Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark is one of the writers that I most admire and I was sad today to hear the news of her death. The first Spark book that I read was her first novel, The Comforters, in the summer of 1985. I was so taken with it that I continued on from there to read every other novel that she’d written to up that point. When her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, came out in 1992, I got a little thrill from this sentence on the first page: “I was born in Edinburgh, at 160 Bruntsfield Place, the Morningside District, in 1918.” You see, I too once lived on Bruntsfield Place, albeit only for one year when I was ten years old. A minor coincidence I know, but it's hard to resist the temptation to accord some significance to even the most tenuous connection to a favourite author. It was one of my reading resolutions for 2006 to revisit the novels of Muriel Spark and now, on the eve of a trip to her birthplace, this seems like a good time to start. At the very least, I will bring a copy of her quintessential Edinburgh novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, along with me.

Robert Louis Stevenson on Edinburgh

I’m gearing up for my trip to Edinburgh next week by rereading Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, my favourite Robert Louis Stevenson book. Here are a few snippets from the first couple of chapters.

On Edinburgh’s climate:

The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in the spring.

On its contrasts:

Few places, if any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye. In the very midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in nature—a Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a garden, shaken by passing trains, carrying a crown of battlements and turrets, and describing its war-like shadow over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the new town. From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed look down upon the open squares and gardens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning themselves along Princes Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley set with statutes, where the washings of the old town flutter in the breeze at its high windows.

On the fall of the land in the High Street:

The building had grown rotten to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed up so that the scavenger’s barrow could not pass; cracks and reverberations sounded through the house at night; the inhabitants of the huge old human bee-hive discussed their peril when they encountered on the stair: some had even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and returned to them again in a fit of economy or self-respect; when, in the black hours of a Sunday morning, the whole structure ran together with a hideous uproar and tumbled storey upon storey to the ground. The physical shock was felt far and near; and the moral shock travelled with the morning milkmaid into all the suburbs. The church-bells never sounded more dismally over Edinburgh than that grey forenoon. Death had made a brave harvest; and, like Samson, by pulling down one roof destroyed many a home. None who saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the gable: here it was plastered, there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle still stood on the hob, high overhead; and there a cheap picture of the Queen was pasted over the chimney. So, by this disaster, you had a glimpse into the life of thirty families, all suddenly cut off from the revolving years. The land had fallen; and with the land how much! Far in the country, people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the sun looked through between the chimneys in an unwonted place. And all over the world, in London, in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could exclaim with truth: ‘The house that I was born in fell last night!’

Much has changed since Stevenson‘s book was first published in 1879, but Edinburgh still has the vile climate, the dramatic contrasts, and the spooky charm born of a dark history.

Not Buying Not Buying It

This evening in the bookstore I dithered for a while over Judith Levine’s Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping. I really want to read it, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to shell out $35 for a book about eschewing consumerism. Eventually I made my way to the library and put my name on the list for it there instead. I had a similar response a few months back to Liz Perle’s Money, a Memoir: Women, Emotions, and Cash. I eyed it up covetously several times in the bookstore, but didn’t buy it. Is it just me, or do the sales of such books suffer more broadly on account of the financial anxiety that they provoke in potential buyers? The fact that I’m 178th in the library hold queue for Levine’s book makes me think that the latter might be true.

Story and Interview Online

My short story Cool and Stuart Ross’s interview of me are now available in the online edition of This Magazine. I’ve made occasional references on this blog to my endeavours to capture a first person teenage voice. Cool is one of those teenage stories, part of a series that will appear in my next short story collection which is due out in the spring of 2007. To read the story click here, and the interview, here.

Trapped in My House

I was sorry to miss the inaugural Test Reading on Wednesday night but it couldn’t be helped. I was literally trapped in my house. What began on Tuesday morning as the apparently minor inconvenience of a blocked drain quickly morphed into a full sewer line replacement. By Wednesday evening, there was an eight-foot trench where my front steps used to be. No problem, I thought, I’ll exit through the back door and down the driveway that runs along the side of the house. But alas, not content simply to block our front door, the workmen had put the dirt that came out of the eight-foot trench in a towering heap that extended from one side of the driveway to the other. I was game to clamber over it in daylight with all my faculties about me, but I didn’t like my chances of making the return journey in the dark fortified by a few of the cheap beers rumoured to be on offer at the reading venue.

