Clark Blaise's Southern Stories By Jeet Heer National Post (December 30, 2000) The Florida that has been so much in the electoral news is not the Florida that Clark Blaise grew up in. Modern air-conditioned Florida is the land of retired snowbirds and Cuban exiles, the sanitized kitsch of Disney and the glittery kitsch of Miami Vice. The son of a French-Canadian father and an English-Canadian mother, Blaise's childhood in the late 1940s was spent in an Old South Florida much closer to William Faulkner than to Mickey Mouse. Blaise remembers an "impoverished Florida" that included "the moss-pickers I went to school with, the worms in my feet that my mother treated with carbolic acid, and the worms she killed with dabs of acid on my rectum holding a flashlight as they churned out of my guts at night to spawn, the Klu Klux Klan (local politicians and businessmen who unmasked themselves every Confederate Memorial Day leading a cavalcade of convertibles with the high school band and beauty queens so we'd know who to vote for and where to shop)." It's this gothic and grotesque Florida -- a land where gawping hillbillies learn about sex at carnival peep-shows -- that is the setting for Blaise's Southern Stories, the first of four geographically organized volumes reprinting his shorter fiction. Inheriting the wandering bug from his traveling salesman father, Blaise has been one of the most cosmopolitan of authors, so subsequent volumes will print his tales of the American North, Canada and India. What makes Blaise a remarkable writer is that the breadth of his travels has not hampered the depth of his perceptions. He has the rare ability to be regional and cosmopolitan at the same time. He can conjure up Orlando as convincingly as if he has been a lifelong resident, but he can do the same for Montreal, Paris and Calcutta. In describing a place, Blaise combines the visitor's attention to surface detail with the native's feeling of intense local attachment . As novelist Fenton Johnson notes in the introduction to this book, Blaise's portrayal of a dirt-poor South haunted by history belongs to an American literary tradition that includes Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty. What needs to be added is that this Southern Gothic tradition has tendrils that reach all the way up to Canada. Aside from Blaise, there have been many reverse carpetbaggers, Southerners who have headed (or returned) north such Leon Rooke, Douglas Fetherling and Elizabeth Spencer. Moreover, many prototypically Canadian writers such as Alice Munro learned their craft at the feet of Southern masters. Like the American South, Canada has been a poor, rural land suspicious of outsiders and technological progress for most of its history. It's no accident that at the end of the American Civil War, Confederate leaders such as Jefferson Davies ended up in Canada. Progressive and enlightened Canadians might not like to think so, but there is a deep emotional affinity between Canada and the American South. French Canadians in particular have felt the lure of the South. Long before the United States or Canada became nations, francophones were traveling down the rivers of North America, often ending up in Texas, Louisiana or Florida. That quintessential Texan Ross Perot is the descendant of these far-flung fur traders. Outside of Quebec, French-Canadians are the hobbits of North America: a shy, diffident people who know how to hide from unfriendly outsiders. Part of Blaise's achievement is to tell the story of this hidden people, his father's people, who form an invisible thread that links Quebec with the Gulf of Mexico. Blaise constantly plays off the parallels and differences between the American South and Canada. Here are the experiences of a young Canadian boy new to Florida: "After a week in Hartley I developed worms. My feet bleed from itching and scratching. The worms were visible; I could prick them with pins. My mother took me to a clinic where the doctor sprayed my foot with a liquid freeze. Going on, the ice was pleasant, for Florida feet are always hot. Out on the bench I scraped my initials in the frost on my foot. It seemed right to me (before the pain of the thaw began): I was from Up North, the freezing was a friendly gesture for a Florida doctor. My mother held my foot between her hands and told me stories of her childhood, ice-skating for miles on the Battleford River in Saskatchewan, then riding home under fur rugs in a horse-drawn sleigh. My mother then consulted her old Canadian Doctor's Home Companion -- my grandfather Blankenship had been a doctor, active for years in curling circles, Anglican missions, and crackpot Toryism -- and learned that footworms, etc., were unknown in Canada but sometimes afflicted Canadian travelers in Tropical Regions. Common to all hot climes, the book went on, due to poor sanitation and the unspeakable habits of the non-white peoples, even in the Gulf Coast and Indians Territories of our southern neighbour." Two worlds are created in this passage: the Florida world of worms (a recurring and apt image, since Blaise himself is a writer who knows how to get under our skin) and the paternalistic world of the deftly described Saskatchewan grandfather. In another story, the same boy, after being acclimatized to Florida, returns to Saskatchewan. "A cold spring gave way, in May, to a dry, burning heat, the kind that blazed across my forehead and shrunk the skin under my eyes and over my nose. But I didn't sweat. It wasn't like Florida heat that reached up groggily from the ground as well as from above, steaming the trouser cuffs while threatening sunstroke." Again, seen through the same eyes, Florida and Saskatchewan are both unexpectedly made fresh by Blaise's brilliant description. Blaise has a mixed reputation in Canada. His best stories have been much anthologized and praised, but the very fact that so much of his fiction is set in other lands has prevented him from becoming a canonical Canadian writer. Yet this gathering of Southern stories, previously unpublished or scattered in other Blaise collections, should solidify his reputation as a major Canadian writer with a special achievement. More than any other writer, Blaise has shown how Canada is linked by geography, immigration and cultural affinity to the wider world, including the Gothic world of William Faulkner.