All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
—WALTER BENJAMIN, AS QUOTED BY MATT COHEN AS THE EPIGRAPH TO Last Seen
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to read much of Matt Cohen’s work without coming to a self-evident conclusion: Cohen is not at every writing moment a literary realist. At the core of his imagination — though not always on its surface — lies the realm of fable.
Sherwood Anderson and Chekhov accept one set of assumptions about what can be placed inside the parentheses of prose fiction; Poe and Gogol and Kafka and Angela Carter and the Stevenson of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde accept another set. Within the latter — the realm of the fable — a body may house two souls, the dead may return to life, an ambulatory nose may flee from its owner, man and animal may exchange shapes. There has always been a certain amount of crossover between the two modes, but it may be fair to say that elements that appear only as figurative language when bound by the strictures of literary realism appear as physical experience when these strictures are discarded.
Cohen is of course a “realist” quite a lot of the time. He can “do” realism — he knows the moves — but it is not the only thing he can do. Throughout his career he alternated between “realism” and other, more peculiar kinds of writing, and in his most deeply felt and personal novel, which I take to be Last Seen, he successfully blended the two.
At times of great emotional crisis, in life as in art, realistic observation of physical detail becomes hyperrealism and can read like a fevered or dream state; and at times of great political and social crisis (wars, revolutions, catastrophes) the same thing happens with events — the stream of ordinary time is disrupted, the sequence of mundane events is broken, and horrific scenes and grotesqueries appear, also as in dreams or fevers. Literary works that attempt to set down or evoke such states will contain instances of the fantastic, as do folklore and myth. In folklore or myth, the hero typically sets off on an adventure and enters an Otherworld where the rules of nature no longer apply; and at times of crises in “real life,” elements from that Otherworld seem to break through a barrier and enter the realm of common human experience, distorting it in the direction of the bizarre.
These are my axioms. Another of my axioms is that Matt Cohen was a born fabulist. He was — among other personages — “Teddy Jam,” a prolific and effortless writer of children’s books. Tale spinning, improvisation, and the invention of wild fantasies came to him easily; it was the “realism” that was hard work.
If Matt Cohen had himself been a character in a fable, he would have been Rumpelstiltskin — the artist as odd little outsider and grumbling isolate. A singularity whose real name is a secret known only to himself, engaged in an improbable activity that transmutes base matter into precious essence — this role was part of Cohen’s own self-definition, as any reader of his memoir, Typing: A Life in 26 Keys, will quickly learn. In his own eyes he could sometimes spin straw into gold, although on other occasions he suspected he was only spinning straw into straw. Some of what he did was seen by him as writing, in the rather noble sense that this word is used in creative-writing classes; some, on the other hand, was viewed by him merely as typing, an act of mechanical dexterity performed with the fingers, but in itself producing nothing more necessarily valuable than waste paper.
One of the “rules” of folk tales, as of espionage tales, is that a knowledge of true names confers power. Rumpelstiltskin’s power resides in his hidden name. His name is never guessed, it’s overheard: Rumpelstiltskin cannot be named by others until he has named himself.
The other part of Rumpelstiltskin’s power lies in his ability as a spinner. He can spin something worthless into something valuable, a talent that is called an “art” by the greedy-hearted king, reminding us of the fact that art, artful, artifice, artificial, and articulate share a common root. Whenever we find a spinner in a story, we know we are not too far from the sort of language often applied to narration. The Greek Fates spin out the stories of men’s lives, and the terminology of cloth-land is frequently interwoven with that used to describe tale telling, as in “spinning a yarn,” “embroidering a tale,” and “weaving a story.”
Spinning, storytelling, and enchantment have been close companions in human speech, a relationship that recognizes that stories are made — concocted, articulated, fabricated — but they may also have a quality that is more organic or indeed magical, a growth or flow like the thread flowing out during the act of spinning. These two qualities of writing — the artificial or fabricated and the organic or magical — were qualities that obsessed Cohen in his own view of what he was trying to do. How to get away from mere mechanical facility to true golden flow — that flow often called by writers “finding the voice” — was a problem for him, one that presented itself at the very outset of his career.
