, produces a bare naked version of Timon of Athens, scoops up a local academic novelist’s half-sister, and becomes a naked caveman in a secluded Spanish valley. Along the way, Rathbone makes sure that we get the parallel to Timon as well as Lord of the Flies, and we think also of Heart of Darkness. Along the way we get homosexuality, incest, drugs, alcohol and cannibalism.

“This is apparently Rathbone’s regular fare, but here, as I said, he tries to dress it up with literary theory of the avant-garde, even having it spelled out in the second-to last section, when a Spanish professor in Unamuno country goes on about narrative and reality. One good feature of the book, and the likely reason for Jean’s lending it to me, is the multiplicity of approaches—we get questionable narratives from several sources, plus TV interview transcription, scholarly introductions, letters, journals, notes, lecture.

“So with the unreliability, can we accept what appear to be two problems with Rathbone’s offering? He seems to know little about the academic world: one scholar signs her name as a professor at “Milton University, Indiana,” while we know that she would supply the city, and she claims that her thesis is about the comparison of twentieth-century life and twentieth-century fiction. Oh, please!

“The other problem? Do you remember those British movies in which would appear an “American” character played by an English actor who only thinks that he has to get the accent right? The badly-behaved American writer here seems to this reader to resemble nothing more than a middle-class self-involved Brit trying to appear wild. He also refers to a two-week period as a “fortnight.”

That will teach him not to pack enough books. You’ll love the comments below from The Guardian regarding Mary Wilson and this novel.

Brian Moore-The Doctor’s Wife UBC

Sheila (the doctor’s wife) is married to the demanding and rather boring Kevin and takes off for a second honeymoon, by herself because Kevin doesn’t really want to go and takes a job at the last minute. A stopover in Paris with an old girlfriend allows her to meet the much younger American Tom who will become her passionate lover and ends up going with her to the honeymoon location. Tom wants her to go with him to the US. Kevin shows up to try and convince her to return home to Ireland—his argument technique; he rapes her. In the end she does not go with Tom and does not return home to hubby and her 15-year-son. It’s rather like a romance novel with a sour ending. Although much is often made of Moore’s understanding of women (most cited is Judith Hearne) I found the “understanding” pretty contrived. The novel does capture some of the stress and horror of living in Ulster in the mid-70s.

David Storey-Saville UBC WINNER

I read the first sentence of this hulking, fat novel, “Towards the end of the third decade of the present century a coal haulier’s cart, pulled by a large, dirt-grey horse, came into the narrow streets of the village of Saxton, a small mining community in the low hill-land of south Yorkshire,” and my heart dropped. It’s going to be one of those sweeping stories about the generation that didn’t want to go down the mine and only a matter of time until I’m told the colour of the stripes on the tea towel. Then I check my list and discovered it is the 1976 winner. Egad. Here I go, again.

I made a rule a while ago—I can give up on a short-listed book but I must read the winning books right through. What a dumb rule.

I’m about half way through. The main character Colin Saville is now about 11. I’ve sat with him through vicious attacks from the masters at his school. I’ve sat with him on the hour-long bus ride to school. I know a lot about the kind of food he eats, how big the tarts are, how much milk goes in the tea, but I know practically nothing about what he thinks about any of these things. It’s like an unopinonated omnipotent narrator. In D.H. Lawrence the loins of the characters are in constant turmoil, responding to this and that (speaking of loins, have you watched the YouTube smash hit, Jizzed in My Pants?). This book is almost completely the opposite. So far there is nothing remarkable, nothing that adds to the Victorian tradition to which this book belongs.

Somewhere around page 40 when Colin Saville is born the narrator starts to exclusively refer to Saville’s father as “his father” and to Saville as “he.” Far too often the “his” or “he” seems to refer to the male character just mentioned but actually refers to Saville.

Trudge, trudge, trudge.

Suddenly, or so it seems to me, on page 331, three quarters of the way through, Colin and his friend Stafford start talking about the Big issues in life; what’s it all about? Class issues. Civic rights. What comes after death? None of these issues are explored in much depth, just the wanton musings of young men. A few pages on and Colin is having similar conversations with his girlfriend Margaret but now the discussion includes women’s rights, independence, job equality and social and class responsibility. It’s like a flood after years of draught.

Colin, who we have watched grow up, but know little of what he thinks or feels starts talking. He’s an arrogant, rude jerk. And although we know in painstaking details the story of his growing up it doesn’t make this reader sympathetic.

This is territory that has been gone over again and again. I don’t see that Storey adds anything new. The book is devoid of humour or irony. The ending drags, as does much of the book.

Andre Brink-An Instant in the Wind—purchased abebooks

No library in BC owns a copy of this novel. I purchased it through abebooks.

Adam Mantoor, an escaped slave and Elisabeth Larsson, the abandoned wife of a Swedish traveller, find themselves together in the interior of the Cape of Good Hope. This might be my Literary Fairy Godmother playing me a nasty trick for mentioning that the Storey novel is almost devoid of knowledge of the inner workings of the characters. No so here. Page after page after page of inner turmoil, recollections, terrors, and so on. When Mantoor first sees Elisabeth, he thinks, “And there you’re standing with your shadow against the canvass. You’re not even aware of it, unless you despise me so much that you don’t care?—brushing your hair, moving your shoulders and arms. If you turn I can see the points of your taut nipples. You: the ultimate thou-shalt-not, the most untouchable of all, you: white, woman.”

Yup, it’s a bodice-ripper, and you know it’s just a matter of time, and scenery, until Adam and Elisabeth are lovers.

In 1976 South Africa this may have been a situation of heightened political incorrectness, and apparently the book was banned for a time. Perhaps politics drove the publication, too. It certainly isn’t the writing. It’s overblown and overwritten. “Purple prose” was the phrase I used to mark in the margins of first-year students.

Keep in mind as you read the following passage that the story (apparently based on real people) takes place in 1749. Elisabeth’s husband has wandered off into the bush and hasn’t been seen for days. She is alone and knows the escaped slave (of whom she is supposedly terrified and concerned he will rape her) is not far away. She has just gone for a swim:

“She has no desire to get dressed again; the day is still warm in the late sun. On the flat rock glowing with inner warmth she stretches out, her body pressed against the burning stone, cleansed and glistening wet, strangely moved, and moaning with urgent passion; turning on her back and tense, with knees drawn up, touching herself, caressing herself, opening, moistening, leaving, assuaging the violence of her need, swaying her head from side to side, bringing herself to ecstasy, hearing her own voice crying out, subsiding into silence with a final sob.”

I, too, feel like sobbing. I’m not sure which is worse—Brink’s condescending portrayal of the hormone-driven black man or his condescending portrayal of the libidinous white woman, unfulfilled by her white husband. This stuff would make Daphne du Maurier blush.

There is a sense of time passing, though we’re never sure whether it’s days or weeks or months. They spend several weeks in a village while Elisabeth recovers from a miscarriage. Several more weeks are spent following the river, trying to get to the sea. A raft is lost, all of Elisabeth’s possessions and one of the two oxen they had from the original expedition of Elisabeth’s husband. After some time, at least a couple of months, and 102 pages: “Now I’m sitting here on my own, trying to occupy myself. Today he has gone hunting. He left early in the morning. It is nearly five now and he still hasn’t returned. It’s almost like the day E. E. [those are her husband’s initials] disappeared. I mustn’t think of it, it will drive me mad. If only he returns before dark.”

It’s 1748. She’s in the wild interior of South Africa, has lost all her possessions except her husband’s journals (but that’s another story), and has been soaking wet for a great deal of the time. And there’s my problem. Time. How does she know it’s “nearly five”? Did she check her Rolex? The novel is full of such sloppiness.

“She thought: for all the others I’ve been no more than a woman, a game, a toy. You’re the first to whom I am a person. That is why I dare be a woman to you. And yet there’s something in me I cannot grasp and which I fear.”

The novel is a few notches up from a Harlequin, but only a few.

1976 Francis King-from The Guardian

“There is a vast difference of scale between the prize as I experienced it as a judge and how it is now. Then the prize money was far less generous, and the fee for the judging was an honorarium. There were only three judges: our chairman Walter Allen, an admirable novelist and critic, then confined to a wheelchair, so that I had to read out his presentation speech for him; Mary Wilson, the wife of the prime minister; and me. Despite his failing health, Allen was, unlike me, immensely conscientious in reading every submission from cover to cover. Mary Wilson, a lover of poetry and herself an artless but often touching poet, was at the disadvantage of having read few novels in the course of her life – so that she was clearly puzzled when I referred to one of the submissions as “Kafkaesque”.

“My sister Elizabeth looked through the piles of books awaiting my reading, and eventually held up David Storey’s Saville. With a colleague, John Guest, she had already put in a lot of robust work as one of its two editors. “This will be the winner,” she announced. It was, she explained, an epic about a north country mining community and was therefore exactly what would appeal to Allen, a lifetime socialist, and to the wife of a Labour PM. She was right. I battled for Julian Rathbone’s King Fisher Lives, to no avail. Mary Wilson was obdurate: “I couldn’t be party to giving the prize to a book about cannibalism.”

“For me far and away the best Booker winner in the whole history of the Prize is JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. The best of all the novels that ought to have won the Prize but failed to do so is Penelope Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Blue Flower.”

It is starting to seem that I should check out The Blue Flower. I guess I will add it as an extra if I ever get to 1995.

Had I been a judge for the 1976 Booker I would have declared No Winner. Maybe even No Short-list.

4096 words May 27, 2010

1.

In James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer the Indians run on moccasined feet through the deciduous New England forest. They run in all the Leather Stocking Tales, they never walk, and when my father read these tales to me when I was ten I imagined the moccasins the Indians ran in were socks, stockings being a literary word for this kind of clothing. The Leather Stocking Tales reminded my father, I think, of stories about Indians he had read as a boy, written by a man named Karl May, who is known to all Germans, and whose name is pronounced by them as a single word, Karlmay. And when I was ten I thought Fennmore was a funny second name and May (pronounced My) was a funny last name.

Why do Europeans write about Indians? One reason, I imagined back then (and still do) is that they (we) are awkward men. With names like Fenimore and Karlmay, this is no surprise. Grey Owl imagined so hard that he was an Indian that he believed himself and wrote books in the voice of the Indian he believed himself to be. Everyone else believed him. I believed him. I didn’t want him to be not an Indian, and when it was revealed that his real name was Archie Belany and he was an Englishman (an awkward kind of European) who lived with beavers and had an Iroquois girlfriend named Anahareo (did she know?) and that he had a stupid name like Archie, the awkward guy from the comic books, I was depressed.

I tried to be an Indian. I practiced walking through the forest on my moccasined (leather stockinged) feet without breaking a twig and making a sound, as James Fenimore Cooper advised.  I tracked animals and people by looking for bent or broken grass blades or overturned leaves. My father read James Fenimore Cooper books to me in German and I thought at first he was a German writer: Mokassins. I had my own, real, Mokassins, the kind you could buy in those days in West’s department store in Castlegar: they had a leather thong strung through the rim and tied into a bow in front, and when I walked in them through the bush I got the not-breaking-a-twig-part down but I never managed silent running. It was hard to run through the bush in the Kootenays in B.C. where we lived in the 1950s because there weren’t many paths, and there were steep slopes and rockfalls and cliffs and the forest was often densely-packed conifers. I’d heard that the eastern woods—they call them woods out there, not bush—were more like European broadleaf forests, the kind my father knew from his childhood, so it was easier for him to imagine running through them than it was for me. James Fenimore Cooper was of course a New Englander, but I didn’t stop thinking he was German until I looked more closely one day at the book’s dust jacket (the drawing on it showed the Indian, an Iroquois,  running on leather-stockinged feet through the bush/woods/forest) and saw the title, Lederstrumpf. I couldn’t yet read German, and I asked my father to repeat what the letters said. He did, and it sounded funny. My father said Lederstrumpf meant leatherstocking, which was maybe an American word, but not one I had heard before. I realized then that the book was a translation.

2.

Karl May was a German who never left Germany and his hero is a frontiersman named Old Shatterhand who has an iron right hand which he uses as a weapon. (The trope was picked up by Stanley Kubrick in the movie Dr. Strangelove, where Peter Sellers played the Ur Nazi). His Indian sidekick is called Winnitou. He’s an Apache. Winnitou captures well the German idea about Indians: they are like the wind, der Wind, and also like breath: they rush freely through the trees, and the wind in turn rushes through their—long—frontier hair, and they join body, place, name, mind, spirit and nature, and probably a bunch more things, into a timeless, well, let’s call it a Gestalt. My father didn’t read me the Winnitou stories; the books had gotten lost after the War, when American officers took over his family home and dumped the family belongings they couldn’t use out the window, but my father talked about the stories often and said they were one of the inspirations that brought him to Canada. When he read me the Leatherstocking stories, and the Indians in them spoke German, (as Karlmay had made his Indians do in the Winnitou stories) I got annoyed. I said Indians, even though they had their own original languages, should speak English in books: Ugh, How, Kemo Sabe, shoot bad white man etc. There’s no such thing as a German-speaking Indian, I told my father.

This anecdote might explain my discomfort: Before arriving in Canada in 1952 when I was just turning six I thought English and Indian were the same language. And I thought this language was a lot like German. In Germany I had been taught to say “How,” and told it meant “hello,” Guten Tag, by my Karlmay-reading relatives, and had learned to raise my right hand, palm forward, in the signal of peace and greeting common to non-literate peoples the world over. My relatives gave me a feather headdress—this was in the last months before we emigrated, when we were seriously studying Canadian customs—and they took a photo of me wearing it and standing at attention in my grandparents’ back yard with a wooden rifle leaned against my shoulder. I look very serious in this photo because I am trying hard to be an Indian and Canadian and a potential German immigrant. Indians, I knew, look dour and serious and have hawk noses. In bed at night I practiced the words “How,” and “I come in peace,” which was another piece of—translated—Karl May vocabulary my relatives imparted to me, and the word “yes,” which I had been told was the English/ Indian word for ja and jawohl.  These, I thought, were the basic English and Indian words you needed to know when you arrived in Canada.

When I did arrive in Canada and saw my first Canadian, his name was Paul, about my age, I walked out of our house to greet him—he was playing with his toy cars in a big pile of dirt; our neighbourhood was in a new section of Edmonton—and I said “How,” “Hello,” and “Yes.” Paul stopped moving his cars around and looked at me as if I were from space.  I said “How,” and “Yes,” again, and then I said, “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” and  “I come in peace.” I was still convinced, in that magical way in which six-year-olds are certain of things, that English/Indian was one language and was indeed basically like German. You just had to add those few English/Indian words, especially “yes” into your sentence and you were away. “How. Mein Name ist Norbert. Yes yes yes yes. How. I come in peace.” And you raise your right hand. Paul continued looking at me as if I were far away, and when I kept repeating, “How,”  “Yes, yes, yes, yes,”  “I come in peace”—I speeded up the “yes” repetitions, and put a little more umph behind them, in case Canadian children didn’t hear things the same way as German kids did—he got up, grabbed his cars and trucks, and bolted. He ran (not on leather-stockinged feet) to his house screaming “Mummy, mummy, mummy.” I hear his voice clearly in memory. I hear also the many times he ran away from me screaming mummy mummy as I tried, in subsequent months, to befriend Paul. I’d learn in this process, too, the word Gemehboy, which, as opposed to Old Shatterhand, became my first English moniker, given to me by Paul—as in “Mummy, mummy, Gemehboy steal my car, Gemehboy riding my bike, Gemehboy bad!” etc.

