NEGLECTED STORY MASTER LEVINE FINALLY GETS HIS DUE
Why don’t more people know about Norman Levine? There are theories.
In 1958, Levine — Polish-born, Ottawa-raised, McGill Universityeducated, and long expatriated to England — came out with a book called Canada Made Me. A collection of impressions gathered on a zigzagging cross-country trip, it’s a vivid evocation of a country that had barely begun to construct a national mythology, even if the Canada Levine describes is hardly recognizable to us now.
“I felt the need to make a reconciliation,” Levine says in the introduction of his desire to write about a place he had left at age 26, in 1949. His general tenor can be gleaned with some randomly chosen snippets, from Ottawa (“I like the poorer streets not far from the river. They represent failure, and for me failure here has a strong appeal”) to Winnipeg (“…loose sand blowing and women with bad complexions and the wide streets looked even more empty with so few people walking ”), Edmonton (“a small town, dull and boring”) and points farther north and west, then back to Montreal, where “the poverty, the squalor, had not changed.”
The country — the small portion thereof that saw the book, at any rate — was not pleased.
Writer and editor John Metcalf, a longtime Levine advocate, posits that the unapologetically unglamorous national portrait in Canada Made Me essentially got Levine barred from the CanLit community in the “boosterish period” leading up to the country’s centennial. If Levine had been more conciliatory, it’s implied, or better still if he hadn’t written the book at all, things might have turned out differently for him. I suspect it was more a matter of timing, that if a similar book had appeared in 1967, landing with a dissenting thud in the middle of the national party, it might have had a kind of succès de scandale. We’ll never know.
What we do know is that Levine’s published work — three books of poetry, two novels and eight collections of stories, the latter form best suited to his style and sensibility — always had a hard row to hoe in Canada: haphazardly reviewed, barely selling, in and out of print, for long stretches simply unavailable up to and beyond his death in 2005. For a writer who wrote so masterfully about neglect and diminished expectations, it was a poetically apt, but nonetheless unjust, fate.
Now, stating the best possible argument for what was missed, we have I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well: Collected Stories (Biblioasis, 580 pp, $24.95). Repurposing the title of the smaller 1971 collection of his work, it’s a book that places Levine firmly with Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro as Canadian story giants, and it underlines a supreme irony: Canada shouldn’t have taken Canada Made Me so personally. Levine wrote the same way about other places, too. His seeming antipathy was in fact the expression of a man with no illusions. Look at the new collection’s title again. It’s not a lament of loneliness. It’s a statement of preference, a terse summary of a whole way of living and thinking.
After a working-class youth, glimpsed with great tenderness in the opening story, A Father, Levine went to McGill. He graduated in 1949, two years before Leonard Cohen enrolled, but still, there’s a satisfaction in picturing them walking the same campus, two Jewish wordsmiths who couldn’t have had more disparate backstories but shared a sense of writing as vocation. A Canadian Upbringing, one of several McGill-inspired stories, nails a crucial juncture in the author’s own life when a mentor is said to be leaving school, city and country for England, “not because he wants to deny his background but because he feels the need to accept a wider view of life.”
Many of Levine’s most prolific years were spent in the artist’s colony of St. Ives in Cornwall, England, a typically counterintuitive choice. For much of the 20th century, a spell in Europe was all but obligatory for North Americans who fancied themselves writers. Most of them went to Paris, posed for a while as a Hemingway or a jaded existentialist, gave up, came home and went into teaching or banking or dentistry. Levine, like fellow Montreal outlanders Gallant and Mordecai Richler, was a lifer. A typical Levine hero isn’t conflicted at all about work: he writes because he’s a writer and he’s a writer because he writes. It’s the rest of the world that can’t seem to get on board.
Levine was a poet of the dull, the dreary, the threadbare. His stories often involve a man bearing at least some resemblance to the author, having chance encounters with the marginalized: isolated pensioners, itinerants, scroungers, borderline con artists, dropouts before that concept had any cultural cachet. Money is always tight, bills always overdue, a household move always imminent. As a Canadian Jew often living abroad — an exile in at least three ways — Levine knew about being an outsider and his empathy, however dryly expressed, infuses every story. Any easy notions of redemption are firmly resisted. On the rare occasions when Levine allows himself something resembling a happy ending — as in The Girl Next Door, about a tentative friendship between a depressed young woman and a solitary older man, neighbours in an Ottawa apartment building — it’s like sunlight suddenly piercing through clouds.
Stylistically, Levine was always of the less-is-more school; his frequent deployment of sentence fragments (“Then down a road with trees. And through a wide gate.”) recalls the upper-class English novelist Henry Green, a fellow writers’ writer and an acknowledged influence. Where most writers strive for rhythm in their prose, Levine liked to wrong-foot. The result was language that kept the reader on her toes and demanded close attention: reading Levine, you never feel lulled. But it shouldn’t be assumed that Levine’s work is especially experimental or difficult. On the contrary, it has the accessibility that comes with a clear and concisely rendered view of the world.
The title of one story, I Like Chekhov, makes the point nicely: Levine was a writer for whom the story — not ego, not flash, not polemic — was everything. As with Canada Made Me, in these stories there’s no thought of gilding the lily. Look at In Quebec City and its depiction of the old town in the late 1940s: “... the cheap stores, the narrow poky side streets, horses pulling milk sleighs, the bargain clothes hung out, the drab restaurants ... Even with the snow falling men doffed their hats to priests.” It’s that last detail, perfectly chosen, that clinches it: you’re placed squarely in a world that’s now lost.
Weighing in at nearly 600 pages, I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well is a delightfully contradictory thing: a massive book by a minimalist of language. Prospective readers shouldn’t be daunted by the scale, though. Absorb these stories as they first appeared, one at a time. Let one sit and steep before you move on to the next. They will stay with you. Welcome this collection into your home and place it on your shelf where it belongs: in among your Gallants, your Munros and, yes, your Chekhovs. Norman Levine deserves it and his time has come.