The "Salon des Refusés" joint issue of The New Quarterly and Canadian Notes and Queries. These two Canadian literary magazines published a joint alternative to the massive Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, which they saw as inadequately reflecting the best of this genre.
The litmags' choices tend to be rather artsier; the Penguin book is more of a survey of the writers who have been deemed important or popular in the genre. The Penguin criteria seem more aesthetically neutral. I would recommend reading the two magazines (they are still available in many bookstores, or you could go to their respective websites) not as an alternative to the Penguin book, which is historically interesting and has a few gems in it (Munro, Gowdy, Johnston, Lyon, Coady, Lee) but as a complement.
The journals' stories reflect the aesthetic of the small presses: dense, complex prose, oblique or otherwise unusual points of view. Where the Penguin anthology does feel good for you from time to time, earnestly plodding through important Canadian themes, the Salon des Refusés is sheer intellectual and sensual fun. Furthermore, there are very short commentaries on each story, either by the author or by another writer, that give insight into how writers' minds work - both how they construct stories and how they read them.
In the literary world, as in the everyday world, the end of the year is an occasion to make resolutions for the future - to try to get certain things right.
What do we need to get right?
An anthology of short stories
Let us begin with the object of this year's finest literary kerfuffle, the publication of The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, edited by novelist Jane Urquhart. A hefty book, weighing in at 700 pages, Urquhart's anthology featured 60 writers. Because of the importance of the Penguin brand name, and because of the sheer number of contributors, the anthology attracted close attention, particularly from writers not included. Goaded by critic and noted short-story author (not included in the collection) John Metcalf, some 20 of these banded together for public readings under the rubric Salon des Refusés, after the 1863 exhibition of painters rejected by the Paris Salon.
This is a matter of no small importance. Much of Canada's finest literature is in the short-story form, and publication of a first-rate anthology of short fiction would be like the appearance of a new literary classic on the Canadian landscape. It would solidify our sense of possessing a vital literature.
Over the years, attempts have been made. In 1929, the novelist Raymond Knister produced Canadian Short Stories, featuring such stalwarts of early Canadian literature as Charles G.D. Roberts, as well as the likes of Henry O'Higgins and Walter McLaren Imrie, long since forgotten. This was followed by the late Robert Weaver's 1958 Canadian Short Stories and a 1978 anthology titled The Best Modern Canadian Short Stories, edited by Ivon Owen and Morris Wolfe. This last was a brave effort, but a sentence from the editors' introduction such as, "The central character in Dave Godfrey's The River has to leave the city and step again into a river he frequently visited as a youth before he can truly understand that life is a process," indicates just how mildewed was some of the lumber they had to work with.
In 1990, Michael Ondaatje weighed in with his anthology From Ink Lake. Many of his choices were unexceptionable, but he displayed a fatal taste for eccentricity, including part of a memoir by diplomat Charles Ritchie, a long-winded speech by an Ojibway Grand Chief named John Kelly and incomprehensible musings by the late pianist Glenn Gould titled The Search For Petula Clark. (Sample sentence: "The principal motivic cell unit of that ebullient lied consisted of the interval of a minor third plus a major second, alternating, upon occasion, with a major third followed by a minor second.")
Urquhart, unfortunately, has adopted the same licence for eccentricity in her anthology, including an excerpt from that same Ritchie memoir, as well as two excerpts from Ondaatje's semi-fictional memoir, Running in the Family, and a short story by Adrienne Clarkson, who can no more write fiction than I can play the oboe. Also, 60 writers are too many. Such quantity indicates that Urquhart has an uncertain grasp of quality - even assuming that her 60 are superior to Metcalf's 20, which, by the way, I do not believe. Writers in the history of Canada capable of writing a great short story are simply not that numerous.
In fairness, the difficulties of compiling an anthology are formidable. The number of Canadian published short stories with literary pretensions is stupendous, and a sizeable portion of them have genuine merit - with the growth of creative writing courses in this country, crudities and excesses in short stories are often shaved off by reasonably competent instructors, and the end result looks quite presentable. To separate the great from the good in this mass would be daunting. My own view is that you would need two editors. A model might be the 1950 anthology Poets of the English Language, edited by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson. This means that a Canadian publisher would have to find a scholar with the brilliance of Pearson and a first-rate literary artist with the breadth of appreciation for different literary approaches possessed by Auden.
