Dear Kenneth,

Perhaps you don’t remember me, and if not I will understand. It was a long time ago. More than half a century. Who could imagine time passing so quickly?

I lived in a beach house near Lund. We used to go out clamming together. Does that ring a bell now?

You rolled up your pants and I said you had ‘city feet,’ because you made such a fuss about walking over barnacles.

I saw your name in a column in The Vancouver Sun. It said you were retiring after a long and esteemed career at the bar. Not having had much of an esteemed career myself, at first I thought you had been a bartender. Then I saw you’d been on the Board of Weyerhaeuser Paper, which is a far cry from slinging drinks!

I read your name and I saw you clear as life, bounding through the heather. That was how I always pictured you, when you weren’t with me. Bounding up that mountain near where you came from in England, a book of poetry in your pocket. Then the memories flooded back, just like it was yesterday. The butter clams we dug up, and how a bucket of them went rotten on my porch and gave off an awful smell. How big the stars were that summer. Who could forget that? Us lying on the beach on my tartan blanket, a million stars overhead, so many of which turned out to have names. Beetlejuice was a name I remember – how about that! I still can’t believe any scientist in his right mind would name a star Beetlejuice.

I suppose I ought to fill you in on my present circumstances. When Frank retired we moved to Victoria. He died three years ago. He said he had a funny feeling in his left arm above the elbow. I said: “Funny ha-ha, or funny peculiar?” I didn’t want to be callous, but those were the last words I spoke to him. He sat in the shade of the house to do the crossword and had a heart attack.

Kenneth Farraday, I do not expect you to get this letter, let alone answer it. But if you do, I’ll let you know this. That summer was the happiest time of my life. I am at the Ogilvie Care Home for Seniors, if you ever find yourself ‘crossing the seas’ to Victoria.

Sincerely,

Priscilla King

Kenneth looked up from the letter. Outside his study window the lawn sloped to a border of rhododendrons with gnarled, rain-slick branches. His pride and joy. That was what Deirdre, his wife, called the rhododendrons: ‘Kenneth’s pride and joy,’ suggesting a simpleness in him, he supposed, as well as misplaced priorities. In June they flamed orange and scarlet, but now they were covered in sticky buds. Beyond the hedges and cedars of the British Properties he could see the suspension rigging of the Lions Gate Bridge, and beyond that, the city’s bony cliff faces.

He could hear Deirdre and his eldest daughter Jennifer having coffee in the kitchen. Jennifer had come to pick up their grandson after a morning with his grandmother, and the two women were murmuring about his likes and dislikes, his fussiness, his learning disability. Kenneth found his grandson difficult to be around, and blamed Jennifer for having cut his hair in bangs that emphasized his oddness.

“He’s peculiar enough,” Kenneth had muttered to Deirdre before Jennifer arrived, as the boy slurped milk out of his saucer. “Must he also have a peculiar haircut?”

Deirdre had shot him a look from under dark eyebrows, a look of frustration verging on fury. Verging on hatred. In menopause she had gotten used to speaking her mind with a blunt force that had shocked him, and the habit had not left her, a decade and a half later.

“He’s your grandson.” She moved her mouth hard. “Show some compassion.”

“It is with great compassion that I have pointed out his unfortunate haircut.” Kenneth had picked up his tray of tea and taken it to the study with the mail, leaving Deirdre with her chalkboard of tasks, machine messages from the Georgia Strait Alliance, and her simmering pot of oso buco.

I saw you, clear as life, bounding up that mountain.

He must have told her about Urra Moor, and the image had somehow lodged in her brain, a sliver he carried too, almost painful to draw out now: running up Urra Moor in the morning, birds scattering out of the gorse, a mule deer watching his scramble. How the blood had raced through his hands and arms and shoulders. He had found a stick and waved it, infatuated with the surge of blood through his body.

Funny that she – Priscilla King – had held onto this memory of a place she had never seen, while Deirdre did not even know the name Urra Moor, though he may have told her about it when he was courting her. He remembered Deirdre descending the stairs of the Vancouver Club in a lemon chiffon dress and gloves. Her father had been an important member. When Kenneth drove her home that night, he had parked at Spanish Banks and pulled up the hem of her dress, stiff as a ballerina’s costume, and touched her knee, then the birthmark high on her left thigh. Perhaps, after that bout of rumpled thrusting, they had lit cigarettes and he had told her about Urra Moor. But he doubted it.

Priscilla King’s handwriting was neatly formed, the s’s like small sails, the g’s and y’s curled neatly beneath each line.

I saw you clear as life.

How odd of her to write to him. The gambit of a lonely widow. Pathetic. And what book of poetry was she referring to? He had taken a couple of classes in English and Philosophy while getting his degree in forestry, before he hunkered down and focused on law. He couldn’t recall carrying a poetry book in his pocket. What a poseur he must have been!

But now he could not stay still. He put on his rubber boots, slid open the glass door and crossed the lawn to the border of rhododendron, where he snapped away twigs, then fetched a box of bonemeal from the shed, scattering handfuls among the moss.

Kenneth had met Priscilla King the summer he worked in Lund, which was the farthest town you could drive north to from Vancouver, along the coastal road: past Howe Sound, Gibson’s, Jarvis Inlet. By day Kenneth had worked in the bush with three other forestry students, Hungarian refugees who had escaped to British Columbia. Together, they measured stream heights, analysed sediment, bushwhacked trails. He remembered lying in his bunk in the afternoon listening to them play cards. The creosote smell of the cabin, the slap of cards as he traced a knot hole with his forefinger, thinking of Priscilla. It must have been a Sunday because he still remembered the anticipation in his stomach waiting for Frank to be gone, back onto his boat. Then Kenneth would wander down the beach, around three coves, to her cabin with its tarpaper roof. Always look for the warning: if she had hung a red towel on the porch rail, a rock weighing it down, then Frank was there.

She was Frank’s wife, a fisherman’s wife, another man’s woman, and this, for Kenneth, was like an aphrodisiac: to taste, to eat of her flesh, to dive into her, to beat himself against her bones, knowing she was another man’s wife, made him flush with desire as he lay on that bunk, surrounded by the smell of socks. When she moaned, he thought: I made her moan more than Frank. When she thrashed, he thought: Can Frank do that? He was stealing her, having his way illicitly. He even remembered whispering Frank’s wife as he kissed her, noticing how she flinched. That, too, was erotic, to hurt her ever so gently. He had been young: affecting any woman had felt exhilarating and dangerous.

Only a year before, he had left North Yorkshire. Mother and Father. Tea at the rectory. He had roamed across Canada feeling like a black sheep, the bad youngest son, though in fact he was the only son, with two doting sisters, Dodie and Kitty. He had a notion about himself, which had to do with pouring himself into the Canadian vastness, submerging himself beneath massive, breathing conifers. After one lice-infested season in a logging camp near Squamish, he had amended his plans, writing to his father for money, enrolling in the University of BC’s new forestry department. That was why he was in Lund with three Hungarians who drank dark beer and called to each other in their bunks at night, leaving Kenneth to speculate on the salty crack in Priscilla’s ass.

Even now (under the rhododendron’s waxy leaves) he remembered the fish scales on her tanned shoulders, tiny, reflective and sharp. The sand in her hair. She had been a kind of beach relic, aged, scaly, sandy. She had shown him places to lick – inner ear, belly button – and every time, because he was young and cocky, it had felt like conquest. Only once, after they had collected clams, he had lain on top of her on the tartan blanket, surprised to feel tears at the corners of his eyes. Gratitude? Relief? Pent up chemical exuberance?

He did not answer Priscilla King’s letter.

Instead he waited for a month, and then he lied to Deirdre, telling her he would be lunching with the Weyerhaeuser advisory committee, then going to the club. She would not be home until late; she had her Georgia Strait Alliance board meeting. Then Kenneth took the ferry to Victoria.

He found a seat by the window, placing his coat and scarf on the seat beside him. They passed the tip of a Gulf island, a red-painted government wharf. Sights like this must have been part of Priscilla’s life, for years and years, as she and Frank returned from fishing on his seiner. And now a voice began to intone, a rocking cadence beneath the engine’s hum:

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the Holy City of Byzantium.

And then, almost like his father’s voice, it was so fever sharp:

A man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing and louder sing
For every tatter in his mortal dress—

Where had these voices been? Gone, that was all.

Clamming: you place your socks inside your shoes and put them on a rock above the high-tide mark. She looks at your feet, which have never seen a day’s sun, and she says, “Time to toughen those tootsies, Kenneth.”

And you say: “Alliteration, Priscilla.”

She smiles radiantly, exposing an incisor inexpertly filled with silver.

“You don’t know what alliteration is, do you Priscilla?”

She walks down the beach, not caring.

You call: “Priscilla prances precisely over provocative pebbles,” and she turns and you know you will lie on top of her tonight, her in all her perplexity and supplicant moaning, her womanly needs.

Come on, Kenneth. I’m going to teach you to catch clams.

I thought they just lay in their shells, and you scooped them up.

After the clamming, he’d gone for a night swim then come up the beach, wrapped in a towel. She was on the blanket, crying. He threw himself down beside her.

“Prissy. You’re a mess.”

“Maybe I’ll kill myself,” she said, conversationally. “I have pills. The doctor gave them to me.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Maybe I am.” She lit a cigarette, blew smoke toward the scrim of stars. “You leave. You go to your university. I stay.”

He kissed the salty tears from her temple, feeling both sorry for her and distanced, in another land, walking among other people, discussing Plato and Locke, discussing Milton. After that summer, for years, if he saw a seiner crossing the Strait, the words Frank’s wife would sound in his head, a taste of sex in the setting sun – and that was it.

He stood outside the Ogilvie Care Home for Seniors, a concrete building of pallid mauve, like cold skin. The glass doors slid open as a nurse wheeled a man into the sunlight. The man clutched a cane, the end propped on the chair’s footrest. He wore leather slippers like Kenneth’s slippers at home. The doors closed, muffled by a thousand brushes hidden in the door sockets. From down by the seawall a child’s voice rose: I want a bagel, I want a bagel, I want a bagel! A seaplane scudded across the bay. Kenneth stepped on the automatic door rug, and the doors hissed open, withdrawing into their hairy keeps.

The lobby tiles had been buffed to a mirror-like brilliance, reflecting the penumbra of Kenneth’s white hair. By the window a cleaning woman patiently ministered to a collection of tropical plants, caressing a dampened paper towel over each broad leaf. Solitary figures in wheelchairs had been stranded here and there, deployed, Kenneth thought, like chess pieces. He shivered as he made his way to the check-in desk. The nurse looked up, visible pores on her nose. A crucifix dangled between her large breasts. Lebanese, she might be, or Spanish.

“Is there a Priscilla King here?”

“Who’s visiting?”

“A friend.”

The nurse glanced at his tweed coat, now over his arm, his sweater vest and tie, then typed on a key pad and checked the computer screen. “She’s had a fall. She’s upstairs now. Room 319. Come.” A single word, as though to a child. Kenneth followed her buttocks down the corridor to the elevator. They went up to the third floor, which had walls the colour of a pool, long-legged insects reflected in wobbly patterns through glass. He heard the sigh of recirculating air.

The nurse paused before a door, knocked on it briskly, and then pushed it open.

“Prissy, you’ve got a friend to see you.” She held the door. Kenneth entered.

Two women were parked in parallel beds. The woman in the far bed had frizzy hair around her ears, but the top of her head was bald like one of the three stooges. Moe? Curly? Kenneth had never known which stooge was which.

The woman in the second, closer, bed was Priscilla.

She shifted her head with a single heavy motion and fixed Kenneth with her gaze. She was over eighty – her hair had turned white, her face had weathered, lines deepening, cheeks sinking, sultry lips cracking – but she was still Priscilla, and he felt an urge to say, You haven’t changed, because she hadn’t, not really. The years on Frank’s boat had merely crystallized her, like a piece of candied ginger.

Kenneth advanced to the bedside. “Hello, Priscilla,” he said softly. “I’m Kenneth Farraday.”

“Who?” She squinted at him.

“It’s me. Kenneth. You wrote me a letter.”

She took out her hearing aid, gave him a complicit smile, flicked the plastic sound piece, and then replaced it in her ear. “I dropped the damned thing in the maple syrup this morning,” she said. “Now, come again: who did you say you were? Because I want you to know one thing, I pay my taxes.” She turned to her companion in the next bed to share this piece of drollery, but the other woman had fallen asleep. Priscilla went through the elaborate head motion, and again fixed her gaze on Kenneth. She had caught hold of the edge of the bed sheet.

“You wrote to me,” he said.

“Now why would I do that?”

He found himself blushing. “I knew you a long time ago. I’m Kenneth, Priscilla.”

A pause. A beat. He watched the message pass in through the syrup-covered hearing aid, along the crotchety synapses, and into the pupils of Priscilla’s eyes.

In the lobby a woman in a wheelchair raised a clawed hand to waylay him in his passage across the sea of tiles, but Kenneth kept moving, through the sliding doors, past the hideous fuchsia hanging in their baskets, along the seawall. Women laughed behind him. Two native women lay on the grass eating fried chicken from a paper bucket. Let them. What did he care?

He found a bench, sat, and looked at his watch. The back of his hand was drained of colour. He had two hours until his ferry left the harbour. If he went now, he could wash his hands in the bathroom of the Empress Hotel, then eat curry at the Bengal Lounge, before driving back to the ferry. But he stayed where he was.

After Kenneth had said his name, Priscilla had searched his face, just as though she were digging in the sand, scrabbling with her fingers, clawing to see one vestige, one aspect of the Kenneth she had known, before settling again on his pupils.

“You see. It’s me.”

She made a sound like youch, or ouch. “You can’t be.”

He answered before he could help himself, “Why can’t I be?”

“You’re nothing like him.”

“I’m older. We’re older.”

She looked from his face to his hands, then shook her head, angrily. “You remind me of an egg.” Oh, the look on her face as she said those words, a kind of practical malevolence, as though she knew exactly what she was doing. At that moment the nurse bustled in to give Priscilla a pill. She told Kenneth he could sit and he sat. When the nurse was gone, he spoke again.

“I got your letter. I thought I’d pay you a visit.”

“You did, did you?”

“You invited me.”

“I gave the letter to the nurse. I didn’t think she had mailed it.”

“Well, she did.”

Sunshine attached itself to the slats of the blinds, lighting each edge to brilliance. When he glanced back, Priscilla was looking at him with fascinated disgust. And why? What warranted this reaction? He smelled of aftershave, no doubt, and he was elderly (though not as old as she was), and he had on a sweater vest and a finely cut jacket, and a scarf, a hat with a small feather in the ribbon. He had assigned functions to certain pockets of his tweed coat. She said: “Do you miss him?”

“Who?”

“Kenneth.”

Now he was angry.

She said, “I miss him.”

“Who do you miss, Priscilla?”

She paused, and then gave him a crafty smirk. “Frank,” she said.

He sat for another minute, and then he told her he must go. As he opened the door, he heard her say to the woman in the next bed, “That’s a real cock-of-the block. A puffed up bird, that one.”

Kenneth looked out at the bay. Buildings rippled and broke in the water.

How long before Priscilla forgot that he had visited – before the boy, Kenneth, returned to her? The reader of poetry. The leaper of gorse bushes. A sleep, a wakening, and then he’d be back. In fact, Kenneth-the-boy might have slipped from the room a second before Kenneth arrived, and danced back the second he left – slipping through the side door as old cock-of-the-block took his hat and departed. Fury prickled Kenneth’s back. The old bird. The old, dried-up bird with her brittle bones, hoary toes, cracked skin. Why should she have such access to his boyhood self when Kenneth himself had nothing?

He got up and walked to the parking lot. No curry this time. He would drive to the ferry, and he would never cross the Strait again. Priscilla had had her revenge. The great karmic wheel of time (something Deirdre believed in) had spun round and now she, Priscilla, had come out on top. One part of her mind was addled as all get out, there was no question of that, but another part, using senility as a cover, had slithered across the floor, crafty as a snake, and lashed out.

Do you miss him?

His car went over the ramp with a thump, into the belly of the boat. Getting out of his car he found himself face to face with a teenage boy holding a dog on a leash. “Get that thing away from me,” Kenneth said. Upstairs he found a seat by the window. Children on the deck were playing at being blown back, coats like sails. Behind him a Punjabi family ate spiced rice and fried meat from plastic containers. Bracelets jingled as the mother took out food.

Outside one of the children had a red coat, the same shade as the towel that Priscilla used to set on the porch railing, a rock weighing it down. Priscilla who now lay in bed like a dried-up bird. He pictured red pubic hair beneath the hospital gown, a softened belly, bones so frail you could break them just by lying on top of her. And the look on her face – the spite and satisfaction as she had insulted him. He stood and walked down the aisle, past the ferry take-out restaurant. Something was moving in him. Something old. Something strange.

From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.

Oh Prissy, he almost moaned. You got me good. You got me by the short and curlies this time. But here he stopped short, making a woman behind him spill her coffee. She scowled as she passed him, but he shook his head, because it had come to him. The solution, that was all. The very solution to his problem.

He would return, that was the nub of it. Lying to Deirdre, lying and sneaking, driving to the ferry, crossing the Holy Sea on his mission. And such a mission it was. And who could say, who could slice it fine enough to say, if it was a mission of contrition or revenge? He would come back every month – that was all – just as Priscilla’s coddled brain made its final round of adjustments, closing out the strange old man, replacing him with the boy.

“It’s me,” he will say.

Hat. Overcoat. Gloves. Cravat. Umbrella.

“It’s me,” he will positively purr.

She will turn her head with that rolling gesture. “Who?” Mouth puckered in fear.

“Kenneth.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

Priscilla will edge back, grasping the blanket, ringing, if strength allows, for the nurse. (“Isn’t it sweet,” the nurse will say, “how he comes back each month to visit?”) Then he will meet Priscilla’s eyes, forcing her to see him, prying open her mind to expose those hard-to-get-at spots that hold the other Kenneth, sucking them out like buttery clam meat.

