According to Gary Geddes in his introduction to the selection of Birney’s poems in 15 Canadian Poets x 3, Birney had a Romantic approach to lyric poetry: “The poet contemplates and is moved to discover some universal significance to his experience.” It’s worth pointing out that the opposite of this would be the Classical approach — where the poet thinks more of impressing an audience, patron or beloved, of producing some fine phrases, rhymes and figures. The Romantic approach involves the presumption that (as Geddes puts it) “the artist has a cure for society’s ills.” Classical poets think of money, prestige and (maybe) sexual favors. Romantics, as Coleridge explained it, think of poetry as its own justification in that the cures for society’s ills are the cures for the ills of individuals like the poet himself, and the ultimate cure is the experience of poetry itself: “I expect neither profit nor general fame by my writings. Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward: it has soothed my afflictions; it has multiplied and refined my enjoyments; it has endeared solitude; and it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and the beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.”

Birney says this, more or less, at the start of one of his “workshop” books for novice writers, The Cow Jumped Over the Moon (1972). Unfortunately for him, actions speak louder than words. Birney’s actions, described in great detail by Elspeth Cameron in her biography (1994) show that in no way did Birney regard poetry as its own justification. He lusted after stardom, worked incessantly to acquire its trappings, and carried on like a spoilt kid when an editor rejected one of his poems (even when he knew the poem was bad), when a critic questioned (even tentatively) one of his books, when a grant or public office (Master of Massey College) did not come his way, when a publisher failed to market him adequately. He drove Roy Daniels (his boss at UBC), Jack McClelland (his publisher) and Esther (his wife) crazy. Esther, who knew him best, said: “He never made the great international success he longed for and couldn’t settle for simpler goals. What a mess most intellectuals make of their lives when their talents are real but small.”

So Geddes is only partly correct about Birney being a “Romantic.” The problem might have been that discovering the good and beautiful, “the cure for society’s ills,” and being an example of that cure, is a heavier responsibility than pleasing one’s mistress, audience or patron. What can happen to the Romantic poet is that poetry — or the responsibility of producing it and living up to it — itself becomes an obstruction to genuine experience and wisdom. The poet is made impotent by his high expectations of himself, which he has sold — or which has been sold on his behalf by colleagues, critics and English teachers — to society in general. When the Romantic poet is blocked he can do what Coleridge did—stop writing; he can write excessively like Wordsworth did, or he can find a middle way — enduring periods of silence while the impulse is building or the experience is anticipated or engineered.

Birney was capable of none of these. He could not abide Coleridge’s silence and was too impatient to test, as Wordsworth did, the same impulse over and over. Nor could he endure the creative sort of silence that Yeats celebrates in “Long-Legged Fly.” He feared missing not just the poetically lucrative experiences that might come his way, but also the chance of achievement in more materialistically rewarding genres like the novel and the play. So he tried the Classical approach, addressing himself to contemporary audiences and trends, trying the popular novel, the philosophical novel, radio drama, beat poetry, concrete poetry, and sound poetry. Because “David” was popular he had to write a second narrative climbing poem even though he was tired of the first. When Creative Writing proved popular, he wrote two handbooks that describe the private “workshops” that resulted in his own poems. When he needed an airplane ticket he wrote a blurb for an airline company. He measured his success not by his own standards (as Coleridge did) but by the currency of public acceptance, which he inflated massively.

He was often aware that he was straying from the genre for which he had real talent — the lyric poem — and not expending his creative energies wisely. He often cursed himself for wasting time. But, since Fame did not rush to embrace him, he rushed to embrace her. He decided he needed time to do even more of he was doing to win her. In his other workshop book, The Creative Writer (1966), he states the problem: “The writer-artist . . .needs time and plenty of it, and the freedom to apportion that time as the dictates of his art determine. And, unless he is born with a silver spoon, he also needs money to buy that time.”

Birney doesn’t say more about what that “freedom” is actually freedom from, but it is obvious from Cameron’s book that it is freedom from family and job obligations. All his life, Birney whined ceaselessly about these obligations — what he often called “the rat-race” — in long letters to his friends and wife Esther.

He also whined about them in The Creative Writer: “The frustrations of failure or non-recognition aren’t really the tough things in a writer’s life. It’s the other lives he has to live, to make a living, or be a responsible citizen or family man, which reduce his creativeness to fitful hours rather than the excitement of self-absorbing months . . . . A lot of beginners hole up in a craft job at nice pay and write nothing anyone would remember the next week. Others will turn out one promising novel or chapbook of poems, or a few short stories, and quit. They quit because they can’t keep physically alive by what they write; they must get into the rat-race; and the rat-race drains both time and energy and leaves them depressed — depressed with their world’s lack of interest in literature as literature, its unwillingness to hire them as artists. They become more dejected than Coleridge . . . .”

Coleridge had much more basic reasons for feeling dejected — opium addiction and unrequited love — and in any case tended to blame himself for his problems. Birney emphatically did not blame himself; his problems were acquired in the name of art. He associated independent travel and extra-marital affairs with creativity and pursued them as frantically as he pursued publication. He ran from and returned to Esther over and over again, and his explanations were always the same. He pleaded his art as sole excuse: “I am a writer. This is a fixture in my temperament. It makes me want to roam, to experience, to be alone often, to be unencumbered by worries so that I can summon the energy for artistic concentration . . . . All my life I have wanted to be an artist, a writer, and I have been frustrated at every turn, and still am, by having to earn a living so arduously that I can’t do the real things I can do . . . .”

In this particular letter to Esther, one of dozens that were all more or less the same, Birney says, “Quite bluntly, I need a wife who has money.” Birney had left Esther to be with Pauline Ivey, who happened to be rich and whom he’d met in a resort town in Mexico. Most of the time his mistresses were not rich — some he had to support them when they were with him, and thus Birney had no “artistic” reason for going to them. Esther of course noted this contradiction and the contradiction between the need “to be alone often” and to have “a wife who has money.”

Esther was a social worker, and often (as their son got older and when Birney let her) worked and paid her own way so she was actually an asset financially. She knew too that Birney wasted much of the time that he could’ve spent writing in scrambling for money, mistresses and attention, and that he traveled to avoid writing, not to generate inspiration.

In neither of his workshop books does Birney deal with wives, houses, lawns and children. He does not, for instance, write about his son Bill, who thoughtlessly took tuba lessons in high school and was obnoxiously loyal to his mother. Perhaps Birney, self-focused as he was, understood how selfish he sounded, and how pompous in attributing his wants to the cause of art. Perhaps he couldn’t quite convince himself that civilization was paying a too-heavy price for Bill’s tuba lessons. Nor does Birney deal with mistresses, not even when they contributed actual lines to poems as Margaret Crossland did to “Mappemounde.” Perhaps he didn’t want to embarrass these women.

Perhaps he didn’t want to encourage novice writers to go this arduous route, believing it would be better for them to concentrate on daffodils. Perhaps he regarded his need for lovers as a strictly personal, even eccentric, one that wouldn’t apply to others. Birney deals only with the job problem: granted a job is necessary, what kind of job best allows the poet to apportion his time “as his art determines?”

Poetry requires at least two things, in Birney’s professional estimate.

One is travel: “Unless he is to end up a regional second-rater or a class snob or fanatic, he needs to spend some of that time and money moving about his country and some of the rest of the world, for his subject is humanity and he must experience humanity to write about it, to fulfill his own destiny.” The other requirement is “a balanced understanding of the world of ideas around him, and of the literary and scientific heritage to which he is heir.”

Obviously both these needs, as Birney seems to mean them, are as eccentric as the need for sexual affairs, two more items on his own personal wish-list. Some great poets travel and some don’t: Shakespeare stayed home, and Johnson went to Scotland and said that no one need go outside London. As for understanding of ideas and the literary heritage, this is no doubt good for you and your society but not as essential to poetry as Romantics like to believe. Birney wasted years being a Trotskyite. As Northrop Frye says in The Educated Imagination, “the poet is not only very seldom the person one would turn to for insight into the state of the world, but often seems even more gullible and simple-minded than the rest of us.”

So how, in Birney’s opinion, does the poet acquire work that pays for maximum freedom to do what art demands? Here too Birney’s advice applies more to himself than others and is sometimes totally contradictory. To beginning poets he recommends university studies, particularly in Creative Writing. Doing a stint at university provides a fair amount of free time and some understanding of ideas. But Birney hedged on this advice. The great Romantics did not associate understanding of the world of ideas with schooling, and Birney acknowledged that university was not for everyone: “the unusual youth, energetic, habitually organized, and disciplined beyond what most writers tend to be,” will not need university. Also, universities in general are “academically hide bound,” the professors “not always very live,” and the writer-professors “too busy or timid” to fight for writing programs.

Still, Birney argues that the university provides, besides time and ideas, a friendly environment and contact with real writers: “Even in our largest academic marketerias, the student still obtains some fleeting contact with the hired help, and some guidance in finding what he is shopping for, provided it’s in stock.”

In those days, as today, writer-professors are something that most university English departments plentifully had in stock. Birney was able to list the best of the Canadian writer-profs, a couple of them at least in each of the major universities.

What wasn’t much in stock in Birney’s time was direct instruction in creative writing: “As for the writer-professors I’ve referred to . . . they have nearly all remained too busy or too timid to offer Creative Writing, even if a Dean of Arts or Head of English could by some accident have been persuaded to admit such an exotic into the hallowed curriculum.” At UBC, at least, this has been achieved, and by Birney himself, for the benefit of beginner poets. Not surprisingly, Birney cheerfully recommended his own program.

For promoting the program, Birney took some flack from his prestigious writer-friends, who well knew that Birney’s private appraisal of the university was more negative than the above comments, lukewarm as they are, would suggest. They could not believe that Birney would seriously recommend Creative Writing to novice writers, and saw him as hypocritical; he was doing what he had to do to make his job more comfortable. In 1960, Robert Bly, an editor for a Minnesota magazine at the time, who had seen Birney’s poetry in US magazines and thought highly of it, read some of Birney’s promotional material for the UBC program and objected: “There is something revolting . . . about the whole idea of courses in ‘creative writing’ . . . which you as a serious poet, must well understand.”

Birney was stung by this, probably because he knew that Bly was right, that his own argument was a rationalization based on his own choices and needs. He countered by pointing out that Bly himself had been at Iowa and that this experience of writers of Bly’s generation showed in contemporary journals like Bly’s: “without the work of ‘serious poets’ in universities during the Forties and Fifties, the level of writing in the journals of the Sixties would, I suspect, be a good deal lower than it is. And this you, as a serious editor, must well understand.”

Bly responded angrily to this counter-accusation of hypocrisy, this obvious mockery, and this misrepresenting of the facts about journal poetry: “Iowa . . . was a grotesque farce . . . . I also took part as an undergraduate in some creative writing courses at Harvard under MacLeish, for one. They were directed by serious men, but they were absurd. The whole atmosphere of a university is the exact opposite of the delicacy of poetry . . . . Most creative writing courses do much more harm than good . . . . The level [of journal writing] is much lower . . . than it has ever been, and for the major part because poetry has become domesticated in the universities.”

Bly might have noted that, in The Creative Writer, Birney absolutely recommends against the novice writer staying in the university to teach after graduation: “Many Canadian authors would have written much more, and consequently developed farther and become more contemporary as writers, if they had not, by going to college, got too deeply involved in colleges, by staying on to teach in them . …I think the young Canadian writer …should not stay around after graduation, however many of his fellow artists are there in academic chains around him.”

Birney really seemed to believe that the university was not a good place for the established writer. In a questionnaire circulated among Canadian poet-profs in 1956, as to whether or not university work was conducive to artistic creativity, Birney was one of only two who recorded an absolute “no:” “Academic obligations have hindered me in writing poetry.” Birney went on to provide a long account of how this happened — of the various duties he had to endure — and listed no positives, not even some that might be connected to teaching creative writing. After he retired, Birney became even more contemptuous of the university — excepting the Creative Writing program for novices — as a seat of artistic creativity. How he expected such a program to exist without teachers, he never said, though he did always argue for the program more as an environment rather than a course of instruction. Presumably Creative Writing departments were to be staffed by artistic losers and self-acknowledged hacks.

It’s significant that Birney never proposed alternate employment for the established writer, never answered the question of what such a writer is to do for a living, beyond suggesting that the state should pay wages to artists. Nor did he explain why the university would be good for the beginner but bad for the writer who stays on to teach. Bly might’ve been correct; Birney could have understood, if only instinctively, that there was something intrinsically bad about mixing teaching literature with writing it — that the teaching involved a method or habit of thinking that worked against the writing. What was obvious is that Birney was a hypocrite, quite likely in his recommending Creative Writing for novices and quite obviously in proscribing serious writers from staying around the university. His equals (like Bly) and any younger writers who regarded him as a model, judged him by his actions, not by what he said: he recommended Creative Writing to beginners, and he stayed around to teach it.

Obviously Birney found, and worked hard to make, his university job the best of all possible jobs for a poet, even if he did hint that it was actually the worst. And why wouldn’t it be the best? What else could compare? Four paid summer months, with funding for travel and conferences; research fellowships, professional development funds, sabbaticals, influence over university publishing houses and periodicals. And, due to the lobbying and advice of Birney and his fellow writer-profs at the time, the federal Canada Council and provincial arts councils were established and funded. Thanks to artists like Birney, society began hiring the artist, as he wished. But it was not to produce art so much as to teach it while producing it.

Birney became an example to the next generation of poets, who largely ignored his recommendation against teaching. Frank Davey, a student in Birney’s program (before it became a separate department), who worked in that program as a teaching assistant while he did his thesis in English, said: “When I enrolled at the University of British Columbia in 1957, Birney seemed to me to be the only ‘writer’ on faculty, and despite campus rumors that he saw his writing as crippled by university demands — he became for me a sign of the compatibility in Canada of a writing career and university teaching.” At other campuses, poets like Louis Dudek, Ralph Gustafson, F. R. Scott, Margaret Avison, George Bowering, and Eli Mandel set similar examples for other student-writers. As the 1957 survey indicates, these writer-profs would’ve been encouraging their “A” students to stay in academe. And more and more these profs and their colleagues followed Birney in working to introduce Creative Writing courses and programs for themselves and their students to teach.

In one sense, Davey was right to ignore Birney’s warnings. For anyone familiar with Birney and his poetry, it will be clear that Birney assessed his own creative needs accurately, and that the trips and lovers were not merely self-indulgence insofar as Birney did write best when he had free (paid) time that he could dedicate to travel and women. (“Study” didn’t really seem to interest him much, though he may have assumed that he had done enough of that in completing his doctorate). A graph showing the public appreciation of Birney’s poetry (measured by repeat publication in anthologies, say) on its vertical axis, and horizontally the years of Birney’s life, would display an oscillation that peaks during his years in the army (1941-1945), during his Nuffield Fellowship (1958-1959), and during his Canada Council Senior Arts Fellowship (1962-1963). These were the times when Birney was liberated from teaching and on the move with various lovers. But what the graph doesn’t show is that it was Birney’s academic job that provided the Nuffield and facilitated the Canada Council grant. It also provided the contacts he used to get both grants and to make arrangements to carry out the required projects, and it allowed him the freedom to take the time off.

Birney’s first poetry was written between 1936-1942, when he was teaching full-time at the University of Toronto. However, the best of his early poems were written when Birney was in the army and on the way out of academic life. Birney volunteered in October 1940. About the years prior to that he says, in The Cow Jumped Over the Moon, that he wrote “scarcely a dozen” poems, “nearly all trivia.” He explains his ensuing situation in Fall By Fury (1978): “In the spring of 1941, I was the Lecturer of the English Department in University College, Toronto, and a private-cadet in the university’s army training corps. I would wind up my last seminar by four, change from customary teaching gown to required khaki, tramp around the quad juggling a rifle for an hour or so, then head for home.” He told a friend, “Now that I’ve burnt my bridges, this last year of academic life is distinctly pleasant.” Birney felt the “summer holiday” exhilaration of someone long in “chains” (the metaphor he always used when referring to the university), who knows that he will soon be released.

He started writing “David” that spring, and finished it by summer. He wrote “Vancouver Lights” when he just started “David,” and “Anglo-Saxon Street ” a few months later. These are his first three good poems. When the academic year was over, life got even better. Unlike fellow poet Irving Layton, a high-school English teacher, Birney loved the army — possibly because his age (36) would definitely keep him out of combat, and because his degree and his years of teaching indicated that he could be put to “management.” He trained as a Personnel Selection Officer, moving around Ontario and Quebec administering tests to conscripts and volunteers, delighting in the information he was collecting, which he saw as material for poetry and the novel he started to plan, which eventually became Turvey (1949). He rose to the rank of Captain, and found that the uniform was easily as effective as the academic gown when it came to acquiring lovers.

In his time overseas (May 1943-July 1945), he wrote “The Road to Nijmegen,” “This Page My Pigeon,” “From the Hazel Bough,” and “Mappemounde.” Purdy thought the latter one of the great and truly original poems of the century. Whatever the truth of that, this batch of poems is definitely superior to the previous one. Birney was now not just out of the university but also traveling, living away from his family, and bedding more women. “This Page” is for Esther, but “The Road to Nijmegen” recalls Gabrielle Baldwin, to whom the poem is dedicated. He’d met her in February 1943 in the officer’s mess at Niagara-on-the-Lake. “Mappemounde” is, as Espeth Cameron puts it, “a reworking of the sonnets he and Margaret [Crossland] had exchanged: …The force of the poem… came from his union with Margaret.” Crossland was Birney’s English lover, who posed as his wife in order to get easier access to him in army camps and hospitals. Cameron quotes lines from Crossland’s sonnets that Birney echoed in his. “From the Hazel Bough” was started in the military hospital in Toronto in 1945 and was for Corinne Hagon, a neighbor on Hazelton Avenue in Toronto with whom Birney had a brief affair while in training.

When he was demobilized, Birney made a serious attempt to avoid returning to university work, following his own instinct and the advice of writer-friends, like Dorothy Livesay, who tried to persuade him “to get away from that neutral limbo, the university.” He took a job with CBC radio, cutting his ties with the U of T, which was expecting him back from his leave. But he found that radio work left him absolutely no time for writing. Birney seems to have concluded that no job could be right for him, and he never tried alternate work again. He fell back on the familiar and hired on at UBC. He was tired of living in the east and, at UBC, the head of English, Garnett Sedgewick, was sympathetic to Birney’s poetic aspirations. Sedgewick promised Birney that he would be allowed to teach creative writing; this would be the first time in Canada that such a course would be taught as part of a professor’s load rather than by a visiting writer like (prominently at that time) Bliss Carman. Birney would also be free of committee work — an easy promise for Sedgewick to make since he decided everything himself, consulted no one.

However, despite the advantages of being at UBC, “dejection” set in by Birney’s second year of teaching, and there were then no sabbaticals at UBC to look forward to. The idea was that for important projects the profs would secure funding and the university would grant unpaid leave. So in the fall of 1952, after five years of full-time work, Birney acquired a Canadian Government Overseas Fellowship to write a novel. He’d written two famous poems — the only good poems he wrote while “in chains” — in that five years: “Bushed” and “Ellesmereland.” Ralph Gustafson and E. J. Pratt supported his grant application — Birney had been writing letters for Gustafson and Pratt had been a colleague at U of T. Birney had already published Turvey to some acclaim, but not enough to satisfy him, especially when he failed to find British and American publishers for the book. Also, some important reviewers were unhappy with it. They thought that Turvey, the central character, was too stupid to be interesting; Birney gave him no inner life, no interesting monologue nor relationships, no crises. They thought the scenes of horseplay were too many, and because Turvey never makes it to the battlefront the book makes no comment on war itself except that it can be a lot of fun. Birney partly agreed with these judgments, thought he could profit from them, and noted that Turvey sold — 5,000 copies in the first three weeks. He wanted to try again, and received from the government the equivalent of a year’s salary for all of 1953. He didn’t want to go overseas, but he’d been turned down for Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships.

He went straight to France — thinking of Hemingway and the Left Bank — and succeeded in getting half of Down the Long Table done, and in making some progress on his poetry book that was overdue at Ryerson. He also edited a war memorial book for UBC and the anthology Twentieth-Century Canadian Poetry for Ryerson. He had acquired a number of magazine assignments for travel articles, as a way of supplementing his income, but couldn’t complete them, and he wrote no poetry. Cameron says, “he detested the life of an expatriate writer.” When overseas, he wanted to have fun. Fun was not to be had in France; the Left Bank was dead. Also writing a second novel was a mistake. Birney realized that fiction was not his genre. Finally, he had Esther close by at the time, mostly at his own insistence. Apparently he didn’t factor in his need for other women.

He eventually learned to avoid these sorts of mistakes, as often as he could. Birney’s second explosion of poetry happened in 1958-9, while he was on a Nuffield Scholarship to write some articles about Chaucer. Once again he’d reached a state of panic about his writing: “The academic chains are almost crushing, and I have written nothing of a creative nature for nearly four years since I finished Down the Long Table.”

Once again he was forced to devise a project that was not really what he wanted; he needed publications in his specialty to hang onto his small classes of grad students. He was no longer interested in “chipping at the granite face of Chaucer scholarship,” but knew that he could write a few Chaucer articles quickly. He planned carefully, sending letters ahead for readings and places to stay. He sent Esther and Bill east across Canada and to England, and traveled the other way around the world himself, by plane, spending time in Honolulu (where he wrote “Twenty-third Flight”), Japan (“A Walk in Kyoto”), and India. He started many other poems.

After a couple of months in the British Museum with Chaucer, Birney fled south into France, without Esther, hooking up with Liz Cowley, who back in 1946 had taken to sending him her poetry and had then become a “mascot” to Birney’s Creative Writing class of 1948. She’d become a top BBC television producer in the meantime, and Birney looked her up in London.

From Paris, he took her to A. J. M. Smith’s place in Nice, then hooked up with her again on his way home on Ile de Porquerolles off Toulon. Cameron points out that there was “a connection between his conquest of new experiences or new women and his creativity . . . . The best poem that took shape in the spate of verses Birney began formulating that year of Asia and Liz was ‘Bear on the Delhi Road.’ It was the only poem he wrote on holiday with Liz.” “El Greco: Espolia” was written shortly after he got home, and about it Cameron adds, “his affair with Liz Cowley had brought to life the emotions that found expression in “Bear” and “El Greco: Espolia.” Other popular poems written at that time and published a couple of years later in Ice, Cod, Bell and Stone (1962) were “Wake Island,” “Bangkok Boy,” “Flying Fish,” and “Wind-Chimes in a Temple Ruin.”

Three years after the Nuffield, in 1962-3, Birney won a Canada Council Senior Arts Fellowship to travel, write and lecture on Canadian poetry for a year. His application, supported by U of T president Claude Bissell and ambassador to Greece Bruce Macdonald — a friend from undergraduate days at UBC — argued that Canada needed “cultural ambassadors to supplement their diplomats and economic emissaries.” The itinerary was extensive– San Miguel (a favored writing/partying spot) in Mexico, Mexico City, New Orleans, Miami, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Lima, Machu Picchu, Cartagena in Colombia, Curacao in Trinidad, Caracas, Spain, London, and Florence. Some spots like Caracas and Buenos Aires were for sightseeing, but for most stops Birney had arranged ahead of time for readings and lectures, a total of 37 by the end of November 1962.

In San Miguel, once Esther and Bill had left, Birney was joined by his student Judith Bechtold (“that rarity: a good-looking girl who can make firsts in Chaucer and also in a writing class”). In London he hooked up with “a delicious and almost-young” Sussex Florence. There, after Crossland returned to London, he met Crowley (the arrangements had been made from Trinidad) and they traveled together, by car and car ferry, to Greece and then through Yugoslavia, Venice, northern Italy, France and Andorra to northern Spain. In Madrid, “the girl went back to London and my wife arrived by plane from Vancouver.” Esther and Birney toured the rest of Spain. In Majorca, in December, with Esther, he began to write, producing the long poem “November Walk Near False Creek Mouth”, an inspired meditation on death and one of Birney’s better poems. Near False Creek Mouth (1964) contained the poems from this trip and is an early example of a new sub-genre — the sequence of travel-poems written on sabbatical, a grant, or both. Other often-anthologized poems written at this time were “Meeting of Strangers,” “Cartagena Les Indias,” and “Billboards Build Freedom of Choice,” but overall these poems were a falling off from those written while on the Nuffield.

When Birney retired, at 61 years of age, in 1965, he covertly arranged with Bissell for a two-year, half-salary writer in residence at the U of T and a place to stay so he could live with Ikuko Atsumi, a student in English and Creative Writing (poetry) and an art-school model. Birney left Esther and drove with Ikuko across Canada. The secrecy was to avoid scenes with Esther and Ikuko’s husband who was threatening to beat Birney up. He also invoked old friendships to arrange for Ikuko to be admitted to grad school at U of T, even though she was short some requirements. Once she was set up, Birney threw himself into writing and literary activities, sitting on the Council’s Advisory Arts Panel and doing most of the work of setting up the League of Canadian Poets (1966).

He resigned from the Royal Society and, as Cameron says, “Made it clear that he despised the universities,” though in reality he was, of course, working in one. When Ikuku returned to her husband, Birney replaced her with Alison Hunt, a high-school teacher who had turned up at one of his readings. He took her with him when he taught summer creative writing in Charlottetown. He sold his papers to the Toronto Public Library for the equivalent of a professor’s full yearly salary. When his gig at U of T was over, he became Writer-in-Residence at Waterloo University, 1967-1968. From there he went to UCLA at Irvine. It was a soft touch, a half-dozen lectures and some office hours so creative writing students could talk to him.

But now it wasn’t working. By 1970, Birney realized that the writer-in-residency was just another job, almost as time-consuming and worrying, and in the same stultifying environment, as full-time teaching. He had to make complicated arrangements and find a new home every year or two. Esther would be with him. Tom Wayman, a creative writing student of Birney’s during his last years at UBC, who had gone to Irvine and worked towards getting Birney hired there, was disappointed in Birney, finding him impatient with the students, “as if he had a chip of resentment on his shoulder that after so much effort he was not as famous, or honored, or rewarded as he felt he deserved.” Wayman also noted that Birney had come to Irvine with Esther and that Bill was nearby working, and the proximity to family seemed to be weighing heavily on Birney. Finally, Wayman believed that Birney was writing the wrong kind of poetry. Birney had taken sides, back in 1965, for the Canadian modernists (Scott, Layton, Purdy etc) and against the Americans (Olson, Creeley, Ginsberg, Duncan etc) who had been brought to UBC by Warren Tallman. But by the time he arrived at Irvine it was as if he were trying to catch up with newer trends: “He declared that concrete or shaped poems were the forefront of poetic endeavor, and was rather dismissive towards other approaches.”

