Canadian Letter [1960]

The new university buildings at Saskatoon are being made out of huge erratic boulders collected from where the ice-cap left them in river beds.  Scottish masons eye the stones and, knowing by divination as much as by skill where to strike them, split them – as the ice failed to do – into manageable pieces.  I had not seen this before coming to learned society meetings there in June last year: and so walked on a hot dusty Sunday in a wide circle from the university with Roy Daniells.  He has an eye for birds.  He talks well, with a biblical lilt, gay and intent in a poet’s way.  When we got back to the university there was a string quartet to listen to.  Would I write a piece, he asked, for Landfall when he was away, when the time came?  I said I would as best I could not having his style.

Some things may be signs: but anyway these things have hap­pened in 1959.  The Governor-General’s Awards for English poetry and for fiction – carrying this year for the first time a Canada Council prize of $1000 – have gone to established writers, and no award was made for non-fiction (criticism, biography, scholarship).  The Stratford Theatre needs to revise its policy now that the first lucrative flush of adolescent high spirits has worn off.  The Can­adian Broadcasting Corporation, after suffering severe internal troubles, looks like being forced quietly but more firmly than ever before into the hucksters’ market.  There seems to be more talk about writing than before, and even a new periodical founded to discuss Canadian writing.  But there are no more signs than there were two years ago of any outstanding young writers: the undergraduate magazines do not promise any renaissance.

Of writing first.  Irving Layton won the Governor-General’s award for poetry with A Red Carpet for the Sun, a collection of the poems (210 in number) he wishes to preserve, written from 1942 to 1958.  Author of eight volumes of verse in eight successive years, he has in this volume much clarified his attack by selection, dis­closing a mind always alert, seldom banal, determined to shock, at times highly original.  Born near Bucharest, brought up in a Montreal slum tenement, Layton acknowledges the sources of his strength in his father’s Jewish mysticism and a mother with a ‘gift for cadenced vituperation’.  Out of this, and a McGill education and much miscellaneous experience of a vivid sort, comes an acute sense of language, a painfully assertive certainty in his own vision and an arrogant and pitiless scorn for those who are gulled or blinded by a corrupt world.  Despite the tumultuous zest, the un­abashed eroticism (‘the disorder and glory of passion’), the snarling contempt, Layton’s theme is compassion – pity for everything ex­cept blindness, brutality, and the ‘hideously commercial’.

It isn’t reason but cruelty distinguishes our species.  Man is not a rational animal, he’s a   dull-witted animal who loves to tor­ture. ... Still, in a world where corruption is the norm and enslavement universal, all art celebrates [the free individual], prepares the way for his coming.  Poetry, by giving dignity and utterance to our distress, enables us to hope, makes compassion reasonable.

In ‘Street Funeral’ he thinks how –

                                    After all the lusts,

                                    false starts, evasions

                                    he can begin

                                    the unobstructed change

                                    into clean grass

                                    Done forever

                                    with the insult

                                    of birth,

                                    the long adultery

                                    with illusion?

Believing that ‘a poet is one who explores new areas of sensibility’, his work is serious in its hatred, in its delight, in its thought.  ‘Yet, love, look again’ he writes in ‘Côte des Neiges Cemetery’:

                        Like an insinuation of leaves in snow

                        And sad, sad with surrender are the tablets

                        For the Chinese nuns; or, a blade between, the rows

                        Exact as alms, of les Sourdes et Muettes

                        And of les Aveugles: – and this, dear girl,

                        Is the family plot of Père Loisel and his wife

                        Whose jumbled loins in amorous sweat

                        Spawned these five neat graves in a semicircle.

Layton has insisted that his gifts and powers be recognized.  For a long time propriety could not be persuaded.  Seen now in this mass and perspective of selection, Layton’s poetry shows why it exists and why it had to come into being.  I doubt whether such certainty of touch and singleness of poetic purpose has ever before been seen in Canadian poetry.  In comparison, his two immediate predecessors in the Governor-General’s Award – Jay Macpherson and James Reaney – though intelligent, skilled, and articulate seem as far separated from the vigorous physical and mental life that informs Layton’s work as Layton is separated from the concern the others have for a cerebral and deliberately academic precis­ianism.