Antiquarian booksellers are snobs – book snobs in fact. The truth is that antiquarian booksellers do not really consider new booksellers to be booksellers at all. That doesn’t mean we don’t think of many of them fondly. After all, while they are really only retailers selling whatever the publishers provide, they are at least selling, along with the tons of mindless crap which should never have been published, some worthy additions to civilization. That civilization of which we, the real booksellers, consider ourselves to be the true guardians.

Many of us antiquarians habitually enter new bookstores to buy current books for reading. And, of course, for many years, until the Internet rendered it futile, we regularly pillaged new booksellers’ remainder tables for first editions, bought when they are at their cheapest and sold later for handsome prices in the world of Modern Firsts, where all that counts is knowledge.

New booksellers, of course, seldom frequent our stores, nor even consider us, except as convenient scapegoats to blame for their stolen and missing books.

Would it be cruel to state that we look on new booksellers professionally, in rather the same manner that professionals in anything look at amateurs? With some affection, a certain respect even, but with the quiet unspoken condescension that the pro invariably contemplates anyone, no matter their passion for the subject, who hasn’t really reached the heights of professionalism? Don’t you first need to reach the “Bigs” before you can understand what it’s really like? We, the antiquarian trade, consider ourselves to be the equivalent of the “Big Game,” even though we are invisible to almost everyone else in publishing and bookselling. I have always found it a bit sad that our colleagues in publishing and new bookselling are mostly unaware that right into the first third of the nineteenth-century the entire booktrade was unified – the publisher, the new bookseller, and the used and rare booksellers – in the same person.

The pros, in sports, call the new players rookies, even though they probably have spent their lives preparing for the moment. So let’s be gentle, let’s call new booksellers rookies and not dismiss them. After all they worship the same Gods that we do – the “Gods of learning,” and of culture, and of civilization.

So, while it’s true that we view new booksellers in perhaps the same manner that real publishers view vanity publishers, who publish only with the assured profit of the author’s payment, we are not seriously prejudiced against them. In fact, we are often on friendly terms. Indeed, I could say that some of my best friends are new booksellers – although that doesn’t necessarily mean that I would be pleased if one of them wanted to marry my sister.

I have noticed that one characteristic new booksellers share with publishers is a certain distrust – even fear – of antiquarian booksellers. The only explanation I can provide for this phenomenon is because, generally, publishers and new booksellers are pretty clever people. And they share a characteristic of many clever people: they don’t like to be ignorant of one aspect, indeed a fairly large aspect, of a field they purport to know something about. They like to think that they are experts about books and bookselling and they become nervous when faced with evidence that they are lacking. In this case what they are lacking is knowledge of about 500 years of the history of their trade. And the evidence is us, the antiquarians. Actually, if we were to include in our mutual history the transcribing and selling of manuscripts, we go back not just five hundred years, to the invention of printing, but millennia, to the beginning of all recorded history, along with soldiers, whores, priests and medicine men. So though they like to dismiss us as unimportant or inconsequential, to what they do, we do not share their ignorance of a side of the trade that we don’t practice. Many antiquarian booksellers, including me, started their so-called careers working in new bookstores, so we often have direct experience of the day-to-day experience. Actually it’s pretty easy. You order a bunch of books from a catalogue, provided by a publisher, sell what you can and return what you can’t. No risk, no penalty, if your opinion of what might sell is wrong. I don’t think it’s cruel, or even unkind, to suggest that anyone who knows something about books could do that. Antiquarian booksellers on the other hand spend years educating themselves about books, paying for every misjudgment in hard cash. And, furthermore, we are forced to confront our errors every day as we encounter our mistakes sitting on nearly every shelf in our stores – unless we simply bite the bullet and throw them out. That leads to a certain humility, which I believe is a necessary counter to the tendency towards arrogance, the inevitable result of our daily interaction with that ignorant but powerful monster known to everyone who has had any contact with it as “The Public.” You can see the snobbery peeking through, can’t you?

That said, it is true that new booksellers, despite their historical deficiencies, are still immensely superior to your regular sort of merchants, who merely sell banal goods of no cultural significance.

And along with our mutual history going back five centuries with printed books, they also share that peculiar sort of character trait that isn’t daunted by the poverty that goes automatically with any sort of bookselling.

Our mutual acceptance of poverty ennobles both branches of bookselling, even if none of us necessarily knew that lifelong poverty was a certainty when we started out. All booksellers must be optimists. How else could we go on trying, especially those of us who have friends not in the trade? Who but an incorrigible optimist could so often enter the often palatial homes of the old friends we went to college with only to see $10,000 to $20,000 worth of electronic equipment, walls of CDs and DVDs and other expensive appurtenances of modern life, with the only books in evidence a shelf of old university textbooks, interspersed with three bestsellers from the last ten years and two coffee table books. Why wouldn’t viewing this gross negation of culture not induce a little bitterness? In our grandfather’s time any successful professional man would be expected to have a library for his leisure. Now expensive possessions seem to be the measure of accomplishment.

Perhaps a more gentle comparison between new and antiquarian booksellers would be found in the difference between a doctor and a veterinarian. The doctor needs to deal with only one species, while the veterinarian deals with all others.

A new bookseller needs to deal only with publisher’s catalogues and Books in Print; we antiquarians need to be able to deal with all the books ever published. How could we not end up assuming a certain sense of superiority?

But in the end new booksellers are our brothers and sisters, and we, despite the hints of bitterness expressed here, know it. They, unfortunately it seems, do not. That’s too bad, because if they better understood how we complemented one another in our noble contributions to all that is best in humanity, they might better understand our mutual destiny.

Of course, I don’t actually intone What would Alice write? whenever my pen gets stuck in the middle of a page. It’s not a case of add-a-pinch-of-Alice-and-stir. Imitation of a favourite author might well be a stage every writer goes through, but the point is to come out the other end writing not in their voice, but your own.

There’s no denying that trying to write like Alice Munro has helped me write like K.D. Miller. But my relationship with her – one-sided as it is – almost didn’t develop at all. The fact is, Alice Munro was an acquired taste.

Ifirst read her stories when I was in my twenties and still hoping for a career in the theatre. Writing then was something I did between auditions, more as a way of blowing off creative steam than anything else. Still, I was starting to submit stories, and had twice been given Honourable Mention in the Flare Magazine short fiction contest. I used to joke that those two words should one day be carved onto my tombstone.

This was in the mid-1970s, when I was working as a professional narrator, recording books for the blind. I was assigned Dance of the Happy Shades to read, followed by Lives of Girls and Women. I struggled through both books, dutifully giving the material my best, but secretly longing for something with more of a plot. Though not exactly a philistine, I did like for there to be a bit of a ta-dah just before the credits rolled. And God knows, one thing you do not get from Alice Munro, ever, is any kind of ta-dah.

But time passed and I grew up a little. I like to think of myself as a writer who is growing up into Alice the way in some circles one is encouraged to grow up into Christ. If that be blasphemy, burn me. The fact is, I am now in my sixty-first year and think of Alice Munro as my unmet literary mentor.

The first time she managed to teach me something unawares was during a reading in the Northern District Public Library in Toronto. (Curious fact: I now live in the co-op that sits on top of that same library. And no, Dear Reader, I did not seek it out for that reason.)

It was 1986. According to my CV, by then I had published two short stories – just enough to make me suspect I might be turning into a writer. Though I was also getting commercials and voice-over jobs, I had all but closed the door on an acting career. Sharing a theatrical agent with one’s actor-spouse becomes awkward when the marriage breaks up, as mine had done just months before the reading.

I had gotten to the point of admiring Alice Munro’s stories while still finding them a little too grown-up to actually like. Though I was over the ta-dah thing, I still wasn’t ready for the cool-eyed, if deeply compassionate, sensibility I found in her work.

The library event was part of a nationwide tour to celebrate the launch of The Progress of Love. I had gathered a group of women friends and planned for us to have dinner at Oliver’s restaurant, then go and hear Alice Munro read. My life was such a financial disaster at the time that I knew I couldn’t afford one of the gleaming new hardcovers that would be for sale. (Frankly, I’m not sure how I even paid for my dinner. Probably my friends treated me as a thank-you for organizing the outing.) But I was determined to get an autograph. So before setting out for Oliver’s, I scanned my bookshelves and chose the least tattered of my softcover Alice Munros – a copy of Lives of Girls and Women.

After the reading, I stood in line with my wee paperback while everybody else got their shiny copies of The Progress of Love signed. When my turn came, I placed Lives of Girls and Women in front of its author. She looked down at it for a minute as if remembering it fondly. Then she looked up at me and smiled.

I don’t think I read too much into that smile at the time, and I won’t now. Alice Munro has a beautiful smile – warm and a bit girlish – and she no doubt bestowed it on many that evening. But it taught me something that would come in handy when I started signing copies of my own books for readers.

I’ve attended readings by authors who appeared bored or even irritated by the task – chore, to them – of signing books. Perhaps they didn’t realize how they came across. They may even have mistaken their own rudeness for that counterfeit sophistication that has us struggling through everything from our first martini to downright odd sex. Alice Munro’s smile, the generosity of spirit with which she greeted someone who hadn’t even bought the book of the moment, was the real thing.

She’s taught me a couple of other lessons by example. Recently I was with a group of writers, and one of them said he had never figured out how to take a drink of water gracefully in the middle of a reading. “I know how!” I piped up. For I had once seen none other than Alice Munro do so on stage.

In the middle of her reading, she stopped and said, “I’m just going to get some water.” Then she went to the little table beside the lectern, poured herself a glass, drank it, returned to the lectern and carried on reading. No fuss. No apology. No aggrieved air, as of genius having been interrupted. Just doing the necessary. Getting on with the job.

Sophistication.

One other writerly protocol Alice demonstrated for me once – one that I sincerely hope someday to have to follow – was the correct way to respond to a standing ovation that goes on for five minutes. I was part of the audience that clapped, stamped, cheered, whistled and hooted itself into a frenzy following a tribute to Alice Munro at Harbourfront. Through it all, its object stood centre stage, simply smiling. Or perhaps I should say, smiling simply. For there was nothing self-deprecating in her attitude, no exaggerated modesty or mock protest. Her smile was not the toothy, aching rictus that most of us would have been unable to tame under such circumstances. It was the kind of smile with which she might greet a rendition by friends and family of “Happy Birthday.” A little embarrassed, yes, but deeply appreciative of the love being shown. A smile that said, Why, thank you. Aren’t you kind.

The real thing.

Ihave no idea how Alice Munro does what she does. I know nothing about her work rituals – whether she writes before dawn or after midnight, in a book-lined study, at a kitchen table or up in a tree. With regard to her own art and craft, she speaks with some reluctance:

Writing or talking about writing makes me superstitiously uncomfortable. My explanations have a way of turning treacherous, half-untrue. . . . I feel like a juggler trying to describe exactly how he catches the balls, and although he had trained to be a juggler for a long time and has worked hard, he still feels it may be luck, a good deal of the time, and luck is an unhappy thing to talk about, it is not reliable. Some people think it is best when doing any of these things – dancing, say, or making love – to follow very closely what you are about. Some people think differently. I do.

I teach creative writing workshops. While I’m grateful to the many authors whose how-to-write books I’ve combed through for tips and exercises, I find this one’s disinclination to take her readers on a backstage tour refreshing.

But at the moment, it’s frustrating, because I’m starting to wonder if that initial W in WWAW should be an H, making it not What but How Would Alice Write. No. Still not right. I’m not talking about writing so much as everything that leads up to writing. All the stuff that informs and drives it. Makes it possible. Makes it inevitable.

A word that’s been nudging the back of my mind since I began this essay is witness. And I’m beginning to think that the letters engraved on that imaginary bracelet should stand for How Would Alice Witness.

Witness is one of those fraught words: witness for the prosecution; eyewitness testimony. And of course, the big one: Thou shalt not bear false witness. Then there’s St. Paul’s “cloud of witnesses,” referring to all the faithful – past, present and yet to be. That last one puts me in mind of my literary community, which includes not just the writing group I meet with monthly but Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf and the still-unknown genius who is scribbling away as I write this, on the other side of the world or just down the street.

It’s impossible for me to discuss or even think about literary witnessing in other than spiritual terms. I came out several years ago as a church-goer when I published a collection of essays linking creativity with spirituality. In that book, I confessed that writing is the way I pray. Writing, after all, brings to mind what I cherish and despise, hope for and fear. But it also compels me to witness to my world in a particular way and from a particular standpoint. As poet Mary Oliver puts it, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

I am as ignorant of Alice Munro’s religious beliefs, if any, as I am of her writing habits. Churches and organized religion don’t do very well in her stories. As she herself says of the faith-tradition in which she grew up: “religion . . . came out mostly in fights. People were Catholics or fundamentalist Protestants, honor-bound to molest each other.” But for all that, she does tend to talk about writing in spiritual terms:

Isn’t the really good time when you are just getting the idea, or rather when you encounter the idea, bump into it, as if it has always been wandering around in your head? There it is, still fairly featureless, but shapely and glowing. It’s not the story – it’s more like the spirit, the centre, of the story, something there’s no word for, that can only come into life, a public sort of life, when words are wrapped around it. . . . Still unspoiled, untampered-with, this intimation. In finer fettle than it will ever be again, after all your pushing and pulling it into sentences.

That may be the best description I have ever read of the inspirational moment – the joy of discovering what is pure and essential, tempered by the knowledge that some of that pure essence will inevitably leak away and be lost in the writing process. And as Alice Munro makes clear, that ambivalent mix infuses not just writing, but the writing life:

. . . It seems to me this is what writing is, when it’s real – a straining of something immense and varied, a whole dense vision of the world, into whatever confines the writer has learned to make for it, and this process, unless you are Shakespeare or Tolstoy, must be accompanied by regret; fortunately it is often accompanied by gleeful satisfactions as well.

. . . something immense and varied, a whole dense vision of the world . . .

I would challenge anyone – even an atheist – to completely divest the word “witness” of its ceremonial robes. Even when used in a literary context, the word implies a moral imperative. It’s not just a case of seeing for oneself, after all, but enabling the reader to see. And for both writer and reader, what’s involved is a heightened kind of seeing. Even when we use the word solely in terms of its secular, contemporary applications – witnessing a crime or an accident – we are hinting at things big and important. Matters of life and death.

Alice Munro can witness to a teapot in ways that encompass matters of life and death. What she does may best be expressed by biographer Robert Thacker when he describes her “wry, distant wonder at the mysteries of being.”

An online interviewer once asked me if I could articulate one particular thing that Alice Munro does that the rest of us don’t. Or don’t do enough. Or don’t do as well. Here’s what I answered:

Alice can see. She really can see what’s in front of her. I don’t just mean in terms of physical detail (though that is so important) but also in terms of seeing into people – what they want, what they’re capable of. She can practically see around corners. One thing I’ve never found, anywhere in her work, is a single shred of cliché. And what is cliché, if not a kind of wilful blindness? Cliché is also a form of fear, or at least gutlessness. And Alice is such an incredibly brave writer. So how would I sum her writing up in a few words? What makes Alice, Alice? I would have to say, the courage to see what is in front of her.

Courage to see what is in front of you. To refuse the wilful blindness that polite society, sometimes even literary society, imposes. This does not mean that Alice Munro’s writing is exploitive or cruel. Though it can probe like a surgeon’s scalpel, it is never wielded as a weapon or applied like an instrument of torture. Nevertheless, it can and does cut to the bone.

There are times, when I am reading her work – especially a story like “The Peace of Utrecht,” which fictionalizes the aftermath of her mother’s death – that I actually get scared on her behalf. The fear I feel is closer to awe. At her courage. Recklessness, even. Her utter devotion to whatever is good for the story, whatever it needs in order to come into its own.

But as she herself admits, the victory is usually somewhat pyrrhic:

‘Why, if Jubilee isn’t Wingham, has it got Shuter Street in it?’ people want to know. Why have I described somebody’s real ceramic elephant sitting on the mantelpiece? I could say I get momentum from doing things like this. The fictional room, town, world, needs a bit of starter dough from the real world. It’s a device to help the writer – at least it helps me – but it arouses a certain baulked fury in the people who really do live on Shuter Street and the lady who owns the ceramic elephant. ‘Why do you put in something true and then go and tell lies?’ they say, and anybody who has been on the receiving end of this kind of thing knows how they feel.
‘I do it for the sake of my art and to make this structure that encloses the soul of my story, which I’ve been telling you about,’ says the writer. ‘That is more important than anything.’
Not to everybody, it isn’t.

Indeed not. The first short story I ever published got me into trouble with my family. I remember a ridiculous telephone conversation with my brother, in which I swore up and down that although my story took place in our home town of Hamilton, on a street and in a house exactly like the ones of our childhood, and although it featured a neighbour eerily similar to one who had in fact lived a few houses away from us and bore the same name as her fictional counterpart, nevertheless what I had written had absolutely nothing to do with reality, past or present. That conversation, which spiralled dizzyingly into concepts of what-is-art and what-is-real and blah and blah, had a very simple subtext:

You hurt Mom.
No I didn’t.
Yes you did.

We were both wrong and both right. I had indeed hurt our mother by writing what I did. But hurting her had been so far from my intention that I was genuinely surprised by her reaction. What was my intention? To write a good story. And in order to do that, I needed for the mother character to be a certain way.

I do it for the sake of my art and to make this structure that encloses the soul of my story . . . That is more important than anything.

Is it? What if, while composing that first published short story, I had sat myself down for a little talk about things like family loyalty, daughterly respect and consideration for the feelings of others? Would that have stopped me from writing what I did? Should it have stopped me?

I didn’t know it at the time, but during that you-hurt-Mom-no-I-didn’t conversation with my brother, I was trying to justify my attempt to be a good witness. Had I written a sugar-coated story full of happy people – the kind that could not possibly offend anyone save to bore them to death – I would not only have been bearing false witness with regard to my subject and my reader, but would have deeply offended myself in ways that I could sense then but not articulate.

But how does a writer go about bearing witness in a way that is true to their subject, their reader and themselves? Specifically, how does Alice Munro do it?

