One of the first things a visitor tended to notice on entering the massive, three-storey brick house on Bedford Road was the stuffed emu hanging upside down over the main staircase. After the bright sunlight outside, the sudden gloom might well have obscured the framed collection of Papuan penis gourds immediately opposite the front door, or the array of red and blue prize ribbons plastering the lobby. But even if you missed the gourds and the horse-racing ribbons, the stuffed emu fixed one’s attention. As one’s eyes adjusted to the low light, more exhibits came into view, crowded among the massive antique furniture: arrangements of shark jaws and monkey bones, stone axes and tribal weapons, a coffin decorated like an ornate wedding cake, display cases filled with mounted Goliath beetles and huge flying insects, a stuffed zebra head surrounded by more equestrian ribbons, an egg from the extinct elephant bird. Above the stairs and partially obscured by the emu hung a striking 8×4 foot painting, a full-length portrait of a young man in a forest of tendrils. From another room, peculiar sounds from resident animals contributed to the unique atmosphere.

For thirty-five years, 140 Bedford Road in Toronto’s historic Annex district was the home of explorer, equestrian, painter, writer and local personality Norman Elder, and the location of the Norman Elder Museum and Gallery, repository of curious artefacts from some of the most inaccessible regions of the globe. The gutting of the unique Museum in 2004 and the dispersal and partial destruction of its contents constituted the final chapter of an unusual and ultimately tragic story.

I first met Norman Elder in the summer of 1967, the legendary Summer of Love. In late Sixties Toronto, Rochdale College was briefly thriving as an alternative university, the club scene was jumping, and the Yorkville district had become a favourite destination for hippies and travellers from across the country. A jazz and blues enthusiast in those days, I had visited most of the city’s music clubs to hear Sleepy John Estes, Rev. Gary Davis and Woody Herman’s Third Herd. I had read my poems at the Bohemian Embassy and the Inn of the Unmuzzled Ox. And I wrote for Ron Thody’s irreverent pulp tabloid, Satyrday.

I was sitting with Ron in a sidewalk caf in Yorkville when Norman Elder stopped to say hello. Norman was then in his late twenties, with a handsome, open countenance that retained its boyish aspect in spite of the beginnings of male pattern baldness. His private Museum and Gallery was then housed across the street from the café. I encountered him again in 1970 when visiting the novelist Scott Symons who was lodging with Norm at the same Yorkville location. I remember that along with Norm, Scott, and a collection of large snakes, the Museum was home to a strikingly attractive young man who appeared to be in his late teens. Someone said he was Norman’s boyfriend.

My first visit to Norman’s Bedford Road mansion was in 1972, when we exchanged books: my first slim chapbook of poetry for a copy of Noshitaka, a handsome production by Coach House Press consisting of poetic notes and sketches from a trip to the headwaters of the Amazon, deep in the interior of Peru, near Machu Picchu. This taxing, mind-bending trip was one of the first of Norman’s countless excursions to remote parts of the world.

Norman’s objective, he wrote, was to live among and study the Machiguengas, a tribe that had migrated to the dense jungles of the Upper Amazon during the Inca conquest, reverting to a pre-stone age existence. There, “geographical isolation has produced a uniquely primitive social organization . . . a strange religious practice and a stoic but dynamic individualism.” The Machiguengas are reputed to be head-hunters, eaters of genitals, executors of girl children. They make meals of parrots and monkey-brains, hunting and killing with arrows the chimp-sized howler monkeys that inhabit the forest. They are subject to uncontrolled epidemics and infections that often result in death. Without words for affection or beauty, they are totally survival-oriented, reflecting “a cultural gap of fifty-thousand years.” Most had never seen the face of an outsider.

Norman’s stopping-off point for this unusual adventure was, paradoxically, a club for Lima’s moneyed equestrian set, “lush to the point of overpowering decadence,” an instructive contrast to the wretched squalor of the jungle towns with their half-naked prostitutes, “sperm-drenched gutters” and fetid smell. By comparison, the jungle was another world, immense, weird and hallucinatory. “About this place,” he wrote, “the vast Amazonas stretches its 50,000 miles of navigable water tributaries . . . it nourishes one quarter of the world’s forests . . . eighty-six percent of all things that grow . . . it breeds more animate species than the rest of the world . . . its growing rate excels all other earthly things . . . the eternal anaconda boa is its king . . . its fearful carnivorous god.”

Penetrating deep into the territory of the Machiguengas, Norman discovered a humid, jungle world hostile to every apparent concept of human life. Parrots were “thick as mosquitos” and thorn-covered vines moved “with the dense tensile life . . . (an) ever-extending layer of intestinal vegetable pulp . . . Enormous trunks uproot the undergrowth and heave their phallic erection one against another . . . like animal tendons knotted . . . pulsating . . . dripping from severed limbs . . .” Cancerous white fungi, silhouettes of tangled vines “producing strange jagged fans in the sky’s flesh,” lush, black organisms that twisted and knotted in the vivid red light and a cacophony of shrieking cries all added to this surrealistic, visionary world.

Here, fourteen-foot fish, poison frogs and giant crocodiles were common, and small, parasitic water creatures could swim into your genitals to feed on their delicate membranes. Bermiflies and screw-worms lay their eggs in your sweat-drenched clothing, burrowing into flesh and hatching white grubs under the skin, producing large abscessed swellings and infected wounds. “Insects,” Norman noted, “are breeding in the small of my back.” In this environment, common staples of civilization like shoes and leather jackets soon become fetid and useless. Leaving the hut at night to answer the call of nature, the humid air pierced by violent, overpowering shrieks, it was advisable to carry a club to deter attacks by wild dogs.

The book’s final chapter breaks off unexpectedly. Norman has managed to befriend one of his guides, a young man called Hector. They exchange presents – some carved totems, anaconda skins and monkey skulls in return for a shirt, flashlight and shoes, “all I have except my cut-off jeans and my shotgun.” But later there is a falling out when Hector “becomes irksome.” Norman sculpts a sand image of Hector and unaccountably stabs its head with a bamboo pole. He immediately regrets what he has done, remembering that in this strange society, perceived insults sometimes lead to suicide. Instead, the sensitive boy’s tentative friendship changes into poisonous glares and an avoidance of contact. Finally, surrounded by a cloud of vampire bats, Norman muses on the power of Hector’s soul as it merges with a mysterious “ovalistic symbol into the most perfect sympathy of union of two bodies.”

Noshitaka is written in a sketchy, poetic style without capital letters, with only ellipses for punctuation, and illustrated with the author’s prepared photographs overdrawn with spiky, tangled vines and spidery tendrils. The book resembles accounts of hallucinatory experiences, drug “trips” – except that this trip is a real journey, to a real place on the earth, as far as possible from the neatly tended surroundings of Bedford Road.

The book was attractive and intriguing, but I found its ambiguous conclusion confusing and unsatisfactory. I couldn’t help thinking that something important here was hinted at but unstated: “I shall leave unrecorded the rest of my diary.” It seemed to me that for all the grisly masochistic splendours of the arboreal forest, the real story here was the story of Norman and Hector – and it had apparently ended badly.

Next to the equestrian trophies in Norman’s front lobby was a large, ornate book stand displaying a copy of either Who’s Who In the World or Who’s Who in Canada, open at an extensive entry for Elder, Norman. Norman was proud – and amused – that his listing occupied the same page as the Queen Mother’s. It was there, in his front hall, scrutinizing Who’s Who, that I first began to learn about Norman’s background.

Norman Elder was born in Toronto on July 17, 1939, the youngest of five children of a manufacturing family with an address on the exclusive Park Lane Circle. His next door neighbour was Conrad Black with whom he was boyhood friends. Educated at Upper Canada College, where he was a reticent student, reluctant to speak up in class, he became an avid equestrian and skydiver, winning his first competitive medals before his tenth birthday. He was also something of a hell-raiser, burning down a historic barn, breaking both arms in fights, and getting jailed for vagrancy. When he broke a leg, he continued his sporting activities wearing a cast.

Four years later, Norman and a friend attempted to cross the Sahara in a Jeep, Norman drawing and filming oasis communities and making extensive notes on the sex customs of desert Arabs. In those days, he was describing himself as “a hippie.” His family had varied reactions to his idiosyncrasies. His grandmother encouraged him to travel, telling him “it will be enlightening for you.” His father on the other hand seemed peculiarly indifferent. “The first time I came back from the Amazon,” Norman wrote, “I was dying to tell Dad all the details of the trip, but he kept turning the TV up louder. Then I thought of a great way to get him to listen. I phoned up (television personality) Betty Kennedy and went on her talk show.”

At the age of twenty Norman won Gold and Bronze Medals in the Pan-American Games three-day equestrian event. (He won his Silver Medal at a later Games.) As a result, he was made Captain of the Canadian Equestrian Team at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics where he shared a mutual love of horses with Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. He became friendly with the Prince, who remarked to him during a long ceremony, “One thing you learn quickly as a Royal is to never pass up an opportunity to go to the lavatory.”

Stints at the University of Western Ontario and the Banff School of Fine Arts preceded Norman’s second major trip when he used the money from sales of Noshitaka to strike out for Inuit villages in the far Canadian North and “hitch-hiked to Greenland,” a journey that resulted in his second book, Oksitartok, published in 1966 in an edition uniform with Noshitaka and equipped with a Foreword by his friend the 86-year-old Lady Eaton.

Oksitartok (“the uninhibited beautiful minds”) was dedicated “to the great globs of raw humanity;” like the earlier book it consists of on-the-spot journal entries, unredacted notes in sketchy bursts (complete with occasional misspellings and grammatical solecisms) and broken up into short lines resembling poetry. In this journal account of living, sleeping and working with the Eskimos (before that term was discarded), Norman comments on the Northern peoples’ elusive character and daily habits, their attitude to their Skidoos (“this machine can’t smell the wind”) and their love of Coca-Cola and country music. He observes with pleasure that among the varied incursions of the modern world, “a primitive element shone through.”

“I feel the same respect and deep honour toward the Eskimo as I did for the Machiguenga. They personified a superior being . . . an uncorrupted purity and honesty of heart.” Several times in the book, he returns to thoughts of the Amazon forest, and to Hector, and a friendship that was sabotaged by impulsiveness and misunderstanding. In the back of the book there is a photo of the author with the dates 1939-1989. Like Glenn Gould, he predicted he would die at fifty. Unlike Gould, he outlived his prediction.

In 1967, Norman made his first trip to New Guinea, hiking 160 km into isolated overgrown volcanic highlands to collect artefacts for the Royal Ontario Museum. He published his account of the trip in Cannibalistic Catharsis, the final volume of his self-published trilogy.

The people he stayed with were men naked except for gourds tied over their penises, wild pig tusks through their noses and quills piercing their cheeks. His aim, he wrote, was to “tap the untouched resources of human behaviour” in “this oddest of circumstances, a choking sanctuary of unhygienic native smells, a blackened thatched atmosphere sealed in smoke, body odours from birth, urine drenched bamboo wall, rot of food residue on dried mud; my new home, alive with humanity.”

Norman set out on these journeys systematically prepared. He carried his necessities (including insect repellent, antibiotics, cash, and garbage-bags as wrapping for cameras and notebooks) in two army surplus canvas bags, with additional empty bags for artefacts and insect specimens. Black’s Film provided free film for some of the trips and Alex Tilley, proprietor of the Tilley clothing company, supplied free shorts and shirts. Many items were intended as gifts. “Shirts are a big thing,” he said. One man he met in New Guinea wrote to say he’d “broken” his shirt, “so I sent him fifty.” Other trade items included candy and locally-purchased cigarettes, salt and machetes. His mosquito nets and hammocks he gave away at the end of each trip.

“I’m just off running around in the bush like a little kid,” he would say with a grin, making light of the taxing, often horrendous conditions – and the recurring dysentery, intestinal parasites and malaria which, inevitably, had to be dealt with. Betty Kennedy, in her Forward to Cannibalistic Catharsis, wrote that “Norman is a man who dares simply to be himself . . . a free spirit . . . open to all ideas and all people . . . he has a natural grace that makes him equally at home with sophisticated cosmopolites or strange-tongued primitives . . . He savors every minute of life.”

The late sixties and early seventies were an especially active time, even for Norman. He made his first film, Alcoholism’s Children, and painted his best known picture, a large, fantastical image of Pierre Trudeau that later made its way to Ottawa; it was said to have adorned Trudeau’s outer office for a while. As a graduate architect, he worked for a time as a draftsman for Parkins Associates and joined the Board of Directors of the Ontario Epilepsy Foundation. Supported by the wealthy maverick politician Dr. Morton Shulman, he made several runs for provincial and civic office. (He once had to be dissuaded from parachuting into Nathan Phillips Square to announce his candidacy.) He also joined the Acres Think Tank, under a fellowship program for five “creative young thinkers,” sponsored by the Norman C. Simpson Foundation. At Acres, Norman designed something he called Earth City, a prototype for the development of the Pre-Cambrian Shield that included a research college and a Peace Centre. Earth City – based partly on Middle Eastern architectural forms – formed the basis of his graduate architectural thesis but, ahead of its time, it did not meet with favour.

I knew nothing of Earth City, but Norman did discuss with me some of his other Acres ideas. He proposed the construction of a network of riding trails in the Don Valley (ideal, he felt, for handicapped children as well as for tourists). He was also interested in planning integrated old age living and addressing the problems of drug-addicted young people, not a few of whom ended up staying at the three-storey mansion. “The Gallery turned into a hippie haven by accident,” he wrote. At one point, a young woman and her small family were living in the basement while various youthful transients crashed upstairs. “I have no interest in being a social worker,” Norman said. “But what else can you do? I see them turn from carefree kids into hard-bitten members of a criminal sub-culture. More and more of the kids are turning into speed freaks. But it is hard to get treatment for kids until they are too far gone.” Norman even became an advisor to the Ontario Department of Corrections, when his rooming house was designated an official group home – an arrangement that would have ramifications for Norman years in the future.

The Amazon continued to be a prime source of fascination for Norman and he made several expeditions there in the years to come. Some of these were sponsored by the CBC and turned into a film, Indians of the Upper Amazon, one of three films he made on native peoples of South America and Papua New Guinea. On one trip, he lost his way in the rain forest, defenceless against prowling jaguars and poisonous snakes; he seemed to take it all in stride. “Some of the best parts of the trips,” he said, “are the things that go wrong.” He said he learned from his early trips to the Amazon that “you could go into a new society and as long as you are honest and friendly and smile and aren’t loud and making them uncomfortable, you’d be accepted.” When he heard about a naked jungle tribe who killed outsiders, he determined to disarm them by parachuting into their midst in the nude. As any old-fashioned Imperial adventurer might, he believed that “being a gentleman is the key.”

By the early seventies, Norman had established the pattern of living that would last for almost thirty years. He would spend a few months of each year in travels and explorations, the rest at home, writing, painting, fundraising, and hosting visiting potentates like the Emir of Fujairah and the King of Rwanda. Norman used to say he considered his adventures to be both recreations and personal trials, a way to confront his fears. “It’s the only way I can keep myself balanced and keep my environment in perspective. When I come back, it makes me appreciate being here in Canada. I put myself in a whole new environment, a whole new dimension, so that when I come back, I find a real refreshment, a real catharsis.” In 1972 alone, Norman travelled deep into the New Guinea jungles with his friend Manny Benjamin, took a photography tour of Nepal with his friend Randy Frost, and collected wildlife specimens in Bali. He usually managed to be in Toronto for the annual Royal Winter Fair which he called “the Christmas of my life.”

In the early years of Norman’s adventures, he brought back many live “specimens.” The return baggage for one trip included nine monkeys, forty snakes, three turtles, four alligators and a vulture. In those days, there were fewer restrictions on the import of such creatures and Norman sold most of the animals to zoos and used the money to finance his trips. A few favourites were given names and kept as pets. Ferrets, pythons (housed in a large herpetarium in the basement and fed on specially prepared mice), monkeys, a tapir, dung beetles, millipedes, fluorescent weevils, hermit crabs, an electric eel, and eventually, lemurs all shared the Bedford Road house which at one point housed about fifty living creatures. For a time, a basement tank housed a big, vicious-looking fish that liked to be fed cherries. “I can’t imagine what it would be like not to live with animals,” he said when one magazine called him “Toronto’s Dr. Doolittle.” Two monkeys rescued from Amazonian hunters escaped the house and grounds one day and ended up swinging from nearby trolley-bus wires causing short circuits and “bothersome delays” before they were electrocuted. “With their hair standing on end and a full blast of current racing through them,” Norman wrote, “the jungle creatures saved from becoming food died an even more useless death.”

The inevitable problems and mishaps – and the progressive tightening of the import rules – eventually convinced him to take a new look at “collecting.” “Ten years ago,” he told me, “I’d see an animal in the jungle and bring it back. But I’m happy with all the conservation rules in place now, so I don’t do that any more. When it comes to wildlife issues, when I have a chance to speak out, I do.” He particularly enjoyed taking animals to public schools. One of the most popular guests was Tony, a 300-lb. Galapagos tortoise, a Museum resident for over a decade. At one point an electoral poll at the Museum had to be moved when nervous voters became alarmed as the great creature ambled placidly through the voting booths. (Tony’s stuffed remains now have pride of place in a private collection.)

Norman’s favourite of all his animals was Henry the Pig, actually an amiable sow whose sad story was one of good intentions gone awry. “I held her on my lap for hours and she quickly gained confidence,” Norman wrote in an article in Toronto Life in 1971. “At first she drank milk from a bottle, then graduated to commercial ‘pig starter’ and ‘pig grower.’ Later I sometimes fetched a bucket of slop for her from a restaurant . . . Henry’s size and affection grew by the day. She liked to jump on the couch when I was resting, nuzzle her way across my chest and lie there. As she approached 200 pounds, this became ludicrous, and my only recourse was to scratch her stomach. A stomach scratch sent Henry into ecstasy. She would immediately roll off the couch onto her back and call for more. She uttered an amazing range of sounds to signify hunger, thirst, leisure, fear, love, anger,” and enjoyed playing games with the neighbourhood children.

Henry loved beer which she would cadge from guests. Intelligent and house-trained, she “only had accidents when frightened. Once when we were guests on Elwood Glover’s show, I picked her up, which Henry hated; she squealed and forgot herself all over the guest chair on national television.” Baths were not enjoyed; her screams could be heard down the block. But most of the time, Norm declared, she complemented what he described as “the informality of my house” with “great good humour and grace.”

“Everyone in our house loved Henry, except Herman the Pony and our senior cat. The cat, a tough old matriarch who feared neither man nor dog, tried to bully the pig. Thick-skinned Henry ignored her claws, which freaked the cat out so badly she finally left Henry alone.” But Herman the Pony couldn’t get along with Henry and had to be returned to his farm – in the back of Norman’s beat-up old limousine which caused a police summons for “blocking traffic.”

“Henry and I often strolled down Yonge Street,” Norman recalled. “People would follow us for blocks. Henry paid little attention until some thoughtful person scratched her stomach, whereupon she instantly rolled onto her back in the middle of the sidewalk . . . Otherwise she trotted along about ten paces behind me. I never needed a leash. She never dirtied the streets or molested passersby.”

None of Norman’s immediate neighbours objected to Henry. But for one woman down the street, the pig’s very existence became unbearable. “In the end,” Norman lamented, “she brought the overwhelming wei4ght of officialdom down on us.” She complained to the alderman, who eventually involved the police, the fire department, the Humane Society, the City Buildings Department, the Health Department, a mortgage company and three insurance companies.” Once Norman had to jump out of bed to hide Henry from a particularly officious inspector. Henry dragged Norm, still naked, into the yard while the inspector took notes. On the other side in the pig war, whole school classes wrote letters to the Mayor and the authorities pleading leniency for Henry.

On her premium diet, Henry grew healthy and hearty, eventually topping 300 pounds. One day Norman returned home to find sixteen policemen with six squad cars and two motorcycles in front of the house. Henry had gotten into the street. One cop had her by the tail; another had a coil of rope and a third was threatening to shoot her. “I rushed over, asked them to release her and called her name,” Norm wrote in an account of the Henry saga he wrote for Toronto Life magazine. “Go indoors!” he told her. She promptly ran into the house. “The police stood around looking formidable and a bit foolish. Some were angry; the rest came in for coffee. One cop warned, ‘If I ever see you and that pig on the street again . . . I’ll arrest you.’“ Soon afterwards, Norman’s house insurance was suddenly cancelled on unspecified “moral grounds.” This left the mortgagee free to foreclose on the uninsured mortgage. Norman was in peril of losing his home, but managed to save it at the last minute thanks to some reinsurance through an influential friend.

Over the years Norman and the Bedford Road house came to the attention of the authorities for various misdemeanours including, most memorably, the electrocuted monkeys. But the outrageous presence of Henry the Pig became a particular irritant to local officialdom. In the face of increasing opposition, Henry’s supporters bailed out one by one as her enemies grew more determined. Norman came to see the stockyards as the only solution.

“I called Henry from the back yard where she was playing, tossing leaves over herself. She came running. As we went down the lane, I knew she expected to go for another stroll. I opened the car door and she hopped in obediently. As we drove to the stockyards, she put her big head over the seat and rested it trustfully on my shoulder.” The carnage at the stockyards panicked Henry and she cowered in a corner as the other pigs butted and sniffed her. Her ear was bitten. “Henry kept looking up at me. I felt it painfully.” Norman knew she was asking for water but her new owners refused.

“I spent hours that night, thinking. Where did my responsibility end? On the day Henry was slaughtered, the inspectors and others who helped drive her to her death still kept coming to the house to look for her. On that same day, I had a meeting with Ontario’s deputy minister of correctional services to talk about prison and reform schools . . . I could only think of Henry. Should I have consigned her to the prison of a farm? Was I wrong in permitting her slaughter? I wish now I had tried harder to find an alternative.”

A few years later, Toronto’s Riverdale Farm, now a well-run children’s farm with a small number of cattle, horses, goats and chickens might have made a pleasant home for Henry. But in Henry’s time, the farm was an overcrowded zoo, and no place for a sensitive pig. Too late, Norman realized he had not fought hard enough, and his guilt weighed heavily on him. “She trusted me, and all humanity, and all of us let her down,” he wrote. “There is no place in urban officialdom for the nonconformist.”

The Henry problem was followed by other run-ins with local authorities. At one point Norman rescued a ten-foot high ornamental iron fence that had once kept polar bears in an enclosure. Installed around the front of his property, it made a handsome addition to the site. Unfortunately, it contravened local height restrictions and a neighbour complained. Another protracted struggle ensued. Norman eventually won that one, but the official files labelled ELDER, NORMAN were growing ever fatter.

Once Norman and I were cruising down Yonge Street in his old car, a former mourner’s limousine acquired from a funeral parlour and enhanced with putty and animal bones. I remember that Norman was sporting the excellent toupée he wore only to gala events and parties. We were stopped by the police. Apparently a fringed blind in the back window was obscuring the view from the driver’s seat, or so the cop said. Norman amiably agreed to remove the obstruction. “Weren’t you on TV?” the cop asked. Once he realized who Norm was, it was all smiles and Norman was let go with a jocular caution. Fortunately, they saw no need to inspect the trunk, as a large reptile was sleeping off a meal in there.

Our leisurely cruise up Yonge Street was halted by a commotion just ahead of us. Norman got out of the car and ran over to a man who had just been hit by a now-stopped vehicle and was lying on the ground moaning. Norman ran over, threw a coat over him – he appeared to have a broken leg – and by the time the police arrived (which was very quickly as they were nearby stopping miscreants like us) Norman had calmed the accident victim down and the two of them were chuckling together. Norman gave an officer his name and particulars and we went on our way. Then I remembered Norman had left his coat behind. “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “Even this shirt I’m wearing came from someone’s garbage.” I remembered his remark that “I always keep one foot in the gutter.”

Throughout the seventies Norman continued his journeys to the jungle. He returned to the Amazon to collect reptiles for zoos, filmed the isolated people of the remote Buka Buki on the April River in the New Guinea highlands, took a photography tour of the Nepalese mountains and a collecting tour of Bali. He went canoeing on the Onakawana River near James Bay, explored the Florida Everglades, Namibia and the Tierra Del Fuego region in the far south of Argentina.

In 1974, Norman published The Destructive Will, a title taken from a quotation by Schopenhauer about the “all-consuming devouring will that creates itself in order to destroy itself.” Dedicated to a list of friends, the book consists of a series of free verse meditations accompanied by fantastical, sometimes violent, pen-&-ink sketches resembling Cocteau’s drawings under the influence of opium: people jump – and shit – out of windows; a bird is impaled on a weathervane; a naked man with an erection reads to a crowd of rooted heads; long-necked creatures emerge from the belly of a horse with a man’s face; a headless corpse dismembers itself with an axe. Friendship and love are contrasted with apocalyptic visions and “blessings too sweet to endure.” The Destructive Will reveals Norman’s hit-and-miss learning; he knew his Schopenhauer but spelled chimpanzee “chimpansey.”

