Literary Celebrity in Canada (review)

Though the first of its kind in Canada, Lorraine York’s latest book joins a number of recent books less about, as she says, the who than the how of celebrity: books that explore how celebrity happens, how its owners work it, how it works its owners. York applies her exhaustive reading in these recent studies to Canadian literary celebrities, from the early cases of Pauline Johnson, Stephen Leacock, Mazo de la Roche, and Lucy Maud Montgomery to lengthier discussions of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Carol Shields.

Literary Celebrity in Canada starts outside Canada, with the state-of-scholarship chapter bred into the academic bone by the dissertation. Here, York provides an overview of existing studies of celebrity, from the largely cynical ‘emptiness theory’ popularized by Americans Daniel Boorstin and C. Wright Mills, to more recent and generally more sympathetic contributions from film and modernist studies. Instead of seeing stars as vacuous versions of the heroes of an earlier age (the Boorstin school), York prefers an ‘ideological approach’ that leans heavily on British film critic Richard Dyer’s notion of the star as a cultural construct, and, especially on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between economic and cultural capital. For York, literary celebrities perform an ‘uneasy dance’ between Bourdieu’s two forms of capital, between popular success and literary respect.

As her first chapter shows, Canadian writers have been dancing to this tune for over a century, from Pauline Johnson’s attempt to combine success on the stage with critical acceptance through Leacock’s and Montgomery’s struggles with the confines of their popularity. The more recent Canadian literary celebrities that form the core of York’s book are not so much a different breed as their descendants, at least in some cases more aware of both the rewards and the dangers of fame. Atwood, most obviously, has proved remarkably adept at managing her public persona through ironic reflections on her celebrity in person and in her writing. But she too juggles the competing demands of the mass market and highbrow respect, as well as another (equally old) tension, Canadian anxiety about her American fame. Ondaatje’s characteristic response to his made-in-Hollywood fame is his notorious privacy, but as York shows, his own works reveal a long attraction to the famous, a contradiction that Ondaatje himself best explains through his family tree: a secretive father, and a ham of a mother. Shields, finally, epitomizes for York the myth of the celebrity unaffected by fame, baking and ironing between the novels and the prizes. In Shields’s final novel, Unless, York finds an angry attempt to ‘set the record straight,’ to resist the myth’s reduction of successful woman writer to woman.

Many successful female artists have shared Shields’s fate, just as Atwood’s self-deprecation and Ondaatje’s privacy are common responses to literary fame. In the end, York admits, ‘there is no distinctive mode of Canadian literary celebrity.’ All celebrities are different, and they’re all the same – past or present, Canadian or American – and that raises the question: if there is no such thing as Canadian literary celebrity, why write a book about it? If the how of celebrity is the same everywhere, and only the who changes, why focus on the how here, in one place? Perhaps York’s answer is in the here, in the persistent Canadian belief that we don’t have celebrities – or that if we do, they’re somehow different from American celebrities, more modest, more human, more ennobling. As her book amply shows, Canada has celebrities, has long had celebrities, and they’re pretty much the same as American celebrities. Like the non-existence of God, that so many people believe otherwise doesn’t make it any less obvious.