GROUND WORKS is an anthology of experimental fiction by writers who emerged on the wilder shores of literature in this country almost forty years ago.
I admit to being the instigator of this book. I agitated for it because a body of work that deserved to be recalled and set within its original frame was slipping from view, leaving the young with the impression that there was nothing unorthodox in this country before folks started getting their tongues pierced. But I did not want to trust my own now somewhat arthritic judgement, so Christian Bök, a young experimental writer of the twenty-first century, was asked to do the selecting and arranging, and is thus the book’s primary editor. The result is a sort of Ogopogo Creature: you’ve heard the rumours about an invisible, impossible weirdness, now here’s the blurry snapshot. See? There was something down there all along!
The term experimental fiction covers a lot of territory. It also makes me a little nervous, as I grew up with scientists and know their single-minded ways, and the term itself is a tribute to the early twentieth century’s reverence for that particular branch of human knowledge. The reverence may have faded somewhat, but the term remains, leaving behind a faint whiff of formaldehyde and Dr. Frankenstein: the dissection of language and narrative, and their reassembly into talking monsters, can strike us as cold-blooded. Dr. Frankenstein himself was not cold-blooded, however; he was a disrupter of social norms, a breaker of laws, a subversive idealist, a feverish believer in the new and the potential; and so it is with many “experimental” writers.
In what ways can fiction be “experimental”? On the one hand, all fiction is experimental, in that it ventures into the unknown and attempts to prove a hypothesis. Thus:
But that’s too broad. What we usually mean by “experimental fiction” is fiction that sets up certain rules for itself — rules that are not the same as those followed by the mainstream fiction of its day — and then proceeds to obey its own new commandments, while subverting the conventions according to which readers have understood what constitutes a proper work of literature. There’s a faint air of peeking beneath the skirts, of snooping behind the rhetorical scenes. Pieces like these can border on the parody or the extended joke — Woody Allen’s story about the machine that allows real people to get into well-known books as characters, Pozzo’s send-up rendition of a sunset description in Waiting for Godot, Michael Ondaatje’s use of pulp romance conventions to syncopate his Billy the Kid saga — which does not exclude the possibility of their being at the same time deeply unsettling. Accepted narrative lines are turned upside down, language is stretched and pulled inside out, characters don’t remain “within character.” Thus the writers in this anthology — at least in the work represented here — were more interested in colouring outside the lines than within them, and some even had it in mind to toss the entire colouring book into the fire and start with a whole new sheet of paper.
What was it that made the Canada of the 1960s such fertile ground for this kind of writing? Partly it was a stranger place in many ways than is often supposed — who remembers the LSD that flowed so freely in London, Ontario, in the 1950s — well before the age of Timothy Leary — not to mention the orgies in the cathedral? It was strange in a literary way as well. What other country would have produced a set of Spenserian eclogues spoken in a farmyard by a flock of geese? (A Suit of Nettles, James Reaney, 1958.) Partly, also, it was an open field — some might say a vacant lot. Many of the conditions taken for granted today — that there is a Canadian “canon,” that a Canadian writer can be widely known, respected, and solvent, that you can get a grant or a film contract or teach creative writing or win big prizes, that there are such things as book-promotion tours and literary festivals, that it is possible to live in Canada and function as a professional writer with a national, indeed an international “career” — these conditions scarcely existed in the writing world of the 1950s and 1960s, when the writers collected here had their toes on the starting line. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does literature. There is nothing more conducive to scribbling than a blank page.
There had been well-known Canadian fiction writers earlier —L. M. Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables fame, for instance, or Mazo de la Roche of the Jalna books, or, on higher literary ground, Morley Callaghan — but as a rule these had entered the scene through non-Canadian publishers, and were then distributed in Canada through agents or branch plants. There was, too, a Canadian-owned publishing industry, which even had a cheap-hardback mass-distribution side to it, but the Depression, the Second World War, and the advent of the U.S.-controlled paperback industry had kicked large holes in that. After the war, the old order changed: the British Empire as a political force was all but defunct, and any writer associated with it was passé; the new wave of money coming into Canada was American, as was the new wave of widely read writers. This was — with a few exceptions — largely a one-way street.
Morley Callaghan had taken it for granted that a young writer would cut his teeth in the U.S. magazine market, and would go on to be published in New York — the route he himself had taken — but this was an increasingly unlikely scenario.1 Young Canadian “experimental” writers felt cut off — too “Canadian,” whatever that meant, to be published internationally, and too radical in their approach to their writing to be published readily in the five or so established but beleaguered Canadian English-language houses functioning at that time. These houses estimated — rightly enough — that in such newly post-colonial times, when the “real” cultural places were thought to be elsewhere, the audience for Canadian writing wasn’t large enough to justify their investing in a novel unless a foreign publishing partner could be obtained. But, Canada being viewed in “The States” as the place where the snow came from, and “Canadian writer” being considered an oxymoron by London cultural commentators, foreign partners willing to take the chance were few.
If you were a frustrated young writer who despaired of making a place for yourself in Canada, you could always move, of course; you could live elsewhere and begin publishing there, and that’s what some novelists did. Or if you were a poet, you could crank out your own work and that of your friends on small presses and stick it into mimeo magazines, such as Tish and The Sheet, or even into more beautifully designed productions such as Emblem Books and Alphabet; there was already a tradition of this sort of publishing in Canada. You could “publish” over the airwaves, on Robert Weaver’s show, Anthology — about the only venue that would pay you actual money. You could — from 1960 or so on — read your poetry out loud, in a few dark, smoky coffee houses that held reading series; and there you might meet international — usually American — poets who were blowing through town.