Then for fiction, Hugh MacLennan’s fifth novel The Watch that Ends the Night was chosen: also a mature work, having been seven years in the writing.  That it should be – in its people, places, situa­tions – not unlike some of his earlier work is only to say that he is a writer not to be deflected from what he has to say, and that he has something to discover that is not to be exhausted in one saying.  He works within the old tradition, as though Joyce and Kafka had never been; he behaves as though, in the old sense, it were still possible to write a novel.  Surely the book is unusual now on this continent, being sincere and grave, even though its wit has little gaiety and its gravity may have a little the air of fatigue: less autobiographical than one expected; improving in quality as it goes and deepening in force; not facetious, bitter, or cynical (thereby unfashionable); neither a pamphleteering nor an erotic commodity; almost self-contained enough to be regarded as a work of art.  MacLennan concentrates upon the subtle internality of life, the pitfalls of self-regard, the ingenuities of self-deception.  If – in this story of an invalid woman and the husband who transfigured and abandoned her and the husband that cher­ished her, and the first husband’s critical return – character and situation are at times less than plausible, they tend to come to life under the ‘rain of detail’, fostered by an observation not altogether naturalisic.  As Layton’s poetry is in part at least child of his origins, so is MacLennan’s novel the outgrowth of his long affec­tion for the significant detail of Eastern Canada, his affiliation with the Maritimes – the oldest civilized part of the country –, his belief (not ridiculous when held) that Montreal is one of the most beautiful and mysterious places in the world.  This is the work of a patient and contemplative man.  Too preoccupied to be visionary, too troubled for serenity, he writes in the closing para­graphs – ‘To be able to love the mystery surrounding us is the final and only sanction of human existence’; and the reflection has by then achieved quietness.  Hugh MacLennan has written what may well be the last novel any Canadian will be able to write within the tradition of Fielding and Tolstoy: it represents a naiveté rapidly vanishing.

In the late spring of 1959 a number of C.B.C. executives, mostly in Talks and Public Affairs, offered their resignations on a point of alleged arbitrary decision in programming.  Their resignations were not in the end accepted.  The trouble was, and still is, lack of strong and imaginative leadership in the C.B.C.  But the incident, threatening to disrupt broadcasting for a time, came at a crucial time: for it coincided with the sittings of a parliamentary com­mittee inquiring into the cost of C.B.C. operations.  The committee, perhaps not informed by ill-will, gave the press the opportunity they had long waited for: of representing the conduct of the C.B.C. – a public institution – as extravagant and wasteful (as though private business were neither of these things); of alleging that the C.B.C. hampered free competition (though what was being competed for was carefully not specified).  The Gordon Commission a couple of years earlier had established the principle that the air belongs to the Canadian public and not to the advertisers; but the public is not difficult to confuse in matters as heady as ‘free enterprise’.  The competition has always been between Canada and the U.S.A. for control of the Canadian air; not between the C.B.C. and private business for control of the profits from broadcasting.  The holy economic principle of the biggest return for the smallest investment invariably, in Canadian broadcasting, plays into the hands of the American networks and the canners of formulated programmes.  The people who safeguard the public interest in such matters are the Board of Broadcast Governors, recently detached from the C.B.C.  In awarding broadcasting licenses, the Board insists upon some vestiges of quality, has specified a required proportion of genuine Canadian programming, and threatens punitive action if standards are not maintained.  Only a few weeks ago they listened to briefs from various commercial interests competing for a licence to operate the first private television station in Toronto.  Seldom outside a Hollywood opening night can there have been such a diverting exhibition of solemn hoodwinking: promises of good behaviour were to be heard; artistic plans and ideals that would look ill-at-ease outside a Venice festival were unfolded with modest confidence; a few promoters even gave assurance that they would spend some money on programming.  In such a competition only one could win; the licence has now been awarded.  One waits with interest to see what song the scythe sings as it reaps that golden harvest.  Much more serious is to see whether the C.B.C. will have been forced one step closer, even in its most careful operations, to the dreary standards of the ad-mass audience.  The C.B.C., never particularly strait-laced, has a distinguished artistic record: it would be a pity to see broadcasting relegated entirely to journalists, clowns, and cynics.