At the end of the decade, excerpts from the Amazon notebooks were published in an illustrated edition by Toronto’s New Canada Publications as This Thing of Darkness, with a Foreword by his old acquaintance, H.R.H.Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. People often asked how he was able to “get the Duke.” Norman said he just wrote to the palace and asked him. Charmingly illustrated with drawings and photographs, this account of journeys to the Marubas and Ticunas is straightforward and poignant, quite different from the elliptical, poetic Noshitaka trilogy. The book includes a photo of Norman wrestling a five-metre-long anaconda on a muddy riverbank, and a note about “the almost claustrophobic feeling of being trapped with no escape from paradise.”

In a Postscript, Norman recounts the problems that befell the “large menagerie I had saved from the jungle stewpot.” Shaking with malaria, he nurses a sick monkey (who shits on him and eventually dies in his arms) and then spends two days of delirium in a Bogota hospital before having to do battle with Customs officials at the Toronto Airport. Homes were eventually found for all the animals, though Victor the Vulture hung around for a while, becoming a picturesque, if unpredictable, TV personality. The tapir went to the Toronto Zoo, but “it took action by the chief of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Canadian Federal Government to get him there.”

Often Norman took one or two companions with him on his travels – usually young men who valued a unique opportunity to see hidden parts of the world. For the rest of the year he made the Museum his home base. It became “a revolving door” for artists and travellers. At one point, several artists were using different parts of the house as studios. Norman lived in the main floor and the basement (where the big snakes were kept in a large, sturdy herpetarium). The top two floors of the house were separated off for lodgers. Norm always slept late, had breakfast every day at the same restaurant and took everyone’s washing to a Chinese laundry on his way to swim his regular round of laps at the local pool.

The Norman Elder Museum and Gallery became a well known feature of the area. Its proliferating exhibits (animal specimens, odd artefacts, Norman’s paintings and trophies and an assortment of taxidermal relics from the Victorian age) provided glimpses of its proprietor’s taste in collecting. One visitor, who attended a slide show about Haiti, remembered that the projector was housed in a baby’s coffin. Museum exhibits were frequently rented out as film and theatre props. The interior of the house was constantly being altered as new artefacts had to be accommodated by additional rooms or knocked-out walls. It was used as a set for countless inexpensive horror movies, one TV series, Robocop, and one masterpiece, David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch in which the hapless rent-boy Kiki is buggered by the giant monster in Norman’s living room.

The Museum’s grounds were modest and well-maintained, not out of place in the leafy, expensive old neighbourhood. Most of the residents behaved themselves. But a house filled with roomers and strangers inevitably gives rise to strange rumours. There were said to be tunnels somewhere under the garden. Someone once tried to find one of them and got locked in a windowless basement room in the dark for over an hour. Once a teenager dashed into the house carrying a cache of stolen goods. A snake got loose. A monkey stole a sausage from a neighbour’s barbecue. More than once the police had to be called. But the Museum stayed open to the public (not before 2 PM please). Norman was invariably agreeable and polite, and the atmosphere at the house tended to be more quiet than rowdy. Any real troublemakers were asked to leave. The press continued to treat Norman kindly, appreciative of the many good stories he provided. For Toronto Star columnist George Gamester in particular, Norman’s travels, animals, eccentricities and remarks were a regular source of good copy, and were amiably reported with a mixture of condescension and amazement.

Norman also made his own press, writing articles for magazines like Horse Sport (“Riding in Madagascar”), The Explorers Journal (“The Dyaks of Borneo”) and Doctor’s Review (“Hippo Hunting Hazards”). He played the part of the Great White Hunter in an insect repellent commercial, exposing his bare flesh to the hunger of 10,000 blackflies. His “From Pandas to Penguins” presentations at local schools were always a hit.

Hamish Grant was twelve when Norman brought his travelling wildlife show-and-tell to the Grade Six class at Jesse Ketchum Public School. He began dropping by the Museum and was soon assigned the task of ensuring that Norman got to his morning school presentations on time. Bypassing a sign on the front door that said “Do not knock or press buzzer before 2 PM,” Hamish would bang on a bedroom window to wake him up. “Norm would come to the front door and let me look around his collection while he got ready. We’d load a snake or a ferret or a chinchilla into a canvas bag and head off in one of Norman’s cars, stopping off for a donut and coffee on the way. It was tremendous fun. One time on the way back, I got curious about the day’s exhibit, a big jar of thirty live fruit bats.” Hamish tried to take one out of the jar but of course “the bats took their cue and exploded out en masse, a dark, furry cloud filling the air in the car as we drove along Bloor Street. Norm typically kept his head and pulled the car onto the sidewalk, We spent the next twenty minutes or so climbing all over the interior of the car collecting bats, laughing all the time.”

Such mishaps were not untypical. Kevin the Goose and Henry the Pig both disgraced themselves by taking bathroom breaks at inopportune moments on national television. Victor the Vulture did the same while flapping around above the heads of a live studio audience. But to Norman these messy minor mishaps were all part of the jolly fun; they made him laugh. He told me he would like to have taken the animals to hospitals too but of course, it was impossible. He joked about keeping a giraffe in the back yard. “If I get a young one – only twelve feet high – I could train it at Central Don Stables. He’d be comfortable there because he could stand with his head up in the hayloft. Of course I’d have to mount him from a stepladder. I don’t know about the reins because the neck is seven feet long. I might have to direct him with feathers attached to the end of a long stick. And if I brought him into the city, he’d have to wear boots because of the hard pavement.”

Along with the animals, some of Norman’s friends came to live at his house, a few of them after having proved unmanageable elsewhere. Duane Robertson, who would accompany Norman as cameraman on several trips, met him as a teenager at the suburban taping of a TV show. He was causing his mother concern and needed a place to stay. He ended up living at the house until his marriage, twenty years later. As unofficial curator of the Museum, he suggested making it the headquarters of a Canadian chapter of the Explorers Club in order to encourage more visits by Norman’s fellow adventurers. They wrote to all seventy Canadian Explorers Club members, and the Explorers Club of Canada was founded. It is now the largest foreign chapter. Duane’s mother believed Norman “saved his life.”

“Norm offered opportunities for interesting experiences to a lot of people,” Robertson recalled. “He showed me that the world was bigger than Richmond Hill.” Long-time friend and house-mate John Haddad said Norman “showed me how to be assertive without being rude.” Another acquaintance said simply, “he helped me to grow up.”

Norman’s travelling companion on his 1982 trip to New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands was not an adventurous young guy with a few free months to spare but Frank Ogden, also known as “Doctor Tomorrow,” the eminent author, pilot, LSD researcher and futurist, then 62 years old. The trip proved an unusual one, even for Norman. He and Ogden arrived in the Trobriand Islands at the time of the month-long Yam Festival, which turned out to be something of a local version of Sadie Hawkins Day. “It’s really a socially accepted time,” Ogden explained, “for the young women of the islands to go out and sexually attack the men in what amounts to gang-rapes.” During this popular celebration of predatory sex and lovingly cooked yams, Ogden reminisced, “about 4,000 man-hungry women go on a rampage wearing only coconut oil and tiny loin-cloths.” To escape the loud enthusiasm of the local ladies, the two Canadians got lost in the jungle for a few days where they were able to collect specimens of some of the 10,000 different insect species native to the region. Having dodged, more or less, the seasonal yam frenzy, Norman returned to beguile the locals by touching his nose with his tongue and walking on his hands – tricks he found hugely popular in most parts of the world.

Later in the Eighties Norman went to the former Belgian Congo with Robert Cudney and Ralph Reppert, on a journey sponsored by the Toronto Sun. “I’m just back from Zaire,” Norman wrote, “and I’ve got a few amoebic parasites in my system. I was living with the pygmies and they kept offering me these live slugs which are a special treat for them Well, you don’t want to hurt their feelings so you have to eat them. But you do get tired of slugs after a while.” In Namibia and Botswana, Norman had to be careful not to go into the local villages at night as it was considered impolite to refuse a chief’s offer of one of his wives. “The women wash only three times in their lives,” Norman noted in one of his many journals, “on their wedding day and with the deaths of their parents.”

On another trip, to the interior of Borneo, Ralph Reppert fell into a river and was almost swept away. “The incident made me think of how serious it could be if someone were to get hurt,” Norman mused, as though the thought had never occurred to him before. “There are no doctors anywhere in these mountain communities.” But Norman – and his companions – always seemed to be lucky – a luck that was often bolstered by considerable help from friendly local missionaries, for whom Norman always expressed great appreciation.

Nineteen-eighty-nine marked Norman’s fiftieth birthday. “”I am amazed that I ever made it to fifty,” he said. “I didn’t think that I would come back from all my trips or walk away from all my sky jumps. And now I feel I’ve got this extra time that I’m not quite sure what to do with.” He wondered if he had a death wish, but decided he “didn’t want to die.” As it happened, he had another fourteen years left to go.

For all his eccentricity and apparent independence, Norman always maintained his ties to his family and the Rosedale horsey set – wealthy, generally conventional people who knew Norman through family or sporting connections. (Norman’s brother Jim was also a prize-winning Olympic equestrian and Norman earned extra money by painting portraits of the horses owned by family and friends.) With these relations in mind, he was always discreet about his homosexuality. At a time when gays were ostensibly becoming more accepted, Norman played no apparent role in public gay life. He belonged to no gay community groups, was involved with no gay charities, frequented public swimming pools rather than bathhouses, and avoided not only gay bars but even discretely ambiguous bisexual gathering places. At Gay Pride celebrations, he was absent. He had gay friends among whom he could speak frankly, some of them as closeted as himself. But to the increasingly visible gay community, he was a stranger. Perhaps like many gay men who had grown up in an era of total illegality, he believed that discretion was the better part of valour.

The social and legal situation for gay men in Canada changed rapidly throughout the eighties and nineties as the AIDS crisis and a series of hard-fought legal and judicial victories brought new visibility. It was rapidly becoming unacceptable to scorn or persecute gay men as such. But where once group fantasies had been projected upon “homosexuals,” now the feared offenders were characterized as a growing army of male “pedophiles.” This terminological slight of hand was facilitated by the fact that while being gay had become theoretically acceptable, the Age of Consent for homosexual relations, set at 21 by the Trudeau reforms of 1969, remained in force. Well into the eighties, even sexually mature males of 19 or 20 were said to be legally children, and therefore incapable of consent to homosexual activity. This at a time when increasing numbers of young people were coming out as gay or lesbian, some even forming high school gay clubs and taking same-sex dates to the prom.

Public awareness of past sexual abuses in Canadian orphanages and Native schools increased public anxiety. Old fears began to surface in the form of a series of moral panics involving allegations of manic sexual violence. In one urban centre after another, groups of children were claiming to have been raped, forced to drink blood, consume human body parts and have intercourse with dogs and bats. Babies were said to have been skinned alive and barbecued, or flown to Mars and thrown into schools of sharks. Investigations uncovered no missing infants, the alleged burial sites yielded no remains, and no sharks were located. Nevertheless, several high-profile jury trials resulted in convictions and heavy sentences. Innocent people were jailed, families broken up and lives ruined. Eventually, many of the children involved admitted their lies had been prompted by social workers and court officials and most of the sentences were reversed. Years later, Saskatchewan Justice Minister Frank Quennell lamented this “truly regrettable situation,” calling the eighties and nineties “a unique period in the history of the justice system throughout North America.”

In the early nineties, Julian Fantino, the ambitious Chief of Police in London, Ontario, claimed, with much fanfare, to have uncovered a “kiddie sex ring” that turned out to be an unremarkable series of consensual relationships among adult men and a few teenaged hustlers. Again, there was a great deal of damage to lives and reputations; one man committed suicide. Other similar cases followed. It was in this toxic atmosphere that a series of sensational revelations about boys, sex and hockey, was given maximum publicity by the national media during the late nineties. Sheldon Kennedy, a young hockey player, had revealed that his coach, Graham James, had been having inappropriate relations with some of his young players. The Globe and Mail editorialized about “a diseased game.” Suddenly, people were asking big questions about the world of junior hockey. Crime writer James Dubro wrote that it seemed as if sex with boys had become “the crime du jour.”

Soon after the Graham James case broke, Martin (originally Arnold) Kruze, a troubled, sexually confused bankrupt in his mid-thirties, added his own twist to the sports scandals, revealing a series of unsavoury sexual goings-on twenty years in the past at Toronto’s famous Maple Leaf Gardens, the nation’s premier hockey arena. Two years earlier, Kruze had been paid $60,000 for an “agreement of silence” about the repeated sexual abuse he said he had suffered as a boy at the hands of low-level Gardens employees. The Criminal Injuries Compensation Board awarded him another $22,000.

The Gardens had traditionally been run with quasi-military punctilio, but with the advent of the Harold Ballard regime in 1972, “everything went to rat-shit” because, as one former employee put it, “the new employees were a bunch of pirates.” Under “Pal Hal,” Gardens staff were often left unsupervised. Several men on the staff began using games tickets and other favours to entice young boys to have sex with them, and with selected girls. As oversight declined at the Gardens, revenue plunged, and the impulsive Ballard decided more seats were the answer. The iconic half-century old gondola from which Foster Hewitt had called every game was unceremoniously torn out and thrown into the incinerator. Ballard’s action was solemnly denounced by the Toronto Star as “the barbaric destruction of one of Canada’s great cultural monuments.” When Ballard heard this – an employee read it to him – he is said to have exploded in paroxysms of rage and hilarity, choking on his cigar and sending a shower of ash across the accumulated detritus of his desk. Ballard was eventually convicted of 47 counts of theft, fraud and tax evasion and sent to an institution he laughingly described as a country club, where he was allowed to drink beer with the guards.

By 1997, Ballard had been dead for several years and the Gardens was about to be squabbled over as an immensely valuable piece of Toronto real estate. With the Graham James case already engaging the media, Martin Kruze decided to renounce his previous vow of silence and go public with claims of abuse. News programs publicized his charges and the Maple Leaf Gardens scandal became a huge story of its own. In a letter to the media about the case, Kruze alleged that he had been taken advantage of not merely by a few hired maintenance men but by an organized “ring” that decades later was still operating at the Gardens. Kruze, who had begun to describe himself as “an innocent child of God,” rapidly became a professional survivor (he even had a calling card printed with SURVIVOR on it). Ostensibly heterosexual, with an official girlfriend, he admitted he was still having sex with men, claiming he did it to punish himself for past misdeeds. He had become part of what he called “the sexual abuse industry.” When asked by one reporter if he was a blackmailer, he referred any such discussion to his attorney.

Toronto Sun editor Lorrie Goldstein admitted later that the subsequent press and television coverage of the sordid Maple Leaf Gardens case was largely driven by homophobia. One veteran police detective who worked the case tried to tell the media there was no truth to the claims of a wide-ranging “pedophile ring” responsible even for a notorious 1977 child murder. But the lack of a “ring,” he said, “spoils their whole story . . . The whole thing about this sex ring grew and grew.” As a result, the Toronto Police Force was under great pressure to uncover more participants in the elusive ring. After Detective Dan Tredrea, chief investigator on the case, went on the Six O’clock News asking for more victims to come forward, the phones, said one officer, began “ringing off the hook . . . It’s been dozens and dozens, literally.” One complainant claimed to have been molested “about fifty times,” and to have told no-one. More men who had known the accused Gardens employees (there were three, one of them deceased) presented themselves to the police. As no sex ring could be substantiated and no Gardens officials could be implicated, the men were pressed to remember names from further afield. One name that came up repeatedly was that of Norman Elder, and the police were able to produce a fat file of past misdemeanours and complaints, including the trolley-fried monkeys, the big pig and the polar bear fence, as well as the names of various reform school graduates who had dallied at the house.

Martin Kruze’s sensational revelations about pederastic goings-on in our national sport’s most sacred site were inevitably discussed in taverns and coffee-shops across the country, often in tandem with the enviable sum he had been paid to keep quiet. And it set in motion a chain of events that led to the first of a dozen serious criminal charges against Norman Elder. Norman had no connection to Maple Leaf Gardens or its employees, and no interest in the young boys involved. But several of the boys had later met Norman, and knew he was gay. His house was only a few hundred yards from Varsity Stadium, the main sports field at the University of Toronto. Of an evening, Norman would often stroll down to catch a game. He would fall into conversation with other spectators, sometimes inviting them to make the short trip home with him. Some enjoyed a cup of tea and a tour of the Museum. Others stayed the night. And back in the seventies, what occasionally ensued afterwards was deemed criminal if one or both parties were shy of the legal age of 21.

While the police began to prepare their case against Norman, there were ominous developments even closer to home. A one-time Bedford Road resident, a mentally disturbed man with a penchant for petty theft, had at one time become involved with a friend of Norman’s called Steve, the putative heir to a well-known Canadian food chain. The relationship had worked out badly, the young thief had been asked to leave the house and had later come to the notice of the police. He blamed Steve, and secondarily Norman for his troubles, and when he read about the Maple Leaf Gardens case, he and a friend began to talk discuss the possibilities of blackmail. One evening, they phoned the Norman Elder Museum and Gallery, looking for Steve, or at least his phone number. None too happy to hear from the pair, Norman told them the facts: “You’re too late. Steve’s dead. He died of a massive aneurism in Belize a few months ago.” Shortly after that call, Norm began confiding to a few close friends that an acquaintance was trying to blackmail him, and that he was neither willing nor able to pay. Before the year was out, Norman was arrested.

Hundreds of people had stayed at the Museum in the decades since the move from Yorkville. Many of his friends and protégés had now become established citizens with families, jobs, businesses or professional lives. But others had become petty criminals, hustlers or perennial bankrupts. It was this second group that provided most of the ten men who now revealed to the police that Norman had initiated sex with them up to a quarter of a century earlier.

After the shock of his initial arrest, Norman realized he would have to decide quickly on a course of action. The question was: whether to contest the charges in court, or to fold and hope his exemplary record and establishment connections would outweigh the flawed recollections and contradictory contentions of an apparently growing list of accusers. “Dr. Tomorrow,” Norman’s old friend Frank Ogden, strongly urged him to plead Not Guilty and fight. One of Canada’s best-known criminal lawyers was mentioned as a possible counsel. The substantial fees involved might have presented a problem, but there were several able local lawyers who could have taken the case, including one whose unofficial office was a window booth in a Yonge Street fast food restaurant, from which perch he had become a shrewd observer of the very world in which Norman’s accusers moved. Others of riper vintage retained their ancient knowledge of those obsolete sections of the Criminal Code under which Norman had been charged. Family members on the other hand dreaded what promised to be a long and gruelling trial with much attendant publicity and embarrassing unpleasantness. Norman decided to avoid further disgrace by signing a court document known as an “Agreed Statement of Facts,” otherwise referred to in the business as a confession. As his solicitor he retained a young attorney with connections to the Elder family.

Norman’s arrest was kept quiet; many of his friends heard nothing about it. Nevertheless, the word was soon out on the street. Men whom Norman had bailed out of jail decades before suddenly remembered him – the guy with the weird house on Bedford Road who took them water-skiing, or offered them cash for a blow job, or let them crash in his upstairs and took care of their laundry.

In October of 1997, I answered Norman’s request for a letter of reference to present to the court. His attorney amassed fifty-eight of these, all from people who knew him, including an impressive number of well-known and distinguished names. They described Norman in “the highest possible terms,” the court agreed, “and as a valued and highly respected member of the community.” Many of the letters attested to Norman’s taking in “confused and lost” young – and not-so-young – people, helping them, re-establishing contact with their families and setting them on the path to “productive lives.” His trial began in January, 1998, with the prosecutor asking Judge Faith Finnestad to give “minimum weight” to any letters attesting to the defendant’s good character on the grounds that his supporters were obviously “not aware that this aspect of his personality existed.”

Against the stack of character references were the sworn statements of ten accusers. The men, all sexually mature males at the time of the alleged events and now approaching middle age, were seen by the court as having been children in the eyes of the law, and thus incapable of consent. Under the statutes in force in the early seventies, no force or even coercion needed to be alleged; a mere sexual advance was an illegal act. One man said that when Norman had “gotten on top of him,” he had “got up and prepared to leave the premises.” After calming him, intercourse was attempted but “no penetration took place.” “At the present time,” he wrote, “I fantasize . . . that I will stop having the nightmare of being chased by an old male.”

In a brief address to the court, Norman admitted he had broken the law, apologized for the distress he had caused and added that “it’s been very difficult for my friends, my family and myself.” Nonetheless, the prosecutor demanded jail time, stressing the large number of offenses and characterizing the defendant as “a predator” who had “ensnared vulnerable youth.” Sympathetic observers heard echoes of the notorious summing-up by Mr. Justice Wills in the Oscar Wilde case a century earlier, when he remarked from the bench that “you, Wilde, have been the centre of a circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young men.” On March 12, Judge Finnestad handed down a sentence of two years less a day, to be served in a provincial prison. Disheartened, Norman instructed his attorney to appeal; he was freed until the appeal was heard. Two weeks later, the police laid two additional charges against him, to be tried, together, the following January.

The following ten months were difficult ones for Norman and friends saw little of him. Though he had always enjoyed reasonably good health, his sleep patterns had become increasingly disturbed, perhaps aggravated by the “listlessness” that sometimes accompanies recurrent malaria. A physician who had been close to Norman’s deceased parents began prescribing the drug Ativan, a powerful soporofic and anti-depressant. He began taking the drug regularly, and came to rely on it to get to sleep.

In January of 1999, Norman faced his second major court appearance. Stunned by his failure to avoid a jail sentence in the first, uncontested, trial, he had decided to fight the additional accusations, which were made by two men he knew well but who by court order could not be identified. He pleaded Not Guilty to indecently assaulting the first complainant in 1979 and 1980 and the second in 1989. Both men alleged that Norman had performed oral sex on them. One claimed that Norman had once gotten him drunk in Muskoka. Norman was able to show that the beer was bought by the complainant. The man’s long history of alcoholism, drug abuse, theft and domestic violence tended to cast further doubts on his veracity, as did his pressing financial troubles and threats of lawsuits. The second man claimed Norman had paid him twice, for sex, and said he had kept the proffered $200. But there were a number of serious inconsistencies in his testimony.

Mr. Justice David McCombs pointed out that the Crown’s case relied wholly on the claims of these two witnesses, both of them silent for twenty years. He found their testimony neither credible nor reliable. “However morally repugnant the conduct of Mr. Elder may be,” he said, “I am not convinced the acts were criminal . . . I do not know where the truth lies, so I therefore find Mr. Elder not guilty on both counts.” One of the ten accusers in the earlier case was in court for the verdict. Indignant, he told the press, “This man is a legendary pee-dophile” who should be forced to “take treatment.” He and the others were having a victims’ meeting that very afternoon, he said, to discuss civil action.

A few days after the acquittal, an old friend of Norman’s held a quiet dinner party at his Rosedale apartment to celebrate the acquittal. The guests included historian Don McLeod, crime writer James Dubro and playwright Sky Gilbert; Norman was the guest of honour. The host was John Grube who had taught the adolescent Norman years before at Upper Canada College where he remembered Norman as a quiet, personable athlete. A writer, artist and translator, Grube was the author of a fictional treatment of the notorious 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids which galvanized the gay community to mass civil disobedience. He had been close to Jacques Ferron, the Quebec novelist and doctor to the poor who later founded the Rhinocerous Party.

The old professor was silver-haired now and beginning to grow frail, but had lost none of his radical fire. Over after-dinner drinks, he mounted a forceful argument for a rallying of public opinion against Norman’s sentence. The testimony of fifty-eight citizens might have been set aside, but maybe the outrage of fifty-eight hundred could make the difference between prison and freedom. Norman sipped his brandy and appeared unconvinced. Shy of further publicity, he suggested his establishment connections would see him through in the end. One guest, a young friend of Grube’s whispered, “Who does he know? Conrad Black?”

Don McLeod recalled meeting Norman at the party. He found him charming but “a bit befuddled or dazed” by his trials. “I remember clearly,” he recalled, “that he didn’t even remember some of the young men who brought the charges against him. I think he was optimistic that the verdict (in the first trial) would be overturned on appeal. At the end of the evening, Norman drove us all home in the snow in his big Lincoln. We briefly got lost trying to find our way out of Rosedale.”

The next month, Norman’s appeal was denied and he began his two year sentence in a minimum security jail near Brampton, Ontario. In May, his accusers filed a four million dollar lawsuit. Perhaps they believed Norman to be wealthy. In fact, he had almost no money, his house and car were mortgaged, and his only assets were the various records of his travels and a ramshackle cottage in Torrance, Ontario.

In September, Norman wrote to me from prison: “Great to hear from you! It is very easy to feel very cut off when in jail. So it means a lot getting your letter.” He mentioned John Grube’s much-appreciated dinner party. Jail, he said, “has truly been an interesting experience, with each day a challenge to see if I can make the adjustment to a world that is definitely harder for me than any of my travels into the rainforests. I do like to pretend I’m in a different sort of adventure here. I keep busy reading, drawing, keeping fit and working in the craft shop. Everyone here has been respectful including all the staff.” He mentioned that he still had the books I’d given him over the years – at home of course; he was allowed no outside literature. To another friend, he mentioned the pleasure he took in preparing the hot rocks the Native prisoners used for their sweat lodges.

I visited Norman soon after his release, several months ahead of schedule. Sitting in his old bedroom, glad to be back in familiar surroundings, he was relieved that he had at least been able to keep his property and belongings. He looked well and seemed eager to get on with life. The following January, I invited him to attend a literary party at the Idler Pub, just around the corner from his house. It was a chilly night; the occasion was a memorial get-together to commemorate the life of the poet Edward Lacey, who had died in a Toronto rooming house in 1995. Norman was in good spirits. It was the last time I saw him.

