John Metcalf's Literary Wars By Jeet Heer Toro (April/May 2003) In the chummy world of Canadian literature, where smarmy mutual praise is the reigning lingo, John Metcalf has a reputation as a troublemaker. Largely unknown to the general public, the British-born novelist and editor is legendary in bookish circles for his blunt honesty, cherished and reviled alike for his willingness to express strong and unpopular opinions. As short story writer Patricia Robertson notes in The New Quarterly, if you haven't met Metcalf it is easy to be intimidated by his many caustic critical essays and biting book reviews. "I had an image of a British pit bull, seizing Canadian literature by the seat of its pants and yanking it, kicking and screaming, in the direction of Mr. Metcalf's School of Higher Literary Standards," Robertson observed. In his new autobiography, An Aesthetic Underground, Metcalf proves that the pit bull of CanLit still has some bite. Aside from many entertaining stories about boozing and skirt chasing by the literati, Metcalf's autobiography is filled with characteristically tart put-downs of revered literary figures. Morley Callaghan, Metcalf insists, was guilty of, "stumblebum writing." Margaret Atwood's influential nationalist tome Survival was, "not only silly but dangerous." The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies was, "a relentlessly bad novel" which won applause because the author's theatrical presence flummoxed dim-witted reviewers. "Like the yokels at a medicine show, the audience was awed by the gravity of mien, the silver splendour of the beard, the Edwardian knickerbockers," Metcalf writes, describing Davies's hammy public persona. In responding to Metcalf's polemics, many otherwise genteel Canadian writers become querulous and ill-tempered. "I think he is a bombastic Brit who came over here and tried to tell Canadians what they should think of their literature with absolutely no background in the subject whatsoever," says W.P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe. "He's a jerk as far as I'm concerned." Douglas Gibson, the diplomatic and civil publisher of McClelland & Stewart, once described a Metcalf essay as "loony." According to poet Gordon Phinn, Metcalf has been "bullshitting himself fearlessly for most of his adult life." Metcalf the curmudgeon has a position in Canadian literature comparable to Don Cherry among journalists: he's a mildly amusing crank whose opinions can be written off as the products of a warped personality. Yet for those who know him best, the dozens of writers he's helped nurture over a four-decade career, this reduction of Metcalf into a cartoon gadfly is an enormous cultural injustice. To his admirers, Metcalf is not eccentric but central, a brilliant prose-smith who has mentored an entire generation of fledgling authors. "People think he's a grouchy bear," complains Annabel Lyons, a young writer whose short story collection, Oxygen (2000), was edited by Metcalf. "But he's not like that at all. Everyone who has worked with him feels lucky. He's a brilliant editor who is very supportive of younger writers." An impressive array of writers echo Lyons's words: Russell Smith, Andrew Pyper, Mary-Lou Zeitoun, Steven Heighton and Caroline Adderson all testify to Metcalf's nurturing influence. As Smith slyly notes, there is a "maternal" and "sensitive" side to Metcalf, which is well hidden by his public image as a hard-boiled scold. Will the real John Metcalf please stand up? Is he a rude crank or a caring mentor? One of the benefits of reading his autobiography is that it lets us revisit the career of our most controversial living writer. *** I first met John Metcalf three years ago after a public reading at Toronto's Harbourfront. Knowing Metcalf's only from his prickly prose, I had to steel myself up before I could talk to him. Yet after a few quick words, I realized my trepidation was misplaced. A compact, dapper man with a neatly trimmed-beard and mellifluous British accent, Metcalf set me at ease with his courtly Old World manners. To be sure, Metcalf in conversation can be as opinionated as he is in print. He'll express mock-outrage at the fact that "fundamentally mediocre writers like Margaret Lawrence and Matt Cohen have awards named after them." About Kinsella, Metcalf simply notes that "I just don't think he's a very bright manŠ I think of him as a commercial writer, and a clumsy one." About Douglas Gibson's criticisms, Metcalf retorts that they are "offensive and dishonest." Yet the stridency of these put-downs is tempered by Metcalf's genial and puckish tone. Like a schoolboy pulling a prank, he knows he's being naughty and invites you, with a wink, to join in the fun. In both his private conversations and his memoirs, Metcalf dwells on his English upbringing. Born the son of a Methodist minister in 1938, Metcalf rejected the religion of his parents but inherited their zealous do-gooding energy. As his memoirs make, Metcalf found in literature the salvation that his father received from the Bible and theology. Metcalf came of age in the 1950s, when the afterglow of literary modernism still suffused the intellectual world. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway were among the idols of the day: from these writers Metcalf learned the importance of language and technique. The British literary culture of the 1950s was also a contentious place. In order to win a hearing for controversial writers like Eliot, critics like F.R. Leavis and William Empson had developed a combative public presence: in championing modernism, they weren't afraid of mocking the philistines who preferred to cling to old-fashioned Victorian literature. Metcalf's literary mentors believed that literature thrives on debate and argument, a position he continues to hold to this day. Metcalf brought this legacy of two-fisted modernism when he immigrated to Canada in the early 1960s. He came to Canada largely because he found the experience of teaching in England to be depressing because the schools were filled with an "underlying viciousness and violence." The year 1962 found the 24-year-old Metcalf in Canada, where after a few dismal years of teaching high school he began a long, fruitful career as a literary critic, short story writer, novelist and editor. Metcalf's aborted career as a teacher left a mark on his writing career. His two spirited satirical novels, Going Down Slow (1972) and General Ludd (1980), both focus on the deadening effect of education, as do many of his short stories. A beleaguered teacher facing down a sullen mob of students is perhaps the most characteristic scene in Metcalf's fiction. When he first started out, Metcalf's novels and stories were almost universally praised. In the Globe and Mail, William