I gather that I missed a very interesting evening. You can read brief reports here and here. Fortunately all is not lost. Recordings of the readings will soon be made available on the series website. It won’t be the same as being there, of course, but it beats missing out on the event entirely.

On the subject of the joys of home ownership, I recently picked up a copy of House: A Memoir by Michael Ruhlman. My interest was piqued by a rave review from Our Girl in Chicago at About Last Night. I enjoy unconventional memoirs and I thought that this one would have particular appeal for me given that I recently took the plunge and bought a house myself. It was undeniably engaging and well written but I couldn’t finish it. I gave up when I started having nightmares about all of the things that went wrong with Ruhlman’s house going wrong with mine. For the same reason, I can no longer bear to watch Holmes on Homes. I’m a house hypochondriac. Perhaps I’ll wait a few years and in the meantime check out Ruhlman’s writing on a different topic.

Poetry and Power Games

Lynn Coady, Mean Boy (Doubleday Canada, 2006).

Mean Boy is set at Westcock University, a fictional campus in the fictional town of Timperly, New Brunswick, in the mid-1970s. Its focus is Jim Arsenault, the poet-professor who runs the newly established creative writing program at Westcock, idol to his students and bane of the administration’s existence. The administration’s denial of his application for tenure, and the rallying round of his students, sets the plot in motion.

Here’s a run down of the key players:

Jim Arsenault is a charismatic, egomaniacal, alcoholic poet. The narrator describes him thus: “The thing about Jim is, he’s a man. More than that—a guy. He is the new breed of poet. He doesn’t fluff himself up, doesn’t wear jewellery or turtlenecks… Jim doesn’t even wear sports jackets, let alone a tie. Work shirts and jeans. Often he comes to class ‘straight from the woods,’ he tells us. He’s big on the woods. Or ‘straight from working on my roof.’ Or his porch.”

Larry Campbell, the narrator, is a second-year student who is completely in Jim’s thrall. He’s full of romantic notions about “real poets” and “artistic friendships.” He sees poetry as an escape from the family that he loves but is ashamed of and a life spent working in the family business, a motor-hotel and mini-putt on Prince Edward Island.

Sherri Ann Mitten writes poems about desire that make her male classmates squirm. Bubbly and blonde (“with her yellow curls going everywhere like a doll or a crazed cheerleader”), she is, in Larry’s view, the antithesis of what “girl poets” should look like.

Claude is a cosmopolitan character who has been to New York and San Francisco. He wears black turtlenecks, writes villanelles, and ultimately becomes enamoured with language poetry.

Todd, “all flailing limbs and pissed off energy,” writes rhyming poetry about industrial accidents. Unlike Larry, he’s proud of his working-class roots.

Chuck Slaughter is a jock and a bully. He’s not in the creative writing class and has no interest in poetry but has inexplicably been befriended by Jim. He has referred to Larry as “fuckwit” since their first acquaintance. To Larry’s mind: “He is not particularly interesting aside from his horrific size and his ability to maim on the football field.”

These are all recognizable types and Coady makes great sport of them. The satire is biting and hilarious. I particularly relished Larry’s internal dialogue during meetings of the creative writing class which made quite clear that the comments of the students had little to do with the work under discussion and everything to do with jockeying for position and currying favour with Jim. The student poems which are quoted in the novel are perfectly evocative of the undergraduate creative writing experience (for example, “The Ass of My Head”—Larry’s “first drug induced effort”).

But ultimately the genius of the book lies in the extent to which Coady is able to delve beneath these stereotypical surfaces. Over the course of the novel, Larry’s preconceptions are challenged and many of his illusions shattered. Coady provides not just laughs but deep insights into the individual characters and into the complex power relations that are at play here.