Soon after the Lacey memorial, Norman began hearing rumours of possible further police action against him. In addition, the four million dollar lawsuit was making its way through the court system, and he again faced the prospect of losing virtually everything he owned. Understandably, he became somewhat paranoid, fearing every knock on the door.

For some time, Norman had been taking Ativan, a strong benzodiazopine tranquillizer misprescribed to him for his persistent insomnia. Ativan is a problematic drug. Its side effects can include “agitation, anxiety, depression, persistent and unpleasant memories and a feeling of unreality.” Nightmares, paranoia and panic attacks are not uncommon. At around the time of the Idler gathering, Norman’s prescription for the drug had been suddenly cut off. Ativan is highly addictive and can require regular increases in dosage to achieve the required effect. Going off the drug without a carefully supervised program of withdrawal can lead to mental disorientation and suicidal thoughts. Sleepless and agitated, Norman began buying it occasionally on the black market. The disorientation brought about by Ativan probably intensified an already anxious mental state. His worries about his precarious financial situation and the ongoing civil suit began to prey on his mind. He feared being arrested again, and imagined being left destitute.

One day in October of 2003, a friend accompanied Norman to a meeting at the home of an Elder family member. Hoping for a loan on generous terms that would at least meet his ongoing expenses, he asked his friend to wait for him in the car while he went inside. When he returned, he looked shaken: no loan would be forthcoming. At about this time, he phoned his friend, Bill Jamieson, a fellow Explorers Club member. Jamieson was a dealer in rare tribal artefacts who had purchased the contents of the old Niagara Falls Museum, storing some of the former exhibits at Norman’s house. Norman told Jamieson he was going to sell the building; would he please come and remove his belongings? Jamieson suggested he could tide Norman over with a loan; Norman thanked him but declined the offer.

That evening or the next, John Haddad, the friend who shared Norman’s part of the house, cooked Norman his favourite meal of bacon and eggs. As they sat together in the rudimentary kitchen, the cupboard door immediately opposite Norman, which a slight tilt to the floor invariably kept shut, slowly swung wide open. John Haddad made a comment about omens. Norman smiled but said nothing.

The following morning, John Haddad was puzzled to find the pet lemurs Norman had brought back from Madagascar had not been fed. Shortly afterwards on his return from a shopping trip, Haddad found one of the lemurs in a highly agitated state, jumping back and forth onto a day-bed in Norman’s room. When he went into the bedroom to sit on the day-bed and find out what the lemur wanted, he saw Norman’s body, hanging lifeless from a fixture in the ceiling. In one of those visual hallucinations a sudden shock can induce, the corpse appeared eerily, impossibly small. Police and ambulance were summoned. As a pair of paramedics eased the body down, one of them remarked to the other, “He’s in pretty good shape.”

Seven squad cars quickly descended on 140 Bedford Road and for the last time, official investigators ranged over the premises, taking note of the excited lemurs and curiously decorated coffins, and stringing crime scene tape around the perimeter. For years there had been rumours that tunnels had been dug under the property. Some people had discerned a resemblance between Norman and the actor Bob Crane who played Col. Hogan in the eighties’ TV show Hogan’s Heroes, set in a World War II prisoner-of-war camp. Now, Toronto’s Finest were convinced that Norman’s bed, like the trick bunk in Hogan’s barracks, must be the concealed entrance to a tunnel or system of tunnels leading to an outbuilding, or to the house next door, or even under the street to a manhole cover serving as an escape hatch. Seismic equipment was brought in, revealing no secret passages, only Norman’s windowless “funky room” in the cellar and a false door fastened to one of the walls. Nothing was found in the garden but a few old lion bones.

Shortly after Norman’s death, Duane Robertson had a dream of his old friend hoisting a cup of coffee, saying “I’m not afraid now.”

There seems little doubt that Norman committed some of the acts with which he was charged. He propositioned, and sometimes had sex with, young men, at a time when Canadian law made such activity illegal. But in writing this piece, I spoke with a number of men who in their youth had lived or travelled with Norman. Without exception, the heterosexual ones, some now married and with families, said Norman had never even made a pass at them. One man said, “I’ve slept in beds and hammocks with Norman and he never did anything.” They were surprised to hear of Norman’s arrest and did not believe the charges against him. But a gay man who had known Norman, a retired civil servant who lived briefly at the Bedford Road house as a long-haired hippie youth, remembered Norman offering a reduction of his already low rent should a bit of sex be involved. As he didn’t fancy Norman and was not in the prostitution business, he declined the offer and no more was said about it. He didn’t believe the charges either.

It might seem odd that though the young men Norman was accused of assaulting were said to have “immediately fled under cover of darkness,” in the court’s somewhat melodramatic phrase, he nonetheless continued the unsuccessful seduction technique of suddenly appearing in his victims’ beds. Perhaps, like the man who picked up women at bus stops, he was often met with outrage but was pleased to get quite a few takers as well. Still, the stories of innocent youths assaulted as they slept do not seem to square with accounts of gentlemanly behaviour in other, similar circumstances. But there may be a relatively simple explanation.

For bisexual men, uncomfortable with their own capacity to be aroused in the presence of another male, compromising situations have traditionally been explained away by pleading (a) I was asleep through the whole thing, (b) I was so drunk I didn’t know what I was doing, or (c) I did it for the money. All these explanations were used by witnesses against Norman. One accuser said “I told him to stop but he said, ‘Go back to sleep, don’t worry.’ He performed fellatio for a half-hour.” Another claimed, falsely, that Norman had gotten him drunk. Others admitted they were aroused, and paid. Though Norman’s gaydar seems to have been in good working order, his courtship techniques might have benefited from a little polish. Whether his actions merited a prison sentence so many years after the fact is debatable.

It was not long before members of Norman’s family removed the furnishings and other useable items from the house. Most of Norman’s paintings were auctioned off in lots along with the rest of the contents, including items Norman had borrowed or was storing for friends. One collector remembers seeing some of his own property at an antique stall, acquired from Norman’s estate as one of a large number of lots. On Bedford Road, dumpsters rapidly filled up with bug-ridden crocodile parts and moth-eaten stuffed sheep. John Haddad and the remaining lodgers moved out and the interior was gutted. The polar bear fence and the stone memorial for Jim Butcher, an old friend of Norman’s who had died young, were all hauled away, just as many of the tribal cultures Norman had visited were being swept aside by bulldozers and factory farms. Today, the house at 140 Bedford Road bears no trace of what for thirty-five years had been the Norman Elder Museum and Gallery.

Though he seemed utterly at home in the Toronto of the late twentieth century, Norman Elder resembled nothing so much as an English gentleman adventurer of the Edwardian era, his cabinet of curiosities enlarged into a private museum with trophies mounted on its walls and curious creatures taking over the anteroom. Like any number of Edwardian gentlemen, Norman appeared to be wealthy but in fact was not. He was an eccentric who insisted, “Norman is normal,” his use of the third person distancing him from his own ingenuous claim.

Norman was one of those people who always seem faintly amused by life. Once, just for fun at a fancy Toronto party, he placed a enormous, somnolent snake beneath a warm pile of coats on a bed. As the affair wound down and the dowagers were retrieving their wraps, a sudden shriek made everyone jump: Toronto the Good – meet the jungle! Though there was no malice in these childish pranks, they could be disturbing, especially after a few drinks. But it was a party to remember.

To the end of his life, Norman retained a certain boyishness of appearance and temperament – “running around like a little kid.” Hamish Grant said of him that he had something of a Curious George attitude to life. Though he loved an emir or an exiled king, he pretty much took everyone as he found them. Whoever you were, he was invariably interested in what you were up to, and greeted any piece of knowledge sent his way as a revelation, what someone called his “Gee, golly!” approach – Curious George having just found the banana. As with most trusting, good-natured people, Norman often appeared naive. He had seen hunters shoot howler monkeys out of the trees and eat them, yet was shocked by conditions in the local stockyards. He continually confronted the world’s destructive will, the “fearful carnivorous god,” the anaconda you wrestle for the camera, that almost drowns you. Yet an English poet, who had once fallen into a drunken sleep on Norman’s couch over forty years before, remembered him as “one of the calmest and most quietly civilized characters I am likely to meet.” He could do extraordinary things on a shoestring, just by being “polite but assertive.”

Norman Elder is buried in Torrance, Ontario, near his old cottage. His tombstone describes him as “Explorer, Equestrian, Author and Adventurer.” On the grounds of the the cottage is an animal graveyard. No-one who saw Norman with any of his animals could doubt his affection for them. Here their graves are arranged in neat rows, each with its own individual, sometimes highly idiosyncratic, marker. The cottage and its home-made outbuildings are now falling into desuetude. The cemetery is still maintained by John Haddad.

Even after forty years attending them I still get nervous when a coveted item approaches sale. No matter your experience or determination, an anxiety occurs which must be similar to those stories one hears about actors, even famous and distinguished ones, who vomit before every live performance in the theater. I have worked out elaborate personal rituals over the years both to minimize anxiety and to operate efficiently, for myself and in pursuing the interests of my clients. One often must make instant decisions and one must be prepared to revise estimates on the spot, so a careful dealer must never relax.

In my early days, Waddington’s on Queen Street, an old established general auctioneer, had been purchased by Ron McLean, one of several auctioneers who had learned their trade at the old Ward-Price Gallery on College Street.

Every Wednesday and Saturday morning Waddington’s had estate sales where anything could appear. Nobody cared then about books and often one could buy a whole wall of books as a single lot and usually quite cheaply. It was perfect for a used bookseller, providing large lots of general books, cheap. I went to every sale and often did quite well.

One Saturday morning I had just bought two shelves of rather seedy looking books when Richard Landon wandered into the rooms. Landon, not long then at the University of Toronto’s Rare Book department, was already a serious private collector, regularly frequenting all the used bookstores and socializing a lot with much of the book trade.

That morning Landon looked at my two shelves of unappetizing looking books and said with some disdain, “What did you have to pay for that pile of crap?”

“Eighteen dollars,” I replied. “Why?”

He said, “You’ll be lucky to get your money back from that junk. Why would you do that?”

A bit nettled, I made my first grievous auction error. “Because of this,” I replied a bit testily, pulling off two thick quarto volumes lacking covers. They consisted of just the text blocks but they were in very nice condition otherwise, without the soiling generally to be found on books which have lacked their covers for many years.

Landon searched past the preliminaries to the title page of the first volume. The coverless book was an eighteenth century edition of Johnson’s Dictionary, dated 1775. It was some twenty years too late to be the first edition and besides, it had a Dublin imprint, which indicated it was probably a Dublin piracy, although I didn’t know anything about the Dublin piracies then, or even that books could, and often had been, pirated.

“Oh,” said Landon, in a subdued voice, comprehension sinking in. In those days his favorite author, whom he quoted incessantly, was Samuel Johnson and so enamoured was he of Johnson and his world that he had even named his cat Hodge, after Johnson’s pet. “Well, what do you expect to get for that?” he asked in an entirely different tone of voice, no doubt wishing he had got there ten minutes earlier.

I was caught – one of my earliest bookselling lessons about keeping my mouth shut. (I’ve had 10,000 others since then, none of which has ever sunk in, it seems.)

What could I do? It wasn’t just that he was a friend, he was a librarian – in the rare books department of the largest university in Canada which then was the only institutional client I had. And it didn’t take a lot of insight to be aware that his ambitions as a librarian were considerable. He was going to rise and I needed to rise with him.

I saw no way out. He knew what I had paid for the entire lot, because of my big mouth, and I didn’t think it would be in my interests to come back to him later with a price of ten or twenty times what he knew I had paid for them.

I bit the bullet. “OK, to you – right now – $36,” I said reluctantly, doubling my investment. (Maybe Richard will think that booksellers always only double their purchase price, I thought.)

“OK,” said Landon. “I’ll pick it up when you get it back to the shop.”

When he picked it up, he asked for an invoice claiming lack of cash. Landon then took the book to Michael Wilcox, the great bookbinder who had recently quit his job gluing bird skeletons together at the Royal Ontario Museum to return to his first love. This was some years before Wilcox began to do design bindings for which he is now justly world-famous. The standard trade bindings Wilcox did then were lovely and technically perfect; I always buy them when I see them. And, of course, I’ve been beggaring myself for his design bindings ever since he started doing them, at the behest of Roderick Brinckman of Monk Bretton Books whose specialty was finely printed and bound books.

It turns out the Johnson was the first Dublin edition in quarto and it preceded the London quarto edition of the same year, making it the first quarto edition and, as Landon constantly likes to boast, worth a fair bit, especially now that they are housed in lovely Wilcox bindings.

However, some two or three years later, sorting papers, I found Landon’s invoice with no markings to indicate it had ever been paid. I called him.

“I just found the invoice for the Dublin Johnson. You never paid me.”

Landon replied brusquely and firmly, “I always pay cash.”

That has been his regular defense in the many instances when I have brought it up in the years since.

And I have been bringing it up periodically ever since – often at the Landons’ dinner table with foreign dignitaries from the book world present. I’ve had a lot of fun doing this but I finally stopped when someone told me privately that Marie Korey, Richard’s wife, had said she was so sick of hearing about it, and that she was going to pay me the $36 herself, if I did it once more.

I guess I should admit here that all the evidence points to Landon’s probable innocence. For $36 would have been a lot of money for me then and it’s unlikely that I wouldn’t remember that it was owed. Once I suggested that we could rectify this unfortunate misunderstanding by Richard leaving the Dictionary to me in his will.

He replied, “I always pay cash.”

My first serious auction was also at Waddington’s, one of their rare early sales entirely devoted to books. They had acquired a very good library of Canadiana which attracted all the collectors and dealers in Eastern Canada.

I was then still apprenticing with Joseph Patrick who specialized in Canadiana. I knew nothing about Canadiana and, in truth, very little about books at all. However, my ignorance didn’t matter because I didn’t have any money anyway so I was hardly in a position to be competition for anyone. But, in spite of my complete lack of any qualifications or money, I already had the instincts of the player and I wanted to participate badly and was determined that I would. The excitement generated by visiting dealers in the shop and talk of great rarities caused me to want to be involved as well. Most of the major dealers in Canadiana in Canada were in town for the sale.

I studied the books, not knowing which were the $10 books or which the $1,000 books. But I was hooked on the action, wondering how I could possibly compete.

I had been studying modern literature and learning how to ascertain what was, or might be, a first edition. I realized that my only hope of buying anything was to focus on what the other dealers ignored.

There were two books I did know and which I ascertained were first editions. They were the three-volume first edition of Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico (1845) and the two-volume first edition of Conquest of Peru (1847), both important historically and both in stunning, almost new condition. I was too inexperienced to know then that this was very unusual. That period, from the 1830s to the 1870s, was a period of some of the ugliest book production ever, especially in America where these were published. The cloth used in America at that time was ugly and cheap. It chipped easily at the extremities, cracked at the hinges, and the gilt titling usually was so shoddy that titles regularly became tarnished or simply disappeared. And the paper, because of the reactions of chemicals in the still time-untested experiments of paper-making from wood chips, often turned dark brown, and worse, became so brittle that turning a page could cause the page to snap into pieces and crumble like a stale cracker. Institutional libraries now find themselves needing to deal with these books, which are literally in danger of disintegrating at any handling whatsoever.

These two copies had none of these defects. In fact, in the forty-some years since that auction, I’ve seen many copies of both those books but never have I seen either in such fine condition. I guess they were included because they were technically Americana even though they dealt with Central and South America. This is not so strange when one realizes that until after the American Revolution all books dealing with the Western Hemisphere were considered Americana, including books on Canada. Even after the revolution there were many books which legitimately were considered both Americana and Canadiana (and there still are) but Prescott, being an American writing on Central and South America, was collected as Americana.

I decided my only hope of participation was to try and buy them. I asked my boss Jerry Sherlock what I should do and what he thought. “I haven’t a clue, Dave,” he said, not even attempting to hide his indifference; he was too busy preparing for his own fights with his competitors for the prized Canadian rarities to care about a couple of books that weren’t in his field. I was on my own.

And here, of course, is the lesson. None of the other dealers cared either, as I found out. Both books came up very early in the sale, luckily for me, because of the level of my anxiety.

Mexico came up and I can still feel the frozen, time-suspending terror I felt as the auctioneer said, “Now we have a set of Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico. What am I offered? Let’s start with $15 for the three volumes. Do I have $15?”

I timidly raised my hand – my first bid at a real auction! I was both terrified and exuberant – indeed the only difference between then and now is that I lacked any sense of what I was going to do next. I lacked any sense of determination, which is the real key to an auction.

No one else bid. Ron McLean, the owner and chief auctioneer then at Waddington’s and the best auctioneer I’ve ever dealt with, didn’t fool around. He barely paused, then knocked it down to me. I was stunned, still shaking with excitement, but aware that I had another book right after it.

“OK,” said McLean. “Here’s the sequel, The Conquest of Peru. How much am I offered? $10?”

I raised my hand again. Ten seconds later it was mine, too. I remember nothing else of that auction. No doubt there were many great struggles for the desirable Canadiana but I missed it all, savouring my great coup. I got them only because no one else bothered to consider them, not the last time I profited from the carelessness of others. After much research and considerable trepidation I priced Mexico at $75 and Peru at $45. After around ten years, by which time the prices had risen to around $350 and $250 respectively, they sold. In case ten years seems like a long time I should say that in those days, with neither the customers nor the knowledge of how to acquire them, that was not at all unusual. From that and many other similar purchases I learned another very important lesson: a good book, especially in fine condition, will always sell. I believe it is foolish to expect it to sell immediately, and I never fall into the trap common to many dealers of thinking I have failed if I don’t sell it the next day.

Of course, a real businessman would point out – as my father, the banker, regularly delighted in doing – that any merchandise, even if you get it free, which sits on a shelf in rented space for ten years is hardly a bargain, or even feasible for any real business.

That lesson, compounded some time later by a second lesson, caused me to formulate a system I have used ever since.

The second lesson occurred when I was much more experienced at auctions, but it was still a confirmation of the first. At Waddington’s they would often put up the least desirable books early on, the principle being that bidders, especially dealers, will bid carelessly before they have spent serious money. The more they spend, the more serious – and cautious – they become. Sitting there at this auction the first lot was a set of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911-12), known as the Scholar’s Edition, probably the best general encyclopedia ever done and still the only encyclopedia that serious booksellers buy for stock. Like everyone else, I had assumed that one of the many collectors or dealers present, knowing that, would pay around $300-$400, its going price then. But it was knocked down for $30 because no one had the sense to bid, all of us ignoring it because we were concentrating on the exciting rarities awaiting us. Really we were making assumptions, presumably assumptions based on logic and common sense, but our error was in entertaining the notion that common sense had any part in the equation.

And that was the lesson. Don’t assume that the obvious will occur. Don’t assume that people, even dealers, will assess everything sensibly and act accordingly. Once, as we were packing up at the end of a bookfair I idly picked up a book from a neighbour’s table. It was a good book on the Klondike which everyone knew was a $200 book. This man had priced it at $15. No one had bothered to look at the price during the entire fair since we all assumed that he too would be aware of its value. Same lesson. Ever since that day I have always used the system that those two incidents taught me, and I never deviate no matter how boring the material or how broke I may be. I look at every book and never reject a book – even the ones I’m not interested in – unless, or until, I have a satisfactory reason for doing so. There are books one can reject because of serious condition problems but even those need to be studied closely in case their intrinsic value or rarity could justify today’s high cost of restoration. So I am always prepared. After viewing two to three hundred lots your memory will be faulty so I depend on my notes. Therefore, when a book reaches $200 and my note says $300, I will drop out if the bidder is a friend or a client, otherwise I go up to the limit as noted. I cross out any book I don’t want at any price, and, using my code, I note the minimum under which I will not allow anyone else to buy that lot.

All dealers have a code, used to provide themselves with details of purchase, etc., while hiding them from others. Many dealers enjoy attempting to break their colleague’s codes. Sometimes such information can be helpful, but I think the real motivation is simply for the fun of it, like solving a puzzle.

These codes are usually formed from a ten-letter word with no letters duplicated – that informs a dealer what they paid for a book. It is usually accompanied by the date and the initials of the dealer they bought it from. This allows them to consider discounts or deals when they are sick of looking at a book.

I have two codes, one of which, after so many years, I can read as though it were the actual numbers. In fact, so deep is it imbedded in my brain I can actually add totals in code as easily as if it were the real numbers. This is a necessary defense and I do all my written business using it. And here’s one reason why. Once, I was sitting behind a close friend – another bookseller at an important auction – and as this dealer turned around to say something, I could see written beside the next item in their catalogue the notation “So and So [a very prominent London dealer] $15,000.” He obviously had a commission from that dealer. What a slip, I thought. If that dealer hadn’t been a close friend, and if that prestigious London dealer had been guilty of some perceived sin against me, even jealousy, it could have been a very costly mistake for my friend and his London client.

Ward-Price, the old firm on College Street, held occasional book sales generally handled by a man called Lee Pritzger who lived out around Hamilton and came in to run the sales.

Things would be bundled at Ward-Price sales and it was necessary to carefully count the books in any bundle before and after the sale, even though the lots were always tied together by string.

Once I bought a lot, its only desirable book a fine early T.S. Eliot. I successfully bought the lot but when I went to pick it up, the Eliot was missing, even though the lot was still securely tied together.

I told the man in charge “There’s a T.S. Eliot title missing from my lot.”

“How could that be?” he wondered.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe my lawyer might, though.”

Off he went, returning a few minutes later, handing me the Eliot. “It must have slipped out of the lot” he said, carefully not looking at the still tightly tied bundle.

Yes, indeed. I heard quite a few instances of that curious “slipping out” of books from Ward-Price lots, escapes worthy of Houdini, one could say.

Iattended many Waddington’s auctions over the years. A very colourful part-time dealer and school teacher named Robert Russell had come to an arrangement with Waddington’s and took to running their book sales.

With Russell in charge of the books the sort of “slippage” found at Ward-Price took on a whole new meaning, culminating some years later when the publisher Charles Musson consigned what in a later magazine article he called a priceless collection of 4,000 books formed by his grandfather, the original Charles Musson. The whole collection slipped out of the bundle, so to speak. Some four thousand books, lost in this “slippage,” later appeared at Memorial University of Newfoundland donated by Bob Russell who, coincidentally, had received an honorary degree from the University.

Even those of us who knew Russell well remained skeptical of Musson’s accusations. Amongst other things, Musson claimed there were many first editions of Charles Dickens, inscribed to the original Musson, who hadn’t even founded his company until 1903 when Dickens had been dead thirty-three years.

Musson also claimed that the collection had resided at his cottage in some thirteen or fourteen wooden crates for some years. A curious way to deal with a priceless collection, some of us thought, storing it in a cottage, unheated for six to seven months of the year and infested by mice and other rodents. Not to mention that such crates might hold fifty to sixty books each at most – more would make them impossibly heavy – but certainly very many less books than Musson contended were stolen.

At an auction, any number of things are going on to which you are completely oblivious. For instance, you, a stranger, will be getting checked out at the preview by dealers, trying to decide if you might be a threat to their interests. They were, also unbeknownst to you, watching you to see what items you looked at. If you looked more than fleetingly at anything which they believe to be in their territory, they took note.

Some people seem to think they can go to an auction and need only outbid a known dealer to get a bargain. Such people could be in for a rude surprise. For a hundred years or so, any outsider thinking that way who entered, say, Sotheby’s or Christie’s in London, might leave with books for which they had paid three or four times the value, because the English book trade believed that auctions were their territory and they made any fool who didn’t accept that pay very dearly.

Here is an example of what can happen if a dealer follows the old rule of always watching and always trying to figure out what’s going on.

One evening I went with a couple of dealer friends up Bayview Avenue to a new auction which was small enough that you could easily preview it in the hour before the sale. While we were looking at the material I checked out the other viewers, as I always do. I noticed one man who was meticulously examining every item with great concentration. It seemed strange to me that a man whom I had never seen in any bookshop should be acting like a sophisticated connoisseur, so he kept my attention.

After the viewing my friends and I went out to eat before the sale and, it not being a significant sale, I relaxed and allowed myself a couple of drinks, something I usually would not do, for a lengthy sale demands intense concentration and instant decisions, sometimes involving real money. Not to mention that it is unwise to place yourself in a position where you might need to visit the washroom at an inconvenient time during the sale.

Back at the sale all of us were in a jolly mood, not really dangerous for pros in that kind of sale. My earlier focus of interest was seated in the row ahead of me so I was curious to see how he might conduct himself. At previews everybody is equally important. It is common to see people, who looked at everything in an apparently knowledgeable manner, who then bid on a few items but miss everything by dropping out at a very low level, thereby demonstrating their entire lack of understanding and any sense of the value of things.

At about the fourth lot in the sale the auctioneer said, “Now we come to the Canadian whaling log and drawings.”

The whaling log – what whaling log? I hadn’t seen any whaling stuff, nor any manuscript. As the floorman lifted a large bundle, string-tied, I turned to the colleague beside me.

“What’s the whaling thing?” I said, a bit confused. “I didn’t see that.”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see it either,” he replied.

