and a tribute to Marian Engel
“Canadian Authors Find Paris Can Be a Closed Shop.”1
This compelling title of a 1985 article in a Montreal Anglophone paper confirmed the reality: English-language Canadian literature was more or less unknown at the time in France. The writer Mavis Gallant, who lived in Paris, was a case in point.2 She was not alone: Margaret Atwood, the author of Surfacing (1972), a bestseller in the US and UK, had scant readership here. In fact, the sales of Surfacing’s French translation were so low that her publisher most unwillingly had to “let her go.”3
In the same article, the French editor of a major publishing house in Paris wondered how she could appraise English Canadian literature when she “could not differentiate English Canadians from Americans.” For her, “someone writing about rural Ontario was not much different from someone writing about Ohio.”
Among other considerations, these sharp observations must have incited the Canadian Cultural Center to initiate a long-term program for the promotion of English Canadian literature primarily through translations and book launches of its writers’ works. Our first major Canadian event at the Village Voice was a tribute to Marian Engel in February 1985, organized by Adrienne Clarkson, a Canadian diplomat in Paris and the future governor general of Canada. Clarkson praised Marian Engel’s novel Bear as a work that holds a special place in Anglophone Canadian literature. Decried by some as “the most controversial novel ever written” in the country, it is regarded by others as “its quintessential book.”
Margaret Atwood
Grande dame of English Canadian literature, Margaret Atwood is internationally known for her bestseller The Handmaid’s Tale,4 a dystopian depiction of a totalitarian state that subjects its young female civilians to coercive use of their bodies for reproductive purposes. Published in 1985, the novel introduces the constant themes of Atwood’s fiction: patriarchal society and its exploitation of women.
These two motifs are likewise at the heart of Atwood’s later Alias Grace,5 presented at the Village Voice on April 5, 1998. The work is based on the 1843 headline news of the double murder of a man and his housekeeper by Grace Marks, an immigrant Irish servant of sixteen, known to be of a gentle disposition. Her trial and the ongoing investigation into her motives bring to light her master’s pressing advances and the fate of Mary, her best friend, also a servant who, raped by the family’s son, has died from a botched abortion.
Yet the doctors and judges who are called in prefer to base their expertise on seemingly invisible mechanisms at work in real life, though often expressed in dreams, a theory much in vogue at the time. Alerted to one of Grace’s dreams that, from beyond the grave, Mary is the killing avenger, they conclude that the defendant is possessed by another persona, “alias Grace.”
Accordingly, they declare that her crime has no relation to her social condition as a poor, young orphan. The Industrial Revolution in mid-century England had been advocating the rapid development of Canada, and it was most untimely to champion a destitute girl against employers who embody a rising bourgeoisie contributing to the expansion of this fledging province.
Atwood’s talk was part of a joint reading with the American novelist Richard Ford, also in Paris for the French publication of his recent collection of three novellas Women with Men.6 Excited by this opportunity to honor such consecrated writers, we planned the big event for a Sunday afternoon with beverages and cakes to be served after the reading.
In my naivete, I had brought together three literary stars: Margaret Atwood, with Mavis Gallant introducing her, and Richard Ford.
As it turned out, Mavis was too tired to attend the reading and would come only to preface Atwood’s work, now reprogrammed to close the gala. However, Ford could not be reached and was not informed of this last-minute change. In truth, I had never imagined that he would not be with us from the start.
Given our prestigious guests, the bookshop was filled to overflowing, but our idyllic afternoon was to turn into a burlesque game of musical chairs. Only Atwood was on time, stoically sitting in her seat, graciously chatting with people in the front row.
We decided to start with her alone, but hardly had she begun when she was interrupted by Mavis who, urgently fetched by cab, had arrived and was gingerly making her way through the crowd. Her belated introduction was witty as usual, but soon broken up by the appearance of Ford who, cool, calm, and collected, confessed, “I lost my way.” There was a huge burst of laughter in the bookstore, whereupon he took full control of his public, captivating the audience and relegating Atwood and Gallant to second and third fiddles.
