Like reading a Monet painting
Have you ever been in a museum or art gallery and just stood staring in front of a painting? Wondered how the painter was able to capture so much emotion in just a few sweeps of a brush? Norman Levine has. Here he is in the short story “The Girl Next Door” describing Monet’s Waterloo Bridge: The Sun in a Fog: “When I was close to it, it was just paint. But when I went back, about ten feet, the sun was round at the top coming faintly through the fog. The sun was orange on the water in the front and further away, on the water through an arch of the bridge, while the darker shapes, of the bridge, the barges, came visibly through.”
Reading Levine, this most painterly of Canadian writers, is a bit like his examining that Monet. Up close, the stories seem simple, almost anecdotal. At a remove, Levine’s technique, and his themes of exile and loss, of hope and disappointment, of deep empathy for one’s fellows come clearly into focus.
“I don’t want to know anyone too well,” a comment made by a character in the title story, belies Levine’s purpose. Levine’s method is to pare down stories to the essentials: the minimum needed to move the story along to reveal character. With a few brushstrokes, Levine creates a life. Perhaps more.
“To Blisland” seems at the outset a southern English pastoral (many of Levine’s stories are set in England, where he lived much of his life after the war). There are the roads and the trees, the leaves and pastures. There are three characters, the nature of their relationship inferred in short dialogue, and the tension in their relationship building the way the painter adds concrete dimension to a canvas until the coup de grâce: the tension is actually between reader and story, not the characters. We are the ones meant to feel ill at ease.
Levine wrote eight collections of stories, two novels, poetry and non-fiction. The stories that comprise I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well were collected by his friend, the editor John Metcalf.
Levine was born in Poland, grew up in Ottawa, schooled in Montreal, then lived in England, where he died in 2005. He mined his own life for material — his characters are often writers, Jewish, McGill grads and ex-RAF pilots living on the margins in England, visiting Canada, never at home anywhere.
The ideal artist, Henry James once wrote of John Singer Sargent, the 19thcentury painter, “sees deep into his subject, undergoes it, absorbs it, discovers in it new things that were not on the surface, becomes patient with it, and almost reverent, and, in short, elevates and humanizes the technical.”
In other words, he knew his subjects well — as did Levine. Raymond Beauchemin wrote the novel Everything I Own. His collection of novellas, The Emptiest Quarter, will be published in 2018.