The Plight of Canadian Fiction?: A Reply

THE PLIGHT OF CANADIAN FICTION? A REPLY FREDERICK PHILIP GROVE I CONFESS myself as among the admirers of Mr. Callaghan's work, his novels as well as his short stories. And I also agree that there is a deal of truth in his statement of. "The Plight of Canadian Fiction;"* but I cannot chime in with the conclusions he seems to draw. More, the statement seems to me, in spite of Mr. Callaghan's obvious desire to be fair to publishers and editors of magazines, to leave the smudge of a blame where it does not belong: it is much too lenient ,in its appraisal of the Canadian public; it ignores the critic; and, finally, it views the Canadian writer in far too rosy a light. The failure of any considerable body of Canadian fiction to impose itself on any considerable Canadian public is indeed monumental; it assumes the proportions of a natural phenomenon. We have a book-shelf reaching from Halifax to Victoria; and on it 'stands one single book, written by a Frenchman transient in Canada.' That, in sober fact, is the situation; and to me it is appalling; for a book is a book only when it is read; otherwise it is a bundle of gathered sheets of soiled paper. There are four agencies that may be responsible; any one, any two, any three, or all four of which may be responsible. In what follows it is my contention that the responsibility must be shared by three. The four agencies are: the writer, the publisher, the critic, the public. I shall discuss them briefly In turn, leaving the case of the writer to the last.·QU.ARTE1UV, Jan.} 1938, pp. 152_61. 451 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY I In order to get at the publisher as one of the possible agencies at fault, let us, for the moment, assume that the writer has done his work carefully, faithfully, and not without that talent which is indispensable as a prerequisite for his work. Being, by hypothesis, a Canadian, he wishes to submit it to aCanadian publisher. Right here he is due for a surprise. He will find that the per capita number of publishers in Canada is amazingly small. Being a man of sense, he would not, of course, expect to find in Canada the multiplicity and variety of publishing enterprises to be found in Great Britain or in the'United States. What he might reasonably expect is to' find them as numerous as they are, let us say, in Sweden and Norway combined. If he has listened to the average Toronto business man who blindly vouches for it that there can be no country to equal Canada in cultural opportunities-Canada being, thank the Lord, still largely "a white man's country"-he might even think that it should excel, in the number of publishing houses, the queer and outlandish nations to be found in the Scandinavian peninsula. But such is not the case. The Canadian publishers who are publishers, properly 'speaking, can be accounted for on the fingers of one hand. Is it the publishers' fault? Every now and then a new publishing firm opens its doors, bent upon arresting the decline of the race. I ts career is usually brief and inglorious. It seems that the existing small number is fully able, and more than able, to saturate the market and to take care of what production there is. The reason, to be looked for later, is very likely the same that accounts 452 THE PLIGHT OF CANADIAN FICTfON?-A REPLY for the appalling scarcity of retail book-shops or the deplorable plight of Canadian broadcasts. A book-shop, by the way, is, in Europe, a place where books are not only sold but discussed, analysed, and quarrelled about as well. As Mr. Callaghan has pointed out, a second surprise awaits the young writer when he finds that not .one of these publishers makes the publishing, that is the printing and marketing, of Canadian books his exclusive business; just as there are no book-shops that sell only books, of which there are several in every fifth-rate town in CzechO-Slovakia. In Canada, publishers...