Later that night, going over this comedy of errors in my mind, I realized the irony of the French titles on the printed invitation: Alias Grace had become Captive, and Ford’s Women with Men, Une situation difficile.
I had to laugh as the translated titles appeared to have jinxed the reading. To top it all, our recording of the event had failed its own mission as the tapes proved to be irrevocably inaudible.
Jane Urquhart
This author’s novel The Stone Carvers7 is another example of the presence of Europe in Canadian literature at the close of the twentieth century. The author of poetry and fiction about women’s destinies, Irish settlers, and immigrants, Jane Urquhart was at the Village Voice on April 7, 2005, to introduce her new work highlighting the role Canadian women played in the historical development of their country.
In her preface to the reading, Nancy Huston8 spoke of departures, “aplenty in this novel and something very Canadian,” she said. Indeed, there’s lots of back and forth between the two continents, starting with the journey of a Bavarian priest migrating from old Europe to Ontario to start a mission in the country’s wilderness and build a church for the local settlers, his future parishioners. Some years later, young Canadians were to make the opposite journey, crossing the ocean to actively participate in the First World War effort to defend France in the heart of Europe.
The main plot here revolves around Klara, a luminous woman whose brother Tilman and fiancé Eamon fall victim to this war. Tilman returns home crippled while Eamon disappears without a trace. A decade later, hearing of the project to erect a memorial to honor the sixty thousand Canadians fallen on the battlefield of Vimy in the North of France, Klara and her brother leave their Canadian village to participate in this project.
Disguised in male clothes, Klara works at stone carving, the “métier” she has learned from her grandfather, the original builder of the church. Entrusted with the task of shaping faces that symbolize the Canadian victims of this battle, she chisels features of Eamon on the countenance of the torchbearer, breathing into him new life while “giving, so to speak, a soul to the monument.”
Invitation card to the joint reading of Margaret Atwood and Richard Ford, April 5, 1998.
“Vimy,” Urquhart stressed, is a historical monument, a symbol of a slice of the history of Canada. When these young men who had contributed to this historical turn of events for Europe, the country of their forbears, returned home to Canada, their experiences and memories became part of the history of their own country.”
A woman in the audience wondered why Klara had thought it necessary to disguise herself in men’s clothes to work on the monument.
Urquhart: “I see her choice as undergoing a transformation as a sculptor, freeing herself from the past as a ‘spinster,’ a condition associated with needlework then. Her case reminds me of the story of these two ladies in a Canadian town who were ‘seamstresses,’ but strongly rejecting such a term, they required their customers to call them ‘tailors,’ a word that evoked power and called for respect.”9
As Jane Urquhart had indicated, Canada’s participation in global affairs was fundamental in the construction of its identity. When the Second World War broke out, once more, along with the Allies, Canadians crossed the Atlantic Ocean, this time to fight Nazism in Europe. Their commitment to the old continent did not end with Victory Day, but continued with the opening of their country to European refugees. We remember Linette, the native protagonist of Mavis Gallant’s story “Varieties of Exile,” filled with wonder and excitement at the sight of those long lines of immigrants from different and distant lands bringing with them a diversity of cultures and languages.
Their new lives in Canada have been told, among others, by the Ontario authors Matt Cohen10 and Anne Michaels11 in their respective novels presented at the Village Voice, but another facet of this recurring presence of European wars in English Canadian literature turns up unexpectedly in the novels of Sri Lankan Canadian poet and fiction writer Michael Ondaatje.
Michael Ondaatje
Born in Sri Lanka and educated in Great Britain, Michael Ondaatje was not even twenty when he settled in Toronto, soon describing himself as “a man of no borders” and “a mongrel of place and race.” Ondaatje was to become one of the internationally renowned fiction authors of Canada, as well as an essayist, editor, filmmaker, and poet. Meeting him for the first time in 1972, Mavis Gallant never forgot her first impression: “Everything about him spoke of poetry.”12 In time, she saw their growing complicity and friendship as the expression of their common pursuit for the perfect phrase.
