FAR FROM THE END
John Metcalf reflects on fulfilling career as an editor, teacher, mentor and author
Ottawa’s literary lion has hit a sweet spot. John Metcalf, editor and critic, is back with his first collection of fiction produced since Adult Entertainment in 1990. He’s working for a publisher, Dan Wells, whom he really respects and who respects him enough to provide him with his own imprint. “It’s like a dream,” Metcalf says. His writers are winning awards and making prize lists. Last year, Anakana Schofield was up for a Giller with her dark story Martin John, and this year Kathy Page has made the Giller long list again for the book The Two of Us.
So it’s good to be John Metcalf these days.
“Working for Biblioasis is a dream fulfilled. I think Wells is going to be the greatest literary publisher the country has ever had.” High praise indeed. Metcalf has always been a teacher-editor-mentor, just not in schools. The institutions don’t sit well. But editing for Porcupine Quill for 18 years, for example, without pay, meant his partner Myrna Teitelbaum paid many bills.
Now, there’s time to reflect on the career in an interview in advance of the release of his newest book The Museum at the End of the World, which has two novellas and two short stories, all of which feature Metcalf’s literary messenger Rob Forde — with an E. Forde has been with Metcalfe through many tales.
Forde is, as Metcalfe is, a British writer who has come to Canada to make his way.
Forde finds much to comment upon and much to, frankly, make fun of a fix. He pricks the balloon surrounding the Confederation poets through the story of an elderly actress wanting to dump her late father’s writings and “ashes” on the University of New Brunswick.
This is a story that Metcalf has had on his mind for many years. He says that, at its root, it’s about the dedication necessary to be an artist — something he knows something about.
Forde also takes aim at the pretensions of literary awards, being a writer in residence, and life in general, and what it was like to be a very young white Brit in a Memphis, Tenn., blues bar surrounded by African-American folks right in the middle of the Freedom Summer of 1964. Forde, somehow, keeps buggering on, to quote Churchill. To find out more about Forde, Metcalfe has written a previous story called Forde Abroad.
Forde is, by turns, acerbic, witty, dour, self-pitying and sensible. He is not Metcalf. And he is.
In the novella, the trip to Memphis is Metcalf ’s version of his life leading up to that bar in Memphis.
“I think it would be fair to say that there is so much in Medals and Prizes (the title of the novella) which is not personal to me and entirely invented. The whole of the other story is invented. But, on the other hand, Forde is a kind of alter ego. We share a sensibility — a good way of putting it, because I’m not saying it is autobiographical.”
Anyone who has received one of Metcalf’s beautifully handwritten letters will recognize the traits. However, at 77, Metcalf, who has made a career out of skewering CanLit and other literary pretensions, finds himself somewhat mellowed, or perhaps the right word is “steeped.”
He still lives in Ottawa with Myrna.
When he is writing, Metcalfe says, “I tend to back away from ideas. I’m trying to convey emotional attitudes. Forde (then) is a character who compromises himself.
“And does things he feels he ought not to be doing but feels he has to, for money.”
Metcalf, though, seeks artistic conviction.
“I think it’s terribly important. Writing, painting, music and everything else are terribly important. You have to stand for certain values in the times in which you live. That’s why I have spent much of my career in Canada editing and bringing on new young writers.
“I have a feeling that if I hadn’t taken them up and helped them and promoted them, they wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.”
Much of his life has been spent editing other people’s work. But he doesn’t regret that.
“I go back to writing in this country to the 1960s. My first full book in this country was called The Lady Who Sold Furniture. It was a novella and short stories.
“It had a reception that was very curious: There were a couple of really good reviews, but then there were grumbling reviews. Either they couldn’t understand it correctly, calling it a bunch of short stories, and it isn’t.
“They were unable to see that it was broken up into scenes and movements.
“And a fairly constant criticism was that, ‘This chap is very foulmouthed.’”
Metcalf was not long out of England. And he was writing out of the same social background as the early works of the writer Kingsley Amis.
“This was normal to me, and it wasn’t going to arrive Canada for years. I realized, from the reaction to all this, that I had other work to do, which was building the infrastructure of writing in Canada. It sounds terribly conceited to say that, but I had to do something about what this country needed in terms of reviewing, in terms of knowledge.
“Then the nationalist thing hit, and I became bogged down in that. I was dealing with people who said, without the slightest flinch of embarrassment, ‘I don’t read American writers.’ ”
He was referred to in reviews then as “British-born John Metcalf” — not really Canadian. He’s been here for 50 years, and he still gets it.
The literary environment that was created by Margaret Atwood’s Survival in the mid-’70s desperately needed someone to point out these were not good writers, Metcalf says. And that was to be him. “And I paid for it.” It meant he was more directed to editing than writing.
“It would have been nice if I had spent all that energy writing. But, on the other hand, I am one of those people who, if they start a fight, finish it.”
And so it goes.