In Typing, Cohen talks about this problem in relation to the writing of his third published book, the 1972 short-story collection Columbus and the Fat Lady. This book was published by the House of Anansi Press, a small but adventurous literary publishing company in which I had become involved in 1971 without knowing how entangling it would be. It was I who edited Columbus and the Fat Lady, although I can remember little about the process. In Typing, however, I find myself making a cameo appearance: “Atwood was slight and elfin, with a mop of frizzy hair, piercing eyes, a sharp tongue and a manner that was both brusque and friendly.” The elfishness, the slightness, the mop of curly hair, the sharp tongue, and the rest of it — this sounds like the Matt Cohen of those days looking in the mirror. But the “Atwood” elf is spoken of as “frightening,” despite the brusque friendliness. An elf with a witchy edge, then; a creature of some power.
In the context of Cohen’s Typing narrative, this “Atwood” seems to be a spirit helper. Such helpers are, in Jungian terms, an aspect of the protagonist’s own psyche, and it is this function “Atwood” would appear to serve in Matt Cohen’s tale or fable of himself.
For tale or fable it is. Typing as a whole is not a tale but a detailed, realistic memoir of a writer’s life qua writer. However, pages 125 through 137 have a folk tale–quest quality about them, plot, language, and all. This little section of the book might be called “How the Writer Found His Voice.”
It goes as follows. The writer — let us call him C. — starts his account of how he came to write Columbus and the Fat Lady by saying that, having made a bit of a splash with his first and second novels, he had begun his third. This novel was to be “a parable-parody about the idea of art as religion and the artist as half-conscious martyr.” But it failed to convince him, and so he began to spend more time on short stories.
Then follows a paragraph about the difference in C.’s mind between the novel — a serious art form, a medium for influencing social consciousness — and the short story, which he considered “an opportunity for a vacation,” where “antiquated” “rules” might be discarded. “For me,” says C., “each individual story is an adventure embarked upon for its own sake”: strictures and responsibilities hedge the novel, while the short story is the realm of “freedom and play” — the realm, that is, of fantasy and fabulation, of Otherworld adventures and quests.
In real time, Dennis Lee of the House of Anansi then suggested a book of short stories by C., and C. decided that he could turn some of his “failed artist’s parable” into stories, and write more stories “with a few sleep-deprived weeks of frenzied typing.” (The nocturnal activity, the spinning out of product, the rapidity, the dexterity requiring “nimble fingers” — this is the writer in Rumpelstiltskin mode.)
Meanwhile, C. was living on a farm in the woods and his marriage was falling apart. In his writing life, he found he was stuck. There follow three interesting paragraphs about the writing/typing he was doing. He could produce the typed yellow pages, he tells us; he could reel them off, ten or fifteen a night. But instead of spinning something worthless into something valuable, he felt he was merely producing heaps of “yellow scrawled-over garbage.” His problem was not writer’s block, i.e., the inability to write at all. Instead it was quality control: he was turning out “reams of surface.” He decided he was involved in a “juggling act,” which had concealed meaninglessness behind incomprehensibility. He felt frustrated by “an inability to break through some indefinable barrier.”
He considered other occupations, all of them impossible: he had only one talent, lodged in him useless. Then he made an unscheduled visit to the Underworld, in the guise of a Toronto party where he found himself “wandering through a series of chemically fuelled Hieronymus Bosch tableaus.” Very stoned, he encountered another sort of supernatural female, a woman talking loudly in a hypnotic manner, and who, to C., appeared as “a powerful and malign female witch who had stolen everyone’s soul.”