Or you could, alone or together with other writers, scrape together a few dollars and start a new small publishing house. And this is what indeed happened, in more or less that order. Contact Press, Coach House Press, House of Anansi Press, Talonbooks, Blew-Ointment Press, Sono Nis, and Quarry Press were among the many such enterprises that began in this way at that time. Many but not all of the writers sampled here were also poets, and many of the presses that first published them began with poetry, in the early to mid-1960s. The overlaps — poets publishing poets in presses devoted to poetry — were considerable. Michael Ondaatje was for years a member of the Coach House collective; I myself worked as an editor with House of Anansi Press. Andreas Schroeder worked with Sono Nis; George Bowering was associated with Tish; and these are just a few examples.
This scene was not idyllic. In my own experience, small-press publishing was a hotbed of jealousy and intrigue and puddles of blood on the floor, second only to Rome under Caligula. Coach House Press got around this in the early days by consuming large amounts of mellowing substances — “Printed in Canada by mindless acid freaks,” read their logo, right alongside “Copyright is obsolete” — but at House of Anansi it was not so much drugs as drinking, and no one got out of it without a knife between the shoulder blades. No one but a lunatic, or someone brainwashed by the Girl Guides into thinking she had to do Good Deeds For Others, would have stayed in this situation for long. Which was I? A little of both. But that’s another story.
The writers in Ground Works, as a group, were born in the 1930s or the 1940s. They were not baby boomers: they preceded that wave. As children they were close to Depression times, and also to war times, when Canada had in fact cut a bit of a dash. They came of intellectual age at the zenith of the postwar French intellectuals; they read the great modernists as a matter of course. Existentialism was the philosophical catchword then; Brecht and Sartre and the Theatre of the Absurd were frequently performed on campuses; “experiment” was in the air. This period followed the McCarthy years, transited the age of the beatniks, and led into days of the civil rights movement and then into the era of the Vietnam War. It was a time of ferment and change, and out of that cauldron came — at about this time — the idea of cultural nationalism. This was a modest enough thing in Canada, consisting as it did mainly in a proclamation of one’s own existence, but it caused a good deal of uproar nonetheless. (Canada was then, and still is, one of those odd places where large doses of patriotism are considered unpatriotic, and where the powers that be are of the firm belief that a rocked boat always sinks.)
This was also, in writing, perhaps the most thoroughly male-dominated period of the past hundred years. Internationally, the great female modernists belonged to the first third of the twentieth century. (Of the Canadians, Elizabeth Smart was then unknown, Mavis Gallant, if noticed at all, was believed to be an American, and Sheila Watson had composed The Double Hook some time before its ultimate publication in 1961, when it appeared just in time to perk a lot of us up.) The hot new writers making their debuts in the late 1940s and the 1950s and the early 1960s were almost all men. Many reasons could be given for this state of affairs, but suffice it to say that such was the reality, and it — as well as the observable fact that men have historically been more interested in literature as a game than women have been — accounts for the scarcity of female writers in this collection. More women writers of all kinds would appear in Canada shortly. Margaret Laurence would come to prominence, Alice Munro and Marian Engel would publish at the tail end of the 1960s, and many more would follow, some of whom wrote “experimental” fiction and are included in this book. But writing in the 1960s was pretty much a guy thing, in Canada as elsewhere, in experimental literature as well as in the “mainstream.”
It was also an urban thing. The small town, the wilderness, the Native motifs, and the pioneering past of earlier Canadian writing had been tossed out along with the Empire. They’d be back, but they hadn’t come back yet.
I’ve made the literary climate back then sound like inclement weather, and it was. There wasn’t much infrastructure or public recognition — writers, when thought about at all, were pictured as bearded maniacs inhabiting some insalubrious bohemia or drafty ivory tower; or, if female, especially if female poets, as half-baked women, the baked half being the head in the oven, for after the recent, spectacular exit of Sylvia Plath, suicide for such was almost de rigueur. Unless you cracked New York — a snowball’s chance in hell — there were scant prospects of being rich and famous. But on the other hand it was an era of tremendous freedom. You didn’t have to worry about market forces, because there was hardly any market as such: the numbers for even a Canadian “best-seller” were tiny by today’s standards. You could travel strange roads, because there were no highways. You didn’t feel weighted down by your country’s cultural baggage, because — officially at any rate — there wasn’t much of it. You could get lost in the language, because the signposts were few. You could take your influences from wherever you liked, because who was looking?
It was a verbal free-for-all: a rambunctious eclecticism prevailed. There was — strangely enough — a spirit of enormous optimism: not much was actual, therefore everything was potential. All was poised on the verge, about to happen. We felt, for a while, as if we really could stop being who we were often told we were — small, boring, hopelessly provincial — and, like the albatross, go straight from fledgling status to full soaring flight.
Ground Works allows us to look back on those simmering years. (After that, of course, everything changed. As is its habit.)
1. See Canadian Novelists and the Novel. Ed. Douglas Daymond and Leslie Monkman. Borealis: Ottawa, 1981. Or contact Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing.