Alex Good review Clark Blaise's Selected Essays

Over at Good Reports, Alex Good has posted a review of Clark Blaise's recent Selected Essays. The entire review can be found here. Here's the first bit:

It's fitting that this new selection of essays by Clark Blaise, edited by John Metcalf and J. R. Struthers, begins and ends with autobiography. Fitting in part because Blaise's fiction has always been transparently anchored in the material of his own life. The titles of the four volumes of his Selected Stories (Southern Stories, Pittsburgh Stories, Montreal Stories, and World Body) both register a personal journey and provide an index to a lifelong fascination with place. But fitting also in that this fascination with biography and geography has always been a feature of his critical as well as creative writings. "Let me start with the autobiographical approach," is how one of his lectures begins. Personal origins will help to "maintain perspective."

They will that, and more. William Carlos Williams has a line in one of his poems about how the pure products of America go crazy. Blaise picks it up a couple of times - readers can expect some repetition of language and anecdote in such a collection - the point being that writers are made as much as born, the pure products of their environment. This doesn't mean that Blaise endorses what used to be known as the "biographical fallacy" (ah, there were such a lot of fallacies back in the day), only that he thinks it vitally important to recognize where writing comes from. A quick look at the table of contents makes the point: "The Border as Fiction," "The International Novel," "American Fiction," "Some Thoughts on Canadian and Australian Fiction," "Notes on the 'Canadian' Short Story." In the first of these we are told that "intense regionalism" is a "national trait of Canadians" as well as "an urgent aspect of my personality." Canadians as a people are "regionally determined." And we aren't the only ones. Within individual appreciations the formative influence of biography and geography is repeatedly stressed. It may be "understandable enough" for V. S. Naipaul to reject the label of "West Indian writer," but still his "Caribbean work is [his] strongest, [in part] because it is closest to his experience of growing up." And here, to take an unhappier example, is how the table is set for a re-appraisal of "one of those famed 'pure products of America'," Jack Kerouac:

An impotent, alcoholic, ruined, middle-aged, mill-town Franco-American living in Lowell, and finally in St. Petersburg with his jealously protective, corrosively ignorant and loudly bigoted mother, or with a wife he alternately loved and hated while trying to divorce, is not a candidate for progressive opinions on race, class, or sexual politics.

To know what kind of cultural milieu Kerouac came out of, and Blaise does, is essential to an understanding the man and his work.

Fine Blaise Collection Examines Nationality

from the Winnipeg Free Press, March 1st. Reviewed by David Williamson

CLARK Blaise was born in Fargo, N.D., to Canadian parents and he's grappled with "being caught between nationalities" throughout his lengthy writing career.

This fine collection combines some of his best work on the topic with engrossing views on fiction-writing and writers.

It is easy to see why Blaise turned to his own life for subject matter. His parents came from wildly different backgrounds, he grew up in 30 different American cities, he studied under famous novelists Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, he married the India-born novelist Bharati Mukherjee, and he established himself as a Canadian writer in Montreal before returning to the U.S., where he eventually became director of the prestigious International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Blaise's mother came from Wawanesa, graduated from Winnipeg's Wesley College, and taught in Manitoba before moving to Europe. She returned to Canada in 1937 as head decorator at Eaton's Montreal store.

As Blaise explains in these witty and charming essays, she met and married Leo Blais (the e was added later), a former boxer, a runner of booze from Montreal into the U.S. during Prohibition, "a salesman, a violent, aggressive, manipulative man specializing in the arts of spontaneous misrepresentation."

"And he was glamorous; short, dark and handsome. As a travelling salesman, he had women in every town; he drank to excess every night, and hit the road at daybreak every morning."

They moved to North Dakota to try to avoid the Second World War, and Clark was born in 1940. Leo's work, by then as a furniture buyer, took them all over the eastern U.S. until Leo's old ways became impossible for his wife to accept, and they divorced.

Many of these details and their consequences made their way into Clark's fiction. His first book, published in 1972, was a collection of autobiographical short stories called A North American Education.

He became well known as part of the Montreal Story Tellers that included John Metcalf, Hugh Hood, Ray Smith and Raymond Fraser. He drew on his wife for his subsequent books Tribal Justice (1974), Lunar Attractions (1979), Lusts (1983) and Resident Alien (1986).