The Canada Council continues deftly to nourish the arts and scholarship – probably scholarship more than the arts.  That a few Canadian musicians should suddenly win international recognition, just when the Council had been formed, suggests that the chances for developing the public arts of symphony, ballet, and drama are promising.  But the individual artist is much more difficult to find and assess; the Council will need time and courage to find out how to do that.  Scholars, often more concerned with the search for fact than the pursuit of truth, can confidently promise to pro­duce results; artists cannot.  There is no difficulty in finding good scholars – beginners and old-timers – to give money to; and there has surely never been so much scholarly work afoot in Canada as now.  There has been more biography, criticism, scholarship pub­lished in Canada than ever before and some of it excellent: that the Governor-General’s award for non-fiction should have been withheld for 1959 is deplorable and possibly Freudian.  But in the creative arts there is some danger of applying standards too aca­demic and in artistic matters of relying too much upon the judg­ment of academic people.

The universities are now too widely recognized as important contributors to the gross national product to be any longer the focus of disinterested and detached judgment.  University profess­ors, in a sane society, should be few and unassuming, a butt for jokes, the myopic guardians of a precious but outmoded passion for accuracy.  But now that they receive the salaries of junior executives, they are inclined to develop imperial longings; wish to control committees, governments, policies; wish to have stables of scholars in their universities, and to cultivate stables of writers and artists outside.  On examination their patronage proves to be a seal of approval, an alpha plus administered in a commendatory spirit for the benefit of publishers, selection committees, and the Canada Council.  And heaven help the seedy mortal who, in com­petition for a little elbow-room, is rated at gamma minus.  A uni­versity committed of social necessity to encourage self-conscious­ness and the effective development of productive human potential, will not long leave the mind fallow for dreaming, so is in the end hostile to the growth of art within its walls.  Having largely killed writing inside universities, they may kill it outside.  Fortunately academic people are impossible to organize; and so with the best will in the world their influence is not consistently malign.

Other people’s fields always look greener.  The French Canadians have discovered this year a child novelist; have given a poetry award for a play, and a fiction award for a collection of short stories.  After ten intermittent years, Cité Libre is being issued regularly and provocatively; Liberté Cinquante-neuf, founded in 1959, survives as Liberté Soixante.  By contrast the two new English periodicals, both in British Columbia, do not proclaim Freedom in their titles: Prism is a ‘little magazine’, daring and creative; the other, sponsored by the University and finely produced, is omin­ously entitled Canadian Literature but has printed some good (if circular) things already.  French Canadian writers seem to find some connexion between the intellectual climate of their reviews and the creative impulse itself; English writers find very little.  English Canadians have not yet discovered how to discuss litera­ture as though it were town politics, nor politics as though it were a highly stylized game like the law.  So Canadian writing, aimed more often at a university than pitched to a universal ear, tends to be monumental; not expecting to delight, not hoping to amuse; dogged by purpose, devoted to ‘the Truth’, and doomed to earnestness.  But some writers slip through the net and are deservedly rewarded.  MacLennan will doubtless write more novels; Layton will surely not be destroyed by what looks to the world like the respectability of acclaim.

Writing and the arts – was it Auden who said so? – are a kind humming to oneself.  The people who like that sort of thing are improbable and sporadic.  And who, short of prophetic insight and apocalyptic zeal, could say – being confused and perplexed by some buzzing in his own ears – how the humming goes these days?