Canadian Classics: An Anthology of Short Stories

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

This book consists of 20 stories, two each from 10 Canadian writers who
have seen their work published for at least 20 years. Among the writers
presented are Hugh Hood, Clark Blaise, Norman Levine, Mavis Gallant, and
(not inappropriately) John Metcalf. Each author’s work is preceded by
a short biography and followed by a short literary comment by the
author. Although the biographies work well, the micro-commentaries are
merely a few truncated paragraphs snatched out of a larger work; they
don’t whet the intellect, they thwart it.

The majority of the stories in this anthology are world class, but are
they classics? That would depend, it seems, on who gets to set the
criteria for the term classic. Metcalf thoughtfully supplies six
requirements. Unfortunately, none of the 20 stories touted in this
collection quite manages to fit all six.

Metcalf insists that there are no Canadian classics because no Canadian
writer has yet been recognized by the world as being of the same calibre
as Hemingway, Joyce, or Faulkner. His solution? “Canadian writers are
producing work just as rich as that produced by writers who are
acknowledged as classics. We only need to recognise and acknowledge our
own.” It is hard to understand how even frenzied domestic recognition
of “our own” Margaret Atwood, Hugh Hood, or any of the eight other
writers in this collection could catapult them into the international
ranks of Joyce, Faulkner and Hemingway. It is not Canadian readers who
have to be won over, but foreign audiences.

What we have, then, is a choice collection of Canadian fiction that, in
spite of its quality, remains undervalued both at home and abroad. Can
anything be more classically Canadian?