Birney designed an escape from writer-in-residence gigs and family pressures by arranging arduous reading tours, one tour after another with little time between. He knew that it would take a mountain of honoraria to make up for the regular university salary that he needed to travel and (much of the time) maintain two residences in Canada. He started with Australia and New Zealand. He used contacts in Canada to make contacts among Australian writers, and did his research. His last couple of lectures at Irvine were, Wayman noted, about poetry “down under.” Birney now had pension money and some savings, and he got a special Canada Council Medal and Award of $2,500 (May 1968) to supplement the honoraria. Alison Hunt went with him.

Alison perceived the nature of the new game that Birney was playing — and the pressures that it put on him: “One thing I found very strange. Wherever he went he had like 500 people to woo who’d written to him and he’d written to. And the Big Link to Earle was American Express. He’d go in there three times a day whenever we were in the big places. And there’d be this great pile of mail. I had this idea that a poet sat around and looked at things and read books all the time. But he was always writing what I thought were long, sort of business letters. He’d be bitching and signing all these lovely things for people to get their Canada Council grants, and all this support for about a hundred thousand poets. And a lot of it seemed to me an awful lot of busy work . . . . Sometimes he’d pull the curtains, put on dark glasses and spend all day writing letters to the editor, to the publisher, saying things like ‘You pisspot McClelland’ or ‘You piss me off, Jack.’ It was like an intravenous transfusion for him, I think.”

It was pretty much like teaching too — talking to unknowns about their poems, lecturing on Canadian Literature, planning itinerary, and reading. But there was no break from it.

In the end, Birney was not happy with “down under,” calling it “a dismal human landscape.” He planned retirement in Vancouver, with Esther.

Esther rented a “writing” cottage on Galiano Island. But Birney couldn’t settle down and soon set off on a Canadian-U.S. reading tour, mid-February – June 1969. He was unhappy with that, too. He earned only $900, got small audiences, and the reviews were not good. Still, he was off again at the beginning of 1971, reading at universities across the country, a tour that was aborted when he was involved in a traffic accident on 25 January. He soon recovered, and was reading in England and France in April through June 1971. Home, he planned an Asia-Africa tour for the winter and spring of 1972, funded by honoraria and “Cancow” ($2,940). He did 43 readings, average stop 3 days, in Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya, Ceylon, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Hawaii. In the Spring of 1973 he did a busy reading tour of the east, 18 readings in seven weeks, returning to Vancouver in April.

But still, inspiration lagged. The books he published in his time of writer-in-residencies and reading tours, 1965-1973, were not well received. Wayman had been right. Cameron comments that Birney’s concrete poems, featured in Pnomes, Jukollages and Other Stunzas, produced by bpNichol in his grOnk series (1969), Rag and Bone Shop (1971), and What’s So Big about Green (1973), “had sprung not from the heart, but from the head. They were cerebral and glib, cynical and cold.” And they were so despite the attentions of admiring and on the whole happy lovers and despite the fact that Birney was traveling intensively.

Two days after returning from his Spring 73 Canadian reading tour, Birney had a heart attack. He was 68 years old. Esther was in Hawaii. His rescuer was Lily Low, who later revived her Chinese name Wailan. Low was a 23-year-old grad student of Birney’s UBC colleague Tony Kilgallen, who had engineered their meeting. She moved in with Birney and then, before Esther came home, went east with him. She soon became his second wife. They settled in Toronto, where she ultimately went to law school and began a practice. This tied Birney down somewhat, but in 1974-5 they did a world tour, with Birney’s airfare paid by “Cancow” for doing a few readings. Birney’s pace was further slowed by an accident after they got home. He was planning a 3-week reading trip to the USSR for the autumn when he fell out of a tree he was pruning. In January 1976, on crutches, he read at some nearby universities.

He entered into a final, though minor, phase of successful writing — his fourth after the Army, the Nuffield, and the Canada Council grant of 1962-3. He wrote love poems for Wailan Low. Purdy wrote in surprise in July 1976: “The six [poems] for Lan are the best love poems I’ve ever seen of yours . . . lovely and delicate . . . with an overlooking sort of love.” In 1978, some of these poems, including the beautiful “My Love is Young” that matches “Hazel Bough” for conventional lyric grace, were published in Fall by Fury.

Birney now had time for writing. He did continue his readings, writer-in-residencies and grant-funded travels: in 1978 he received a three-year Canada Council Senior Arts Grant, in 1981 he was writer in residence at Western, and in 1983 (at 79 years old) did 25 readings across Canada. However, as Cameron puts it, “anxious ambition no longer spurred Birney on . . . . No longer was he scrambling desperately as if he had to scale impossible heights.” The fact was that Birney’s life now revolved around Low’s. She was going to university and then working, so his trips were done during summer or over Christmas, when Wailan was free to go with him. Otherwise, Birney watched TV, wrote, and waited for her to come home. This ended in 1987 when another heart attack damaged Birney’s brain and put him permanently in chronic care. He died there in 1995 at 91 years of age.

Birney set the pattern for the literary life of the writer-prof both before and after retirement, and for the famous writer who wants university work. He helped set up the Canada Council and the League of Canadian poets, he participated in the work of these organizations, and he benefited from that work. He ran a university periodical — Prism International — and published in it and the periodicals of his colleagues and students. He worked to bring Creative Writing to Canada, to make it possible for students and professors to submit literary as well as scholarly writing for credit and in satisfaction of “publish or perish” professional development, sabbatical and tenure rules. As well he encouraged donors to set up writing fellowships and awards, and promoted the teaching of Canadian literature. From all of this he also, deservedly, benefited. Once he retired, his influence and connections remained intact, and he used them energetically to get what he felt he needed.

But what did it mean to his writing? Writing can thrive under the most adverse of circumstances, and can even blossom because of those circumstances. In the absolute sense, money and time are not needed to produce writing if the creative urge is intense enough, or the sense of mission. On the other hand, it would be too easy to argue that Birney would have benefited from some slave labor or a long-term dependence on a 9 – 5 job. It is excessively Protestant to argue that this would have focused him and given him more serious material to work with than travel-adventure and romantic love, replacing these with suffering or politics, or that it would have eliminated his detached ruminative moralizing and his satirical and experimental urges, by replacing them with the urgency of tragic or prophetic insight. It’s easy to show, too, that Birney’s rationales for what he wanted, as well as his after-the-fact explanations of the genesis of each of his great poems, are self-serving and contradictory. All that can be said fairly is that the system he built worked for him.

But did it work better than some randomly acquired form of wage-slavery would have? By 1965, when he retired, Birney had written almost all but one or two of his major poems. Maybe he needed his job in order to continually be liberated from it, and maybe once he was liberated permanently that “rush” disappeared. He seemed to have needed the interstices between slave labor and freedom, the “rush.” The writer-in-residencies and reading tours proved infinite — there was no release from them because Birney was his own manager and there was no one like Daniels, Esther or Bill to blame for lack of creativity. The picture of Birney painted by Alison Hunt is haunting: a poet spending his days not so much with her, Australia and poetry but caught inside the system he’d helped to create, writing business letters, angrily fighting with critics and publishers, dutifully returning favors and humbly requesting them, eternally designing grant applications and proposals.

The new possibilities that Birney set up for the poet to earn money to buy time may not have amounted to what Bly thought — a domestication of poetry in the university. But they have amounted to the domestication of a lot of poets — including Birney. These poets trained at university, and later their main venues became the textbook anthology and the classroom reading, their main audience was made up of teachers and students, and their main patron was the government and its arts/education bureaucracy. Birney helped create another job of work for the poet, one that has the benefit and maybe the danger of providing, in addition to time and the power to apportion it, all the trappings of fame: audiences, ready publication, good money and endless distraction. For Birney, more and more, as he got what he said he wanted, it was mostly the distractions that proved real.

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Prince George, B.C., May 28, 2008.

While it is now commonly assumed that any group supporting the Canadian mission would have to be composed solely of conservatives, bellicose veterans, warmongers or worse, the Post story noted that “strange as it might seem,” CASC had a heavy presence on Canada’s west coast, “where the political landscape tilts sharply to the left.” The Post found it remarkable that CASC’s founders “include poets, environmentalists and local authors who will never be mistaken for conservatives, such as Terry Glavin and Stan Persky.”

True, but it’s also the case that CASC members come from pretty much across the political rainbow. Among CASC’s founders are former Progressive Conservative cabinet ministers John Fraser and Flora MacDonald, and former federal Liberal cabinet member and B.C. Lieutenant Governor Iona Campagnolo.

Still, we’re grateful that the Post spelled our names right, at least once. Journalist Hutchinson: “Among the many books Mr. Pesky [sic] has written is Boyopolis: Sex and Politics in Gay Eastern Europe; one can assume it is not on [Canadian General] Rick Hillier’s bedside table.” We are happy to concede that Persky, spelled correctly or not, is indeed pretty “pesky” at times, and occasionally even “perky” (and we plead ignorance about what’s on General Hillier’s bedside table, although we hope it’s something like Clausewitz on War rather than one of Persky’s salacious texts).

We are happy the Post has noticed that at least some non-conservatives think there’s a point to Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan. The views of CASC’s founders have already appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, the Ottawa Citizen, the Tyee, Vancouver’s 24 Hours metro daily, and on various radio programs, so we are especially pleased to welcome the Post to the scrum.

What worries us, however, is not the state of our media profile, but the fact that too few Canadians share our views with more than grudging approval (and depending on the state of the polls, a majority sometimes totally disagrees with us). So, we thought we should engage in a bit of dialogue as part of our obligation to provide an answer to the question, “Why is Canada in Afghanistan?” And then, we’ll go on to murkier political matters such as, “Why should the left support the Canadian mission?”, and then try to answer some really arcane questions like, “Is there still a political left in Canada and, if so, what sort of shape is it in?”

We’ll try to keep the latter analysis—to use Sigmund Freud’s terms— “terminable” rather than “interminable.”

Stan Persky: Last fall, in a college ethics class I was teaching, I was trying to make a perhaps obscure point about how the fundamental ethical question, “What should I do?” gradually but inevitably shades over into the question, “What should we do?” My would-be lesson for the day was how individual ethics is necessarily connected to political philosophy’s “we” questions, which is basically the question of, “How should we go about living together?” Since, at that moment, Canada was in the midst of a major debate about the country’s participation in the United Nations-authorized Afghanistan mission—and there were nightly lead stories on every TV station and on the front pages of every newspaper in the land—I innocently asked my students, “Why are we in Afghanistan?”, figuring that they would all have opinions on the subject.

The politer students looked up from their computer screens or turned off their cellphones or even pulled one earphone out of their iPod-connected ears. I was then treated to a display of typical Canadian politeness, one of our major national traits. The students knew we had troops fighting out there somewhere, but they politely claimed they didn’t know much about it. They knew it was all happening in some faraway Absurdistan, but weren’t exactly sure where it precisely was, although several of them politely offered to bring their recently-purchased Global Positioning System devices into play in order to locate it. When I asked, “Should we be in Afghanistan?”, the façade of politeness gave way to another national trait: they were simply flummoxed.

I worried. My worry went like this: if our best and brightest have only the foggiest notion of what we’re doing in Afghanistan, what do you suppose the national state of mind is on this question? So, for starters, I suggest that we offer a straightforward answer to the question, and that we don’t take anything for granted in terms of assuming knowledge. We can go on later to more complex matters, like 1) offering a balanced assessment of the virtues and faults of the present Afghan government and the views of its people, 2) determining the difference between the war in Afghanistan and the one in Iraq, and 3) figuring out why most of the Canadian left is vehemently opposed to Canadian participation in the Afghan mission. So, why don’t you get us started on the initial big question. Why are we in Afghanistan?

Terry Glavin: Well, there are, as you point out, at least two related questions to begin with here. It’s necessary to answer the “Why are we in Afghanistan?” question before we can sensibly approach the question “Should we be in Afghanistan?” And you’re right, it does help to consider the broader, philosophical question “What should we do?” as a kind of extension of the ethical question “What should I do?”

I’m not so dismayed when I encounter people who are, as you say, “flummoxed” by these questions. Given the sadly shallow level of debate about Afghanistan in this country, perhaps especially as it tends to unfold on campus, “flummoxed” might be evidence of an open and healthy state of mind. At least your students didn’t answer these questions with rote invocations of the names “George Bush” and “Haliburton” and the dyspeptic employment of words like “imperialism” and “occupation.” Count yourself lucky.

I do find it very curious, and not a tiny bit dismaying, that otherwise intelligent Canadians don’t know much of anything about Afghanistan. For starters, it’s far and away the most important recipient of Canadian “foreign aid” at the moment, and the mobilization of our soldiers there is as robust as anything our military has done in half a century. You’d think that by now we’d at least have the semblance of a consensus about an answer to the first question—the question of why we’re there.

If I were to try to try to answer that question in a way that was intended as a kind of contribution to a proposed consensus, I’d want it to be as uncontroversial as possible. So it would look something like this:

We’re there because history put us there.

Canada is a member of NATO. Following the events of September 11, 2001, NATO invoked the self-defence clause (the all-for-one clause), and we remain in Afghanistan because we’re a member of the United Nations (and we’re one of the UN’s richest members) and the UN wants us there. The UN has explicitly asked us, in several Security Council and General Assembly resolutions, to be there, and to continue doing what we’re doing there.

Canada is in Afghanistan because we’re a member of the UN-sanctioned International Security Assistance Force, which consists of close to 40 NATO and non-NATO countries with soldiers in Afghanistan. We’re there because Canada is among the 50-or-so countries that signed the terms of the Afghanistan Compact, which sets out specific commitments in the rebuilding of Afghanistan, and in providing security in the country. We’re there because the Government of Afghanistan has asked us to be there.

That much should be without controversy. It should at least provide the basis of a conversation, before any “yes, but” chorus proceeds. If the basic facts aren’t the basis of a conversation, then there’s nothing to discuss.

But do these things mean that we should be there?

As you point out, this is the sort of question that is difficult to answer in any way that is held separate and apart from personal, ethical considerations. In that context, I don’t know of any way to answer the question, myself, except to say “yes, we should be there.”

We can get into arguments about what Canada should be doing in the work of development and reconstruction, exactly, and what specific roles our soldiers should be taking on, and how we might best make our contributions to security, infrastructure, and the rule of law in Afghanistan. But the “left” has largely absented itself from these discussions. By its default troops-out declarations, it has abdicated from any right to make contributions to these conversations. One cannot say Canada should leave Afghanistan, and then turn around and proceed to offer elaborate instructions about how Canada should behave in Afghanstan, and what Canada should and shouldn’t do there.

So we now move to the question of whether we should be there in the first place, and I can answer only in the affirmative, precisely because of the contents of the answer to the first question—the reasons why we are there. Those specific reasons involve some pretty basic duties of solidarity and global citizenship. And this is where the ethical dimension seems fairly straightforward to me.

Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest countries. Prior to 2001, the Afghan people had already been brutalized by a quarter of a century of almost constant warfare and despotism of the most savage and merciless kind. The women were slaves. Almost a quarter of the country’s population had fled, and wandered the world as exiles, or survived in refugee camps.

Since the rout of the Taliban, a baker’s dozen of national public opinion polls and focus group surveys has been undertaken in the country, and they present overwhelming and irrefutable evidence that the Afghan people themselves want us to be there. Is it ethically possible to say “no” to them? I can’t see it.

But if we put the question slightly differently— “Are there good reasons to leave?”— there might be defensible answers. But when one surveys the “anti-war” arguments, two things become obvious.

The first is that on their own, the “anti-war” complaints rarely withstand any serious scrutiny at all. Secondly, just for argument’s sake, if we were to go so far as to grant all but the most lunatic “anti-war” arguments—and there is no dearth of those—they still don’t add up to a case for withdrawal. They don’t come close to justifying an abdication of our basic obligations of solidarity and citizenship as a member of the UN, as a member of NATO, as a member of ISAF, or as a signatory to the Afghanistan Compact.

As for the directly personal, ethical context, I approach these questions from a fairly conventional social-democratic and internationalist perspective, and what is probably a distinctly Canadian version of that perspective as well. So, when I try to assess the struggle in Afghanistan from that perspective—and in light of the left’s traditional understanding that shooting fascists is no vice—I can’t help but notice that our soldiers in Afghanistan are clearly engaged in the advance of the historic mission of the left.

Our soldiers are helping to hold a critical front in the global struggle against tyranny, slavery, mysogyny, illiteracy, and obscurantism. No self-respecting and well-informed person of the left can refuse to take sides in this kind of a struggle. And it should be expected that there will be armed elements of reaction, arrayed against the people in times like these—and in this case there are such armed reactionary groups, such as the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Hezb-e Islami. One has to be prepared to take up arms against such elements—that’s what soldiers are for. We must stay and fight on.

Beyond that, things do get murky, and so I turn for guidance to our Afghan-Canadian comrades, and to our friends who have worked in Afghanistan. But none of these people ever says we should leave. The subject never even comes up.

Yes, some of the challenges we face there are terribly daunting, and desperately complicated, and worth arguing about. Some of these things leave me downright flummoxed.

But the last thing this means is we should leave.

SP: You mention “anti-war” arguments. I agree with you that we should skip the “most lunatic” pseudo-left arguments. The left has included a lunatic fringe ever since I was licking lollipops while Tommy Douglas orated from a hay baler. So, let’s stick to the relatively rational “anti-war” arguments with which we’re in disagreement. Very briefly, what are those arguments, and even more briefly, what’s our objection to them?

TG: To get at the “rational” arguments isn’t as easy as that, I’m afraid, so I’m not going to be able to be too brief. I regret to say that a degree of lunacy is actually quite commonplace, even in mainstream “anti-war” arguments, and that the term pseudo-left is adequate to take in a rather wide array of “anti-war” arguments.

Here’s some lunacy: We should withdraw because we’re only there to protect oil pipelines; because it’s part of a war the “west” is waging against Islam; because we’re imperialists engaged in a war of occupation against a Third World country, and we’re just trying to suck up to George Bush.

It’s easy to write off this stuff.

The oil pipelines don’t even exist. The signatories to the Afghanistan Compact, which sets out Canada’s marching orders in Afghanistan, include Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, and more than a dozen other Islamic states. The Taliban are not the Vietcong, and the Sixties are over. The stuff about George Bush? Jack Layton said that. He’s the leader of the New Democratic Party.

This should give you an idea why it’s not so easy to simply cull the lunatic arguments from the rational ones.

SP: Yes, as a member of the NDP on and off for the last three decades, I’ve been distressed by the social democrats’ position on the Afghan mission. The NDP’s call for complete withdrawal strikes me as vapid, shallow, and confused thinking, and perhaps more ominously, a kind of opportunistic bid for votes from Canadians weary of seeing the caskets of Canadian soldiers who have died in Afghanistan. For the moment, though, let’s pursue the rest of the array of “anti-war” stances.

TG: Alright. Just the other morning, I was being interviewed on a radio program about these very questions. It was one of those call-in affairs, and one person phoned in to say Canadian troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan because it’s none of our business, our army should be used only for the defence of Canadian territory, and most importantly—he was adamant about this—his tax dollars should not be spent on things he doesn’t support.

This is a far-right libertarian view, although you will also find this sort of posture masquerading in “left-wing” guise. I suppose one could say it is “rational,” but it also strikes me as at least slightly lunatic.

Here’s another example: “There is no military solution to the problem in Afghanistan.”

That sounds perfectly rational, and you hear it all the time. The thing is, no one is making the argument for a “military solution,” so how “rational” is it to declare as null a non-argument no one is even making?

Then there’s this one, often uttered in the form of a question: “Is this the right mission for Canada?” This is the foreign-policy version of the question: “Does this make my ass look big?”

The question is almost always answered with a melange of pieties that counsel something like vanity as the basis for Canada’s approach to its UN obligations, and it safely directs the course of inquiry to a prearranged destination: This is the wrong mission for Canada. What it really means is: There are Americans involved, so we must be on the wrong side. Sometimes the shorthand phrase “Canada’s international reputation” is randomly inserted into a sentence to express the same idea and achieve the same effect.

What you’ll notice about this line of argument is that it never actually contains a defensible reason to leave Afghanistan.

Then there’s the Rudyard Kipling collection: Afghanistan has never been conquered, the people are incorrigibly warlike, backward, and priest-ridden, you can’t impose democracy at gunpoint, just look what happened to the Russians, that kind of thing. The less one knows about Afghanistan, the more these arguments make sense. The more you know, the more you wonder why routine “anti-war” polemics require that the Afghan people are made into objects of caricature.

Here’s another “mainstream” argument, or at least it’s one the NDP uses, which is to say it certainly isn’t isolated to the lunatic fringe: NATO soldiers should be pulled out of Afghanistan and replaced by UN peacekeepers.

This is the one that comes in a backpack with a Maple Leaf on it. It’s a line that reflects an irrational nostalgia for the Cold War, when life was simple, Canadian soldiers wore blue helmets and kept an eye on proxy-war standoffs brokered by Moscow and Washington, and everyone liked us. If it was a movie, with Maoris, it would be called Once Were Teletubbies.

As an argument, it requires enormous revisionism to sustain (Canada’s peacekeeping missions were routinely bloody and drawn-out affairs), but the weird unreality of it is that NATO’s role in Afghanistan is already a function of the International Security Assistance Force, and ISAF is already a function of the UN. And with no ceasefire to enforce, no truce lines to patrol, and no peace to keep, there would be nothing for blue-helmeted “peacekeepers” to do except get shot at. Short answer: Afghanistan is not Cyprus.

This next one is closely related, because it more or less serves as the NDP’s way of answering the illogic of its non-existent peacekeeper option: Canada should withdraw its troops immediately, and focus on negotiating with the Taliban.

You could say that talking to the Taliban is an innovative approach, an imaginative “new” idea, and what’s the harm in trying, right? Get the UN in there. Talk peace. Sounds a bit quirky, but at least it’s rational, right?

Wrong.

Long before the NDP began proclaiming the virtues of peace talks, Canada had already helped organize a negotiated-surrender initiative that had demobilized something like 60,000 militants. The Karzai regime has been offering negotiations ever since it came to power, and had indeed engaged in some tentative talks with the Taliban long before the NDP championed the idea.

Leave aside the likelihood that nobody at the UN would take Canada seriously if we distinguished ourselves by becoming the first ISAF country to pull its soldiers from Afghanistan, turning its back on the UN, and NATO. Leave aside the fact that the NDP approach has been tried before, with the UN Special Mission to Afghanistan. It began in January, 1994. You will remember all the “peace” that followed. The initiative ended on September 11, 2001.

The only reason there are some Taliban leaders even thinking about negotiations these days is that as a conventional fighting force, the Taliban has been crushed, and this wouldn’t have happened in the first place if the “anti-war” movement had got its way.

Still, it’s nonetheless true that negotiations really could produce a kind of peace in Afghanistan. Hezb-e Islami has indicated that it might not slaughter everyone it encounters so long as it wins its bottom-line demand that the Afghan constitution be purged of any vestige of liberal-democratic content. And the Taliban have hinted that they might even settle for a partitioning of Afghanistan’s ten southern provinces into a Taliban slave-state.

But what strange dialect is it that one has to speak in order for the word “peace” to be the right word to describe this sort of thing? In what lexicon could betrayal of this magnitude be talked about as consistent with the “Canadian values” we keep hearing are at stake in these matters?

SP: I think Tacitus was there ahead of us: “…where they make a desert, and call it peace.”

TG: Aye. This brings us to the central dysfunction at the very core of the entire “anti-war” discourse. It unfolds within a kind of alternative reality, with its own rigid hierarchies of virtue, its own pass codes, its own self-referential, self-confirming feedback loops, and its very own vocabulary. You can make almost anything appear completely rational in this way, so long as you don’t let anything in from the outside world. It involves inverting the meanings of words, such that just talking about it requires frequent use of parentheses and the repetition of such qualifiers as “so-called”, merely to avoid becoming complicit in its fictions. It all brings to mind Primo Levi’s description of German civilians during World War II: “Shutting his mouth, his eyes and his ears, he built for himself the illusion of not knowing, hence not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door.”

It starts with the very term “anti-war.”

Ask anyone who knows anything about Afghanistan what they think would happen if the “anti-war” movement had its way and foreign troops were simply pulled out of that poor country. They will tell you it would mean total war.

It is not for nothing that UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon calls the demand for troop withdrawal a “misjudgment of historic proportions.” The Senlis Council’s Norine Macdonald, a fierce critic of the Karzai regime who has spent more time in Kandahar than in Canada over the past five years, says it would be like giving Germany back to the Nazis. You can even ask the eccentric Afghan MP Malalai Joya, the patron saint of Canadian “anti-war” activists. Even she admits that the result would be a convulsion of bloodshed.

It would mean war to the knife, and the knife to the hilt, and I regret to say that this war-is-peace delusion is not a condition peculiar to Canada’s lunatic fringe. It is commonplace on the left.

SP: Actually, I sort of tried to ask Malalai Joya something like that. I attended a luncheon in Vancouver put on last fall by NDP Vancouver East MP Libby Davies at which Joya was the featured guest. I was expecting that there would be some real discussion of the issues and that I would come away, at the least, with a better understanding of the NDP’s call for troop withdrawal. Well, it turned out not to be a discussion, but an event “honouring” Joya, which meant that you were already supposed to know the answers, and not ask questions.

In fact, there were a couple of pro forma questions at the end. The luncheon took place just as a front page story in the Globe reported that the latest results of public polling in Afghanistan clearly showed that the foreign troops were not regarded as occupiers and/or repressive (which is something, by the way, that similar popular polling in Iraq doesn’t show), and so Joya was asked if the poll results were accurate. Maybe there was a translation problem, but I just couldn’t figure out what her answer was, other than that it circled around the question. Then she was asked whether Canadian troops should be in Afghanistan, and again the answer was less than coherent. As near as I could understand it, she said, If Canadians are just in Afghanistan as puppets of the U.S., then that was bad, but if we weren’t puppets then maybe there was a role of some sort. Well, I couldn’t figure out if she was merely trying to please her NDP hosts or if it was simply political bafflegab. And that’s also the problem I’m having with various thinkers in the political party of which I’m a member.

TG: I know. It’s exceedingly strange. Jonathon Narvey, a co-founder of the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee, had the same experience with Joya. After a lengthy conversation with her, he came away no more enlightened about what she wants from us than when his interview with her began.