3.

Germans and Indians have been on my mind often since those days of first contact. Once, when I was on the Queen Charlotte Islands—Haida Gwaii, off the northwest coast of B.C.—doing research on this question, I was motoring with my hosts Diane and Dull Brown between Hotspring Island and House Island on their cabin cruiser, the Hai Yu—this was in Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, which had recently (1986) been inaugurated, following Haida protests against logging by transnational corporations in this, the Haida homelands—and we encountered, out there in the chop and the rain, a green canoe in which the shapes of two bedraggled, rain-drenched young white men gradually materialized. Diane, who is Haida (so is Dull: both had been involved in the anti-logging protests) said, “They must be crazy, out here in this weather in a canoe. We better stop and see how they are doing.” We pulled over and I said, without thinking, “I bet they are German.”

And indeed they were. Dull slowed the Hai Yu way down so as not to swamp the Germans with its wake, and we pulled alongside and started talking to them. I learned that they were two kids from Heidelberg. They spoke the eager English that German students of English speak when they encounter the Anglo Saxon world, English which for them, the children or, now, the grandchildren of  Karlmay readers—and children, more recently, of the American books, magazines, movies, TV shows, pop music, that saturated the post WW II German cultural marketplace and made English the omniscient linguistic signifier—and when I spoke German to them they responded with the delight Germans always show when you speak to them in the home language in a far-away place. Diane said we better give them some food—she had already cessed out that they didn’t have any, just as they didn’t have proper rain gear—and we gave them some rock scallops and abalone I had dived for off the Hai-Yu (under Diane and Dull’s supervision); and when Diane explained and I translated to them how you “fix” these traditional food items from the land, or in this case, the sea, the Germans were beside themselves with excitement about this authentic experience in a wilderness. When they paddled away their animated chatter in my—in our—language drifted back to me in the Gwaii Haanas mist and drizzle. Dull turned to me and said, “Your kinsmen sound happy.”

Kinsmen. Happy. The words startled me. I felt suddenly awkward. Were these crazy Germans my kin? Had I, even after all these years, not succeeded in becoming “Canadian”? Do awkward Europeans have kinsmen? When we recalled the encounter later Diane said, “It’s interesting when you were speaking German: it’s like when we speak Haida. There’s two languages going on up here.” Indeed. Yes. German and Haida. Two languages. Yes yes yes yes. Howa. Gemahboy had arrived somewhere. But where?  I fancied for a moment—and more often later in my stay in Haida Gwaii—that Diane and her family might have a soft spot for us Germans. It stemmed perhaps from our eager, naïve, even goofy way of speaking when we are in foreign places and experience first hand what we have read about in books; it stems from our greenhorn enthusiasm when we encounter our Idea of Nature and Eingeborenheit (that’s Aboriginality) in Real Life. We Germans, I thought, can be childlike when we are face-to-face with the Other, whether natural or human; this might be (when you’re German you start with a theory) because we historically had minimal experience of colonial face-to-face contact with the non-European world. We’ve got lots of stories and books; no history, though. We have Geschichte: stories; tales.

Our naive inventiveness has its dark side, of course. My friend Liliane from Egypt told me once the Germans’ mistake was that they—we—tried, in two wars, to colonize Europe, rather than the rest of the world. And I imagine the Haidas, like everyone else, balk at the German propensity to devise ontologies, worldviews, Anschauungs, Gestalts, Zeitgeists, etc., from the tiniest threads of factual evidence. But I did feel, at times—often—in Haida Gwaii that I was being hosted as a different kind of European invader than would a first-language English-speaking Anglo-Canadian. I had “two languages going on up here,” and I had, as do the Haida, God bless or curse me, yes, kin.

4.

The imaginary Indian is a trope in Euro-North American literary culture. Daniel Francis has written an excellent book by that name on the subject, and Anthony Wilden, in a quirky essay, extended the idea into his concept of The Imaginary Canadian. I’m happy, I discover, as a (German)-Canadian, that I live in a partly imaginary country (it’s sometimes described as “post-modern” or “in the process of becoming”).  It reminds me of home, Germany–which, from its very beginnings as Holy Roman Empire through to its implosion as Third Reich, has been an imaginary construct. I worked with Diane Brown on a writing and recording project which was to be a collaborative book on the relationship between imagination, language and place: the book part of the project bogged down, but our work became a CBC Radio Ideas program called “Walking-Around-Eating”—named after one of  Diane’s father Watson Pryce’s uncles, and given to us by Watson to use for our program—and I learned, in the making of it, that speaking, eating and paddling (and motoring in a cabin cruiser) can be related concepts, and that the act of naming someone—and also something, a place, say–works differently in Haida Gwaii than it does in the European parts of  Canada.  Being here is differently valenced, and you are in another, er, Weltanschauung. At its core is the idea of kin.

Some Europeans have been given names by Indians and in this way satisfied their yearning to acquire local worldview and authenticity. They acquire kin via this name. I played in—awkward—moments with the fantasy of this happening to me in Haida Gwaii, but—well, Norbert, got over it. I was also, most certainly, not “adopted into a tribe” as some white authors claim to have been, in this way dealing with the problem (popular at the time: late eighties) of “voice appropriation”—which accrued when white guys wrote about Indians. I did not imagine myself, even for a moment, certainly not with someone like Diane around, to be Haida, even of a faux variety.  No, the curious thing that happened in Haida Gwaii was that I became more German, more German than I was in my home city, Vancouver. I was clearly a visitor, but I had a home country. I was like Haidas in this way. I had language, culture, place, and I had, God help me again, kin. As did the people here.

5.

The above account is only partially true. I was given a name by Diane and her relatives, but it was an English, not a Haida name. The name had to do with a large black bear I encountered and swore at when he charged and chased me away from his/my pink salmon fishing hole on Pallant Creek on South Moresby Island, Gwaii Haanas, and I felt myself turning, as I ran away, anything but silently, on gumbooted, not leatherstockinged feet, breaking all the rules about how to comport yourself when charged by a black bear (you’re supposed to stay and “fight back”) into food. Luckily the swearing worked, or more probably the pinks, which the bear was free to fish for once I was shooed out of the way, were tastier fare than was the body of a German, and when I returned to Skidegate, Diane’s and her family’s village, and told the story and everyone laughed—that’s when I got my name, my Haida/English/German/Canadian/Immigrant name. Call me “Swears-At-Bears.”

Language, kin, irony. Cross-cultural mirth. What’s in a name? I had a friend in Vancouver who had a classic, upper-class hyphenated English name, and with this friend I had long debates about the relationships between race, color, speech, ethnicity and identity. He said that he, a “brown man” (his mother is South Asian, but the family’s from Britain) suffered, by definition, as a “person of colour,” more at the hands of Canadian racism, than did I, a white man with, albeit, a funny name and a dark national history. I said with a name like his and an accent like his (he talks Upper Canada College English) he could rule the world or at least its waves. He said, Yeah, so long as I’m on the phone: when I walk physically into the room the conversation stops. I said, When people see me and I’m silent, everything’s fine, but when people hear my name, and then ask me to spell that name, then declare it “unusual,” and then look at me in the manner Paul back in Edmonton pioneered, my stomach churns. I want to swear.  I admitted that this had happened more in my youth in the B.C. Interior, where my parents insisted I wear indestructible Lederhosen—you get the picture: Lederstrumpf; Lederhosen?–to school than it did today in the city, but I recalled that just recently a person had made me repeat my name three times and after I did so still addressed me as “Norman.” When, in our final conversation, my friend called me a typical arrogant German, kraut, white man, eurocentrist, etc. and I could not bring myself to call him a Limey, Tommy, Pom, let alone a dumb brown Hindu, I walked away, and our friendship seemed to collapse. I felt ashamed, lost, frightened.  He called after me that he had been goading me in jest, that I couldn’t take a joke, handle irony—the absence of a sense of humour being a typically German trait.

In Haida Gwaii, yes, I learned that name calling, a fundamental way of imagining the Other, goes differently there than it does in Old Europe and its teenaged colonies, and to try to illustrate this I’ll follow the above sad story with a—hopefully—funny one. I lived in Haida Gwaii with Diane’s father, Watson Pryce, who was an elder of the Eagle Clan and hereditary chief of Chaatl, a (now abandoned) Haida town on the West Coast of the Charlottes, out on Buck Channel, on Chaatl Island. Watson told me one day about a man he had worked with on the dozer boats for MacMillan-Bloedel, the major logging company from the sixties through to the eighties in the Charlottes. The dozer boats sort the logs in a boom and their noisy unmufflered engines made Watson partially deaf.  He referred to this man as “one of them down east Indians,” and when he spoke this phrase I burst out laughing. My first thought was, he’s speaking about one of my former friend’s—kinsmen. In Castlegar B.C., “East Indians” were those Indians who were from India, and who you learned about in school but never saw (no “East Indians” lived in the Kootenays in those days)  and you differentiated them from “our,” ie. Canadian Indians (of whom none lived in Castlegar anymore either—the teachers didn’t tell us where they had gone).  I thought next that Watson might also mean an “Indian” from eastern Canada, an Algonquin or a Huron or an Iroquois, Anahareo’s kinsmen, about whom we also learned in school, and who lived in what we called The East (where they ran around on leather stockinged feet). Or he could mean a Cree, or Ojibway, or a Blackfoot from the Prairies, this region being still down east as far as B.C.ers are concerned. My final, funny, thought in this sequence was that the Down East Indian was a White Man, an Ottawa DIA bureaucrat, say, who had come to try to live in a real place (“on the ground,” as the  media expresses the idea these days) rather than an office cubicle, and who, because he did everything haywire, turned into an Indian.

I didn’t ask Watson which kind of Indian he meant. In Haida Gwaii you respect elders and don’t ask questions. (You do this in Germany, too, but not always for the same reasons). Nor did I want to display my ignorance about what everybody else around here knew a down east Indian to be (and thereby of course, in due process, becoming one). Watson used the word “Indian” in many ways: there was an “Indian boat” (one that leaked and miraculously stayed afloat), there was an “Indian net” (one whose mesh had big holes but still netted a lot of fish, but let a lot get away, also, so they could spawn) and there was an “Indian suitcase,” which is a plastic garbage bag into which you stuff your clothes when you get on the plane to go off  Island, fly “down south” to Vancouver. Diane only used this last form of the word; in all other contexts she said, “we,” or, “people here,” or “people around here,” or “Haidas.”

6.

The word “tribalism,” which I’ll link up here with the idea of kin (anthropologists  Marshall Sahlins and Levis Strauss say kinship is the structural base of all tribal social arrangements) was being bandied about a lot when I was in my twenties and we were reading Marshall McLuhan, and it was reprised in the nineteen eighties and early nineties when the “Jihad versus McWorld” conversation was moving around the globe that had become a village.  The word was used in “New Age” spiritualist circles to denote the desire for “connection,” “ unity” “oneness,”  “om,” etc., (Gemeinschaft rather than Gesellschaft !) something approximating, people hoped, the experience of kinship in a consumerist world. It is still used in its dark sense to label the mindless religious fundamentalisms that are making an anti-consumerism comeback in formerly colonized Middle Eastern locations. The word was—and is—also used, by both Germans and non Germans, in a negative way, to label the enthusiasm, the spirit, the Geist, that fueled the nationalist/racist fervour with which Germans in the Thirties flocked to the Blut und Boden, blood and soil, philosophy espoused by the Nazi movement. The Pied Piper dreams and behaviours attendant upon all three branchiations of the term hark back, in turn then, to the Romantic movement in both England and Germany, where poets like Novalis, Tieck, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron experienced, in “nature,” a kind of religious unity and authenticity that Eighteenth Century rationalism had expelled from culture. This impulse finds its nineteenth century popular (some say Kitsch) cultural zenith, then, in the writings of, well, authors like Karl May, James Fennimore Cooper, and, let’s not fear to say it, Canada’s Grey Owl, who carried the flame into the 20^th century.

When Dull and Diane and I (my daughter, a kin, then seven, was with us also) met the Germans in the green canoe, such big historical thoughts, too, bobbed up and down in my mind out there in the chop. They were trying to explain my feelings of awkwardness on the one hand, desire for kinship on the other. Germans, when they meet in foreign climes, are, even as they are happy to see each other, also wary of each other. They play a hide and seek game. This has to do with the specific awkwardness that the German branch of the European branch of humanity got itself into. I’m talking about the black hole in history that Germany’s Nazi Pied Piper dream made manifest, and the shame and guilt it produced in the immediate post war generations. Germans often go abroad, even emigrate, in order to escape this shame/guilt complex. A stain.  Germans can be found, as people often remark, in the most distant corners of the earth, vis in green canoes here in Haida Gwaii. This results in part from the false, perhaps kitschy, in any event tricky romantic streak that led them to first follow and later try to escape the push and pull of the Nazi Pied Piper tune—to whose lyrics they or their parents did not pay proper attention. When Dull called the young Germans my kin, I winced: I was proud, and then ashamed: in which sense, I asked myself, is he using this word? In the good, holistic, “authentic,” tribal sense, or in the mindless (and evil-minded) sense in which Germans, Hitler’s “willing executioners,” Gemehboys, Krauts, Nazis, et al are easily stigmatized? I was proud to have kin, to be like the Haidas in that way; I was also afraid of having such kin, of being—not Haida, but Hun, way out there in the historical darkness, and right here, in a home and a native land.

I’m noting now, as I write this, that when I said, “I bet they are German” upon sighting my kinsmen—it turned out someone, a Haida, had lent them the green canoe when they arrived, all eager to explore South Moresby, and had not realized there were no roads there—I was slagging them in a way not dissimilar to my former down east Indian friend’s easy way of talking about stupid Germans. When Germans are found in the remotest corners of the exotic, post-colonial world it is “fun”—if you act Canadian, as I was attempting to do, by way of a localizing performance for Diane and Dull—to declare them crazy, obsessed, naïve, even stupid in this seemingly mild mannered, poke-in-the-ribs kind of way. It is also insulting. The boys in the canoe were a generation younger than me, less guilt-ridden, shame-infested, fearful, potentially passive-aggressive than we, the immediate post-war babies, are. They were genuinely enthusiastic about being where they were, and about meeting us, about meeting one of their “kin” out here in the world of the Indianer, a possibly truer world than the one at home, and certainly a world of adventure, not shame or guilt. In slagging them, I unwittingly slagged myself. Fear of “blood and belonging” drove me, as did deep desire to belong, even—let’s not go too far with this metaphor, but let’s go some distance—to taste blood: you eat your food fresh, often raw, in Haida Gwaii. Sometimes the blood’s still dripping. “You look your food in the eye,” goes the local saying.

7.

After my last conversation with my former friend I developed (being German) a theory. The theory was that the Germans, because they “started” two World Wars, invented Naziism, perpetrated the Holocaust, etc. are perhaps the last people on earth whom one can, with impunity, slag. It is not politically incorrect to label and make fun of Germans, nor does one generally pay a price for doing so. After all, they (we) did perpetrate the Holocaust, opened the black hole of European history. They (we) were willing executioners. (Were we?) We’re the benchmark, says my theory, for twentieth century Evil, perhaps for all Evil, Evil’s very definition. I recall to mind HannahArendt’s and Karl Jasper’s letter debate on this point. My theory is self-serving, of course, as most theories are and it doesn’t hold for long, but it does, at times, as they say in the media, have legs. It explains my former friend’s confidence that he could name/label me with impunity, and it explains my silent (lack of) response. And it explains my easy, secret, fear-and-desire-driven slur against my compatriots way up North there in Haida Gwaii.  My friend’s words had their intended effect, which was to rob me of a place from which to speak.  My quip about my kinsmen was an effort to rob them—and unwittingly myself—of dignity. I was back there in Edmonton playing Paul and Gemehboy. Playing Kraut, Nazi, Hitler or–Rhubarb, by the way, was my nickname in Castlegar: another sour vegetable.

8.

My German grandmother, a most influential kin, used to say Einmal Deutsch, immer Deutsch. Once a German, always a German. She meant this in a positive, not pejorative sense. She wasn’t a Nazi (as far as I know) and she said wars were made by men who were fools and wanted to control the world, which was something one couldn’t do. When I lived with her in 1965 she sang me a song from her early twentieth-century elementary school days called Der Kaiser ist ein Guter Mann: The Kaiser is a Good Man, and she said she yearned for those times when one had rulers who one could trust and there was order rather than madness in the world. My grandmother grew up in a smallish town where you spoke your local dialect at home and with each other, and you spoke high German to your teachers and to your priests. She didn’t travel further than a couple of hundred kilometers from that town until she flew to visit us in Vancouver in 1961. She learned one English phrase while there: Shöt ze dowa, shut the door, which was spoken to my younger sister’s friend Heather who came over and left the back door open, a habit which my grandmother, who lived without central heating for most of her life (and with no heating at all in the immediate post-war years) could not comprehend. My grandmother learned Heather’s name, which she pronounced Hedeh, and which sounded, when she said it, like Hede, the name of her daughter, my mother’s younger sister. My grandmother was convinced until the end of her life that my parents’ decision to emigrate to Canada had been the biggest mistake of their lives, that my father would have had a better career as a doctor if he had stayed in Germany, and that my parents would never have divorced (like Americans) if they had stayed in their own country and not started speaking so much English. She thought Indians were people who lived in books (or maybe in India) and that men who read too many of these books deserved whatever misfortune befell them.

When I think about Germans and Indians now I sometimes think about this: I know a man who lives in Princeton B.C. (I began writing this essay there/here) and who was a German prisoner of war in Russia from 1945 until 1948. He was forcibly inducted into the Nazi war machine right out of high school in 1944 and sent to the Russian front. The Russians captured him one year later, forty kilometers from Zwickau, his home town in Saxony, the point to which their invasion had by then advanced, and he was transported to a prisoner-of-war camp four hundred kilometers east of Moscow, in Siberia. He will not tell me about life in the camp, albeit, he does give one account—of how they, the prisoners, all teenage boys, were so hungry that to survive they told each other stories about food. Fantastic stories about three and four course meals, lavish feasts, were accounted and recounted in detail, food item by food item. Then, when the stories got out of hand, and the vacuums in their bellies reminded the boys of where they were, they sometimes had to jump on the story-teller and forcibly silence him because if he went on they would have to kill him for telling a story that had not an iota of potential truth.

My friend told me some things about the return trip from Siberia: they put the teenage prisoners in boxcars along with some cattle and they dropped them at the Polish border where they were allowed to wash. Then the boys were put on a Polish train—you know that the track gauge changes at the Polish border, my friend explained—and this took them to the German border. Posen was the city where they re-entered Germany. When he got back home my friend went to university and became an engineer, escaped via Berlin, just before the wall came up (1961), from East to West Germany, and he traveled the world managing construction projects for an American company. South America, Africa, Southeast Asia: he’d been everywhere. Then one day on a train between Germany and France he met a woman from Princeton B.C. who was “doing Europe” and the two fell in love. They were both well into middle age and had lost previous spouses. They could hardly speak to each other—she had her own European background, having been born of Slovakian parents who came to British Columbia’s Tulameen Valley early on in the twentieth century to coal mine—but she spoke no German or much Slovakian, and he spoke no English. They found other ways to communicate.

My friend, I’ll call him Rudy, came for a visit and decided he liked the country and he stayed and married the woman from Princeton, call her Mary. Rudy told me the country around Princeton, lodgepole and ponderosa pine, some spruce, a few hemlock, some aspen and birch, among outcroppings of shale and granite on rolling mountains, was a lot like the country around the prisoner of war camp in Siberia. It reminded him of that place, which had been quite beautiful, would have been, if they hadn’t been so hungry. We were driving through this country in his Jeep Explorer headed toward Link Lake to go ice fishing when he told me this, and I looked more closely out the passenger window at the flora and the topography than I so far had. On the CD, Rudy was playing a disc by a German popular singer, a kind of crooner, who sang Heimat Lieder, homeland songs, to an orchestral accompaniment. The genre was familiar to me: I knew some of the songs because my father had sung them (to guitar, not orchestral accompaniment) when we lived in Castlegar, a couple of major mountain ranges to the east, and I could even sing along with some of them. I found the music schlocky: the schmaltzy accompaniment and the performative vocalizations did the songs no favours; but in the context of Rudy’s story, and of the way he looked at me occasionally after he had told it, to see how I had listened, to him, and now to his music, gave me a strong feeling. Even a true feeling. I was in one of truth’s possible presences. We were home in a cozy cruiser with the heat on, it was fifteen, maybe twenty below outside, and the conifers and aspens that whipped by reminded me of my first glimpses of the Canadian boreal forest when my mother and my sister and I rode on the CPR through the woods of Northern Ontario in March 1952 in the first week of our immigration. When Rudy and I arrived at the lake we walked out on the ice, Rudy found a spot and shoveled the snow away, took out the auger and showed me how to bore the hole. The ice was about six inches thick. He baited the hook with a kernel of corn (how do Canadian trout know corn, from southwest America, is interesting winter food?)  and we dropped it down and put the short rod in the holder. We waited for the bites.

Rudy speaks a kind of English which in our family was disparagingly called “Gerlish.” Sometimes known also as “Kanädisch, it is a mixture of English and Germanisms, German and Englishisms, and it rings true in an odd and hilarious true sort of way when one knows both languages:  Die Kuh ist über die Fence gejumpt und hat den Kebbitsch gedemmitsch, my father would say, imitating not the Katzenjammer Kids but one of his German-Canadian patients.  Det iss goot seenery hier, ne? is how Rudy uses this vernacular: Vee mussen now de korn on ze Hook, machen. Pass auf. Det ice iss not so sick over ser ass hear. You know? he says. And…Hello, hello, yes, yes, how, I come in peace. Yes yes yes yes yes, Norbert says, bobbing his head up and down like an immigrant FOB. I answer Rudy in full “high” German, mostly, afraid to slip into the possible madness of two lenkwiches mixen zugeser or zwei lenkwiches mixen toozamen, and becoming Gemehboy. (Paul, I found out much later, was actually Ukrainian: we lived in a part of Edmonton where “there were a lot of them,” as my father put it.) When we talk for a longer time, Rudy gradually slides over into fuller German, and I hear then, and love then, the rolling and drilling Saxon dialect intonations—Mundart, mouth manner, as this speech mode is called in German—of his home province.

When Rudy and Mary are together and Rudy speaks Gerlish/Kanädisch, she listens and answers him in pure B.C. Canadian English. She says—when I ask her—that she understands “most” of what he says and can guess the rest. When I am there she sometimes asks me for direct translations of specific words or phrases, and when I give them to her she nods her head and says that’s what she thought; or she laughs and says I always thought _____ meant _____. Rudy laughs, too. They both said (Mary passed away, of cancer, shortly after I wrote the first draft of this essay) language between them had never been a problem; their marriage had other foundations.

9.

Out on the Siberian ice of Link Lake (I want to call it Mary Lake) I see Rudy, in mid distance, standing beside the ice fishing hole. He’s got his black Siberian felt cap on, with the ear flaps pulled down, and he’s packed up in a thick black down parka that amplifies his already considerable seventy-three-year-old girth. (He jokes that he’s catching up for what he lost in Siberia.) He’s wearing black felt-lined snowmobiler boots and pants, and mitts that he takes off only to bait his hook.  At this distance, with his arms packed into the jacket sleeves and angled away from his body, he looks like a strange German-Siberian-Canadian-Saxon-Inukshuk. He’s pretty snug there, I think to myself—I, the “assimilated” English speaker, and resolute “high German,” speaker whose feet are freezing because I’m here from Vancouver and not properly geared for local conditions. Don’t know from winter gear. When we get back into the Jeep and the heater blasts on, I start to relax. Fee get no fisch, det iss too bet, Rudi says, becuss dem traut iss goot eating—and then he puts a crooner on the CD player again. This time it’s, Freddie, ein Seeman, a seaman, who sings about Die Gitarre und das Meer, his guitar and the sea, and about Hamburg, the city he left and occasionally—not  too seriously, not seriously enough to want, in the actual moment of singing, to act on what he is singing about—yearns to  return to.

Dees Freddy songs, und dee ossos off dem, says Rudy after a while, dem songs are how vie survive in det kemp. We zing dem zen. I zing zem zen. I ask if he still sings them and he says, No not now. Jesst lissen. As I sit and attempt to hear and name where we are—we are in the Similkameen watershed, driving through the Hayes Creek drainage, in the Undivided Metamorphic Rock Terrain of British Columbia—I listen to Freddy, and I start, despite myself, to hum along with the orchestral accompaniment. Then, from somewhere, almost nowhere, the name “Pablo Neruda” arpeggios into my brain. Yes, here’s another literary changeling, a name bender, a EuroAmerican, albeit not an immigrant, not first generation, but still a man with a funny name—his real name was Neftali Ricardo Reyes—whose poetry, whose namings of things, made him a giant of international verse. Did his original name sound funny in Chile? Or does “Pablo Neruda” sound funnier? His famous adage, “He who eschews sentimentality walks into ice” slides down from an Andean precipice and fills in the terrain here on Hayes Creek.

10.

Some fun, mixed with astonishment, is made these days in the Canadian media of the German “Indian Clubs,” Indianerklubs, which flourish all over the old east and west, and now reunified Ossie/Wessie Germany. Here every-day small businessmen, teachers, workers, civil servants, shop keepers, craftsmen, spend their weekends going into “the bush” (the German Wald—forest—which is meticulously manicured and kept by the local Förster, and is often just a farmer’s field) and dressing up and acting like Indians. They put on war paint, they sing and do the dances, they build teepees, they construct stone age weapons, and their replicas of traditional “Indian” (mostly Plains/Prairie Indian) artifactual culture are meticulous and exact. These men are serious fellows.  They have studied the literature, including Karl May (who is making a big comeback not only in Germany, but all over Europe, and even Asia—not England, though) but also the anthropological and travel literature. They know how to pow wow. They will tell you exactly and show you in detail how to make a tomahawk, light a fire with flint or two sticks, sew a buckskin bead shirt, erect a teepee, create an eagle feather headdress, weave wampum or perform a chant. “Real” Indians from Canada come over there and are invited to these club outings, and they, the real Indians, marvel at the accuracy of the replicated artifacts and ceremonies. Even the songs, they say, are accurate. Only the dances are a little bit, well, wooden—awkward. When the German Indians aren’t correcting, in true German fashion, the real Indians for their sometimes false knowledge about their traditions, the real Indians giggle. They come back and report on their visits in funny/serious CBC radio documentaries.

And in the New Yorker (or was it Vanity Fair?) I read that there are ceremonies, held in upstate New York or Arizona or the Florida Everglades, in which American CEOs, Washington lobbyists, high-level bureaucrats, corporate lawyers, go to wilderness camps and play wild men. These “corporate retreats,” orchestrated to encourage “team building,” involve quite cruel rituals: the guys from the top floor offices cut themselves, brand themselves, bury each other up to the neck and stay there overnight, tie each other to trees and throw knives and shoot arrows at each other, and spend hours hurling verbal insults. This is teambuilding Yankee-style, and the retreats (from what?) are understood, said the Vanity Fair or New Yorker article, to be soul-building for each team member.

11.

The Haida do in fact say How–or rather Howa. They say it when they greet each other, and when they say goodbye to each other. I deduced, after hearing it in various contexts, that it might mean “we are Haida.” Sometimes they briefly raise and wave with their right hand while saying the word.

7141 words  May 26, 2010

I’ve been at this project now for months, reading the shortlisted and winning books. In order to meet the demands of a prize that requires reading 100 or more books, considering the time allotted, jurors must be reading 5 or more books a week. I’m not convinced that is possible—or desirable. How do judges figure it out?

In the interview from the 1974 report Christian Bok gives a detailed account of his involvement with the CC poetry jury. Is that same approach doable when a novel list includes books of 300 to 600 pages? I don’t think so.

But before I head off in that direction, let’s look at some comments I received about Bok’s interview, from George Stanley. “I liked Eunoia – but it’s hard to understand Bok’s critical (I guess) language.  E.g., George or Fred or Erin’s books “are far more lyrical than they are radical” – are these opposites?  “They represent a more readerly practice…”  Is there something else to do with poetry than read it? The work by Darren Wershler-Henry as described–it seems quite reasonable that the CC would have to decide whether it qualified as “poetry” or not–who says it is? Bok calls it a “conceptually sophisticated artifact,” which no doubt it is, but is surely pushing the envelope when he refers to “the collective brilliance of people writing on the Internet–the inadvertent poetry.” Why not just call it art? Did Duchamp call his Fountain (urinal) sculpture?”

These comments reinforce for me the need for jurors to discuss books.

Charlotte Gray; My own view of awards is that they are useful, and the books that are shortlisted are ALL good. Who gets to take the big prize is a crapshoot – the conclusion of a long (and sometimes fiery) negotiation. And the shortlist itself reflects not just good books, but also the judges’ tastes. When Vincent Lam won the Giller, with his very first book of short stories, it was a political decision on the part of the judges (one in particular, who wanted new voices recognized.)

Over the years others have told me it was the ex-GG throwing her weight around that created that Giller shortlist and winner, but who knows if that has any basis in reality or is just part of the wild conspiracy theories that surround prizes. Another theory is Atwood manipulated the prize that year—a nifty feat since she wasn’t on the jury. But how can one juror or one jury decide to change the perimeters of the prize?

Charlotte mentions the importance of discussion and negotiation and again I wonder about those prizes when that is discouraged or doesn’t happen at all. A frequent judge for the BC Book Prizes reports, “I’m trying to be as objective as I can in my judging. I read a few chapters of every book and assign them to one of three categories: No/Maybe/Yes. The nos are definitely out usually on the basis of poor writing skills. The maybes are readable but usually lack some quality that would make one want to read the book all the way through. The yeses are well written, readable and engaging. Apparently we are permitted to consult eventually with the other two judges in our category but in two previous stints as a judge in the Roderick Haig-Brown category I haven’t bothered with any consultation and have just chosen the books that I thought were the best written and most interesting on my own.”

Charlotte, again, “But it’s like democracy – infuriating, until you consider the alternatives. There is no way of making the process “better.”  It all depends on the quality of the books and the independence and good judgment of the judges. And all the organizing institutions (GGs, Writers Trust etc.) do their darndest to get the best judges. The GGs is a problem because the volume of books that the judges must consider (over 200 for non-fiction) deters established writers with projects underway from volunteering.”

I think one way to make prizes better is to encourage discussion. How else do you know if the other jurors have even read the books, or cracked the spines. That happens. Another way is to make the process more transparent. If you can maneuver the GG site you can find lists of all the books submitted for prizes for any given year. That does not happen for the Giller—the Giller doesn’t post such lists because publishers don’t want writers to know which books have been submitted (remember a publisher can only submit 3 books to the Giller).

Merilyn Simonds suggests that the Trillium prize is also a problem for readers since it is open to books in any genre: fiction, non-fiction, drama, children’s books and poetry—often 300 books are submitted. Her system—go through and eliminate non-qualifying books (I would think that weeding out non-qualifying books should be the job of the prize administration but jurors say it is common for such books to show up). She reads the information on the dustjacket, some from the beginning, middle and end of the book. Then she sorts into yes/no/maybe piles based on the quality of the writing. Next she starts reading the yes pile. If she isn’t engaged by page 100, out it goes. Merilyn errs on the side of generosity. She makes a list of books she thinks are worth discussion, in order of preference. All this happens before discussion with other jurors. She says that only once did the first book on her list win the prize, though she always fights hard for her first pick.

Frank Davey, from an unpublished essay in response to a kafuffle on the Canpoetics list:

“Should there even be awards? – awards recurrently tainted by suspicions of corruption, incompetence, and literary nepotism. It’s quite possible that the cumulative results since 1936 [of the GG] would have been equally credible if juries had been confined to drawing up shortlists and the awards had been made drawing the winner’s name from a hat. ‘Nothing to do with lasting influence or impact on national poetic consciousness’ wrote Robert Kasher in the first hours of the Canpoetics discussion – presuming, perhaps rashly, that there is a “national poetic consciousness” beyond a grubbing for awards. The awards have always been a lottery anyway, governed by the chance of who else publishes that year and who the council happens to pick as jurors. Probably no other poetry book could have won in 1986 once Purdy’s collected had been printed. Miki’s book would have had difficulty winning had his book been judged by the 2003 jury of Marilyn Dumont, Gary Geddes and Phil Hall, and Tim Lilburn’s book, the 2003 winner, would have been unlikely to win under the 2002 panel. At dog shows – a venue in which I have had exponentially more success than in poetry competitions — one at least has the opportunity to select which panel of judges one wishes to compete under. With the GG it’s impossible to hold a book back until a propitious panel appears.”

Tom Chatfield in Prospect:

“It is a central paradox of writing that true greatness only becomes apparent over time, and yet that the judgements of the future are substantially dependent on what the present chooses to publish, publicise and preserve. Viewed from the pinnacles of hindsight, literary history looks like a stately procession of great texts. A snapshot taken at any particular moment, however, reveals a far messier business; one clogged with readers, writers, commercial obligations, prejudices and misconceptions. Everything we might call the canon of literature—those enduring works that collectively form a standard we judge others by—is busily being forged or maintained within that snapshot. And somewhere close to the heart of this business lies one of the most ancient and contentious of all artistic institutions: the literary prize. Prizes are an attempt to mould, and to preempt, posterity. Their answers rarely satisfy; they seem, sometimes, to possess an astonishing capacity for ignoring talent. Yet they occupy an increasingly crucial, and volatile, position amid those imperfect processes by which writing is turned into literature….”

Chatfield also looks at the impact on sales:

“By the 1990s, winners could regularly expect to shift over 500,000 copies. Within hours, this year’s victor, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, was topping online British fiction charts. Before being shortlisted, it had sold fewer than 1,000 copies. During its time on the shortlist, it sold around 2,600. Now, post-victory, there are predictions of global sales of over a million.”

I find this particularly interesting since administrators of prizes will insist that being on the short-list impact sales. Perhaps, but clearly it’s winning that usually counts.

Chatfield continues: “While big-selling popular fiction can afford to take its awards with a pinch of salt, prizes such as the Booker are increasingly vital to the field that likes to think of itself as quality literature. Along with the book clubs—among which Richard and Judy are in Britain what Oprah is to America—their influence on booksellers can determine entire publishing house budgets. Which leads to a question that’s weighing increasingly heavily on the shoulders of critics and prize-judges alike: in an overcrowded field, over-reliant on its relatively few hits and sporadic PR injections, might ambitious literature lose the big audience, as poetry and classical music have done?

“If a panel is too exquisitely tailored to match media and public expectations, the context of lasting literary value begins to look rather distant. At what point does a jury become a focus-group, or jury selection begin to look like a popularity contest? And just how significant is any award when there are so many of them that most literary CVs boast at least one gong? It’s an unwritten part of the contemporary media deal that, in exchange for PR and banter and sales, everyone is expected to be either a good sport or a calculated curmudgeon.

***

“Simply decrying the populism and commercialism of modern times, however, won’t make these problems go away. And it’s also to miss perhaps the most important point of all: that literature is, among other things, a confidence game; and its health depends a lot on what one is and isn’t able to say and do in its service. Unlike a sporting contest, the notion of a literary winner is itself a kind of fiction: an act of propaganda and persuasion. If the current landscape of literary prizes is approaching deadlock, then, its problem is not so much over-extension as the sheer narrowness of the ground that’s being battled over—ground where the delicate balance between populism and underlying standards is increasingly warped by the need for easy headlines and safe sales. Even before it arrives, every controversy has a hollow ring to it. The sniping, the joke awards, the populist panels: these aren’t half as amusing or interesting as the media pretend. At a lean time for everyone in the print industry, it doesn’t do to bite one of the few hands that’s left feeding you. But the increasingly interchangeable (and arbitrary) feel of each literary event in the calendar cannot serve the long-term interests of a trade that ultimately relies on fresh talent, readers and ideas for its survival.

“It’s a troubling, self-destructive trend—and one that may yet see shopping for serious literature driven entirely online. Yet there is, too, a pale glow of illusion surrounding the wilder claims made for prize sales figures. Winners can and do sell big, but no victory guarantees vast sales, and the tail-enders of shortlists often fare poorly. Most importantly—and despite the wishful claims of some publishers—there is still no substitute for word of mouth. In 2007, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid lost out to Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss in the Booker, but considerably outsold it, becoming one of the best-performing literary novels of the year (it was also, in my opinion, a far more ambitious and exciting book). Prizes grant opportunities, but their pronouncements remain at the mercy of the reading public. And the bottom line is that this public are ill-served by much of the current marketplace of overlapping awards and those “prize-winning” books manufactured to claim them—sensitive, trendy tracts of needlessly effortful prose whose elegant openings so impress some juries.”

On to the 1975 Booker nominees:

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; Heat and Dust John Murray, Thomas Keneally Gossip from the Forest Collins

Yes, folks, that’s correct. This gutsy, or uppity (?) jury created a short-list of two books.

Jury: Peter Ackyrod, Susan Hill, Roy Fuller, Angus Wilson

Notes about these people appear in Susan Hill’s comments from The Guardian, below.

Thomas Keneally—Gossip from the Forest VPL

The dustjacket: “Compiegne, November 1918. A railway carriage waits in a siding in the dank forest.” The train is waiting for the odd group who have been designated to force the armistice to end WWI. It is often said that that armistice set the stage for WWII. The German representatives seem so unlikely, the appointments designed for politics rather than success at the task at hand (and interesting to be reading about these appointments while Stephen Harper appoints 18 new senators).

The structure of the book takes the reader right into that carriage, and into the minds of these characters, all with their prejudices and terrors. But ultimately the novel raises more questions than it answers. Keneally gives no credits or sources and you can’t tell what is fact and what are the fictions he has created to further his own narrative (and given the intimacy of some of the information it’s hard to believe it isn’t fiction). Either it is presumed that the reader will have a great amount of background information or that that information isn’t relevant to the narrative.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala—Heat and Dust VPL WINNER

A young nameless woman, the narrator, is curious about the first wife of her grandfather, Olivia, and she trudges off to India to try and finds answers. Fifty years before Olivia has scandalized the British community by having an affair with the Nawab, aborting his child, then abandoning her husband to live with the Nawab. Jhabvala intertwines the two stories. This book has the same condescending attitude toward “natives” that has happened in other books on these lists. The writing if fine, if not really stimulating. The main problem, given the structure of the novel and its emphasis on generational things, is that we never find out why the nameless narrator has any interest in this wicked almost-grandmother. It seems merely a device. As does the narrator’s pregnancy at the end, from a brief affair with a “native” creating the promise of an Anglo-Indian baby. It’s contrived, and unconvincing.

It must have been a bad year for publishing if these are the only books the judges could muster up.

1975 Susan Hill—The Guardian

“Peter Ackroyd was the young, newly appointed literary editor of the Spectator. Roy Fuller was a distinguished older poet. Angus Wilson was in his years as founder of the creative writing course at UEA and one of the elder statesmen of the contemporary novel. It was a daunting experience to join them as a judge. I took the mountain of submitted novels on my honeymoon, and our first meeting was scheduled for the day I returned. I discovered that Angus had spent a holiday at the same Italian hotel a few weeks earlier. So we should all have been in mellow mood, and three of us were. But Roy Fuller was not the easiest man to work with. He was acerbic and disliked being contradicted, and when it came to choosing a shortlist he refused to join in, on the grounds that we had agreed on our winner, so a shortlist was superfluous. The Booker management committee was, rightly, having none of this and insisted.

“I had been shortlisted myself three years earlier, and it had given my career a huge boost. I fought hard. We all did. Fuller grudgingly agreed to allowing a shortlist of two – the winner and one runner-up. Otherwise, he was going to walk. It was tricky and it spoiled what should have been an enjoyable experience. I was very happy with our winner, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, but I wish we had stood up to Fuller and if he had walked out, so be it.

“My personal Best of Bookers is JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. The omission of Penelope Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Blue Flower even from the shortlist in 1995 I find quite inexplicable.”

I’ve heard that comment from many Canadian writers, I wish we had stood up to …

But seriously, folks, she took the books on her honeymoon? How dismissive is that—both of the novels and the new husband.

Butch and I were similar in several superficial ways. We were blue-eyed and blondhaired sons from relatively prosperous local families, both of us were chronic underachievers at school who stayed at the edges of the school’s social hierarchies, and, whenever possible, well clear of parents and teachers. But Butch was more thoughtful than I was, a nicer kid who read more and lipped off less compulsively. He seemed to know exactly who he was, and he had a certainty of judgment that was well beyond his years and far beyond mine. There was a sweetness and a gravity to him that made me, and more than a few others, look up to him.

We did most of the things young men do together—and to one another: we teased and tested one another, tried to steal each other’s girlfriends, got drunk, got into fights and into minor scrapes with the cops. We even went canoeing and camping and fishing together. It was in these last activities that we most deviated from our peers. We camped and fished with Ernest Hemingway’s Michigan fishing stories as our manual, and instead of the local custom of drinking whiskey and puking into the campfire, we built our campfires with exquisite care and put sticks in our coffee the way Hemingway wrote about, and we speculated, under the cool and starry northern skies, over what the universe might be about.

I don’t know how Butch died. I don’t know where he died, except that it wasn’t far from where he was born, and I don’t know what it was that killed him. If I were one of those self-involved assholes who thinks the world evolves around whatever they’re doing or thinking, I’d say that Butch died 45 years ago, when his brain went permanently off the main road while he was taking classes at the University of British Columbia. It is true that shortly after that he retreated back to the north, and into some obscure territory within himself which he never again left, as far as I can tell, for more than a few minutes or hours.

The common view was that he experienced what medical people call schizophrenia, which is a stigmatizing catch-all term for deviations from normal perception.  Don White has always found it more accurate to think of what happened to Butch as a kind of mental stubbornness rather than schizophrenia—as if Butch took stances that he was unwilling to let go, and then backed it with an almost-rational decision to let irrationality govern his perception of the world.

Whatever it was, something happened inside his mind in his early 20s that changed him. One night, late in the fall of 1965, while he was at UBC taking creative writing classes, he showed up at an apartment I’d rented on Vancouver’s West 2nd Avenue to show me a play that he’d written. He was in a state of agitation unlike anything I’d seen from him, and when I glanced through the play, I recognize how similar it was to Leroi Jones’ Dutchman, which was about a group of people trapped in a New York subway car. It’s occurred to me over the years that it might have actually been Leroi Jones’ Dutchman he showed me, but really, there’s no way to know what it was. His creative writing instructor hadn’t responded to it well, and Butch seemed completely distraught over it. What I do remember clearly about that night is that everything—not just the play—was seriously out of kilter for Butch, from the complaints that “it” wasn’t good enough, that he wasn’t good enough, to some less coherent complaints about what was real and what wasn’t. I tried to argue that everything was okay, that since we were just starting as writers, of course we weren’t good enough, yet.

After a long, mutually anguishing wrangle, we walked across the Granville Bridge, and I had to physically grab him to prevent him from jumping. I got the sense, even while I was holding onto him that he wasn’t really intent on jumping into the oily waters of False Creek, but rather, wanted me to know that whatever was happening to him was serious enough to make him consider it. It was an extreme moment for me as well as him, but I believed it would blow over and our careers as writers and thinkers would continue to unfold.  I was wrong.

A couple of weeks later, Butch quit university and went back to the north, where he disappeared for several years. Whenever I was back there, I tried to find him, but never did—or when I did, the Butch I knew refused to engage with me or was simply unable to. And really, I didn’t try as hard as I might have. I’d started university myself, I’d gotten married, and my own life was suddenly in full flight—and the stories I heard from others about Butch weren’t sanguine. Someone—Claus Spiekermann, I think—had spotted him walking the highway between Prince George and Vanderhoof—a distance of almost 100 kilometres—and Butch had been vague and evasive about what he was doing on the road when Claus stopped to offer him a ride.

“I’m restless”, he’d said, not as an explanation, but as a way of refusing the offer of a ride. Getting to Vanderhoof, he was saying, wasn’t going to alleviate his restlessness.

During those years I told myself at least a thousand times that Butch knew what he was doing. But really, I wasn’t sure. I told myself this because in high school and the few years we had after that, he always seemed to know what he was doing, emphatically and authentically so. He knew what to think about, and he knew what to read.  I’d followed cheerfully in his footsteps because I sure as hell didn’t know what to think or what to read. My early education was almost wholly based on appropriations of his recommendations about what to think about and what to read. He gave me a life I couldn’t have constructed on my own, and therein lies an unpayable debt.

He (and thus, “we”) had set out, in those innocent days, to (as Albert Camus wrote, quoting Pindar) exhaust the limits of the possible, or to burn ourselves up in the pursuit. We wanted to live without the comfort of divine design and without the pretense of objective meaning—both, we thought, were unscientific and fatuous. Dostoyevski had taught us that a controlling god was unacceptable even if it did exist, and the Second World War and its atrocities confirmed it. With Camus, we took the absurdity of life as our starting point and set out on the business of judging whether life is or is not worth living. For me this was a judgment already settled by my temperament, which was disposed not to question whether life was worth living. I was attracted to the question’s gravity and drama, but there was, for me, little about it that was precarious. If our studies offered an alternate answer, well, this would be a fine drama, no?