Instead of trying to offload the legal and religious freight the word is carrying, I’m going to put it to use. Alice Munro is first and foremost a reliable eyewitness. When she describes a teapot, by God, it’s a teapot. Furthermore, she could testify in court to the truth of that teapot. The several truths, more like. Finally, in what she makes of the teapot – what, if anything, the teapot signifies – she reveals a sense of justice and compassion that has not a shred of sentimentality, cheap moralizing or the ta-dah my younger self wanted.

So if I were to come up with a handy Witness-Like-Alice checklist, it would look like this:

• see what’s in front of you
• tell it like it is
• don’t tie a bow on it

None of those actions, however, is discrete. Seeing and telling are almost inextricably interrelated in the writing process, and the tying or not tying of a bow directly dependent on both. Even when I do manage to prise one action away from the other two, it proves to be more complicated than it first appeared.

See what’s in front of you? Fine. But what if what’s in front of you is obscured by lies or family legend or your own prejudice? And who are “you,” anyway? You don’t just open your eyes, as a writer. You open a particular pair of eyes – those of a character in the story, perhaps, or of a narrator whose reliability is questionable. How perceptive or selectively blind those eyes are will depend on what they have already seen. What they may want, or fear, to see.

Tell it like it is? Okay. But what is “it”? (See: “Seeing . . .”) And again, who is doing the telling? (See: “Who are you . . .”) Furthermore, who are “you” telling “it” to? Do you relate an anecdote to your lover the same way as to your maiden aunt? (I know, I know. Depends on the maiden aunt.) Even if your audience is the old reliable Dear Reader, that is still a relationship – one that will affect what you write and how.

Finally, as for that bow that must never be tied, well, damn it, sometimes Alice Munro does tie a bow on things – an exquisite and necessary bow.

Still, a checklist is a terrible thing to waste, so I’m going to use it. And I’m going to take a close look at three stories – “The Peace of Utrecht,” “Meneseteung” and “Dimensions.” I chose these particular stories not just because they represent the early, middle and later stages of their author’s career but because they’re favourites of mine. I enjoy them. I am fulfilled by them. And yes, I suppose I envy their author. I would be very happy to have written any of them, or anything as good.

But is that really a case of envy? What I feel when I finish reading one of these stories is actually more like gratitude. That such a story was written. That I had the great good luck to read it. Wonder comes into this too, and joy.

Though I’ll let the word envy stay on the page, I do think it harks back to a primitive stage in my growing up into Alice. The more mature mix of gratitude, wonder and joy is closer to envy’s opposite. Yes, I am made aware of the gap between Alice Munro’s achievement and my own. But this awareness has nothing of despair in it. Not only do I want to try to bridge the gap by writing better than I have so far managed to do, but I actually believe I can.

See what’s in front of you

In the following excerpt from “The Peace of Utrecht,” the narrator, Helen, has arrived with her children for a visit to her childhood home, where her sister Maddy still lives. When they pull up at the door, Helen’s daughter asks, “neutrally yet with some disbelief” if that is her mother’s house:

And I felt that my daughter’s voice expressed a complex disappointment – to which, characteristically, she seemed resigned, or even resigned in advance; it contained the whole flatness and strangeness of the moment in which is revealed the source of legends, the unsatisfactory, apologetic and persistent reality. The red brick of which the house is built looked harsh and hot in the sun and was marked in two or three places by long grimacing cracks; the verandah, which always had the air of an insubstantial decoration, was visibly falling away. There was – there is – a little blind window of coloured glass beside the front door. I sat staring at it with a puzzled lack of emotional recognition. I sat and looked at the house and the window shades did not move, the door did not fly open, no one came out on the verandah; there was no one at home. This was as I had expected, since Maddy works now in the office of the town clerk, yet I was surprised to see the house take on such a closed, bare, impoverished look, merely by being left empty. And it was brought home to me, as I walked across the front yard to the steps, that after all these summers on the Coast I had forgotten the immense inland heat, which makes you feel as if you have to carry the whole burning sky on your head.

There was – there is – a little blind window of coloured glass beside the front door.

What is important is my being able to see that small, decorative and essentially useless window, stuck for some reason beside the door. So I’m not going to go symbol-hunting here, and try to winkle out some little trophy of meaning. In the words of John Metcalf, “Alice Munro has rightly always resisted symbol-seekers and reductive reading, insisting that a spade is indeed and always a spade . . .”

Yes, that window is undeniably a window, just as the red brick is red brick and the verandah a verandah. Still, nothing in an Alice Munro story is ever just there because it’s there. Everything does double duty.

So I think it is fair to say that the little blind window gives me something beyond its immediate self. That is, it reminds me of St. Paul’s assertion that we see “through a glass, darkly.” For the description of the house is neither neutral nor omniscient. It is not of any house, not even of the house, but of the house as seen by Helen. A mature Helen, moreover, who has returned as a wife and mother. Even her child’s introductory question, which could be a simple seeking of confirmation, is given a particular spin – disbelief, “complex disappointment.” For Helen has returned to “the dim world of continuing disaster, of home.”

Just as she regards the little blind window with “a puzzled lack of emotional recognition,” so too does she almost fail to recognize herself in a mirror:

. . . the reflection of a thin, tanned, habitually watchful woman, recognizably a Young Mother, whose hair, pulled into a knot on top of her head, exposed a jawline no longer softly fleshed, a brown neck rising with a look of tension from the little sharp knobs of the collarbone – this in the hall mirror that had shown me, last time I looked, a commonplace pretty girl, with a face as smooth and insensitive as an apple, no matter what panic and disorder lay behind it.

This is one of those instances when seeing and telling are virtually indistinguishable. Yes, we see what Helen looks like. But we get so much more than that from the passage. Helen has come to visit someone who is not just her sister, but the sister who stayed. At one point, she even comes out and says it – “Maddy is the one who stayed.” The one who, in other words, gave up her chance to have what Helen has – husband, children, a home someplace other than in that old house – in order to nurse their terminally ill mother. If Maddy is the one who stayed, Helen is the one who escaped. But only temporarily. Like the prodigal in the parable, she has returned laden with guilt and in need of forgiveness.

So that glance Helen takes of herself in the mirror is, again, doing a lot of work: thin . . . watchful . . . pulled into a knot . . . look of tension . . . sharp knobs of the collarbone . . . Compare that, just in terms of how the words sound, with: commonplace pretty girl, with a face as smooth and insensitive as an apple. “Insensitive” is a surprise. Wouldn’t “innocent” or “unprepared” be more the expected thing? Yes, it would. But it wouldn’t do the work of “insensitive.” This is, after all, the face of the girl who would grow into the woman who got away. The one who would be tough enough and selfish enough to do whatever she had to, in order to survive. Everything Helen sees or experiences in “The Peace of Utrecht” reminds the reader of the weight of emotional baggage she is carrying.

I may be getting ahead of myself in terms of my self-imposed checklist, but I don’t want to leave this story without an appreciation of the name of the town in which it all takes place – Jubilee. First of all, it’s funny. There is not a shred of jubilation in Jubilee. The description of the town hall cupola includes a great bell “to be rung in the event of some mythical disaster.” This is the small-town Protestant mindset in a nutshell: If doom is inevitable, you might as well look forward to it.

Finally, there is the Biblical interpretation of jubilee. In Old Testament times, every fiftieth year was a year of jubilee, when slaves were freed, debts forgiven and fields allowed to lie fallow. Freedom. Forgiveness. Rejuvenation. Everything the story deals with, in one word.

No, I am not symbol-hunting. Nor am I tying a bow on something. I am accepting a gift I believe is being offered.

Tell it like it is

One happy side effect of trying to be a better writer – one that is not stressed enough in creative writing classes – is becoming a better reader. And a large part of my growing up into Alice has been learning to read. The learning curve has not always been gentle, however, which may explain why “Meneseteung” was such a puzzle to me the first time I encountered it.

Given my training in acting and directing, I should have had more of an eye for the story’s stagecraft. I should have appreciated its use of alienation techniques, whereby the audience is tapped on the shoulder and reminded that it is seeing a made thing – a thing that was made in order that it might see.

The unnamed narrator of “Meneseteung” is an amateur historian researching a bit of potted 19th-century Ontario. She wanders graveyards, reads old newspapers, quotes from a book of poems, and finally surrenders to that most reliable of perceptive tools, her own imagination.

Her description of character Jarvis Poulter, for example, teeters back and forth between what he officially is, according to the local newspaper of the times – “a civil magistrate, an employer, a churchman” – and what she wants to make of him:

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?

Those question marks – the playful juxtaposition of “self-possessed air” and “large pale wart” – capture the voice of someone trying to assemble a puzzle whose pieces are more missing than present. But they are also the sign of a director at work – exerting some control over her audience’s focus, and the depth of their emotional involvement.

Much of the joy of reading “Meneseteung” comes from these glimpses of the storyteller at work. In fact, it could be argued that there is more telling than story. A slightly peculiar spinster catches the eye of a prosperous man in the town. He makes a coded offer of marriage. She turns him down. They go on living side by side until their deaths, he growing more prosperous and she more peculiar. End of story. Or so it would be, if we read Alice Munro for the plot.

In “Meneseteung,” the telling is the story. More specifically, the utter impossibility of telling the truth in its entirety is itself the truth that is being told. This saves the story from any superficial feminist spin. Though issues of feminism are definitely raised – for example, Jarvis Poulter’s inability to appreciate Almeda Roth as wife material until he glimpses “her indiscretion, her agitation, her foolishness, her need” – the story is much more than a scaffold to support a political agenda.

“Meneseteung” emerges in shards and scraps, like bits of broken artefact coming to the surface of an archaeological dig. Nothing is either complete unto itself or unstained by the dirt in which it has been buried. So-called “facts” can only be sifted from gossip and poetry. Even the relatively prosaic summing-up of Almeda Roth betrays the narrow, speculative gaze of the town, the times, and would-be suitor Jarvis Poulter:

Almeda Roth has a bit of money, which her father left her, and she has her house. She is not too old to have a couple of children. She is a good enough housekeeper, with the tendency toward fancy iced cakes and decorated tarts that is seen fairly often in old maids. (Honorable mention at the Fall Fair.) There is nothing wrong with her looks, and naturally she is in better shape than most married women of her age, not having been loaded down with work and children. But why was she passed over in her earlier, more marriageable years, in a place that needs women to be partnered and fruitful? She was a rather gloomy girl – that may have been the trouble. . . . And 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.

“Offerings, the book is called.” This is how “Meneseteung” begins. Each section of the story starts with a bit of verse culled from the book. These poems, while sometimes hinting at something deeper and more disturbing, are entirely conventional for the times, in no way at odds with Almeda Roth’s ladylike public mask. The narrator studies the author photograph on the dust jacket (“It’s the untrimmed, shapeless hat, something like a soft beret, that makes me see artistic intentions, or at least a shy and stubborn eccentricity . . .”) and quotes Roth herself in the book’s preface:

From my earliest years I have delighted in verse and I have occupied myself – and sometimes allayed my griefs, which have been no more, I know, than any sojourner on earth must encounter – with many floundering efforts at its composition. My fingers, indeed, were always too clumsy for crochetwork, and those dazzling productions of embroidery which one sees often today – the overflowing fruit and flower baskets, the little Dutch boys, the bonneted maidens with their watering cans – have likewise proved to be beyond my skill. So I offer instead, as the product of my leisure hours, these rude posies, these ballads, couplets, reflections.

The choice of a wry, satirical researcher’s voice to narrate the story is what is referred to in the theatre as an alienation technique. It serves to keep the reader from getting too attached to Almeda Roth and demonizing Jarvis Poulter. By the time the climax occurs – a neighbourhood fight that has Almeda believing a woman has been beaten to death by her husband – the reader is sufficiently distanced emotionally to focus on what is happening between the two main characters. For once, each sees what the other has the potential to become. Jarvis Poulter, who has just nudged the rump of the “corpse” with his boot and sent her on her way, looks at Almeda Roth and sees a wife – one whom he could manage and subdue. She, however, looks at him and sees not just a husband, but one who, in however gentlemanly and respectable a fashion, would destroy her.

Jarvis informs Almeda that he will call later to escort her to church – a way of announcing to the community that they are engaged. She, however, puts a note on her front door window telling him that she is ill – implicitly rejecting his proposal. Then she takes laudanum for menstrual cramps, makes grape jelly and writes a poem in her head.

Or does she? The final paragraph of the story jerks us back into the narrator’s speculative frame of mind: “I may have got it wrong. I don’t know if she ever took laudanum. Many ladies did. I don’t know if she ever made grape jelly.”

Or ever wrote another poem. What we do know is that, in refusing Jarvis Poulter, she has turned her back on small-town respectability. She becomes a figure of mean-spirited fun, the butt of schoolboy pranks, one of which contributes to her death.

But does she also become a kind of holy fool? Does she manage, if not to write her poem, somehow to live it?

Isn’t that the idea – one very great poem that will contain everything and, oh, that will make all the other poems, the poems she has written, inconsequential, mere trial and error, mere rags? 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 with its blue-black flower. . . .
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 and its grinding blocks of ice thrown up at the end of winter and its desolating spring floods.

A lesser author would end the story with a quote from the actual – published? famous? standard of school textbooks? – poem. A lesser author would give Almeda Roth a better monument than the tiny, weed-smothered stone engraved with Meda. But to do either would be to bear not so much false as incomplete witness. For the whole truth of the story is contained in that repeated phrase, “I don’t know.”

Don’t tie a bow on it

Years ago I took a crisis counselling course at my church. What I learned from it – something that has actually served me well as a writer – can be summed up this way: When someone shares their grief, anger, deepest secret or darkest sin with you, shut up and listen.

Do not presume to identify with them (“I know exactly how you feel”) forgive them (“nobody’s perfect”) or even understand them (“I can see why you would want to quit your job/ kill your husband/ blow up City Hall.”) Respect the silence that will stretch between you after such a confession. And above all, do not tie a bow on the situation by saying, “it’s always darkest before the dawn” or “these things are sent to try us” or “God never gives us more than we can bear.” Such clichés of the heart demean not just the gift of confidence, but the giver. So say nothing. You are in the presence of the sacred. Be silent and respectful, as you would be at a shrine, whether or not you believe in the god to which it is dedicated.

How does that relate to writing? Well, I’m beginning to think that good writing, with all that it entails, might be one antidote for fundamentalism.

When the unthinkable happens, human beings nevertheless try to think about it. They search for explanation, for meaning, for some sense of justice, however harsh. One dead end this searching can come up against is fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism doesn’t necessarily thump a Bible or blow itself up on a crowded bus. It’s a narrow, reductionist, black-and-white view of life that can creep like mold into anything – a family, an office, a book club. It’s the opposite of Keats’s negative capability, and as such is the enemy of ambiguity, relativity, inclusivity, even acceptance and forgiveness.

In the writing of fiction, vestiges of the fundamentalist mindset reveal themselves when an author is too ready to impose meaning, write to a scheme, or limit the complexity of their characters to serve some ideological agenda. Fundamentalism requires at least a partial shutdown of the imagination, and is anathema to the true witness that good writing bears.

“Dimensions” is a story that confronts and defeats this mindset in the way it deals with some of the Big Questions: can a human being be inherently evil; can someone who has committed the worst imaginable crime be deserving of forgiveness; is there life after death. It is also a story whose subject matter, in less skilled hands, could have overwhelmed its treatment.

Much has been made of the eerie similarities between the events and characters portrayed in “Dimensions” and those of a real-life crime committed two years after the story was first published. For her part, Alice Munro has admitted that, perhaps owing to subsequent news headlines, it is the one story of hers that she cannot reread.

But long before life came to imitate art, she would have known that there were huge risks in taking such a story on. It could so easily be written on the cheap, becoming a sensational or moralistic indulgence.

Instead, the story seems to be working against any engagement of the reader’s baser or more elevated sensibilities. The tone is most often that of flat, just-the-facts-ma’am reportage:

One night her mother died suddenly, of an embolism. Doree’s mother had a lot of women friends who would have taken Doree in – and she stayed with one of them for a time – but the new friend Lloyd was the one Doree preferred. By her next birthday she was pregnant, then married.

Lloyd turns out to be the husband from hell. He is paranoid and abusive and isolates Doree, dismissing her only friend as “the Lezzie.” When she escapes him for one night, she returns to find that he has killed their three children. Again, the passage reads like notes from a coroner’s investigation:

Dimitri still in his crib, lying sideways. Barbara Ann on the floor beside her bed, as if she’d got out or been pulled out. Sasha by the kitchen door – he had tried to get away. He was the only one with bruises on his throat. The pillow had done for the others.

Even the depiction of Doree’s reaction has a cool, removed quality, its details rendered almost clinically:

[Doree] . . . was stumbling around the yard, holding her arms tight across her stomach as if she had been sliced open and was trying to keep herself together . . .
. . . [Doree] kept stuffing whatever she could grab into her mouth. After the dirt and grass it was sheets or towels or her own clothing. As if she were trying to stifle not just the howls that rose up but the scene in her head.

This climax occurs not near the end but exactly in the middle of the story. The author is getting the details of what happened out of the way – not because they are distasteful but because they are backstory. The prime focus of “Dimensions” is Doree’s and Lloyd’s continuing relationship.

The story starts, in more ways than one, with Doree riding one of three buses she has to take to visit the institution for the criminally insane where Lloyd is kept. This is also the point where the Big Questions start to be asked.

Typically, Alice Munro rejects small answers. When Doree visits Mrs. Sands, her social worker, someone in the office slips her a pamphlet:

On the front of it was a gold cross and words made up of gold and purple letters, “When Your Loss Seems Unbearable . . .” Inside there was a softly coloured picture of Jesus and some finer print Doree did not read. . . .
“When you’re down is when they’ll try to get at you,” Doree said. . . . They think you’ll fall on your knees and then it will be all right.”
Mrs. Sands sighed.
“Well,” she said, “it’s certainly not that simple.”
“Not even possible,” Doree said.

Doree’s conversations with Lloyd are eerily polite, infused with small talk. Out of context, they could be the dialogue of a couple falling in love:

“Do I seem like a different person to you?” he asked.
“Well, you look different,” she said cautiously. “Don’t I?”
“You look beautiful,” he said sadly.
Something softened in her. But she fought against it.
“Do you feel different?” he asked. “Do you feel like a different person?”
She said she didn’t know. “Do you?”
He said, “Altogether.”

Is this how forgiveness begins? Is it even possible, in such circumstances? Alice Munro pursues these and other Big Questions by giving them to her least reliable narrator – Lloyd – to mull over. He writes letters to Doree that read like religious tracts:

What I Know in Myself is my own Evil. That is the secret of my comfort. I mean I know my Worst. It may be worse than other people’s worst but in fact I do not have to think or worry about that. No excuses. I am at peace. Am I a Monster? The World says so and if it is said so then I agree. But then I say, the World does not have any real meaning for me. I am my Self and have no chance to be any other Self. I could say that I was crazy then but what does that mean? Crazy. Sane. I am I. I could not change my I then and I cannot change it now.

When we first meet Lloyd, he’s a joker and a charmer. Even after becoming what most of the world would call inhuman, he remains intelligent and articulate. His “I am I” actually echoes God’s “I am that I am” as spoken to Moses from the burning bush.

There is not a shred of stereotype in his depiction. He has an authority that is as strangely seductive to the reader as it is to Doree. So we do not throw the book against the wall when he claims to have seen his children – alive and happy in heaven:

Possibly I got hold of this from being so much on my own and having to think and think and with such as I have to think about. So after such suffering and solitude there is a Grace that has seen the way to giving me this reward. Me the very one that deserves it the least in the world’s way of thinking.

Is this truly the grace of God? Is it mere insanity? Is it pure evil, spinning an emotional trap for Doree in order to keep her under control? The reader is as alone in grappling with these questions as Doree herself. She does not tell her social worker about Lloyd’s letters. All we know is that she derives comfort from Lloyd’s vision of the children while she gropes to find a rationale for continuing to visit him:

Aren’t I just as cut off by what happened as he is? Nobody who knew about it would want me around. All I can do is remind people of what nobody can stand to be reminded of.

The story ends with Doree once more on the bus, on her way to see Lloyd. But the bus hits a truck, and Doree helps save the truck driver’s life:

She enveloped his mouth. She pressed his warm fresh skin. She breathed and waited. She breathed and waited again. And a faint moisture seemed to rise against her face.

Once an ambulance is on the way, she offers to stay with the victim. The bus driver asks her if she doesn’t still need to get to London. Her answer is the unadorned No that ends the story.

So what has happened? Has an instance of real-life salvation driven all the religious nonsense out of Doree’s mind? Has helping someone to live assuaged some of the guilt she must feel about her dead children?

We don’t know what her “No” means. Whether she will simply not be seeing Lloyd today, or ever again. We don’t know if she has forgiven him, or if she will continue to comfort herself with visions of her children in heaven, or even open any more of his letters.

Are we witnessing a life-changing epiphany, or just a thing of the moment? Yet, what is a life-changing epiphany, if not a thing of the moment?

All we know is that a woman has changed her mind. No questions, big or small, have been answered. No bow has been tied.

And I’m not going to tie one now.

I’m still in the process of growing up into Alice. She’s teaching me to see what’s in front of me, tell it like it is, and then – the hard one – leave it alone. Because it’s not mine any more. If it ever was.

So all I’m going to do now is compile a kind of checklist for life. Here is what I have learned from Alice, on the page and on the stage:

• If you need water in the middle of a reading, pour yourself a glass and drink it.
• If a standing ovation goes on too long, just be patient. This too shall pass.
• Witness to a teapot the way you would to a revelation. Witness to a revelation the way you would to a teapot.
• If someone asks you to autograph the wrong book, do it with a smile. They might grow up to write an article about you.

Summer stayed no longer than a sparrow.
Medication is passed over a trembling lip.
The postcard arrives one day too late.
A man notes he’ll get an Asian hooker if
he’s dying, maybe if he isn’t. A spider
in the woodpile ends up in the fire.
One beggar spits in the air at another.
The field of sunflowers holds on as long
as it can, but dies before the gentle old lady
passes on the train. Babies are placed
in planes and carried to cars. A good man
is murdered in his house. They leave
his body, pass his son on the lawn, reach
out to ruffle his hair, and he watches them go.

For some reason we all wait for something.

NOTES ON A SMALL WORLD

No part of either army mourns, refuses to move
for political reasons. Field clear and level,
each pawn moves straight. Forward, armed
with a spade, that’s all. The bishop is cruelest.
Nobody knows why he asks to be served
those he slays with chutney. Nobody knows
he dreams of being handed his own severed head.
The knight has an odd but loyal compass, puts up
with the rook, his raucous affairs in the off-hours,
so frequently heard by the king, part dragon
but shifty and slow out of need to feel his aromatic
movement in silk. It’s all about breeding, instinct.
There’s no difference in resources between armies.
Reincarnation is a fact, but they get only one try
at this before beginning again. It is the queen who
works hardest, pregnant only with celestial concerns,
lands with both feet on an opponent, thinks ahead
to a summer of peace and freedom: a straw hat,
yellow dress. Little does she know, it’s game over.

MAMA SPIDER

Mothers die and return as spiders, to stamp
every part of your home – the living room wall,
bathroom sink – with tenuous hope, defying
gravity to check on you in the days and months
after a funeral, they are found on shower curtains,
are knocked off and kicked down the drain, or
they try again and again just to get to you,
moving over shiny summer lawns, concrete
and guano, picked off by blackbirds, some
get as far as a window, self-hired in the humidity
to watch a while beneath cumulus and a sky
that’s loaded with rain and eyeing the land.

For a moment that bacchanal, finally quiet man,
pear-shaped, asleep on a park bench, clinging
lightly to a book, comes near a truth on the swell
of a dream: remembers the lady in the shop
by the school, encouraging a banana over chocolate,
friendly to all the kids, her fan pushing back
at fat heat, humming like an old lighthouse.
She went into hospital for a too big heart, and all
were smart enough to see the irony, but he’d dismiss
as drunkenness the idea of noble spiders, or her
nearly invisible in a room, relishing legs and legs,
the protein strands of silk, the secondary eyes.

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
—Wallace Stevens, “Gubbinal”

Three hundred times as heavy as our sun.
The Bubble Observer scientists report
buzzing and whizzing and gesturing in a ball
of swollen crimson gas burning standingl
ike a braintrust of firebrands and cake batter.

See the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
for updates, they say. This gubbinal—R136a1—sits around the house,
a rich tanned coot at the corner of Magellanic Cloud
and Shalimar’s Dowry, 165,000 light years in mystery
beyond the Milky Way.

The CN Tower casts its ex-cathedra shadow by day,
recently suited with LED lights, red and purple.
With the moxy of a junior vampire,
they stroke the shaft with abandon;
that is, aggregating the infrared of the city

and taking possession even as markets drain
the sweet sad drainage of abandoned wives.
A motive pure as sunrise, sure as sunset.
Watch the flick of green and greedy gold on a deerfly:
a glittering buzz we still don’t understand.

Don Draper

—after Lavinia Greenlaw

Moths feather your far gazebo
like young sailors on first leave.
You know something, and keep reminding me

of my own needs. You see an audience
of blooming heads and sugared bank notes,
and act accordingly. The swallows see it at five o’clock,

a Wolfman’s tragedy.
They hang themselves upside down,
handsome sienna prizes in the semaphore of bats.

Swayed by a summer night, I swing out
to your silk pocket square standing at attention,
a bird about-face. You’re the dark dew on the green grass of home.

Poseurs

The walking stick insect was a late childhood horror.
That July night, a squib on me from the natural world
scaled the wall as a vampire under the porch light,
ugly as an umbrella’s disrobing.
Moths, with brown wings the prize of
Asian fan-makers, pestered it like paparazzi.

Hoping to forget its awful likeness and presence,
I gave night-deep chase:
all twelve or so flirting shutterbugsre
grouped at the ha-ha,
honoured their lives were spared by a virtue of brevity.

That Peruvian familiar, a race almost entirely female,
had come down from the Morello cherry long after sunset;
after the plums turned the humid blue they want to be,
after trees sighed and inhaled the nearby jasmine, blooming
them nightly to dream-lives as smooth-complected date palms
for some caliph’s odalisque
or the low-stress Oregonian monkey puzzles,
a species whose softly-prickled, rounded shoehorn limbs
propose new varietals of orgasm.

Those giants, waving in their best Isadore Duncans,
know the poseurs well, the little stand-ups
fashioned after their mutineered twigs. Given half a chance,
the clowns would not walk at all, nor meander,
perambulate or otherwise imitate
Wordsworth or Nietzsche. Like the wives of 17th century
men of garden science, they loiter and loll
between vivarium and cabinet of curiosity,
dividing their time between joy and sloth.

The danger in happiness: Now everything I touch turns out to be wonderful. Now I love any fate that comes along. Who feels like being my fate?

Neitzche’s fate, of course, was to go mad and grow an absurd moustache.

In the evenings I loved Tyger the best. I would often set him upon the piano’s keys to serenade me. Tyger was a fine minimalist. His paws selected notes precisely, though within a small range. He would play nervous tone poems – very Oriental-sounding. I often recited in time with his tinkerings. You had to watch him, though, or he’d go over. One evening after an interminable book launch for two of my former students, I returned to my dark home full of darker spirits. I brought a glass of wine into the moonlit living room and sat brooding. My African-primitive paintings screamed at me. It seemed all of my small creatures were sleeping, but then I heard Tyger’s squeaking and scratching start up in the dining room, where his cage was kept. He seemed eager to play, so I brought him downstairs to the Steinway. He began a slow, rodent blues that immediately splashed joy and sorrow on my smouldering anomie. I moved around the room, dripping wine down the front of my chemise, and began incanting, sans gêne, some of my older poems. I had not thought of them in years: Trudeau’s speeches, as written by Milton; tanks in downtown Montréal; explosive rhythms and exploding mailboxes; muffled cries from a cabinet minister in the trunk. My youth expanded in my chest, filling my lungs.

What is a poet? Kierkegaard asked. An unhappy [woman] who in [her] heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music.

I grew lost in the remembered lines and did not notice that the piano was silent. Tyger had slipped from the keys and was lying on the floor before the pedals. He was stunned for a moment, and I held him and wept and apologized and explained to him, as I have to you many times, that I am the daughter of Milton’s Eve, full of demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, and moon-struck madness. I began to intone the poem again, but more softly, stroking the back of his broad, furry head. He bit into my knuckle and I dropped him angrily. Scrambling on the wood floor, he disappeared under the couch and did not emerge for the rest of the evening. I locked myself in my office.

Iwish that Tyger had scarred me with that bite. The smell of him is still there in that cage in the kitchen. Guinea pee and woodchips. I sometimes ask Ross to smell the cage, after he has taken off his shoes and come glumly into the kitchen in his ludicrous, red socks. Ross is the young man who comes each week to type my poems and journals into the old computer the university bought for me after I told them it was impossible for me to come downtown two days a week just to sit in a hot office. Ross looks to me like a clean-shaven Edgar Allen Poe, or a sober John A. MacDonald. A disarmingly bright young man with a weakness for Jean-Louis Kerouac (he denies it, but I can smell it in the work shirts he wears, the state of his running shoes, his occasional grumpiness). When I am in London or Trieste, I leave Ross with the keys to the house. No matter how detailed the instructions I leave for the care of flora and fauna alike, there is yet always one plant and one animal drooping upon my return. He is at least more dependable than that thirteen-year-old girl, Jocelyn, the niece of a friend, who was reduced to shuddering tears when presented with the evidence of her own incompetence. Again, I had left pages of instructions, and yet I returned to a home littered with dried-out leaves and dyspeptic rodents.

I once again unhook the wire structure and lift the plastic base to my nose: Tyger is there, plastic cannot defeat his lingering odour. The smell is long-since lost to the car seat from which he made his farewell tour. It is lost to the hands that held him in the fading light of his final afternoon. It is lost to the hard wood of the floor on which pooled my tears. But it is still in that cage, still in that small home that was Tyger’s sleeping quarters for two years.

Sabba dukkha, sabba anatta, sabba anikka, said the Bhudda. Sorrow is everywhere, in man is no abiding entity, in things no abiding entity. But perhaps there is a sorrow that abides in a plastic cage?

Tyger and the others had the run of the house during the day. They all got along, most of the time. If I was working at home, I would often hear a scramble and some angry squeaking – one of the others had tread too close to Tyger, once again forgot the bare fact of his dominance. Perhaps it was Gwendolyn, the rabbit with ears like soft wings, and a kick that could silence Alberto the cat. Or perhaps Tiff, my poor, ailing puppy, who is yet with me, though he is blind, and his bark is incomprehensible. Every few months I must have Gabriella clip the matted, foul fur away from his anus. Poor Tiff took the longest to accept Tyger’s rule. “He’s so small,” his eyes would say to me, after being routed yet again. “He is only a rodent. I am a dog. I was bred to lead.” He would then find a warm spot in the kitchen and lay there, head on his paws, sighing like an old queen.

Gabriella scrubbed the cage of the dead with harsh chemicals, poisons that came too late. Gabriella, the cleaning lady whom a wicked friend once said had the soul of poetry but the body of a limerick. She wore buttercup-yellow gloves, slightly nubby along the palms and the fingers for grip. As she prepared to make sterile what was once infected with Tyger’s life, with his contagious squeak, Gabriella let me stroke the thin, textured rubber of the gloves before she dipped her fingers into the bleach. They reminded me of the French condoms my architect friend once threatened to bring me on his next visit to Canada. He used to announce his visits only a day or two before his arrival. Or he would call from the airport, looking for a ride.

My days after his visits were post-colonial. I had to learn to govern myself amid the wreck he left behind. I rebuilt the ruined infrastructure. I expunged his memory from the schools, pulled down his statues, emptied the ministries of his allies.

I must forget how the curved tusk of his cock gored me.

Yet still, says Flaubert, as soon as one abandons one’s chimera, one dies of sadness. One must cling to it tight and hope that it carries one off.

This past week I have had Ross searching through my dream journals, seeking references to ‘blood’, ‘horses,’ and ‘porcelain’. This is for a new song cycle I am preparing for Hibernacula Press. I feel the familiar joy and dread that comes with publishing a new book, with passing the world a cup of hot blood. I am readying myself for this new book with yoga and meditation. Tiff whimpers at my feet. How mad, that his mummy is a poetess! Sometimes she stays like this for a very long time, without talking or eating; then she wakes up – and comes out with marvellous things. (Flaubert again, the fat genius.) Each book is a mad spell I must cast, though the spellbound profess not to feel it. When I am in the grip of creation, the stairs of my old house slope before me. My father’s clock sends out futile ticks – time cannot touch me. Light does not enter through the clear glass windows of my hallowed rooms. Sun does not catch the clumsy smears left by Gabriella (I must speak with her again).

Tyger will not be with me when my book enters the world and recreates it. She was destroyed, like Icarus, by the sun, but the hubris was all mine.

Before Ross, it was Liam who typed out my pages. My architect friend carried his charm, even when stone sober, like a crown worn at an angle. In every situation, he gave off Mozartian insouciance. Liam, on the other hand, entered a room as if he had just been unshackelled and brought up from the cellar. He often struck me as an overgrown child. His clothes never quite fit him. That absurd knapsack. The toes of his socks drifted ahead of his actual toes like deflated balloons. He loved hockey and hated wine. I’d urge him outside into the sun, and he’d only talk about burning, like some clichéd Southern priest.

I hope to never see Liam again. I still sometimes see him and his daughter in the market, but I refuse to speak to him or look at him. Occasionally, he attempts a quiet, ‘Hi, June,’ then looks away and does not dare stop walking. If I am walking with someone, they will ask me why I do not respond.

Liam was there on Tyger’s last day, but he has never said anything. Never said one word, except to call the next day and leave a cruel message saying he would not be able to help me any longer. His hasty, fumbled apology before the final click was a dismissal of my grief, my despair.

I had listened to his message as it was being left, while I sat on the floor of the living room. I could not answer the phone all that day, and for the next day, too. The sun sent light through the house, attempting to find me, then gave up and passed the search to the moon. I did not stir. I did not sleep. The new world without Tyger would not allow me to sleep. For hours I was dumb, insensible. Then I would moan and weep, imploring the ceiling above to drop down and crush me. Scratching at the floor to open a seam and send myself into the basement. And from every corner of the room, the new knowledge, the new truth, propped open my ears and eyes. Scattered notes and chords coalesced into a searing dirge. The awfulness of it. Pain after pain, and woe succeeding woe. I finally fell asleep in the afternoon of the second day and awoke in the dark, my legs stiff. I went to the bathroom in the dark. I could not bear to face my face. Loss must have surely torn the flesh from my skull. Nothing would darken my hair now, it must be as white as a hag’s. Vultures sat on my shoulder throughout the night, chattering and clicking their beaks. A murder of crows sat quietly in the garden. When I did at last allow the bathroom mirror to show me to myself, my face was streaked black with mascara. My tears had become ashes, pouring out from my burnt spirit. Flames still licked at the back of my mouth, and I gagged on my grief.

Though it tasted like wet sand, I forced myself to eat some food. Small strength was gained, and I prepared to do what I knew must be done. I emptied a shoebox of clippings from the Globe and Mail (dark forebodings of war, ancient bones found in ice, a pumpkin parade), then lined it with thin, blue paper I had left over from Christmas. Tyger’s tinkling ball went in, too, and some food pellets. One earring from the pair I was wearing. And then, into the living room to retrieve Tyger’s small corpse. I thought of seeking out gloves from Gabriella’s cleaning supplies, but that would have been an insult. I put him in the box, closed and kissed the lid. Morning had come. In the garden I could hear neighbourhood children playing in the alleyway. A Portuguese voice in the yard next door, behind the tall fence – an older Vasco da Gama, weary of the world and exploration, settled in the lower Annex. There were no more crows, but a solitary seagull slid overhead, making its uncharacteristically quiet way back to the lakeshore. This would have to serve as albatross to my mariner, though the animal I had killed was not fowl. With my garden spade I dug a small grave in the shade of the maple, placed the box inside, and covered it over. And so there lies Tyger: while the Loves all in a ring/ softly stroke the stiffen’d wing – or “paw.” Coleridge again, anyway. I returned to the house. A hot bath.