But “anti-war” polemicists do sometimes lapse out of the dialect and reveal something of their true politics. You tell me, but I don’t think James Laxer, the writer, academic and elder of the NDP’s famous “waffle” rebellion, is right-wing. But what does Laxer say about these things? He says foreign troops should be pulled from Afghanistan no matter that it would be like giving Germany back to the Nazis, no matter that the result, in his own words, is “a fascistic theocracy.”

Is this a “rational” anti-war argument? What is even remotely “progressive” about this?

A few weeks ago I got a call from Sima Samar, the head of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission. She wanted to talk to me about the unseemly enthusiasm for negotiating with the Taliban that has lately become the vogue in Canada.

Samar would prefer to focus on extending the writ of the law and the protection of human rights to every corner of her country. But, of course, she said, negotiations are better than war. The question is, who is involved in the talks? What do we concede? Do we write off the very real advances Afghans have made in the realm of women’s rights, democracy, education, and health, just so rich countries like Canada can go back to feeling untroubled by the obligations of basic human solidarity?

In Afghanistan, it is the most reactionary, corrupt and clerical-fascist elements associated with the Karzai regime that tend to be most enthusiastic about striking a “peace” deal with the Taliban, Hezb-e Islami and the rest. In Canada, it is the so-called “anti-war” movement—in other words, the “left”—that has most vigorously taken up this line.

We should be honest about this. Negotiations actually could produce something we could call “peace,” if we weren’t too fussy about finding the proper word for it. All the soldiers could go home. And Afghan girls would be sent home from school. There would be millions of refugees wandering the world again. With the armies of nearly 40 countries in full retreat, and Afghanistan reverting to the “host for terrorist and extremist groups” that the United Nations has warned would result, we could expect new and bloody vistas opening up to emboldened Islamist reactionaries, from the Pillars of Hercules all the way to the Banda Sea.

What sort of “progressive” vision is this?

If this is what it means to be left-wing nowadays, then the left has ceased to be on the side of progress, and objectively, if not subjectively, it sides with the forces of reaction.

I have some of my own tentative ideas about how this state of affairs has come to pass. But enough out of me.

Tell me what you think.

SP: Ok, I’ve got two things on my mind, and one of them is a question about what you’ve just said concerning the “very real advances” in Afghanistan that have resulted from the U.N.-supported intervention. I’ll come back to my question in a second.

First, though, one of the things I’ve been most disturbed by among my friends in the leftist anti-war movement is their tendency to conflate the Canadian mission in Afghanistan with the war in Iraq. Now, I know there are people who take the view that both interventions are politically desirable and legitimate, but those aren’t the people I’m thinking about. I’m more concerned about people who want to elide the differences between the conflicts, and assert that both are illegitimate and reactionary. This conflation strikes me as a distortion of reality, and makes me wonder about the mental health of some of the left.

The differences between the Iraq and Afghanistan situations that should be recognized are, briefly, as follows. The American-led war in Iraq is not U.N. sanctioned; Iraq under Saddam Hussein might have been a horror to its people, but it wasn’t a clear and present international danger that called for eradication; the motives upon which the war was predicated, namely, the existence of so-called “weapons of mass destruction” and a linkage between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda, were totally false; and finally, public opinion polls in Iraq indicate that the Iraqi population really does regard the foreign troops as an occupation, even if they’re very uncertain about what would happen if the occupiers left. None of that is true in Afghanistan.

In February 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, I trudged through the streets of Vancouver with a hundred thousand or so other people in an anti-war demonstration. But today, when I stand on a streetcorner as the anti-war demo passes me by, and I see them calling for withdrawal from Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, and all the way to Pango-Pango or wherever, that’s when I start to get flummoxed about the left. I had a similar sense during the Yugoslavian wars of the 1990s. The Canadian left seemed set against any intervention whatsoever, even if doing nothing resulted in genocide in Bosnia or Kosovo. That strikes me as deeply distorted, and certainly not very leftist thinking. I realize there’s more to say about global intervention and the left, both practically and theoretically, and perhaps we’ll get to that, but for now my point is, the inability to distinguish between situations is one of the prominent features of the the leftist anti-war position that leaves me in disagreement.

But let me get to my last question about Afghanistan. A recent story in the Globe by a usually knowledgeable writer (Doug Saunders, “Corruption eats away at Afghan government,” May 3, 2008) painted a dire picture of the Karzai government. My question is that old political election chestnut, “Are you better off now than you were 4, or 8 years ago?” That is, what are the improvements in Afghanistan, and how do they stack up against the undeniable failings of the present regime?

TG: Well, this is happily serendipitous—Doug Saunders is a journalist I have a tremendous amount of respect for, and I’m very pleased to see he’s spending more time in Afghanistan. We briefly corresponded after an essay I wrote about the same subject we’ve just touched on here—the infantilization of the internationalist left, and what to do about it—appeared in the Globe a couple of years ago.

But I don’t want to gloss over the observation you make about the “anti-war” tendency to elide the differences between the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is perfectly reasonable and sensible to have opposed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, but still to have looked forward to an eventual intervention to help Iraqis overthrow the Baathist regime. Still, apples and oranges, as you say—but it’s important to understand that the anti-war leadership deliberately conflates Iraq with Afghanistan. This is not just some naive mistake, or innocent ignorance of basic geoography. It’s explicit policy.

The leaders of the Canadian Peace Alliance—Canada’s national umbrella “anti-war” group—along with leaders of the Toronto Stop the War Coalition and other “anti-war” groups, meet annually in Cairo for strategy sessions with the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other such famous pacifist outfits. At these gatherings, these “anti-war” leaders have explicitly pledged not just to conflate Afghanistan with Iraq, but to conflate Afghanistan with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to conflate militant Islamism with anti-capitalism, and to conflate “Islamophobic” incidents in Canada into all this as well. Vancouver’s Stopwar Coalition has gone so far as to describe the banning of Palestinian terrorist groups in Canada as McCarthyism, thereby conflating Jew-killing with Communist Party membership. And the Mobilization Against War and Occcupation openly counsels the left to take the side of armed Islamists “wherever Islam is fighting against imperialism.”

But back to Saunders.

Last January, in an obituary for neoconservative foreign policy, arising from Francis Fukuyama’s conclusion that it died in Iraq, Doug asked this intriguing question about the foreign-policy neocons: “Did they represent, for those of us who consider ourselves progressives, the only group of conservatives who are ever likely to share our values?”

My answer would have to be no, for a variety of reasons, not least because sensible Canadian left-progressives contentedly share some values with Canadian conservatives of the Red Tory kind. But Saunders pointed a way out of the neoconservative graveyard that follows a path that I expect you’d find the more unapologetically left-wing members of the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee would want the left to take, towards “a more socially-focussed form of nation-building” with “elements of a social-democratic, progressive foreign policy.”

In Doug’s recent inquiries into the state of Afghanistan under Hamid Karzai, let’s first look at one of his earlier reports (“Is TV Censorship in Kabul Really a Sign of Re-Talibanization?” April 26, 2008). It noted widespread fury in the country after two daytime Bollywood soap operas were ordered off the air because they were “un-Islamic.” Saunders pointed out that the real reason was that the programs are Tolo TV’s top generators of advertising revenue. Half of Afghanistan television viewers devotedly follow the soaps. The real target here is Tolo TV. For starters, it runs a wildly popular show, Laugh Bazaar, where stand-up comics regularly skewer corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

Afghanistan’s new media is engaging the people in a conversation the government can’t control. This is a grave threat to corrupt politicians, and the big problem here isn’t that Islamist extremists are returning to power in Afghanistan. The soap-opera ban came from Information Minister Abdul Karim Khurram, one of Karzai’s most committed enemies. Behind the banning of Bollywood soaps you’ll find the same motivation that’s left a brave young journalist, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, facing a death sentence. The charge is he was circulating “un-Islamic” material. It’s completely bogus. When the Canada Afghanistan Solidarity Committee started looking into his case, what we learned from friends in Kabul was that Sayed’s brother, Ibrahim, who is also a journalist, had been fearlessly pursuing stories about government corruption. State officials are trying to get at Ibrahim by going after his brother.

The Saunders’ article you point to (“Corruption eats away at Afghan government,” May 3, 2008) is one of clearest treatments of the Afghan corruption dilemma that I’ve ever read. For one, Saunders’ investigation shows that corruption occurs on a far greater scale than is generally reported in the Canadian news media. Saunders also puts it all in its proper historical and political context: In a country that had been ravaged by war for a quarter of a century, anyone of any stature and influence is likely to be a “warlord.” In areas of the country where the economy pretty well runs on opium, anyone of any economic means is likely to have been living off the avails. Gul Agha Sherzai, who admits to once having made up to $1 million a week in the opium trade, is now governor of Nangarhar province. To be fair, he appears to be doing a fairly decent job of it.

One of the most outrageously corrupt and opium-wealthy Afghan politicians who shows up in Saunders’ story is President Hamid Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali, who is the chief representative of Kandahar province in Kabul. And where have we heard his name lately?

In the past few days, there have been reports that some Canadian military commanders in Kandahar appear to be engaging in a sensible experiment, supported by ordinary Afghans: they’re reaching out to low-level Taliban fighters in the hopes of convincing them to put down their guns and come down from the hills. This has set off a flurry in Canadian newspapers to the effect that Jack Layton was right all along, and we should be talking to the Taliban. But who in Kandahar is most loudly applauding the proposition that these informal entreaties be ramped up to full-blown deal-making with the Taliban? Ahmed Wali Karzai is who. And no wonder.

Saunders also reported this: “Unfortunately, the corruption now has reached even the highest-ranking elected officials. . . The President sees them as an instrument for re-election himself, so he doesn’t dare touch them.” Who said that? The Speaker of the Afghan Parliament, Yunus Quanooni, who may run for president one day. That should give you at least a glimpse of an answer to the very pertinent question you ask about whether things are better now than they were before the Taliban was sent packing.

Then there’s the fact that one of the biggest fears around the Tolo TV studio these days is whether they’ll be getting more censorship grief when they start airing an Afghan version of Yes, Minister. And what were the Afghan people doing while Canada’s “anti-war” movement was staging its troops-out demonstrations a couple of months ago, with Jack Layton showing up at a Canadian Peace Alliance rally to make his usual George Bush speech? Eleven million people—one third of the Afghan population—were glued to their television sets, watching the runoffs in the Afghan Star contest, engaging in furious debates about who was the best, and text-messaging their votes. Would the winner be the young Pashtun songstress Lima Sahar, or the Tadjik crooner Rafi Naabzada?

The prize went to Naabzada. And a good choice, if you ask me.

Under the Taliban, nobody was allowed to watch television. Nobody was even allowed to sing. Women weren’t allowed outside, unaccompanied by a man. Women were beaten if they showed so much as an ankle underneath the tents they were forced to wear. Now, even in bloody Kandahar, the people say they don’t want our soldiers to leave. Across Afghanistan, poll after poll has shown that the people say life is better, prospects for women are much, much better, the economy is better, and the government is better. Things are better.

Are the people satisfied? No. They want more, better, and faster, and they deserve what they’re demanding. But there are millions of girls attending school now, 100,000 women have begun their own small businesses with World Bank micro-loans, and one of every four Afghan MPs is a woman. In 2004, only one in ten Afghans had access to medical services—now it’s eight in ten. Three out of every four children under the age of five have been immunized against childhood diseases. More than 17,000 communities have benefitted from new wells, schools, and roads. More than a billion square metres of ground has been cleared of landmines. There are now ten universities open across the country, and seven national television stations, and several newspapers.

What has the Canadian “left” contributed to this great progress? What has the New Democratic Party done, or the Canadian Labour Congress, or the CLC’s 136 labour councils, or the 80 student unions affiliated to the Canadian Federation of Students? Nothing. And if we’d listened to the “left,” none of this progress would have happened. If the”anti-war” movement had gotten its way, and the ISAF armies had just packed up and left, all this progress would have started running backwards, fast, until it was gone.

You tell me, Stan. Is this what it means to be on the left?

SP: What the left’s response to Afghanistan has meant for me is that I find myself asking (not for the first time in my life, I assure you), What is the left in Canada?, and, What should the Canadian left be?

First off, the left is not and never has been a monolithic entity, and it exists in a country that struck me, ever since I began participating in Canadian public life in the 1960s, as fundamentally inclined toward moderate social democracy, irrespective of party label, although of course the NDP is the official social democratic party entity. However, a lot of Liberal Party policies and some of the views of the former Progressive Conservative Party also struck me as social democratic in character. And that’s no accident.

As many Canadian historians have pointed out, the very nature of the country’s geographic vastness and its political location (the obvious fact of being next door to the U.S.), as well as our own political history, has necessitated a considerable degree of public ownership and services, in health care, public welfare, communications, infrastructure, transportation systems, education and the like, albeit with a much greater degree of uncertainty about the question of public participation in industry and other business sectors. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s “repatriation” of the Constitution in the early 1980s, emphasizing civil liberties, rule of law, and judicial independence, seemed to me to be very much of a piece within the national context.

About the only new political development outside the traditional Canadian spectrum was the invention in the late 1980s of the Reform, then Canadian Alliance, then Conservative Party entities, and the resultant minority government of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Both in its advocacy of what’s known as “social conservatism” (anti-abortion, anti-feminism, anti-gays, etc.) and its economic policies (essentially, unregulated American-style capitalism and the reduction of government and taxes, especially for the capitalist sector), it struck me as something new (and to me, unwelcome) in Canadian politics. So, my simplest concern as a leftist is the reconstruction of the social democratic state in Canada.

There is also a left-of-the-NDP left, and both of us have had a lot of life-experience among various independent presses, leftist Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), specific issue campaigns, broad movements and the like. There are a variety of possible positions on the left. About the only one I would write off is that of the more extreme groups, although like you, I sometimes have a hard time identifying the extremists without a scorecard. But the extremists are the only ones I exclude from a notion of plausible positions on the left.

One simplified way of looking at matters that I’m inclined towards is to divide up the discussion into national domestic policy, the thing I’ve just been talking about when I refer to the social democratic state, and foreign policy, or what we leftists call “international solidarity.” Like you, I believe that these two aspects have to be sensibly integrated into a worldview. It’s the latter question, international solidarity, that we’ve been considering in talking about the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. The problem with most of the Canadian left on international solidarity questions, as I see it, has to do with how the left reads the notion of American imperialism.

The analysis of a lot of the current left stems, I think, from a reading of the works of linguist and political philosopher Noam Chomsky, which offers an interpretation of the U.S. as historically a proto-fascist country. I don’t agree with Chomsky’s interpretation, but I think it explains something about the views of the Canadian left, which strike me as unnuanced and crude. The result is that anything the U.S. is involved in is a priori defined as imperial aggression, and something we should have no part of.

Now, it’s certainly true that there is an American imperium, and the Bush presidency is a particularly intense period of pre-emptive aggression, for a variety of specific historical reasons, including the events of Sept. 11, 2001. By the way, I think the Bush administration should be understood as a period or phase in U.S. history, and not as an eternal representation of U.S. policy, as many people have been prone to do. The truth of the matter is that the U.S., at least among voters, is pretty evenly divided, half and half, and this is expressed not only in political policy, but especially through what are known as “culture wars.” But an indicator of the temporality I see in the Bush period is the enthusiasm that the Barack Obama presidential candidacy has ignited among the young. So, America is not monolithic, but divided, and we of course have an interest in seeing the progressive side succeed. Still, there is a critique of American imperial power to be made, and insofar as Canadian leftists tell a cautionary tale, their advice of severe prudence should be taken into account.

But it also should be recognized that the context today is broader. There are issues that are world concerns, and the United Nations is their appropriate forum. Among the fruits of “globalization,” for all its better and worse effects in the world, the notion of selective political intervention has become more plausible. Of course, there is a long tradition of respect for national sovereignty, and that is the basic default position, even when that sovereignty is exercised undemocratically.

What we’ve learned is that particular political circumstances, such as those involving crimes against humanity, call for international intervention. The intervention is usually phased, beginning with economic sanctions, and can be extended all the way up to and including military action. The last requires the utmost prudence. In the last quarter-century, the paradigm case was, I guess, apartheid in South Africa. Both the left, as well as liberals, and people of other political stripes, were able to agree on the significance of the issue, and the case for intervention, which primarily took economic forms, in accordance with the requests of South Africans opposing the apartheid regime.

Since the fall of communism, the left (in Canada) has been confused. We’re sort of okay when it comes to calling for international solidarity on environmental questions, or opposing the worst features of globalization, since all of that conveniently fits into the orthodox leftist analysis of American imperialism. We’ve been through a period in the 1990s of “identity politics,” as it’s called (or more negatively, “tribalism” and “political correctness”), and here the left has been distracted and less than coherent. And when it comes to sites of crimes against humanity, especially where the U.S. has an interest, we’re, to use a word that’s popped up during our discussion, flummoxed. In the past, before the fall of communism, the left was prompt to oppose attempts by the U.S. to suppress potential revolutionary situations, particularly in Latin America, but the left was also too prone to turn a blind eye to equally egregious acts in nominally socialist regimes, whether it was excusing Soviet suppression of its dissidents, or romanticizing various disastrous Maoist campaigns in China, or being reluctant to recognize communist genocide in Cambodia. One American liberal historian, Tony Judt, calls the period since 1989 “the years the locusts ate,” and he pointedly asks, “What have we learned, if anything?” (See the New York Review, May 1, 2008.)

When it comes to Afghanistan, I’m afraid the answer, with respect to the left, is, not much. In a sense, I’m tempted to say, the left has lost its mind. Not that it’s gone bonkers, but that it’s not thinking clearly. There’s a further temptation in the face of this to lean toward becoming just a grumpy non-left old codger. But I’m not prepared to cede the concept of “left,” and I don’t think you are either. So, I remain a leftist—a combination of on-the-ground social democrat and what Marx sneeringly called a “utopian communist”—who is in disagreement with a lot of his colleagues, who are also leftists.

The response of most of the left to the Canadian mission in Afghanistan strikes me as kneejerk, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of tolerance for disagreement. I haven’t been at the centre of the debate, and consequently I have observed the left’s response from the periphery with bemusement and disappointment. But I know you’ve been more directly engaged in debates about Afghanistan, Israeli and Palestinian policy, and questions about natural and cultural extinction. My impression is that your effort to engage the left in debate has been fairly bruising, and not a matter of mere bemusement.

So, my leftist bottom line is: a campaign to restore the social democratic state in Canada, and international solidarity, proceeding with all due caution. That notion of international solidarity includes support for the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. And like you, I haven’t heard a persuasive leftist (or rightest) case against it.

How about you wrapping up this discussion with a few reflections on how you see (and have experienced) the present edition of the Canadian left? Since it, too, is an historical entity, I assume it’s possible to imagine it achieving a more coherent picture and program. I also assume that’s part of why we’re having this conversation.

TG: Well, I’ll certainly give it a try.

To start with, your assessment of the trajectory of the left in recent years is fairly consistent with mine. We all make mistakes, and it’s quite right to forgive one another our mistakes. But—at the risk of unfairly generalizing—it’s the left’s refusal to learn from its mistakes that leaves me completely cold, so you’re far more generous than I’m inclined to be.

I’m certainly more than content with your general outline of what a reconsolidated Canadian left might look like. The first order of business would have to be the integration of “domestic” and “foreign” policy into a whole new unapologetically Canadian worldview. This would be a damn good start. There is one minor but important difference I think I have with your view of the Reform Party phenomenon, but I’ll come back to that later.

The thing that colours my perspective, giving it a hue perhaps a bit more “red” than yours, is that I really do find myself seized of a real sense of urgency these days. I’ve come to conclude that the challenges we’re facing—right now, Stan— are every bit as daunting as the challenges our people faced during the darkest moments of the 20th century, when our parents and grandparents waged their great struggle against fascism. There is some rather urgent, even “militant” work to be done, and quickly.

As you say, I’ve been spending a great deal of time these past few years chasing down the implications of natural-resource depletion, the collapse of biological and lingustic diversity, the implications of globalization, crop monoculture, and so on. In the past five years, I’ve written from Central America, Singapore, Nagaland, Calcutta, Russia (twice), Buryatia, Norway, China, and elsewhere. Billions of people live in in the most grinding and precarious poverty. There are far more slaves in the world today than there ever were. I’ve become convinced that the conditions that prevail in the global economy today are precisely the conditions that prevailed in the years and months immediately preceding The Great Hunger in Ireland in the mid-1800s. The spectre of despotism and failed states and mass famine are very real threats that loom large over much of the world.

But I’m still optimistic, and I remain convinced that, as it was in the 19th and 20th centuries, the answers to the mortal threats that face masses of humanity lie at least partly in the traditions of the left. If I’m right, then socialists should pick up where the neoconservatives left off, and “we” shouldn’t be squeamish about imposing “our” values abroad—as though basic human dignity and liberty are “our” values alone, whoever “we” are. Remember the old labour slogan, “What we desire for ourselves, we wish for all”? More of that, please.

We need to revive effective international workers’ solidarity. We need to be prepared to harness the interventionist power of the state, at the global level, to avert the crises of global capitalism. We should enforce international law in aid of the women’s liberation struggle, and the struggle for independent trade unions. We should end slavery. If we can do this in cooperation with friends to the “right” of us, all the better.

But what is the state of the “left,” or what passes for the left in the “west,” in the centres of wealth and power in the industrialized world? These days, I keep finding myself coming back to a letter George Orwell wrote to Cyril Connolly, in 1938: “Everything one writes now is overshadowed by this ghastly feeling that we are rushing towards a precipice, and though we shan’t actually prevent ourselves or anyone else from going over, must put up some sort of fight.” And in my thinking about Afghanistan, I find myself haunted by the analysis of the brilliant Mid-East scholar and linguist Fred Halliday: “To my mind, Afghanistan is central to the history of the Left, and to the history of the world since the 1980s. It is to the early 21st century, to the years we’re now living through, what the Spanish Civil War was to Europe in the mid and late 20th century.”

By an unexpected turn of events, it just so happens that it has fallen to Canada to play a role in this drama. It has fallen to Canadian soldiers to defend a critically strategic front line in Kandahar. The British writer David Aaronovitch has pointedly argued that if Canada pulled out of Kandahar, the mayhem that would result could well panic the British and the Dutch, leaving only the Americans to fight a losing rearguard battle by bombing villages from the air. And in this way, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and you know the rest. Something slouches toward Bethlehem.

But to drag out the Second Coming metaphor just a bit more, what happens when we look to the leadership of the Canadian left is that we discover that it lacks all conviction. It wants to retreat from the fight, and to make excuses for itself as it does this, and it engages in elaborate justifications for its timidity, because it’s worried that its ass looks too big. This is not to say there are no respectable “domestic” social-democratic ideas on offer from, say, the New Democrats. But even so, to my ears, they have taken on a decidedly tinny and conservative sound, as though the purpose was to consolidate the NDP’s support base, and to hell with eveyone else. It’s like the “socialism in one country” policy from the 1920s— that final nail in the Bolshevik coffin.

But how to answer your question about where we might situate the contemporary Canadian left, in its historic context? My answer is, you can’t.

Yes, the NDP still talks a good line on higher minimum-wage levels and more generous assistance to students. But you can dig right down to Canada’s deepest socialist roots, and you won’t find any recognizeable antecedents for the parochial, narcissistic politics of the NDP’s “left-wing” constituency today. If one wanted to be really cruel, one might say that what’s at work here is a recessive gene from the naive-pacifist minority among the NDP’s 193os’-era predecessors in the Cooperative Commonweath Federation. But I won’t do that, because that would sully the memory of the CCF dead, and I’m sure they’re busy enough spinning in their graves to be bothered by me.

The cultural milieu we have come to understand as “left-wing” politics in Canada, especially as it is manifest in “anti-war” politics, is wholly new. This is where I may differ with you in your assessement of the Reform phenomenon. True, the prairie Reformers were wholly outside the bounds of conventional Canadian conservativism. But their forerunners can be found in the “politics of resentment” that had long afflicted Alberta and British Columbia. The Reformers could also count some great-grandpappies among the west’s Social Credit movement, which enjoyed a long-standing, national Parliamentary presence in the form of Quebec’s Creditistes. And in the Reformers’ pro-American pronouncements, you could hear at least a faint echo of similar affections for American ideas, and American markets, that once most noticeably animated the Liberal Party.

Contemporary “anti-war” politics stands not just outside the best traditions of the Canadian left. It stands outside the traditions of the Canadian left, period. You’re quite right that the confusions of 1989 have a lot to do with it. And the sheer trauma of watching airplanes plunging into those towers in New York probably has something to do with it, too. Perhaps a few years down the road some brilliant sociologist will convincingly diagnose a kind of mass psychosis. For now, I’ll settle for a more straightforward explanation, and I’ve argued that we can find just that in what the Canadian philosopher-journalists Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter have to say. In the contemporary left, they say, the politics of the counterculture have thoroughly eclipsed socialism and class politics.

I’d go farther, and say identity politics has supplanted the politics of solidarity, and the national self-loathing associated with “cultural relativism” has wholly undermined progressive internationalism. Along the way, the counterculture left also jettisoned the old, bedrock progressive conception of human rights as universal rights. And a crude and irrational anti-Americanism—which, paradoxically, owes far more to American counterculture politics than to Canadian progressive-nationalist politics—is a big part of it, too. And so it came to pass that by the afternoon of September 11, 2001, everybody fell back into their familiar counterculture habits, and the handiest explanation was a shopworn and obsolete narrative that simply pits Third World revolutionaries against the American empire, and we’re living with it yet.

To be clear, I can talk trash about Yankees as well as anyone I know, and it’s all good fun, and sometimes it’s actually useful. We should never forget that the Canadian state is at least partly a function of resistance to American manifest-destiny assertions. And America itself is at least partly a function of resistance to the politics of reconciliation and coexistence that John Ralston Saul proposes as the basis of the British, French, and Aboriginal joint venture that went on to extend the Canadian dominion westward.

But now, in Canada, the left rarely misses a chance to denigrate and deny the distinct virtues of Canadian history and custom. This is new. At the same time, its overcaffeinated anti-Americanism has become a weirdly paranoid, fully functioning substitute for rational thought and debate in this country about Afghanistan, about globalization, and about any number of “domestic” and “foreign” policy challenges. This is new.

As you say, I have indeed taken a bruising for making these sorts of observations. I’ve been called a Zionist, a warmonger, a red-baiter, a neocon, and (my favourite) a left-gatekeeper to the Ziocon false-flag hegemony. I have been called a Liberal Party spy. Even my Wikipedia page says I supported the American position in the 2006 Hezbollah war (I’m not sure that I even know what the “American” position was).