Battered by the “waves of powerfulness” coming out of this woman, he keeled over and passed out on the floor. “But I wasn’t losing consciousness,” he says, “I was gaining it.” The soul-stealing woman is evidently another spirit helper, another anima, another slice of the psyche: a good witch disguised as a bad one, an ambiguous life-and-death Kali. If she stole his soul, she appears to have handed it back with a gift attached, because after this momentous encounter C. discovered that he was writing “with a confidence and freedom that were entirely new to me.”
As so often, the Underworld keeps the keys to dreamland — that is, to the treasure of creativity — and hands them over through unexpected messengers at unexpected moments. The benign elf anima can’t do the whole task: the hero of the tale has to confront her malign counterpart and face his own annihilation before the unleashing of his psyche is possible. Over the next few months, Cohen says, the stories for Columbus and the Fat Lady “emerged in rapid succession,” as though they’d been there the whole time, “just waiting to be discovered.” “Each of these stories,” he says, “seemed to emerge from a deeper place in my unconscious,” “more like strangers I’d met in an all-night diner than contrivances that I’d deliberately put together.” Finally, after writing steadily for four years, he had “discovered [his] own voice.”
But what was this “own voice” saying? Quite a few things, as it turned out. Columbus and the Fat Lady contains fifteen stories, or quasi-stories. Few follow the “rules” for the short story that Cohen might have read in the analyses of such things then available. They are not classical short stories at all, although they are narrations. Here is how they go:
1. “The Watchmaker” is a dialogue with a Jewish watchmaker whose family has been obliterated in the Holocaust. This man survived because he was placed with a man who once had an affair with his mother, and who may possibly be his father. He is now in Canada but feels out of place. This story is the seed material for the later “European Jews” trilogy, comprising The Spanish Doctor, Nadine, and Emotional Arithmetic.
2. “The End.” A series of absurdist killings triggered by the question, “What is the meaning of life?” in which a student, a professor, and a doctor take turns with a pistol and one another’s foreheads.
3. “Our Passion Lit the Night.” Strange sexual triangle involving a young male student and a somewhat older couple. The couple use the student to get the wife pregnant, then turf him out.
4. “The Nurse from Outer Space.” Aliens pose as people. One is a nurse who writes short stories consisting of her name and phone number on a candy wrapper; the other is a solitary man. They discuss the short story as a form, in which such analysis is presented as ludicrous.
5. “Keeping Fit.” Two pages about compulsive running, ending in the death of the runner.
6. “Country Music.” An old lady lives near a dump. Talk of her and of various country characters, including the Frank brothers, who will later turn up in Cohen’s Salem novels about Ottawa Valley life in decay. This story and “The Watchmaker” come closest perhaps to literary realism.
7. “Janice.” A lyrical rendering of a promiscuous lost lover, with the narrator cast as both cuckolder of other men and the odd man out.
8. “The Toy Pilgrim.” One of the writer-martyr stories. A slob named Elmer writes stories under the pen name of Harold Noteworth, and rewrites his own boring domestic life in various incredible ways inside his head. No one else finds him noteworthy, partly because he has concealed the secret of his name. He decides to write a play about a man perpetually embarrassed by himself; also a last novel, in which the hero will pass into pure being after having finally connected his past with his present. This novel will be published only after his death; it will be the only one of his works to bear his “own name.” Strange as this story is, it grapples with a problem that obsessed Cohen: who is the hidden writer in him, really? And how to connect the past with the present?
9. “Uncle Philbert and His Big Surprise.” This piece is in the form of a saccharine play for children. Uncle Philbert comes to visit, and ends by initiating the boy of the story into “manhood” via a Grand Guignol killing of a stuffed donkey and a blood-drenched feast. (If written by a woman, this would have been called “feminism.”)
10. “Straight Poker.” A bravura meditation on love, involving three people, an “I,” a “she,” and a mysterious entity in some sort of invisible communion with the writer, although they have never met.
11. “After Dinner Butterflies.” A surreal exercise in marital tedium and pestering, involving some butterflies that materialize out of the husband’s previously empty pocket.
