Ray Smith's Century has just been released as an audio book from Iambik. It's a great list of international literature, and we're quite proud Ray's Century made the first launch. It deserves to be there and can be purchased in two formats for 4.99.
To purchase Century, and to listen to a preview, please go here.
The next Biblioasis title to be included in the list will be Terry Griggs's Thought You Were Dead. More, hopefully, will follow.
For the full list of Iambik titles, which includes Andrew Kaufmann's All My Friends Are Superheroes, Gordon Lish's Collected Fictions and Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, please go here.
Ray Smith's Century has won Kerry Clare's / Pickle Me This's Canada Reads Independently Challenge. My offer of $20 incl. shipping/ GST (though sorry Alex: lap dance is extra) still stands. Or get your favourite indie to order it, which, considering the name of the competition, seems only right.
Over at his blog Banjaxed, A. J. Somerset becomes just the latest fan of Ray Smith's Century. (He is also, incidentally, the only person yet to take me up on the offer to send Century to anyone, anywhere, for 20.00 incl. all taxes and shipping. In Andrew's case I drove it to Toronto and exchanged it for a sweaty twenty under a table at Hemingway's while the rest of the table was preoccupied. The offer still, of course, stands, though I may choose whatever means necessary, from Canada Post to pack-mule, to get it to you.)
For once, I'll cut to the chase and give you the last bit of his review. But you should really read the whole thing, here. Then buy the damn book. Skip the real Canada Reads for once, and, to paraphrase the lovely Kerry Clare, Read Independently.
From Banjaxed:
Henry James said that the only obligation of a novel was to be interesting. This one is fascinating.
And the writing. The writing is oh-so-artful, diction and syntax changing as we cast backwards in time; Smith does not allow himself to be trapped within the dictates of any particular style. This is a writer with a well-oiled gearbox, and he shifts gears smoothly without ever mistiming the clutch.
Also, it’s short. Writers of sweeping historical novels, take note: thine asses have been handed thee, upon a platter.
Over at his Vestige.org, August Bourre reviews Ray Smith's Century. It's brought me a great deal of happiness to see even a small group of readers discover this work over the last year, and my thanks to Kerry, once again, for giving me the chance to push it a bit more over at Pickle Me This (but .... Hair Hat!!!! Really???)
August has no doubts: Century is "one of the finest, most beautiful books I have ever read, regardless of the author's nationality. I don't feel the need to qualify this as a great "Canadian" book. It's just a spectacular fucking book. I will be shocked if I read anything better this year.
Amen to that. So go pick up a fucking copy, will ya?
If you need to read more to make up your mind, August's review can be read here.
And, to make it easier, I'll ship anyone who wants a copy for $20 flat, including shipping. Just email me at biblioasis@gmail.com, or send your crisp twenty to Biblioasis / PO Box 92 / Emeryville, Ont. / N0R 1C0.
Over at Pickle Me This, Kerry Clare has reviewed the first of her Canada Reads Independently choices, Ray Smith's Century.
Its sombre cover coupled with my misunderstanding that Ray Smith had eschewed story for higher principles would have kept me from Century: A Novel, were it not for Dan Wells' recommendation. I thought this was a book that wasn't for me, not only in a "not my cup of tea" sense, but that it was meant for a more erudite kind of reader for whom the act of reading is not meant to be a pleasure cruise ("Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song... Wallalaleialala").
So it is my surprise to find I love this book, that it contains everything I look for as a reader, including that most unfashionable self-contained universe. That Smith may have eschewed traditional narrative structure, but he has done so only to compress a 500+ page novel into his first 98 pages, to represent the disintegration and disorder present in the universe the book contains, to have Century be what it's meant to represent. And that his writing possesses a sympathy for and understanding of women that I found surprising, and striking, and even (dare I suppose in a book such as this?) somewhat heartening.
Heinrich Himmler didn't shock me. Perhaps I'm just being defiant in my reactions, but Jane Seymour, the young woman in 197o's Montreal who receives his ghostly visitations in her bed, the nightmares in which he touches her naked body (but oh, I was struck by the details-- "the buttons on the cuffs of his sleeve caught on the sheet when he reached under to touch...")-- there is context for her, precedent. Of course, her friends suppose that she has undergone a trauma, perhaps she has been raped, which has led to the visions, which leads to her suicide. And that may be so, but the whole thing is the extreme end, I think, of how ordinary girls become obsessed with Nazism, which manifests in more usual terms with an Anne Frank fascination and YA books about the Holocaust. As a kind of dangerous experiment in empathy, though of course the Holocaust is so sanitized in such literature, but there is a thin line there, and I just think that Jane Seymour has crossed it for one reason, or for many.