One charge to which I will happily plead guilty is that I’m optimistic. It’s true. One charge I won’t stand for is the allegation that I am a conservative. I am very happy to have conservative friends. But the allegation that I’m one myself, well, that goes too far. I don’t think I’ve written a conservative sentence in my life. If you find one here, let me know, and I will check my head.

.

Victoria-Berlin, May 7, 2008. Terry Glavin is the author, most recently, of Waiting for the Macaws (Viking Canada, 2006). Stan Persky is the author of Topic Sentence: A Writer’s Education (New Star, 2007) and The Short Version: An ABC Book (New Star, 2005).

It could be said that Harlow hasn’t done much better, having at 83 years of age to keep his seven novels in print through the publication-on-demand service at www.Xlibris.com in Philadelphia. And anyway, it’s not sympathy for a fellow loser that attracts me to him. I admire Robert Harlow immensely, and I worry that I won’t be able to show why accurately and with respect.

Harlow’s first two novels, while amateurish, contain some fine descriptions of the country and society in and around Prince George, where he grew up and where I happen to have spent most of my adult life and hope to see out the rest of my days. More importantly, his last two novels are good, better than any novels by, say, Jack Hodgins who works, like Harlow, in a realistic vein with a regionalist streak, or Rudy Wiebe, who writes, like Harlow, novels of ideas — featuring cerebral characters who try to solve or reconcile themselves to their problems by thinking back to first principles. The kind of novel that Harlow was driven to write — the novel of Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner—is, in my opinion, supreme.

Harlow is also a sort-of colleague. He was, like me, a writer-professor, though we’re both retired now. I think I know what he went through to get to his last two novels. Admittedly he worked at a higher level, UBC Creative Writing, where he was the first head of that department, and I worked in the English department at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George where I taught mainly business and technical comp and rose to prominence only in the union. But I completed a PhD, and that’s surely an indication that I can claim a piece of the Ivory Tower even if it’s covered in moose moss.

I’ve been there, man, and what I feel is this: Harlow went (to switch clichés) upriver ahead of me to the inner station: creative writing. This is the place where the English Department sticks its neck out the furthest, saying, “because we understand the objects of our study, we can replicate them.”

Robert Harlow suffered horribly, judging by his third novel, (which is his most famous and also his most embarrassing) and by his fourth and fifth novels which are barely equal to his first two. But he didn’t, despite the horror, turn into Kurtz. He wasn’t hollow inside. His “gift of words,” which remained stubbornly “unattached” through most of his teaching career, triumphed in the end. He was a man with plenty to say, and he said it.

But I should probably lay off the Heart of Darkness allusions. Most writers have to work at jobs or look after kids and keep house, right? Their lives are not really theirs, their best hours lost to the daily grind. And while some writers (like A. M. Klein in “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape”) think that any job taken by the practicing writer should be “menial,” to keep (one assumes) the mind clear for writing, most consider it wise to do something connected if possible, like journalism or English teaching. And what could be sweeter than a connected job that also pays well? Braver sorts, like Mordecai Richler and Ernest Hemingway, go into journalism, but for most of us, teaching is the natural choice. The working conditions and benefits are better, and the facilities and organizational structure are more less harsh, at least on the surface.

Also, there’s lots of companionship. Fully half the members of any college/university English department are or think of themselves as poets or novelists. A century ago, once the English Department got up and running, writers flooded into it, attracted by the idea that they would, a la Arnold, be spreading culture and fighting anarchy. By expounding on literature they would be providing students with, as John Dewey put it, “equipment for living.” They would be more important, less (Klein again) “schizoid.”

Once in, they tended to make themselves comfortable, backing off a touch from the Arnoldian cause, coming up with the New Criticism or reading for technique more than message, sneakily easing their passion into the job of expounding on literature and marking on spelling. Finally they invented creative writing, whereby half their work involved writing poetry and fiction for themselves: Nirvana. If Harlow and I walked into any sort of cage, it was a gilded one, built by writers for writers.

But gilded or not, it is still, I think, in its bravado or pretense, injurious. It’s an ongoing experiment that might not be working out. With creative writing — with the New Criticism, even — we writer-profs may have gone too far. To me, Harlow’s career points at the dangers — prolonged artistic adolescence, permanent apprenticeship, and fascination with technique instead of with meaningful subject matter and messages. The result: AirBooks. But Harlow himself is a living illustration that the smart and brave can survive creative writing.

Here’s what I think, on the basis of a lifetime in the academy, happened to him. To accentuate the drama of the story, I’ve put it in chapters like a novel and used (in italics) some of both Harlow’s own words, and those of his critics and associates.

Chapter 1: Harlow gets out of the RCAF after two years of flying bombers over Germany. He’s at loose ends, but has the Distinguished Flying Order and a chance to go to school at the expense of Veteran’s Affairs, which will pay his fees and a salary of $60 per month. His only other choices are being a lumberjack, driving a truck and working on the railway. He registers in the BA program at UBC.

Chapter 2: In his second year he decides to major in creative writing. To get in, he has to have a story approved by Earle Birney, the English department prof who brought the whole idea into Canada. The story is submitted and, a short while later, Harlow goes for his interview: Earle took my story from his in-basket, glanced at it . . . and tossed it onto the desk. It was never mentioned during the rest of our interview. What he was interested in was what I’d been, what I was now and what I wanted to be so that he could judge whether it was a potential writer he was talking to . . . . It was scary. He wanted to feel in me, I sensed immediately, a long-term commitment, and I’d never committed myself to anything except staying alive during the war and having enough money to get drunk on Saturday night. Earle finally leapt to his feet, said I was accepted and gave me his wonderful grin-cum-smile. That yes, based on what could only have been wild surmise, changed my life.

Chapter 3: Harlow gets his BA and goes off to the University of Iowa, then and now the biggest and best-known creative writing school in the English-writing world. He graduates two years later in 1951, the first Canadian to do so – (others are Robert Kroetsch (’61), Kent Thompson (’62), Clarke Blaise (’64), Rudy Wiebe (’64), Dave Godfrey (’67), W. D. Valgardson (’69) and W. P. Kinsella (’78)) . Harlow regards Iowa as the Left Bank . . . the first time in my life that I was surrounded by a group of professionals, people who took writing seriously. His master’s thesis is a novella about the RCAF.

Chapter 4: Harlow returns to Vancouver, gets a full-time job as a CBC producer and a part-time job teaching creative writing for the UBC Extension Department. He publishes his first novel, Royal Murdoch in 1962 and in 1964 is given a full-time job in creative writing, under interim head Jacob Zilber who is, ostensibly, a writer of dramatic scripts. In 1965 Harlow becomes the department’s head and publishes A Gift of Echoes. The two novels are in the familiar realist, mimetic mode, third person, from three or four points of view, everything tied down in terms of time. Critics think both books are amateurish work — contrived, clumsy and self-conscious, the action melodramatic and the characters overly introspective. But Harlow is identified as promising. Harlow later agrees with the criticisms, saying: I didn’t do these books as history in quite the way I wanted to because now I’ve grown up a bit as an author . . as a person, perhaps.

Chapter 5: However amateurish the critics thought the books, they were published in hardcover, impressively bound, and produced by a major publisher, Macmillan. This is good because Harlow’s most important audience, now, is the dean, who is even less likely than Birney to read any of Harlow’s writing, but who will wave them at upper management, senate and board of governors. He will suggest that Harlow is clearly a star and can be trusted with power. He sets up the new department with Iowa as a strong influence. His philosophy is that he can’t teach inspiration, but only preach awareness of the conditions that allow originality. His program will not pressure students by offering fixed courses or threatening them with failure. Nor will they be forced to do much in the way of analysis, as in the English department. Creative writing teaches synthesis wherein never the twain shall meet. Approval of a manuscript gets students into the program, and also guarantees them a pass, their specific final grades being determined more by the instructors’ impression of whether or not they have it in them to be writers. His program will be a local substitute for the Left Bank or Greenwich Village. Bohemia is an ideal, is portable, found by the practicing artist at different places at different times. It represents “freedom from compromise . . . from commercial commitments . . . from the pressures of the manners and mores of society. . . . It is intellectual freedom. . . . It is the best suburb of the conscience, without which the whole of our moral and cultural heritage might perish.

Once students learn something about writing in these ideal circumstances, the theory goes, they will leave the university, because the university is only a good thing for the emerging writer provided that he is not simply a product of the campus and has never left it.by the time the writer has shown he has talent and has begun to develop, the experience he will use as a basis for his work has mostly been gathered. Also, for faculty, writers, like gamblers want to be where the action is . . . the university is a centre of influence and therefore a good place for the writer. And faculty will be forced to take full advantage of their privileged position. In his department, as in the UBC English Department, it will be publish or die. Some students may come back to the campus, later, to teach. This is fine, because

Chapter 6: Harlow is attacked by Warren Tallman, English prof and member of the 1957 committee that first set up creative writing as a program, with most of the courses taught using the Iowa workshop model. Tallman now thinks the Iowa curriculum is too scattered — most writers shine in one genre only, and students at the university level and interested in writing literature should already know what genre they have a passion for. Tallman also thinks that a writer’s dominant passion ought to be for language and literary form, for the act of writing, rather than for any “material”or idea. Students, he suggests, should be given a good base in linguistics, foreign languages and poetics. Synthesis and analysis must go together. Finally, Tallman believes that this is happens best in the English department, as at Simon Fraser University, which has just hired Robin Blaser and Lionel Kearns (both poets of considerable accomplishment, with Kearns as a linguist) to teach the new poetics. Tallman recommends that Harlow hire George Bowering and Fred Wah to do the same at UBC—which he doesn’t.

Chapter 7: George Woodcock, an English prof who speaks with authority as a widely published poet, critic and biographer and as the editor of the English department’s flagship periodical Canadian Literature, attacks from another direction. He regards Harlow as a personal friend, because he and Harlow have done some CBC productions together, but he sees a dangerous contradiction in Harlow’s assertions that the university is both safe and influential, a suburb and a centre at the same time. Woodcock believes that the university is actually a kind of limbo, and no place to duplicate bohemia or to be a writer. The freedoms that Harlow lists are freedoms from subject matter and motivations to write. Students would be caught up in that combination of inverted academicism and competitive ambition which characterizes the ingrown atmosphere of the writing class. They might not be chasing marks in the usual way, but some of them would be chasing jobs, just like English-studies students, who (like me) found the university warm and safe and stayed on for doctorates and then immediately moved to the other side of the podium, where they stayed for the rest of their working lives. As writers, they will suffer from association with the cautious and mediocre spirits who make up most university faculties. And they will be permanently distracted from writing. For this latter point, Woodcock is himself evidence. He is in his mid-fifties when he attacks Harlow and, after only a dozen years up the river, already a mess. Everyone around UBC knows that he’s had a mental breakdown and heart attack as a result of the excessive eating, drinking and smoking that resulted from the loss of self-esteem which itself resulted from the inability, due to his teaching load, to get all of his many, many, many writing projects done.

Chapter 8: Harlow’s back isn’t even safe inside his own department. J. Michael Yates, recently hired by Harlow, with a doctorate in comparative literature, ardently promotes European theorists and surrealist models and the writing of “metafiction” — fiction that turns back on itself and questions its own assumptions and techniques. Then Harlow hires Michael Bullock, a widely published freelance writer and translator, who promotes “surrealism” through his own writings and his newsletter Melmoth. Yates starts a press, Sono Nis, to spread the word even further. The department’s magazine, Prism, takes on a surrealist tone.

During Harlow’s twelve-year tenure as department head, surrealism spreads like cancer. It even invades two magazines started and run by students, Andreas Schroeder’s Contemporary Literature in Translation and Geoff Hancock’s Canadian Fiction Magazine. Schroeder later testifies to the effect of Yates’ promotion of surrealism: It fostered a climate at the Creative Writing Department in those days which said, in effect: ‘We’ll be as experimental and obtuse and impenetrable as we like, and if readers can’t stick with it, then screw them.’ This is not Iowa, which teaches marketing and promotion and studies audience. Harlow doesn’t have what he calls the scholarly acumen to argue with Yates, and worries about his department being tagged as the home of “west-coast surrealism” because such a tag could affect the reception of literature written by his students, his faculty and himself.

Chapter 9: Under Harlow’s leadership, despite external and internal dissent, creative writing doubles and then triples in enrolment and faculty, and Harlow himself is stimulated into a burst of writing, reading and thinking: I didn’t stop. I was reading and writing sixteen, eighteen hours a day. Whether it was student writing or my colleagues’ or my own. Unfortunately, this frantic activity results in no publications except for a few articles in Maclean’s and Canadian Literature. Harlow needs to publish novels to give authority to his teaching and leadership, but he is blocked in the course of two novellas that are connected in style and subject matter to his first two novels. In addition, he is trying to rewrite the RCAF story that had gotten him his degree. By April 1968, he has about 70,000 words written on his three stories and has to put it all away to do a stint as Associate Dean.

Chapter 10: Harlow returns to his writing on April 7, 1969: I came back, opened up the manuscript and began writing. I read it through and immediately asked for a leave . . . .I was simply struggling with three stories and had to find a way to write three stories at once. And besides the three stories in the book there are three different levels. The history of the thing and what’s happening to somebody who is watching other people happen . . . . I locked him in a hotel room . . . I gave him a wife and three daughters and a mistress and that seemed enough because he was saddled with all this other stuff, saddled with the whole history. Then I gave it to Scann and said, ‘Okay, you write it.’ He’s enthusiastic because he has had the idea of putting himself in a novel under the fictitious name, Scann. In this way, he figures, he can unite and complete his three stories:

Chapter 11: Harlow decides to go to Europe to write Scann: I wrote it on the boat. I wrote in Southampton while my wife visited relatives . . . . I wrote on the boat to Spain and finally finished it in Majorca . . . with my long-suffering family . . . in November. . . then another four months to revise it and type it the way I wanted. Scann is a long novel, some 140,000 words, but it is written quickly because Harlow has another batch of material to add to his three unfinished novellas. Scann’s meditations as he writes are Harlow’s lecture notes — the ones developed and used through ten years of part-time and five years of full-time teaching: All the way through Scann are rules on how to write the novella. All Harlow has to do is add a connecting story about Scann getting to, living and writing in, and leaving the hotel room.

Chapter 12: But at some stage past the halfway point in writing the novel, a contradiction becomes evident. If Scann possesses relatively profound knowledge of writing, if his theories about time, beginnings and endings, symbology etc aren’t merely bullshit, if the rules can actually be used for synthesis, if his monologue (Harlow’s lecture material) makes any sense, his writing should show signs of improvement, his novellas should be resolving themselves. But there are no signs of this. There’s no movement towards a resolution of the story sequences. Increasingly Scann derides himself as obsessive and questions his own progress or, he engages in eloquent defenses of his blocked writing — the main defense being that he is trying to be honest. He even winds himself up in the possibility that honest stories can only prove that humans are absolutely ignorant, in which case they wouldn’t be able to write honest stories.

Chapter 13: Harlow decides that there’s some humor in Scann’s negative narcissism, his idea that he has to fail to prove his own point. He introduces another perspective, that of Scann’s superego, or of the book’s author himself, or of another character imagined by Scann who is attacking Scann’s novellas. This figure, however it is taken, is both eloquent and learned, citing an authority, even, to prove that Scann is hopeless. The authority is a book that Harlow used in his lectures, E. K. Bennett’s A History of the German Novella. The new voice is also funny — good at pompous invective. Scann’s new critic sounds more than a little like David Solway.

Chapter 14: This merely creates another problem. The more it becomes clear that Scann is a confused idiot, the more evident it is that much of the 70,000 words of his novellas and 40,000 words of his professor-like meditations on his stories should be cut. In a realistic novel, you don’t bore and confuse the reader to prove that a character is boring and confused. You don’t produce dishonest writing to prove that writing can’t be honest. If this happens, the reader puts the book down. But Harlow can’t go back to where he started. The dean is waiting, expecting to see some return on the university’s investment. So Harlow has his intrusive narrator suddenly concede that there is some hope after all — in a story (a sort of northern BC “Beverley Hillbillies” in the style of William Faulkner) that Scann tells to the hotel chambermaid in an attempt to seduce her (she doesn’t go for it even though the story has lots of sex): We must confess that research into the origins and the writing and the reality of Scann’s first novella have turned up oddly significant shards from the dump of his waste materials. Thus blessed, now more of an idiot savant than an idiot, Scann leaves the hotel confident that he will return to finish his book.

Chapter 15: Harlow, having finished his book, immediately sends it to Macmillan. The response is not good: It was sent back to me not by an editor, not by a sub editor, but by the commercial manager. Along with it somewhat later was a note saying they’d found fourteen copies of the other books in the basement and as a gift they’d like me to have them. That was a downer to say the least. Harlow’s feelings are understandable; he’d been dumped by a major publishing company that had been loyal through two amateurish but marketable books. Harlow then sends the manuscript to a publisher in New York and one in England. No luck. Then, John Robert Columbo . . . an editor and a friend . . . sent it back to me and said, ‘This is the only piece of fiction I’ve read in my life that I can’t do anything for.’ His advice was to publish it myself because nobody was going to publish it the way it is. Nobody ever said it was bad writing . . . nobody made any suggestions at all. Finally, something good, sort of: J. Michael Yates is interested in publishing his boss’s book: Then Sono Nis said they’d like to see the manuscript. They wrote back and said they’d like to publish it and I said, yes, go ahead.

Chapter 16: So, seven years after becoming head of creative writing, Harlow has a novel out, a gigantic one, justifying his position as professor and head, the expense of his sabbatical and his argument that faculty in his department would publish or die, an argument considerably weakened by the fact that Jacob Zilber is still around and that Scann has been published by a fellow faculty member. But the book is hardcover, nicely printed and bound. The dean hefts it and smiles. The fallout elsewhere, however, is not so nice. The eastern newspapers ignore the book, telling Harlow he should write something more the length of Surfacing and then they will be able to get through it. Reviews in the smaller papers and the academic periodicals are grouchy. They attack Scann on the same grounds that they’d criticized Harlow’s first two books as overly self-conscious, but now they claim to see a particularly academic sort of self-consciousness at work. Ken Adachi and Robin Matthews call the writing in Scann professorial, and its central character academic. John Moss complains that the book reads like an exercise in form and technique. Ken McGoogan (a graduate of UBC creative writing) calls Scann a technical tour de force. In a summarizing account, written a dozen years after the appearance of Scann, Peter Buitenhuis says that there is a self-consciousness about the narrative that reveals that Harlow has spent much of his time reading and teaching fiction as well as writing it.”

Chapter 17: One review, in Canadian Literature, really hurts because it questions the happy idea at the centre of Scann. It’s by Audrey Thomas, a young novelist much admired by Harlow. She had studied and worked for a time at UBC and was still in contact with the English and creative writing departments, acting as advisory editor on Hancock’s magazine etc. Thomas doesn’t allude to Scann’s “academic” content, but she says that except for certain episodes in Scann’s novellas that are terrific stuff and real history, is trash. First, she says, the puns are stupid. Second, there is a lengthy authorial “aside” that identifies Scann as an obsessive fuck-up. Why would a reader be interested in the meditations and writings of an obsessive fuck-up? Thomas concludes that the reader tosses the bathwater (the novel) out with the baby (Scann). Her advice to Harlow: Rewrite it without him and you may have a major novel on your hands.

Chapter 18: Harlow’s friends, colleagues and students leap to his defense, though their resources are limited. Most of their reviews appear in Hancock’s magazine. They utilize Yates’ dust-jacket blurb (of which Thomas has made fun) which depicts the book as an experiment conducted out of patriotic concern for the Canadian novel: Scann works with Canadian materials in a very new way . . . . Mr. Harlow establishes an idiom of time-structure and point-of-view intelligible to both traditional naturalists and the most avant garde of readers and writers. By bowing neither to the genteel nor the hallucinated tradition, yet spanning and “scanning” both, this book fixes a fulcrum in the present polarized situation of Canadian novelistics. Doug Barbour praises Scann as a very self-aware fiction, one in which the nature of the whole fictional enterprise is deeply probed. He duly places it with Surfacing as one of the most important Canadian novels of 1972.Scann is particularly Canadian in its self-consciousness: The discussions of fictional aesthetics, both by Scann and the intrusive narrative voice, result in a self-consciousness that is an integral trait of contemporary Canadian thought. Hancock himself avoids the patriotic rhetoric and puts Scann in the company of Johnny Crackle Sings (Matt Cohen), Gone Indian (Kroetsch), The Studhorse Man (Kroetsch), Lord Nelson Tavern (Ray Smith), The Invention of the World (Hodgins) and Mrs. Blood (Thomas), and offshore classic works like One Hundred Years of Solitude, all of which feature extremes of character and situation and pages of prose so effervescent they tingled in me like champagne. Robert Diotte says that

Chapter 19: Harlow, appreciating the efforts of his friends, colleagues and students, and perhaps concerned about the possibility of the dean and enemy profs, alerted by Thomas’s review, investigating Scann, steps into this potential breach. He affirms that Scann is metafiction. He is encouraged by the fact that McClelland & Stewart have decided to publish Scann in their New Canadian Library Series, an unexpected piece of good luck. But his heart is not in metafiction. In a long interview with Hancock concerning, mostly, Scann, Harlow reveals interests that are likely at the very least puzzling to Hancock, as well as to Bullock and Schroeder who are on Hancock’s advisory committee. When asked about literary influences, Harlow lists E. M. Forster as number one, and Faulkner as number two. His example of a great Canadian prose stylist is Ethel Wilson in her novels and Hugh Maclennan in his essays. His favorite exercise for students is the historical novel and the model he recommends is Robert Graves’ I Claudius: I mean, people put it down . . . but you’ll find some of the best language, novel language, that’s been written. Damn good story and fine history . . . That’s the novel which deals with time in the sense that we were talking about in Scann: time buried in or amalgamated with, or woven into, the Times. Hancock, who is passionately committed to magic realism, to Marquez and Kafka, is forced to wash his hands of Harlow: I have neither the intellectual stamina to passionately assess the mythic underpins (if any) of his work, nor the inclination to write a slash and burn critique. Let it be enough to say that Robert Harlow is my friend.

Chapter 20: Harlow, with McClelland & Steward as his new publisher, writes Making Arrangements (1978), a marketable entertainment in the Damon Runyon mode. This book, he tells Hancock, gets him through a troubled time in his life. Critics (me among them) note that it is over-written, sentimental, full of clichéd pimps, prostitutes, jockeys, hotel detectives and writing and is not nearly fast-paced enough for a detective story. But everyone admits that the book is readable. It sells, and M&S takes Harlow’s next novel, Paul Nolan (1984) as well as re-issuing Making Arrangements. Harlow is perceived to be back on track again; Paul Nolan is identified as a novel of ideas, though an unsuccessful one. It’s seen by Robert D. Callahan as “a self-conscious flirtation with aesthetic failure,” because one of its themes is the impossibility in Canada of having a serious theme. Harlow is setting up infinity mirrors again, as he did in Scann. The novel fails, and M&S dumps him.

Chapter 21: While working on Paul Nolan, in August of 1981, Harlow spends a month in Poland as a guest of the Canadian embassy. He sees Warsaw when Solidarity is facing the final confrontation with the communist puppet regime and the Soviet Union. He visits Auschwitz, a troubling experience in the usual way but also because it reminds Harlow of his bombing runs over German cities. He believes that he has participated, albeit unwittingly–or worse–thoughtlessly, in an atrocity. His experience is, cathartic. Eventually, the shaping of experience on the spot became so fierce that I began, in September, and finished in March, a novel, not about Poland, but fuelled by the experience of it. This is the first time that Harlow has spoken of his writing in terms of its origins in experience and as anything more than tinkering with a mechanical device, the first time he has broken off work on one novel to write another, and the first time that he has written an entirely new book so quickly. The novel, Felice, is accepted and edited by Ron Smith — whom Harlow praises as his best editor ever — and published by Smith’s small press, Oolichan.

Chapter 22: Most critics receive Felice with delight — and maybe also relief. Harlow has had the balls to ignore Yates and Hancock, to put the debacle of Scann behind him. He hasn’t believed his publicity after all. He has, for the first time in 20 years, shown progress. The critics — even the major ones — had always sympathized with Harlow, even while they were trashing his novels. They may have focused on his academic, professorial self-consciousness, but they also perceived, and wanted to commend, his courage (Lawrence Matthews) his sincerity (Ken Adachi), his social conscience (Robert Callaghan) and his ambition (William French). Of course, such comments are generally good sportsmanship awards handed out to losers, but they indicate that in the opinion of the major critics Harlow tended to lose in good company and in a good cause — the novel of ideas. Now he was back in the game. Burt Heward, in The Ottawa Citizen, very impressed by the main character, compares Felice to Margaret Laurence’s Hagar. Most critics found that, as Louis Mackendrick said in a summarizing account in Canadian Writers and Their Works: “Felice is that rarity, a well-made novel, with an outstanding coherence of craft, action, and philosophy. Everything comes to fit and mean . . . . It is a novel of ideas, never far from Harlow’s continuing practice — which are ardently proposed, dramatically illustrated . . . and almost didactically repeated . . . rather than being warm, human, and compelling, Felice is topical, intelligent, and challenging. Even the dissenting critics have some praise. Laurence Matthews sees Felice as dramatized argument, and wrongheaded argument at that, but admits that the novel is partly redeemed by its moral urgency. He finds the book infuriating . . . because it should be so much better than it is. This is another good sportsmanship award, but a more passionate one than usual.

Chapter 23: In 1988, Harlow follows up Felice with The Saxophone Winter, also edited by Smith but published by Douglas McIntyre, a larger press. This book is criticized for having cerebral characters who, given that they’re in their early teens are too young to be cerebral, but this criticism is questioned by others and overall, the book is well received.

Chapter 24: Harlow goes into retirement on the Gulf Islands and stops writing.

My Coles-type summary of Harlow’s history suggests that creative writing prolonged Harlow’s writerly adolescence — what most of the critics referred to as his academic self-consciousness — into late middle age. Of course any real proof for such an interpretation waits on the application to authors and texts of brain-scan technology and other advancements in the application — to which this paper hopes to make a necessarily preliminary contribution — of psychology to canonized artists and their works. Obviously anyone with a knowledge of and interest in the poetics of the novel could have written Scann — an English prof who writes novels, a novelist gone on poetics, a literary critic moonlighting as a novelist. A prof is most likely, because a prof is under no pressure to make money from a book. More lucrative benefits come straight from the university. Also a prof might be more inclined to confuse literature and life, to cross the line between lecturing and writing. It’s also true that lots of writers have friends who are critics, and some might even have critic-friends who will praise everything they write, and even assist in the building of elaborate rationales. A few writers might have publisher friends who put out books to help the “polarized situation of Canadian novelistics” rather than to make money. But each of these situations is more likely if you are a professor of English or creative writing.