The dealer on the other side of me shrugged, “Me neither. I must have missed it too.”

Suspicious.

The bidding began and who should start bidding but my strange, over-attentive gentleman of earlier. That son-of-a-bitch, I thought. He hid it under the table. I’m going to buy that whatever it goes for. I started bidding, too. When the only other bidder, that unknown gentleman, finally dropped out, it was mine. I think it went for $200, not a fortune then, but not a small amount either.

“What was so good about that?” one of my friends asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I had a hunch. I’ll find out later whether I was smart or stupid.”

Examining it the next day I found it was a hand-written diary/log of a seaman from Quebec who had shipped out on a New England whaler in the 1870s. It was incomplete but substantial, including quite a few drawings in a competent hand of ships and scenes of whaling.

It turned out the only Canadian connection was that the man had been from Quebec and shipped out from there. I shopped it around some Canadian institutions first, but no one wanted it. So I raised the price to reward myself for my cleverness and nerve and sold it to one of the many New England institutions who collect whaling history.

I was very pleased with myself and secretly thanked the two or three drinks I had had which no doubt contributed to my sense of adventure and to the nerve to follow my hunch.

I got, if I remember, $4,000 for having the confidence to trust my instincts and so I should have, for I could just as easily have lost my investment.

And, of course, I never saw that mysterious unknown man again, who thought he could outsmart the pros by hiding something under the table. But ever since I have paid as much attention to the people at the previews as to the material.

So if you think auctions are logical and straightforward you should think about that story before you venture into unknown territory. Why do you think it is that knowledgeable librarians or collectors never bid for themselves at auctions? They always hire a dealer at the usual 10% commission which must be one of the great bargains in all bookselling.

One of the most relevant such auction anecdotes I know was told me by Justin Schiller, the acknowledged preeminent children’s book dealer in the world.

Two copies of the true first edition of Alice in Wonderland came up in Paris – the 1865 printing which had so dissatisfied Lewis Carroll because of the inferior printing of Tenniel’s illustrations that he had suppressed it. His publisher had withdrawn the entire edition, excepting the very few copies sent out before publication. They sent the whole edition to America where it was issued with a new titlepage as the first American edition. So rare is the real first edition (there are twenty-two recorded copies of the 1865 Alice, of which only five were then still in private hands) that the new, 1866 printing is generally referred to as the first edition, the true first edition being almost unobtainable.

Two copies of the 1865 Alice (as it is generally referred to amongst the cognoscenti) came up at a sale in Paris run by Drouot, the major Parisian auction house.

There are so many bizarre details in this anecdote I hardly know where to start. Both these copies were extraordinary.

One of the copies of Alice had ten of the original Tenniel drawings tipped in and was then believed to be Carroll’s own copy since it had markings in it in the purple ink Carroll habitually used. The other copy was inscribed by Carroll to Dinah Mulock Craik, the Victorian novelist who wrote John Halifax, Gentleman, and was rendered even more important because her husband, a partner in Macmillan, was Carroll’s editor. Not only two copies of a great rarity but both copies enhanced by stunning associations.

Both copies were together, as the last lot in a sale which mostly contained very early and important books in other fields.

These Carroll books had been purchased by the great dealer Dr. Rosenbach and sold to a collector named Eldridge Johnson. How Johnson handled these priceless treasures is so amusing and eccentric that I cannot resist recounting it. Johnson would travel with them on his yacht, carried in a solander case, and he would place them in a special waterproof safe he had anchored in his stateroom. If ever the ship were to sink a huge buoy attached to the safe with a long thick rope would rise to the surface. On the buoy, in bright red letters, was painted “ALICE” so that the world could locate the safe and rescue these priceless treasures. The Alice’s would be saved even if the humans weren’t. Who said collectors are eccentric?

Justin wanted these badly, one of them for his personal collection. But how to deal with the competition? He learned through a colleague that his biggest competitor was likely to be John Fleming, a prominent New York dealer, who had worked for Rosenbach and wanted to buy them for the sentimental connection. Rosenbach had, in fact, bought them twice at auction over the years.

Justin very cleverly approached Fleming, who agreed to act for him – a brilliant ploy – thereby eliminating the competition at the mere cost of a 10% commission.

And then it got more bizarre.

It is said that a private offer was made before the sale of $250,000 for the two Carrolls but the French auctioneers made an exchange mistake and the catalogue estimate was shown as 250,000 francs (then between four or five new francs to the dollar). It was a long sale and the auctioneer must have been weary, wanting it over. He announced the last lot and started it at 220,000 francs. Fleming raised his hand and the auctioneer banged down his hammer instantly, and departed. Justin got both books for well under one third of what he had been prepared to bid.

But more important to a dealer is the lesson which can be learned from wrestling with such a dilemma and I have factored the implications into many of my own business strategies since. “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” goes the old adage. For a bookseller, revise that to, “If you can’t beat ’em, have ’em join you; hire ’em.”

At a San Francisco bookfair a couple of years ago, a man stopped to examine books in my booth, and in the ensuing conversation it came out that he was a surgeon who collected early medical books. After chatting for a bit, the subject of rarity came up, which in turn led to talk of what happens when really rare books appear at auctions. He mentioned that an important book in his field, one he badly wanted, came up at auction on an afternoon that he had a heart surgery scheduled.

“Did you have a dealer bid for you?” I enquired.

“No. With really scarce books I like to do it myself. Sometimes it’s necessary to revise your upper limits on the spot.”

“So, what did you do?”

“I bid myself.”

“And you had a colleague do your surgery?”

“No, I did that too.”

“You mean you interrupted an operation to bid at an auction?” I enquired, intrigued, picturing the anesthetist, and the assistants and the nurses, standing around someone with their chest open, waiting for an auctioneer to bang his gavel.

“No, I did both.”

“Both? You mean you bid while you were operating?”

“Yes.”

“Where was the phone?”

“On my shoulder. You need both hands with a heart.”

“You mean you were operating on a man’s heart and buying a book at the same time?”

“Yes,” he said grinning sheepishly.

The only response I could think of, to an anecdote like that, was to say, “Well, I was intending to avoid heart surgery anyway, but you’ve given me an added incentive.”

“I would strongly advise you to avoid heart surgery – if you can,” he said, his grin wider.

Especially one done by a serious book collector, I thought, but didn’t say it out loud.

“And did you get the book?”

“Yes! It’s a beauty. But it cost plenty.”

But in spite of his sheepish grin, he still spoke with the quiet confidence of a man who knows his capabilities. I knew he wouldn’t have said such a thing if he didn’t know he had the goods to handle whatever might ensue. There’s bravado, and there’s the confidence that comes to all pros and I could tell he had the latter. This was not Dr. Benway in The Naked Lunch calling for the toilet plunger; this was a man who had performed many, many such procedures and knew he was in control of his operation. It was that sort of professional who landed his plane safely on the East River, not long ago, arousing admiration and pride in all of us who still admire human capabilities and pure nerve. Or, like the airline pilot who has three hundred people on autopilot and is talking with his second officer about his mortgage or his daughter’s despicable boyfriend, but is never unaware of his airplane or his duty.

Still, I thought, I’m going to start dieting and taking regular walks tomorrow.

Any auction, indeed any interplay between dealers in general, will contain elements of envy and spite over perceived advantages or old grudges.

No outsider can understand, even partially, most of these factors. Obscure reasons can be in play: the other bidder, another dealer, could be his sworn enemy and he may have decided that his despised opponent will not buy that book no matter the cost. Vanity and malice are emotions which will defeat common sense every time.

The story of my own favorite auction triumph gets complicated because it operated on several of those levels. The auction I refer to here, with the attendant subtleties, included a rivalry between two dealers, who had once been friends, but no longer were by the time of the auction. It also includes one of the greatest examples in my experience of the kind of cooperation between a dealer and a librarian which can occur when both parties are operating in an area where they understand each other and each carries, in regard to the other, a professional respect and trust.

On viewing the offerings in the preview, a few days before the sale, I found a copy of Robert Service’s rare first book Songs of a Sourdough. The copy offered was bound in plain paper wrappers instead of the cloth it was issued in, making it appear to be a book missing its covers, which had had brown wrapping paper pasted on. It had come from the estate of Fay Fenton, a journalist who had lived in the Klondike, and it was immediately obvious to me that it was a proof copy and probably unique. It made sense to assume that she would have known Service and that he had undoubtedly given it to her. Service’s first book, for which he had paid the printing costs, at least for the first 100 copies, was already a legendary rarity selling, even then, for $2,000 or so.

Like many another hopeful scout, I had always been looking for it. For many years every time I went into the Old Favorites Bookshop, I went first to “S” in the Canadian poetry section hoping that one day it would be sleeping there, waiting for the handsome prince (me) to come and wake it from its slumber. One day I walked in and there it was – priced at $10 – another example of why scouting is so exciting. It was a fine copy and I sold it for $2,500 the next day.

The people then in charge of Waddington’s book sales were a little short on experience and they had not realized that it was a proof copy and had it described as “in plain wrappers,” and had estimated it in the catalogue as selling in the $100-$200 range. I knew it was worth very much more than that and left hoping that other dealers might go past it without seeing it, or if they did see it, would also be too inexperienced to know its importance. I knew that was unlikely, but . . .

I thought about it for some time and arrived at what I considered should be a proper retail value – $30,000 to $35,000.

But unfortunately I knew who would be very unlikely to miss it: my ex-friend Steven Temple. Still deeply hurt by and smarting from his actions over the Canadian Editions debacle, I was determined that he would not get it. But in spite of my continuing anger I knew he was far too good a bookseller not to know exactly what it was and what its value should be. His specialty was Canadian Literature then and I had no doubt that he would be my most dangerous adversary.

I knew that my anger towards Temple was both childish and unbecoming but it was still there and my whole strategy was influenced by those feelings.

I figured it would take around $10,000 to buy it if Temple saw it and I figured he would try to raise that amount, maybe by borrowing, or maybe by taking on a partner.

Given the threat from the competition and my financial state I wondered if I should contact Richard Landon and work on commission for the University of Toronto. If I did that and he commissioned me I would get only a 10% commission for my trouble. But recently I had done that for a very scarce early Canadian Literature item which was about a $750 book. Not caring much, but my still-hurt feelings demanding that I not let Temple get it, I mentioned it to Richard and got his commission, which was a sad result for me, since Temple didn’t attend and I had no knowledgeable competition at all and bought the book for the University of Toronto at $90 . . . making a profit of $9 instead of the $700 or so I should have made. So with this one it could work both ways. My cowardice could do me in as easily as my spite.

Checking my credit line I found I had a $15,000 credit limit, still unused, at the bank, which was about exactly what I felt would have to be my uppermost limit if I bought the Service on spec. So it would take all my available resources of credit, an uncomfortable situation. Even though I firmly believed it was a $30,000-$35,000 book, any book in that range becomes problematic, for any such price demands the resources to pay it. And, of course, when books get up in that price range, customers are limited; one might sit on such a book for several years until a knowledgeable collector appears.

Finally, two days before the sale, I decided I was too close to the edge and I decided to contact Landon. By this time I was far more concerned with just getting the book than with any potential profit. The problem was that Landon was in England. I knew he usually stayed in London with Ian Willison, a retired librarian at the British Museum, but they didn’t have Ian’s phone number at the Fisher. On a hunch I phoned Marie Korey’s assistant at Massey College to find that Marie had left Ian’s number for any emergency. I phoned. It was evening there and Ian was home alone. He informed me that Richard and Marie were in the Lake District and he expected them the next day. I explained my dilemma: a unique format of the first book of a very important Canadian writer (before you dismiss Service as a writer of doggerel, remember Kipling). As we spoke, Ian became more and more excited himself. My God, I thought, a real librarian, who actually cares about books and understands their importance – what a wonderful surprise. I hadn’t yet met Ian. The next year when I did, it was at the Landons’ dinner table and I could see instantly that he was indeed that wonderful rarity, a real librarian, who was a real bookman. And to compound my pleasure at meeting him, he had known one of my youthful intellectual heroes, Colin Wilson, when they were both young and Wilson was writing The Outsider in the reading room of the British Museum.

We left it that he would have Richard call me as soon as he returned. And the next morning, the day of the sale, Richard did call. I explained the situation to him and said we couldn’t count on others making the same mistake that Waddington’s staff had. “What do you think it will go for?” Richard asked.

“I think it should go for $10,000-$12,000,” I said.

“OK,” he said, “I’ll go that high.”

A pause. I knew I had to say more.

“Listen, Richard, if it goes for $12,000 or less, it’s yours. But I have to tell you, if it goes higher I’m going to go on for myself. I want that book.”

Another pause. “What do you think it’s worth, Dave?”

“I think it’s a $30,000 to $35,000 book,” I replied. “And I think I can sell it for that pretty easily. And I’m going to buy it, if you don’t.”

A longer pause.

“Okay, Dave. I don’t have any money” (meaning his budget was exhausted); “Just buy the book. I’ll get the money somehow.”

I had an unlimited bid, every dealer’s dream. This is what can happen when a system of trust exists between two knowledgeable people, a trust which has developed over many years.

An unlimited bid – almost unheard of. An unlimited bid contains unlimited power in its essence, a wonderful feeling. Of course, I didn’t really have an unlimited bid, as both Landon and I tacitly understood. He was trusting my professional expertise. If some unknown fool had crazy ambitions I was expected to realize that and desist if necessary. Still, up to $25,000 or so, I was free to act. We had both understood this without any need to state it.

When I entered the saleroom that night it was full. I surveyed the crowd, noting several western dealers whom I knew would covet it too, and, of course, the entire eastern trade was there, including the one I saw as my real competition, Temple. I felt an almost benign affection for the lot of them. Poor guys, I thought magnanimously. Their dreams of glory, so soon to be shattered. So sad.

I looked, as I always do, for a spot where I could observe my presumed probable competitors without being seen myself. I sat two rows back and on the other side from Temple and the two most dangerous western dealers who were also plainly in view – including their hands, which you need to monitor most, since they not only bid, but give off the most effective indication of the buyer’s intentions.

The Service came up very early. Ron McLean, a very astute man, and as I said earlier, the best auctioneer I’ve ever encountered (his son Duncan is not far behind him), announced the lot number, adding, in a manner he often adopted – where he pretended to be dumb – that someone had told him that the next item might be unique.

“What do I know?” he asked with a shrug. “It’s estimated at $100 – $200,” he said slyly, “so in case that unique stuff is true, I guess I’ll start at $200. Do I have $200?” He knew very well what he knew and I’m sure he expected exactly what happened, to happen.

The room erupted, arms in the air everywhere, McLean pulling in bids as fast as he could call them, the place chaos. I didn’t bid; I watched. Sure enough, the West was bidding frantically. Then Temple raised his hand and kept it up imperiously, the gesture presumably intended to tell all of us that it was futile to thwart him, but telling me that he had indeed obtained money, a loan, or a partner, or both. The bidding died down in the $3,000 to $4,000 range – as always, an indicator of lack of imagination. I entered at around $4,000. There was only Temple, his arm still pompously in the air, and a couple of others. By $5,000 it was just me and Temple. He couldn’t see whom he was bidding against, but at $7,000 he started to get nervous – this wasn’t going the way he’d planned. At $8,000 he started lowering his arm, then it went up again, then down, then up again – but each time more hesitantly on the up part. McLean watched us both intently, back and forth, a small smile on his face, continuing now in $500 increments.

Down came Temple’s arm, a look of intense frustration on his face; a pause, up again, one more try, the hope born of desperation. I bid instantly every time, hammering it home. Finally at $10,000 Temple was at his limit and showed it. After a few seconds he made his last desperate move, one more bid, hoping his opponent’s level was also $10,000. I raised my pencil one last time and Temple slumped in his seat, defeated. It was mine at $11,000!

There was silence for a moment and then the entire room erupted in loud applause. I had always believed such applause at an auction to be vulgar and stupid. Imagine cheering just because some fool spends a lot of money? Crazy, I’d always believed.

But curiously this time I did finally see the sense in that just acknowledgement of the victor’s superiority.

In this case it clearly wasn’t the money spent they were applauding; it was my cleverness and courage they were celebrating. I positively basked in it. Then Ron McLean joined the game. A born actor, as are all great auctioneers and great salesmen of all sorts, he knew how to play a crowd. He knew how to turn any result to his advantage, to create a feeling that anyone could do it.

“That’s David Mason who bought that,” he announced. “I can remember when he would come in here as a kid to buy a wall full of books for $10 or $20 dollars. Who would have thought then that he’d be spending $11,000 for a single book today?”

Ron was still playing the room. He was telling them all that they too could be applauded. You too can be world-famous here tonight, all you have to do is stick your arm up and keep it up and we will cheer for you, too.

And so, the University of Toronto got a unique copy of the most famous book of poetry ever published in Canada. But I got the glory – and this story.

I am a feminist . . . I also feel that sex and pornography is really powerful for the female. Even if she has eight dicks on her face, she’s still the queen of those eight dicks . . . It’s hard for me to say that porn is degrading to women, because the women are the most desirable and beautiful and attractive people in the porn . . . .

Lindsay is confused.

To Lindsay, pornography is concerned with the desirability of women. On the surface, it appears to be. But to pornography’s main audience, its male audience, the subtext is the desirability of men, and specifically, of the penis. Mainstream pornography is penis worship. The woman in the video is only queen of anything until her clothes come off; thereafter, her role is to worship those eight dicks, avidly, and to make hungry, animal noises while doing so. As desirable as they may seem, women in porn are numerous, and interchangeable, a dime a dozen.

But Lindsay believes what she wants to believe. That’s how porn works.

The times, they are a-changing: in 1963, Hugh Hefner was charged with “publishing and distributing an obscene magazine,” and today, the same magazine struggles to stay afloat, chiefly because it’s too tame. Hardcore pornography has entered the mainstream. The past 20 years has seen a tenfold growth in the production of porn movies, with over 13,000 produced in 2005 – more than even the most enthusiastic aficionado could watch in a year, even by diligent multitasking. Traci Lords, underaged porn queen of the 1980s, took a role on Melrose Place. Sasha Grey, reigning porn queen, starred in a legitimate movie, The Girlfriend Experience. Porn has become a feature of the cultural landscape, broadly accepted if not universally welcomed. And there’s no sign of it going away.

Yet the Canadian novel, with rare exceptions, behaves as if pornography doesn’t exist. Not that CanLit needs delicately rendered scenes of men masturbating to Young and Tight, in the best Anne Michaels soft focus. (Although that does raise endless parodic possibilities – writing contest, anyone?) But how does such a prominent feature of contemporary culture escape literary notice?

Perhaps, as accepted as porn now is, we’re still reluctant to admit actually knowing anything about it; if you can name two porn stars, not including Jenna Jameson, you might be taking it too seriously. Or perhaps we’re just chicken. You risk becoming too edgy for the book club. And if you’re a man, you risk getting it all wrong. The last thing you can trust is your instinct; this topic is a minefield. Everywhere you turn, you risk tripping over a high-explosive cliché, or at the very least, the accusation that you’re oblivious to the extent of your patriarchal entitlement.

Besides, your mom might read it.

Your best option, therefore, is to write historical fiction. No one will complain that you’ve got Fort William, circa 1926, all wrong. And if anyone does, you can rest assured that nobody will be listening, except for the readership of the magazine formerly known, for reasons unique to our time, as The Beaver.

How can a writer, in particular, a male writer, approach a character who works in porn? Sex-positive feminists insist on viewing women in porn as happy, well-adjusted people who entered the porn business of their own free will – in short, as happy hookers. Anti-pornography campaigners portray the same women as messed-up girls who sign up on the promise of good money, only to find themselves coerced into increasingly degrading acts. They are victims.

Michelle Sinclair, Wildworks productions

Who are we to believe? We could ask a pornstar. Consider Belladonna (Michelle Sinclair), who appeared on ABC’s Primetime Live in 2003. Although Primetime portrayed Sinclair as a fresh-faced girl-next-door – which at some point, she undoubtedly was – she left home at 15 and worked in a variety of retail jobs (most proudly, she says, as a Subway “sandwich artist”) before becoming a stripper, and then moving into porn. In her first scene, at age 18, she was pressured into anal sex:

I think I was just so, like, wow, I’m gonna be famous . . . and I’m like, well, I’ve never even done anal sex in my entire life, never, never even thought of it . . . it was painful, you know . . . I didn’t know any better, you know, I didn’t know that I couldn’t get work again if I didn’t do that.

Within a year, she had contracted chlamydia, started using drugs, and had thoughts of suicide – but the money kept her going. She kept resolving to quit the business, and then going back to it. During the interview, Sinclair smiles continually, until Diane Sawyer asks her why. Then, without warning, she breaks down:

[I smile] because I like to hide my, everything, you know . . . Now I’m gonna cry . . . I just, I like to hide my real emotions because I want everyone to see how happy I am. But inside, really, I’m not happy. I don’t like myself at all.

Sinclair later complained of Primetime’s manipulative editing, and said her many positive statements about porn were excised. Her fans complain that Diane Sawyer manipulated poor, naive 18-year-old Belladonna into crying on camera, forgetting that poor, naive 18-year-old Michelle Sinclair is supposed to be capable of entering, fully informed, into all her performance contracts.

Sinclair, now a producer and director, offered these insights on her fulfilling work in a recent segment on Adult Video News:

To me it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, doesn’t matter how extreme it is or how soft it is . . . it’s a great feeling to feel like, you know, you’re not just fucking, you’re actually making a difference, you know, people are getting more confident in their sexuality because of you.

They say public service is our highest calling.

Active performers present the sex-positive position; some former performers take the opposite view. So perhaps we oughtn’t to ask the pornstar, after all. Porn movies are, in the end, movies: pure illusion. You can pretty much believe anything you want to. Which puts us right back to square one.

No writer can be blamed for steering clear of these risks. Mob rule on the Internet quickly forces all parties into opposing camps and lowers the tone of debate to a level just below that of the average schoolyard. Everyone has to wear a label. Liberal feminists risk being caricatured as old-school anti-porn crusaders and allies of the Christian right; in the other corner, sex-positive feminism becomes pro-sex, and then, pro-porn. You must either be in favour of all pornography, regardless of its content – hey, somebody enjoys it, and who are we to judge? – or be a zealot who hates sex. There is no room for nuance.

Violet Blue, a self-described “sex-positive pundit,” offers this refutation of Feminists Against Pornography in a video posted at a pro-porn website, “Our Porn, Ourselves”:

According to anti-porn pundits, pornographic imagery is such a powerful mind-control weapon that it could make Gandhi into a serial killer. That is because the people that make porn are rocket scientists . . . the people who use pornography are creepy guys who smell really bad and can’t have a real relationship, and watching pornography makes them into brain-chemical drug addicts, wife-beaters, and baby rapers . . . How to label the anti-porn evangelists can be tricky. Some people call them Christians, most people call them douchebags, but a loud and very vocal, but small, minority call themselves feminists.

The goal, according to Violet Blue, is “a world where we can all be grownups about our sexuality.” Apparently, being a grownup in other respects is not on her agenda.

Her favourite punching bag is Gail Dines, a self-described anti-pornography feminist. Dines is a professor of sociology and womens’ studies at Wheelock College, and the author of Pornified: How Porn has Hijacked Our Sexuality. Dines, speaking to an anti-pornography conference in 2007, saw porn everywhere:

Everywhere we go, we are bombarded with the droppings of the pornography industry. Our lives are overwhelmed by images that scream misogyny. Turn on the TV, surf the Internet, flick through a magazine, pass a billboard, and you are visually assaulted by images that encode male visual entitlement to technologically effected female bodies. And then, as if this isn’t bad enough, we are told that these images represent our sexual freedom, and to be angry or enraged is clear evidence that we are anti-sex, prudish, and hopelessly old-fashioned. To this, I answer that our rage is clear evidence of our refusal to be colonized and commodified by corporate patriarchal ideology . . . .

This is the quality of our discourse at the dawn of this brave new century.

In his recent book Reality Hunger, David Shields attacks the conventions of character and of linear narrative, saying “I find it very nearly impossible to read a contemporary novel . . . since it’s not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now.” It’s not clear to me, on the other hand, that being alive now differs significantly from being alive at any other time, save for the degradation of our discourse into diametrically opposed snark bites. If the conventional novel is failing, it is not because of the conventions of character or of linear narrative; it is because the conventional novel insists on being set in 1840s Saskatchewan, or on following abstract lines of inquiry into the significance of place, or on any number of other tricks by which it can avoid the inherent risks of being alive right now.

Even writers who court controversy generally avoid the here and now, and it’s not hard to see why. Nobody can say that The Handmaid’s Tale “got it wrong.” No one can claim to have interviewed dozens of handmaids, and found that they’re all happy and proud of their work. Imagine, on the other hand, if Margaret Atwood was to write a novel about strippers working in present-day Montreal. The controversy would not be about the novel itself, but about whether Atwood got it right.

Witness the mixed reaction to Russell Smith’s Girl Crazy, much of which swirls around gender. Chandler Levack, writing for Eye Weekly, asks, “Male members of Pop Fiction – did you relate to Justin’s sexual obsessions? Is this how guys really are?”