On my answering machine there were three messages. One was Liam, I knew. I forwarded past it. The next was only a click. The third was Antonia, to whose house I had been travelling with Tyger, on his final trip. Her voice thanked me for the bread and the flowers. She and Sam had just moved into a new house in Riverdale and she had invited me over to christen it with wine. She had offered to take copies of my books to London with her, to pass on to her UK editor, so I had packed a small box and put it in the back seat of my car. My plan had been to bring Tiff, my usual travelling companion, but he was feeling low with worms and would not leave the bedroom, so I chose to bring Tyger instead. The worms had already begun to turn for all of us! I looped the front seat seatbelt through the bars of his cage and was off. It was a hot, sunny Friday. The lunchtime traffic on Dundas was thick and irritable – office troops escaping the city early. Eliot’s crowds of the dead, out looking for life. I was stuck for the moment. I had loaned my cottage in the Kawarthas to an Italian translator with a club foot and a Québecois mistress, and would therefore have to endure summer’s worst in the dead palaces of the city. The sun wrapped its heat tight on me like a wet sari. I thought of Tyger, but he was still adjusting to the novelty of the car. When we finally crossed over the Don Valley, he had fallen asleep under a covering of woodchips. O folly, that I did not turn around immediately and return to our dark, cool home. But it did not seem then like a killing heat. I was blind to the sun’s evil intent. When fate summons, monarchs must obey.

I knew I could not carry the cage and the flowers and the bread, so I left Tyger in the car as I ran into the shops. It was damp and close in the flower shop; I felt none of the usual temptation to ogle pistils and stems. Stout tulips, and I was off. In the bakery, a moustachioed baker offered me samples of cakes and pastries, and tucked a dense marble rye under my arm. The car was dreadful and hot. Tyger had not moved – I had my first pang of worry. I could see the wood chips moving with his breath, but I felt I should hurry.

The sloping, sleeping streets of Riverdale tangled my course, and when I at last fitted the number Antonia had given me to a house, it was almost three o’clock. My architect would have steered me there in half the time, I know. He can barely drive a car, yet, when it is needed, he can master whatever the task at hand. He mastered and massacred my heart with ease. I still send him poems and letters, but the honesty of his replies have become blurred by disinterest. Dying love is a nursing home of the soul. He asks casual questions I have frequently answered. He mentions trips not made with me, memories not shared, gifts bought for another. Once in a while, a small spark of life, a promise of a visit. Then the transmission clouds over, and I am left in my Arctic outpost, left with my polar bears and floating peaks of ice.

Said the fly to the spider, “If you spare me, I will grant you one wish.”

Said the spider to the fly, “If I kill and eat you, then my only wish is granted.”

Antonia’s house was a marvel, a poem of glass and stone. Sam was bringing tiles in from the car, and came over to meet me. Antonia came out the front door wearing a man’s shirt and holding a paint brush. The tree-cooled air was refreshing after the car.

“‘This castle hath a pleasant seat.’”

“Is that from one of your new ones?” Sam asked.

“I’m not sure whether to be flattered or appalled. It’s from Macbeth, darling!”

What terrible luck: I named the play. I was as cursed as any powdered actor.

“You brought us a guinea pig?” Sam asked, looking at the cage in my hands.

“No, I brought you bread and flowers. Sam, meet Tyger. Tyger, meet Sam. Tyger, dear?”

“He’s probably boiling hot. Do you want to bring him inside? You can put him in the basement where it’s cool. I’ll lock Jammy out so she won’t try to stick her nose in the cage. Is he still breathing okay?”

“Of course he is. I can’t wait to see your garden.”

“There’s not much to it yet, June. It certainly will never rival yours. It’s actually cooler in June’s garden, Sam. You forget where you are.”

“I do that here, sometimes,” Sam said, and gave his wife a lascvicious look. The two were like fauns.

“I have been trying to grow a maple tree in the south corner to block out the view of the CN Tower,” I told them. “Then my neighbours’ voices can convince me I’m in Lisbon. Sam, there is a box of my books in the back seat. Could you bring it in?”

“I think we have most of those, don’t we June?”

“It’s for Antonia’s editor, Sam.”

“Does he even publish poetry?”

“Sam.”

“These streets and trees. Oh, I cannot live away from Kensington Market. But if I could . . . I must say hello to Jammy. Oh, Jammy! You fat dog!”

I floated through Antonia’s rooms like a spirit. Each door and hallway was a vision, a mirage. I quietly blessed each room with the words of as many creeds as I could recall. We sat in the garden while Sam piled tiles by the back door. Jammy gave chase to squirrels. Stray clouds wandered the neighbourhood’s skies. Antonia’s hair was held back by an elastic and there was paint on her face and arms, but she was as alluring as Sheba. I felt like sleeping on their mattress of grass, and I did lay down on my back in the shade for a few minutes. At last, I passed Antonia my glass. Liam would be at my house soon. Sam retrieved Tyger from the basement.

“Are you okay to drive, June? I don’t mind driving you.”

“Of course, Sam. Antonia and I were only drinking white wine. I’m fine.”

Tyger had not awoken, but for some cursed reason, this pleased me. As if he would awake when we got back, refreshed. Perhaps he would be a little disappointed at having slept through the entire trip. What sickening foolishness! But I did not pause. Back down through the winding streets and across the Don Valley, back into the grey haze of Toronto. The traffic was even thicker than earlier, and I worried I would not get home before Liam arrived. I felt part of a mass exodus. A flight from the twisted structures we ourselves had built. I longed for Trieste. For Provence. For the Mediterranean. For the Atlantic shore. For the Rockies. I felt I had bound myself to a malevolent machine, blurting black smoke and cutting into flesh and muscle. My architect says that Toronto, from above, looks like a bomb site, with a jagged crater and scattered debris. We are our own terrorists, with slower methods of destruction. The buildings fall of their own accord. And so hot in the summer. A dungeon horrible, on all sides round/ as one great furnace. (Milton.) My skin was slick, the air was hotter than melted glass.

The architect once told me to leave this place. Toronto is no city for a poetess! I told him he was wrong, that he could not see the humming symbols, the radical rhythms that surround me. Here was my darkest loam of meaning. Now I am not so sure – those rhythms may be the rattle of skeletons. Perhaps my poems are merely graveyard whistles.

The car moved along the alleyway behind my street like a dying rhino. Two sets of hockey goal posts were moved aside for this mournful procession. Kids stared in at me as if at a phantom. I had left the garage door open as usual, and its darkness cloaked me with welcome. For a moment, I could not move. It felt as though the garage were a ferry, transporting me back safely across Styx to the world of the living. I dozed for a moment – only a moment: the string quartet on the radio had not even changed movements! – but the lapse let the ferry-driver lose his grip on the tiller, and we drifted back to the netherworld in a red fog.

I went inside and drank a glass of mineral water, then, remembering Tyger, dashed back to the car. The seatbelt snapped like a live wire, catching my forearm. Panic froze my hands. I could not unlatch the cage. I tore at it and lifted Tyger from the damp woodchips. My fingers knew what my mind took a minute to accept. Tyger was lifeless. He sat inert in my hands. No thumping heart stirred his fur. I brought his body to my cheek. Carrying him like a baby brought out from a well, I ran to the living room and placed him gently on the floor and rolled him on his back. I knelt and bowed my face to his. My tears dropped into his fur. I would be the Prince who returned Snow White’s beauty to the world. I would be Christ, who bade Lazarus walk again. I would escort Tyger from the Inferno. I laid my mouth upon his and gave a soft breath. I could feel his teeth on my lips. His whisker brushed my nose. I gave another breath. His form expanded slightly, but refused the life I offered. Death had him in a stubborn grip.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

I was blind with tears. Each breath I gave him came back out, unprocessed. His lungs slept, his life was null. Death blew my breath back into my face with a sneer. But I would not stop. I would blow and lay my ear between his forepaws, listening for an echo of my own throbbing heart.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

I tore the compact from my purse and placed the mirror under his nose, hoping that my panic was making me oblivious to his struggling life. The mirror stayed cruelly clear. Tyger’s reflected eye had the look of taxidermy.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

I thought for a moment of dropping a tiny amount of water down his throat. Perhaps life refused to return to a desert. I attempted to moisten my lips.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

“Holy shit.”

“Liam! Help me! Help poor Tyger! Oh help him!”

“Did you have him in the car? I came around back and your car door was open. The cage was . . . holy shit.”

“Liam! Please! My Tyger!”

I collapsed against the couch as Liam kneeled over Tyger. His placed the flat of his palm on Tyger’s chest. He gave me a quick look, then put his ear to Tyger’s fur. Then slowly, he sat back on his heels and, with vicious sadism, wiped his hand on his jeans, as if poor Tyger’s death were a contagion.

“I’m sorry, I think he’s dead. June? I think he’s dead.”

I could only stare ahead of me. I thought of Orpheus, bringing Eurydice back from Hades, then losing her again in a moment of thoughtlessness. I though of his body torn asunder by the women of Thrace, his lyre silenced. I am both Orpheus and the killer of Orpheus.

Liam stayed for a while. Left a glass of water by the couch that I refused to touch and later discarded, allowing it to shatter in the blue recycling bin on my front step. I did not move Tyger but instead lay beside him, drawing his body against my chest. The taste of his mouth was still upon mine. I savoured our last contact.

For There! Have I drawn or no

Life to that lip?

Do my fingers dip

In a flame which again they throw

On the cheek that break a-glow?

My architect may never read this, may never know what happened. Perhaps he wouldn’t even care, but would only laugh. Maybe it was never for him, anyway. Maybe it’s all been for Tyger, my lost guinea pig. The soul of my bestiary, the spirit of my garden. Maybe, with this creation, he will forgive me for his own destruction, though I will never forgive myself.

Sabba dukkha, sabba anatta, sabba anikka.

It’s the same for the arts and literature, even among those of us involved in the enterprise. Do we pay attention to the threats to the artistic environment? Are we aware that vital habitats, the environments which make literature and reading possible, are eroding at an alarming rate? Are we willing to do anything about it?

For writers and publishers, there is only one thing that matters: an audience. And the truth is the audience for literary writing in Canada is so small it cannot enable CanLit to survive in its current state, let alone thrive. It never has. Those who write, edit and publish books know this. The reading public, insofar as it cares, has been insulated from this truth for decades, for generations, by the appearance of a viable literature: an appearance, a facade, largely bought and paid for by the various layers of arts funding in our federal and provincial governments. Without this funding, the vast majority of Canadian literary publishers would not exist, nor the books they publish. Government funds support our libraries, our universities, our magazines, our literary festivals, even our writers. These features of our literary environment do not exist because significant numbers of Canadians demand it. They exist because our governments believe arts funding is a good investment, financially and politically. And because if the government doesn’t pay for them, no one else will. And because not to have them would make us seem a rather puny and underdeveloped country.

So, casting aside the government-funded illusion, we are left with authors in need of readers and publishers in need of customers. And while the writers keep typing up manuscripts, and the publishers keep printing them, and the libraries dutifully put them on the shelves, we pay scant attention to the decline of what little habitat for readers still exists. The unexamined assumption underlying all this government-funded activity is the fanciful notion that so long as we keep churning out books, the audience, by sheer force of our efforts, will, like the surprising rebound of the sandhill crane, eventually emerge. But it has not. And it will not.

The simple fact is, after innumerable launches, readings, publicity campaigns, hundreds of author interviews with Peter Gzowski and Shelagh Rogers, the publication of thousands of books, and millions upon millions of dollars in government subsidy, the environment in this country for Canadian literature has not changed perceptibly since the onset of official CanLit and the proliferation of small, state-funded literary presses some forty years ago. The best which might be said is that CanLit, in the midst of the technological onslaught from the Internet and the digital revolution, is holding its own. Sort of like swift foxes in Alberta, or the five-lined skink in Ontario – the populations are not robust, but a steep decline has yet to be observed. Though this statement, I have no doubt, could be easily challenged; in certain respects, things are inarguably worse. Perused your newspaper’s book review section lately?

There are two basic forms of environmental degradation: pollution, putting garbage and toxins into the air, land and water, and habitat loss, razing forests or draining wetlands to “develop” the land or extract resources. Similarly, there are two basic “habitats” of crucial interest to Canadian writers and publishers: schools and bookstores. After all, where do readers come from? And where might they go to buy Canadian books?

Let’s consider education first. Our schools, it is safe to say, are not keenly interested in literature, let alone Canadian literature, which is troubling enough. What is worse, our schools no longer place an urgent emphasis on the written word. There no longer exists an unquestioned dictum that the early acquisition of the solitary skills of reading and writing are crucial for unlocking a child’s potential and ability to learn. Instead, the focus in our primary and junior classrooms is on group activities and shared experiences, what is called in teacher-speak “cooperative learning.” Precision of written expression is not valued. The necessary attention span and ability to concentrate for meaningful reading are not encouraged. Basic grammar, spelling, punctuation and sentence structure are not taught with any urgency or conviction. Composing sound, logical, error-free prose is no longer regarded as a crucial skill.

I know these things to be true because I happened to teach English in Ontario schools for several years. In my advanced level high school classes I had many perfectly capable, intelligent students who simply did not understand what a sentence was, did not recognize the logic underlying sentence construction, and thus did not understand how to utilize basic punctuation. They possessed no clear understanding of the function of a paragraph and thus possessed little skill in terms of the simplest methods of organizing ideas. Worse, most had yet to obtain an innate sense of the rhythms of written English (something only acquired through regular reading, which one might assume they had done to reach this level of their education), and therefore had difficulty reading grade level prose at merely a phonetic and denotative level. Having breezed through primary and junior grades, suddenly in high school students find themselves expected to apprehend the nuances of composition and the basic strategies of rhetoric, when in fact many have yet to master the building blocks of simple written English. And spare a thought for the harried teacher, struggling to inspire thematic interest and stylistic appreciation for serious fiction and poetry, while in truth, the majority of his or her students find it arduous to simply read the texts on the level of linguistic comprehension. And this is prior to attempting to teach these same students Shakespeare, because my discussion here refers only to the “advanced” or “academic” stream students. I lack the space or stomach to detail the shameful reality of how we “educate” those in the “general,” “applied,” or “essential” streams.

Simply put, our schools are not producing avid readers. We all know this. Young people keenly interested in reading, writing, books and literature, now emerge in spite of our educational system, not because of its efforts to inculcate literary appreciation, rigorous standards, or academic values. We know the vast majority of recent high-school graduates have not received anything close to a worthy introduction to fiction and poetry. We know even those lucky few who have – graduates from special arts schools or enriched programs for gifted students – likely have not been exposed to more than a few Canadian authors. Where I taught, Canadian writers did not exist. The novels assigned to my classes were To Kill a Mockingbird, Call of the Wild, Animal Farm, The Outsiders, Night, The Hobbit, and Lord of the Flies. The lone Canadian book I had an opportunity to teach was Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens, this for an “essential” level class where every page of the book had to be read out loud, most of it by me, since several of the students, in fact, could not read. If I had not illegally photocopied short stories by Alice Munro and Guy Vanderhaeghe for my advanced classes, many of my students may never have encountered Canadian writing in the course of their secondary education. I am aware there are schools which teach Canadian books, but I also doubt my experience to be anything other than typical. The norm, after all these years, is still Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird; Sinclair Ross and Mordecai Richler, sadly, remain exotic.

All this should be cause for alarm. The fact it is not says something disheartening about the larger culture. But more to the point, despite the indifference of the larger culture, those of us invested in the field of CanLit should have been, for our own good, angrily sounding the alarm a long, long time ago.

“But wait,” you say. “What about all these bright young people enrolled in English programs at our universities? What about all those arts schools, and writing workshops, all these degrees and diplomas in creative writing? Are these not the writers and readers of the future?”

I am a graduate of such programs and I’ve attended more than my share of literary workshops; their existence shouldn’t convince anyone of a vibrant literary culture thriving in our halls of higher learning. Our academic standards are not so stringent that any university English faculty or MFA program is going to voluntarily cut enrolment due to a lack of qualified candidates. Whatever the secondary schools pump out is what the universities take in. And in turn, churn out, failure being a foreign concept within the halls of liberal arts academe. Students enrolled in the last graduate program I attended received grades for their course work within a strict range of B- to A+. When pressed, instructors admitted, privately, that it was almost impossible to fail one’s thesis defence.

But in regard to low levels of literary ability and understanding at the university level, don’t take my word for it. I’ve only taught public school and the odd undergrad composition or ESL class. A few years ago, in CNQ 74, Adrian Michael Kelly had this to say about the preparedness of his undergraduate English-Lit students:

Take a random sampling of Canadian students from a senior seminar in Romantic or Modern poetry: they may be able to parrot what they’ve been told about the male gaze in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” or about Pragmatism in the poems of Wallace Stevens, but few if any could explain the difference between an iamb and a trochee, never mind scan a phrase such as “rammed with life in every line.” Asked to read a poem aloud, many would pause at the end of an enjambed line, and pronounce each word like a disconnected unit. . . . I am not saying that teachers should loom over students as they sweat their way through memorized Virgil. I am saying, however, that few students can hold a poem – or the best prose – in their hearts. They cannot do so because they are deaf to its cadences and rhythms and euphonies.

Kelly does not assert that something is innately deficient with the younger generation; neither do I. Instead, his observations echo my argument, that our schools are failing – not only our children – but literature. His students, who, bear in mind, have chosen to study English literature, are oblivious to the “cadences and rhythms and euphonies” of the best poetry and prose, to the aesthetic power of charged language, because they were educated in schools which failed to instil an understanding of basic prosody or communicate veneration for the written word. Why then do these same schools not feel the sting of our collective scorn? Why instead, through their silence, have Canadian writers and publishers expressed only indifference?

