Uncommon Ground

Tom Venetis is a professional journalist and editor in Toronto.

Matt Cohen’s place in Canadian letters was never a solid one, and this
collection of essays, reminiscences, and interviews about him is
certainly not going to make it easier for people to like his work or
Cohen himself.

At times, Cohen comes across as a rather prickly person. Despite his
having won awards and praise for his novels and stories, Cohen saw
himself as a loner on the Canadian literary scene who was never accorded
the same respect, let alone sale figures, as writers like Robertson
Davies or Margaret Atwood. When his memoir Typing: A Life in 26 Keys was
published shortly before his death, many were shocked by his sweeping
claims of anti-Semitism in Canada’s literary culture and his belief
that such anti-Semitism explained the lack of respect among Canadian
readers and critics for his work. It was a controversial assertion that
did not earn him many supporters and harmed his reputation in the long
run.

Many of the essays in Uncommon Ground try to explain Cohen’s
allegations of anti-Semitism and his troubling description of himself as
a “self-hating Jew.” Cohen’s friend Greg Hollingshead was shocked
by Cohen’s memoir: “[T]his was not someone who behaved as though he
hated anyone, let alone himself.” Hollingshead attempts to connect
Cohen’s description of himself as a man with little confidence in
himself to Cohen’s decision to write about people who were different
from him as a way of writing without having to fall back on
introspection. While Atwood’s essay notes Cohen’s obvious
indebtedness to South American Magic Realism, it is disappointing that
the editors did not include more works examining Cohen’s early novels
and their relation to the times in which they were published—those
heady days of Canada’s emerging literary landscape, which in some ways
resembled the simultaneous emergence of South American literature on the
world stage.

While Uncommon Ground may not win converts to Cohen’s works, it is a
worthy start in trying to understand the man.