The existence of divisions and hierarchies among poets and different types of poetry is a growing preoccupation for Larry over the course of the novel. Many of the characters decry the marginalization of Maritime poets by the Canadian literary establishment, and of working-class poets by ivory-tower academics. For his part, Jim handily divides Canadian poets into two lists, separated by a line of chalk down the middle of the blackboard. On one side are the “Hucksters” (Toronto poets) and on the other “The Real Thing” (poets from the east coast, the west coast, the prairies): “He handed out the work of the Real Thing writers but said that to inflict the Hucksters on us would be contamination.” Larry’s vision of the purity and unity of the poetry world is further shaken when one of his classmates communicates his enthusiasm for various schools of experimental poetry that don't fit on the grid:

Movements. It reminds me of the way Gramma Campbell used to discuss her bowels after every meal. I don’t want there to be movements when it comes to poetry. It’s hard enough to figure out Hucksterism versus the Real Thing, just trying to write a line that’s any good.

While Coady very effectively skewers various literary targets, she never diminishes the value of poetry or of creative aspirations in the process. An exchange between Larry and Dermot Schofield, a Toronto poet who visits Westcock to give a reading, gets to the heart of things:

“It’s all part of the game,” he tells me.
“Game?” I say. “Poetry?”
“Not poetry,” he says. “What you’re talking about. Being reviewed, acknowledged, known. Not writing poetry, but being a poet.”

It’s “being a poet” that Coady takes the piss out of here, not writing poetry.

I found Mean Boy wildly entertaining much of the time, but I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed it exactly. Larry is so self-conscious, so ill at ease, that it was sometimes downright uncomfortable to be in his company. However, it’s quite likely that my discomfort is rooted in the fact that I was once a pretentious teenage poet and, even at his worst, I could relate to Larry dismayingly well.

Lynn Coady is an enormously talented writer and Mean Boy is a fascinating novel.

Is Crime Fiction Inherently Reactionary?

In the course of some musings about genre fiction over at The Sharp Side, Ellis had this to say about crime fiction:

But there’s a problem with crime fiction, which is that the form is inherently reactionary. Crime fiction is about a disturbance to the established order. The hero or heroine restores the existing state of things. Crime fiction celebrates the restoration. Crime fiction celebrates stasis. It projects comforting fantasies of justice in the world. Hence the ubiquity of crime drama on television.

I certainly find much television crime drama to be reactionary. I often find myself gnashing my teeth over shows like Law & Order where the accused always seems to be presumed guilty and that presumption of guilt is used to justify police brutality and all manner of unethical conduct on the part of other players in the justice system.

But what of crime fiction? There’s no question that some crime fiction is reactionary, but is it fair to say that the form is inherently reactionary? I agree with Ellis about the projection of “comforting fantasies of justice in the world.” In almost all crime fiction the villain is unmasked and punished in the end. I sometimes opt to read it for this very reason. Occasionally someone takes me to task for describing as “comfort reads” books in which multiple murders occur, and I explain that what’s comforting about them is that everything comes out right in the end.

But coming out right in the end is not necessarily equivalent to “restor[ing] the existing state of things.” In an unjust world, coming out right in the end might mean a drastic change from the existing state of things. I think that there are lots of ways in which crime fiction can be subversive rather than reactionary. Let me offer up just one example.

Incompetence and corruption on the part of societal authorities is a mainstay of crime fiction. Thus, even if the goal is to set things right, those authorities are rarely trusted to do the job. In contrast to the standard Law & Order scenario that I describe above, the police are frequently depicted pursuing and arresting the wrong person; in fact, they often point a finger at the hero or heroine at some point in the investigation. It’s up to this renegade figure to make sure that the authorities get it right. In a cozy, that figure is likely to be a bumbling amateur sleuth, in a P.I. novel, a lone wolf private investigator. Even in a police procedural, the police officer at the centre of the tale is usually something of a maverick, at odds with the higher-ups and willing to break rules when necessary.

This strong anti-authoritarian streak doesn’t sit well with blanket assertions about the reactionary character of crime fiction. The genre is much more complex and interesting, much more versatile than that.