Blaise, Mukherjee and their two sons left Quebec over the issue of intolerance of immigrants, taking teaching jobs wherever they could find them, often being forced to live apart in separate cities. Blaise's position at the U of Iowa gave some stability, but he was required to travel to other countries all over the world.

In 2000 came "the biggest development of my writing life," publication of Time Lord, the story of Sir Sanford Fleming and the creation of standard time. The success of that book allowed Blaise to settle down -- in New York and San Francisco.

The best of the essays on writing is American Fiction. Given originally as a lecture at Meiji University in Tokyo in 1994, it deals brilliantly with the state of contemporary American fiction at the time, highlighting the work of Malamud, John Cheever, Raymond Carver and Donald Barthelme.

Despite the editorial efforts of Metcalf and Struthers, many points are repeated in these 18 pieces (Malamud's definition of fiction -- "the dramatization of the multifarious adventures of the human heart" -- appears at least three times). Also, Blaise's book Man and His World was published in 1992, not 1993 as stated on page 218.

Selected Essays is a fine sampling of Blaise's non-fiction, especially for anyone approaching him for the first time. It includes an extensive bibliography of his critical and autobiographical writing with an introduction by Struthers.

Bryson on Blaise

Over at the Underground Bookclub, Michael Bryson considers Clark Blaise's Selected Essays. The whole post can be found here. Here's an excerpt:

If I had to pick one essay as the best, I'd choose: "Kerouac in Black and White." It's the only essay I've read about Kerouac that starts from the point of view of the end years of Kerouac's life. The lonely, angry, reactionary, and as Blaise makes clear, the overtly racist years, though it is a racism consistent and persistent throughout Kerouac's career. Kerouac engaged, explored and wrote about "the other" consistently and persistently, but the exploration didn't lead to reconciliation; it led to entrenched alienation and the ultimate failure of Vanity of Duluoz (1968).

Amazon provides the opening sentence:

All right, wifey, maybe I'm a big pain in the you-know-what but after I've given you a recitation of the troubles I had to go through to make good in America between 1935 and more or less now, 1967, and although I also know everybody in the world's had his own troubles, you'll understand that my particular form of anguish came from being too sensitive to all the lunkheads I had to deal with just so I could get to be a high school football star, a college student pouring coffee and washing dishes and scrimmaging till dark and reading Homer's lliad in three days all at the same time, and God help me, a WRITER whose very 'success', far from being a happy triumph as of old, was the sign of doom Himself.

Blaise provides the context:

An impotent, alcoholic, ruined, middle-aged, mill-town Franco-American living in Lowell, and finally in St. Petersburg with his jealously protective, corrosively ignorant and loudly bigoted mother, or with a wife he alternately loved and hated while tying to divorce, is not a candidate for progressive opinions on race, class, or sexual politics. Forget Kerouac in his youth, the beautiful boy with his breathless tales of breaking away from canadien catholicism nightmared in Doctor Sax or tapestried in Visions of Gerard; forget the trips he took us on, like swatted rubber balls on their widest orbit in On the Road and The Dharma Bums and Mexico City Blues before they crashed back to the paddle that propelled them. That was then; this later, much later.

Which Blaise later expands:

Race, in the normal American black/white sense, was never a reality for Kerouac, never part of his early personal history -- only a metaphor for freedom, or temptation. He carried his blinkered childhood within him like a malignant unborn twin,and a white, Catholic, lost, pure French empire was part of that childhood. But for the likelihood of Indian blood, which he (like most French-Canadians) embraced, Kerouac was pur laine, a proud, full-blooded, full-culture French Canadian: ("Go back,"he wanted to call to his Breton fishermen ancestors,"ils vous I . jouent un tour." That is, America's going to play a trick on you.) Against the backdrop of the Church, and his own monochromatic background, "Negroes" offered only occasions for sex, drugs and music. And since those are also occasions for merging identities, they specifically challenge the corrosive dreams of racial and religious purity. Gerald Nicosia, in Memory Babe, mentions that Jack would have married Mardou Fox, the heroine of The Subterreaneans, if she'd been white. A strange inhibition for a Beat. "Purity" rose up early, and late consumed him, his vulture-twin pouncing on a helpless host.

You can start to see here that in Kerouac, Blaise has a precursor: a French Canadian border-crosser who struggled with multiple identities and modernity ... but who failed (found in the end only bitterness and collapse), whereas Blaise survived and tells us things Kerouac never could.