12. “The Empty Room.” This too is about an author, who has Walter Mitty–like fantasies in a room inhabited by unwritten novels. Meanwhile, in his real life, he is subjected to the banality of marriage. The author thinks of writing a novel about a wastepaper basket. Then he burns down his house, thus freeing himself to rejoin the desert-adventure heroine of his romantic dreams.
13. “Too Bad Galahad” was published earlier as a children’s story; there must have been some confused children. This piece consists of a series of fables about Galahad the perfect knight and his search for the Holy Grail, which either can never be found or else is common as dirt. Again the subject is the writer-as-martyr, this time as the hero of a truly ridiculous quest — for success, for fame? — that always defeats him.
14. “Spadina Time.” This story begins with an odd poem about loneliness in the city and goes on to describe the life of Erik, another self-fantasizer. Erik is unemployed, lives in a rooming house, and is involved with two women, one a waitress. Considering his problems with space-time, he may have been doing drugs. The Erik character, the rooming house, the waitress, and much else in this story are the seeds for the last section of The Disinherited, the next book Cohen was to write. There’s another “Harold,” a fat, intrusive fellow roomer and failed painter; this name will reappear in Cohen’s later, extraordinary novel Last Seen, as the name of the dead brother who keeps turning up in Elvis bars and in the narrator’s house.
15. “Columbus and the Fat Lady.” Columbus has failed to discover America because he fell out of the boat. Now, through a time warp, he works as a freak in a sideshow, along with a Fat Lady who glories in the fact that her hard-won fat is real. Perhaps a meditation on the nature of truth and reality — is history “true” when it exists only as stories, or indeed only as performance? Is the flesh “real”? What classes of objects merit these words?
Columbus is another storyteller, but he can never finish the story about himself he begins every day as part of his sideshow act, because he always passes out.
This too is a “seminal” story, the seed for the various Old World/New World stories and novels that followed.
These short descriptions fail to convey the flavour of the adroit but eccentric writing in this grab-bag collection; but think of precise physical descriptions (rooming houses, clothing, weather) blended with literary parody à la Woody Allen, with some Theatre of the Absurd thrown in, blended with Kafka and perhaps a little of the George Gissing of New Grub Street, and you get a faint idea. “Facility” and “dexterity” come to mind. “Funny,” “surreal,” “wistful,” “savagely satirical,” and “brilliantly inventive” also come to mind, or they must have come to my mind when I was writing the jacket copy, because there they are on the cover.
For the purposes of this essay, several things may be pointed out. First, this collection begins with a story about Jewishness, which is precisely where Typing begins. Second, a great many of the pieces either contain writers or play riffs on various literary tropes. Third, the stories may have been written with “confidence and freedom,” but they are not about confidence and freedom; rather they are about the absence of these qualities. The narrators are lost, uprooted, wandering, failed, absurd, despairing, unconnected, or dying.
Fourth, the collection seeded almost all of what Cohen was subsequently to write. It’s a sort of sampler: here’s the range, here are the styles, here are the interests, here are the prototypes: all arrived at through fabulation, through the “adventure,” the “freedom and play,” of the short-story form, all popping out of the unconscious unbidden. This must have been what Cohen meant when he said he had found his “own voice.” Fifth, the collection ends with Columbus passing out: a dead faint, as you’ll recall, is the key moment in the Tale of C. and of how he found his “own voice.”
From the standpoint of the “finding the voice” fable, the collection is arranged exactly backwards: it should begin with the faint — the handing over of the keys, the opening of the door — and end with the first story, the one about the deracinated Jewish watchmaker; because deracination and Jewishness, and the absurdist dilemma created for the writer who partakes of these things, are at the innermost core of the material Cohen’s “own voice” delivered to him during his four months of writerly “confidence and freedom.”
A writer’s own voice is not of course a real voice. It’s a way of putting words on the page that is convincing, first to the writer himself and then to at least some readers. Such writing creates the illusion that a “voice” the reader can trust is saying something interesting or moving, and will not feel to the reader like mere ventriloquism, or like trickery, falsehood, or manipulation.
