Canada Emerges as a Literary Light : Writers in a Country Divided Show a Burst of Energy

For years, the phrase Canadian culture was seen as a contradiction in terms. The best-known Canadian actors became famous as Hollywood heroes, Canadian artists painted gloomy northern landscapes, Canadian writers produced stodgy books that went largely unread, even at home. Canada was a country known for its Mounted Police, its hockey teams and its weather.

Not any more, at least not as far as literature is concerned. In both English and French, Canadian writers are turning out some of the most vital, vibrant and exciting prose and poetry to be found anywhere.

The works of Margaret Atwood, Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, Marie Claire Blais and Roch Carrier are published and read the world over and acclaimed. And these are only a few.

Canadian authors are producing imaginative works with universal themes that reach far beyond their national boundaries.

Timothy Findley, for example, retells in an elegant, imaginative and funny way the story of Noah in his latest novel, “Not Wanted on the Voyage.” Before that, his “Famous Last Words” examined the fascist literary movement before World War II within the framework of a well-constructed mystery plot.

Still Writing at 81

Morley Callaghan, whom the American critic Edmund Wilson called a literary giant, is still writing, at age 81, about the relationships of people to the forces that press on their lives. His short stories are models of that difficult form.

Poignant Insights

Atwood, Gallant, Alice Munro and several other Canadians appear regularly in the New Yorker and other major periodicals. Richler, perhaps the best-known Canadian writer in the United States, constantly produces funny and poignant insights into Jewish life in Montreal, as well as examinations of mid-life crises and the relations of the country’s various social and business classes.

Most of these writers, and many others, are well-known in the United States, Britain and other English-speaking countries, and they account for the growing reputation of Canadian literature.

However, it can be argued that the most original and innovative--if not the best--Canadian writing is done not in English but in French, and this is ironic because the works of Quebec writers are still widely ignored in the English-speaking provinces and even by many critics. Atwood, for example, makes only one major reference to French writers in “Second Words,” a collection of criticism.

Surrealistic Style

Still, the works of Quebec writers are steadily gaining appreciation and acceptance, if not always in English Canada then in France and the United States.

Jacques Ferron, whose exciting, surrealistic style is admired by French and American critics, is considered the most influential writer in Quebec despite his hermit-like existence. “Ferron is an institution,” says Alberto Mangel, an Argentine-born editor and critic working in Toronto.

Another French-Canadian institution is Roch Carrier, whose works in French and in translation sell well enough to support him. His books are full of violence and humor. One of his most famous, “La Guerre, Yes Sir!,” is a devastating account of English insensitivity to French speakers in Quebec during World War II.

“When I wrote ‘La Guerre,’ I was bitter,” he said in an interview. “I was bitter, conscious of the inequality of our lives. There was a lot of frustration. I came back from France to be told my language and education were second-rate.”

But as the French have gained confidence with their growing political and economic influence in Quebec, much of the bitterness and frustration have passed out of the literature.

“The situation has changed, and so have I,” Carrier said. “My writing has evolved into something a lot less bitter.”

Another Quebec writer who largely disregards politics is 43-year-old Ives Beauchamain, whose giant novel “Le Matou” (“The Tomcat”) has sold 600,000 copies in France, Quebec, South America and Scandinavia.

Liberating Effect

“Le Matou,” which will have even wider sales when it comes out in English later this year, deals with what Beauchamain sees as the liberating effect of street life in a humorous, tough-minded but sensitive way, without political or sociological lectures.

“I am a Quebecois,” he said, “but literature has no country.”

Perhaps the most impressive and startling French-Canadian writer who pays little attention to politics is Marie-Claire Blais, an openly lesbian author who examines life and relationships in such novels as “A Season in the Life of Emmanuel” and “Nights in the Underground,” in images so searing that they haunt the reader long after the books are put down.

In fact, what these writers--and some English-Canadian writers--seem to be saying is that their influences are not Canadian. Beauchamain says that Mark Twain is among the writers who influenced him.

“I know more about American literature than English-Canadian literature,” he said. “My job is to tell a good story, and that is the American optic.”

All this makes it evident that although there is what critic and poet Barry Callaghan calls “a clear burst of energy,” there is no encompassing body of writing that can be identified as a Canadian school of literature, or “CanLit,” to use the scholastic shorthand applied by Atwood and some teachers to the works of Canada’s authors.