Fiction isn’t about guys and girls, or any other convenient category by which we can divide the population into large groups, except in the minds of people who can’t actually read. Fiction, unlike political rhetoric, is never about the general case. It deals in specifics. A work of fiction is never “about pornography”; it is about its own story, carried by its own internal logic and adhering to its own internal rules. The story may depart from reality in any number of ways, but we can only say the writer got it wrong if the work fails as fiction. And fiction’s sole obligation, beyond being interesting, is that it be accurately observed and true to its own rules. Fiction isn’t about how guys are; it’s about how one guy is.

Mordecai Richler said that a fiction writer’s job was to be an honest witness to his time and place. The fiction writer’s job is not to decide if porn performers are victimized or empowered. An observer need not reach conclusions. In fact, he probably shouldn’t, because conclusions inevitably deny the contradictions, the nuances and the complications that distinguish real worlds from invented ones. Nothing is so sterile as an unambiguous story. Nothing is so obviously fabricated. It is artifice, without the art.

Chandler Levack fretting over how guys are, Violet Blue tapping out another blog post, Gail Dines preaching to the choir at an anti-pornography conference: none of these people inhabit the real world. They live in worlds of their own invention, worlds constructed of ideals and desire, simplified worlds defined by comforting ideologies. To be alive right now is to be muffled, insulated, comfortably numbed by an information medium, the Internet, that allows us to select only the news we want to believe. The job of fiction is not to show us what it feels like to be alive right now; we are already here, and we know what that feels like. The job of fiction is to be the axe for the frozen sea within us, to disturb and unsettle us, to open us to the full breadth of reality. In an age where our public discourse has devolved to schoolyard levels, only fiction can do that. More of it should.

She was a doctor. We were acquaintances outside of professional matters, though she’d recently written up a prescription for me, something topical for a bothersome rash she assured me was nothing serious – “stress related,” she’d said. Like all small towns, the place was cliquey as hell, and I was, through a combination of apathy and good manners, successfully straddling most of the cliques. It was the night of the 2004 election south of the border, everyone praying Bush wouldn’t win a second term and a small group of us – doctors, teachers, university graduates – gathered at the young doctor’s house to watch the results come in. At some point later in the evening I found myself sitting on the floor of the living room, looking at the walls festooned with driftwood, and listening to seven or eight people take turns talking about all the books they didn’t have time to read.

Need I mention I was the only man in the group? The other males in the house stayed downstairs, depressed, mutely watching Wolf Blitzer and James Carville talk about exit polls.

I’m not really sure why I ended up in that club or why I stayed, attending a number of monthly meetings, at least nine or ten. Like the misguided idiot I was, I think I must have regarded it as an extension of my work at the school, part of my ongoing mission to convert people to the aesthetic pleasures of literature, to singlehandedly save serious reading from the Canticle for Leibowitz future I saw headed our way. Or maybe it was more to do with having some opportunity to discuss books and art in a town whose cultural condition is, I suspect, a harbinger of the near future: no bookstores, no art galleries, no concert hall, any artistic-minded individuals no doubt satisfying their interest through the isolating wonder of the Internet.

There did exist a public library, stuck between the Robyn’s Donuts and Red’s Hardware. However, its staff possessed an alarming attitude towards serious literature. Presumably desperate for cash, they’d installed a wooden table in their tiny lobby, a sheet of paper taped above it indicating all the books on it were for sale, at prices guaranteeing fast business. There was the usual junk: old magazines, defaced kids’ books, single encyclopaedia volumes, and then I was amazed to discover, tucked away at the back of the table, a small assortment of excellent fiction titles. That first visit I bought old copies of Winesburg, Ohio and Men Without Women and left with a sly grin on my face, feeling I’d caught some rare good luck. In the weeks to follow I was thrilled to pick up like-new editions of Richard Yates, Norman Mailer, and Robert Stone for next to nothing, but then I soon started feeling a bit guilty. Were these mistakes or misunderstandings of some kind? Clerical errors, perhaps?

The day I found on the bargain table a near-mint edition of John Cheever’s Collected Stories, I asked to speak to the librarian, an impassive woman with white hair and a cross hanging from her neck the size of a hood ornament. As she listened to my concerns she regarded me with cold lizard eyes.

“If no one has checked the book out in over two years, then it is evaluated and considered for removal.”
“But this is one of the essential books of American fiction of the last fifty years.”
“New books come in every week.”
“Few as important as this one, I can assure you.”
“There are procedures in place. I am a trained librarian.”
“But the whole point of a library is to keep important books available, even if they’re not popular.”
“We are dealing with a storage crisis.”

She did have the Cheever volume put back on the shelf, but that didn’t stop the current of outstanding titles from washing up on the bargain table. I figured I’d done my duty and over the next few months helped myself to hardcovers of Leon Rooke, William Gass, Anthony Powell, and Thomas Berger. And wondered how many other libraries were doing the same thing.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007

The first book officially chosen by me for the club was Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. I knew it was a bad idea the moment everyone agreed to read it. I suspect the group opted for the novel in part due to my evident enthusiasm for it, but also because, out of the several titles I’d mentioned, it was the one written by a woman.

I felt terrible. I had no doubt everyone would hate the book and I’d be defeated in my attempts to articulate why I considered O’Connor one of the great writers of the 20th century. What had I been thinking? To go from Maeve Binchy and Amy Tan to Wise Blood was surely a leap too far. In the days leading up to the meeting, whenever I saw another member of the club around town, leaving the grocery store or crossing the parking lot to pick up their mail, I felt the urge to run up and drop my knees into the cold slush before them and beg forgiveness.

“It’s all a stupid mistake!” I wanted to shout. “I don’t know what I was thinking!”

At the meeting, I was at a complete loss to explain my ardent love of O’Connor’s charged sentences, her faultless timing, her cutting humour, her wonderfully weird and wicked characters. But instead of illuminating these things for the group, I behaved like a penitent monk while most offered comments of muted, shoulder-shrugging approval. A few expressed impatience with the characters’ inscrutable motivations and some were disturbed by its violence, but then one member, an awkward young woman who spoke in a raspy voice and was generally not given to lengthy responses, left us all speechless with a Catholic-inspired analysis which uncovered levels of theological coherence largely undetected by this casually Protestant reader. I stared, for a moment wanting to cross the room and embrace her. Yet despite what was a reasonably successful meeting, I continued making apologetic noises for the rest of the evening. I still found it impossible not to think of Wise Blood as a bad idea, still couldn’t shake the sense that something was wrong and it was my fault.

Vintage, 2000

My last suggestion adopted by the club was a peace offering: Kent Haruf’s Plainsong. It’s that rare thing, a serious contemporary novel with an uplifting ending, simple yet moving, sentimental yet convincing: in other words, a safe choice. (I like the book quite a bit and try to forget that Haruf wrote an absolutely awful sequel titled Eventide that manages to stumble into all the clichés and sentimental pitfalls he somehow avoided with Plainsong.) The discussion of the book was straightforward and everyone liked it and I felt relieved.

The obvious questions: why were “peace offerings” and “safe choices” necessary? Why so many apologies?

Despite people’s assurances to the contrary and their stated desire not to have it be an all-female enterprise, I could never shake the feeling that I was an intruder, an interloper, the one that shouldn’t be there. And not just because I wasn’t female.

I’m confident in stating that, among the small circle of people who know me well, I am not known for my temper. While there exist things which, if I dwell on them, can certainly rouse anger in my heart, I am rarely explosive. But with each passing meeting, I have little doubt my fellow book club members were asking themselves questions like: Doesn’t he like anything? What is bothering him? Why can’t he ever just say something nice?

Because, the truth was, I couldn’t. Even when I tried to restrain myself, I couldn’t stop being fiercely critical. When it was my turn to talk, after six or seven women in a row had discussed in soft-spoken, conciliatory tones their overall receptiveness to the book in question, I would be the one loudly pointing out the lapses and flaws, the implausible situations or the sentimental cop-outs, as if each were a personal insult, and go on to deliver something akin to a physical assault, a severe battering, right in that young doctor’s living room. Snow Falling On Cedars, The Poisonwood Bible, Blindness, Life of Pi – they all got hurled to the floor and had the living shit kicked out of them. And while I don’t regret my being the harshly judgemental one in terms of the books themselves – each of them, I would insist, got exactly what they deserved – I was aware, even while I was holding The Kite Runner up by the throat, the better to viciously pound it with my critical clouts, that this likely was not the type of discussion my fellow club members were looking for.

One of the things irritating me, spurring me on, was the hushed, stiff atmosphere fostered by all those polite, smiling, agreeable women, drinking tea and patiently listening to one another, speaking in such thoughtful and reverent tones about books that, in this man’s opinion, deserved anything but such respectful treatment. Their piousness. Their facial expressions of great seriousness and gravity. Their measured and meditative thoughts. The silences as we sat and, together, contemplated the book, one of us breathing a bit harder than the rest.

Looking back, I feel for my fellow club members; putting up with me could not have been easy.

But the real reason for my anger was less a masculine desire to challenge feminine mores of gracious, inclusive, non-judgemental fellowship. I realize now that my feelings of exclusion within the group, the sense that my thoughts and responses to literature could find little room there, mirrored my larger sense of being an outsider within my own culture. At the high school, I found it increasingly difficult to relate to my bored, apathetic students, though I realize now that they were exhibiting the attitudes of the prevailing ethos (a non-ethos, really, but we’ll let that go). They viewed me, with my genuine enthusiasm for reading and literature, as something odd, an eccentric, while I took for granted that I was representing the cultural norm and the academic standard they would be asked to conform to. Not true. They were right and I was wrong. And I was resisting this fact, a fact reinforced by my isolation in the book club. It wasn’t just that I was a man who loves books and reading. It was that I couldn’t make the shift and start putting my masculinity into my back pocket, so to speak, where it wouldn’t bother anyone. We live in a culture which can no longer integrate masculinity and intellectual, artistic pursuit. And to this day, this makes me angry.

The tenor of our literary scene is such that women can dismiss valid literary debates as “penisy,” and this is viewed as a legitimate comment. Women, despite their generous representation in all aspects of writing and publishing, still play the victim card, and men are expected to nod respectfully and sympathize. Meanwhile, the idea that men (specifically straight, white men of course) are non-reading, non-thinking, useless clods has become cemented in the popular culture. I imagine few now could take seriously a short story set in the present where two typical, heterosexual young men are hanging out, having a few drinks, and discussing, in addition to baseball and the perils of marriage, what books they’re reading and which is the better author, Cormac McCarthy or Pete Dexter. Hemingway wrote such a story, “The Three Day Blow,” back in 1925, the authors in question Chesterton and Walpole. Nick’s idle question to Bill in the story, “What are you reading?”, sounds more and more like one uttered in another time. Today, men don’t read; they watch television and laugh at all the shows and commercials that insult them.

And, speaking for a moment as the high school teacher that I was, this has much to do with why boys are, as the statistics tell us and as I saw firsthand, not faring as well as girls at every level of education. The vast majority of teachers are women, and the prevailing ethos within schools and classrooms is not competitive, critical or even subject-centered. Its focus is instead on inclusion, cooperation and pleasant experiences. Boys, when not fused to televisions, computers, cellphones, iPods or X-Boxes, are bored out of their freaking minds. Yet they understand perfectly well what’s expected of them and naturally learn to follow the path of least resistance, gliding through the system while expending as little effort as possible. Rarely challenged, rarely inspired, rarely moved or thrilled by anything that happens inside a classroom, they simply wait to collect that all-important piece of paper, which will lead to other pieces of paper, so they can start making money. Or so my students told me.

My youth and my attitude towards school were vastly different, because my childhood was different. As a boy, I was an incessant reader. Our home didn’t have cable television yet (our acquisition of it when I was twelve or thirteen did affect my reading habits) and when I wasn’t outside doing things like climbing trees, building forts, performing dangerous stunts with my bicycle, or pretending to be a soldier, pirate, or cowboy, I was reading. Not surprisingly, I liked reading stories about soldiers, pirates, and cowboys. Comic books were of course choice number one, but when I was as young as nine I was reading westerns by Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey. I wasn’t much older when I was devouring the tales of Conan, Tarzan, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I thought nothing of reading the novelizations of the movies I enjoyed as a boy, Star Wars, Rocky, James Bond (though I quickly realized Ian Fleming’s novels, which I admittedly found somewhat difficult, bore almost no resemblance to the films). I wasn’t intimidated by page numbers and I never questioned the idea that the subject matter that interested me – adventure, war, cowboys, etc., was somehow unliterary. Both of my parents were university graduates and I grew up in a house full of books, but I never thought the type I enjoyed were strictly for boys. I was aware that adults read Louis L’Amour and Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Executioner series with its flashy covers featuring exploding cars and huge rifles, while off-limits to me since I was too young, struck me as something to look forward to.

I never thought of reading as boring. I never thought of it as work, or something I was forced to do. Reading was often thrilling, moving, exhilarating, even intoxicating, in its own right. As I got older, I never disassociated the jolt I got from exciting books from the similar thrill given me by my favourite movies or rock albums or watching, say, a great boxing match or the seventh game of the Stanley Cup playoffs. In other words, reading, for me, has always been fun. And if we’re serious about books regaining any of the ground they’ve lost to movies, television, video games and the Internet, we’ve got to make reading fun again.

It’s not that men and boys don’t like to read. It’s that over the course of the last twenty years or more, we’ve made reading uninteresting for men, successfully cleansing the publishing world of excitement and putting at the center of our literature self-important novels wrestling with big, boring ideas in prose that’s either bloodless, or over-wrought, pseudo-poetic blather. We’ve stopped paying attention to the fact there’s a type of fiction that men respond to, and it isn’t restricted to genre categories, to Robert E. Howard and Elmore Leonard, but to books with energy and action; sharp prose that crackles with life and velocity; deft characterization; wicked humour; sex, conflict, suspense, and, yes, violence.

Men and women are different. They have different tastes and interests. This was clarified for me when speaking with a young woman who had recently read The Odyssey. What did she think of it? She sighed. “All that sword brandishing. It wore me down. I was bored.”

Following my stretch as the lone male in a women’s book club, I wondered if there weren’t book clubs for men, and it didn’t take much investigating to find out the beast actually exists. A search on the Internet found several such clubs, but in most cases the books were not as important as the socializing, and in others the reading lists were disappointingly predictable. The same tired names and titles: Toni Morrison, Wally Lamb, Jane Urquhart, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

Here’s the men’s book club that I want to be in. It would take itself seriously and put the books above everything else. The men attending would understand there’s nothing emasculating about art and literature, intellect and imagination. Everyone present would take for granted these are exciting pursuits for men; the question would never merit attention. The gatherings would occur in someone’s den or basement, somewhere one didn’t need to worry about the furniture, where one might find a set of weights or a chin-up bar. There would be strong drink. There would be impassioned readings of choice passages and exceptionally well-crafted paragraphs. There would be showdowns: Barry Hannah vs. Clark Blaise, Thom Jones vs. James Jones, Mark Anthony Jarman vs. Denis Johnson, Philip Roth vs. Richard Ford. And there would be room for anger and intensity, for raised voices and arguments and enthusiasm. The academics and the theorists and the feminists have bled the life out of fiction for some, but the men in my club have kicked the wallflowers and weak-willed ones, not to mention the humourless ideologues, out the door. And we’re too busy enjoying ourselves to care what those who disapprove of us think.

And women are welcome, naturally, but only in the guises of Eudora Welty, Caroline Adderson, Ellen Gilchrist, Alice Munro, Amy Hempel, Beryl Bainbridge, Terry Griggs, and the late, great Flannery O’Connor. At least for the time being.

Grove Press, 2010

In her July 15, 2009 column, National Post columnist Barbara Kay addresses her frustration with “Giller-endorsed but virtually unreadable CanLit,” singling out Lisa Moore’s February as an example. Kay’s criticism, somewhat undermined by her not having read February, takes the novel to task for not being Barometer Rising.

It is possible that Kay hadn’t read Barometer Rising either, or at least not lately, forgetting that Hugh MacLennan’s novel is also a love story set against tragedy, that both books “deflect attention from the tragedy to hover solicitously over a surrogate victim.” Barometer Rising is also a story about a woman, from whom February’s Helen is not such a departure.

I point out this discrepancy to establish that Kay’s literary criticism should be paid little mind. Still, her column is remarkable for its most unsubtle application of Woolf’s “difference of value.” The problem with February, according to Barbara Kay, is that Lisa Moore puts the 1982 Ocean Ranger disaster (in which an oil rig sank, killing all 84 crew members on board) in the background, focusing instead on the disaster’s aftermath and its effect on one woman who lost her husband.

This is an important book, Kay assumes, because it deals with oil, and storms, and shipwrecks. This is an insignificant book because it deals with women in a drawing room.

Barbara Kay’s assessment of February is only worth considering because it is not an anomaly. Her ideas share something in common with the legitimate criticism of Alex Good, who had actually read the book, and reviewed it three weeks previously in the Toronto Star.

Good writes that February “seems held together with a kind of teary hormonal paste.” The narrative is fixed to the female body – Good citing fetal kicks, leaky nipples, fecundity, fertility, and streaming orgasms. February’s, he reports, “is a deeply maternal universe,” and then he rearticulates his thematic concern as aesthetic:

There is no sense of evil, aside from nature’s rage in the sinking of the oil rig, and hence no conflict. The narrative doesn’t progress so much as gestate, rolling around through a series of flashbacks until the hatching and matching at the end.

The one scene Good uses to show “flashes of how interesting a writer Moore can be” is, notably, from the perspective of Helen’s son. As a reader, Good finds Moore’s maternal universe offering little of appeal.

The difference of value persists, however, not just in elevating one book over another, but in how one book is valued from separate points of view. It doesn’t help the argument for February that while on the one side critics dryly malign its emphasis on female emotions and its lack of explosions (orgasms notwithstanding), everybody else is hysterical.

“It makes me cry whenever there’s a conversation about it,” says Moore herself of the Ocean Ranger disaster, in a National Post profile by Katherine Laidlaw. It’s this profile that set Barbara Kay off, that Moore used her own experiences of grief as a touchstone to understanding her main character. “Moore didn’t know any of the 84 men who died when the Ocean Ranger oil rig went down,” Laidlaw writes, “. . . but that doesn’t stop her from crying about it.”

Caroline Adderson is crying too, in her Globe and Mail review: “I teared up on pages 157, 198, 206, 253, 261 and wept from page 291 pretty much straight through to page 300.” Her review is too effusive in both praise and tears, but at least Adderson considers February itself, beyond its failure to be another book. Applying close reading to a tiny scene about the removal of a tissue from its packet, she suggests the narrative is doing more than just rolling around:

The gesture is broken down into its constituent parts. The repeating use of “and” combined with the prose-poem-like structure of each short chapter, often starting with a present time moment, then jumping from memory to memory, lulls us and draws us in.

“Women’s literary fiction” is often distinct from literary fiction in general, either because it reads as such (with the squirting nipples, breaking water and placenta on a plate – if a man had written this book it would be surprising), or because it’s come into the world via a woman’s pen and is therefore received differently from literary fiction in general (which is to say, men won’t read it). Sometimes both of these things are true, sometimes one is, and sometimes neither.

In her essay “Shakespeare’s Daughters,” Rachel Cusk writes, “it seems to me that ‘women’s writing’ by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.” Still, it would be convenient for the purposes of some if there were no such thing as women’s writing. But it would be a fallacy to pretend that all fiction is universal; worse, to demand universality as a quality standard is to say that drawing-room women are insignificant, that sisters, wives and daughters do not matter.

Because for many readers, sisters, wives and daughter don’t matter, or at least their stories don’t. Or their stories do, unless these are stories about squirting nipples, breaking waters, or placentas on a plate. And I can’t help but wonder where the onus lies in the failure of women’s writing to achieve universality – what is it that lets us down, the stories or their readers?

In his review of February, Good addresses the notion of women’s fiction, how “men are cordially not invited to examine its mysteries.” But who is doing the uninviting? Apart from the women in his life who’ve advised him to “stay away” from Cat’s Eye, of course, but I suspect these women meant something different. I suspect that what they actually meant was, “Don’t even bother. You’re not going to like it. You’ll only just tell us it’s all held together with ‘teary hormonal paste.’”

“But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of transparencies laid on top of one another. You don’t look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing ever goes away.” —Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

Barbara Kay finally read February, and reported back that it was lacking in “prole-friendly dialogue, action, and, above all, plot.” If such things are what you demand from your books, then you’re probably not going to like women’s fiction. Alex Good’s point that February has less progression than gestation is probably true of most women’s fiction, though this, of course, is not the case for every book. It’s impossible to pin down what women’s fiction looks like, but it’s bound to be as distinct from men’s as that drawing room is from a battlefield.

The Cat’s Eye passage comes close to defining a structure for it, however. If “narrative” can be substituted for “time” the structure serves both for February and for Cat’s Eye, which Good cites as the quintessential women’s novel. The passage also defines the structure of grief, as expressed in February. Moore’s prose appears plodding, and rolling, taking 40 pages to contain a single moment (Helen watching orange sparks fly as a skate blade is sharpened), because that single moment contains the past and even the future. Because nothing ever goes away.

Instead of progressing, February’s narrative accumulates, sentences and clauses linked by a repetitive “and.” Other sentences are constructed as lists, to similar effect. Every moment is distinct from the others, belonging to itself, this one and this one and this one, which is the way that Helen, in her grief, manages to stay upright and breathing.

Such momentum, however stilted, charts the plot that lies at the heart of this book. Which, incidentally, is not the present day love story most critics scoffed at – Good refers to “the stuff of commercial fiction”; Nathan Whitlock’s CNQ review is titled “Highbrow Harlequin”; Emily Donaldson calls February an “overly sentimental love story” in Quill & Quire. Each of them overlooking the real plot implicit in a line like, “All of the families of the drowned men were waiting for the settlement, because how do you feed four kids and pay Newfoundland Light and Power?” Forget about Helen getting her groove back; the premise of a heartbroken widow left alone to raise four children is positively dripping with plot (direction onward, with one foot in front of the other) and conflict (she can’t go on vs. she’ll go on).

Of course, this plot is not straightforward, just as time is not a line. In a CBC interview about her first novel Alligator, Moore explained, “I think that a real engagement with a book means that the reader has to chase after the story,” and the reader has the same task before him with February. Looking down through Moore’s narrative, the plot is present, to be teased out from the whirlpool of churning cycles and repetition, but it’s a story as harrowing as a shipwreck, and Helen is its hero.

It’s a question of scale, I suppose. There are sock-matching heroics, and there are dead-in-a-shipwreck heroics, though it’s worth noting that only the former has a choice in the matter. It’s also strange that one gets to be a hero by merely being aboard a ship that sinks, but the story of those left behind is “deflection.”

The sock-matcher, however, has an awesome task before her:

Matching socks was an act that looked very much like matching socks. She looked exactly as though she were in the world, engaged in the small work of Here is one sock, now where could that other sock be? And when she was done there would be an actual pile of socks.

An actual pile of socks: it’s a small thing, a moment, but in February these moments are what life is constructed of. They’re entirely significant to a woman with four kids to feed, a household to keep together. A woman whose husband’s death has just rent a hole in her life, and the hole is threatening to engulf her.

The hole left by Cal’s death is as gaping and devastating as the one created the night Helen learns that his body has been found and her living room ceiling comes crashing down. The actual hole serves a purpose beyond the merely symbolic, making clear the practical matter that the falling-down house is now her problem because her husband is dead, and there will be those bills to pay, and socks to match, and always, there will be more socks to match.

In her essay, Rachel Cusk suggests a connection between the pattern of a woman’s daily life, the cycles of her body, and the use of repetition in her fiction: “She can look around her and see that while women’s lives have altered in some respects, in others they have remained much the same.”

And so it seems: the difference of value persists, more than 80 years after A Room of One’s Own. Though February is probably not as good as Caroline Adderson asserts, I must protest that neither is it insignificant for being a woman’s story, or therefore beyond (or beneath) any critic’s scope.

One explanation for feminism’s dissipation in our social discourse and particularly our fiction can be found in the third-wave movement’s varied inclusivity and refusal to set a definition, which is precisely the point of third-wave feminism. Second-wave feminism, the wave of the Pill and women’s lib., was eventually considered too militant and exclusionary: too white, too sex-negative, too academic, too female. Third-wave developed as an all-inclusive feminism, which, according to Jennifer Baumgardner, co-author of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, “is something individual to each feminist.” However, the problem with keeping feminism undefined and mutable is that the stereotypes the second-wavers fought against creep back into public thinking and published fiction, brought back and advanced by women as well as men. When body shots and Girls Gone Wild can be considered not just feminist, but as feminist as Planned Parenthood, sooner or later nothing is feminist, and the same rights women fought for are replaced by the sexism we fought against. In such a climate, few dare to accuse a number of the novels written by Canadian women (February, Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Birth House) of being sexist and promoting negative roles for fear of being called anti-feminist as well.

