Fiction

FICTION Here on a shelf are twenty-five fictions by writers in Canada in 1969. As a group, how do they define the kinds and qualities of fiction written in Canada now? Twelve months, of course, is a brief span of time, and these twenty-five make up only most, not all, of the 1969 fiction. Nevertheless as a group they do offer a window through which a part of the literary landscape in Canada may be seen. What is most obvious is that sixteen of the twenty-five are first appearances of fiction writers in book form. Only two are by writers in mid-career - Margaret Laurence and Mordecai Richler - another one is by Will Bird, now eighty, with twenty-four books of historical romance, history, and travel behind him, and six are by authors who have published a few earlier books. Most of the new writers are in their twenties; the rest in the early thirties. For many of them, writing is an act of self-assertion; they are committed to intense personal visions, to turbulent feelings, and to experiments in language and fonn. The appearance of such a large number of new writers in anyone year is remarkable, but it may recur. For nine of these sixteen writers are published by new, small publishing houses-the House of Anansi in Toronto, Oberon Press in Ottawa, and Prism International Press in Vancouver-who place the nurture of new writing above making money. The rest are published by well-established large publishers like McClelland and Stewart or Macmillan of Canada who can and do take the financial risk of publishing manuscripts from new writers. As a group these twenty-five also reveal something about the audience that reads the work of Canadian fiction writers. Of the twenty-five, only the books by Margaret Laurence and Mordecai Richler appeared simultaneously in New York, London, and Toronto. A few others appeared in New York and Toronto, or in Toronto and London. The rest appeared only in Canada. So if you are writing fiction today in Canada you may hope but cannot expect that your work will be read outside of Canada, unless you have a good literary agent in New York or London. In Canada a young writer is being realistic if he assumes that his work will have its impact largely On that small segment of the Canadian reading public who follow New Writing. The response of this special audience is apt to encourage him to latitude in choice of material and in manner, which may be revivifying for all concerned. FICTION 339 But it may not be entirely to his advantage in the long haul, for there is much more to writing than just letting go. For new writing, this has been the year of the House of Anansi. David Godfrey's press brought out Graeme Gibson's Five Legs, Ray Smith's Cape Breton is the Thought Control Center of Canada, and inaugurated its Spiderline Edition of novels. The Spiderline novels now number five, of novella length (90 pages or more) at $1.95, in a uniform format of unusually handsome deSign. More will be published in 1970. Of the Anansi books, Graeme Gibson's Fi11e Legs is the most impressive . It is a very literary fiction, haVing as some of its forefathers Joyce, Eliot, Salinger, John Bunyan, and Malcolm Lowry-especially Under the Volcano. It is apocalyptic: it counterpoises two views of Life: one life·destroying; one life-seeking. The anti-Way is expressed in the first half of the book through the flow of consciousness of Dr Lucan Crackell, a Prufrockian young professor of English at the University of Western Ontario; the other Way is expressed in the second half through the flow of consciousness of Felix Oswald, under thirty, who is striving to escape from the Inferno of graduate school and middle·class WASP life-in-death. The physical action is minimal: Crackell drives Felix to Stratford where they attend the funeral of a graduate student who has been killed by a hit-and-run driver. Clock time also is minimal, for real time here is inner time. Gibson is unusually discerning about selecting the...