I wasn’t, in other words, serious. This was part of my education, which I sensed (correctly, as it turned out) would go on for a very long time, after which I would settle the philosophical accounts, and if necessary die for what I’d discovered to be the truth. Meanwhile I was romantically tuned to burning up in the pursuit: at 30, I told myself, I would have the most interesting face in the world, and what woman could resist that? And hadn’t Camus himself written that he had never seen anyone die for the ontological argument? I took this to mean that no one could die from it, either. But maybe both Camus and I were wrong about that.

So what was it that Butch Nielsen introduced me to?  First of all, hundreds of books and their writers I might not have otherwise read; with Dostoyevski and Albert Camus at the centre of them. The ideas he brought me I’ve never really tried to put together in any organized fashion, maybe because I was so seamless at appropriating them that it didn’t seem necessary to acknowledge that they were more his than mine.

Beyond the reading lists and our common contempt for authority, whether it was governmental or that of our parents, what he brought was, in its briefest formulation, what Albert Camus called absurdity: the idea that a human life is without objective meaning, that we’re here to roll rocks uphill until our strength fails and the big rocks we’re pushing tumble back to the bottom and we have to choose whether to trudge back down to start rolling them back uphill—or to commit suicide with a 40 hour work-week and fling ourselves into the void by other means.

In Camus, this is sometimes phrased with a seductive counter-theology: “…if there is a sin against life,” he wrote in the essay “Summer in Algiers”, “it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.”  But mostly, it was a darker and less romantic expression of the realities Europeans had experienced over the long, cruel past, and particularly since the beginning of the 20th century: that life was cheap and hard; that meaning was both elusive and slippery; that harsh evils ruled the human condition; and that taking one’s own life could be a legitimate way of asserting one’s freedom.

I heard only the lyrical side of this, because that’s all I wanted to hear. I’d caught a glimpse of the darkness while we were travelling in Europe. It had just been the once, at the end of an arduous six week adventure into Yugoslavia, when I felt my mind starting to slip away from me. It scared me enough that I retreated to the relative safety of distant relatives in England. Not long after, I went home, and I stayed away from any kind of travel for years after. Butch, I think, went deeper into all of it, beginning while we were in Europe. He disappeared for about four months at one point, and no one knew where he was. When he returned, he offered no explanation, and he seemed prepared to get on with the same set of half-baked plans we’d had before we left for Europe: read books, go to university, become writers. He was more moody than he’d been, but the moods passed and the playfulness we shared as young men reasserted itself. Until that day when it went away forever.

The clinical definitions of schizophrenia are broad and not entirely coherent. It is usually characterized by “abnormalities in the perception and expression of reality” that can manifest as auditory hallucinations (hearing voices), paranoid or “bizarre” delusions, or simply as disorganization in speech and thought, and the social dysfunction that naturally results from that. I’m not sure Butch heard voices. If he did, he would have been reluctant to admit it. And really, “abnormality in the perception and expression of reality” is the long term goal of art, isn’t it? Certainly that’s what I’ve spent my professional life trying to achieve. But it is clear that for more than four decades years, Butch struggled with a disorganization of his thought that he could only overcome for relatively short periods.

When Don and I had a conversation with Butch in Prince George during the autumn of 1996, I noticed that when he came out of his shell and started to talk, the conversation quickly trailed back to the ideas and books that had interested us in 1962-1964. It was as if he’d simply stopped in that nexus of experience, and either couldn’t or wouldn’t move beyond it. The idea that he was actively refusing to move beyond it makes a certain sense, but it’s also possible that he was trapped there, inside a kind of mental fugue where there was a problem—an intellectual problem—that he couldn’t solve, and that at best, he was choosing to stay inside. Maybe that’s what schizophrenia was, for him.

That 1996 conversation went on for about twenty minutes before Butch’s attentions began to wander: he had things to do—laundry, I think he said—but his eyes told us he wanted us to go away, and we did. It was the last time I saw him. I tried to find him several other times when I was in the city, but no one seemed to know where he was, although nearly everyone conceded that he was there—somewhere. Often, they’d seen him walking along a street or highway, lost in those restless thoughts that were his chosen companions—or  tormentors.  After his sister Peggy died, I had no more easily approachable family contacts, although in retrospect it’s apparent from the obituary that his family was there for him, and that they took care of him as far as he’d let them.

The uncomfortable truth here is that I simply don’t know what became of Butch Nielsen, except that he “got lost”, and I didn’t try very hard to find him. I now know, sort of, that  life doesn’t have any objective meaning, and that we don’t have a right to purposeful existence or happiness, and that the goodness and sweetness of life is often wasted or lost. Butch seems to be the proof of that. Even there, I have no sense of what is true and what is a lie. All I can testify to is that the small darkness of Butch Nielsen’s absence has been with me for 45 years now, and that now, it can never go away.

.

2351 words  April 28, 2010

The ash cloud was a traveller’s nightmare, of course.  As the British poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who weighed in with a short poem published in The Guardian, put it, “the grounded planes mean ruined plans / Holidays on hold, sore absences at weddings, funerals … wingless commerce.”

Apart from producing the ultimate Holiday From Hell, the cloud was spooky. Over Europe, it was invisible. It was an unseen object poised between intimations of Armageddon (an ominous “what next?” feeling) and the sort of surrealism you might run into in a Rene Magritte painting. Poet laureate Duffy wasn’t the only one inspired to poesy. The headline of a Sunday newspaper I glanced at last weekend while strolling through the marketplace square in the German town of Erfurt, declared, “The sky is free,” meaning free of noisy, polluting airplanes. And one did notice, with a sort of aural double-take, that something was strangely absent. The ambiant, sporadic roar of jet engines that we all simply become inured to in urban life had temporarily fallen silent.

On Iceland itself, the ash cloud was neither invisible nor poetic. The spewing ash from the almost unpronounceable Eyjafjallajokull volcano (its first eruption since 1821) was not only visible as a giant cloud, but the heat melted glacial ice, causing flash floods, visibility was reduced to a few meters as ashes clogged the air, and the sulphuric smell of rotting eggs choked the atmosphere. It was one more mess to add to the island’s already messy collapsed economy.

Back on the European mainland, the ash cloud, poetic or just a pain in the butt for people trapped in airports, was mostly an object of economic contention. Although European Union air traffic officials had grounded planes because the volcanic ash clogs jet engines and endangers flight safety, the airlines themselves were insistent that commerce comes first. The aviation companies claimed that the danger was minimal, that they were losing hundreds of millions of euros a day, and that they might be driven out of business or have to demand government compensation for their mounting losses. As far as the airlines were concerned, they were perfectly happy to flood the ash-clogged skies with their big machines. If a few planes crashed, well, hey, stuff happens. (No, they didn’t actually say that, but you read it between the balance sheet lines.)

The airline pilots association was, understandably, somewhat less enthused about the proposed policy to restore profits. In the end, airplane manufacturers came to a dubious rescue by assuring everyone that maybe the ashes wouldn’t cause the planes to crash. Whatever. The flight ban was lifted.

The lesson (about business and morality) was reasonably clear.  The EU public officials may have been a bit over-cautious, but if the safety decision had been left in the hands of private enterprise, flying travellers would have been putting their lives in the hands of corporate accountants. The other minor lesson, although no one is going to do anything about it, is that there are simply too many airplanes doing too much flying, all in the name of business. The “budget” airlines that fly people short distances within Europe are a completely unnecessary menace and source of pollution. The one thing Europe has is a great train system that efficiently and with minimal ecological disruption gets people from place to place. Filling the sky with giant Sports Utility Vehicles for short hops is solely a commercial proposition. Okay, okay, this is an argument I’m not going to win, even among the iPod-listening, cellphone-chatting, texting-and-travelling public.

One of the things that media coverage of the volcanic ash cloud blotted out almost completely was reflection on the April 10 air crash at Smolensk, Russia that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others, including a large contingent of the country’s military and governmental elite. Kaczynski and his party were on their way to a memorial ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Soviet slaughter of 22,000 Polish military officers in the nearby forest of Katyn in 1940, at the outset of World War II.

For years, the Soviets had denied causing the massacre, and only in recent times had Poland and Russia patched up the historical dispute with Russian recognition of responsibility for the atrocity. A couple of days earlier, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, had met at Katyn to acknowledge the belated agreement on what had happened. The decision to hold a larger ceremony to memorialize an historic tragedy produced only an additional contemporary tragedy, or as one New York Times headline had it, “Where history’s march is a funeral procession.”

In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, it quickly became clear that it was one of the stupidest air crashes imaginable. The weather was foul and foggy; the air traffic controllers had warned off the Polish plane and recommended they land elsewhere. But either somebody decided to risk it, or there was a failure of communication, or… who knows? The plane clipped the tops of trees near the Smolensk landing field and the tragedy of 96 lost lives was added to the ashes at Katyn.

Most media attention to the crash was focused on the late President Kaczynski and the national outpouring of grief that surrounded his controversial burial at Wawel Castle in Cracow, Poland, the burial site of Polish kings and heroes. A lot of people thought that Kaczynski’s accomplishments hardly merited internment among Poland’s major historical figures. Even former Polish president and former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, 65, acknowledged the burial anomaly, remarking that since it was a decision of the Catholic Church, he would have to accept it.

Although Kaczynski was widely praised in death as “our president,” in life, the rightwing leader had a less than 30 per cent approval rating among Poles and was considered unlikely to win reelection this year (the election has now been moved up to mid-year). Both Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslav, a former prime minister of Poland, were known for politics that were economically conservative, strongly nationalistic, and blatantly homophobic. When he was mayor of Warsaw, Lech Kaczynski had attracted notoriety for shutting down gay pride parades.

Most Poles I’ve talked to in the wake of the crash emphasize that their grief is directed to the large number of prominent fellow-and-sister citizens who perished, and not to any particular elected official. As Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk put it, “From death’s perspective… there are no presidents or flight attendants… There is just the person, always dear.”

As it happened, I knew, however faintly, one of those who died in the Katyn crash. She was 80-year-old Anna Walentynowicz, the heroine, in 1980, of the Solidarity trade union strike at the shipyards in Gdansk, Poland, that presaged the end of communism in Poland a decade later. She, along with Walesa and others, was among the leaders of the most significant workers’ revolt against a “workers’ state” in a half-century. I interviewed the then 50-year-old former welder and crane operator in Gdansk in spring 1981, just months after the trade union strike that would eventually transform Polish society.

“Pani Anna,” as she was known to everyone in the shipyards, was a soft-spoken, small, middle-aged woman in a floral print dress. When I asked her, since I was attempting to construct a journalistic account of the historic events in Gdansk, she gave me a minute-by-minute account of her experiences during the first day of a strike that would flash the famous “Solidarnosc” logo around the world. What one couldn’t discern simply from her appearance was that Walentynowicz was a veteran political activist. She’d begun as a Communist Party member, stormily quit when the communists so obviously failed to live up to their ideals, and became part of the workers’ opposition, one committed to the creation of a genuine workers’ council–type society.

Walentynowicz was unlike many of the people associated with Solidarity. She was not a rightwing anti-communist, a strident nationalist, or a religious activist, all of whom could be found in the divergent Solidarity coalition. One of those conservative figures, by the way, was future president Lech Kaczynski,  then an advisor to strike leader Walesa and eventually a Solidarity member of the Polish parliament as a result of the first free elections in 1989. By contrast, Walentynowicz broke with Walesa as the labour leader who became the first modern Polish president drifted to the right.

For a journalist, meeting her was a brief but memorable brush with history. Certainly, the circumstances of that encounter were headier and more hopeful than Poland’s trudge into post-communist capitalism turned out to be. Yes, you mourn real people when the plane goes down, but you also mourn dreams, and want to be sure that neither the dreams nor the people are forgotten.

There was scant time to remember before the volcanic ash cloud arrived. It prevented international leaders, including U.S. President Obama, from attending the Polish burial services. And now that the planes are back up, our distracted attentions will no doubt be directed elsewhere. For now, though, a pause to consider the mortal course of ashes to ashes.

Berlin, April 22, 2010.

‘Doctor Shock’ charged with sexually abusing male patient

Canadian police investigate dozens of allegations against psychiatrist nicknamed for use of electricity to ‘cure’ gay soldiers

Chris McGreal in Washington

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 March 2010 19.47 BST

A leading Canadian psychiatrist who kept accusations of gross human rights abuses in apartheid-era South Africa hidden has been charged in Calgary with sexually abusing a male patient and is being investigated over dozens of other allegations.

Dr Aubrey Levin, who in South Africa was known as Dr Shock for his use of electricity to “cure” gay military conscripts, was arrested after a patient secretly filmed the psychiatrist allegedly making sexual advances. Levin, who worked at the University of Calgary’s medical school, has been suspended from practising and is free on bail of C$50,000 (£32,000) on charges of repeatedly indecently assaulting a 36-year-old man.

The police say they are investigating similar claims by nearly 30 other patients. The Alberta justice department is reviewing scores of criminal convictions in which Levin was a prosecution witness.

Levin has worked in Canada for 15 years since leaving South Africa, where he was chief psychiatrist in the apartheid-era military and became notorious for using electric shocks to “cure” gay white conscripts. He also held conscientious objectors against their will at a military hospital because they were “disturbed” and subjected them to powerful drug regimens.

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard that Levin was guilty of “gross human rights abuses” including chemical castration of gay men. But after arriving in Canada in 1995 he managed to suppress public discussion of his past by threatening lawsuits against news organisations that attempted to explore it.

Following the arrest, other male patients have contacted the authorities. One, who was not identified, told CTV in Canada that he had gone to Levin for help with a gambling addiction and alleged he had been questioned about his sex life and subject to sexual advances.

The arrest has raised questions about how Levin was allowed to settle in Canada. Canada admitted other South African medical practitioners accused of human rights abuses, including two who worked with Wouter Basson, known as Dr Death for his oversight of chemical and biological warfare experiments that included the murder of captured Namibian guerrillas.

Levin, who made no secret of his hard rightwing views and was a member of the ruling National party during apartheid, has a long history of homophobia.

In the 1960s, he wrote to a parliamentary committee considering the abolition of laws criminalising homosexuality saying that they should be left in place because he could “cure” gay people.

His efforts to do just that in the army began in 1969 at the infamous ward 22 at the Voortrekkerhoogte military hospital near Pretoria, which ostensibly catered for service personnel with psychological problems. Commanding officers and chaplains were encouraged to refer “deviants” for electroconvulsive aversion therapy.

The treatment consisted of strapping electrodes to the upper arm. Homosexual soldiers were shown pictures of a naked man and encouraged to fantasise, and then the power was ratcheted up.

Trudie Grobler, an intern psychologist on ward 22, saw a lesbian subjected to severe shocks.

“It was traumatic. I could not believe her body could handle it,” she said later.

One gay soldier claimed to have been chemically castrated by Levin. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was told by investigators that he was not alone. It also heard that at least one patient had been driven to suicide. Levin refused to testify before the commission.

Levin also treated drug users, principally soldiers who smoked marijuana, and men who objected to serving in the apartheid-era military on moral grounds, who were classified as “disturbed”.

Levin subjected some patients to narco-analysis or a “truth drug”, involving the slow injection of a barbiturate before the questioning began. In an interview with the Guardian 10 years ago, he did not deny its use but said it was solely to help soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress.

