Forde Abroad

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Two images in John Metcalf’s new novella capture his push-pull
relationship with Canadian literature. There is Forde’s dislike of
travelling with anything more capacious than a small carry-on bag. “He
hated lugging heavy cases about. He hated luggage itself. Luggage, he
had often proposed to Sheila as she sat on her case to get it to close,
reduced people to being its ill-tempered guardians.”

The second image is welcoming and expansive. It comes at the very end
of the story. Forde’s cab driver takes a detour on the way to the
airport in Ljubljana, Slovenia, following the conference on Canadian
literature at which Forde had presented a paper. He stops at a small
bridge over an island. “Standing at the near end of the island,”
Forde says, “were two cranes…. The cranes were bowing to each other,
their heads coming down close to the ground…. One of them stretched
its long heron-like neck straight up into the air and gave forth a great
trumpet blast of noise, harsh and unbelievably loud. ... The cranes
trumpeted at the sky, first one then the fierce reply, reverberating
blasts of noise bouncing off the stonework of the bridge filling the air
with the clamour of jubilation…. Forde exulted with them.”

Metcalf’s relationship with Canadian literature since his arrival
from Britain in 1962 has been one of both economy and expansiveness. His
own creative work has been relatively sparse during the last couple of
decades (the last collection of his new work, Adult Entertainment,
appeared in 1986). But the Porcupine’s Quill, where Metcalf is senior
editor, has enriched Canadian literature with contributions from young
writers such as Terry Griggs and Mike Barnes. Metcalf contends that
literature’s value should be based on aesthetics, not (as is often the
case with Canadian writing) thematic content. Forde, no doubt
Metcalf’s proxy, tells his Slovenian protégé, “art arises from the
realness of the world. [It] encompasses ideas but it’s not about
ideas. It’s more concerned with feeling. And you capture the feeling
through things, through particularity.” Any new book by Metcalf is to
be welcomed, and Forde Abroad is no exception.