What saved Harlow, kept him ready for the catharsis of Poland, was what kept him away from success for so long — idealism and determination. No matter how confused he got by the crap he taught — and Scann shows how contradictory it was and what it could do to the mind — he always had his mind on target. That target was the novel of ideas — the main features of which Callaghan identified in Paul Nolan and other critics had picked out in earlier novels, including Scann. These features are intensely cerebral main characters and philosophical themes. About Felice, Harlow said: “Nietszche said the most radical thing you can do is get to the bottom of a problem. A novel is quite often considered to be an entertainment, which it is. But the best novels always try to get to the bottom.”

The motivation to write such a novel is moral, as most of the novelists of ideas affirm in their poetics. Tolstoy believed that the dominant idea of our age, to be expressed in all great art, “is the consciousness that our well-being . . . lies in the growth of brotherhood among men.” Faulkner in his Nobel Prize speech advised the writer to focus on “the old verities and truths of the heart — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacifice.” Great writing cannot be “of the glands.” Conrad affirmed that, “the novelist “must believe in the possibility of the world being made good.” All said that conscience begins in humility — the novel of ideas cannot be allegorical or didactic. As Conrad says, “a novelist who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the first condition of his calling.” Conrad further affirmed that the novel cannot be rhetorical in essence: “To have the gift of words is no such great matter. A man does not become a hunter or a warrior by mere possession of a firearm. It is in the impartial practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this or that particular method of technique or conception.”

Humility and impartiality in the practice of life — exactly what creative writing and literary studies work against. “Absurd formulas” — that’s what they teach. A more rationalized, less visceral version of Conrad’s point, applied to creative writing, might be this: Students are required to engage in formalized imitation. Usually they are straight out of high school and upper-middle class homes. They are good-natured and idealistic but have nothing to express except horniness, self-reverence and what Thomas M. Disch, a freelance journalist and writer of horror and science fiction novels, described (no doubt after some frustrating experience in the classroom) as “the protective contempt that adolescents feel for the oppressive vistas of history and the intricate machineries of the world they never made.” They want nothing from the university beyond credit towards the acquirement of lucrative employment and some acknowledgment of their God-like talent. They necessarily produce “workshop writing” — deliberated, laboured, self-conscious and either experimental or imitative (most often, both at the same time). And their profs, among whom Harlow was prominent, engaged as they are in rationalizing and dumbing-down their writing experience into a methodology that they can use to lecture these obtuse students, mark their amateurish drivel, and explain these marks in painful one-on-one office coaching sessions, necessarily produce similar crap themselves, though the deliberation it exhibits may be more sophisticated.

Evidence for this is coming in from a surprising source — the creative writing professorate itself. B. W. Powe, a well-known literary critic and a prof at York, prefers the term “creative composition” to “creative writing.” He says, “With few notable exceptions the university poets and authors, writers-in-residence and creative composition teachers have created a literature of narcissistic self-contemplation and mandarin staleness, of conventionality and acceptance.” Lynn Freed, an American novelist and (only when she’s really hungry) creative writing prof, recently described in Harper’s what teaching does to her: “When the classroom is so present in my life,” she writes, “everything I write begins to sound like a teacher writing — intended, crafted, lifeless, and too clever by half . . . ‘There are many forms of stupidity,’ said Thomas Mann, ‘and cleverness is the worst.’ This cleverness, this stupidity — is the creative equivalent of an autoimmune disease. And it is ongoing. It lasts right until I emerge from the classroom . . . and sometimes longer than that.”

Also, for the past decade, poet-profs with doctorates in creative writing, who are interested in pedagogy or who like Tallman see poetics as a branch of rhetoric and linguistics, are criticizing the Iowa approach. Patrick Bizzaro, whose poetry has appeared in eight or ten books and hundreds of magazines, and who is (probably more importantly) Director of University Writing Programs at East Carolina University, is busy with surveys of students who have done Iowa workshops. He wants to find out why their writing is so bad and what the essence of this badness is. These studies are appearing in the Mississippi Review and College English. He agrees with Kelly Ritter, Coordinator of First-Year Composition at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, that the whole idea of hiring “elephants” (major writers) to teach “Iowa lore” is dangerous. If it continues, the elephants should be accompanied by keepers, trained in rhetoric and pedagogy, who can quickly sanitize the tons of shit produced by the elephants. Students must not get the idea that they are learning anything more than composition.

Bizzaro and Ritter point out that Iowa lore makes lawnmower tune-up instructions look like nuclear physics. Teaching this lore in isolation from rhetoric and linguistics discredits the university and them. Furthermore, while this lore might belong in isolated exercises in public school and freshman comp classes, beyond that its use is dangerous. This is because, while Iowa lore is usually delivered as non-prescriptive, to be used as needed, it is accompanied by the attitude that practice makes perfect. Iowa lore builds what is a necessary technique in the classroom into a writing habit. It celebrates the idea of practice for the sake of practice.

The technique is called “brainstorming” in composition rhetorics, and “pre-writing” or “automatic writing” in Iowa-method handbooks like Jack Hodgins’ A Passion for Narrative. The exercises after the first chapter of this book ask the student to “’Free-fall’ a page of ‘automatic writing’ to follow each of these opening phrases: (1) The most frightening person in my childhood was . . . . (2) If I were Prime Minister I would . . . .” Hodgins advises that, once these pages pile up, the student should sift through them for vivid images, effective tones, and hints of stories. He then asks that these be elaborated upon, built up into stories. And Hodgins insists that his moronic exercises be done: “Don’t just read them and think, ‘A person should try this sometime.’ They are meant to be done. Anyone can sit around and think about writing. Real writers write.”

According to the new creative writing theorists, this is cruelly misleading, like posting “arbeit macht frei” at the entrance to Auschwitz. The method of writing your way into writing and then applying Iowa lore to the pitiful results kills inspiration and leads directly to what it is trying to avoid: workshop writing. It is the equivalent of advising someone to sand and polish a badly made piece of furniture into a work of art.

Bizzaro and his friends can be accused of not being objective about Iowa, of being prejudiced against the workshop approach. Obviously they are motivated by personnel ads in the journals that read “English Instructor: MAs only. No MFAs.” They know that a knowledge of Iowa lore is considered at most a minor prerequisite for teaching public school and freshman writing, which is what most creative writing grads end up doing. They know that if their grad students don’t get jobs then creative writing will quickly disappear, and they’ll be back to freshman, technical and business comp, where their literary prowess is (believe me) not wanted. They want a whole new English department, where English studies, creative writing and composition come under rhetoric. But whatever their motivation, in the university, politics and theory go hand-in-hand; theory is tested in pedagogy. The poet-profs with doctorates in creative writing could prove to be right.

Harlow did what he taught his students to do — what has to be done in the classroom, where you write whether or not you have anything to say or are too busy with other things to concentrate, and then use your lore to fix up and justify the results. He did this doggedly himself, was obviously a believer. And this was not just because he was paid to be. His defenses of creative writing show his idealism, and his dedication has been fulsomely described by students and colleagues. Hancock praises him as a teacher, revealing in both what he says and how he says it exactly how Harlow, with modesty, humor and the best of intentions, fucked him up: “Harlow . . . has helped nearly a generation of prose writers sharpen their technical axes, to go after the literary timber in the Canadian woods. My own stories were a mixture of pandemonium and tropical disease. But Harlow, with a few well placed appraisals, created a technical smorgasbord from which to draw nourishment on a hungry day. Fiction has a focus, unlike life with is in constant flux. Each long fiction requires a different tactic so you don’t become a technical caricature of yourself . . . . A short story is not a novella or a novel. He made sure his students knew how to light the fuse on their fictional dynamite.”

The danger is obvious: Hancock, with an MFA, doesn’t seem to know that his tribute to an honored professor reads more like an advertisement for a pickup truck. And when did Hancock himself “explode into fiction”? Have I missed something in the past few decades? For his bombing runs over Germany, Harlow got the Distinguished Flying Order. For surviving creative writing he should get another medal — though maybe the appearance of his last two novels on the permanent list of a real publisher would be a more meaningful acknowledgment.

John Harris

7,371 words

The essay is unusual in several respects. It is, first of all, almost certainly the longest single piece of writing to appear in a Canadian magazine in recent memory: eighteen full tabloid pages, and more than 25,000 words. Second, it has an unusual subject. The essay is a defense of Conrad Black, the man who, less than a decade ago, had control over 60 percent of Canada’s daily newspapers along with a number of prestigious papers outside the country—the Telegraph in Great Britain, the Chicago Sun-Times in the U.S., and the Jerusalem Post—but who is today facing a raft of white collar criminal charges. The essay argues that Black is not guilty of fiscal misdeeds against the shareholders and investors of the matrix of corporations and companies he and his junior partner David Radler constructed during the 1980s and 1990s. Black is, the essay argues, the victim of a conspiracy aimed at discrediting and impoverishing him while radically altering the landscape of corporate business in the United States. Finally, the essay is a hyperbolic paean to the ethos if not the ethics of something that might be called “entrepreneurial capitalism.”

All this is moderately interesting and surprising stuff, and I’ll get to the substance of what’s in the essay shortly. But what is of specific moment here is the context and placement of the essay. It appears in Books In Canada, which is a magazine that has been, on and off over the last quarter century, among Canada’s premier forums for book reviews and essays on a variety of subjects of literary and intellectual interest. It has recently been lively and interesting enough to have attracted both my and Stan Persky’s support, to the extent that a semi-regular column written by us runs in its pages under the title of “Dooney’s Café,” based on our dooneyscafe.com website. In a country that has almost universally gone over to the discursive darkness typified by 900 word maximum “McReviews” of virtually all matters artistic that don’t have publicity budgets in excess of $1M, Books in Canada has recently been a bright, unpredictable and largely non-devotional light.

The authors of “Auto Da Fe: Conrad Black, Corporate Governance, and the End of Economic Man” are Books In Canada’s publisher and editor, respectively, Adrian and Olga Stein. What that means is that the huge essay at least isn’t the result of a takeover by space aliens or the Cosa Nostra or by MI5 trying to protect the reputation of the British nobility. The Steins are good people. Olga Stein’s hard work and editorial acumen, in particular, have been largely responsible for the magazine’s renaissance in recent years. Her publisher spouse, Adrian, is a serious, literate person with an interest in ethical philosophy, particularly the work of Emmanuel Levinas, the French-Jewish existentialist thinker whose utopian ethics proposed that in the wake of the Holocaust we accept total responsibility for the condition and fate of the Other.

Thus, at first glance, what a 25,000 word defense of Conrad Black is doing on the pages of Books In Canada has a couple of suitable and related answers. First, it’s their magazine. That is, as the old pop ditty puts it, “It’s my party / I can cry if I want to,” or even utter a lengthy J’Accuse. Second, Black is, among other things, defensible both as a writer and as an historian, plus he’s a Canadian writer/historian—sort of. However, a moment’s reflection reminds us, despite Olga Stein’s editor’s note that Black “as an author, deserves the same consideration we show any persecuted writer the world over,” that he’s not being prosecuted as a writer but as an allegedly crooked businessman.

The essay’s expository devices—a set of references to Umberto Eco’s novel Baudolino, and an account of a black-tie cocktail fundraiser for the Kenyon Review magazine which the Steins presumably attended and at which they marveled at the “special frisson” produced by the “propinquity of New York wealth and philanthropy with the glitterati of the publishing and literary world”—are okay, I guess, and at least literate and literary. The Steins’ essay therefore is, if at a considerable stretch, within the Books in Canada mandate. At very least its disruption of the usual hum of the country’s chattering intellectual class makes it an intriguing if verbose entertainment that isn’t yet another reconsideration of the impact of Robertson Davies’ novels.

That was, as a matter of record, my response to the first half-dozen queries I received asking me if I was in agreement with the controversial notions the Steins argue in “Auto da Fe”. I have to admit that at first I was vaguely pleased to see anyone defending Black and his consort, Barbara Amiel (I think I’ve got the order of that right) after the deluge of Schadenfreude that has followed in the wake of Black’s fiscal and legal difficulties. Much of the rancourous delight, I note, has come from the same people who were willing to sell their offspring or pull knives on their friends to get invitations to the Blacks’ Bridal Path cocktail parties in Toronto during the 1990s. I’ve also been finding the lack of support for the Blacks from the young and right-wing journalist corps troubling. Black, after all, was the guy who provided nearly all of them with the conditions for their “Favourite Year” by starting, and then heavily subsidizing the money-losing National Post well past the point of fiscal common sense. Watching those same people jumping ship—or walking the plank—as the bottom-lining Aspers, owners of the successor CanWest Global, transformed the unruly vibrance of The National Post into an emaciated and often truly nutty hybrid of the Financial Post and The Jerusalem Post should have made at least a few of these Young Turks slightly sentimental about Black. Alas, the only Black alumnus who’s really stayed loyal has been Ken Whyte, now transforming Maclean’s Magazine into the Fraser Institute’s version of Pravda. Even Whyte couldn’t resist letting emeritus editor Peter Newman, who fed the wolves circling the Blacks with his 2005 bio-trashing, Here Be Dragons, from excerpting it on Maclean’s pages.

Because I’m not an expert in corporate law and my accounting abilities are so dull that they make sorting through the mess at Black’s Hollinger corporations a little like trying to repair a wristwatch while wearing hockey gloves, I’ve been trying not to have an opinion about whether Black has committed criminal acts against his shareholders and against the laws of the land. It’d be much easier to let the courts decide that for me during the next several months—or as it will likely turn out, years.

What I have opined, whenever asked, is that Conrad Black appears to be a man being pilloried for his personal arrogance as much as for fiduciary misconduct, and that as corporate kleptocrats go, he’s hardly in the same ranks as the late Ken Lay or Dennis Kozlowski—he of the ice sculpture of Michaelangelo’s David with vodka coming out of its penis. At least Black used the shareholders’ money to buy Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s papers, and then used those to write a serious work of history. Virtually every other corporate captain/criminal has used his or her ill-gotten gains to finance vulgarities of ostentatious wealth: mansions with twenty pink marble-lined bathrooms, or fleets of Hummers, ho-hum. Pointing out that Black at least has good taste in his business excesses is hardly a ringing endorsement, just a small admission that a man who got himself kicked out of Upper Canada College, can’t resist a six syllable word and is unreservedly in love with his wife, who just happens to be a beautiful, intelligent and uniquely obtuse personality in her own right, can’t be all bad.

But having now read the Steins’ essay four or five times, I’m obliged to have a clearer opinion about Black’s guilt and/or innocence, and more specifically about the substance of the Steins’ essay. And at the relevant end of those opinions I find myself asking a number of questions I can’t see any easy answers to.

The Steins’ essay, as I’ve mentioned, is titled, somewhat mysteriously and ambiguously, “Auto da Fe: Conrad Black, Corporate Governance and the End of Economic Man”. The ambiguity lies in the term “Auto da Fe” which, for those who aren’t familiar with the Spanish Inquisition, was the public confession forced (generally after torture) on those accused of heresy, after which, in most cases, the accused were burned at the stake or hanged anyway. In historical usage, Auto da Fe is both the legal announcement of charges against the heretic and the act of carrying out the sentence—between which there was generally no debate whatever. If the Inquisition made an accusation against you, you were going to be found guilty and all that remained to be determined was the degree of penitence you displayed prior to execution. The Steins seem to be implying that something like this is being forced on Conrad Black.

The mystery rests in exactly what “the End of Economic Man” might be when the ascendance of the marketplace as the sole model for human polity during the last 30 years has featured pretty much the obliteration of every other kind of human being but the economic kind. Without getting into gender correctnesses, it leaves me wondering what kind of “man” the Steins envision we’ll have left if Black’s enemies get him.

The direct argument of “Auto da Fe” is that Conrad Black is not a criminal perpetrator of fiscal felonies against his shareholders, but rather the victim of a nasty conspiracy of a clique of corporate opportunists who have decided to use the current climate of regulatory enthusiasm to ruin Black while covering themselves in glory, and, one assumes, large denomination US currency notes. Beyond that, the Steins see the forces at the root of the attack on Black as a threat to the well-being of the capitalist system, and certainly to the viable functioning of the American economy.

As usual, you can’t tell the players (or conspirators) without a scorecard, but before we get to the boxscore, we need to remember a few of the rules of this particular game. The game is capitalism. In its ideal or mythical form, someone (an entrepreneur) thinks of a useful thing that the public needs, and then invests and risks his capital to produce that thing. If all goes well, the capitalist reaps the benefits of his production in the form of profits, which are then reinvested in further production, with the slopover surplus spent on whatever conspicuous consumption lifestyle the capitalist fancies. The social spin-off benefits of capitalism include the creation of jobs and a rising, improved standard of living for the society or planet affected; an incentive for technological advancement to produce improved things; and the creation of a market of competing capitalists that is wonderfully and justly ordered by an “invisible hand.”

Two centuries and more down the road from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, in which this economic model was first and famously outlined, the situation of “actually existing capitalism” is considerably altered from its mythic purity. The “invisible hand” has given way to a sometimes-visible, very manipulative hand that is less concerned with heroic entrepreneurs and useful things, and more obsessed with trillion-dollar-a-day global currency transactions, corporate mergers and takeovers, and a tendency to oligarchy and monopoly that Smith himself warned about. For the purposes of this Capitalism for Dummies-style history, perhaps the crucial moment came when the classic entrepreneur decided to use not only his own money but other people’s money in the form of shares in his company sold in a public stock market. This created various categories of people—owners, hired managers and directors, and stockholders, to say nothing of squads of advertising personnel to peddle the more or less useful things produced and a legion of lobbyists to secure regulatory advantage in whatever political regime the corporation was operating—all of whom have different and divergent interests as well as substantially differing degrees of power. The reason for mentioning these elementary matters is that the Steins in their essay don’t, and thus they substantially obscure the underpinnings of the particular internecine squabbles that they detail and that have, according to them, landed Conrad Black in the glue.

The malfeasance that has periodically, and especially recently, resulted from these arrangements has given rise to a desire for reform among both the public and various groups of capitalist investors. This desire for reform currently appears under the rubric of “corporate governance” and is apparently legally embodied in U.S. law in something known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. I say “apparently” because although the Steins rail at length against various regulatory measures designed to govern capitalism, they don’t really analyse this or any other bit of the corporate governance mechanism, and so it’s often not clear what their criticisms are. This is unfortunate because one of the questions at the core of all of this is, How should the capitalist market be regulated within and without democratic societies? It is a question that is only obliquely and confusingly addressed in the Steins’ essay, which is why I’m obliged to make it explicit here and subsequently in this rejoinder. Instead, the Steins pursue an aspect of corporate governance, namely its alleged corruption by a group of corporate governors, that they believe is responsible for Conrad Black’s predicament.

The clique supposedly hounding Black does, in fact, include a number of the principal actors within the corporate governance movement set in motion by then-Attorney General of New York State—and now Governor—Eliot Spitzer, who seems to have acted out of genuine outrage at the recent piracy scandals within the upper echelons of the corporate universe, most of which involve upper management applying “creative accounting” techniques in order to inflate or maintain share values while grossly over-rewarding themselves. The Steins argue that whatever virtue the motives that initiated the corporate governance movement may have had, it has morphed into something quite different, and much less sanguine.

There are a lot of villains in the Steins’ essay, and if I’m going to keep my analysis shorter than theirs, I’m going to have to concentrate on the main ones.

1.) Richard Breeden: chairman in the late 1980s of the powerful U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). He gained considerable powers for the watchdog organization and wrote the key report on corporate governance in August 2003. That one was titled “Restoring Trust” and the subject was the future corporate governance of MCI Inc, whose founder and CEO Bernard Ebbers screwed his shareholders for $11 billion and drove the corporation—then called “WorldCom”—into bankruptcy. Ebbers was convicted on all charges and sent to prison for 25 years in September 2005. On the other side of Breeden’s ledger, it’s rumoured that he inexplicably didn’t pursue the first person he got by the shorthairs for insider trading—George W. Bush.

Breeden, who styled himself a “corporate monitor” on the title page of his report, is also generally credited with a second, and to our purposes more directly relevant report, “Report of Investigation by the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of Hollinger International Inc.,” written by a committee headed by since departed Hollinger International CEO Gordon Paris and advised by Richard Breeden & Company. Breeden, by the Steins’ reckoning, is the most powerful player in the corporate governance movement, and the primary instigator of proceedings against Conrad Black.

2.) Richard Perle: renowned in Washington, D.C. as the “Dark Prince,” Perle was a director of Hollinger International, but best known as the head of the Defence Policy Board, a quasi-governmental organization that does the long range planning for the Pentagon, and served as the intellectual engine of the Bush Administration’s deep thinking on the Iraq War. Perle has dodged numerous questions about how he can advise Bush on military policy and tactics while running a company, Trireme, dedicated to taking economic advantage of the American presence in Iraq. This is, apparently, a form of conflict of interest that doesn’t seem to excite corporate governance activists. Perle was a longtime Black loyalist until, well, it wasn’t useful for him to be.

3.) Christopher Browne: patrician principal shareholder and executive of Tweedy Browne, the investment company that invested heavily in Hollinger International and was the instrument that began the process of questioning Black’s fiduciary behaviour. For reasons that elude me, Browne hired disgraced Wall Street Journal and Forbes journalist Laura Jereski, a woman of questionable commercial judgment and perhaps of dubious intellectual integrity, to act as his chief analyst on the Hollinger file, and then listened to her when she began to question Black’s integrity.

4.) Paul Healy: Hollinger International’s Director of Investor Relations, and a supposed protégé and friend of Conrad Black, Healy is depicted by the Steins as the person who orchestrated most of Black’s fiduciary miseries, which he did by spoon-feeding Laura Jereski the details of Black’s misdeeds.

5.) Richard Burt: former U.S. ambassador to Germany, Hollinger International board member, Black associate and principal shareholder in a corporate intelligence company called Diligence that sounds suspiciously similar to the companies headed by Richard Breeden and Richard Perle. Burt is every bit as eerily connected as Breeden and Perle to the corporate governance movement and to virtually everything else in the Bush apparatus. He is also, somewhat irrelevantly, a once-and-occasional lover of Judith Miller, the too-connected NY Times reporter who spent 85 days in jail in 2005 and was forced into retirement for being the contact through whom Dick Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby exposed CIA operative Valerie Plame. Libby has since been indicted for perjury and has joined Richard Perle at the Hudson Institute.

Black knew most of these people well. In fact, many of them were his colleagues and friends. Healy worked for him, and Burt and Perle were on the Hollinger International Board of Directors, along with Henry Kissinger and a number of others intimately connected with the two Bush administrations. This is the board, remember, that was criticized for its lax supervision of Black, and became a poster child for what the Breeden Report on Corporate Governance thinks needs to be changed: boards of directors that are like-minded but otherwise-engaged, and inattentive except at cocktail parties.

The Steins’ extremely negative characterization of corporate governance is something of a surprise to me. I thought the corporate governance movement arose out of a common-sense recognition within the business community that having corporate managers and/or large stakeholders screwing small and institutional shareholders was an initially bad idea that had gotten wildly out of control when the pirates realized that the fleet were reluctant to pursue and hang them.

What I was aware of, if dimly, is that a de facto civil war has been raging inside contemporary corporate capitalism since the collapse of communism in 1989. It is a war between capitalism’s management apparatuses and those who have invested money in the corporations and expect the highest possible return for it. Basically, it has been, until the corporate governance people appeared, a civil war without any detectable good guys. On one side were the plutocratic pirate/bandido/entrepreneurs (the Ken Lays and, allegedly, Conrad Blacks), and on the other, the plutocratic “people”—the wealthy or not-so-wealthy investors who don’t give a damn about anything but short-term profits and the dividends and share-value increases that obtain from radical bottom-lining of corporate activities. When the talk of enforcing corporate ethics began, it seemed like a bright light in a whole lot of darkness. A revival of ethical behavior within corporate boardrooms and shareholder meetings is a timely idea, particularly if notions of the corporate community’s responsibilities to the societies within which they’re lodged are included. That seemed to me to be what corporate governance was about.

According to the Steins, this is wrong in two different ways. First, they claim, the corporate governance instigators are purely self-interested entrepreneurs themselves, and the principal players are there primarily to rack up fortunes for themselves, along with the privileges of power—just like any other gang of bandits. Second, the Steins say, this new echelon of corporate ethicists and “governancers” is siding, wholly and unequivocally against the corporate stakeholders and for the shareholders. If this is true—and it is virtually impossible for someone like me to get a clear view of the issues without months of further research—it really might be a disaster for the capitalist system.

A corporate system constrained by a model of governance aimed solely at maximizing shareholder profits, as the Steins claim, would significantly diminish the innovative flexibility capitalist entrepreneurs require and would initiate a one dimensional and single-minded pursuit of near term profits. While this might not appear to be of much importance to those of us who are not players in this particular game, such a view would be myopic. We are in a historical situation where the political and social system—a system in which corporate business is an integral and arguably controlling factor—is faced with the most complex set of circumstances in human history. Those complexities include global warming, environmental collapse, religious and tribal enthusiasms undermining the culture of Western democracy, and the ascendance of a binary/idiot savant economy—China—that has shown absolutely no interest in ethical rules or constraints of any kind. So there is more at stake here for all of us than just the lusts of corporate stake- and stockholders.

The Steins don’t have to convince me that underestimating the political power and influence of the shareholder classes is foolish, even if, on the surface, shareholders appear to be essentially passive economic players interested only in the security of their capital. This is essentially the same group whose oxen were seriously gored during the bout of hyperinflation that occurred at the end of the 1970s and ran into the early 1980s. Hyper-inflation was fabulously good news for land developers, people holding mortgages, and anyone else carrying debt on real assets. But it was not good news at all for the passive holders of the system’s capital, who lost a portion of their wealth before governments rejigged the entire global banking system to protect them. This occurred even though it wasn’t at all self-evident that the interests of the passive holders of wealth, namely shareholders and those who provide the capital for mortgages and bonds, were any more consonant with the public good than those of the people benefiting from inflation. At the time, it seemed to me that I had glimpsed, for the first time, the true ruling class of Western civilization. It is significant, at least to me, that the beneficiaries of the corporate governance movement are the same people.