For the rest of what Kerry writes on Century, please go here.
What else can I add? Not much. Kerry fears towards the end that "it occurs to me that this response to Century has done it no favours. That its biggest problem is that no one is ever going to to say, "Hey, read this" with a snappy one-sentence reason why. That it raises questions without answers, and begins an engagement that is unceasing, and it's more like someone handing you pieces of a puzzle than recommending you a book. Except you get to rearrange the pieces over and over again, which is infinitely more interesting, but frustrating too." But I think she's mistaken. Her analysis of Century is so open and generous and engaging that she has me putting the book once again on the bedside table for another read. Hopefully she'll have convinced a few of you out there to pick it up as well.
Has anyone else read Century? Any thoughts you would care to share?
Steven Beattie has offered his own take on Century in the comments section on Kerry's blog that I'll take the liberty of quoting in its entirety:
Century is such a strange, unconventional book that I find it intensely difficult even to come up with a critical language appropriate to discuss it. And yet, its very strangeness, its very iconoclasm and idiosyncrasy, is what makes reading it such a potent experience.
Even its generic classification is open to discussion (as you point out, Kerry). Is it a novel? I'd argue yes. John Metcalf, on the other hand, considers it a collection of short stories, and certainly a case could be made. The closest Charles Foran comes in his introduction is to call the book a "tonal labyrinth," but even he admits that it's finally "unclassifiable."
What I love about the book is its morality, its honesty, and its embrace of language as a means of rescuing us from darkness. It's a deeply troublesome novel, but it's well worth the effort an engagement with it requires.
In the end, I'm convinced that a single reading is insufficient to come to a full appreciation of Smith's achievement in the book. I look forward to returning to the text and will be interested to measure my second encounter with it against my first.
But, hang on: this isn't my recommendation; it's Wells's. What am I doing defending it? Go read Moody Food, then we'll talk again.
That's right! I almost forgot. We get to do this again. Stay tuned for Kerry on Ray Robertson's Moody Food.
It is nice to see backlist titles continuing to get coverage. It leaves me hopeful -- a scarce commodity around here these days. Kerry Clare is currently reading Ray Smith's Century for her Canada Reads Independently program, and despite the fact that the novel opens with the ghost of Heinrich Himmler coming to Jane Seymour in the middle of the night, whispering endearments and stroking her exposed shoulder, a rather brutal and horrifying introduction, she seems "hooked, intrigued, confused and wonderfully searching." Which is exactly as it should be.
Mike Barnes's The Lily Pond continues to find new readers as well. He continued yesterday with a successful talk in Cobourg, one of more than a dozen he has given over the last year. Whether or not you have read his book -- and you should -- he has been posting sections from these talks, which can work either as an excellent introduction to The Lily Pond, or as supplementary reading, over at his blog. (The blog is titled 2009, because he didn't want to commit to a blog longer than the year. The fact that he has continued into the new calendar year is a very good thing.)
You can check out some of these talk segments at his blog -- www.graphomaniac.blogspot.com -- just go over and click Mike Barnes's name on the sidebar. Here is one of the more recent segments, "Know Thy Selves".
Know Thy Selves
“Know thyself.” Everyone has heard the ancient Greek injunction, inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. For all its wisdom, though, I still think it could be improved. It presumes, in its singular pronoun, a stable and consistent identity, when in fact identity is malleable and multiple, a condition of flux which must be constantly updated, even renegotiated. “Know thy selves,” I humbly suggest, would be a more humane and practical credo.
Something I remained ignorant about for a long time, for example, was the fact that my periodic inability to read–words, these things I loved, going dead and blank, their sequences fuzzy and meaningless–is a common symptom of depression, and doesn’t at all betoken apathy or lack of intelligence. Or at least not permanent forms of those things. What it may mean, though, is a temporary impairment of interest and cognitive ability. And there are far better ways to deal with that than simply dropping out of the life one wants.
