Western Canada Fiction; Past and Future

R U D Y W I E B E The University of Alberta Western Canada Fiction; Past and Future In a paper published in Western American Literature, Winter, 1968, Dr. Donald Green of the University of Wisconsin candidly admits that his credentials for speaking about western Canadian literature could perhaps be based on only two facts: one, that he had ‘always been an incurable addict of literature’ and two, that he had ‘spent the first 35 years or so of [his] life in western Can­ ada.’ He then comments at length. The bent of his attitude is clear from his introduction where he raises the large (and for him not rhetorical) question: ‘is there a Canadian literature worth consideration by a serious literary critic?’ He continues: As I read Wilson’s book [Edmund Wilson’s O Canada/] I kept wondering when he was going to answer the despairing cry that young Ernest Hemingway, then a reporter on the Toronto Star, long ago uttered in a letter to Wilson, begging for some literary news—“You don’t know anything in Canadal” But no answer was forthcoming. An examination of all the evidence Greene quotes partially here shows that his attitude toward literature may indeed be addictive; he certainly does not follow the standard critical approach of dis­ interested rationality. In a year’s correspondence between Heming­ way and Wilson, beginning in November, 1923 and quoted at length in The Shores of Light, 1952, Hemingway in Toronto asks Wilson in New York whether or not his little book Three Stones and Ten Poems has been reviewed in the U.S.A., adding as ex­ planation ‘You don’t know anything in Canada’ (p. 116)— i.e. the facts of New York literary activities don’t reach to Toronto. T o make a despairing cry out of that, Greene, on his own initiative and without explanation, underlines ‘know’ and adds an exclama­ tion mark; as a result, though in context Hemingway seems to imply no disparagement of Canadian knowledge, in Greene’s con­ text the sentence implies that Canadians en masse are too ignorant to have any literature whatever. What Hemingway himself thought 22 Western American Literature of New York and Boston literary activity becomes clear in sub­ sequent letters to Wilson: one dated Oct. 18, 1924, says ‘Do you remember my writing from Toronto wanting some reviews and publicity? [that substantiates my interpretation] and then got some and it turned me sick’, (p. 123) Earlier he had commented on what he saw as the demise of Sherwood Anderson: ‘His work seems to have gone to hell, perhaps from people in New York telling him too much how good he was. Functions of criticism.’ (p. 117). So much for Hemingway’s apparent support of the opinion that to know about literature worth serious consideration one must know what is going on in New York and Boston. Further on in his paper Prof. Greene notes that the University of Saskatchewan should be grateful that its existence has been noticed by Mary McCarthy in her novel The Group, even though, as he admits, some facts she has about the university are wrong. Well, let’s keep the record straight: we western Canadians have had our moments before Mary McCarthy. William Faulkner, with whom the author of The Group does not deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence, has a character in his novel Pylon come from the farthest and nethermost depths of the inhabitable world: Edmonton, Alberta. In literature too we have had our moments. It seems to me Canada has given birth to an abnormally high number of expatriot professional debunkers. A vivid example appears in the Atlantic Monthly issue on Canada, November, 1964. In it a young man named Brian Stock, whoever he is, after re­ counting his pilgrimage from Canada via Harvard to the ultimate shrine, Trinity College, Cambridge, concludes, I feel that had I remained in Canada, something frightening would have taken place, Canada would have destroyed me. I felt that I could not have carried on the battle for culture and art in Canada, because the country does not have the spiritual resources to support them; and so, like...