Marc Coté and the Gentle Art of Canadian Literature

Note: This was an older piece I wrote many ages ago complaining about the complaints some have had about Canadian literature, and some of the nonsense that I have waded through as a lover of books.

A cormorant is, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Current English (3rd ed.), “a diving seabird with a long hooked bill and black plumage.” I have seen this animal in action on certain nature programs and have been impressed by its beauty, speed, and grace. It provides an interesting metaphor for a critic or publisher working through the various piles of novels and journals that appear across their desks in this country: a specific work is spotted, drawn out with great speed, and taken away from the ugly herd of unappealing tomes. This is the image that formed in my head as I read a piece on the difficulty publishers face in Canada: the seabird as arbiter and decision-maker.

Marc Coté works as a publisher for a company called Cormorant Books, and I expected him to fill his own role as that seeker; a publisher who finds the books that should be read by any interested reader. However, after reading his article in the February 14th, 2009 edition of The Globe and Mail, I have to conclude that he is only after whatever may float to the surface of the slush piles with a very specific viewpoint; work that clearly avoids the dark eddies and undertows of truly great writing.

His essay does not begin with a complaint about the difficulties of being a publisher in Canada; in fact, he has a lot of praise and good tidings to share with us: sales of Canadian books are up; staff are not being cut at the main publishing houses (he compares this situation with unfortunate job losses in England and the United States); Cormorant has had its work “reviewed with greater regularity than those of the average publishing company operating in Canada… Our books are reviewed widely.” Despite the fact that sales are not as high as they were twenty years ago – a fact pointed out in the essay – things are going well for our publishers. This is my favourite boast in the article: “Our sales representatives have placed our books as far north as Yellowknife and in Tofino and St. John’s”. Well then, Happy St. Valentine’s Day, Mr Coté!

Everything is going well, right? Sales are up, books are being written about, by, and for Canadians, and no one had to be fired, dropped from an imprint, or coerced into reading our books. Excellent!

So, why did you include all that bile and whining? Even the title of your piece made me cringe: “Why’s everybody always picking on us?”

The complaints are nothing new: our bookstores are filled with too many “foreign-written and –published books”; advertising budgets are higher in the U.S., which means that their books sell more copies faster and more widely than in Canada; and our schools and the media – glad he did not forget them – are not doing the work of promoting Canadian culture through our literature. And he blames all of this on colonialism.

There are so many holes in his arguments that you could fill them in yourself if you had the chance to respond directly to Mr Coté. Let me go through them point by point. First, the market and personal taste determines what people will buy and enjoy reading, not school reading lists. All of those kids who bought up Harry Potter books did so because of word-of-mouth advertising (playgrounds are great disseminators), movies, games, costumes, and the thrill of fantasy. They did not pick up those books to chastise Canadian publishers who have never heard of muggles, Voldemort or the benefits of phoenix tears.

Now, there is the important issue of sales figures. Mr Coté is a publisher. He should be concerned about sales figures. He should also pay attention to census reports. The U.S. has almost ten times the population of Canada. More people usually equals more readers, more money, and more power, and whether any publisher here accepts it or not, they have another huge market to the south that is lapping at our shores and will continue to do so for a long time. That should be another target in their cross hairs.

So, on to the schools and the media: Mr Cote mentions CBC’s Canada Reads, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Indigo, Costco, and online vendors. He may have also mentioned Bravo!, TVOntario, CBC Radio One, Radio-Canada, the Man Booker Prize (some recent Canadian wins have put a spotlight on our writers), all the various independent publishers – perhaps he did not want to include the competition on his list – of books, magazines, and journals which do the ugly work of sorting through all of the rough expressions of art that have not yet been heard by a literate audience and may not deserve the time and effort needed.

That should do it for the media. Now, the schools: it has been quite some time since I’ve stepped into a high school or primary school, but we all have had some experience with at least one Canadian book. This is something that I have to believe. I was given W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind? in a high school English class and I enjoyed its easy symbolism and comfortable characterizations. I also read Mordecai Richler’s The Incomparable Atuk for an essay on darkly comic themes in literature. This led to a summer where I read everything by Richler that I could find (fiction and non-fiction). Canadian literature was as much a part of my school life – and after-school life – as road hockey, the national anthem, and snowed-out stay-at-home-from-school days.

So, we have the media and the schools. The literature is there and is getting the attention it deserves. And may I say that when I use the word “we”, I mean the “English-language media” (Mr Coté’s words). No mention is made of the success in Quebec of the film, print or television industries. What shocks an Anglo like me in living here is the depth of interest the Quebecois have in regard to the best and the worst of their culture. They see their society as it is, and they want more. And aren’t they also “dominated by U.S. and British culture” (again, Mr Coté’s words)? Yes, there are linguistic and cultural differences, but the appeal of these former colonial masters is still strong (living in Montreal makes you very aware of the American presence in Canada: films are shot here, tourists are everywhere in every season, and I pity the person who tries to take away from the Quebecois certain staples of American culture: jazz and rock and roll, comic books, hamburgers, Hollywood, etc.). And wasn’t France once a colonial master, as well? I guess they have a lot to answer for in La Belle Province, right? Anyone?