Like what? you may be thinking. What are you supposed to do if you find yourself bottoming out just when you need yourself most? Unable to read–but an exam coming up? Unable to write–but an essay due? I can think of some practical approaches to these problems, but outlining them would take us too far astray in a short talk. And I would be the last person to say that these are not serious problems, serious threats. Fluctations in mental health still threaten my job and my personal life; they’re a minefield I am always trying to pick my way through. I have no wish to travel back in time to advise my younger self: he did the best he could, what he had to do, then. But I know a couple of things he didn’t. One is that hiding a problem–from yourself and from others–usually takes more energy than trying to manage it. Coming out is almost always a good idea. What I hope I would do now, when I felt myself slipping, is to approach someone I trust with the facts: I want to do this (finish my course, write my exam, hang on till tomorrow), but for some reason I’m unable to. I need help, something to get me through this. That would be a start. Not a solution yet, but the only sure step I know towards finding one. I don’t say it is an easy step to take.
It seems strange that my eighteen months on a psychiatric ward in my early twenties had not begun my education in these matters. That tumultuous passage had schooled me in many miseries, fears and self-doubts of every kind, but it had not taken me very far at all in developing a practical awareness of myself, how I had changed, and how I might get on with my life, given the fluctuating and rather fragile (though at the same time newly toughened and robust) creature I now seemed to be.
Strange...or not so strange. Many medical mishaps–including a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia, zombiefying tranquilizers, many electroshock treatments and a near-fatal overdose–had given me good reasons to drop out of the standard curriculum of mental health. Again, though, I was an extremist: I shunned the mental health system completely for the next decade, which included some of the lowest and most pointless wandering in my life. Some kinds of learning occur only slowly, in tiny increments. No matter how successfully it is managed, trauma takes time. Time to occur (since it occurs in waves, even if one event precipitates it)...and a long time to come back from. Long, slow time is usually not on offer in an age that idolizes speed and a narrowly defined functioning. These idols of quick-time get stamped out crudely and worshipped thoughtlessly. And is it perhaps yourself–your image and expectations of yourself–that have helped to mold this unforgiving deity? Just because what you need isn’t on offer–or doesn’t appear to be–doesn’t mean you can’t ask for it, claim it. A system may function badly–many do–but it can’t function better than we ask it to. Demand it to. And: permit it to. “Time heals,” we say, but do we act as if we believe it? It takes courage to trust time–the courage to wait and see.
After that, of course, comes the challenge of admitting what you see, and finding room to accept it. Several times each year I still experience what I call my “shut-downs.” These are the periods that have taught me how far beyond sadness depression really goes. In these dead zones my brain and body and spirit–my whole self, really–become, in stages, unable to comprehend or respond to the world. It is a lot like that famous scene in 2001, when Dave Bowman unplugs HAL, and the computer disappears circuit by circuit–busted right down to his programmed origins of “Dai-sy...Dai-sy”–though by that time I have long since lost the urge to sing. At such times I’ve learned to apply what I call the small-circle cure. This means reducing activity and stimulation to a bare minimum. Dimming the lights, unplugging the phone, cancelling social engagements. And, as I feel my ability to think in sequence ebbing away, scaling my reading down from the love life of Anna Karenina to the love life of Britney Spears...and then further down, to just flipping through books of pictures or watching reruns of The Sopranos. To return to the idea of functioning: Someone seeing me lying on my side for hours beside a single lamp, flipping pages of Rolling Stone or People, might see a very low order of functioning...and it is, in a way...but it is a much higher order of functioning than I showed in the years when I tried to keep reading and writing through these spells, which can last six weeks or more, and added terrible frustration to depression when I could understand nothing, produce nothing. Self-acceptance, I’ve come to see, involves a better understanding of one of the simplest words: and. I am a person who reads, and writes, challenging books...and I am a person who, at times, cannot read or write the simplest sentence. The two facts are not mutually exclusive; they mustn’t be, since I’m living both of them.
But that little word and can be a terribly hard word to remember. A major part of my ongoing recovery, including the therapy I do with the excellent psychiatrist I have now, involves trying to remember the truth of and. As I said earlier, there is a degree of amnesia to my condition, so that every time I lurch upward into mania or downward into depression, it feels like the first time, and I lose all memory that I have been here before and gotten through it. Retaining a thin thread of memory, enough that I can say, “I know this place; I was here before, and I left again,” is one of the most important gains I’ve made in recent years. It’s a lifeline to cling to, a thread to guide me out of the labyrinth.