It seemed fitting that Ondaatje’s first presentation at the Village Voice on April 9, 1986, should be devoted to poetry as he read from his collection Secular Love13 and his memoir Running in the Family, a book of vignettes and poems about the rediscovery of his native Sri Lanka and large family there, remembered from his childhood and revisited in the 1970s.
Someone asked him about his main source of imagination:
Q: “Canada or Sri Lanka?”
Ondaatje: “From everywhere. When I first came to Canada it was an exciting time for me, not a traumatic one. However, for a long time, I forgot my past. I had come to Canada not with a lot of baggage as people do, but my return to Sri Lanka twenty years later, my reunion with my family was intentional: I wanted to rediscover my past and my country. Sri Lanka was a surreal place.”
A poet at heart, Ondaatje is also a novelist with a long list of prestigious literary prizes. Three out of the four fictional works he launched at our bookstore are set in the context of a war: the First World War in Divisadero,14 the Sri Lankan Civil War in Anil’s Ghost,15 and World War II in The English Patient,16 a piece he discussed with us on February 17, 1993.
On this occasion, a member of our audience remarked that war is omnipresent in this novel, but never shown. So, Ondaatje made it clear that “The English Patient is not a war novel. If it were to be one, which I did not want it to be, I would have depicted action and facts around the people involved. I don’t speak about allies or enemies.”
In fact, the reader is never directly confronted with the 1944 war raging in Italy, but in this Florentine Villa San Girolamo, which used to be a field hospital, everything speaks of war: damaged by the bombs of the enemy in their retreat, it is now a ruin open to the winds and beleaguered by a mined garden. All the patients have been evacuated but one, a mysterious man known as the English patient who, burned beyond recognition, has been left behind in the care of Hana, a Canadian nurse who volunteers to stay with him. Few words are exchanged between the two, and yet they communicate through the patient’s annotations of Herodotus’s Histories that Hana reads aloud to him from his personal notebook.
These bits of words, interrogations, and expressive silences progressively reveal who they are and where they come from. Soon and out of nowhere, two strangers appear at the villa: one with his bandaged hands, maimed, we learn, during a torture session, and a Sikh drawn to the place by the sound of a piano heard in the distance. Contracted by the British army to defuse mines and buried bombs, Kip also knows that booby traps may well be hidden inside musical instruments.
These four characters locked in together and isolated from the rest of the world remind us of another Florentine “huis-clos” at the time of the Black Death in medieval days. As in Boccaccio’s Decameron, where young people keep the plague at a distance by inventing an alternative world of stories, the empty and desolate space of this villa is an invitation to fill it with the freely flowing meditative thoughts silently circulating among this family of sorts.
Q: “Writing this novel of the characters’ interiority in poetic prose, did it feel different from writing poetry?”
Ondaatje: “I come from poetry and, as in my poems, I leave space in my prose. I suggest and let the reader fill in the blank spaces.”
Q: “How do you plan your novels? Do you write detailed outlines?”
Ondaatje: “No, I don’t. As I write, I discover the story and the place. I had started this novel as a mystery and wrote a four-page outline, but by the end of it I was so bored that I abandoned it. The book begins with the image of a man crashing in the desert. Who was he? What was he doing there? Why had he crashed? With these images, the book started its quest. While I was describing that desert landscape, I knew I was waiting for someone. That’s the way, starting with an image or whatever, something calls for a story, but sometimes there is no story.”
Q: “And yet you seem to have control over the narrative and your characters.”
Ondaatje: “Oh, no, I don’t control my characters. Some writers treat the characters like puppets, and finally we get the feeling that they are talking down to them. It ends up as a didactic piece. As I said, I’m waiting for things to happen. I love accidents, unexpected occurrences. In The English Patient, Caravaggio appears at the villa out of nowhere. Or what happens with Kip, the sapper? I did not even know that Kip would be in the novel, but I was describing this field of mines, and I knew that I was expecting someone and here he was.