No doubt there are studies and statistics to refute all of these observations and assertions and their disturbing implications. I would be surprised if there were not. Ministries of Education, school boards, teachers’ unions and universities all have interests to protect and the money to produce evidence to support their claims. (This, for example, is what standardized testing is all about.) But the point I’m trying to highlight is that literary writers and publishers also have interests to protect, also have reasons to speak out on what is happening in our classrooms, and also have ample evidence at hand to support their concerns. As the saying goes, the silence is deafening. Not to mention, lethal.

If the educational environment is compromised such that it no longer encourages serious reading, the bookstore habitat is equally threatened. In fact, it may be beyond saving. But the damage has not happened overnight. The bulldozers and cement mixers of Chapters/ Indigo have been paving over northern spotted owl habitat in broad daylight for fifteen years or more. The warning signs from south of the border go back further, to at least 1991 when the Borders chain was bought out by Kmart, or even to the 1980s when Barnes & Noble became the first bookseller to aggressively discount new books.

In terms of recruiting readers and making available Canadian books, independent booksellers were second only to libraries in their importance because they actually cared about books. The people who opened now-vanished establishments such as The Double Hook or Duthie Books got into the business not because it was so profitable, but because they had a passion for the printed page. They chose titles for their shelves not just on the basis of fast turnaround, but because they valued certain authors and had regard for certain publishers. Their employees were readers and knew something about books, could actually recommend titles or converse about a given writer’s strengths and weaknesses. Small, independent bookstores which promote Canadian books still exist of course, much like Bengal tigers or right whales still exist, but for the most part they have been replaced by the corporate outlets whose employees remind one of order-takers at McDonald’s, outlets which in recent years stock fewer books and more toys, candles and jars of Lovefresh Pomegranate Body Scrub.

This is old news and no one can be surprised. And yet, many of us were. In 1996, just after the huge, oversized Chapters outlets began opening their doors across the country, author and critic Philip Marchand speculated in an interview on the upside of their emergence:

A couple of days ago I went to the new Chapters superstore on Bloor Street here in Toronto and I went up to the mystery section and there was my novel Deadly Spirits, displayed quite prominently . . . I had assumed it was out of print and of no interest to any bookseller but there it was, prominently displayed. And naturally this very kindly disposed me to that store and this is not an isolated thing. A lot of writers [will] be very pleased that their books are going to be on the shelves longer and get more exposure . . . these superstores are a tremendous marketing force for books and they’ve been by no means harmful . . . to the interests of writers.

Marchand was not alone in feeling “kindly disposed” towards Chapters in the late 90s. During the first years, few of us were not. There was something exhilarating about the sight of those vast floors devoted to nothing but new books – all those long, uninterrupted aisles; the silent escalators transporting one to even more aisles; the sheer quantity of volumes; the sense that virtually any book in print was there, within reach. Everyone loved the fat, comfy chairs and their silent invitation to relax and read as long as one liked (an invitation homeless people soon found irresistible), not to mention the tolerant attitude towards snacks and refreshments. Chapters appeared to be doing all it could to make everyone, including that small percentage of people serious about literature, feel welcome and accommodated. They were even stocking small press backlist titles as if it were the normal thing to do, and hosting readings and book launches with nary a votive candle, cheeseboard, or bar of beauty soap in sight.

If it took a few years, a few bankrupt publishers, and the disappearance of scores of independent bookstores for us to acknowledge the awful truth, maybe it shouldn’t have. As early as 1997 the true motives of the corporate enterprise, not to mention its total disregard for anything resembling literary interests, were spelled out for everyone at a high-profile symposium on the publishing industry in New York City. At one point in the evening, Cynthia Ozick spoke of the need for bookstores to actually care about books as something other than units of sale, to maintain their traditional role of helping to uphold such virtues as sophistication, taste, intellect, excellence. As John Seabrook later reported in his book Nobrow, her “eloquent argument for the value of good books . . . drew applause from the sympathetic audience.” What followed revealed in no uncertain terms the true interests of the corporate bookseller:

After Ozick had finished talking, another panelist, Leonard Riggio, head of the Barnes & Noble chain of megastores, said, “Well, Cynthia, I happen to have your sales figures right here,” and, reading from a computer printout, proceeded to inform the audience that the recently published Cynthia Ozick Reader, a collection of the author’s favourite writings, had sold only a few hundred copies. He then asked, “So why should the publishing industry support a midlist book that readers clearly don’t want?”

Ten years later, after the worst of the destruction levelled by the Chapters/Indigo monolith (the market not being large enough in Canada to support two mega-bookstore chains) and long after the chain stopped stocking small press backlist titles or hosting literary readings, its mercenary book display and shelving policies were exposed by author and editor John Metcalf in his sui generis volume, Shut Up He Explained:

To have a book displayed face-out at the end of an aisle in Chapters [or Indigo] costs $5000 a month. To have a book displayed on a “power table” . . . costs a publisher $10,000 a month. It is even rumoured that “Heather’s Picks” are not favours freely bestowed. . . . books displayed spine-out are granted an existence of 90 days and are then automatically returned. Chapters does not stock “backlist,” a writer’s earlier titles; Chapters places “product.”

The above passage was published in 2007. Not a word in response, let alone a public cry of protest, escaped the lips of any author, critic or publisher I know of.

Less temperate and level-headed people than myself might attach certain words to this type of business practice, though “payola” and “extortion” are not the ones you will hear uttered by any Indigo sales rep or see printed in Quill & Quire. “Co-op advertising” is the preferred term, as cheerful a euphemism as you could find to describe a monopoly’s tactics to squeeze even more profit out of publishers who, with few exceptions, can barely survive.

But the terms Metcalf outlined are now defunct. It seems the number-crunchers at Indigo have come up with a better scheme. Why level specific costs for specific titles which actually have to be put on display, when you can simply charge a base percentage on every book that finds its way past an Indigo loading dock? Starting this past January, Chapters/Indigo mandated an extra 4 per cent fee for all books they stock, regardless of where they are displayed. The change makes sense if in fact less shelf space is going to be given in future to books, and more to things like lamps, gourmet coffee, and baby toys. Besides, states Stuart Woods, editor of Quill & Quire in the July/August 2011 issue, “there’s a strong argument that the new terms are a reasonable cost of doing business.” He concludes: “My guess is having a national bookstore chain to gripe about is preferable to the alternatives.”

Really? Well, one alternative could be hundreds more independent book stores promoting books not just because they happen to sell in large numbers, but because they happen to be good books, and thus making it potentially possible for more literary presses and Canadian authors to reach an audience. But Woods, like pretty much everyone directly involved in the publishing industry, has his hands tied when it comes to publicly telling it like it is. In many respects, Indigo is the only game in town and casts a long and dark shadow over the entire publishing industry. But don’t worry; it isn’t a huge corporate monopoly causing untold damage and making the business of writing and publishing in this country more difficult than it already was. As Woods says, Chapters/Indigo is our very own Canadian bookstore chain, a national treasure. With 30% off the latest by Stephanie Meyer and Danielle Steele.

When one takes a good hard look at the reality of our current book-selling business, one understands better why the government had to step in to encourage the enterprise of Canadian literature. How else were Canadian publishers and writers ever going to get a piece of the action? Under the protective wing of state funding via the Canada Council and sundry government programs, Canadian literature has been able to function safe from the consequences of that most basic of economic laws: supply and demand. There is a correspondingly high price to be paid for this protection of course, namely the “facade” I referred to earlier, the government-created illusion and all its necessary critical distortions. (Distortions, because when you attempt to manufacture a literature, you have to manufacture the myths and reputations that go with it.)

Not to mention all the time and effort devoted to the tasks of completing grant application forms, as well as working to stay in the good graces of those looming, powerful figures – people, mind you, of exquisite literary taste and judgement – the arts council bureaucrats. During my brief tenure as a managing editor at a small literary press, no assignment was more pressure-laden or time consuming than the completion of our applications to the federal and provincial arts councils for grant moneys. Naturally the procedure is slightly less arduous for the individual writer and I know of authors who, far from finding the application process hazardous to their integrity, actually appear to enjoy it. If successful, there is satisfaction to be taken from being approved of by a jury of one’s peers. And it is comforting to embrace the idea that the state will always play a role in encouraging and making viable the enterprise of Canadian literature. But in truth, the government has little sympathy for what we do, and in many ways is our active enemy.

By way of illustration, consider the plight of the National Library of Canada. The one institution charged with the task of archiving the substance of our intellectual heritage – the letters, documents, rare books and collections which provide the literary links to our history – has also been the one government building left to contend, for decades, with ongoing water problems, problems so pervasive that by the government’s own admission, entire collections of Canadiana have been severely damaged. A 2001 report admitted that just since 1993 (the building was opened in 1967) over 25,000 items in National Library collections had been damaged by water. This is of course prior to the flood in 2008 when a burst pipe resulted in water leaking onto three separate floors of the library. While the construction in 1997 of the LAC Preservation Centre went a long way to improve this absurd situation, the original, leak-ridden building remains in service.

But in the last few years, something more insidious than rusted-out pipes, crumbling plaster or even subterranean mould growths has recently invaded the safe house of our collective history, this being the mandate of Library and Archives Canada to “modernize” the institution. As a result of this new directive, starting in 2009, the National Library no longer acquires books and rare documents from Canadian dealers, a practise fundamental to the library’s relevance and the maintenance of its holdings. According to Liam McGahern, president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, the library has, for more than two years, “effectively stopped acquiring and preserving Canada’s historic print materials.” In a statement released last fall, McGahern went on to say that “important artifacts of Canada’s history and heritage . . . have likely been lost, many leaving Canada never to return.”

As part of its ongoing “modernization initiative,” Library and Archives Canada and the National Library are questioning the very nature of what they do. According to LAC’s own website, the “face of information has substantially changed” due to the onset of “overwhelming digital production.” Further, “considerations of sufficiency can introduce pragmatism to collecting efforts.” In government terms, LAC is “working to draft proposed orientation instruments and practices that will encompass a manageable and results-driven approach.” In real terms, this likely means the National Library will suffer diminished influence and an ever decreasing budget. By way of comparison, can anyone imagine the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian being undermined and abused in similar fashion?

Ultimately, our governments, while useful in the short term for grants of much-needed cash, are not the reliable allies of writers and publishers. The arts council funding which keeps things going is always uncertain from year to year, and increasingly under threat as Canadians elect right-wing governments which have about as much commitment to literary values as they do for preserving the habitat of the endangered northern cricket frog. Probably less. Witness the unfolding debacle in Toronto, Canada’s Mecca of literary publishing, where Mayor Rob Ford and his retinue of deep thinkers have taken over. No doubt Ford’s promised “gravy train” assault will hit funding for public libraries, the Toronto Arts Council, and the International Festival of Authors. If it hasn’t already.

According to a diverse panel of scientists who gathered at Oxford University this past April, humanity has roughly twenty years to take decisive action in order to avoid a wholesale collapse of the world’s oceans. A diverse range of threats, including rampant overfishing, rising sea temperatures, increasing ocean acidification due to air pollution (most carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans), and reduced oxygen content in the seas, are combining to make it increasingly likely the oceans will soon be incapable of supporting the diverse range of life which has thrived there and formed the basis of the food chain for millions of years.

The comparison is absurd of course, but we might also take a guess as to how long CanLit has to reverse the anti-literary trend in our schools and bookstores and protect other elements of our literary habitat before it finally loses all relevance to Canadian life. My bet would be something less than twenty years. In both situations, swift and bold action is required. And yet when talking to other writers, teachers, and editors, I rarely encounter a sense of urgency about the current situation. I find it difficult to think of another industry where the people involved display such indifference towards its sustainability. If the schools are not going to foster reading, and the bookstores are not going to encourage literary taste, and the state is not going to protect vital cultural institutions, just how do literary publishers and writers expect their enterprise to survive?

I have used the metaphor of environmental degradation and endangered species less to mirror the decline in the numbers of literary readers in Canada, and more to highlight the steep price to be paid for inaction, for doing nothing to address what, despite appearances and the general indifference of most, is a crisis of monumental proportions unfolding before us. Serious readers may soon be an endangered species, but unlike the black rhino or the blue whale, those of us with a passion for literature in this country, can, if we choose, take action to protect ourselves and our enterprise. At the very least, there is nothing preventing literary publishers from organizing campaigns to lobby governments, raise awareness, pressure our schools and universities, and, dare I say it, organize boycotts of our corporate enemies. There is nothing preventing us from finally getting angry and choosing to fight for our future.

Insofar as we don’t, insofar as our complacency allows us to tolerate anti-literary education, the takeover of the book trade by corporate hucksters, and the continuing erosion of the fundamental pillars of literary culture, how can anyone say we do not – unlike the disappearing aurora trout or the poor Vancouver Island marmot – deserve our fate?

As is the case with most science-fiction, the world Snowman describes is in many essential and uncomfortable respects our own. But other SF writers who have imagined the post-literate dark age ahead have come up with more likely scenarios for how this cultural watershed will be brought about. For Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury the future is bookless due to aliteracy. Huxley sensibly turned Orwell on his head, envisioning a brave new world where “feelies” and other trivial entertainments would be more popular than reading, making the thought police redundant. In much the same way, state censorship isn’t the real villain in Fahrenheit 451. The firemen who burn books are dystopian props. The public, we are told, “itself stopped reading of its own accord,” preferring immersive and interactive social networking and “three-dimensional sex magazines” to books and newspapers (the latter “dying like huge moths . . . no one wanted them back”). This is not a police state. There is no surveillance apparatus spying on closet readers. Indeed there doesn’t seem to be any police presence at all aside from the Mechanical Hound. Subversive book people are turned in by concerned members of the community who freely volunteer to inform on them. Contrasting Orwell to Huxley, Neil Postman remarks how the latter describes a world where people “adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” This is what coming to love Big Brother (the face of dictatorship and the TV show) really means.

In much the same fashion, aliteracy today is a consumer choice driven by new technologies. Blaming the tube and the screen may seem like an old story, but it’s not. It’s worth remembering that many of Canada’s senior literary figures grew up in a world without television. Meanwhile, the digital revolution is only a generation old, and e-books still in their infancy (can we say incunabula?). These e-books are, in turn, read on tablets or other devices also designed to play games on, send or receive e-mail, or used to browse the web. The book is now a multimedia platform, a shift in functionality that comes at the expense of the word. “I’m not against e-books in principle,” writes Johann Hari in the Independent, “I’m tempted by the Kindle – but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book. The object needs to remain dull so the words – offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person’s internal life – can sing.”

Well, you can bet the “object,” in a highly competitive marketplace of electronic devices, is not going to “remain dull.” Kate Pullinger, winner of the 2009 Governor-General’s Award for Fiction, puts it bluntly: “If you are going to put a work of fiction on a computer, why would you not use the multimedia components a computer has to offer you – image and sound and interactive games?” Indeed. And make no mistake: this will lead to an unfair fight for the reader’s attention. The videogame industry is a big business, and these guys aren’t messing around. Game testing involves “galvanic skin response” measurements that detect increases in heart rate and the amount of sweat on one’s palms. Arousal levels are also measured, positive and negative emotions, and the level of cognitive engagement. Researchers watch and record players from behind one-way mirrors, making transcripts of everything they say, how frequently they save their games, how many times they blink and wet their lips, all so that game designers can then adjust their narratives to optimum responses, making the experience more compelling. Compare this to publishing, where it’s getting harder and harder just to find good editors and layout people. In George Borrow’s classic Lavengro (1851) the narrator is told by a London publisher that the business is “a losing trade . . . literature is a drug.” That’s still true, and today there are many more powerful, more addictive, and cheaper fixes on the market.

It is useless to say that literature is just different – more intellectual, appealing to different tastes – and so doesn’t have to directly compete with these newer forms of entertainment and distraction. Nonsense. All of the arts have to evolve in order to survive. Poets don’t compose narrative epics and sculptors don’t carve heroic nude forms out of marble any more. Publishing is a business like any other and an audience with a finite amount of time and money will naturally look to where it can get the most bang for its buck. Simon Meek, for example, is a game designer who wants to see classics like Wuthering Heights and Crime and Punishment take the next step in their “digital evolution” toward a medium that blends text, film and videogames. This is thinking beyond e-books even. Meek “doesn’t like that electronic books still have people reading printed words on white pages that need to be turned. . . These electronic books are still too rooted in the form that gave them birth, the physical side of the media.” “We are not turning the books into games,” Meek further explains, “but rather we are turning the stories in these books into experiences on gaming platforms.” Such books will not be read so much as (the preferred word) “consumed” by way of an interactive, immersive, visual experience. The words of “the stories in these books” will, in turn, become ghostly, disembodied, fragmented ur-texts. “Words pulled directly from the book float into view at the appropriate times,” for consumers of Meek’s version of Wuthering Heights.

None of this, however, constitutes the major challenge literature faces from the digital revolution. Nor does that prize go to the devastation of the retail environment by online booksellers, or the possibility that Google is making us stupid (an argument popularized by Nicholas Carr in an essay that first appeared in The Atlantic and was then expanded in his book The Shallows). While I agree that Amazon is, in the long run, bad for publishing, and that digital forms of entertainment train our brains to respond to ever faster forms of stimulation, reducing our attention spans and making it harder and harder for us to re-enter, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, the exacting silence of a book, I have other concerns.

The digital revolution poses two existential threats. The first of these is economic: how, in this new environment, is publishing going to pay its bills? This is a fundamental point. As Ewan Morrison recently put it, “The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart.”

Are things falling apart? Rocker John Mellencamp was only stating the obvious when he called the Internet “the most dangerous thing invented since the atomic bomb.” We have already seen the digital fallout in other industries, notably music and film. But books were thought to be different, a perfect technology that could not be improved upon. There is, however, no immunity from what Nicholas Carr lays down as the iron law of the Internet Age: “As the Net expands, other media contract.” Looking about the current landscape, I don’t see any reason to be hopeful.