At the same time, it is important to recall that the direct power of shareholders has been and continues to be limited. There are different categories of shareholding, many of which do not entail voting power and executive control. Raising alarms about the dangers of a “shareholders’ revolution,” are one thing, but critics of corporate governance rules will have to do more than make ideological claims to demonstrate that the entrepreneur-owners, their appointed boards, and their hired managers are not by and large still in control of the corporations and other ships of state. The claim that shareholders are a particular clear and present corporate danger because of their single minded pursuit of near term profits may be true. But the historical fact is that stakeholders in corporations were already pretty adept at all the things that Ken Lay and Conrad Black have been accused of before the “revolt” of the shareholders that brought “corporate governance” onto the scene. After all, turn of the twentieth century business leaders in manufacturing, railroads, forestry, and high finance weren’t called “robber barons” without reason. One thing that is clear is that the story of progress and regress in corporate reform is historically far more complex than the Steins suggest. Indeed, the Steins (and the rest of us) could do worse than read Black’s own tome about Franklin Delano Roosevelt to learn something about how the American president rescued capitalism through a reform program that produced, among many other things, the mid-twentieth century notion of the “good corporate citizen.” This is not to suggest that the corporations of Roosevelt’s time became “good” or “citizenly”. They didn’t and don’t today because considerations of the public good are secondary if not tertiary within the legal definition of a corporation. But at least the notion became a necessary element in its public relations arsenal.

An examination of the specific details of Conrad Black’s descent to criminal prosecution through the Steins’ eyes leaves you with the distinct impression that Conrad Black is a man surrounded by a web of intrigue, self-interested ambition, incompetence, and at times, not-entirely-explicable malevolence. It is a web that apparently reaches into both the most powerful offices—and bedrooms—of the American Republic, although the warp and woof becomes tenuous the closer one gets to the current U.S. presidency and strangely funky when it gets close to Black.

Much of the funk, unfortunately, is the product of evidential and logical gaps in the Steins’ essay. The essay isn’t footnoted, and the endnotes and the short bibliography that they provide do little more than establish the Steins’ philosophical values. This may have something to do with the fact that much of what remains factually ambiguous is in front of the courts, as well as caution in the face of the combative and partisan arena within which the epic economic stakes are being played out. The essay doesn’t always offer a logically coherent narrative, either, possibly because its scope is so ambitious. But the narrative also goes off the track because whenever it approaches exactly what Conrad Black has been accused of, it tends to respond with rhetorically clouded economic philosophy of the most general sort. Some of this, it should be noted, may be the result of fear of litigation against the authors.

So be it, I suppose, although their enterprise may be doomed by the mutually incompatible purposes of securing Conrad Black’s fiduciary innocence while arguing that corporate governance is a threat to the safety of the capitalist system.

The Steins’ narrative of how the attack on Black began and why it is being carried out is probably the essay’s weakest element. There is no more than a single passing mention in their text of David Radler. Radler is the crucial insider and star witness slated to testify against Black in court in order to protect himself from further charges than the one fraud count to which he will plead guilty, cutting a deal that will see him off to a two-year term in a minimum security country club. Nor are Black’s co-defendants in the criminal fraud charges so far lodged—Jack Boultbee, Peter Atkinson and Mark Kipnis—even noted in the essay.

Then let’s recall, briefly, the character of man the Steins are trying to defend here. Conrad Black is, as New York Times journalist Bryan Burroughs pointed out, a man with a “jaw-dropping sense of entitlement…[who] thought of shareholders as sharecroppers, bugs on his corporate windshield.” He is also a man who petulantly renounced his Canadian citizenship, sued the Prime Minister of Canada and called Canadians “whining, political conformist welfare-addicts” as he was heading out the door to accept a British peerage. In the two years before his long crash-landing began in 2003, Hollinger International racked up losses of more than $550 million US—not exactly a situation designed to pacify restless sharecroppers or stockholders.

One of the defenses the Steins use in supporting Black’s high-handed flamboyance is to compare it to that of early twentieth century American newspaper tycoon Randolph William Hearst, saying, well, this is how newspaper tycoons behave, and really, Black isn’t half bad if you stand the two next to one another. Defending Black’s life and management styles by comparing them favourably to the excesses of someone operating 80 years ago is at best mixing apples and oranges—or old, shriveled oranges with fresh ones. It is also a little like arguing that Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney’s nine year attempt to dismantle Canada’s political and economic sovereignty during the 1980s and early 90s was just fine because Mulroney wasn’t dead drunk the way his conservative primogenitor Sir John A. McDonald generally was. The reality is that over the course of a century, standards of acceptable behavior change. Had he been operating in the 1920s, sure, Conrad Black would have cut a fairly pale figure amongst his robber baron contemporaries. But this isn’t the 1920s. For better or worse, it’s the Post-Communist era, the Triumph of Capitalism, where nobody quite knows what’s good or ill and thus every impulse invites fundamentalisms of one sort or another, even inside capitalism itself, apparently.

At one telling point, the Steins make the highly rhetorical gesture of enumerating all the jobs Conrad Black provided for workers, and how many papers he’s published, adding that “…this immense economic product was produced while serving the duplicate public service function, with its attendant financial burden, of communicating the news and buttressing the basic institutions of free speech and democracy. Without dedicated newspaper proprietors prepared to serve this function our democratic freedoms would be greatly imperiled.”

In the real world, it’s hard to argue that Black’s effect on the Canadian newspaper business has ever been sanguine to anything except the bottom line at corporate headquarters and/or the various Black residences around the world. The exception to this—and virtually the only one—was his creation of the National Post, which is almost universally recognized by the journalists who worked for it as the most fun they ever had or will have. But a quick conversation with anyone who worked at any of the smaller newspapers Black took over, particularly the ones serving communities outside the major urban areas, will get you chapter and verse about how those papers were gutted, and journalists and other employees systematically terrorized and intellectually demoralized. It is also easily argued that the National Post was never a high-water mark in the history of journalism, let alone Canadian democracy. Its journalism was both ideologically directed and ideologically coloured, sometimes well into shades of yellow. Conrad Black was not a man interested in journalistic or intellectual balance, nor did his newspapers make any attempt to practice it. And in these late stages of the kleptocratic George W. Bush presidency, democracy and free speech remain in greater peril than at any time since the Second World War, and there is little evidence that any element of the corporate media has recently offered either protection or that it plans to in the near future.

One of the questions not broached by the Steins is why Black had all these global high rollers on his Hollinger board in the first place. The Steins are curiously silent here, but I have a theory that is lodged so deep in Black’s character that it sounds ludicrous until alternative answers to the question collapse. Conrad Black is, as anyone who has read his books will instantly attest, a disciple of Thomas Carlyle, who believed that history is best explained by the actions of “Great Men”. Carlyle’s view of history is, in that sense, the opposite of the Marxist theory of history, which supposes that history is explainable as the conflict between social and economic forces. Both views, I should point out, are deeply partisan (and therefore partial) theories of how things actually work, and therefore, at least in my view, faintly silly.

But Black brings a distinctly “Amielesque” twist to Carlyle’s view of history that is laugh-out-loud silly even while it is evident in most of Black’s judgments, whether historical or fiduciary. Black believes that history is what powerful people decide at cocktail parties, and if you want to affect the course of anything profound, it’s a matter of bringing the right power-group together in the right room. Ergo—and I’m a lot more than half serious about this—Conrad Black spent an inordinate amount of his social and intellectual energy putting powerful people into cocktail parties under his “governance”, and he did it because it made him believe that he had his hands on the levers of history. It probably also made him believe that he was above the rules of ordinary men and women, and that since he had access to the levers of history, he could do whatever he wanted.

All of this may explain why the Steins’ Auto Da Fe is less successful as a defense of Conrad Black than as a critique of corporate governance, which the Steins clearly regard as the new face of totalitarianism. I’m not sure it’s any more than one of many forms of fundamentalism that has emerged from the absence of alternate forms of economic polity after 1989. And I get the sense, at several points, that the Steins are reaching for explanations to situations that are both shockingly and sometimes incomprehensibly corrupt, in which, for instance, public officials responsible for setting military and diplomatic policy in the United States are simultaneously setting up companies to profit from situations created by the policies they are creating.

If half of the political malfeasance their essay identifies is actual and prevalent, then the corruption at the heart of the current Bush Administration and American corporate life is as breathtaking as it is alarmingly open. And as the Steins propose, it makes the system’s pursuit of Conrad Black seem frankly hypocritical, self-serving, and curiously gratuitous.

But at the same time, implying that Black is being persecuted because his impersonation of Louis XVI (with Barbara Amiel’s contributory Marie Antoinette outbursts) made him appear a dangerously loose cannon to the corporate governance elites may dovetail neatly with a critique of the larger currents of contemporary capitalism, but it doesn’t really get Black off any of the many hooks he’s on. Fiduciary malfeasance is still an affront to both the legal and economic systems we agree to live under, even if those policing the latter may be villainous themselves. Finally, devoting 25,000 words of moral umbrage to a deadly internecine corporate squabble, however immoral, hardly seems an efficient use of the ethical interests the Steins normally evince, which range from Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative to Emmanual Levinas’ post-Holocaust ethics. The ethical plight of Conrad Black that they passionately discern hardly seems in the same league.

The larger picture the Steins paint requires some outside-the-box thinking to gain perspective. Sensible people are very reluctant to depict the United States as a conspiratory oligarchy, but the elements of oligarchy are clearly visible, and the conspirators are easy to find, if not to manacle to one another. The fact that a son of a U.S. president was elected president himself less than a decade after the father was democratically defeated despite the son having highly evident character flaws and a relative absence of skills, intelligence and talent is telling. George W. Bush admittedly isn’t Kim Jong Il, but there are some distressing similarities.

Many of the insights the Steins have into the workings of the American corporate civil war require that sort of outside-the-box perspective to grasp, and even then, tend to remain similarly tangential. Their notion that the corporate governance movement has produced a particularly virulent sub-oligarchy in an astonishingly short time may be unorthodox thinking, but it hardly strains credibility if you recall the YK2 hoax, where entrepreneurs inside the computer industry used the same combination of technical ignorance and fear to hose governments and industry for billions. Occasionally, we need to remind ourselves that not only is capitalism not run by rocket scientists, its characteristic responses are reptilian core reflexes.

The weakest link in “Auto da Fe”, in my view, is the limited options the essay is able to envision for corporate polity. In the twenty year civil war, the binaries have been stakeholders and shareholders and the divergence of their interests is found in the gathering of profits. Stakeholders like Lay, Ebbers, Kozlowski and if you believe the charges, Conrad Black, stole from passive, unsuspecting shareholders to enrich themselves. The corporate governance movement, with its monitors and entrepreneurs and its legislative expression in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of July 2002, is the shareholders’ retaliation. If taken to its logical ends (as the Steins believe is happening) this counter-revolution will be economically destructive well beyond anything perpetrated by the renegade stakeholders.

I’m in agreement with the Steins when they point out that “…one can see without any prophetic talent where this collusion of corporate intelligence, and heavily financed corporate governance hedge funds will ultimately lead”. Where I diverge is in their defense of stakeholder/entrepreneurs as the sole relevant energy of capitalism.

We need to remember that the word “entrepreneur” is the French term for “enter and take”, and how short a trip it is from there to “break and enter” and other forms of criminal theft and/or anti-social aggression. The Steins trot out John Maynard Keynes’ truism that the field of action between “rational calculation and entrepreneurial action” is indefinable and wild, and then go on to romanticize the effect of entrepreneurial activities. It is fair to point out in the face of that sort of romanticization that among the “animal spirits” that vitalize economic activities is a preponderance of social psychopaths and arrogant assholes—not that I’m convinced that Conrad Black fully falls into either of those categories. But to suggest that society ought to protect and elevate entrepreneurs when they consciously stand outside the categorical imperative—as Black has throughout his career—is as foolish as it would be to stand by and let the binary revolution of the shareholders destroy the system.

Entrepreneurial Capitalism, now that the intellectual and economic collapse of Communism has left it without competition and the human species without alternative forms of polity, desperately needs to be restrained and guided even if the corporate governance movement isn’t the one to do it. What it needs, awkward and old fashioned as it may seem, is the reintroduction of the “public good” into its gearing, even if the complexities that notion will inevitably introduce causes the system, temporarily, to grind to a halt. If it is what it claims to be—a vital, irrepressible energy and an essential component of the human spirit—it will quickly make the needed adaptations.

January 22^nd, 2007 6447 words.

I.

Once upon a time, I played a viola. In orchestras. This means I sat right in front of the cellos, playing exactly a fifth higher than whatever they were playing. You can see us violists play – we’re sawing up and down in the air while the cellists are sawing sideways – but you can never hear us. We don’t count. We’re drones to the violin and cello melodists.

That’s how writing literary nonfiction in Canada often feels.

In 1978, when as a brand-new author of a nonfiction book I joined The Writers Union of Canada, I was shocked to hear the serious discussion still going on among its members whether nonfiction writers had a right to be members of TWUC at all. We weren’t “literary,” you see, and, besides, we made pots of money.

Never mind that nonfiction projects were ineligible for Canada Council artists’ grants and nonfiction writers were excluded from the Canada Council readings and writers-in-residence programs. Never mind that we weren’t welcome at any number of literary festivals, most notoriously at the Harbourfront International Festival, except if we wrote literary biographies or were non-Canadian; and that the juries that gave out nonfiction prizes were overwhelmingly composed of academics. And, if you wanted to learn how to write the stuff, you were directed to journalism schools, or to the myriad creative writing programs in the USA which unashamedly offered programs in “creative nonfiction” or “literary journalism.”.

I was once told by an established literary nonfiction writer: “What does it mean when literary festivals coast to coast are allowed to exclude nonfiction writers, when most writer-in-residencies are reserved for people who do not write nonfiction as their primary genre, when critics and academics routinely study and write about fiction and poetry to the exclusion of literary nonfiction? I can only conclude that no one cares.”

Much of this has changed, apparently (see discussion in the May 2005 issue of Quill & Quire).. Writing programs have opened up to nonfiction (well, “narrative prose” anyway), substantial prizes are distributed to its writers, literary journals regularly feature “creative nonfiction,” the new regime at Harbourfront promises more fuss about nonfiction, and, best of all, young writers have energetically entered the genre and are being published in new venues such as Maisonneuve and Walrus.

But as an Albertan, inured to the blandishments of boom-and-bust cycles on the oil patch, I may be forgiven for not holding my breath as this new enthusiasm crests.

Two years ago, I circulated a cri de coeur: “Writing Canadian nonfiction in the 21^st century: is there a crisis?” Much of my angst was fuelled by the frustrating experience of having served on a Governor-General’s jury for nonfiction and then watching the fine publisher of nonfiction, Macfarlane Walter & Ross, who had published our winner, Andrew Nikiforuk, go out of business. Gary Ross told the Globe & Mail (April 23/03), “I can’t believe how little winning the Governor-General’s award did for Nikiforuk.” I can’t say I was surprised, although I was terribly disappointed to hear it. I was aware that among the people I know in Alberta, for instance, who read Canadian books, there had been tremendous discussion (“buzz”) about Guy Vanderhaege’s new novel, The Last Crossing, which had not won a prize (but would be selected as the sole survivor of the blood-letting on the Canada Reads panel that year) but precisely no conversation about the Nikiforuk book, which had not only won a national prize but had addressed, fearlessly and artfully, a public issue of the first importance, the environmental crimes of the oil patch.

And I was much affected at the time by the pointed comments National Post columnist Noah Richler made in the splashy wake of the big fiction prizes (“Enough about fiction, already”), about the “proliferation” of literary fiction and of literary celebrities “singing the landscape,” serving us “dollops” of history, painlessly swallowed, about a “surplus of accreditation and often mediocre criticism” and prizes sponsored by “business interests” that nevertheless encouraged every stage of production of fiction and “even the most ordinary writer of fiction.”

Compared to that kind of grooming for fiction, is it any wonder that our nonfiction doesn’t show up on the international radar screens either? Ian Jack, the editor of the celebrated journal of international nonfiction, Granta, confessed to Richler: Well, he’d like to publish a Canadian issue “but the problem was that there were so few good writers of contemporary nonfiction in Canada. Why was that, by the way?” Not that we need a Brit to patronize us. Toronto-based literary agent Anne McDermid told Quill & Quire [May 2005], “Readers have been buying narrative non-fiction by U.S. and British writers for at least 20 years, but Canadian writers haven’t yet made a significant contribution to the genre.”

II.

I once went to a conference on reading which hosted a session called “One Book, One Community,” an ambition I consider problematic in the extreme, not just for its perverse desire to reduce the reading public to a single, monomaniacal fan club but also for its – surprise! – desire to corral us all into reading a novel, and nothing but. CBC radio hosts “Canada Reads” which, through a process of triage (one book overboard each day of the week), resolves in a single “winner” which is often already a well-known and best-selling product. I echo Hal Niedzviecki’s alarm, of a couple of years ago, that libraries, of all civic spaces, should be zones liberated from the commercial activity of book-industry marketing. Nevertheless, Vancouver Public Library had a campaign to get the entire city to read one novel; visitors to Toronto’s public libraries cast their own votes for the Giller winner; Grant MacEwan Community College in Edmonton had been running The College Book Project for several years, in which a recently-published Canadian novel is chosen as a focus for discussion and activity within the college community and community-at-large, as they put it.

Noah Richler, for all his unhappiness about the “proliferation” of literary fiction, recently hosted a CBC “Ideas” series called A Literary Atlas of Canada intended to “explore the stories that bind the country together in conversation,” with “some of Canada’s best writers” in French and English. There were 71 writers on the slate and they were all novelists and poets, Ronald Wright and Sharon Butala being partial exceptions.

In April 2004 a group of western Canadian nonfiction writers gathered in Banff and drafted a “Banff Declaration,” which was subsequently quietly retired because of lack of consensus on its content but which nevertheless did make some unexceptionable points. “We believe,” it began, “that nonfiction is the intellectual lifeblood of public imagination and discourse” and that the “vitality” of Canadian literary life must be measured by the state of its nonfiction as well as of fiction and poetry . “We note with alarm,” it went on, the diminishment of the public space for debate and inquiry as a consequence of “media convergence” and loss of opportunities in local publishing markets.

With the shrinking of such public forums, I would argue, whether public affairs trade magazines or Book Sections of newspapers or prime time literary programs on radio and television that should take as lively an interest in Canadian nonfiction as fiction, we risk losing the vital role that nonfiction writers play – lobbing arguments into the public square. If readers would rather be arguing about the one novel that “everybody” should be reading, or choosing their reading material from bestseller lists driven by publishing conglomerates, or relaxing with those “dollops of history,” what does this say about the level of public discourse in Canada? Compared to the novel as entertainment, does our nonfiction seem somehow too difficult to read, not action-packed enough or lacking a plot to keep us interested? How many times have I heard otherwise thoughtful people, literate citizens, claim never to read nonfiction as a matter of some principle: they find it too “depressing” or too “fatiguing” to read at the end of a stressful day?

So thin is our sense of Canadian nonfiction that most people assume that its topics – history, sexuality, class struggle, identity, landscape, theology – will be better articulated by fiction writers who have been granted a kind of dispensation to handle the big stuff. A friend who had recently published a bold work of creative nonfiction wrote me: “Actually, my experience of being reviewed as a writer of literary nonfiction was that none of the questions I posed in my book – about Canadian nationalism, modernism, gender and race politics – were even mentioned.”

In a recent review of Barry Callaghan’s collected essays, Raise You Five, the reviewer cited Matthew Arnold’s dictum that “a great literature needs and in some sense depends upon the co-presence of deep and passionate critical thought.” Yet Callaghan appears not to have anything to say about Canadian nonfiction – another instance of our nonfiction writers foundering without critical feedback or passionate thought about our work.

III.

For years I championed the cause of creative nonfiction whenever I could. My point was that, thanks to the New Journalism, nonfiction now had a whole new rhetorical and formal repertoire that should be recognized as something other than “mere” journalism. Call it creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, literary journalism, creative documentary, whatever, the point was that, since the literary establishment turned its nose up at nonfiction as unliterary, then, dammit, we would not be “just” nonfiction writers but creative nonfiction writers who had every right to be treated as equal to fiction writers and poets in the creation of Canadian literature.

I am seriously reconsidering this argument.

I now think “creative nonfiction” is an over-used term for writing that is essentially narrative prose (magazine writers have been writing the stuff for generations), and when we use it we exhibit the “cultural cringe” of nonfiction writers who are ashamed their roots are showing. It was a matter of self-defence, really, given the sheer canonicity of the novel in discussion about the flourishing of writing in Canada, while we nonfiction writers were left to believe that we toiled in the unprestigious backwaters of the non-imaginative, also known as reality.

To camouflage our journalistic origins, we wrote narrative, which we constructed scene-by-scene, and with lots of dialogue and we wrote memoir – boy, did we write memoir -because once the genie of the narrating self, or “I,” was let out of the bottle, we ran the danger of becoming our own subject.

Alexander Wolcott once wrote excoriatingly, in Vanity Fair, October 1997, about the vogue in memoir, of “dogged” monologues “piddling away” into pointless “passive-aggressive chat.”

In defence of the memoir, Elizabeth Renzetti of the Globe & Mail suggested that it is the “one place in non-fiction where the general reader can find important ideas discussed without being bogged down in the painful jargon of the professional philosopher, psychologist or literary critic.” The one place? I find this a bizarre claim, given the wealth of general non-fiction, literary and journalistic, written in this country about philosophy (Mark Kingwell), economics (Linda McQuaig), information technology (Heather Menzies), queer culture (Stan Persky), art history (Susan Crean), historical trauma (Erna Paris), urban ecologies (Brian Fawcett)…I could go on. I’ve written some of it myself. All of this is writing deeply “connected” to the world outside ourselves as well as resonant with the writer’s voice. It is, I believe, what Wolcott would have us write: “civic journalism for the soul.”

Where would our novelists be without what writer Russell Smith has called “the news,” without “a deep and compulsive curiosity about the contemporary, about politics and technology and culture….It can’t all be about our childhoods or our parents’ stories….”

I’m fond of citing Anthony Burgess’s Introduction to an edition of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year, whose full title is: A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials Of the Most Remarkable Occurrences, As Well Public as Private, Which Happened in London During the Last Great Visitation in 1665.” It even has a subtitle: Written By a Citizen who continued all the while in London. Never made public before.” Well, of course not. The “citizen” had just finished writing it – in 1722.

Defoe wrote his “novel” from childhood reminiscence, tales told by his parents and neighbours, medical references, public records, contemporary witness accounts and other verifiable sources: what we’d call reporting. And then he invents an “I” who narrates the whole thing as though this creative alter ego had

been present at the events described. Is this fiction, journalism or something in between? Here is Anthony Burgess on the subject: There are people who still find Defoe hard to take as a novelist and this because they have become accustomed to regarding the novel as a form almost aggressively ‘literary’ full of barely-concealed machinery and self-conscious fine writing….Defoe was our first great novelist because he was our first great journalist and he was our first great journalist because he was born not into literature but into life. [from his preface]

In 1993 while holidaying in Montana, I dropped in on Bill Kittredge in Missoula, who had been teaching creative writing since 1969. He said his best students were writing non-fiction and were not even “vaguely interested” in writing fiction. “They have a subject. Everyone’s tired of the smaller-than-life, ironic, low mimetic narrator in fiction. In non-fiction it’s fun to be able to write as a narrator who is as smart as you can be. But I always tell my students that the most important thing to figure out is what your subject is going to be.”

And you find your subject, it seems to me, by doing a reporter’s job. This is what Tom Wolfe reminded us in his 1989 manifesto issued in Harper’s magazine in which he deplored the belief of young fiction writers that the act of writing words on the page was the “real thing” while the real world is merely “so-called” – or “constructed.” He argued then that it has fallen on non-fiction to exploit the “most valuable and least understood resource” available to a writer: documentation, or what Wolfe calls “reporting.”

Or, as Brian Fawcett extended the argument (in a Dooney’s Café posting March 2004), “ [Creative nonfiction’s] specialist posture seems to suppose that it can establish empirically-sound factualities and coding even while it claims that its verity lies in the realm of creative imagination. Thus, it pretends to objectivity while using creativity to shelter it from the rules of discourse and evidence. I don’t think writers can or should have this both ways.”

Otherwise, we run the risk that so much fiction runs – narcissism – and present a writing self “untaxed by history,” to quote someone at the recent AWP writing conference in Vancouver.

It was at that conference that I heard two doyens of nonfiction in the US square off against each other. In the one corner, Lee Gutkind, writer and editor of numerous “how to” volumes of creative nonfiction, in the other, essayist and anthologist Phillip Lopate. After Gutkind’s exuberant pitch for the genre – “two stories in play, the public and private, framed in narrative” – Lopate pronounced total disagreement. Lopate is drawn to the personal essay precisely because it requires a reflective voice, not the “invasive techniques of fiction and poetry that have marginalized the legitimate genre of the essay.” Lopate likes to think “on the page”: it’s not just “what happened” that is important – the narrative impulse – but reflecting on what happened.

I mull this over as I now read of the “story-driven” nonfiction that is attracting young writers. And I think about the editor of Granta, who has introduced a collection of nonfiction that includes the luminous and mind-bending work of such literary masters as Ryszard Kapuscinski, Carolyn Forche and James Fenton, and has called it The Granta Book of Reportage.

October 28, 2006-2600 words

The insight was this: contact with such people creates, in me at least, a kind of a neural acridity that, for a few hours—or sometimes days and even weeks—interferes with thought. My preconditions for anything deeper than reactive cognition are very similar to my preconditions for social or intellectual exchange: that we agree to operate in a realm of reasonable discourse and good will—and that we must act as reasonable beings and not as a troop of dominance-crazed baboons. If that reasonableness isn’t there, then all bets are off, and thought turns into chaos, sociality to violence.

By nature, I awaken each day with the possibility that any thought is possible to think, and that, since no one is trying to hit me in the face with a rifle butt, life is a pretty sunny affair. At the end of most days this sanguinity has generally been kicked to death by incoming information and events, but that’s the price we all pay for consciousness in an unjust world that is accelerating out of easy understanding. Never mind. The next morning, I’ll start anew, with my batteries mysteriously and mercifully recharged by sleep or by some piece of light-seeking software I’m barely aware of. There’s nothing heroic here, and it has no moral component. It’s just the physical equipment I work with to get beneath the brassy surfaces of daily life.

