The passion and quirkiness of Canadian authors
Author offers personal perspective in passionate, quirky exploration of works by Canadian writers
Arrival: The Story of CanLit Nick Mount Anansi
When Margaret Atwood’s first book, The Circle Game, was published in 1966, she was paid not in money, but in free copies (12). A few months later, she was so pressed for funds that she sold the manuscript to a rare book dealer. Weeks later, The Circle Game won the $2,500 Governor General’s Award for poetry, making the 27-year-old Atwood the youngest person ever to win the prize in this division.
This is the sort of story that makes Toronto academic Nick Mount’s new book, Arrival, such an exhilarating read. He also relishes the yarn about short story writer Mavis Gallant celebrating her first sale to The New Yorker by splurging on a $75 alligator bag, and then months later pawning her typewriter so she could keep eating.
Mount is a literary historian with an eye for the fetching anecdote, especially if it’s tinged with irony. And this serves him well in his engaging exploration of the CanLit explosion that erupted in the latter part of the last century.
Among the many books triggered by marking the 150th anniversary of Confederation, Arrival occupies its own unique niche: It convinces us that Canadian literary history can indeed be fun to read about.
There are always larger-than-life personalities to engage us, be they poet Irving Layton wallowing in his own narcissism or publisher Jack McClelland’s outrageous promotional gimmickry — to wit, sending reviewers miniature jockstraps along with a book about sexism and racism in professional football.
But it’s also a book about survival — a word that also provided Atwood with the title for one of her most influential non-fiction works. It presents us with a triumph against the odds — what Mount perceives as the arrival of a genuine Canadian literature.
We’re looking at an approximate time period between 1958, when the Canada Council was finally in the business of handing out grants, and the early 1970s. However, there is a bit of presumptuous cheek in this thesis. It may be news to Mount, but high school students were studying the poetry of Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman and E.J. Pratt, the fiction of Hugh MacLennan, Louis Hémon and Ethel Wilson, and the plays of Merrill Denison and Gwen Pharis Ringwood years before the socalled dawning of CanLit.
Furthermore, although Mount is no Leavis-like purist when it comes to popular literature, it’s amusing that he should single out for our attention the meteoric rise of temporary Canadian resident Arthur Hailey from humble CBC radio dramatist to the internationally bestselling author of Hotel and Airport. It might have been helpful when considering the Hailey phenomenon to remember it was trumped by that of Ralph Connor, the Canadian cleric whose melodramatic novels were selling in the millions a century ago.
Yet there’s no denying that something was happening in the years that Mount is writing about so wittily and perceptively. From 1963 to 1972, the number of Canadian- published literary books rose by 250 per cent. And it’s clear that several factors were at play: the strength of the Canadian economy; an entrenched commitment at the federal level to public funding of the arts; the crucial role of visionaries like legendary CBC producer Robert Weaver in fostering Canadian writing; a growing sense of nationalistic pride spurred on by the 1967 Centennial celebrations and, in an odd way, the sovereignist ferment in Quebec. And, above all, a flowering of incredible writing talent.
Still it’s best to approach this book in the right way — not as a history of CanLit during a particularly lively and creative period — but as one person’s perspective on it. Mount, who was born in 1963, cannot claim to be personally engaged with these times— unlike McClelland with his published letters or that invaluable literary contrarian, John Metcalf, with his memoirs.
Mount is driven by his own interests and biases. So we must be prepared to give him a pass for essentially ignoring Robertson Davies, Marian Engel, Wilson, Hugh Garner, Austin Clarke and the striking career rebirths of W.O. Mitchell and Morley Callaghan. And it’s a pity he ignored the seminal contribution of U.K. expatriate George Woodcock in founding the magazine Canadian Literature.
At the same time, we can be captivated by his enthusiasms — Gallant, Atwood, Matt Cohen, Mordecai Richler, Alistair Macleod, George Bowering, Milton Acorn and many more. Mount may have not been on the scene, but he is so exhaustive a researcher that all these people become lively players on his personal stage.
And such is his wide range of interests that we also reacquaint ourselves with more remote figures worthy of attention — New Brunswick’s troubled but valiant Alden Nowlan and British Columbia poet bill bissett ( he of the lowercase name), a talented mischiefmaker whose writings so shocked some members of Parliament that they touched off a campaign to curb the Canada Council’s freedom to fund such material.
It’s a selective landscape. The Prairie provinces are largely ignored, but there are rewarding pages on the British Columbia scene and the founding of Tish, an extraordinarily influential poetry publication.
Ultimately Mount, a central Canadian, is drawn to the environment he knows best — meaning that by page 96 he’s ready to declare Toronto the cultural capital of English Canada. But then, he impishly explains why this came to be: Toronto’s relaxed drinking laws meant Montreal was no longer the only major city in the country where creative people could have a drink in public.
Indeed, Mount is venturing into social history here and with rewarding results. Consider the stories of the much-loved Village Book Shop, where poet Al Purdy would show up with a bottle of his wine, or the early acid-dropping antics of the people of Coach House Press, later a revered Canadian institution.
Arrival is published by Anansi, whose own history is part of the story Mount has to tell. But it’s by no means a total hallelujah. Richler’s fierce opposition toward political correctness led to smartass racial slurs against Clarke that are painful to read.
And Mount himself peppers his narrative with capsule appraisals that are sometimes distinctly churlish toward sacred cows. Hence Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, for all the beauty of the writing, is “a juvenile, self-centred novel.”
And Mount slams Rudy Wiebe’s award-winning The Temptations of Big Bear for its “plodding style — obese, ungainly sentences that trudge across the pages like the story’s vanishing buffalo.”
Yes, Mount definitely has a way with words.