The bet being made – it is in fact the only bet on the table – is that e-books will somehow “grow the game.” It will have to grow significantly. In the early days (that is, a couple of years ago) the announcement that Amazon would be setting a benchmark price of $9.99 on e-books was met by many with horror. This response was not, however, universal, as Finn Harvor of the website Conversations in the Book Trade found out when interviewing ECW publisher Jack David in 2009:

CBT: How much potential do you think e-ink and e-book technologies have? Do you see e-books catching on with the public? And do they provide a reasonable business model?
JD: Of course they do. We are publishers of intellectual content, and it doesn’t matter to us how that content gets read by the public as long as our margins exist. Take away the cost of printing, and shipping, but not selling, and you have cut out a big chunk of your costs. We typically get about 30-35% of the list price back in our hands, after bookstore discount, distribution and selling costs. For a $20 book, that’s $6 or $7. And from that we pay all our other costs, including royalties. If we get $10 from an ebook purchase, we’re laughing.

Unfortunately, $10 for an e-book is a price point that has, predictably, already passed. Names like Amanda Hocking and John Locke (not that John Locke, but a writer of thrillers) are the great success stories of the e-book revolution. You may not have heard of them, but they are self-published genre writers who sell their books for 99 cents a pop, and do a good business, with royalties reported to be in the six figures. (When Locke became the first self-published author to join Amazon’s “million Kindle club” he remarked of his success: “When I saw that highly successful authors were charging $9.99 for an e-book, I thought that if I can make a profit at 99 cents, I no longer have to prove I’m as good as them . . . Rather, they have to prove they are ten times better than me.”) At one point in 2011 a full 20 per cent of the top 100 Kindle sellers were 99-cent e-books. In general, $2.99 seems to be the new sweet spot though I wouldn’t bet on our having reached bottom. Digital prophet Chris Anderson even subtitled his book on the Internet economy “Why $0.00 is the Future of Business.” Things may not get to that point, but I suspect what is coming is a “bundling” of content offering 100, or even 10,000 books for $9.99. Or perhaps something more along the lines of NetFlix, where a monthly fee will provide you with unlimited downloads. For a publisher this means there is no more margin – they will effectively be paying to give their books away. Jack David will not be laughing.

I said this slide in price was predictable. In fact, it was inevitable. How could publishers hope to hold the line after they’d already ceded control over price to deep-discounting online booksellers? How are new books to compete in a market where all titles in the public domain are free? How is intellectual property going to be protected when it takes the form of what is basically just a text file (that is, something far less sophisticated than, say, movies, which are already easily copied and shared online)? How much are people going to be willing to pay for what is in effect only a license to view a file for a limited time on a specific reader? Media companies from newspapers to record labels, and brand-names from Stephen King to Radiohead, have been trying for years now to figure out some way of turning the Internet’s “culture of free” into a sustainable business model for the primary producers of that culture. They haven’t been successful. The only winners in the new digital economy have been the platform builders, those anonymous types who quietly file away all of your personal information and sell it to advertisers. The people who actually make things are the zeroes in this binary. Anthony De Rosa pulls no punches in describing how the system works: “We are being played for suckers to feed the beast, to create content that ends up creating value for others. . . . . We live in a world of Digital Feudalism. The land many live on is owned by someone else, be it Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or some other service that offers up free land and the content provided by the renter of that land essentially becomes owned by the platform that owns the land.” This is Web 2.0: the game that plays you.

The chief result of the digital revolution, then, has been to downgrade all art and personal expression to the level of ephemeral, quickly-consumed and discarded content. In terms of writing this means genre filler: romance (or its seedier cousin porn), suspense thrillers, and supernatural twaddle. What we’re talking about here is the kind of stuff people purchase by the bale, but that nobody wants to have on their bookshelf at home. Not, I might add, out of shame but simply because they don’t think such books are worth keeping. In Britain, for the last three years in a row the novels of Dan Brown have been the “most donated” to the charity Oxfam. Meanwhile, though sales of printed books are in decline across the board it is the sales of genre fiction that are in freefall.

Content, on the Internet, is crap. Everybody freely produces it; nobody thinks it’s worth very much. And so in his manifesto of the new age, You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier sees the open culture of the Internet as ultimately relegating creativity to slums outside the economic mainstream where it then becomes a cannibal subculture feeding off itself (or, in a metaphor provided by David Carr, “the equivalent of a refrigerator that manufactures and consumes its own food”). The culture itself is dead, of interest only to the odd collector and antiquarian. In this neo-feudal media landscape advertising is the only real content, with everything else just a way of snagging eyeballs for a few seconds: “At the end of the rainbow of open culture lies an eternal spring of advertisements,” writes Lanier. “Advertising is elevated by open culture from its previous role as an accelerant and placed at the center of the human universe.”

The usual response to such complaints is to champion the Internet’s promotion of individual self-expression, the way it allows for a new literary culture free of middle-men and mainstream corporate elites. Unfortunately, what has happened is that by giving more power to the people we have only empowered a disposable culture. It’s a good system for discovering and promoting James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer wannabes, but that’s about it. E-books reduce literature to the status of Tetris, and, what’s more to my point here, they’re not sustainable as a business (unless your business is making dedicated reading devices, and even then I have my doubts). Chad Post, a small press publisher of books in translation had a piece that recently appeared online, “Why Selling E-books at 99 Cents Destroys Minds,” that talks about his own experience with pricing e-books and the lessons he learned:

. . . more than three million books were published last year [2010]: 300,000 from “traditional” publishers, and 2.9 million from nontraditional publishing outlets, such as self-publishing.
So, you have an e-reader, you’re bored with TV and all your video games, ain’t feeling the Facebook, and want a book. Why pay $12.99 for “entertainment” when you could buy a John Locke thriller for $0.99? I have no answer to that question. Seriously. And this has always been my problem with e-books: they emphasize immediate entertainment – and gratification – over real “reading,” which takes more commitment, patience, attention and time.
Now, you pay what you would pay for an app and dump it after you’re done. And why not? Those “expensive” books are a lot of work.
As someone devoted to literary culture, this scares the crap out of me. Sure, John O’Brien and a few others will claim that this has “always been the case,” that there has always been only 10,000 “serious readers” in the U.S., and that’s the same today as it was 50 years ago, but I don’t know if these people are actually in touch with the world around us. It’s all $0.99 e-books and instant movies and Angry Birds.

You can call this snobbishness (and a flood of angry commenters on Post’s article quickly did just that), but the economic point Post makes is valid. It was also addressed by Boyd Tonkin in the Independent:

This feels like a tough case to defend. We all want cheaper entertainment and enlightenment. But look at tasteless supermarket fare. Ruthlessly enforced economies can kill diversity. Rather, they favour uniformity and predictability. Contra the pub wisdom you often hear, e-books do have significant production costs even if they don’t need trucks and sheds. Those costs include keeping professional authors alive.
Dirt-cheap e-books benefit the very rich – and the very dead. They might also help new authors to find a foothold and win an audience – although, on that logic, newcomers should think about showcasing their work for nothing. Many do. But the almost-free digital novel hammers another nail into the coffin of a long-term literary career. Who cares? Readers should, if they cherish full-time authors who craft not safe genre pieces but distinctive book after distinctive book that build into a unique body of work.

I, too, dislike it, but getting rid of the publishing industry – especially in a country like Canada where its role in fostering homegrown talent is so essential – leaves us with nothing but the Internet, producing a form of writing that isn’t supposed to last: eye candy meant to be consumed quickly and then discarded, literature as app. What will be the consequences, not just for us but for our cultural inheritance? What will happen when people come to see Pride and Prejudice no longer as a novel, or even a book, but only as a worthless file to be diced, sliced, mashed-up, manipulated, and (mostly) ignored? Where, Mark Bauerlein asks, if “students grow up thinking that texts are for interactivity – to add, to delete, to cut and paste – do they acquire the patience to assimilate complex texts on their own terms, to read The Iliad without assuming that the epic exists to serve their purposes?” How will such texts be “read” when they appear on a digital page framed by a toolbar and links, with embedded videos, pop-ups and banner ads?

That is a rhetorical question. The studies have been done: we don’t read from a screen, but only scan in an F-pattern for information.

There is something more to this transformation than the shedding of a Benjaminian “aura.” Not just the integrity of the text, but our sense that text can have any value or meaning at all is being lost. But why? Why are we in such a rush to throw so much away? Why are so many of us volunteering to be exploited as digital serfs in the new economy, while at the same time brazenly boasting of our aliteracy?

In the concerned conclusion to his book Reading the 21st Century Stan Persky flags an important point: “we find ourselves in a paradoxical dilemma in which writing flourishes, which is just cause for celebration, but book reading is in decline, especially among younger people. That situtation ought to set off alarms.” How to interpret this paradox? Colin Robinson, writing in the London Review of Books, suggests one answer by introducing the second threat I see being posed by the digital revolution:

Electronic communication has generally made life easier for writers and harder for readers. Text is simpler to produce on computers, easier to amend and spell-check, and a breeze to distribute. No one can be more conscious of this than editors, who are now deluged with manuscripts, attached with consummate ease to letters explaining that if this particular book is not of interest, several others, perhaps more appealing, await on the author’s hard drive. But how does this technology serve the reader? For all the claims of their optical friendliness and handiness, e-books still strain the eyes and are challenging to carry around. Worse, the dizzying range of easily accessible material on the Internet conspires with a lack of editorial guidance to make web reading a disjointed experience that works against the sustained concentration required for serious reading.
This privileging of the writer at the expense of the reader is borne out by statistics showing the annual output of new titles in the US soaring towards half a million. At the same time a recent survey revealed that one in four Americans didn’t read a single book last year. Books have become detached from meaningful readerships. Writing itself is the victim in this shift. If anyone can publish, and the number of critical readers is diminishing, is it any wonder that non-writers – pop stars, chefs, sports personalities – are increasingly dominating the bestseller lists?
Perhaps the problem has to do with more than just the way in which words are transmitted. People bowl alone, shop online, abandon cinemas for DVDs, and chat to each other electronically rather than go to a bar. In an increasingly self-centred society a premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and on being read rather than reading.

Take that last sentence and inscribe it on the grave of the book: In an increasingly self-centred society a premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and on being read rather than reading. The Internet is a mirror not of our society but of our private selves. Or rather “isolated,” since privacy no longer exists. The first thing to keep in mind about social networking is that there is in fact nothing social about it. The Internet has become a seamless web of self, a standing pool of Narcissus that we are now drowning in.

Specifically, we are drowning in an ocean of our own words. Near the end of Douglas Glover’s Elle, the heroine recalls her lover F. (code for Rabelais) saying “that as soon as everyone can read whatever they want, they’ll all decide to be writers as well.” With regard to the present discussion, Denis G. Pelli describes how this works:

By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
As readers, we consume. As authors, we create. Our society is changing from consumers to creators.

Barthes has been neatly inverted: in order for the author to live, the reader must die.

This is by now a common complaint. We are familiar with the observation that there are far more people today writing poetry than reading it, and that the only growth sector in university literature departments is their creative writing programs. Even the field of literary criticism and reviewing has suffered from this atomic blast, with book reviews and journals falling before the flood of Amazon reviewers (in fact, a small team of professional Amazon reviewers were the first to be made redundant, hoist with their own petard).

Nor is there anything new about invoking the spectre of narcissism in this context. Christopher Lasch saw it as defining the culture of the 1970s, and in the 1980s Allan Bloom blamed its inherent moral relativism for the closing of the American mind. The Internet, however, has both enabled and amplified the condition, as numerous studies now attest (in The Narcissism Epidemic the authors see in the web “a giant narcissism multiplier”). Online, we can all become as gods. Or at least, as Glover’s F. predicted, as authors. “If there were authors, how could I bear to be no author? Consequently there are no authors.” Thus spake Zarathustra.

Perhaps this is our revenge on art, tearing it down from its pedestal and making it finally as disposable and ephemeral, as mortal, as the rest of mere humanity. If so, I fear it will be a root-and-branch job, as the lasting nature of art has long been a myth necessary for its creation. Writers have to believe in some kind of posterity for their work: that their “Kilroy was here” will remain on the wall, that what they lovest well will remain, that they may enter the pantheon and be counted among the English poets, that so long as this (my immortal sonnet) lives, it will give life to me.

The Internet, however, has put an end to all that. No writer today can seriously believe that their words will long outlive them, even if they do manage to attract contemporary notice. But, as Snowman understands, to come to the conclusion that any reader one can possibly have is in the past is self-defeating. Why even bother, then? I have long thought that such feelings lie behind the appeal of historical novels, and in particular our literary fetish for the nineteenth century. For the Victorian Era was, manifestly, a time when (in the words of Jean-Christophe Valtat, defending the setting of his “steampunk” novel Aurorama in an alternative nineteenth century) literature was “regarded as able to educate, elevate, delight and even change life”: “Perhaps that is what we are missing, too. . . . Perhaps it’s a certain idea of literature as a power that we are nostalgic about.” If so, that nostalgia is something both producers and consumers of the written word can identify with.

It is a narcotizing cliché to speak of every crisis containing opportunity. This may be true, but crisis can just as easily lead to total collapse. And while some kind of contraction in the scope and extent of print culture is now inevitable, my concern is that the collapse will in fact be sudden and catastrophic, hastened by the forces I’ve been talking about. As Bauerlein puts it, “Knowledge is never more than one generation from oblivion.” That’s a maxim we are going to put to the test. “How long have we got?” Ewan Morrison asks. “A generation. After that, writers, like musicians, filmmakers, critics, porn stars, journalists and photographers, will have to find other ways of making a living in a short-term world that will not pay them for their labour.”

In Double Fold Nicholson Baker made a passionate plea for saving our cultural heritage of old newspapers from having their archives purged and replaced by microfilm copies (and don’t ask where all that microfilm is now). The Internet has improved on this. Today the talk is all about “the cloud,” a.k.a. “the end of tactile media.” Somewhere out there, in the electronic ether, after all the books are gone, our culture will continue to enjoy an immaterial afterlife. I take it this is part of the ambiguous meaning of the apocalyptic conclusion to Don DeLillo’s Underworld, where the world is transformed by the nuclear desolation of cyberspace, to be made new or somehow preserved in a binary form that will no longer be a part of the world but a container for it: either the holy grail, or final reductio, of information theory.

We can’t say we were never warned.

As for the (mushroom) cloud itself, the image says it all. A piece that recently appeared in the Guardian (May 2011) caught my eye with the headline “Google can’t be trusted to look after our books.” Before I could mutter “No shit” I was into the lede:

Google announced last month that it would be deleting the content of the Google Videos archive. After a public outcry, it said it would work on saving all the video content and making it available elsewhere. But the situation raised concerns about data under Google’s control, including the archive of Google Books.

That concern is justified. Google is in the business of making money, and it can, any time the content of the cloud becomes unprofitable, just get rid of it. Much as Amazon can delete, at its own pleasure, the contents of your Kindle with the click of a button. Clouds are not forever. If this is the future of literature then we truly are writing on water. What will survive the coming Great Erasure? How much will dissolve, and, like an insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind?

The existence of literature, not the words on the page but the whole system of production and consumption, writing and reading, rests on a paradox. Literature is a leisure activity, a private, pleasurable pursuit of instruction and delight, but it also involves effort, intellectual labour, money, time, and public commitment. We cannot take its continued role in our culture for granted. I’ve said before that the arts need to evolve in order to survive, but we should remember that evolution does not mean progress, or even adaptation of ever more complex and sophisticated forms and functions. Evolution just as easily follows the path of least resistance and leads to degeneration and decline. And what we lose will not easily be regained. You can call this a slippery slope argument, but it’s really just facing hard facts. Sentences aren’t going to start getting longer any time soon, nor vocabularies expand. Every year enrollment in university English programs goes down, and students in those programs read less and less. In tough economic times and the changing media environment we face does anyone think this is a course that is going to be reversed? Given hard times, does anyone believe for a minute that public funding for the arts is going to become a priority at any level of government? Who wants to bet that bookstores are going to start making a comeback, or that e-books will turn out to be a short-lived fad? Who can imagine a twenty-first century like the nineteenth, when literature, with its power to “to educate, elevate, delight and even change life” actually mattered?

On a couple of occasions in this essay I’ve mentioned the analogy that has been drawn by others between the Internet and an atomic bomb. What I find interesting about this is the historical fact that the Internet was first developed to be a communication system that would, due to its dispersion of nodes, still be operational in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Of course humanity might not survive such a disaster, but by that point we would be expendable. The sole necessary survivor would be the Internet itself, a force we should be able to recognize now as the true destroyer of worlds.

This is rather like declaring that the major musical milestone of the 1960s was “Yummy Yummy Yummy, I’ve Got Love in my Tummy.”

How did it come to this?

It begins with an online poll. Online polls run by their own strange rules. Consider the disparity between editors’ and readers’ selections for the Modern Library’s top 100 novels of the twentieth century. Editors selected James Joyce; “readers,” Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard, two writers who more resemble cult leaders than novelists. Their cult members, of course, had stuffed the ballot boxes.

And, as might have been expected, partisans of various stripes stuffed the ballot boxes of Canada Reads. Three of the novels on the resulting list were typical Canada Reads fare: Amy McKay’s The Birth House, Carol Shields’s Unless, and Angie Abdou’s The Bone Cage. But the others were unexpected. The Best Laid Plans was the self-publisher’s Cinderella champion. And an organized campaign to get out the graphic-novel vote gave us The Complete Essex County to round out the list.

Two of these things, to borrow shamelessly from Sesame Street, are not like the others. Setting aside any tendency towards evaluation, three of these novels can claim to be “literary” in intent. One – The Best Laid Plans – makes no pretense of joining that company. And another, The Complete Essex County, should have been excluded on the grounds that it is not even a novel – which criterion, I hasten to add, came from the show’s producers.

The loudest fuss kicked up by the latest iteration of Canada Reads was not provoked by the move to an online vote, nor even by its unaccountable outcome, but by that single, innocuous word: “novel.” In calling for readers to vote on the essential Canadian novels of the past decade, the CBC had excluded short stories and poetry – and Canada’s poets and short story writers, struggling under the weight of the chips on their shoulders, were quick to object.