What provoked all this deep thinking was a day-long e-mail catfight with Montreal poet David Solway over my lengthy review on this website of his monograph On Being a Jew. My review clearly sent Mr. Solway into a towering rage, and he undertook, in his e-mails, to correct my faulty understanding with a barrage of supercilious sarcasms, most of which thankfully sailed over my head or landed harmlessly short of target. But there was something familiar about the venom with which this was delivered, and I soon enough found myself thinking about my old friend and enemy Bill Hoffer for the first time in years, and about the extended set of scuffles I had with him at the end of the 1980s. On the surface both Solway and Hoffer, it seemed to me, possessed parallel strengths, similar intellectual dysfunctions, and quite possibly similar bats in their respective belfries.

In the e-mail exchange, David Solway employed Hoffer’s annoying trick of letting you know that he’s only deigning to talk to you because you’ve temporarily passed his acceptability test—the standards for which he doesn’t reveal or tell you how or why you passed. You are informed that you are “promising” or some similarly condescending designation that leaves you perpetually at risk of revealing your deeper barbarity, thus reversing your passing grade and making further conversation as worthless as you are.

What made me draw the parallel between the two men was the peculiar anxiety that provoked in me. With Hoffer , I seemed to have sufficient cultural confidence (or obliviousness) that I was able to shrug off most of the anxiety contact with him invariably induced. Or at least I could until around 1989 when I did or said something unrecoverable or his acceptability test made a radical and permanent shift in its standards. At that point I received a permanent failing grade and was sent to join the barbarian hordes. After that, things became openly hostile between us. (Anyone interested in my version of the blow-by-blow details and the issues involved can find it in Unusual Circumstances/Interesting Times (New Star, 1991), and I’m sure Hoffer’s diatribes against me remain in various archives, too. I note that I didn’t have much appetite to go back and re-experience any of it again for the sake of this writing, and I won’t fault you if you don’t.)

Bill Hoffer, by the way, was formally known as William Hoffer: Bookseller, the brilliant, unbalanced man who was the star of Vancouver’s antiquarian and cultural book trades until he turned on both—and on nearly everyone who knew him—in the late 1980s. He was the son of Abraham Hoffer, the charismatic Saskatchewan-based psychiatrist who, in 1952, posited the notion that schizophrenia was the result of the body producing its own toxic compound similar to mescaline and that niacin was effective in its treatment. Hoffer the elder then forged a career for himself along the margins of conventional and holistic medicine based broadly on the general theory that mental illness is caused by dietary factors, and can often be cured by the same means. His science was unconventional but frequently sound, but its messianic delivery earned him the not-really-deserved reputation as a crackpot.

Bill Hoffer’s personality was similarly extreme. In conversation he always insisted on setting the terms, and there were no categorical shades of grey in his discourse, no provisional intellectual or civil agreements, particularly not toward the end of his life. He was, by temperament, a shouter and a gloomy rabbinical monologist. In the early days, he was often witty and entertaining, even when he dived into the murky end of the pool. The extreme incidents could have been (and often were) blamed on his diabetes, which, given his liking for good scotch, was a fairly frequent generator of strange behaviour—he’d forget to stop drinking, or forget to take his insulin, or he’d forget to eat. Diabetics live by regularity and solid habits, and both were alien to him.

No one ever questioned Hoffer’s intelligence, or, for that matter, his sincerity. That said, he was simply not a reasonable being, and he rarely tried to pretend he was. If you could live with that, you could stand among his small circle of intimates, towards whom he was often extremely generous.

During the early 1970s, I went to his store on 10th Avenue every Wednesday, brought him lunch and we’d talk for a couple of hours. I enjoyed his company even though I knew that he viewed me with a combination of patronizing affection and contempt, and I wasn’t much bothered by the steady barrage of insults because he interacted with everyone that way. During that period I also edited and printed about a dozen issues of a  literary magazine called NMFG out of the store. NMFG was an acronym for “No Money From the Government”, but all that meant was that I wasn’t prepared to wait around for a government grant to put the magazine out. Other readers did a lot of fooling around with the acronym, and so it also sometimes meant “Now My Father’s Gone”—a reference to then-recently deceased Charles Olson, who was a major influence on many of Vancouver’s young writers—and any number of other, sillier permutations. Bill and I ran it off the magazine in a single afternoon and I delivered most of it on a selected mailing list—and then took the rest to the bar for distribution on the last Friday of each month.

Then as now, I’d put up with a lot of abuse if intelligence and subversive wit went along with it, and Hoffer always had plenty of both on offer. I learned, somehow, to hold a certain reserve of self when I was around him, one that allowed me to cull the goodies from the steadily increasing flow of rhetorical and intellectually binary crap he dished out.

Things got more difficult when he moved to a downtown store on dank Powell Street , where his invective grew more shrill and his circle of acceptable allies and friends began to shrink. At first I decided this was happening because Hoffer had realized that he wasn’t going to live long enough to fully collect the prehistory of Canadian Literature, and was shortening and sharpening his focus to get the best. Even when he began to turn on the project itself I reserved judgment, and maybe I’m guilty of not taking him or it very seriously. I didn’t have to, since my genetic inheritance suggested that I was going to be standing long after he was gone, and thus could take a longer view.

What exactly sent Hoffer over the edge has never been clear to me or, I suspect, anyone else. But in 1987, he published a bizarre pamphlet by Ottawa editorial maven John Metcalf titled Freedom From Culture (partially funded by the right wing Fraser Institute), and attached to it a still more bizarre and extreme introduction. What was most bizarre of all was the alliance with Metcalf. Metcalf was, at the time, among the top two or three individual recipients of government cultural subsidies in the country. In the pamphlet, Metcalf argued rather pedantically that cultural subsidies were failing to breed first rate writing. This was fairly squirrelly because the details revealed it as really nothing but a self-advertisement for “litrachuh” edited according to Metcalf’s values, which tended to produce texts that were so Britishly tight-assed one suspected that their authors had to shit through a straw. Hoffer’s introduction, much more apocalyptic, pulled out all the stops, demanding that grants cease, subsidies to publishers be curtailed, and the guilty criminals be rounded up for re-education. It wasn’t entirely certain that he was speaking symbolically on the last part of it.

Several other publications followed under the absurd military theme of “Tanks are Mighty Fine Things”, including a listing of chief enemies. I was among them, along with Dennis Lee and others, even though at the time I’d received just a single Canada Council grant. I think I got tagged because I was local and intransigent, and because, well, when Bill demanded that I drink the Cool-Aid, I told him point blank that I thought he’d lost his marbles. There were numerous outbursts during that period, including a threat to put his entire CanLit collection in a dumpster and send it to a landfill. (It eventually ended up in Peter Howard’s Serendipity Books in Berkeley, California.) Somewhere around 1992, a near or actual nervous breakdown saw Hoffer leave the book business and move to Moscow , where he claimed intellectual entrepreneurs could roam free. (He also, during these years, taught himself Yiddish, and hooked up with a Russian widow with several children. By several accounts, this relationship changed Hoffer, and he was still devoted to her when his life ended in 1997.)

For all of its silliness, Tanks was traumatic for those Hoffer targeted, me included, and but not entirely because Hoffer was behaving unreasonably. It was traumatic because there was a possibility that, despite the overkill and blather, he might be pinpointing some essential corruptions within our national cultural project.

All through the 1970s and 1980s, Canadian governments had been subsidizing cultural production as if it was an essential if fiscally minor industrial sector. Writing grants were plentiful and book publishers were, if not exactly drooling cash, proliferating like rabbits. Most writers with even a little talent quickly learned the system and how to get their share of the watery gravy, and most published books that shouldn’t have gotten into print. Most got grants they hadn’t really deserved coming in and didn’t earn out at the far end. The system wasn’t near as lucrative or corrupt as the CanLit industry that was building within the university English Departments during those same years, but even a little money corrupts if you’re operating on the margins.

But Hoffer stood up and began shouting that it was a racket, and that a national culture created by artificial insemination and then force-fed bonbons was worthless. This carried a grain of truth, and most writers reluctantly sensed it. This was, by the way, around the same point that Pierre Trudeau was asked, at a conference of writers in New York , what the appropriate relation writers should have to the state. His answer—that writers should be ambivalent toward the state—was much reported on, but like Hoffer’s Tanks, never taken seriously. Even watery gravy is fairly tasty.

The on-the-ground reality of Canada ’s cultural subsidies wasn’t quite the racket Hoffer claimed it had become. It more resembled a wilderness preserve that only academics could hunt inside, and the so-called force feeding of bonbons was a little like those bales of hay conservationists drop into game preserves when the overpopulating deer and elk begin to starve at the end of winter. Enough writers, meanwhile, were crawling out of the preserve into the mainstream that it was possible to make the argument that the system sometimes produced genuine excellence and commercial viability—and that, anyway, the total outlay of public funds over the decades was less than the price of a F-14 squadron, and had done more over those two decades to protect the country from foreign invasion than the entire armed forces had. Those arguments, abstract as they are, still hold, I think, even if they don’t exactly engender élan. But the grain of truth Hoffer had located ground away inside everyone’s gears, and it was resented.

A couple of other things were obscured by the rhetorical violence of Hoffer’s attack, and I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never considered them until now. One of them was that Tanks cost Hoffer more than anyone else involved. It cost him his reputation, and it cost him a large portion of his livelihood. He was, after all, the holder of the largest private CanLit collection in the country, and by questioning its legitimacy the way he did, he destroyed much of its value. There’s something else, too. At the time that he launched Tanks, Hoffer was in his late 40s, a common age for intelligent men to question what they’re doing. In retrospect, that’s likely what set Tanks off, and the questions he’d asked himself clearly hadn’t come up in his favour. So maybe he wasn’t crazy—a designation that simply identifies behaviour that doesn’t make conventional sense to others—but rather genuinely anguished at what subsequent history has demonstrated were very real issues.

Almost two decades have passed since Tanks. Most of the literature Hoffer declared fraudulent or intellectually and artistically superfluous has proven to be pretty much what he said it was. The cultural status of writers, meanwhile, has fallen to that of widget-producers within a marketplace that is largely closed—in Canada, 70 percent of books are now sold by a single chain—and the model of market relations has invaded and supplanted the traditional values of democracy and social improvement throughout Canadian polity. If Canadian cultural subsidies were supposed to protect our cultural institutions, they didn’t do much of a job.

So maybe William Hoffer was crazy and right at the same time. Maybe it was all a badly-framed and articulated warning from an anguished man that, for the wrong reasons, no one listened to.

Which gets me back to David Solway, who was the trigger for this retrospective on Hoffer. He seems to invoke similar responses—affection and loyalty in some, derision and dismissal from more, and uneasy interest from people like me—up to a point. Of the two people I’ve talked to who knew Hoffer and know Solway, one claims a close resemblance, the other says the two men are quite different. I can see at least several fundamental differences between them. One is that Bill Hoffer’s blanket condemnations often went against his personal interest, and occasionally cost him dearly, both financially and emotionally. They were, in that sense, not self-serving. More important, they were often not self-aggrandizing, unless you think that setting yourself on fire is a successful form of self-aggrandizement. Third, Hoffer never saw himself as a victim of injustice, although it’s also true that in the 1980s, defining and establishing oneself as a victim wasn’t the prime social and intellectual instrument of identity politics and social bullying it has since become. It was, rather, considered a fairly cheesy thing to be engaged in.

Since I’ve never met David Solway in person and know nothing of his private life, his social skills or his commitment to his ideas, I really can’t have a firm opinion about whether he’s a latter-day William Hoffer. But the brief e-mail exchange over my review of his pamphlet left me with the same unpleasant taste in my mouth, although it’s possible that my experiences with Hoffer have made me hypersensitive to a certain style of demagoguery.

I certainly can’t attribute to Solway any of Hoffer’s unfortunate ability to both home in on interpersonal wildernesses or create them from scratch. Hoffer characteristically took the same wild chances with his personal life that he took with his professional and intellectual life. His personal life regularly crashed and burned, and more than once he took female partners with him to cushion the landing. Even though as physical specimens go, Hoffer most resembled a live-action version of a Don Martin Mad Magazine cartoon—it was hard, watching him walk down the street, to determine the direction in which he was actually going—some women found him attractive and more than one or two attractive and intelligent women fell hard for him, maybe because his messianic tendencies carried a powerful strain of the Quixotic. Whatever else he was, Hoffer was all of a piece, and when he ran with the scissors, they ended up in his own eye as often as not.

From what I’ve seen of Solway’s writings prior to “On Being a Jew” , he has been more the sort of guy who likes to wave the scissors around in the hope that others will be impressed and/or intimidated by their flashing edges. On the other side, he does have Hoffer’s predilection for extreme and barely argued judgments, and the same with-me-or-against-me attitude toward his contemporaries and collaborators.

I’m told that an elaboration of Solway’s “On Being A Jew” is going to be published as the launch-vehicle for a new press headed by Malcolm Lester and David Mason, titled The Big Lie: Reflections on Terror, Antisemitism and Identity. I suspect that it will reveal the direction in which this one is going to proceed. He’s clearly gotten hold of large and very sharp pair of scissors with this. Let’s hope he doesn’t jam them into his own eye.

3000 words: October 24, 2006

KARIM MAKDISI

]]> http://www.dooneyscafe.com/archives/462/feed 0 http://www.dooneyscafe.com/archives/453 http://www.dooneyscafe.com/archives/453#comments Mon, 03 Jul 2006 21:54:16 +0000 John Harris Frank Davey is among Canada’s foremost academic critics of Canadian literature, the author of a dozen books of criticism and a contributor to another dozen. These books are controversial and much used by professors: the encyclopedic From There to Here is in the arsenal (Davey wouldn’t like that metaphor) of anyone who teaches and writes about Canlit. He’s a good critic, one of the best, clear in his definitions and prose, unafraid to get into the old inductive-deductive scrum — to sort categories of themes, stylistic devices, characters and plots, and to test the categories on further themes, etc. He is perceptive as to an author’s consistency in these matters, and the accuracy of her references/imitations (Davey would prefer the word “enactments”).

Davey is “academic” in the original denotative sense: “of the school of Plato; skeptical” (Oxford). He claims to analyze and appraise literature using a theoretical framework rooted in a modern version of philosophical idealism. The operative word, and he uses it all the time, is “phenomenological.” In his 1999 autobiographical blurb in Contemporary Authors 173 — the source of much of the information used in this article — Davey sums it up: “Over the next decade [1961-1971] I would get a reputation for being something of a phenomenologist of poetry and skeptic about what passed for Canadian literary criticism.”

I think Davey’s use of theory in his criticism is questionable. I think it’s a distraction and pushes him into being “academic” in the connotative sense: “abstract, irrelevant.” What does he mean by claiming to be a phenomenologist of poetry? One thing that he doesn’t mean, I hope, is that he is a phenomenologist. No one has reasoned their way back and forth from philosophy to specific aesthetic judgments, from Truth to Beauty, just as no one has ever written philosophical poetry or reasoned their way from Truth to Virtue.

When Davey “bridge[d] Tish poetics and French structuralism” and discovered “a phenomenological text-based poetics,” he never said how he did the “bridging” and the “poetics” he ended up with was nothing new. Olson’s dictum, “art does not seek to describe but to re-enact,” a version of Archibald MacLeish’s “A poem should not mean/But be,” became “a poem does not represent something prior to itself but enacts the moment of its own construction,” and “criticism cannot represent a poem or novel but is merely a new text that enacts the reading of those texts.” There’s little difference between these propositions and what Wordsworth said even earlier about the purpose of his poems: “namely, to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement.” Olson, MacLeish and Wordsworth wanted to valorize (Davey likes this word) style over content.

Tish poetics, like Wordsworth’s, was a call to arms, and these will always be needed until we’re in paradise. Calls to arms find mantric utterance from wherever — their content suits their circumstances but no others. Later, to be understood, they have to be put into context, which is history, not philosophy. When the revolution succeeds, as Davey’s did, the mantra means little in the new situation. Those who try to prolong its legitimacy by rationalizing it are ignored or snuffed (see what Stalin did to Trotsky et al in any encyclopedia).

When Coleridge ran Wordsworth’s poetics by German idealistic philosophy, he came up with nothing anyone has since been able to understand. He got a mantra, the best parts of it plagiarized from Schlegel. He continued to use and explore it because it gave him comfort. But it didn’t get him back to poetry or provide a measure and vocabulary for criticism, and it made Wordsworth angry when he was informed that he was not really, for example, a man speaking to men. In fact, Coleridge had the balls (Davey would prefer “gonads”) to admit that he sought recourse in theory to avoid the pain of trying to write poetry. When we read Coleridge’s criticism, we have to shuck his theory. The same goes for Davey, after he ran Olson past Husserl.

All criticism is faith-based, but the evangelical, puritanical stuff (Christian, Marxist, Freudian, Post-structuralist) wants around Kant’s dictum that aesthetic judgment never achieves absolute certainty. Since there is no way around, Davey, no matter how loud and long he works his mantra, will be read as a New or Rhetorical Critic who connects rhetorical sophistication to the expression of libertarian or New Left themes (rather than Arnoldian “great ideas” — the conservative alternative). He makes this connection in the usual way, through the cunning sophistry of the personal essay fortified by scholarly bean-counting and jargon — in his case, philosophical jargon. This is the critical tradition he was trained in through advanced studies (and many protest marches and sit-ins) in the English departments of UBC and UCLA during the 1960’s, and the tradition he evolved with through the faith-based, poststructuralist or new New Left “victim’s revolution” of the 1980’s and ‘90’s — a revolution he participated in assiduously over his long career as a professor.

In criticism, the idea is to make the sophistry as unobtrusive as possible. Forget absolutes. Forget conscience, except as a subconscious canon of moral judgments. Use rhetoric (what else is there?) but keep it subtle. By all means demonstrate your all-round humanity, your sensitivity, your conscience, by reciting anecdotes about your spouse or Great Dane, but don’t overdo it. By all means scan Harper’s and listen to CBC “Ideas” for those echoes of why you think Heart of Darkness or whatever is great. Above all, make your criticism pleasurable, like a good poem or novel. Supplementary rules for academic critics: summarize the bean counting, avoid authoritative (lecturing) arrangements, don’t talk down to readers, and keep the jargon to a minimum.

Davey has more trouble with this than Coleridge did, and Coleridge, that “sad ghost” as T. S. Eliot called him, had trouble enough. Davey seems to suffer from a kind of intellectual autism that seeks comfort in the mantra of theory and in constant assertions of its logical and empirical validity. This autism is further indicated by his compulsive bean-counting, his hair-trigger defensiveness, his loyalty to those who “understand” and his anger at those who don’t, his concern for definition, correctness and scholarly propriety, his urge to polarize and politicize, his formulaic, jargonistic prose (he sometimes sounds like “software man” in Barthelme’s “Report”), his humorlessness, his confidence and his inability to process irony, especially Margaret Atwood’s. That’s autism.

These symptoms are aggravated by his context: the university. Davey is an academic critic in the other and more usual denotation of “academic”: “a member of a university.” He has worked in organizations like York University where he was professor for a couple of decades and Chair of English for five years. He was president of the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English for two years. He is right up there at the top of the ivory tower. This world — a traditional home for functional autistics, an autistic world in fact in its emphasis on rationalized methods of study, teaching and management — is Davey’s natural habitat.

Davey says about his Tish days, “I began imagining myself as a poet who would need secure university employment to continue writing.” Note: not secure employment, but secure university employment. It would seem he made an accurate assessment of his personality and of the nature of the university. Probably too he watched Earle Birney sashay around, easily getting anything he wanted — sabbaticals, grants, a separate creative writing department, Rona Murray.

For over thirty years now, Davey’s situation has been not just secure, but posh. He is forever on sabbaticals to write books. Also, he shows his Great Dane, and listens to his daughter play violin with orchestras in Antibes, Menton, Cannes, and Nice-Acropolis. He lives at conferences, where he and his colleagues do great things — like driving stakes through the hearts of Northrop Frye, Atwood, D. G. Jones, and other “thematic” critics at the 1974 Learneds. Also, while at various conferences, he shows his Great Dane. His journal, Open Letter (supported by the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council) is an album of these conferences, publishing the papers and grainy photos of the writer-professor family looking like friendly aunts and uncles at a picnic. There’s Frank with Stephen Scobie in Paris. They’ve been talking about Alice Munro (no picture of her — she must have missed the plane, or they didn’t have the funds to fly her in, too). There’s Frank hugging — what? The Great Dane? No! George Bowering.

All the other derivative bureaucracies of liberal democracy — like the corporation — have drawn Davey’s fire, but not the university, especially when you consider that actions speak louder than words. Davey has argued, in the Preface to Canadian Literary Power, that “the independence of individual universities [some, evidently, aren’t independent]” is a major factor, with “the democratization of arts council grant procedures” and “the strength of regional publishing,” in limiting the coercive power exercised by giant multinational publishers and media companies.

Where has Davey been? Not to the 2001 Writers’ Union of Canada meeting, where his Tish buddy, Fred Wah, a prof at Calgary and president of TWUC, fielded a complaint from Myrna Kostash: “I’m what Myrna Kostash has rightly noted, an academically supported writer who is eligible for Canada Council readings but who gets to go on lots of international junkets as a Canadian writer because he’s also an academic and in on the Canadian Studies scene . . . . The majority of Canadian writers who get in on these affairs are also university professors [and] the same relatively small group of people keep “representing” Can Lit in foreign Canadian Studies programs.” The universities do open up opportunities, but for professors only, and the kinds of easily-processed writing that professors do.

Davey has worked hard to ensure that the university does not change, that it will remain an oligarchy of the highly accredited (not necessarily the highly educated, talented or intelligent) and continue as the favored child of the Euro-American Enlightenment, and that he himself and his buddies George and Fred will forever to find comfort and support within it. As a new member of the English Department at York, back in 1970, he found York’s libertarian mandate “amusing.” That word, in Davey, usually means “stupid.” York faculty actually believed that everyone should teach first and second year, that it was irresponsible to take time away from teaching to write books, that you could vote in departmental assembly that all department members were equally meritorious and accordingly that all merit money will be given back to administration. After awhile, this stopped being amusing and became threatening. Everything he proposed in his first years at York was voted down: “I took this personally because I considered myself a democrat.” Probably he took it personally because York’s philosophy was based in New Left libertarianism, which Davey supports in most of its manifestations.

But not this one, where it threatened his security. At York, Davey was forced to take control, as he was in his high-school club when he voted for himself as president and won (embarrassingly) unanimous support, as he was at Tish, as he always is. He got permission from the union to break the rules in order to hire well-known poets and novelists to teach creative writing, instead of having it taught by degreed faculty who might write the odd poem and want a break from large classes. He supported the purging from the graduate program of faculty who did not publish three articles or more over five years. And, when he became Department Head, he realized that “the undergraduate department was left with numerous members unlikely ever to be considered qualified to teach a graduate course. . . . I told the department that it needed to hire new members with research records that would enable them to teach almost immediately in the graduate program.”

This was the conventional Enlightenment reasoning. It’s called “specialism:” creative writing is taught by published writers, undergraduate programs are taught by people who focus on teaching or haven’t done enough scholarly publishing, graduate programs are taught by published scholars. The idea is that teaching ability doesn’t matter or isn’t quantifiable. This is the original format in the first modern (German) universities, and it is that of Davey’s alma mater, UBC. It was established in the English Department there by Earle Birney and department head Roy Daniells (in conflict with one another), and solidified in the early seventies by department head Robert Jordan (in conflict with students and a majority of faculty) and his “publish or perish” hiring and tenure policies. Jordan was, presumably, with Warren Tallman, one of the Americans who had left America (“the best Americans are the ones who leave”) to “enrich” UBC academically.

The trouble with Davey’s academic life is that, by his own theory, his support of the objectifying, hierarchical, patriarchal rules of the academic oligarchy, as well as his resultant affluence and leisure, disqualifies him from making statements on racism, sexism, globalism, free trade, etc and thus (since theory is meant to prove direct connections between judgments of aesthetic and moral value) with any literature that deals with these issues. So far as theory goes, Davey can’t make statements on these matters because he has no part of them. He is “Nowhere Man,” and this must be explained and atoned for in his criticism. Just as the format of Atwood’s novels — big-press, with fixed conventions of characterization and narration — tags her, for Davey, as a compromised feminist, so Davey’s status as a professor, with his academic connections and expository books riddled with quotations and jargon, blocked in by prefaces and bibliographies, and published by research/arts councils and university presses, puts Davey firmly in the patriarchy.

Compromised as a poet and critic, he has by his own rules to submit to those who can talk about these things. Theory is not the university, though it lives there. When the English Department continued to vote Davey down, when his status there was threatened, he took over, but in the context of theory he can’t quite do that. In the context of theory, no matter how fucked up those who have earned the right to speak are, and often the evidence that they have earned the right to speak is that they are so obviously fucked up, Davey is forced to participate in the orgiastic self-purification and denunciation sessions that theory demands. In 1988, with Reading Canadian Reading, he subjected all of his previous books to such a review. In 1999 in CA, he repeated the process and included his poetry books.

So it is evidently essential to us in our reading of his phenomenological criticism to know that Davey, while he was raised in a comfortable Abbotsford home with a loving family, was traumatized by the war, especially the letters from family in England which his parents and grandmother thoughtlessly read out loud, and by arguments that his father and grandmother thoughtlessly conducted over the kitchen table. This left Frank conflicted, as evidenced by the fact that he loved racist and sexist comics like Johnny Hazard, Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon, and “thought the geometric rows of rivets on a DC-3 or P-51 were the pinnacle of modernist aesthetics.” He still thinks “the Dragon lady much more dangerously attractive than . . . Margaret Atwood.”

Davey was also abused by his father in the sense that his father established a male ethos in the home by playing a dominant role, and leaving pornographic stories like “Irma: Queen of the Nazi Death Camps” all over the place. Frank, masturbating over these, ended up “conflicted” about women and maybe even Nazis, which caused him to mistreat his grandmother and which forms the context in which his books about Kim Campbell (1993) and Karla Homolka (1995) must be read. Also he was comparatively poor — poorer than friends whose parents had cars and could take their kids to New Mexico and California and whose fathers had time to discuss baseball with them. This poverty was also indicated by his “class problems with books” — nothing to read at home but old stuff from England, since his parents couldn’t afford to buy Reader’s Digest. “Later I would realize that mine was a problem in ethnicity as well as class.” In other words, Brits were disadvantaged compared to Yanks, no matter how superior both were to bohunks. Also, Abbotsford wasn’t Vancouver back then, but more like the Interior, so Davey was alienated in that way too, cut off from the cultural and economic advantages of city life, forced to associate with Yokums. And of course he was a westerner with ambitions to write, and all the action in regards to writing was hogged by Toronto, especially after Margaret Atwood, Queen of Canadian Literature, came along. He has indicated that his marginalization, along with that of his Tish partners, was behind Tish and the formation of Tish poetics: “I think we felt marginalized in a number of ways, having come from a small town . . . . Marginalized by being Canadian in North America, marginalized by being west coast . . . . marginalized by . . . becoming more and more interested in language rather than in content, which was the dominant esthetic . . . . That sense of being marginalized, and the anger that that aroused in us, was I think a very important source of the abrasive energy [behind Tish]”

But all of Davey’s proffered victim credentials were subsequently denied by a theory purification committee led by Pauline Butling (Fred Wah’s wife) who pointed out that, “as young, white, able-bodied males . . . . they [the Tish group] were in fact quite close to “the dominant pole. In the case of young, white, males, gender trumps class, location, and economic position; their lack of money and power is only temporary.” Poor Frank. He turned his father in for nothing. Poor us, because this means that we need to join Frank in “revisiting” Tish poetics and Olson.