I learned all this again just last fall. Ironically, after my book launch in October, and at the talks I gave subsequently, some listeners said to me, “You seem well now,” as if all the troubles I was describing were safely behind me. “I do feel well,” I said, “...now.” But I could tell they didn’t believe me when I said I knew bad times would return, times they, and even I, could scarcely imagine. Sure enough, within a month, I was floundering, slipping into a netherworld of sleeplessness and incoherent thoughts and depression and even hallucinations. I could barely understand the book I myself had written or the talks I had given about it. But while I felt myself slipping, while I still had time, I did a useful, practical thing. Using what few verbal resources I had left, I wrote myself a letter, a sort of “message in a bottle” from my still-hanging-on self to the unwell self I felt gaining on him. I taped the letter to the wall beside my desk, it is still there, and read it often in the next two months, feeling disbelief but also comfort at its assurances that I had gone to this black place before and had returned from it. I wanted to read it as part of this talk, but it is a little too long. “Letter to Thursday” is a frank and simple statement from one self to another, saying in essence: I know you, even if you don’t remember me. We are in this together.
“In this together” is a sentiment alien to the depressed person, since a feeling of utter desertion is at the core of the predicament. One is abandoned by joy, by purpose, by energy...by others, by the world, by life...by oneself. The last is the harshest turning in the lock. Losing this first advisor, ally, friend–this best angel, truly–confirms that the ship has indeed been abandoned and must inevitably go down. Without this “other” there is no self–only a cave where someone used to live. Heaing no word is having no word. Getting a letter, a postcard, a murmur, on the other hand, is evidence that desertion may not be absolute, or at least not final, since somewhere your self-in-health is still speaking.
Over at Pickle Me This, Kerry Clare has decided to run a separate book club of sorts, due to her disappointment with the official CBC Canada Reads shortlist. She asked me in December if I'd care to select a title to defend. I asked her, at least in part with my tongue in my cheek, if I might choose one of my own. Kerry said that the fact that I had endorsed a book by publishing it was good enough for her.
But: which title should I choose? I immediately gravitated to our Renditions list of reprints. I love this series, and consider it in some ways the heart and soul of the Biblioasis enterprise: to ensure that important and unjustly overlooked works of Canadian literature are brought back into print, that they are given a chance to find the audience they deserve. If Canada Reads worked as it should, it would be books like these -- overlooked classics, in my opinion -- and not recent bestsellers and more common fare -- that would be given a shot at the spotlight. If I could afford it, I'd do 3-4 of these titles a year, and you would see books by Clark Blaise, Bharati Mukherjee, Susan Kerslake, Norman Levine, Leon Rooke, Mavis Gallant, Douglas Glover, Mark Anthony Jarman, Linda Svendson and many others alongside the already existent titles by Terry Griggs, John Metcalf, Ray Robertson and Ray Smith (3 of them). I've viewed the series as a form of service, of giving back, and it is something I hope we can eventually grow as a bit of an aesthetic counterpoint to the New Canadian Library. As it is, unfortunately, I may have to take a break from the series for a year or two until my finances make it once again possible to take the hit these titles inevitably are.
Of the current Renditions titles, my favorite at the moment may just be Ray Smith's Century. I worried about selecting this title for Kerry's program: it's elicited wildly different responses from its readers. There are those who think it perhaps the most important work of Canadian fiction published: Charles Foran said as much in his introduction to the book, and a few others since the title's re-release this past Spring have concurred. Others have read it and hated it, and have not seen what the big deal is about. It is certainly an uncomfortable book: dark, troubling, sad, moral, while remaining blackly humorous, as is the case with so much of Smith's work. Steven Beattie, reviewing the book on That Shakespherian Rag this past summer, said, in part: "... the experience of reading Century is bracing, even 23 years after it was first published. Its pervasive sense of melancholy in the face of a fallen world may even carry greater impact in our post-9/11 society. In any event, it remains sui generis: a strange, searing work by one of our finest literary practitioners." It is one of the books I most hope readers of this blog -- all six of you -- will pick up. And i'm thankful for Kerry for agreeing to read it, and giving it a shot at finding at least a few more readers.