Good luck. We may be faced with an impossibility at this point, but we can't give up the task - it is too important to get this business of a Canadian anthology of short stories right.
The real Salon des Refuses dirty work: play-doh pizzas.
Heather Birrell reading from her wonderful, wonderful story Impossible to Die in Your Dreams.
AT ISSUE
Recent issues of literary journals The New Quarterly and CNQ (Canadian Notes and Queries) offered short stories by 20 writers left out of The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, edited by Jane Urquhart. Both magazines titled their issues The Salon des Refusés, holding the view that the Penguin anthology presented a distorted view. In a Sept. 13 essay for Books, John Metcalf supported that view. Now, Wayne Grady, who edited the first Penguin anthology, comes to the defence of a new and inclusive definition of what constitutes a short story. Metcalf, meanwhile, holds his ground.
John Metcalf, by listing 20 writers not included in Jane Urquhart's Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories - his self-styled Salon des refusés - commits the lazy critic's error of castigating a book for failing to do what it never set out to do in the first place, and then questioning the judgment of its editor because she didn't produce the book he would like to have seen. His diatribe, therefore, amounts to little more than a fit of unseemly name-calling and name-dropping.
This is tiresomely familiar Metcalf: He did the same thing 28 years ago, when I edited the first Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories and left him out of it. It was sad then, and sadder now, to watch him flail about in a slough of despond, and take so many other writers down with him. I can't speak for them, but if I had been left out of such an important literary anthology, I wouldn't thank John Metcalf for pointing out that fact to the world.
Midway through his fulmination, Metcalf does rise above vitriol long enough to make a valid point: "Accomplished, demanding literature can only be strengthened and nurtured by austere, honed criticism." One measure of the success of Urquhart's anthology is that it has sparked just such an occasion for a re-evaluation of the changing nature of the short story in Canada. Such a debate would have been welcomed in Metcalf's appraisal: Unfortunately, after voicing the need for it, he sinks back into self-promotion without telling us why his choices would have been better than Urquhart's. Bafflingly, he even manages a swipe at Ann-Marie MacDonald and Enid Blyton, who aren't in the Penguin book either.
The fact is that the new anthology includes 66 writers from an incredibly wide range of styles, themes and accomplishment, whereas, in presenting his list of refusés, Metcalf seldom looks beyond the small coterie of writers he himself has edited and published.
But let us revel in what the Penguin book is, rather than roll in what it is not. Urquhart divides her selections into five parts, each arranged behind a totemic story that establishes a theme she feels is crucial to the Canadian literary experience: thus, Alice Munro's The View From Castle Rock introduces the theme of immigration; Michael Winter's This All Happened speaks to the "immediate and contemporary view of who we think we are"; Michael Ondaatje's Lunch Conversation deals with matters related to family, and so on. Along the way, Urquhart includes stories by the giants of the genre - Munro, Alistair MacLeod, Mavis Gallant - and also celebrates the work of more recent arrivals, such as Vincent Lam, Madeleine Thien and Lynn Coady.
She includes work by writers of creative non-fiction - Charles Taylor, for example - an acknowledgment that such work now belongs in any modern definition of "story." She includes self-contained excerpts from longer works, an innovation introduced by Ondaatje in his 1990 anthology, From Ink Lake. The result is a rich overview of the state of literature in Canada today, as well as a fascinating introduction to the social and intellectual history of this country. Twenty-eight years after the first Penguin anthology, this one was long overdue and fulfills its mandate superbly.
As has been known since Noah, no collection can include everyone. In Inuit legend, Noah sails his ark into Hudson Bay after the flood. The Inuit note that there are no polar bears on board, but rather than writhe in righteous indignation, they help Noah survive and enjoy the animals he brought to them: They find the giraffes particularly tasty. They know that the Ark is what it is, and the Arctic is what it is, and that there is room for both.
So read the refusés, by all means. But for a broader, deeper and less biased viewpoint from which to survey the ebb and flow of our literature, read the Penguin anthology first.
Wayne Grady is the editor of 10 anthologies of short fiction and nonfiction, including the first Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories and, most recently, The Desert: A Literary Companion.
***
REBUTTAL: JOHN METCALF REPLIES
A story is a carefully crafted work of art that is discrete and entirely self-contained. It ... demands an aesthetic response. It does not offer itself as lessons in history or sociology
To set the record straight, not one of the 20 writers celebrated in the current issues of CNQ and The New Quarterly was selected by me; these writers were chosen by Dan Wells at CNQ and Kim Jernigan at The New Quarterly.
Grady refers to his editing the first Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories 28 years ago. His credentials for doing so were as tenuous as Jane Urquhart's now, credentials seemingly derived from his editing Harrowsmith, a magazine devoted to husbandry and mulch.
Grady seems to approve of including in a book of short stories "creative non-fiction" and "self-contained excerpts from longer works" - in other words, chunks of novels.
The resulting "rich overview" provides, he claims, "a fascinating introduction to the social and intellectual history of this country." And this is precisely where he and Urquhart get it all wrong, for she too thinks of her anthologizing as "a national narrative." Both editors think of themselves as using stories for some non-literary purpose, and both see that purpose as nationalistic.
Neither seems to grasp that a story is a carefully crafted work of art that is discrete and entirely self-contained. It is a performance. A story demands an aesthetic response. It does not offer itself as lessons in history or sociology. A story does not follow the flag.
The writers in the Salon des refusés issues of CNQ and The New Quarterly write with a crispness that is a relatively recent development in Canada. Some tend toward the minimalist while others are positively baroque. What marks them all, however, is a dedication to language. These writers are not the "coterie" Grady imagines. They are where the excitement lies; they are the heat in the kitchen. These writers are the polished vanguard leading us into ever more astonishing and engaging literary possibilities. A pity that Urquhart and Penguin Books were deaf to their voices.
John Metcalf's most recent book is the literary memoir Shut Up He Explained.
The current issues of two literary journals, The New Quarterly and CNQ (Canadian Notes and Queries), offer 20 short stories by 20 writers left out of The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories, edited by Jane Urquhart. Both magazines title their issues The Salon des Refusés, in reference to the salon in 1863 that excluded, among other artists, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Pissarro and Whistler. The magazine editors felt that the Penguin anthology presented a distorted view of Canadian achievement in the genre. The Penguin anthology is important because of the cachet attaching to the imprint; the very name Penguin suggests authority, confers significance. This anthology presents Canada to the world; by this anthology, our achievement will be judged. It is a sorry book.
Urquhart, in her introduction, confesses that she had doubts about her qualifications for the job, and further confesses that she was not familiar with Canadian stories, her preferred reading having been novels. It shows. Among the many omissions are Hugh Hood, Norman Levine and Clark Blaise. To leave them out of a Penguin presentation is like omitting Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty and William Faulkner from an overview of U.S. short fiction.
Not only does she omit these monumental figures in Canadian short-story history, she also omits so many other, often younger writers, especially, it seems, those stylish innovators who perform with verve and sparkle: Patricia Robertson, Douglas Glover, Mike Barnes, Mark Anthony Jarman, Keath Fraser, Sharon English, Steven Heighton, Russell Smith, Diane Schoemperlen, Mary Borsky, Linda Svendsen, Cynthia Flood, Mary Swan, Patricia Young, Kathleen Winter, Terry Griggs ... As the names pile up, the list becomes, well, risible.
But the anthology is further distorted by the nature of some of Urquhart's inclusions. To include Adrienne Clarkson, Michael Ondaatje and Charles Ritchie - not one a story writer - is to edge toward the utterly bizarre. Too many of the selections indicate want of judgment, unfamiliarity, perhaps, with U.S. and British practice and achievement.
The focus of the two magazines is not, however, Jane Urquhart. She is merely collateral damage. The objection embodied in the writing celebrated by the two magazines is to Penguin Canada. Why did Penguin commission a tyro to edit such a weighty book? The answer must be to capitalize on her popularity, to exploit her celebrity. This is vulgar and irresponsible; it is an abdication of Penguin's responsibilities to our literature.