To get full benefit from this revisit, we need to know what other Tish groupies (they wouldn’t like that word) said. Angela Bowering, in her parts of the fictionalized memoir Piccolo Mondo, says, “What’s upsetting is that she’s beginning not to like them much — all that bafflegab . . . comparisoning off each others’ personae. All that trumpeting, disappearing into their own stories. . . .” And, according to Butling, Daphne Marlatt was traumatized by the male ethos of Tish, especially its physical and emotional violence. Creeley punched Bowering and continually prodded Davey about not taking enough risks with his writing — like “breaking open his beloved’s [Marlatt’s -- see below] skull and putting a candle behind her eyes.” Wah threatened Purdy and Robert Sward punched Robin Skelton. Because of this, Marlatt “took years to unravel her own self-censoring and articulate a lesbian/feminist possibility.” Even Fred Wah, beginning as his wife, Butling, says “to explore his personal/social history as a racialized subject [he’s ¼ Chinese],” was pussy-whipped into nagging Davey on the matter of Tish’s racism which he, Wah, must (subconsciously) have deeply felt, and which kept him from realizing and getting excited about his cultural identity until long after, when Butling kindly drew his attention to it.

Davey responded weakly by pointing out that it was he, not Wah, who campaigned for the first Chinese city council candidate in Vancouver in 1960, so Tish poetics did incorporate some awareness of racism (if not sexism). Generally, though, Davey broke under pressure and recanted. He came up with a new opinion (more “bafflegab”) on what drove Tish in its seminal work in poetry and poetics: “In my first year in Tish I was still remembering wanting, and wanting, to spend my hours talking with Daphne Buckle, and she was elsewhere making plans to marry Alan Marlatt. This is difficult to sum up. A lot of the energy I put into getting my Tish buddies to publish nineteen issues in nineteen months was more than likely displacement of the energy and anticipation I had felt talking with Daphne about art and writing . . . . Davey was “marginalized” alright, but by a woman , not society.

Davey’s unrequited affair with Marlatt drove him to other accomplishments: “Warren Tallman called the context of my book D-Day and After, ‘the haunted house of the lost object.’ He was thinking of Daphne. . . . Most of the poems in Bridge Force were written in the aftermath of my (self-induced?) crisis over Daphne Buckle.” In fact, Davey says, other works of his were inspired by other “lost objects,” and found ones too: “Creeley . . . in a Montreal bar in 1970 . . . said I wasn’t willing to take enough risks for my writing. I was both pissed off by his presumption and amused because of how chaotic and chancy my life had been over the last six months, during which I had secretly written much of the prose-poem book Weeds, broken up with [first wife] Helen, eloped on five-day’s notice from Victoria to Montreal with Linda, who then was still married to my ex-Royal roads-colleague Roger but was now pregnant with our son Michael . . . I published eight books between 1970 and 1973.”

So we need to revisit the denouncing, in Tish poetics, of writing that was occasioned mostly by emotional crisis and urgency,” that was “emotion recollected,” as opposed to “writing that was occasioned mostly by the satisfaction of having created textual meaning.” Davey, with his talk about the subconscious and sublimation of emotion into poetry seems to be adjusting his view. This means revisiting Olson’s “a poem does not represent something prior to itself but enacts the moment of its own construction.” Unless Davey was multi-tasking through his relationship with Marlatt, writing poems with one hand while his other was being shoved off her knee, a poem represents something prior to itself, and a good poet avoids a “tranquility” so cerebral that it can’t recollect “emotion.”

Davey would of course encourage this exploration of his “rhetoric.” It’s part of the phenomenological approach. Study my biography, read my autobiography. Every criticism is an act of self-criticism. In Reading Canadian Reading, he told us to read our favorite book, From There to Here, as not encyclopedic, authoritative: “The brevity of the essays . . . despite their undeniable subjectivity, invites summary judgments, sharply focused arguments, decisive conclusions. Here the crucial limitation is conceptual. The author had neither worked out a theory of criticism suitable to the task which the book posed nor structured the book to accommodate the theory of criticism the book explicitly endorsed.” He then goes on to tell us what he would now say of, for example, F. R. Scott: “[his] humanism [Davey hates humanism]is signaled in part by the high incidence in his poems of clausal syntax, closed rhyme schemes and verbal irony . . . .” Using this as an example, we can easily go on to revise the other 59 entries.

As if. All of these stylistic features are evident in T. S. Eliot, too, who hated humanism even more than Davey does.

Some revisits we have to handle ourselves. They are too painful for Davey to do himself. Here’s how, in 1999, he revisited his attack on thematic criticism, which happened at a 1974 conference event and led to the book Surviving the Paraphrase (1982): I took advantage of my invitation to speak at the Learned Societies’ meetings of May 1974 to take apart the assumptions of thematic criticism, using not Atwood, whom I had already critiqued elsewhere, but Jones as my example of it. Some scholars called the moment of my lecture a turning point in Canadian criticism. I remember the seats of the amphitheatre were filled and that there were people standing in the aisles and doorways. I remember Miriam Waddington grabbing me as I left the podium and saying “That’s good, you’re not a structuralist, are you?” Perhaps, like many others, she had mistaken Jones’s and Atwood’s criticism as structuralism. Then I noticed Doug Jones, and his wife Monique, sitting quietly near the centre. I wished they’d been somewhere else. I wish I hadn’t taken advantage. I wished I’d been somewhere else. I wished I hadn’t made so many things up.

Since he doesn’t list the things he made up, presumably not wanting to fall into permanent depression about humiliating Jones in front of his wife and confusing Waddington, we have to do it for him if we wish to understand what he now sees as the limitations of his arguments against thematic criticism. One of these limitations might have been the derivation of Jones and Atwood from Frye, whose Anatomy of Criticism Davey specifies as the source of thematic criticism. The conventional wisdom is that it is anything but, but never mind that.. It is, like Barthes’s criticism, which Davey admires, structuralist criticism. Davey later calls it “superficial structuralism,” to distinguish it from Barthes’, I suppose, but this still makes it structuralism. Waddington’s “mistake” was really Davey’s problem with definition. Another thing he might have made up is the idea that Jones (and Atwood) derived their thematic analysis entirely from considerations (mostly summaries) of plot and character. They don’t, but are inclined to. In other words, Davey simplified the approaches of all three writers.

It is Davey’s criticism of Margaret Atwood, though, extending from Tish through to the present, that best shows the difficulties of the endlessly self-reflective criticism of the New New Left, the Poststructuralists or, as Harold Bloom describes them, the New Puritans. About the Tish approach to Atwood, Davey says that he and George Bowering were inclined to make friends with her: She was to become our companion in Canadian writing, whether or not we wanted an eastern-Canadian companion. This was not true of John Colombo or Daryll Hine or Alden Nowlan or Roo Borson, whom if we ignored would not become companions. Davey adds that he and Bowering were subconsciously glad to have her detached and ironic companionship.

But why “subconsciously?” Because consciously Davey (he probably shouldn’t be speaking for Bowering here, who has acknowledged his own fantasies about Atwood) didn’t know why they wanted the bitch in the club in the first place. Hadn’t she pulled the “field” right out from under their feet? Admittedly this had made more room for women, “among whom we had not enough companions in writing,” but at what cost! The field had shifted back to Toronto, “to Frygian thematics and away from language as the ground of culture and politics, even though her own words were precise and complexly political. We could not forgive this superficial structuralism in Frye and its glib generalizations about Canada and we could not forgive them at all when Atwood wrote Survival and defined out much of the Canadian culture and writing we valued.”

William Carlos Williams, Olson’s guru, made similar comments about T. S. Eliot: “The Dial brought out The Waste Land and all our hilarity ended. It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it and our brave sallies into the unknown were turned into dust.” What Williams wanted from Eliot, and what Tish wanted from Atwood, was their intimate and productive relationship with language. Atwood was doing what they wanted to do, and didn’t seem to need theory as a guide and encouragement.

Atwood’s language-power was insightfully analyzed in Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics (1984), which examines first the image patterns that define what Davey calls Atwood’s theme of “male and female space,” and her enumeration “of the methods by which mankind affirms male over female space.” Here, Davey affirms, Atwood explores what she seems to see as the central dilemma of feminism, that language (naming, definition, categorizing) is male space, but women must appropriate it “to have any voice at all.” But, as Davey is always saying, language is a force unto itself. It permits women to have a voice. So why do women want the male voice if not to speak to men, to alter them? Otherwise they would develop their own voice. Davey questions this initial move of Atwood’s into male linguistic space, and is still unsure about it. Why does she seek reconciliation of the eternal opposites rather than what Blake sought, “the continued joyful struggle of opposites?”

Maybe because, as Atwood graphically points out, a lot of women are hurting and dying in “male space.” This is “joyful?” Davey, in his tower, immersed in “the pleasures of the text,” promoting rhetoric over reality, fighting positivistic thinking, doesn’t want to acknowledge that Atwood is describing something that she and others would call “reality.” You’re not supposed to be able to so obviously valorize content and still write well. Davey’s problems with Atwood’s ability with language lead to the suspicion that his analysis is a tactic to drive Atwood out of male space, so she isn’t continually writing poetry that makes his look like shit.

But Davey’s description of Atwood’s dilemma is perceptive, even if he suggests a stupid reconciliation of the opposites — opposites that he himself, due to his categorizing, has portrayed as extreme and immutable. Davey continues his analysis, with equal incisiveness, into Atwood’s novels, wherein he sees Atwood moving more and more into male space and thus, possibly, locking herself into the feminist dilemma (the one novel that confuses him is Life Before Man, where the men are in female space and the women control male space).

A decade later, Davey revisited the Atwoodian version of the feminist dilemma in Canadian Literary Power, focusing on a crucial feminist poem, “Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never Be Written.” Here he applies a full-blown phenomenological analysis in all its jargonistic, nit-picking tediousness, but he arrives at the interesting insight that Atwood could now be appalled at her occupation of “male space,” and envious of other women who can speak with more authority on feminist themes because they are still in “female space.” Davey is careful to avoid solipsism, to actually say that the only poetry that can be convincingly written about rape, mutilation, enslavement etc can be written by women who are being raped, mutilated, enslaved. He does not mean this, although he implies it. He seems to determine (his prose here is unusually convoluted) that Atwood’s title is ironic, and her poem is a good poem, and not just “notes towards a poem.” He only worries that many women — especially in relatively safe and peaceful Canada — will not understand the irony and decide that Atwood is seeking to silence them. It is kind (if of course condescending) of him to explain Atwood’s real intentions to these women.

Finally, in Post-National Arguments (1993), Davey revisits Atwood’s novels, focusing on his perception, again very insightful, that Atwood portrays the politically active characters in Cat’s Eye (and in all her novels) as clowns. He points out that the situation and history of Elaine, the heroine, closely resembles those of Atwood herself, and that Elaine, like Atwood, achieves artistic prominence of the sort that is likely to be appropriated by feminists. She becomes a feminist icon by avoiding and making fun of feminists and their politics. And what does Elaine’s art portray as the source of her creative individuality, if that source is not solidarity with feminists? It portrays the primeval Canada of [Atwood’s] childhood . . an impossible Canada , but an enormously powerful one [that] resonates through the nation’s culture in the canonical paintings of the Group of Seven . . . .”

Davey is disappointed, as he is in all the great Canadian novels that he studies in this book, including Ana Historic by his “lost object.” All seek resolution to the racist, sexist, rationalist, soul-destroying, globalizing trans-national obsessions of Western Civilization in the vision of Canada as individual-friendly and bucolic (female space). By opting for what Davey calls “sentimentality,” all signal “a decided lack of faith that human cooperation can address injustice and accommodate difference.”

Davey’s unhappiness is endearing. He has perceived the thematic inclinations of the novels he studies, and he has done it through perceptive analysis of style, character, and plot, especially plot (which is character), especially the endings of plots. He is close to writing the plot-summary thematic criticism that he once hated. He does not pretend that he is not upset by the fact that all of these really bright novelists, some of them good friends of his, don’t see the point.

Atwood has the right attitude to Davey — she responds ironically. Irony and autism don’t mix, but irony can force autism into stuttering withdrawal, which is good for Davey when he tends to belligerence, which is when he tends to hurt himself. How did Atwood respond to Davey’s totally justified concerns about “how lightly she was taking Canadians’ various struggles for cultural power,” an attitude that would have to change before he and George would accept her into the club? “She commented to my wife Linda that I must have “female-Hitler, evil-stepmother” fantasies about her.” Ha! says Davey. Takes one to know one! Admittedly he does have dominatrix fantasies, but his involve only blondes like Kim, Karla, and Irma, and they are not his fault, because his father exposed him to men’s magazines, with “the predictable drawings of a leggy blonde with black whip and jackboots,” and anyway Davey prefers the Dragon Lady to Atwood. And these fantasies make him ANGRY because they indicate women marrying male power, offering to lead it, enacting its fantasies (nay, seeming to enjoy them!) overcoming it by conquering it and not eliminating it. This is WRONG and Atwood should not be making a JOKE out of it.

I admire Frank Davey, but I wish he’d give up on theory and just do his critic’s job of work. Maybe then I wouldn’t have to read Husserl and listen to Davey’s life story which could only be interesting (1) if Elspeth Cameron wrote it or (2) something really bad or extremely exciting happens to Davey and he has to write about that thing instead of write about writing about it.

Mind you, I’m conflicted here as you can obviously see. I love gossip. But it has to be good gossip. Look at it this way. Davey’s poststructuralist fellow-traveler, Robert Lecker, another prof but a kind of Sancho Panza to Davey’s Quixote, always blowing off great nationalistic (Davey hates nationalism) farts in Davey’s vicinity, over a decade ago proposed a new genre — criticism as narrative. His sample of it was Making It Real, the Canonization of English-Canadian literature. In it he narrates, through previously-published essays that in this book are strung together and “revisited,” his life in Canlit. “Each chapter is part of the process of re-writing myself.” And he has recently published Dr. Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit.

What if hundreds of other retired English profs followed Lecker’s example and began their own Biographiae Academiae? Millions of university sabbatical and professional development dollars, millions more in Canada Council writing and block grants, could even now be in jeopardy, about to fed into the maw of professorial ego. Haven’t these people had enough of the podium?

Imagine reading such books, or Davey’s if he decides that he needs to expand the moronic 23 pages that he wrote for CA? It would be like having an English prof who did nothing but tell anecdotes about his wife and Great Dane. You’d have to walk out of class, or put your hand up and say, “Mind just telling us what this poem on your reading list means, Sir?”

July 2, 2006 5989 w.

Aggressiveness Training

When young men in Taiwan are inducted into the army they are enrolled in “sit down classes” and given psychological aggressiveness training which is largely a matter of learning tone of voice and types of sentences. The rules are: never ask a question, always give an order; don’t say “Would you like to,” say, “Do this”; always raise your voice when you speak—in fact yell all the time; put emphasis at the beginnings of words and phrases when you speak.

The young man who explained all this to the Media and Communication Studies class said this aggressiveness training strongly contradicts the habits people learned in the civilian life in Taiwan: to be respectful, cooperative and soft-spoken. It took him a while to get used to the switch between the civilian and the military way of being and speaking, but when he got used to it, it was not hard. Once he was in uniform the transformation worked automatically and out of uniform he was never tempted to yell at his friends or the members of his family. He said Taiwanese boys who graduate from high school are generally eligible for officer training and only officers learn the psychological aggressiveness techniques. When student officers in the sit-down classes are spoken to aggressively by their teachers, they sit and listen and do not talk back. The students practice speaking aggressively to students of lower rank, never to students of the same rank. A few of the students are women. The young man said he had never been spoken to aggressively by a female officer.

As officers rise in the ranks of the Taiwanese army, things change with regard to who speaks aggressively to whom. A colonel might still speak aggressively to a captain, just as a captain might speak aggressively to lieutenant; but once you get to be a general you didn’t have to speak aggressively to anyone. Generals, the young man said, never speak aggressively. They act more like politicians.

Spell

People in Korea use the text messaging function on their cell phones more frequently than they use the voice message function, which is preferred by people in China or Japan or Taiwan. The young man who reported this fact to the class said Koreans find it easier to use the text function to communicate complex messages such as those involved in ending relationships. It is easier for them to say “I don’t love you anymore” in text mode than in voice mode, not to mention face-to-face mode. In Seoul people walk around punching letters to their boyfriends or girlfriends, or their ex-boyfriends or girlfriends, into their cell phones and often bump into each other because it is not easy to spell out words while walking around.

Cranky

A man told the Media and Communication Studies class that his grandfather was a cranky man who, when he watched television, commented continuously on the clothes, jewelry and cosmetics worn by people on the screen. His grandfather could never be quiet while watching TV, he said, so it was hard to watch TV with him. But when his grandfather listened to the radio, he shut up completely. He paid close attention to what people said and never uttered a word in response to the voices that came from the radio.

The man said his cranky grandfather considered television to be a two-way communication, whereas radio was one-way. His grandfather heard radio voices as monologues, and found it easy to be quiet in their presence, whereas when the television was on there seemed to be other people in the room and he could not help speaking with them. When the people in the television failed to respond, the grandfather had no alternative but to speak to family members about these strangers who were in his living room. Look at those people, the way their lips are painted, how their hair are coloured, how they walk, the cranky grandfather would say.

The cranky grandfather’s habit of speaking whenever the television was on was painful to the man, who was a filmmaker and didn’t like it when his grandfather provided another soundtrack for a film he was trying to watch and learn from. He wanted to watch the films, not listen to his grandfather, and he had moved all the way from India to Canada so that he could watch movies on television without hearing his cranky grandfather’s voice.

POW

When he joined the army, a young man from Singapore spent five days in solitary confinement in a Singaporean prison. All conscripts into the Singaporean army have to undergo this confinement, called “POW Treatment,” in order to learn how to resist revealing a password if they are captured. The inductee who is learning how not to reveal his password is placed in a totally black concrete cell eats food thrown in through a hatch high up on a wall and scattered on the dirty cell floor. He sees or hears no other human being during these five days of learning.

The young man who described the practice to the class said most inductees into the Singaporean army do not complete this training: they reveal their passwords before the five days are up. He himself had completed the training because he had successfully applied the only known method of doing so, which was to smuggle a small radio into the blacked-out cell and listen to it whenever he felt in danger of going crazy, which occurred many times during his confinement. He said his fellow inductees had tried other methods—meditating, talking to themselves, singing, chanting, holding their breath—but these methods had all failed, and the recruits had all revealed their passwords.

Fishermen

Two young women from Thailand analyzed a cigarette ad for the class. The ad showed two Caucasian men in short pants and hiking boots standing on a rocky pinnacle, holding loops of rope. The young women said that in Thailand fishermen often held ropes like these, with nets attached, before throwing them into the water, so these Canadian men might be fishermen. The only problem was that the men in hiking boots and shorts were standing hundreds of metres above the ocean, an arm of which could be seen in the distance among many mountains. How, the young women asked, could these Canadian fishermen throw their nets into the sea when it was so far away and so far down?

Transfer

A young man from China said the North American cigarette ad that the class was analyzing was stupid because it did not show anyone smoking and it did not show a pack of cigarettes. How would people know the ad was for cigarettes? He said ads in China showed what was being advertised and showed people using the products that were being advertised, so when you looked at an ad you knew what it was trying to tell you. North American ads did not make sense.

A week later the class analyzed an ad consisting of a black and white photo of a deserted city street with a red Don’t Walk traffic signal prominently displayed in its foreground. Below the photo, in black type on a strip of white background, ran the government health warning about smoking. The young man from China said that he now understood how Canadian and North American ads worked. This ad was encouraging people to smoke. The red “Don’t Walk” sign flashed on an empty black and white street, and you would be stupid to heed a sign that said not to cross when there were no cars around; this same stupidity applied to and was being transferred to the health warning.

Why would you believe anything your government was trying to tell you about health? the man asked. He said ad makers in North America were quite clever and had found out how people thought.

Take Out

In Dubai, men do the shopping and women do the cooking at home but when the family goes to a restaurant the man makes the decisions about what to order and what to eat. That’s why the man in the KFC ad the class was examining was reaching out of the framed photo in the centre of the ad and grabbing the box of KFC on the ad’s periphery while his wife and children remained at home, inside the photo’s frame, so to speak. The young man from Dubai who explained this said people in Dubai don’t go to restaurants often but when they do it is the men who decide where to go. The women are lucky, he said, now that Dubai has KFC, because they have to do less cooking. But they also get unhappy at times because they no longer have control over what the family eats, especially when the husband gets take out.

Dubai pizza restaurants use the same advertising strategies as KFC.

Tradition

A young man from Beijing told the class that he drank Coke Classic because he wanted to communicate the idea that he was a traditional Chinese. He wore Nike running shoes, American-style army fatigues and a large American-style army jacket with fur-lined hood to show that he was a modern Chinese, and he always carried a red-and-white can of Coke Classic to signify that he was mindful of tradition. Pepsi drinkers and Diet Coke drinkers were a different kind of Chinese: they were less worried about the American, possibly imperialist influence on traditional Chinese values. The young man said the red colour in the Chinese Coke Classic ads signified Chinese New Year and good luck and then Coca Cola. His parents, the young man said, drank Coke, but they didn’t look at ads.

Visor

The young man who wore his baseball cap sideways said he didn’t know why he wore it that way, other than to signify that he didn’t like to wear it with the visor in front or in back. He said some people do wear the visor in the front or in back; others, who were like him, wear the visor to the side. His classmates asked him to swing the cap around so the visor was at the front, just for a moment, so they could see what it looked like, and he said he could not do it, that it was impossible. He said nobody that he knew wore a baseball cap with the visor in the front, few people he knew wore the visor in the back. He said in Japan, where he came from, people didn’t talk about these kinds of things.

Bite Me

A young woman said she liked wearing ripped jeans because they were sexy and showed parts of her body that were not usually seen by others. She often cut extra rips into jeans that were bought with rips already in them, and she put these new rips in places the manufacturers hadn’t thought of. She wore her favourite ripped jeans when she was in North America and her less favourite ones, which had fewer rips in them, when she went home to Indonesia. Once when she went home wearing a pair of North American jeans into which she had cut a rip near the top of her thigh, at the front, her mother had taken the jeans away and sewn up the rip. So she had to walk around in Indonesia for a month with a patched-up rip in her jeans. When she came back to North America she cut the rip open again.

In class, when she looked at a Levis ad that showed a young Caucasian woman with long legs wearing a very short denim skirt with a frayed hem, the young woman from Indonesia said it was a good ad because it showed the “dirty and sexy” side of women. She said the woman in the ad was probably rich because she was white and North American and had, except for a black smudge on her cheek, flawless skin. She was self confident enough so go out in the street in a run-down part of the city on her own and even risk being taken for a hooker by appearing to look like a kind of hitchhiker which she obviously wasn’t. The young Indonesian woman said long legs were something all Asian girls like herself who were born with shorter legs wanted to have. The self confidence to walk out on the street and to have sex when you wanted to was also something Asian girls tried to achieve but they didn’t always succeed. She herself wore Levis because she sometimes felt that when she did so she could have the same freedoms as this Western woman who was not a hooker but could pretend to be anyone she wanted to be.

The young Indonesian woman said the theme of an ad which showed a famous Japanese singer biting her lower lip and closing one eyelid, with her messed hair hiding part of her face, was “bite me,” which meant that the singer enjoyed sex and could have it with any man she chose whenever she chose it, but she could also not choose it. The singer was famous enough not to need a man or to get married, which was what most women thought they needed, and although she probably secretly did want to get married, she would not settle for any man but the best. “Bite me,” the young woman explained, was what the singer was saying to any man who wanted to date her and whom she didn’t want to date, and it also meant that the singer sometimes enjoyed being bitten.

Media Event

Once while living in Burma (now Myanmar) Goran Simic and his brother, whose father was the Serbian ambassador, were stopped by rebels on their way to the international school in Yangong. They were hauled out of their Mercedes limousine and forced at gunpoint to witness the beheading, by the side of the road, of a uniformed Myanmar government official. “Look,” said the rebels to the boys and prodded them with their rifles. “Watch.” Standing nearby were two photographers and one video cameraman who were recording the beheading. When it was over the rebels tore the films from the cameras and the tape from the video camera and pressed them into the boys’ hands. “Take them. Show the world,” the rebels shouted. “Show what we are doing.” The rebels herded the brothers back into their limousine and told the driver, who had been watching from his seat, to drive on. Then the rebels sped off.

When Goran and his brother got to school they gave the films and video to their teacher. They never learned what happened to them. Years later, in the Media and Communication Studies class, Goran wondered whether the incident he and his brother had witnessed might be called a media event. He could see, after taking the class, that it may have been one, but when it was happening he hadn’t thought of it that way.

History

One day after the Media and Communication Studies class I went to the steam room at my local community centre. Inside, a man from Africa whom I had met before asked a woman who had said that she was Chinese what the dragon dancing around in Chinatown on Chinese New Year was all about. The woman said she didn’t know exactly, but she knew it had something to do with Chinese tradition, and that China was a pretty old country. After a pause the man asked, well how old is China, is it 4765 years old? The woman said she didn’t know exactly, but it was probably close to that because that’s what the Chinese calendar said. It might be older, but in the times before that—and she moved her arm in the air to indicate these times—people had nothing to write on. No one said anything for a moment, and steam rose hissing from the heated stones. Then the woman said to the man that although China was a pretty old county it was not the oldest country in the world. Egypt, she said —and she made an inverted V with her hands, and the man from Africa said pyramids, and she said yes, pyramids— I think Egypt and pyramids are the oldest country in the world and they are older than China. She thought this but she didn’t know for sure because she didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about these things. She didn’t have enough time to do this kind of thinking, she laughed. I prefer to watch television, she said.

17 June 06

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