In CanLit novels, two prominent types of female characters emerged from the pick-and-choose chaos of third-wave feminism: passive girls or girl-like women and past-obsessed (grand)mothers. Almost twenty years ago, while in the midst of earning my Bachelor of Arts at York University in Toronto, I was immersed in the peak of the third-wave, the shaven-headed riot grrrl, hyper-politically-correct feminism that smashed at glass ceilings and held hands during Lilith Fair sing-alongs. Female enrollment at post-secondary schools increased as the birth rate decreased. Then the riot grrrls grew out their hair and reclaimed femininity just as their daughters started wearing thongs to elementary school. My current university campus (Dalhousie) bears little resemblance to the York of yore: sockless ballet flats have replaced army boots and no Chelseas emerge from the sea of iron-haired blondes and hijabs. Today, Canada’s birth rate is higher than it was in 1995 as professional women return home from the jobs their mothers fought for to live the housewife lives their mothers fought against. With fewer women on the frontlines of feminism, with fewer examples of feminist characters in our literature, it’s easier to default back to stereotypical gender roles. The predominance of such characters in our novels is extremely problematic. As Adrienne Rich writes, “If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is renaming.” Our women writers are failing us – failing women – because they have stopped questioning, challenging and conceiving of alternatives. To prevent the loss of our hard-won rights, it is time our literature returns from its vacation from feminism and reclaims the voices it has (hopefully) temporarily lost.

Until as late as the early nineties, to be a woman writer was to be a feminist writer as well. Many famous feminists are also literary writers: Simone de Beauvoir, Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem and, of course, Margaret Atwood. For a woman, putting pen to paper, providing a voice for the voiceless, has often been considered a radical act. Publishing, like everything outside the home, was men’s work; women who wanted to write and publish had to fight to do so: Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and even Beatrix Potter. And if it wasn’t society stifling women writers, it was their brute husbands (Sylvia Plath) or their families. Alice Munro wrote her first stories in her laundry room as the wash ran and her children napped; Margaret Laurence wrote while her children were at school. On snow days, she resented her kids for being home. Alice Walker taught her daughter that “being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery.” For these women, marriage and motherhood were not choices – they were expectations. As Atwood says, “I was writing anyway, I was writing nevertheless, I was writing despite.” That women wrote anything at all is astonishing and inspiring.

Now, thanks to these feminists, women can choose to live whatever lives they want (in this country anyway) and write about any topic they wish, yet, increasingly, women are reverting back to marriage and motherhood (in both life and in fiction), or never emerging from girlhood. Or both. Such is the case with Rebecca Walker, Alice’s daughter, who hasn’t spoken to her mother since she herself became one and her mother disapproved. Rebecca writes that “Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.” But why is it devastating? Why isn’t a PhD or career enough for women? Has feminism “betrayed” women, forcing them into careers when they’d be happier, as Rebecca Walker claims, just being mothers? It’s 2010. Why are women willingly choosing gender roles that already looked antiquated in 1950?

Sophie Kinsella, Dell, 2004

The rise of commercial ChickLit is partially to blame. Bridget Jones’ Diary was published in 1996, coincidentally around the time third-wave feminism was reaching its peak. And though I actually like Bridget Jones’ Diary, mostly because it’s funny and has a plot and sex, unlike a lot of women-authored CanLit, it begat Sex in the City (the book) a year later which eventually spawned the yummy-mommy, shopaholic pink-covered books that have spread like a rash in bookstores across North America and the UK. Titles in the Shopaholic series alone make me shudder: The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic, Shopaholic Ties The Knot, Shopaholic & Sister, Shopaholic & Baby and the forthcoming Mini Shopaholic. Canada, too, has its yummy-mommy shopaholic: Rebecca Eckler, who used her accidental pregnancy and monetarily-enabled motherhood to transform herself from a mostly unknown freelance journalist to successful author by writing under the most nauseatingly-named column in all of Canadian letters: Mommy Blogger. Publishing is an industry, and ChickLit makes money. It’s not surprising, then, that sooner or later, CanLit, even highbrow, Giller-worthy Literature, would become ChickLit-ified. Not surprising, too, when all forms of media, from trashy tabloids to celebrity blogs to our national magazines and newspapers obsess over the insides of women’s uteruses. Is that a baby bump? Is she expecting (in vitro fertilized) twins? Having a baby earns a woman a lot of positive attention. As French writer Corrine Maier, author of No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Children, says, “it’s a way to show that you are happy, that you succeed in life. It proves something. It proves that you are normal, that you do like the others.” As well, babies are used to boost flagging TV ratings and are, according to gossip blogger Elaine Lui, the ultimate whitewash. “Steal someone’s husband, or be a drug addict, then become a mother and you’re redeemed.” And, of course, often the only way a girl can finally be thought of as a woman is by having a baby.

The problem with considering motherhood a woman’s greatest accomplishment is that all of her other accomplishments pale in comparison. That feminists have been trying to convince everyone for years that women can do anything else and (or instead of) be mothers matters little in 2010 and has no bearing on our literature. Nothing else a woman does is as universally applauded as having a baby – not earning a PhD (more women attended a friend’s baby shower than her PhD defence), not becoming a lawyer (most of my lawyer friends are now stay-at-home moms), not even running for president. Just ask Hillary Clinton. While the election of Barack Obama was a milestone for African-American rights, the campaign itself proved that women’s rights are still unimportant. Gloria Steinem writing in The New York Times, observed that while Obama was “seen as unifying . . . his race [Clinton was] seen as divisive by her sex.” Because feminism “is something individual to each feminist,” Feminist A often distrusts or even hates Feminist B. Or, as Margaret Atwood explains, “The fear that dares not speak its name, for some women these days, is the fear of other women. But you aren’t supposed to talk about that: If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. There are many strong voices; there are many kinds of strong voices. Surely there should be room for all. Does it make sense to silence women in the name of Woman? We can’t afford this silencing, or this fear.” I know that in writing this essay I risk being accused of misogyny. But who’s misogynist? To privilege one type of woman over another, as our literature does, also silences specific women (e.g., child-free) in favour of another (e.g., mothers).

As well, the problem with reducing women to breeding stock, to not taking gender issues seriously, is that women’s rights become threatened. States (South Dakota, Mississippi, North Dakota, Nebraska, Utah) are moving once again to make abortion illegal. Our own government refuses to accept the UN’s support for world-wide reproductive rights. And when women’s groups complained, Senator Ruth told women to “shut the fuck up” without any consequence. All these issues would make for an interesting and engaging novel. Instead, women write and read stories about ye-olde pregnancy down on the farm, about widows of husbands lost on yesterday’s seas, about good houses and the good families that inhabit them.

Grove Press, 2010

Complaining about mothers is akin to shaking a baby. Mothers, after all, are sacred – they bore us for nine months and without mothers, well, we wouldn’t be here. But if motherhood is so sacred, why did 75% of Ann Landers’ readers once say “no” when asked whether they would choose to be mothers again? Not many mothers I’ve met love being mothers – they endure, they feel rewarded – but they’ll get extremely angry at the mere suggestion that motherhood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Corrine Maier has been called a “monster.” After Anne Kingston’s article “The Case Against Having Kids” appeared in Maclean’s, the magazine received thousands of often cruel emails and letters accusing Kingston and those who choose to be child-free of being “disgusting,” “selfish,” “lonely,” and “bored,” whose houses are “not safe to send trick-or-treating children . . . on Halloween.” And who can forget the brouhaha generated by Barbara Kay’s honest and accurate description in The National Post of Lisa Moore’s February, a novel which privileges “an artistic, leisured rendering of memory and feeling over prole-friendly dialogue, action and, above all, plot.” February, according to Kay, is yet another example of “the unrelenting self-regard of CanLit, where it’s all about nobly suffering women or feminized men.” Though Steven Galloway and a few mommy bloggers took umbrage with Kay’s comments, Kay was bang on. The problem is not “the impact that feminism has had on the industry” as Stuart Woods said on the Quill and Quire blog, the problem is that February “is so representative of what the Canadian fiction publishing industry – itself highly feminized by comparison to 40 years ago – seems to like, and typical of what wins or is at least nominated for awards here.” Note the difference between Woods’ “feminism” and Kay’s “feminized.” The literature written by women in this country is in no way – and no longer – feminist. It is feminized. And the difference between those two words – and worlds – is vast.

Anansi, 2005

To better understand the difference between feminist and feminized, let’s compare Lisa Moore’s February with her story collection Open. “Melody,” which commences Open, finds a first-person narrator accompanying her friend to an abortion clinic. It is a story about the consequences of making and not making choices – about the character Melody, who does, and the narrator who lets things happen. Compare the passive narrator’s following thoughts: “I will do whatever Brian Fiander wants and if he wants to dump me after . . . he can go right ahead. He seems to go through girls pretty quickly and I want to be gone through” with Melody’s post-abortion words: “Not too bad, she says. She is ashen. Tears from the corner of her eyes to her ears. Sometimes you have to do things, she says.” The story flashes forward to find the now forty-something narrator widowed and regretting her decision to remarry, realizing she’s “never initiated anything in her life.” When Melody arrives to visit, the narrator tells her, “I’m married . . . I’ve messed up, Melody.” And Melody responds, “You’ll just have to do something about it.” Differentiating between active – women who do – and passive – women who have done to them – is what makes “Melody” feminist literature. The feminist movement, in all its waves, has fought to ensure that women have and can make choices. And making choices is also what drives narrative and moves plot. Adrienne Rich says, “for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive.” In making Melody active – and in making the narrator realize she needs to be active – Moore has written a real story with real, fully fleshed-out women characters, has properly transformed reality, which should be the goal of all fiction.

Stories about passive female characters who do not make choices cannot move a plot forward, resulting in the plotless word clouds that often masquerade as fiction in this country. Writers of these ciphers do a disservice to women – reducing them to flat, feminized caricatures. Active = plot = feminist. Passive = no plot = feminized. And February, with its non-existent plot and passive female characters, is feminized, not feminist. The novel is written mostly from the perspective of Helen O’Mara, the brooding outport widow whose husband died when the Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland on Valentine’s Day, 1982. Though the novel takes place in the present, it flashes back regularly. Helen remembers. Helen waits. Helen thinks. A lot. According to one blogged review, Helen’s “thoughts are positively ‘thought-like.’” Indeed, here’s an example of Helen’s apparently scintillating thoughts: “She could not think about the rig because she could not think about it.” What utterly fascinating thought-like thoughts! In fact, Helen’s state throughout the novel can be summed up in its first sentence: “Helen watches as the man touches the blade to the sharpener.” Helen watches. While remembering her husband and waiting for her son. In other words, Helen passively does nothing. It’s the men in Helen’s past and present life who do: her husband drowns, her son impregnates. And the fact that Helen waits and watches her men do – that it’s the men in Helen’s life more than the women that fill her thoughts is problematic. By the fourth paragraph of the novel we learn that Helen is “the mother of one son and three girls . . . .” Note: girls. Not daughters and not, most notably, women, despite the fact that these daughters are adults.

With its emphasis on “womanly knowledge” and “femininity,” on placentas and grieving and remembrance, on mothers and mothering, February certainly seems gynocentric (seriously – someone should concord the novel and count the use of the word “placenta” and “blood”). But the examples I cite above – Helen’s passivity and the novel’s consequent lack of plot, her privileging of her son and dead (and therefore passive) husband over her (barely existing) three daughters, the feminized clichés (“Helen cleans the cupboards. She cleans the fridge. She listens to the radio and scrubs a pot and the yellow of her rubber glove looks weirdly yellow . . . .” “She sews wedding gowns . . . . Her sewing gives her satisfaction”) – February isn’t just unfeminist, it is actually anti-feminist. To write and publish such a novel and create such a character at a time when more women graduate from universities than men sends the message that breeding is more important than education. Take the following scene from February as proof: PhD-candidate Jane’s academic friends throw her a baby shower. Jane is pregnant with John’s baby. John is Helen’s son. Of the women at the shower, Moore writes, “They were all in their mid-thirties and most of them were childless because they’d lost themselves to academic careers.” Note how much this line echoes Rebecca Walker’s claim that women have been devastatingly betrayed into childlessness. Lost themselves? Why not found? As the holder of (almost) four university degrees, two of which are graduate degrees, I most certainly know that education has helped me find myself, not lose. Since writing Open, Moore has forgotten how “to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives” as Rich said. Instead, February celebrates female passivity, shows no alternatives to “mother” or “wife” when such alternatives are innumerable, and in championing passivity and old-fashioned gender roles, Moore, along with the women who champion her, twists feminism into its inverse. No wonder Canada’s Employment Insurance has maternity leave benefits but not graduate school benefits. No wonder Nancy Ruth can tell women to “shut the fuck up” and get away with it. Mainstream CanLit agrees with Senator Ruth.

A problem with such passivity is it creates victims, certainly on the page and quite possibly in life. Passive characters allow themselves to be victims. Victims in CanLit are not new; Margaret Atwood pointed out the proclivity for victim characters in 1972’s Survival. Then she argued that the two primary preoccupations with CanLit were survival and victims. Almost forty years later, despite a greater number of women writing and working in publishing, little has changed. Moore’s Helen O’Mara is a survivor (though an amputated survivor, to paraphrase Atwood, having lost a husband and living most of her life internally); her husband Cal is a victim. But Helen is also a victim because she, as Atwood says, “show[s] a marked preference for the negative”: “Helen has mastered loneliness . . . .” “[She] had died and was dead and was back in the car, a ghost, or something without musculature or bone. Something that could never move again.” Or, as Barbara Kay summarizes Helen, “Me, me, me and my extraordinary capacity for sadness.”

Mothers, in life and in fiction, are often equated with victims because of the sacrifices they feel they must endure. Education, career, sex, creativity, money, environment – all must be sacrificed for the baby, as Helen and Jane do in February, as if women don’t have a choice. The thing is, especially in North America and all over Europe, women do have a choice. In France and Russia, governments have resorted to bribing women to have babies. Italy has the second-lowest birth rate in the Western world: its state incentives aren’t incentive enough to drag women back to the bambinos. Again, this is what feminists fought for. By the time this essay is out, I’ll have just started teaching a third-year university fiction-writing workshop. My students, male and female, will have absorbed plenty of the reverence for Lisa Moore in general and this novel in particular. Why coach women toward publishing and graduate degrees when Canada’s successful women authors literally coach them towards mental suicide? “My brain went out with the placenta,” Moore writes in February. Women continue to erase their identities once they become mothers as if motherhood isn’t just motherhood but, to use Atwood, “a vestige of a vanished order which has managed to persist after its time has passed, like a primitive reptile.” Thus, Helen is doubly a victim for losing her husband and being left behind to care for their children and grandchildren, sacrificing all else in the name of the seemingly saintly but ultimately unhappy, imprisoned state of motherhood.

Harper-Collins, 2006

A CanLit character whose name alone indicates her victimhood is the utterly victimized Baby in Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals. Lullabies isn’t just victim-lit, it’s victim-porn – everything bad that could happen to Baby does: dead mother, drug-addicted, abusive father, homelessness, rape, prostitution, heroin addiction, drug overdose. Though the novel spans Baby’s childhood and adolescence, Baby is in a perpetual state of juvenility – she obsesses over toys and dolls and her not-too-distant past. “I remembered this one time . . .” starts far too many sentences. Baby is absolutely passive – instead of doing, she lets things happen to her. When her father rips up her dolls, instead of getting angry at him, she pities herself: “That doll had been like a miracle to me. It had reminded me that I’d been loved by my mother. Now I was nothing, a real nobody.” She can’t even save herself. At the end of the novel it is Jules, her father, who whisks her away from the city to a cousin in the country. On the bus from Montreal, Baby plays with the “little family of toy mice” Jules has given his teenaged daughter as a gift (even though the gift came with a tag that said “GIRL 5 and Up”) and tells Baby about her mother: “Elle etait seulment une bébé comme toi, mon amour” (she was only a baby like you, my love). Only a baby. Nothing else. The thing is, despite her name, Baby should not be a baby. Baby’s been turning tricks on the streets of Montreal. But O’Neill’s Baby doesn’t get her climactic, grown-up moment like that other famous fictional Baby, Frances “Baby” Houseman. Yes, Dirty Dancing is a Harlequin tale for the big screen, but at the end of the movie, when Johnny finds Baby at her parents’ table during the last dance of the season, recall what Johnny famously says: “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” and Baby steps onto the stage as Frances, Baby no longer. O’Neill’s Baby, however, lets everyone put her in a corner.

In life, of course, a woman with so many disadvantages would find it difficult to save herself and change her situation. But Lullabies is fiction, and as stated, fiction must question, challenge, and conceive of alternatives. Worse than O’Neill’s refusal to question or challenge, or conceive of alternatives is the fact that this book was chosen by the CBC as the book all Canadians should read in 2007. Should all Canadians read such an example of a negative role model? Should all Canadians celebrate the passive, victimized and self-piteous Baby? If, as Atwood claims, “a writer’s job is to tell a society not how it ought to live, but how it does live,” then what is O’Neill telling Canadians about Canadian women? That we don’t grow up, that we are content to be babies or kinderwhores or that it’s okay to be a victim.

Baby isn’t just a baby through her name and (lack of) actions but also through her voice. O’Neill is not the only woman writing in Canada who is content to, as she says, “write in the voice of a child;” there is a long line of women who want to approach the microphones of literary festivals with lollipops in their mouths. Lullabies for Little Criminals, Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness, Ami McKay’s The Birth House and Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise, all suffer from “girl-voice.” Girl-voice is almost always first-person, present tense, child-like (despite the fact that the narrator is often not a child!) and throws around sentence fragments like beads at Mardi Gras. It is the same twee voice used in most YA novels and indeed, girl-voiced novels and short stories are often as simplistic and easy to read as YA (not to bash YA – YA novels almost always have a plot, unlike a lot of so-called adult CanLit). Girl-voice is cutesy and quirky and silly and saccharine, the narrative equivalent of skipping ropes and jellybeans. Girl-voice reduces the importance of such adult topics as rejecting religion, midwifery vs. hospital births, and the death of a parent. In fact, at the outset of Come, Thou Tortoise, I had a hard time believing that the narrator was not 1) a child (she’s not – she has a boyfriend) and 2) developmentally delayed (her voice sounds strikingly similar to, but not as smart as, the autistic teen who narrates The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time). Girl-voiced books are extremely popular precisely because they are simply written and easy to read – their narrators with their infantile names (Baby, Nomi Nickel, Dorrie Rare, Audrey Flowers and her pet tortoise Winnifred – who narrates portions of the novel!) are of little threat to the status quo.

The problem with the rise in popularity in girl-voiced literature is it exacerbates the perpetual adolescence craved by Baby Boomers, Gen Xers and Gen Y. Nowadays, no one wants to grow up; thirty-something women openly refer to themselves as girls, especially on blogs: BritGirl, Grumble Girl, Goofy Girl Blog, That Girl Emily, Clever Girl Goes Blog, The Everywhere Girl, Book Club Girl, Home Girl’s Book Blog. And then there are the book titles. The Girl with the Pearl Earring, The Other Boleyn Girl, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gossip Girl, Twenties Girl, Anthropology of an American Girl, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, Spooky Little Girl, Girl in Translation, and, for some CanCon, All the Anxious Girls on Earth, Dead Girls, The Continuity Girl, and Girl Crazy. A search through the Halifax Public Library’s catalogue for title keywords: “fiction: girl” resulted in 805 entries; title keywords, “fiction: woman” produced 470. Remember The Edible Woman? Remember The Lives of Girls and Women? Looking for The Love of a Good Woman? Probably not. Though third-wave feminists told women to reclaim whichever words and roles they want – from bitch to slut to mother to girl – the problem with a woman calling herself a girl or choosing to write and speak in girl-voice is that it is self-deprecating. She sends the message that what she has to say is immature and not to be taken seriously. She traffics in the stereotypes promoted by romantic movies, glossy magazines and dating manuals (such as The Rules) that tell her that a woman, to be truly attractive (to men, to other women and, importantly, to readers), must be “young and frivolous, almost childlike; fluffy and feminine; passive; gaily content in a world of bedroom and kitchen, sex, babies, and home.” This according to Betty Friedan, who wrote these words in 1960. Fifty years later – fifty years! – has anything changed? Let’s see: women still earn less than men; men, for the most part, even in publishing, still head up companies; and Canada ranks very low for democratic countries in electing women. Perhaps if women stopped being girls – in life and in fiction – perhaps if they finally grew up, these issues could be taken seriously and the wage gap may finally diminish.

I do disagree with Friedan’s problem with women being “gaily content in a world of . . . sex.” If third-wave feminism got anything partially right, it was in encouraging women to reclaim their sexuality. Second-wave feminism gave us the Pill, and that helped delay or eliminate motherhood all together. But second-wavers also worried that women would, in taking the Pill, more easily allow themselves to become men’s sexual objects of desire. Third-wave told women to become their own sexual objects of desire (or each others’). Suddenly pornography maybe wasn’t so bad (especially self-proclaimed, “feminist pornographers” like Tristan Taormino with their female-orgasm-aplenty porn). Then along came the Internet, and porn, for better or for worse, was everywhere. Except, quite notably, in our fiction. Thanks to Web 2.0 sites like YouPorn.com, anyone can go online and watch videos of dozens and dozens of women clearly enjoying sex and having orgasms. Yet, while both men and women enjoy sex in today’s porn, where are the female orgasms in CanLit novels written by women? Women writers, more than men, are still stuck writing two sex-and-women clichès: that sexual activity has negative consequences (think Baby’s drug addiction in Lullabies) or sex is for the sole purpose of procreating (think Dorrie Rare’s obsession with getting pregnant in The Birth House). Men in these novels are still rapists or sexually indifferent (Female orgasm? What’s that?) or Harlequin-esque, lower class saviours who come late in life (for example, Dorrie’s physically-challenged farmhand Hart – Hart! – in The Birth House and Helen O’Mara’s handyman Barry the Carpenter in February). And if there’s barely any sex in these novels, forget about orgasms. Though Helen O’Mara’s husband “made her come, and waited and made her come again” he doesn’t anymore; he’s dead (the ultimate emasculation). Note, also, how this line is completely disconnected from Helen’s body – there are innumerable ways one can make a woman come – how did Cal do it? How can readers believe that Helen truly grieves for her lost husband when Moore eliminates this detail? As well, as Ryan Bigge pointed out previously in these pages, Anne Michaels’ idea of a woman’s orgasm (in The Winter Vault) is no orgasm at all: “His hand on his wife in the place their child would some day open her, where his mouth had already so often spoken to her, as if he could take the child’s name into his mouth from her body.” Where’s her and Helen’s clitoris? Why “some day”? Why not now? Why not take her labia instead of “the child’s name into his mouth?” Wouldn’t taking the woman’s orgasm be much more enjoyable for both parties than taking some non-existent, future child’s name? As Corrine Maier puts it, “Open the nursery, close the bedroom” and “Kids are the death of desire.” Worse than Michaels’ laughably bad prose is McKay’s laughing at the female orgasm in The Birth House. Dorrie (now Dora) suffers from “neurasthenia” while her husband is away at sea. To cure her condition, she orders the “White Cross Home Vibrator” and administers it nightly. What results! It cures her insomnia, makes her less anxious, quells her loneliness! Of course the joke is that Dora, without realizing, is making herself come. It’s true a self-administered orgasm can do all those things (and so much more). What’s problematic here is that the section is written for laughs. By laughing at Dora’s silly ignorance, we laugh at her orgasm. Thus, the message is that a woman’s orgasm is funny – something to be laughed at. Orgasms for comedy are no orgasms at all (after all, a woman doesn’t need to come to get pregnant). Third-wave feminism’s encouragement to reclaim our sexuality failed. Even in the rare novels that actually do feature career women, (Leah McLaren’s The Continuity Girl and Katrina Onstad’s How Happy to Be) their jobs become secondary in the quest for sperm and baby. Today, twenty-something women still have a hard time meeting selfless lovers, and a woman can’t walk into a room at a party in a short skirt without getting the stink-eye (even at a party of English professors, many of whom teach feminist literature courses). In our fiction, sex is still bad (i.e., ruinous or at best a means to an end), while social displays of female sexual confidence are verboten.

Perhaps if those Canadian journal issues and anthologies that claim to be devoted to sex were actually sexy, perhaps if our women writers created sexually confident, twenty-first century, adult women characters instead of babies, mothers, or grandmothers, perhaps if Lisa Moore and Dede Crane had edited a collection called Great Orgasms: Twenty-Four True Stories about Mind-Blowing Sex instead of Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories about Childbirth, then perhaps I wouldn’t have had to write an essay about the disappearance of feminism from our literature or worried about the diminished status of women in our country. Wouldn’t it be great if Canadian women writers were as sex-positive as their British counterparts, who contributed to In Bed With: Unabashedly Sexy Stories? What we really need are a few more Alice Munros. Though the focus of this essay has been novels, I want to emphasize Munro because she’s a feminist, not feminized, writer. Canadian women short story writers and poets have, for the most part, kept their eyes on feminism. Because these genres are less commercial than novels, these writers aren’t pressured to sell out for sales. Alice Munro, however, is commercially successful, despite writing short stories featuring some of the most intriguing, intelligent and confident women in CanLit. That’s because Munro bridges feminist divisions – she writes about rural, small towns, about grandmothers and motherhood, about marriage and birth and family and about sex and child-free (note: not childless) couples and aging and careers and affairs and separation and remarriage. But most importantly, Munro’s women – from young women to grandmothers – don’t just watch and wait and yearn for babies, Munro’s women do. Munro’s women actively drive plots; some of Munro’s women, gasp, dislike being mothers! Some leave their families! Some are abandoned by their daughters. And some stay and raise their kids and retire and live their lives, in the present, without yearning over the past. There are lots of grandmothers in Munro’s stories, but they live now, in our time, and don’t reminisce about stove-blacking and the croup in olden times. In fact, some of Munro’s grandmothers have sex! Or at least are sexual beings. Munro is so damned good at what she does, goes deeper into and gets more out of her characters than most writers in Canada that it is no wonder her writing appeals to such a variety of readers.