Giving up on a Mystery Series

There was a discussion recently on Dorothy-L about what causes a reader to give up on a once favourite mystery series. I’ve just finished reading Steeplechase, Jane Langton’s latest Homer Kelly mystery, and I’m afraid that I’m ready to throw in the towel on this series. The last couple of instalments have been disappointing and this one is the thinnest of the lot. Homer has become a caricature of himself, and his wife Mary seems to be merely an excuse for Homer to talk out loud. The two of them are here reduced to a very flimsy structure upon which to hang the historical tale that is at the centre of the book. There is a great deal of interesting detail in that historical tale and I found it quite compelling toward the end. (Once I managed to straighten out all the characters with H names that is -- to have Horatio, Horace, Hector, and Homer all wandering about one novel struck me as unnecessarily confusing.) But the connection between it and the present day adventures of Homer and Mary is very tenuous. I loved the early books in this series -- the fascinating literary connections and the wonderful evocations of Harvard, Cambridge, Concord, and that whole area of New England. I miss the old Homer who was a real character rather than a compilation of blustery, annoying tics, and the old Mary who was a strong-willed woman with a mind of her own rather than just Homer’s sidekick. Steeplechase is the eighteenth book in this series. I recommend the first twelve without hesitation; thereafter, go at your own risk.

Fictitious Reading Series 4

The fourth instalment of The Fictitious Reading Series is fast approaching. It will take place on Sunday, March 26th at 7:30 pm in the gallery space above This Ain’t the Rosedale Library (483 Church Street, Toronto). This month’s featured writers are Clint Burnham and Elyse Friedman. The evening will include readings by Clint and Elyse, as well as an informal onstage interview with them. Stuart Ross will conduct the interview and I will serve as host.

Clint Burnham is a Vancouver writer and teacher. He is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction including Airborne Photo and Buddyland. Of his new novel, Smoke Show, the Calgary Herald said: "His ear for conversation is impeccable and often hilarious, as quintessentially low-brow Canuck as a squashed Kokanee can...What makes this book work is its spaciousness, creating a kind of post-modern mad-lib where the reader supplies the narrative connective tissue, not unlike an actual overheard conversation.”

Elyse Friedman is a Toronto writer. She is the author of two novels, a book of poetry, and several feature-length film scripts. Her first novel, Then Again, was short-listed for the 2000 Trillium Award. In a review of her second novel, Waking Beauty, Now Magazine said: “Think Kafka's Metamorphosis meets Extreme Makeover as interpreted by Robert Altman and you have an idea how brilliant Friedman is.” Elyse is currently working on a collection of short stories.

Come out on Sunday night to hear these excellent writers read from their work!

The Toronto Writers' Centre

There was an article in the Globe and Mail this past weekend about the Toronto Writers' Centre, a new venture which is set to open on May 1st:

The Toronto Writers' Centre aims to provide a communal space where writers can pen (or, more accurately, laptop) their latest work, network with other writers and just plain, old get out of the house.

For a one time initiation fee of $107.00 and a monthly fee of $175.00, members gain access to “a 2,600 square foot, air-conditioned, writing haven, divided into a Quiet Room, Lounge and Kitchen.” The Quiet Room contains 30 work spaces, each outfitted with desk, chair, lamp and other electrical outlets, while the Lounge is given over to relaxation, conversation with fellow writers, and occasional readings and seminars.

It’s modelled after similar facilities in other cities such as The Writers Room in New York.

This sounds extremely appealing to me. I have the good fortune to have a pleasant work space at home, but I can’t help but think that getting out of my pajamas and heading downtown to an office of sorts would help me to be more disciplined about work on my novel-in-progress. I also imagine that it would be stimulating and encouraging to work in the midst of other writers like that. I expect that the centre will develop the sort of communal creative energy that I've thrived on at the short-term writing retreats I’ve attended in the past.

The fees will be beyond the means of many a struggling writer, but they are considerably more affordable than the rent on a downtown office.

Is there anyone out there who has taken advantage of such communal writing spaces in other cities? Was it worth the money?