This brouhaha has been commented on by Russell Smith in The Globe and Mail, by Alex Good in the Toronto Star, by Paul Wells in Maclean's and by Adrian Michael Kelly on the CBC radio program Q. The Los Angeles Times is carrying the story on its website. Good wrote, "this 700-page tome has become the flashpoint for one of the sharpest literary debates this country has ever seen."
The point that ought to be made is that these Salon des Refusés magazine issues shouldn't be news at all. Our literature should be in constant turmoil, continual debate, dissent, passionate uproar. If our literature is important to us, its importance should be worth fighting about. Accomplished, demanding literature can only be strengthened and nurtured by austere, honed criticism.
The media interest in the Salon des Refusés has happened because, for the first time since the 1940s in Montreal, CanLit has woken from its habitual placid somnolence. This is the first time the editors of literary magazines have banded together to assert a different aesthetic, a different hierarchy. This is the first time editors and writers have said no! to a canon being imposed by a large and wealthy publisher.
Our pleasure at the attention being paid to the genre is, however, somewhat vitiated by the fact that the media's real interest is in the feuding, the supposed "nastiness" of Dan Wells's critical introduction in CNQ (Tweaking the Beak) and what Russell Smith described as the "stomach-curdling" criticism of my own essay (Thinking About Penguins).
There is, unfortunately, no consensus in Canada about our literature. The difference between commercial entertainment and work of literary value is scarcely understood. Our critics, such as they are, eschew evaluative judgments. Agents and publishing conglomerates dictate and define; publicity budgets are our arbiters. A benighted pedagogue at the University of Toronto actually requires students to read Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees.
Why not Enid Blyton's Fun for the Secret Seven?
It is a world gone mad.
Concerning the short story in Canada, critic Philip Marchand wrote: "There is something both heartening and disheartening about the fact that so much of the strength of Canadian literary culture lies in the short story form. It is heartening because there are now many Canadian writers who are truly proficient in the art - so much so that whatever is enduring in our literature will be more likely found in their work than in over-stuffed prose epics such as Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance or Timothy Findley's The Piano Man's Daughter. ... The disheartening element in the situation, of course, is that few people actually read it."
There is, of course, a reason for the Salon des Refusés issues beyond the desire to castigate Penguin Canada; it is to celebrate what they spurned. What a feast of fiction awaits the reader, wonderful writers you may not have encountered before: the tight passion of Cynthia Flood, the enormous delicacy of Ray Smith, the meditative calm of Steven Heighton, the fragrantly nutty mind of Terry Griggs ... They are all here, worlds awaiting you.
Another 20 come easily to mind, among them Libby Creelman, Susan Kerslake, K. D. Miller, Robyn Sarah, Mary Borsky, Rebecca Rosenblum, all of them building the golden edifice that is the short story in Canada.
Jack, David (ECW), Karen Haughin? (Descant)
Sharon English, Heather Birrell in conversation; Adrian Michael Kelly and Kim Jernigan
Rebecca Rosenblum and fan club.
A blow hard, blowing. Mike Barnes, English and Birrell looking on on stage. Paul Wells from Macleans at the immediate right.
Wells, Barnes, English.
To forestall a lawsuit: that is the TINARS mascot reading the TNQ and not Penguin's ... well... penguin. Unintentional irony: there's been a lot of that going 'round.
Rebecca Rosenblum meets Steven Beattie, whose Shakespherian Rag is a must read: especially this month, with his marathon 31 Days of short stories.
Steven, Rebecca and someone I should recognize, I think, but Can't. Help! (Davidson?)
Wells, Barnes, English.
English, Birrell, Beattie.
Wells, Barnes, Birrell.
Barnes, English, Birrell, Beattie.
Sorry: there are two of these, but damned if I'm taking this one off now.
Wells, Barnes, English, Birrell, looking in Kim's general direction.
Chris Reed, TINARS mastermind, and Kim Jernigan, editor of the New Quarterly.
Kim Jernigan.
The only one who needs introduction at this stage is Adrian Michael Kelly, far right, who's Imprint of Foxes piece in CNQ is worth the cover price on its own.
Thank God that's over.