“But I certainly did not expect what came next: He is concentrated on the bomb he is defusing, the third and most dangerous one, when, all of a sudden, he’s rushing out of the pit where he is working, screaming. ‘What happened?’ everyone asks. ‘There’s a rat down there,’ he yells back.”
Q: “Kip, whose name evokes Kipling, is a Sikh medical student turned sapper in the British army. In the course of the novel he becomes aware of his own contradictions between his allegiance to the British Crown and his disillusionment in Europe with its wars for the sake of power. Is he a character you identify with or feel particularly close to?”
Ondaatje: “I feel very close to my characters; each one is a part of myself, including Kip, but at first, I was not aware of this. As a result, fiction is much more intimate, say, than autobiography. With Running in the Family, a memoir of my family, I didn’t feel as much bereft of my characters as I felt at the end of this novel.”17
In June 2012, on hearing of the closing of our bookstore, Michael called us from Toronto. His new book was not coming out in France until the fall, but he was nevertheless coming: “I want to read from my new novel as my personal farewell to the Village Voice,” he told me. I was moved beyond words, and one of his admissions during one of his interviews crossed my mind: “I’ve loved the readings at the Village Voice, as an audience member and as a reader.”18 So a date was set for his reading of The Cat’s Table for June 28, three weeks away.
That night, the bookstore looked like a “crowded pigeon coop” (his own words), but there was also a strong whiff of nostalgia in the air. Fortunately, Ondaatje’s playful title The Cat’s Table19 seemed to refer to a children’s adventure which it is, at least partly.
Before starting to read, Ondaatje warned us that this book was fiction. Yes, he had traveled by sea from Sri Lanka to London as a young boy, but he said, “Luckily, I had no recollection of that trip and I had to invent it all.” The Cat’s Table is the story of that picaresque sea journey told by the narrator as the eleven-year-old Minah who travels from his birthplace of Sri Lanka, Ceylon at the time, to London to be reunited with his long-absent mother.
On the boat he meets two other boys his age, and together they throw themselves into reckless and fun adventures. We follow them in their exploration of the depths of the ship with the marvels of its engine room and their discovery of a magical garden, not unlike the one in Alice’s Wonderland. We are seized with awe and terror as the liner is caught in a spectacular gale, and we share their excitement as they pass through the Suez Canal with its intense, colorful life of exotic hustle and bustle on its quays.
But most interesting of all is what’s happening at the “Cat’s Table,” the table farthest away from the Captain and his distinguished guests. Seated in that lowly place with its strange cast of eccentric adult characters, the youngsters pick up fragments of conversations that hint at secret lives and extravagant ways that will continue to fire up their imagination, making their sea passage into a unique coming-of-age experience, a life passage.
Q: “In this novel, like in others, you have people living at the margins of society. Is this a political stand on your part, a class issue?”
Ondaatje: “I’m simply not interested in people with power. There is no intimacy in their conversations or interactions. As I was finishing the book, I thought it would be good to go through the experience of a voyage at sea, and I traveled from Canada to England, seven days at sea. I had a seat reserved at a table of six people. I didn’t know them, and they were not my people. I ended up going to the cafeteria every day.”
Q: “Two historical figures, Buddy Bolden and Billy the Kid, are the subjects of two of your earlier books. Do you have any other historical figure you would like to write about?”
Ondaatje: “I’m interested in people who are interesting personalities.”20
Closing our thirty years of readings with Michael Ondaatje was particularly significant to me. I remembered the words he had told us at one time: “There’s always a story ahead of us.” Indeed, there would be many more stories written by the author in the years to come, but this one—the narrative of a boy on his way to his destiny—was still a blank page waiting to be filled. This thought that the end of this wondrous voyage at sea meant the beginning of a new adventure for the protagonist suddenly brightened up my mood: the end of a story is always the beginning of a new one and the closing of the bookstore would not be our last Village Voice journey.
Michael Ondaatje at the Village Voice with French publisher Olivier Cohen, literary agent Michèle Lapautre, and Edmund White, February 17, 1993. © C. Deudon