Levin said he left South Africa only because of the high crime rate, and denied abusing human rights. He said electric shock therapy was a standard “treatment” for gay people at the time and those subjected to it did so voluntarily.

“Nobody was held against his or her will. We did not keep human guinea pigs, like Russian communists; we only had patients who wanted to be cured and were there voluntarily,” he told the Guardian in 2000.

(l) Glenn Weyant and (r) Margaret Randall at U.S. wall.

—for Glenn Weyant

I press my face against dark steel tubes
14 feet high
filled with poured concrete
solid as fear
undulating over these rises and hollows
of desecrated land
like the Great Wall of China
without its invitation to walk.

We are making music here, you
with your ‘cello bow,
percussion implements
and contact mike.
Me with words I coax
from walls and fences everywhere.
There is always a chance our vibrations
will change these molecules of hate.

Along this fictitious border
the dark tubes snake
throwing their shadow in foreshortened stripes
across offended turf
until they stop, suddenly, beyond washes
that threaten our vehicle.
Two Border Patrol SUVs race to the far end
intent on beating us to the unprotected crossing.

The government calls this a fence
though it’s clearly a wall,
its solid dimension
meant to keep humans, small animals
and cultures apart. Between uprights
I see the old mattress springs
and sad ocotillo laced with barbed wire
irrelevant in sand.

Closer to Nogales (town of Charlie Mingus’ birth
where neither statue nor street name
honor the strings of his passionate bass)
the wall is makeshift patches
of battered war materiel, weathered
and graffitied with little doors
not for human passage
but the same patrol of men

in dark green uniforms and white SUVs
with green stripe
as if bringing green
into this improbable equation
can give an illusion of life.
The officers warn us against stones
thrown from the other side.
Some have cages on their moving arsenals.

Standing by a Wakenhut bus waiting to fill
with the captured immigrants
it will deliver to the other side
guards wear gunmetal gray
with red and black insignias:
fascism, empty power
aimed at the most vulnerable.
Aimed at us all.

Along the lonely desert roads
with clusters of Minutemen
in unmarked cars, a parade
of jeeps their license plates
from far-flung states,
abandoned plastic gallon jugs
some still containing the urine of desperation
crack beneath mid-March sun.

This month’s heat is no match for July
or August, yet brittle earth
cradles the dead
on landscape of mesquite and ironwood
cacti and rabbit brush
where one nameless cross
wails INRI and “adios”
to all who pass.

"one nameless cross"

At Arivaca we stop at a small café
for coffee and pie
a group of bikers talk
beneath the shade of improbable trees.
On the walls: flyers for “No More Deaths”
recognize locals
who organize a first line of defense
for those who only want to live.

Surrounded by virtual fence towers
—billions spent on failure—
dry ocotillo, barbed wire,
rusted mattress springs,
patched metal from every war
and imposing cement-filled tubes,
we have full measure
of might bereft of right.

In the blue haze of distance
Mt. Baboquivari holds
its permanent pose
of knowledge and warning.
Born long before the wall
and destined to remain a landmark
after desert reclaims the hideous scar.

Do publishers select books to publish based on literary merit or because the book might win a prize—which means more sales and more profit? Are publishers choosing authors—and then editing, packaging and marketing their books  strictly so they can win prizes?

When David Davidar took over as publisher at Penguin Canada in 2004 he was very vocal about his aim to get a Giller prizewinner for his publishing house. To date Penguin had been frozen out. The 2008 win was Penguin’s first.

A writer friend reports that his publisher would like him to do a major revision on his new novel so that “book clubs and even juries might like it.”  Imagine this:

Dear Mr. Joyce:

We are interested in publishing Finnegans Wake but our marketing department believes it will be too difficult for the average reader and therefore won’t do well in prize season. Please do a substantial rewrite to make the novel more accessible.

Regards

If it seems safe to assume that some publishers are aggressively searching out books to win these prizes, how often do they succeed and what are the implications for the industry and writers? Here is an article from TidewaterBooks.ca about the 2005 Giller shortlist:

Surprising Giller shortlist dominated by Random House – again. For the second year in a row, all but one of the books shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize are published by Random House imprints or McClelland & Stewart, 25% of which is owned by Random House.

Lisa Moore’s novel Alligator, published by House of Anansi Press, is the lone title not affiliated with the Bertelsmann-owned multinational. Random House’s three imprints and M&S each have one title the list: Joan Barfoot’s Luck, published by Knopf Canada; David Bergen’s The Time In Between, published by M&S; Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly, published by Doubleday Canada; and Edeet Ravel’s A Wall of Light, published by Random House Canada.

Moments after the announcement was made Wednesday morning in Toronto, Random House of Canada executive vice-president Brad Martin said he was overjoyed. None of Random House’s nominated books were the lead titles on their respective lists, so Martin thinks this will help with marketing. ‘On our list, if you look it, [the shortlisted titles] were second-level to the [Michael] Crummey, the [Jane] Urquhart, the [Sandra] Birdsell, and the Lori Lansens. Yes, this will give them a leg-up,” Martin says.

Moore is the only author on the shortlist who has previously been nominated for the Giller Prize – in 2002, for her short story collection Open. Anansi president Sarah MacLachlan couldn’t tell Moore the good news right away because the author was on a flight to Toronto for her launch Thursday night. Moore has already toured much of Canada for this book, but MacLachlan says the nomination will only help. ‘When we went into publishing Alligator, we were kind of determined towards marketing outside of the prizes,” MacLachlan says. ‘We were getting good reviews and coverage for her already – this is going to add to it.”

Ellen Seligman, vice-president and fiction publisher of M&S, said she was thrilled for Bergen, whose book she published. But she also thought there were some notable absentees. ‘I think it’s an interesting list, there are some obvious and surprising omissions. I think most people were expecting Joseph Boyden, Michael Crummey, and Jane Urquhart. So that was shocking,” she said. Urquhart, whose book A Map of Glass was published by Seligman, currently tops the Q&Q hardcover fiction bestsellers list but has received less than glowing review coverage.

Boyden’s first novel, Three Day Road, received generally positive review coverage and led Penguin Canada’s push to end the drought that has kept its titles off every previous Giller shortlist. When juror Elizabeth Hay read Gibb’s name, confirming that Boyden wasn’t on the alphabetical list, there was a noticeable gasp in the room. Shortly after the announcement was made, Penguin Canada publisher David Davidar said he was disappointed. ‘But you can never tell with juries. It is a very subjective assessment of the novels published this year,” he said. ‘There’s still the GGs to go. Let’s not forget that last year Miriam Toews didn’t get the Giller, but she’s the one author who kept selling and selling and selling. We’ve done very well with Three Day Road this fall”¦. I don’t see it as a setback at all. Joseph has another book to go. I think this is just the beginning.”

Brad Martin’s comment suggests that Random House had been backing Crummey, Boyden and Urquhart—in other words, RH editors didn’t pick the winner. Since publishers can only submit two books, they have fair amount of control over the list of possible nominees (more than two can be submitted if the books are by previous winners).

MacLachlan’s comments clearly acknowledge, at least for Anansi, that prize marketing is part of the agenda.

Susan Musgrave fondly remembers the days of Jack McClelland. “Jack published writers, not books.” McClelland was famous for nurturing writers and careers. If you had a book that had less than favourable reviews, so what? You moved on to the next book.

Steven Heighton thinks those days are over. “I agree with Susan M. one or two low-key prizes was/would be fine, but the proliferating glitter these days is blinding readers.  Book clubs–a major consumer of today’s fiction books–use prize lists as crib sheets.  if the prize lists didn’t exist, those same readers–thousands of them–would have to cast around, read reviews, listen to booksellers, try out books they didn’t know and maybe end up loving them and endorsing them to their club.  Word of mouth.  Books passed from hand to hand.  It would give good authors who don’t get nominations, as well as small press authors, a better chance.”

Merilyn Simonds concurs with this opinion. Merilyn does lots of readings at book clubs and libraries. Like Steven, she says these groups almost exclusively use prize lists to pick books, and to select writers for readings. If you don’t make the short lists you aren’t invited to reading festivals, aren’t invited to give readings and don’t get teaching opportunities, all of which are important sources of income for Canadian writers. In other words, no prize nomination equals no career.

Ken McGoogan suggests that prizes are a promotional tool for the publishing industry and without them things would seem rather drab. The alternative—no prizes—would “make everyone invisible.” He thinks they serve a useful purpose though he acknowledges the downside if your book doesn’t make the cut.

In these tough times, what will happen if publishers continue to pursue the golden egg mega hit?

Denise Bukowski, George’s agent, circulated the following message with the subject line, “It’s as if Dan Brown and The Gargoyle brought down Doubleday.”

December 4, 2008

Publishers Announce Staff Cuts

By MOTOKO RICH

In a day of especially grim news for the book business, Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, announced a sweeping reorganization aimed at trimming costs, while Simon & Schuster laid off 35 people.

The moves signaled just how bad sales have become in bookstores and followed

the news this week that the publisher of the adult division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the house that represents authors including Philip Roth and José Saramago, had resigned, presumably in protest of a temporary freeze on the acquisition of new books.

Industry insiders were already calling it “Black Wednesday” as news trickled out about further layoffs at Houghton Mifflin, a cut of 10 percent of the staff at Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest publisher of English-language Bibles, a freeze on raises at the Penguin Group unit of Pearson and a delay of pay increases at HarperCollins, the books division of the News Corporation.

The news at Random House, which included the resignations of the heads of two of its largest groups, followed months of speculation about the company. Ever since Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate that owns the publishing group, appointed Markus Dohle, formerly head of the company’s printing unit, to head Random House in May, most people assumed he would consolidate some imprints and make staffing changes.

In a memorandum to the staff on Wednesday, Mr. Dohle said that Irwyn Applebaum, publisher of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, and Stephen Rubin, publisher of the Doubleday Publishing Group, had stepped down. In a separate message, Mr. Dohle said that he was in discussions with Mr. Rubin about “creating a new role for him at Random House.”

Bantam Dell publishes authors including Dean Koontz and Danielle Steel. Doubleday’s authors include John Grisham and Dan Brown.

Mr. Dohle did not announce any further layoffs on Wednesday. But in an interview, a spokeswoman, Carol Schneider, said publishers would be reviewing their staffs. “There may be some difficult choices that they’re going to have to make down the road,” she said.

In a message to the Simon & Schuster staff, Carolyn K. Reidy, the president and chief executive, said the 35 layoffs at the company resulted from “an unavoidable acknowledgment of the current bookselling marketplace.” Rick Richter, president of the Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division, also left the company. Ms. Reidy said Mr. Richter resigned to “explore other opportunities in publishing.”

Simon & Schuster, publisher of authors including Stephen King and Bob Woodward, is the books division of the CBS Corporation.

The shakeout in the industry comes during what publishers and booksellers have described as the worst retailing environment in memory. Recently, Leonard S. Riggio, chairman and largest shareholder of Barnes & Noble, predicted a dreadful holiday shopping season and wrote in an internal memorandum that “never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in.”

The deterioration in book sales appears to have come late in the year. According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, sales for the year are actually up slightly. But several publishers said that sales in October and November had weakened drastically.

The industry was bracing for more layoffs. Last month, John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, whose publishing houses include Farrar, Straus and Giroux and St. Martin’s Press, said in a companywide meeting that he could not guarantee that everyone would have a job going forward. Mr. Sargent declined to comment. Macmillan is part of the Georg von Holtzbrinck publishing group.

“During good times, you can better absorb a variety of lines not doing well than you can when the economy is in this kind of condition,” Robert Gottlieb, chairman of the literary agency Trident Media, said.

At Random House, Mr. Dohle announced changes that elevated the roles of Sonny Mehta, head of the Knopf Publishing Group; Gina Centrello, head of the so-called Little Random unit; and Jenny Frost, president of the Crown Publishing Group, publisher of two memoirs by President-elect Barack Obama.

Mr. Mehta’s empire will expand to include the Doubleday and Nan A. Talese imprints, merging authors like Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Lethem with Knopf’s writers, like John Updike and Toni Morrison.

Ms. Centrello, who oversees the Random House Publishing Group, which includes the Ballantine division, will assume Bantam Dell, the Dial Press and Doubleday’s Spiegel & Grau. Ms. Frost will take over imprints including Doubleday Business, Doubleday Religion and Broadway Books.

Many people in the industry were not surprised that Mr. Applebaum was resigning from Bantam, considered Random House’s weak link. A significant part of its business is the mass market segment, the smaller paperback format of thrillers and romances, whose sales have declined over several years.

But industry veterans were surprised that Mr. Rubin, who is well regarded in the business, was being removed from his post and that the Doubleday Group was being dismantled, despite a particularly bad year.

Dan Brown, author of “The Da Vinci Code, failed to deliver his next novel, originally set for release in 2005. Jon Krakauer, author of the adventure hits Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, withdrew his book about Pat Tillman, the former football star killed in Afghanistan, originally scheduled for an October release.

To top it off, The Gargoyle, a first novel for which Doubleday reportedly paid $1.25 million, flopped, selling 34,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan. In October, Doubleday laid off 10 percent of its staff.

Interesting, eh? I wonder if the editor who brokered the Krakauer deal is still on staff?

Jury: Ion Trewin, AS Byatt, Elizabeth Jane Howard:

Ion Trewin was a journalist with The Times who later became editor-in-chief at Weidenfeld & Nicolson and is now the administrator for the Booker (that means he’s the one to pick the jurors). Byatt, the novelist. Howard was a model and actress before becoming a novelist. Her third husband, and the one at the time of this award, was Kingsley Amis.

The Books:

Beryl Bainbridge—The Bottle Factory Outing UBC

Another small canvas with two more feckless girls who work in a wine-bottling factory—these girls have even less feck than those in The Dressmaker. Laverne and Shirley, British style, but with black humour you’d never see on mainstream US television. The world of the Italian immigrants who work at the factory is so isolated. In the end, a death/accidental death is easily covered up because no one would miss her. Sad, but not in the least sentimental—no redemption.

C. P Snow—In Their Wisdom UBC

It’s like Bleak House for the 1970s—just how disastrous can a legal suit become? This world is about as far removed from the girls of the bottle factory as you could get—House of Lords and law courts. These characters are the intellectual and landed aristocracy, the movers and shakers concerned with money, position, power, and how to keep these things.

Snow has such a rich vocabulary, more than the other writers so far—“inspissated scorn”, “tenebrous room”. I spent more time with my dictionary reading this book than I have for more than I can remember.

My Ph.D. began with a minor in Shakespeare and a major in Modern British Literature, before it got derailed into bibliography. That meant my comprehensive exams were on modern British. I read a lot of C. P. Snow, but not this one. And frankly, not a lot of the other novels so far. When I was working on my doctorate in the late 80s/early 90s the influence of the Bookers had not penetrated the academic towers at McMaster. Murdoch, Spark, Naipaul and Amis were all there, but not because of the Booker. The reputation of these authors had been well established through what was the usual method for those times—book reviews, critical response and readers’ response.

Kingsley Amis—Ending Up UBC

Through fiver geezers who live in a small cottage—Tuppenny-hapenny—Amis explores the nasties of aging. No wisdom and mellowing with this lot. They are both monstrous and petty. Even the cat and aged dog are cranky and incontinent. Loss of memory. Loneliness. Physical decline. Misogyny. But it is the nastiness, and our lack of sympathy for any of this crew that really gives the novel its edge.

