An Aesthetic Underground: A Literary Memoir

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

The subtitle, A Literary Memoir, focuses accurately enough on John
Metcalf’s unceasing and all-too-often-frustrated efforts to encourage
imaginative literature as an essential element in the wider context of
Canadian culture. Yet this book also becomes a vivid portrait of the man
himself, offering glimpses of his compassionate and often sad personal
life, and extends to other interests as well, including painting, book
collecting, jazz, and African masks. Central, however, is his vigorous
and lonely crusade against the crassness of a culture more interested in
hockey than in literature, a vast country where readers are
distressingly thin on the ground.

At the book’s best moments, one finds oneself either chortling with
pleasure or shaking one’s head ruefully at the vulgarity and lethargy
that he exposes. It’s curious, indeed, that he can write so
exhilarating a book about the depressing business of casting literary
pearls before non-literary swine in the quixotic and seemingly
impossible world of Canadian publishing.

Yet he can also be infuriating. But one doesn’t have to agree with
all his impassioned value judgments. He has his blind spots, as we all
do, and sometimes flaunts them to the point of irritation (e.g., his
constant sniping at Robertson Davies—almost always abuse rather than
reasoned criticism). Personally I applaud the majority of his
evaluations, both pro and con, yet often enjoy what he dismisses with
contempt and find some of what he praises as technically accomplished
lacking in lasting substance.

But Metcalf’s own writing, even if we find it occasionally
wrong-headed, is invariably a stylistic delight. Along with Stephen
Henighan’s When Words Deny the World, published by The Porcupine’s
Quill—Metcalf’s work there is the one undoubted success story in a
sobering book—this is an essential exposé of the disastrous cultural
developments of the last two decades or so: what Metcalf describes as
“Literature metamorphosing into Show Biz.” The “L’Envoi” is a
poignant, eloquent, angry, elegiac masterpiece. An angular, spunky,
courageous book that shouldn’t be ignored–though the chances are, of
course, that it will be.