But it is almost a precondition of such a “voice” being “read” that the reader must recognize at least something about it, and know what sort of name may be applied to it.
Any writer is a sort of anti-Rumpelstiltskin, in the way that anti-matter shares the characteristics of matter but spins left to right. Rumpelstiltskin knows his own name, but the writer must discover his. Rumpelstiltskin loses power when he is truly named by others, the writer gains it. In no human endeavour is “naming” more important than it is in the sphere of the arts. As Lewis Carroll pointed out through the White Knight, there’s the thing itself, there’s the name of the thing, and there’s what the name of the thing is called, and all are different; but in the arts these may suffer easy confusion. The adjectives applied to a work by critics influence how readers may read it, and this process always has something to do with how the work is “named” — what box it is seen to fit into.
The criteria considered worthy aims for quality writing are not absolutes, but change over time according to that nebulous gas, the Zeitgeist. Holding a mirror up to Nature, delighting and instructing, creating Beauty, analyzing social problems, peering at gender, digging up history, bearing witness to atrocities, giving a voice to the voiceless, rewarding the virtuous and punishing the wicked, experimenting with language — all have been held up as goals toward which good fiction-writing should aspire.
Which of these goals is considered desirable at the moment will influence how a writer’s work is received by reviewers, which in turn has an effect on how readers will read it, or fail to. Though such attitudes are not spread homogeneously over all reviewers and critics, there is nonetheless at any given time a certain consensus. Terminology is often key. If a writer can be fitted into a named box that is also a hot box, then “critical discourse” will take place around that writer. If not, there will be silence, as there has largely been on the subject of Cohen’s work, especially among academic critics. And if the writer appears to be in the wrong box at the wrong time, there will be trashing, which is what happened to Cohen’s “Jewish” novels, in Canada, in the 1980s.
One of my theories about Matt Cohen is the Wrong Box theory. At certain moments the box was right, at least for some readers: experimental fabulation in the late 1960s was reasonably well received among the literati, though not embraced by a wide reading public. The Disinherited (rural family falling apart, deracinated young descendant messing up in the city) was a modest hit in the early 1970s, when rural and small-town themes were in. (It is inaccurate to say, as has become the fashion, that these rural motifs were always the “mainstream,” the “canon”: most of MacLennan and Callaghan, the red-hot Richler of the 1960s, Gwethalyn Graham’s huge success Earth and High Heaven, Gabrielle Roy’s classic The Tin Flute, the early Marian Engel novels — all are urban writing, as was most of the Columbus and the Fat Lady collection and a great deal of the writing, both poetry and prose, of the late 1960s and early 1970s.)
Cohen’s next two novels in the Salem series were well received, though with diminishing fervour. (What, pray tell, was a Jewish writer doing writing about the crumbling WASP rurals of the Ottawa Valley? Those who wrote about “Jewish” writing couldn’t fit him in: there was no Yiddish, there were no bagels, and the characters weren’t Jews. Neither could those writing about “Canadian,” small-town, Sherwood Anderson–like sagas, because what he was doing wasn’t exactly realism of that sort. Nobody seemed to understand the affinity between Jews and crumbling rurals — the common threads, which were destroyed culture, demoralization, and rootless and wandering survivors.)
As the 1970s wore on, times got tougher for certain kinds of writers. New boxes were trendy: “nationalism” gave place to “regionalism”; “feminism” was on the upswing. In the 1960s, from the Right Box point of view, it was better to be male than female; as the 1970s wore on, the reverse became truer. The age factor also came into play: the mid-thirties to the late forties is the danger zone for a writer — no longer a sizzling young firebrand, not yet a grizzled veteran, one to whom neither “promising” nor “established” can be applied. White male writers of a certain age (Graeme Gibson, Robert Kroetsch, Rudy Wiebe, and others) all produced interesting writing in this decade, and all were — relatively speaking — overlooked.