Just recently, before I began this crazed Booker project (ah, the good old days) I read The Biographer’s Moustache. It’s better than this novel. So are Lucky Jim and The Green Man.

Stanley Middleton—Holiday UBC WINNER (shared)

Here’s a piece from The Sunday Times:

January 1, 2006

Publishers toss Booker winners into the reject pile

Jonathan Calvert and Will Iredale

THEY can’t judge a book without its cover. Publishers and agents have rejected two Booker prize-winning novels submitted as works by aspiring authors.

One of the books considered unworthy by the publishing industry was by V S Naipaul, one of Britain’s greatest living writers, who won the Nobel prize for literature.

The exercise by The Sunday Times draws attention to concerns that the industry has become incapable of spotting genuine literary talent.

Typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of Naipaul’s In a Free State and a second novel, Holiday, by Stanley Middleton, were sent to 20 publishers and agents.

None appears to have recognised them as Booker prizewinners from the 1970s that were lauded as British novel writing at its best. Of the 21 replies, all but one were rejections.

Only Barbara Levy, a London literary agent, expressed an interest, and that was for Middleton’s novel.

She was unimpressed by Naipaul’s book. She wrote: “We . . . thought it was quite original. In the end though I’m afraid we just weren’t quite enthusiastic enough to be able to offer to take things further.”

The rejections for Middleton’s book came from major publishing houses such as Bloomsbury and Time Warner as well as well-known agents such as Christopher Little, who discovered J K Rowling.

The major literary agencies PFD, Blake Friedmann and Lucas Alexander Whitley all turned down V S Naipaul’s book, which has received only a handful of replies.

Critics say the publishing industry has become obsessed with celebrity authors and “bright marketable young things” at the expense of serious writers.

Most large publishers no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts from first-time authors, leaving the literary agencies to discover new talent.

Many of the agencies find it hard to cope with the volume of submissions. One said last week that she receives up to 50 manuscripts a day, but takes on a maximum of only six new writers a year.

Last week, leading literary figures expressed surprise that Naipaul, in particular, had not been talent spotted. Doris Lessing, the author who was once rejected by her own publishers when she submitted a novel under a pseudonym, said: “I’m astounded as Naipaul is an absolutely wonderful writer.”

Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, who teaches creative writing, said: “It is surprising that the people who read it (Naipaul’s book) didn’t recognise it. He is certainly up there as one of our greatest living writers.”

While arguing that the best books would still always find a publisher, he added: “We need to keep the publishers on their toes as good books are as rare as hens’ teeth.”

Middleton, 86, whose books have a devoted following, wasn’t surprised. “People don’t seem to know what a good novel is nowadays,” he said. Naipaul, 73, said the “world had moved on” since he wrote the novel. He added: “To see that something is well written and appetisingly written takes a lot of talent and there is not a great deal of that around.”

“With all the other forms of entertainment today there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is.”

So, here is my report on a novel that would not get published in today’s publishing industry.

In this novel Edwin Fisher leaves his wife 18 months after their two-year old son dies. He goes on a holiday to the seaside where he had vacationed as a child. What happens during that time is superficial and of little importance to the novel. It’s about Fisher, inside his head as he slowly examines, then reexamines the events of his life.

In October 2006 my daughter died in a car accident. George and I are coediting an anthology that Random House will be publishing fall 2009 called The Heart Does Break; Canadian writers on grief and mourning. Right now George is working on his introduction. He describes my behaviour in the moments and days after Bronwyn’s death as too “normal.” With very subtle handling, this novel explores the thin lines between “normal” and madness, how grief dulls, and our inability to grieve and connect during mourning.

If I were under time constraints—in other words, if I were a judge and had to read 120 books—this is one that I might put aside at 100 pages. And be wrong to do so. Tip: if you want a better shot at winning a prize you must grab the reader’s full attention at the beginning and not rely on a brilliant ending.

Nadine Gordimer—The Conservationist VPL—WINNER

For a time I was considering doing work on Gordimer for my Ph.D. I read a lot of her novels and decided I was too apolitical to take it on. Well, apolitical is an overstatement. But I was keenly aware that every word in a Gordimer novel is charged with the political situation in South Africa.

Half way through the novel I’m wondering if this is the one I didn’t finish years ago—if this is the novel that convinced me not to do graduate work on Gordimer. I’m finding it a slog.

Mehring is a rich man from pig-iron, and his position at birth, i.e. white. He buys a farm, in part as a seduction plot. The comparison of his life in the city and on the farm illustrates in painstaking detail his total alienation from what is going on around him. His wife, mistress and son desert him. I wish I could. But, no, there you are, right inside his head. This is not easy reading. At times you plod on because you know “this is important” stuff.

1974 Ion Trewin—The Guardian

We were three judges – AS Byatt, Elizabeth Jane Howard and me. At the shortlist meeting, Jane remarked that she thought Ending Up by Kingsley Amis (then her husband) was his best book and should go on the shortlist. I looked first at Antonia, and then at Martyn Goff, the prize’s administrator – both remained impassive. We broke for a breather. Martyn said that as chairman it was up to me. Antonia liked the novel (as did I). On literary grounds neither of us had problems about shortlisting it, but what would the press say?

The Booker was already familiar with controversies. Martyn, I know, was not averse to the publicity that our decision would inevitably bring. (This was to centre around a vituperative correspondence in the Times.) But would the burgeoning reputation of the prize be damaged? He thought not. More important was our choice of winner. Antonia and I spoke up for Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist, but Jane was less impressed. She remained keen on Ending Up, but realising that neither Antonia nor I would countenance it winning, she concentrated on Stanley Middleton’s Holiday, a study of middle England that she saw as a “perfect miniature”.

With only three judges, it seemed important to me that we did not compromise or produce a two-one verdict. Might we split the prize between Middleton and Gordimer? Martyn said he knew of no reason why not. We were vindicated by The Conservationist being selected this year for the Best of the Booker shortlist.

My favourite Booker winner remains Schindler’s Ark (1982) by Thomas Keneally (but I must declare my interest and say that I was its editor).

What would Andre Alexis say about this situation?

It is unusual in Canada for jurors to be open and transparent about the jury process. In private and in confidence jurors may tell you what transpired, but not publicly. Here are two exceptions.

First are some excerpts from an interview with Christian Bök. Interviewed by Owen Percy (PhD student at the University of Calgary), originally published in Open Letter 13.3 (Summer 2007): 113-131.

The Politics of Poetics:

Christian Bök on Success, Recognition, Jury Duty, and the Governor General’s Awards.

OP: What do you think of the concept of national prizes or recognition—for example the Governor General’s Awards, which purport to speak for “Canadian Literature.” What do you think of an award which claims to be ‘national.’

CB: Oh, well I think that any prize that aspires to be “national” is probably more concerned with propaganda than aesthetics. All the prizes, of course, claim to pick the most meritorious work. To me, assertions about merit have to address the innovation that a work  might have to offer literary history—not simply for one minor nation, but for our whole planet. Nevertheless, nobody creates a prize saying ‘We’re going to pick only the most conservative, most recognizable, work.’ Every panel of judges is going to say that their choices for winners represent the cutting edge of all contenders. But from my perspective as an academic looking at the history of literature on a planetary scale—the shortlists for these prizes often seem very pathological. The jurors are supposed to be selected from among your peers—but when I see the results of their deliberations, I always  ask myself: ‘What the hell are my peers thinking?’ How is it possible that they can call themselves writers, aspire to greatness, know something presumably about literary history, and yet nevertheless pick mediocre work—work likely to be forgotten within fifty years?

OP: I’d like to have a conversation about the jury experience and specifically how jury members can and do influence the awarding of a prize. You have recently had a unique experience as a GG jury member. I’d like you to explain or give me a quick narrative about your experience on and subsequently off the GG jury. I would also like to know how you ended up on this year’s GG jury in the first place, and how your subsequent experience altered your perception of the awards process.

CB: Of course. Perhaps I should contextualize my anecdote by talking about my other experiences on juries prior to this one. I’ve been on numerous juries for both prizes and grants. I have found each of those experiences very interesting and they have taught me a great deal about the social politics of the awards process. What pleases me is that my experience has been, for the most part, very collegial and relatively uneventful. However I have noticed that some jurors come more prepared than others or less prepared than others, that some come to the process with unreasonable expectations about their influence on the jury. Others come with more reasonable expectations. I think that some jurors have greater or lesser expertise than you might like to see in such a context. Nevertheless, I think that my experience has been pretty normative, and I have generally been very happy with the results of my work on juries. I think that merit has generally prevailed. I don’t think that I have ever had to make unhappy concessions. I have never felt that I have somehow compromised my own sensibilities. What I’ve noticed about the fundamental psychology of the process is that, for most people on a jury, a vote for the winner is actually a kind of vote for yourself. You are hoping, in a certain sense, to see yourself either reflected or embodied in the winner. I think that this fact alone may account in large part for the mediocrity of many prizewinners. I think that, if you are a mediocre assessor , you are going to have difficulty advancing the cause of your betters at the expense of your own career.

OP: Or of your own ego?

CB: Yeah. I mean, it seems to me that, in the history of art, consensus never explains who the best people are in the short term. Really, I think that any statements about the future importance of an author for posterity’s sake are generally made as wagers by charismatic individuals staking an expert claim against history. I had never been on a jury for the GG prize, and typically you have to be nominated by your peers, and you have to fill out paperwork indicating that you’re willing to participate in future committees. In this case, I was called directly by the Governor General’s Committee, which is a branch of the Writing and Publishing Section of the Canada Council. The representative asked me whether or not I would be willing to participate, and I said ‘Certainly!’ Nobody with my expertise from my generation had ever been asked to participate on this jury, and despite many other competing priorities, I felt obliged to do this community service. As a young writer, you never really imagine that can ever get your hands on the levers of cultural control, you know? So when you’re given an opportunity like this one, I think that you’re obliged to take it. I received a description of my responsibilities in the mail —paperwork outlining conflicts of interest, guidelines for assessment, and a schedule of obligations. I had to reserve about five months in order to read about 125 books. I got them in increments, as they were received by the GG Committee. I had to generate a longlist of ten books that would be subsequently submitted a fortnight in advance of any deliberations so that other jurors could see what we would be discussing. I was pretty assiduous about my performance, and read all the books completely. I ranked them all with notes to remind myself about my rationales for each evaluation.  I felt pretty confident that I had a very good longlist of ten books. Now the Canada Council did offer a description of what constituted a conflict of interest, and I thought that it would be very difficult to be an informed committee member without having some reason to comment upon a potential conflict: first, by being involved in an intimate relationship with a poet; second, by being financially obligated through cultural institutions to another poet; and third, by being an artistic collaborator with other poets. The community is very small despite the number of people writing in Canada, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that I would have to fill out some sort of paperwork. Now, I’ve been on grants and juries where I’ve had to face very serious conflicts of interest: I participated in a jury for the Toronto Arts Council, which called for blind submission, and my girlfriend at the time had submitted a proposal, not knowing that I was a juror, because, of course, I had to be confidential about it. I recognized the work immediately, and so I informed the administrators, not the other judges, because even they couldn’t know about my involvement—and I was basically told that any deliberations around the work required that I remain mum, without making any commentary. At the end of the process, when the identities of submitters was revealed, jurors were quite impressed with my objectivity upon discovering that my girlfriend had been a contender. She didn’t get the grant, and the other jurors were somewhat dismayed that I had followed the rules so scrupulously even though I could have tried to argue on her behalf. I have been involved in many other  analogous situations—and in each case there have been very deliberate rules of governance around the handling of these problems.

OP: Your personal experience recently on the GG jury in terms of conflict of interest…?

CB: Right. This last year, my best friend Darren Wershler-Henry published a book called Apostrophe with his good friend Bill Kennedy. Apostrophe is a work of poetry written almost entirely by machine. In the 1990s Bill Kennedy wrote a very whimsical poem called “Apostrophe,” which consists of a whole series of non-sequiturs, each of which begins with the phrase “You are.” He read from it quite frequently in Toronto when Darren and I were apprenticing as poets, and it was always a crowd-pleaser. Darren and Bill wanted to collaborate on a project, so they decided to design a piece of software that would hijack a Google search-engine, inputting individual non-sequiturs from this poem and returning results from the Internet, collating the random results from these requests. The engine would spider any websites returned from these searches, looking for subsequent predicates that began “You are,” and then the software would concatenate these sentences into a new poem. The machine is quite brilliant. It constitutes an amazing use of the Internet as a means for writing poetry. And it shows something about the collective brilliance of people writing on the Internet—the inadvertent poetry lingering in these beautiful synecdoches linked across the network. The book is a very conceptually sophisticated artifact, and it has some important influence now upon any millenial conception of our relationship to the Web. This book, to my misfortune, came out this year, when I had agreed to be on the GG jury. I did not receive the book among any of the boxes that had been sent, and about six weeks into the process I wanted to be sure that it was in fact being submitted so that I could fill out the appropriate paperwork about any conflict of interest. I felt obliged to say, ‘Look, this is my best friend, I have a tremendous amount of intellectual influence upon him and vice versa, and it’s important for any jurors to know about my relationship with him because, chances are, if this book appears on the reading list, I would want to discuss it with the judges.’ It wasn’t in the first salvo of boxes. I phoned the people responsible for managing the logistics of the GG and asked if the book had been submitted. I, of course, couldn’t phone my friend, and I couldn’t phone ECW, the publisher, because I had to maintain confidentiality. The rep at the Canada Council told me that, yes, the book had been submitted, but that it was being held back. So I needed to say ‘Look, I just need to know if it in fact qualifies for submission so that I can fill out the appropriate paperwork about a conflict.’ But they were being very cagey about telling me whether or not the book was going to be submitted to the judges, and I was a bit concerned by this behaviour. I, of course, wouldn’t have cared about some sort of bureaucratic snafu—such as the book being submitted after deadline, etc. But the rep at Canada Council seemed to be intimating that the office couldn’t decide whether or not the work was actually a legitimate book of poetry, and they wouldn’t tell me why. I tried to make an argument that we on the jury, should be judging its poetic merits, and I really did need a statement from them about whether it was being submitted or not so I could actually declare a conflict to the other jury members. I also wanted to ask about the protocols around handling any conflict, because they weren’t actually made explicit in any of the received paperwork. No document outlined my duties in the case of a declared conflict. If we ended up discussing the merits of this book, I wanted to know how I had to behave. On juries for other grants and awards, I would have been permitted to discuss all other works except the one for which I might have declared a conflict. and sure enough the officer in charge explained to me that, if this book should be shortlisted, I would be excused from any subsequent discussion to pick the winner. Given that the other two jury members were Evelyn Lau and Mary Di Michele, I felt that I was very unlikely going to delegate any of my authority to them, so that they would choose a winner on their own. If the book were to be shortlisted, I would probably bracket any discussions around it and suggest that the book itself be excused from any consideration so that I could actually participate in the selection of another winner. The protocols of the award seemed perfectly consistent with my own experience on other juries, so I didn’t question the officer further about the issue. So I proceeded to finish my readings over the next four months or so. I then received a phone call on the very day when I had to submit my list of ten books. I had received an email that very morning requesting my longlist, and I hadn’t yet submitted a response to it, but a few hours later I received a phone call from Writing and Publishing indicating that I was excused from my responsibilities due to my conflict of interest declared several months earlier. This was, of course, an extraordinary surprise, especially since I had just received a request for my top ten list that morning and I hadn’t even submitted it yet. No one had even seen my selections. The rep explained to me that my friendship with Darren and my questioning of the committee about Apostrophe excluded me from my duties. So I got into a very heated argument with the rep—a very prolonged and impolitique argument over the course of about a week. I was constantly in discussion with this bureaucrat in hopes that I could, in fact, be reinstated as a juror. I was stonewalled throughout the process. The rep felt that expressing my interest in the book to somebody outside of the jury process, indicated that I would be disqualified from any objectivity. Now this excuse seemed to me to constitute a real Catch-22 given that, if I wanted to discuss the protocols around any conflict of interest, I would have to actually do what I did. I felt that I was being punished for demonstrating good judgment, and I wanted to know what the rules of governance were for handling this process because it seemed extremely arbitrary. The administrator told me that in fact I could not be allowed to excuse myself from any deliberations around a winner. And in fact, the earlier rep in charge had given me misinformation about all the protocols for such a process.

