–By J.S. Porter
For John Robert Colombo and his many contributions to Canadian Literature
When I entered Indigo Books in Ancaster last month, I spotted a customary table of “Heather’s Picks.” Heather Reisman likes to let the public know the books she reads and enjoys. Seeing Heather’s Picks made me think of having my own Picks, an imaginary table of CanLit books, true to my own quirky taste and perhaps true to other quirky readers.
First off, I need short stories. It’s the end of summer, it’s hot, and, in the age of relentless data, we all have short attention spans. Besides, short stories are almost, by definition, a Canadian genre or at least a genre in which Canadians excel. Yes, to Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant and Alistair MacLeod, three of the world’s finest. And yes, to the new kid on the block Souvankham Thammavongsa for How to Pronounce Knife. And an oldie, but not yet recognized as a goldie, Norman Levine’s By a Frozen River. One story in particular has stayed with me since high school – “We All Begin in Little Magazines.”
I’m not a big reader of novels—one of my many deficiencies, gaps, holes, blind spots. But I think I need to have Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute on my table, the first Canadian novel I read and loved. And I need Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, a tossed salad of prayer and pornography that has so much to say about Canadian history –its French-Canadians, its Indigenous peoples and its Jews. See my piece on Cohen and Catharine Tekakwitha, the Mohawk saint.
Have to have Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel. Once you get that cranky, crusty old woman’s voice (Hagar Shipley) in your ear, you can’t get it out. Have to have Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a work of stunningly accurate prophecy. Pound for pound, book by book, Atwood is the best we have – a superb novelist, poet and essayist. How can the Swedish Academy possibly deny her the Nobel Prize for her contribution to world literature?
Will you permit me one more novel? W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind, a story of a boy growing up on the prairies where his observations on the death of animals prepare him for inevitable human mortalities.
Some of the best writing in Canada has come from writers difficult to classify. What do you call Marshall McLuhan’s work? Probes. Or, how about George Grant’s – laments? Or even Northrop Frye’s essays, which at their core consist of nuggets, kernels, and aphorisms of the highest eloquence and insight. Frye once described the trio (himself, McLuhan and Grant) as religious writers. With respect to McLuhan, I particularly like Counterblast and Through the Vanishing Point, but if I can only have one McLuhan on my table I’d choose Understanding Media. Frye? Maybe The Educated Imagination or John Robert Colombo’s The Northrop Frye Quote Book. Grant? Technology and Empire or David Cayley’s Conversations with George Grant.
Some great Canadian writing consists of what Michael Ondaatje in a speech in Italy and Stan Dragland in The Bricoleur and his Sentences call mongrel writing (art) –mixing genres, blurring lines between poetry and prose. An example is Anne Carson’s Nox.
When Anne Carson lost her brother, she wrote a book about him. Nox contains photographs, ephemera, dictionary definitions, lyric shards, fragments, cutouts, clippings, handwritten jottings and incomplete narratives. The contents sit in a box, open like an accordion, and contain the soul of a dead brother as remembered by a sister. Carson’s book is an elegy, a eulogy, a coffin, a gravesite, a memorial service for her brother, Michael. While she grieves, she translates the Roman poet Catullus’ elegy for his brother (known as “Catullus 101”) as parallel grief.
Another example of Canadian mongrel writing is Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid—biography, autobiography, photography, poetry, prose all interbred, or, if you prefer a plant metaphor, interpollinated. Ondaatje’s friend, bpNichol, in Some Lines of Poetry so interfuses drawings and words, you don’t know whether to “read” it visually or verbally.
Yet a third example of extraordinary mongrel writing in Canada is B.W. Powe’s Mysteria, a cornucopia of Spain, Covid, Toronto, and family love poems, particularly to his wife. The book proceeds in dream, parable, chant, poem, playlet, homage, unlettering, anecdote, smudged words, fragments, proverbs, elegies, eulogies, epigraphs. It manages to put more love on the page than I would have thought imaginable. I wrote at length on it in New Explorations.
As I’m compiling my list, stacking my table, I’m becoming conscious of the fact that I am clearly drawn to works of mongrelism. I need one more mongrel work: The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust by Krystyna Gunnars, painter and poet. I wrote about her ecstatically in my book Spirit Book Word in 2001. She is still going strong in her latest, The Silence of Falling Snow.
My table is still thin on poetry. Let there be more. Robert Bringhurst, The Ridge. Jan Zwicky, Chamber Music. Dennis Lee for sure. His poems “The Coat,” “The Gods” and “Not Abstract Harmonies But” belong on any table of world poetry, never mind a table devoted to Canadian writing. You can find all three poems in Lee’s Selected, Nightwatch. I’d also want So Cool as a companion volume that combines whimsy with profundity where his tongue is always at play. See my say on his Heart Residence.
Susan McCaslin, her Selected, Into the Open. I touched on its breadth and depth, its beauty and earthy mysticism in Canadian Woman’s Studies Vol. 32, Numbers 1,2, reprinted in https://poets.ca/review-into-the-open-poems-new-and-selected-by-susan-mccaslin/. And Ondaatje’s great lyricism in Handwriting, his homage to his native land, Sri Lanka, and a hymn to the delicate, the precious, the transitory.
I’m running out of space; my table is buckling. I see it lacks a biography. How about Rosemary Sullivan’s Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen, a fine biographer of a fine poet. And my table lacks books of essays. Please make space for Don McKay’s The Shell of the Tortoise and A Dropped Glove on Regent Street by Don Coles. And how about a book from the Massey Lectures – Alberto Manguel’s City of Words? Yes, I’ve written about it and about him on a number of occasions.
Can’t resist a memoir which I first heard read beautifully on the CBC many years ago – Memoirs of Montparnasse by John Glassco, one of the great books about living in Paris around the time of Joyce and Hemingway.
So that’s my table of Canadian books I personally find invigorating. What’s on yours?
