Satire tenders a life in full
In “Lives of the Poets,” the third of the four long stories that comprise The Museum at the End of the World, John Metcalf’s first full-length collection of fiction since 1986’s Adult Entertainment, Anna Tresillian, the octogenarian granddaughter of Childe Chauncey, an at-best-second-rate “Confederation” poet, opines: “I never did much trust cleverness . . . I never thought cleverness had much to do with feeling.”
Anna is speaking to the writer Robert Forde, Metcalf’s long-suffering fictional stand-in who appeared first in the short story “Travelling Northward” and again in the 2003 novella, Forde Abroad. In “Lives of the Poets,” Forde, who is serving sentence as writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick, finds himself charged with squiring Mrs. Tresillian around Fredericton until the ashes of her versifying grandfather are ceremoniously interred in the Poets’ Corner of Forest Hill Cemetery.
There is, in this linked collection, much that Forde finds stupefying: his inept and delusional writing students in the aforementioned “Lives of the Poets”; the bewildering coital misadventures of his youth recounted in “Medals and Prizes”; the epidemic of grammatical ignorance plaguing the nation in “Ceazer Salad”; the drear and drudgery of a Black Sea cultural cruise in the collection’s title story.
Metcalf is a gifted satirist and very funny. The comic set-pieces on offer here are exceptional. And if that were all there was to Museum at the End of the World, it would be enough.
But Metcalf is more than a jester, poking fun at the nonsensical world around him: he is — beneath all of the grumbling and gruff — a sentimentalist. For these stories have, at their core, a tenderness, a sadness, that is, at times, heart-rending.
Following, as they do, Robert Forde from his childhood in England through to his emigration to Canada and early experiences as a teacher and writer, and on to his not-so-contented golden years, the stories tender — with trustworthy cleverness and feeling — a life in full. Stephen Finucan is a Toronto novelist and short-story writer.