On Writing
George Fetherling
A memoir of
mine named Travels by Night, a book
that could be called a story of growing up in Canadian publishing, is very much
a product of its time. This defect may also help account for its surprising (to
me, in fact, almost miraculous) longevity, for it has reappeared recently from
Quattro Books in a 20th-annievsray edition with new material added. In
his famous work Enemies of Promise, the
English critic Cyril Connelly speculated about how difficult it would be to publish
a novel that would still be alive in both the marketplace and its readers’
hearts once a whole decade had gone by. As though unwittingly proving the point,
his only novel, The Rock Pool, failed
that particular test spectacularly. Of course there are limitless exceptions to
Connelly’s statement; they’re called classics. Travels
by Night is not a classic and it’s certainly not a novel, though its
language and structure have certain novelistic qualities. The Quattro edition
is the fourth appearance of a title that, alone among my books, has been uninterruptedly
read, taught, cited, debated and denounced for 20 years.
The tale of how Travels came
into being is told in piecemeal fashion in a much more recent work, The Writing Life: Journals 1975─2005,
which I rely on here for my summary. In the late 1980s, two decades after
moving to Toronto from New York, I was working as a literary journalist in
Kingston, Ontario. My life was in a troubled period and I conceived the idea of
writing a memoir for both relaxation and therapy. Few people anywhere,
certainly no one in Kingston, knew that I had grown up in violent poverty in the
lower reaches of the old industrial culture that was quickly dying. Or if they
did, they were too polite to remind me to my face. I wanted to show how my early life, as
described in the first two chapters, led, logically, inexorably and yet implausibly,
to my life in Canada, the subject of the final three parts. Many memoirists and
autobiographers who grew up someplace other than where they grew old have tried
to paper over the big seismic fault that runs through their narratives. The
results are not always convincing. I took the opposite tack, emphasizing the
shift by showing how stark and sudden it was.
In purely literary terms, I had this temporal matter in mind all along
once I began drafting Travels in
Kingston and finished it later, in the early 1990s, in Toronto. But my attempt
to reinforce the kind of structural seam that runs through bifurcated life
stories turned out to have a disadvantage, in that many readers seemed to
believe that I was writing a political manifesto. The book was and is nothing
of the sort, but rather an account of a young fellow trying to find his true
home, one that happened not to be the place he was born.
When I had finished, a literary agent I knew first seemed enthusiastic
about the manuscript in the abstract but did an about-face after starting to
read it. She stopped by my home in the middle of the night, leaving the bundle
on my front porch, like an abandoned infant, along with a note stating that
representing the work would ruin her business. Something similar happened with a
prominent Toronto publisher who specialized in high-end non-fiction. At the
beginning she was very encouraging. But after seeing the finished pages, she
stridently changed her mind, telling me that she wouldn’t publish such a piece
of trash even if it came with a hundred per cent subsidy. I imagine she must have
been offended by the fact that the book mentions sex, as seems to me perfectly
normal in a memoir of youth. She may also have been horrified to learn that I
had never attended Queen’s University or McGill and may not have believed that
the Vietnam War had been a noble crusade. Other Canadian-owned publishers
declined politely while the big American-owned houses, for their part, turned
it down smartly, one after another, even though in the two most important cases
the Canadian editorial executives in charge later went out of their way to
praise it in private. The orphan finally found a home in 1994 with Malcom
Lester, that brave independent Canadian publisher, and shot to No. 2 on the Globe and Mail’s bestseller list.
It received a good many reviews, several of them almost rapturous, it
seemed to me. David Macfarlane, for example, called it “a wonderful book […] by
a man who, for most of his life, has been thinking about what makes good writing,
and it shows.” Philip Marchand wrote of it as “everything a memoir should
be—revealing, witty, erudite, beautifully written. Of more literary weight than
the vast majority of novels.” Robert Fulford understood how it captured for
reflection and study the most creative period in Toronto culture; he was kind
enough to call it “a work of literature [and] a valuable work of history as
well.” It did so well, I suppose, because people liked reading about Margaret
Atwood, Dennis Lee, Gwendolyn MacEwen and other figures, and recalling events associated
with the early days of Canada’s literary renaissance—or hearing about the birth
of House of Anansi or the notoriety of Rochdale College. In short, Travels seemed to speak directly to a certain
generation. But it was controversial because it was perhaps the first such
full-throated memoir of the arts scene and certainly the first one to deal
candidly with people’s personal lives. Because of such frankness and sheer
unexpectedness, as well as because of my background, it provoked unintended controversy. There was a spontaneous protest when
it didn’t get shortlisted for one award or another—and then again when it did.
Only with the new edition have I had the opportunity to expand a number
of scenes, shorten a few that needed shortening, and make other emendations,
such as correcting small errors. To do this of course I had to read the text
again. I found it an odd experience, in my mid-sixties, to look back at what I
wrote in my mid-forties about events that took place mostly during my
adolescent and teenage years—indeed to look back on a time that now seems downright
historical. Doing so has taught me a lesson about style. I wrote the book quite
carefully but was at some pains to make it conversational, with word choices
and sentence patterns that deliberately mimicked the way I normally speak,
almost as though I were dictating my own story to myself. Time has changed
everything else about me but I still recognize the way I spoke. The effect is a
little like shaking hands with one’s ghost.
No comments:
Post a Comment