THE ROARING EIGHTIES
And Other Good Times
By Norman Snider
Exile, 286 pages, $29.95
JOIN THE REVOLUTION, COMRADE
Journeys and Essays
By Charles Foran
Biblioasis, 185 pages, $19.95
STARDUST
By Bruce Serafin
New Star, 227 pages, $19
In This is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada, Noah Richler traces the process by which literature turned Nowhere - Canada before it was written about - into Somewhere.
It is strange - this very human belief that writing things down somehow gives a sort of substantiality, legitimacy and, as it were, metaphysical reality to places, which they don't have by merely existing.
These three books - by Norman Snider, Charles Foran and Bruce Serafin - are exercises in trying to pin things down, giving a local habitation and a name to people and places that - mute and unnamed - were previously unanchored, inexistent, merely floating around.
In The Roaring Eighties and Other Good Times, Norman Snider opens with a salvo of nostalgia for the "buccaneer" Toronto journalists of the 1970s and '80s, those rough-edged, existentialist, romantic, bohemian scribblers who grubbed for the real stuff, wherever it might be found - in bars, slums, jazz, the boxing ring, drugs, booze, sex, or just out there, on the road, going somewhere, anywhere, just away.
The real "there," in those days, was not here.
One of the real places was - and is - Tinsel Town, where the props and posers are reality. Snider, at the time a neophyte screenwriter, takes us on a hilariously inconclusive mid-seventies trip to L.A., with his pal, the as-yet-unknown film director David Cronenberg. The talented Hog Town provincials were in quest of a meeting with legendary independent film producer (and B-feature genius) Roger Corman. This being L.A., our boys got the runaround. They wait for Godot: He never comes. Older and wiser, the lads trek back.
Another will-o'-the-wisp is pianist Glenn Gould. Again, Snider, this time as journalist, never gets to the man, except over the telephone. The result is a comic, insightful and even tender portrait that contains, as a bonus, a marvellously succinct account of the peculiarly analytical quality - pure cerebration - of Gould's genius.
Since the True North Strong and Free has only a tenuous foothold in narrative reality, its politics often seem strangely afloat. It's as if it all really were a pantomime that nobody, except the junkies, takes seriously. Snider catches this fatuous aura in riotously objectionable reportage on the 1983 Conservative Party shindig in Winnipeg, where Joe Clark's leadership evaporated. Snider strips the jokers bare, leaving their jowls aquiver, their pretensions unzipped, their hot-air pronouncements floating away like so many convention-hall balloons.
But the epitome of Canadian political playacting, for Snider, was Brian Mulroney. The slickly handsome, bilingual, Irish Catholic poor boy from Baie-Comeau was desperately ambitious. Learning to play every part, he could spout blarney to the workers and kowtow to the bosses. Representing the "branch plant mentality," he was, Snider argues, a hollow man. Real power and real responsibility - and hence real being - lay elsewhere: south of the border.
Snider's Mulroney psychology is acute; but I do think Mulroney showed political courage and vision, particularly as regards the GST and NAFTA.
Snider deftly escapes clichés and ideological pitfalls. A conformist he is not. His pitiless flashbacks to earlier times - to the Woodstock and hippie era, and his brief portraits of such literary figures as Henry Miller and the underrated Morley Callaghan - are enlightening surgical strikes. About music, Snider writes with marvellous fluidity and erudition. His essay on Miles Davis is a feast of insight and irony. If you want a sparkling thumbnail history of the tussle between jazz and pop music, this is where to find it.
In Join the Revolution, Comrade: Journeys and Essays, novelist Charles Foran leaves Nowhere - Toronto's Willowdale - for Somewhere - China, Thailand, Vietnam - taking us with him on a rich and reflective voyage as he skillfully navigates the clash of languages, cultures and points of view that travelling can trigger if you are wide-eyed, curious and eager to learn.
In 1989, Foran was in Beijing when Deng Xiaoping aborted China's drift toward democracy with the Tiananmen Square massacre. Registering the shock and disarray of his Chinese students, Foran sums it all up in the way one young man plays riffs on the English phrase - "Join the revolution, comrade" - to express his cynicism, or despair, or resignation, or mockery, or disgust over what has happened.
Much later, Foran visits booming capitalist Vietnam. In Vietnam, as in most former war zones, forgetting is an art, amnesia a necessity.