Clark Blaise: Our Greatest Unsung Writer

Or so says Philip Marchand in the National Post.

It is testament to the vagaries of literary reputation on this wilful and iniquitous planet of ours that Clark Blaise remains unknown to most Canadian readers.

For these readers the following introduction may serve. Clark Blaise was born in Fargo, N.D., in 1940. His mother was an English-Canadian woman who studied art and design in Europe. His father, Leo, was the second youngest of 19 children in a rural Quebec family. Fourteen of his siblings didn't make it to adulthood. Leo survived to become a professional boxer, bootlegger, salesman, among other occupations. He was barely literate and had an ingrained contempt, his son writes, "for anything that couldn't be sold, drunk or eaten."

Clark, their only offspring, was diagnosed as an infant with "a form of muscular dystrophy that was considered fatal," Blaise records. A thyroid extract saved his life, but left his body flabby and unco-ordinated. That the family left Fargo shortly after his birth and moved frequently during his childhood made matters worse - he was a "classic schoolyard punching bag" for a succession of new bullies in new schools. And what schools some of them were! In the late '40s, the family roamed the hookworm territory of northern Florida, in towns where students were "let out of school to watch Klan floggings, cross-burnings and lynchings."

For years he found relief in prodigious childhood feats of memorization - "I knew the county seats of every county in America," he recalls - but in early manhood he discovered the more therapeutic powers of writing fiction, a discovery reinforced by a life-changing seminar at Harvard with Bernard Malamud and by his stint at the famous writing program at the University of Iowa, where he met and married novelist Bharati Mukherjee.

In 1966, the couple moved to Montreal, where Blaise taught at Concordia (then Sir George Williams University) and joined The Montreal Storytellers, initiated by John Metcalf, which enjoyed surprising success doing readings across the city. These were "the happiest years of my life," he recalls. In 1978, the couple moved to Toronto, and two years later left Canada when the country, in Blaise's words, "turned racist." (It was a particularly nasty period of assaults on East Indians in Toronto.)

The rest is a story of teaching jobs at various institutions in the United States, near destitution at times, the awkwardness of Blaise finding his wife's acclaim, with the publication of her short story collection The Middleman and her novel Jasmine, overshadowing his. Through it all, however, he managed to write 18 books of fiction and non-fiction, including nine volumes of short stories. Some of those stories, such as "The Fabulous Eddie Brewster," rank among the best stories written on this continent in the past few decades.

These bare bones of a life story are particularly relevant in a review of Blaise's latest book, his Selected Essays, edited by John Metcalf and J.R. (Tim) Struthers (Biblioasis), because, as Blaise himself notes, "More than most authors, I am dependent on autobiography." Much of the power of his writing consists not just in the remembering of the drastic conditions of his childhood and adolescence, but also in the layered points of view he brings to that memory. Recalling his early student days, he writes, "I began to see the intellectual dimensions of my life; I wasn't just Southern, I was Southern from a Yankee perspective, and I was Yankee from a Canadian perspective, and I was Canadian from a French and English perspective, and on it went."

Blaise's stories, which are intimate, accessible and usually possessed of a strong narrative drive, practically vibrate with the tensions produced by this layering. Blaise, like every other writer, had to work through the ersatz stuff - he recalls in one essay how, tempted by the atmospherics that come almost automatically with any depiction of life in the Deep South, he wrote Southern stories "so swampy they should have been drained, then sprayed." But he learned, and his interest in the pure craft of the short story, dating back to early days with Malamud, remains strong. "The most interesting thing about a story," he writes in a characteristic observation, "is its beginning, its first paragraph, often its first sentence. More decisions are made on the basis of the first few sentences of a story than on any other part."

No matter how detached Blaise becomes in his discussion of literary craft and contemporary literature, however, he never ranges far from the nakedly personal. It is his most American quality - like Whitman he can honestly proclaim, "Who touches this book touches a man."

His candour raises one interesting question. Recalling his father's habit of abandoning promising commercial ventures and moving from town to town, Blaise writes, "Had we stayed in any of those towns and cities, we'd be millionaires now." It is tempting to speculate, in similar fashion, that if Blaise had stayed in Canada, instead of exercising his own form of wanderlust, he might have developed a stronger platform for his work and his reputation - in this country and perhaps even outside it. Canada is not so impervious to strong literary voices that it could have ignored long the continued presence of such a writer, blessed and cursed with such comprehensive awareness.