French described Going Down Slow as "trenchantly funny." However, as Metcalf became a more outspoken critic in the late 1970s and 1980s, other writers began to stop discussing his work and not including his stories in their anthologies. This informal blacklisting has prevented Metcalf from gaining a wider audience. Yet Metcalf's unpopularity in certain circles hasn't dampened his spirits. He has constantly sought, with great tenacity and energy, to find new writers. According to Leon Rooke, a Governor General's award-winning writer whose first Canadian book was published with Metcalf's help, Metcalf spends countless hours, "pouring over the lit mags, keeping his ears to the ground, discovering writers, getting their work into print." Given the loneliness of a literary life, even the small acts of kindness that Metcalf performs can have a lasting impact. In the late 1960s, Alice Munro was starting her career and feeling dejected. "I had absolutely no status as a writer," Munro recalled in an autobiographical essay. "A creative writing teacher at the University of Victoria told me that I wrote the kind of things he used to write when he was 15." Then Munro received a letter of praise from Metcalf. "I was stunned by it, really. He had taken the trouble to do this - to write so generously and thoughtfully, to a writer he didn't know, a writer of no importance." Munro's description of her "literary friendship" with Metcalf nicely distills the impact he has on many writers. Since 1989, Metcalf has served as senior editor of the Porcupine's Quill, a literary press in Erin, Ontario - a position that allows him to do more than just praise writers. Now he can publish them as well. Over the last 14 years, Metcalf has edited more than 100 volumes for Porcupine's Quill, many of them from young writers he first discovered in the pages of small literary magazines and writing schools. Metcalf's judgments as an editor have been vindicated time and again. Many of the writers he first published have gone on to win not just big awards but also lucrative contracts with large publishers. Metcalf's achievements as an editor are based not only on his unequalled abilities as talent scout, but also on the sensitivity with which he handles his writers. Editors have real power, especially when dealing with young writers. Not surprisingly, some editors have fallen into the temptation to play God, using a writer's work as an outlet for their own frustrated creativity. In the 1930s, Max Perkins was accused of doing that with Thomas Wolfe; more recently, similar charges have been leveled against Gordon Lish, in his relationship with Raymond Carver. Given Metcalf's strong views on literature, one might suspect that he's a domineering editor of that sort. Yet the writers who have worked with him are unanimous in praising the way he sensitively works to enhance their own voices. "John does read his writers well," Steven Heighton notes. "And not just their vulnerability or toughness when it comes to criticism, but their special strengths or weaknesses as artists. The most cursory look at the writers he has edited will show that the never tries to make his writers sound like himself, as bad writer/editors do." *** For all his good works, Metcalf's reputation remains covered by a cloud of acrimony. This is undoubtedly for political reasons: Metcalf is a vocal critic of government cultural subsidies; he thinks nationalism corrupts literary judgment; he is skeptical of fiction that promotes "progressive" causes like feminism and multiculturalism. Moreover, Metcalf believes that many of the alleged giants of Canadian literature (Morley Callaghan, Robertson Davies, Timothy Findley) were never very good and deserve to be knocked off their pedestals. All of these positions are worth debating. In a healthier literary climate, Metcalf and his critics would be able to thrash out their difference in the court of public opinion. Unfortunately, Metcalf's ideas have usually been answered by catcalls, in part because he himself has a tendency toward invective. Yet even if they don't like his ideas, readers should pay attention to Metcalf's words. As the title of his autobiography makes clear, Metcalf's primary concerns are aesthetic, not political. Metcalf hates the way Canadians talk about literature largely because he is a master of English prose and therefore offended by the sentimental blather that pervades our book chat. Take the case of the poet Al Purdy. When Purdy died three years ago at the venerable age of 81, he was repeatedly praised as a decent, down-to-earth writer who voiced the everyday concerns of ordinary Canadians. "He sounded, looked, acted and thought like your imagined average Canadian," argued Purdy's publisher. "That's why he's so beloved." Metcalf shared an office with Purdy at Loyola College in the 1970s and remembers a frisky poet, too lively to be called average. "He'd boom and bellow about in the English department office for a while, groping unfortunate secretaries and filching letterhead and then he'd phone a nearby grocery store to get a case of beer delivered. A pizza would follow and soon he'd have the place comfortable with a fug of cigar smoke. His cigars were rank, plastic-tipped and dipped in port." In order to sleep off his daytime boozing, Purdy kept a collapsible cot in his office, a piece of furniture that apparently had numerous uses. "On some afternoons I'd be further excluded from my office facing a locked door while on the collapsible cot he plumbed the depths of one of the female department members." "With the advent of spring and the retreat of the snow under our office window, beer bottles began to surface, more and more every day as the sun gained strength, until they lay revealed on the playing field like corpses after a mighty battle." In a few quick paragraphs, Metcalf demolishes all the stifling cliches about Al Purdy as The Voice of the Common Person and replaces it with a much earthier image of the poet as a disreputable coot, both endearing and unmanageable. The beer bottles are nicely placed in the last sentence, right between the high rhetoric of "the advent of spring" and an imaginary "mighty battle." Without saying so, Metcalf is suggesting that Purdy's beery muse deflated his poet diction. This little sketch of Purdy is a typical Metcalf performance: a strong and funny piece of writing designed to upturn the conventional thinking of the Canadian literary world. An Aesthetic Underground vindicates Metcalf's long service as the troublesome conscience of Canadian culture, who provoked debate in order to stir up thought. Instead of continuing to subject Metcalf to the silent treatment, perhaps his critics will now take up his long-standing offer to start talking about literature.