Now, colonialism is such a weak argument in the world of literature that I hesitate to explore it here. Yes, power still resides with the ancestors of former slave owners, murderers, and thieves. But, the Third World – and Canada has not qualified for such a title in at least a hundred years – has produced Wole Soyinka, V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott. Would Mr. Coté argue that colonialism has held these very visible minority writers back? Before answering, it should be noted that all three are Nobel Laureates in Literature, a title which only one Canadian writer has obtained. There is the argument that Saul Bellow counts, but he did his work as an American; this does not mean that he was taken seriously because of his family’s move from Quebec to the States – talent does not obey geography or borders. It means that he had the talent and used it. Colonialism did not interfere with his abilities.

And then there is the matter of Gwethalyn Graham, winner of the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction for two books: Swiss Sonata in 1938 and Earth and High Heaven in 1944. Mr Coté uses her career and work to illustrate his points on the effect of colonialism and a particular type of writer that Canadians should be proud to read and support. Do not feel bad if you have never heard of these books. It is not so easy to find information about the Governor-General’s winners in literature; actually, it is easier reaching a real voice over the phone when you call Revenue Canada. You want a list of Pulitzer-Prize winners in any category? No problem, with a mouse and a modem. Nobel laureates? Even easier. For a list of Governor-General’s winners, I had to trawl through several windows before discovering a Microsoft Word file with a list of incomplete names. But this has been rectified: the new list is now available over many web sites. The only embarrassing thing is the number of names that have now been forgotten (anyone still reading Thomas H. Raddall? Winifred Bambrick?). Mr Coté is right when he says that he worries about who reads what. What is truly disturbing is what an unknown literary history says about our culture’s interest in the arts.

But back to Miss Graham’s work. Let me begin with a quote from the American critic Edmund Wilson. He wrote the following complaint about writing during the Second World War (March 3rd, 1945 – The New Yorker):

In general, it has been disappointing to find so many writers of serious talent turning away from the study of behaviour to reassure themselves and their readers with some immediate political program or some resuscitated religious system… The result of this tendency is to simply land the writer in melodrama.

And Miss Graham did master melodrama. Just listen to this brief plot outline from Earth and High Heaven: a Protestant woman from a rich family in Montreal falls in love with an impossibly compassionate Jewish man from Northern Ontario (at one point in the book, Miss Graham describes his care for an “undernourished pigeon”). Her family disapproves and the young couple spends almost three hundred pages fighting their way past the prejudices of the time.

I am grateful that Mr Coté has brought this writer to our attention. And I will not be cynical and criticize his choice to publicize the career of a writer his publishing house has re-released (her work had been out of print for almost a quarter of a century). He has made us all better informed about what had been neglected in our literary history. What I will criticize him for is his lousy taste in books.

Another review (June 26th, 1995 – The New Yorker):

I have a problem with [Earth and High Heaven]. I cannot read it. God knows I have tried. I have downed three straight whiskeys and then tried to read it. I have leapt clean and sober from a cold shower, grabbed the book, and, standing upright, started to read it out loud. But the same thing always happened: I buckled like a puppet and fell asleep.

I suppose this lengthy quote is unfair and makes my argument suspect, but when the writer quoted is Anthony Lane, he deserves some space and my respect. I have read his reviews of books and movies for more than a decade (his film reviews in The New Yorker are brilliant). He is the wittiest and sharpest critic in print today (his collection, Nobody’s Perfect, should be required reading in any course involving literary or film criticism). In this particular article, he went back and looked at The New York Times best-seller fiction list from June 1, 1945. He discovered Miss Graham’s book at number nine. And then he told the truth: “[T]he world is not a sadder place without the work of Gwethalyn Graham.”

That does sound harsh. However, such criticism is deserved when encountering lines like this:

I don’t see why our Liberal politicians should make such an effort to avoid reminding the people of Quebec that they are a part of an organization which, whatever its faults, is still the only concrete example of the kind of international federation which we want to see existing all over the world.

Is this a quote from a work of fiction, or the rough draft from a reporter’s notes on parliamentary procedure? It is long-winded, stilted, overwhelmingly dull, and confirms all of Mr Wilson’s complaints about wartime writing and writers. Can’t we look back at something written this way and say, yes, it is Canadian, and, yes, it is bad? What is nation-building through the arts if the foundation is so shaky, weak, and awkward? In this country, we accept too much work that takes a pedagogical approach to literature without actually entertaining us (medicine disguised as candy). This is unacceptable in a nation that gave the world Marshall McLuhan and his famous edicts: “The medium is the message”, and “The world is a global village.” We have to think about what we say, how we say it, and how it is perceived beyond our borders. Otherwise, in that same global village, we may look like the gentle village idiot that no one has to take seriously.

I once heard Mordecai Richler state in an interview that one of the great things about being a writer in Canada is that there are no names like Henry James or Leo Tolstoy in our literary history, therefore we are working with a clean slate. This may be one of the biggest problems we face. Writers in Canada are facing a blank slate that keeps on being erased. We have a palimpsest culture and a literary history that does not speak directly to us. Mr. Coté has raised some important issues with his article. I just wish that he took a very long look at what writing in this country amounts to when compared to writing in almost any other country over the last century. It is time that we stop blaming things that are not the real problem and reassess what we want from our writers.

Let’s dive in deep and see what we can find.

Thank you for reading!

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