As the 1980s set in, with postmodernist critical theory on the boil, those with a foot or a friend in academia were to some extent better placed — convincing verbal boxes could be manufactured into which such writers could be stuffed — but then along came ethnicity and identity politics and “appropriation of voice.” The turf wars were on. It was no longer just what was said and how, but who was considered to have the right to say it, that mattered in evaluation. The boxes multiplied, but the ice got very thin, and who was allowed into which box became crucial for that fragile thing, the bubble reputation.
Into this fraught atmosphere came The Spanish Doctor, and what was a Canadian Jew doing writing about fifteenth-century European Jews? Wrong Box! In addition, “historical” novels were looked on askance, for those who had forgotten Kamouraska; the Jane Urquhart Away moment had not yet arrived. (Outside Canada, the box was not wrong, and the novel did well.) Then came Nadine — what was a Canadian Jewish male writer doing writing about a European female Jew? And what was he doing writing about love, among boring heterosexuals? (Homosexuals would have been daring.) Didn’t “love” mean “trashy commercial romance,” written only to make money? Looking at this novel again today, this response is very hard to fathom. Only those who have never read any real trashy commercial romances could make such a call.
At the very end of his career, Cohen regained some critical altitude and won the Governor General’s Award for Elizabeth and After, a novel that continues the string of his fictions that deal with decaying rural life. But it was hard to escape the impression that a lot of wordfolk still didn’t know quite what to make of the man.
Consider the case of Last Seen, Cohen’s penultimate novel. This is a quirky book indeed. In it, a man called Harold dies in excruciatingly described agony and then reappears to his angry and grieving brother in a club frequented by Elvis Presley look-alikes. The brother fears dead-alive Harold, argues with him, makes jokes about him, and longs for his manifestations, which occur at unpredictable intervals until they both end up at Harold’s grave, where Harold literally peels off his own mortality.
The juxtaposition of the bizarre image, the dreamlike progression of events, the closely observed realistic detail, and the deeply painful emotional state recall much of the early writing in Columbus and the Fat Lady. This time round, Cohen brings it all together: Last Seen is a work of considerable power and strange enchantment. But it’s not a reassuring book. It isn’t familiar, it isn’t cozy, and for those attempting to pin the taxonomic tail on the elusive donkey, it’s a somewhat outrageous puzzlement. To quote Alice Munro’s story “The Dance of the Happy Shades,” “what kind of a party is this?”
So what would have been the right box, for Cohen? Into what box might his oeuvre now be placed to allow critical discourse to take place around it? In Typing, Cohen made a stab at naming this box himself by putting into it the writers with whom he felt — at least toward the end of his life — a strong affinity. They include Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and especially Joseph Roth; three Jews out of place or in flight, the two writers of fiction both fabulists of a sort. They also include the Leonard Cohen of Beautiful Losers (a wildly fabulist novel if ever there was one) and Mavis Gallant, which may seem an odd choice until you consider that she too is uprooted, or, in Cohen’s words, “incredibly alienated.” As for the already existing boxes — the “Canadian” ones, or at least those Cohen recognized — he felt he simply didn’t fit into them. He considered himself to be an oddity, a singularity. Like Elmer/Harold Noteworth in “The Toy Pilgrim,” he was a writer with a name, that is, an essential writerly self, that was not recognized by others.
There’s another possible box, a “Canadian” one — because, despite the still-expressed belief that Canadian realist domestic writing is the only recognized form, there is a strong tradition of fabulism in Canada. This box would contain Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John, James Reaney’s “The Bully” and “The Box Social,” the work of Larry Garber, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers again, Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook, some of Timothy Findley, Marian Engel’s Bear, Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool, Graeme Gibson’s Communion, and the work of Barbara Gowdy and André Alexis and Eden Robinson and Steven Hayward, among others. Perhaps even Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion and Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces are more comfortable in such a box than in the box of straight literary realism.
This is the box of the romancers, the fabulists, the yarn spinners; and perhaps it’s the frame — or one of the main frames — within which Cohen should have been viewed all along.