Compare the confident, active, sexual grandmother Sophie in “White Dump” to the passive, past-obsessed, asexual grandmothers in most Canadian novels. Sophie, during her regular morning lake skinny dip, has had her robe destroyed by lakeside “hippies.” She marches naked back to her cottage where her son is about to enjoy his fortieth-birthday breakfast with his family: “Sophie of course did not try to shield her breasts with an arm or place a modest hand over her private parts. She didn’t hurry past her family. She stood in the sunlight, one foot on the bottom step of the veranda – slightly increasing the intimate view they could all get of her . . . . The idea was – Sophie’s idea always was – to make her own son look foolish. To make him look a fool in front of his wife and children. Which he did . . . . That is what Sophie could do, would do, every time she got the chance.” Sophie doesn’t just sit and think – she decides and does. She does not let the hippies victimize her – she won’t even be controlled by her son, who desperately wants her to cover up. And the effect Sophie’s actions have on her daughter-in-law, Isabel, is disarming: “Isabel thought she knew what it was that had unhinged her. It was Sophie’s story. It was the idea of herself, not Sophie, walking naked out of the water towards those capering boys . . . . That made her long for, and imagine, some leaping, radical invitation. She was kindled for it.” Sophie’s actions, in turn, cause Isabel to act (Isabel has an affair and her marriage eventually ends). Munro’s women do and in their doing are feminist, not feminized.

Munro delves deeply and honestly into the multiple reasons of why women do in almost all of her stories. From “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”: “When Grant first started teaching Anglo-Saxon and Nordic Literature he got the regular sort of students in his classes. But after a few years he noticed a change. Married women started going back to school. Not with the idea of qualifying for a better job or for any job but simply to give themselves something more interesting to think about than their usual housework and hobbies. To enrich their lives. And perhaps it followed naturally that the men who taught them these things would become part of the enrichment, that these men would seem to these women more mysterious and desirable than the men they still cooked for and slept with.” For Munro, sex – and usually adulterous sex – represents or is an escape from the drudgery of marriage and motherhood. Sex = change and enlightenment. Sex is one of the easiest ways a woman can conceive of alternatives, can, as Rich says, “transcend and transform experience.” Munro’s stories are refreshingly full of sex, just as many of our lives are. The fact that CanLit women don’t write about sex, or only write about the negative or maternal consequences of sex, proves that our CanLit does not properly represent the women it claims to.

The title of Munro’s story “Differently” indicates how the author, to paraphrase Rich, actively transforms reality through imagination. The story is typically Munrovian: a married woman begins an affair that changes her life. But again, Munro’s insights are remarkable, telling, and, most important, feminist, because, as Munro writes in the story, “she knew that there [are] different ways of looking at such things.” Note Munro’s confident, adult description of her protagonist Georgia’s feelings after her first encounter with her lover: “Georgia walked home, a strengthened and lightened woman, not the least in love, favoured by the universe.” Georgia’s actions take her through Rich’s “alternatives,” transform her from housewife and mother to an other self: “And Georgia herself, watching her children on the roundabout, or feeling the excellent shape of a lemon in her hand at the supermarket, contained another woman, who only a few hours before had been whimpering and tussling on the ferns, on the sand, on the bare ground, or, during a rainstorm, in her own car – who had been driven hard and gloriously out of her mind and drifted loose and gathered her wits and made her way home again.” And then, note what Georgia thinks, waiting for her now ex-lover to call: “But it seemed that such a phone call would have given her a happiness that no look or word from her children could give her. Than anything could give her, ever again.” In these lines, in her stories, Munro does what women writers in Canada have forgotten to do: she shows us other possibilities, she lets women know that there can be and should be more to their lives than being broodmares. “How should we behave?” Raymond asks Georgia at the end of the story. “Differently,” says Georgia, wisely and accurately.

Writing this essay depressed the hell out of me – reading the novels I cite here made clear to me how far backwards women have fallen in Canada, how little women care about their rights, their time in the present, how content they are to obediently accept the subservient roles of madonna or whore. As a reader, I crave intelligent, insightful, plot-driven, well-written, funny and sexy fiction. I want the fiction I read to remind or even show me how rich and varied life is. Yet, like the sexless women in CanLit, my needs are not being met. Surely I’m not the only one who wonders why there are no stories of smart, sophisticated, urbane women or university students or twenty- or thirty-something, child-free couples (both hetero and gay) equally navigating the ups and downs of co-habitation. That I’m dissatisfied by fiction for women is one thing; that these novels rife with stereotypes are published, celebrated, awarded, read and taught is worse. If, as Harold Bloom and others suggest, reading is a means by which we feel we are less alone, then as a woman reading in Canada, I am extremely lonely.

There’s a tiny glimmer of light at the end of this dark (vaginal) tunnel of CanLit for and by women. Authors such as Ramona Dearing (So Beautiful), Charlotte Gill (Ladykillers) and Krista Bridge (The Virgin Spy) are obviously Munro’s heirs – their writing is as smart, witty, adult and sexy as Munro’s. A reader gets this from the first sentence of Bridge’s “Cockney Sunday”: “Marriage is not for the women of Daphne’s family.” Bridge’s women don’t just have sex – they have orgasms! They are active, non-stereotypical women who “cannot tolerate sad-sacked women intent on depriving themselves of the ecstasies of the female body,” who “love . . . the act of distortion, mak[e] things appear the opposite of what they are,” who “come to see penetration as a necessary invasion, something taken masquerading as something given.” When I read these women’s stories, I want to shout, “Hooray!” These female authors, my peers as readers, writers and women, get it. They are brave enough to delve deeper, to, as Wallace Stevens said of writing, use “the imagination to press . . . back against the pressure of reality. It seems . . . to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”

Nominees for Journey Prize #19, including myself, were asked to write a short explanation of why or how we wrote our stories. The explanations were to be published in the back of the annual anthology along with our biographies. With such a platform, I decided to use the opportunity not to just write about how I wrote “High-Water Mark,” (a Maritime story of the lives of girls and women) but to address the themes in the story, and address my concern, as I have in this essay, over the disappearance of feminism from our literature. I was inspired, in part, by how many young women have approached me after public readings of the story – how many come up to me alone or in small groups to thank me for getting it right. The “it” varies – some relate to working in the tourism industry, some think the drug references are cool, some had a parent die of cancer or some were also teen mothers. But overwhelmingly, they thank me for creating Ainslee, the fifteen-year-old who narrates the story. Over and over they tell me, “Ainslee is me.” They relate to her because she is not a woman of yesterday or some other time – Ainslee, like these young women, is firmly of our time, and these women at my readings are desperate to meet her.

Notably, however, McClelland & Stewart ultimately chose not to publish the very commentaries they had solicited. Apparently, for “lack of room” they were only posted on the M&S website, and the next year author explanations were discontinued. I’ll conclude with (a slightly edited version of) what I wrote:

Harper Perennial, 2007

A few years into the twenty-first century, women still earn less than men. In Canada, only 20% of the seats in Parliament are held by women. All of Canada’s premiers and big city mayors are men, and the Conservative government cut funding to the Status of Women Canada. At the bookstore, most female characters are shopaholics, prostitutes, ciphers, or yummy mommies-to-be, yet in 2003, twice as many women as men graduated from Canadian law schools. Much positive attention was given to the image of a pregnant woman on the cover of The Birth House. But look closer. This headless woman is barefoot and pregnant.

Our society’s preference for immediate gratification, not sustained efforts, is now reflected in our stories: shopping versus saving, childbirth versus childrearing. When young women see fewer and fewer examples of empowered alternatives, it’s no wonder fewer women run for public office. No wonder we still earn less than men.

As a teacher, I am increasingly alarmed by the messages our young women absorb. Yes, teenagers like Ainslee in “High-Water Mark” are angry. They are disenfranchised. But when teenagers speak, how often do we listen? The message they get, then, is to not speak, and by their twenties, many seek the comfort of established gender roles. After all, it’s easier.

Young women like Ainslee and her sister Lauren exist. They are not ciphers, they are not shopaholics. On top of their bodies they have heads, and within those heads are their voices.

CNQ 80

When it comes to literary conversations, some topics, like those items that find their way under the couch, seem to collect the most fuzz. Technology is a good recent example. It’s hard to believe now, but only ten years ago technology wasn’t a word that was going to trigger much heated debate in bookish circles. Even hardcore McLuhanites were starting to look played out and a bit tweedy. This was an innocence that was lost with the advent of Amazon, e-books, litblogs, controversies over digital copyright, and a host of other hot buttons.

But a perennial favourite of longer standing, one that has provided grist for book columns and sparked debate among readers of every brow for generations, is the subject of gender. Like a social disease, it is the gift that keeps on giving. Do men and women read differently? How so? Why do so few men read? Or, to be more precise with the facts as we know them, why do so few men buy literary fiction? What is “feminist” writing? Why did this year’s (insert name of prize here) shortlist have so few women on it? Or did it have too many? And what about those prizes that are for women only? Should we view them as affirmative action, or an example of gender tribalism gone mad? Do women authors not get reviewed as often as men? Is ChickLit an offensive label? An offensive genre? Can porn be art, or art be porn? Is the publishing industry systemically sexist, and rife with sexual harassment? Or does it discriminate against men?

What about national differences? Why, to take just one example that’s always struck me as odd, has the mystery genre been dominated by women in England, from the golden age Queens of Crime (Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham) down to the present day (P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Minette Walters), while in the U.S. it has been primarily a male preserve? Why did one country become the home of “hard-boiled” pulp thrillers and the other the “cozy”? Surely there’s more to it than a constitutional right to bear arms.

Sticking closer to home, the Canadian scene has its own gender idiosyncrasies. Reading the new Cambridge History of Canadian Literature I came across an essay by Robert Thacker on “the quartet” of Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, and Carol Shields. These authors, according to Thacker, are “the leading English-Canadian writers of the latter half of the twentieth century.” While one could argue with such a judgment (and I would), I think it’s fair to say that it could at least be considered a critical consensus in some circles. And that is remarkable. In what other country in the world could the same be said about the standing of four women authors? None come to mind.

If Canadian literature, which only came of age in the latter half of the twentieth century, is the product of its Founding Mothers, does that say something about the kinds of books we read, write, and celebrate today? For several years now it’s been obvious that historical romance is our dominant literary mode. Is that a phenomenon related to gender? And if so, what does it mean that our most celebrated practitioner of the historical romance is male?

Do questions like these even matter? Or are we supposed to simply declare that good writing is good writing and there’s an end of it?

Whether they matter or not, and I’ll say up front that I think they do, it’s questions like these that are addressed in this special issue of CNQ. But rest assured, none of them is resolved. This is only to be expected given how long-lived they’ve been. Certainly from the eighteenth century on, critics have argued over what Ian Watt described as the “tendency for literature to become a primarily female pursuit.” And from the days of blue stockings and the “novel-reading girl” through the gender battles of the culture wars and today’s psychobiological literary theories, the basic elements of the debate have remained constant. In our own time, online, the discussion has become even more intense, with the subject taking on some of the characteristics of a third rail. More than one person I approached to write for this issue begged off with the excuse that no matter what they said on the subject it was going to be interpreted as offensive by someone. “What Kind of Idiot Writes About Porn?” A. J. Somerset asks. (But he’s not, and we’re glad he did.)

What follows here is more in the way of a conversation than an argument, engaging a full spectrum of different opinions. Our contributors do write about porn, and the Pill, and Peter Pan. They do not all share the same point of view. CNQ has never been a magazine keen on building consensus, written in a house style, holding certain totems sacred. It wouldn’t be Canada’s most interesting magazine if it did.

The expression of that contrarian spirit continues to evolve. With our new layout, unveiled last issue, we’ve also launched a number of new features. “Word of Mouth” revisits an underappreciated or forgotten work, while “The Short Story” takes an in-depth look at a favourite bit of short fiction. “The Landscape” is a series of panoramas by Canadian graphic artists, and the “CNQ Collection” an insert included in each issue (for subscribers only) showcasing different aspects of the printer’s art. “CNQ Abroad” takes us on the road for a taste of travel writing, while Brian Busby’s “Dusty Bookcase” provides fascinating biographies of Canadiana. Finally, starting in this issue with Marian Engel’s Bear, we begin our series of graphic interpretations of Canadian classics. These fragments are, alas, all that Hudson and Stanfield managed to rescue from the terrible fire that . . .

. . . well, you’ll see.

Alice Munro, photo by Derek Shapton

Alice Munro’s constant concern is to correct the reader, to undercut and complicate her text until all easy answers are exhausted and an unnerving richness of life stands revealed in the particular, secret experiences of her characters.

She does this in two ways. First, she has a sly capacity for filling her stories with sex, thwarted loves, betrayal and violence while self-presenting (somehow, in the prose) as a middle-aged Everywoman with only the faintest hint of a salacious gleam in her eye. And second, she deploys an amazing number of intricately interconnected literary devices that ironize and relativize meanings while conversely revealing (unveiling as in “apocalypse”) an underground current of life that seems all the more true because it is hidden, earthy, frank, and shocking. In her story “Meneseteung,” for example, the truth has something to do with menstruation, bloating, diarrhea and opium. That this truth is called into question at the story’s close is pure Alice Munro whose message may only be that life is never what you think it is.

“Meneseteung” advertises itself as faux amateur biography of a forgotten and forgettable “local” poet, a spinster named Almeda Joynt Roth, who lived at the end of the 19th century in a small Ontario village just inside the advancing frontier. In 1879, Meda is drifting toward middle age when a salt well entrepreneur named Jarvis Poulter moves into town and half-heartedly begins to court her. One night Meda hears a drunken commotion in the street outside her house. Ignoring the ruckus, she manages to fall back asleep, but in the morning she discovers a woman’s body in her backyard and runs to Jarvis’s house, two doors down the street, for help. Jarvis nudges the body with his toe, pronounces the woman drunk and wipes his hand off on a leaf after shaking her roughly by the hair. Then, apparently aroused by Meda’s nightgown (suddenly seeing her in a sexual light), he invites her to walk with him to church later in the morning (a decisive signal of interest in the world of the story). Meda is in a tizzy. She has taken a sleeping drug the evening before, her period is starting, she has diarrhea, she’s making grape jelly; now she doses herself with nerve medicine (probably laudanum). Just before Jarvis shows up she pins a note to her front door; Jarvis retreats in silence. Meda spends the rest of the day in a drug haze, imagining the townspeople as gravestones toddling down the street. Then life returns to normal; only Jarvis is no longer interested in paying court to Meda. In 1903, village louts chase the eccentric old biddy into a nearby swamp. She catches cold and dies, leaving behind a slim volume of poems entitled Offerings.

That’s the story action, the bare bones. But with Alice Munro the difference between the bare bones of the story and the way she organizes the bones and flesh of her text is enormous. Munro’s telling extends to roughly 9,000 words which she splits up into six numbered sections. Each section begins with an epigraph, a four or five-line stanza from one of Meda’s poems. The chronology of the text extends from 1840, the year Meda was born, to the mid-1980s when the story was written (a first-person narrator, someone like Alice Munro herself, tells the story from the notional present). But the crucial events of the story take place over a weekend in August, 1879.

The first section of text deals, essay-like, with Meda’s slim volume of poems; section II describes her little southern Ontario town in 1879; section III introduces the widower Jarvis Poulter and his half-hearted interest in Meda; in the fourth section, Meda wakes to the sound of wailing and fighting in the backyard, summons Jarvis and unmans him, so to speak, with a show of fluttery weakness; in the fifth section, she gets stoned, and leaves the note pinned to her front door, rejecting Poulter’s sudden romantic overture; and section VI is aftermath: Meda’s 1903 obituary and the authorial narrator’s ruminations on rescuing the experience of the past. The main action is concentrated in two of the six sections; the first two sections read like essays; and the last section contains two obituaries and some paragraphs of narrator reflection rooted in the present, the time of writing.

By “main action” I mean plot, a structure of desire and resistance (conflict) in which the same desire and the same resistance meet in a series of actions (events). Because her story organization is heterodox, Alice Munro is almost always precise and transparent in terms of her desire-resistance patterns. The first plot event in “Meneseteung” is a composite of Jarvis’s half-hearted courtship described in the third section. Meda’s concrete desire is enunciated in the following sentences:

[My italics] And she is thinking of him. She doesn’t want to get her hopes up too much, she doesn’t want to make a fool of herself. She would like a signal.

The notion of what this signal might be is refined a few lines later.

Nor does he call for her, and walk with her to church on Sunday mornings. That would be a declaration.

In section IV, at the climax of the Sunday morning scene with the drunk woman behind Meda’s house, in a burst of (comic) Canadian machismo, Jarvis gives her the signal she has been waiting for.

He is sufficiently stirred by her loosened hair – prematurely gray but thick and soft – her flushed face, her light clothing, which nobody but a husband should see. And by her indiscretion, her agitation, her foolishness, her need?
“I will call on you later,” he says to her. “I will walk with you to church.”

However at this stage even Meda’s body is telling her that this is no longer the signal that she wants; in section V, she rushes away from Jarvis to the privy, then leaves a note on the door politely rejecting his offer. The accent on the word “signal” has shifted; Meda still wants a signal but of a different kind. When it comes, the sign is inside her own heart. Thus the plot sequence is completed when, in a drugged dream-state, she looks into the “river of her mind” and imagines the crotched roses in her table cloth floating.

They look bunchy and foolish, her mother’s crotched roses – they don’t look much like real flowers. But their effort, their floating independence, their pleasure in their silly selves, does seem to her so admirable.
A hopeful sign.

How does Munro make this heterodox structure work? So much preamble and aftermath, the plot condensed into a narrow band of text? The answer lies in the way she deploys, develops, elaborates, and ramifies basic structural devices and the way she uses this elaboration to create rhythms, rhymes, reminders, echoes, antagonisms, under-meanings, and semantic loops – action and drama at the level of text and syntax. She uses resonating structures so that various parts of the text echo off each other. She uses a complex point of view structure to create variety and contrast in the types of text threaded through the narrative (and thus a variety of perspectives). She dances with time. She creates action, conflict, and emotion even in those parts of the story that are not directly relating plot. In other words, the setup, backfill, and aftermath are more than setup, backfill, and aftermath; the essays are not just essays; they are written into the text as what I call ancillary devices, devices for elaborating, extending, complicating, and repeating aspects of the main plot structure of the story. While they do add information and explanation, I suspect their real function is to create complex rhythmic and aesthetic effects which make the story grander and yet far more ironic than any mere summary can intimate.

Take that elusive point of view, for instance. Unstudied readers tend to think of point of view as consistent and monolithic. They barely give it a second thought. Munro explodes the notion of consistent point of view. The whole story is told by a first person narrator who comes into the text three times. The first mention occurs glancingly in the second paragraph (“. . . that makes me see . . .”), the second occurs more emphatically in a one-sentence paragraph in section II (“I read about that life in the Vidette.”) and the third, most insistently, through the final paragraphs of section VI, each beginning with “I.” The notional setup here is that the authorial narrator, someone like Alice Munro, has researched Meda’s life, read the local newspaper, read Meda’s poems, visited the family graves, and is writing the story.

However most of the story is written in a fluid third person, that first person authorial narrator transforming into the objective observer describing Meda’s book of poems and the wry interpreter of the village newspaper the Vidette (“This kind of thing pops up in the Vidette all the time. May they surmise, and is this courting?”) while here and there modulating into a third person plural corporate point of view (the townspeople) and finally into a close third person single character point of view focused very tightly on Meda (and once or twice, even in Jarvis Poulter’s mind). But even the third person plural structure has gradations of attack. It shifts from strict synopses of the Vidette to third person plural (“People talk about . . .” “All he has told them . . .”) and finally to a group interior monologue, a variation of free indirect discourse (“Anyway, it’s five years since her book was published, so perhaps she has got over that. Perhaps it was the proud, bookish father encouraging her?”). It’s lovely to watch Munro’s structural segues. Here’s an example of a shift from third plural to third singular in three sentences:

Everyone takes it for granted that Almeda Roth is thinking of Jarvis Poulter as a husband and would say yes if he asked her. And she is thinking of him. She doesn’t want to get her hopes up too much . . .

This is not to mention the point of view shifts involved in the inter-textual play of narrative and quotation that is one of Munro’s hallmark devices. In “Meneseteung” she provides Meda’s first person narrative in the form of a quotation from the preface to her book, also quotations from the village paper, the Vidette, including the obituaries of both main characters, and stanzas from Meda’s poems along with a sprinkling of poem titles (the title of the story is a reference to the title of one of the poems). Quotation is a device for varying point of view within a text, not to be overlooked just because, on one level, it is so obvious.

Nor does it take into account another favourite Munro device, something I call the device of imaginative reconstruction: this refers to a moment in the text when the point of view shifts into a purely hypothetical or imagined mode and relates events that may or may not have happened at all.

Instead of calling for her and walking her to church, Jarvis Poulter might make another, more venturesome declaration. He could hire a horse and take her for a drive out to the country. If he did this, she would be both glad and sorry . . .

These sentences introduce a long paragraph of narrative summary of an event between Meda and Jarvis that never takes place. The subjunctive verbs “might” and “could” provide the syntactic frame.

Another example occurs when the authorial narrator describes Jarvis Poulter for the first time. Lacking photographs, she imagines what he looks like in a series of rhetorical questions (the syntactic frame device), the question marks indicating the purely speculative quality of the details which nevertheless enter the reader’s mind as story-fact.

This is a decent citizen, prosperous: a tall – slightly paunchy? – man in a dark suit with polished boots. A beard? Black hair streaked with gray. A severe and self-possessed air, and a large pale wart among the bushy hairs of one eyebrow?

The author uses the device of imaginative reconstruction to insert pictures (fictions within fiction) in the reader’s mind, modulating in and out of strong narrative authority using grammar (framing hypothetical text syntactically; syntactic framing is a device you often see in Munro stories).

The effect of these point of view shifts, the constant fluidity of structure, is to create a relativity machine within the text, the beat of authority skipping from sentence to sentence, more or less subverting what has gone before. This is action at the level of point of view, conflict at the level of discourse; no one is giving the conclusive picture; the work of art is not a reality but a domain of shifting and competing relations. Vladimir Nabokov says somewhere that we read with our spines; like him, I am a straight materialist when it comes to the effect of reading on the reader. Being forced to play the scales, to shift from point of view to point of view, causes fizz in the networks, causes the brain, suddenly, to be more alive in ways that are at once disconcerting, pleasurable, and illuminating.

The same goes for the way Munro manipulates and elaborates her time structure. In every story, there is an objective time scale that is chronological and runs from the very first event indicated within the text to the very last, and, in contrast, there is the way the author actually deploys time in the narrative (what I think of as the time flow). In “Meneseteung” Munro controls time with surgical precision. The objective chronology runs from 1840, when Meda is born, to the mid-1980s when the story was written. Munro carefully dates the major events in between. 1865, Meda’s photograph taken. 1873, Meda’s book published. August, 1879, the incident with Jarvis and the drunk woman. 1903, Meda dies. By calculations based on internal evidence (e.g. “My sister was eleven and my brother nine.”) we obtain more dates. 1854, Meda’s family moves from Kingston to the frontier village. 1857, her two younger siblings die of a prevalent fever. 1860, her mother dies. 1872, her father dies. These dates, in themselves, begin to tell a story.

But time in a story never flows in a straight line; it loops and eddies and suddenly compresses in a spasm of action then stretches out again. “Meneseteung,” for example, begins in the authorial present with a description of Meda’s book of poems as if held in the narrator’s hands (“Gold lettering on a dull-blue cover.”), then swoops back to the 1870s with a quote from the Vidette and then, more precisely, dates when the book was written and when the author’s photograph was taken. In this first paragraph, Munro is teaching us to read the time shifts that characterize much of the text that follows.

In the second paragraph, through the photo, we see Meda in 1865. In the third paragraph, Munro’s narrator quotes from Meda’s preface (written prior to 1873) which loops dizzyingly through the whole of Meda’s life from 1840 to 1873. The last few paragraphs of this first section summarize individual poems that limn events in Meda’s life and, though undated, clearly loop back over the life again (Meda playing games with her brother and sister, the children making snow angels, Meda visiting the family graves). Each time these poems or events are referenced in the text (including those stanzas used as epigraphs), they send the reader’s mind (remind the reader) back to an earlier time. This reminding creates a sort of temporal jazz; the reader’s mind is constantly dashing from context to some other moment and simultaneously referring to that objective chronology so the reader can gauge the relationship between the two.

In terms of time flow, Munro often uses a lovely little device I call the then/now construction, a grammatical structure that juxtaposes two moments in such a way as to imply change (story) over time. Sometimes authors use the words “then” and “now,” and sometimes the words are only implied. Here is a masterful example of a then/now with intervening moments deftly added (as technique, it’s breathtaking).

