Light Prose

LIGHT PROSE 493 LIGHT PROSE Have you noticed the extent to which the humorous familiar essay has gone native? Not for southern export, I should think, at least not in quantities sufficient to balance our book payments. The genre is worthy of analysis (Canadian Studists please note) in relation to national image and preoccupations. For example, the materials are drawn from commOn life almost exclusively, from domestic, neighbourhood, leisure, and workplace incidents, leading the reader to a snort, not a shock, of recognition. Impressionistically, I should judge the order of frequency to be about that I've listed, with home well outdistancing workplace as shelter for the normal idiocy of life. Relatively uncommon are examples of larger social and political generalizations: we learn much about individual and smallgroup manifestations of human nature (that ultimate mystery) but not much about how to ignore or control it (those ultimate temptations). The scope is narrow, the aims modest, but the practitioners are adept at the celebration of inadequacy. There is something pleaSingly static about the celebration: we neither regress nor advance, no matter what the complications or simplifications that experience seemingly demands. Such observations are perhaps too portentous both for the genre and for the disappOintingly few samples of it that reached me in 1972. These works strike me, however, as typical of what has been produced in the last decade, few (in fact, two) though they be. Stuart Trueman's My Life as a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak. (McClelland & Stewart, 128, $5.95) is a collection of brief essays, culled from Weekend Magazine, Macleans, The Atlantic Advocate, Saturday Evening Post, etc., and gathered in sections that illustrate the normal range in the genre: 'Birds, Beasts and the Common Man: 'The Frustrated Male: 'Christmas Joy: 'Men Vs. Women,' 'Have a Happy Holiday,' '... And Other Stories.' The mundane is nudged by highlighting exaggeration into fantasy, as Trueman, who was a newspaperman until his retirement in 1971, frequently picks up a wire-service filler reporting an apparent oddity or statistical finding, and projects his own and his friends' behaviour into the implied context, or, if the item is foreign, interprets the situation in Canadian Maritime terms. It may concern a census of songbirds, or husbands forgetting wedding anniversaries , or a request from the dairy industry that we all eat two cheese sandwiches a week: the reSection, however, will always be on the inadequate protagonist, who mirrors the reader all too well. 494 LB'ITERS IN CANADA Much of the foregoing is also applicable to Eric Nicol, whose Still a Nicol (McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 232, $7.95) is an anthology, edited by Alan Walker, of pieces mainly from his newspaper columns by way of his thirteen previous books of humour. Nicol is also a newspaperman (blessedly not retired or in need of retreading - but yes, of rereading), who has WOn the Leacock Medal (three times to Trueman's once), and whose essays fall into similar groupings, though of a rather wider range. The principal differences, apart from sheer quantity, are that Nicol adds delight to situational comedy by witty wordplay, and spurs his fantasy with a wider range of allusion. Any illustration is bound to expose the selector to accusations of bias and infantilism, but I'll dare to select a few sentences from Nicol's account of his early sufferings in Paris, which he reached during that 'mystical period between the arrival of the first frost and the turning on of the first heat.' He moved into the Maison Canadienne , which had steam heating. The romance began: 'I had never kissed a steam radiator before. Her embrace was perfunctory but its warmth was sheer historical novel.' Predictably, he woke one morning to find 'she had turned cold. I'm ashamed to say,' he recalls, '1 kicked her. That same afternoon I walked in and caught her, stripped, with the plumber. After that things were never quite the same. We lived together, of course, as friends, but my heart was open to the first pair of bedsox that came along.' Then there was the cafeteria of the International House, where 'for a trifling 60 francs One is served a rare old gymshoe soup, a slice from the...