But coming from afar, Foran has his own memories, though they are vicarious and second-hand: He intends to track down the landscapes that featured in old Vietnam War movies. Foran's ironic take on his own - our own - Western movie-filtered war nostalgia is multidimensional. I mean, as Canadians, these weren't even our wars. And why should the Vietnamese, busy chasing dollars, care about Apocalypse Now or Full Metal Jacket or the 2002 remake of The Quiet American?
But what the Vietnamese think is irrelevant. Even as our empire fades, as Western tourists, the world is still our oyster; it's there for us to consume. As Foran remarks: "Night darkens beyond the terrace, and lanterns are indeed lit along the riverbank. It's a charming effect, one I have to believe is for our benefit."
Coming back home, Foran makes this observation: While all peoples all over the world are adopting the English language, playing with it, taking it over, making it their own, English Canadians - west of the Ottawa River - use the language in a way that is timid: "buttoned up ... simpering ... and bland." We English Canadians, he suggests, are "tenants" in the language, transients and weekenders; we're passing through; unlike everybody else, we don't really live here.
In Stardust, a collection of essays and reviews and autobiographical fragments, Bruce Serafin repeats the charge: "English Canadian writing is almost never 'of the people', even linguistically." Above all, we are afraid, he suggests, of being "vulgar."
Serafin - who was a founder of the Vancouver Review and author of a novelized autobiography, Colin's Big Thing, was an outsider and, in a way, I suspect, that's the way he liked it.
For years he worked as a mail-handler; then he studied for a degree. Nowhere did he feel at home. Brought up in Alberta and British Columbia, he discovers who he is for the first time in the Montreal-based work of Michel Tremblay, Les belles soeurs, because he recognized everything: "The coarseness, the anger, the self-pity, and especially the violent, unabashed, almost childlike speech ... the screaming fights, sickening with self-hatred ('Polish pig!' 'French cow!')."
From his outsider's viewpoint, Serafin attacks the ease with which we all - and he includes himself - strike poses, assume roles, live vicariously. In the 1960s and '70s, rock stars offered a sort of "image bank of style," so that "we 'put on' experience in the form of clothes [and]succumbed to the glamour of other people's experiences."
With an outsider's irritation, Serafin unmasks postmodernist academic jargon and asks why Canada produces so many literary reviews and little magazines that are unreadable. He praises Canadian critic Northrop Frye, who understood "our need for wonder" and who "knew what literature was for," and U.S. novelist Don DeLillo for his Underworld and its immense ambition in portraying that mythical giant, the United States.
Above all, Serafin wanted to write about what hadn't been written about before; he wanted to get at life in the interior of British Columbia, at the places and people whose existence was ignored, he felt, by the thin veneer, glossy prosperity and fashionable snobbisms of Vancouver and the Coast.
He wanted to turn Nowhere into Somewhere.
In several of the pieces, Serafin sits in the quiet of the evening with natives of the Interior, and listens to the inconsequential, downbeat, self-mocking, apparently directionless talk. In snippets, he learns of the murders, the corruption, the nepotism, the alcoholism, the drug abuse and, above all, of the stress, the angst, of the failed and botched lives engendered by the present system, in its misguided paternalism.
In a way, Serafin was trying, even here, to get close to authenticity - to the real life, the real suffering - and to write it all down. In the end, Here really is Somewhere.
Stardust is a brave and raw and lonely book - like the man who wrote it. Bruce Serafin died of cancer in 2007.
Gilbert Reid writes for television and radio. He's preparing a five-hour radio series on France for CBC Ideas.
On eloquence
At age sixteen I discovered how old books talk. ... In my local mall was a Coles outlet selling classic novels for a dollar each. The print was squinting and the bindings were of cardboard. The novels seemed chosen mostly for their brevity, and maybe with an eye to readers who liked their tales tall and ripping. For a year or so, I read only about Swift's Gulliver and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, the Kipling of Captains Courageous and Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
They were wondrous and thrilling, these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century worlds of adventure, and never more so than when characters opened their mouths. Everyone spoke with such refinement. ... Even the most rough-hewn sorts, their dialogue littered with "arrghs" and "ayes" and other piratical grunts, possessed a verbal quality I had not encountered in my own life.
That quality was eloquence, and I was, in fact, already too late to hear much of it out of the mouths of the living ...
Charles Foran, Eloquence Lost: The Death of the Topographical Mind, from Join the Revolution, Comrade.