[my italics and bracket notes] In 1879 [then], Almeda Roth was still living in the house at the corner of Pearl and Dufferin streets, the house her father had built for his family [ca. 1854]. The house is there today [now, ca. 1985]: the manager of the liquor store lives in it. It’s covered with aluminum siding; a closed-in porch has replaced the veranda [then, 1879]. The woodshed, the fence, the gates, the privy, the barn – all these are gone [now, 1985]. A photograph taken in the eighteen-eighties [then, 1880s] shows them all in place. The house and fence look a little shabby, in need of paint . . . No big shade tree is in sight, and, in fact, the tall elms that overshadowed the town until the nineteen-fifties [1950s], as well as the maples that shade it now [now obviously, 1985] are skinny young trees [then, 1880s] . . .

Note especially the final arabesque flurry which swoops the reader from 1885 to 1955 to 1985 and back to 1885 in less than one sentence. As with those bravura point of view shifts, I am not sure the general reader notices this kind of authorial stick-handling, though, again, I suspect it has the same neural effect on the brain as doing loop-de-loops in a biplane without a seatbelt (today, I like the word “fizz”). But Munro’s precise and adamantine control assures the reader that the story’s temporal matrix is as consistent and reliable as a ticking clock.

The time structures I’ve mentioned so far have little to do with the hoary ideas of scene and summary in which time is conceived of as being either slowed and drawn out (scene) or speeded up as in fast-forwarding (summary). If you think of summary as nothing but a plodding rehearsal of time past, you miss the point of the phantasmagoric loops and eddies in a narrative like “Meneseteung.” Munro does speed up time, covering over a hundred and forty years in a few pages. But the techniques she deploys do more than just fill in the blanks; she forces the reader to experience the passage of time, to become conscious of change, of mutability, and to taste the ironic aspect of Death that dogs all history.

Munro does, of course, slow the moment; in fact, the first four sections of the story create the effect of a step-by-step deceleration (somewhat paralleling the progressive tightening of the point of view) until we reach the fourth section which begins with Meda shocked awake on a hot August Saturday night by the drunken rumpus in the back street behind her house. She sleeps, then wakes on Sunday morning and discovers the body and runs for help. The dialogue scene that follows, between Jarvis, Meda and the resuscitated drunk, is the longest in the story, a climax of imagined horror – sordid, shocking, surprising (and somehow more real because it’s sordid, shocking, and surprising), and hilarious. The drunken woman is awful, an image of filth, poverty, and drunken animal sexuality (somehow this phrase gives animals a bad name). Jarvis is upright, bourgeois, masculine, and despicable. Meda is in shock; she has to use the outhouse. Then suddenly Jarvis is aroused. He finally sees Meda as a possible sex object and marriage option. He announces that he will walk her to church. (The fact that Alice Munro comprehends and can convey the complex and deeply comic conditions of male arousal in Jarvis’s case alone justifies calling her a genius in my books.)

This scene is the notional climax of the story, but Munro is a master of syncopation, and, besides, the story isn’t about Jarvis Poulter’s arousal. In this scene, Meda gets what the text has told us she wants (“She would like a signal.”), but by this stage she realizes she doesn’t want it (a man and a man’s reality), and so in the fifth section of the story she must escape from the ogre of her author’s creation. In the fifth section, time speeds up slightly; a whole day passes in a series of small dreamy scenes and snippets, mostly Meda’s actions and thoughts as she gets more and more stoned on nerve medicine, skillfully punctuated by a stream of minute domestic acts, external impressions, and time markers.

As soon as Jarvis Poulter has gone . . . She closes . . . she writes [and leaves a note for Jarvis on the door] . . . She sticks . . . She locks . . . she builds a fire . . . She boils water . . . several dark drops of nerve medicine . . . She is still sitting there when the horses start to go by on the way to church, stirring up clouds of dust. The roads will be getting hot as ashes [Jarvis comes and goes from the veranda] . . . Then the clock in the hall strikes twelve and an hour has passed . . . . The house is getting hot. She drinks more tea and adds more medicine . . . She doesn’t leave the room until dusk, when she goes out to the privy again . . .

The climax of this fifth section, the true climax of the story, is what takes place in Meda’s mind as she sits in her dining room sipping laudanum and tea after Jarvis has retreated from the veranda. The relevant text begins with Meda looking out (“Her surroundings – some of her surroundings – in the dining room are these . . .”), but then she peers inward and she is stoned and what floods the page is an intense and surreal confluence (the story is named for a river, after all, and the thoughts are motivated by emotional shock, hormones, opium, and poetry) of physical detail, image, memory, and theme that is at once the secret, hidden life of Almeda Roth and a bravura meditation on life, poetry, the self, language, and metaphysics.

It’s fascinating to realize that this climactic confluence is not so much an action on a plot line as an eruption of Meda’s inner experience provoked by the plot. And what it amounts to in terms of story construction is an intersection of various images, motifs, and patterns already precisely adumbrated in the text. Munro seems to realize that the inner life of a man or a woman is also a text, that in our secret hearts we are talking to ourselves, muttering, declaiming; at its deepest point this is our experience of experience. In this case, she constructs her story so that the inner text of Meda’s heart cunningly reflects and pulls together the outer text of the story. Here we re-discover the old truth that repetition is the heart of art.

Take Meda’s poems. They are not part of the surface drama of the story. They were written long before she meets Jarvis Poulter. They are contained in a book which we glimpse (“Gold lettering on a dull-blue cover.”) in the first line of the story (“Offerings, the book is called.”) The first section of the story further contains three paragraphs of quotation from Meda’s preface to the book and then a list of poems: “Children at Their Games,” “The Gypsy Fair,” “A Visit to My Family,” “Angels in the Snow,” “Champlain at the Mouth of the Meneseteung,” etc. The poem titles pick up family background motifs just mentioned in the prefatory material (brother and sister, their deaths, etc.). The river name Meneseteung repeats the title of the story. In the next seven paragraphs, Munro glosses each of the listed poems, nailing the content to an experience from Meda’s life (again, brother and sister, their deaths). The title of the Meneseteung poem is repeated and glossed: “This poem celebrates the popular, untrue belief that the explorer sailed down the eastern shore of Lake Huron and landed at the mouth of the major river.” And, of course, we remember that each of these poems is again referenced in the epigraphs that begin the story sections (it’s not difficult to puzzle out which stanza comes from which poem). At this stage, the astute reader realizes that he is witnessing the construction of a major image pattern, part of the organization of the story as a whole, a vehicle for meaning and aesthetic effect (rhythm, cohesion), that is also somehow separate from the dramatic action of the story.

Image (or word) patterns begin with mere repetition, accumulate meaning by association and juxtaposition, splinter or ramify, sending out subsidiary branch patterns, and, finally, discover occasions for recombination or intersection of the various branches in what I call tie-in lines. Often, as in this case, the primary image pattern is tipped in the story title, a further sign that the image pattern controls development and meaning within the text (in a sense, the title tells us the story is more about the image than the plot). In “Meneseteung,” we have something faintly reminiscent of the rhetorical device of ekphrasis, though here the work of art being decoded as an element of the meaning of the whole is not a painting or a statue but a book of poems. The words “Meneseteung,” “river,” “book,” “poem,” and “poet” appear as a branched constellation at the center of the story “Meneseteung.”

Once you begin to tease apart the branching patterns and spot the relevant associations, some fascinating story elements begin to appear. Given the title (and the way things work out in the fifth section), “Meneseteung” is the root pattern; “Meneseteung” is a river, a poem in a book, a reference to a popular but mistaken historical belief, the title of a story. “Book” is mentioned in the first line of the story and leads along a wonderful line of “bookishness,” paternal influence and popular prejudice:

[my italics] . . . preface to her book, “my father . . . My father was a harness-maker by trade, but a cultivated man who could quote by heart from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the writings of Edmund Burke . . .”

But why was she passed over in her earlier, more marriageable years . . . All that reading and poetry – it seemed more of a drawback, a barrier, an obsession, in the young girl than in the middle-aged woman, who needed something, after all, to fill her time. Anyway, it’s five years since her book was published, so perhaps she has got over that. Perhaps it was the proud, bookish father, encouraging her?

Note how the image accumulates a precise list of associations (linked words) and also, how, depending on point of view, the list varies: what Meda sees as “cultivated” the town sees as “proud” and “bookish.” Word lists like this are a very common structure in Alice Munro stories, and, as in this instance, she often develops contrasting words lists (Meda’s list of associations with books and poetry v. the town’s list; Meda’s list of geographical associations v. Jarvis’s list; words associated with the proper part of town along Dufferin Street v. words associated with the poor part of town along Pearl Street – of course, Meda’s house sits at the corner of Dufferin and Pearl). And the effect of these branching image patterns and their associated (conflict-driven) word lists is an extremely complicated and dense cris-cross matrix of interconnected references that echo in the reader’s mind and construct a disciplined and precise semblance of experience.

This matrix of cross-reference is all the more alive, as it were, because it is inscribed with conflict; the competing points of view strive for interpretive primacy – at the end of the story which list of associations will own the image? This conflict plays out in the reader’s mind, but, more significantly, it plays out in Meda’s mind and is embodied, through story action, in her near acceptance of Jarvis Poulter as a suitor. This is Alice Munro’s version of Mikhail Bakhtin’s vision of the novel as a battle of discourses, which is also a battle to subvert some old or conventional or authoritative discourse. In “Meneseteung,” Meda Roth battles for the meaning of the book, of poetry, of her father, of the land, and of her self against the popular, conventional discourse of the townspeople and the Vidette and against the bourgeois male, commercial discourse of Jarvis Poulter.

[my italics] He could hire a horse and take her for a drive out to the country. If he did this, she would be both glad and sorry. Glad to be beside him, driven by him, receiving this attention from him in front of the world. And sorry to have the countryside removed from her – filmed over, in a way, by his talk and his preoccupations. The countryside that she has written about in her poems actually takes diligence and determination to see.

In this passage, Meda and Jarvis compete over who will get to describe the “countryside.” Consciousness is a text; the words you use colour your experience. It takes diligence, determination, and poetry to recover experience from the conventional. And the word “countryside” here is not an isolate; Munro has carefully threaded landscape and countryside through the story as a branch of the poem-book-Meneseteung pattern. It begins in the first section with that poem “The Passing of the Old Forest” glossed as “a list of all the trees – their names, appearance, and uses – that were cut down in the original forest . . .” which later becomes (reflecting Jarvis’s values) “[a] raw countryside just wrenched from the forest . . .”

[my italics] The meandering creeks have been straightened, turned into ditches . . . The trees have all been cleared back to woodlots. And the woodlots are all second growth . . . the grand barns that are to dominate the countryside for the next hundred years are just beginning to be built –

In truth, everywhere you look in an Alice Munro story there is conflict and change. No word sits by itself; instead, each word vibrates in a dozen relationships with other words, repeating, competing, dominating, wrenching, transforming, shading, and subverting.

The moment of climax for all this comes, as I say, not with Jarvis’s priapic epiphany (I use the word ironically) and sudden access of ardour, nor when the poetess rejects him, but when Meda locks herself in her house and gets stoned. At this point she shuts out the discourse of the conventional Others (Jarvis, the town) and attends first to her surroundings which seem “charged with life, ready to move and flow and alter.” Note the word “flow” because presently the “glowing and swelling” of things begin to “suggest words,” and the words begin to suggest “Poems, even. Yes, again, poems. Or one poem.” And that one poem will contain all the poems Meda has written and all the events of the story.

Here Munro inserts a classic rehearsal device, a piece of text in which previous events are recapitulated, the story rehearsed (a repetitive structure that has the effect of reminding the reader of the salient points and also giving a kind of rhythmic kick that announces the approaching end of the narrative):

[my italics and bracket notes] . . . one very great poem that will contain everything . . . Stars and flowers and birds and trees and angels in the snow and dead children at twilight – that is not the half of it. You have to get in the obscene racket on Pearl Street and the polished toe of Jarvis Poulter’s boot and the plucked chicken haunch and its blue-black flower. Almeda is a long way now from human sympathies . . . [here Munro inserts some lines on Meda’s problematic conventional alternatives for dramatic effect, also a reference to grape jelly, another image pattern that has some sly connection with menstruation – there is no end to this] . . . She has to think of so many things at once – Champlain and the naked Indians and the salt deep in the earth . . .

Munro follows the rehearsal of events with a new twist on the things-to- words-to-poems-to-everything-in-one- poem pattern. It’s an amazing passage, the climax of the story’s linguistic acceleration, the electrical charge, transferred along the image lines (networks) from the very beginning of the story, from the title, in fact, to this point. Technically, it’s a simple modulation of the image pattern that starts with the word “channel” used as a double figure; first, as a conventional metaphor (as in “channeling my energy”), and, second, as a pun. “Channel” has the magical effect of turning the poem into a river, the Meneseteung, a mighty poem-river, an image of all things, as it were, even the story itself (it is the title, after all). And then the “river” turns figurative and becomes “the river of her mind.”

[my italics] All this can be borne only if it is channeled into a poem, and the word “channeled” is appropriate, because the name of the poem will be – “The Meneseteung.” The name of the poem is the name of the river. No, in fact, it is the river, the Meneseteung, that is the poem – with its deep holes and rapids and blissful pools under the summer trees . . . Almeda looks deep, deep into the river of her mind . . .

This is the confluence of image patterns, the point at which the battle of discourses ceases and Meda performs the mythic rite of the naming of experience; she reclaims forever her self, her poems, and her countryside.

What Alice Munro reads, I have no idea. But the philosophy, the theory, behind her plots and patterns is clear, complex, and very contemporary. As you might expect from a writer so at home in language, the mind is a text, experience a flow of words. The struggle within every story, the struggle for identity, is always a battle for the word, the authority to give names. Perhaps all writers think this way in their hearts. And whatever is real beyond the words is problematic. In fact, it doesn’t matter. All the devices I have discussed so far in relation to this story – fluid point of view, time flow, and image patterning as deployed by Munro – serve only to relativize the object, make the object a moment of contest, never at rest. Every word in “Meneseteung” is restless and alive. And even at the point of confluence, when Meda lets herself sink into the river of her mind – Meneseteung – Alice Munro is there with her spade, ready to turn the earth of the story one more time.

In the last section of the story, Munro jumps ahead twenty-four years to 1903; the battle of discourses cranks up again; she quotes Meda’s obituary in the Vidette:

[my italics] . . . the mind of this fine person had become somewhat clouded and her behaviour, in consequence, somewhat rash and unusual. Her attention to decorum and to the care and adornment of her person had suffered, to the degree that she had become, in the eyes of those mindful of her former pride and daintiness, a familiar eccentric, or even, sadly, a figure of fun.

Meda is dead and the townspeople get the final word as to her “mind.” There are two things to notice here. First, Munro is extending the competing patterns already figured into the text beyond the climax; this is an example of her style of syncopation – she always adds a beat at the end of the phrase, always undercuts the conclusion. In 1879, subjectively, Meda may have won the war, but from a different point of view (in Munro stories, there is always another point of view), she merely becomes an eccentric figure of fun. In terms of the story, the state of her “mind” remains in play.

Second, this is also an example of a different sort of repetition, what I call book-ending (as in book-ends or brackets), which is also a sort of structural epanalepsis. The words of the obituary echo, with emphasis, sentiments expressed in the opening paragraph of the story:

The local paper, the Vidette, referred to her as “our poetess.” There seems to be a mixture of respect and contempt, both for her calling and for her sex – or for their predictable conjuncture.

The smug condescension dripping from those quotation marks encode the story from beginning to end with an attitude of amused dismissiveness. Being a “poetess” and unmarried, Meda never achieves a position of significance within her community; her experience never recognized as a legitimate experience.

At this point the battle for Meda’s mind and the soul of the story seems lost. Note that we have gone far beyond the plot interest here; Meda has escaped Jarvis’s attentions; both characters are dead; but the conflict of patterns and discourses continues. This is a fascinating moment: our concern is no longer with the characters; at this point we are more interested in the battle of discourses than we are in how the plot action turned out. We want to know what conclusion the story comes to – about Meda, Meda’s mind and, ultimately, about itself.

Munro nails Meda’s descent on the social scale of significance with another repetition – so pretty a thing I can’t bear not mentioning it. In the second section of the story, that description of Meda’s town, Munro tells the story of Queen Aggie, “an old woman, a drunk” whom the village boys would harass, riding her around in a wheelbarrow (oh, the wheelbarrow pattern!) and dumping her into a ditch to sober up. Queen Aggie prefigures the drunken woman in Meda’s backyard in the fourth section, but she also prefigures Meda’s death as described in the Vidette – chased by village louts, the old biddy tumbles into a swamp (the swamp pattern!), catches cold and dies.

The last paragraphs of the story fall to the authorial narrator, Alice Munro’s first-person stand-in, in a sense, the umpire. She looks at the microfilm, hefts the book, visits the cemetery and, with some difficulty, finds Meda’s gravestone.

. . . I began pulling grass and scrabbling in the dirt with my bare hands. Soon I felt the stone and knew that I was right.

We are reminded here that it “takes diligence and determination to see.” As she angles towards her ending, Munro, as her alter ago, muses on what she thinks she knows about Meda Roth, whether anyone else could figure it out, whether it’s even true. But then she thinks:

[my italics] People are curious. A few people are. They will be driven to find things out, even trivial things. They will put things together, knowing all along they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off the gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.

The phrase “this trickle in time” is gorgeous, the sort of authorial nudge that sets up the hair on the back of your neck. It extends the river-poem-Meneseteung-mind pattern one last step. Nearly the final words of the story, the phrase washes back over the text as a whole, the little repetitive points of contact flashing like streetlights. The passage invites readers to make connections, put things together, and rescue Meda’s experience from the rubbish of conventional judgement. There is this allegorical element in everything Alice Munro writes; she is always teaching readers how to read her stories as she writes them; there are always connections to be made.

The trickle in time is the Meneseteung, the great poem-river of Meda’s mind, rescued from forgetfulness and conventional opinion by the curious narrator (much as Meda has to rescue her own experience from conventional expectation and judgement). The allegory is gentle; the mind is the hero and poet laureate of its own experience. Experience is not a passive act; it takes diligence and determination to identify, name and own the facts of one’s existence. The enemy is conventional language; the antidote is poetry and mild intoxicants. The result may not be authentic in an objective sense. Munro, true to the flux and flow of her own narrative, is careful to suggest experience thus earned may be faulty. (“I may have got it wrong.”) In a final act of subversion, she seems to say that reality itself is a fiction, that what we rescue with poetry is, well, poetry. As Meda, stoned, watches trippy, animated roses and tombstones, the narrator opines:

She doesn’t mistake that for reality, and neither does she mistake anything else for reality, and that is how she knows that she is sane.

I am happiest when I‘m working on a story. Over the years I’ve written a play, a slim volume of poetry, a hockey novel, a nonfiction travel memoir on Ireland, and done some freelance articles on skiing and canoeing. I’m currently working on a novel set in the Wild West and a novel set in Italy. But last spring I took time from those projects to write a futuristic short story for Zsuzsi Gartner’s new dystopian anthology, Darwin’s Bastards. The story is called “The December Astronauts” and is set on the moon.

As the story evolved and came together in bits and pieces, I felt a kind of delirious joy rising at its creation, even though it’s a rather melancholy story.

I’m pleased when work on a novel seems to be going well, but I noted a more palpable reaction when I was jumping into this new story, I sensed a blood happiness while living inside an unknown story on the moon (even though I envision the moon as being like working in Fort MacMurray).

I had the same positive feeling when pulling a very rough excerpt from my Italian novel. Before that I was grumpy about the futile random nature of the book’s material and felt I was getting nowhere.

I decided to treat one piece like a separate story, and I worked it over. That story became “The Troubled English Bride,” a finalist in the CBC Literary Awards. It became a much better piece of writing by being singled out, laid under a klieg light, made both shorter and longer, carved up, chopped and channelled into a new creature. The novels are fine, I want them to go out in the world and do well and be content, but they do not induce this kind of glee. The story does it for me. The short form has parameters, and it works for me because of the parameters. Don’t fence me in, the cowhands sing out west, but perhaps I like being confined. I think the story is the most natural form. The American writer Steven Millhauser has called it the realm of perfection and it can be that.

Yet the world sends me other signals, very different signals, that, realm of perfection or not, the story doesn’t sell, the story isn’t wanted on the voyage anymore.

It can be hard to be a story writer now. I’ve bitched about this before in Fiddlehead editorials for Summer Fiction Issues. Agents, publishers, and editors tell their stable of writers to forget writing stories and go for the big book. At the University of New Brunswick we’ve had visiting writers read a story and then say, Don’t tell my agent, she doesn’t want me to spend time on stories. The writers are being jocular, but it’d be a tad funnier if it wasn’t so true. This pressure can lead to a self fulfilling prophecy in the business. They don’t sell, so therefore we won’t sell them.

Neil Smith’s fine collection Bang Crunch was a success and sold globally, but reviews and articles held it up as an exception, an oddity, a book of stories that sells, as it was akin to someone with one leg winning a foot race.

I want to be very clear: I am not against any form, I like them all. Feel free to try a novel or a screenplay or a cookbook, but I hate to hear of active discouragement or censure of one form in favour of another. I hate to hear that you should start with stories, but then move on. Why move on? Some authors write their best stories later in their career. No one told Hemingway or Flannery O’Connor to stop writing stories. They made money on stories and they worked on novels too. I realize that writers want to pay the rent, but it is not impossible to work in several forms.

Many believe that Hemingway’s reputation will rest on his stories, not his novels. And what of Flannery O’Connor? How many pick up her novels? It’s her stories that will prevail. Cheever’s Collected Stories cemented his reputation, not his novels. Add the names William Trevor, Alice Munro, Updike, Joyce, Isaac Babel, Lorrie Moore, Lisa Moore, Michael Winter, Steven Heighton, Rebecca Rosenblum, Bruno Schulz, Ha Jin, Kate Braverman, Jayne Anne Phillips, Clark Blaise, Denis Johnson, Maile Meloy, Donald Barthelme, and Ray Carver. I could append dozens more. Why denigrate such a rich tradition, such a successful form?

Time’s Arrow may be Martin Amis’s best book and it started as a story and is not much longer than a story, really a novella or long story rather than a long-winded novel. Lydia Davis argues that “shorter pieces have a bigger emotional impact.” Read Steven Millhauser’s brilliant short story, “Flying Carpets.” It’s so good it makes me jealous and it would never work as any other form, other than perhaps a short film, and even that wouldn’t be as fine. John Cheever’s “The Swimmer?” It is perfect as a story, it doesn’t need to be a novel.

But if you invest your time in stories, you are made to feel part of some Legion of the Doomed. I joke with the poet Ross Leckie that short stories are like a car teetering on the edge of a big cliff and that soon we will down there with the poets and 8 tracks, down there with the other wrecked cars.

Maybe the good times will swing back, maybe the salad days will return. Russell Smith, in a recent Globe and Mail column, noted that over the centuries the story has had ups and down in popularity, mentioning the Renaissance and 19th-century Germany. I would add the Roaring Twenties, when short story writers were paid handsomely by many glossy magazines, and I look back fondly to the 1980s, when many magazines paid well for serious fiction, e.g. Esquire, Atlantic, the New Yorker, Playboy, Saturday Night, and prestige publisher such as Vintage, Atlantic, and Penguin signed short story writers and published scores of collections in beautiful editions. I didn’t know how long it would last, but it seemed normal and possible and there was a kind of optimism then about writing that is perhaps lost now.

The problem may be one of surfeit. There are so many books out there now. I think there was far more excitement for a book even in 2000 than there is now, for any book, big name or not. One editor said to me that it’s like we have warehouses of corn, but no one is eating. The bookstores stock millions of books, and we agree that books are good, that literacy is desirable, but how to compete with the crowd, how to make a dent, how to avoid being another return in the truck after a brief stint inside the box store?

This problem of making a dent is related to the problem of promotion, or lack thereof. An editor or publisher has to convince the reps and all the staff at a house that the book has merit and must be sold, and there must be a viable plan. They must really get behind a book, not just toss it out there and hope for a prize or random buzz or wonder if Kindle or the internet will save them. Publishing is the only industry I’ve experienced where most know how to make a widget, but don’t know how to sell the widget.

I don’t believe the form is the trouble. CDs have separate tracks and no one thinks that odd or impossible to market. People download single songs and no one says, Hey, I’d rather have me a fat novel. I think the form is fine. But something has altered. I know that cultures are constantly in flux, people always think there is a crisis, so I don’t want to convey just doom and gloom; instead I feel more anger and puzzlement at the fate of the story, and a perverse stubbornness. I’m going to keep writing stories no matter what they say; my story set on the moon put me over the moon. I had fun with it, but it ain’t always easy. As the old song declares, Jack of Diamonds is a hard card to play.

The wild southern writer Barry Hannah was teaching at Iowa when I went to school there. His collection of stories, Airships, was a huge influence on me; it was liberating to see the way he’d mash up a sentence; he made me realize it didn’t have to be noun verb, noun verb. And his language was a weird risky inspiring mix of Elizabethan and cracker. “Testimony of Pilot,” from that book, is a great, great story.

Barry died of a heart attack in Oxford, Mississippi this past March and I saw his obituary in the New York Times. The obit spoke of his novels and his attempt at Hollywood screenplays, but he said he was a short story writer first, a fragmentist, with an imagination calibrated to the short burst. I like that idea, I think I’m calibrated that way and I’m going to keep living by that line from a dead man.