Shut Up He Explained: A Literary Memoir, Vol. II

Jules Lewis is a professional writer who lives in Toronto.

In his latest book, Shut Up He Explained, John Metcalf vents his disgust at the “deeply unhealthy connection between literature and nationalist politics” in Canada. It’s left us, he argues, with a canon full of bad writing: “posturing windbags like Robertson Davies … the mildly hysterical writings of Timothy Findley … Morley Callaghan’s ‘sloppy, gooey sentimentality.’”

Metcalf, author of numerous fiction and non-fiction titles, critic, anthologist, senior editor of Porcupine’s Quill Press until 2005, has led a varied literary career. Shut Up He Explained reflects that: it’s a blend of memoir, criticism, and travel writing. Some of it works, some doesn’t. Metcalf is most engaging when writing about his nineteen-year editorship at Porcupine’s Quill Press, where his primary mandate “was to fight for and establish an aesthetic approach to literature.” This was partly a reaction against the simplistic moral tone he traced in much of the popular Canadian literature—for instance, writers like Margaret Atwood, for whom Metcalf claims that “presenting ideas and political positions” is more important than craft. “Craft,” Metcalf writes, “was our savior.” Less appealing is Metcalf’s foray into travel writing: a long and meandering recollection of a “Swan Hellenic Cruise” through the Black Sea with his wife, Myrna. The writing is weighed down by too many quirky digressions—a brief history of fish sauce; a commentary on genre fiction and its “tyranny of plot”— and the book would be no less without it.

Woven into these varying chapters is Metcalf’s central theme: Canada’s literary establishment, “whose fundamental interest is not in literature but in nationalism,” has had a devastating effect on Canadian writing. The wrong books are taught in Universities. The wrong books are kept in print. The wrong books win big awards. As a solution, Metcalf spends a great deal of Shut Up He Explained promoting Canadian writers whom he thinks should be paid attention to. The last section of the book is the “Century List,” a compendium of forty Canadian short story collections published in the twentieth century by writers Metcalf considers our greatest (and most unjustly neglected) talents, such as Clark Blaise, Norman Levine, Leon Rooke, and a host of others: young, old, established, obscure. Whether you agree with him or not, Metcalf is deeply passionate about books and his passion is infectious.