I was surprised to learn later that the same Steven Beattie chose another Renditions title, Ray Robertson's Moody Food, as the title he'll be defending. Beattie writes: "Rock and roll novels are difficult to pull off. It’s hard to capture on the page the unkempt spirit of the music – its energy, its anarchy, its ethereal, emotional immediacy. Which makes Moody Food, an extended booze- and drug-fuelled odyssey into Toronto’s Yorkville (and beyond) in the 1960s, a fairly stunning achievement ... the novel is many things: a modern retelling of The Great Gatsby; a vividly realized portrait of Yorkville in the 1960s; and a metaphor for the disillusionment of the generation that came of age pursuing a heady mix of peace, love, and marijuana smoke. Robertson has said, "I believe that no matter what artistic pursuits you have, you want to be regarded like a rock star." Ambitious and ultimately highly moving, Moody Food is that rarest of all beasts: a great rock and roll novel."
The other contestants are:
Katrina Onstad: How Happy to Be. Martha Ostenso: Wild Geese Carrie Snyder: Hair Hat.
To read the write ups about each book and its defener, please go here.
Over at Beattie's Shakespherian Rag, Steven Beattie takes a look at Ray Smith's Century, the fourth title in our Renditions Reprint series, and one of my favourite novels, bar none. For those of you who won't follow the link, here's his conclusion:
If Smith’s novel has been unfairly ignored in the pantheon of important Canadian literature, it might be because of its unfamiliarity, but it might equally have to do with the pervading sadness of its vision. The novelist in the opening story finds a kind of salvation in his writing, but the father who is his doppelgänger later on comes to a much more contingent conclusion:
These little trips will help me to bear what I know is coming, but the real solace will be my imaginary garden. Surely the green of it will comfort me when the jumbo jet next disgorges me, and again I will gaze upon the running sores, the twisted limbs, the clutching brown hands, surely cool breezes from it will restore my soul when next I walk into the lazy, swirling colour, the drifting red dust, the blinding light, the hot, sweet breath of Africa.
Surely?
The forlorn tentativeness of that last one-word interrogative suggests that perhaps even the imagination, which is the wellspring of all art, is insufficient to counter the corruption of modernity – an unsettling thought in a novel whose last word is “lost.”
Still, the experience of reading Century is bracing, even 23 years after it was first published. Its pervasive sense of melancholy in the face of a fallen world may even carry greater impact in our post-9/11 society. In any event, it remains sui generis: a strange, searing work by one of our finest literary practitioners.
Writer Ray Smith leans back in a chair at the kitchen table of his family home in Mabou, takes a puff on his cigarette and begins to recall some of his earliest experiences with the written word.
“When I was a young boy the older folks got me a series of books by Thorton W. Burgess, and they’d read to me even before I learned to read. In many of the stories the characters would always go to see the wise old Grandfather Frog to help them solve their problems. I was up over the hill here one day as a child, and I looked at those frogs, and it became pretty damn clear to me that they couldn’t talk. That meant it was all made up. I thought that was pretty interesting, but I realized I was still involved in those stories, and it still seemed like a lot of fun to me,” he recalls.
Born in Inverness in 1941, Ray is the eldest of the three Smith boys born to Fred and Jean (MacMillan) Smith.
“Dad was in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and Mom and I lived here in Mabou during the war years until he got out in '45,” he says.
Fred worked as a banker but qualified for flight training during WWII and piloted Liberator supply planes on some of the longest and most dangerous missions of WWII in places like Ceylon and Malaya.
Ray began school at age five in Mabou at a small school near the Hawley house, just a few houses down from what is now the Red Shoe Pub. At that time the schools were still segregated by religion, and the Smiths were members of the Hillsborough United Church.
“The Red Shoe building was built in 1865 by Colin MacMillan, my mother’s great-uncle. Colin ran it as a store until it passed to Allan MacMillan from 1868 to 1905, and from that time until the early 1940s it was owned by my grandfather, Jimmy MacMillan. So it just feels like going home when I go down to the Red Shoe to enjoy a drink or listen to some music, and I really enjoy it when my sons Nicholas and Alexander come home and they want to go there or to the dances in Glencoe or West Mabou,” he says.
When the war was over, Fred returned to a career with the Royal Bank, and Ray attended schools in Sydney, New Glasgow and Halifax. The family always spent summers in Mabou, and Ray’s parents continued to live there after Fred’s retirement. Fred kept up his commercial pilot license until his death in 1993 and logged as many as 2800 hours in the air in his career. Ray still keeps his father’s two flight logs and wrote a fascinating feature on his father’s life as a pilot for the Inverness County Partici-paper in 1993.
Smith attended Dalhousie University where he completed a BA with honours in English and years later completed his master’s at Concordia.