The range of styles is broad, as is the range of subject matter. For the best of the writers, Canada is often ignored as a subject, or it merely provides the setting for a serious and imaginative exploration of living, of surviving.

Beyond His Backyard

According to Mangel, Findley “is far beyond anyone in Canada. . . . No one,” he said, “can write the same again after Findley; he explores far beyond his backyard.”

In fact, the lack of a specific or identifiable CanLit is underlined not only by the differing styles and subject matter but by the disparate views of Canadian writing by Canada’s authors and critics. At times these differences become almost vicious, though in the customary Canadian spirit they are generally politely put.

A young and increasingly influential critic, 29-year-old B. W. Powe, recently published a critique of English Canadian writers in which he downgraded Atwood, questioned the vision of Cohen and savaged Northrop Frye, a critic and scholar of international renown who has tried to systematize Canadian literature into a pattern of national themes.

Barry Callaghan also speaks harshly of some of Canada’s current literary giants, particularly Atwood, who also tries at times to see a national character in her country’s writing. She is considered something of a god by many people, particularly by other women writers.

“Seldom has a writer been treated with such kid gloves,” Callaghan says. “No writer has been treated with such reverence.” But, he goes on, “she writes with a contempt for her own characters, although she does it in tiny, perfect sentences.”

He does not have much good to say about Richler, either. He accuses the author of “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” of engaging “in the easiest game there is--belittling Canada.”

Atwood has returned the compliment, calling Callaghan “trivial” for objecting to one of her best-known nonfiction works, “Survival,” an otherwise widely respected book of literary criticism.

Frye, who though well into his 80s is still working at the University of Toronto, taught Atwood, who is now in her mid-40s, and he praises her work, but mostly her poetry, saying that “it surpasses her novels.”

Rather than diminishing the quality of writing in Canada, this controversy really reflects in the minds of many critics a healthy and energetic state of affairs.

It also raises questions. Why, after a century of derivative and isolated--even dull--writing, has Canada suddenly emerged as a literary light? The answers vary. Richler says, “There is no CanLit, that is clear, but there is a lot of good writing. Why, I don’t know.”

Mangel also denies the existence of CanLit, but he points to “a national personality” that allows Canadians “to leave the boundaries of Canada both physically and culturally, and that is all to the good.”

By this he means that Canadians traditionally have been free of the narrow patriotism and chauvinism that have restricted writing in some other countries.

On the other hand, Atwood, among others, says that a birth of Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s helped fuel the creation of a vital literature in her country.

“One of the things was nationalism,” she said in an interview. “Things were all dammed up. The parallel is to the women’s movement, or the resurgence of American Jewish writing several decades ago.

“My generation didn’t want to read Canadian literature because the assumption was that Canadian writers couldn’t write and didn’t have anything to say.”

Canadian writing is still “a stepchild in the universities,” Atwood said, “but it is getting better.”

Barry Callaghan doesn’t have an answer, or, rather, his answer is a question: “Is this writing good or not? More and more Canadian writing is succeeding on these terms.”

As to nationalism, he adds that “there is enough good writing being done here that the question of nationalism is beside the point.”

Callaghan believes that the booming interest in Quebec writers can be credited, at least in part, to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the former prime minister from Quebec who exploded into the public consciousness in 1968. “Out of this,” Callaghan said, “came terrific interest in Quebec writing.”

Another factor is that Canadians buy books in far greater numbers per capita than most other people, including Americans.

“Canada is recognized as having a big book-buying public,” said Louise Denys, one of the most aggressive and prestigious publishers in the country. “In a per-capita sense, Canadians buy a third more books than Americans.”

Beyond these theories of nationalism, quality and even public interest lurks a commercial factor--government grants.

During the last 20 years or so, the federal government, through the Canada Council, has provided millions of dollars to writers and other artists. These grants have given writers the time to create without worrying about paying the rent.

Beyond Its Frontiers

This is important in a country of only 25 million people, a country that once looked beyond its frontiers for literature rather than buy the works of its own writers.

There are some--among them Morley Callaghan, who was a compatriot of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald in the Paris of the 1920s--who see little use in such benefits.

“I don’t think grants have anything to do with writing or improvements in writing,” Callaghan says. “Money doesn’t make a Robertson Davies.”

Whether it is called CanLit or not, and whether there is any reason for it and even in spite of strong self-criticism, there is little doubt that, as Louise Denys put it, “Canadian writing is among the best, and there is a mushrooming in world interest in what Canadian writers have to say.”