OP: But there are protocols in place?

CB: Well, actually, there are none. That’s what is so galling about the whole experience. As is the case for any other jury on which I have participated, I did all the work on the assumption that there are actually very formal rules of governance written down, to which the jury members and the award managers must conform. Apparently there are none for the GG prize. The woman to whom I first spoke was responsible for managing the logistics of the prize, and she apparently gave me information that was completely incorrect. I would in fact not be able to participate. When I asked for the formal documentation indicating what the protocols were. no one could provide it because it simply didn’t exist. Members of the committee had decided quite arbitrarily to excuse me from duty at the last minute, in effect for no good reason. They had made up the protocols as they went along. For whatever reason, they felt a lack of confidence in me after several months of work. I don’t know why— the excuses of the Canada Council seemed absurd to me. The committee had suddenly decided (months after my initial enquiry) that I had exceeded my duties as a juror and that it would be impossible for me to judge any application objectively by virtue of having made inquiries about the book’s submission to the prize.

OP: Now, you say that you were dismissed for ‘no good reason,’ but I would imagine that someone had to have formulated some definitive reason somewhere along the line…

CB: Well, the ‘no good reason’ has to do with the fact that there are no rules of governance—so they’re making up the reasons as they go. And to me that’s unconscionable for a prize that’s supposed to be this important. Throughout the process, the woman responsible for managing the GG in Writing and Publishing was saying that she was trying to “protect the integrity of the award.” This justification seemed to me completely bogus. As you have already noted, there have been many occasions in the past when the committee has not really cared about the integrity of the award—and without written rules of governance, there is no standard by which we might judge the integrity of the process. It seemed to me that the rep at Canada Council was poorly informed about the history of Council’s relationship to experimental writers. I felt outraged that, as an experimental writer on a jury, I was being excused, despite being a PhD with a long history of involvement in similar juries.

OP: Well presumably, had your poetics and your personal avant garde sensibilities been an issue, you wouldn’t have been invited onto the jury in the first place…

CB: Yes, but my personal history with the Canada Council has always been somewhat vexed. The rep was very surprised when I reminded her, for example, that my book hadn’t been shortlisted for the GG. The very fact that people didn’t know that I might have some concerns about being personally involved in the process was disconcerting. It seemed that the GG committee had taken this opportunity to redress what was a very long oversight in the past and now, suddenly, were rescinding all of it. I could not believe that members of the committee could just make up these rules as they went along and then say that they were protecting the integrity of the award, when in fact there were no rules of governance around its management. If you can make these kinds of arbitrary decisions on a whim, then there is no integrity to the process. I don’t see what you’re protecting. I think that they could have demonstrated their integrity by adhering to the protocols that they had initially given me rather than making me do all the work after the fact, only to change their minds. I should have been having these arguments four months earlier, not on the very last day when they requested my longlist. So this brouhaha only highlighted for me the bureaucratic incompetence in the Canada Council; the process simply undermined my already-failing confidence in the institution—

OP: What’s the solution in terms of an administrative fix at the GGs or at the Canada Council in order to prevent this from happening again?

CB: Obviously they have to have a set of rules of governance in place. The Council has admitted to me that there are none,[1] and I have said that this situation is unconscionable. I am dismayed that an institution like this can run for 40-odd years without some protocols formally in place. I don’t know how that’s even been possible. I don’t know how the Canada Council can suggest that this award is well-managed, when in fact it actually has no governance. In any other organization of this scale, there would be written protocols in place, produced through consultation with the literary community—protocols that would have been assessed by a board of governors of some sort, and that would have been generated like a constitution. The very fact that the Council doesn’t even have these basic structures in place undermines the credibility of the award.

OP: The results of this year’s GG deliberations have obviously come out now—you were replaced by Cyril Dabydeen and—

CB: Yes, I was actually required to return all of the books, all 125 books, on short notice. I had to box them all up and send them back. I spent four or five months of dedicated time reading those books. I had to read a couple per day in order to maintain the pace required, and they insisted that whoever replaced me on the jury would in fact read all of the books and make an objective assessment about their merits. In less than two weeks. I think that’s impossible. There’s no way that anyone could’ve done a respectable job reading that many books and assessing their merits in less than two weeks. Now, they certainly paid me for my time of course, and I did receive letters of apology. I did make sure that some sort of recognition was paid—

Have changes been made to CC selection policies because of Christian’s situation? He reports, “The new protocols (such as they are) are toothless, and from my

perspective, unenforced.”

And a piece by Brian Fawcett written for the Toronto Star a few years ago:

JURY DUTY

If you’re fond of literary bloodsports, you’ve probably been tracking the fall book celebrity prizes, and you know that Margaret Atwood won the Giller Prize (AKA the Downtown Toronto Prize), that John Ralston Saul won the Governor General’s award for non-fiction and that Guy Vanderhaeg won the GG for fiction.  That means you’ve probably also noticed that there’s been an awful lot of whining over the Governor General’s awards over the last several years, and that this year has been no different.  Some is the predictable complaining of wounded losers or publishers bickering over administrative foul-ups, along with a few loudmouths along Toronto’s Queen Street who noticed that the now-more prestigious Giller Prize nominees were very well dressed while the GG fiction short listees have straw sticking out from under their collars.

If you’re really nuts about these kinds of things, you may even be aware that in the last few years, jurors themselves have been doing their share of whining and bickering about the GGs.  Last year, Bronwyn Drainie carped that there were too many books for a busy woman like her to read and that publishers weren’t being selective enough with what they submit–meaning that she didn’t want to have to read all those hayseed autobiographies and scholarly monographs about transformational representation of acne in Canadian fiction and other, similarly dim PhD thesis subjects.  More than one juror has whined bitterly about being paid too little for the use of their valuable time.  It’s hard to find anyone in the writing and publishing community who doesn’t have a gripe, actually: the choices are too regional, not regional enough;  the prizes are too small and ill publicized; not enough representation by minorities, too much representation by virtual foreigners. The more the whiners have had to drink or smoke, the louder, sillier, and more nasal the whining gets.

This year I was a member of the non-fiction jury, so I got to see the process from the inside. That means, among other things, that I’m not supposed to be writing this, since jury deliberations are confidential. But because the Canada Council is too underfunded to defend their process–or publicize the prizes adequately, and the Council staff are too overworked to defend themselves, I’m going to break the rules and shoot off my mouth.

When I got the invitation to serve on the jury, my first question was the predictable one: “How many books?” There was a deep pause on the other end of the line. I’d have to evaluate over 200, and I’d be paid what worked out to about 20 cents an hour for it.  I thought about it for almost five seconds before I said yes.  I agreed to serve because being on a GG jury is a civic duty and, I suppose, an artistic honour.  I’m more interested in civic duty than in artistic honours, but there you are.

The truth is that I also saw it as an opportunity.  Several opportunities, actually. It was an opportunity to be able to read nearly every work of non-fiction published in the country at least one year of my life. It was also, I suppose, an opportunity to be able to blow off anyone asking me to review fiction by saying I’d decided to read nothing but non-fiction in 1996.  And to be completely candid, it was an opportunity to keep Rudy Wiebe and his conspiratorial colleagues out of at least one jury spot for one season.

Hey! You know what? Now that it’s over and done with, I don’t have a single complaint. It was great fun, and not at all onerous. Making up my short list wasn’t exactly an exercise in agony, either. Once I’d made my interpretation of the Council’s guidelines and done the basic reading, there were about 35-40 books I thought were pretty good, and well over ten I thought were worth shortlisting.

My judgment criteria was fairly simple. Non-fiction supposedly draws its primary base from the “World-O-Facts”, and so should illuminate and educate. But it must also do what literature has always done: surprise readers with the play of authorial intelligence, and delight them with the clarity of its language.

Four kinds of books didn’t make it onto my shortlist. The first kind was the ones that were poorly written. They’re amazingly easy to spot, and plentiful. Most of the time, their authors weren’t much interested in language–they just wanted to tell their story and get on with it. At lot of the books of this sort came from small presses, often from people who don’t write professionally and likely won’t ever write another book. What they wrote are frequently valuable documents, usually of community interest. But they just ain’t literature.

A second type of non-contender were the scholarly books Ms. Drainie complained about.  They’re non-contenders because the authors’ primary intentions are scholarly thoroughness and not art.  Those aren’t mutually exclusive goals in theory, but in practice, they tend to be.  That they are so mind-numbing wasn’t a problem I could correct. For the universities and the discourse they’re supposed to be fostering,  they’re a huge problem, but that’s another kind of bloodsport, isn’t it?

A third category–let’s call it commercial propaganda–abrogates my understanding of language and human reality, which I happen to believe are both infinitely complicated. Any piece of writing that can’t or won’t acknowledge that complexity just isn’t competent literature, whether the book is about Karla Homolka’s consummate evil or a commissioned wank of Ted Rogers.

I also excluded what I’ve come to call “devotional literature”. These are books that proceed by an undisclosed set of exclusory attitudes or beliefs, and the authors are really just rearranging their play blocks on paper. Since art is by definition inclusive, any work that defines reality on devotional terms can’t be literature. That got rid of the religious, ethnic, preferential and otherwise-crazed entries.

Don’t get me wrong. The entry criteria for the GGs can’t  and shouldn’t exclude any of these books, as Ms. Drainie would prefer. So long as Canada remains the democracy it is, publishers have the right to enter any or all of their books in the GG competition. Similarly, every writer has the same right to compete–why would they write at all if they didn’t believe their writings weren’t unique and excellent.  There is always the chance that one of these books will lift itself from its apparent limitations.  A few of the books I read for the GG’s actually did that.

Judging the quality of  a work of non-fiction is, of course, notably easier than judging fiction. With non-fiction, there is a nexus of facts and ideas to consider, along with the degree of clarity to which the writing holds and upholds that nexus. With fiction, there are no such comforts.

What I’m suggesting, I guess, is that everyone ought to give fiction juries a break. They’ve got an impossible job, and in recent years, it has gotten worse. Part of their problem is the virtual collapse of genres, which has meant that no one is really sure anymore what fiction is. That has led most jurors to exclude genre-crossing writing altogether, and to pull their critical wagons in a circle around anything that resembles 19th Century fiction. The other part of their problem is the elevation of sectarian sensitivies to the level of social lunacy, a phenomenon that in fiction, has turned point-of-view into a minefield of competing correctnesses.  A fiction juror’s only safe basis for judgment is the conventionality of narrative quality and writing style and a miniscule zone of “correct” subject matter that can’t be acknowledged: WASP writers expressing cultural guilt about what their ancestors did to the oppressed, or minority writers offering aggressive tribal hagiographies of one sort of one sort or another.  Fiction prizes are now prizes for conventional and correct behavior.

Given that, and the fact that the GG fiction jury is charged to make its selection from across the country and its various clamouring regional sensitivities, there’s no way to make any choice that doesn’t tromp on someone’s toes.  The winners don’t really win, and the losers all get to feel cheated whether they were or not.

Is there a better way?  Sure. Since we’re now a free market society,  let’s make a 90s kind of competition: triple the prize money, move the competitions for translation, poetry, drama and kidlit (they’re only club prizes anyway) to a lower category. Then we drop the jury size to one or two, announce the jurors at the beginning of the year, pay them properly (they’ll be working more or less full time) and let cyborg capitalism do its job. That means public debates, lobbies, and directed publicity campaigns throughout the publishing year–a free-for-all consciously aimed at influencing the juries. We now have the media capability to ensure thaat jurors won’t be able to take a wiz on the sly let alone make a sneaky deal or play the home side. And anyway, openness is always the best safeguard against corruption. The prize profiles would get a huge boost in public interest from such a process. Why not televise the jury deliberations like a kangaroo court or game show so everyone can know exactly why and how the winners win? Wouldn’t it be entertaining to see judges holding up scorecards with their ratings? Maybe we could hire Don Cherry to do between-book analysis.

Ah, but then we’d have to drop our tribal affiliations, stop whining about how we’re being victimized, and take the GG’s seriously.

8900 words, March 17, 2010

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

“Why won’t it just tell me what it’s about?” said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. “There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I’ve looked everywhere—there’s nothing here but words.”

“Ow,” Thomson added after reading the first and last lines in an attempt to get the gist of whatever the article, review, or possibly recipe was about.

At 3:16 p.m., a deafening sigh was heard across the country as the nation grappled with the daunting cascade of syllables, whose unfamiliar letter-upon-letter structure stretched on for an endless 500 words. Children wailed for the attention of their bewildered parents, businesses were shuttered, and local governments ground to a halt as Americans scanned the text in vain for a web link to click on.

Sources also reported a 450 percent rise in temple rubbing and under-the-breath cursing around this time.

“It demands so much of my time and concentration,” said Chicago resident Dale Huza, who was confronted by the confusing mound of words early Monday afternoon. “This large block of text, it expects me to figure everything out on my own, and I hate it.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Mark Shelton, a high school teacher from St. Paul, MN who stared blankly at the page in front of him for several minutes before finally holding it up to his ear. “What does it want from us?”

As the public grows more desperate, scholars are working to randomly italicize different sections of the text, hoping the italics will land on the important parts and allow everyone to go on with their day. For now, though, millions of panicked and exhausted Americans continue to repetitively search the single column of print from top to bottom and right to left, looking for even the slightest semblance of meaning or perhaps a blurb.

Some have speculated that the never-ending flood of sentences may be a news article, medical study, urgent product recall notice, letter, user agreement, or even a binding contract of some kind. But until the news does a segment in which they take sections of the text and read them aloud in a slow, calm voice while highlighting those same words on the screen, no one can say for sure.

There are some, however, who remain unfazed by the virtual hailstorm of alternating consonants and vowels, and are determined to ignore it.

“I’m sure if it’s important enough, they’ll let us know some other way,” Detroit local Janet Landsman said. “After all, it can’t be that serious. If there were anything worthwhile buried deep in that block of impenetrable English, it would at least have an accompanying photo of a celebrity or a large humorous title containing a pop culture reference.”

Added Landsman, “Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t even have a point.”

March 17, 2010, Anonymous Internet (aka The Onion)