“My first serious attempt at being a professional writer was in a hotel in Spain in May of 1964. I used to write poetry but moved to short stories and novels after that. I knew that not too many people make a living from writing, so I soon got into teaching, and I taught at Dawson College in Montreal from 1971 until my retirement in the spring of 2007. Mordecai Richler once told me that I should get out of the teaching business. He said it would just eat you up, but I knew I wasn’t like Mordecai. Besides being a novelist, he could make a decent living as a free-lance writer, but I write slowly, I follow my own interests and I knew that working as a free-lancer wasn’t for me. So I stuck with teaching,” Smith adds.
Smith’s first book of short stories, Cape Breton Is The Thought Control Centre of Canada, won him early critical acclaim. It was considered a postmodern work, but Smith decided after its publication to adopt a style less demanding on the reader.
“I decided after that I would write things that were a lot more user-friendly, and if I was going to play games they would be more underneath the surface. As far as major influences, I always enjoyed Nabokov’s playfulness, Jane Austen’s beautiful economy and Tolstoy’s power,” he says.
For a couple of years in the early seventies Smith was part of the Montreal Storytellers group of writers that began to bring their works to larger audiences through public readings. Living in Montreal and being part of the literary community there and the Writer’s Union, Ray met and befriended many of Canada’s most influential writers, including Richler, Atwood, Margaret Laurence and Mavis Gallant.
Upon retiring from Dawson College in 2007, Smith decided to “retire” to the family home in Mabou. Writers however seldom retire, and Ray is no exception. He set up an office in the family home that he inherited and is now busy working on another novel, a sequel to The Flush of Victory: Jack Bottomly Among The Virgins. The new work, It Floats: Jack Bottomly Among The Politicians, is typical of many of Smith’s works in that it features various locales.
“There’s a section of it in New Zealand; it moves to Edinburgh, London, Berlin; and then ends up in Venice. Still, I’m a Canadian and it’s a Canadian novel,” he says.
He admits he surprised some people by returning to Mabou after forty years in Montreal.
“I suppose conventional wisdom should have dictated that I’d stay in Montreal and perhaps help my landlord pay off his mortgage, but my health is good. I guess the timing was right. It’s home after all, and I can garden in the mornings and write in the afternoons. I have some old friends here, and I’m meeting new people all the time. And I enjoy having friends and family visit throughout the year. My two sons are grown, they’re busy in Montreal, they’re able to take care of themselves, and we keep in touch by phone, e-mail, and we visit and travel together on a regular basis,” he says.
Many of Smith’s books are being reprinted and re-released by his publisher, Biblioasis, giving him the opportunity to gain new audiences around the world. He still travels frequently, conducting readings throughout North America, Europe and the world but appears somewhat uneasy about promoting his work.
Smith says he considers Century his best work, and for the most part, the critics have tended to agree.
“Century got some pretty solid reviews, and I believe it’s my best work but as a novelist. It’s not uncommon for your works to be received in Canada with stony silence. I once asked Farley Mowat why he wore that kilt, and his answer was: “Have you ever tried to get any attention in this country?” But if I had to do it all over again I don’t think I’d do it any differently,” Smith concludes, perhaps with a feeling that his best work may still lie ahead.
Ray Smith’s published works include: Cape Breton Is the Thought Control Centre of Canada (1969), Lord Nelson Tavern (1974), Century (1986) and A Night at the Opera, which won the QSPELL Hugh MacLennan Award for Best Novel of 1992, The Man Who Loved Jane Austen (1999) and The Man Who Hated Emily Brontë.
Released late last month, Ray Smith's Century marks the fourth entry in our Biblioasis Renditions Reprint Series. I think this is a stunner of a novel, by far the best work Ray has done. But don't take my word for it: Charlie Foran thinks as highly of it, and penned an introduction to the book which states the case with more eloquence than I have at my disposal. If this doesn't convince you to pick up a copy of Century and give it a shot, then there simply isn't that much life left in you: my condolences.
An Introduction to Ray Smith's Century, by Charles Foran
As a novice reader in late 1970s Toronto, I struggled with many of the novels being heralded as evidence of the exciting new phenomenon known as ‘Canadian Literature.’Two questions lingered in my mind about the anointed books.Why so formally and linguistically conservative, and why, why so glum?The qualities seemed connected.They seemed of a piece with stiff Canadian movies and unfunny CBC comedy shows.They seemed only too true to how people around me talked and thought.But I was just a teenager then, and shy.I held my critical tongue.