The wording was no accident. As Ann Jansen, senior producer of Canada Reads (and a “self-identified poetry lover who adores short stories”) explained, it was all about a level playing field:

Canada Reads is about five people debating their favourite books and somehow agreeing on one to recommend to a country. It’s kind of like comparing apples and oranges and pomegranates and gooseberries, or some such fruity comparison. And that’s just the novels. When you think of adding poetry and short stories, it’s probably the equivalent of comparing a variety of fresh fruit with a set of bottles of icewine (that’d be the poetry) and maybe my favourite apricot-raisin buns from Cobb’s Bakery (short stories, anyone?). More distilled language in poetry, different intentions, more characters to get to know in short stories, different numbers of journeys, a variety of locations, etc., etc.

The producers repeatedly stressed their affection for poetry and short stories – so Canadian, so determined not to give offence – but they made it clear that short stories and poetry just didn’t belong. It would be too difficult to compare such diverse forms.

But when graphic novel fans asked if a graphic novel was a “novel,” and therefore eligible, the producers found themselves equally unwilling to give offence. Of course a graphic novel is a novel! And the graphic novel was in.

Narration carries the novel. Turn that novel into a movie, and lens and lighting become our narrator. Have an artist draw the scenes as storyboard, and you have a graphic novel. Instead of a narrator, we have drawings. Sara Quin, who defended The Complete Essex County on Canada Reads, pointed out this distinction and said, in fact, that reading a graphic novel requires a different set of skills – a different form of literacy.

A Globe and Mail review of Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise by the cartoonist Seth – no stranger to readers of CNQ – puts that different form of literacy on full display:

The powerful diagonal graphic thrust of this panel leads you in.
Your eye starts in the top left at the word balloon (“Come in,” he says). Now, follow that dramatic tail from the balloon to the figure and then follow the figure’s widespread hands, which lead you right into the store.
Observe how the lighting leads you in as well. Note the bleached solar lighting of the street compared with the inviting dimness of the store’s interior. Even the passerby’s shadow points into the store.

Seth is not speaking the critical language of prose narrative. No one will ever discuss the bleached, solar lighting of The Best Laid Plans, the dramatic tails of Angie Abdou’s word balloons, the inviting dimness of The Birth House, or Carol Shields’s powerful diagonal graphic thrust. Yet the producers of Canada Reads felt that The Complete Essex County – which, to split a hair, is not even a graphic novel, but a collection of graphic novellas – was not icewine, nor baked goods, but fruit. A pineapple, perhaps.

Yet if the graphic novel is a pineapple, how is the short story a muffin? It works through the same narrative machinery as the novel. Indeed, people usually find themselves unable to explain the difference between the short story and the novel, and lapse into generalities. The difference may be as small as Jim Harrison has explained: “Short things are short all over, and long things are long all over.”

Yet graphic novels were permitted, when the same rationale the producers used to exclude poetry and short stories argues strongly for their exclusion. The explanation is obvious: audience.

Whatever interpretation is placed on Ann Jansen’s grocery-related explanations, there is no denying another significant difference between the forms Canada Reads included and those it chose to exclude: sales. No one will ever get rich writing poems in Canada, and your risk of pulling off the same feat by writing short stories declines if your name does not happen to be Alice Munro. Novels – preferably those aimed squarely at book clubs – have the sales.

But the plain old novel is so, like, yesterday; it’s the kind of thing your mom reads with her lame book club friends and they’re all drinking, like, Chardonnay and munching on, you know, hors d’oeuvres and stuff like that, and listening to Canada Reads. Because who listens to Canada Reads? Certainly not the members of (in Sara Quin’s somewhat less than unequivocal words) “a generation that has sort of given up a little bit on reading.”

When Jeff Lemire’s book was the program’s first casualty, howls of dismay were heard from supporters of the graphic novel: there, they proclaimed, goes all your audience under forty. Including a graphic novel allowed Canada Reads to hook in a new audience and, in keeping with CanLit orthodoxy, the graphic novel was held to be important because of its useful social function, specifically as a gateway drug to the heady pleasures of reading. And apparently it worked, however briefly: one commenter on the CBC Books website, singing the praises of The Complete Essex County, noted that she had read only fourteen books in her adult life (the word “adult” enclosed, quaintly, in quotation marks).

What nobody has yet explained is why Canada Reads should appeal to an audience that doesn’t.

It is difficult to decide which was the greater travesty: that one of the Canada Reads panelists, Debbie Travis, could not muster the mental resources to finish one of the books, or that the winning book, The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis, was so outrageously bad that her failure to finish it vindicates her.

The story is a cliché, the writing turgid, the chapters padded with filler, the dialogue clumsy. I cannot comprehend Fallis’s notion of the paragraph, which seems entirely arbitrary. But worst of all, this comic novel is not funny. Fallis does not grasp that the art of humour is the art of surprise; he overreaches, bludgeoning us with joke after joke, and when in doubt, has Angus McClintock fart. This book has all the subtlety of a drunk armed with a ball-peen hammer.

It is popular these days to excuse a book like The Best Laid Plans by arguing that writers come in two forms. There are the writers, those people who form wonderful sentences and write books of high seriousness with which educated people are gosh-awfully impressed. And then there are the storytellers, who are successful because they tell good stories that people actually want to read.

There may be some truth to this, but that superficial truth conceals a terrible fallacy.

All storytelling derives from an oral tradition. The oral storyteller, who relies on memory, builds his story from recycled bricks, a set of oft-repeated phrases and ideas rather like the floating couplets of traditional folk music. And as in traditional folk music, the art of oral storytelling lies entirely in performance. A vast gulf separates the earnest and respectful rehash made by a thousand college folkies, circa 1962, from the early recordings of Bob Dylan.

Writing freed the storyteller from the recycled bricks of the oral tradition, creating a new emphasis on originality. But writing did not put paid to the storyteller’s obligation to perform. It simply moved the performance from the present to the page. A new medium demands a new way of surprising and delighting the audience. Those who excuse poor writers as “good storytellers” forget that “story” is a mere noun, and “tell,” the verb. And if the art of storytelling is in the telling, then The Best Laid Plans is an abject failure.

Except that it won Canada Reads and, thanks to the CBC’s rather silly claims for Canada Reads’ mandate, is now considered the essential Canadian novel of the past decade.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Canada Reads, in its search for “essential” Canadian books, arbitrarily excluded some of Canada’s best writing, using a dishonest explanation involving fruit and baked goods to gloss over the fact that the producers wanted popular books. The producers included graphic novels in an attempt to appeal to an audience that doesn’t care about books. And through the dubious mechanism of an online poll, they labeled as “essential” a novel completely lacking in literary ambition or merit. Clearly, Canada Reads had sort of given up a little bit on reading.

It is time to face facts. The CBC does not care about books: not one iota, not one whit, not to the extent, even, of a rat’s patoot. The CBC is not in the book business. The CBC is in the business of audience. And in the business of audience, all that matters is the number of earlobes turned to the radio.

You can’t be a snob in the business of audience. If your aim is to engage a group of people, you must inevitably seek the lowest common denominator, and the larger the group, the lower that common denominator becomes. And so the online CBC Books portal became the “CBC Book Club,” where the emphasis is decidedly populist, and Canada Reads began with an online poll.

But in its rush to build a new audience around an online community, the CBC is also destroying any credibility its book coverage had. Set aside the complaint that CBC books coverage is relentlessly “middlebrow”; The Best Laid Plans does not rise to that level. And The Best Laid Plans appeared on Canada Reads only because the CBC threw out a perfectly good model – find interesting panelists, and ask them to champion interesting books – in favor of asking the audience to stuff the ballot boxes.

At one time, you could hear short stories read aloud on the CBC. You could wipe the sweat of a day’s honest toil from your brow, sit down in your easy chair, smile indulgently at the happy children playing quietly on the carpet, and hear a story called “The Peace of Utrecht,” by an unknown writer named Alice Munro. In all likelihood, you owned a pipe and a spaniel, or your husband did. It was, presumably, a stodgier time, even for spaniels. But then progress happened, and we became a nation of pygmies rapt in the glow of Dancing With The Stars.

If CBC radio still aired readings of short stories, Alice Munro might now be followed by something pulled from True Confessions, all in the name of audience. It is not the CBC’s fault that times have changed. If the CBC were to return to broadcasting readings of short stories, surely our nation would just tune out. We have Twitter to keep us occupied. No, we can’t blame the CBC for the decline of the national attention span – but we can fault the CBC, as a public broadcaster, for its happy embrace of that decline.

The modern viewer was the new boss: no more uncomfortable seats, unwanted audience participation, travelling inconvenience and expense, and (short of leaving the premises) lack of options during the film. Investment, in the deeper sense of the word, was tenuous. Parallels can be drawn with opera, sporting events, and cooking lessons.

Another association parallel can be made with literary readings at book launches, festivals, regional promotions, and ongoing venue series. The crystallizing idea of a literary event as truncated amusement – whether capriccio, metalinguistics, or willed hypergolic category mistake – has become a self-fulfilling intellectual accelerant. Like the info-beset VHS purchaser (now a key-clicker on Netflix, or downloader of nebulous legality), the audience may sign up to be haunted by supraliminal wonder, but, if event orchestration is any indicator, may also attend out of half-baked desire or (reversing Fellini’s contrasts here) social communion.

The poet, short story writer, or novelist now intervenes. “Some of this may be true, but I can’t compete with the fireworks of hockey playoffs, rock concerts, movies, TV, and the Internet.” Quite right, though you can compete with other poets, short story writers, and novelists. But the fatalistic shrug, this time from the audience, persists. “Artists who read from their own work are boring.” At times, yes. But does the fault lie with the work or with the reader?

Let’s investigate the reader’s complaint first. Most are aware of the familiar opposition: plugged-in, overloaded basement-brow Goliath versus page-turning, crafty Luddite David. Most also know who gets voted off the island these days. The outcome doesn’t resemble the Biblical dust-up. It’s the Fellini lament multiplied. We want the pre-digested, but now we want it cheap (or free), without delay, and in micro bites (or bite). But literary readers/authors aren’t competing with optically challenged philistines mistaking the Art Bar for the Dart Bar. Once the clean-cuticle bank dividend checkers conclude that the place is devoid of darts and loud rock, therefrom and therefore promptly departing, the reader is still confronted by the only audience that has ever mattered – those who have at least a passing interest in the highlighted genre.

Those convened on both sides of the microphone frequently bemoan the large number of vacant seats at literary events, the readers (obviously) the most disheartened. Michael Carbert, in an otherwise perceptive September 2008 Maisonneuve essay in September of 2008 for Maisonneuve, offered prescriptions to boost the roll call audience from thirteen to thirty. But everyone knows that most readings, outside of the yearly mega-events with a hundred participating readers or the few readings featuring name brand stars in (usually) well-established festivals, garner few attendees and even fewer neophytes. The focus should always be on quality over quantity, yet the latter is increasingly targeted. Hence the proliferation of gimcrack industries like the (now) international Literary Death Match, the organizational fribblers encouraging similarly produced spinoffs in (to list only two of many) the Vancouver Writers’ Series and the Guelph Spoken Word.

The caffeinated inanity of Literary Death Match enforces a seven minute time limit per actor (sorry, author). If the unfortunate reader actually dares a transformational eight minutes, he or she is body-puckered by a nerf dart. (Perhaps our hypothetic, optically challenged philistine would sign on for that.) The Vancouver Writers’ Series readers were are manacled by a six minute count, and the authors in the Guelph Spoken Word (admittedly more influenced by the Slam line) have to make do with three minutes. Next up: voting on a lone yelp.

The more common time constraints seem to hover around the fifteen minutes mark. That this is standard only emphasizes the conforming timidity of organizers in capitulating to a supposedly fidgety audience. I’ve never been able to understand this attitude. We’re repeatedly told by current practitioners that to go beyond a quarter-hour is to somehow invoke a Dantean sentence of purgatory, if not hell. Lynn Coady sets the familiar tone well: no imposing podium, softish lighting, comfortable seating, and most importantly, easily accessible alcohol and fifteen minutes of fortune if not fame. The sad part about Coady’s ideal literary reading? She’s right. But only if the reader is inept. And in that case, why show up at all? No, it falls on authors to demand (with exceptions stemming from various practical scenarios) lengthier reading periods. The aim of every reading (at least from where I balance on my wobbly plastic seat) should be wonder, if not transcendence, otherwise what the hell’s the poet or novelist really doing up there? Solidifying a career? If the reader cares to take the time to enunciate, project, pace (vocally), change dynamics, create effects with pitch and tone, use pauses wisely, engage with genuine gestures, and, most important, slow down, (along with reading from a worthy piece in the first place, of course), then the audience members who aren’t there just to socialize between and after sets have a chance at a transformative experience in a single, extended reading.

Now it’s time to flip the mirror. What about that (often true) whine, “the readers are boring”? Poets, novelists, and short story writers don’t get enough credit for their vocal capabilities. The failures outlined in the last paragraph are obvious to any audience member who’s attended more than a few readings, but many do a decent, if not exquisite, job in letting the glory of their creations do the work for them. After all, the author more than most, knows what sonic effect she wants to strike when stressing delayed consonantal twins, for example. Similarly, the tone a listener may have thought ironic upon first acquaintance with the page may turn out to be genuine when hearing the poet read the now dramatically altered passage. But the most important quality the audience member needs to bring to a reading is attention.

Awareness and attention. Everyone agrees on their importance, but how many pull a Todd Zuniga (founder of that Literary Death Match) and text a buddy after a desert of jokes at minute three, then awake to the proceedings at minute five when catching a multiple dessert of scatalogical clichés? And less obviously, how many intellectualize the small epiphanies, snapshot the deep images, and turn up the internal chatter, thereby drowning many subtle aural surprises line to line?

There’s no need to assign romance, nobility, or charm to the rhetorical effusions of mid-eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards competitors, nor to their stoically receptive parishioners under stark joists trying to ward off chilblains on ass-punishing pews. There’s also no need to follow the pendulum to the opposite and extreme arc, though that’s where the arrow is currently frozen. We live in distaste, if not terror, of being bored, and want our epiphanies paradoxically pre-ordered and familiar. We also want to like and admire the author, as if the reading is on a horizontal plane of easy reciprocity. Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of performing, largely, for a coterie of sympathetic fellow pracitioners, made even more clubby by regional repetition. There are ways of avoiding the churchly mutuality, though: organizing events at non-traditional milieus (halls over libraries; parks over pubs) and in alien quarters (while on holidays, overseas). This is still market tweaking, however.

A poem on the page is not the same as a musical score. The squiggly type of the former can be voiced by a lone reader effectively; the latter usually needs a professional with ready instrument, if not a coordinated assembly and skilled direction. But to voice a poem, short story, or novel extract with a view to “entertain,” or to “enlarge” the words, perverts the original, just as altering the stage directions of a play or the staff markings of a sonata effectively contravenes the composer’s wishes, and usually makes a farce and travesty of the performance. Samuel Beckett and Dmitri Shostakovich weren’t shy regarding their crass interpreters. The playwright took some of them to court; the composer received LPs of his own work, then turned them into coasters. Wanting the author to perform her or his work in the spirit in which it was written, then, is likely going to mean a lot of unsensational voicing. This is a problem if one is only happy with tone-knockoffs of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf or “Howl.”

It’s not only OK-okay, but inevitable and historically par for the course that the receiver of art must often work to plumb a few depths – hidden metaphor, traded phrase-making, image hierarchy, voice tone, allusion, meta-punning, lyrical subtlety, narrative reverie – and that he or she must have the patience, good will, and love for literature to maintain energy and focus during the inevitable dull patches, wrong turns, and misunderstandings. Why? How else know when the tide has turned, and out of nowhere enters the startling phrase, the contextual epigram, the emotional shift? In sublime art, the author sometimes has such confidence in his own procedure that he purposely injects tedious prose into the fabric just to tease out a tear in order to make the contrast more amazing and worthy. Yes, authors at times botch their own works by ineffective presence and voice projection. Yes, at other times the acoustics and ambiance of the specific site are unredeemable. More often, though, patrons are guilty of receiving the words out of benign sociability or a “greatest hits” wishthe problem is really the audience’s, and their expectation to be both entertained and enlightened, when these are not always the same thing. It’s often easy to blame organizers, but it seems the argument here, again, hinges on comfort levels, both physical and literary.

It’s interesting that the six-to-fifteen minute monitors don’t have much of a problem with extended post-reading Q-and-A sessions, interminable pre-reading poetic statements, or lengthy set-ups to each individual poem. This reinforces another dynamic: the fact that we’re here to learn about the poet’s processes. The poems? Not so much. Unless and until the CanLit readership – other authors, those authors’ friends, lifestyle commentators, biographers, students pressed by profs who are friends of the author, and the occasional book lover mildly curious about the event – approaches readings with intense focus on the poems, stories, and novel passages being read, we’d at times be better off to attend these events by scrapping the usual event itinerary. Hang out, talk shop, buy or swap books, and drink.

That view – the total vocal white-out (pardon the anachronistic typewriter term) – certainly has antecedent traction in other artistic worlds. Robert Schumann, donning his critic’s hat in 1838, opined that an unspectacular contemporary’s latest quartet was “for the entertainment of good dilettantes who are kept fully occupied by things that an expert artist can grasp with one glance at the page, a quartet to be heard by bright candlelight and in the company of beautiful women; whereas true Beethovenians lock the doors, savoring and reveling in every single measure [of the late quartets].” Like many provocative statements, this is true, but it also has its limitations. His comments were prescient and against the grain. But poetry and prose, no less than the Great Fugue, needs an audience, a live interpretation, to introduce or revivify a silent page read or cloistered CD play.

Fellini thought technology knocked him out. He was wise to be concerned, but he was wrong. So was Marshall McLuhan. People still line up at movie houses, and others still attend hour-long poetry readings performed by a single author. The medium only changes the message in that it amplifies defects already entrenched in reader and listener. That kind of awareness is invaluable. Sometimes progress is a boon.