Likely I was simply reading the wrong novels. (Mordecai Richler was one roaring exception; I remember blushing in my suburban bedroom at rude Cocksure.) Whatever the reason, I came of age accepting that if I wanted my literature nervy and witty and willing to meditate on its own nature, I’d best look south to those restless Americans, such as Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon, or across the ocean to language punks like Martin Amis and English-rattling post-colonials of the Salman Rushdie variety.
My views were pretty much set by 1986, when I first read Ray Smith’s Century.So great was the shock of it, I disbelieved my own eyes.I had to go find Smith’s earlier books, Lord Nelson Tavern and Cape Breton is the Thought Control Centre of Canada, to be convinced that here indeed was a local writer burdened by neither a plodding sense of the novel form nor the apparently unbearable heaviness of being Canadian.Better still, here was a maker of fictions content that his books abandon the pretence of verisimilitude for the dare of showing themselves to be, well, fictions; sly, purposeful arrangements of narratives into sequences that told many things – a ‘good story’ being just one.
Century is a collection of six such fictions, set mostly in Europe between the near arbitrary parameters of a hundred year span – 1893-1983.Connections between the tales are minimal – a filament tied together by the family of the character called Jane Seymour – and concerns remain embedded in the Proustian textures of the stories themselves.Matter of fact, the textures may be the meanings; Smith has too much respect for language, and too little patience with theme-speak, to insist any overarching concerns upon these smart, bright words.At moments, he might even be counting on musicality to serve as medium and message alike.Take the book’s opening line: “In the night, Heinrich Himmler came to her as she lay waiting for sleep.”In partner with its no less cadenced follow-up – “He came from behind, stepping slowly, carefully in the unfamiliar dark” -- the sentence sounds all sorts of resonances.Here is dark night, time of dreaming and nightmare, and here is menace both specific, in the spectre of a dead Nazi, and general, in the helplessness of sleep, where humans “lay waiting” for such visitations.
Does the reader need further direction into the tonal labyrinth of Century?Much will depend on the reader.The entire novel, or collection of linked stories, or sequence of fictions – call it what you like; naming a thing can often limit how it is viewed -- will sound similar high, pleasing, occasionally harsh notes.The closest Smith comes to announcing a theme comes, appropriately, in the final piece, ‘The Continental,’ a dazzling faux-homage to Henry James, via various prankster satirists.The louche American Kenniston Thorson’s exchanges on modernist art, aesthetics debated with luminaries Toulouse Lautrec and Frank Harris, echoes backwards into the book, suggesting the enshrinement of absurdity and instability into the 20th century consciousness from an early date.Conventional unities of theme and action will need be intimated once again from the prose itself.How else can Century end except with a further invocation of darkness gathering:
“Laughter spilled, trilled from Lulu’s red mouth, laughter like clinking crystal, laughter like cinder sparks whirling from her, brief in the winter night, like snowflakes whirling, filling the night, chill in the swirling dark all about, multitudinous, lost.
How else, too, can language behave, except to simultaneously sing, T.S. Eliot-like, of the looming catastrophe(s) while celebrating the wonder of its own lovely, largely innocent being.The ‘shock’ I felt on first reading Century was both aesthetic and moral.I had read books before whose formal virtuosity, quickened by charged prose, had set my heart racing.But never before had one of those writers been Canadian.Similarly, I had recently wrestled with a few giants of European modernism, Thomas Mann and Robert Musil among them, admiring their often colossal books for engaging with the volcanic, still unfolding century.Writing decades later, and doing so from the New World, Ray Smith wished to engage as well.Of course he couldn’t write as Mann or Musil had done.Of course he required a new form for New World meditations on, in effect, the Old World’s cataclysms. (Heinrich Himmler must travel to Montreal to unsettle this particular Jane Seymour.)The form would be post-modernist and would be meditated upon, or perhaps simply mediated, through music rather than through plot.This was language and structure as morality; this was serious literary craft.
Ray Smith was, and still is, an artist of great seriousness and, I sometimes think, greater sadness still.Nearly a quarter century after its publication – that word again! – Century continues to stand alone in Canadian Literature, apparently too singular, strange and unclassifiable.Out of this sad truth comes a happy one: the book remains to be discovered.Here it is.
